I have a birthday coming up next month. If there are two times of year that get me to reflect, it’s the end of the year and a month before my birthday. Both are milestones. The new year creates thoughts of a clean slate, while my birthday makes me reflect on what I’ve accomplished. When looking at my birthday, I tend to think where am I currently on the fitness spectrum? When looking at fitness programs, I believe we flow between multiple training objectives on this big scale or continuum.
I consider these listed below as common goals on the continuum:
Prehab Mobility
Strength Power
Muscular endurance Body composition
Rehab
Let me break each one of these down.
Prehab is taking an injury prevention approach to your training. An example may include doing drills that address the muscles of the rotator cuff for a tennis player or exercises for the glute medius which aids knee tracking for a soccer player. These workouts tend to revolve around a specific sport or activity. These workouts can be a great compliment to power sessions and are used as people transition from pre-season workouts to in-season training.
Mobility training is all the buzz now. What we’ve learned is that you are only as strong as your range of motion will allow. Routinely seeing members who range in age between 45- 65years, I can state one of the biggest limiting factors I observe is mobility. People walk into our studio looking to drop body-fat and tone up their arms, soon to realize that they don’t move well. The foundation for any program is going to be movement. You can’t ignore it. Those who choose to ignore it are typically forced to deal with it after they suffer an injury. One of the best exercises to make your shoulders look like they are carved out of stone are overhead kettlebell presses, but try them without having adequate mobility in your upper back (thoracic spine) and you’re asking for trouble.
Getting stronger solves a lot of problems. One of my sources of referrals is from doctors in the Las Vegas area. They range from general internist to surgeons. They send us people with a prescription for them to get stronger. A senior suffering bone and muscle loss- get stronger. A 45-year old female suffering posture issues from a desk job- get stronger. A 53-year old male with elevated cholesterol and blood pressure and in need of losing 20 pounds- get stronger. An increase in lean muscle mass can help each of these woes. To date, I’ve never had a situation where being stronger was a detriment.
When was the last time you ran a 40-yard dash or jumped as high as you can? Probably not in a while. Power is a skill that we lose if we don’t train for it. I see a big diminish in power in people over 45. I’ve used medicine balls in drills for power with great success for years. These exercises are safe and have an easy learning curve.
How do you measure fitness? I look at muscular endurance. Pushing a sled loaded with 215 lbs. fifty feet across turf builds whole body strength and improves work capacity. I look at your muscular endurance as a bucket. The larger I can make your bucket the better. Battling ropes, the sled, and the cross-country Ski-ERG are a few of my go-to’s for this type of training at the studio.
You can’t be a jack of all trades. If you’re training for your 1st marathon or body-building there may be a few trainers better skilled than me. I don’t spend a lot of my time currently training either of those populations. If you want to drop 25 lbs. of fat and increase your lean muscle mass, I don’t think anyone does it better than us. After observing years of consistent results, the HIIT workouts we feature at the studio have been proven to work.
Life happens. A hectic travel schedule, lack of sleep from stress, or dehydration from forgetting to drink water throughout the day are some of the common issues I see consistently. Each of these can put
you in a state susceptible to injury. If an injury occurs, there’s a way to train safely so that you can return to where you were pre-injury. Taking the necessary steps to work around the injury while not interfering with it’s healing process is critical for the mental state. There’s nothing worse than dealing with an injury and watching your body become a shadow of itself. This has been my approach to knee and hip replacements and other injuries.
As I close in on my birthday next month, I feel I’ve shifted from mobility back into getting stronger. I question myself, “Am I stronger than I was last year?” It’ll be fun determining that answer in the next month. Stay tuned, I’ll have to let you know.
See you at the studio.