The Core of the Sun

I was helping a couple of athletes on their deep squat pattern and while performing this, they would get to the end-range and lose balance.  The universal question was “Why is this happening?”  We ended up talking about the need for strengthening the core and integrating each part of the core into the movement pattern that we were working on.   As the session progressed we talked about what it means for the core to be strong.  Automatically, it is easy to limit your core engagement to a stability exercise that trains only one part of your core…the part that is in the front side.

Your core does consist of a few areas:    (WARNING: Some anatomical references below)

1) The abdominals or the “Dear Abbies” or even the “Ab Vigodas”  This group is talked about the most and consists of the  Rectus abdominus (6-pack), the internal and external obliques, and the transversus abdominus.  One function of this group is to provide stability along with the internal organs to the front of the spine.

2) The back core.  This group contains those spinal erectors like the multifidus, as well as the quadratus, and the psoas which attaches to the front of the lumbar spine.  To a degree the lats are  a part of the core and can act as a spinal extensor.  These muscles are responsible for maintaining good posture.  In the case of the the squat, swing, or deadlift these are the muscles that will help the spine maintain posture under the load of the weight.

3)The hip complex is included in the core because is is responsible along with those deep abdominal muscles in stabilizing the lumbosacral area of the spine.  The hip complex also helps with transferring and stabilizing forces from the ground.

We’ve all heard the phrase that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  The same applies when trying to synchronize all of the different core muscles into one movement pattern.  For example if the back isn’t doing its job, the spine will flex or hunch.  Also, when the abs are not working properly the pelvis can tilt forward and the low back can hyper extend.

So all of that is good….BUT, what does it mean for me?  And how do we fix this?

First of all, you have to know what you are working with.  You don’t want to do the shotgun approach and do several exercises for the sake of randomness hoping that your problems will be solved.  You need to be screened to assess which movement patterns are affected.  In the presence of pain, it may be necessary to follow up with a physician to be certain that there are not any underlying orthopedic issues.  Once the green light is given figure out if the inability to perform a pattern is the result of a lack of mobility or stability.

If you are dealing with a lack of mobility then stretching the appropriate segment should make its way into your training.  With stability issues, I’ll oversimplify this a bit.  You should try to approach this from a few different angles.  First, strengthen the area with stabilizing exercises.  These could be anythings from planks,  prone hyperextensions, to supine hip lifts or bridges.  It depends on what was discovered during the screen.  Once these muscle groups are facilitated, then work on inserting them into the pattern for as long as it takes to get it right.

That is it.  In a nutshell  IDENTIFY, CORRECT, TRAIN.

Soon I’ll post a couple of videos with some drills.  So, until next time TRAIN SMART.

FAQ’s:

• Which goals are acceptable? You can choose anything you want as long as the goal pertains to any aspect of fitness.  The goal can be related to strength, conditioning (target hr training), weight loss, or even perfecting a martial art technique.  As long as it can be measured, your goal will work for the competition.
• How are the goals measured? We’ll take a baseline of whatever your goal is and then at the end of the competition, we’ll see how you’ve improved.
• What do I win? The top 3 finishers will all get embroidered shirts.  1st place:  One hour private training session and a Restaurant gift certificate.  2nd place:  30 minute private session and a Whole Foods Gift Certificate.
• Why is there an entry fee? It is a competition and entry fee is one motivator.  The fee will also pay for the prizes.

Now, you won’t have to go through this alone of course.  We’ll talk and work out your plan of  action, because at the end of the day it is all about reaching your goals.

We’ll plan on starting February 7th, so get ready for a period of good work and even greater rewards.

Read the full article here:    http://bit.ly/yoRYqF

We have been working through similar progressions here at the studio.   Try them out and enjoy the training.

Train Smart!!!

Balance in the body is controlled by an interaction of the inner ear which aids in the sense of direction; the eyes give info on the dimensions of the environment; your skin lets you know where you are actually touching the ground; the muscle and joint receptors work together to maintain posture and stability in relation to a changing environment; and finally the brain puts it all together.

With so many interconnected parts, it is easy to see that any break in this chain could cause you to lose balance.   For example, anything affecting the inner ear such as an infection or calcium deposit can cause you to have a bout of vertigo or that spinning room feeling.  There are also disease processes such as multiple sclerosis that diminish the information that the joint receptors get from the environment which can also affect how the muscular system works to stabilize the body.

For our purposes we are going to look at what we can control which is how the muscles contract to stabilize our bodies in the environment.  For some of us, this isn’t due to a disease or a traumatic injury process, but rather something less insidious – inactivity.

Here is a drill:  Try standing on one leg as long as possible.  If you could stand at least one minute then try to make things more difficult by changing the body position such as doing a single leg toe touch or controlled kicking exercises.  If this is still easy, close your eyes.  If you are still wondering what the big deal is then consider yourself a rockstar.

If you found any of that difficult, make this correction:  Push the foot through the floor, tigthen the glute or butt muscle, and brace those abs.  If you are able to stand with no problems now, well congrats!  You just told your muscles what they were supposed to be doing.  If you made some improvement but still found it difficult then time for a few remedial exercises.  Bridges, posterior rocks, and lower body rolls are on the exercise menu for a few weeks to make those adaptations.

With those stabilization exercises, 1-2 sets for 15-20 reps should do the trick.  Practice balancing as you do the stabilization drills so that you are actually patterning the balance drills.  Just like that, you will be a pillar.

It is really very easy to be seduced by the speed of a technique and practice fast to the detriment of technique.  That unfortunately is the fast track allowing your technique in any skill to degrade.  Let me say first that speed is real – and speed kills, literally as well as figuratively.  It is really about how rapidly you fire those muscles.   There are some things that are overlooked when thinking about technique:

• Quickness or the time that it takes you to respond to something appropriately
• Agility or the body awareness to change direction while maintaining your athletic posture.

Taking these two things into account you’ll have to, as self-defense expert Tony Blauer says, be sooner.  Being sooner means that you have to take a lot of time very slowly practicing basic technique.  Shadow boxing is one example of how you can do this.  The second condition to being sooner is to take your basic techniques and become agile.  So, practicing with focus mitts; practicing self-defense scenarios; and other reaction drills are important.  When all of these different drills are practiced together slowly with a gradual build up in speed, you’ll gain the right to practice fast.  Well, at least your technique won’t suffer.  You’ll soon find out that while the technique may still be cool it is only a simple set of gestures practiced at such a volume that the movements become ingrained in the muscle memory.

So, when practicing, be an active participant, not just physically but take stock in how you execute each of your techniques.  Practice what you need to improve and if you are missing steps or if it isn’t looking ‘cool’, slow down and make your body do what it needs to do.  When it is all said and done, you really haven’t started training until you have done a couple of thousand good repetitions.

Train smart….get quality reps….improve  JUST LIKE THAT!

• First,  if you are put in a state of anger by someone else then it is not their problem but only yours.  This is a tough one to swallow since it is fairly easy to run into abrasive people in our daily dealings.  If their actions do upset you and elicit an emotion then you are losing your personal control.  Deal with the situation calmly and be clear with the person who you are dealing with about those bothersome issues.  Once you have expressed these things, move on.  Keep breathing and continue with your day.
• Next, don’t lash out verbally at a stranger.  If you feel bothered by a stranger just say ” No thanks” and move on.  This way you can maintain your personal space without coming off as overly aggressive.  I always remember “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” from the Dave Chappelle show.  I’ll paraphrase one of my favorite lines from the skit “You may ‘keep it real’  but some people ‘keep it realer’” Don’t start anything that you aren’t willing to nor capable of finishing.
• Work some of your frustration away with exercise.  During training, you body will release endorphins as a response to physical work.    This is the mental part of exercise that is overlooked.  It just makes you feel good.

One interesting thing that I learned recently from a training course is the A.N.T. principle or ABOLISH- NEGATIVE- THOUGHTS.    I am sure that for the vast majority of us, when these negative thoughts creep into our minds it is easy for them to consume us.  This certainly isn’t easy but with practice the negative thinking can be minimized.  I’m not talking about giving up your power to people who try to bully you.  You do have power to control your part of many situations while remaining true to your values.  You do not have to respond with a negative angry emotion.

I’ll leave you with this picture from thingsweforget.blogspot.com This really sums up the point.

Do we all really have the power?  Well, if you have been around for the latest period of classes.  You answer should be, “Of course!”  What does it mean when we talk about power?  It can be a lot of things to many people, but all power is the function of moving a load with speed over a given distance or:

Here is how this applies to your training.  Let’s say you take a heavy kettlebell and lift it.  To move this load, you are going to have to use quite a bit of muscle to move the weight.  Now, immediately after finishing the heavy set, you will do an exercise with a lighter resistance and move it as fast as possible.   Here is an example.  Let’s say you are doing relatively heavy squats for a triple.  After finishing the set, you put the bells down and do a set of squat jumps as fast as you can for maybe 10 repetitions.  What you have done is recruit more muscle units to move the heavy resistance, synchronize them, and finally increase the speed in which they can move.   Sometimes, for my training and a for couple of martial artists I training with, I’ll use a method called complex training.  I’ll do everything just as it was listed above.   This time, I’ll add a specific exercise like a kick, punch or a throw.  You can apply this to a few skills , play with it, and of course record your results.  Remember, if you don’t write the results of your training down, you aren’t training.

Try this sample power session

• Deadlift  3-5 reps
• overspeed eccentric swings  10 reps  (w/ a partner)

Do this for 3-5 sets and remember that when the speed or force production starts to decrease, the session is over.  If you are a weekend warrior and enjoy sports, you can add defensive slides, stride outs, or trips.  You don’t have to know what those names mean.  Only understand that your sport skill is going to be related to the weightlifting movement that you are practicing.

So play with these things and be very conservative with your volume.  You should feel fresh when you are done.  As always, feel free to ask me questions.

The moment you embark on your chosen course of training, it must be done with a purpose for a sole purpose of achieving a specific goal.  Let’s start with goal setting.  Without sounding like a broken record, your goals with anything need to be measured.  They can’t be nebulous ambiguous goals like the ever popular “I want to lose weight” or “I want to run faster”.  On the surface, they both sound pretty good.  Right?  Who doesn’t want to lose weight or be faster?  The challenge with setting goals like this is that there are no numbers involved.  Remember the measurements?  In each condition, the weights and time must be measured to ensure success.  You’ll also want to put a reasonable time frame on the goal so that you aren’t just out there meandering along without any sense of urgency.  So……

• “I want to lose weight” becomes “I want to lose 25 pounds in 4 months”
• “I want to be faster” becomes “I want to take 30 seconds off of my 1600M time in 4 months”
• “I want to be stronger” becomes “I want to add  30 lbs. to the max deadlift in 3 months”

For goals that involve numbers, if you stick to the  “condition/deadline” formula, you’ll go a long way to achieving your goals.

Now, we’ve talked a bit about how to track the goals.  We should discuss purpose.  First of all, if you are not tracking your progress in some kind of way, then you are wasting time and may not be as serious as you think.  You get to see trends in the training…where your peaks and valleys are and you’ll eventually learn how to maximize those times.  You’ll see progress.  You’ll also see huge days of missing space if you decide to take several days off.

We all have to do something with our new found strength and speed.  I am by no means suggesting that you go enter contests, but it is certainly one way to try out the body to see how it runs.  Obstacle course races, martial arts competitions, weightlifting meets, participating in field events are all small ways that you can test your strength.  Of course if those suggestions are not your thing then you can always test yourself by carrying the groceries home or even climbing the steps in your building.

Finally, to do things with purpose, your mindset must be purposeful.  To paraphrase Descartes “As you think it, so will you do it!”  If your mind is not engaged in whatever it is you are doing, then the task is doomed before it gets going.  You can be aided in this task by visualization and affirmation.    Visualization can aid you by forcing you to create a mental picture of whatever it is you are trying to do.  For example, when trying to go for a PR in a lift you certainly have to see yourself doing the movement over and over.  This is very much like The Matrix. You are actually through your meditation practicing ‘downloading’ the mechanics of the movement into the body.   Really all you have to do is continue to work on the lifting groove and add weight…and VOILA…you are there in no time at all.

Saying an affirmation daily is just one way to overwrite the programming in the overly pragmatic and pessimistic subconscious.   For the affirmation to work, you first need to accept the present condition in order to really discern what you want.  Using the lifting example again, if you have not lifted anything more than a bag of groceries in your life then the affirmation may go something like this “I accept that my strength can improve and I have taken steps to learn the lift that will make me stronger.”  That’s it, really.  Accept the present condition and follow it up with the condition that you would like to experience and you will have a tool to help you mentally prepare for your goals.

Hopefully, these tips were of some use to you.  Try them out and drop me line to tell me how they worked.

I wanted to leave you with a final thought. A thing that I have noticed during my time in the fitness industry is that sometimes we get a little too focused on the fitness goals at the expense of the life that is going on around us. It really isn’t a big jump for some people who are motivated to go from 0 MPH to 100 MPH and eventually stay at that top end for months and weeks on end. Now, I am not knocking motivation at all. Actually, it is quite the contrary. Motivation is a great thing, and you would not have read my messages this far if you did not have a fair amount curiosity and motivation.
Things that motivate you drive you to succeed. It doesn’t matter if it is looking good in the clothes, running faster, dancing longer, or jumping higher. Those things will make you go into a gym every day to do things that not everyone will do.
What I am saying is that there are other things. It is also easy to become a one dimensional person; a specialist. We do it everyday with our work because it is what we are paid to do. Having our lives dominated by work and fitness pursuits can leave a lot to be desired especially if we have other interests. Since I enjoy quotes, I’d like to read this one from Robert Heinlein:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. “

Of course this can be interpreted in many different ways, but I think that this really speaks to our complexity. We should engage these complexities and nourish them lest we become drones in a hive performing our daily specialized tasks until death.

I hope that it is your vision to use fitness as a mechanism to help you in nurturing your own complex nature to approach your extracurricular interests that you may have had when you were in high school. Yes, it is true your strength and endurance should be treated as your birthright and just a hobby that you try get out of the way once or twice a week.

Your fitness puts you in position to live life to the fullest and I do hope that you are able to take advantage of it.

To get you jump started, I am offering a 3 month trial for any class at Rhodes Fusion Fitness. Please follow the link below to take advantage of the offer.

3 month trial

Trial Classes : $99.00USD – monthly

 

I hope to meet you soon. Until next time train smart.