Let’s get Play back into Fitness!
Play is a necessary component in life to keep our bodies and minds young and powerful. Blog post contains poi spinning and contact juggling videos.
Posts Tagged "Wellness"
What I learned from my experience working at the Spa at Trump
The Spa at Trump is the premier luxury fitness and wellness facility in Chicago. I was fortunate to work there for two years as the Lead Personal Trainer. Here are a few things I learned.
The Rules of Smart Fitness (Part I)
The Rules of Smart Fitness (Part I)
What is smart fitness? It is fitness that understands that the body is an organism with several systems working in synergy with each other and should be trained as such. The nervous system, the endocrine system, the musculoskeletal system, the respiratory system, etc; are interdependent of each other and if one fails it will affect the other systems. Also each of the systems have parts with are also connected and interdependent of each other.
What does this all mean? It means that training muscles groups as if they were independent from the rest of the body is not very efficient if our goal is to produce efficient movement. Efficient movement is the ultimate goal of smart fitness.
To make the concept of smart fitness clearer I will propose six simple rules to help guide your training and get the most out of your time in the gym (I use the term gym to describe any training location). In this first part I will cover rules one and two. Here they are:
RULE NUMBER I: We must pay attention to the 3 components of WELLNESS
1. Nutrition: food is fuel and without proper nutrition even the best designed fitness program can fail.
2.Physical Activity: the body is a biological machine and it is constantly changing. Physical activity ensures those changes are positive. Exercise is not limited to making the body look good, it is also suppose to keep it healthy and pain free.
3.Recovery and regeneration: exercise produces changes in the body but those changes happen during the recovery and regeneration periods. If you want to get the most out of your workouts you must not only work hard but also take resting seriously. Massage, quality of sleep and eating a protein-carbohydrate meal within one hour after working out are examples of proper recovery and regeneration techniques.
RULE NUMBER II: We must understand the basics of how the human body moves.
The Stability-Mobility Continium: this is one of the greatest ideas in fitness in the past decade. Developed by industry heavyweights Mike Boyle and Gray Cook this explanation of how to the train the body works refers to the main function of each joint in the body. Here is the breakdown which gives us a guideline of how each joint must be trained:
-Ankle: mobility
-Knee: stability
-Hip: mobility
-Lumbar Spine: stability
-Thoracic Spine: mobility
-Lower Cervicals: stability
-Upper Cervicals: mobility
-Scapula: stability
-Shoulder: Mobility
-Elbow: stability
-Wrist: mobility
When there is a problem on one joint, let’s say the hips test low for mobility then the lumbar spine is affected and this can produce low back pain. As a matter of fact understanding this concept can help us realize that to correct problems such as low back pain, a strong core is only one part of the equation. The other two are good mobility on the hips and the thoracic spine as well as helping balancing asymmetries and enhancing neuromuscular connections.
So there are the first two rules of smart fitness. Keep posted for the next four rules to come and let me know if you have any questions or comments about this post, I would love to hear them.
Train smart, eat right and recover. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, the body you want is up to you.