First Blog + Most Common Question

Hello, and welcome to my first blog.

My hope here is to engage, educate and begin a dialogue with you over some of the principles of training I’ve used over my 10 years of training and coaching and to also examine some popular and new trends in health and fitness. I’ve never been known to be a master of words, as many of you who have trained with me know, but please bear with me as I fine tune this blog as I truly believe it can become a forum for us all the learn and improve together.

As most of the first readers will be people who have already trained with me I thought it would be appropriate to tackle the most common question I get asked on a day to day basis:

“Why do I have to Squat/Lunge/Pushup… through a full range of motion?”

 

Since my general reply of “because you can” doesn’t seem to cast a lot of light on the issue I’ll quickly cover the basics:

When we set out of accomplish any exercise we attack we do it from an order of form, range of motion and load or resistance. Your body is an amazing machine not like any other but functions on the same mechanical principles as most, that being there is a mechanically sound and safe way for your body to do almost any movement. Unfortunately many times we’re taught, from our youth on, just to move and not necessarily how to move. We learn movement patterns or “tricks” that aren’t necessarily the healthiest for our bodies but we apply them over and over again as they “work” and we figure anything that works must be right. But as Chris Rock famously said “you can drive a car with your feet if you want to, doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea”. 

So the first thing we do is try to build our form and range with very light resistance to teach the body the balance, coordination and flexibility necessary to accomplish the movement safely then slowly add load as our form improves. Now there is a school of thought that going through a full range of motion puts joints at risk of injury, and it certainly does if the load is too much for the joint to handle, so why not just strengthen working in the pre-existing range of motion? I would contend this is fine as long as you’re never planning on having that joint go through a dynamic range of motion for the rest of your days. Sport and more importantly life can be unpredictable, you never know from day to day what you will be required to lift, step up onto or quickly get out of the way of so why not prepare your body the best we can for anything that may be thrown at it?

Simply put I want to build long strong muscles and not short tight ones to help me navigate my life and if you attack your fitness from the order of form, range or motion then finally load you’ll move better from this day to your last day!