Not everyone has a gym membership or trains to achieve specific goals, yet we all experience movement on a daily basis. The least active people in the world are likely to wash, sit down and get up, eat and drink, get in and out of bed regularly, and even when it comes to these simple tasks of life, it quickly jumps to the eye that some do it better.
Far too often we see athletes training to build strength and fitness, but failing to draw the link between posture and performance. Endless hours of lifting heavy weights and performing high volume repetitive repetition will never deliver the optimal results if the technique is compromised by posture.
“Movement Is life”… “No movement? No life!”
Your spine has roughly 50 joints that allow you to move in complex ways. Unfortunately, due to a sedentary lifestyle and lack of movement complexity, most of us have lost full control of our backbone. A healthy spine is a mobile spine, how often do you move yours?
Place a cannon in a canoe and put both into the water. Then fire, and... what happens? KABOOM! Id’ bet money on the cannon ball not going far. Why? Because the canoe has a poor base of stability for maximal force production to be generated. Chances are, the canoe will capsize or be blown to pieces.
Hardly. So why keep pushing your body in training to go to places (KBOOM!) that your shoulders just aren’t strong enough to survive unscathed? Many athletes focus on building the primary moves (for the purposes of my analogy, let’s think of those as big cannons), yet fail to understand the importance of building a bigger canoe (ie. strengthening the stabilisation muscles in the shoulder). It’s typically here that the shoulder gets injured, or you start experiencing pain in the elbows or wrists joints because it’s all linked together in the chain.
Is this the year when getting strength, improve your conditioning, or simply become a better version of last years model? Speaking with many of our clients, some have set goals to become better at CrossFit with the idea of competing in competitions and pushing themselves to achieve a higher level of conditioning. However, many of us don’t have a plan or know the best way to reach this goal? Where do you start?
