Back with another Travel Workout Program! This one is under 9 minutes and again, requires No Equipment! Give it a shot and let me know what you think in the comments! * Disclaimer: Remember to always consult with your physician or physical therapist in regards to starting or changing your exercise routine and in no means is this information meant to diagnose or treat your injury. For full legal disclaimer, see About Me page.
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People ask me ALL THE TIME for a quick exercise routine or workout that they can do at home or while traveling without any equipment. Well here is one example that can be done anywhere and takes LESS THAN 8 Minutes!
Give it a shot and let me know what you think! * Disclaimer: Remember to always consult with your physician or physical therapist in regards to starting or changing your exercise routine and in no means is this information meant to diagnose or treat your injury. For full legal disclaimer, see About Me page. Change is constant. This is what makes life so interesting and at the same time a challenge. As I am writing this, I have just had a few changes in my own life. I am adjusting my main focus for work right now from Physical Therapy to Personal Training! I see a need for skilled Personal Trainers who understand anatomy and physiology and can help people transition from physical therapy to fully functional. Whether that is going to the gym to exercise safely, sports, hiking or Crossfit, I have been helping people make that transition successfully for years. I am very excited about this new focus, as this will allow for more opportunities to help people in my local community of West Seattle. It will also give me more time for writing, and therefore helping more people beyond my immediate community. As the saying goes, "When one door closes, another opens." -Alexander Graham Bell Therefore, I am letting you in on this “Open Door” opportunity to train with me! I have just opened up a few time slots during the week for Personal Training in West Seattle. Please contact me here if you are interested, as there are a limited number of training sessions available. Also, you can read more about my experience and approach to Personal Training here. I am really excited and looking forward to this next chapter of my life and SUPER EXCITED to help YOU with your goals! I hope to hear from you soon! Jordan Proudfoot ACE Certified Personal Trainer, Physical Therapist Assistant, FMS, Crossfit L1 Trainer Contact Me The first question you need to ask yourself is, why are you exercising? Why are you going to the gym or the garage, or the living room. Why are you going through the effort and forcing your body through uncomfortable workouts? I believe that most people would answer this question with something that has to do with the desire for change and improvement. Whether that is losing weight, gaining muscle, strength, endurance, flexibility, sport or any other reason, the desire to improve is universal. To challenge your body with something that is more than what it is used to, in order for a change to be made. Those changes are often times limited only by the amount of effort and consistency we are willing to put towards our goal. Now that we can see the clear purpose of exercising is to make positive changes to your body through consistent action. We can also recognize the importance of doing the correct exercises or stretches or positions in order to reach our desired outcome. If you want to build an increase in muscle and strength, you are going to have to challenge your muscles in a way that is specific for increasing strength as apposed to endurance or flexibility. That is the concept of Specificity of Training, and the idea that our bodies can adapt through training, but tends to adapt to what we practice and not what we don't. Therefore, practicing good posture and body positions during training is important, as well as practicing good posture and positions throughout your day outside of training. This will help to minimize the chance of adapting to poor positions and posture and will help to reduce or avoid injuries. When it comes to exercises, training ,weight lifting, sports, etc, I BELIEVE THE NUMBER ONE THING WE CAN DO TO MINIMIZE AND AVOID INJURIES IS TO WARM-UP PROPERLY. It seems that for most people that exercises at a gym or at home tend to either do a poor job of attempting to warm up before exercising or just skip the warm up altogether and jump right into their workout. This is thought to be a really great way to cut a few minutes off of their workout. Unfortunately this is setting them up for a poor workout and a potential injury. I believe there are 5 principles of a good warm-up routine to avoid injury and optimize your workout. 1) Start with increasing systemic blood flow which will help to increase body and tissue temperature as well as preparing your breathing for your exercise. This increase in body and tissue temperature is important for shifting blood flow away from your organs and into the working muscle tissue. This not only helps prepare for activity but allows improved tissue extensibility as well as improved oxygen supply to the muscles. This can be done with a number of different exercises including but not limited to jogging in place or around the block, jump rope, bicycle or rowing, to name a few options. 2) Increase blood flow and neuromuscular awareness to specific muscles that control your major joints including hips, shoulders, and spine. This is important for getting your body out of the patterns of daily movements and positions that are adapted during work, driving, sitting, and repetitive tasks. You want to break out of these potentially poor patterns before trying to add additional stressors or learning new movement patterns or skills. This can be done with focused controlled motions with bodyweight squats, lunges, push ups, rows, and side stepping to name a few. 3) Take your joints though their full Range of Motion (ROM). This includes shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees ankles and spine. This is very important to ensure that you start each workout with access to your full ROM at each joint before adding additional stressors or movement patterns. This can be done with movements like, full depth bodyweight squats for hip, knee and ankle ROM as well as shoulder pass throughs and around the worlds with a dowel as well as leg swings to name a few. 4) Prepare movement patterns that are specific to today's workout. This is primarily focusing on the neuromuscular connection and awareness. This is how you can continue to refine a skilled movement pattern as well as prepare your body to go through specific motions and movements that you plan to challenge your body with during todays workout. This should be done with no weight to light weight depending on the movement. 5) Things to avoid during your warm-up including but not limited to, static stretches, ballistic stretches, quick agility work, aggressive plyometrics and extended cardio. Static stretches inhibit the stretch response and therefore can limit muscle reaction time and performance and are best used for muscle lengthening post exercises. Ballistic stretches, quick agility work, and aggressive plyometrics all rely on muscles being stretches far and quickly followed by a quick and strong muscle contraction. This puts excessively increased forces on your joints and even more importantly on your connective tissue. These are great exercises when done properly and once you are already warmed-up. Extended cardio training can be a great way to train for cardiovascular endurance but is not a substitute for a proper warm-up. If you choose to have extended cardio as part of your exercise routine, this shoulder ideally be done after completing your warm-up to ensure proper mechanics and to avoid injury. If fatigue is reached with extended cardio, this could be another reason to avoid this as part of your warm-up. To wrap things up, it is a good reminder to focus on your purpose for exercising in the first place. Challenge your body in specific ways in order to achieve desired changes without injury. The 5 principles of a good warm-up can help to prepare your body for a great workout while avoiding injuries. * Disclaimer: Remember to always consult with your physician or physical therapist in regards to starting or changing your exercise routine and in no means is this information meant to diagnose or treat your injury. For full legal disclaimer, see About Me page. Now I'd talk about the "core", which is another one of these over-used and under-defined terms that we hear all of the time in health, fitness and wellness. We must first make clear what it is we are actually talking about. The elusive six-pack is for most people this image that comes to mind when talking about or training for a better core. This is, unfortunately, not at all the same thing as I am referring to and most of the good science shows us, that this is NOT the core we should be focusing on. To make this idea clear, let’s refer to this idea of the core as the “inner core”. If trained and used properly, these are the muscles that help to stabilize our spine, assist with proper breathing, stabilize our pelvic bones and allow for more controlled safer movement. There are basically 4 muscle groups that make up what we refer to as the “inner core”. These are the pelvic floor muscles, transverse abdominis (TA), spinal stabilizers, and the diaphragm. As you can see, the muscles that make up our inner core create this cylinder around your abdominal cavity which houses your stomach as well as internal organs such as kidney’s, liver and intestines. If we don’t’ have good access to these muscle because of deconditioning, muscle atrophy, motor pattern problems or low back pain, we often times create this much needed abdominal stability through holding our breath and forcing air pressure against a closed airway which we call the “valsalva maneuver”. This unfortunately increases intra-abdominal pressure as well as increases heart rate and blood pressure and should be avoided during exercise routines and lifting tasks. On the flip side to this, when you start to create strength and stability in these inner core muscles, this will begin the foundation of all other positions including good posture and proper breathing techniques. So the next obvious question is, how do you train these muscles and ensure that they are being used properly? Let's start with the pelvic floor muscles, which again make up the base of our inner core. These muscles are going to stabilize our pelvic bones as well as SI (Sacral Iliac) joints. To contract these muscles, we start with the classic exercise known as a kegel. These are popular in the world of woman's health especially pre and post pregnancy. Fortunately, we all need to be aware of these muscles, male and female, and make sure that we are using them in conjunction with the other inner core muscles. A common cue that is used to contract these muscles is the sensation of holding in urination or stopping mid-stream. As silly as this sounds, it is quite effective in turning on this valuable muscle group. The next group of the inner core muscles we want to begin to train is the Transverse Abdominus (TA), which is the corset-like muscle that runs horizontally across your midsection. This muscle is involved with stabilizing our abdomen as well as compressing your abdominal contents during tasks like coughing and having a bowel movement. In order to contract this muscle for training purposes, you should try to lightly pull your belly button towards your spine and notice some increased tone or stiffness towards the side of your stomach. The third group of muscles that we need to involve in the inner core muscle activation are the spinal stabilizers including the multifidus. These are small muscles that live deep in our back and cross one to three joint segments depending on the fiber. Although small, these muscles play a vital role in segmental stabilization of our spine and are notoriously shut down when pain and or injury is present. These muscles can be a bit more challenging to contract until you get the feeling dialed in. One helpful way to train them and check in on them is to place your fingers on your back, one finger on each side of your spinous process of your low back( the pokey bony prominence that goes all the way down the middle of your spine). This muscle fills the "gutter" on both sides of this bony point. From here, you can imagine you have a string from one gutter to the other (where your fingers are) and you are trying to pull these together. Another cue that can be helpful is if you imagine another string that goes from your low back to your upper back and you are bringing these two points slightly together. These muscles again can be tricky to locate and ensure that you are using them correctly, but you should feel an increase in tone or stiffness underneath your fingers when practicing this exercise. The fourth piece of this inner core puzzle is the diaphragm. This is a large muscle that sits on top of your abdominal cavity horizontally and attaches to your spine as well as your ribs. It is an important muscle for stability as well as respiration and to ensure proper oxygen consumption. To train this muscle, begin by placing one hand on your stomach and the other on your chest. Take in a nice deep breath by breathing into your stomach. You should notice that the hand on your stomach moves outward before the hand on your chest. You can the release this breathe to exhale and notice that your hand on your stomach comes inward back to your starting position. Practice this for a few breathes before removing your hands to ensure you are using your diaphragm when breathing. Now that we have identified and began to train each of the components of our inner core separately, it is time for us to put it all together and make this a functional component of our core stability. Begin this by going through a mental checklist of each of the four muscle groups and the cues to turn on these muscles. Turn on your pelvic floor by holding the flow of urination, your TA by pulling in your belly button, your multifidus by tightening the imaginary string that goes from one side of your spine to the other and your diaphragm by breathing deeply into your belly and making sure your belly rises and falls with each breath. This can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but just like learning any new task, the more you practice the easier it will become. The other important point to mention is when we are using these muscles throughout the day and even with exercise, we don't want to just contract them as hard as we can all the time. Try and turn these muscle groups on at a low grade, about 20% of a total muscle contraction. This will not come automatic to you and will most likely take some refining to adjust down to this place of subtle but steady muscle use and awareness. Practice these for 5 second holds at a time with rounds of 5 repetitions throughout your day. Eventually this will be apart of constant core stability especially during exercise or other lifting tasks.
* Disclaimer: Remember to always consult with your physician or physical therapist in regards to starting or changing your exercise routine and in no means is this information meant to diagnose or treat your injury. For full legal disclaimer, see About Me page. |
Author : Jordan ProudfootHere are my thoughts and insights into fitness and wellness to be the best you possible. Archives
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