My commitment to you and to myself

      As you may know, if you're a client of mine, I do my best to encourage and inspire you to do something active everyday. I don't always follow my own advice, so in the desire to live with integrity, I have committed myself to do something active everyday. And as much as I love what I do for you as your trainer, and am passionate about it for you, I don't always feel the same about creating workouts for myself.  Motivating myself to stay active or getting some sort of activity or workout in is always much more challenging.

      I get more from doing workouts along side you during my 360 classes or the times when you allow me to join you in your workouts. So, my solution has been to do short, fast paced and high intensity workouts that will make me sweat and burn and that are over quick. Other options are going for a long walk or hitting the climbing gym for an hour or so, and of course joining you for the 360 workouts. I'm also adding in to my weeks one or two corrective exercise sessions to help keep my body in good working order.

      Here are a few examples of what I've been doing to get in my 'something everyday'. I've been doing this, not only to stay healthy, strong and feeling good, but to help to show you that even something done in a short amount of time is much better than nothing and that it really all does count and matter. We'll always have days where we feel that rest is best or days that we're sick, but I'd venture to say that on most days we are capable of giving at least 15 minutes to moving our bodies, getting our muscles to burn and having a little sweat-fest. 

      In addition to this commitment that I've made to myself, the commitment that I make to you everyday is to continue to support and guide you to your better health. I will do this with honesty and integrity. I make no effort to hide the fact that I am flawed. I have good days and I have bad days, sometimes it's a challenge for me to come out of a bad mood or a bad day but with that I'd rather be honest and open than hide or pretend that that is not a part of who I am. I believe that those of you who have gotten to know me, know this about me and I'm very grateful that you allow me to be me. My honest self, even when training, is loud and blunt, not always too talkative. But, get me going about 'Game of Thrones', and you may not get me to shut up. I often get much more excited about your fitness gains and successes than you do, and I'm totally OK with that. 

     

       I hope that I can keep on challenging you and inspiring you to get into something active everyday, with no excuses. Good day, bad day, long or busy day, make some time just for you and I promise you will feel better in the long run for it. I have to admit that though I've been doing this only for a short time, I'm already feeling much more motivated. I even was up early the other day, and instead of taking my sweet time with my morning coffee and breakfast, I went to a friend's studio and did one of her awesome bootcamp workouts. And, it was great.

      So, come with me and stay active! We'll feel great, we'll look great and we'll know that nothing can stop us! 

                 Train Today to Move Tomorrow!

Proper Form. So, what's the big deal about it anyway?

      I'm a stickler. That is a fact that if you train with me you know very well.
      Learning and using correct form when strength training is, in my opinion, the most important part of your fitness routine. Taking the time to learn can be an agonizing process, but one that's well worth it in the end.
I'm still learning and working on it and I'll most likely keep on learning and working on it for as long as I strength train. That is also a fact as I see it.
      So, why do I bother so much about proper and correct form?
      Because, that's why.
      Just kidding. I do it because in order for us, all of us, to build the true strength, endurance, capacity, efficiency, and longevity we must train correctly. All of our parts are connected and work together in a synchronized way to illicit the movement that we want. That includes all the things that we don't think about, like sitting, standing and walking. Our bodies sometimes forget what to do in order to maintain posture and gait. This can happen for many reasons. From injury or surgery, from inactivity, from sitting at the computer for too long, slouching, shuffling or dragging your feet when you walk. That's all besides the point because I want to talk about strength training. Though our everyday habits do have an effect, when it comes to strength training, we should all be starting at the beginning. Learning correct positioning and form.
      This should be the standard for all training. For me and for my clients, it is.
      There are a handful of basic positions and moves that are the foundations of better movement patterns and strength.
      Planks. Squats. Hinging. Pushing. Pulling and Rotating. Learning how to do these correctly, and by correctly I mean, aligning the joints and activating the muscles in accordance to maximize effort and minimize injury. Minimize Injury. That, athletes, is the key.
      If you neglect the foundations of strength training, you will at some point get injured. Now, that's not to say that no injury will occur even if you do all the right things, but we can absolutely minimize injury when we spend time and focused energy on learning the foundations.

The Plank. Everything stems from this position, you want to maintain a straight line from your ears, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles. Elbows and wrists (if you're on your hands) should be directly underneath your shoulders. All core muscles, glutes, quads, triceps, pretty much all muscles, are activated to hold this position. Work up to holding for 60 seconds for a solid strength building exercise.

 The squat and hinge work together, though can and will be trained separately. Learning the hip hinge first will help keep your squat balanced. To Squat, start with your feet about hip width apart, toes facing forward, and core muscles active. Then push your hips back keeping the weight through your heels and drop down (like you're sitting into a chair) until your thighs are parallel to the floor. Going deeper into your squat is great once you've got the foundation down. Keeping your torso upright aids in core strengthening. In a good position, your back/torso, and shins should make parallel lines.

Pushing, like a push up, starts with that Plank. Even if I were doing a pushing move elevated on a bar, bench or TRX, I would start by finding my plank position before initiating the movement. Maintaining that position through the entire movement.

Pulling exercises are the same. With pushing and pulling exercises, we get into shoulder strength and stability, which can take a lot of time to build. Especially, if you spend most of your day at a computer or find yourself hunching forward or slouching. PS--building your core strength a foundational exercise like a plank can also help with the shoulder strength and stability. It's all connected!

      Rotational exercises also will stem from our building strength from the other foundation exercises. Knowing how to control and move together will make your rotating exercises feel good and these are fun ways to work on power. In this last photo, I'm doing a split squat with a cross-body chop. Using my squat techniques, stabilizing my hips and driving the medicine ball diagonally from my shoulder to my opposite hip without falling over. All the foundational exercises are being utilized to perform this one exercise.
      So, one of my main objectives as a trainer and coach is to teach and make sure that you understand and can perform these standards correctly. Once that happens, the fun can begin!

                                                  Train today to Move Tomorrow!