Better Is Better

Neural Fitness — Is it the missing link?

If you're not getting the results you want. If you think you are "injury prone." If you'd like to perform better in your sport, but you're plagued by lackluster development. You may be neglecting the most important aspect of your training program—your nervous system.

Listen to Dr Kareem Samouri's explanation of his Neural Fitness principle. And if you're a fan of Circular Strength Training, you can have some fun with this video. Watch out for the parallels to many of CST's core philosophies.

BTW - you can check out Kareem's innovative programs by clicking here...

Enjoy!

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The Steve Jobs Workout - Bodyweight Exercises For the Virtual Nomad

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The pace and rhythm of our lives are changing.  And the transformation is only accelerating.  I read today how Steve Jobs is now working from home.  This speaks volumes about the future of lifestyle design.

My colleague Ryan Murdock has been intrigued by the Virtual Nomad concept for some time now.  Probably because he is one himself.  More and more, people are abandoning the daily grind.  In its place a lifestyle of flexibility and creativity is coming of age.  And the metamorphosis is reaching into every tentacle of this new lifestyle, including the way people are getting and staying fit.

Ryan gave a good example of this new approach to fitness in his article about bodyweight training for business travelers.  It no longer flies to tell people they need to fight their way to a crowded gym and waste their time standing in line for marginally effective weight and cardio machines.

These people are choosing better options at work.  They need better options in the rest of their lives too.  As you probably know, one of my favorites is bodyweight exercise.  It's a time-tested and NATURAL way to build muscle and burn fat anytime and anywhere.  Deep rooted physical cultures have been using nothing but bodyweight to build natural vitality, beautiful physiques and outstanding performance for centuries.  But enough with the sales pitch...

What could Steve Jobs, and all his fellow Virtual Nomads, being doing to stay fit, healthy and vital?  The answers to that question are endless, but here are a few suggestions.

1. Compensate for your over-specializations

First off, many Virtual Nomads will be spending significant time slouched in front of laptops, iPhones or other tools of their trade.  This causes certain over-specializations.  The body adapts to take on the "shape" that you spend most of your time in.  If you spend all your time in the "slouched desk jockey pose," that is the shape your body will want to take on.  You need to specifically counteract that.  Try these mobility exercises for the desk jockey as a start. 

And then there is Prasara Yoga exercise to specifically target the desk jockey slump.  You must strengthen the "functional opposite" to whatever over-specializations you may be developing.  In the case of the Virtual Nomad, this probably means some form of back bending.  Here is Coach Scott Sonnon doing an advanced back bending exercise.  But you can start with something simple like a Cobra or Upward Facing Dog pose.

2. Build or Maintain Muscle Mass

As we age, we inevitably lose muscle if we do nothing to prevent it.  Many Virtual Nomads are still young.  Start preventing now!  But increasingly older Nomads like Jobs are coming onto the scene.  For them, it is crucial to encourage lean mass.  Muscle, and by extension strength, are a vital factor in keeping us young.  It helps you burn energy and reduce fat.  And when developed in a balanced way will reduce the chances of injury.

You don't need fancy equipment to build muscle.  There are plenty of bodyweight exercises for strength and hypertrophy.  The result you get from exercise has more to do with the way you put things together and the protocols that you use than with the tool.

One of the easiest rules of thumb to target muscle building is the Time Under Tension (TUT) principle.  Essentially this uses the time you perform the exercise to target different goals.  If you are looking to grow muscle, generally it is recommended to stay "under tension" for between 30 and 75 seconds (depending on the source).  I like to work with 45 seconds.  By the end of those 45 seconds, you should be starting to run out of juice, but still have two or three repetitions in reserve.  Do that for 3 sets and you're good to go.

When first getting started, you can pick a few simple exercises that hit most of the body.  Push-ups, One-legged squats and Planks are enough to get you going.  Then, when you start to crave variety, you can browse through these unique bodyweight exercises for some ideas...

3. Burn Fat

Again, although Virtual Nomads are generally on the go more than their cubicle bound counterparts, they are still more sedentary than our evolutionary ancestors.  So we're going to have to spend some time burning off any excess fat.

The most bang for your buck comes from short and sweet metabolic conditioning workouts.  One of my favorites is the Tabata protocol.  It's super easy to understand and to implement, and it delivers awesome results.  Just choose two to four bodyweight exercises that get the heart pumping.  Starting with the first exercise, perform 20 seconds of maximum intensity work and then rest for 10 seconds, then start all over again for a total of 8 rounds through that same exercise.  Then move on to the next exercise and do the same thing.

A couple good candidates for this approach are the Mountain Climber and the Prisoner Jump Squat.  You can take a look at them in the clips below:

So you see, it takes little space and no equipment to get an effective and complete workout.  The Virtual Nomad has no excuse to not stay healthy and fit as they ply their craft from exotic locations around the world – or from their local Starbucks as the case may be.

Top 5 Mobility Exercises For Desk Jockeys

I start every training session with an Intu-Flow joint mobility warm-up session.  And without fail, no matter how long the client has been with me, they always comment on the wonders of systematically moving the body through 6 Degrees of Freedom.  They recount how they religiously perform certain movements throughout the day, and how much better it makes them feel.  And almost universally, I hear the story of how “viral” the movements are, as coworkers join the party and reap the benefits.

Everything you do repeatedly in life causes your body to adapt in order to make that task more repeatable.  An athlete training for an event adapts to better perform in that event.  But a desk jockey’s body adapts over time to being bent over a keyboard all day.

Most often, the desk jockey’s head will come forward and down.  The upper back rounds out.  The hip flexors shorten and place strain on the low back.  And the wrists develop overuse injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome.  But a few minutes a day of focused joint mobility can go a long way to preventing pain and limitations.  It's interesting to note that the movements my clients like the most - the ones that feel great - are the ones that target the specific over-compensations of the office worker.

So, here are the top 5 mobility exercises for any of you desk jockeys out there, as picked by my regular clients.

1. Neck Yaw (rotation)

2. Neck Surge (front to back)

3. Wrist Pitch & Yaw (up/down & side/side)

4. Thoracic Surge (front to back)

5. Pelvic Pitch (tilts front to back)

Your best bet is to regularly perform a full course of Intu-Flow from top to bottom and from the centre out.  The reasons for this are thoroughly explained by Coach Scott Sonnon in the Intu-Flow DVD set.  And all the exercises are also taught in detail.  But these 5 movements can greatly contribute to your well being throughout the day.  So learn them and, above all, share them.

If you’ve tried Intu-Flow, what are your favorites?

The CST Mobility / Stability Symbiosis

It seems there is a fair bit of confusion around the concepts of mobility, stability and flexibility.  Admittedly, the concept can sometimes be a bit hard to wrap your head around initially, but with a few guideposts, it becomes an incredibly powerful tool in planning and executing your training plan.

First off, let’s look at some definitions for these terms.  The NASM Integrated Flexibility Training manual gives us this:

Flexibility is the normal extensibility of all soft tissues that allow full range of motion of a joint.

So a pretty two dimensional concept comes out of that definition.  We’re talking strictly about the length of tissues, nothing more.  In a perfect world, your level of flexibility is the theoretical range of motion that you would be able to create around a given joint.  But I think we all know that we lose that potential range of motion for a myriad of reasons as time progresses.  So why do we get tight?  Is it dysfunction?  Not at all.  Dev Chatterjee, a cutting edge practitioner in the human performance field put it to me this way recently, “Tightness is exactly what the CNS wants.”  What he meant was, the neuromuscular system is very smart.  It will create tightness to counteract perceived threat such as a lack of neuromuscular control, to protect an injured area, etc.

But let’s get back to our definitions.  If flexibility is only a theoretical potential for range of motion, what is the practical extension of that.  I think we could probably call it mobility.  I like the definition for mobility given in the Introduction to Reebok Reactive Neuromuscular Training and Movement Screening manual:

Joint Mobility: is the degree of freedom of movement around a joint or body segment.  Mobility is a balance of flexibility, strength and the integration of the neuromuscular system.  It is uninhibited motion.

OK, so now we are getting somewhere.  If flexibility is our potential, mobility is the degree of control we have over our neuromuscular system in order to access that potential.  And that goes beyond the ability to recruit the muscles desired to form the intended action through a range of motion, to the control over all the stabilizing muscles involved in aligning the structure for that movement.  If something isn’t working, that darn CNS will step in and hijack the movement.

So we are starting to understand flexibility versus mobility, but what the heck is this stability thing that we keep seeing thrown into the mix.  A prominent physiotherapist, Bill Hartman, refers to stability as, “the ability to resist an undesired movement.”  That makes sense.  But it also presents what I perceive as a potential for confusion.  I think a lot of people equate that resistance to movement with a lack of movement, or stiffness.  This places mobility and stability on opposing ends of a spectrum.  I prefer to think of this stability, or ability to resist movement, in the terms of segmental control.  This paradigm places mobility and stability in a symbiotic relationship, rather than on opposing ends of a scale.

Two personal anecdotes serve fairly well to illustrate this.  A few weeks ago I had a massage with a therapist who I had never seen before.  At the end of the session she remarked on how supple my spine was.  She determined this simply through manipulation, not having me perform any movement.  Then, a couple weeks ago I attended a course on the biomechanics of the trunk and spine.  Part of the course consisted of screens to determine the functionality of various muscles which play a role in correct movement and stabilization patterns.  Out of the entire group, I had by far the best control over my movements in those tests.  So on one hand I was told that I had a very supple spine, and on the other I was shown to have great stability in my spine and trunk.  The link between the two is segmental control.

Because I have fine neuromuscular control, I am able to resist movement in order to stabilize segments while in motion.  And at the same time, because my body knows that I have that segmental control, it also allows my joints more mobility within its potential for movement.  With less neuromuscular control, my system would limit that movement within the structural potential.  And without that control I would not be able to stabilize sufficiently to maintain good alignment of my structure during movement, which would show up in the types of movements screens I alluded to earlier.

So, for example, my lumbar spine is not stiff, in fact it is quite supple as mentioned earlier, but my potential for resistance to movement is very high because of segmental control.  So I am able to stabilize that area efficiently when and how it is required.  Conversely, I think there is a notion floating around out there that certain joints need to be stiff and others mobile.  I agree that certain joints are both functionally and structurally meant to be more mobile and others more stable.  But again I believe that this is more of a symbiosis than a continuum.  You need to be stable to be mobile.  You need fine neuromuscular control to both prevent and allow movement.

But how do you develop this?  Personally, I credit my mobility and stability to the CST system’s Intu-Flow program.  Over the course of time, by taking my joints back through their natural range of motion, shaving off tension gradually and incrementally each day, and then sophisticating the way I move through those ranges on an ongoing basis, I have reeducated my body in both the movement patterns and in recognizing its inherent capacity for motion.  In other words, I slowly wore away the motion barriers which were holding me back from movement.  I added control, which promoted stability, and opened the gates of mobility.  Can you see the symbiotic relationship there?  You can’t separate the two.  Mobility and stability need to play off of each other and are co-dependent.  And each situation at each joint will call for more or less of one or the other.  And the magic link that ties them together is segmental control, or control over the little movements that make up and support the big ones.

Of course, it goes without saying that we will be delving into great detail regarding how this functions and how the three wings of the CST system takes a three pronged approach to physical development in which Intu-Flow, Prasara and Clubbells synch up to provide mobile, natural and pain-free movement. 

For a visual example of Intu-Flow Joint Health & Mobility in action, take a look at this post which explores the best mobility exercises for office workers.