Walk into your local gym. Take five minutes and simply observe. I’m sure you’ll report seeing many people walking on treadmills, riding stationary bikes, and using strength training machines. Is this proper? Perhaps for a small portion of the population, but for most of us it is an inoptimal way of exercising. Physical therapists and other medical professionals have known this for years, but it has not carried over to personal training and the general population.
Research done in the last decade has shown that many methods of exercising can and should be replaced. For example, levels of fitness when performing interval training (running at different speeds during a session) increase more than jogging at a constant pace. This is due to different metabolic pathways being trained (more on this in a later post). Many variations of cardiovascular training can be used that better increase fitness levels. However, I’d rather focus here on strength training.
Most people like to do their strength training by isolating certain muscles. For example, the biceps muscle is isolated in the arm curl and the quadriceps musculature is isolated in the knee extension. But is this how our body moves? One of the first things I learned at KPA was that it is more efficient to train MOVEMENT PATTERNS rather than MUSCLES. We exercise in order to increase the quality of our lives, largely through the way we move. So does it make sense to sit down on a machine and perform an arm curl in order to move more efficiently?
I’ll be providing some example exercises that can be used to increase the quality of your movement over the next couple of days.
June 16, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I am quite interested in this topic as well. I’m anxious to read about the example exercises that you will be detailing in the future.