World Fitness Blog : Leading Global Bloggers

July 11, 2021

3 Ways to Address the Myth of Good Posture

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 1:48 pm

Not many words make people shift in their seats as the word posture does. Probably just reading it made you straighten up. What did you do? How are you sitting now?

When most people think of good posture, they think of sitting and standing up straight with the shoulders pulled back. Trying to maintain this position can be tiring.

Many people give up, falling into the hunched position encouraged by gravity and our screens. Even those who manage to hold themselves in a good posture may experience tension and discomfort. So what’s the point?

The Downside of the Urge to Hunch or Slouch

While attempting to maintain good posture can cause discomfort, it’s better than the alternative. Sitting or standing for prolonged periods without actively engaging our muscles for support leads to an extra load on the joints and ligaments of the spine.

These structures aren’t designed to be loaded in a bent position for long periods, and the additional stress can result in stiffness and pain.

Our spine isn’t the only thing that suffers when we hunch and slouch. When the upper back stiffens, our rib cage and lung expansion are restricted. This restriction limits oxygenation and increases the work of breathing, which can trigger our stress response and impair cognition.

When your upper back rounds and your head sticks forward over your body, tension can develop in the muscles attaching to your jaw and face. This tension can result in the movement of your jaw becoming painful or restricted and contribute to headaches.

Many other hormonal and behavioral effects are associated with bad posture, some of which are discussed in this popular TED talk by social psychologist Amy Cuddy. But maintaining good posture is easier said than done.

To Maintain Good Posture, Avoid the Pitfalls

Many people develop imbalances when they try to achieve and maintain good posture. Imbalances occur when parts of your body that generally work together can no longer cooperate because of a mismatch in strength or mobility.

Imbalances can result in tension and discomfort and cause dysfunction in other parts of the body.

This pitfall comes from how most people think about attaining good posture. A common misconception is that to have good posture; you need to get into a straight position and hold it there while you sit or stand.

When you ask your body to complete a task such as stand up straight, or pull the shoulders back, without telling it how to accomplish this, the body will use the muscles you use the most.

This reliance on strong muscles results in the prolonged use of muscles that are already strong, while weaker groups are neglected. Over time, stronger muscles get stronger and tighter, while weaker muscles atrophy.

For example, if you’ve experienced lower back pain when sitting up straight, this may be because your stronger lower back muscles are working too hard, attempting to compensate for your weaker lower abdominal and pelvic muscles.

The Most Common Imbalance

Your lower back and pelvic muscles are the most common site of imbalance. The muscles that arch your lower back are often overused in many activities, including prolonged sitting and standing, exercising, and carrying.

Conversely, the muscles of your lower abdomen and pelvis are usually under-utilized. This neglect is partly because many of us experience stiffness and rounding in the upper back, and our body compensates for this by overarching the lower back when we ask it to sit or stand up straight. The result is an exaggeration of our natural spinal curves.

When the lower back is over-arched, the pelvis will tip forward, reducing activation in the lower abdominal and gluteal muscles. If left unchecked, this imbalance can contribute to dysfunction throughout the body.

Rethink Good Posture

Instead of thinking of posture as a position, think of it as the balance of strength and mobility across the muscles and joints of your body.

Rather than trying to achieve good posture by sitting or standing up straight, use your body in a way that promotes musculoskeletal balance.

An excellent way to improve posture is to move more. Setting reminders to move regularly by incorporating methods to move more into your day, such as:

  • Vary your work position with an adjustable desk.
  • Use the restroom on another floor, so that you can climb the stairs.
  • Vary the type of manual work you are doing.

A variety of movements will mix up the loading pattern on your body and reduce imbalances.

However, movement without conscious effort is usually not enough to resolve significant imbalances.

Unless we are performing a new type of movement, or consciously activating weak muscles and relaxing strong ones, the body will still use the muscles with which it is most familiar. You may still experience discomfort or tension, even after taking a break to move around.

Actively Improve Posture

Consciously challenging your weaker muscles and relaxing your overactive muscles is the best way to restore balance. But, this is easier said than done.

Overactive muscles are difficult to relax, and underactive muscles are hard to feel and use.

The rest of this post will discuss techniques designed to help you restore balance while:

  • Sitting
  • Standing
  • Performing functional tasks like manual work and exercise

Improve Lower Back Posture

The first step to achieving balance across the muscles of your lower spine and abdomen is to move the area through its full range of motion, rather than to confine it to an arched or slouched position. You can do this with an exercise called the pelvic tilt.

If you have limited control of your lumbar spine and pelvis, you may find the pelvic tilt to be difficult at first.

These exercises are fundamental, and we recommend them for people of all ability levels.

To perform the pelvic tilt:

  • Sit in a comfortable position with your feet on the floor. Place the hands around the hips so that you can feel the bony bit on the front of your hip with your index finger. Wrap your thumb around and feel the bone at the back of the pelvis. Imagine you are holding a big bowl of water in your hands.
  • Tip the pelvis forward as far as you can, as if pouring water out of the front of the bowl. Your lower back will arch, and you will roll forward onto your crotch. Tilting forward will activate the muscles of the lower back while reducing the load on its joints and ligaments. If held for a prolonged period, the tipped forward position will lead to overactivity in muscles of the lower back and front of the hips. The muscles of the lower abdomen and pelvis will be put at a mechanical disadvantage, leading to an imbalance.
  • After you have pushed the bowl forward as far as it will go, roll backward (tipping water out of the back of the bowl) while preventing your chest and upper back from slouching. As your pelvis tips backward, activate the lower abdominal muscles.
  • A useful cue is to imagine that you are using the area underneath your belly button to zip up your pants. Tipping backward and drawing up like this will stretch the lower back and activate the muscles of the lower abdomen and pelvic floor.
  • Sitting in this tilted back position will offload the muscles of the lower back, but may stress the joints of the spine if held for a prolonged period.
  • Rather than arch or slouch, try keeping the back and pelvis in the middle of the two positions. With a neutral pelvis, the load is balanced across the front and back of the trunk. The spine, abdominal, and back muscles all take a share of the load.

Repeat the pelvic tilt five times to activate and stretch both sides of the trunk, and then finish in a neutral position. You can find the neutral by moving your bowl of water to a level position so that the bony bits on the front and back of the pelvis are even in height.

Another way to tell is by looking at the waistband of your clothing. In a neutral position, the waistband usually is parallel to the ground rather than at an angle.

You can perform the pelvic tilt while sitting, standing, or exercising. It can function as a preventative measure or as a technique to relieve pain in the back or hips. It’s one of the best ways to assess and improve the most common site of postural imbalance.

If you have an existing back injury, you may experience some pain when pelvic tilting. This pain is normal. Reduce the range of motion until the movement is no longer painful, and then gradually build it up again.

Or, try imagining that a string is pulling the top of your head to the ceiling, making you as tall as possible as you perform the tilt. This lifting will help to unload the spine and reduce pain.

Another effect you may experience is the feeling of being hunched when you tip the pelvis backward. This feeling is also familiar, and it probably means that your upper back has stiffened into a rounded position. This stiffness may be why your lower back was arching excessively in the first place: to keep your upper back more upright.

Improve Upper Back Posture

Now that you’ve begun to improve your control of the lumbopelvic region, you can move on to the second most common region of imbalance: the upper back and neck.

These areas may feel rounded now that the lumbopelvic region is in a neutral position. You will need to improve their ability to arch if we want to promote musculoskeletal balance.

You can extend the upper back, also known as the thoracic spine, over the back of a low-backed chair.

  • Lace your fingers together behind your head, squeeze your shoulder blades together, and lean back so that the top of the backrest pushes into your back.
  • To emphasize the extension of the upper back, limit arching of the lower back by keeping your lower abdominal muscles engaged.
  • Hold this extended position for about fifteen seconds, feeling a stretch in your chest and upper back.

Stretching the muscles and joints of the upper trunk with the thoracic extension is an excellent way to reduce overactivity. But we still need to strengthen our underactive muscles.

The muscles between and below the shoulder blades are often underused, and activating them can help to relieve upper back, neck, and shoulder pain.

  • With your pelvis in a neutral position, pull the chin back as if trying to be as tall as possible.
  • Then, squeeze the shoulder blades down and back together.
  • The body often compensates for limited movement of the shoulder blades by arching the lower back, so be sure to keep the pelvis neutral.
  • The upper shoulders will also try to compensate during this movement, so remember to squeeze the shoulders down and back, rather than up and back. Perform the squeeze ten times to activate the muscles of the upper back.

There may not be much movement at first, and it will be hard to feel the muscles working..

It’s All About Balance

Good posture is traditionally thought of as standing and sitting up straight with the shoulders pulled back. This is difficult for many people to maintain, and those who do maintain it do so by often overusing their strong muscles.

To improve your strength, mobility, and risk of injury, think about posture as the balance between different muscles and joints of the body.

Improve your posture by introducing more movement to your daily routine and by consciously developing a balance between overused and underused muscles.

When performed regularly and deliberately, the pelvic tilt, thoracic extension, and shoulder retraction exercises will help you achieve and maintain balance without strain and discomfort, making good posture second nature.

Initially, these movements can be made difficult by stiffness in adjoining parts of the body.

Source

March 13, 2021

The Ultimate Isometric Exercise Guide

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 12:41 pm

The Ultimate Isometrics Manual is a nerd’s paradise, at least for this nerd. From the mind of Convict Conditioning author Paul Wade, and published by Dragon Door, this hefty 462 page book that is about as complete an overview of isometric training as you can get.

The Ultimate Isometric Exercise Guide - Reviews, bodyweight exercise, isometrics, functional strength, concentric-only training, contraction

Isometrics is about easily accessible and yet outside of a dedicated group of practitioners, not something that gets much press. It’s a shame because isometrics has broad applicability for all populations of strength trainees including novices and seniors.

That’s because isometric exercises force you to stay in your lane. By that I mean that they are not like lifting a barbell or dumbbell in so far as you can’t overload, or under load, an isometric set and the risk of injury is, overall, much lower than more traditional exercises.

Isometric exercise is only as effective as the effort and the effort can only be felt if you are properly positioned to create the tension demanded. That doesn’t mean you can’t screw up an isometric exercise but you have to be pretty motivated to get it wrong.

What is Isometric Exercise?

Isometric exercise relies solely on the creation of tension with concentric contraction of the muscle against an immovable object. That object may be a device like the isochain, it may be a door jamb, and it may be your own body.

Invariably, any discussion of isometrics will refer to the seminal study done by Hettinger and Muller in 1953 (Muscle capacity and muscle training). The German researchers found that a single daily effort of two-thirds a person’s maximum effort for six seconds at a time for ten weeks increased strength by about five percent a week.

Melody Schoenfeld wrote on these pages that isometrics is working at standstill or the the act of using force against resistance without changing your muscle length. For example, holding a bicep curl at a 90-degree angle for 30 seconds.

Logan Christopher wrote about legendary strongman Alexander Zass who was a big proponent of isometric exercise who believed the secret of isometric training was that it stored energy instead of dissipating it, and that it allowed him to work against very strong resistance helping to build up his stamina.

Zass had little to no access to weightlifting equipment in his life. He was a strongman who bent bars and broke chains. Bruce Lee was also known for his isometric work, as noted in Bruce Lee’s 3-Minute Workout by Shane Trotter.

Unpacking The Mysteries of Static Training

Hetting and Muller did seminal research on isometric training in 1953

Let’s get the biggest criticism of this book out the way: it’s a little overwrought in promoting the Isochain, an expensive isometric training device that isn’t being reveiwed here and isn’t needed to enjoy this book or take advatange of it.

You’d think that Paul Wade, the guy behind no equipment workouts would be less inclined to push a piece of equipment, but to be honest, his publishers should have done a better job of addressing this one minor flaw of the book.

To put it in perspective, this ebook is just under ten dollars and has plenty of great information and exercises that don’t need the Isochain. I’ll be generous and give the Isochain infomercial about 50 pages of overexposure, which leaves about 400 pages of other stuff.

Otherwise, I stand by my nerding out statement. I have a reference for isometric training. I have enough information to make an intelligent decision about its efficacy, and I have plenty of examples of how to apply isometric exercises.

More importantly, there is enough information here to justify exploring how isometric training can help increase weight and reduce the chance of injury.

I asked an older friend of mine, someone who is quite sedentary, to try 10 minutes a day of a set of isometric exercises that I had improvised for him during the lockdown, while he was working from home. Based on my sample of one, the impact of phenomenal.

Whether it was the 10 minutes a day only part of the routine or the actual palpable increases in strength that he experienced, my friend was sold and actually go the book himself.

Like everything else in the fitness industry, there are cycles, fads, and fashions. Isometric exercise isn’t fashionable or faddish, but it may need to have a refresh cycle and demands some modern-day appreciation. Paul Wade’s book may be all you need to freshen up your isometrics.

Source

February 2, 2021

Health, Fitness and the Tao of Functional Bodybuilding

Filed under: Fitness — Tags: , , , , , — admin @ 3:33 pm

There’s a reason functional bodybuilding (FBB) has become an overactive buzzing buzzword in the fitness industry today: It combines traditional strength training with a more, let’s call it, practical way to train, one that gets you moving better—moving more functionally. This goes a long way in improving health and fitness long-term.

Learning Functional Bodybuilding

Functional bodybuilding, which focuses more on quality of movement than intensity, allows us to bring bodybuilding principles to functional resistance training.

This helps build a great foundation of strength and efficient movement, one that is designed to accommodate each individual’s abilities and goals in a way that’s supportive for health and longevity.

Hence, it’s useful not just for high level athletes, but also for people just wanting to be healthy and functional for life, but who aren’t interested in being bodybuilders.

A Functional Bodybuilding Primer

I mentioned the importance of understanding the principles of bodybuilding and energy system training. Let’s talk about these principles, starting with traditional bodybuilders.

Bodybuilders are known for their ability to increase muscle mass (aka hypertrophy). This isn’t just about lifting heavy weights, it’s also about understanding how to manipulate repetitions, sets, tempo and rest time, as well as mastering concepts like time under tension—meaning the amount of time a muscle, or muscles, are under tension during any given set.

For hypertrophy to occur, the optimum time under tension is in the neighborhood of 40 seconds.

While that might sound simple enough—5 squat reps @3311 = 40 seconds of time under tension. Easy peazy—it’s not quite THAT simple.

It’s also incredibly important to consider the person’s abilities and their training age, meaning how long they have been training. This is why if you’re a coach, or if you’re a client looking for a program or a coach, an individualized assessment with a coach is key to the process. You may want to try the systematic approach assessment guide for coaches.

Health, Fitness and the Tao of Functional Bodybuilding - Fitness, Health, energy systems, functional strength, functional training, functional bodybuilding, fitness assessment

That being said, here are four key principles to keep in mind if you’re about to start, or build a FBB program for a client:

  1. Compound movements first: Compound exercises, like a squat or a bench press, should be done at the start of a training session, while isolation exercises, like a bicep curl or a leg extension, should be done later in the training session.
  2. Keep track of contractions per muscle group in any given session: Ideally, the number of exercises per body part should be between two and four per session. If not, technique and recovery is likely to suffer.
  3. Keep in mind intended contraction: This comes down to knowing what movements are appropriate for you (or if you’re a coach, knowing your clients’ abilities and limitations). Don’t be fooled by sexy movements. If they’re out of your ability, they’re not going to help you.
  4. Quality over intensity: It’s as simple as that. This doesn’t mean there can’t be intensity. It simply has to be appropriate intensity given the skill and strength level of the individual. Simplicity over complexity. Quality over intensity.

Energy System Training

One of the ideas behind FBB is to provide strength training without hurting aerobic capacity. This largely comes down to understanding energy system training, meaning the anaerobic alactic, anaerobic lactic, and aerobic systems.

Two important, and often overlooked, concepts to understand include:

  • Get the rest time right: The most important part of rest and recovery time comes down to the individual and what they are capable of recovery from. This is true to both rest time during interval training and recovery from one session to the next.
  • Avoid interference: If you’re doing (or programming) aerobic work, consider the types of movements you (or your client) is going on their resistance/FBB training the next day. For example, if they’re doing a ton of hinging the next day, then maybe avoid high-volume rowing intervals on their energy system training day, as it’s a similar movement pattern. As a general rule, keep these movement patterns separated by at least a day.

Key takeaway: Whether you’re someone wanting to begin a functional bodybuilding program, or a coach looking to design one, the most important takeaway is that there’s no one-size fits all approach to a program.

For best effectiveness, a great functional bodybuilding program needs to consider the individual’s capabilities, priorities, training age and goals. This concept is at the heart of OPEX education, and the foundation of their new functional bodybuilding guide.

Choosing the Right Functional Bodybuilding Program

Take one scour of the old internet and you’ll find countless functional bodybuilding—or FBB—programs for sale. And like most products and services, they’re not all created equal.

Take one scour of the old internet and you’ll find countless functional bodybuilding—or FBB—programs for sale. And like most products and services, they’re not all created equal.

I believe a great functional bodybuilding program will get you results and requires understanding the key principles of not just bodybuilding, but also of energy system training.

Check out OPEX’s free How to Program Functional Bodybuilding Workouts introductory ebook.

Source

Powered by WordPress