All those flashy jumping and dynamic movements are a lot of fun to watch and make us feel good to pull off. But if you haven’t spent time working on your movements slowly, you could be missing some issues in your range of motion!Continue reading
Tag Archives: movement
Muscle Balance Is Essential For Quality Movement
Strength training was originally popularized through bodybuilding in the 70’s. Arnold Schwarzenegger popularized working out and a bodybuilding style weightlifting program became the norm for cross-training athletes.Continue reading
Why Novel Movement Is Important For Your Health
Keeping a healthy mind is more than just doing a crossword puzzle every day. There is a mind-body connection that cannot be ignored. You have to engage them both if you want to be healthy. That’s where novel movement comes into play.Continue reading
What Two Days Of Intensive Movement Showed Me
I spent the first half of last week getting my Level 2 MovNat trainer certification. You can read my MovNat level 2 certification review here if you haven’t already. In a nutshell, it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot.Continue reading
Why Should You Chew Your Food?
Most of us don’t think too much about chewing our food, but it’s actually pretty important. There are several good reasons to chew your food well past the point you can just swallow it.Continue reading
What Is Movement Efficiency Really?
Let’s talk about what movement efficiency really is. Efficiency is using as little effort as possible to accomplish a movement. But that doesn’t really help understand how to be more efficient, does it?
You create efficiency by using the minimum amount of tension and the maximum amount of relaxation needed to complete the movement. It sounds odd to talk about relaxation during something like deadlift, but it is important.
Obviously, as the movement becomes more demanding the tension required becomes higher and the amount of relaxation used will become lower, but for most movements, we won’t need that level of tension so there’s a lot of room for more relaxation.
Moving From The Ground Up
Alright! Today I’m just going to show some groundwork. These are all simple exercises I like to do to help open up my hips. None of them require any equipment and can be done just abut anywhere.
There’s no instruction this time. Just a few reps of each exercise!
Don’t Build Function On Top Of Dysfunction
So often, I see someone who does not have the basic mobility and stabilization necessary to perform a proper squat. And her trainer is working hard to add all kinds of props to help the person do a barbell squat. If you can’t do a proper body weight squat, you’re not ready to do a weighted squat.Continue reading
Lunge Variation to Stabilize Hips, Knees, and Ankles
Just in case you have the regular lunge figured out, I want to share a version that will bring the challenge back! Here’s the plie lunge.
This variation really makes the lateral muscles of the leg work. It will help strengthen everything on the outside of the leg and teach you how to better stabilize the hip, knee, and ankle.
Try it out, but go slow! It will leave you crazy sore if you overdo it.
But Isn’t Crawling for Infants!?
Why in the world would you want to crawl once you’ve learned how to walk? The truth is there are a lot of benefits to crawling!
If we still lived out in the woods where things aren’t groomed, we’d HAVE to crawl fairly often. This could be to get under obstacles, over steep terrain, or to sneak up on dinner.
Crawling is also more stable as we have more points of contact and out center of gravity is lower. This can be incredibly helpful when moving over narrow or unstable objects. Think about crossing a downed log over a stream. How many times have you see someone crawl across that log if they can’t balance well enough walking?
Some of the main benefits to crawling are more developed core stabilization, better coordination between opposing limbs i.e. right arm to left leg, and Hip Flexor and Glute activation!
So give it a try and see if you still have what it takes to crawl!
