Get out of your head and into your body
The other night I was reminded that kids do indeed move in more ways, speeds, angles, and with much more unpredictability than adults.
One of my clients brought her 4 year-old twins to hang while she trained (Parents modeling healthy habits is one of my favorite things to see and kids who grow up in/around gyms are some of the most socially adjusted kids in existence - but that’s a topic for another post).
And, during this time, her daughters proceeded to move everywhere while occasionally mimicking Mom; from grabbing their own weights, to watching her to see what to do, to creating their own little obstacle course and climbing on Mom’s back like a horse!
I felt the juxtaposition of coaching a room full of young adults through regimented and controlled movements.
We select movements for the stresses they put on desired muscles, joints, and the benefits they carry in helping us to move our best ways. And for good reason.
Training a select number of major movements has major benefits.
Building strength in our prime movers AKA your biggest, strongest muscles
Developing well-balanced strength to help improve posture
Allowing us to progressively overload by consistently training the same movements
The downside of training a small number of movements and especially those with limited ranges of motion (looking at you barbell bench and jogging) as well as playing a limited number of sports lies in the lack of movement variety. A lack of movement variety can lead to repetitive, overuse injuries that ultimately have the opposite desired effect.
But when and why does this transition take place in our exercise evolution?
WHEN do we stop playing around & WHY do we allow our movements to become so limited?
Think about it - can you remember the last time you truly just let yourself move?
It probably wasn’t in the weight room.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t still find ways to play with movement variety.
We live in a 360 degree world. As athletes, we need to be what those of us in the industry call “proprioceptively enriched”. This simply means that we train movements front-to-back, back-to-front, side-to-side, rotationally, vertically, and every combination of these.
The solution to the bland, narrow movement regimen isn’t necessarily to nix the main movements but rather to think of where they fall short and what supplemental moves we can incorporate to improve our movement ability.
This can look like specifically targeted “pre-hab” or “corrective” exercises like most rotator cuff or knee stability drills. But it can also look like unplanned/interactive/reactive drills where the athlete does not fully know what direction, speed, cadence, etc. the outside stress will come from.
Something as simple as laying out three different colored cones and calling out which one to pick up can add an element of play to an otherwise simple movement drill.
At times, I will begin training sessions with an improvised warm-up. Initially, my clients groan. “Ugh - here we go again with Coach Sam’s weird warm-up.”
I have to credit Cory Schlesinger, the Detroit Pistons strength coach, for this idea stemming from his time working with very tall athletes. Think about it - when a 6- to 7-foot tall basketball player falls on the court, they’re falling a LONG way. So Coach Schlesinger thought about helping them prepare for these situations.
He brought them to the wrestling room and worked on getting down to and up again off the ground.
Enter my warm-up:
Simply set the clock for 2 minutes and work on getting down flat to your back or your stomach before standing all the way back up.
It’s that simple.
Until you decide to add more constraints. Constraints breed creativity. Movement creativity. Like children possess.
Some constraints you can add that will gamify this practice:
Use only one hand at a time
Use no hands
Try not to repeat any movements
Speed up or slow down the pace
At the end of the day, finding more ways to PLAY with our movements yields tremendous benefits. Unplanned, varied movements help us along every chapter of our lives. It is really when we start to become limited in our movements that moving doesn’t sound so fun anymore.
Get out of your head and into your body.