In general,  try to stay generous in my assumptions about fitness trends and other styles of training. It feels good to cheer for others trying to bring fitness to their communities and I always want to support members and friends finding a style of fitness they LOVE, even if it’s not what I think they should do. Truly.

But… I recently read an insane study that I can’t unsee and it’s lit a fire under me. The truth is NOT every style of fitness is created equal. I’ll just say it that bluntly.

Workout related injuries are 144% higher than they were 10 years ago! 

The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness earlier this year looked at injuries from 2007 through 2016 and found a 144 percent increase in all workout related injuries in the years 2012 through 2016 compared with 2007 through 2011. The study went on estimate that during this time there were an estimated 3,988,903 injuries, most often in males (58%) and with the age between 20 to 39 years (39%). These increases in injury incidence correlated with a 274% increase in HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training).

This caught my eye because Gymnazo workouts can be described as HIIT style to a degree. It’s also sobering to me because hundreds of members walk through my doors trusting our workouts to be safe. I know I can’t stop workout related injuries from happening, but did you know I still feel a pit in my stomach whenever a member experiences anything close to a tweak or twinge of pain under my roof? I do. It weighs on me.

Two Things You Should Know as a Gym Goer

1. You are injury prone right now and at risk to some degree. Each person who walks into a fitness facility brings with them movement dysfunction from past injuries, past unbalanced training styles or habitual movements that they do everyday. For most people it’s not a question of IF you get injured, but WHEN. So because this level of risk exists now, it’s never been more important to be discerning when it comes to fitness.
2. You deserve coaches who can help problem solve and program for injury prevention. Very few educational resources adequately prepare 99% of trainers to be able to help you and safeguard you in your workouts. Did you know in the state of California, all you need to be a personal trainer is liability insurance?!? Even if a trainer gets an actual certification, the vast majority are simply just not prepared for it, and it puts you at significant risk. We all know preventing injury is the holy grail, and you deserve to be coached by people who passionately obsess over how to improve their programming, to advance their skills and to see results of declining injury rates in their facility.

It honestly makes me cringe when I see someone get injured… have to stop doing their favorite activities… be told to not do anything active… take longer to heal then they wanted and slowly make their way back to feeling like themselves… only to get injured again. It’s honestly the worst. But it’s so common a cycle, I’m asked often to jump on podcasts and teach trainers how to avoid this cycle of injury —> rehab —> performance —> injury.

So I share with them how we’ve been able to reduce workout related injuries consistently by doing these four things.

4 Things I Advise Trainers to Do to Safeguard You In Your Workouts:

1. Blend fitness with restoration when you program workouts. Build in the solution to the problem. This reduces wear and tear and prepares our clients to be safer doing the activities they love.
2. Build a culture in our facility that values a three dimensional warm up and intentional cool down. Don’t compromise on these.
3. Teach and empower our clients to listen to their bodies and see aches and pains are the messengers they are. Discourage pushing through the pain and encourage body awareness and intuition.
4. Invest in your education and knowledge. Never believe you’re good enough. Never believe you know it all. Always be learning and growing because our clients deserve that.

Bottomline:

I’ll step off my soap box for a minute, but I feel so strongly that you deserve to NOT be a statistic in studies like this. I know how hard it is to make fitness a habit and to step away from busy lives, demanding jobs and even sacrifice time with your family to take care of yourself. I know it can be challenging to build it into your budget and have to shave costs elsewhere.

All I’m saying is if you are going to go through all that to prioritize yourself, to end up picking a riskier program with less educated and capable coaching, would be a real tragedy. I want more for you. I want you to be able to sustain the healthy habits in your life that bring you energy, pride and results. Don’t settle. You deserve to be as injury free as humanly possible.

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It’s the time of year again in Gymnazo where we scrap past workouts and start over, innovating the new trimester of workouts. We have almost finished all 60 new workouts, unique to this trimester and likely never to be repeated again. Myself and four other coaches have met repeatedly to wrestle again with programming strategies rooted in science, programming values and client feedback.

Each quarter it seems the programming team revisits the philosophy behind our programming strategies and this year we had one key theme come up. We have been contemplating what we ultimately care about, fitness or vitality?

This may seem like a redundant concept, but in the movement industry fitness and vitality are very different.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
— Martha Graham

Fitness vs. Vitality

Fitness typically represents the pushing of the body’s many abilities. In more cases than ever before, fitness is pushing the body to the very edge of capacity. Vitality is to command the body’s many abilities at any given time, the power giving continual fitness.

Fitness can lead to vitality only if we don’t over stress the systems we use to get there. Just because we can do more now doesn’t mean we always should. We see this mistake being made throughout the industry.

Collectively the Gymnazo coaches are unimpressed with fitness trends that emphasis fitness as the sole goal for the everyday athlete. This mindset leads to an incredible routine of high output and high burnout. If you only strive for fitness you’re only pushing faster, harder, stronger and will break down sooner.

Our physical exercise shouldn’t beat down the average daily athlete. Exercise should uplift us and give us energy, physically, mentally and spiritually. We want athletes to thrive and not just survive in our workouts.

Identifying a Balanced Workout

At Gymnazo we have a hybrid approach to traditional fitness: here we equally prioritize fitness and vitality or performance and restoration. It’s one of our key differentiators in today’s fitness mindset. Our team is dedicated to building balanced workouts, advanced in movement literacy and positioned to make any athlete at any level successful. This has far more to do with vitality than just fitness.

Whether you are a Gymnazo member or not, it’s vital *pun intended* to evaluate any workout program and determine if it’s a program that balances fitness with vitality.

Lets compare fitness and vitality workouts:

Fitness workouts are …

• limited in the boundaries of movement, likely moving only up/down and forward/back
• built to target muscle groups
• deigned (in traditional gyms) for looks first and performance second
• focused on only strength or cardio
• working on the same limited movements repeated ad nauseam
• focused on explosive movements while neglecting deceleration
• built for ideal situations and hand/foot placements
• built with the ideal athlete in mind

Vitality workouts are …

• expanding the borders of movement, moving forward/back, up/down, side to side and rotational
• built for the entire body
• designed for looks and performance at the same time
• focused on flexibility in tandem with strength and cardio
• consistently building upon the complexity of movement
• providing variety consistently
• focused on controlling movements to maximize acceleration
• programmed for any situation, especially the irregular and unexpected
• built with the realistic athlete in mind

Bottom Line

It’s not wrong to want to be fit, to want to push the boundaries of the physical and learn how to harness your mindset and ambition in one focused direction. But if you want to be able to compete at that level for many years to come, prioritizing vitality will be more important.

Vitality is the better goal than just fitness. As we program we are reminded that what is easy is not always the best. To program for fitness is easy. Anyone can make something harder but it takes skill and deep knowledge of the neuromusculoskeletal system of the body to program for vitality.

The next programming theme we’re working on is advancing our top tier group program into a higher level of performance and benchmarking without sacrificing vitality. Stay tuned!

The post In Fitness the Most Vital Part is Vitality Itself appeared first on Local Gym | Fitness | Crossfit | Gymnazo, San Luis Obispo, CA.

We hear all the time that workouts are functional, but rarely is it scientifically the case. Applied functional science may sound confusing, however, simply put it applies three types of scientific principles to individuals in order to create and maximize human function. These three truths, or field of facts, are: physical sciences, behavior sciences, and biological sciences. But what does that mean?

Applied Functional Science applies to three types of scientific principles to individuals in order to create and maximize human function

It means that we design each workout or movement with these three areas of knowledge in mind, so that your movements have purpose. Functional movement is driven by these three principles in order to enhance your life:

1. The physical science aspect includes important concepts such as chemistry, our immediate environment, and especially physics: ie. gravity, ground reaction forces, mass/momentum laws etc. These facts are necessary knowledge in order to know how the body reacts to the physical boundaries of earth. The best example is the concept of gravity. Resisting gravity’s pull is something we each have to battle all day. For this reason, at Gymnazo we train in situations contrary to traditional methods. Where most training tells you to explode against gravity, in fact the deceleration of gravity is more important than the acceleration against it.
2. Biological sciences are our most important area of knowledge. This concept consists of anatomy, physiology, human biomechanics, and neurology. In order to be able to enhance the body’s function, we must know, in detail, how each muscle works in all three planes of motion; and how each interacts with its surrounding joints, nerve endings, and neurological pathways to the brain.
3. Behavioral sciences consist of social and cognitive sciences. There are certain ways humans respond and behave that are crucial to understanding why humans function the way we do. It is important to know the desires and drivers, both positive (such as success) and negative (such as pain, fear, and/or guilt). These innate drivers enable us to build upon our successes and fight against our failures.

Our job as coaches is to take these facts, transform them into strategies, and then create techniques to enhance your workout and your life. Studying the behavioral sciences allows us to effectively motivate, and know how to best read individuals and understand what drives them. The physical and biological principles allow us to strategically design programs that will increase optimal function, benefit your fitness, and help you live a more pain-free life.

The knowledge within these three main sciences are well known principles. Applied Functional Science takes these known facts and applies them to members and clients in order to uniquely benefit each individual’s life.

To learn more about the founders of Applied Functional Science, check out The Gray Institute.

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