Increasing your Strength: Look further than the Obvious

This past weekend myself and several of our bootcampers participated in our first ever Strongman/Woman Competition.  It was an awesome experience and definitely a bucket list item I have had.  While I personally didn’t do as well as I had hoped, our group had some great success in the competition.  We had a woman finish 2nd and one of our bootcamp instructors and personal trainers finish second in his weight class.

Overall it was a fantastic but tiring day.  After I reflected a little bit and started thinking about things I could work on personally that would enhance my performance if I decided to participate in an event like this again.  This also goes hand in hand with what we are starting to do in our bootcamp program as a whole in the next few weeks (long overdue, I confess).  A movement analysis or Functional Movement Screen is something that everyone should do at least once to assess their movement, mobility and flexibility to find their weaknesses.  It is our weaknesses that hold us back in terms of moving without pain, jumping higher, or in our case this weekend, pulling a fire truck faster.

Of course training the large muscle groups and practicing the actual movement of an exercise you will be performing are part of the plan, but making your holes, or weaknesses stronger lifts up your entire game.  Let me use vertical jump as an example: your thigh muscles are the main muscles worked in a vertical jump, secondly your calves and hips.  Those muscles you will focus on getting stronger.  But what if one leg was weaker than the other?  Would you also benefit from single leg strengthening exercises to ‘catch up’ the weaker leg to the strong leg so you can jump higher?  What if your Hamstrings were not flexible which limited your range of motion when performing hamstring strengthening exercises?  All of this information can be found in an assessment and fixed with some simple exercises so that your weaknesses can catch up to your strengths.

What about if your main goal is to just lose weight and get lean?  An evaluation is still beneficial because finding the gaps in your ability to move and assess your strengths and weaknesses can provide relief of the typical aches and pains so many feel on a daily basis.  Perhaps the cause of that pain is lack of mobility, too much mobility, lack of flexibility or uneven strength on both sides of the body (or something else).  Or perhaps the pain is not related at all.  However, without an assessment, we are guessing.

Also beneficial to those just trying to shed some weight, discovering deficiencies in movement and flexibility can also alert you of an issue that hasn’t happened yet but will unless it is addressed.  An example of this could be an unstable knee or weak abdominal area which can cause a back injury.  Finding these out are helpful so that they can be prevented, addressed, and can ensure longer uninterrupted training without the increased risk of injury.

Assessments are a no-brainer in my book, and while I’m ashamed I haven’t done them sooner, taking this on with 300 clients is a challenge, but is also important enough that making this happen for our clients is something that is absolutely a necessity.