Got Training?

I don’t just treat patients; I train clients as well.

And when I train clients, I teach them awareness of their body with movement. And with that awareness, they discover what areas tend to work more and what areas tend to work less. For example, everyone knows about running, right? Maybe not, but when you observe someone who says they “run”, they’re actually “jogging”, which is a slower pace form of running. And when they run, there’s actually specific areas that take more stress then others. For example, it’s common to see the calves, shins, heels, and/or lower hamstrings do a lot of work and the glutes sent on vacation somewhere. Where’d they go? I don’t know, but they’re not functioning on that “runner”. My point is that most people go on auto-pilot when exercising and when they over-do it, they start to experience some kind of discomfort and/or pain that may “go away on its own”, or actually worsen over time if they keep ignoring it.

One simple test I do with clients is to have them perform an exercise, such as running, and to stop when they start feeling an increase of muscle activity in a predominant area such as the calf or even when they start noticing an increase in pressure on the heel, etc; The point is to have them stop when they reach a point of excessive demands on a specific area not to the point of discomfort or pain but when it grabs their attention more than when rested. This point would be what I call their threshold and I would design a program with the goal to increase it so that they could do more of their activity but with less chances of overuse to a specific area.

Obviously there’s more to it than threshold testing. Once I’ve examined their mechanics and tweaked variations of their movements to pin-point what I call the “Golden Nugget”, or primary area of dysfunction, I further investigate specific muscle imbalance relationships in a more stable, less-threatening to the nervous system position such as lying on the table. From here, we work on any specific relationships that may be affecting the client’s movement capacities. In other words, I guess you can say we work on their “weakest links”, improve them, integrate them with the whole body & movement skills, and then challenge them to sink it into the nervous systems movement repertoire.

My take on training (in no particular order) is Awareness, Variety, Consistency, and Newness.

Yes. I do train clients.