Body weight training is gravely underestimated in the health and fitness industry. PTs push for cardio equipment, strength and resistance training, gym patrons prefer equipment-based training. All of this is fine, if the patron moves optimally. Which, in today’s day and age with the sedentary lives most of the population live, the sitting jobs or the labour work people do, puts their body’s into dysfunction, standing, and moving dysfunctionally. Put them onto a machine or lifting heavy weights and they are an injury waiting to happen.

• We prefer to give our clients the basics and foundations of movement with body weight training or lighter weights, to teach them to use their own bodies first.
• We improve your posture through activation exercises, mobility and stretches.
• We then focus on teaching you to move optimally making sure that you can move without dysfunction, without tightness and without pain.
• Once this movement becomes optimal for your specific body, we then then coach you into how to use your own body with exercises.
• We increase resistance by adding tempo, time under tension, advancing the movements from beginner, to intermediate and to advanced and beyond.
• There are thousands of body weight exercises to choose from and advance.
  • For example, you can start off performing push ups against a wall, progressing to a high bench, a medium bench, a low bench, then ultimately the floor.
  • We do not advise our clients to perform push ups on their knees as this increases risk of injuries and prevents them from ever progressing. The movement does not replicate the complete push up.
  • As such, eventually, all of our clients can perform push ups on their toes on the floor, unless they have a shoulder or wrist injury. Then we avoid push ups altogether to keep them safe.

What are the benefits of body weight training?

• Body weight movements have an even distribution of weight. As such, by using activation exercises, mobility and stretches, it helps you improve the distribution across all the muscles evenly. It ensures the front and the back muscles work in synergy. Same with the side-to-side muscles and the muscles across each other on a diagonal, top and bottom.
• When muscles are all moving in synergy it improves posture.
• As posture improves, it opens up the chest cavity, improving your breathing and heart function.
• As the chest lifts and the shoulders are pulled back, it opens up the abdominal cavity more, allowing all of the other organs more room to function better, without being compressed in a concave abdomen.
• This in turn allows the spine to curve in its natural correct curve, activating the back muscles correctly, reducing lower back pain.
• When the abdominal cavity opens up it allows your abdominal muscles to function better and connect better, again, reducing back pain.
• Moving our attention to the feet, the foundation of the body, we help you strengthen the feet, reducing the ‘flat foot’ syndrome that is taking over our population.
• By improving the strength in the feet, it will improve the strength of arch and improve the foot stance. It may not cure the flat foot problem, but it will certainly improve it.
• Creating an arch then allows the ankles to move outward instead of caving in, which then straightens up your knees, instead of them caving inward.
• Knee pain, like back pain, is amongst the highest in our population. And this all stems from dysfunctional posture and movement.
• As we straight up the lower section of the legs, it then allows the upper leg to sit in the right position in the hips, reducing hip pain and improving movement.
  • Think about improving the foundation in your sinking house.
• The improved position of the hips also allows the organs, including sex organs, to function better.
• As this posture improves overall, it allows muscles, ligaments and tendons to move in the way they are designed.
• All of this reduces pain, reduces risk of injury, and improves your quality of life.
• As a result, any exercise or movement you perform, will give you greater results as all of the tissues just mention, are working properly. If your muscles, tendons and ligaments are not working properly, they will not develop and grow properly reducing tone. They will also reduce fat burning as it will limit muscle growth, and creating curving of the bone structure. We need to improve the body before it effects the skeletal structure. If the bones bend, it is then virtually impossible to straighten them back up.
  • Prevention over cure.
• Since this is the case, if you go straight into strength training, not only are you increasing the risk of injury, you are in fact working hard with minimal results because your muscles can’t grow to their biggest capacity due to movement and posture restrictions, and you are risking injuries and curving of your bones.

Progression to Strength Training or Cardio with Equipment:

• Once we have improved posture and functional movement, we can then progress to other forms of training.
• This can take anywhere from 4-12+ weeks, depending on the individual’s age, dysfunction, physiological issues, skeletal structure, and how coachable they are; that is, how quickly they learn.
• Once commencing strength training or equipment-based training you will then reap huge rewards for your effort as your body will have learned how to stand, and move optimally for your structure.
• Your muscles will grow to the their optimal level, ligaments and tendons will work correctly, your organs will be able to work better and will feel so much better.
• Your quality of life will improve, you will have less pain, less injuries and you will be able to do more.

Nothing beats learning how to use your body to its maximum capacity!

• Coach Terri