Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Biceps Curls And Your Feet


Image courtesy of wikipedia.org
Image courtesy of wikipedia.org

So I've talked about balance in a number of posts--how it is a skill of maintaining your COM over your BOS and how your brain will figure out how to use what you have available to order to perform this skill to the best of your ability.  I have also proposed the idea that just because you can physically perform something doesn't mean you are necessarily prepared to perform it in as much as you may have exceeded certain thresholds of the tissues, namely the ability of your muscles to contract efficiently and on demand.

Going back to the title, if you perform a standing exercise such as dumbbell biceps curls, as you move the dumbbells from by your sides to out in front of you to back closer towards you, the redistribution of your center of mass over your base of support as you perform the exercise, as well as the changing moment arms to many of your joints, will present a challenge to muscles other than your elbow flexors.  And, depending on the exact mechanics of the exercise as well as the speed with which the exercise is being performed, the demand to produce tension placed on the muscles of the feet may exceed their set point, which means your standing biceps curls may be detrimental to the ability of your feet to work efficiently.

And from there, mechanically inefficient feet may cause a myriad of problems at other joints and tissues in the body.

I'm not trying to say standing biceps curls are bad or you shouldn't do them.  I'm trying to highlight the point that there is a lot to take into consideration when creating and performing appropriate exercises for your body, and unless you have a means to analyze and assess how your exercise is affecting you, such as Muscle Activation Techniques™, an exercise that may appear completely focused to one area of the body can actually be causing massive issues in seemingly unrelated areas of the body.

Inter­ested in find­ing out more? Check out the “Mus­cle Acti­va­tion Tech­niques™” page.

Inter­ested in set­ting up an assess­ment time or dis­cussing this sub­ject fur­ther? E-mail Char­lie at charlie@selfmadefitness.com.

Is your exercise right for your body?


Want to use this arti­cle in your blog, newslet­ter, or other plat­form? You may, but be sure to include all of the bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion found in the yellow box below!

No comments:

Post a Comment