Exercise For Tomorrow

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Injuries are not fun.  There's just no way around that.  And rarely will you ever find someone who says they exercise with the goal of getting injured.  In fact, many people will say the exact opposite, that part of their goal in exercising is to become less prone to injuries.

There are a lot of injuries that are unavoidable such as those that are caused by a single traumatic event.  But there are also a lot of injuries that are avoidable--ones that unknowingly occur over many years until all of a sudden the discomfort doesn't go away anymore.  These injuries may be brought on by doing the same things over and over and over every day for years as well as by exercising inappropriately for your abilities.

The good news is that by understanding how to appropriately manage your exercise these chronic injuries may be less likely to occur or avoided altogether.

One form of exercise that may help in the prevention of these chronic injuries is Muscle Activation Techniques™.  Muscle Activation Techniques™ assesses how well your muscles can contract and then improves upon that ability.  By improving the ability of your muscles to contract efficiently, you will have more muscles that are working at a higher level.

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This means any activity you enjoy doing, you'll have more muscles working better to do that activity with.  Additionally, by bringing more muscles to work with you, you will have better control over your joints, which may lead to healthier joints down the road.

The goal of MAT™ is not to relieve your discomfort today, but by getting your muscles to contract better you may have a greater chance of not experiencing chronic discomfort down the road.

Are the choices you make today going to leave you better or worse off tomorrow?

Interested in finding out more?  Check out the Muscle Activation Techniques™ page!

Interested in setting up an assessment or discussing this subject further?  Leave a comment below or e-mail Charlie at charlie@selfmadefitness.com!

Your body.  Your training.

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Are Your Muscles Ready?

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What activities do you like to do?  Are your muscles ready for those activities?

What does your daily life consist of?  Are your muscles ready for those events?

What do you have in store for today's workout?  Are your muscles ready to take on that challenge?

How do you know??

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If you didn't sleep completely well, ate something that your body doesn't totally agree with, have some kind of mental/emotional stress going on, or any of a number of other factors, your muscles may not be absolutely ready to do what you want to do or do what you are asking or requiring them to do.

Muscle Activation Techniques™ can check in on your muscles and nervous system and assess that.

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This is one of the greatest benefits of MAT and one that I utilize with all of my clients before we get into the meat of their workout for the day.  Similar to what I discussed last week, performing CAMs and AMC&S tests before we head to the fitness floor gives me an idea of the state of their system at that moment in time.  And this feedback isn't always the same as the verbal feedback I receive from them regarding how they are feeling, which, to me, makes it a vital aspect to keep tabs on.

Think of it kind of like a diagnostics check for your car.  A brief assessment can unveil if something you were planning on doing should be momentarily put on pause because your body just isn't quite ready at this point in time.  While that's not always pleasing to hear, it certainly is more enjoyable than suffering an injury because you didn't take the time to check things out beforehand.

Additionally, you may not be receiving the full benefit of your physical activity if everything isn't up to par before you begin.  How much more could you achieve if your body was completely ready for what you were going to do?

While I check in on my clients' muscles every time we meet, having an assessment done every other week or even once a month can still be of great benefit.  This little bit of time spent asking some questions can turn up some very powerful answers that may lead to a huge boost in the results you are currently getting through your exercise as well how you feel during your everyday chores and activities.

Are your muscles ready for your life?

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.

Your body.  Your training.

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!

Back To Par

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When I was first introduced to Muscle Activation Techniques™, one thing that stood out to me in my mind was the intent of the modality.  I saw it as a tool to, in a sense, get the client's body back to par or back to the way it could work under circumstances that are free from pathologies or structural deformities and are within the person's threshold to tolerate stress.  In reality, MAT is more trying to give the brain more options regarding what it has available to work with to produce specific motions and/or maintain specific positions, which I suppose may be seen as getting the body back to par.

Coming from a sports performance background, this was a drastically different idea than what had always been proposed to me. Previously, par had not been good enough. You had to train to be better than that. Suddenly, it seemed like par was what almost every person was failing to get to.  While the ability of contractile tissues to generate tension may have improved through the sports performance type of training, I'm not sure how much it was doing in terms of improving the ability of tissues* that were in a deficit regarding their ability to send enough afferent signal so as to have the opportunity to generate tension when needed.  Rather, this training may have just been improving the tension generation capability of the contractile tissues that were already working well, so any deficit of other tissues that was present to begin with may have remained.Perhaps a better way of improving the way the body functions and subsequently the way it performs may be to, at some point in the progression, just try to get the body closer to par, meaning having more of its options available for motion production and position control at a given point in time, and then improving upon what all of those options can do instead of taking a more limited number of options that are already working well and trying to build something bigger and better off of those.

If you had a building and wanted to make it bigger, would you just add more new structure to the top of it without going back and reinforcing all of the weak points in the current structure?

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.

Your body.  Your training.

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

*muscle fibers and their associated muscle spindles

Five Reasons Athletes Should Consider MAT

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If you are a seemingly healthy, well-functioning athlete, how can MAT be of benefit to you?

1) More tension-generation capabilities = improved ability to move = improved sports performanceMAT improves your muscles' ability to contract and generate tension.  More tension generation means more potential force that can be put into the ground, ball, water, etc.  This potentially allows for faster, more efficient movement and greater sports performance.

2) More muscles available for work = greater ability to work through fatigueIf you only have 75% of your muscles coming to work to their fullest capacity on game day, that may mean three muscles are trying to do the job of four.  While they may be able to handle this in the short term, if one of those guys gives out due to fatigue or stress, now you only have 2 trying to do the job of 4.  That's significantly harder.  Instead, if you have all four coming to work to their fullest capacity from the get go, you might not have any give out because they are able to distribute the work evenly over the course of the game.  When the game is on the line, would you rather have all of your guys working for you or only half?

3) More evenly-distributed workload = greater ability to recover from training and competitionIf everybody worked for you during yesterday's game, they will be a lot less exhausted the next day than if you would have only had half.  This means you can potentially recover faster from your training and competition, which means you can potentially get back to performing at a higher level sooner.

4) Inter-competition tune-upsWhat was the toll last night's game took on your body?  MAT's assessment process can figure out what positions you are having difficulty moving into, out of, and maintaining and potentially what muscles may have been inhibited during the previous competition.  More importantly, this information can be used to dictate your training and treatment process to give you the best chance to be firing on all cylinders by your next competition.

5) Injury preventionYou train hard, and you compete harder.  All of those hours can take a toll on your body, more so than you'd expect.  Even if you feel good, you could be one stressor  away from the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.  Why risk watching all of your hard work and hours go down the drain with one injury when you could give yourself a little insurance?  Once again, more muscles contracting and doing their job at a higher level means a greater potential ability to control your joints and withstand potentially negative forces.  All good things.

As an athlete, do you want to improve your performance?  Perform at a high level when fatigued?  Improve your recovery time?  Feel good between competitions?  Prevent injury?

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.

Your body.  Your training.

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

The Importance of Timing

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People's understanding of what MAT provides the opportunity for tends to lend itself towards improving the ability of muscle fibers to contract and generate tension.  While this is often true, I think it is important to point out that it is not just the ability to generate more tension that is improved, but also the ability to generate that tension the moment an external stimulus is imposed.


It does not matter how much tension can be generated by the muscles that control the knee.  If they are unable to generate the exact amount of tension you need them to at the exact moment in time you need it to be generated, that could be the difference between rupturing your ACL and walking away injury-free.

A great example of this happened to me this past Spring.  I was playing in a city league basketball game and went up for a dunk along the baseline.  An opposing player put his body into my chest when I was in mid-air and I had to grab onto the rim to protect myself.  The problem was, because of the contact I didn't get up as high as I had expected and I slipped off of the rim.  I fell backwards and landed straight-legged on my right leg with that hip externally rotated.  I felt my body continue to travel backwards and laterally over that leg as my foot stayed planted to the ground, and then I felt an immense pressure on the medial aspect of my knee.

It was right at that moment that I caught myself with my left leg and hopped up.  I was a little shaken because I thought I was on the verge of seriously injuring myself, but I didn't have any pain at all.

Two weeks prior I began scheduling regular MAT sessions.  I am thoroughly convinced that had I not begun those sessions when I did, I would not have walked off that court that day and the entire course of events between then and now would have been dramatically altered.

The next day I went back in for another MAT session and had my hips worked on.  I have not experienced any pain, swelling, or sign of injury in general from that incident, and I have MAT to thank because of that.

Even a genetically superior being like Derrick Rose had issues with the timing of tension generation. Do you really think you aren't susceptible?
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You may be strong and healthy and lift a lot of weight and feel great and that's awesome, but understand if the timing of your muscles' ability to generate tension isn't there, if that orchestration of joint management is off in any way, you are leaving yourself very susceptible to injury.

And quite frankly there isn't any faster way to not get to where you want to go than to be out of the game completely because of some preventable injury.

Weight lifting can't guarantee that timing.  Neither can plyometrics.  Or yoga.  Or Pilates.  Or running.  Or swimming.  All of these other things will simply improve the ability of the guys that are already working well, but it is the guys who aren't doing their job that will be your downfall.

With all of the time and energy you are investing in building a bigger, stronger, more powerful, or more efficient and well-running body, what are you doing to make sure that investment is insured?

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.

Your body.  Your training.

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

Prefences of Movement

 

You see it all the time--trainers and coaches inflicting their opinions and biases upon their athletes and clients with only a limited acknowledgement of the individual's abilities, limitations, or needs.  When it happens in the medial realm it is called malpractice but when it happens in the gym it is called working out.  Huh??  This is absurd.

Take the squat, for example.  Back squats, front squats, box squats, split squats, single-leg squats, goblet squats, assisted squats, wall squats, ball squats, squats with accommodating resistance, and I am sure I am forgetting some other type of variation.  All of these--based on the implements used, the placement of the resistance relative to the body and the specific joint in question, the direction of the resistance, how the person is applying force into the ground, tempo, intention, and how much movement occurs at each joint during the motion--will affect the body in profoundly different ways.  You can even take the same movement with the same weight, implements, and placement of resistance and get completely different adaptations and sensations both from a structural and neuromuscular perspective if the other variables are not controlled, as well.

The point of all of this is that to label an exercise as "good" or "bad" or to completely disregard one variation of an exercise and/or only using a single variation is not only ignorant, it is dangerous, because the question that is failing to be asked is, "Is this appropriate for this individual at this moment in time?".  Without first asking this question and then seeking the answer, you are simply guessing as to whether the stimulus you are applying to the body should, in fact, be applied while at the same time assuming it is appropriate to do so.

It is time to collectively give up our arrogant and ignorant preferences of movement and start developing a preference for appropriateness.

Get big or die tryin'.

Charlie Cates, CSCS
Self Made_®, Owner and Founder

Charlie Cates is a strength and conditioning specialist and the owner and founder of Self Made_® (http://selfmadefitness.com/) in Chicago, IL.  He has worked with competitive and everyday athletes of all ages and ability levels, from 9-year-old kids to NFL MVP’s.  He can be reached via e-mail at charlie@selfmadefitness.com.

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Almost all of us have been told at one time or another to not let your knees go past your toes while you squat in order to prevent injury. But is this advice actually helping to prevent or setting yourself up for injury? Check out this article by Ian Middleton for more information.

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Get big or die tryin'.