Newsflash: New Suspension Training Equipment

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 Suspension Training Equipment

In my ongoing quest to provide my clients with the latest and best innovations in exercise technology, I am excited to be adding Suspension Training to my exercise programs come November 2011. 

What is Suspension Training?

In actuality, suspension training has been around for a long time in one form or another.   Think of the rings in Gymnastics as a form of Suspension Training.  The roots have even been traced to exercise manuals dating back to the year 1866.  However, this form of training did not make its way into the mainstream exercise world until just a couple of years ago.  A Navy Seal developed a mechanism utilizing a pair of straps that could be suspended from a strong tree branch or vertical pole.  The Leverage Principle is then utilized to use your own body weight to perform a multitude of exercises to improve strength, mobility, balance, endurance and flexibility. 

The refined version of the system was eventually marketed as the TRX Suspension Training System.  Other versions of this system have since followed.

The real value of this system is that is will give us another tool in our arsenal of training apparatus that excel in providing workouts which facilitate Functional Strength, Constant Core Activation and Balance Training.  

By Functional Strength, I mean exercises that require the human body to act as an entire unit, not just isolating out one specific muscle group (a very powerful concept).  When I talk about Constant Core Activation, I am referring to 360 degrees of trunk involvement (not just simple rectus abdominis crunches).

This allows us to work the body in a way that mimics natural everyday motions we are required to perform (i.e. getting groceries out of the back seat of the car; lift a squirming child); thus making us less susceptible to those nagging little injuries.   The equal value to having a strong core and a central nervous system (which are trained to connect) is that we will become even more proficient when performing the other exercises in our program and  “Keep the Results Coming!”

As we go forward with this new system the possibilities will be endless:  from body sculpting to injury rehab/from sports specific training to weight loss/from cardio conditioning to flexibility.

I have purchased the latest incarnation of this system, so it will be available to all clients regardless of location.

What is good exercise form?

This is one very frequent question that I get asked in the gym as I am training my clients.  When performing a particular exercise and see another person doing the same exercise differently; perhaps in a manner that I had previously cautioned my client against.  My client will then ask –Is their form wrong?  Should we correct them?

I wanted to make this one of my first issues to tackle in the blog since I will be addressing exercise form time to time. 

In the “real world” I prefer to think about exercises in a realm of Risk vs. Benefit—rather than Right vs. Wrong.

Your goal may be to excel in a particular sport, requiring your exercises to mimic the extreme movements of that sport. This in turn may jeopardize you living pain free life years down the road. 

To illustrate this take one of the most popular exercises –The Bench Press.  When I first started training I worked with a trainer who had been a competitive Power Lifter most of his life, he did very well in his sport, thus winning several competitions.   Unfortunately when performing a “Competition Bench Press” the rules requires that the barbell is lowered all the way to the chest. The study of Kinesiology has sense taught us that performing the Bench Press in this fashion places the rotator cuff at risk  (in a future blog we will go into the specifics on this).  Anyway, as a result of years of doing the Bench Press in this fashion (with very heavy weight) this trainer was forced to rely on shoulder injections every three or four months just so he could sleep at night.   At the time I lost track of him he was considering shoulder replacement surgery.

By doing the exercise in this fashion he saw the benefit of winning the competition outweighing the long-term consequences on his health.   Also, he may not have been aware of the long-term consequences because back when he did a lot of this we didn’t have the scientific information that we do today. 

The goals and workout of a Professional Football Player might be very different from workout and goals of a 45-year-old Female.  Anyone who has know a Professional Football Player after his retirement from the game knows that they physically pay a price for the intensity of the sport.  

Problems arise when certain exercises (or the way we perform them) work their way into the mainstream that have a higher risk to benefit ratio than the average exerciser might want to take.

In the future when we critique certain exercises be aware that we are not calling them wrong, but wanting to alert you to a high risk to benefit ratio.   When possible we will show ways to make the exercises safer.

In the end for most of us it is finding a balance between our goals and exercises can help us safely and effectively achieve those goals, thus allowing us to maintain our exercise program well into our senior years.