Category Archives: Joint Stability

Stop The Insanity

stop-the-insanity-images“Every day we see more extreme “fitness programs” advertised with high-intensity workouts and volumes of work that even my elite athletes would never hold up to. And every day, we see the injuries in the clinic that define these workouts as ill-designed, dangerous, and unsustainable. What most recreational athletes and fitness buffs don’t realize is that elite athletes spend more than half of their time in the gym on injury prevention, and the rest of the time on performance enhancement. Safe and effective stretching and injury prevention workouts might not be spectacular to watch, but they allow athletes to work harder at their sport and in the gym on performance enhancement.” Robert Forster – Physical Therapist to 42 Olympic Medalists, NBA and Grand Slam Champions and Member of the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness.

Everyone knows how to work hard — it’s those who work equally hard on stretching, recovery, and injury prevention who reach their highest genetic potential in sport and in health.

24 Fit Workout

The basic premise of all well designed exercise programs is the progressive overload principle. Fitness must be “pushed” from below, i.e. starting slow and progressing to harder workouts slowly. The periodisation model used by 24Fit builds your fitness up with a stair step series of methodical, progressive challenges and recoveries that strengthen your body and keep brain and brawn fresh.

There are 3 phases each of 8 weeks:

Phase 1 – Stability.
Phase 2 – Strength.
Phase 3 – Power.

Phase 1 is about establishing stability throughout every part of your body. Thats Spine and Pelvic Stabilization, Shoulder Stabilization and Total Body Integration. By the time you’ve completed Phase 1, you’ll not only have improved posture and joint health, but your body will also be properly prepared for the strength and power workouts to come in Phases 2 and 3.

Contrast that with some high intensive workouts creating a plethora of overuse and traumatic injuries and other ill designed training programs that not even Olympians would hold up under the stress of these workouts.

Get ready! Armed with a bulletproof fitness program and solid science based nutrition you’ll get great results..

Joint Stability – Shoulder Stabilisation

Choosing a fitness programme? There are some programs out theresucha s p90x where its intensive exercise from day one, jumping through hoops by the end of the week you are visiting the physical therapist!

Too often however, the urgency to get fit quick leads to poor results and injury as we try to play catch up with overzealous workouts and ill-advised dieting.

The basic premise of all well designed exercise programs is the progressive overload principle. Fitness must be “pushed” from below, i.e. starting slow and progressing to harder workouts slowly. In addition, what recreational athletes and fitness enthusiasts don’t realize is that elite and professional athletes spend half of their workout time in the gym on injury prevention. All strength and conditioning programs must begin with a joint stability phase where the body is hardened against injury. This phase prepares the body for the more strenuous work to come later in the training cycle.

Phase 1 of the 24 Fit Workout is about establishing stability throughout every part of your body. That’s Spine and Pelvic Stabilisation, Shoulder Stabiliszation and Total Body Integration. This involves the use of light weights and other exercises to strengthen all the little “helper muscles” around the joints, which, along with a lot of stretching insures that each joint is functioning properly.

Take the shoulder which has the greatest range of movement of any joint in the body, which explains why injuries to the shoulder are common. Maybe interesting to see how the shoulder works before addressing the preventative measures. As the video shows its’ an elegant piece of machinery where hundreds of little muscles and tendons come together and attach and interact with each other.

The bottom line for those injuries is that there is only one way to prevent them – by creating the correct posture for the shoulder joint, which means strengthening and stretching the muscles around your shoulder to prevent injury to the joint. So the 24 Fit workout includes exercises such as “Shoulder Horizontal Abduction in 1/4 squat”,” Shoulder Flexion in 1/4 Squat” “Shoulder internal rotation” etc. etc

Phase 1 prepares your body for the more challenging workouts to come