Discussing Fitness Sap

Hi everybody, it’s Robert. I have one of my oldest t-shirts if you remember this character. This is the Flash, my fantasy staff. I like to fantasize that I can run as fast as Flash. I never could. I was never the fastest sprinter. I was more about a longer distance guy and I did pretty well at that but fantasy, to tell you the truth years ago, my fantasy was to be a decathlete and I’m only about five foot seven. I don’t have anymore close to the natural speed to do the decathlon. That’s ten events and you pretty much have to dedicate your entire life to doing that event but one of those fantasies I have. I can run the 1500 meters okay; it’s the other nine events. The high jump, forget it. Anyway, if you saw the last episode, I told you about being a fitness sap. Hopefully you’ve taken that to heart and you’re starting to think about please don’t be a fitness sap and I was going to give you a case study of an old client of mine. Actually, he is not an old client and I still work with him. He is my oldest client. This is the guy that’s—I think he’s 51 or 52. Most of his life, he had problems with asthma, never worked out, stiff as a board and decided to take up MMA, mixed martial arts training at a franchise here in New York City who shall remain nameless. They have many branches throughout the area here. And yes, he did get much more fit. His breathing is so much better, he is stronger. He can certainly generate work for a much longer period of time at a much higher level but today, more than ever maybe his not case so match. We have devised methods scientifically where we can easily file fitness on top of a very dysfunctional body. You can go to any gym and see the exercise machines and see how it’s done. You can sit there all day, doing this, this, this, sitting on a recumbent bike, holding on to the rails of treadmill. You can certainly pile fitness on top of a dysfunctional body. On top of a stiff body, on top of a body where it’s actually pretty week in all those stabilize your muscles that have to activate first so the big muscles can do their job right. Take someone that goes out as I said the last time, running for the first time over the week, endures themselves. They obviously had an imbalance they have to take care first. They were a fitness sap and this guy is a fitness sap, why? Well, before he works out now, he has pile fitness on top of the very dysfunctional body. Hamstrings so tight, he has let a hip get so bad. He has a big cyst inside that they have not removed that he insists—they insist on not wanting to remove. The shapes of his hips are such that he’ll never be very flexible. The shape of the bones but they can certainly be better than they are now. His back is always stiff, back pain comes in and he says, oh my back is so soar after this workout that he did yesterday. His neck—he had a shoulder surgery to remove bone spurs that came from years and moving the shoulder badly. I could go on and on and on it doesn’t work on any of it. Part of the attitude is, oh the back pain is just part of the game, it’s suppose to be there. No it’s not. This is the kind of people that eat Tylenol for breakfast or Advil. No. That’s being a fitness sap. Remember I showed you last time great hooks three kind of tier fitness building block, remember? The bottom one, the one that needs to be the broadest is basic movement, okay? How you move in basic movements, not anything fancy, not running, not jumping anything like this. These are very basic things that are screened. Number two is performance and this would be the strength, the stamina, the flexibility, mobility and all that stuff and then more for an athlete but for anybody really skilled that would be technique would be piled on top of that. So let’s say for a runner, it would be the technique of running, however, as briefly once said, techniques which would be skill has to be built upon a good base of strength and flexibility but to take that a step further, strengthen flexibility need to be built on a base of basic movement which a lot of people have lost through the years, gone. To certain movements, some they might still have and some they might have part of and this really needs to be developed first and tested. That’s how you know a good trainer as if they test this first before moving on to any of this. So this guy has done none of this. He doesn’t really bother if I have him do some of this. He says, why do we have to do this stuff, why don’t we just get on the drill stuff. Well, that is a fitness sap. In fact the true great athletes I’ve met have worked on step A more than anything. They refine it, refined it, and got the basic things, the building blocks, like Michael Jordan for instance stressed the fundamentals. John Wooden the great coach at UCLA constantly worked on the fundamentals and in today’s society we have kids that go right to specialize training before their bones are even grown all the way, big, big mistake. Specializing in whatever sport it is and they all say, oh he is going to be a great athlete. She is going to be a great athlete, a great soccer player, this and this and it blows the knee up, blows the back up, tears an ab muscle, gets what they call a sports hernia, gets nothing but ankle problems, shoulder, because the basic stuff wasn’t worked on. I knew kids back when I was in high school. State champions in cross country who in high school were—moved on to college, they were burnt up and they just couldn’t do it anymore. They specialize I think too early. The African distance runners on the other hand, they worked on the fundamentals for years before they moved up to a more specialize running. They just run to and fro from school. Whatever phase they wanted over hill and dale five days a week. So there are a lot of problems I think in today’s fitness and exercise. So how do you know how to begin an exercise program? Number one, if you screen yourself for basic movements and you shouldn’t really be screening yourself. A person who knows what they’re doing should do it instead and you have any pain in any of these movements, not stiffness restrictions, you’re grunting and struggling. But I mean pain specially joints and your back is made up of all joints so this could be foot, heel, ankle, knee, hip, anywhere up and down your back. Shoulders, elbows, wrist, fingers, neck, jaw and all of these joints—any of those, it needs to be addressed by a professional. A PT, a physical therapist, an orthopedist—take care of that first because to try to pile fitness on top of pain, nothing good is going to come of it. I can tell you now. You’re a fitness sap if you do it. If you think you can bell through it, your fitness sap and you’re letting yourself buying some stupid. That’s my experience, this is what I do for a living. I know other top level guys and I can tell you now if you do that, you’re fitness sap. Okay. It doesn’t make you good, bad, right or wrong but it is what it is. You’re a fitness sap, okay? It doesn’t make you a bad person if you—if these movements are not on either. You can always fix them and that’s the good thing about this. Now, here is one test, an overhead squat. You can do running on your own to find out just how limited you are. It would be the subject of a regular FFTV episode but here’s a picture of an overhead squat test. You see here, dowel rod above your head, shoulder with—hip with and just bend down into a squat. If your feet spin out, if you can’t get down very far, if your arms or your body pitches forward, if your knees cave in, you’ve got some work to do. Now, I’m going to give you some more information on how to get started with that in future view logs. I just wanted you to start thinking about this and look at your exercise program and see what’s happening in there. Take a good look and question and I really pile like fitness on top of all these problems. Am I asking for it?