Good day today. Little early morning workout, a lot of business building at the Club, a great group session with some awesome athletes, and finished with a team meeting with the greatest personal training team in Lafayette! What did you do for your personal physical, occupational, or social development today?
Today, we are talking about your support system, your bones. Many people move their exercises with a muscle mentality. They believe that by being "strong" with their muscles, that they can power through any movement well. However, consider this. Our muscles are only as strong and supportive as the structures for which they are attached, or can create torque upon. Think about squatting on a solid rubber floor. It is easy to create torque in the feet, externally rotate the femur, and create massive force. Now consider doing it on ice. Much less force can be created. Now on top of water (yes, I know, you can't stand on water, point made!). The final point is that our muscles are really great levers, but they must have something on which they can act: your bones.
Your skeletal system is the support system of your body. The sole purpose of your muscles is to generate force on your bones to change the angles of your joints. This is why it is called the musculoskeletal system. These two systems work together to move your body. Without your skeletal system, you would be very mushy.
So what does this mean for exercise? You can only be proficient in a movement with muscular strength alone for so long before your posture and form cause faults and failures. Imagine a back squat (check out The Back Squat - Learn to Lift Well, I added a new video!) where you become very soft in your core, allowing your spine to be loose and flex or extend with no resistance. Very quickly you will fail to be able to lift the load. Now imagine that you are in a "somewhat proper" position, but still not quite perfect, but are trying to lift a maximal load. Again, being in a slightly compromised position can lead to failure. This is why it is imperative to learn how to use proper mechanics and posture throughout each of your movements to ensure not only that you can support maximum loads, but so that your body wears more slowly, due to it being in the ideal position to go through every day motions hundreds of thousands of times in the right way.
So don't just learn how to move hard, or move strong, learn to how to move WELL and in the right position. Check out the short video below to help demonstrate my point. And always,
Stay Fit.
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