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Not All Strength Training is Equal – How To Get The Most Out of Your Lifts.

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Fast-twitch, slow twitch, speed work, strength work, conditioning work, mobility, neuro function, agility, balance, cross-training, etc, etc, etc.

The world of strength training can be so confusing and it can be hard to know what type of work can help you and your activities the most. What is the best way to get faster? Stronger? More agile? Recover from injury? The way you train – the load, the speed, the tempo – all of these change the response in your body. 

When designing strength programs, I like to think in layers. Take a look below for a guide on how to set up your own programming. Need help? Reach out to Koa Fit and schedule a session.

Layer 1 – Strength vs Conditioning

This is where I see people make the biggest mistake. In Boulder, most people are doing some sort of endurance activity, whether it it cycling, hiking, walking, or running. Then they head to the gym and do high rep, low weight strength training. These are similar stimulus and will illicit similar responses in the body. Meaning, there is no cross-training happening.

Benefits of Strength Training

  • Hypertrophy
  • Power
  • Explosive/Dynamic
  • Bone Health

Benefits of Conditioning Training

  • Foundational Fitness
  • Stamina
  • Endurance
  • Aerobic Capacity

If you are doing an endurance activity, most of your conditioning will already be covered. Think about using the gym for more strength focus. If you are new to lifting or are using it as your primary way of moving and exercising, you will want to stay in more of the conditioning realm or include both.

Within this layer, you can also include:

  • Corrective work/rehab – remember to train for when things may go wrong, not just power for when things go right. 
  • Prep work
  • Isolation Movements
  • Compound Movements

You will want to progress each week. Whether it is 1 extra rep or extra load, you want to do more each week so you can see improvement.

There are 2 ways to progress:

2 Ways to progress

  • More load – reps, weight, time under tension
  • More complexity – position, stability, multi-joint, coordination

Layer 2 – Tempo

There are 3 different stresses put on the muscle with every movement. Depending on which part of the movement you focus on, you can change the input.

  • Concentric  – Muscle shortens under load
  • Eccentric – Muscle lengthens under load
  • Isometric – Muscle is static under load

Concentric focused will help you create explosive, dynamic power. Eccentric focus can be better to increase overall strength and is utilized for injury prevention and recovery. Isometrics are helpful if you need a lotto strength in a specific range or if the joint you are working is compromised and you want to strengthen while not aggravating the area.

Layer 3 – Specificity

Once you have the first 2 layers dialed for what works best for you, you can start to get very specific with your program.

Things like:

  • Joint Focus
  • Pattern Focus
  • Sport Specific

Layer 4 – Extras

Once you have your program dialed with the first 3 layers, take a look at what could be missing. Some extra things to think about when training are:

  • Balance
  • Coordination
  • Rhythm
  • Mobility
  • Agility
  • Mind/Body Connection

I hope this helps you improve your strength training program and gives you some ideas about how to make it work better for you. If need guidance or would like me to set up a program for you, please reach out at Brenna@koafitusa.com

Exercises for High Hamstring, IT Band, and Hip Pain

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A lot of runners, hikers, cyclists, and walkers will experience high hamstring, IT Band, or other hip pain in their lives. With 60% of runners experiencing high hamstring pain, and 50% of cyclists and 20% of runners experiencing IT Band pain, hip pain is one of the most common injuries/complaints among this active group. The good news is that with a little bit of prevention/intervention work, a lot of those aches and pains can be avoided.

The hip is a ball and socket joint which gives it its ability to move in a large variety of ways. The six motions of the hip are: external rotation, internal rotation, abduction (leg moving away from center), adduction (leg moving towards center), flexion, and extension. Tension and limited range of motion in the hip (and the whole body) can only be caused by 2 things – mechanical tension (structure limitation) or neural tension. Most of our day-to-day mobility restrictions are cause by the latter.

When expanding space in the hip capsule, rotation should be addressed over any linear limitations. Without the establishment of good rotation, both internal and external, other ranges such as flexion and extension will never improve. Good range AND control of both of these rotations should be the primary goal of anyone experience hip tension.

Below are a few exercises to help. When doing these exercises, there should be no pain. You should feel stretch in the long tissue (the part your are lengthening), but you should never feel restriction or pinching in the closed angle (where the body is shortening or folding). There should also not be pain in other joints like the spine and/or knees.

While both rotations should be explored, if you are primarily experiencing hamstring pain, you would want to focus on your hip internal rotation and control. If you are experiencing more IT Band symptoms, you should focus more on the external rotation movements.

First, explore your hip range with this exercise:

Next, let’s work on hip external rotation and hip extension first.

Now let’s work on hip internal rotation.

And then put it all together with hip CARs. This exercise can be done daily on its own as a warm up for a run.

Have questions? Reach out at Brenna@KoaFitUSA.com.

Exercises for Plantar Fasciitis and Achilles Pain

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While not the same, Achilles Pain and Plantar Fasciitis can come from the same mechanism – insufficient dorsiflexion. Dorsiflexion is the ability of your ankle to flex in a way that gets the top of your foot closer to your shin. How much you need depends on the movements you want to do. For example, at least 10 degrees is needed for walking on a flat surface and at least 15 degrees is needed to run on a flat surface. If you want to add hills or uneven surfaces to the game, you are going to need more.

Getting more dorsiflexion isn’t as easy as stretching your calves. In fact, stretching past your range of dorsiflexion is what probably caused the pain in your heel or achilles in the first place. When you dorsiflex, a bone called the talus rolls anteriorly, but then needs to glide posteriorly. Sometimes, we feel this lack of glide when we flex our ankles and feel a resistance or “hard stop” at the front crease of the ankle. This lack of glide overstretches the tissue on the backside of the ankle, and over time, can create inflammation at the heel or the achilles depending on where we are weaker, what’s happening with the rest of our gait, and other factors.

To gain back dorsiflexion, we need to establish heel rock. This is our ability to invert and evert at the calcaneus (heel bone). Watch the video below to practice this move.

After we understand inversion and eversion (and probably discover we lack eversion), we combine this motion with the entire movement range of the ankle.

After we establish this range of motion, we move on to working directly on our dorsiflexion. This next exercise can be hard the knees if done on the floor (as shown). You can modify it by placing the foot that you are working on up on a chair or table.

Once we increase the range of our dorsiflexion, we will want to gain control of it with this next exercise.

Finally, we want to work the eccentric (loaded and lengthening) of dorsiflexion to ensure we have the strength we need when we are out on our runs, hikes, and walks.

It is important to remember that if you currently have pain, you may need to include an anti-inflammatory method in your recovery. You can talk to your doctor about what is best for you. These things need to work in combination to reduce the inflammation and prevent the injury from coming back. Anti-inflammatory options alone (such as ibuprofen and cortisol shots) will not fix the mechanics of the problem that got you in pain in the first place. Meaning, as the anti-inflammatories wear off, you could be back at square one if you have not done the work to fix the issue (not to mention you are leaving a lot of strength and power on the table by not expressing your full range of motion).

Your best option? Prevention. Start these exercises now so you don’t have to experience pain in the future.

Want more? Koa Fit’s Online Library has 35+ routines not just for ankles, but for hips, shoulders, low back, and more. Try it out today boy clicking here.

2 Exercises for your Low Back

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To keep our low backs happy and safe, it is important for us to learn how to stabilize them when we lift, push, and load them. Just as important though, is to learn how to move the lumbar spine in bending and extending, twisting and side-bending. Our lives are not lived in neutral spine, and in order to keep our spines prepared for our active lives, we need to train outside neutral as well.

These 2 exercises will help you discover how much you move (or don’t move) in your lumber spine, which motions are easier and which are harder, all while strengthening those deep core muscles that we need to keep the spine safe.

3 Exercises for Your Ankles

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Do you keep rolling your ankles? Maybe you feel like they are stiff and don’t move well? Is there a little tweak in them after a big hike? Do you always feel the need to stretch your calves? Try these 3 moves (daily if possible) to help bring some mobility and control to your ankles and tension relief to your calves and feet.

Case Study – Dislocated Shoulder

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Session 1

A client of mine came in recently who had dislocated his shoulder. The dislocation happened 9 days prior and he had already been to the ER to have it “popped” back into place. The shoulder was still very sore, did not take load well, and was extremely guarded (shoulder elevated towards the ear, elbow flexed, and arm hugged into the body).

Letting pain be our guide, we used shoulder CARs (controlled articular rotations) to explore the full range of the shoulder in all movements (external rotation, internal rotation, abduction, adduction, flexion and extension). This gave us a baseline of his current movement capacity, allowed him to explore his pain-free range, and displayed where the “weakest links” resided.

After the CARs, we moved onto some capsular work for the shoulder. Again, letting pain be are guide, we explored the range of motion in shoulder external rotation. We used PAILs (progressive angular isometric loading) to establish if the reason for the lack of motion was neurological tension (guarding) or mechanical (something injured). This allowed my client to gain range in a safe way without further injuring his shoulder.

Once we created more range in the shoulder (most of his loss was due to guarding), we gently moved the shoulder through the full, pain-free range of shoulder external rotation and internal rotation to “upload” to the nervous system the availability of this new range.

This may not seem like much, but it is a safe and easy way for this client to learn where he can move his shoulder safely. It connects our mind and body (via the nervous system) so we are less likely to guard and compensate. This expedites the healing process and gives us a roadmap of what we can train during this time so there is no “waiting” between rehab and fitness. We have identified where there is a lack of range, where there is a lack of control or strength, and we can use those perimeters to adjust the workouts so he can keep getting strong while protecting his shoulder from further injury.

Session 2

When we met again, and we went over his shoulder CARs, his range had much improved. We could see there was still limited motion in his internal rotation and his flexion, so we addressed that lack of range of motion first by adding a PAILs (progressive angular isometric loading) for shoulder internal rotation.

After creating that space, we repeated our shoulder CARs movement and then moved on to some strengthening for the shoulder capsule.

We started with shoulder external rotation since he had been working on that at home for the last week. We also started with eccentric loads (loading as the muscles elongates rather than shortens) in both shoulder external rotation and internal rotation because it has the ability to train the tissue as if it wasn’t injured. Eccentric exercises can override the reflex to guard the joint and lets the nervous system know that it is okay to move and load that area. This is the path back to full range strength.

This is the beginning of the strength phase. Again, loading in the eccentrics allows us to strengthen the shoulder, in full-range, while avoiding any unnecessary re-injury or pain. He will be sore from this exercise, but in a normal, muscle-sore capacity.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to progress.

Want to know more of have questions? Reach out Brenna@koafitusa.com

Feet and Ankles

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Feet, our connection to the world around us. These 29 muscles, 33 joints, and 26 bones propel us through our lives. How they work and connect affects how everything up the chain works, from our ankles and hips, to our low backs and shoulders. Over the next few weeks, I am going to focus on our feet and how to keep them happy. Check back each week for new videos.

The best place to start, is to see if you have control of your feet. Try this video below. If you can’t get it at first, keep trying. It will come quicker than you think.

Now that we can move our toes, let’s try to gain some more range of motion. Try this big toe extension stretch with both a straight and bent knee. Hang out in both positions, but spend a little more time in the one that feels the most useful.

Moving up to the ankles with this next video. Limited range in our ankles usually means we have limited “rock”. Meaning our heel has a hard time rocking side-to-side. Try this next exercise to check on this side-to-side movement while also working on gaining more control of the movement.

Now that we have some side-to-side movement, we can work on increasing the range of our dorsiflexion (shin bone towards the top of the foot). This PAILs/RAILs exercise allows us to gain more range of motion while actively engaging that new range. This means, we are strengthening while we are gaining more flexibility.

To round out all our work, we will finish with ankle CARs. This helps upload all our new range and maintain it beyond our session.

Balance Challenge

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Try our balance challenge and see where you stand (pun intended). Try each move (1 added each week). If you can do it, move to the next. If not, keep working at it daily until you have it, then progress to the next challenge.

Intro

Challenge #1

Challenge #2

Challenge #3

Challenge #4

Challenge #5

Weekend Recovery

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After a weekend of playing, our bodies can wake up Monday morning a little stiff and tired. That doesn’t mean we don’t move. It means we give our bodies a little motion to help them recover stronger and feel better. Try these 4 mobility exercises to help keep you moving well.