You know what workout advice I give to my clients the most often?
“Breathe.”
It’s staggering just how many people fail to do something as simple and vital as breathing. But try to maintain your systematic breathing while holding weight or controlling motion is often more difficult than it sounds.
Here’s a test: Lie on the floor on your back with your knees bent, feet on the floor. Put one hand under the small of your back and the other on tip of your stomach. Tighten your abs like you’re about to get punched in the gut and press your back into the hand on the ground as hard as you can. Now Breath. Not down through your diaphragm, but up through your ribcage. Now try it without the hand under your back. How about with your legs flat on the ground?
The movement of locking your abs in position is called an abdominal brace. Whether you feel it or not, that is the very first thing that happens when you make any kind of movement. Any kind. Your core musculature locks in position and allows the transfer of power between the upper and lower body. If you can’t maintain your breathing in a simple fixed position, how do you expect to do it while concentrating on a dozen other pieces of a movement. Simple, you can’t. You have to practice expanding your ribcage and not just breathing down through your stomach as part of either your warmup or cooldown or simply when you’re lying in bed. Making it a habit will ease the stress on your body during workouts and most other activities.
Jaime Gamache M.Ed., CSCS, is Owner and Head Strength Coach at The Way Human Performance Institute. Follow us also on Facebook and Twitter. Any questions or requests for future topics, please email jgamache@thewayhpi.com
Many of you played sports at one level or another during the course of your life. Hopefully at some point you experienced being “in the zone”, that feeling of playing completely fluidly and stress free. It is a state that can be achieved with practice and confidence.
The flip side of feeling in the zone is to be playing out of control, where stress builds and there is a distinct lack of control. Both situations are caused by stress, or rather the ability to regulate it. Everyone who’s ever played sports has gone through some kind of pre-game ritual. Putting on a uniform of any kind is not really different. We listen to certain music, go through certain movements, get ourselves ready to do a job. This process is about generating stress. Good stress amps us up and gets us ready for action. Bad stress is when we’ve lost control and have become too excited, for better or worse. Our blood pressure, heart rate, focus, reaction time and all sorts of of physiological responses are out of control. Want to know how to fix it?
Take a deep breath.
That’s it. Simply re-regulating your breathing has a profound effect on returning all those responses back to tolerable levels. When we’re under stress, whether from mental anxiety or as a reaction to physical activity, we tend to hyperventilate. This causes a fight or flight response of increasing adrenaline in the body. Adrenaline can have a detrimental effect on any movement requiring skill, focus or reflex (ie. shooting and fighting). Self-hypnosis and mental practice can also help trigger this relaxation response with practice and control.
Jaime Gamache M.Ed., CSCS, is Owner and Head Strength Coach of The Way Human Performance Institute and here on Facebook. Any questions or requests for future topics, please email jgamache@thewayhpi.com
A recurring theme, and some of the central tenets of my training philosophy are balance and deceleration. But how do these become integrated in the day to day?
When most of us were children, we ran through the woods, fell out of trees, fell off our bikes (usually without helmets!), got up and kept going. Why? Because we learned to spread out the force of impact and control our bodies. This is a skill that fades with time and lack of practice. It’s a factor of life that we stiffen as we age and this can only be overcome by a conscious return to the fluidity of our youth. The lack of this skill is also an epidemic among the youth of today and is at least partially responsible for the uprise of catastrophic knee and other lower body injuries in youth today.
The world around us is by its very nature, unstable. In the gym, we try to recreate some of that instability in a controlled manner. In places like The Way Human Performance Institute, there is specialized equipment to mimic and control the amount of instability in an exercise. Some examples of these are half foam rollers, Airex Pads, disk pillows or BOSU all help create an unstable environment in a manner that is compatible with experience and relative to the exercise being performed.
Jaime Gamache M.Ed., CSCS, is Owner and Head Strength Coach of The Way Human Performance Institute and on Facebook. Any questions or requests for future topics, please email jgamache@thewayhpi.com
If you’re in the police or military, at some point you have (or will have to) fire a gun. But have you ever thought about the mechanics of that action, more specifically how the time you spend in the gym can make it easier to master the skill of shooting?
I’ve already discussed core stability and shoulder stability, but how do they interact and how do they improve? First, and foremost, by challenging them beyond the point of normal imbalance by creating situations that force shoulder and core stability to interact. An example is an alternating dumbbell bench on a stability ball. The alternation is from the top position, forcing the constant tension in one arm as opposed to have one constantly in a resting position. There has been some controversy with this exercise with too much weight used or poorly maintained stability balls, so one should use care when choosing the implements of this exercise.
Jaime Gamache M.Ed., CSCS, is Owner and Head Strength Coach of The Way Human Performance Institute and on Facebook. Any questions or requests for future topics, please email jgamache@thewayhpi.com
If you’ve ever had to run, you’ve also had to stop. Whether in sports or in life, you’re ability to speed up is almost irrelevant compared to your ability to change direction. But have you ever thought about the process of stopping or what it takes to do it more quickly or efficiently?
The first step to controlling movement is to slow it down and teach the body to strike the ground in the proper pattern. A simple method of achieving this is bounding. Bounding involves leaping from one foot to the other as opposed to a hop, which is one foot to the same foot.
Linear bounds are performed in a straight line with the initial strike in the heel to initiate deceleration with the posterior muscles. The foot makes contact and the hips drop. Landing should be soft and under control. The bound should increase till control can no longer be maintained.
Transverse bounds occur at 45 degree angles to the body. The landing shifts to the ball of the foot and the big toe with the foot pointed straight ahead. All other mechanics remain the same.
Jaime Gamache M.Ed., CSCS, is Owner and Head Strength Coach of The Way Human Performance Institute ( www.thewayhpi.com and www.facebook.com/pages/The-Way-Human-Performance-Institute/11774282495465 ) Any questions or requests for future topics, please email jgamache@thewayhpi.com
Balance is a skill that is often touched upon here but only because it is so often overlooked as a component of training. There are three ways to make any exercise more difficult: more weight, more speed or less stability. One of the easiest and most functional methods of decreasing stability (without the use of pads, pillows, rollers, etc.) is simply to do exercises standing on one foot.
Check out any action shot anywhere. Most of the time, in motion, we are constantly on one foot or the other but rarely both at the same time. The ability to stabilize on one leg not only reduces the risk of injury but allows us to be more efficient at movement by decreasing the amount of energy being expended stabilizing the joints on every step.
Take a minute to simply stand on one foot. Bend your knee to about a quarter squat. Are you shaking at all at the ankle, knee or hip (or all of the above)? If you are, that means that on every step when you walk, run, shuffle, cut, etc., your joints wobble. You are probably completely unaware that this is happening because it happens so fast. What that means in practical terms is that not only are you wasting energy stabilizing but also your leg never truly locks out to apply force into the ground, thereby making you run slower. It also makes you more prone to injury, especially catastrophic ones such as ACL tears. This is because in the time it takes the muscle on one side of the joint to take over from the one letting go, there is a fraction of a second when nothing is holding it in place. It is in this time that those injuries occur.
Jaime Gamache M.Ed., CSCS, is Owner and Head Strength Coach of The Way Human Performance Institute ( www.thewayhpi.com and www.facebook.com/pages/The-Way-Human-Performance-Institute/11774282495465 ) Any questions or requests for future topics, please email jgamache@thewayhpi.com
I’ve already discussed the problems associated with toe braking, but how does one actually re-train the body to use the posterior muscles to decelerate the body?
If there is a legitimate weakness in the hamstrings or a movement pattern that is quad dominant, one must begin by reducing the amount of force the hamstrings are controlling. This is achieved by reducing the distance required to achieve control or the overall amount of force produced.
One method of doing this is box jumps. Box jumps are commonly misconstrued as being an exercise to train vertical leap. While there is a certain amount of assistance in this regard, box jumps actually are a superior way to train deceleration as the closer the top of the box is to the apex of the jump, the less distance gravity has to accelerate the body into the ground. This allows the body to learn proper deceleration techniques in controlled environment at much lower force production than would be found in real world situations.
This is achieved by keeping the toes up and landing on the heels when landing on the box. The heels make contact and the hips continue to drop, spreading out the force of the impact. Both heels should make contact at the same time and as little noise as possible should occur.
Jaime Gamache M.Ed., CSCS, is Owner and Head Strength Coach of The Way Human Performance Institute ( www.thewayhpi.com and www.facebook.com/pages/The-Way-Human-Performance-Institute/117742824954659 )
