Fitness Nutrition: The Finale
Some readers may have thought I had negatively criticized yoga due to its comparative limitation to resistance training with weights. My comments were not a ‘drawn conclusion’ but rather an enticement to explore, and thus the open mind that continues to suspend judgment will find out in this article how I may turn a so-called negative into a positive by shedding light on yoga's awesome power for developing positional strength - which is the foundation for smart strength training.
Any child or adult who has vigorously raked leaves knows that you must press down ‘pretty hard’ on the handle and lean/crunch forward during the stroke-rake-pull motion toward the body. You must firmly ground your feet (as well as need a firm ground) or else the body would suddenly crunch, tuck, and roll forward into a somersaulting motion! Use your imagination to picture this and feel it. The harder you press down on the rake and pull the handle toward your body, the harder you must crunch your abs and ground your feet!
This is a classic case of using ‘counterforce’ against another force, i.e. using the core (abs) to counteract against the force coming up through the ground, into your feet, and throughout your skeleton! In other words, Newton's Third Law of Motion is at work here: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
You need to ground your feet to work your core effectively. When you do, then your whole body is engaged, and core training is sublimed into the wholeness of a greater total body energetic demand. With proper grounding you'll control a weight rather than swinging it, and ironically, discover that lighter weight feels much heavier, thus making the exercise safer! Strong abs and a strong back result from handling weights under grounded conditions with exercises that are not ostensibly ‘core’ exercises.
Overall, the problem with many so-called core exercises is that they fail to solidly ground the feet or establish ‘firm points of contact’. You must eliminate placing or holding your body 'slackly' in a position in most (not all) poses or exercises. This explains why yoga develops positional strength... you eliminate slackness! This requires mental concentration, focus, and heart.
Carry this concept into weight lifting where you must control the body – when the mental effort to ground your feet and literally control the entire body in a position during ‘the exercise’ - and it is easier to conceive that you are still doing yoga! Hence... yoga is NOT about achieving positions and weight training is NOT about throwing weight around from point A to point B... it's about body awareness and moreover, learning to control muscle tension and feel force/energy in literal way... a concept that instructors must understand in order to teach people.
The keystone for this entire picture is muscle itself. The practice, distilled, is learning to feel tension within the muscle, and feeling ‘force’ moving through skeletal structure and connective tissue of your body - and most importantly - for your emotional and psychological development, understanding the externalization seen as poses and moving weight from point A to point B as mere artifices and visual devices to help you learn what you feel inside of your body.
At any rate, even though 'core exercises' ostensibly appear to ‘work' the midsection/core – these exercise often pale, in comparison, to activate the core to the degree that many traditional resistance training techniques do. This is why I say ‘strength training on a ball’ (an actual title of a book) is an oxymoron. Let’s take a moment to consider how you use your body on an air filled ball.
Like throwing a dart, balancing on a ball is more of a fine-tuning, precision motor skill and not a strength training move where you need to brace your body firmly in order to ‘push hard’. The squishiness and shape of a ball is great for stretching, but provides no firm point of contact! This is why I very rarely hand weights to my clients on a ball and especially never to beginners. It’s stupid to burden a person who is trying to 1) Learn to ground one’s self and 2) Develop whole body strength while trying to simultaneously balance on a ball.
It’s not that we (as trainers/teachers) must teach the physics, but at least we need to get people to FEEL this phenomenon. A good carpenter does not need to know F=Ma. Teaching a person to ground the feet is not only beneficial for developing strength, but also for better understanding the spine and back care overall. If you are shown how, and learn to feel your core working during many standing exercises with weights in your hands, then you will:
- Strengthen your core
- Learn that isolating ab work for more than 5 to 10 minutes is a waste of time and money, and may fail to strengthen your body to the degree that you expect.
Maintaining health, stamina, and strength has always been and will continue to be the foundation of ‘feeling and looking good’. Realize that we can create our health, not just maintain it! The ‘arena of health care’ is the body, not the hospital. A gym is only a place we may use the body and more completely understand how food, energy, and physical forces work together. Muscle is the keystone of this picture.
I am understating the full extent of how deeply the body and mind are connected by muscles. Even empathy is built into your brain’s motor cortex – the area that orchestrates movement and muscle control - by the feedback from other peoples’ facial expressions, gestures, and body language through brain cells called ‘mirror neurons’. Brain, nervous system, movement, nutrition, and feeling all relate to muscle!
Building stronger muscles does not equate to building bigger muscles, it equates to building knowledge on nutrition, psychology, body mechanics, neuroscience, physics, biochemistry, and much more.
Edward V. Watson: Consulting Exercise Physiologist
Owner: Physiologics
(612) 845-9817