Total Health Breakthroughs: Alternative Solutions for Mind, Body, and Spirit

When my client Carrie first came to me, she was injured. Only three weeks earlier she had made up her mind to lose weight and starting running for 45 minutes per day. But this was not a good idea, given that she hadn’t run in years and was 20 pounds overweight.

After only a few workouts, she had developed a muscle strain in her upper thigh and it required weeks of rehabilitation to heal.

In my years in gyms, I’ve met thousands of men and women who care enough about their bodies to want to exercise. The only problem is that sometimes I cringe when I see what they’re doing to themselves. I try to offer advice when I can, but as the saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

Many of these exercise enthusiasts spend all of their time on what I call the “mirror muscles.” These are the ones that you can see when you stand in front of a mirror and admire yourself. Of major importance to most guys is their pectoral or chest muscles. But, they are making a crucial mistake by not spending enough time on working their shoulders.

What happens is, they end up with a body out of balance. Without building the shoulders along with the pectoral muscles, they’ve put their shoulders at great risk. And this isn’t important for just the guys! Having strong shoulders is important for women too. That’s because there are so many daily activities that put stress on the shoulders.

A lot of people think you’ve got to hit the weight room to really build muscle. It’s understandable, but they’re mistaken. You can skip the weights entirely. Think about it: real strength isn’t about isolating a muscle group and working it to death. The kind of muscle power you really need should give you functional strength.

Functional strength means you have ability to get yourself up a flight of stairs. It means you can lift your groceries and load stuff into your car. Functional strength is the power to live your daily life. But as you age, that power starts to fade.

We are all trying to get more out of our workouts, but one of the things we don’t want is to sustain an injury. Like anything else we do in life, organization is key. An organized plan for your workout sessions will provide a more consistent and effective workout, but more importantly, will also help prevent injury.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons recommends doing a proper warm up, cool down, and stretching exercises to reduce your chances of injury while trying to become fit.¹ I also highly recommend working with a certified fitness trainer who can help you design a program with all of these components and who can make sure you are using good form when executing exercises.

I’m going to admit something that might shock you. I’ve been a professional fitness instructor for about ten years. During that time, I’ve studied quite a few different fitness programs. All of them required exercising for long periods of time. I was trained to think that I needed to keep my body going for 45-60 minutes to get a good work out… the kind that would burn off fat and increase both the strength of my heart and the capacity of my lungs.

I want you to remember this quote for the rest of your life:

“Don’t put an age limit on your DREAMS.”

Dara Torres, Olympic Champion

If you look in any gym, you’ll see hordes of people sometimes spending as much as one or two hours working out. These people are under the mistaken belief that they are doing the best kind of exercise for their muscles. Unfortunately, they’re actually mistaken. What happens is that when you do these long extended exercises, you force your body to become more efficient. In order to do that, your body shrinks the muscles so they can operate more effectively as your body tries to horde energy.

Proper posture helps maintain a structurally stable body. But how do you achieve proper posture? Well, it all begins in the core. The core is the center of the body and where all movement begins. The core consists of the muscles of the hips, abdominals, and low back. These are some of our largest muscles groups, and provide the human body with the structural integrity it needs to function.

When these muscles are strengthened, they protect your back from potential injury and can alleviate most existing back problems and help to take undue load off of your joints and spine by helping the body to work more efficiently.

Building those six-pack abdominal muscles is notoriously one of the most difficult areas of the body for many people to achieve for a few reasons:

• The abdominal area is one of the most common places that the body selects to store fat which then causes the muscles to be hidden.

It has been said that up to 80% of the U.S. population will suffer from some type of low back problems throughout their lifetime. And there are many causes — including instability, strains, injuries, and accidents. Among adults, low back pain is often caused by overuse and muscle strain or injury. Proper treatment can help you stay as active as possible and enable you to understand that some continued or repeated back pain is not surprising or dangerous.¹

Specific exercises have also been shown to reduce low back pain and speed up recovery from a strain or injury.² I have outlined below, an effective program for the low back that includes a series of strengthening exercises.