Fitness, Training, Health & Conditioning

So congratulations you are an adaptive organism that is in a constant state of change based on the stimulus it receives. A few more points on this because understanding this is the key to finding success when you are looking to improve your health. Go out in the sun and you will get burnt. Ok I will get burnt, you may get tan. Eat far more calories than you burn, you will gain body fat. Two very simply examples of how you adapt to change in stimulus. For this particular post lets just focus on the muscular system and how it responds to stimulus.

“If you don’t use it you’ll lose it.” This old saying is true when it comes to your muscular system. Don’t believe it, put your arm in a cast from the mid upper arm to the wrist. Leave it on for a few weeks, then take it off. Not only will it be half the size of the other arm, you also will have lost the ability to completely move your elbow. Your muscles rely on constant stimulus to maintain the neurological impulse from your brain to each of the muscle fibers in your body.

There are well over 600 muscles in the body and each of them requires the same constant stimulus to remain in an active state. What does it mean for a muscle to be in an active state? Well lets keep it very simple and say that your muscles have 2 primary functions. The first is obvious, they are responsible for the movement of the skeletal system. Second, they are responsible for the alignment of the skeletal system. I know there are many other functions of the muscular system but for the sake of this blog I want to focus on how to keep you healthy by keeping you moving. 

So lets revisit the earlier post regarding the progression we go through from infancy through the toddler stages, and into childhood. The adorable little infant lying there wigging its arms and legs in an effort to roll over onto its stomach some day is simply doing the most fundamental of all exercises, just move. They continue this phase as we talked about earlier until they are capable of doing just about anything physically. Watching my develop over the last 7 years has proven to be the best education in how to train the human body I could ever have hoped for. I have learned some great tips for parents of young children and tomorrow I will share several of these with you. For now, enjoy your Thanksgiving!

So do you have an answer? How is it that we are at our best when we are young children when there is not a extremely overpriced piece of equipment we sit down on or we are not paying a trainer to make us do exercises that may or may not be what our body needs to be healthy? Common Guesses I hear are, “well your still growing so your body is more limber” or I love this one, “our muscles and joints are just healthier when we are young”. Here is the real reason we are at our best when we are young. You can try to argue this if you want but I think it is so basic that there is not much of a valid argument against it.

When we are born, or created, or evolved, or whatever else you may believe in, we have a very instinctive mechanism that our body works with. When we are born or in most opinions, even in the womb our body begins to respond to stimulus. There is literally tons of research my wife would read to me from her 50 pregnancy books about how while in the womb your child is reacting to light, sounds, the foods the mother eats, the stress levels she may have, and many other sources. The same is true upon our birth. we spend the first few weeks or even months of life simply responding to stimulus. We learn hot from cold, hungry from full, loved from abandoned and thousands of other forms of stimulus. We are also unconsciously doing some very specific things that I feel are completely instinctive. I truly believe that our bodies are wanting to be challenged and moved at all times.

It was such a blessing to watch my kids develop because I was able to witness all of this first hand. I have a son who is 7, and two daughters, 4, and 2. I can remember them laying on their backs kicking and wiggling and waving their arms. I thought it was cute but really they were exercising. They knew that in order for their little bodies to become more efficient they needed to supply stimulus to their muscular system. I will not bother you with the intricacies of how the body really does this from the creation of a neurological signal to the various components and chemical reactions of a muscle contraction. Just trust me it is extremely complex and ultimately is a perfect system.

To keep this short we spend the first 3- 4 years of our life in a constant state of challenging our bodies to become more efficient to allow for proper movement of the skeletal system. Brian Cassidy from ADAPT Training called this “Natures Strength Progression”.He realized that our bodies followed a specific pattern of development. A baby starts Supine or on its back, then its first major accomplishment is to be able to roll over onto its stomach, otherwise known as a prone position. From there we develop the ability to get up onto our hands and knees, then eventually stand and walk and run.  

We can get more in depth into this concept later but the key I want you to understand is that for our bodies to be able to perform the way we want we must be able to supply the right type of stimulus to our muscular system. Next post we will get into how this pertains to exercise and how many trainers are completely missing the boat on this one. Remember an exercise is simply a form of stimulus, the key is how do you determine what type of stimulus is right for your body. I’ll do my best to teach you that very thing.

I want to take a chance to go over my opinion of how the fitness industry has been programed to run. Here is the issue that hurts the industry. It is driven like everything else by money. What does this mean to you as someone looking to stay healthy? It means you are at the mercy of advertisers to determine what you need to be your best. Many trainers fall into this same trap. Keep in mind this is not a hunch, this is the reality I personally witnessed for many years.

My First job in the training world happened to be at a Nautilus Plus in Tigard Oregon. I was 19 years old and was hired to do be a maintenance person. I spent my day walking around the gym cleaning strangers sweat and who knows what else off the machines. My favorite was the stair masters. I would see someone get on those things and just go crazy for 45 minutes amassing a lake of sweat and hair underneath them. Needless to say I was very motivated to become a trainer as quickly as possible. Time for me to come clean to my old boss. I was not the best maintenance person ever. I secretly would always be cleaning close to where there would be a personal training session going on and I would eavesdrop. I would take thousands of mental notes on what to do and just as importantly what not to do.

This was in 1994 and the fitness world was enjoying a real boom. Many new gyms were opening all over the country. Long Story short I became a trainer in a just a few months. For the next 5 years I spent every day learning as many exercises as I possibly could. I read every magazine out there. Mens Fitness and Mens Health are both tremendous sources for great information. I also have been a long term subscriber to Shape and Womens Health (i pretend its my wife’s when company comes over). Each subscription was packed full of great moves.

Here is when I really started to understand that personal training and ultimately the fitness industry was driven by exactly that, exercises. What was the latest and greatest move? You could look around the gym and see a trainer use a new move and then bingo, it was then the best thing going and everyone was doing it. Every few months a new type of fitness equipment would be introduced and that to would become all the rage and every fitness instructor would figure out how to incorporate  into every training session.

Here is the biggest thing the fitness industry was missing, they became all about what was selling, not what was best for your body. I will discuss this in the next post in more detail. but I will leave you with this thought. If it takes fancy machines and way overpaid trainers to keep you healthy and in shape, how is it that the best physical years of our lives are when we are small children?

My name is Scott Olson and I am excited at the opportunity to share over 17 years of fitness training knowledge with you. Starting in High school I started to take an interest in training the human body. Through a series of blessings in my life I was given the chance to work side by side some of the best trainers in the country. Each of them had their own unique styles and ways of impacting the human body. It was interesting to see how each of them had different opinions on the “Best” way to train the body.

I often wondered how they came to believe what they did and most of them were what I liked to call “Grab Bag Trainers”. They would find exercises they really liked or that clients would comment about positively and use these on everyone. Over time their bag became a little bigger but really they just picked random groupings of exercises during training sessions. The more time I spent with trainers the more I realized they were all about the exercises, not the body they were working with. In a later post I will go into much more detail once we really get into philosophy.

Before I continue I must give credit where credit is due. There is one trainer in particular that truly changed the way I looked at how to work with the human Body. in February of 2000 I was introduced to Brian Cassidy. He had a Business called Function Dynamics (now Adapt Training) that focused on training individuals of all ability levels from a person fresh out of surgery to high level professional athletes. Never before had I seen a trainer that was capable of training this wide of a spectrum of clients. The difference was that he had a completely different take on how to train the human body. I will discuss this further with you soon but for now check out his website at http://www.adapttraining.com

I was able to work with Mr. Cassidy for 6 great years until finally the biggest blessing of my work career came to be. I was offered a job working at Horizon Christian High School. It was always my dream to be able to work with athletes on a daily basis. At Horizon I was given the chance to have total control over the complete physical development of all the athletes at the school. The school opened in 2006 and I even had a chance to put together our training center exactly the way I saw fit. It has been everything I expected and More but what I realized is that I also had much knowledge to share those outside of the walls of Horizon and this is my chance to do so. I also started my own Fitness Training business called Trinity Sports Camps.

Thanks for visiting this Blog. My associates and I hope it is able to impact your life the way it has for the thousands of Clients we have worked with over the years.