Over the years I have seen a lot of people strength training in the gym, always using the same routines. Normally they will go in and knock out 8 to 12 reps on several different exercises, usually what are called Isolation exercises, this is where they train one muscle group at a time, isolating a particular muscle and working only one joint at a time.
Well for normal daily life or for any kind of sport, your body does not work this way at all. You will never do a movement based task where you will only work one muscle at a time. Movement will always require several muscle groups and joints to work in a chain of events. To understand what I mean, I will give two examples with a very simple explanation. One is an everyday task and the other is a sporting movement.
Example 1. Walking
Walking is something we do every day (most of us anyway) when you take your first step, the first thing that happens is one leg must move in front of the other (obviously) to make this happen, first of all you must lift your leg at the hip, at the same time you have to start to bend your knee, then extend the knee to put your heel down, then you have to extend your hip and plantar flex your foot to place force through your foot to get forward locomotion, at the same time the muscles of your core have to work so that you don’t collapse in a heap.
Example 2. Jumping
Jumping requires a chain of events to get the vertical movement that you require. First you will have to do what is known as a counter movement, this means you will quickly bend at the hip, knee and ankle, followed quickly by what is described as triple extension of the Ankle, knee and hip, by doing this movement forcefully it will propel you upward. At the same time your core must remain strong so that the minimum amount of force is lost during your jump.
All movement requires lots of different muscles to work together to produce it. Thinking about that statement, you should be able to see that apart from looking the part in the mirror, lots of Isolation work is not particularly productive to movement as there is no chain of events across multiple joints taking place.
So when you start a resistance training programme you should consider using Exercises that will train more than one muscle and one joint at a time.
Another point to consider if you go to a gym, you will normally find stacks of fancy machines these days. The majority of machines will train muscle but are not great for training tendons, ligaments and all the small stabilising muscles around the joints that you are training. The reason being is that the machine will keep you nice and safe by supporting the load in a fixed line.
To understand this, you can try an experiment the next time you are at your Gym. Try this out on any machine based exercise. I will use the Smith Machine Bench Press as an example. If you don’t know what a Smith Machine is you can see an image Click here. Get on the Smith Machine and find your best Bench Press weight. Once you have done this, rest for 3 or 4 minutes and then get a spotter (partner who can help you) and go for your best bench press weight again, this time though use a Barbell. You will find that the amount you can lift is a significantly less than you could lift on the Machine. This is because you now have to use control to stop the barbell moving about and your central nervous system will only allow you to lift a weight that you can control. To take this even further, if you now try to lift a pair of Dumbbells in the same lift, the combined weight of the dumbbells will be quite a way off the amount that you could lift with the Barbell; this is because even more control is required to lift the Dumbbells. Therefore unless you have to use machines for medical reasons, you should always consider using free weights for your main exercises when doing resistance training so that you get better carry over into your daily life or chosen sport where you require balance and control for all your movements.
I hope you have had a great weekend.
Steve
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