IOL Strength and Conditioning

Expanding on our earlier discussion of human planes of motion, today let’s take a look at a few other common movement terms that are a touch out of range of most of us traditional gym rats. We’ll keep it as brief and simple as possible so you’ll have a cheat sheet for reading some of the more advanced corrective exercise articles found on the ‘net, stuff that’ll might turn around that aggressive aging process.

Prone vs supine
Prone is lying face down; supine is face up.

Superior vs inferior
Superior means closer to the head; inferior means closer to the feet.

Medial vs lateral
Medial refers to nearer to the center; lateral refers to farther from the center.

Posterior vs anterior
Posterior is toward the back; anterior is toward the front.

Distal vs proximal
Distal means farther from the torso; proximal means closer to the trunk.

Extension vs flexion
Extension straightens a joint; flexion bends the joint.

Supination vs pronation
Supination and pronation are used to describe action at the feet or forearm. In the feet, supination refers to excessive outward action; pronation refers to the ankle turning in. With the forearm, supination refers to turning the palm up; pronation refers to turning the palm down.

Medial vs lateral rotation
Medial rotation turns toward the center of the body as in internal rotation; lateral rotation turns away from the body externally.

Inversion vs eversion
Inversion turns the foot in; eversion turns the foot out.

Elevation vs depression
Elevation means upward; depression means downward. These terms are most often used to describe faulty scapula position, too high or too low.

Protraction vs retraction
Protraction moves a joint forward; retraction moves it backward.

Adduction vs abduction
Adduction brings the limb in toward the body; abduction moves it away.

Dorsiflexion vs plantar flexion
Dorsiflexion at the ankle is to bring the toes toward the shin; plantar flexion points the toes away.

Joint mobility vs flexibility
Joint mobility encompasses the ability of the joint to move through it’s full range of motion; flexibility is about muscles, not joints, and is about lengthening to optimum.

Stability vs mobility
Stability is the muscle, tendon and ligament action needed to hold a joint in position; mobility requires the correct muscle action on one side of a joint and the necessary muscular flexibility on the other to produce full movement through a joint’s range of motion.

Activation vs dormant
Activation means an action to trigger a muscle that’s not firing well; dormant refers to an inactive muscle group, at varying levels from fully inactive to fully engaged.

Tendons vs ligaments vs fascia vs myofascia
Tendons connect muscles to bones; ligaments connect bone to bone; fascia is connective tissue that covers soft tissue from head to toe, superficial to deep; myofascia is fascia covering muscle

Lordotic vs kyphotic vs lordosis vs kyphosis
Lordotic is the curve of the spine bending to the front; kyphotic bends toward the rear; lordosis describes too much lumbar curve (toward the front); kyphosis describes too much bend at the thoracic spine (to the rear)

Bilateral vs unilateral
Bilateral refers to both sides of the body working together; unilateral is one side alone

Concentric vs eccentric
Concentric shortens the muscle; eccentric lengthens, ie in biceps curls the concentric action brings the wrist toward the shoulder; eccentric returns the weight to the side

Isometric vs isotonic
Isometric changes the muscle tension without changing the length; isotonic changes the muscle tension while changing the length

Origin vs insertion
Origin of a muscle is the stationary attachment site of muscle to bone; insertion is the mobile attachment end site

Primer mover vs synergist vs antagonist
Prime mover is the main muscle that carries out an action; synergist assists the prime mover; antagonist performs the opposite action

Planes of movement — Sagittal vs frontal vs transverse
Sagittal refers to forward or backward; frontal (aka coronal) refers to side to side; transverse refers to rotational — more on planes of motion here

There ya go. The simplest movement cheat sheet on the ‘net.

Monday was Day One of my return to regular weight training after six months of corrective exercise rehab. Most of my forum pals can’t fathom why I would consider taking that much time away from the gym, and truthfully if I’d have known in advance it would take that long, I wouldn’t have done it.

At least, not until something decked me, which once you see the list you’ll realize was about to happen. Talk about a train wreck!

Tired of daily back aches and knowing there wasn’t an actual injury causing the problem, I decided at the first of the year to take a month and try to figure it out. Six months have passed, and take a look at the list of nagging niggles that are now either completely gone or at least mostly gone and fading fast.

Chronic pains that I’d had for months, years or decades – note the past tense:

Joints hurt, especially in the morning
Lousy posture, real lousy
Head tilted to one side slightly
Couldn’t turn head to the right very well
Twinge in the neck when turning head left
One shoulder raised
Internally rotated shoulders (palms facing rear)
Right shoulder ache
Impingement pain under left scapula
Elbow ache
Wrist ache
Thumb ache
Upper back ache
Lower back ache
Scoliosis (functional not actual)
One leg shorter than the other (functional not actual)
Shifted from leg to leg when standing, due to hip pain
Habitually stood on one leg with hip jutted out
Achilles tendonitis
Heel pain (resulting in a closet full of perfect left shoes and worn-down right shoes with costly insoles and heel lifts)
Dropped metatarsal, both feet
Duck walk (toes pointed out)

How did those get fixed? Surprisingly easy:

Worked mobility of all joints
Stretched some spots
Strengthened others
Worked out the triggerpoints littered throughout

I’m still waiting for a few things to settle in; that part takes a while. There’ll be a day of blissful pain-free motion — like I’m really moving well — then a day of lots of popping and shifting of the joints, or even a day of reminder of the old chronic aches. Following that will be another day or two of childlike movement that reminds me why I veered off the mainstream and onto this corrective exercise course.

I’m fully convinced most everyone who trains who has regular muscle and skeletal pain and those who get injured often in training, can make themselves feel better by a dedicated joint mobility program and by fixing relatively easy structural imbalances caused by one side being too tight and the other too weak.

It’s a pain in the rear because there aren’t too many people around — the personal trainers and the medical pros — who can do a hands-on analysis and simply tell us what to do. As this field grows enough that we can pop by the clinic and get a personalized exercise and stretching assignment, everyone will be doing it… for sure, because it works, and sometimes fast.

Obviously we can’t fix everything, but I’m 100% sure we can make things better. I’m also absolutely certain this past half-year’s effort has halted any arthritis that may have been developing due to poorly moving joints. In fact, let me give you a hint here: That thoracic spine of yours that doesn’t move very much is a nest for your growing arthritis. Get after it while you can!

My project for July: Are pain-free noisy knees fixable? We used to say if there was no pain, it was no problem; just ignore it. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it means the knees aren’t tracking as well as they could be. I’ll let you know what I find out, and if somehow these crunchy knees go quiet, I’ll holler out with your fix-it instructions.

Which supplements should I buy? That’s one of the most common questions simmering in the IOL discussion forum. The confusion caused by over-the-top advertising combined with a petrol-powered shrinking wallet size will mess with a new trainee’s head, so let’s boil it down to something simple.

Start with this: Rarely is taking a supplement short term valuable. Occasionally we’ll have an issue such as a bladder problem that can be addressed with a short course of D-Mannose for example, but generally speaking, if you can’t afford to continue a supplement over the long-term, a single bottle of a $50 product “just to test it” is not worth your money, and even less worth the concern.

We want to select supplements that will help us over the lifetime, not the newest fancy-label ingredient popular this month with the gym floor gossip crowd.

But first, before anyone starts with the specifics, set a budget. That’s right… a budget. That credit card you’re using for your internet buys is not a magic money maker; you need to decide in advance exactly how much you can afford to spend on supplements each and every month. How much is it? $75? Less? More?

We’ll use the seventy-five number and see where that takes us. Not too far, I think you can guess, so get serious from the outset: Those testosterone boosters are flat out on this budget. If you get all eager-beaver and press the Buy button without thinking it through, you’re either going to forego your multi-vitamin and protein powder, or you’re going to eat into your evaporating retirement fund.

Before you can begin to choose the supplements that are right for you, you’ll next have to take stock of your circumstances. Look here:

Regular food consumption: Do you eat a variety of whole foods daily, or do you flake off on the vegetables or run yourself through the local drive-through at lunch?

Protein intake: Do you get protein several times a day, or just at dinner?

Fish as food: Do you eat fish regularly, particularly oily fish such as salmon?

Fiber intake: Is there plenty of fibrous vegetables, fruits or bran in your menu?

Training goals: Are you striving hard but not making the gains you hope for?

Access to the sun: Do you get outside daily, and does the sun hit your skin?

Vitamin C intake: Do you eat red bell peppers or citrus fruits?

Dairy intake: Do you get enough calcium?

Age: Are your joints beginning to ache; are you beginning to have trouble with digestion; do you sleep well?

Genetics: Does osteoporosis run in your family? Heart disease?

Given your personal answers to the above considerations, you can begin to hone down your list of priority supplements. Starting with our budget of $75, you’ll discover we don’t get very far down the list. Heck, we barely get a protein powder with our multi-vitamins!

Hint: Dave’s big idea… move the protein powder out of the supplement category and over to the food budget. That works pretty good, but it might be cheating some. On the other hand, a protein shake is probably replacing a meal, so I guess it’s fair; let’s do it.

1.    Quality vitamin/mineral
2.    Fish oil
3.    Protein powder
4.    Metamucil
5.    Creatine
6.    Vitamin D
7.    Vitamin C
8.    Vitamin E
9.    Vitamin B-complex
10.   Calcium, magnesium and zinc
11.   Glucosamine/Chondroitin/MSM

A sharp shopper who moves the protein powder and Metamucil over to her food budget, and if she tosses the creatine off the list (which I can do because I’ve switched our shopper over to the female gender, and women for the most part don’t like the water weight gain of creatine), can probably get that list done on budget. Nice work!

Past the basics most everyone should use, we begin to get to the specifics an individual might need, stuff like L-Glutamine for gut health and muscle repair, ZMA and melatonin for sleep issues, iodine to boost a sluggish metabolism, enzymes for an aging digestive system, or 5-HTP for a serotonin lift.

Those with an eye toward the most current nutrient science are already taking a second look at Vitamin K, a vitamin the rest haven’t yet heard about in the nightly news.

A hard-striving athlete will probably try to widen the wallet for some branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) or a handful of liver tablets, and would find no quarrel here. He also might spring for a bottle of NO2 for a test run; most of the reports around the forum have been less than stellar, as was Dave’s experience (a dud is what he called it), but there are definitely some who keep rolling with it, so it’s worth a try if it fits in the budget.
The same athlete getting a little long in the tooth and stuffing a bigger bank account will be extremely pleased with Ageless Growth, no stretching the truth there. But again, none of those are on the month here-month there plan; if you don’t have the budget for them, don’t try a bottle to check ‘em out. No gains from BCAAs or Ageless Growth will hold after the initial supply runs out.

Digging a little deeper brings us to the serious issues of hormonal imbalance and heart health. Supplementation can absolutely help in some cases, but first we need to dedicate some time and finances to a doctor’s visit and a list of blood tests.

Buying all the latest forum rage of testosterone boosters and heart strengthening supplements is both expensive and stupid. If you need these, you need a baseline test and a real specific supplement plan, not a fancy ad-itorial or a synopsis of the newest research that may or may not suggest hope for some off-beat herbal preparation.

And you need to move those ingredients — worthy stuff like CoQ10, policosanol, an estrogen blocker like DIM or 6-OXO (quick tip: try daily broccoli first) — out of your supplement budget and over to your medical one. There’s no room left in your supplement category, particularly for some of these expensive items.

A long conversation spanning the past four years takes place here in the forum. Feel free to join in the discussion with your current thinking.

Last week, the half-way point in my ten-week introduction to Feldenkrais movement classes, I decided to spring for an individual therapy session. It was both an enjoyable experience as well as a breakthrough, so let me tell you about it.

In the group lessons, about a dozen women and one brave guy spend about an hour and a half on the floor, sometimes face up, sometimes face down. The instructor in this case is a woman who knows as much as any doctor about how the muscles work together and what input each bodypart needs from the others to do its job.

Using as little verbal guidance as possible, and even less visual — but as much as necessary — she runs the class through a list of tiny movements designed to remind the brain how to use more muscles. She doesn’t exactly tell us how to do it; the purpose is to use the micro-exercises to trigger a brain response, not for her to explain the action.

For instance, at the beginning of the session, the raising of an arm may start at the shoulder; at the end of the class the whole of the back beginning at the opposite hip will get in on the action. Little by little, more muscles at work to move the arm, the point being less fatigue and less pain when the body movements are optimal.

Now this may sound silly, and to a visitor watching but not participating, it must look as goofy as all getout. But I’ll tell you, I leave these classes moving very smoothly, very nicely for about a day, then sore all over the following day. We’re using muscles in these small, targeted exercises that usually don’t get much use, and it’s enough of a pain that I’ve had to schedule my regular training around the class instead of the other way around.

After a few classes, I began to get clues about which areas are giving me the most trouble, the thoracic spine and the hips… still. Since the instructor had seen what I can and can’t do, it seemed like a good time to schedule an individual session.

I expected her to walk me through a list of personalized exercises, but that wasn’t how this treatment turned out. Instead, it was hands-on, her moving my joints through their full ranges of motion with me on the table, passive.

Let me tell you first off, it was very pleasant, and the range of motion was a good deal better than I can perform on my own. This was joint mobility at the highest level; Moshe Feldenkrais again ahead of his time.

How about the results? That’s the real issue, and more than just that post-session afternoon, during which I *floated* around town doing errands.

Once home, I try my most important test — on the floor, face up, to gauge how the hips rest: flat. What’s that again? FLAT, that is to say, hips resting evenly on the floor.

Now I’m stunned, not quite believing what I’m feeling. I’m about six months into a corrective exercise, rehabilitation phase designed to fix a number of issues, the most difficult of which was an anterior tilt in one hip and a posterior tilt in the other; one hip shifted forward, the other back, which flat on the floor means one rests heavily as the other barely touches. That day — last Thursday — they rested evenly for the first time in twenty or thirty years.

Today, six days later, they’re still even. I’m nervous to write this, but I will anyway: This problem seems fixed. You notice I’m still too chicken to write that it IS fixed. But I think it is.

Here’s what I think happened. I spent the past months strengthening the back of one side and the front of the other, and lengthening the front of one side and the back of the other. All the prep work was done; the imbalance had been fixed. It just took the Feldenkrais practitioner to move the joints through their full ranges of motion — farther and smoother than I’m able to do using muscle action — for the brain to recognize the mobility.

It sounds as far-fetched as … I dunno… astrology, maybe. But I’m here to tell you, those hips are even, and I wasn’t able to do it alone.

It’s been frustrating to do all the right work, really attentively, with little or no results. Ugly work, one side getting one program and the other side a different one, with nothing to show for it these months later. Then, all of the sudden… poof… I’m done.

I’m wildly guessing here, but I wonder if it’s not a case of how long the problem was there, the duration of the imbalance. If it had only been a recent development, those oddly tilting hips, the corrective exercises may have worked alone, and I’d have been telling you of that success long ago.

Perhaps if you’ve had a problem for a long time and have worked the appropriate corrective exercise program diligently with no results, maybe, just maybe, you’ll experience a miraculous correction with an individual Feldenkrais session.