IOL Strength and Conditioning

The Cutting Edge of Function, with Fraser Quelch

The Las Vegas IDEA personal trainer conference opened early for me with a day-long pre-conference class taught by Fraser Quelch, the guy who’s behind the gathering and organizing of a vast array of exercises done with the TRX Suspension Trainer.

Starting with a foot on the floor, this session traced the actions of the muscular-skeletal system during basic actions like walking and training, muscular reaction to gravity, the ground and momentum, corrective exercises easing into functional movements, the planes of motion common exercises work through and, taking that into consideration, how to program more effective workouts.

His main gig is this: Get your body working in as many angles and directions as you can dream up, and make sure the movements cover all the major joints… in all directions – all joints, all planes of motion.

Let’s look at an example from Fraser’s article on Multi-Planar Training (click to read in full). About mid-way through the article he documents the movement planes of a traditional bodypart training program. It’s a common-looking program, plenty of good exercises that includes squats, lunges, leg extension, leg curls and calf raises on the leg day, for example.

After his mapping of the primary joints and planes of motion using the sample workout, he writes,

“Hip is primarily involved in only 2 of 22 exercises
Shoulder is primarily involved in 9 of 22 exercises
Spine is primarily involved in only 5 of 23 exercises
Elbow is primarily involved in 9 of 23 exercises, more than the hip and the spine combined

15 (68%) occur in the sagittal plane
2 (9%) occur in the frontal plane, both at the shoulder joint.
5 (23%) occur in the transverse plane, the majority of these were also at the shoulder and none at the hip.”

What do you know?! It’s an average weekly training routine, and it’s upside down. I’m telling you, he spent the day leading us slowly and patiently to one blatant conclusion: Our normal gym-based programs need to be re-evaluated. Bigtime.

Here’s the link again to the multi-planar training article where Fraser explains, including a revised sample workout that he’s split into one third in each plane of motion, plus charts that will make his training philosophy clear… and compelling.

To make this multi-planar thing easier to figure out, consider a splurge for a TRX Suspension trainer because that really makes blending planes of motion simple (if you’re a personal trainer, this is a shoe-in, no kidding). Fraser didn’t do a sales pitch in the session, that wasn’t what this was about. But after watching that treasure in action as he demonstrated a few of his points, I bought one and have used it daily since. I love that thing.

Say, you still have any of that stimulus check left? This suspension style of training will seriously stimulate you, no doubt about it. Aside from making the multi-planar action easy and fun, it’s demanding on the core in pretty much everything that can be done on this thing, which is pretty much unlimited as far as I can tell. Suspension training also works the joints differently than our traditional training, because they have to stabilize continually, and again, in all planes of motion.

We had a longer discussion of the TRX here in the forum, where Fred Fornicola and Jim Bryan offered their more-experienced considerations, along with some suspension training workout plans, and where Byron Chandler has suggestions on how to trick out your existing ring set-up to more closely match the TRX design. The talented frugal types will be able to pull this off easily enough.