Hi, everybody, Kris Stokes from Custom Fitness Amarillo’s non-gym where your health and wellness comes first. Today, we’re talking about an important subject, fixing what’s broken first. If you have any questions about today’s blog, then please give us a call at (806)-322-3188.
Fix what’s broken first. Sounds blatantly obvious, doesn’t it? Like if you had something at home that was broken, you would probably fix it before moving on to something else. However, when it comes to our bodies, to fitness, to nutrition, we don’t always do that. We kind of tend to step over that subject and then try to repeatedly bang our heads into the walls, doing the same exercise over and over and over again to try and improve it when we haven’t really stopped to think about what’s broken first.
So, this just comes to mind, I’ve had so many clients through the years that have come in expecting a specific change, and when they come in, we find that they have a specific weakness or they have a dysfunction in their body or in their lifestyle, that’s causing them to not be able to complete this goal the way that they would like to.
So, we backtrack to fix what’s wrong. Sometimes, that can feel frustrating to that person because they feel like they want to jump in, they just want to get this goal reached. Who doesn’t want to have things happen right now?
The problem is that until we take that step back to reassess and to fix it, we can’t move forward. The people who go through that process with us here at Custom Fitness and make it through that phase see the benefit of taking a step back and they see how much stronger they are later, whether that’s physically, mentally or emotionally. They’re able to move forward, they’re able to achieve their goals because they took that step backwards, and it ends up being a good thing.
So, let me give you an example – exercise. Having something broken related to exercise might be if you can’t do your pull-ups. Let’s say that you really wanted to get in five pull-ups, and you just can’t even get one in, can’t figure out what’s going on, or maybe you’ve maxed out at two and you just can’t go any further than that.
You still keep trying to do those pull-ups, right? And then you start talking to people at the gym and finding out what they’re doing, and then you start looking into online sources, maybe some pros and things like that and figuring out what they’re doing. Then you maybe even buy a pull-up program and you still just can’t get past that max, whatever it may be, and you can’t figure out what you’re doing wrong, so you just keep trying over and over again. You add resistance bands, you take resistance bands away, you add a jump, you take the jump away, you add a box, you add all these things, but you never step back to look at what the problem actually is.
In this case, the problem is not that you are incapable of doing a pull-up, the problem is that there’s some area in your body that’s weakened. Maybe it’s your core and you’re not realizing how much it is involved in a pull-up along with our posture. We actually need to have a specific core and posture strength available to us in order to do this type of movement.
And so, maybe if we step back for a moment, we do a little bit of testing, a little bit of assessment to figure out where we’re starting from, what our weak areas are at, and we discover, “Okay, my core’s not as strong, now what can I do to build that?” And as you build that, you’ll find that you’re going to be able to build your pull-up off the bar.
This happens in a lot of exercises, you can build your bench press off the bench, you can build your pull-up off the bar, you can do this with all of it, okay? It all comes down to strengthening the muscles that are needed and getting the right form and function for your body.
So, instead of just continuing to break your body down by doing the same repetitive motion all the time whenever you body is not capable of doing it at the moment, we want to take that step back and look.
What that’s going to do is it’s going to help us keep from getting injured because whenever we keep doing the same thing over and over again whenever our body’s not ready for that, it’s going to lead to injury. So, it saves us from injury, it helps us to become stronger and better, so that we can move forward then. And it overall becomes your step forward rather than one more broken step back.
You want to make sure that you’re figuring out exactly what the problem is, and that can be done whether you’re working with someone or you’re doing it on your own, but you want to take that time to really think that through because in the end, you’re going to discover that you don’t have to do a pull-up in order to strengthen your pull-up or a bench press in order to strengthen your bench press. In fact, that may be the one thing that you shouldn’t be doing.
Instead you can take a moment to fix, say, the core strength in our example, and then you’ll see not only the pull-up improve, but many other lifts improve as well.
Now, this goes the same for nutrition, too many people go and break their nutrition, they’re not feeding themselves enough food, they’re not feeding themselves the right macronutrients, they’re not feeding themselves the right amount of food, or they’re not balancing. There’s something going on there that’s broken in the system. Our bodies have physical needs for certain things, and we have certain thresholds that we have to meet in order to perform functional daily activities. Now, that’s just baseline, that’s not even going above and beyond to get in your workouts and things.
So whenever people come to me who have been strictly dieting and have been dropping calories or dropping out major groups of macronutrients and things like that, we find that their body nutritionally is not at a place where it can continue forward. They want to keep losing weight, they want to keep losing fat, they want to build muscle, but the brain is saying, “My body doesn’t have the fuel to do that.”
And much like working on core strength to build a push-up, we instead have to take a little step backwards and relearn what those nutritional foundations are and get to where our body has its thresholds. Then, we can step forward and create those changes within our body.
These foundations are so important that if we don’t think of them, we will constantly feel like we are just banging our head in the wall, wondering why we can’t reach our goals and why we are failing all the time. If we step back and look at that with a different perspective sometimes that is the key to the truth that leads you forward and sets you free.
If there’s something that’s holding you back, I would love to hop on a phone call with you and just see what we could do to best help you. Feel free to give us a call, 806-322-3188 or email us at info@customfitness.biz At Custom Fitness, we are YOUR personal triaining option in Amarillo, Texas. Have a great day.