Moving With Precision
Have you ever been sitting in a chair, in front of a computer, hard at work, only to glance at your reflection in a nearby mirror and realize you need to straighten your posture?
Have you ever stood for a long period of time and began to feel that one of your legs is getting achy and tired, only to look down to see that you're leaning completely to one side?
Without realizing it, people form movement habits, and those habits become the norm for their reps throughout their everyday life. Have you ever thought about how you are supposed to move vs. how you actually move when you’re:
Getting in and out of your car
Putting your seatbelt on and taking it off
Walking up as well as walking down a flight of stairs
Getting up off the floor and getting down to the floor
Reaching overhead for a glass in a cabinet
For most people, they don’t really think about how they’re moving unless they feel discomfort or pain when they move a certain way. Does that pain stop them from going about their day? Heck no! When something hurts, most people just “work around it” until they either
Determine its way too painful or annoying to work around it any longer and they need to get it checked out OR
Find a way to move differently in order to compensate for whatever is causing their discomfort and continue going about their day
From a trainer’s perspective, it makes watching human movement very interesting! Bad form can be very obvious, but tracing dysfunctional movement to its root is often overlooked by trainers. Luckily, our Fitness Screening at Precision Training is intended to bring dysfunctional movement to light. Speaking as one of the trainers who helped to develop the Fitness Screening as it exists today, our goal is to understand how our client’s body is moving from the moment we meet them so that we can help them learn how to safely and confidently control their movement for the rest of their life.
A few months ago, I started working with a new client. They came to Precision having already worked with a trainer for several years at another gym. During their Fitness Screening, I was assessing the client’s overhead range of motion. It’s a simple assessment that anyone can do on their own. You start with your arms bent and your thumbs touching the front of your shoulder. Then, you move your arms from your shoulder to overhead with your palms facing each other.
While I was watching this client move, their arms were pressing overhead in a slant. One arm was moving overhead much sooner than the other. So I gave them a PVC pipe and asked them to repeat the movement. It was very obvious that the PVC pipe was not level.
When I made the client aware of this movement compensation taking place, they didn't believe me. I didn’t take it personally. After all, they had spent years working with a trainer already. Who was I to tell them that something as basic as the stability of their overhead range of motion was completely overlooked by their previous trainer?
So with the client’s permission, I took a video of their shoulder movement with the PVC pipe. That was all the proof that the client needed. Then something wild happened... that person felt for the first time what they saw was happening with their body in the video. It was like a lightbulb in their brain had lit up and they had access to a new room for the first time. I’ll never forget the expression on their face when they discovered their left arm that day.
Such minor everyday tasks like reaching overhead with adequate stability, control, strength, endurance, and speed is something most people have no idea how to value or appreciate. At Precision Training, our team aims to help you connect your training to your life so that you develop the confidence to control your body and move through every day with precision.
