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Each month Overland Park CrossFit recognizes a member who exemplifies our values and motivates others in the gym to push themselves with encouraging words.  November’s Athlete of the Month is Jake Taylor.  Jake was chosen because of how hard he works in the gym.  His consistency and positive attitude are inspiring to other athletes.   Learn more below about Jake!

1. What were your thoughts after your first CrossFit workout?

  Each month Overland Park CrossFit recognizes a member who exemplifies our values and motivates others in the gym to push themselves with encouraging words.  October’s Athlete of the Month is Lisa Suderman.  Lisa was chosen because she is an amazing representative of a CrossFit woman.  She strong and confident yet humble in her success.  Lisa is definitely an inspiration to others at OPCF.   Learn more below about Lisa!

1. 1. What were your thoughts after your first CrossFit workout?

One of the biggest goals for Overland Park CrossFit is to improve people’s everyday quality of life by teaching them to move better and have fun doing it.  For us, instructing proper technique and form to each member of the Overland Park CrossFit family is the first step to getting there.  Last week, we discussed the importance of flexibility in improving movement, today we’re going to tell you how to own your mobility.

If you took last week’s advice, you’re on the right track.  You’ve been doing your foam rolling, corrective stretching, and bookending your workouts with proper warmups and cooldowns.  You can finally break parallel in that squat or can get overhead without excessively arching your back.  Awesome, that’s half the battle and you are on your way!  But keep in mind, new range of motion is weak range of motion.  Right now you’re borrowing that flexibility.  Now it’s time to own it!

Being gumby doesn’t do you much good unless you are stable in the positions you can get into.  You need to be able to control your own body weight and external weight too — after all, that’s what we do in life.  Hauling moving boxes into a truck, bending down to pick something up, climbing up on your roof to fix your dish.  You move in a lot of different ways, and you need to know how to move safely in these positions and make sure you have the proper stability doing it.

Let’s establish one thing: Posture = Form.  Everyone knows that proper form is important in working out, but fewer people understand that proper form is important at all times of the day.  Start thinking about posture as proper form for all your non-working-out time.  Just like proper form in a pushup, proper posture ensures that muscles of the body are optimally aligned and that appropriate stress is distributed among all the joints in your body, reducing the risk of injury.  The problem is that most of us have poor posture and our body is really good at adapting to the way we abuse it.  If you have spent the last 10 years hunched over at a desk with your shoulders rolled forward, your body basically says, “okay, this is what we’re doing, I better get really good at being hunched over!”  The muscles of your body then form along these lines and it becomes a never ending cycle.  And that’s what we’re here to do with you, let’s break that cycle and get you living better.

That low back pain?  The ankle tweak?  Some kind of tendonitis?  There’s a decent chance it’s related to your posture.  When we ask you keep your chest up, push your butt back, and feel tension in your hamstrings to set up for a deadlift, we are asking you to establish your beginning posture for the lift.  This keeps you moving safely and effectively during your workouts.  But if you have good posture for one hour a day while we’re watching you and then sit slouched with your shoulders rolled forward at a desk the rest of the day, you’re reinforcing poor form the other 23 hours of the day and setting yourself up for potential injuries.  Learn to be your own coach when you’re not with us.  Put a sticky note at your computer to says “sit up straight, shoulders back and down!”  Just like nutrition or hitting your workouts, this is about building healthy habits for life, and you need to be constantly reinforcing this in your everyday life.

So how do you go about correcting your postural flaws that you’ve been building up for the last 10+ years?  You learn the proper exercises you need to correct it and work at it!  We have many coaches that can provide exercises to correct your postural imbalances.  Just ask.  To borrow an old quote, we want to teach you how to fish!  After all, what we aim to do is not only your workouts but also your everyday quality of life outside the gym!

In a recent article, we outlined how modern society encourages a sedentary lifestyle.  It also promotes postural imbalances , such as sitting hunched over at a desk all day, cramming uncomfortably on an airplane, or repetitive movements in a work setting.  These postural imbalances restrict proper joint function and put you at greater risk for injury.  So what’s the solution?  Work on your flexibility from several different angles.

I always hear people say, “But I’m just not flexible.”  For the most part, this is simply untrue.  Some people do have certain genetic restrictions to their flexibility, but people who say this often haven’t even tried.  It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy:  “I’m just not flexible, so I might as well not stretch.  See, I’m still not flexible!”  I wonder why…

Do you want to get faster, stronger, fitter, and improve everyday movements?  Then you need to start working on your flexibility every day.  Do you have trouble squatting below parallel?  Can you not get your back into neutral setting up for a deadlift?  Are you having issues getting your shoulder into a safe and stable position in overhead movements?  Then guess what, you are cheating yourself out of your fitness potential.

Position is power, folks.  At Overland Park CrossFit, we teach everyone how to move better.  The foundation of moving better is the ability to get your body into proper, safe, and stable positions.  If you can’t get into those positions, you can’t move as fast, lift as much, be as powerful, and become as fit as you should be.  You also put yourself at greater risk for injury because your body will seek the path of least resistance when performing an exercise, so if you set up wrong, muscles that should be working won’t fire properly and you will compensate with secondary muscles to complete the movement.

Okay, so now that you know why you need to work on your flexibility, let’s talk about an action plan.  First, some groundwork:  Flexibility is the ability to move a joint through a complete range of motion (ROM).  The ROM of a joint is limited by how much you can elongate the muscles surrounding it.  If you have aching knees, a stiff shoulder, or tight ankles, then you need to start hammering the muscles surrounding those problem areas.  So, let’s talk about four major forms of mobility work:

STATIC (CORRECTIVE) STRETCHING
These are stretches that passively take a muscle to the point of tension and are held for at least 30 seconds.  Something like a seated hamstring stretch or child’s pose are examples of static stretching.  The idea is that your body senses a muscle is being stretched (lengthened) which creates tension in the muscle. When held for long enough, your body’s instinct to contract the muscle is overridden by a Golgi tendon organ, triggering a response for your body to relax the muscle, and allowing for greater length to the muscle being stretched.  This is how static stretching works, and if performed consistently over enough time, your muscles will continue to lengthen to a point where they allow for greater joint ROM.  These stretches should be done after a workout (when muscles are shortened due to exercise) and during non-training times.  Static stretching can pre-fatigue your muscles, so it can affect your performance before a CrossFit workout.  Consider this type of stretching your post-WOD work and your daily homework!

ACTIVE-ISOLATED STRETCHING
These stretches use prime mover and secondary mover muscle groups to dynamically bring a joint through a ROM.  These stretches relax overactive and tight muscles and allow them to elongate.  They do not pre-fatigue the muscles as muscle as much as static stretching and are often performed aerobically during warmup.  An example of this would be a standing abductor stretch where you start in a wide stance and slowly move into a side lunge until a stretch in the groin area is felt.  You hold that for 1-2 seconds and then shift to the other side and repeat 5-10 times.  These can be done both before and after exercise and as part of your daily homework.

DYNAMIC STRETCHING
These stretches call for force production of a muscle and use the body’s momentum to take it through a full ROM.  An example of this would be leg swings.  These are great for warmups before a CrossFit workout because they increase your heart rate and get your central nervous system ready for exercise.  Some people may have trouble performing dynamic stretches through a complete ROM because they have muscle restriction or imbalances.  If you are one of these people, it’s super important that you do your corrective stretching and active-isolated stretching as homework and post-workout to improve this.  Dynamic stretching has an added bonus in that it also improves balance and coordination.

SELF-MYOFASCIAL RELEASE (SMR)
Do you wish you could get massages all the time without spending the money?  Well, SMR is just that:  A self massage.  This technique works on the fibrous tissue that surrounds and separates muscle.  Using a foam roller, lacrosse ball, or length of PVC to apply pressure to knots in your muscle, the muscle fibers begin to smooth out from a bundle into a straight alignment with the direction of the muscle.  Like static stretching, the pressure stimulates the Golgi tendon organ to relax the underlying musculature.  The foam roller and lacrosse ball should become your best friend.  Use it all the time:  Before workouts, after workouts, while watching tv, talking on the phone, reading a book — whenever.  Basically, sleep with it, your significant other will understand… ok, maybe not, but they should!  SMR can also be performed before stretching to maximize the muscle-lengthening benefits of corrective, active-isolated, and dynamic flexibility.

And no excuses about not having enough time — you can do this during TV commercial breaks or when talking on the phone with your friends.  If you have 10-15 minutes to spare, that is plenty of time to get a good mobility session in.  Isn’t that a tradeoff worth improving your recovery, joint health, and performance?

So get out of that hunched position staring at this article on your computer screen, break out your foam roller and mobility mat, and get stretching!  It is key to your long-term health, fitness performance, and improvement inside and outside of the gym.  Next time we’ll go over mobility’s best friend, stability.  (Spoiler Alert: You need both!)

“What is that weird looking thing with a handle on it… You want me to do WHAT with it?”  That was probably your first reaction to seeing a kettlebell, but once you get used to them you see how versatile and useful they are.  They can be used during workouts, warmups, mid-line focus, heck even during mobility!  It’s not hard to see why we use them often.

Before we go into depth on why we like kettlbells, a little background.  Kettlebells are flat-bottom cast iron balls with handles.  They were first used as a unit of measurement on market and farming scales and later in the Russian military for strength and conditioning work.  They are often measured in “pood” (no laughing!).  One pood is about 16 kilograms or 35 pounds.  Kettlebells are unique from other free weights like dumbbells and barbells because their center of mass is away from the handle.  This means kettlebell movements often require more coordination as well as recruitment of your stabilizer and primary muscles simultaneously.  This is especially true for the kettlebell swing, which is the foundation of kettlebell training.

Kettlebell training isn’t limited to swings though.  They are excellent for Olympic Lifting skill transfer exercises like cleans, jerks, and snatches as well as strength movements like farmers walks, presses, thrusters, and rows.

Here are ten benefits of kettlebell training:

• Enhances athleticism due to required coordination and balance
• Increases mental focus and physical stamina
• Improves proprioceptive breathing development
• Multi-joint total body conditioning compared to isolation exercises
• Total recruitment of posterior chain (calves, hamstrings, glutes, spinal erectors)
• Increases core stability and muscular endurance
• Develops body awareness and hip flexion/extension
• Improves grip strength
• Teaches you how to control weight eccentrically
• They are fun to use!

Although you can do much more than swings with them ,here are five basic checkpoints for in a kettlebell swing:

• Feet – shoulder-width apart and pointing no more than 10-15 degrees out
• Knees – tracking over toes, NOT caving inwards or driving way out
• Hips – level with your lumbar spine and neutral
• Shoulders – shoulderblades back and down (yes, I’m a broken record but there’s a reason!)
• Head – neutral position with chin tucked in

There aren’t many better tools that develop strength, teach you how to control your body through a large range of motion, build coordination, require mental focus, and are just plain fun to use!

 Each month Overland Park CrossFit recognizes a member who exemplifies our values and motivates others in the gym to push themselves with encouraging words. August’s Athlete of the Month is Courtney Oddo.  Courtney was chosen because of her work ethic in the gym and how fast she has progressed because of it.  Over her short time at OPCF, we feel she is already a big part of our community.   Learn more below about Courtney!

1. What were your thoughts after your first CrossFit workout?