Check out this snippet from Charlie’s most recent post on FitnessProfessionalOnline.com, titled “The Physiological and Mechanical Tradeoff“!
“As a personal trainer, one of the difficulties I often run into is trying to balance what a client can do with what they want to do. Often times these situations will look like this:
Client: “I want to build my glutes.”
Me: “Okay, let’s add in some lunges today.”
Client: (During the first set) “Ouch, this is bothering my knee.”
I call this dilemma the physiological/mechanical tradeoff. It’s a tradeoff because, as personal trainers, we know how we want to challenge our clients’ physiology, but we need to be able to do so within the mechanical parameters that are presented.
When we think of exercise, we often think of the physiological component of it — building muscle, dropping fat, increasing cardiovascular endurance, etc. The mechanical component does get considered, but usually as “form” or as “exercise rules” — “That’s great form on the bench press. You are keeping your shoulder blades retracted.” “Don’t let your knee go past your toes with that split squat. It will hurt the cartilage.”
The problems with thinking about mechanics this way are 1) it is nonsense and inaccurate and borderline dangerous to your client, and 2) it is in no way enhancing your value or the client’s experience (see point #1). As personal trainers, we have a usable working knowledge of how to challenge and change physiology, but we often struggle with the mechanics piece. A simple test: describe the difference between a moment arm and a lever arm and apply each to an exercise of your choosing to identify the torque and joint forces created by the resistance. If this is a struggle, there is some work to be done with your understanding and application of mechanics.”
Why is this important? Read the rest of the article here.
Interested in learning more about the personal training and Muscle Activation Techniques™ experience at Muscle Activation Schaumburg? Contact us and connect with us on Facebook!
Did you enjoy this post? Give it a share below and subscribe to our mailing list to receive our most popular posts every week 🙂
