Top Five Areas YOU Should Be Training More Often

It is common for folks to want to lose inches off their waist. A misguided bit of fitness fiction is to work on your abdominal muscles to trim down the fat around the waist. I'll leave that topic for another article. Those who train abdominal muscles at all tend to go to planks, crunches, and sit-ups. The abdominal wall consists of three main muscle layers: rectus abdominis, obliques, and transverse abdominis. Planks are a great isometric exercise, and crunches and sit-ups are great at working the rectus abdominis. These exercises are an excellent way to start but are lacking when it comes to training the obliques and transverse abdominis. 

It's imperative to understand the functions of each abdominal muscle. The rectus abdominis allows you to flex your torso forward. The obliques allow unilateral bending to the sides and rotate the trunk. The transverse abdominis will enable you to turn the torso, increase intra-abdominal pressure (bracing maneuver), and stabilize the core. A series of exercises requiring bracing, bending laterally, and rotation are recommended, such as Russian twists and chops are used to strengthen obliques and transverse abdominis. Strengthening all three abdominal muscles leads to less low-back pain and better posture. It allows more stability to do everyday activities such as tying your shoes and picking up items from the ground. 

Wrist flexors are responsible for your grip strength and your ability to flex the wrist. Wrist flexion plays a crucial role in your ability to throw a ball as you flick the wrist to release the ball as you propel it out of your hand, and when you are pulling on some resistance. Wrist Extensors are responsible for extending the wrist and are necessary for your ability to catch a ball or break a fall.

Our dexterity with our hands is one of the key traits that allowed us to use tools and gain an evolutionary advantage. We take for granted our ability to reach out to grab the table salt and pass it to our neighbors while dining or play catch. Having worked in the local senior center, my mother, and with youth athletes over the years, I've noticed a pattern. At the senior center, I witnessed many of the elderly there, predominantly female, struggle to hold onto anything more than a couple of pounds and hand it to someone. My mother would always break the glass cups while washing them and often complained about her hands working due to work. She was only in her late forties. The elementary and middle school level athletes I worked with would fall during a game and fracture their forearm or tear an elbow tendon. The truth is, no matter what your age, your gender, or your athletic capabilities are, you need to keep your wrist muscles nice and sturdy so you can continue to use your hands without pain or weakness and enjoy one of the many perks of being a human.

The hamstrings are three big muscles that make up the back of your thigh. I worked with many special groups populations to be an essential muscle group to isolate and integrate into an exercise program. They are a key part of locomotion because they play a role in the hips and knees' movement. They are used to bend the knee, extend the hip (pull your leg behind you), load up power to prepare to run, act as absorbers to slow down, or stop locomotion. Without strong and stable hamstrings, you wouldn't be able to run, walk, or go up and down stairs very easily. 

In my experience, the hamstrings play a very key component in injury prevention as well as enhancing performance. Because of their function to extend the hips and absorb impact, they are vital to outputting enough energy to jump higher, run faster, make sharper cuts and movements. With stronger hamstrings to absorb the impact of jumping and running, it will also prevent injuries to the knees because your legs can adequately take effect and avoid twisting and injuring the knee. They are also critical in my clients recovering from knee operations such as ligament repairs or knee replacement surgery.

Many of the clients I've trained with my senior clients come to me with the goals of being able to restore balance and moving better. Usually, the client feels unstable and have had falls forward or to the side. The instability and feeling like falling forward often are due to the hamstrings not decelerating your forward momentum adequately. So your body keeps moving forward when you don't want it to and results in a fall. Instability and falling to the side are usually more due to weaker obliques and transverse abdominis muscle and hip abductors.

Hip Abductors are on the lateral portion of your hip. They include the gluteus medius, gluteus minimus, and tensor fascia lata. These muscles are responsible for balance standing on one leg. When you stand on one foot, the abductors and lower back muscles hold your hips steady to not tilt too far to one side and cause you to fall over. The hip abductors serve a second function to rotate your hip externally, allowing you to point your toes outwards. This motion also helps with stability and counterbalancing weight and enables you to walk around a poll to avoid running into it.

I've previously mentioned my experiences with populations that struggle with balance. Everyone can benefit from having a better balance. One of the first things a client would bring up to me as they progress is they notice the little things like putting on their underwear and socks easier. It's a subtle change, but huge implications on the quality of life being able to move better and efficiently. Athletes I train show improvements in their performance, and elder populations feel more safe and secure, knowing they can take a bigger step and not fall to the ground or catch themselves if they stumble.

Four muscles make up the rotator cuff: Supraspinatus, Infraspinatus, Teres Minor, Subscapularis. The rotator cuff holds the arm in the shoulder socket and is unique in that the joint is a ball-in-socket joint allowing free motion of the arm. The trade-off in having all this range of motion is that the shoulder joint is prone to instability. Think of the shoulder as a ball held by four pieces of string. Imagine you're trying to place this ball into a hole that is almost the same diameter as the ball. Proper tension on all four strings is ideal for putting the ball in the hole with accuracy and consistency. 

Shoulder pain and impingement are common. It is something that I have had to deal with because growing up. I wore a backpack on one shoulder throughout all my grade school years and my college days. This shoulder pain is known as an overuse injury. It happens when you position your shoulders in one place for so long that the shoulders start to tighten chronically, and there is a rounding of the shoulder that happens. This pain happens to many workers with desk jobs, and students, while studying, are required to sit with a poor posture for many continuous hours daily. It also happens with workers who have to reach for an object like restocking items at a grocery store or throwing objects repeatedly like bricklayers and factory workers often have to. Because the rotator muscles are so susceptible to muscle imbalance, we must take care of the shoulder by regularly maintaining balance with proper stretching and strengthening exercises.