Move better or get a sweat up – can you do both?

Over the past few years, there has been a really big push from within the fitness industry into the ‘movement quality’ or corrective exercise space. Good trainers no longer just ‘flog’ their clients – they also help their clients to improve the posture and movement challenges that our ‘sitting society’ creates. If you are one of our long term clients, you will have probably noticed your trainer using a variety of ‘tools’ to help improve the way you move and feel – foam rollers, massage balls and posture pro rollers as common examples.

However one of the ‘risks’ that I see is that in the pursuit of moving better/building core strength/improving posture, less emphasis is placed on traditional cardiovascular and strength building work – both essential pillars for your health. Regular cardiovascular and strength training are well established ways to enhance your health and manage against many common lifestyle diseases including high blood pressure, diabetes, cancers, heart disease and brain degeneration.

So where should our focus be for the limited time we have available to exercise?

This will clearly be different from person to person but in the end, incorporating elements of both movement quality/postural work and traditional cardiovascular and strength work should be structured into your exercise week.

We’ve had many discussions about this ‘tension’ among our PT team and use a number of solutions such as doing release work with a roller prior to a strength session to ensure optimal function/reduce injury risk or incorporating mobility aspects into weight training in itself. Keeping cardiovascular work ‘high intensity’ is another strategy to use time efficiently as it means less volume (time) is required – the additional time can then be channeled into strength and mobility work. So next time your trainer prescribes a hard set of intervals on the versa climber, you can know that it is coming from a good place 🙂

-Kristin Lewis