What It Means To Be Healthy & What Is The Best Exercise Routine To Maximize Health
By: Alex Pennington | April 2023
“Wow she looks so healthy!”, “He works out 5 days a week, he’s very healthy!”, “I can do 100 pushups, I’m must be pretty healthy”. When thinking about exercise and health we attribute how often we go, how many reps of an exercise we can do, and how we look to mean we are healthy. But are these the best indicators of a physically healthy person? Where did the term healthy even come from? What does health mean?? Looking back, we see that the term healthy comes from the concept of having the ability to self-heal. Self-healing in the sense of how well our body can heal and prevent injuries, regenerate various tissues, positively enhance metabolism, and maintain an overall harmony of our physical selves.
Health and Our Current Fitness Industry
CrossFit, Yoga, Bodybuilding, Orange Theory, Cycling. These are some of the most popular training systems. Each one of them having a different focus on how to make a person “healthier”. In CrossFit, individuals try to increase the number of repetitions of a particular exercise within a specific time frame using Olympic Style lifts, power lifts, and gymnastics training. Yoga emphasizes the ability to stretch our bodies in a multitude of ways and hold specific poses for a time frame. Bodybuilding is the art of isolating muscles to build in size and create a more muscular physical appearance. Orange Theory puts different exercises together to create a circuit and focuses on keeping your heart rate at a specific level in order to “burn fat at a more efficient rate.” Cycling classes focuses specifically on repetitive muscle endurance while on a stationary bike.
Ok, now let’s return to the term of being healthy, the ability to self-heal. If we are trying to achieve this ability of our bodies unconsciously self-healing, then which training system would be best? Let’s first focus on the exercises. What we need to do here is find what exercises allow us to build the most strength in our bodies without damage. Let’s call this risk to reward benefits. With this we can focus on what exercises will make us the most physically healthy. The first exercises that come to mind are ones that do not create joint compression. Joint compression causes damage to the joint over time and can lead to many physical health issues: including disk herniation, tendonitis, unnecessary inflammation, and increasing pain. In order for us to avoid joint compression, we would need to find an exercise that develops physical strength while integrating as many other muscles as possible. The more muscles that can integrate into an exercise, the less stress that will be put onto unconnected muscles, vertebras, tendons, ligaments, and joints.
Integration and Disconnection
Let’s talk muscular integration. How can we integrate as many muscles as possible into various exercises? Well in kinesiology, we know that the body moves primarily through the Transverse Plane(rotational) of motion, so this must mean the greatest muscular integration(connection) must come through rotational planes of motion. On our search for the healthiest exercises, we must make rotation a significant contributor. This takes out Bodybuilding, CrossFit, Cycling, and Orange Theory, since the exercises involved are primarily done within the Sagittal Plain(forward/back without rotations) and Longitudinal Plane(Strictly up and down) . Yoga has rotations involved within its various systems, but are the rotations made with muscular recruitment or forced rotations absent of muscle recruitment? Here we get into the concept of TORQUE. Full body muscular connection requires rotational torque. After torque is created, our bodies need an transfer of movement from that torque. So, that means we need to use that torque and release it towards an ending position in order to complete the exercise. For example, if you want to jump as high as possible you will need to create torque while lowering your body into the bottom position before you release the torque creating the drive upwards and off the ground. Let’s call this a transmission of force, or Myofascial Force Transmission. This is the drive through the exercise from the beginning loading to the ending load. If there is a disconnect throughout the Myofascial Force Transmission, the disconnected muscles and joints will take more of the load than necessary and results in over-tension and unnecessary compression. This is the biggest flaw in Yoga as a healthy exercise practice. The rotations involved in Yoga do not come from a Myofascial Force Transmission. The movements involved are forced through disconnected(untensioned) musculature, thus creating many imbalances from one pose to the other. The more we drive movements through untensioned muscles(absence of torque), the greater the compensations and compressions are more likely to occur.
So, what exercises has rotation, torque, and a release of that torque in a specific direction? It will have to be a standing exercise, since the feet are part of the whole body. There is one popular exercise that has all of the properties that we are discussing. That exercise is the Sprint. When Sprinting our bodies go through rotational motions, that are driven by torque and the transmission of that force into a specific direction, repeating itself from one leg to the next. Yes Sprinting!
Sprinting and the Physical Health Benefits
Let’s talk about decompression, and the ability to keep the body from degenerating. If a sprint has the properties to create the greatest amount of decompression in the body. Then why isn’t every Chiropractor, Physical Therapist, Fitness Guru, and Doctor prescribing it? If health literally means the ability to heal oneself, and compression is what keeps our bodies from healing, then why isn’t the sprint being talked about more? Simply put, it’s hard! There are many factors that go into making a sprint efficient. It depends on the person’s current physical state, their current mental state to learn new techniques, the actual time that it takes to put in the work of building correct mechanics, and the most important the expertise to know how to progress. Most doctors, Chiropractors, Physical Therapists don’t have the time to learn how to properly sprint and probably never had it in their educational curriculum. This is a big problem. That means, if we are seeking to be as healthy as possible, we can’t completely rely on these professionals to help us optimally. They are limited in what they can give to someone, no one will come out of their therapies being optimally healthy if they do not understand the mechanics of sprinting and it’s decompression benefits. Not to say these people can’t help give some relief. But we are talking about optimal health. Let’s stay on that track.
Exercises and Fitness That Utilizes Sprinting Mechanics
Let’s jump back into exercises now that we know that Sprinting is the great way to decompress our bodies. Obviously, we can’t all run outside and start sprinting. That would be negligent of me to recommend. But there needs to be a process of strengthening specific patterns to the sprint in order to create the ability to sprint. Also, what about a paraplegic person who will never be able to sprint? We want to help everyone, even the individuals with limitations. This is when understanding the biomechanics of a sprint is necessary to build an effective exercise/fitness plan. Say I want to strengthen someone’s shoulder. Isolating the shoulder in an exercise would be very limited and would create a compression somewhere else around the shoulder or elsewhere throughout the body. To be effective at building long-lasting strength for the shoulder, we would need to do an exercise that focuses specifically to the shoulder and build that strength with connection to the rest of the body while respecting sprint(or gait) mechanics. For example, I would have someone start in a unilateral stance(split stance) with a dumbbell in one hand and I would train that person to be able to do a shoulder press while taking a step forward. It would take some time to build that movement to be effective, but once they understood the movement, we could then start building strength into that movement. This type of training is called Biomechanics Training.
Biomechanics Training, Functional Patterns, and Health
Biomechanics training is a quickly growing exercise field that more and more people are practicing every day. With the Sprint lately being seen as a new measure in health, this field is turning a lot of heads. The system that does this best is called Functional Patterns. The entire exercise system of Functional Patterns is based on exercises that respect the mechanics you’d find in a Sprint(gait). The certified practitioners within Functional Patterns are not only knowledgeable in these mechanics, but they are also knowledgeable at applying exercises to all types of people and create specific progressions for each individual. This training has helped many senior citizens, elite athletes, and office desk jockeys to name a few. Everyone is very different in where they need decompression, it could be their back, their neck, their knee, it could be their pinky! If you want to be healthy as physically possible this system is a must. The more we can exercise without compressions and poor muscular connections, the healthier we will be.
Take Away
Sprinting is not a must in order to exercise healthily. But the patterns of muscle connections found within a sprint IS necessary if we want to create the healthiest exercise routine as possible for ourselves. Do you want to train for a decade, or do you want the ability to keep exercising the rest of your life? Don’t settle for the former. Let’s build the best version of you!