Neutral, Brace, Breathe
Its a long road ahead
Longevity is everything when it comes to non-professional fitness training. Remember, all fitness goals require us to move, which is why preserving our ability to move should always be our main priority. If we want to maintain our physical resilience as long as possible, we need protocols in place that help keep our body safe, strong and resilient whilst training.
Fitness training requires us to purposefully stress our body in order for it to improve. This means we will be purposefully challenging our body to work at or near certain limits (mobility, strength, endurance, cardiovascular fitness, balance etc) and with some level of fatigue which means we need to know where our limits are. I believe movement quality is that limit because if movement quality drops too much, so does our ability to best protect our self from injury.
Movement quality in terms of longevity requires moving in a way which best spreads our training forces through our body to minimise joint stress. This is why I use a simple three word approach to define as well as test movement quality when training my clients.
For training longevity, movement quality is everything.
Three Words To Rule Them All
I use these three words to help keep clients safe whilst strength training without them needing deep knowledge of body structure and biomechanics. It is a simple test to see whether a client can keep all three under control throughout their resistance training regime. My aim is to get clients to understand and apply these three principles to all of their loaded training movements.
1. Neutral
Joint alignment
Movement is complex and we are very lucky that we don’t need to think too much about the 600+ muscles of our muscular system which work with the 200+ bones of our skeletal system. If we are to look after the longevity of our training, we need to look after these systems by controlling how we move and load our body.
I help clients learn to control their movements to better align their joints. This helps them to better spread out their training forces allowing them to apply more stress through their muscles and less through their joints.
2. Brace
Muscular tension
Controlling the tension levels we create through our muscles helps us control which joints move and by how much. The amount of tension our muscles create on our skeletal system, affects both our movement as well as our ability to resist unwanted movement, which is vitally important when loading our body with external forces.
I help clients learn to control their muscular tension and move their body as one whole system, keeping simple awareness of where their joints are throughout their movements.
3. Breathe
Breathe control
Our breathe is our internal bracing strategy. Controlling our breathe helps us to stabilise our torso, giving strong central stability to assist both our tension levels and our joint alignment. When we fill our lungs with air, we can turn our torso into a pressurised canister adding to the stability of our whole system.
I help clients to understand and control their breathing mechanics. This helps to improve their core stability, which in turn helps to control the rest of their body during training.
I use these three words to teach clients when their joints are aligned and how to keep them that way when training with weight. This is why I always start every fitness regime by teaching these three words so that clients know what I expect them to maintain when loading their movements with weight. If they cannot maintain their neutral, brace, breathe trio then the exercise is either too tough to begin with or has fatigued them enough that they can rest, before going again. Training is supposed to be stressful, but we always want to be smart when stressing our body.
Important
Although we all have similarities in our body structures, we all have slight individual variations too. This simply means, we won’t all look exactly alike when doing similar movements to others. These principles can be simple guidelines to safety, but will need a little playing around with and practice to find your own personal movement groove. We may not all be physically able to perfectly maintain these three principles but we are aiming for “as best as we can” for our own physical capacity. This is why I would always recommend working with a professional to help get you started and to help you understand your body a little better especially if you are struggling or in pain, see a specialist straight away.