Motion Training
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008Bodyweight-only workouts are often seen as something you do when you don’t want to really train. Well, times are rapidly changing, and a new category of fitness is emerging, motion training.
Motion training boosts strength by increasing the integrity of the smaller, stabilizer muscles that surround and fortify the larger muscles you focus on when you perform traditional weight training.
Most people want to bench more, but the body will let you press only so much—mostly for safety reasons. If you’re under a load that your body cannot effectively handle, the body senses danger stabilization muscles, not necessarily the inability to lift heavier. So if you can strengthen your stabilizer muscles, you will get stronger! And you will get bigger!
Motion training also improves athletic performance. Using traditional methods and equipment to increase strength and flexibility has limitations. For example, there’s no way to activate or challenge posture, stabilizer or neutralizer muscles on a machine.
So, in addition to increasing strength and muscle size, motion training will improve balance, improve joint stability, and your posture. That bodes well for anyone that’s interested in becoming more efficient at any given sports activity, such as martial arts, track and field, or even dancing.
It’s also time efficient. Motion training can cut your workout time by at least one third by taking advantage of multi-joint exercises. Typically in bodybuilding circles we train bodyparts—chest, back, biceps, triceps, etc. With motion training, you integrate and coordinate muscles so they work together in harmony—exactly how the human body was meant to function—thereby increasing energy output and taking what would have been a mundane workout and turning it into a fat-burning, full-body, time efficient cardio boot camp.
