Dear Body, I'm sorry I've treated you this way, feeding you the wrong foods and not taking care of you. I promise to do better and get you back to the best shape and fitness level you can be. I know we can do it together! – ………………………………sincerely, me.
Pilates is similar to yoga but emphasizes your body’s core — the abdomen, obliques, lower back, inner and outer thigh, butt, and so on. For this reason, Pilates develops much of what exercisers need — strength, flexibility, muscular endurance, coordination, balance, and good posture — with a much lower chance of injury than with other forms of exercise. The discipline emphasizes correct form instead of going for the burn. With so many exercise variations and progressions, you may have a hard time getting bored with Pilates.
Pilates moves require you to engage virtually your whole body. At times, you may try to strengthen one muscle while stretching another. The moves take lots of concentration; you can’t simply go through the motions like you can on gym equipment. And then, for every move you think you’ve mastered, Pilates has another version that’s a little different and a little harder.
Consider a move called rolling like a ball: You balance on your rear end, roll backward, and then roll back up into the balanced position again. This move requires a good balance of abdominal and lower-back strength and is deceptively tough. Pilates teaches you to think about how you use your muscles during your workout so you use them better in daily life. For instance, because much of the focus is on good posture and body mechanics, you stand and sit taller and walk more gracefully.
Here’s a bit of trivia: Pilates is named after its inventor, Joseph Pilates, a former carpenter and gymnast who invented the exercise for injured dancers. Many of the moves were inspired by yoga or patterned after the movements of zoo animals such as swans, seals, and big cats.
The CrossFit prescription is performing “functional movements that are constantly varied at high intensity.” CrossFit is a core strength and conditioning program. The CrossFit program is designed to elicit as broad an adaptational response as possible. CrossFit is not a specialized fitness program but a deliberate attempt to optimize physical competence in each of ten recognized fitness domains. They are as follows:
Cardiovascular and Respiratory Endurance
Stamina
Strength
Flexibility
Power
Speed
Coordination
Agility
Balance
Accuracy
The CrossFit Program was developed to enhance an individuals competency at all physical tasks. Our athletes are trained to perform successfully at multiple, diverse, and randomized physical challenges. This fitness is demanded of military and police personnel, firefighters, and many sports requiring total or complete physical prowess. CrossFit has proven effective in these arenas.
The CrossFit Defined programming is meant to be scaled and suitable for all ages and physical conditions. Anybody that has a body can be an athlete at CrossFit Defined. The philosophy behind CrossFit training is an all inclusive lifestyle change. Our program is distinctive, if not unique, in its focus on maximizing neuroendocrine response, developing power, cross-training with multiple training modalities, constant training and practice with functional movements, and the development of successful diet strategies.
CrossFit Defined is offering the client a chance to expose themselves to the training methods and philosophies that have been adopted by numerous major universities and professional athletic training facilities.
Who is CrossFit good for?
Everyone to be honest. I know that sounds crazy but it’s true. Parents, college students, adults, teenages, youth, many professional and elite athletes are all participating in the CrossFit Program. Prize- fighters, cyclists, surfers, skiers, tennis players, tri-athletes and others competing at the highest levels are using the CrossFit approach to advance their core strength and conditioning, but that’s not all. CrossFit has tested its methods on the sedentary, the youth, overweight, pathological, and elderly and found that these special populations met the same success as our stable of athletes. We call this bracketing or scaling. If our program works for Olympic Skiers, the overweight, and sedentary homemakers, then it will work for you.
Commercial Gyms vs. The CrossFit Method
In gyms and health clubs throughout the world the typical workout consists of isolation movements and extended aerobic sessions. The fitness community from trainers to the magazines has the exercising public believing that lateral raises, curls, leg extensions, sit-ups and the like combined with 20-40 minute stints on the stationary bike or treadmill are going to lead to some kind of great fitness. Not to mention the fact that when you walk in any commercial gym the first sight to be seen is the sea of machines that come with no directions. Learning how to use them, when to use them, in what order, at what intensity can be a mystery and quite overwhelming to even the best fitness enthusiast.
At CrossFit Defined we work exclusively with compound movements and shorter high intensity cardiovascular sessions. Weve replaced the lateral raise with push-press, the curl with pull-ups, and the leg extension with squats. For every long distance effort our athletes will do five or six at short distance. Why, because compound or functional movements and high intensity or anaerobic cardio is radically more effective at eliciting nearly any desired fitness result. Startlingly, this is not a matter of opinion but solid irrefutable scientific fact and yet the marginally effective old ways persist and are nearly universal. Our approach is consistent with what is practiced in elite training programs associated with major university athletic teams and professional sports. CrossFit endeavors to bring state-of-the-art coaching techniques to the general public and athletes who havent access to current technologies, research, and coaching methods
CrossFit is based on a team/group workout environment. Very different from the commercial gyms; there are very few open gym times and almost no traditional machines. The complete program is based around maintaining a low client to coach ratio and one of the most important characteristics is the fitness programming. Each member chooses a time that he/she can attend a scheduled class. All participants in that class warm-up together, work on skills together and perform the workout of the day. As a team, as a family, as a unit, they start and end the workout together. Pushing, encouraging, and helping each other along the way; similar to that of a professional sports team or military unit.
Another one of the biggest problems with commercial gyms is the lack of training and knowledge passed on to the client. Teaching correct form and technique from day one and educating all members on how to perform every movement they will encounter in the CrossFit environment can mean the difference between an injury and a forever healthy and limber athlete.
This education of proper form and technique will be offered through a mandatory On-Ramp Program. This program will be 9 sessions long, held 3 days a week for the first 3 weeks of membership. Each 1 hour session will focus on proper form and technique in warming up, cooling down and the workout itself. There are 9 CrossFit foundational movements that each athlete must learn and prove competency in before moving on to the class environment. Each client will have to successfully finish the On-Ramp Program or in the case of a seasoned CrossFitter, they have the option to test out.
What is the CrossFit method and how is it different?
The CrossFit method is to establish a hierarchy of effort and concern that builds as follows:
Diet: lays the molecular foundations for fitness and health.
Metabolic Conditioning: builds capacity in each of three metabolic pathways, beginning with aerobic, then lactic acid, and then phosphocreatine pathways.
Gymnastics: establishes functional capacity for body control and range of motion.
Weightlifting and Throwing: develop ability to control external objects and produce power.
Sport: applies fitness in competitive atmosphere with more randomized movements and skill mastery.
That’s an easy question to answer, calisthenics is a form of exercise where you use the weight of your own body to build muscle. Despite what you may have been lead to believe, you do NOT need a gym membership or expensive equipment to build the muscle definition that you’ve always wanted.
Why not lift like everyone else, Bro?
Well, not everybody has the same goals and preferences. You’ve heard the saying before, “Practice makes perfect”. If you practice pitching in baseball, you’ll get good at pitching in baseball. If you practice bowling, you’ll get good at bowling. The way I see it, if you practice lifting heavy stuff, you’ll get really good at lifting heavy stuff. If you practice controlling your body, you’ll get really good at controlling your body.
Think about this for a moment, John and Jake are both highly-athletic people. If John weighs 180 lb and can bench-press 360 lb, and Jake weighs 250 lb and can bench-press 400 lb, who’s stronger? You might say, “Bro, Jake is pushing 40 lb more than John, he’s obviously stronger”. I however like to think, John is lifting 200% of his bodyweight, and Jake is lifting 160% of his bodyweight, which means John is stronger.
Proper calisthenics training will promote the growth of lean muscle mass, and increase your strength, mobility, flexibility, agility, and endurance. Proper strength training via weight lifting routine will promote the growth of muscle mass and strength. I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with lifting weights, it’s just not for me.
How do I decide if calisthenic workouts are right for me?
It’s up to you, do whatever you enjoy the most. I’m biased towards body weight fitness because it’s what I enjoy doing. I aspire to be strong, lean, flexible, agile, and have great endurance. I don’t care if I’m huge, I want to have as much control over my body as I possibly can. If you don’t care about those things, calisthenics might not be for you.
What are some good beginner calisthenic exercises?
Chances are you already know a few of them, push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and squats are all calisthenic workouts. It may sound boring but there is actually a lot you can do with calisthenics, and you can work every main muscle group with these four exercises.
Doing those four exercises all the time sounds like it would get boring.
That may be true for some people, fortunately, there are hundreds of different variances of those four core exercises. Take a look at this video to see what I mean.
By the way, this is not me.
Now don’t go thinking that if you work REALLY hard for a week and a half you’ll be able to bust those out like nothing. Getting to the point that you can do that takes time, determination, and patience.
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