Planning to go about your new health and fitness journey, can be a hard task, if you’re unsure where to start… Periodisation programming will give you the pathway to achieve any goals you might have!
First, you must ensure that you have stability within your joints. Often people are inhibited by facia tissue and unsure about what range of motion should be achieved whilst exercising. Calisthenics is a good place to start getting the joints moving and muscle used to the change in workload, but other times, some weights maybe needed.
My experience with myself and my many clients may not be compelling enough to make you spend time giving stability training serious thought. Truly effective training comes through understanding that some important concepts and skills be established.
The following is the recommended progression from spinal expert Dr. Stuart McGill.
Good Motor Patterns: Highly coordinated and efficient movement skills
Stability: Building stability of both joints and whole body
Endurance: Strength coaches have long used “anatomical adaptation” or general physical preparation as a means to lay a foundation for higher intensity strength work
Strength: Not just to see how much you can lift, but teaching the body how to coordinate, connect, and utilize the natural chains in the body
Power and Agility: Performance specific training methods
How does this play out in the real world? The truth is they are all interconnected, it just depends on which point you are emphasizing. Understanding how we use training variables for these goals is very important.
We can see these ideas in practical ways. In squatting patterns we can introduce or help “groove” the pattern by using a kettlebell goblet squat. We can add more stress to the movement by loading a front squat. Finally we can introduce instability with a shoulder sandbag squat (try to minimally use a load 50% of your front squat weight).
With even more complex drills like thrusters, we have a lot of options. Just by using kettlebells instead of dumbbells or dumbbells instead of kettlebells (use the opposite of what you have been) you are going to feel a great new level of instability. We can move in a more unstable manner by going from a drop lunge up to an overhead press. This adds instability via different body position. Finally, we can add instability through a new plane of motion and unstable implement with a lateral lunge to rotational sandbag press