POSTURE

I am often asked of my own grueling training demands and how my athletes have developed extreme physical abilities. The answer comes easily in the guarded wording of "balance." In a peculiar twist of words, "balance" is in fact not a section of training but more accurately the manifestation of correct training protocols. "Balance" is not only the all-encompassing ability to control bodily movement but also, and it cannot be stressed enough, it is also the totality of balance and self-fulfillment in life. As years of experience will tell us, patience is the key to possess this magical ability and can be done through adherence to the Renegade concepts of training and movement generation.

Physiologically-speaking balance training is often grossly misunderstood as "functional training" zealots promote what has become the flavor-of-the-week in health and fitness. While many hide behind the myriad of gadgets and slick marketing terms, improving balance is a path laid first with the recognition of training (i) movement not musculature, (ii) the core first and not the extremities and (iii) the ability to stabilize movement in the most destabilized environments through proper postural alignment.

Balance training, while in vogue now as the hungry fitness industry recognizes the opportunity to pimp gadgets, has for the most part been ignored for the last fifty years. In a move to make exercise easier, less "dangerous," more compacted and isolated, the simple recognition of concepts and that the body was meant to move in a single harmonious fashion and over-take challenges has been all but forgotten. And so with the advent of the fitness revolution the nation's level of health has deteriorated to pathetic levels and initiated from early-childhood development but with an equally-so destruction of "balance" abilities. The rich diversity of exercise and activity-based games and chores that a child/teen would experience years ago has now been replaced with the ever-present video game. Not limited to children, adult lifestyle is significantly less physically challenging and for those who do engage in exercise, the selection of activities is extremely limited and quite often flock toward machine-based resistance training which very directly weakens the body over time by eliminating core-activation. Stimulation needs to be varied to not only avoid adaptation to movement but to assist in the wide spectrum of developing different attributes and adhering to the aforementioned Renegade concepts.

Within the actual application of Renegade concepts and program design, any student of my work will tell you that there is actually no "balance" section. It is all layered throughout the entire body of work, whether it be something as simple as varying work surface (from simpler choices of lifting platforms or soft sandy surfaces to more extreme of the Indo Board), aggressive protocols with imperfection training, blindfolded lifts or quite likely the easiest adjustment to training, the wearing of the Xvest. With every level of our work "balance" or more accurately, postural adherence training is integrated—whether it be in earliest stages as the wheelbarrow walks, Overhead Squats, hybrid movements to the aggressive progressions that include Indo Board training or hyper-core loading with the Xvest.

And while I have noted the rush toward gadgetry in the fitness industry I would be remiss at not noting two items that are indispensable to any training room much like a barbell or skipping rope—the Indo Board and the Xvest. The Indo is one of the most important and powerful training mediums at an athlete's disposal but equally so the most misunderstood by those who ignorantly mistake it as a sedentary "wooble board" where your feet remain affixed during training. For every user to Indo, care must be taken to ensure picture-perfect posture is maintained and never strayed from. If performed properly it will assist with virtually every "spoke" in the Renegade "Wheel of Conditioning" in athletic performance enhancement, re-hab work, improving aesthetics and has had dramatic impact in areas few consider such as torso angle in squatting and thus in turn improving maximum effort lift totals. Doubly so, in conjunction with the Xvest and its enormously diverse use balance, postural training is perfected and performance improves exponentially.

In an upcoming series we will begin to examine the impact of postural training through all components of your training.