Purposeful training: our job / your job

Life is busy, we get that.  We have busy lives too.  And in today’s fitness culture, the trend for busy people seems to be to make them focus by increasing the intensity and difficulty of the workout. And sure, it works to a point, it wakes us up and makes us “feel” like we did something as we walk out of yoga class drenched in sweat.   The original culture of yoga would not recognize the yoga that we have today from its original purpose of being a moving meditation connecting with the breath to increase mobility, stability, inner focus, etc.   

Well the same can be applied to almost any fitness category in America today.  In the era of arbitrary workouts designed to make us sweat for the sake of burning calories in our rush to get to the next part of our day, we’ve lost touch of the importance of purpose in our training,  

We say all the time when talking with clients that the positive changes to body composition is a wonderful silver lining to the training we do, not the focus.  We’ve recognized in a very acute way the detriments of being sedentary as we reduced our movements exponentially during the COVID years and noticed the impact.   At KORE, our goal is to help you achieve the wellness goals you have for yourself but in order to do so, we must first address competency and efficiency of movement through purposeful programming and progressions.  That’s our job. 

Now for yours:

When you are in your training session and doing the exercises, it is your job to:

• Improve the mind-body connection by being present and paying attention to not only what your body is doing, but how it feels in your body.  Ask yourself

  • What are you supposed to feel? 

  • Do you feel that

  • If not, how can you adjust the movement (slow it down, check to make sure your form is correct, focus more on a specific area) to target the specific pattern?

• Improve your movement efficiency by making sure that you are doing the least possible work to effectively perform the exercise.  The example that always comes to mind is the clean, when done right, the bell just rolls onto the forearm in a smooth movement. 

• Manage your emotion and focus under physical stress and fatigue through proper breathing mechanics.  Just because we are working on competency and efficiency doest mean that  the exercises won't be challenging.  The first thing we see when exercises get challenging is that breathing stops.  When you can do the exercise while keeping your breathing mechanics in check, you have truly overcome the stress of the challenge.