Monday, June 28, 2010

What I've been up to lately - Face the wall squat

Ok, quite a bit has happened since my last blog entry. Good news, I got a job, part-time job as a gym instructor at the gym that I usually train in. Doesn't pay much but a job is a job, once I'm getting $$.

I've been at the job for just about a week and already I've noticed some things of interest. 80-90% of the people who do exercises in the gym do them on machines, and when using free weights or bodyweight exercises, do them with poor form or cannot do them at all.

This brings me to the topic I want to touch on in this post. Many people cannot do exercises with proper form because of poor mobility. Mobility is something that we were BORN with, however, because most of us did not practise moving, we lost that mobility ability. To emphasize my point, this is how any child 1-3 years old would squat:



There may be quite a few of us older heads who cannot get into this position properly and some of us are loading external weight onto this movement dysfunction. No wonder why people say squats hurt their knees and damage their backs:


Head jutting forward, chest not spread, causing back to round. Not good form


However, by practise, we can get ourselves back to the level of mobility that we once had, or close to it. In terms of the squat, there is an easy exercise that you can do at home, work, gym, wherever you are that has a wall, to find out that is wrong with your squat form and correct it easily. It's called the face-the-wall squat:



Here is a video that shows you the face the wall squat by Yoana Snideman:



I've taught this exercise to one person in the gym, and she immediately got perfect form in the squat.

Do this every day, throughout the day, and your mobility in the squat would improve. Until next time.

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