by Robert Brook

To succeed with any training program I need to clearly define the goals of my training. If for instance I am training to run a marathon, then I can gauge the success of my training approach on whether I am increasing the distance I can run while decreasing the average time it takes me to run each mile. These clear goals allow me to track my progress and assess the efficacy of my training approach, perhaps leading to changes or modifications to my training to achieve my goals more effectively.

The goals of your average “work out” or what we might referent to as “self guided training” are often much less specific. I might spend time at the gym, go out running or attend my local yoga class because I want to “get cardio,” “get stronger”, or “be more flexible.” For some of us the goal might be as basic as “to exercise” or “to stay in shape.” And while there’s nothing wrong with the desire to simply “stay in shape,” my experience has taught me that this type of self guided training can result in…

putting our time and effort into training ourselves to perform “better” in ways that we may not intend or in some cases, even want.

To understand the reasons for this, it helps to understand what I mean by “training.” Training is any activity or series of activities we undertake to learn a particular skill and/or to prepare ourselves to perform well in either the activity we are training with, or in some other related activity. If I am training to be a better runner, clearly part of my training program should be to run, but I may also include other activities in my training such as jumping rope or stretching.

Training is typically done with intention, but it isn’t always. In fact, many of the habits we’ve manifested that impact our health negatively, such as the habit of internally rotating the hips – a major contributor to the development of hip and knee arthritis, are habits that we’ve inadvertently “trained” ourselves to do. Let’s say my workout is to go running for cardio, and when I run my hips internally rotate. This means my knees will roll in when I run, and if I keep running this way I may in fact succeed in getting cardiovascular exercises, but I will also speed the degradation of my knee joints.

With this approach to training, regardless of whether I intend it or not, I am effectively training knee damage, and the better I get at running, the faster I’ll wear out my knees doing it!

One of the biggest challenges of my work is not so much figuring out what movements or postures will help my clients improve their function and health, but rather just getting them into the habit of doing them regularly. Typically the obstacles to establishing a regular movement program are habits that have been established through years of training ourselves to do them. This type of habit can be mental, physical or a combination of the two.

A while back I started working with a new client who had come to me with a back problem. During a session I introduced some appropriate movements and postures to her, and our work together seemed to be going fairly well. But afterwards, when we were looking at our respective calendars to schedule a follow up, a red flag appeared – she said she didn’t want to schedule anything in the morning, not because she was physically unavailable, but because she had a daily routine of taking her time, drinking her coffee and cozying up with the newspaper, and she didn’t want to plan anything that interfered with that.

I had never had anyone tell me something like this before, and I suppose I should have been grateful for her candidness. No doubt all of us have routines that we cherish and are loathe to disrupt, but while I completely understood and respected the priorities she’d set for herself, I also understood that the impulses behind them were going to be very much at odds with the training that I was going to recommend for her.

She had trained herself to establish a routine that was so important as to make necessary changes impossible.

Sure she could do her movements in the afternoon, but I’d been here before, and I knew the mental habits I was up against with her would make progress difficult to attain. Sure enough our working relationship was very short lived.

While the mental habits that we’ve trained and established can be a major obstacle to success in introducing and training something new, physical habits can be just as big an obstacle. The best example with this might be the way we walk. Our gait mechanics are a complex series of movements that happen so quickly and more often than not, unconsciously, that any dysfunctional habits we have while walking are a significant challenge to correct.

The reason being that every time we walk we are reinforcing and re-training the dysfunctional habit.

A simpler example is squatting. Invariably when I work with a client who has knee pain and I look at their squatting mechanics, they will overload their knee joints and report pain with this activity. Squatting in some form or another is an activity we do over and over, all day long. If our squatting mechanics are flawed the stress to our joints due to poor mechanics will have a significant impact on the health of the knees and sometimes other joints such as the hips and the spine. Clients who squat by overloading their knees, which is most of them, are either unaware that they are overloading their knees or that there is any alternative to doing so.

Squatting for these clients is essentially “training knee pain,” and therefore if they are not trained to squat differently the habits they have trained will persist until they simply cannot squat anymore because of the pain.

What makes Personal Alignment Training different from many other training programs is the goal health and function over performance. This means that when you do a Personal Alignment Training session the goal of each session, primarily, is to improve your overall health and function. And while you will also get stronger, more flexible, more mobile and more skilled at the movements you are training, will never achieve these at the expense of your joint health or your health in general.

Personal Alignment Training sessions are training to be better at living a healthy human life.

Another important feature of Personal Alignment Training is that, at its most basic, it is training human movement. It may sound strange that we’re in the business of training people to move like a human being, but it turns out that this is exactly what works from a health and longevity standpoint.

We’re designed to move and to move in specific ways, and when we do move in these specific ways things tend to go well for us health wise.

When we don’t, well, things tend to go as they go for the many of us who have manifested movement based conditions such as chronic back pain or joint degeneration.

So the next time you have a few extra minutes, take the time to consider your exercise habits carefully by asking yourself the question – “WHAT AM I TRAINING FOR?” Then think about whether the time and energy you are putting into your training is really serving your goals or if it is, as is often the case, working against them. If you discover that your current training is in line with what your long term goals, then continue with that training for as long as that’s the case. If you discover a mismatch, consider changing your training program until it better aligns with what you’re after.

You might also consider scheduling a Personal Alignment Training session to help you!