Why Your Favorite Exercise Is Harming You
Posted on | February 21, 2009 | 1 Comment
We all got our favorite exercises. We enjoy them, it feels awesome and we do them. A lot. The thing is that your favorite exercise could be harming you and causing considerable problems with your health.
[What?!]
Your favorite exercise is harming you by throwing your body out of balance.
The key to this seemingly crazy statement comes from understanding posture and muscle balance.
Depending on your posture, some exercises will be easier to do. Those tend to be our ‘favorites’. Our bodies, like water, always look for the path of least resistance.
Let me give an example to clarify my mumblings:
an average guy loves exercising upper body and consistently neglect legs.
[Why?]
Guys have a tendency to have a higher center of gravity. An average guy loves doing upper body exercises because it is easier for him, literally. Working out lower body takes more effort (it’s farther away from center of gravity) and therefore is hard and often neglected.
Most women, on the other hand, have lower center of gravity. As a result, lower body training is much easier for them. This is why most women hate upper body routines. It much harder than exercising legs! The result? You guessed it, many women forgo upper body training or spend very little time on it resulting in weak upper body.
Ok, well, that is very generic. How is your specific favorite exercise is harming you?
Lets say that you are a guy who loves push ups (or bench presses – anything that you get to press away from your chest is a ‘like’). It’s your favorite. You do it often and enjoy it. You are good at it.
When one does that much pressing, chest muscles become strong (no surprise there). It is bad news, however, since now we have a muscle imbalance to deal with. Chest muscles overpower back muscles. As a result, shoulders roll forward and stay there, pulled by chest fibers.
[Yeah, well, just go work on the back!]
Yes, that is the answer, the problem is that at THIS point working on the back is very hard and uncomfortable. Because of strong pull of chest muscles, back muscles fibers become stretched and weak. At this point you would have to select back exercises very carefully and focus on proper technique. Even a pull-up would not be very effective, as the person with chest/back imbalance would be much more likely to use their arms to pull themselves up and the back would be neglected yet again.
What to do
- Choose variety of movements
- Do exercises that are ‘hard’
- Focus on ‘big’ movements involving many muscles
The best thing you can do for your body is to provide variety of movement.
What do I mean?
- Get out of the gym and go climb a tree
- Play with your kids on a jungle gym
- Play basketball
- Use kettlebells
- Do yoga
- Try pilates
- Hike
- Climb things (trees, rocks, be creative)
- Have fun
Little by little your body will balance itself out and you will find yourself doing thing with ease.
What’s your favorite exercise and how do you think it is harming you?
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Tags: exercise > functional training > kettlebells > posture
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March 1st, 2009 @ 9:32 pm
[...] Mary Guiden (mguiden@u.washington.edu) posted a noteworthy aricle today onHere’s a small snippetAt this point you would have to select back exercises very carefully and focus on proper technique. Even a pull-up would not be very effective, as the person with chest/back imbalance would be much more likely to use their arms to pull … [...]