Archive for May, 2010

Increase Weight And Reduce Injury Risk On Barbell Squats With Proper Preperation

Most of us know that we need to warm up our bodies and maybe even do a couple of light reps before loading the bar with weight.  This is completely adequate for most training styles and lifts, but for those looking to move large amounts of weight, especially on multi-joint exercises,  a little additional preparation can go a long way.

To complete a squat properly takes a lot of practice and coordination, add a few hundred pounds to that and things get really complicated.  The initial plateau in max squat weight is usually not a result of lack of strength in the legs, but rather a combination of weak balance and core activation that prevent the brain from allowing full activation of the target muscle groups.

Try these exercises before the first set of heavy squats, they will allow better form and an increase in weight.

1. Single Leg Balance with Eyes Closed: Complete 1 minute on each leg.

2. Squat with No Equipment:  Complete 10 reps, focusing on perfect form, proper muscle recruitment, and maintaining an active core throughout the movement.

3. Pelvic Tilt:  3-5 repetitions completed in the standing position just before the bar is un-racked.

Taking a few minutes to complete these exercises before heavy squats allows the body to effectively transfer the weight from the shoulders down to the target muscles.  The risk of injury drops as the proprioceptors are activated, creating more awareness of joint position and stability.  This in turn permits recruitment of additional muscle fibers, increasing the effectiveness of the exercise.

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Elevation Updates

As you may or may not have noticed, over the past two to three weeks there has been a period of inactivity with regards to the blogs, exercise postings, and comments by Elevation. This inactivity was not due to a lack of content or information, but rather was due to the fact that we have been tirelessly working on a boatload of updates to our public site and application. Within the next week, you will find yourself visually stimulated by what we consider to be a greatly enhanced website designed to maximize the user experience and ease of use. While the most apparent of these changes is the color and design, the most monumental, and well kick-a$$, are the alterations that have been made to the exercise search. Not only have we totally upgraded the look, feel, and process through which you all can search our exercises, but we have completely redone the backend search operations that return the exercises.

As previously mentioned, we have been making alterations and developing new feature set within the application as well. Though the vast majority of these changes have been items that clean up the application and put a higher level of polish on it, we have been wire-framing and establishing the needed functionality for a trainer scheduling section. The scheduling section will allow trainers to completely control their scheduled availability by creating time blocks for training sessions.   Once these time blocks are establish on the trainers side, existing clients and potential clients can request an appointment either through the trainers public site scheduling widget or within the applications in the scheduling widget.  When an appointment has been requested, an email is sent to the trainer informing them of the pending appointment request.  From there they can respond right there in the email, or click on the link taking them back to the Elevation Application confirm where the appointment can be confirmed. We are supremely confident that our methodology of creating time blocks for appointments and the process of requesting/accepting appointments will greatly enhance a trainers visibility of their schedule and ease of adjustment it.

In today’s world of twitter, facebook, foursquare, and linkedin we realized that there is a need for trainers to be able to blast to world that they have an appointment open. While it will not be released in the first revision of the scheduling feature, we have prepared for this by enabling trainers to engage/request appointments with clients that they currently have.

For the individual trainer this sounds all well and good, but what about a larger organization you ask. Well, we did not forget about you. Stick true to our roots, we have developed our scheduling section in such a fashion that larger organizations have the functionality that allows Administrators to request an appointment between trainers and clients.

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