💪🏿💪🏻PT CORNER: FierceMovement® for Injury Prevention Off the Machine 💪🏾💪

By: Reagan Rupard

In my last blog, I wrote about how strengthening our slow-twitch muscle fibers not only builds long and lean muscle that looks great in your yoga pants while you work from your home office, but also strengthens the deep stabilizing muscles of our body that are then better equipped to stay strong in moments where our stability is compromised and we might otherwise injure ourselves. This especially applies to athletes who find themselves with chronic overuse injuries; strengthening our stabilizing muscles can help to improve or eliminate compensation patterns that are causing that injury. But that’s not the only way that you’re getting stronger on the FierceFormer® that will make you stronger in everything else that you do, whether that’s skiing, running, cycling, carrying children or going to work in a physically-demanding job.

I was lucky to have the experience of attending PT school while I was coaching at Fierce45®. As I learned the core tenants of injury rehabilitation and recovery, I was floored by how much of that we were already doing at Fierce. It makes me so proud to coach here, knowing that we are doing the things on the machine that are going to prevent you from having to learn it from scratch later in life after an injury.

We’ve extensively covered how slow, controlled movement strengthens your slow twitch muscle fibers for more deep stability and strength, but the other piece of that message is the importance of the control itself. Remember your first class, where all of the movements felt so foreign and out of control to you? Think of how far you’ve come, and acknowledge that you’ve strengthened the connection between your mind and your body to be able to produce refined movements that are constantly challenging your strength and your balance. You’ve learned (and we are always ever-learning on the machine) exactly what a right oblique contraction feels like, or how deep to go in a lunge to maximize the work of your hamstrings, or how to make slight adjustments in your plank to ensure the work is happening in your core rather than your shoulders. This is also happening subconsciously off the machine - you’re better at making hard turns on skis, or hiking downhill, or controlling your balance when you’re walking on ice.

The other cornerstone of Fierce45® that makes a huge difference in injury prevention is that we work sides of the body individually. Limb dominance is a risk factor for injury in sport, especially after a previous injury to one limb. When you work on one leg, arm, or side of the core at a time, you are forcing one side of your body to strengthen without help from the over dominant side. Creating improvement in an individual limb’s ability to balance, stabilize and move against resistance means that you’re working to prevent that moment when planting on your “weak” ankle causes a sprain or overuse of your “strong” leg causes an overuse strain.

Take it from me: the body awareness you gain to be able to square off your hips strengthens the muscles that prevent knee injury. Using your core to maintain a neutral spine in everything from a sprinter’s lunge to an overhead shoulder press is laying the foundation to prevent back injury and pain. Letting your ankle wobble a little bit in a carriage lunge but keeping your balance is strengthening the muscles that prevent ankle sprains. The mental toughness that you build in every burning and shaking minute to stay in it with good form is making you stronger for everything else the world may throw at you off the machine.