My job mostly deals with physical health and structure.  Every day I spend time with people who are trying to move better and without pain, move faster, or be able to move more resistance.  However, over the years I have found that this is only one component of wellness, and I wanted to take the time not only to acknowledge the other sides of this whole thing we call “being” but take a look at ways that you can help yourself achieve a higher level of potential in your day to day living.

I want you to think of the whole thing as a square structure.  In one corner there is your physical health, which incorporates all of the things in the physical realm you can control.  Your strength, nutrition and sleep fall under this category.  These are the things I talk about all of the time.  But what about the other three corners?  These corners are your mental health, your emotional health and your spiritual health.  Let’s break these down and see if you are really paying attention to them like you should be.  So many people walk through their daily lives not even thinking about what is going on inside them and what fuels their desire to perform in other areas of their life.  Try to increase awareness and focus on these things that may have been long neglected can really help to enhance your overall being.  I’m of the opinion that everything is linked, and what we think really determines what we do and how we act, towards ourselves, and each other.

Life has energy, and your thoughts do as well.  How we think determines a large part of how we act and react to things around us every minute of every day.  Therefore mental health can be a large part of your overall being, and one that many people struggle with on a daily basis.  Think about it – how many people do you know with a “defined” mental illness?  I put defined in quotations only because it is my belief that people who are simply outside of the norms get put into a box and labelled as different because they think in a different way.  I’m by no means saying that there are not real diseases, but sometimes we as a society need to not be so quick to rush into labelling someone as mentally ill, especially our children and young adults who are just developing into their ways of thinking.  Our mental health is a huge part of how we approach every day and the people that we interact with.  It can control the decisions that you make and steps either forward or backwards in your existence.  Learning also falls under this envelope.  I try to learn something every day – do you?  Even if it is just reading an actual newspaper about world events or a magazine article about gardening, this goes a long way into keeping our brain active and working well.  Keeping your brain fresh can help you be more physically able to react and deal with everyday situations.

How do you deal with emotions?  Do you bottle them up and then vent all over somebody who doesn’t deserve it?  Do you expose them to anyone who will listen only to find that they stop listening after a while?  Learning to control and manage the emotions that we deal with daily is another component – your emotional health.  Sometimes we all need a good venting session, or to just sit and be sad, but we also need to open ourselves up to truly being happy and joyful about the things in our life we are grateful for.  Tony Robbins calls this the “hour of power” where you take time first thing in the morning to think about and acknowledge all of the things that you are blessed with in your life.  Often when I’m walking my dogs in the morning I’ll just go through the list and realize how lucky I am to have a great family, a beautiful place to live, and a job that I love to go to in the mornings, even at 5am.  If you have a hard time with this, friends and family are good ways to express how you are feeling (hopefully) without judgement and let you explore how you are feeling.  Some people need direct counselling help for this type of thing, but it is still important just like the other two for overall well being and healthy living.  When you’re angry – be angry.  But make sure that it doesn’t detract from your overall health by causing you to have stress and be mentally unstable.

Which brings us to the final cornerstone of this equation – spiritual health.  Whatever higher power you believe in really doesn’t matter to me, and if you don’t believe in one then that’s fine too.  What you should have though is a set of principles and beliefs that you follow that fulfills you as a person.  In a nutshell, I think that one can be spiritual in many ways, even if it is something as simple as being good to others.  Giving to others can be a big part of this, and if you don’t have something like that in your life I encourage you to create it.  I’m a believer that what we put out there is what we get back, which is one reason I do what I do every day.

So there we have it.  Body, mind, heart and spirit all form the cornerstones of a healthy being that is able to go through life in a fulfilling way, conquer their goals and attain a higher state of being.  What steps can you take today in order to shore up some of these cornerstones?  Even a small step can make a difference and I encourage you to start right away.  Feel free to comment and let me know what you have done today to help yourself.

When people join a gym, and even when they hire a trainer inevitably they become a bit stumped with the sheer overwhelming amount of information that they need to process.  There are so many times I get asked “what is the best thing” or watch as people go through a really complicated list of exercises designed for whatever they think it is doing for them.  When I tell them the truth about strength and proper movement they get almost shocked like they have been lied to over the years.  So here’s the fundamental truth:

If you train with fundamental movement patterns in mind, and train specifically for what you want to be able to do, that’s all you have to do.  Push, pull, squat, lunge, bend, twist.  Some people include tilting and righting, and some will include bracing as well.  A maximum of eight different things – that can be applied in hundreds of ways.  My point is that if you train with these things in mind, you can make yourself really strong, fast, powerful and/or be able to last forever.  The rest is just using physics, gradual adaptation and specificity.  It’s not nearly as hard as you think it is.

You can actually get away with three exercises that cover moving and strengthening most of the major joints in the body (ankles, knees, hip complex, lower spine, thoracic spine, shoulder complex, elbows).  Three.  Could take the average person about twenty minutes a couple of times a week and you’re pretty good in terms of maintaining or developing strength and reducing risk of injury.  But people persist in doing ten or fifteen exercises, and trying so many different applications and programs it would make your head spin.  My only addendum to this is if you are trying to train for something specific like bodybuilding or an athletic event – then things change – a lot.  But for the average gym goer who just wants to be strong it really isn’t that hard.  Even 70-year-old Nana Sue can benefit a great amount from strength training, and yes, with the right coaching and application, even she can do a pull up!

One way modalities like CrossFit have it right (not that I’m condoning CrossFit in any way, shape or form) is that they stick with fundamental movement patterns and (in a well coached environment) teach the stuff really, really well.  Things like pull-ups, proper squats and deadlifts and push-ups are something that everyone should be able to do.  Unfortunately in most CrossFit workouts they are doing it too fast, too soon, and with too many different types of movement involved for the nervous system to be able to take it.  There are other reasons why I’m anti-CrossFit but that’s not what this article is about.

The problem with our industry in general is that people who work within it constantly are marketing things that might be effective for a short time, but often never really take into consideration the individual or their individual goal.  They will use gimmicks and tools that are completely unnecessary in order to generate more revenue for themselves, usually without caring one bit about whether it will help the person that they are applying it to.  Even magazines are filled with workout after workout that somehow are new and revolutionary, when they are just variants on very simple movements.  In fact, I’m willing to bet if you purchased a magazine 12 months in a row, you would probably see the same exercises many times, just advertised as different things.

So why does it have to be complicated?  The truth is, it doesn’t.  Stick with the basics – especially at the beginning, be smart and consistent with your effort, and progress will come.  Then, when you figure out what you want to apply it to, just adjust what you’re doing towards the goal you have in mind.  Working out and being strong and healthy doesn’t have to be hard.  We have just spent years making it that way.