What's YOUR Motivation?

What motivates you?  A D-1 Scholarship?  Your health?  Your appearance?  Playing ball with your kids as they grow up? 

Whatever your motivation, it’s important to be able to remain focused on your goal.  One of the biggest reasons people stray from their fitness plans is that they lose focus on their goals and motivations.  It’s crucial to keep cues in sight that will remind you WHY you want to make the changes you are striving for – and that’s the first step in keeping focused on your goal.

If you’re working toward a scholarship, hang posters and pictures from the college you want to go to on the walls where you’ll see them every day.  If you’re working to improve your physique, buy the bikini  you want to wear on your next vacation and hang it from the mirror in your bedroom.  Heck, plan the vacation and put a picture from the destination on the fridge, next to the mirror, etc.  If your doctor said you need to improve your health, tape a note of the blood pressure range you’re aiming for on the mirror in the bathroom, or on the center of your steering wheel.

See the pattern here?  Visual references are extremely powerful reminders of why our goals are important to us – and visual references are crucial in keeping our eyes on the prize.  Now, don’t confuse visual reminders with looking in the mirror every morning.  The very subtle differences that you may see in the mirror will likely go unnoticed in the short term, while seeing that bikini or college poster every day will serve as the reminder for why you’re committing to this change.  

What your motivation entails is up to you.  If it’s important to you, then keep reminding yourself of it, and stay the course.  The most important thing is to stay committed to your goals. 

Our Training Philosophy

Constant Motion Fitness’ training philosophy is anchored in the belief that life is a sport and everyone is an athlete. With that in mind, the most important tenet in our training is that function and performance outweigh physical appearance. Clearly, physical appearance is a highly motivating factor for many of us. When we look good, we feel good. Don’t misinterpret our philosophy to mean that we don’t respect or understand your desire to look good. In fact we encourage that. What you should know is that our training methods and the main goal of our workouts is to help develop peak personal performance. Whether your sport is playing football or chasing 5-year-olds, you need your body to respond quickly, efficiently & safely when you ask something of it. When this workout style/philosophy is combined with a healthy, balanced diet, the results will include the body you’ve always dreamed about having. Even more importantly, you’ll protect yourself from injury when you have to move quickly in a different direction to protect your kids or catch something that falls from the cabinet.

Our workouts involve four major components:

Core Stability and Strength – Your body’s core is the key to stability in any movement. Everything from bending over to pick up your kids to putting away heavy boxes in your garage requires you to transfer strength from your lower body to your upper body. This transfer takes place almost entirely in your core.

Balance – Your body moves in all directions every day. In order for your body to effectively move, you must have proper balance. By training the small stabilizing muscles that don’t get used during isolation weight lifting or while running or cycling, you’ll optimize your performance in all aspects of all activities. We work to maximize your balance while creating a faster connection between the neural network and your muscles, creating smarter muscles in the process.

Full Body Strength – How often do you find yourself using JUST ONE muscle? Isolating just your bicep for example… Ummmm… NEVER!!! In real life and real sports, your body works to combine movements in the most efficient manner possible to perform an action at the command of your nervous system. Every Constant Motion Fitness workout (group or individual) challenges the entire body, not just one area.

Agility – Agility is the ability to maintain your balance and stability in order to change your movement pattern. If you’ve ever tripped and managed to get your foot out in front of you to catch yourself before you fell, you’ve experienced the benefits of good agility in everyday life. Life and sport happen in all directions and planes of motion. Running is a great exercise for cardio-vascular health and endurance, but how much does it really help you in your activities of daily living?  Running should be part of your workout scheme, not sole component.

Please contact us at any time when you have any questions about getting started.

Specificity

The Law of Specificity states that changes to a system will be directly related to the stimulus applied to the system.  Put simply, this means that you must train what you want to change.  If you want to improve your balance, then you must perform exercises that challenge your balance. 

With this in mind, it is imperative that you ensure that your training protocol is directly related to your sport or activity or everyday life.  Remember, life is a sport and you should train for YOUR life just as a football player trains for a football game. 

Seems obvious, right?  Then why is it that we see so many athletes training in fashions that do not replicate the movements and actions required for their specific sports? 

It is paramount that we, as trainers remember the concept of specificity, and ensure that the workouts we design are appropriate to the athletes – and the functions – we train.  Imagine the shortcomings of training a football player by only performing exercises in one direction of movement. Football players (as with most athletes) constantly move in all different directions in random order.  It’s imperative that these athletes are prepared to adjust to the constant changes of course by training in all directions. 

Ultimately, the most important consideration when designing a training plan for any athlete at any level is that the core of the workouts imitates their sport and continuously progresses them towards their goal.