5 Foundations for Fire and Ice
Achievement
One of the overlooked benefits of working out with a trainer is managing all your data! This helps you see your accomplishments even when you don’t feel like you’re making progress. Our default is to assess our progress by how well we feel or maybe even how we look day to day. How we feel and how we perceive ourselves changes to the beat of the day. That is why keeping good records and tracking trends is something we take a lot of pride in. Strength gains are not measured by your scale and weight loss doesn’t means your butt gets smaller. When you look at the data you can see the achievements your mirror and your feelings aren’t telling you.
Power & Strength
A lot of people think about body builders and power lifters when they think power and strength. However, these attributes are foundations to performance of all activities. When we have more power and strength, we can do more work. Sometimes people combine these two attributes into one and use these two words interchangeable. Here at Fire and Ice we like to say you need strength for power, but power is both strength and speed. Sometimes these two attributes, strength and speed need to be trained at different cadences so that you can optimize the output to achieve a specific goal.
Endurance & Cardio
Cardio has become a pop culture phrase in the gym, “going to do cardio”. What does that mean? Well, it could mean a lot of things. For instance, I might be wanting to get a good sweat, or I might want to go for a run, or it could mean I want to burn a lot of calories. Cardio here at Fire and Ice is simply getting your heartrate into a specific zone. Furthermore, we want to create some endurance. Endurance is the ability to sustain a certain output for a certain interval. When you train your cardio system its not just the heart, its also all of your arteries, veins and capillaries all working together to get nutrients to your cells. Some of the best conditioning for cardio isn’t even working out vigorously its slow and steady.
Stability & Mobility
Being able to move (being mobile) the correct way is one thing we take very seriously here at Fire and Ice. Habitually moving in the incorrect way can erode the body into all kinds of chronic pain. Here we place form above everything else. When you learn to move the right way, the other things feel better, and you get far more out of your workout programs. The downside to this? Well, it takes time to teach your body how to create movement memory. Repetitively practicing proper movement will lead to a more fulfilling program here. Stability is the ability to balance. Many injuries are generated from the inability to keep balance, especially as we get holder and move around less. Balance is also a skill; it requires both cognitive stimulation and muscular stimulation.
Flexibility & Recovery
Recovery might be more important than the exercise itself. You can perform almost any activity over and over if you fully recover from the first. Think about that for a second, if I completely recover from the activity I just performed, I can do it again and again and again. The lack of recovery is why we get injured. Flexibility is a sign of how well nutrients can travel throughout your body. If we are not flexible, then we will not move the muscle in its full range of motion thus inhibiting kinetic flow throughout the body. Your lymphatic system is stimulated by your muscle movements. So, keeping a good flexible body will help in the recovery process and dispense cellular waste.