We did our first structural balance assessments last night at Ninth Wave Fitness and what a great start. Both clients had a good balance between their bench press max and their rotator cuff strength/endurance. Having the right strength ratio leads to better gains and longer lifting with less injuries. Well done Charlie and Adam!
Being balanced is a common modern theme. Here are two common phrases: 1. You need a good work life balance. 2. You need to balance your flame with fuels (yang vs yin). I cannot go a day without hearing some reference to these things as for the most part I completely agree – balance is a wonderful thing. This is very different from encouraging people to squat on a swiss ball – that’s just silly and dangerous.
Our efforts to lead a healthy lifestyle should also be balanced, here are some examples:
- Just performing exercises you really enjoy will overdevelop your strengths and makes weaknesses more pronounced. You need a variety of exercises that cover your whole musculature;
- Only lifting heavy weights because you like being strong can lead to fat gain and over stressing joints, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. We like people to be athletic and lean too;
- Extreme ‘diets’ and crash courses don’t have long term benefits. Eating a balanced diet is still one of the best and most simple bits of nutritional advice you can apply for long term health. It is appropriate for most people to ensure that every meal has some good quality fat (like organic butter, nut fat, or fat from fish), some protein (we prefer protein from sources that used to have eyes!), and some good quality carbs (low GI, non gluten));
- If you work hard – you need to rest easy! Rest is a key component to ongoing gains in health and fitness.
- Weight training on unstable surfaces – in most cases this is dangerous, less effective at increasing strength or burning fat, and has no proven benefit to improved balance in other activities;
- Using the calorie counter on a cardio machine to balance out the bag of chips you ate – even if it were as simple as calories in and calories out (it isn’t) – you don’t negate the problems from taking in the trans fats, the insulin overload and all of the chemical flavourings and preservatives;
- Balancing out a poor diet by taking high quality vitamins and minerals! We do use supplements here but they supplement a healthy lifestyle – they cannot balance out an unhealthy diet.