Pillar I: True Specificity
When it comes to any type of specific training, you always try and relate the training to the task that you're trying to accomplish. If you take football, for example, I wouldn't do any exercise in a gym that wasn't aimed at making the footballer in front of me better at football. You want it to be as specific as possible.
For example, if you're doing even something as simple as a squat as a footballer, unless you're a goalkeeper, you're very rarely in a fixed shoulder-width position where your feet are facing forward and you're in a static stable position. When you play football you're always off balance on one leg or one foot further forward or one foot further back. Try to replicate that when you're training. You want to work your joints and your muscles in as many different varieties of positions as possible, especially those which are trying to achieve an improvement on the football pitch.
When you receive a football on a football pitch, you'll very often be getting an opponent nudging you in the back or you'll be looking around over your shoulder or reaching or stretching. So try add as many variables as possible to make it as football specific and as close to a match environment as you possibly can.
- Work your weaker foot a little bit more.
- Test your balance.
- Add a bit of strength to it in terms of how much you're making them off balance, making them on one leg.
- Add some strength when they're in these unstable positions, replicating a match environment as much as possible.
And stretching and mobility should be exactly the same. You should only do static stretches post-workout. If you do a static stretch, it will switch the muscles off. It'll relax the muscle. You don't want to do that before you enter into either training or a match. Before training, before a match, you do mobility exercise; you do active stretches. Do active stretches that are specific to the task at hand. If it's a general workout, you want to stretch everywhere. If it's a football match, you want to stretch the muscles in a way that they're going to be stretched in a match. Active dynamic stretches get the muscles woken up, gets them prepared. The more you stretch your muscle, the more neurologically that muscle will switch on and react, and it reduces the risk of injury. So active dynamic stretches before the game, after the game; static stretches for every body part used in relation to what you're trying to achieve.
Pillar II: Original Movement
Training we do at the gym at Original Movement is all about returning the body back to its original movement. Most gyms were designed in the 60s and 70s for bodybuilders to gain muscle. So, it's sit-down machine weights that isolate muscles and they're great to improve the strength of individual muscles, but they're not great for the function of the body.
There's no wrong way of exercising. If it's pain-free, it's good. Get exercising. However, in the modern world we all sit down too often. Humans started walking on 2 legs millions of years ago and our evolution has made it so gravity has very little impact on our amazing structure. It has allowed us to become the alpha predator on the planet. Upright, scanning the horizon, covering long distances and dominating our environment.
If we, as humans lose that perfect posture, for whatever reason, the constant that is gravity will slowly erode our body and potentially cause various ailments. We all spend too much time in a seated flexed position. It switches our core off. It switches our muscles off. It reduces our bone density, our muscle density, we are devolving, it is essential that we get up, we get moving.
We live in a 360-degree world, so get twisting, get turning, get off balance. Test your body to actually think about what it's doing and moving the ways that it naturally is designed to move. I feel like now we've lost our way quite massively, to sit down in the gym is criminal. You spend too much time sitting down; you should go into a gym to move, to twist, and to turn and test your body neurologically, and use your muscles in a set style like they're designed to do, not in these individual isometric ways where we don't challenge our body. We sit down, our brain switches off, a lot of our muscles switch off. Ideally get out in the fresh air..... walk, run, climb, chase a ball, swim.... just move! But if you want to gym, do it as purposefully as you can.
You know, when you push something, you don't just use individual muscles to push something. Use your legs, use your arms. If you want to lift something above your head, don't sit down to push something above your head. If you could magically imagine everyone exercising in a gym sitting down on these machine weights where you're doing a leg press or you're doing a hip adductor or you're doing a shoulder press, if you could visualize that person and click your fingers and make that equipment disappear, it would be insane to see the humans moving the way that they are. They'd be sitting pushing their legs away. It's just it makes no sense at all. It's not a natural movement.
Yet, most people that goes into a gym do exactly that. So I feel like it's important to get on both feet, get testing your balance, get working your muscles in the chain that they're designed to work in, and get your body back to move in its original movement.