Functional Movement Training Disciplines
Agility, Balance, & Flexibility Training
The term agile has become ubiquitous across many industries—from project management, to software development, to business operations, and to fitness training. In it simplest definition, agility refers to the ability to move quickly and easily. Human movement occurs in three different planes of motion:
Sagittal Plane: Cuts the body into left and right halves. Forward and backward movements.
Frontal Plane: Cuts the body into front and back halves. Side-to-side movements.
Transverse Plane: Cuts the body into top and bottom halves. Twisting movements.
With our ability to move in multiple planes or directions, it is important that we can keep as much control as possible to avoid injuries, falls, accidents, or any other incident that may negatively impact movement. We practice control through our mind-body connection to activate quick reflexes, coordination, balance, speed, and correct muscular and joint response to any changing situation.
Agility training occurs throughout many different sports, but agility training is not exclusive to sports. Through multiple modalities, BoldFit integrates agility training with the intention of bringing focus to acceleration, deceleration, stabilization, responsiveness to stimuli, and the ability to perform complex movements through different speeds and intensity.
Moreover, in the pursuit of greater strength and improved performance, power is a key element to smarter training. Through resistance-training, muscles will increase in strength as a result of the increase of force produced. When increased force production is performed in a short period of time, the output is power, or Power=Force (strength) x Velocity (speed). Power training has multiple benefits for clients of all ages:
Power training will enable quicker reactions from muscles, particularly Type II (or fast twitch) fibers, to generate force more quickly, which is critical to the function and safety of any movement. This becomes particularly important as power diminishes faster than strength as we age, and quicker reactions help to reduce loss of balance and falls, a leading cause of death or serious injury in older adults.
Improve efficiency within your energy system that lives right in the muscle.
Metabolic rate increases the body’s ability to convert food into energy more efficiently, which is crucial for all the chemical processes that take place in the human body to to keep us alive, such as breathing, repairing cells and digesting food.
Balance is often considered synonymous with stability. The subtle difference is that stability works to support muscles and joints through movement, whereas balance, is the ability to control the body without movement and against gravity. Further, balance training may seem that it is most important once we become older adults. While balance training for seniors is critical to help prevent injuries and falls, starting to practice balance from early on will reap many more health benefits.
First, balance training helps people at all ages to reduce risk of injury. Second, balance reinforces synergistic muscle recruitment throughout the body to maintain control, resulting in improved cognition function, postural alignment, performance, and strength. As a result, balance training will enhance mobility, stability, and strength for much longer and help prevent chronic conditions such as back pain, arthritis, heart disease, and diabetes.
Starting with the initial fitness assessment, BoldFit will evaluate a client’s current balance and work with each client to improve the following, but not limited to, benefits:
Body Awareness, or proprioception, is sensing our body’s position and self-movement in the space we occupy. For example, to perform a squat with proper form, it’s important to understand how far back to drive the hips and glutes during the descent in order to maintain proper spinal and knee joint alignment.
Coordination—the ability to truly harness the mind-body connection to engage multiple muscle groups, joints and cognitive function to work together. The result is full mind-body engagement.
Increase joint stability and core strength.
Improve focus and concentration.
Enable mobility for longevity.
Clients often express how they are not born flexible, or do not have a flexible bone in their bodies, or they cannot practice yoga because of lack of flexibility. The simple truth is that while we are born with greater flexibility in our early stages of development, flexibility training is required for any person to ‘be flexible,’ even for individuals who are more naturally flexible.
In terms of health and fitness, flexibility is the ability of a joint, group of joints, 0r the soft tissue around the joint to support a full range of motion. Unfortunately, it often becomes a neglected aspect of fitness training, which can be detrimental to our overall mobility. Benefits of flexibility training range from increasing range of motion, improving posture, releasing muscle tension and soreness, and reducing risk of injury .
At BoldFit, we are adamant to the commitment of our clients’ safety throughout the whole workout. This includes proper warm-up and cooldown. We incorporate dynamic warm-ups that include movements from the workout to better prepare muscles, joints, and circulation for the actual program of the day. Following the workout, it is imperative to cool the body down properly through various movements and stretches to bring heart rate levels down slowly, to avoid excessive tightening or soreness in muscles and joints, to keep circulation moving smoothly throughout the body, and perhaps most importantly, to maintain as much range of motion as possible for a more mobile, healthy, and independent life.