Aug 15, 2020
Jon reacts to his article, "Step Inside My Head".
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STEP INSIDE MY HEAD (2008)
by Jon Messner
I believe there is a better way to train athletes and rehab clients, but we are not there because of lack of education. Lack of education leads to misinformation and misinformation leads to the quick fix. The quick fix is everywhere in society, from fast food to health and fitness fads. It is the nature of our impatient society where the quickest solution is the only solution. These fitness fads are not only giving us a mirage of what we want, but doing more harm than good.
A few of these quick fixes are:
1) Spot reducing works.
There never has been and there never will be spot reducing. If you purchased the Ab Crunch 2000, then you need to stop watching infomercials at 2 in the morning while drinking a martini and smoking a cigar. Quick fixes do not exist and the only way to get rid of that gut of yours is to clean up your diet and start exercising.
2) Women shouldn't lift weights.
This is just silly. Give me one good reason females shouldn't lift weights. "But Jon, I don't want to get big". Let me tell you something sister, the only way you are going to get big is if you lift every day for two hours while taking steroids. Everyone should lift, regardless of gender. Lifting improves the way we look through muscular adaptation and fat loss.
3) You must exercise in the fat burning zone to burn fat.
If you want to exercise in the fat burning zone you should be prepared to do at least an hour and half of cardio everyday, however, this will most likely lead to a spinal injury or a knee injury, or both. Even though cardio can help you lose weight, it will destroy your joints (yes, even swimming). There is a much better way to burn fat; it is called interval training. Google it.
4) Back pain is part of the aging process.
I work in a health club. I love my job, I love my clients, and I love the members, HOWEVER, if I hear one more person say, "Jon, back pain is part the aging process" I truly believe I will lose my mind (even more than I already have). Back pain is a product of you sitting 12 hours a day for the last 30 years and then possibly doing something stupid in the gym to make the problem even worse. Back pain occurs because of faulty movement patterns caused by years upon years of sitting. In very black and white terms, muscles get bigger (hypertrophy) or smaller (atrophy). When you sit a lot, your glutes get ALOT smaller. Your glutes may be the most important muscle when it comes to movement and if your glutes don't work because you don’t have any, then your low back begins to move unnecessarily. Let me be crystal-can see every zit and pimple on your face-clear, if your spine moves too much unnecessarily you will damage it. So please stop exercising on quite possibly the worst invention ever, the rotary torso.
5) Strength and size are the same.
I think this may be the biggest lie we as an industry are trying to overcome. There are many definitions of strength, however on one level, strength is a function of the level of innervation between your brain and your muscles. A great example is the small karate master who can break bricks with his fingers. My clients lift for strength, never size, and we still get great aesthetic results.
There is no such thing as a quick fix. If you’ve been beating your body up for thirty years, it will take a couple of weeks (at least) before you see results. You need to have patience, and if you have read this far, then you’ve definitely demonstrated patience.
In order to grasp somewhat the way I do things, you first must have a very rudimentary knowledge of functional anatomy. This stuff is fun, I swear.
Let’s imagine our bodies as a circuit breaker. Complex movement (any form of movement; walking, playing sports, picking up groceries, moving boxes, etc.) requires those breakers to be turned on in order, #1, #2, #3, etc. If you have faulty movement patterns (like you probably do) that order looks more like #5, #2, #7, etc. Your muscles aren’t “turning on” in the right sequence, and movement is more or less forced upon the body, which causes musculoskeletal damage over time.
Most of the clients and athletes I initially see are injured in one form or another, whether they know it or not. The fact that you are pain free does not mean you are healthy, it just means that the injury you have sustained to your body hasn’t manifested itself in recognizable pain. Most individuals with spinal damage or patella-femoral damage incur the injury long before they feel pain. It is when they feel pain that they decide to try and correct the issue, and it’s usually in the form of treating the pain source, not the injury source. This can, infact, make the injury worse.
Even though no two programs are the same, I go through a pretty standard sequence with my clients and athletes. These phases of training are not absolute, each one falls on the exercise continuum sliding from one side to another and always overlapping with one another.
Phase one involves fixing the core. The core can be defined as the area from your scapula to your knees, and we need all those muscles turning on in the proper sequence at the right time, #1, #2, #3. Mike Boyle calls this neuromuscular re-education, which not only describes what we do, but sounds really cool. The second phase of training involves training movement patterns. Movement patterns or primal patterns are instilled in us before birth and are universal, applying to everyone all the time. These patterns are a constant throughout civilization and a precursor to all forms of movement. Squatting, bending, pushing and pulling are examples of movement patterns. Sitting on the couch playing video games and drinking a bud is not considered a primal movement pattern.
The final phase is what most considers strength training, and it is where we load movement patterns with weight or instability. It is in this phase of training where we see the biggest gains in strength and performance. Chronic back pain or chronic knee pain become a thing of the past and the performance of the athlete attains a whole new level.
These steps cannot be skipped. You would never build a house without a foundation, and all too often, people are exercising who cannot squat, bend, or stabilize their lumbar spine.
Understanding the intricacies of the human body and exercise is extremely complex, and it is not quite as simple as television and bodybuilding magazines would have us believe. Each movement and change of movement affects infinite micro systems of the human body, therefore making the body stronger and pain-free can be an overwhelming and challenging undertaking.