There is a lot more to your hip than obsessing over your glute exercises, quad development, or hamstring crushing workouts. None of these tissues are ‘one thing’ or can be trained by one exercise. Notice you never hear someone talking about the best obturator externus or glute minimus exercise. Those don’t seem to be important because you can’t ‘see’ them. This lackluster rational a majority of the fitness and rehab industry seems to operate under is problematic. Regardless of intent — it doesn’t take a genius to question why some of your anatomy is important, and the rest of it is not.
We have a lot of the anatomy that we have because of evolutionary selective pressures. If you have it, it certainly deserves some of your training attention versus none.
Maybe you need another reminder your arms aren’t only made of ‘biceps’ and ‘triceps’, which also aren’t one thing. The biceps has two different heads. The same can be said of the ‘tri’ in tricep, indicating three heads. I’ll restate the obvious that one is not three. While they may have some things in common, anatomical details matter. The role of the supinator, the pronator, anconeus, brachialis, brachioradialis, the glenohumeral joint capsule, coracobrachialis, etc.
These structures don’t stop existing just because we don’t train them. Though their tissue health and quality certainly do. They can play a vital role in force management, joint control, pain, and your overall durability.
Where are these tissue specific assessments and exercises?
How this anatomy gets considered (or overlooked) can be the bottleneck that determines whether or not you can use your arms with or without chronic pain and dysfunction.
This may be an opportunity for exercise fanatics to argue that there surely are exercises that ‘target’ all of these aforementioned muscles, or that the exercises they do are full range of motion.
This isn’t about doing more exercises. It’s about understanding what your joints actually need to function well.
Remember the fundamental motion of a joint, is not met in any exercise, because exercises are not focused on maintaining or developing fundamental, specific joint motions. They’re simply concerned with using the ranges of motion you have to execute complex movement patterns, sometimes (often) those found in the sports of powerlifting or olympic lifting.
Apples are not oranges.
If you’ve been training hard and are still dealing with nagging limitations or plateaus, this is likely a missing piece.
What I’ve posted below is a beginners guide to practicing the fundamental ranges of motion each and every articulation you have needs to experience — daily. There is a lot of background education that I typically bring someone through prior to showing them how to maintain the health of their joints. Given that we live in an increasingly online world, you can get an abbreviated version of that in this mini learning module that comes with an introduction, a long-form class, morning routine, and additional training concepts. Please understand there are multiple reasons we spent an entire day on this at the FRC® seminar. It is that important. I hope you enjoy, and keep practicing, I promise you aren’t going to be good at these for a long time. And your physical health depends in part, on you sticking to practicing.
Beginners Guide To Joint Maintenance
This is your starting point for learning how to move your joints the way they are biologically designed to move. It is simple and accessible regardless of your training background, and it gives you the structure to begin improving health and longevity today.
If you’re interested in 1:1 training or are an FRS® provider looking for guidance, visit www.theartofstrong.com.
If you’re a fitness professional or manual therapist interested in our courses, visit www.functionalanatomyseminars.com.