Building the Body Through Fitness
At Industrial Athletics, our goal is to build better individuals. In order to do that, we believe we have to give our members the ability to grown in three key areas: The Body (Fitness), The Mind (Core Values), and The Community. We call these the 3 Pillars of Success. If we are able to maximize these 3 Pillars in each of our members, we believe they will be living the best life possible. That’s when we know we are successful in building a better individual.
The First Pillar
The first pillar is The Body. Essentially, this means we are building your level of fitness so that you are in the best shape of your life. This also means our fitness program has to be provide you a chance to constantly grow. In other words, we want you to always become bigger, faster, and stronger.
Functional Fitness
The best fitness program to maximize your continued progress is a functional fitness program. The most common functional fitness program is the world is CrossFit. Basically, this means that what you do in the gym will have a direction connection to what you do in real life. Functional fitness utilizes your body to move how you are built to move, is inherently safe, is built with compound movements, and derives power from core to extremities.
Direct Connection to Real Life
When you do functional fitness, you are increasing your ability to do more outside of the gym. Take squatting for example. Throughout life, you have to squat. It doesn’t always look like it does in the gym, but you are squatting. If you sit down in a chair, that’s a squat. When you stand up out of bed in the morning, you squatted. Squatting in the gym even improves our ability to do things like climbing stairs. Furthermore, not only will you improve on things you can already do, but also you will gain the ability to do things you never thought possible.
How You Are Built To Move
When you are in a functional fitness program, you are primarily using free weights and no machines. You need to be able to move how you are built to move. If you aren’t ready to lift an object over your head, then it’s pointless to force you to do so. Additionally, it can cause you injury. Therefore, you don’t want to use machines that will force you into a particular plain of motion. It is also really good for you to force your body to use all of its little muscles to stabilize weights while you move.
Inherently Safe
Because you body is built to move, functional fitness is inherently safe. You are made to pick things up (deadlift), squat down and stand up, push yourself off of the ground, and pull yourself up (pullups). You may need to regain the strength or mobility to do so, but it is what you are built to do. Therefore, a functional fitness program is inherently safe when it is done properly.
Compound Movements
There is little to no room in a functional fitness program for something like bicep curls or tricep kickback. That’s because we don’t use those movements in regular life. Small single muscle movements like that are great to strengthen an imbalance, or rehab a joint. However, how many times has a calf raise been useful in everyday life? Instead, functional fitness programs use compound movements that primarily use your bigger muscles and move multiple joints at one time.
Core To Extremity Power
Finally, you will learn how to use your body to generate power. This gets a little heavy on the science, but bear with us. Our core, ore trunk, is built with big muscle meant to stabilize and move heavy things. The biggest muscle in your body are found around your midsection: stomach muscles, back muscles, butt muscles. If you want to maximize your power output, you get your power from those big movers and transfer that power to your extremities. Imagine swinging a baseball bat. You don’t just swing with your arms. You use your torso to twist violently through your midsection and transfer that force through your arms and into the bat. Functional fitness programs are designed to help you build those powerful muscles.
If our mission is to build better individuals, we are going to use a functional fitness program like CrossFit to do so. When programmed correctly, our fitness program will build your body to be stronger than ever before. The best part, the more you do it, the more you progress. There is always something new to learn and always something to improve upon.
