Variety of movement - one important benefit
NOTE - This post was originally written for our 'weekly warble' segment in a few Facebook groups for the community local to our gym.
Hello and welcome to the not-so-weekly warble here at Ideanthro Movement.
This "week" I'm going to talk about one reason (amongst many) why it's important to have a wide variety of movement in our life and more specifically in our exercise.
A quick heads up, the video attached to this post doesn't have a lot specifically to do with this discussion, but in a general sense it's totally relevant. If you've seen a few of our videos you might have noticed that at Ideanthro Movement we do a really wide variety movement in our training. Let's talk about why!
In the health and fitness world there's a principle called the SAID principle. It stands for Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands. In a nutshell what it means is that not only do we get better at the things we practise, but we specifically get better at those things and much less so at other things that might appear similar but which we aren't practising. For example, a typical gym movement like a regular barbell squat will make us much better at that type of barbell squat, but do far less to help us improve at another type of squat such as the split squat shown in the video. It will help, but not as much as you might initially think.
The reason that the SAID principle is important is that most of us are training to be fit and capable in our daily lives. The movement we encounter in our daily lives is much more varied than that which is generally seen in gyms. Consider all the different squatting patterns you might use during an afternoon working in the vegetable garden as compared to those in the gym. The garden wins for variety. If we want our training to prepare us best for daily life, the SAID principle tells us that it needs to reflect this variety.
Now please don't get me wrong. None of this is to say that regular gym training is ineffective. If that's what you're doing, that's amazing! You're doing great things for your body and your health! Keep it up! All that I'm saying here is that variety of movement is really important too, and that's one of the reasons why here at Ideanthro Movement we do such a wide variety of it.
P.S. It also makes our training really interesting and engaging because we're always learning and exploring new movements.
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