Monday, January 30, 2012

FREE Home Workout

2012 is the year of giving at Full Circle Fitness!!

Each month we will provide for you a workout that you can perform at home or in a park in your own time so here's the February workout a little bit early to get you into action right now!!

The holidays are all done and dusted and it's time to get back on the fitness wagon (you've already wasted a month!)

What You Need: Stop watch or Clock

How To Do It: Do each exercise one after the other in a circuit and do 3 total circuits. You may need to start at 1 or 2 circuits but over the month increase the total to 3.

However many circuits you do, time how long it takes you to complete them then beat that time each successive time you repeat the workout. Keep your drink breaks to as little time as you can and do every exercise in the same area to keep transition time to a minimum.

Perform a 2 minute warm up of just basic running on the spot and star jumps alternating each for 30 seconds.

Split Squats x 8 each leg
Push Ups x 5 – 10
Bent Over Aeroplane Hold x 30secs
Prone Stability Hold x 30secs

Here is a video of the exercises:

Take some basic measurements before starting this training program, doing your "trouble" spots at a minimum. Aim to do this workout at least 10 times for the month of February..

If you can reach a personal best each time you repeat this workout then you can guarantee there will be a decrease in those measurements.

Monday, January 23, 2012

How Personal Training Is Supposed To Be


There are now 100's of personal trainers in Melbourne. They train out of chain gyms, home garages, parks or they come to your home or workplace. Some of these same personal trainers are good, some of them are even great but sadly, a lot of them barely make the grade.

At Full Circle Fitness we aim to be not just good and not even great at what we do. Our aim is to be the absolute best and with being the best comes the pressure to perform, which in our case is to get you the results that you crave.

Here are 6 things that you will get at Full Circle Fitness that you won't get with other personal trainers.

1 - Problem Finding Postural Assessments, Not Symptom Finding

Though the use of the Joint by Joint Approach to Training popularised by US Strength and Conditioning Coach Mile Boyle, we can bypass all the symptoms of pain that you have and locate the site of your problem/s.

By following the mobility – stability continuum, we don't just treat the site of pain (which is more often then not referred), we can locate what the actual problem is meaning you get pain relief almost immediately.

Joint Requiring Mobility
Joint Requiring Stability
Ankle
Knee
Hip
Lumbar Spine (core)
Thoracic Spine
Scapula
Gleno-humeral  Joint


2 - Resistance Training Programs That Actually Burn Fat

Metabolism plays such a huge role in body composition, that it actually burns 90% of your calories. What this means is that if you’re embarking on a journey of losing body fat, then metabolism is the key to it all. The one thing that has the greatest impact on metabolism is the amount of muscle mass that you have as it’s this very muscle mass that requires constant calories to feed and sustain it.

So instead of those crash diets that make you miserable and those high rep training routines that can actually decrease your muscle mass, we implement resistance training programs that actually build and sustain muscle mass, making your fat loss efforts so much easier, and quicker!

3 - The Ability to Build Core Stability Without Slow Boring Classes

Pilates is very popular but it is also very limited. It uses very low level and isolating pelvic floor and deep core muscle activation, but it does very little for actual core strength and force transfer. As well as being built to stabilise (or hold still) the lumbar spine (lower back), the core muscles  also serves to transfer force through the body to the extremities (arms and legs).

This means that once you can perform low level lying or reformer exercises, you need to progress them to actual real life movements. I’m not sure how many of us only move when we’re lying down or spend the day on a reformer. The classes also burn very little calories so they won't really fit into your fat loss program.

As we know time is of a premium these days, so we can speed this process up by implementing our unique core stability exercises into your resistance training program.

4 - Lose Body Fat Without Pounding the Pavement (and your joints)

As stated in point 2, resistance training is the key to fat loss, not long, boring and joint stressing cardio workouts. Look at sprinters vs long distance runners and tell me who looks better.

To spare your precious joints which have probably already taken a pounding and are aching already, we don't use traditional cardio methods in our training programs, opting for continuous resistance training exercises mixed with body weight exercises to build and maintain muscle as well as actually breaking adipose tissue away from your fat cells.

5 - We Train Clients, Not Exercise Them

Why do you perform exercise? To lose fat? To increase muscle? To increase energy levels? Whatever the answer is, it’s because you want to improve something, you want to become better at something.

A lot of trainers exercise their clients, but they don’t actually train them. They don’t actually improve on what they initially started training for.

For you to get the results that you’re after, you need to TRAIN to get better. You don’t go to football or netball training just to run around and get a sweat up, you go to practice skills of the game you need to improve on. This is what we do at Full Circle Fitness.

To lose body fat you need to become better at recruiting the muscles of the body, you need to learn to train to oxygen debt and you need to learn how to follow a nutritional plan that fits your lifestyle and gets results at the same time.

To gain muscle you need to become better at managing stress, you need to learn how to progressively overload the body to force it to get bigger and again, you need to follow the specific nutritional guidelines to increase muscle mass.

At Full Circle Fitness we are constantly researching and implementing new strategies to become better at what we do, thus passing them on to our clients to assist them on improving themselves and making their training goals a reality.

6 - Unsurpassed Customer Service

At Full Circle Fitness we pride ourselves on getting know you, your partners, your family and your friends.

We pride ourselves on delivering not only a personal training environment that is unpretentious and fun, but also one that can deliver consistent results regardless of the goal of your training.

Most importantly we are a local business and that means that we value each and every client that we have. Each of our trainers knows every client by name. You’re not just a membership number on a account to us, you’re an extremely valuable and appreciated client of our studio and we aim to interact with you on a more personal level then those big gym chains.

Here's what our clients have to say about us.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Shoulder Pain


The upper body crippler, shoulder pain is usually referred from dysfunction elsewhere in the body.
Can't lift your arms above your head? Check your thoracic spine.

                                                                

Can't perform a proper push up? Check your scapula stability.

                                               

Pain in one shoulder? Check your opposite hip and ankle.

Yep, even totally unrelated area's of the body can contribute to shoulder pain.

At Full Circle Fitness we test your shoulder through various ranges of motion and find correlations between them and your static and dynamic postural findings.

We're not like all the physio's in town who will simply give you the same two outdated exercises for rehab that ensures you keep paying them money, we'll actually address the problem (which those 2 exercises don't even do!!)

As you can see, where other personal trainers fail miserably, we thrive.

Your pain is our pleasure.