Fascia Fitness Friday: Break Out of Your Pattern

Most athletes tend to gravitate to a particular type of training.  Runners run, swimmers swim, bikers bike and lifters lift.  Some even combine them and call it "cross training."

What you have is a pattern.  Pattern is important to develop, we call this movement memory, or muscle memory.  Athletes train for decades to hone their movement.  To make it effortless.  To know that it takes them 42 strides to run a 100 meter.  To carry a 95rpm cadence on the bike, hour after hour.   Pattern.

The cost of this efficiency can be the fascial health of their body.  Fascia likes big movements that allow all the muscular chains to be involved.  It doesn't like repetitive activity.  It likes variation in tempo, duration and intensity.  Right now as I type, sitting in a chair, my fascial health is not improving.

Runners should do bear crawls, swimmers should trail run, lifters should play soccer, bikers should play some beach volleyball.  They should all jump, climb, crawl and throw things.  Their fascia will be healthier and in the end they may have found that the pattern they have worked all these years to develop actually improves.  That is some "cross training."