Gorillas Don't Do a Lot of Bicep Curls
And I doubt anyone's ever seen a bear doing calf raises
We missed our posting this Tuesday! Life gets in the way for all of us sometimes. I may shift to a 1x per week posting schedule in the near future, but for now, I hope you enjoy today’s post as you step into your weekend.
Have you ever thought it was odd that most fitness routines seem to place a lot of importance on the idea that we should focus thought and energy on isolating our muscles from one another?
“Is is chest day, leg day or back day?”
It’s a common question to hear echoing through the average gym, but how often have we stopped to consider if it’s even the question we should be asking?
Lessons from Nature
Whether you’re talking about health and wellness, business and logistics, or just life in general: nature is a wonderful teacher in a great many ways. This truth is one to keep in mind the next time you get ready to step into the gym.
Think about how our bodies were made to move. How we evolved to function in the real world, and how every other animal in the animal kingdom moves their bodies. Muscle isolation is NOT where it's at. It's all about compound exercises and multimodal muscle engagement across multiple planes of movement. EVERY workout is a full body workout for a huge percentage of animals in the animal kingdom.
“… you may find that mother nature has done a lot of the field testing for you.”
Genetically speaking, we’re just clever hairless monkeys. So why are our workout routines written out as if we’re robots? Too many routines are crafted as if we’re regimented pieces of machinery; using chest muscles today, back muscles tomorrow, and our cardiovascular system the day after that… all artificially isolated from one another as much as humanly possible. This doesn’t make much sense for the vast majority of us.
Maybe it’s time to come at this from a different angle.
Movement Patterns vs. Muscle Isolation
It's worth considering what value you may be able to glean by focusing on movement patterns instead of strict muscle isolation. Push, pull, hinge, squat vs. chest, back, hammies, quads. If you’re trying to build a routine of your own, I can offer a few meaningful takeaways that may help.
We've personally found a lot of benefit in focusing the strength portion of our workouts on 1-2 of these human movement patterns (push, pull, hinge, squat). When we do this, we’re looking to put both large and small muscle groups to work in a variety of ways. We then focus our HIIT sessions for that day primarily on movement patterns not addressed through the day’s strength session.
Formatting sessions in this way allows you to turn in a full body workout every day, while switching up which groups of muscles are seeing the heaviest workload from one day to the next.
Let me be clear. I’m not saying some degree of muscle isolation or exercises focused on “glamour muscles” are an evil. I'd merely contend that treating small muscle-group targeting exercises (ex. bicep curls) as a sort of "dessert" after some compound movement strength sets may be a better way to frame them in your routines.
Working This Approach into Your Routines
Our yoga sessions not withstanding, we very intentionally structure all our workouts as a warmup, followed by strength training, followed by a HIIT session. And as mentioned above, we like to focus HIIT sessions for each day primarily on movement patterns that weren’t the principal focus of the day’s strength session. But more than that, we like to take a lot of inspiration from nature - incorporating a bit of primal movement into what we do.
If you’re building your own routines, you obviously don't have to do things how we do them in the Ditabo app. Any number of different approaches can lead you to a healthier body. But this format offers a very balanced, and time-efficient approach. You get low-rep, moderate to heavy-weight strength sessions with a lot of focus on form, followed by lighter weight and/or bodyweight-only HIIT sessions where you can really go full steam ahead. This formatting also allows your HIIT sessions to encourage blood flow to muscle groups that may have been worked hard in a strength session the day before.
So consider playing with these ideas and experimenting to see what feels right for you. As you do, you may find that mother nature has done a lot of the field testing for you, and can offer a few unique ideas, as well as a fun and engaging “path less-traveled” for your fitness efforts.
Have a great weekend everyone!
