Elite Strength Lab is held up by 5 pillars that serve as the foundation and driving force of our team. These pillars keep us aligned to our mission as we work with unique client needs, and provide a framework to further develop as a team. Our programs are designed to target these five areas to approach health interdependently, instead of independently.
Movement
Moving the body efficiently and effectively is our primary objective. Whether moving powerfully for athletic development or moving pain-free for everyday life, movement is essential for living a healthy lifestyle. The human body craves activity in all forms, from anaerobic to aerobic. The phases of the movement program progress from:
Posture → Proper Movement Patterns → Strength → Power
Correcting posture entails fixing our strength imbalances, asymmetries, and misalignment while improving our muscular coordination. These are often strongly-rooted habits that need time and attention to change. Poor posture is acquired over time, so it can’t be fixed overnight. Possible reasons for these issues include sedentary lifestyles, poor understanding of body awareness, or predisposed genetics.
Once balance is restored, the next focus would be on ingraining proper movement patterns. Moving correctly and training these patterns help us get closer to our goals — like running a faster sprint, jumping higher, or simply picking up our children without pain.
In our next step, strength is defined as being able to generate force in our movements without compromising our posture. This phase focuses on being able to produce great force without leakage from improper posture or movement, ultimately equating to higher efficiency.
Lastly, power is taking the force our body is able to generate and apply it quickly and effectively. Power can be depicted in various ways, from lifting more weight in the Olympic lifts to throwing a faster baseball pitch to gaining more vertical for a basketball dunk.
All the phases of movement build on top of each other and share one common truth: they require proper practice and patience to develop. Fitness is often distorted in media, feeding audiences the expectation that results come from shortcuts and will take less than a week to achieve. An objective of Elite Strength Lab is to debunk these myths and help expel the instant gratification mentality.
How we plan to do this is by helping people fall in love with the fitness journey, where clients focus more on improvements in every workout instead of just the end results. Making changes to your body takes effort and time, but the route we take to get there should be enjoyable.
Mobility
Mobility is a joint’s ability to move actively through its optimal range of motion. Proper mobility allows our body to stay aligned and avoid imbalances. Movement depends on the body’s ability to work through the joint’s full range of motion to effectively build muscle, strength, and power. This is an example of how the body works in synergy by depending on the other pillar in order to function properly.
Dysfunctions occurring to muscles from immobility involve tightness, inhibition, weakness, and overuse. Common complications caused by lack of mobility include forward head posture, lordosis (swayback), and kyphosis (hunchback).
Although poor posture seems to only affect appearance, the consequences extends further into our physiology and psychology. With today’s technology, people often suffer from poor posture as a ramification of constantly looking down at our phones and being at the computer.
Elite Strength Lab’s program aim to retrain the body to be more spatially aware, have better control of the positions of our anatomy, and correct problems by increasing (or decreasing in some cases) mobility to the optimal range unique to each individual.
Nutrition
Nutrition should be viewed as a way to fuel the body to optimize function. Weight management is only a small piece of a larger picture, not the entire picture itself. When our body is properly nourished with the proper foods, adequate water, and right balance of micronutrients/macronutrients, our body begins to transform into something greater. This pillar of Elite Strength Lab allows the other pillars to function to their full potential.
Our society is often overfed yet undernourished. Elite Strength Lab’s strategy is to teach proper nutrition principles that are evidence-based and practical to people’s unique lifestyles. By exposing circulating misinformation, our hope is to reeducate people about food and that no food group should be demonized as the sole reason for illness.
Like all things, nutrition is about balance and moderation. When armed with the right knowledge on how to approach nutrition, it’s up to the person to use it effectively in their everyday lives. Nutritional habits are so pivotal in our lives; they can either fuel us to achieve our goals or deplete our health.
Recovery
Under the umbrella of recovery, there are various modalities that aim to accelerate your body’s healing process. Generally accepted as the vital components of recovery are sleep, proper nutrition, and hydration. In addition to those three, what can we do to help our body recover more quickly from the breakdown of exercise, competition, and everyday physical activity?
Some of the recovery modalities that are often used include deep muscle simulators (DMS), compression, massage therapy, heat treatment, and cold treatment. Learning how to effectively use various tools and when to use certain methods will aid us in recovering quickly.
Mindset
Mindset forms the keystone for these five pillars. Our mind and body are interconnected. When examining our body in an anatomical lens, the central nervous system begins to look a lot like a tree. The peripheral nerves in our body resemble roots, the spinal cord resembles a tree trunk, and the brain resembles the crown.
To feed the leaves, the tree needs to take in water from its roots. This personification helps us understand that to feed our minds, stimulating and fueling our bodies properly is vital. Our mind tells our body how to function just as much as the body tells our mind how to feel.
Having a powerful mindset gives us the confidence to take on challenges to become stronger, both physically and mentally. Inversely, moving our bodies with more vigor and carrying a robust posture reinforces our minds to be more inspired. This virtuous cycle begins with a decision to think better and move more.
One of the most the vital ideology to adopt for success (both in the gym and out) is finding our intrinsic motivation. Instead of focusing on external prizes, like money and looking a certain way for others, focus on internal rewards, like how every workout completed is improving your body.
Conclusion
Contrary to the outdated beliefs of the mind and body operating independently, we now treat the two as two interdependent units. When each pillar can stand with steadfast grounding, the building stands stronger than the sum of its parts. They may have their own unique functions, but without the other, they can’t get very far.
Elite Strength Lab’s mission is to improve each pillar so that the client leaves stronger than when they came in. We want to show people how powerful they can be in any avenue in life; we just happen to help people achieve this through exercise. Strength isn’t defined purely on how fast you can run or how much you can lift, it is defined on factors that go beyond quantitative measures.