Total Gym

Ask Dr. Salada – A Real Pain in the Foot

Q:  I’m a runner and recently started feeling pain in my heel when I run. It feels like I’m stepping on a rock with every step. What does this mean?

A:  Heel pain is a very common complaint for many populations, especially among avid exercisers, such as runners and participants in other high impact sports. Pain in the heel can be caused by issues such as heel spurs or another condition called Plantar Fasciitis. Pain due to these issues can be caused by improper “loading” on the arch of the foot. The fascia (connective tissue) gets overstretched and sometimes can even get pulled off of the bone, causing micro-tears which then become calcified and cause a spur. These conditions can be eased by applying ice to the arches two to three times immediately after exercising for ten minutes or so each, with a ten minute break in between sessions. Also, try strapping the arch with tape before exercising for extra support.

As always, if the symptoms don’t resolve in a week or so with these conservative treatments, consult your doctor. If the pain gets worse quickly, see your doctor immediately to identify other causes of pain. Your doctor may have you stay off the foot for a specific period of time. When you’re ready to get back on your feet, you may have to shorten your workout routine or change the terrain for a complete recovery. Take care of your feet; they are your most precious piece of exercise equipment!

Until next time, keep moving!!
Elizabeth Salada

Dr. Salada is board certified in Internal Medicine and has been in practice in San Diego since 1996. She attended medical school at Wake Forest University where she received high honors in Family Practice and Internal Medicine. Her final training was obtained from Pennsylvania State University where she completed her residency in Internal Medicine.

Visit Dr. Salada’s website for more information: http://elizabethsaladamd.com/.

Total Gym Weekly Workout: Pedal Power!

This is for all the cyclists out there! Amber and Chad introduce some strength training exercises to increase your power and endurance on the bike.

Now get out there and ride!

Give your Total Gym workouts a cardio kick with the Cyclo Trainer! Get low impact “cyclocentric” training using the Cylo Trainer with your Total Gym. See what we mean here.  

Fitness Wisdom Wednesday: Core Golf Fitness

Hello Total Gym golfers and Total Gym trainers with golfing clients!

The 2011 Master’s Golf Tournament, which many consider the kick-off to the golfing season, is coming up in April. So my next couple of blog posts will focus on utilizing the Total Gym to improve your – or your clients’ – golf mechanics to get into pro form!

Today’s exercise is an overhead shoulder press on Total Gym. In the video below, I demonstrate a great alternative to the shoulder press that I learned in my Total Gym GRAVITY training course, which is taught inverted and prone (or lying face down) on the glideboard. By utilizing the principle of “line of pull” that my fearless GRAVITY Personal Training educator Jeff Groh strongly emphasized, we are able to do this seated forward as demonstrated in the video

This exercise will help your golf game in the following 3 ways:

1. Hit the Ball Farther: A strong, functional core allows you to transfer the power from your legs to the upper body to generate more club head speed.
2. Improve Your Consistency: During this exercise, focus on emulating the spine angle of your golf swing. This will train your core to stabilize this angle so you can hold it constant throughout your golf swing until the end of your follow through. Without a stable, constant spine angle, it is very difficult to get back squarely to the ball at impact.
3. Protect Your Back from Aches, Pains or Injury: Having functional core strength AND core endurance is crucial to protect your spine from the vigor of the golf swing. As Keith Kleven, Tiger Wood’s physical therapist, points out, “Every time you swing the club, seven to eight times the weight of your body is directed into your spine.” That is a lot of torque happening during a round of 18 holes!

Click the video image to play:

Until next month golfers! Hit ‘em straight!

JayDee Cutting is a GRAVITY Master Trainer, certified personal trainer, Pilates instructor and creator of the “Core Golf Fitness” program. JayDee’s Core Golf Fitness DVD offers on-course and warm-up exercises proven to help advance your golf game and is available for purchase at http://coregolffitness.com/.

Men’s Health – Drew Brees: A Champion Never Rests (Secret Total Gym Mention)

If you want an inspiring health read, check out the latest “Celebrity Fitness” article from Men’s Health on Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees and his trainer Todd Durkin. Man, Brees has some drive!

In reading the article, we were pleased to see what seemed to be an uncanny reference to Total Gym. An excerpt from the article reads:

“An hour earlier, this man [Brees] was lying on an inclined sliding bench, belly down, with his head facing the floor, doing single-arm gravity presses. His excruciating rep count was not a voice, but a gut-deep moan: sehhhhhvin…aaaaaate…niiiiiiine. On 10, he rolled off the bench, stood, and gave himself a subtle fist pump. A small victory.”

“Inclined sliding bench” … “single arm gravity presses” … hmmmm. We’re of good mind to know the writer is talking about Total Gym PowerTower. We know this because Total Gym is the only machine that will allow you to do a single arm “gravity” (or inverted) press on an inclined sliding bench (or glideboard, in our terms). We also know Todd Durkin owns a PowerTower at his gym Fitness Quest 10 in San Diego, and he utilizes it for training his NFL, MLB and Olympic athletes.

Some publications are remiss to mention name brand products like Total Gym in articles… so we went ahead and it did it for them! Click here to read the full article.

From the Ancients to Total Gym and Beyond

Did you know that ancient Greek athletes principally only ate fresh cheese? In some ways sports medicine has come a long way since then, but you may be surprised to learn that many of the functional training techniques that professional athletes are adopting today actually owe their roots back to those original cheese heads.

For example, ancient athletes mostly employed training regimens that leveraged their own body weight in addition to tools like stones, logs and animals. That doesn’t mean that you should start throwing your dog like a discus, only that the important thing is to lift things of varying weights to gain “functional” strength. The same held true for their military training where the body was the weapon and therefore must be in shape and functionally able to survive.

That’s one of the reasons why I love the Total Gym so much. It’s all about taking your body (a living weight stack) and translating it to a sliding incline plain (calibrated to gravity). It gives you a functional way to move your body (or at least a chosen % of your body) through multi-plane movements. One of the hidden benefits of this form of training is the flexibility enhancement that is attained by the natural stretch within the range of motion of the exercise.

This functional approach to training has been gaining traction with athletes today but only after decades of falsely assuming that only formal weight lifting was the key to top performance. Like I’ve always said, half your workout is downhill!

I personally started doing body weight exercises in the early to mid 60’s (not quite ancient Greece, but close!) and then transitioned to weights for body building in the mid 70′s. I immediately saw the multi-purpose benefits that could be attained by training on the incline plane body weight resistance machine.

Then the most fantastic thing happened, just by changing my body position I could change to over 200 different exercises to hit every part of my body. Essentially, I could reproduce virtually any form of functional training from a single piece of equipment. All of this culminated in 1974 when we designed the first ever Total Gym.

Do you have any unusual functional training techniques that even an ancient Greek athlete might be proud of? Share them in the comments field below…