This is the third part of a series on learning proper body position and alignment. Please see below for Parts I and II.At the end of Part II I mentioned the importance of body awareness and how we know when we are in or out of alignment. Because sometimes the clues as to being in or out of alignment are a little more subtle. We don't necessarily have to be in excrutiating pain in order to recognize something is wrong.And so I gave you three ways to work towards proper alignment.1. We need to understand what the muscle we are trying to contract is doing.2. We need to know what the opposite muscle is doing.3. We need to recognize when both of these change and step back at that point, recuperate and try again fresh.Consider something as simple as being in a half kneeling position.What does the ideal position for half kneeling look like? Well it should resemble the following:Straight lines and 90 degree angles.From the front the foot, knee, hip and shoulder should all face straight forward.From the side the there should a 90 degree angle at the knee and hip of the forward leg. And the trail leg should have the knee under the hip which is under the shoulder. The chest should be up, shoulders down and back, with a neutral head position.Take a look at the following picture.From the side the front leg has a 90 degree at the knee and the hip. And the left knee is under the hip and the shoulders stack up nicely over both of these.If you notice my arms hang a little bit in front of the body and you can see more of my pinkie than my thumb. This gives a clue that I am slightly internally rotated on the...

In the last post I introduced a discussion about body awareness. And what I meant by this was understanding which muscles were firing, when they are firing and how they are firing. The reason this is so important is that many of us having compensations or deficiencies of some type. Think about it. The aches and pains that we get from time to time are partly due to the strain we put our body under when it is out of alignment. And when we live with these aches and pains for long enough we can sometimes become a little bit desensitized to the feedback our body is trying to give us. For example if you've had a chronic low back problem you may not think about it all the time. But if someone asks you how it is and you stop and think about it for a second you'll realize it simply hasn't corrected itself but instead you learned to block it out somewhat in order to get through the day. And you aren't consciously thinking about it until someone asks you about it or it gets worse. So let's jump ahead and assume that someone was able to point out where it is that you're out of alignment and how to correct this alignment issue. Perhaps it's a lack of frontal plane (think side to side) glute activity and by firing this muscle helps to restore your alignment and take stress off your joints that were 'picking up the slack'. As well, you were also made aware of how you will alter your body position to cheat when your glutes get tired and you don't want them to work anymore.This would all be very useful info to you. So how do you make sure to ingrain this process and ensure...

The next few posts are based on what I learned at a weekend seminar with Mike Roberton. Mike is the president of IFAST and one the top performance coaches anywhere.If there's one thing I really enjoy about what I do it's that the job is so dynamic. And I don't necessarily mean this in the sense of running, jumping and bounding etc but more in the sense that the information is contantly being refined and new discoveries are being made.  For example in last week's posts I wrote about things you should avoid doing in the gym. These weren't hard and fast rules that every knows as soon as they step foot in a gym. Instead these were things that had to be learned through education, through trial and error and sometimes unfortunately by injury.  And there were a few things in those posts that I'm sure you were guilty of doing and now hopefully were aware to not do them anymore and the reasons why. As I admitted in the last post I was guilty of making all of the mistakes at some point in my training and later in my coaching career.But now and I know better. And so do you. But there is a small but key difference here that is vital to your health and performance. And that difference is body awareness.What I mean by body awareness is understanding what your body is doing, why it is doing it and how to correct it. Whew! That's kind of a tall order, Chris! How can you expect that of us?Well, you're right. Because if I said to you that are contantly weight bearing on your right leg and shifting away from your left would you know this? Maybe if you stopped to think about it you would. But...