Week 1 Exercises – Agility, Locomotion and Runner’s Pose

Runner’s Pose with Twist and Reach

Welcome to week one! I will be posting the exercises for every week, so please check back to the PROGRAM RESOURCES page each week for review.

The focus of our exercises is this:

• restore our God given abilities to move as we were intended to move, before we began sitting for eight hours a day which has lead to tight, stiff, stubborn muscles (“sitting is the new smoking, chairs are the new cigarettes”)
• improve patterns of movement, that is the way you sit, stand, push, pull, kneel and carry things, instead of focusing on muscle groups. Your goal is not to have strong biceps or calves only, but to be able to pick things up confidently and securely, stand for hours with good posture, and down and back up from the floor
• mobility and strength come before cardiovascular conditioning – for most people, their first thought is to walk more. If you work on your flexibility and strength with the two exercises listed below for example, you will get a cardiovascular workout. Your “cardio” exercise is very important (going for a walk every day), but too many people focus only on this, and too often to the detriment of the other two key fitness attributes – strength and flexibility
• consider these exercises as new abilities or skills, or better yet, like a new language your body is learning. That is a key CatholicFIT Exercise Principle – just as you will never unlearn 5+5=10, your goal is to learn and improve your body’s ability to do these exercises and never unlearn them. Unless you have had a surgery or have a disability, your body was at one time able to do these moves, our goal is for you to restore these natural human moves

Week 6 of the CatholicFIT Program is about expressing yourself. If I asked you how you expressed your health today, how would you answer? If I asked you to express your fitness, what would you do? Picking a sport to play, or an exercise to do daily is about choosing some way to physically express yourself. Drinking more water, eating more clean food, going for a walk each night … these are ways to express your health and fitness.

“Sitting all day long is like having a beautiful singing voice but never opening your mouth even to talk. Your body is meant to move. The more ways you express this gift of movement, the more fit you will be.”

Next time you go out for a walk or head to the park with the kids, go through these agility exercises below to get more bang for your fitness buck.

Agility Exercises

“Agility” is one of the fitness attributes we want to restore and improve. The other attributes include strength, flexibility, balance, speed, endurance, accuracy and power. We do agility exercises with everyone, as it helps young athletes develop the coordination and foot work required for sport, and it is vital for seniors to maintain this balance as well for stepping off of curbs, etc.

Agility & Locomotion exercises include:

• walking on heels, walking on toes
• high knee marching, high knee skipping
• knee bending walks and jogging
• crawling patterns
• side shuffle
• grapevine pattern side step
• walk and jogging backwards
• monster walks (walking with long, straight knee high kicks forward)

Here is a video we shot with Signature Medical Group specifically for mature adults working on their agility exercises:

Stretch Move of the Week – Runner’s Pose & Runner’s Pose with Twist

• this is an awesome total body stretch and core strength move – check out the video for modifications
• this stretches your legs and hips in the same way you do when you walk or run by putting you in a stretched out, striding position
• just as with strength, we focus many of our stretches on movements, not body parts or individual muscles. Our body acts as one unit, with all of our muscles and nerves firing together as one
• try this one with and without the twist and reach at the beginning

This is an advanced modification of the regular Runner’s Pose we did earlier in the program. This is an excellent stretch for everyone, in particular running athletes as it opens up your hips and stretches your upper back and spine.

Try these out and as always, comment below, on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/catholicfit or reply to any of my weekly newsletters with questions or comments.

God Bless!