With ageing, workout becomes even more challenging and I would say that speaking to a professional therapist is recommended as well as doing your check up before and occasionally during the training.
I believe that many people just love workout. From our early childhood, through the school programs and probably, some recreational or more serious, professional training, we learn about our own body, its capacity, challenges and limitations. We notice the changes in the muscles, how they shape up, become strained, spindle-shaped and sometimes sore. Besides our muscles, the body uses joints and bones to perform certain movements, while the nerves associated with the locomotive system develop and live their lives, sometimes making us vibrant and cheerful but sometimes also causing discomfort.
Our mood is very much affected by workout. Before we start, while still preparing for our regular set of exercises, our mind may hesitate in anticipation of hard, sweaty work, but once you are there and actually doing it, you start feeling good, strong, relieved and happy. I find it so rewarding and great that, while bringing benefit to your body, your mind gets grateful and assures you that you are doing the right thing. We step into the state of wellbeing.
With ageing, our exercises become even more challenging and I would say that speaking to a professional therapist is recommended as well as doing your check up before and occasionally during the training. It just may happen that, while working on one group of muscles or joints, you put more strain on another, quite unintentionally. In my example, while doing some upper abdominal muscles exercises, my neck muscles suddenly started causing problems. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to correct this – I had to adjust the abdominal muscles exercises and started with a special set of gentle movements focused on the neck and supportive muscles area. It is amazing how well this works – all with a help of the therapists and their valuable knowledge and experience.
From their expertise, their functional training system has developed and this is how they describe it:
“Functional training is a training concept which affects simultaneous development of motor skills (power, strength, coordination, speed, balance …) and functional ability (aerobic and anaerobic) and which reduces body fat while increasing muscle mass. The choice of equipment is really great (TRX, rope, dumbbells, medicine balls, elastic bands, steppers, kettlebells, own weight ..), and the exercise is based on the performance of a complex exercise involving a larger number of joints in motion which activates a large number of muscles and requires activation of at least two energy systems.”
I can assure you, it isn’t that complicated and for us, who do it regularly, it is a lot of fun!