This post is to help members, who have some experience with the program, develop a more thorough understanding of what we’re doing and why. It’s also for anyone wondering what we do and how we do it.
Ultimately, the purpose of our training is for the preservation and enhancement of our ability to move where and when we need to and want to.
Our Foundation level of programming is our base, where we focus on the big picture. We all participate in the Foundation portion of the program to some extent. This is where everyone starts. But whether it continues to make up the majority of your training or if you are using it essentially as a warm up or to supplement other things – everyone does it all the time to stay “balanced”.
Before you think of shifting your focus away from Foundation and towards training that is more sport specific such as Olympic Lifting, Power Lifting or CrossFit we want to make sure that you feel comfortable, healthy, lean and energetic.
What does this really mean? To begin with, you are training consistently week in and week out. Secondly, you feel confident in things such as and your body weight strength, your aerobic capacity, your posture, and your joint function.
It doesn’t matter if you sit in a desk all day, paint walls all day, or workout all day – all of our bodies have the tendency to develop weak spots. In the Foundation program we take a joint-by-joint approach and focus on developing strength over range of motion. We’ve chosen exercises that we feel, if approached with the commitment of making intentional progress, will yield the biggest bang for your buck.
So when you are contemplating if you should be adding more complexity to your routine or if you should be spending some time with patient, persistent, practice of your Foundation program ask yourself: Are you training consistently? Are you feeling lean? Are you feeling healthy (not sick, not injured)? Are you having any major difficulty with any portion of the Foundation work (flexibility? balance? lack of strength is one particular area? a major discrepancy from one side to the other?) Layering complexity on top of a base that isn’t solid tends not to be particularly effective.
The beauty of this portion of the program is that if you are just starting out, or you’ve taken a long break, or you haven’t been able to be as consistent as you would like, or if you do have an injury or just do not feel mentally like you want a complicated, thought provoking workout. . . you can always return to Foundation. When you have this program as an option, there really aren’t many things that can interfere with your training for long.
Time invested working on developing confidence in your body’s strength and physical abilities is never going to be time wasted. It spills over and leaks confidence into all other areas of your life.