Everything we do in life takes balance from sitting in a chair to walking through the halls of an office. In the fitness world, these activities are often referred to as activities of daily living. We often take for granted the ability to maintain balance, therefore we don’t notice how used our bodies get to being on solid land until we are on an unstable surface. And therein lies the beauty of balance training in that anyone can do it to varying degrees. Balance training improves the overall health, confidence, and efficiency of activities of daily living for the young and not-so-young alike.
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What are the Benefits of ABST?
Good question, yes this will we be on the test.
Benefits of ABST
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Body Awareness. Body awareness is the sense of how your own limbs are oriented in space, also referred to as proprioception. Balance training promotes body awareness, which makes movement more seamless, with less likelihood of injury.
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Coordination. Balance training requires all of your body's musculature to work together otherwise you might fall or stumble. By improving your coordination during balance training, there will be an improvement in your coordination in everyday life.
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Joint Stability. Balance training promotes stable knees, ankles, hips, and shoulders. This can prevent a whole array of injuries including sprained ankles and serious knee problems. These injuries can be common in people who train and participate in sports, but do not include balance training in their workout regimen.
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Reaction Time. If you slip or stumble when carrying out challenging balance exercises your body needs to re-balance immediately or you will fall. This can improve your reaction time as you learn to quickly realign your body while creating new and corrected muscle memory.
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Strength. Balance training is challenging for your nervous system (brain and nerves). The nervous system activates your muscles when lifting weights, so as your nervous system becomes more efficient it can utilize a higher percentage of your muscle for each lift. This means you are stronger and can lift more weight.
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Power. Power is the ability to exert maximum muscular contraction instantly in an explosive burst of movement. The two components of power are strength and speed. With quicker reaction times and stronger muscles, your power ability will naturally increase.
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Agility. Agility is the ability to change the direction of the body in an efficient and effective manner and to achieve this you require a combination of balance, speed, strength, and coordination. Therefore, the better your balance is, the more likely you are to have good agility.
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Fun & Challenging. Adding some balance exercises into your fitness routine adds another dimension to your workout. Taking tried and true land-based exercises and re-learning to negotiate them with instability causes you to engage the body/mind connection in a fun new way. It is motivating when you notice the improvement in the rest of your fitness regimen by adding balance training.
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Long-term health. Incorporating balance training into your routine helps to maintain and improve your balance, which is needed to prevent falls and fractures. As the body ages without balance training, commonplace activities can become more challenging, something we want to avoid.
Continuing on we will go over the 5 main effects ABST Training and HIIT have on your body in more detail.
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Since you are already a personal trainer this may seem like a review, however, there are a few differences between the land and water.
Make sure to read everything carefully. The test will be centered around this material on using GlideFIT equipment.
Body Awareness
Proprioception, simply put, means a sense of self or body awareness. The proprioceptors are sensors that provide information about joint angle, muscle length and muscle tension, which gives the brain information about the position of the limb in space at any given time.
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How is it that a professional basketball player can launch in the air, catch the ball, and then do a reverse dunk seemingly effortlessly? Proprioception. We also use Proprioception every day without thinking twice about it. It’s how we walk down a flight of stairs at night when the lights are off, or insert our car key in the ignition without looking.
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Most of us are able to execute body movements that require proprioception without much worry. GlideFIT classes will help develop high-level proprioceptive abilities that will not only improve your athletic performance but simply make you more coordinated and agile no matter what your doing.
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Keep this in mind when you build classes for your students.
Coordination
Whatever your athletic interest, your coordination training plays a key role in your overall fitness. GlideFIT will improve your balance and coordination while enhancing your performance and reducing your risk of injury. Basically, you can do more complex movements faster, with less risk.
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If you are coordinated, you can make your muscles work together at just the right time to produce the exact amount of force you need to accomplish a skill with the least amount of effort. Increasing your coordination will increase your body’s ability to work in a more efficient way. This increase in efficiency will allow you to prolong your exertion with less effort.
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As we age, our risk of falling rises—as does the chance that those falls will be debilitating. You want to be able to catch yourself before you fall, but you also want to be able to manage your fear of falling, which can in itself begin to restrict your range of motion. You need to be able to move confidently through the world, rather than tentatively—and for that, you need to be able to trust in your own powers of balance and coordination.
Joint Stability
There are many benefits to either creating or maintaining stability in your joints. These include better range of motion (ROM), decreased chance of injury, greater maximal force, and stronger muscles. Each type of joint in our body allows for different degrees of movement. Maintaining strength through those movements is important in giving us the ability to move better.
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Joint Stability is referred to as the resistance of musculoskeletal tissues around a joint. What this means is that the stronger the muscles are around a given joint the more stable that joint will be. This is very important to remember no matter what your level of training.
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In the majority of lifts and exercises done in the gym and out on the sports field, the muscles that are used are known as “prime movers”. Prime movers push and pull us around in almost every movement. When prime movers gain strength, they put more force into those movements. In order for the prime movers to have a stable base to push and pull from, the stabilizer and fixator muscles need to be strong.
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The GlideFIT works on those stabilizers, but if not properly addressed, pain and injury can occur. To reduce this, as a trainer it’s your job to properly educate your participants on how to properly stand, bend, and move, especially at the knees.
A few tips to teach:
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Remind your class to stand with their feet a bit more than shoulder-width apart
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Keep knees bent and never locked
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Balance through the feet pushing down into the mat
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Use focal points such as the wall, or the center of the board
Reaction Time
The space between a stimulus and the beginning of the muscle response to that stimulus is known as reaction time. Reaction time, along with agility, coordination, balance, speed, and power, are key components of skill-related fitness. Good reaction time translates to success in sports and in life activities that require strong motor skills. It’s also one of the critical factors for safeguarding health and independence as you age.
HIIT training engages fast twitch and slow twitch muscles. Fast-twitch muscle fibers are the ones that control reaction time and agility.
They excel in the explosive, brief anaerobic moves of the participant, and it takes a powerful force to enlist them. The aerobic activity utilizes slow twitch muscles first so, in order to get to the fast-twitch response, you have to instill the habit with repetitive anaerobic exercise. FIT HIIT is designed to incorporate fast and slow-twitch muscle fibers. Faster reaction time gives you a significant competitive edge in sports and helps to protect you from injury in daily life.
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Yes, this means that these programs and training on an unstable surface help keep your joints working longer and anyone can do it.
Power and Strength
Not only does strength training aid in shedding pounds, but it also helps keep that weight off, too. A recent study revealed that women who followed a weight-training routine 3 times a week increased the number of calories burned in normal daily activity (in addition to those burned during exercise), helping them to maintain their current weight.
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Strength training protects bone health and muscle mass. After puberty, whether you are a man or a woman, you begin to lose about 1 percent of your bone and muscle strength every year. One of the best ways to stop, prevent, and even reverse bone and muscle loss is to add strength training to your workouts.
Strength training has benefits that go well beyond the appearance of nicely toned muscles. Your balance and coordination will improve, as will your posture. More importantly, if you have poor flexibility and balance, strength training can reduce your risk of falling by as much as 40 percent, a crucial benefit, especially as you get older.
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Strength training will elevate your level of endorphins (natural opiates produced by the brain), which will make you feel great. As if that isn’t enough to convince you, strength training has also been shown to be a great antidepressant, to help you sleep better, and to improve your overall quality of life.
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You burn calories during the CardioWave strength training, and your body continues to burn calories after strength training. More calories are used to make and maintain muscle than fat, and in fact, strength training can boost your metabolism by 15 percent — that can really jumpstart a weight loss plan.
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Power training is proving to be just as important as strength training in maintaining or restoring function. Power training is aimed at increasing power, which is the product of both strength and speed. Optimal power reflects how quickly you can exert force to produce the desired movement. Here’s an example: Faced with a four-lane intersection, you may have enough strength to walk across the street. But it’s power, not just strength, that can get you across all four lanes of traffic before the light changes. Likewise, power can prevent falls by helping you react swiftly if you start to trip or lose your balance.
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GlideFIT HIIT classes have specific exercises that are aimed at increasing power and building your stabilizers all at the same time.
Benefits of Strength training in the long run:
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Increases HDL – High-Density Lipoprotein (good cholesterol) and decrease LDL – Low-Density Lipoprotein (bad cholesterol).
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Reduces the risk of diabetes and insulin needs.
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Lowers risk of cardiovascular disease.
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Lower high blood pressure.
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Lowers risk of breast cancer – reduces high estrogen levels linked to the disease.
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Decreases or minimizes the risk of osteoporosis by building bone mass.
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Reduces symptoms of PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome)
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Reduces stress and anxiety.
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It decreases colds and illnesses by boosting the immune system.
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Basically… ABST is good for you, it’s good for your gym, it’s good for the people around you, and on top of all of that, it's a new way for your clients to have fun in the pool.