Health is Wealth: A Pain-Free 2025
Eat, Sleep, Move, Think, Connect.
These five factors form the foundation of health and performance. They’re the elements we can control to live our best lives. Consider these questions: Do we eat enough, too much, of the right things to fuel our brains and bodies? Are we getting enough restful sleep so we’re ready to take on the challenges of the next day? Are we challenging ourselves to maintain our flexibility, strength, power, and conditioning? Are we auditing our thoughts and words to keep our identity in line with who we want to be? Are we building and maintaining meaningful relationships with friends and family? These are the questions I ask myself every day, in hopes of helping others that are looking to reach the same goals. Whether you’re looking for a gym to exercise at or pursuing peak physical, mental, emotional health, I want to be ready to point you in the right direction. Let’s start with a simple step: showing up consistently. Because when you see results, have fun, and make friends along the way, you’ll want to keep coming back.
Your Health is an Investment
The time you invest in your health now will pay off in the future. Think of the gym as a savings account for your fitness, enabling you to thrive as you age. The comparison between an active elder and a sedentary one is striking. Beyond physical differences, their mental and emotional well-being often diverge just as significantly. Someone that is able to enjoy being independent, mobile in their home, participate in physical activities such as walking or hiking, or just be able to navigate the day-to-day activities that we take for granted when we’re younger. I view the gym, our program, and the functional movements we try to engrain into your daily lives, as the nest-egg that will get you through old age and increase your life and health span. Health is wealth, and every workout is a deposit toward a vibrant future.
Maximizing Your Fitness Journey
We’re here to help you make the most of your fitness investment. You’re already doing the work, but how you do it is what we’d like to help with. Aches and pains can happen but they should go away with a little down time and recovery work. If energy levels are low, we would love to hear it from you. If your hips or shoulders are stiffer than usual, let us work with you in selecting exercises that will move you forward in fitness rather than potentially setting you back. These challenges often signal areas where we can adapt your training to move you forward safely. Remember: “The only bad workout is the one that didn’t happen”—but with an asterisk: “...or the one where we ignored our body’s signals.”
With the New Year, we have an opportunity to start with a fresh approach. We can work on being consistent in our gym visits, the way we do each rep, and adjust our workout intensity to accommodate a long, slow, progression to a distant horizon. Dialling back intensity allows our bodies to need less time to recover, allows us to focus on ideal ranges of motion, which will lead us to less aches and pains and more fitness in the long run. Think of your workouts in terms of three buckets:
Less-than-ideal movement
Current movement capabilities
Ideal movement patterns
The goal is to fill that third bucket as often as possible. Out of every 10 workouts, aim for 1 focused on practice, 8 on training (working 10-15% below maximum intensity), and 1 on testing your limits. This balanced approach minimizes downtime, reduces the risk of injury, and enhances overall performance.
Distinguishing Pain from Soreness
With all of that said, there will be times when aches and pains persist. Not all discomfort is created equal. What course of action to take, if any, is determined by a few factors. First, distinguishing between the different types of pain. Is it aching? Or is it sore? What we do in the gym may lead to soreness, which should subside in a matter of days, and is what we consider acceptable. We break down muscle and during the recovery process we are left feeling those muscles when we use them. What we do not want to experience is aches, which can be felt during the workout, immediately after, or keeps us up at night. Aches can last days or weeks, and it’s when they don’t go away that we want to address them. Aches are an indication that we are overusing our muscles in some way and they’re not able to recover. This can happen a number of ways but the primary method we’ve seen in the gym is from less than ideal movement mechanics. Taking your time in the movement, taking note of where we feel it in our muscles, and making sure we aren’t pushing through pain just to get the work done. Movements are complex and require a lot of coordination between many muscle groups to perform an action. At no point in time should we be experiencing pain during a movement (discomfort is what we aim for), and adjustments in intensity or movement selection should be made. What it comes down to is, are we performing the movements with the intended muscle groups performing the task? If we are, then we might be sore there for the next day or two. If we’re consistently feeling a dull ache during the day or when we sleep at night, odds are we’re not and some re-patterning/learning needs to happen to prevent injuries.
Communication is Key
As your coaches, our mission is to help you move well. While we can’t diagnose injuries, we can guide you in adjusting volume or intensity to suit your needs. But we rely on your feedback. Let us know how you’re feeling. If something feels wrong, trust your instincts and share it with us. Together, we can ensure you stay healthy, happy, and pain-free in the gym and beyond.
Let’s make 2025 a year of consistent progress, meaningful connections, and lasting health. Health is wealth, and we’re here to help you build it—one workout at a time.