Our extremities are designed and neurologically wired up to alternate.  Running, walking, crawling and swimming are all movements that implement some form of alternating motions.  When you look at our body and watch how it moves, you will quickly notice that functionally it is driven by alternating forces of the arms and legs and not by voluntary muscle contraction.  By getting the arms and legs alternating in an integrated fashion, the body is able to functionally perform at an incredibly high level of power and efficiency.

Not only that, here are some other benefits that occur as a result of alternating movements

1.  Increase abdominal activation

Extremities are attached onto the trunk so needless to say when the legs and arm start swinging the trunk is going to get really busy.

2.  Increase rotational power

Our power production comes from our ability to rotate.  Alternating arms and legs allow us to rotate aggressively and produce great force production which in turn makes us faster and more powerful

3.  Improved balance by implementing an reciprocal counter balance

Our body uses alternating movements to counter balance our body and keep our center of gravity well positioned.  Without alternating movements, our body would always be overloaded to one side.

4.  Improved dynamic flexibility  

One of the easiest ways to get the body to relax is to train or activate rotational movements.  This is seen in physical therapy all the time with many of our activation techniques we use.  As a result if we maintain rotation and improve our rotational control, we maintain our ability to keep moving freely and safely.  The cool thing is all alternating movements use rotation.

5.  The ability to handle unilateral forces on the body

Alternating movements make our body learn how to handle being overloaded to one side.  This becomes important when you look at all the unilateral loading activities we do every day.  Teaching unilateral control goes a long way in preventing injury.

The goal of this blog is not to go into extensive detail on how these benefits occur.  The goal is to make you aware of how important it is to strength train your body using alternating movements and to show you how to do this easily with resistance bands.

When training alternate movements, most people typically only make on side of the body work at a time by placing the non-working side in a resting lengthened position.  To optimize recover between reps this would make the most sense unless the goal was to improve core stability and metabolic output.

In this case you want to maintain a stabilizing contraction on “non-moving” side while the other side goes through a full range of motion movement.  Interestingly, this enhanced stabilization will not only increase core activation but it will also help with opposite side power production which you will feel when you try it.

Once again, seeing and trying is believing.   Bands make this form of training so easy to do especially in the horizontal plane which is where most of us really lack stabilization strength.

This week’s RBT live is all about how to train the entire upper body using alternating movements that emphasize stabilization as much as dynamic movement. 

Enjoy and please shoot me your comments.  I want to know your thoughts

Reactive Training …. Powerful Results                    

Schmitty the Band Man

PS… When I created the Fitness Band Boot Camp my goal was to build in as much alternating workouts as possible.  I honestly feel is the number 1 reason my bootcamps become so functionally strong and balanced.  You just can simulate this type of training with other tools, especially in the horizontal and rotational vectors.