The most neglected approach to training I see with beginners in every commercial gym is skipping body control for mobility. It’s also why I would see the same people never progressing with their training for years at the gym.
If you feel, you’ve been spinning your wheels with your own training, body control is something that will move the needle forward for you too. Especially if you want to achieve any of the following:
- Reduce your injury risk
- Move better in and out of the gym
- Improve your mind-muscle connection
- Feel stronger in all positions in movements
- Improve your focus and develop a mindfulness practice
Unfortunately, in today’s instant gratification world, most people will never apply these principles I’m sharing with you today because they never focus on mastering body control.
Lack of body control is why you keep hurting yourself at the gym
Here are 5 reasons why avoiding body control for mobility keeps you failing at the gym.
- You start pushing yourself too hard too soon.
- You focus on intensity but neglect body control.
- You get frustrated due to a lack of results or injuries.
- You believe you are somehow defunct and not capable of getting results because you’ve been consistent but nothing has changed.
- You repeat the cycle and never learn from previous mistakes.
If you resonate with the above points, it’s not your fault. The fitness industry tells you that you should be doing punishing workouts to get “real” results.
These steps will teach you the proper approach to take with your training to break this frustrating cycle.
Let’s dive in:
Step 1: Use Timed Sets for Body Control for Mobility
With new clients and guys who have been training consistently for less than 6 months, I focus on timed reps.
The reason for this is to focus on quality, not quantity. If I set 6-8 reps in the push-up, my client might do 4 good reps and 2-4 bad ones. If I ask him to focus on slow controlled pushups for 30s, chances are his rep quality will go up exponentially.
This is because he’s not “chasing” reps. He’s simply focusing on doing one solid rep, then another and so on, until his time is up. In your next session, focus on doing slow controlled reps for 30s instead of a set amount of reps.
Step 2: Get exceptional at the basics
This is the biggest mistake beginners make. They want to move on to the fancy workouts before they build the foundation. Once you build a great foundation, you have the base to explore everything else with your training.
Like language learning, If you rush through your practice and never spend time on pronunciation, nobody will ever understand you. Body control is you spending time learning the pronunciation and accent so you can then converse with more ease. Poor body control and never getting results with your training is like having all this new vocabulary that is useless because nobody understands what you’re trying to say.
Step 3: Use tempo work
Slowing things down is the first step but that can be vague for some clients. So “tempo” is often used in programs to dial in the speed at which you move in movements.
You may have seen in your programming that tempo is denoted by a series of three or four numbers, for example, 3:1:2:0. The numbers tell you how many seconds to lower, pause, or contract in each phase of the lift. The order of the numbers indicates the phase:
- Eccentric (lengthening)
- Isometric (any pause at the midpoint or bottom of the lift)
- Concentric (shortening)
- Isometric (pause at the top of the lift)
In a back squat this would mean, 3s lowering phase (eccentric), 1s pause at the bottom, 2s upward phase (concentric), 0s pause at the top and repeat for the outlined reps.
In this video, I’m demonstrating the Klokov tempo of 7:6:X:0 which is a fantastic tempo for building control in the back squat (if you see an X it means you are being explosive in that part of the movement).
Some More Benefits of Using Body Control for Mobility
Find more client reviews on body control for mobility on my coaching success story page here.
Conclusion
Good body control is like having a great foundation for a building. Once you have control of a movement you can play with endless options. If you want to move fast, first you need to master the movement slowly. You will build way more strength, muscle mass, and flexibility and do it all with lower injury risk.