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How your glutes are essential for a healthy core and proper spine posture

January 24, 2023 by keith

Everyone knows the importance of core muscles for stabilizing our spine. Let’s not forget that’s what your core’s function is: to keep the back safe and spine stable. We need the gluteal muscles involved to ensure the core succeeds and we attain healthy spinal posture. Doing an exercise like push-ups or planks, anything where you want to encourage the pattern of everything staying straight in your posture, core strength is critical. What’s not not often talked about is pelvic position.

The pelvis (“hips”) being below your waist, includes your sacrum down to the bottom of your spine. People run into trouble when they have their core tight, but they’re relaxed in their glutes so the tailbone sticks up, which ends up putting a lot of stress on the low back. That’s why you might get back pain if you’ve been doing a really long plank, or you’ve been fatiguing in a push-up.

Think of the bottom of the spine like a bell, where your pelvis hangs off the end of that spine; the spine may be straight, but if that bell is swinging, we put stress there at the lumbar spine (low back). It’s necessary to engage your glute muscles when you’re using your core. A neutral spine, core engaged, and glutes activated is the winning recipe for a healthy pattern in the push-up or plank. Check out some of the exercises we use to integrate the core in almost every movement we do at StraightLine.

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5 Secrets to Stay On Course from a Career Fitness Trainer

May 20, 2016 by keith Leave a Comment

Are you ready to finally follow your health goals but are unsure how? Or have you begun but are struggling to incorporate your workout regime with your busy life? These are common roadblocks in the fitness world which is why we have created five secrets to helping you stay on course.

1. Always keep your workouts fun and interesting.

Nothing kills a routine like routine. Play music that makes you full of energy and want to move. Working out in silence or listening to a television isn’t going to provide you with the gusto a powerful track can. When possible, work out with friends.

2. Maintain the Machine.

Do your warm ups, foam rolling, and keep good form. Injuries are a common major setback and lifestyle change. Too many times I’ve witnessed people go from being in the best shape of their lives to being laid up from an injury.

3. Regularity.

Do your workouts at a standard time each day. Use routine and habit to your advantage. Once you get consistent for about three weeks it becomes almost automatic. Conversely, nothing stunts results more than someone with an inconsistent workout schedule who tries to “get it in when I can”.

4. Outcomes.

Always have a short-term and long-term set of goals in mind. Write them on a whiteboard if you have to. Don’t work out just to work out; keep your motivational and inspirational ideas in mind before you go to the gym and while you’re in your workout.

5. Track the Journey.

Finally, keep some sort of record of where you came from. It’s very easy to lose track of how far you’ve come if you didn’t create a starting point. This includes: how you feel, measurements (like body weight), clothing size, weights in exercises, how many sets you complete in a workout, or even activities that you might be able to do now that you weren’t able to do in the beginning.

Follow these above steps, and never worry about having to start over again!

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Tools to Handle Stress

May 13, 2016 by keith Leave a Comment

Stress is pervasive. Next to regular fitness and good nutrition, handling stress can have a huge impact on how healthy you feel day-to-day.

From headaches to fatigue to irritability, stress makes itself known. Figuring out what to do about that stress isn’t as simple as shoveling your driveway after a snow – after all, stress is mysterious, intangible, and unpredictable.

Stress is a constant. Its part of being human. We can’t avoid it.

Some people seek out pills or other escapist magic wands, but managing stress is an active process; not something you want to delegate to a pill.

In my 20+ years helping clients become sustainably healthy, I’ve found certain strategies and tools that work together to optimize your stress management.

So, what’s a human to do?

Step 1: Identify Triggers and Limit Exposure

Minimize your exposure to: a) extreme stress and b) frequent stress. This is easier said than done, and often it’s hard to identify the specific cause of stress when faced with complex situations.

Keeping a “stress journal” can help you identify triggers. Once you see certain items come up repeatedly on your journal, you can start making some decisions. Reducing or removing items from your list takes a good deal of commitment, and can often be incredibly difficult or costly.

Let’s be clear: work, kids, in-laws – all are stressful in their own ways. You won’t ever have a stress-free day at work or a tantrum-free visit from your in-laws, but you can ask for new or different responsibilities, or limit your one-on-one time with in-laws. You just don’t want to get stuck accepting that stressful situations 24/7 are par for the course. Even ER docs have to sleep and play golf.

You probably won’t be able to get rid of your in-laws or quit your job but you can learn to identify stressors, and then handle or mitigate the highly stressful situations in your life.

Step 2: Identified Stressors Can Be Planned and Handled

We won’t always be able to avoid all stressful triggers in our life, so how we absorb these moments is critical. Anxiety and anger are normal and natural, but that doesn’t mean you want your emotional dam to overflow and leak all over your family or friends, or flood your work throughout the day.

It’s just about cushioning the blow, softening the emotional storm, and minimizing the time that stress takes hold. Plan to catch the weight of a stressful moment with focus and control. Instead of reasoning why you should be upset, understand the freedom you gain by extinguishing the harmful fire of the stress. Slow your breath, and shift your focus from the trigger to your wiser and more composed self. It takes practice, but in time you’ll be able to take on a tough moment and recover within a minute or two, no worse the wear.

Figuring out the most effective buffers can take time and experimentation. Knowing if you’re actually improving is pretty easy, though. Whenever you feel stressed out, upset, or drained write down the time and day in your stress journal. Then, when you feel back to normal write that down too. What’s the length of time between those two points?

The goal is for you to return to normal healthy thoughts and feelings faster after getting upset. If your buffer shortens your recovery time by even an hour you will be on your way to kicking your stress to the curb and loving your day-to-day life again!

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Loving Your Body: The Real Secret to Fat Loss

May 6, 2016 by keith Leave a Comment

The next time you’re at the grocery or bookstore, take a moment and pause in front of the Health and Fitness section of the magazine racks.

Despite the fact that Star Wars is once again in the public spotlight, you haven’t time traveled into the past. You’re in 2016, looking at headlines pulled almost verbatim from decades ago.

It’s not the fault of the magazines, though. They are only a reflection of the reader’s interests – and looking at those titles, our interest in “health and fitness” can be surmised as cliche at best and criminal at worst.

‘Fat loss’, ‘getting cut’, acquiring ‘six pack abs’, and other superficial, cosmetic improvements are gross misrepresentations of what health and fitness are all about.

Having been a trainer my whole adult life, I can tell you from experience and decades of observation that when we stop putting the cart before the horse, health and fitness become a lot more attainable and healthy.

When we stop worrying about the cosmetic changes that we think will make us feel better about ourselves, and simply commit to incremental health improvements, the cosmetic changes typically follow and the emotional benefits are immediately noticeable.

When you make a long term, dedicated effort to having a healthier lifestyle, a healthier body will follow. All your systems are going to improve; you’ll feel and be a better version of yourself, and as a result, will naturally trend towards your ideal body weight.

Weight loss shouldn’t be a central focal point for a training or dietary program, just as the weight gain wasn’t the central issue when a person begins getting unhealthy. Weight gain and being overweight is merely a symptom of a much bigger picture. I think we all understand this, but we also go out of our way to overlook it and over simplify concepts of health and weight loss. Give your body the basic love it deserves, and it will amaze you!

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What a Fitness Expert Thinks of your Shoes

February 4, 2016 by keith Leave a Comment

I’m no shoe salesman, but I get asked about shoes a lot.

I talk with many people that have foot pain from improper footwear, mostly because of lack of knowledge of their options.

Some of the most popular brands of athletic shoe are often designed with extra material everywhere, especially the heel, which creates a shift in the mechanics of the foot/ankle, and a shortening of connective tissue up the whole calf, sometimes affecting the knee, the foot, or even the back and hips.

The best pair of shoes I’ve ever owned are “minimalist road shoes”. After wearing them for long walks, standing on my feet all day, and any kind of fitness workout I throw at myself – they perform better than any other shoe I’ve worn, ever.

My feet never feel achy or unsupported while wearing these shoes. Why is that? Minimal material and padding allows the foot to move and function and contour with the surfaces we step on. This gives you better sensitivity and adaptive benefits for movement (including fitness).

If this feels like a complete 180 from traditional schools of thought, it is. The idea has been that we ‘need’ lots of cushion and ‘support’ around our ankle, heel, and the famous arch. These seem like well thought-out ideas in theory, but reality has shown us that giving us all these supports acts as a crutch for our tissues and joints, encouraging them to atrophy, weaken, and become further dependent on the crutch.

Don’t take my word for it – give it a try. But be warned: it takes time for feet to adapt from traditional sneakers to minimalist shoes, and should be done gradually in small increments of time. That is: don’t run a marathon in ‘em after switching from jogging shoes. Try 15 minutes to an hour at a time, and gradually increase your time each day.

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What Causes Plantar Fasciitis?

November 5, 2014 by keith Leave a Comment

Plantar fascia = tissue on the bottom of the foot

“-itis” =inflammation

In layman’s terms, Plantar Fasciitis is simply inflammation of the tissue on the bottom of the foot. Recent studies have shown that the tissue is often damaged, but with no inflammation, making “itis” a misnomer, and explaining why anti-inflammatory treatments have little or no effect.

The most common pain is near the front of the heel. Unfortunately, most treatments chase after the symptom, not at the source of what’s causing it.

The significance of that painful spot is: it’s the attachment for the Achilles tendon (which is pulled upon by muscles in the leg). Overly tight calves, pulling on the achilles, are usually the major culprit for plantar fasciitis. This explains why many methods of treating the foot directly (e.g. shots and surgeries) often do not provide any relief.

By releasing tension and adhesions in the calves, one can significantly improve the recovery from plantar fasciitis, and decrease inflammation in the foot. A Rossiter workout does precisely this, very effectively. For more information contact Rocky Mountain Rossiter or visit RockyMountainRossiter.com