Active Standing

The brace position: This is a fundamental skill and the most essential pattern to adopt when practicing resistance exercise. It secures the body in its optimal position of neutral so that you reinforce healthy spinal mechanics and torque at the shoulder and hip if required. Learning Cues: 1) Tuck your tail – Engages your lower abs 2) Chest up, shoulders back and down – Engages your upper back 3) Chin back – Sets your head position 4) Corkscrew your shoulders or feet into the ground – This is dependent on what part of the body the weight is being received. The key is utilising the glutes and lats when performing upper or lower body biased exercises.

Humans’ greatest anatomical advantages paved the way for the growth of our frontal cortex and higher intellect. Our mandible thumbs allowed us to grip and design tools and weapons. Moving away from the trees and standing up accelerated us ahead of our nearest primate rivals. We developed glute muscles for running, jumping, throwing. Our shoulder capsules allowed for 360 degrees of angle - more than any other species on the planet. This gave us more capacity to adapt to our environment with greater efficacy and design more complex weapons like spears. It also meant we could engineer things with ropes and sails and oars while using the strength of other animals to create agriculture. Fast-forward to the industrial age and we see a modern version of humans that still had an environment that required higher levels of physical activity. By default their lifestyle required it. Food was nowhere near as abundant or calorie dense and much more nutrient dense. The social and industrial construct required more collaboration and better personal communication because technology hadn’t removed our capacity to connect with our fellow human. The turn of the century saw the introduction of automation and the rise of machines and technology. For the first time in our history, we can no longer rely on environmental and physical adaptation the cornerstones of human development to help keep our bodies supple and resilient.