Core Synergistics

I generally find this to be one of the more fun workouts in the 90x arsenal but yesterday it destroyed me. This is the sign of a good workout. One that is challenging and fun but still requires you to be on your game. I'm very tired from the events of the preceding weeks, which is why this is recovery week in the first place. The next time this workout pops up on the schedule it's going to be different.

Core Syn is a hybrid workout that targets all the muscles of the core region. You'd guess this from the title but many of the movements confuse people that have been conditioned to think that the core region is trained with nothing but crunches and sit-ups. In reality, its attached to everything so practically any full body movement trains your core. This is why this workout is full of variations of squats, lunges, and push-ups. Since it's your core, not your legs, that are essentially the trunk of the human tree core training is single most important body region to keep in condition.

Isabelle, wife of our CEO Carl, is a core training expert. She works will a lot of world class athletes on balance and core synergy to try and even out their training. She developed a program years back that never made it to market. It was outstanding, in my mind, and a completely new concept for not just home training but training in general. But Carl nixed it because we couldn't find a home for it. It was just too conceptual for us to sell to the masses. I fought to keep it, even if just a piece of our arsenal, because in my world the more fitness solutions we offer the easier it is to get results with our clients. But Carl didn't want to "half ass" its release, which is what we'd have to do if we couldn't sell it on TV. We're still hoping to find a way to sell it to the masses. In the mean time, we've added more core and balance oriented movements to all of our programs. So we're essentially building our own base for this program. The X Plus workouts have taken another step in this direction. We'll get to those later.

Tony's line of the day is when he's discussing some people's tendency to do a move with poor form. He corrects this with "I want you to start a new tendency..." I love this. It'll work for anything. Why blame bad habits? Just change them into good habits and you'll be fine. Life doesn't have to be as difficult as we like to make it.

pic: climbing requires a lot of core strength.