Building An Unbreakable Body

Guest post written by: Kate Galliet

 

At 21, my doc told me that the GERD I was experiencing (for which she’d Rx’d a lifetime of taking a pill for) was “just the way I am.” And then I found the paleo diet & lifestyle via Robb’s podcast. And “just the way I am” changed completely. No more GERD, no more pills.

Know what’s nice about the paleo diet? It lays the foundation for sustainable health for the long-haul and reduces & even eliminates many ‘common’ diseases and health-challenges for those following it. Nice, huh?

What if the chronic sore spot in your low back, the ache in your calves, or the shoulder twingey-ness isn’t “just the way you are”?

Just as an excellent nutrition program should lay the foundation for incredible health, an excellent fitness program should lay the foundation for incredible movement quality. It should be sustainable for the long-haul, and it should build durability in your body so that today’s ‘common’ body breakdowns just don’t occur.

Hey I’m Kate Galliett, I’m the creator of Fit For Real Life, an education & coaching platform geared to helping you become fit for real life. And thanks to Robb, I’m here to help you change what you currently consider as “just the way you are” in your movement capacity.

After you started a paleo lifestyle, remember the first time you realized the sniffles you get every year didn’t happen? Remember the first time you noticed your skin clearing up or your stomach calming down? I’ve spent 12 years helping my clients discover similar answers about the way they move, and what aches & pains they don’t actually have to live with anymore.

We do this by taking a look through a different fitness lens – one that puts body durability, mobility, and foundational strength in each of 6 key pillars of the body at the forefront.

With the paleo diet, per Robb’s recommendations, you start with a basic 30-day (minimum!) reset to get a foundation of gut restoration and health adaptation – to help yourself know what your ‘baseline’ feels like. It helps you have a solid foundation of good habits that become easier the longer you do them, before you go mixing it up with any of the sexy add-ons, like IF or carb-backloading, that exist for enhancing your diet.

Let’s look at fitness through this lens.

Did you spend time building your movement foundation?

Do you know what ‘baseline quality movement’ actually feels like when you move your body?

Did you build daily habits into your movement life so that your body naturally maintains a level of quality movement, just as your baseline of healthy eating choices does for your gut flora, weight, and inflammation?

Having worked with clients ranging from Olympians to every day folks like you and me, I discovered over time that if we build strength in the 6 pillars, (I refer to them as ‘pillars’ because they hold up all of your movement capacity) then we could say yes to those 3 questions, and that as a result, pain & injury rate goes down, strength & movement quality goes up, and kittens everywhere would dance with glee.

So what are the 6 Pillars then? So glad you asked!

The 6 Pillars are:

– strong feet

– strong glutes

– hip stability

– strong core

– postural strength

– scapular stability

The 6 Pillars are to movement excellence as eating a low-inflammation, high-protein diet is to ‘common’ diseases and health challenges. They’re the starting point for everything and the foundation for all other things.

There’s No Biological Free Lunch

Truly, as Tim Ferriss says, “there’s no biological free lunch.” If one segment of your body isn’t strong, mobile, and durable, another segment of your body will take up the slack, even though in doing so it will over-work and generate inflammation and injury if it does that long enough.

For example, did you know that about 25% of the bones and muscles in your body are located below the ankles? Where you have bones and muscles, you have movement capacity (or, you’re supposed to).

However, if we don’t train that part of our body for strength & mobility, we end up with feet that can hardly move at all, let alone do the gazillions of movement combinations that are possible with that many bones and muscles located there.

When you’re built for heaps of movement capacity, and you use only a tiny smidge of what you’re capable of, the rest of it drops off over time because it’s just not being used. And when we start to lose ‘tone’ to the muscles of the foot, we start paying for that ‘not-free-lunch’ by doing silly things like altering the way our hips stack over our legs, reducing the force with which our glutes fire and shifting where the load of our body rests over our feet.

In case you missed that, there’s no free lunch gang. Your glute strength is being affected by what’s happening or not happening in your feet. Your core strength and posture is being affected by how your feet move and what direction they face. Your knee pain or your plantar fascia discomfort in the bottom of your foot? The likely payment for sub-optimal foot position, mobility, and strength.

The Unbreakable Body

If fixing up your feet could have such implications elsewhere in your body, what of the other 5 pillars? What can be improved in them to make your foundation of high-quality movement top-notch?

You can build a durable, injury-resistant, strong foundation of strength & mobility that allows for all of the sexy fitness add-ons you want to do in your life to be done without fear of body breakdowns.

This is the 6 pillar strength model that I developed and use to coach my in-person clients to Ironman finishes, tops of mountains, and out of pain & its associated costly therapy treatments, and thanks to the magic of the internet, I now can give you that very same coaching and guidance right in your own home or gym.

I created The Unbreakable Body as a program for any person to do anywhere by developing a proprietary 6-question self-assessment that easily determines where your strength levels are at in each of the pillars, and then provides 12 week cycles of programming to address your pillars exactly where they need to be met.

Because aches and pains absolutely doesn’t have to be “just the way you are.” And I want to help you discover that!

So if you’re curious about training in a way that removes ‘common’ aches and pains and that makes your movement quality and capacity grow exponentially, then check out The Unbreakable Body on this special page I’ve created for Robb’s readers over on the program site: www.theunbreakablebody.com/robb

 

 

Squatchy

Christopher Williams (a.k.a. Squatchy) is a paleo aficionado, educator, personal trainer, wellness coach, and hobbyist chef. He also works as part of the Robb Wolf team.