Running can be hard on the body, and doubly so if you’re out of alignment. Impact from each stride travels through the body, and if the eight load-bearing joints (shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles) aren’t aligned, you’re asking for trouble. This alone is a good reason to incorporate dynamic warm-ups and cool-downs before and after your runs.

Another common pitfall for runners is driving forward motion from the shoulders rather than the hips. “If you’re running with your elbows winging out and your shoulders rounded forward, it could be because your hips aren’t activated,” says Brian Bradley, fitness director of Elev8d Fitness, the new home workout program from the experts of Sonima. “People are tearing their rotator cuff running because they are overcompensating with the shoulders.” But there’s a way to fix this.

The Shoulder Problem

The shoulders shouldn’t factor into the forward motion of the run. “It’s just not natural for you to drive your gait from your shoulders,” Bradley says. But when the back and shoulders are rounded forward and the hips are tucked under and inactive (and can happen when we sit most of the day), then the shoulders take over for the gait, rotating forward and back. This compensation is a surefire path to injury.

Your body should operate like a well-oiled machine—joints, muscles, and skeleton working in concert. If you have full range of motion in the load-bearing joints and your hips are driving the forward motion, this will naturally take your shoulders out of the equation. A smooth stride and pace is really all about functionality.

Related: A New Approach to Improving Flexibility

In order to be a functional runner, the arms should swing back and forth, and the shoulders should be down and back. If you look at a professional runner, you’ll notice they are upright, shoulders pulled back, upper back relatively still. Their arms swing, but their shoulders aren’t punching forward and back.

A Sequence for Function and Speed

It is essential to set your body into proper alignment before you introduce impact and rapid movement. These three exercises—excerpted from one of Elev8d Fitness’s eight-minute home workouts—free up the shoulders and activate the hips so that you are prepared to stress your system with a cardio workout (or strength training, for that matter).

To improve range of movement in the upper body, you need to free up the scapula, a.k.a. the shoulder blade bone. “The first exercise in this sequence, active cows face, teaches the arm bone how to function correctly in relationship with the shoulder blade. It’s really the same with the relationship between the femur and pelvis,” Bradley explains. This simple movement addresses range of motion in the shoulder, which shifts the mid-back, thoracic spine, and pelvis into better alignment.

Related: The #1 Most Overlooked Muscle in Your Workout

Sequence, Bradley stresses, is everything. Only when your shoulders are in a better position, are you ready for the next exercise, mountain climbers. “With your shoulders down and back, you’re ready to load them and fire your deep hip muscles,” he explains. “Your core will stabilize during this second movement.” Activating your core and hips further establishes function in the spine and shoulders.

Finally, the downward dog bent knee requires you load up the torso and the shoulders and hold the very position that was just activated by the mountain climbers. You’ll notice that in this final static position your upper body wants to collapse. It is crucial to pull the weight off your hands by pulling your hips back, tilting your pelvis forward, and firing the front hip flexors.

How Does This Translate to Running?

Once you’ve aligned your joints and activated your hips, how do you optimize for speed? Leg stride is actually the easy part. The key, Bradley says, is the arm swing. “The body naturally knows how to run, your legs know how to move,” he says. “But if you want to be the fastest person, you need to learn to arm pump as fast as you can.” The hips are driving the movement, yes, but the arm swing will take your pace to a new level.

Faster, stronger, fitter—whatever your goal, Elev8d Fitness can help you reach it! Try the Flat Belly Workout Series or the Move Better, Feel Better, Look Better Workout Series and see for yourself.

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But this traditional understanding of stretching is flawed. Flexibility doesn’t come from stretching the muscles to a more impressive length—flexibility is actually the absence of tension in the muscles. And to get to the root of this tension, you have to address why your body is tight in the first place.

“People always come to me and tell me that they are genetically tight, that their body just isn’t flexible,” says Brian Bradley, fitness director of Elev8d Fitness, the new 8-minute home workout program from Sonima. “But this is a misunderstanding.” You’re not inflexible because your muscles are short. You’re inflexible because your body is out of alignment, and that impinges your full range of motion.

How Does Alignment Improve Flexibility?

Proper alignment starts with the pelvis. “The hips are the epicenter of the body, so when you have function in the hips, all the muscles that originate in that area are no longer under tension or restricted,” Bradley explains. The better the position of your hips, the better its relationship with the upper back, mid-back, shoulder blades, and all connected areas of the body.

“When you align the body, the bones where the tendons connect move into a more aligned position, which loosens the tension in the muscle. It’s freeing up your muscles to their full and natural length,” Bradley explains. In other words, you are changing the position of the skeleton where the tendons attach. When you put these attachment points into alignment, the muscles can relax into their full range of motion. As you slowly loosen tension in this or that muscle, the body comes into concert with itself, unifying as one system rather than a collection of disjointed parts. And that, Bradley says, is where real strength and wellness happens.

Related: Move Better, Look Better, and Feel Better with This Workout Series

Elev8d Fitness is designed around this fundamental principle: Align the body so that it can move through its full range of motion, thus balancing and unifying the musculature as a functional, efficient system. “You’ll actually get your body to the point where you don’t feel like you need to stretch,” Bradley says.

A Workout to Improve Flexibility

In this 8-minute workout, Elev8d Fitness co-founder and world-renowned physiologist Pete Egoscue will coach you through a sequence of one-minute movements. As you fire the hip flexors and core, notice a subtle release of tightness is the upper back and knees. Remember, form is critical. In order to align and balance the body, you have to pay close attention to the position of your spine, shoulders, and hips. For example, be sure to pinch the shoulder blades in the Da Vincis and maintain a slight arch in your back when you squat down for the Elev8d Side Unders.

Related: Can’t Touch Your Toes? These Three Exercises Will Change That

“You’re going to feel some work in these exercises,” Bradley says. “What we’re doing is training your muscles at their full length.” Strengthening your muscles in this state of zero tension or tightness is key—that’s the way to train your body back into its natural and functional alignment.

“This eight-minute sequence is literally changing how each section of your spine relates to your hips and shoulders,” Bradley says. As you work your way through the exercises, your range of motion is increasing exponentially. So much so that if you started the whole thing over again from the top, you would notice a dramatic difference in your flexibility. That’s because you’ve freed up your shoulders, mid-back, and hips, thus loosening the tension in the muscles.

You’re not necessarily going to feel a stretch with this workout, though. “It’ll feel like work and you may start breathing a little heavy. But then all of the sudden, you’ll be able to reach down and touch your toes,” Bradley says.

Transform your body in a little as eight minutes! Try the revolutionary Elev8d Fitness Flat Belly Workout Series!

The post A Quick Workout to Fix Tight Muscles appeared first on Sonima.

What you may not realize is that the position of sitting could also be the reason you want to curl up for a nap in the afternoon. Luckily, the right kind of movement can combat these negative sitting effects, and you can do these exercises from your home office or other workplace for a quick pick-me-up.

How Sitting Affects Your Energy

We often don’t realize just how much our posture impacts our health. When your anterior contracts and your posterior is rounded, you effectively constrict the flow of oxygen through your body. In this rounded position, your spine is in a C-shape rather than its natural S-shape, cramping the diaphragm so that you can’t take full, deep breaths. What’s more, the C-shape in the spine tucks the hips under. When your psoas and hip flexors are tucked and unengaged like this, the body essentially collapses forward, crunching the vital organs into a smaller space.

Your energy flags post-lunch because you’ve spent the better half of the day collapsed forward and inert. When this happens, it’s all too easy to turn to sugar and caffeine. But what if there were a healthy, more holistic option?

Related: The #1 Most Overlooked Muscle in Your Workout

The solution to activating the hips and improving posture is actually quite simple: Move more. We’re not saying you need to quit your job or stop watching your favorite TV show, just simply get up and move around every 30 minutes. While you’re at it, give your body a quick alignment prompt with the three dynamic movements below from Elev8d Fitness, the new home workout program from the experts at Sonima. This routine takes less than a minute and does wonders for shaking loose the cobwebs and improving your posture.

Related: 4 Posture Exercises to Do While Sitting At Your Desk

3 Moves to Boost Your Energy

The Active Cows Face requires you to stand up and engage the deep muscles around the shoulder blades (the rhomboid muscles, trapezius, and deltoid). This effectively opens up the front of the body, allowing more oxygen into your lungs and more blood flow to your head, heart, and vital organs.

Next, the Downward Dog Bent Knee activates the hip flexors and the psoas while also loading up the shoulder blades. By engaging these deep, core muscle groups, this static position ignites a higher intensity burn. A true total-body exercise, the Downward Dog Bent Knee positions your head below your heart, which brings increased blood flow (and oxygen) to the brain.

Lastly, the Standing Arm Circles strengthen the muscles between the shoulder blades while also requiring static resistance in the core muscles, especially the obliques. This may look like a shoulder exercise, but notice the perturbance in the abdominal wall; you are working your abs too. Hand position is key, and remember to keep your shoulders down and back.

In combination, these three movements reset posture and increase blood flow in less than a minute so you can sit back at your desk with a clearer head and more energy. What’s more, if you make a daily practice of these three movements, your posture will improve in the long run. Give it a try!

Active Cows Face | 15x Per Side

1. Stand with your feet fist-width apart, toes pointed straight ahead. (You may even pigeon-toe them slightly.)
2. Reach your arms out at shoulder height with palms facing forward so your body forms a “t” shape.
3. Raise your right arm toward the ceiling, bending at the elbow so your hand reaches toward the center of your back. Simultaneously extend your left arm toward the floor, bending at the elbow to reach your left hand toward the center of your back, getting your right and left fingers as close to touching as possible.
4. Return arms to their original position and repeat, moving your arms in the opposite direction to bring the left to the center of the back from above and the right from beneath. That’s 1 rep.

Downward Dog Bent Knee | 30 Seconds

1. Start on hands and knees, then push into downward facing dog.
2. Bend your knees slightly, without touching the ground.
3. Hold this position as you pull the hips back to the heels, keeping the pelvis angled up and the back flat. You should feel this in the hip flexors.

Arm Circles | 40x

1. Stand with your feet hip-width apart, toes pointed straight ahead. Put your hands in a golfer’s grip: Make a thumb’s up and fold your fingers so the tips are on the top pads of your palms.
2. Extend your arms out at your shoulders with your thumbs pointed forward, hands palms down, and shoulder blades pinched back.
3. Keeping your shoulder blades pinched, circle your arms forward 20 times.
4. Pause, then flip your hands palms up, thumbs pointed backward, and circle your arms backward 20 times.
   
   

Transform your body in as little as 8 minutes a day! Try the revolutionary new approach to fitness that helps you achieve better results by doing less. Check out Elev8d  Fitness now on Vimeo.

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Each exercise is geared toward shifting your body back into alignment. When the body is in alignment, oxygen flows freely to the muscles and creates more energy. This way you can burn calories and skip the afternoon coffee. Give it a try!

If you like this video, check out more quick routines from Elev8d Fitness, the new home workout program brought to you by the experts of Sonima. Every routine uses only your body weight to help tone your body, boost fat burning, and become functionally fit. Try these eight-minute weight-loss workouts or the Flat Belly Workout Series.

Thirty Cubed

Exercise #1: In a standing position, reach your arms straight out and run in place, bringing your knees high, for thirty seconds.

Exercise #2: Drop your arms and run in place so that your heels kick your butt for thirty seconds.

Exercise #3: Squat low with your feet pointed straight forward. Then spring up as if to jump, driving your arms straight up, but do not let your feet leave the ground. Repeat these ‘fake jumps’ for thirty seconds.

The post Burn 100 Calories in 90 Seconds appeared first on Sonima.

Brian Bradley, fitness director of Elev8d Fitness, a new, posture-based home workout program from the experts of Sonima, has a different view of things. “Sitting doesn’t have to be bad for you,” he says. “We just have to view it as another form of activity.” In his eyes, sitting isn’t the problem. Instead, the horrifying health statistics are a reflection of how we’re sitting. Most of us perch with compromised posture, meaning the spine is in a C-shape, the pelvis is tucked under, and the chin is jutting forward. This poor sitting form is what is leading to the myriad of problems.

Related: The Simplest Change You Can Make for Better Health

But Why Is Sitting So Bad?

Here’s an example: You sit in front of a computer and use one hand to click and scroll with a mouse. The arm (shoulder, elbow, and wrist) controlling the mouse is moving a lot more than the other, inactive arm. This creates a muscular imbalance. And if you have not fired the deep core muscles around the shoulder blades, this one-arm mouse activity isn’t anchored and can strain the joints and spine. What’s more, an imbalance in the shoulders will inevitably throw the rest of your body out of whack.

The next time you’re in the office or a coffee shop, notice the posture of the people sitting around you. More likely than not, their backs are rounded and their hips are tucked under. This poor posture basically compresses the body, restricting the proper functioning of its various systems. For example, you can’t digest food properly with a restricted digestive tract, nor can you breathe fully with a cramped diaphragm. When you consider it this way, it’s no wonder sitting is linked to so many health issues!

Related: The 8-Minute Weight-Loss Workout Series You Can Do at Home

How Can You Correct Your Sitting Form?

To improve your sitting and body, first change your mindset. “People assume that when you’re sitting, there’s no work going on in the body,” Bradley says. “But there should actually be a lot going on. You have to treat it as a sport.”

Before you sit down for a day of work, it is crucial to set your body into alignment. When your hips are engaged and in dynamic connection to your spine, rib cage, and shoulders, you are setting course for more functional movement for the rest of the day.

“With just a few dynamic movements at the start of the day, you can essentially prevent bad posture and all the discomfort that comes along with it,” Bradley says. Imbalances like with the mouse example above can be repaired by accessing and firing the deep stabilizing muscles in the core, from the shoulders down to the hips.

This short sequence designed and ordered by Bradley and the experts at Elev8d Fitness will prepare your body for a day of functional sitting. Each movement increasingly connects and engages the deep stabilizing muscles that are so vital to proper alignment.

The Standing Arm Circles pin the shoulder blades together and fire the mid-back, and they also access the deep hip muscles that are essential to active sitting, Bradley explains. The speed of this exercise is what requires action from the hips, so remember to keep a steady pace.

After you’ve fired up the muscles in the deep hip, the One Arm Bridge loads the shoulder to condition it to stay in the right position. This classic core exercise activates the entire length of the body for 30 seconds on each side.

Last, the Finish Line Abs kick you into high gear with a minute of rapid arm, abdominal, and hip work. The arm swing again requires the deep stabilizing muscles to fire at maximum capacity. “This last exercise is major. It’s setting you up to be able to move [and sit] from the right posture,” Bradley says.

Put them all together, and “these three simple exercises are really prepping you for better positioning to handle whatever activity you’re doing,” he adds.

Transform your body! Try the Move Better, Feel Better, Look Better Home Workout Series to build strength, boost energy, and have better posture without beating up your body.

The post A Short Workout to Prepare You for a Day at a Desk appeared first on Sonima.

One secret to building lean muscle mass is in the deep hip. “An increase in metabolic rate comes from hip-driven exercise,” says Brian Bradley, fitness director of Elev8d Fitness, the new home workout program from the experts of Sonima. “Once you loosen up the hips and establish full range of motion, you tap into a completely different, deeper set of muscles.”

Related: The #1 Most Overlooked Muscle in Your Workout

The hips are the epicenter of the body. The strength and range of motion of all the load-bearing joints (shoulders, knees, ankles) depend on the alignment and functionality of the hips. Better range of motion allows your body to better activate your deepest muscle groups, which aids the creation of balanced, lean muscle mass.

Here’s an example: If the shoulder joint is functional and limber, movement in the shoulder will use all the muscles surrounding that joint. But if your shoulder has limited range of motion and is bound forward, you won’t be able to fully access and activate the posterior muscles around the joint. They will be effectively turned off and inactive. Full range of motion removes the muscular and structural limitations that keep us from accessing all our muscles.

Think about it this way: When you move, you should be moving with 100 percent of your body, your muscles functioning like one integrated, fluid system. Bad posture, imbalances, and muscular compensation disconnect the muscles in the body. This disconnect, Bradley says, is the crux of the problem: “If you only move the hip 50 percent of its natural range of motion, then you’re only getting 50 percent of the benefit as it relates to your metabolism. But if you’re moving it through its full natural range, then you’re getting full muscle engagement and full metabolic benefit.”

Related: The Most Effective At-Home Total-Body Workout Program

3 Movements to Activate the Deep Hip

These three dynamic movements are designed and sequenced specifically to access the hip flexors and activate the psoas—the core muscle that connects the lumbar vertebrae to the femur—and re-establish full range of motion in the hip joint.

The first exercise, Elev8d Figure 4, unloads your spine. We spend all day vertical, often with our back rounded and shoulders forward (especially if you sit at a computer all day). “Loading the spine horizontally puts you in mid-back/thoracic extension,” explains Bradley. “And as you cross the leg over and push that leg away, you’re teaching the leg bone how to rotate in the hip joint.” Even if you just did this static exercise, you’d spend the rest of the day with activated hip flexors.

Next, the Elev8d Bear Crawl Sideways focuses on lateral hip motion that you don’t often get in day-to-day life. “When you move left to right, it makes you load one hip at a time,” Bradley says. “And because most people favor one side versus the other—from repeatedly pressing a gas pedal, clicking a mouse, or carrying around a shoulder bag—we need to wake up these deep hip muscles to do the work while the spine is loaded in extension.” In this exercise, be sure to pull back with the hips, keeping as much of the work out of the shoulders and arms as you can. By loading the hips one at a time, you are ensuring that both sides are getting the same amount of work, effectively balancing this muscle group.

Finally, the Fake Jumps target the psoas and low back muscles. Think about this exercise as a plyometric jump that never gets off the ground. “You safely create that movement of jumping up onto a box,” Bradley says. “Swing your arms forward at high speed and then almost push off with your legs.” This exercise is a surprising amount of work. Not only do you drop down into a deep squat, but the sheer force of energy required to spring up will surprise you.

If you can fire up your foundational hip flexor group on a sustained, daily basis, your muscles will be conditioned to stay activated. And the more frequently you access and activate these deep muscles, the more lean muscle mass you will create, thus, raising your metabolic rate.

Craving more? Try the Elev8d Fitness Weight-Loss Workout Series. Each bodyweight workout lasts no longer than 24 minutes and is designed to recruit more muscles, boosting your metabolic rate.

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Elev8d Fitness, the new home workout program from the experts at Sonima, is designed and sequenced to position the body for complete engagement. The exercises are slow and deliberate with an emphasis on form. “Our focus is on putting the body in the right place to tax all systems at once,” explains Brian Bradley, Fitness Director of Elev8d Fitness. “When you go slower, it requires a huge amount of stability.”

This also reduces the risk of developing dysfunctional compensations and ensures your body is aligned so you establish proper posture and functionality. When the body is working in concert like this, it can fire all the muscles at once. And that, Bradley explains, is where real transformation happens. “We train the body to function properly to give you a better metabolic reaction from your muscular system all day, long after you’ve finished your workout.” Here’s how it works:

Related: The Most Effective At-Home Total-Body Workout Series

The Plank Problem

When you load up into a forearm plank position, the impulse is often to round the back and shoulders and tuck the tailbone. In this version, you clasp your hands together and wing your elbows out, creating a triangle base to hold up the rest of the body. “And there’s nothing stronger than a triangle,” Bradley says. “But what are you compromising?” In this position, the shoulders and upper back are taking the workload. Sure, you may be working your abs, but nothing is gluing it all together. The abdominal wall is trying to work in isolation and the shoulders are trying to work in isolation.

“When your form is out of whack, your body takes the path of least resistance,” Bradley explains. “That group of muscles is only firing because it’s trying to take over for what the other muscles aren’t doing.” The position of the body in the plank is so compromised that you’re actually exacerbating the compromise rather than strengthening from a position of correct posture.

How Do I Fix It?

If you pin the shoulder blades together and drop the chest cavity, you establish a functional curve in the lower back. This fires the core like crazy but also engages the rest of the body. You may not be able to hold this position as long but that is the point. When you are deliberate with form, your workout engages the whole body and becomes infinitely more efficient. “You are decreasing the time and increasing the work,” Bradley says. “And you’re working six hundred muscles, rather than about twenty.”

And this is what makes the Elev8d Fitness workouts so powerfully efficient. The increase in muscle and joint demand is where caloric burn comes from. An exercise with correct form fires not only the deep core muscles but also the smaller stabilizing muscles around the joints. And that is the key to kicking up your metabolism and efficiently toning the body.

Related: This Workout Boosts Strength in 8 Minutes

The 8-Minute Total Body Transformation

At first glance, this eight-minute workout may not seem particularly challenging. Unlike HIIT, Elev8d Fitness workouts are low-intensity. “Remember, we slow down the exercises to focus on the quality of movement,” Bradley says. By focusing on form, you are asking the body to work in concert. Proper alignment allows the deep core muscles to fire all at once. As these larger muscles fire and do the heavy lifting, you further refine the functionality of your eight load-bearing joints (shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles).

There’s also an inherent feeling of wellness that comes along with proper form and deep muscle work, Bradley says. After a true total-body workout, your metabolic rate will stay raised for hours. You may even find that you’re not craving sugar and you’re sleeping better. “These are the long-term effects of a functional, form-focused method like Elev8d Fitness,” Bradley says. “Your body is working in harmony.”

Love this workout? Try more from Elev8d Fitness powered by Sonima!

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Often the only constant in our busy lives is mornings. Schedules and responsibilities may vary wildly from day-to-day, but every day starts the same: You wake up. This consistent context is the best time and environment to create and maintain habits, whether it’s drinking coffee, meditating in bed, or writing in a journal. The point is to create a morning ritual that sets the tone for the rest of the day. If you have a calm, happy morning, you’re far more likely to have a calm, happy day.

Related: 10 Quick Home Workouts to Jumpstart Every Morning

But just as you align your thoughts with meditation or journaling, it is as important to align your body to prepare for the day.

The Benefits of Alignment

Ideally, the body should be a symmetrical unit. The load-bearing joints (shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles) should be even and balanced. But environmental influences (sitting, injuries, lack of diverse movement) causes our musculature and skeleton to shift into asymmetrical positions. Your spine settles into a hunched, C-shape from sitting at a desk all day, and your shoulder punches forward in your morning run to make up for your misaligned hip. All these compensations come at a cost. When the body is out of whack, overall wellness suffers.

However, when your body is in alignment, your various interconnected systems—digestive, nervous, and lymph—function more smoothly. Alignment can do wonders for energy too. When you remove postural limitations such as an out of whack shoulder or a creaky hip, oxygen can flow more freely through the body. Adjustments in posture have even been shown to improve headaches, sleep, and mood.

Related: A Meditation to Help You Prepare for Restful Sleep

Quick Start for a Better Day

Elev8d Fitness, the new home workout program from the experts at Sonima, is an alignment-based method that focuses on form and quality of moment. The exercises are designed to re-establish your body’s symmetrical posture and natural range of motion.

The short alignment sequence below is the perfect way to wake up the body and activate the deep stabilizing muscles. Each exercise gently activates the hips and spine, expands the diaphragm, and eases the shoulders back into a straight and open posture.

In just a few minutes, your blood will be pumping, releasing endorphins, the feel-good hormone. The Squat exercise will activate the hips to establish a healthy S-shape in the spine, a crucial reset if you plan to be sitting in a chair for most of the day.  And you’ll love Shadow Boxing. It’s nearly impossible to pop around on your toes and box an imaginary opponent without a smile on your face!

Even better, research shows that it’s the initiation of an exercise activity that solidifies the habit, not the execution. In other words, once you stand up and decide to exercise, the rest is more or less an automated follow-through. So start every day with an 8-, 16-, or 24-minute Elev8d Fitness workout, and you may soon find yourself looking forward to waking up and working out. It not only boosts energy and puts you in a great mindset for the day, it’s also fun!

Active Cows Face | 5x Per Side

1. Place your feet fist-width apart and point them straight ahead; you may even pigeon-toe them slightly.
2. Move your right arm toward your head and reach to the center of the back while you, simultaneously, bring your left arm up from the hip to the center of the back, getting the fingers as close to touching as possible.
3. Return arms to their original position then repeat process with opposite arms, bringing the left to the center of the back from above, the right from beneath.

Active Squat | 5x

1. Spread your feet just wider than your hips and point your toes straight ahead.
2. Extend your arms directly in front of you, palms down.
3. Drop your hips into the squat but keep your pelvis rolled forward so that there’s a small arch in your back—this arch is crucial!
4. Slowly return to standing.

Shadow Boxing | 30 Seconds

1. Stagger your legs with one foot forward, one foot back.
2. Shuffle the feet and switch foot position consistently.
3. Simultaneously throw punches with alternating fists, keeping your hands up near the head.

Transform your body and start every day off right in a little as 8 minutes a day! Try the innovative Elev8d Fitness program that boosts energy to keep your body and your mind sharp all day long.

The post The 3 Dynamic Exercises You Should Do Every Morning appeared first on Sonima.

What’s the difference? Diversity of movement. The body is designed to move in eight directions: over, under, around, sideways, rotation, flexion, extension, and push/pull. Moving in all eight directions with full range of motion simulates common movements you might do at home, at work, or in sports. And that is the very definition of functional total-body fitness.

The three simple exercises below fire deep core muscles that promote symmetry in body and strength in key muscles groups so that you can be stable and functional in your everyday life. Give it a try and feel what a difference this type of workout makes.

Elev8d Crunches | 20x

1. Lie on your back, knees up, feet flat, fingers interlaced behind your head with your elbows flat.
2. Cross your right ankle over your left then keeping your legs straight, lift them as high as you are able.
3. Do crunches for half the allotted time, lifting from the mid-section, not the head and keeping your elbows straight.
4. Repeat process with left ankle crossed in front of the right, doing crunches for the remaining half of the allotted time.

Wobbles | 15x

1. In a seated position, bend your knees and pull them towards your chest.
2. Hug your knees tightly, then roll backwards on your hips and spine then roll forward back to the seating position.
3. As much as possible, avoid using momentum on the roll and focus on using your abs to return to the seated position.

Static Squat | 30 Seconds

1. Spread your feet just wider than your hips, pointing them straight, and extend your arms directly in front of you, palms down.
2. Drop your hips but keep your pelvis rolled forward so that there is a small arch in your back.
3. Hold this position for 30 seconds. Try to be mindful of the firing in your hip-flexors.

Feel this great every day and transform your body in a little as 8 minutes a day! Try Elev8d Fitness, the revolutionary new approach to fitness that helps you achieve better results by doing less. The innovative At-Home Total-Body Workout Series burns more calories, boosts energy, and strengthens and tones from head to toe.

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How do you do this? We asked Pete Egoscue, Sonima’s pain and anatomy advisor and co-founder of Elev8d Fitness, the new home workout program brought to you by the experts of Sonima, to share his top advice for overcoming fitness obstacles and achieving your goals. Here’s what he says.

1. Change Your Perspective on Exercise

“If you view fitness as an obstacle to overcome, then you’re producing stress and getting less and less in return,” says Egoscue, who holds that the best workouts are the ones that are measured in joy, not in the number of abs visible in a bikini. When your instincts tell you something is stressful, painful or unpleasant, that’s when people stop going to the gym.

Instead of thinking about fitness as a chore, think of it as an opportunity to do something you enjoy. This may involve changing your routine or your go-to workout method. Celebrate playground-esque moves, like bear crawls and jumping up onto benches, because they’re fun. They allow you to be in the moment, rather than worrying about your to-do list or what you need to work on to alter your body. An exciting workout keeps people coming back, so make fun your focus.

Related: Our #1 Diet Advice Has Nothing to Do with Calories

2. Realize That You Know Your Body Best

According to Egoscue, the only obstacle you really need to overcome is buying into the “perception that somebody else knows more about our body’s health than we do.” We are constantly measuring ourselves up—against often unfair benchmarks—and then we get down on ourselves for not overcoming the obstacle we identify as holding us back. “The fitness world says, ‘You have to work hard and be dedicated. In other words, you have to suffer, and we apologize, but these results will be worth it. So buckle down, grunt it out, get dedicated,’ it demands,” says Egoscue. The truth is, physical activity doesn’t have to be an unpleasant feat. You don’t need to slug through a workout counting down the seconds until it’s over. Instead, find the exercises and the routines that work for you and make you happy, even if that goes against what other people tell you to do.

3. Shift How You Measure Success

Instead of worrying about how you’re stacking up against that guy doing 8-minute miles without breaking a sweat, ask yourself a few other questions. “Are you living a life of compelling presence? When you take away everyone else’s judgment, are you doing those things that provide you joy? Are you having fun? How’s your energy level throughout the day? Are you experiencing a life well lived? That’s up to you to define, not up to you to let the experts tell you what that looks like and how to achieve it.”

Fitness is a feeling, not an objective measurement, and it differs from person to person and from day to day even. Stop all the banter about excuses, and just listen to your body, suggests Egoscue. “I don’t believe there are obstacles to overcome. I believe there’s a life to be well lived,” he says. And the key to doing that is finding the things, people and purpose that you love. When something is fun, it’s easy and pleasurable to do. Even better, it allows you to live in the moment, not stressing about a long list of must-dos, but actually loving and enjoying your life—sweat and all.

The post 3 Unique Ways to Overcome Fitness Obstacles appeared first on Sonima.

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The post Mere Color, Unspoiled by Meaning appeared first on Sonima.