Karolina is an experienced, NASM-certified personal trainer and a corrective exercise specialist who designs individual programs for each one of her clients. She and her husband, Artem, are the owners of Fit Core Smart Moves, a personal training, Pilates, TRX and yoga studio located in the heart of Calabasas that offers a holistic approach to fitness.
Change Your Workout:
Transform Your Life with Fit Core Smart Moves By Elena Richards Photography by Marvin Steindler
T
he time is gone when getting in shape meant getting through the day sore, starving and exhausted or, even worse, acquiring all sorts of injuries. Anyone who does their share of aerobics, running and dieting knows that when you do enough impact activity, it inevitably stresses the joints to the point of inflammation and pain and that once you come off that strict diet, the pounds just start piling back up again.
Fortunately, there is a better way! And that better way means striving towards workouts based on the latest insight from sports medicine and the wisdom of yoga. With this approach, the goal is different. Working out is no longer about getting in shape at any cost. Instead, the goal is to get or maintain healthy, athletic body composition while ensuring that your body functions in the most efficient way possible. As you maintain a healthy body, you have a lot of energy, your mind is stress free and you are productive in anything you do.
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Calabasas Style
With this new approach, the assessment is no longer about how many pushups you can do or how fast you can run. The assessment is about quality: structure and function. Through simple functional movements, you look at each set of opposing muscles and identify muscle imbalances. If muscles on one side of the joint are stronger or tighter than on the other side, they pull, and the structure and function are compromised. Eliminating muscle imbalance gives you more efficiency and, therefore, more energy as you move. Another way to create efficiency in the body is to reduce the body fat percentage that resists you and build strong muscles that help you. Eliminating the tug of war between muscles dramatically speeds up progress to more complex, total-body exercises that activate as many muscles as possible. Total-body workouts are most effective for people that want to lose weight and achieve other fitness goals. Additionally, learning multi-joint movements improves coordination and neuro-
muscular efficiency and builds more neural connections in the brain, creating more vitality in the brain and improving communication between the brain and the rest of your body.
Here is how and why. It is not surprising that over 80 percent of people have lower-back pain. Some people keep a natural curve, but for most, the curve is either flattened or excessively arched. When the curve is flattened, not only are the abdominal muscles so tight that they are pulling on the lower back, creating much of the discomfort, but they are also squeezing all of the internal organs. As a result, absorption of essential vitamins and nutrients and detoxification of the body through digestion are compromised. If flattening of the back is the case, the muscles of the back need to be strengthened more than the ab muscles to lessen the pull and, as such, return the spine to its natural curve. Deep yogic breath massages all the