7 minute read
BUILDING FITNESS FROM THE INSIDE OUT
by Paul Collins
You know the routine— each spring after the lazy fall and winter holidays, you start working hard on conditioning for the climbing season. You follow the same routine that you have followed season after season only to find that, like season after season, you have invited injuries and, well, you haven’t reached the condition you imagined when you got off the sofa in January, or February, or whenever.
In my work, I help people think about their bodies and train them differently than they have in the past. I focus on a method known as the Internal Strength Model (ISM). Its principles shift the focus from external performance (how much, how fast) to internal capacity. It’s really about building your body from the inside out, strengthening the scaffolding so your performance can soar higher than ever before. It’s not about asking “How much can I lift?” but about asking “How well do I control what’s happening inside?” This all means becoming more intentional, pivoting to the quality of your body’s movements, tissues, and joints. This allows you to unlock your ability to perform at higher levels without breaking down.
In the following, I provide a synopsis— four points or building blocks, really—that are ISM and, in my view, a way for much more effective conditioning.
1. Outdated Training Methods and Shifting Your Mind
While you have trained hard, lifted more, run faster, and climbed higher, if you’re honest, there’s a nagging frustration—your body isn’t keeping up. The gains are harder to come by, injuries are starting to creep in, and despite all the effort, you feel stuck. The problem isn’t your effort. It’s the outdated, “chase-the-numbers” approach to training that most athletes are unknowingly trapped in. This mindset treats strength, speed, and grades as the ultimate goals, but it overlooks one critical piece of the puzzle: the health and resilience of your joints and tissues.
The fact is that the body adapts to stress in ways that bypass its weakest links, leaving joints and tendons to pick up the slack. When you repeat the same movement over and over again, tissues stop adapting, and weak points remain weak. The harder you push, the more wear and tear you invite, which leads to stagnation, injury, and burnout. This “muscle-through” mindset is a villain in disguise—setting you up for breakdowns instead of breakthroughs.
True athletic development requires mastering the internal mechanics before focusing attention on the external load. The Internal Strength Model (ISM) helps you build a stronger foundation so you can move with more efficiency and less wasted energy, reduce injuries, and build a body that can handle more, and break through plateaus.
2. The Secret of Joint Health
Joint health is more than being painfree. Since joint health is the silent force behind everything you do with your body, such as lifting, running, and climbing stairs. Joint health is about creating "workspace"—room for movement to happen effortlessly. Think of your joints as hinges. When they’re healthy, they allow you to move with effortless precision. But neglect them, and every movement becomes a fight against your own body just as a creaking door can resist opening and closing.
In your training program, you likely focus on building your muscle and strength but may neglect joint function. You would not put a powerful engine into a car with misaligned wheels. Sure, you might have a contraption that has a lot of power, but it’s wasted and inefficient because what it tries to operate is, well, inoperable. ISM directly addresses joint health. Something we call CARS (Controlled Articular Rotation) identifies restrictions before they become problems and helps expand your range of motion and neurological control. PAILs/ RAILs (Progressive/Regressive Angular Isometric Loading), on the other hand, strengthen joints at their end ranges, build control where you need it most, and create lasting improvements in mobility.
3. Joint Capacity
A gymnast who holds an iron cross from rings as if gravity has been switched off, a martial artist kicking above their head with effortless precision, and a climber gliding up impossible routes as if their body and the rock are in perfect conversation— each of these athletes has built strength where most of us don’t even realize we’re weak: at the edges of movement, in the places where things usually fall apart.
In your more traditional training, you might be doing everything right as you aspire to be like the aforementioned athletes, but somehow you don’t end up where they are. That is due to a lack of attention to what’s happening inside your joints, the critical foundations of your ability to move. The “inside-out” method that is ISM, which starts with CARS, asks you to make smooth, controlled circles with your joints that in the end expand their usable space. Then, tension is added to this till you reach the limit of your range. This builds resilience.
Once you’ve laid that groundwork, you can move on to more advanced techniques that target the deeper layers of joint health and strength. Each of the layers has a special name—positional isometrics, isometric ramping, eccentric neural grooving, and eccentric quasi-isometrics— but the goal here is to create space in your joints, build rotational strength, and layer on straight-line strength.
4. External Training with a TissueFocused Twist
After you master the principles of internal training, expand your joint capacity, adapt your tissues, and develop resilience from the inside out, you should then move on to external training. But here’s the twist: You will need to focus on tissue adaptation. While your traditional training program might focus on executing movement patterns—deadlifts, squats, presses, you name it—your tissues aren’t engaged uniformly during any movement. You need to shift to adapting entire tissues, making them resilient enough to handle any variable thrown their way. Ankle weights, resistance bands, and clubs are tools to do this. They help strategically load your tissues in order to create varied forces and oscillating challenges that adapt tissues in ways traditional weightlifting can’t touch. Focus also on rotational and anti-rotational training to challenge your tissues through complex planes of motion and train them to resist external forces. Through this combination, you will enhance your ability to produce force but also to fortify your body against injury.
One last thing: When you do external training, you should not be focused on trying to lift the heaviest weights in a controlled manner, but rather to push your tissue capacity to the limit with intent, and focus on precision. This means selecting loads that challenge your ability to maintain tension and control. By maximizing your internal effort, even with an external load that doesn’t look “maximal” on paper, you’re driving tissuespecific adaptation and building force production from the inside out.
Wrapping Up
The basic idea here is that you need to build strength that lasts. Start with internal training and progress to external methods with a tissue-focused twist. In doing so, you can create a system that’s adaptable, resilient, and built to handle whatever life throws at you.
Remember, external strength starts internally. The principles of intent, control, and tissue-specific adaptation are your key to sustainable progress and injury prevention.
Visit tinyurl.com/MazPeakCond to see a collection of video demonstration of the techniques discussed in this article
Paul Collins, owner and founder of Peak Condition, is a certified strength and conditioning specialist (CSCS) with a Bachelor of Exercise Science. He provided this synopsis as a general guide for getting people to think differently about training. Specific tools utilized in support of the four areas of focus above include a Joint Health Assessment Guide, Joint Capacity Training Guide, and Complete Guide to Internal and External Training
