Are You Activated? |Reset Your Body For Optimal Performance|

Do you know the feeling when one of your ankles hurts and you start limping, but then your other knee starts to hurt as well, and the same hip, and then you end up developing other injuries?

This is all because you were trying to compensate for your first injury, but this is not only happening when we’re injured. We compensate all the time. As a personal trainer in PureGym Brighton, the most challenging work is to re-teach clients' proper movement patterns.

Old habits die hard. If you were running in a certain way for years, it will be very difficult to relearn correct foot placement, stride length, arm swing, or just breathing optimally.

Most of the time, injuries occur because of a muscle doing a job that it is not supposed to, but the main muscle is not active and it puts a lot of extra pressure on the other parts of the body.

That’s why resetting correct firing patterns is so important.

Reflexive Performance Reset or RPR® is a system of breathing and neurological Wake Up Drills that help you move and feel better.

It’s based on Reflexology, also known as zone therapy, which is an alternative holistic therapy, involving the application of pressure to the feet and hands with specific thumb, finger, and hand techniques, often without the use of oil or lotion. It is based on a system of zones and reflex areas that purportedly reflect an image of the body on the feet and hands, with the premise that such work effects a physical change to the body.

"Reflexology is gentle manipulation or pressing on certain parts of the foot to produce an effect elsewhere in the body."

I heard first about RPR from Cal Dietz. He’s the coach who came up with the Triphasic System. Watching his seminar, I was amazed at how a simple one-minute massage can make you stronger. Turned out it wasn’t the case. RPR doesn’t make you stronger per se, you should think of it more as a lighting system. If the wires connect in the wrong way, the lightbulb is never going to work.

Your movement patterns are the wiring system, your force production is the lightbulb.

RPR resets your body for optimal performance. It can fix old injuries, prevent new ones from happening, and it can make you a better athlete in just a matter of a few minutes.

It All Starts With Breathing

I wrote a whole article about the importance of breathing (link), and the same goes here, too. Creating a calm, relaxed state is the starting point to reset your body.

Belly breathing is not just going to put you in a parasympathetic state*, but moving your diaphragm will active your psoas muscle as well.

*Sometimes called the rest and digest system, the parasympathetic system conserves energy as it slows the heart rate, increases intestinal and gland activity, and relaxes muscles in the gastrointestinal tract.

Zone 1

We differentiate 3 zones in the RPR system.

Zone 1 is the core.

That’s where everything starts. It houses our two survival mechanisms: breathing and walking.

We need to breathe and be able to walk (getting food) to survive, so we should optimize these two primal functions first.

To help to get more oxygen and to increase breathing cavity, we can open up our airways with massaging the chest and the ribs in a reverse “Y” shape.

The Psoas Major is the biggest hip flexor muscle, hence it’s should be the strongest, but this often gets tight and dormant because of our sedentary lifestyles.

The Psoas and the Diaphragm are attached. With deep breathing, as the Diaphragm moves the Psoas activates as well.

Together with trigger-point massage, we can really fire up this muscle for a fully functioning hip flexion (raising your leg).

Now, as the airways are open, we practiced belly breathing and activated the Psoas Major (hip flexion), we have to optimize hip extension as well.

The biggest hip extensor muscle is the glute. One of its many functions is to bring your leg back down and behind you (walking, running).

It’s fascinating how we can compensate for the weakness and the lack of stability in the biggest muscle in our body and never really use the glutes to its full potential.

After turning the glutes on with RPR, many athletes who were training for years are amazed by the results and the fact that their muscle was sleeping or firing incorrectly.

In most cases, activating zone 1 fixes most issues for athletes, but sometimes we need to go further and focus on other muscles like the hamstrings, quads, abs, neck or shoulders.

Don’t forget. We always try to compensate for our weaknesses. If you have back pain, it could be caused by the weakness of the glutes or abs, shoulders can hurt because of a tight chest, and knees can be overworked by the lack of ankle or hip mobility.

It’s all connected.

Always start with zone 1, then move out to zones 2 and 3.

This all can be overwhelming or might sound bogus.

Thankfully, RPR is easy to learn and I’ve found that the results are instant. Also, with the new self-application system, you won’t need a practitioner either.

I can teach you how to use trigger points on yourself to reset your muscle’s correct firing patterns.

To book your reset contact me <here>

Or at contact@traincompleat.com

And for the first time, you can learn RPR online trough my video course. Sign up here

Train ComplEat

Coach G.