What having a bunch of friends helping you move has in common with functional training.

The Vitruvian Fitness Method to learn the Perfect Push Up The Perfect Push Up is an expression of strength that demonstrates serious determination and movement organization. Plus it comes with, in my opinion, more self-satisfaction than any other exercise after the Perfect Pull Up. Part 1 - The Set Up The position of the arms and shoulders is most important. Begin by lying face down on the floor and imagine looking down at yourself from directly above. You are going to make the shape of an arrow with your body. Place your chin at the imaginary point of the arrow with your upper-arms positioned at 45º to your torso and your hands directly below your elbows. If correctly positioned, your forearm will be pointed straight down or perpendicular to the floor. Looking down at yourself, you should look like a straight arrow with your arms flared out 45º. The reason for this is because when your arms/shoulders are in the 45º position, the joints and muscles are at their medium-est positions which, in simple terms, means they are positioned optimally to recruit all the muscles to help with the pushing up. It’s also healthier for your shoulders since you’re not rubbing up against any end ranges of motion. Next, drop your heels back and try to tuck your toes under your feet so your weight is resting on the balls of your feet. If your toes don’t bend that far, it’s ok but you’ll want to wear shoes. Whether your toes bend that much or not, you’ll still want to drop your heels as far back as you can. When you drop your heels, you’ll feel how your quads engage which is part of organizing your core to be as stiff as possible for the upcoming movements. After all, a Push Up is just a great plank with elbows that flex and extend. So, a solid plank is the precursor to the Perfect Push Up. Part 2 - Getting Stronger Push Ups are hard and take strength and good posture. Keep reminding yourself why you’re doing these - because people who can do great push ups have a lot to be proud of. In this part, we’re going to focus on the “down” phase of the Push Up. This is also known as the eccentric phase. It’s pronounced EE-sen-trick. (Not ECK-sen-trick like your goofy uncle.) It doesn’t sound intuitive at all but you can actually build strength faster by focusing on a very slow descent from the top of your ever-improving plank to the floor. So, get into the arrow position as described above and then get up into a high plank position by any means necessary. It literally doesn’t matter how good or bad it looks - just get to the top. Make sure your feet and hands don’t move out of their positions though. This is important. While maintaining your perfect plank – head, neck, core, hips, quads, feet all as stiff as a board – slowly lower yourself to the floor counting 5 Mississippi OUT LOUD along the way. When you reach the floor, take a breath and recommit to doing another 1. Repeat. Do this for a total of five 5-Mississippi Top-Down Push Ups. This all takes about 1 whole minute with 3-5 second rests in between each repetition. You’ve got 1 minute, don’t you? NOTE: You may not do these from your knees. They can only be done from your toes. Are they hard? Yes they are. You got this. NOTE 2: If you can’t time the descent to last 5 whole Mississippi’s, that’s OK. You’re still going to count out loud. If you get to the floor at 3 Mississippi, that’s fine. You’ve got 2 more Mississippi’s of strength to build. And these are hard enough that you might not be able to hold any Mississippi’s on your 5th rep. That’s OK! You know exactly where you are and what you’ve got left to gain. Start there and work on getting stronger. Once you’ve done five 5-Mississippi Top Down Push Ups, you’ve accomplished something terrific. Part 3- Repetitions The reason we never do Push Ups from our knees is because the difference between our knees and our toes is about 20 inches of body-length and that’s actually a huge jump in difficulty. Imagine if you were doing biceps curls with a 5 pound weight and then suddenly you had to do them with 25 pounds. (It’s not actually the same thing but the difference feels equally abrupt.) So, instead of doing Push Ups from the knees, we do them on an incline that we can gradually decrease which makes the Push Ups from our toes do-able and we can get in a lot of repetition. If you have stairs in your home, this will be super easy. In a gym, you can use a barbell in a squat rack, a smith machine, or anything you can get your hands on and gradually get lower. We’re going to use a “rep range” of 8-12 reps. This is important because this is how you’ll know when it’s time to increase the challenge. Your set up is the same as before - upper arms at 45º to your torso with your forearms pointing straight down and your heels dropped back. However, instead of your hands being on the floor, they're on the 5th or 6th stair up from the bottom. In this position, do as many push ups as you can stopping at 12 if you get there. If you couldn’t get to 8 reps, reposition your hands on the next stair up. If you did get to 12, reposition your hands on the next stair down. You’re seeking the stair where you can do at least 8 Push Ups but not 12. Can’t do 8? Make it easier. You can do 12, make it harder. Once you find that stair, keep working until you can do 12 Push Ups. That’s when you drop down a stair. Every time you get to 12, you drop a stair until you’re doing Push Ups with your hands on the floor. But what if you can do 12 Push Ups from one stair but you can only do 6 from the next one down? That’s OK! Do all the Perfect Push Ups you can do on the lower stair and then move back up one to finish the set. When the day comes that you can do 12 Push Ups from your toes and your hands on the floor, you’ve accomplished something so awesome. Congratulations! Be dedicated to the process and be kind to yourself. You got this. Curious to learn more? We encourage you to do a 14-Day Trial Membership. In 14 days, you will get a private onboarding session that includes the Functional Movement Screen® , then unlimited semi-private training sessions doing the program we design based on that first session. And you’ll get to be a part of one of the most inviting, inclusive, and fun communities you’ll find anywhere. At the end of your trial, you get to decide if you liked it and if you want to continue with a regular 6-month membership. All the options and prices are on our Membership page. Click here to sign up now! Our facility is conveniently located on the northwest corner of Denver in beautiful downtown Wheat Ridge.

How do you know how much of each to do? This is a great question. It may not surprise you that the answer is, "it depends." Some people love doing cardio. Some people love lifting weights. Some people dislike both. The short answer to this question, obviously, is both. Do both. Lots.

Heart Rate Variability – What it is and why you might be interested in it. According to experts, the key to a longer, healthier, and happier life comes down to these 5 things. I call them The 5 Things . A healthy diet. Abundant cardiovascular and resistance exercising. Sleep and restorative downtime. Stress management and mental health. Community. The famous Coach Ted Lasso, when challenged to explain the offsides penalty in soccer (or football, depending on where you watch the game), dodged the question by saying it’s kind of hard to define but you know it when you see it. Knowing if you’re getting the 5 Things right more often than wrong might not be as easy to recognize as an offsides violation. Until now. That’s where understanding and measuring Heart Rate Variability may interest you. What It Is – What It Measures – What it Means Heart Rate Variability (HRV) measures the variation in the time intervals between successive heartbeats, reflecting the beat-to-beat changes controlled by the autonomic nervous system. It’s an indicator of the body's ability to adapt to various stimuli, stressors, and activities. Things influencing HRV include diet, physical activity, sleep, and stress levels. Not coincidentally, that’s 4 of The 5 Things. Higher HRV typically correlates with better health and fitness, while lower HRV may indicate increased stress or potential health issues. HRV serves as an indicator of autonomic nervous system function, offering insights into the balance between sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) activity. A higher HRV suggests a dominance of parasympathetic activity – a good thing – promoting relaxation and recovery, while a lower HRV may signify sympathetic dominance, indicating heightened stress or fatigue. Understanding HRV enables individuals to make informed lifestyle choices to optimize well-being, manage stress, improve recovery, and enhance overall health and performance. It is objective feedback about how well you’re balancing the 5 Things . Among all the ways we might describe people, two of those ways might be 1) people who geek out on technology and data and 2) people who definitely do not. HRV Monitoring Devices May Appeal to Both Types of People I became aware of HRV monitoring around 2012 from Joel Jamieson - a strength and conditioning coach who recognized the utility of tracking trends in HRV to maximize training efficiency. One of his companies is called Morpheus Training Systems . (Update: Joel was a guest on the Peter Attia podcast in June of 2024 where he makes a really great in-depth and nerdy case for using his system for cardiovascular exercise programming.) Since then, several companies have developed convenient wearable tech devices that measure HRV and other vital signs and then provide guidance on how to improve them. I have been wearing a Whoop wrist strap for about 2 years now. I have friends who wear the Oura Ring and others who use FitBit , Apple Watches , and Garmin Watches . With some variations between them, each monitors your HRV and gives you actionable insights about what to do about it. Here are some examples of how HRV monitoring devices can help you. Sleep tracking. Every morning you get a sleep score that tells you about the quantity and quality of your sleep. If it needs improvement, the devices have advice how to improve. Recovery score. If you’ve been hanging out with me for long, you’ve probably heard me say, “Work without rest is a wasted effort.” You need to recover between workouts because the magic happens on the rest intervals. If you’re not recovered, you don’t need to add more exercise stress to your body. When your device says you’re not recovered, heed! Strain Guide. Based on your HRV, Sleep and Recovery scores, these devices will give you advice about how hard you should train that day - if at all. Health Markers. While tracking HRV, these devices also collect respiratory rate, blood oxygen saturation, and resting heart rate data. If any are outside of normal, you get advice about how to improve them. These data are often your first signs that you're coming down with a bug. Trends. Like a lot of information, there is often more value in seeing trends in the information than individual scores or values on any given day. The Point Ideally, all of us would benefit having the intuition and self-awareness to recognize how we’re doing without relying on tech. But the truth is, external feedback is often the only way we see ourselves. Whether it’s a mirror, friend, mate, teacher, therapist, coach, or a tech device – objective observations of ourselves is how we see ourselves. HRV isn’t a technological solution to a lifestyle question, though. Your heart has always beat with some measure of variability and how much so is an indication of how you’re doing. The fact that we can measure that variability with inexpensive wearable devices is a modern technological development – and a really cool one at that (in my opinion). If you can do this on your own, that’s extra-ordinary. But if you can use one of these feedback tools to help you develop your intuition and self-awareness, then why not? Use them. Learn how. Graduate. Share your new skills. If you would like to experiment with Whoop, you can use my super special link . You’ll get a free Whoop device and your first month of tracking for free. Full disclosure: I’ll get a month for free, too. And don't forget the 5th Thing and hug your friends. Resources: Joel Jamieson – 8 Weeks Out An Overview of Heart Rate Variability Metrics and Norms - Fred Shaffer and J. P. Ginsberg Outlive – The Science and Art of Longevity – Peter Attia, MD Blue Zones Curious to learn more? We encourage you to do a 14-Day Trial Membership. In 14 days, you will get a private onboarding session that includes the Functional Movement Screen® , then unlimited semi-private training sessions doing the program we design based on that first session. And you’ll get to be a part of one of the most inviting, inclusive, and fun communities you’ll find anywhere. At the end of your trial, you get to decide if you liked it and if you want to continue with a regular 6-month membership. All the options and prices are on our Membership page. Click here to sign up now! Our facility is conveniently located on the northwest corner of Denver in beautiful downtown Wheat Ridge.

New-Client Onboarding As part of our new-client onboarding experience, we take a detailed history of your health, catalog any injuries from the past or present, discuss a variety of other exercise-readiness issues and perform a qualitative movement screen called the FMS. All this to make sure we understand what makes you unique and special – so your workouts are not too easy and not too hard from the get-go. It’s the Goldilocks of exercise programming – just right. It's starts with a story about a car. Picture your car parked in the garage. In this scenario, you work from home. And because you work from home, you don’t know that the front-end of your car is out of alignment. If your car is just parked in the garage and you never drive it, it doesn’t actually matter that the wheels are out of alignment. Right? Now let’s say you do use the car but only for occasional short trips to the 7-11 a couple blocks away to buy beer and cigarettes. In this case, it probably still doesn’t matter much. But now let’s imagine you get a sweet new job that means you commute on the highway 15 miles each direction every day. Well now the fact that your front-end is out of alignment matters quite a lot. Now you’re driving at highway speeds, 30 miles per day, 5 days per week. After a couple weeks of ignoring the problem, the consequences of the misalignment become evident. At first, it’s uneven tire wear. And then the shock absorbers and steering parts quit handling like they used to. And then other stuff breaks and then it’s this, and then it’s that. The repair bills get more expensive the longer you ignore the situation and all this could have been easy and inexpensive to repair had you just fixed the alignment to begin with. It's not actually a story about a car. Now let’s imagine that the sweet new job is a metaphor for a new exercise program and that car is a metaphor for your body. Before you start doing a lot of new exercises, we recommend checking out how well your body and all its moving parts move. The Functional Movement Screen Introducing: The Functional Movement Screen , aka the FMS: a quick and simple way to evaluate how well your moving parts move. The Functional Movement Screen is a screening tool designed to assess movement patterns in individuals. It consists of a series of seven fundamental movement patterns that are evaluated through specific tests. These movement patterns include squatting, lunging, reaching, bending, and others. The purpose of the FMS is to identify movement dysfunctions, asymmetries, or limitations that may predispose individuals to injury or affect their performance. The FMS has its origins with the partnership of two physical therapists – Gray Cook (of "Cook Hip Lift" fame) and Lee Burton. While working with young athletes, they observed signs of movement dysfunction that frequently resulted in injuries. The pair created a system that helped identify inefficiencies in movement and a process to correct those inefficiencies before they lead to injuries. Since the mid 1990s, they’ve refined the system and taught it to thousands of health and fitness professionals around the world. We began using the FMS in 2010 when we opened Vitruvian Fitness. At our new-client onboarding sessions, the FMS is just the beginning of the process. Using the data we collect during the screen, we implement a variety of strategies to help our clients move better, more efficiently, and more safely. And all this leads to stronger, more powerful, more athletic. healthier, and injury resistant members. To paraphrase Gray Cook, “let’s play to our strengths, work on our weaknesses,” and move forward together to reach even greater heights. Curious to learn more? We encourage you to do a 14-Day Trial Membership. In 14 days, you will get a private onboarding session that includes the Functional Movement Screen® , then unlimited semi-private training sessions doing the program we design based on that first session. And you’ll get to be a part of one of the most inviting, inclusive, and fun communities you’ll find anywhere. At the end of your trial, you get to decide if you liked it and if you want to continue with a regular 6-month membership. All the options and prices are on our Membership page. Click here to sign up now! Our facility is conveniently located on the northwest corner of Denver in beautiful downtown Wheat Ridge.