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

Reboot Your Movement: The Power of Pressing Reset Our tagline is Move better. Get stronger. Feel Great. That's what we do. In that order. So when it comes to getting stronger, the most visible aspect of strength training is weight-lifting. The concept of progressive overload — increasing intensity, volume, loads, and other variables— is what makes you stronger. However, lasting progress starts with moving well first . High-quality movement leads to high-quality results. That’s why we incorporate two separate but complementary systems into our programming: The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) and Original Strength’s "Pressing Reset" into our programs. The gist of the FMS is to identify what we do well, what we don’t do well, remove or improve the not-so-good, and add more of the oh-so-great. We include the FMS in every new client’s onboarding session and every program is designed only after we establish a baseline movement capacity. The FMS tells us what needs improvement. OS Resets are one of the ways we achieve those improvements. In this post, let's dig deep-ish into Pressing Reset as a foundational tool for better movement. What is "Pressing Reset?” Pressing Reset is a system developed by Tim Anderson from Original Strength that ”reboots” your body's natural movement patterns—the ones we developed as babies—to restore reflexive strength, coordination, and mobility . These simple, yet powerful movements (like diaphragmatic breathing, head nods, rolling, rocking, and crawling) help improve the function of your neuromuscular system, allowing you to move with less effort. Movement is a continuous loop of sensory input, processing, and action. Your body senses the world around you (through vision, touch, balance, and proprioception), your brain interprets this information and sends signals to your muscles, and you move. Each movement creates new sensory feedback, helping your brain refine and improve coordination over time. At its most fundamental level, the way we move is controlled by our nervous system. When it functions optimally, we move smoothly and with little effort. When it doesn’t, we struggle with stiffness (neural inhibition), poor coordination (inefficient movement organization), and pain (pain). Let’s break it down. Stimulating The Vestibular System The vestibular system , located in the inner ear, is responsible for detecting motion, balance, and spatial orientation. It has direct connections to the central nervous system (CNS) , influencing how we perceive movement and how our body maintains posture and stability. Purposeful movement—especially head and body repositioning—can sharpen this system, improving coordination, posture, and balance. When we Press Reset, we influence the vestibular system by performing controlled movements that change head position and spatial orientation. These movements provide sensory input to the semicircular canals and otolith organs in the inner ear, which detect rotational and linear acceleration. This information is then relayed to the brainstem and cerebellum, which integrate it with visual and proprioceptive feedback to enhance balance, coordination, and movement efficiency . As a result, movements become better organized and posture improves which lead to better exercise outcomes. The Role of the Vagus Nerve and the Autonomic Nervous System In addition to influencing the vestibular system, Pressing Reset can also influence the autonomic nervous system (ANS) via the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body, extending from the brainstem down to the abdomen and is a key regulator of the parasympathetic nervous system. It helps control involuntary bodily functions such as heart rate, digestion, and respiratory rate, playing a crucial role in promoting recovery, relaxation, and homeostasis by counterbalancing the stress-driven sympathetic nervous system. Essentially, it regulates the balance between rest and digest and fight or flight. Movements like diaphragmatic breathing, rocking, and rolling stimulate the vagus nerve, helping to calm the nervous system, reduce inflammation, and speed up tissue healing.(1) Stimulating the vagus nerve through resets has the additional benefit of speeding up recovery from injuries, reducing inflammation, improving neuroplasticity, and other cool neuromuscular adaptions.(2)(3) How We Use It at Vitruvian Fitness At Vitruvian Fitness, resets are a key part of our training philosophy. Here’s how we integrate them: Movement Prep Before Training: Resets help prepare the body for movement, reinforcing good posture and control. Done with intention, resets help prepare you for your workout so you move more easily and efficiently overall. During Rest Intervals: Resets are great to use as active recovery between big lifts that require extended rest intervals. We can also use resets to "course-correct" when form breaks down, improving movement quality in real time. For Recovery & Longevity: Performing resets at home between workouts can accelerate recovery and improve daily function. The Resets: Simple and Powerful They are so simple, even a baby can do them! Actually, that’s who we learned them from. Breathing – Lips closed, tongue pressed to the roof of the mouth, inhale and exhale through the nose. Practice this method of breathing throughout all the resets. Head Nods and Turns – Lead with your eyes, then your head, while breathing properly. Rolling – Move your body in various directions while maintaining controlled breathing. Rocking – From a hands-and-knees position, shift back toward your heels and return. Connecting the X – Engage cross-body movement patterns like: Cross Crawls – Alternating opposite hand-to-knee taps. Crawling – Move across the floor with contralateral limb coordination (like a baby). Marching and Skipping – Add cross-crawls for enhanced coordination. The Golden Rules of Resets: Always breathe correctly. Never move into pain or discomfort. Follow rules #1 and #2—no exceptions! Watch a demonstration of each of the resets on our YouTube Channel. 

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.