Nomenclature: How to Apply the Language of Movement
Michael Hughes
Welcome to the Gymnazo podcast where you get to peek behind the curtains of what it takes to create and run a seven figure fitness facility that ranks in the top 5% of boutique fitness studios for revenue. But to be honest, that’s the least important thing about us. Founded by me, Michael Hughes Gymnazo has created an ecosystem of services that blend performance with restoration techniques and attracts top coaches to its facility hosted by donors Paden, and myself and our top coaches. This podcast shares our best practices on everything, from how to build a sustainable fitness business, to how to program for maximum results to how to build a hybrid training module that’s online and in person. We have marketing secrets, movement, innovation, and breaking down trends in the industry. If you’re a fitness professional, or fitness business owner, this is where you learn how to sharpen your skills and to see maximum results.
Unknown Speaker
What’s happening y’all welcome back to the Gymnazo podcast we are your hosts CJ Kobliska and Kaleena Ruskin, welcome to the show, we are going to go into a deep dive a rabbit hole swim into the matrix of what is nomenclature, how we use it, why we use it, why we find that it’s what actually one of the most important tools that we have as coaches at least here and Gymnazo. And I think, in the future of fitness to help us walk similar paths, and not only compete with each other, but also cooperate with each other and grow and learn together. So we don’t actually have anything planned on how exactly we’re going to dive into this because it is such a broad topic, but we’re gonna try to localize some points vocalized some points, so that if you are a coach, or you are an athlete, which every single one of us are athletes that we can move, we are in the sport of life, this will help you communicate to your body on a deeper level, and it may at first feel restricting. And other times, it may feel overwhelming because of the limitless nature of the nomenclature as it is a living, breathing thing. It’s not set in stone, especially not the Rosetta Stone. It’s can be putting in all different languages. But let’s let’s start with start with the simplest part. And I think cleanest says she’s gonna ask me this question, but I kind of want to ask her this question, because I think it’s important that we have we have similar and different perspectives on it. What the hell is nomenclature? What does it even mean? Nomenclature to me is our written movement language. So when you’re describing an exercise we actually have a written form of what that looks like. And it’s consistent so that when you any any person who reads it understands what the motion is, so not just a sagittal plane lunge, but okay visit anterior posterior launch when we say frontal plane lunge, is it a same side lateral lunge or opposite side lateral lunge, or for rotational lunges transverse plane ledge is it same side rotational is lob side rotational and then combining that with reaches I think, for us as coaches and for me, I’m I’m very type A and organized. So to have something that is more like a legend, or a key to movement is important. And it provides consistency for your training, because there’s all I feel like there’s like subtle tweaks, you know, there’s subtle differences. Every time you go to practice moving very good exercise. And it’s, it’s nice to have something to look back on be like, oh, yeah, this is exactly what I did. Or even working with clients, you know, very specifics of what we got into, to make sure that we stay consistent. But to me, nomenclature is a written movement language, so you can read it, and you can visualize exactly what every joint every muscle in the body is doing at that point in time. What is nomenclature? Do you I mean, you got it directly, but I think it’s it’s, as far as the simplicity of it, it’s just naming something. It’s, it’s putting a name to something. And I think there’s so many different nomenclatures that exist.
Unknown Speaker
So many different systems of naming things that exist, you go to different methodologies, let’s say you go to a kettlebell cert, or you’re gonna go learn the steel mace flow, or you’re gonna go learn Animal Flow, we’re gonna go live in the TRX, you’re gonna go learn some Olympic lifting, functional movements.
Unknown Speaker
There’s nomenclature for it sports have their nomenclature as well, for your position, you’ve gotten nomenclature. It’s a shorthand form of stuff to so you can quickly reference something and you do have a visualization, you have some you have an idea of what that’s going to look like a picture of it. And a lot of times I think, we either go there too quickly. We name something right off the bat and say that’s the name of it, and it limits it or we wait too long and it kind of just fizzles out in the motion isn’t really nice to have a name. And I think the prime example of a system that does work is something like steel mace flow, because you’ve got people across the world from speak different languages. They’re from different backgrounds, different styles of mace swinging traditional versus more functional versus more dynamic versus more performing art style.
Unknown Speaker
You can get the message across with
Unknown Speaker
by saying, like, Hey, I’m gonna do a cross body low switch. If you’re in the flow community, you have an idea of what that looks like. And is it specifically this? Or is it specifically that I think that’s where the document of nomenclature continues to grow is that there is room, there’s wiggle room for interpretation.
Unknown Speaker
And nomenclature in this sense, is just a naming of something. And so how we’ve done it, Gymnazo, is we’ve set a framework, a grid of 3d space, we didn’t set it, we just are using that as our framework as our grid, you know, we’ve got every personal trainer goes through some level of understanding the sagittal plane, the frontal plane in the transverse plane, maybe not necessary understanding it, but at least having a visual of like, okay, there’s something that splits us into a right and left side, there’s something that splits us into our front and back side. And there’s something that splits us from a top and a bottom, that kind of gives us a reductionist view of all the things going on. So I think where we, where we can start with this conversation, for our extent is, what does the framework if you had to describe the framework of Gymnazo nomenclature, it comes from applied functional science gray Institute, but we have definitely grown it because of the equipment we use the people we train. And then the thing is that we want to progress. And so I guess my question to you cleaner, or something we can dive into is, if you had a visual representation, or a way to kind of pull somebody who has no idea what this whole 3d nomenclature is, doesn’t come from the personal training side, they’re just that say, they’re 45 years old, they’ve kind of done some functional training here and there some hit style training some CrossFit here and there, but they never really understood the language they know, like a curl and oppress and swing. How can we pull people into this web of understanding this, this language that we use here? It’s cool, because nomenclature is a language that you can feel, right? Like you move through it, so you can articulate what you’re doing, as you’re doing it. And so that’s how I like to, like, bring nomenclature into our workouts, even describing it using the same language that’s, you know, we have our for our workouts, we have nomenclature up on a board that’s displayed for everybody, really, it’s there for the coaches so that we can remember what we’re doing. And see then have reminders. But I love when clients try and figure it out, like what is this mean up here, but so they’re understanding their own sort of like, body movement and awareness and bring people into that is kind of fun, because not everybody is connected with their body, or has an understanding of what they’re capable of, and how to move through 3d motion. So it’s fun to articulate that and then see them kind of like go through that process. And you know, as coaches and trainers, we’ve all had that client who just,
Unknown Speaker
oh, yeah, I want you to take a one step forward with your right foot, like left foot goes backwards. Oh, so close. So close. So it’s a good way to like get them to feel and articulate what their bodies are actually doing.
Unknown Speaker
I think athletes have more nomenclature, awareness, just inherently because you’re more in tune with that, but loving to just articulate and then having them experience it’s literally just like anything else learning a new language, you have to like, be in it and experience it and talk through it in order to understand it. Yeah. And be I think, being in it. What does that mean, you know, so I think what I jump into here is, is we are all surrounded by a giant sphere of potential,
Unknown Speaker
there’s a viewer to reach your arms up right now, that’s weak say is the top of your sphere. If you reach your arms out to the sides of us, and gives me a big ol hug, that’s the sides of your sphere. And then if you try and reach down to the ground and touch that’s the bottom of your sphere, when you’re on flat ground. And then you can also reach out in front of you,
Unknown Speaker
the front of your sphere, and you can try to reach behind you or you can turn in reach behind, and there’s the back of your sphere. So we have reference points, and many individuals have not addressed this potential, it just exists. But we don’t have any way to communicate to that potential. It’s just I do the things that I do. And I’ve always done them this way. And that’s how I do things. And I think the first step that we typically will take is that we’re going to become aware of how aware this person is in their sphere. And that’s how we can start to merge this language or more so bridge the gap from where they are to where they want to be also where we see that they can be or what’s holding them back from their where they want to be. So recognizing that there’s an environment that we are within, and that’s a sphere, we’re on a sphere, we’re inside of a sphere, we’ve got spheres within us, if we can start with that level of awareness, we can at least then build from there. So we start with the environment. And we’ll go into some of the observational essentials as you’ve gotten in the past because I think it’s important in the nomenclature is that those things are always there, even if they’re not written, they’re kind of given. We know that we’re in an environment in an environment can be a pool, your environment could be ground could be the grass, it could be on top of a mountain could be on top of a box on a wedge. And that changes our sphere of potential, right.
Unknown Speaker
When we’re talking about when we’re telling ourself to move and you’re telling yourself to move, and you know you’re in an environment you’ve stepped in
Unknown Speaker
What then is the next thing you’ve got to address if you’re gonna go move?
Unknown Speaker
Was how’s that? Does that make sense to you in terms of how you will then take your your first step, or your reach? Or your what’s a word we can use for that action? We need to activate something to do in our environment. Yeah, right. Your dive into actions, like things that we could potentially do, at least how we use the nomenclature. Yeah, yeah. And I think it’ll be cool to touch on like, there’s a formula for it, right? Like there’s a specific order in which we nomenclature because it flows better, right? And
Unknown Speaker
me, sure, we’ll dive into this later. But like why nomenclature, nomenclature is so important for consistency within our facility, so that every coach knows exactly what’s going on, and it doesn’t have, you know, it’s consistent. It’s not different between one coach and next on what this might look like, we know exactly your starting position, your environment. And then what’s the action? Are we doing to reach? Are we doing a poll? Are we doing a lunge? Are we doing a squat? Are we pushing? Are we doing pull ups? Are we doing a bench press, we’re doing a deadlift, like you need some sort of action? Are you jumping, hopping, dropping like all of these different actions have been no acquainted, but it tells you exactly what you’re doing. So we have an action. And in terms of exercise nomenclature, a cleaner said, Is it a lunge? Is it a squat, there’s eight of them that we we pick from, say that there’s lunges or squats, there’s pushes, there’s poles, there’s lifts, there’s reaches, and there’s locomotion, and there’s verta motion, and pretty much everything that we can do in terms of an exercise in terms of movement, which is limitless, can fit and recite one of those categories. If it doesn’t fit in one of those categories, I want to know we need to expand our list, like I said, it’s a growing document of words. So at least we have that framework saying these are the things that we can do as humans. Now, how do we do them, and not go into the philosophical side of things, but we just go into what are ways in which we can do that. And if we think about our, our framework of our 3d sphere, we can think that there’s, there’s heights, we can go, there’s directions we can go. There’s distances, we can go like an X and a Y and Z within that plane. So whatever action you do, it’s got three, three coordinates, it’s got a triangulation. So we’d say that those three are also very important when we’re going into nomenclature. Like how, how are you going to go? Or how low? How far are you going to go? How close from your body or from your starting point? And then in what direction?
Unknown Speaker
Cool. So we’ve got drunk, we’ve got a
Unknown Speaker
we’ve got environment, we’ve got a action and we’ve got triangulation. Yep. So I was gonna go to this, but you want to talk about drivers? Drivers? Yeah. What is actually driving motion leading, leading the motion? Is it your nose? Is it your eyes? Is it your hand? Is it your foot? Is it your chest? Is it your butt? Like there are all different types of drivers that start your motion or start your action? You go through? And then again, it’s like, okay, but that we use that triangulation? Where does that driver go? Let’s go dive into dive into that. Like, what is your favorite? You know, if you guys don’t know, CJ is the director of programming for juveniles. And he comes up with all of our workouts, and they’re just, they’re just badass. But, you know, do you have
Unknown Speaker
a process for how you select your drivers? Drivers? Yeah, there’s certainly a rhyme and reason to it. And then also some just creativity to some pieces. But think, what are our daily drivers? What are our what are our initiators of action, let’s say, some of the thing that we do most of in our day is gate walk, we go from point A to point B, we’ve got a foot that can be a driver. So in walking, our foot takes a step forward, and then our next foot takes a step forward, sometimes we got to step over something, so that foot has to drive it in a different way or different height. Sometimes we got to go upstairs or downstairs, so it’s stepping down. So I think I need to include foot drivers cuz we need to be aware of how we tell our foot what to do. We also have our eyes as drivers, we look around in our environment and are often scanning, if not all the time scanning, a lot of times we’re at the computer and our eyes are just looking straight ahead and they’re driving through a sentence reading something, right. But we’re out in everyday life, and there’s cars going, we’re crossing streets, we’ve got kids, we’ve got things happening, we got to see what’s around us. So eyes can be a big driver of movement. And something that I included a lot of my training and a lot of one on one training in group it can get fun as a tweak, if there’s too many cues out there at monkey off hand, but eyes as drivers, and especially the hands, hands if you’ve ever looked the you know, the homunculus it’s like the diagram of
Unknown Speaker
a human body and how much space it takes up in the brain. It’s like this funky looking creature with giant hands, big ol lips and like eyes like all these, these really big parts of the body are the ones that have the most space in the brain like most nerves and its associated pathways. So I think the
Unknown Speaker
feet, the hands the eyes, if they have that much of an impact in our brain, we need to include them in our training. So foot reaches, hand reaches and eyes in different positions. It’s amazing what happens when you squat looking straight ahead, versus squatting while you look to your left to your right, if you want your max power output, you probably should look straight ahead or find something that’s very stable. But if you were starting to challenge some of the deeper dimensions of stability, and affecting different parts of your brain, just turn your eyes and doing whatever lift you’re doing, you’re gonna be like that was significantly different, different challenge. So in terms of drivers, definitely feet, definitely hands, definitely eyes. Now, that being said, there are so many other important parts of the body, depending on what position we’re in what we’re doing in our life, our hips are powerful drivers, when we’re throwing something swinging something, lifting something, knowing how our hips can initiate or assist in sequencing of emotion
Unknown Speaker
is paramount to success. If you don’t have the hips included in the in the driver, we’re gonna miss out.
Unknown Speaker
Can you give some examples of like how we add hip drives, like okay, hip driver, well, what does that mean? What’s a what’s an exercise, that just by adding a hip driver becomes a more challenging or more functional, more intentional exercise, literally, our hip drive matrix called hip drive matrix was just taking a plank and turning it into a moving plank. So if you’re in a prone position, whether your elbows are on your hands play position, we use the hips as a driver to move through the hip. So a sagittal plane hip driver kind of looks like you’re flowing in and out of downward dog. But using the hips to decelerate motion, maybe not going all the way to the floor, but coming back to that neutral position. But you’re getting lengthening and shortening of your core tissues and of your hip tissue, which is going to again, make your muscles accelerate and decelerate motion, which IO and we go through all three planes you drive in the frontal plane, drive your hips side to side, you drive your hips, you say like pocket to floor, right, rotating the pelvis, a rainbow but as I like to call it making like make nice little arc with the hips. And it challenges your core to decelerate motion. And all three planes a little bit more challenging to with your thoracic spine locked into place because your hands are locked in feet, wiggle a little bit, see a little bit more hip mobility, but using your hips as a driver, functionally, you know, everybody’s like planks, great dude, like 17 minutes of planks or a minute of planks, and you’re just rigid holding position, which can be great, right? Isometric core stability, but no point in my life, in my day to day functional lifestyle, am I holding a position like that for a minute at a time, what I do need is core strength through motion, I need like stability through motion. So adding in a hip driver challenges your tissues to have more stability, but through controlling massive momentum, which is every single day, you know, I go to pick up a box or pick up my daughter or you know, throw the dog around, you know, that’s like you need that stability in that action. But it’s uh, other good ways like proprioceptive ly, challenging somebody to use their pelvis as a driver as opposed to
Unknown Speaker
their arms or their back, like, how often do we see people who have poor sequencing when going to just throw something, or squat, pick something up, hips, like left in the dust, like the hips, like, what are the me, they’re the most powerful part of the body, literally, hips are the most powerful part of the body, and they need more love to do. And I think that’s why it’s important to understand, as we dive deeper here,
Unknown Speaker
we’re setting a framework and we’ve we’ve, we’ve talked about the environment, we’ve talked about an action, we’ve talked about the triangulations, the height, direction and the distance. So you know, how far are you gonna drive those hips? Are we going initial range or medium range or end range? Each of those have a purpose, don’t always just go end range. Sometimes we gotta go initial, if you’re only going to this will probably work your end ranges, let’s work the spectrum of effort.
Unknown Speaker
That being said, we haven’t talked about something I think is even more important than all the rest is. Where do we start? We assume that we’re starting in a standing position, or we assume that we’re starting in a plank position, we assume that we’re, you know, these ones that we’ve been taught the standard, which are very sagittal plane dominant positions, a way to just step outside of your comfort zone and expand your box is to look at what position you’re in while doing these things. I’m talking about traditional lifts are fantastic. Building strength, building speed, are we going to stay in those same positions, because that’s where we have the best leverage. While in real life, we may not be in the best leverage position, or can we start to ask our body or communicate or into our body in such a way that we say, okay, we’re in a disadvantageous position. This is actually a very dangerous position. This is a zone that I go, Oh, shit, I don’t think I should be moving from this. What if we put ourselves into some of these not nothing crazy positions, just outside the norm of traditional lifting. We go into biasing a plane of motion. And I’ll preface this to say we talked about a lot of planes of motion. And this goes around in this industry quite a bit. It’s like yeah, but you’re using all three planes all the time. Yes, we totally get that you’re always rotating every single joint and every part of your body you know, or every time you’re doing a motion
Unknown Speaker
But there are parts that you’re isolating, or you’re trying to integrate on a more global or more local level, that if you are aware of the communication to that to your body in that position or in that action, you can actually collect more movement data proprioceptive ly, for your body to make a better decision in real time. So while we’re training, we’re consciously integrating a specific plane, which we know is going to integrate all their planes and other parts of the muscle, but we may be isolating a certain area of fascia, or a certain chain of motion motion, that brings awareness to something that may have been a dead space, an area that’s not getting the love. So what are some positions that we use standard, I think in our nomenclature, not only in one on ones and with ourself, but in group. Now our members have actually started to understand some of the nomenclature. I mean, we could use kneeling position, kneeling position, upright stance,
Unknown Speaker
prone, supine bridge position. quadrat is our is the new unlike tabletop position, where you have bent knees underneath you, so it’s not a full plank position. But that tabletop position,
Unknown Speaker
single leg balance, you know, all these different, you know, you can benchpress different position, right? We can have one foot on the box, no, all sorts of asymmetric loading that we use, which I think is way more functional than just being in one, completely balanced, traditional setting. I think most of the time, people go, Oh, I hurt myself doing this. What was it doing? It was doing something that they they deem, quote, unquote, weird and funky, but that’s weird. That’s life. Life is weird and funky. So I think it’s ironic that traditional training has you train in these super safe, rigid, structured motions, but that’s not life. You know, that’s like we don’t we don’t move like that. My favorite right now are all the parody videos for like how you put your backpack on and it’s like, you’ve just turned into a hang snatch. And it’s like, all of these super rigid motions. Like I’ve never seen anybody put their backpack on like that, because it’s not it’s it’s harder, right? It’s more work to try and do that than to just like, rotate and bend over and grab all that. But that’s, for some reason. That’s how we’ve been convinced that that’s a functional style of training. But I think too, you bring up a good point, like the love the parody videos of like, Hang snatch with the backpackers. And then he walks out in his arms read like straight lines, it’s all sagittal from a plane. Yeah, no transverse no rotations.
Unknown Speaker
I think as a society, especially this Western culture, we’re just unaware of the positions that we’re in, in our day to day, and the only real conscious physical thing we do potentially is at the gym. That’s the one time we’re conscious. And if we’re conscious at the gym, how can we use that time, if it’s 45 minutes to an hour and a half, let’s say for the average individual three times a week, they come in, and they’re doing primarily bracing, core sagittal, plane lifts that are building strength, they are getting stronger, they are losing weight, they are feeling more active and powerful than they were 10 years before. But they’re feeling achy or some discomforts here and there, and like they can’t, they’re still afraid to go play rec soccer or go on that trail run or go do the opposite horse race, because they don’t want to hurt themselves and ruin the progress that they’ve made with their training. And I think this is where there’s an opportunity to kind of flip that script is that well, if we can bring in some of those positions that you unconsciously visit throughout your day, you go pick up a shoe off the ground, just say about how you pick up the shoe, every single person who’s thing about this right now probably is doing it in a slightly different way. Even if it’s a if it looks pretty close, they’re probably doing it slightly different how the hip is how their knee is, at their back is Which hand did it which foot did it which angle they’re at, right? Or how you pull the water filter water jug, the Britta out of the fridge
Unknown Speaker
or how you loaded the top load washer? Yeah, or unloaded your dryer. This one is positions that we don’t necessarily think are that important. It’s just we’re doing chores, they’re actually physical experiences, physical opportunities to connect deeper to our body. I’m not saying you need to have a great time. I’m gonna go do the laundry later and say I got my reaches and my squats and lunges in but we can be aware of, okay, I just reach for something I got a little twinge in my back. Oh my gosh, I haven’t done any rotation training at all the past five years. Maybe I should integrate some rotational training. If we can bring in some of these positions that maybe aren’t exactly like real life but split stances.
Unknown Speaker
Toes inner toes out
Unknown Speaker
wide or narrow feet, and some singly bouncers, some kneeling positions. I mean, we see it day in day out of the the level of success people come in with all the level of excitement they come in with saying like, Oh my gosh, I did this. I walked up my stairs other day and didn’t use the handrail.
Unknown Speaker
I reach for something my kid was falling and I was afraid that I was interested my shoulder and I was fine.
Unknown Speaker
You know, there’s so many examples of day to day things that we just write off as like I’m getting older. This is just
Unknown Speaker
is how it is
Unknown Speaker
I made stupid mistakes, and now my My body hurts, I’m just gonna have to reap the the consequences of it. Versus we can change that script inside of the gym and say, let’s work these positions. And let’s talk about these positions in a way that aren’t just about lifting. They’re about making you better in real life.
Unknown Speaker
And one thing I want to reiterating to like if we’re in these quote unquote, funky positions, we’re, we’re doing sub Max loading. Right, this is not, you know, powerlifting. If you’re trying to max out, you’re gonna want some structure to that, but in my day to day and no point in my deadlifting 185, outside of the gym,
Unknown Speaker
doing it wrong, I love traditional I love some traditional lifts, and powerlifting. But I’m not going to do 185 with rotation and like a single leg balance, like I personally can’t, I’m sure there’s some people can, but that’s like that’s different. But if I’m taking a 10 pound mace or a 10 pound fighter and adding in some rotation and doing some crazy, like, that’s a different, I’m providing my body the capability of motion, not just like lifting does not have to be your strength training does not have to mean Max loading all the time, it could be sub Max loading and just teaching your body how to how to understand movement with load. I think it’s yeah, a key point to understand, should definitely dive into that whole sub Max loading things, I think it’s a different way of looking at training, it definitely exists in the the hit style training that’s outside of the powerlifting realm. But a lot of people are going either to light, like they’re not feeling the action, it’s in its entirety, or expressing it entirely, and say, Okay, I’m not getting any benefit out of this. Well, it’s one thing to swing a five pound weight from your hips, the opposite side shoulder, like seat belt, swing, diagonal swing. So the second thing is swing that thing for 45 seconds with some speed, and stopping or accelerating and decelerating very quickly. So you feel your fascial lines, essentially working in that pathway. You do something slow, and you don’t feel very much you do something fast, your body’s like whoa, we gotta get some other receptors on board here, because we’re gonna fall over, or oh my gosh, my foot kind of twisted this funky way because of that momentum. So exposing again, I think it’s it all comes down to more movement data, so that you can be better off in real life and enjoy yourself and not be afraid of hurting yourself because you haven’t trained for that thing. You can want to go play catch.
Unknown Speaker
Have you done any rotational single arm swings or like med ball catapult throws or some kind of angular motion with momentum? Maybe, maybe not. And if you haven’t, you should probably get a good dynamic warmup before you go throw, play catch. But if you have been doing it, who’s to say you need to go do a 1015 minute warmup, just go pick up that ball and throw it because your body’s ready to go down that pathway. Whatever we train it for with pressure with consciousness with load, something that puts tension on our body, our body’s going to adapt to that stimulus. So if we’re just putting heavy heavy weights on it, we’re gonna be so fucking strong. We’re gonna be strong. But Are we strong, just in that motion pattern Are we strong in life and when I see when I think of strength, strength isn’t just how much weight you can lift. That’s such an
Unknown Speaker
prehistoric way of looking at strength and I think it’s a very important gauge of strength as people know it but strength can be mental it can be physical, it can be spiritual and strength can be multi dimensional and a different ranges and relative to the task that you’re doing.
Unknown Speaker
If the task is to do a max deadlift, and that’s your definition of strength, more power to you. But if somebody has another power, another definition of strength that involves their ability to carry their laundry basket that’s full of kids and there’s their team one trip they’re trying to do all in one to the laundry room. That’s pretty damn strong. In my book, yeah, you can carry the groceries from your car to the house. One trip six bags wonder for sure. Let’s go Is it dangerous?
Unknown Speaker
You’re gonna get gauge momentum, because it’s the bags nowadays people bags can trust No. Different game. I still try to trust them. No, scooped through like okay, I sent something moving. Shit the whole bag rip, you know, do what you can. Yeah. Alright, so let’s let’s tap at dive back into the structure that we’re talking about. We’ve had, if we look at it in order, we’ve got seven things now we’ve got an environment, we’ve got a position that we’re starting an environment that we’re in position, we’re starting in the driver of whatever action we’re going to do. So there’s your four, driver of the action, they action, and then where’s the action going? So direction triangulation right. Yep, we get the height Where’s how high is it? And then how far are we gonna go? Um, then I think those last three which are important modifiers of that exercise nomenclature, which are the standard in the in the industry, adjust speed, adjust the load and adjust the time, or the duration of doing those things. So we’ve got that set of foundation those 10 things when we go into
Unknown Speaker
Talking about actual exercise, we’re teaching somebody a new exercise, we’re not just teaching them a curl. We’re not just teaching them a snatch which all these have their own cues and important pieces, that of how you’re stacking your hips, how you’re stacking your shoulders, when we start to get into more dynamic three dimensional movements, we’ve got to think about the intent of what’s going on. And the intent is when people come in, they’re going to do the action. And then everybody does it just a slight bit different because of their body, what they’re asking their bodies to do, how we can see the communication that’s going on internally,
Unknown Speaker
some freeze.
Unknown Speaker
Like I have no idea if she in the mirror, and others are going for it and looks completely off. And we can make some adjustments. And others aren’t have this developed communication where like they can read a movement exercise sentence,
Unknown Speaker
and then figure it out as they go and find the fluidity or find the intent along the way.
Unknown Speaker
So let’s talk about some examples of movements. We’re just gonna come up, come up with a spot.
Unknown Speaker
And then we’ll go from there. Let’s let’s let’s come up with instead of just a lunch. All right, you have lunches today. What’s a gym Nazo FIDE nomenclature, lunch that may we may have had an workout today?
Unknown Speaker
Great. We are going oh, do you want to dive just straight? Let’s go all the way. All right. All right.
Unknown Speaker
We’ve gotten an under bilateral hand under over grip at the mace
Unknown Speaker
with
Unknown Speaker
opposite side, lateral lunge, or common frontal plane lunch, right?
Unknown Speaker
With a reach or sweep that same side hand at opposite side knee to a single leg bounce. That was like that was a great example that was, but I think that was in the workout today. It wasn’t the workout today. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, and we’ve been talking about like the order of what when we say with versus then versus to how that now structures your movement pattern. And like the sequencing of it, especially when you have a complex move, or two moves going from a lateral lunge, to sagittal plane lunge, or an anterior lunge. Whether it’s a reach with at the same time, or then or after, right, the sequencing of your of your action. And the sequence of multiple body parts is different. I mean, like, that’d be such an interesting topic, just in the fitness industry in general. We have no real nomenclature, but is it because it’s too complex. So we haven’t we have, it’s easier to just say, like, do a bicep curl, do squat without having to you know, because for every person that’s relatively easy to picture and understand, but if you say, all right, you’re gonna go, right, you know, right hand power block at shoulder, opposite foot does the same side lateral lunge with a reach at knee to a single leg bounce to an overhead press.
Unknown Speaker
I was like, wait a minute, I love what you just said, because I just visualized the whole thing. But people are going to what the cleaning and talking about she’s speaking hieroglyphic language, Wingdings over there. Let’s break that down. Because I think you brought up a lot of beautiful points of the complexity of it, and how that can actually steer people away from wanting to branch into some more functional movements. Because it’s, it’s too complex, it’s too weird. But more. So I think as a trainer, I just don’t want to be wrong, and then take my take my client through, something’s going to hurt them. So let’s first realize that any movement one person can do, you can build strength in that motion pattern. Yes, and that strength involves the range and like the strength in the length. So we can, there’s a spectrum of effort, if we just take the simple thing of just a lateral lunge, you literally take your foot to the side, and you come back home. So great exercise in and of itself. It’s a boring ass exercise in and of itself, not a bad thing. And I’m gonna say boring is bad. But if you get stuck, and just I do lateral lunges, now we are getting lost in only doing something in one plane, that we are structuring our body to handle just that motion. In life, it is more complex, there are multiple drivers, we have lower body, we have upper body, we have our brain, our own thoughts going on. Sometimes we’re not even thinking about what’s external. It’s just what’s happening inside of our body. And a lot of times we’re only external weren’t even thinking about what’s going on inside of us, we’re just reacting to our environment. So in order to set our clients up for success, we need to be able to progress an exercise, not always to just the most complex thing possible. But in order for them to communicate to a lower half and upper half. And then to do that, with fluidity to do that with intent so that what they tell their body to do, is actually doing that thing, or is their body subconsciously, compensating bailing out somewhere, or showing that, hey, I’m not ready for this level of progression, though, they might be able to do something in real life in reaction mode. As soon as we break it down and say, Hey, let’s slow this down a little bit and put into some parts and reduce it. It’s like saying, hey, let’s let’s assess your gait. Somebody walked in and now all sudden you’re assessing their gait and like, I don’t know how to walk anymore. Joining the thing about my toe in my heel striking first, my left hand swings back when Where do my eyes go? And am I supposed to flex my cord? When do I breathe? So hold on
Unknown Speaker
Let’s, let’s step back from this, it says more. So let’s just look at the basics. So let’s, let’s start with the we’ve already looked at the 10, OES. Now an actual exercise written in its format so that we can dive into the to the when the with the ands and all that other conjunctions,
Unknown Speaker
how we write it at Gymnazo. And with our MDM CS is we start with just addressing the position that you’re in and the tool that you’re using.
Unknown Speaker
Fall back, comma. So let’s say we’re going to do a,
Unknown Speaker
a dumbbell lunge. our start position before the comma is bilateral hand, dumbbell at shoulder.
Unknown Speaker
Comma, we’re ready to go. We are in position we are in our environment. We assume we’re in an upright stance, but we could also do this from a kneeling one. Right? Let’s do an upright stance, bilateral hands at shoulder. If we can get somebody in a start position, they are successful. And now we can build on top of that. It’s like, Oh, why don’t teach our kids how to read. Here’s a book.
Unknown Speaker
They may be able to teach them how to read but chances are they need to know what letters are. They need to know what words are how to sound stuff out context clues of making meaning. So how we make meaning with this and nomenclature is we start with the foundation. When you know what all these words mean, first of all said bilateral, and what’s a what’s a dumbbell, maybe just what isn’t a dumbbell. So it may be worth just introducing some simple things with the dumbbell aka curl your standard traditional lifts. They don’t know how to do that. And now you’re gonna go into something really dynamic, it’s not going to work very well, probably no, you can try it. The movie learn by doing but let’s start with a beginning position. Then we go into after the comma. So by the end power block at shoulder, nobody know what’s our action? Where are we going? How far are we going? How are we going and so triangulation with our action,
Unknown Speaker
and then any modifiers let’s keep it simple. It’s a lateral lunch. So to the side,
Unknown Speaker
the action has a lunch.
Unknown Speaker
And we come back home. So that drill that we just said, Hey, do side lunges, we give them an opportunity to recognize that they have loaded their chest, they have a start position, they’re gonna go into it and come out of it. And we can build on top of that language, right? Let’s say we add to this clinic, we’re done with just doing lateral lunges, holding these dumbbells at our chest, we could add in or reach, cool, give me one reach, we’re gonna do a opposite hand, reach at
Unknown Speaker
the outside of the knee, that’s lunging the same side knee would say the same technique. So if we wanted to nomenclature it right, we sit because it’s like long form. We’re talking to somebody through this. But if we want to make a shorthand note on our sheet to note we did bilateral power block at shoulder coma. Lateral Lunge with opposite side power block or dumbbell reach at lateral knee.
Unknown Speaker
But then you come back home. So now you’re just reaching that one hand across the knee and pulling it back just added a whole bunch more things to this. Now we may not be going for just lower body. They were trying to teach somebody how to pull a weed, they’re stepping to the side, they see weed, they pull it like man, I do yard work, and I’m always hurting my low back afterwards. Or maybe in this drill, we just expose something that is a weakness. And we see how they do it. Are they doing it fluidly? Are they able to communicate to the opposite side hand? And what happened? Were they able to stabilize when they came back? Or did they lose balance, we now have a bunch of data points that we can help progress this person, we can either then reduce it and say let’s just work on the dumbbell reach.
Unknown Speaker
And let’s just put the lateral lunges and then put them two together. And now the progress is complex defying the motion. Can you add one more dynamic piece of that?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, all right, we’re gonna go opposite hand, reach at lateral knee.
Unknown Speaker
Then overhead press.
Unknown Speaker
Two like same set handle right press then seems okay. So so we’ll say
Unknown Speaker
alright, so start position you got bilateral hand power block at chest, right. Same side lateral lunge with opposite hand reach at lateral knee, hold. Then
Unknown Speaker
opposite hand overhead press
Unknown Speaker
to Single Leg bouts Shopsmith foot simulator. Perfect. So now this is actually beginning to turn into flow language that exists like with with sequencing multiple parts, it’s chaining them together. You can use any piece of equipment with any methodology, you chain one motion to the next motion and what is life is just a chain of one motion to another motion a chain of one position to another position. The experience is the transitions from those positions. We can be sitting at a desk for four hours, and then the nomenclature for that is seated and to your face computer.
Unknown Speaker
Okay for hours.
Unknown Speaker
We know things happen in that time. It’s
Unknown Speaker
Just like you’re training your body 24/7 for something, if it’s sitting down if it’s walking, and then in the gym, it’s lifting. Well, how is your lifting, carrying over to real life, clean, it just demonstrated with that motion with that nomenclature was somebody pulling a weed, and then tossing it into the trash can, and then reaching for something up overhead, or going into a single leg balance. So building stability on that one foot, knowing that when you’re doing your job, you’re not probably not doing the single a balanced project coming back to both feet. But you are now training for more than what
Unknown Speaker
you’re training beyond for what you need, basically. So you’re setting yourself up for more success in life, you’re making that easier, putting yourself through something more complex, a little bit more uncomfortable, a little more load a little bit faster, in that gym setting, but it’s carrying over directly.
Unknown Speaker
Now, where we’re going with this is that we’re essentially setting up somebody who comes in will no matter what level they are, in terms of awareness of their body of physical training, gym etiquette, whatever, we’re setting them up for success and finding the way that they are on their path. So that they come in, let’s say it’s didn’t really have discomfort, they’re just they feel weak, they feel out of touch with their body, and they just need a routine. Where are they? If we just start with our standard lifts, we may actually no, not ever know where they are, functionally, we only know where they are, strength wise in the traditional sense of, they can lift this amount of weight for this many reps, and we’re building strength, or they can go this fast, or they can go this far before they fatigue. It’s a, it’s not a great starting point to just have those data points, although those are good to know for your fitness sake, what about functional movement sake, we need to consider all of the motions that somebody may be going through on a day to day basis.
Unknown Speaker
Sitting, standing, walking, wondering the eight fundamentals that we talked about earlier. But I think where the most of the power sits in this is not in the ability just to help somebody build a bridge, it’s actually communicating across multiple channels of coaches and other trainers so that now that one person is not just stuck with this one person and their language and how they talk and then have to go to another practitioner, another doctor or another physical therapist, and say, it’s just all different languages. Where do I Where do I go, I can’t do all of these things. Meanwhile, we know that no one thing is gonna be good for the person. Sometimes you gotta go to medical, sometimes you got to go. Alternative, sometimes you just gotta go do some fitness, sometimes you got to do something yourself and go meditate. But if we have a universal language, something that unites us in this field, how much better it will be for the athlete coming in the client coming in saying, Oh, my gosh, you’re talking the same language that I know, or you’re helping me continue to grow? I’ve been working with these trainers, and then I go move here. And then you go to speaking something whole different. I feel limited. What has been your experience? From I mean, you’ve been here for eight years, at just Jim Nazo.
Unknown Speaker
learning this language, where have you seen some of the biggest wins the biggest gains, kind of those lightbulb moments of like, oh, this is like this is the power of the nomenclature embodied?
Unknown Speaker
I think seeing it, seeing it rollover into your clients and their understanding of movement and being able to articulate a complex move, you know, not to somebody who’s brand new, but for clients who’ve been here are vintage clients. So we came up with today, vintage clients.
Unknown Speaker
Yet the understanding of communication and how I mean, as a coach to when you can talk to your athletes and talk to your players, and they know exactly what you’re saying. It’s super powerful. And it just elevates their level of movement understanding I think from literally from an athlete perspective, when you’re coaching the game, whether it’s soccer, or football or basketball, and you’ve created a team environment and your teammates, your players, your coach, you all speak the same language, right and keep you on one page, you have a cohesive goal. But to be able to say, Hey, make this adjustment or do go do this and they know exactly what you’re talking about. I think it’s powerful in their their understanding, but empowering them to move and understanding their body’s nomenclature has been super powerful to be able to articulate that language and communicate to somebody what they’re doing and giving them awareness of their own bodies has been very, very powerful. I think it’s a struggle and other gyms or facilities when you don’t have that. I think it limits you in movement awareness and understanding and how you how you relate. I mean, like all of the best teams I’ve been a part of we’ve all had this language and understanding of what we’re doing. And I think that just translates over into the into our facility. Same way. There’s a with the nomenclature that exists. There’s there is a limitless
Unknown Speaker
framework, the framework is set, but you can expand in all directions with whatever intent you want. We didn’t dive too much into the full intent but it can be as simple as changing
Unknown Speaker
Speed changing the time you’re doing it and changing the load with what you’re doing, or the tool in which you’re doing it something with a barbell, versus a 45 pound barbell versus a 45 pound kettlebell, you do the same action, it’s gonna be a whole different experience.
Unknown Speaker
Or things that we’ve been included, which we’ll dive in deeper into other podcasts is things like chi, torque, or coiling, or flow and bringing in intent into your movement that now has an expression. And now as something that you can connect with and drill deeper,
Unknown Speaker
I really like to dive into kind of the whole emotional component of training. For me personally, sometimes I’m just training just to get my sweat. And other times I’m training like, man, what is going on here? And the nomenclature framework, 3d movement, AFS, it sets up a path that there is no end,
Unknown Speaker
there’s a beginning and you recognize where you start? Can you get back to that beginning position, something as simple as I want to do a common lunge matrix flow, you know the difference of okay, I’m going to, I can say out here and answer your laundry, do a lateral lunge, I can do rotational lunge. But I could go into your lunge. Then the other foot, do a lateral lunge. And then the other foot, do a rotational lunge. And it becomes this beautiful sequence in an art that I can modify. And anybody can modify. And I think that’s the beauty of it is that nobody, once you kind of have set yourself up in the nomenclature, you use it for how you need it.
Unknown Speaker
It’s a language that sets up
Unknown Speaker
that removes barriers, it kind of opens up doorways for somebody to go like I, if they’re in fear, I told not to do that. I told not to let my ego be on my foot, or today, we’re going to drive your knee beyond your foot.
Unknown Speaker
You’d say it’s a nice new zeal for toes guy stuff, or you say, Hey, we’re just adding a driver that’s knees over your toes. How’d you feel? feel fantastic. And along the way, you might find, especially if you’re a deeper diving scientists, and oh my gosh, this motion pattern that I’ve been working with with clients is now helping them out of back pain. What’s going on here? I just wanted to help them move better and more freely. But now these people are actually out of pain. What is going on here? Well, without the nomenclature, it’s really tough to say exactly what your what it is that you did, how we did some overhead presses, we did some lunges, there are 1,000,001 more ways to do lunges and depresses, you better tell me exactly how you did it. If you’re gonna say that’s how it works. So I encourage any coaches listen to this, any athletes listen to this, that want to be on a deeper communication with your body.
Unknown Speaker
Understand what’s on your body, drivers Hands, fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder, spine, hips, I was actually sitting in a yoga class once and they’re like, took me through a body scan. I’m like, all of these are potential drivers of my life.
Unknown Speaker
Like super family, but I use my feet and my hands, my eyes. But there’s opportunities there to just expand. And so it helped me actually get out of being stuck of like, there’s got to be more to this lifting thing than machines and heavy weights. I’m not feeling my strongest what’s going on? Yeah, I love hearing from people like how, you know, again, nothing wrong with traditional lifting. But for some people that gets redundant, and it gets repetitive, how many people don’t come back to the gym because they don’t know what to do, or they don’t know that. That actually, there is limitless movement potential. And it’s not just curled squats, machines, it’s so much more than that. And to be able to articulate that and find a flow, something that has transition zones, something that’s free moving and global, like our life is global life is not very local, like when it comes to actually like functionally getting up and doing things. And having that language, being able to articulate that and show people that so powerful, and so much fun. One of the things we think about one of the first drills we did like coming in learning about nomenclature is pick three things you do in your day and nomenclature it
Unknown Speaker
in and I didn’t realize how powerful that was. And even when I say when we integrate Institute, and they do the whole nomenclature, talk. It’s a long talk, just talking about language, but really embodying it and recognizing, wait.
Unknown Speaker
I’m telling my body to do all these things that I’m unaware of all these things that it’s doing. And now after write it down and become aware of what my body is doing without me telling you to do. Oh my gosh, you’re connecting mind and body. And it felt to me itself was like, Oh my gosh, there’s this path. I’m gonna walk for the rest of my life. I hope I was like it too. So it’s really fun to communicate with other coaches who speak it to speak to nomenclature because
Unknown Speaker
man coach Lucas, when I first started he’s he took us to nomenclature challenge and read like probably a five sentence exercise.
Unknown Speaker
And you know, you’re processing us one step at a time and it’s like, just go one step to the next step, the next step, the next step, okay, come back to the start position, one step to the next step to the next step, the next step and really recognizing that our bodies are so much more capable of what we’ve been
Unknown Speaker
led to believe, because we’re limited by our own language. I mean, even the English language itself, we’re using English to talk about movement nomenclature and write other languages themselves. But
Unknown Speaker
we think in that language, and another language is that it’s their thinking as well. But thinking completely differently. This language is one of those universal languages that is of movement that we’re not, we’re giving you truthful words, or words that come from truth of what you are doing. Like we’ve defined a lunge as this, a squat as this. And even so far as add terms like school lunch, it’s both favorite words, school lunch. And that’s just kind of how it has to it has to, we have to move forward. If we don’t move forward with this level of communication that is universal, there’s gonna be a lot of diff methodologies out there that are all separate. But there’s gonna be a lot more fighting in competition, versus understanding that we’re all able to move, we’re able to come up with novel things within our movement patterns, we just give them fun names. And the nomenclature exists in very simple reduced terms in terms of planes of motion, and an actions and directions. And it’s also in a very artsy way of expression. And so depending on which methodology you use, you can go either route, in fact, I encourage you to go the route of expression first, and just play around with stuff. And then how do you teach that to other people, they may not be related to that, they just see what you’re doing and want to do it, they don’t care about the artsy fartsy shit that you throw in there, and the emotions that are part of it, because they don’t, they haven’t built that bridge yet to themselves, what they can do is go through steps, do this, then do this, and then do this, and then just keep doing this, and then do that, to this with this than that. And in that process of, of weaving together our intent or action. That’s where expression can actually start to come out because we’ve unlimited ourself to what we thought we could do. And we just got taken through by another coach, taken through something that was a little bit weird, a little bit flowy sequencing and felt like I was dancing, but felt I was working out I’m tired and winded. That felt kind of good. I’m smiling at the end of this, these this nomenclature can help bring out these deeper layers of ourselves, the more we’re able to take others through it, and communicate to ourselves and see like, okay, where I’m at today, what am I capable of? What am I not capable of yet? Maybe I can’t do a certain weight or certain speed or certain range. But today I can do this range. It’s still an exercise. Maybe you’re not doing an ATG squat and asked to grass squat technical term, I hear.
Unknown Speaker
But maybe you’re able to do a medium range of motion squat today. Okay, we’re doing medium range or medium range of motion squat today and come to terms with that versus like, I couldn’t do it. Let’s put ourselves on the spectrum of effort. What is it we can do in terms of that motion? How can we down we can up tweak. And I think that’s one of the biggest things that we can do as coaches is to help others find their success threshold for that day.
Unknown Speaker
cleaner, and beautiful chatting. Do you have any closing remarks on nomenclature? steer people back? Hey, I know we just chatted a lot about nomenclature and said a bunch of funky words and hieroglyphics that you may have seen. Yeah, if if you’re a trainer who wants to know more about nomenclature and how we do that? How do you how do you articulate in writing what we just talked about? Where would somebody go to learn more about how we know McLean.
Unknown Speaker
gymnazo.edu has a beautiful set of classes, courses on there that we have our we have our full NDMC multi dimensional movement coaching certification, that’s about three to six plus month course, with group coaching calls where you actually ask questions, and we deep dive into different movement patterns and get good at speaking the language of movement. But if you don’t want to go that fully committed route yet, you just want to start to tap into what we’re chatting about. We do have a spherical movement course that was just launched. Earlier in June, it’s a beautiful way to not go too deep into the dive and the wormhole of words, but more so in just embodying the sphere of your movement and seeing the potential of what that’s what that looks like what that feels like a great starting point there. And then we have some courses along the way that kind of dive deeper into the philosophy of it, where the physics of it one of the biomechanics of the matter, and I think they’re all important, it’s just a matter of where do you find yourself gravitating towards? If it’s just for yourself, cool. If it’s for your clients, cool, let’s dive deeper and communicate. So we can start building this wave, even heavier. Party wave party, we have a nomenclature. Cool. Also check it out. Check us out on Instagram gymnazo.edu. Gymnazo. You can check out Kaleena, what’s your Instagram?
Unknown Speaker
Kaleena.Ruskin. Yeah, powerful stuff on there, girl. And then also on movement exploration channel. We use the nomenclature in our posts. And often we’ll if you have comments or questions about what that stuff means just ask just reach out. We’re happy to explain more. The best thing you think you can do is not assume you know what somebody else is doing because
Unknown Speaker
you saw it. Ask questions, ask questions, ask why. Try it for yourself. And we can all grow together. So until next time, y’all. Peace y’all. I hope you guys enjoyed today’s episode. And if you did, please share it with your fitness obsessed friends and peers who are also navigating this world of fitness and trying to succeed the trends and misinformation. As you guys can see, this podcast is basically a masterclass for trainers wanting to level up in their coaching skills, and a fitness business model. We launched this in 2020. Because you and your fitness tribe deserve to see an unfiltered look at all the aspects of what it takes to stand out as a next generation coach, and build a successful fitness business. So share it far and wide. And please, when you do do me a favor, take a screenshot of this screen and share it to your social media accounts and use the hashtag Gymnazo podcast that’s hashtag Gymnazo podcast that way we can see you and share your posts with our audience. And finally, when you’re ready to go to the next level as a coach, or in your business, and to reach more people, please go check out gymnazoedu.com. We have put together the best 90 Day coaching program on the market for trainers wanting to become a masterful practitioner and build a business that gives them the freedom and impact. So let us help you do just that. We have online training and one on one coaching to guide you through a whole 90 Day certification. We even get you 20 of our clients live because it’s always better to work out your kinks on someone else’s clients than yours. But we promise you this, your clients will be blown away by the transformation our program will help you make you’ll be masterful at a whole new level and part of an incredible community of coaches worldwide, taking their skills to the next level. So if you thought today’s episode had some fire to it, and inspires you to take action, wait until you see what we deliver on this program. So just go to gymnazoedu.com. And we’ll see you on the other side. Remember that turning your passion for fitness into transformation and sustainable business is critical to reaching the people and lives you were put on earth to help it matters and truly can make an impact in other people’s lives. So hope you do that. Keep sharing your passion and I will talk to you soon.
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