Setting clear, specific fitness goals and diligently tracking progress are crucial for achieving desired results. Understanding personal objectives—whether for strength, endurance, or sport-specific training—guides the creation of an effective workout regimen. Emphasizing long-term health and functionality, especially with age, is key. Addressing common injuries associated with various sports through tailored training ensures a balanced approach to fitness.

Additionally, refining exercise form and maintaining consistent tracking are essential for continued progress and motivation. A focused approach to fitness, aligned with personalized goals, leads to better outcomes. By addressing both the physical and motivational aspects of training, individuals can optimize their workout routines for lasting success.

Highlights of the Podcast

01:23 - Importance of Specific Goals
02:33 - Common Issues in Sports
03:40 - Return on Investment
04:57 - Importance of Longevity in Fitness
06:12 - Functional Training for Daily Life
07:33 - Injury Prevention
08:56 - Balancing Strength and Core Stability
09:59 - Tracking Progress
11:09 - Focus on Form and Specificity
12:23 - Importance of Goal Clarity

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:03] Okay, so, I want to run through the listing properly. So, I talk about this a lot. I was talking with the patient yesterday who's been watching for a while. And it was funny because we started going over it, and I was like, all right, well, what are you doing? And he told me, and I was like, cool. How how well is that working? And he looks at me. He goes. What do you mean? And I was like, well, how well is it working? Like, how is it getting you to your goals and stuff like that? He is, I think it is. How long you been doing it? He was like 5 or 6 months and I was like, you have no idea if it's hitting you closer to your goals or further away or anything. I said, well, how have you been tracking it? He has, I don't know, I just go and I do my say and see how it feels. So couple things on this. I know I harp on this a lot. I it's super duper important. This is the basis for everything to do. I talk about how there's different workouts for what our goals are, and that's 100% true. You know, we have to we have to set our workouts according to our goals, but we have set our goals right. And then we have to track them. So we're we're we're trying to figure out what we want to do in the gym. We actually you got to plan that out. And so, you know, if you're like I want to get stronger. Fantastic. How much bigger do you want to get? Do you want to get bigger. You want a stronger. Is this functional for a sport.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:23] Is this functional for long term life. Are you are you trying to be a best offensive lineman or tight end or linebacker or soccer player or ballerina or female softball player? What is what is the goal? Because every sport has like people come in all the time and they're and they, they're like, oh, I'm a I'm a swimmer. And I'm like, okay, so your shoulders are going to be messed up. You've got back issues, you got neck issues. And you know, they go out like female soccer players union national players come and I'm like, okay, we have ankle and knee issues. And they're like, how do you know. Because every single sport has specific higher level damage to individual joints because you use them more. And so if you don't understand that concept of I am in this sport, I don't have access to force through this joint or this range of motion, then you're never going to be able to offset that damage. So for instance, when the swimmers do this all the time, it activates pectoral muscles so it doesn't roll the shoulders forward and their hands are going to come in and down because the pec attaches to the humerus right here to roll it out, which is going to give you AC joint issues and some contraptions from you, neck issues, jaw issues, things like that, headaches, tension headaches, that type of thing.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:33] And then people are going to mistake those for fatigue and they're going to tell you that they're tired all the time when they're just bound up, especially female swimmers, because women carry a lot of their stress between their bra line and the base of their skull. So we're doing a lot of work that to push stress and fatigue here, and then they're fatigued and stress there anyway. It creates secondary problems that we have to account for. So you've got to do lots of post to your backwards and post to your fly. You're going to post your delt, rhomboids, traps, things like that to offset the active motion, the repetitive motion, the pectoral driven especially because of pectorals or flexor groups. So and if none of that made sense to you, you definitely need to come to things set up properly. But that's the things we have to understand. Why are we lifting? Why are we exercising? What are we training like? I always tell people, you should never workout. You should always track. Training is working out with purpose. You you get your purpose from your goals. And then you set your tracking function from the goals you set. And so if we don't understand the goals, we can't track properly. And so we're never going to we're never going to move forward in where we actually want to be.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:40] So this gives people this is one of the reasons people stop working out because they go, I want to see results, which everyone should want to see results. That's return on investment is why you should do everything. And this is again part of tracking because if you go, oh, I went and worked out. I didn't get where I wanted to go. Where do you want to go? Well, I want to get better. Better how? I want to get stronger. Stronger with what? Like. Like what? What is. What are your actual goals? Dial them down because you're like, I want my bench press to go up to X, I want to I want to look like this. That's why I ask people to, like, bring me pictures of what you want to look like. You know, get you a judge, get in our head where we actually want to go, and then we can design how to get there. Once we get once again, this is why. So what I always tell people, we got to find out where you are, why we do the nutritional muscle testing, where we have a blood. So we do the imaging. Where are you today? And then where do you want to go? Without these two points you can't design a plan. And so when we start talking about, you know, how are you supposed to lift. That's entirely on your goals. So a lot of the stuff that I do when I just plan things out is I asked, you know, do you want to be the biggest, strongest in the gym? Most women told me, no, I've never had a woman. Do you? I would be the biggest, strongest woman in the gym.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:57] I've never heard that. I'm sure somewhere out there there's women who are like, that's my goal and I would love to work with those people. But anyway, that'd be so much fun. Anyway. But usually it's, you know, even guys on tell me that they're like, look, I want to be. I want to look good. I want to feel good. I don't want my joints to hurt. I want to be. Most guys are like. I'd like to be a little bit bigger. Usually what I hear is, like, I want to be bigger, but not like you. Which is funny because I said the same thing could go up and down. But, I mean, he's not that much bigger than me. So, you know, again, it is where it is. You know, we track everything through, but that's kind of the thing was, until we figure out where our goals are, we can't figure out what the best exercises are now. So what I'll do is I'll just, you know, if we're putting something together, I will always put it together. Unless for specific first sport, I will always put it together with longevity in mind. So the things are, you know, when you're 45, you should be able to move through daily life with zero pack. You're picking stuff up, moving stuff around, picking up boxes off the floor. None of that should hurt at all. And people, I heard it all the time because you're not you haven't trained your body to do those things.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:12] But and this is really important because if you're, if you're in a position where you're 40 or 40 5 or 50 and things hurt, you can't like your daily life like picking up a box or going to Costco and getting water or whatever, and you're like that. That makes me sore. How are you going to be in 20 years? This is a this is a dead serious question. If you're 40 or 45. And your daily life makes you sort of day. It's always going to degrade as you get older. So where are you going to be? And ten, 15, 20, 30 years. Like just go look back. Like where where were you when you're 25 and now you're 35 or 40? Is it better or worse? Yeah, that's a real easy way to just kind of start to get the idea. But what we always do is we'll say, okay, look, we need to all the joints have to work. And so we're going to make sure that we do extract extension function. Because that time brain function we a pushback against that. We got we got to make sure that, you know, the body's capable and moveable. The joints are functioning the way they're supposed to. And the number one thing we have to work on is balance and coordination. Foot, ankle, knee, have pelvis, low spine and on every single person. Because what are we. What is the number one thing we're worried about once we get past 55 or 60? Especially for women following, breaking, hips breaking pelvis breaking, things like that. That's if you said those things are 100% right.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:33] That's the number one thing we got to worry about. Ligament damage is right behind that one. But falling and breaking a hip can be deadly. And I'm 100% serious about that. How is that possible? You take a 75 year old woman who's active and doing things, and she falls and breaks her hip, and now she has to be sedentary for a while. Not good. We start seeing blood clots. We start seeing, muscle deterioration, atrophy, osteoporosis. We start seeing because there's lack of information from the body to the brain. We start seeing, you know, memory issues. It goes downhill real fast. What's in it? Lots and lots of times. So keeping all those things together is really, really important. So designing exercises that are specifically built around creating and maintaining postural function, balance, coordination, core functionality, is really, really important. And you can do if you decide to work out properly, you can do chest work that also build your core. You can do back work that also build your core. You can do legs that also build your core legs. The easiest way to build balanced stabilization and core functionality. So but just tweaking the exercises a little bit. You can get giant muscular function. You can get balance and coordination function. You can get brain activation function. You know, there's lots of different ways of setting it up so that you can get cardiovascular function just from lifting. So depending on what your goals are, it's going to radically affect how we design your program.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:56] And, you know, you might come in and say, look, I want to get a little bit stronger. I want to look a little bit better, and I want to make sure I have bouncing coordination stuff for the rest of my life. Great. You know, that's a pretty easy thing to put together. And then it's just as you start kind of getting on it than it would be now that you kind of are on the program of this. Is there something else you want? And usually guys are like, I want to see my abs and I want bigger arms. Usually women are like, I want bigger thighs. I want a bigger rounder. But easy. Okay, great. And as we roll through, we just put those things. We change those things up. We make sure that they're in. But the other thing is I make sure that you understand these are the exercises for balance and coordination. And here's why. Here's the exercises for your butt and here's why. Here's exercises for there for your, you know, your knees or your elbows or whatever, whatever we're doing. And here's why. Because once you understand why, then it becomes one of those things where when we start sitting down and we're like, well, what? What exercise do you want to cut out? Because we're trying to make it fit into a time frame and people go, I can't do this one because I so want I still got to have my wrists, my elbows work.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:59] I can't have this one because I want my shoulders. My shoulders are finally quit hurting this one health, right? Like my ankles aren't hurting or when I walk them down stairs. And so we start rolling through things like. What do you want to change? And so sometimes you can swap and exercise, you know, basically the same thing if you're bored with the exercise. But the biggest thing I'll tell you is if you're doing if you have a workout that's set up like this, where it's it's hitting all your goals, we're tracking everything through and we're, you know, our measurements of our body, our, you know, body fat function, our strength function. You know, the progress pictures are all going in the right direction. Often as well, don't change your workout. Get more specific about it, because I've been doing the same workout for two years, but I'm really, really specific about my form. So instead of just like, oh, I'm doing bicep curl, it's here's my elbow. Perfect because my shoulder perfect is my pinky rotation. Perfect. Am I extending my elbow all the way down? Am I relaxing my hand right. Is every single rep perfect. And they're not. So that's and that's that's the thing it's never going to be if you're if you're struggling against a weight, you're struggling. It's a wrap. Your form's never going to be perfect.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:09] And so that inner struggle has been the thing that's kept me interested and focused and my lifting, and so that's one of the things we try to teach my son on things that are really, really helpful. But when you guys are sitting there and you're, you're doing your workouts and you're getting tired of them, you don't know what's going on. You know, think about that. Like, have I put it together a goal of what I actually want? Am I tracking the things that I'm doing and and in trying to achieve that goal, you know, have I, have I done all the things I needed to do for this particular path? You know, and the thing is, there's lots and lots of things that people mess, that, you know, unless you've been thinking about kinetic motion from a neurologic function standpoint for a long time, you're probably not going to get that muscle fitness isn't going to get you there. So yeah, there's a lot of great trainers out there. There's a lot of pros out there. There's a lot of guys who can put these things more or less together. You've just got to make sure that, you know, you sit down. There's a lot of times where I'll build a workout for somebody and do 2 or 3, you know, modifications have stuff. And on a third or fourth iteration, that's all they need. Like they don't need a new workout every two weeks.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:23] You can program that in if you have to. But like I said, if you really, really well, these are my goals. This is what I want long term. These are the best exercises to get me to that point long term. And I just a really, really focused bore down on how perfect am I doing them. You can do the same exercise routine for a long time because you know why you're doing it. You know what the importance is? You're tracking your functionality and you're seeing that get better. And. Like I said, if you're getting bored, really focused on how perfect are you doing it? I guess there's lots of ways of doing these things. So if you guys haven't started to think about that for your workout, I highly recommend you do. Whether you're 13 or 40 5 or 70, it doesn't matter. Like figure out like, is this workout the very most conducive thing to my goals and tweak it. So like I said, there's a lot of and there's it's always funny because people ask me, you know, all the time like, well, how do you change your workout? I'm like, I don't like, I don't like so fast. I've added things to my workout, but my workout I do now, 90% of that amount of things I've added has stayed the same for the past five years. So, you know, again, we don't need a lot of variation. If we pick the very best function for the goals we have.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:13:36] The thing I think probably will get into is that people are not getting very specific with their goals, which is again, why the first thing that we always do whenever we sit people down and we're trying to design their program, is we go, I need to know your goals. I think my goals are always 7030 for you because you've got to figure out what you need and what you want, and then you have to tell me, because it's important that I have that information so I can design a program. But it's really important that these are really your goals because they're really your goals. You're going to work towards them a lot harder than if I make them up for you. So but figure out your goals. Make sure that your workout plan is dedicated to those specific goals, and then work your plan and track it. The return on investment is always gonna be the same. The reason why I can do the same workout over and over and over again is because I've tracked everything. Like I wear a, I wear a CGM. We were like, are you diabetic or not? This makes you think I'm diabetic. Like, I just I need all the information in my body so that, you know, the diet I'm doing so that you know everything. I can track everything through knowing where my sugars are. It's important. Knowing where your form is, is important. So check all that stuff out, figure out where you want to go. And if you guys need some help. Hit us up and we'll help you put some stuff together. After that. Thanks for your time. Have a good day.

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Dr. Matt Chalmers

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