Speaking “THRIVE”

We’ve had a lot of new members working out with us recently in the Restorative Fitness Department at Thrive.  I always love the opportunity to coach someone new and have found a lot recently that it’s given me the chance to talk about some key principles we use. If you’ve been in the program for any length of time, these themes should not be new at all.  They are concepts that we understand to be tenets of our work here and vital to the ability to make real and positive change. They represent what Restorative Fitness at Thrive is all about. Here are four of those terms in a little bit more detail:

BREATHING– Breath is the origin of all movement.  In fact it is the foundation of both posture and movement.  Because of the enormous impact of breathing on our bodies in posture and in performance, we incorporate a lot of breathing exercises in warm-ups and focus on the mechanics of breath during our coaching as well.  Our bodies breathe over 20,000 times daily, so we feel it’s something that probably deserves some attention.

GROUNDING– Our ability to organize movement well depends on our ability to sense where we are on the ground and in space.  To effectively perceive position and posture we have to have a strong sense of grounding.  We train it and talk about it so much you’ll likely be so grounded you won’t remember what it is not to be.

POSTURE–  We don’t use the word “Posture” with perceived positive or negative connotations such as “good posture vs. bad posture”, but rather to reference the “Position” of the body and how the brain along with the respiratory and musculoskeletal systems produce it on a continual basis. We look at a neurological movement approach to optimize posture and performance. Posture is dynamic not static – the body has to move in and out of various postures and positions constantly.

MOVEMENT– It’s what we train for.  The human body moves in Three Planes of Motion- Sagittal, Frontal, Transverse.  To fully optimize movement, we coach you in all of them.  We believe in the mantra “Movement is Medicine” and know that the body needs a certain dosage of specific kinds of movement to function at its best.  We can easily add load and complexity to exercise, but the system has to be proficient in movement first.

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Meet Matt: Restorative Fitness Program Director

Matt brings over 18 years of experience in the fitness industry and a passion for movement and people! He has an insatiable appetite for learning and has always had a fascination with how things work. That curiosity first manifested during his studies at VCU and evolved over a life of navigating his own chronic pain and injuries and the search for information and hard-to-find answers. He credits that important journey, though, with truly learning the capabilities of the applied human body and the transformative power of strength training.