It took us between 500,000 and 200,000 years to evolve from Neanderthal to Homo Sapiens, and less than 300 years to turn it all to shit.  Sometime around 1760 the Industrial Revolution began and since that moment, the need to treat the human body like a human body has diminished more with every generation. 

Now a days, the average American daily schedule looks something like this;

• Wake up and sit down to check social media and drink coffee.
• Take a shower, throw on some clothes, sit down and drive to work. 
• Sit down and type at a computer for four hours.
• Sit down for lunch
• Sit back down for four hours of computer work
• Sit down in the car to drive home
• Sit down to eat some dinner
• Sit down on the couch to watch some Netflix
• Go to bed only to do it all over again the next day.

Some people are lucky enough to go to the local gym on the way to and/or from work and manage to get a decent “pump” or are “work up a good sweat”.  The problem here is usually one of two things: 

1. They see something “sexy & cool” on Instagram and try it. They have no idea why they are doing it, and end up hurting themselves.
2. Or the most common thing; they have lost to ability to communicate with their own bodies so they default to a circuit of machines that they read in the latest “Muscle & Fiction” magazine. It usually goes something like:
   • Sit down and push this
   • Sit down and pull this
   • Sit down here and mimic a squat rather than doing a real squat
   • Sit here and pick your nose
   • Repeat for four cycles and go home

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s better than nothing but what if, just maybe, we used the gym as a place to break the cycle of SITTING DOWN?!? Think long and hard about a gym really is. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Okay, that’s long enough, I will just tell you instead.

A gym is a place that people can go to mimic the natural movements of the human body because modern society and the education system and workplace that come with it have deteriorated the natural connection we are born with to our muscular and nervous systems.

At the end of the day, humans are born natural athletes that learn to master their own bodies throughout seven major motions/movements combined with three planes of motion.  At Kerley’s Fitness we recognize what a gym is supposed to be, what a gym is supposed to accomplish and most importantly what the human body is supposed to be and do.  Over the next few weeks, we will be posting individual blogs to dive deeper into:

1. Transverse Plane of Motion
2. Sagital Plane
3. Frontal Plane

As well as the 7 main movements of the human body:

1. Squat
2. Hinge
3. Push
4. Pull
5. GAIT
6. Rotation
7. Anti-Rotation

Your exercise repertoire, no matter how limited or extensive, is literally just a combination of these movements and planes of motion mixed in with different external loads(i.e. barbells, kettlebells, Amazon packages, sandbags, your screaming baby, medicine balls, etc). Master the basics and you can be as fancy as you want down the road.