Operation: Matt Garufi

I've been good friends with Matt for over 6 years now. He was a good athlete back in high school with a couple of Varsity letters under his belt, and he also played a year of Division 3 football in college. He underwent extensive surgery back in high school on account of a separated shoulder. Physical therapy aided his recovery, but he still wasn't comfortable playing football with it, which is why he quit the team. He started to focus more on his academics and less on athletics and moving around, which unfortunately made his body adopt a computer/caveman posture.

With the help of a diet of Popeye's Chicken and Wendy's that was washed down with a bottle of Jack Daniels - he began to get increasingly out of shape and started packing on the pounds. He enlisted my help once he hit 180 pounds at a height of 5'7'' - 20 pounds heavier than his frame in high school.
Here are some details from my original assessment with him. I first took note of his static posture:

Nothing too big here - right shoulder drops lower than his left, and his feet are externally rotated. Not too much to nitpick about.

So, here we see some early signs of some exaggerated kyphosis - shoulders rounding and head protruding forward. Also, some anterior pelvic tilt.

Again, nothing to write home about. Static posture just gives me some clues on what to look for in my dynamic assessment, which includes an overhead squat and a single leg squat. So, let see some movement:

Overhead squat:

Here we get some forward leaning - probably from tight hip flexors. Also arms falling forward - probably from immobile thoracic spine, and tight pec minor and latissimus dorsi. His feet externally rotate, which might be from tight calves or externally rotated femurs. Also, when checking the front view we see a lot of instability in his knees and hips, which could be lack of core strength or posterior chain strength - probably a combination of the two. Let's see what happens when we shift his weight on to one leg:

Single leg squat:

His left knee is slightly unstable, and his quads look a lot stronger than his hamstrings and glutes (his knee shoots out over his toes). His right knee collapses quite a bit inwards in a manner that would be a recipe for an ACL injury if enough force was applied.

From here we moved onto some foam rolling for his hip flexors, calves, IT band, inner thigh, hip external rotators, and t-spine. Here are some t-spine extensions we performer to help loosen up his upper back:


Here's a picture of a spiderman lunge we did to loosen up his hips and inner thighs:
The Tin Man probably has better mobility!

But I've given Matt a mobility circuit he can do everyday that'll take him around 5-10 minutes that should help considerably.

After the foam rolling and mobility work, we moved on to some activation drills for his scapula and his glutes:

The wall slide stretches out the internal rotators of the humerus, while activating and strengthening the lower traps and improving shoulder mobility - awesome bang for your buck exercise.

The superdog - developed by strength coach Nick Tumminello, is an excellent glute activator because it removes any possibility of using the lower back because of the flexed hip on the opposite side.

After all of that, we moved on to the strength training portion of our work out, which included goblet squats, pushups, face pulls, and some core stability work. I'll go into more detail for Matt's strength training portion in the next coming posts, but right now the priority is on improving his mobility/flexibility and soft tissue quality. Here's one of the stretches we used at the end to target his rectus femoris:


Train Hard,
Jason

Client Spotlight: Ken F.

My job enables me to develop relationships with some amazing people. You can tell a lot about a person when they're performing an intense, grueling workout. Do they quit? Cut themselves short? Rise to the occasion? The mental aspect to training is just as important as the physical part. I've found out that with the right motivation, people can push themselves past their self-imposed limit and really do some amazing things.

I first started training Ken back in December of '07. He had already began adopting healthy eating habits in October, which was when he decided to turn his life around:

In the above photo, he had a 40 inch waist and weighed around 200 pounds. Through healthy eating habits, he dropped down to about 185 pounds when we first started working together. Ken was 51 at the time - he could do one sloppy pushup, had knee pain, had the flexibility of a steel rod, and could barely get past eye height when he tried to raise his arms overhead. Of course, when I told Ken to get a referral from his physician for a physical therapist to look at his shoulders, he was told that the pain and lack of mobility in his shoulders was "all in his head".

That mental toughness I had mentioned in the beginning of the post was crucial to Ken's success. I'm not even sure I could've gotten through some of the workouts I designed for Ken! We focused on heavy strength training along with some targeted metabolic circuit and interval training. Ken also came in early for every session and performed my prescribed mobility and foam rolling exercises which was critical in improving his hip/shoulder/thoracic spine mobility and overall soft tissue quality.

18 months later, here's Ken!


Ken developing some power with box jumps:


Posterior chain work:
Deadlift: 315 pounds



Box Squat: 225 pounds



Bodyweight:

12 Decline Ring Pushups:


3 Neutral Grip Pullups:



Single Leg Squat with 10 Pounds:



If this doesn't inspire you to go work out right now, I don't know what will! Sadly, Ken moved away from Massachusetts last month so we've stopped training together. However, he did get a promotion, which comes as no surprise because like I said before - you can tell a lot about a person when you watch them perform an intense workout. Ken's determination and dedication inside the gym is as just a part of him as it is outside of it.