At Guerilla Fitness we have a philosophy, not a Programme. We follow a set of principals not a training method and often our principals don’t align with others which sucks as all we want to do is to help others 😉
Firstly, let me open by explaining our philosophy. It’s simple and stands true for everyone from the elite athletes right through to your grandparents and that is health comes first. Healthy doesn’t just mean having a good resting heart rate, good blood pressure and cholesterol levels. They are the health parameters your doctor wants. I want to know are you pain free, are you able to move properly free from mobility issues and muscular imbalances and deficiencies.
And this is where our philosophy needs to align correctly for our relationship of coach / athlete member needs to work well. You may want to be FIT and LEAN but this is easy for me to help you achieve, these are simply by products of making you what I term healthy. You see if we can make you healthy you can better express your true potential and fitness easily.
So what then is our philosophy in a nut shell and how to be implement it? Step one is movement. We scale movements appropriately to the individual so at first they can move safely. Then when they can move safely we focus on getting them to move better and finally when they can move better we get them to go faster, harder or heavier when they are structural sound. So while you are just looking to get lean and fit we triage your movement and categorise you so you can first move safely when training hard, then we aim to progress you to move better and over time we build a bulletproof body which can then move fast and hard.
Step two is rotation creating torque. Walk into any gym in the world and you will be lucky if you are shown how to do something technically well which is bad enough as it is but no one is going a step beyond technique to the same extent we do. The reason for this is simple, you can teach someone a movement exactly as per a text book will describe, even the athlete can look like that in the text book but the reality is that only in textbooks do perfect people exist. If you teach a textbook deadlift to an ordinary desk worker who works 9-5 and has a weak ass posterior chain and is quad dominant then that textbook deadlift will break them. Instead we teach people the correct rotation which is binary, its either internal or external torque which will activate and ensure what is meant to work is in fact working. This allows people to go from moving safely to moving better.
Step 3 is identifying muscular imbalances. EVERYONE everywhere has muscular imbalances, some are just much bigger than others. If you play golf swinging of your right that is going to make one oblique stronger and cause hip and back issues over time. If you run or cycle and are more dominant to one side every stride is only feeding the issue not fixing it until injury strikes. Often these imbalances are minor and cause little issue, but when you start lifting weights or training and over time these imbalances and over dominance/reliance to certain area’s which you bring into the gym go untreated will 100% lead to serious injury. So we aim to fix muscular imbalance and restore full function of the body so what is meant to work, does work.
Finally, step 4 is building structural integrity which allows you be and do anything you want to the best of your abilities. This is where we want to get everyone to. Over time we get them from moving better to moving faster, we teach perfect technique and how to create tension so they can isolate the muscles which need to work which when combined with identifying muscular imbalances allows someone to be structurally sound. This all adds up to allowing someone to express their true potential, unlocking their maximum capacity. Basically, in a nut shell, as we see it, people are like cars and some people have 1l engines and some have 6l V8 super engines, but no matter how much power a car has it can’t go anywhere with the handbrake on and as long as you are driving with the handbrake on you are making shit of car or yourself. As simple as it sounds, our whole philosophy is built around taking the handbrake off while building you a bigger engine so you look sleeker and can go faster !!
