.png)
Phase 2 of the the Harbor Park Voyage is all about function, and more specifically, how our body functions and how we can improve our functionality.
The purpose of this phase is to understand your body, joint by joint, to see what limitations you have and what is causing them. The reason that this is super important for your longevity is because if we skip this phase, the chances are pretty high that you will eventually run into some sort of significant injury when you are pushing yourself in the gym.
What a lot of people don't realize is that our bodies have thresholds - meaning that they can withstand a set amount of stress, until they hit that threshold level. Once it is hit, we experience some sort of trauma. In a physical trauma, we get some sort of injury like a herniated disk in your spine, a sprained ankle, a torn ligament or a sprained muscle.
What we also have to understand is what goes in to our stress thresholds. It's not just stress from your activity, but also stress from your life, physical and mental. The higher stress that you accumulate, both physical from labor intensive jobs and from working out, and mental from any number of stressors, the more likely you are to hit that stress threshold. If you have any pre-existing issues, like a prior injury or disfunction, those lower your threshold from the start.
In order to counteract the stress that you accumulate, we work on things like stretching, mobility, and sleeping. Basically anything that reduces stress will help keep that stress lower than the threshold. That's why doing mobility and recovery work on your own is so important - if you don't, chances are your accumulated stress will continue to rise towards your stress threshold.
By improving your flexibility and mobility, we are increasing your body's natural stress threshold. By stabilizing and strengthening muscles and tendons, we further increase your stress threshold. These are the specific things we are looking to achieve within the function phase - improving our functionality so that we can withstand physical stress better in any area of life.
What you'll find once you start improving these often neglected functionality issues is that you will move better, with less pain, and be able to do things you couldn't do before or you'll be able to do them much easier. And more importantly, you'll be setting yourself up for better quality of life for the long term, since your thresholds will be improved across the board.
