I ❤️ My TRX

Have you tried the TRX Suspension Trainer? It is the greatest exercise device ever.

Single Leg Squat

Full body workouts that promote healthy joint function and joint stability. What could be better.

Invented by a Navy Seal, every exercise on the TRX challenges your core. A strong core is the foundation for power and stability in all movements in life. A strong core protects your delicate spine.

What is your core?

TRX defines core as muscles from mid thigh to collar bone. It takes all of that to stabilize your trunk.

Because the TRX is unsteady, it creates a feedback loop within your nervous system. It makes your brain figure out what position you are in and what forces are acting upon your body. This improves proprioception and is good for your brain.

Squat to Row

Y Fly

Pilates, WTF?

You can’t get any of those benefits on a Pilates reformer. Lying down, your core muscles are signaled to stay at rest. On a Pilates reformer, you are not stimulating your nervous system, nor are you improving your balance or proprioception. You are not strengthening the deep supportive muscles that wrap your spine. You are not practicing using your joints well. What is the point.

Before I knew better. Ouch!

The pelvis tucking moves in Pilates encourage poor posture and damage the low back, which is the most vulnerable part of the spine besides the neck, which Pilates also strains.

There is one wedge shaped disc in the spine. Respect it.

Pilates has high injury rates due to unnatural positions and joint overload (too much force on a joint).

Joseph Pilates built his brand training dancers, who already were strong and had beautiful bodies. You cannot get a beautiful body doing Pilates because it is too limited a workout.

Just looking at these spine-crunching pics makes me hurt. So much pressure on the neck and low back. Ouch ouch ouch.

These ladies are hardly burning any calories. They aren’t even supporting their own weight. Major muscle groups are not engaged.

None of these weird moves mimic motions a human would actually do: chopping down a tree, bending, throwing, carrying, lifting, squatting, running, climbing, etc.

Just because everyone is doing something doesn’t meany anyone should.

TRX creates a balanced body.

TRX makes you feel your muscle imbalances and asymmetries and automtically correct them. Fantastic!

Doing a TRX chest press, your nervous system is forced engage the weaker side. When you are extremely flexible like me, muscle imbalances pull unevenly on joints and cause pain. Fixing them is essential to having less pain.

This exercise is a moving plank, stabilizing your low back and making your core oh so strong.

Chest Press

There are many ways to use a TRX wrong, so hire a fitness trainer who has a TRX certification to teach you.

Or do like me, and get trained by TRX yourself. I did their Sports Medicine Course at the TRX headquarters in San Francisco, where I learned the regressions (easier versions) of the TRX exercises. I also learned how to treat specific injuries. I had a great time. Most of the attendees were physical therapists from the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. I was lucky to be there. TRX does not offer this course often, and I am not a medical professional. But I talked my way into the class. Yay!

Then I progressed, training myself at home, where Mr. Pennington drilled a hook into a rafter to suspend my TRX. I have mirrors so I can see what my joints are doing. It took a lot for me to get good at TRX, a major accomplishment of which I am very proud. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be strong enough to us my TRX regularly, with ease, but now I am and have been for a long time. Yay!

Here are a few more TRX moves, footage from the gym at the fabulous W Hotel in Bellevue, Washington.

Hamstring Curl

Mountain Climber

Power Pull

Low Row

There are many, many more TRX exercises.

I highly recommend this book as well. It is the very best book on posture and healthy joint use ever written. It is the basis for how I use my body without pain and strain.

Learn to stand, sit, walk, sleep, lift and carry without pain and strain.

How can I do so much exercise when I am so severely affected by Ehlers-Danlos?

I inject Ascor everyday. This makes me build much stronger connective tissue and to recover from and benefit from exercise. Yay!

Without it, I am totally disabled by EDS.

Building better collagen.

Other critical elements that make me a super high-functioning EDSer:

Salt loading to keep my blood pressure up. Salt depletion causes fatigue and bone loss.

I add to all water I drink.

Naltrexone twice per day cuts through that EDS brain fog and tones up nervous system.

Brain healing.

Posts about naltrexone coming.

Happy exercising.