Your personal fitness journey shouldn’t be stressful. However, it can be confusing when there’s a lot of misinformation out there. It never hurts to get informed.With physical performance at the core of their ethos, Perfect Stride aims to promote both physical longevity and injury prevention.

Perfect Stride is one of the leading physical therapy clinics in New York City, renowned for their research driven and personalized services helping individuals move better than ever.  Here, their experts reveal the 5 biggest fitness myths.

1. Letting your knees go over your toes is bad – there is no movement that is inherently bad, movement is just movement. The more you avoid a position the weaker you will become in that position and thus increase your likelihood of being injured.

2. Stop working out if you have pain – not all pain is created equal. This means that in certain situations working through or with pain can be acceptable, however, this done must be done in close partnership with your healthcare provider. You can still get a great workout with scaling/modifying your workout.

3. You must sit with “perfect posture” at all times –while there is benefit to maintaining a “neutral” posture since you will be strongest there. You also want to make sure you expose your body to other postures (lean left/right, slouch, stand, cross your legs and so on and so forth) so that you can improve your tolerance. There isn’t one best posture, as we say at Perfect Stride, “your best posture is your next posture”.

4. You must brace your core – the theory is that by activating and bracing your core, you will create stability that you need to be successful with whatever task/exercise you are trying to accomplish. It should not be a long-term strategy and could point to potential inefficiencies within your movement that should be assessed by a movement specialist.

5. Your glutes are not firing – If your glutes weren’t firing, you wouldn’t be able to move. This primarily occurs when there is a limitation in the hip joint and other structures such as the quadriceps and lower back (two of the most common ones) will try to pick up the slack. This will cause an increase in your likelihood to be injured since the muscles that are compensating may not be equipped to handle the forces being
applied to them.

For more information visit www.perfectstridept.com