Living life more efficiently: Kilgore’s concept

Are you moving as efficiently through life as you think you can?

At our Functional Restoration Seminar that our office attended last weekend, I was introduced to a new concept about the way our bodies move and how we can move more efficiently. It’s called Kilgore’s concept and a quick Google search reveals that this was developed by a guy named Lon Kilgore PhD.

Functional training in Salt Lake City

They found that when they were doing physical testing on firemen, the fire fighters who regularly trained in Cross Fit used less oxygen from their oxygen tanks than did the regular guys. This was the case even though all of them were performing the same tests.

They use to think that when you worked out hard, the reason why you could do more than other people is that you have increased your ability to use oxygen. You took in more oxygen, the muscles used the oxygen more, and your body pumped out the CO2 faster. Your body body became an oxygen processing machine.

What they found instead is that when firemen were trained in Cross Fit, their bodies worked more efficiently overall. The thinking is that when you train your body using real-world functional training scenarios that mimic what your body does on a daily basis, and what it is designed to do, your body learns to perform these movements more efficiently.

It’s not using more oxygen. The nervous system coordinates the control of your muscles to replicate patterns that you train for. When doing functional exercises, your nerves coordinate all of your muscle actions far more efficiently, and you can handle tasks like squatting, pushing, pulling and lifting while breaking out in less of a sweat and with less effort. This is efficient movement, with less drag to get in the way.

Chiropractic care can help with this too. When you demand that your body moves you through your life, you need to ensure that your spine is both flexible and stable. You need to hinge properly at your hips in order to have a stable pelvis and lumbar spine. You need to have your lumbar spine moving well in order for it to be properly stabilized. Your mid back needs to loosen up in order for your shoulders to become more stabilized and in a stronger posture.

Sacroiliac joint showing deep muscle attachments

You need to have fluid movements throughout your body in order to be more efficient. When you move better, you can feel it instantly. Most people describe this fluid movement as being more loose, more at ease or that they are experiencing relief. This sensation of relief is interesting because you often use this to describe the more efficient motion this way even though this might involve an area of the body that wasn’t feeling any pain.

Moving better puts less drag on the body, and this makes everything more efficient. This loss of movement or poor movement either comes from poor neuromuscular control, or from joints that don’t move very well. Chiropractic care helps you move better, and it is an important part of keeping yourself physically efficient.

Todd Lloyd, DC
Chiropractic Physician in Salt Lake City.