Working Out For Real Life Situations


Posted by Dr. Scott Wilson | 20-Jun-2017

A question to ask yourself is, if you’ve had a great workout, do you take what you’ve learned and applied it to real life situations that occur during your day? Dr. Jason Lemieux shares an exercise tip and shows us that although you may have an excellent workout regime, you may not be using those techniques in day to day situations, such as gardening or taking out the trash.

Dr. Lemieux takes you through the Turkish Get-Up which is one of the best exercises you can perform when transferring skills learned in the gym in your everyday activity.

In the following video (Working Out for Real Life Situations), Dr. Jason Lemieux demonstrates the Turkish Get-Up, a great exercise that focuses on mindful movement.

I’m Dr. Jason Lemieux. We’re at Physiomed Oakville, and we’re gonna talk about one of my favorite exercises. In a lot of our videos, I talk about the idea that exercise should transfer into real life. That things you do in the gym should change how you fundamentally move in life. I see tons of patients that they’re exercise technique is really, really good. They’re no good at life. They leave the gym having performed great exercises and they don’t know how to take out the trash well, or they don’t know how to get up and down in their garden well. So we wanna make sure that the exercises that are performed in the gym have transferred into real life. And there may be no better exercise for that than an exercise called the Turkish get-up. I didn’t name it. It’s called a Turkish get-up. You can Google it if you want.

One of the things we are anal about when we work with patients is how they get up and down from the ground. So we’ll see people with knee pain that go full deep squat, getting up and down from the ground, and then when they’re finished, kinda rub their knees a little bit and say, “Ow, my knee hurts.” You think? So yeah, if I’m gonna go max knee flexion with my full body weight, that’s probably gonna start to hurt my knees.

We say a lot that our lower body does three main movements: deadlifts, squat, and lunge. And to lunge, that’s how I’m gonna get myself down to the ground so that I can sit, lay down, do whatever I gotta do. So the Turkish get-up is a great exercise because it focuses on mindful movement. People who watch me perform it for the first time, say, “I don’t know if I can memorize all those steps.” Awesome. I don’t want you to memorize the steps. I want you to think between each step to think, “Hey, what’s the most efficient position I can put my body in so I don’t blow out my back, blow out my shoulder, and blow out my knee?” I think those are probably things that the average person should know how to do.

So the Turkish get-up is essentially laying on the ground with a weight overhead. And that weight can be light, that weight can be heavy. I don’t care. You can do it with just your body weight. It doesn’t matter. But from there, you’re gonna make decisions on how you get yourself up from the floor.

So I’ve got a kettlebell here that I’m gonna use to hopefully talk my way through a Turkish get-up. So as I lay on the ground, I’m gonna grab the Turkish get-up with both hands as I lay on my side, and I’m gonna roll onto my back as I press the kettlebell overhead. So now I’m gonna stand up. So the first question is, “Well, okay, what’s the first thing I do?” We’re gonna see a lot of people want to sit straight up, flexing their spine. Can you do that? One hundred percent. You can do it if you want. And there’s gonna be some people that have the muscle, coordination, and strength to do that. You are not one of them. Very few people can do that. So what we’re gonna think about is bracing our core and using our hips to roll to our side as I pull through my arm to get onto my elbow.

From there, I’m gonna press myself up onto my hand. I’m now stabilizing my top arm and grabbing the ground to stabilize my bottom arm. I’m gonna get my shin vertical, rather than letting my knee dump to the side, I’m gonna get my knee over top of my foot so I can use my hips to bridge myself up. A bridge, a glute bridge is an exercise we do a lot.

From here, I’m gonna translate my leg underneath me to get into a lunge position. Hey, wait a minute. We said lunging was the way that I get up and down from the floor. So now that I’m in a lunge position, I can just lunge my way up to stand. And now to come back down, I’m just gonna reverse it. I’m gonna lunge to the floor. I’m gonna use my hip, not my knee, my hip to bring myself down to the ground so I can go back into that modified bridge to lower my hip to the ground, to slide to my elbow, to roll myself back down to the ground. I lower the weight, and then I can perform the same thing on the other side.

The biggest task of the Turkish get-up is once you’re done, how do you stand? I see people perform a great Turkish get-up and then do some weird knocked-kneed thing to stand up. No, the whole point of the get-up was to teach you how to efficiently get up.

So let’s start making better choices with our exercises. Let’s start making the decision to do exercises that are gonna change the way that you move in real life, because even if you’re working out an hour a day, everyday, that’s more than the average person, that still leaves you 23 hours to screw yourself up. So let’s make better decisions during those 23 hours, and it starts by making better decisions during your workout.


Dr. Scott Wilson

Dr. Scott Wilson is the Founder & Chairman of Physiomed; one of Canada’s largest franchised networks of inter-disciplinary healthcare clinics. A graduate of Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, Dr. Wilson founded Physiomed in 1994 and has since grown Physiomed to over 30 clinics in Southern Ontario and British Columbia. With hundreds of practitioners from over a dozen disciplines, Dr. Wilson and Physiomed have helped over 100,000 Canadians with physiotherapy, chiropractic, massage therapy, orthotic therapy, compression therapy and clinical conditioning as part of a program of rehabilitation and health optimization. In addition to helping patients improve their physical and mental well-being, Dr. Wilson has also mentored hundreds of practitioners to provide better care while enjoying more fulfilling careers. He is also a keynote speaker on many health related topics including how physiotherapy, chiropractic and health & wellness treatment can help with stress, weight loss, and unlocking the true potential within to achieve lasting physical well-being.

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