Before I explain the meaning of ‘Tensional training and Tensegrity’, I’ll first explain know who Tony Susnjara is. I do not know him in person but I hope I will meet him one day. He is the designer and the founder of the FreeForm board exercise tool, which I am a very big fan of!
As English is my second language, when talking about fitness, sometimes expressing my vast amount knowledge is not always easy. Most my studies I did in my native language. It is actually not a bad thing because our personal training clients can understand us better as we are not using all the fancy fitness words and jargon.
Since we started to follow each other’s work, with Tony I always find something interesting. We are both busy but using social media to talk about fitness and personal training, helps us to share and evolve ideas.
I’d like to share one of his latest comments about his creation to help you understand why functionality in training is very important to stay injury free and improve sport performance.
I was not able to share the training video here and I do not have four FreeForm boards to replicate the exercise here at ProTom Fitness. To learn more about ‘Tensional training and Tensegrity’, please see the images and commentary from Tony below.
Tony: Well apart from the obvious strength and control demonstrated here, there is something else that I’d like to point out. freeFORM Board/s provide a low friction surface with no end of range of motion which means? Under load, they want to run away and the body’s muscles, joints, tendons and ligaments have to decelerate and stop them.
There has been some discussion recently about TENSIONAL training as opposed to say lifting weights where the structures of the body are under compression. I’m sure that both compressional and tensional training are fine however most of what goes on in a gym is compressional training.
The body is a TENSEGRITY structure meaning that it relies on BOTH tensional and compressional forces. By all means, keep up your compressional training but throw in some tensional training as well.
To go one step further, the boards are low friction with no end of range + no limit or restriction in direction or plane of motion. There is a great book emerging from the myofascial movement called “The Endless Web” referring to the meta structure of connective tissue permeating the entire body. My point is that with an unrestricted training tool, you can PULL (load tenionally) on this web from every angle, every vector and from any point to any other.
So my excitement on developing and playing with this tool in the early stages was that it was not just a new tool, but a paradigm shift and one that took me some time to unpack. That was the easy bit, the tough part is getting the end user to shift or evolve their paradigm so I’m grateful for this video and this opportunity to share one more piece of the puzzle to those who are willing to listen.
if you would like to find out more about Tony and his creation, please visit his main site:
Order your freeform board today and train at home: Related blog article : Body like a used Freeform Board / FreeForm board training with physiotherapist Birgitta / Revolution in core stability and function