As a 50-year-old with a history of injuries, I have to do everything I can to not only deal with the injuries I’ve had in the past but to make sure I don’t injure myself going forward.
Several years ago, I’d simply had enough. I found myself absolutely fed up with the state of my health at that time. I was in my late 40’s, overweight by almost 40 lbs, and in pain. I needed to do something!!!
MAPS Prime Pro gave me a systematic way to assess and address mobility and range of motion issues across 8 key areas of my body. Following the system for 2 years, I’ve greatly reduced my joint pain, increased my range of motion, and vastly improved the effectiveness of my training.
First, I hired a trainer
Since I clearly hadn’t found a path to success on my own late into my 40’s, I figured it was time to bring in an expert. So I spent a good deal of money and hired a trainer. I firmly believe it was one of the best decisions I’d ever made. He is incredible, and I still work with him today.
He taught me how to lift, how to brace, how to breathe, and how to train without getting injured. He programmed around my limitations instead of just telling me not to do thing. In just two years, he helped me build and retain more strength than I’d been able to in a lifetime of trying before I hired him.
My only issue with the trainer is that “he programmed around my limitations.”
Don’t get me wrong. This is exactly what I needed and asked him to do. Trying to force myself to do things I shouldn’t have been doing was the cause of many of my injuries to start with. But I wanted more than to just work around nagging injuries and mobility issues.
I wanted to fix them for good!
Shouldn’t I be smartly training within my specific abilities and expanding those abilities at the same time? Instead of simply training around pain and discomfort, shouldn’t I be working to eliminate that pain and discomfort in the first place?
I bought MAPS Prime and Prime Pro.
Right around the time I hired that trainer, I also bought the MAPS Prime bundle from the guys at Mind Pump (check it out here on their site). I was looking for anything and everything that would help, and those programs looked to be exactly what I needed (for a detailed description of the difference between these two programs, see the article I wrote here).
While I started using Prime right away, Prime Pro kind of just sat there. I gave it a half-hearted effort but didn’t see any real results. Besides, my training was going really well for the first time in my life. So I didn’t pursue it.
About a year into working with my trainer, I started experiencing pain again. Not the same pains I was training around, but new ones. A little bit of shoulder pain here. A touch of hip pain there. And my feet were oddly sore in the mornings when I woke up.
Knowing from experience what happens when you leave those sorts of things unattended, I decided to take another run at Prime Pro.
This time would be different.
There are a lot of good things about being 50. One of them is that I have a lifetime of failures to learn from. If I ever had the chance to screw something up, I probably did at least once.
One of those hard-earned life lessons is that when it comes to correctional exercises, they have to be done all the time. It can’t be a once-in-a-while thing. It can’t be something you forget. They just don’t work if you don’t put in the work yourself.
This is the very first thing I tell anyone if I’m recommending Prime Pro to them. Prime Pro can work wonders. But you have to commit to doing the work. Every day, several times a day, no days off, without fail. If they can’t honestly commit to doing that, I tell them not to buy the program.
While the program is worthwhile on its own, I cannot give it 100% credit for my improvements. Half the credit, at least, goes to consistency. But I cannot stress this enough, consistency plus Prime Pro = magic.
How the program is laid out
Like all MAPS programs (and I own quite a few of them), Prime Pro is well presented with a ton of written and video content. It’s organized logically and walks you through step-by-step.