Circular Strength Training®

Circular Strength Training packs all of your health and fitness needs into a FUN and ENJOYABLE package! With CST you are constantly learning new skills, setting new goals and reaching new heights that you never dreamed possible. The scientifically conceived and real-world tested CST system allows you to shatter the tethers that have been holding you back from your potential.

The incremental nature of CST, progressing at the pace of the practitioner, and the system's focus on the natural developmental process of human movement means that anyone, of any age and level of fitness, can fully benefit from CST. A vast range of people are already taking advantage of this powerful system, from grandmothers to professional athletes!

CST's proprietary and entirely unique Training Hierarchy Pyramid (THP) is a process by which any goal can be achieved by carefully progressing through a series of stages which identify and address the performance requirements of the goal versus the current state of the practitioner. I have had astounding success, for myself and my clients, using the THP as my roadmap. The THP will accelerate your ability to gain new skills, improve sports performance, shatter personal records or simply regain everyday health and mobility.

To ensure that every aspect of your health, fitness and sport performance needs are addressed, CST incorporates three fully integrated wings or spheres of practice. These are not steps on a ladder but components of an overall training strategy which support each other:

Intu-Flow Joint Health and Mobility
Prasara Body-Flow Yoga
Clubbell Athletics

Coach Scott Sonnon, founder of the CST System, is fond of the saying, "you are only as old as your connective tissue." Intu-Flow, short for Intuitive Flow, is the place to start in rebuilding the health of your joints, regaining control of your natural movement and rediscovering your full range of motion. The flagship program is the Intu-Flow® DVD.

There are many systems or philosophies out there that get results. However, there are none, to my knowledge, that do so while placing health as the number one priority. The good ones generally have health in their priorities somewhere, but still focus first on either function (functional fitness), attributes (power lifting) or physique (body building). Circular Strength Training puts health at the very top of its value hierarchy. Here is the Fitness Value Hierarchy of CST.

Health
Mobility
Function
Attributes
Physique

Note that physique came last on this list. That does not mean that CST athletes do not develop lean and beautiful physiques (as is clear from the accompanying photo of Coach Sonnon). It means that a great physique will flow naturally from developing each of the previous elements of the hierarchy.

You may have seen other approaches out there which use a subjective rating of exertion in order to judge an appropriate level of exercise intensity. But nowhere will you see the incredibly sophisticated, yet simple to use, approach developed by Circular Strength Training to guide its athletes in their personal practice. You see, CST does not limit the intuitive powers of its athletes to merely the level of perceived effort, but also has us tap into our intuitive appraisal of our perceived technique and our perceived discomfort. CST athletes assign a rating on a scale of 0 to 10 for each of the following elements.

Rate of Perceived Effort: This refers to how hard you feel you are working. For example, a rating of zero may be equivalent to sitting on the couch watching the game, while a 10 would be assigned to that feeling of being doubled over, winded and on the verge of wanting to throw up from exertion.

Rate of Perceived Technique: How well do you feel you performed an exercise or a skill, based on your personal best performance and on the essential technical cues of that exercise provided by your coach? A rating of 10 is the best possible technique.

Rate of Perceived Discomfort: RPD refers to the perceived level of pain. It is important to distinguish this one from effort. Although effort may seem "painful" (ex. "no pain, no gain..."), it is not the same as a structural or possibly injurious pain.

Using these three elements, a complete protocol is used to guide the athlete through their personal practice to gain results in the most healthy and accelerated possible way. The FlowFit or Intu-Flow DVDs both provide an excellent stepping stone into the Intuitive Training process.

There are schools of thought which approach breathing "technique" as absolute. Conventional Strength & Conditioning approaches breath from a pressurizing perspective, in which Maximal Tension is used to create stability in any situation. Yoga subscribes to a hollowing paradigm, where Minimal Tension, through activation of the deep abdominal wall muscles such as the TA, promote mobility and release, regardless of the task. CST espouses a Selective Tension approach which allows us to slide up and down a scale between Minimal and Maximal tension.

This scale is actually two-fold, incorporating both a Breath Mastery Scale (quality of breath) and a Breath Volume Scale (quantity of breath). Where one falls on these two scales is directly proportional to the Rate of Perceived Effort - RPE (how hard you perceive a task to be). Thus, breath becomes an important analysis tool for both the coach and the athlete in assessing the level of RPE. If we discover that an athlete is breathing at the Anger Level (active inhale and pressurizing), we can assume that their body is reacting to a load which it perceives to be beyond its current capacity, thus pressurizing to create stability. In essence, the level of effort the athlete is attempting to exert is beyond her technical capacity (real or perceived) to contain it. This is a cue to drop load to a level where Rate of Perceived Technique - RPT (perception of skill efficiency) is at or above a 6-8, so that we are training more desirable technique than undesirable technique, thus reducing the risk of injury.

Conversely, if we notice that an athlete is consistently performing an exercise at the Normal Breath Volume and at the level of Flow Breathing (passive exhale on compression and inhale on expansion), we need to increase resistance if we want to garner a training effect. Thus, we must increase load as long as the Rate of Perceived Technique stays at or above an 8 and Rate of Perceived Discomfort (perception of pain) stays at or below 3. This maximizes training effect while again reducing the risk of injury by limiting RPD (which must be differentiated from RPE).

When I came to CST, I suffered from chronic pain in my right shoulder. Conventional lifting had caused ongoing minor impingements and tears which constantly cycled through periods of seeming health and crippling pain. When I found CST, I was searching for an alternative to what I knew subconsciously was a dead end path. I didn't know how or why it would work, but in retrospect I can examine the process with perspective.

I started with Warrior Wellness, a set of 15 lb Clubbells and the Clubbell DVD. I could swing the 15s, but I could not do anything from back position due to shoulder limitations in the form of discomfort and even Fear Reactive bracing. I immediately began performing WW every day and started out with a Clubbell Density Cycle of Forward Pendulums. At the time, I was not yet involved in Prasara. Looking back, I believe that the combination of decompressing the joint and washing out of the shoulders through WW along with the natural traction, opening up the joint, of the Pendulums set me down the path to recovery. I was in the process of taking care of my Inner Bag, or in other words the layer of fascia which wraps the bones and joints. I believe the WW was breaking up much of the "junk" that was in my dysfunctional joint and opening it up while feeding it and washing it with synovial fluid and ground substance.

Although pain was receeding, the joint still needed to be reprogrammed for proper movement after years of compensating around pain and tension. Sometime thereafter I ordered and began practicing FlowFit. I now believe that the Dog Press exercise family, in particular, served to begin pulping up the compensating chains in and around the shoulder and beyond while reprograming proper movement patterns such as Shoulder Pack and Arm Lock.

When I returned to the Back Position with Clubbells, the difference was marked. There was no longer any pain or bracing. Previously, performance leaked out through poor shoulder mechanics and Fear Reactive bracing, both of which would have lead me down the path to more injury had I not first removed the restrictive forces through Intu-Flow and Prasara. Whereas originally I was unable to move into back position, within three months I completed a Double Density cycle which incorporated the Swipe, pain free, thanks to the duo of Intu-Flow and Prasara.