Fitness Crazed

The “Fitness Crazed” opinion post in the NY Times was emailed to me by so many clients, friends, and personal trainers I thought it would be a great idea to write a post on it. If you haven’t read it, Daniel Duane (the columnist) talks about his fitness experiences with:

Personal trainers that taught him “…to avoid cave man barbell lifts like squats in favors of tricky new exercises on wobble boards and big inflatable balls to stimulate my body’s core.”
P90x workouts and the highly marketed and often misunderstood term “Muscle Confusion”.
Barbell Training with Mark Rippetoes “Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training” book. The program calls for bench, squat, deadlift, power cleans.

To put shortly Daniel was tired of all the fluff workouts (ahem above video…yikes!) and found that barbell training actually worked. After a year of training in the lifts with the basic overload principle (increase your weight by small amounts each week) Daniel had obtained his goals of gaining strength and size. The one aspect of the article I didn’t like was the dig on personal trainers business model akin to babysitting. He goes on to say “Better to invent super-fun, high intensity routines that entertain and bewilder clients, so they’ll never leave you.” I can only speak for myself and the other educated personal trainers that I surround myself with, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. We at Fusion Performance Training we teach our clients not only to be able to lift efficiently but also the our the basics concepts behind our training. This not only makes our job easier but allows our clients to give us important feedback to make adjustments to the program and workout. In fact, many of our clients probably have better knowledge and understanding about strength/fitness training than some personal trainers out there. Enough with the rant… :p

My Thoughts

I’m very ecstatic that this article is starting to get publicity, as it discusses fitness trends and how barbell training is extremely effective for getting results. The educated and experienced personal trainers know that to make any significant change in a clients body type there has to be some form of challenging general strength exercises such as the:

Squat
Deadlift
Bench
Overhead Press
Pull Up

The above list exercises are known as “core” exercises for a reason…not because they utilize your “core”, but because these movements should be the center of your strength training routine. Basically meaning that these are the biggest bang for your buck exercises. Utilize these “core” movements correctly and you will get results.

The Cons

With this basic knowledge starting to get out to the general fitness enthusiast comes misuse and misunderstanding of lifting concepts. I talked about this last week HERE, stating just because you deadlift doesn’t mean that you’re deadlifting correctly. Being a personal trainer I get a good bit of emails regarding fitness programming. The emails usually state that they do all the “core exercises” (squat, bench, deadlift, etc…) and really push themselves but despite their best efforts, they still are not getting the results they want.

For the general fitness client, typically the difficulty comes from lack in technique, in-correct intensity, and not having the physical preparedness for maximal lifting:

Clearly this can lead to injury… Typically this then brings up a debate amongst misinformed fitness enthusiasts about how core lifts, i.e. deadlift is bad for your back and so on. While I believe it’s great that the general fitness community is finally catching up with what qualified personal trainers and sports performance coaches having been doing for decades. There still needs to be much more education about the execution and preparedness for the general fitness community to safely and effectively utilize the barbell lifts.

Abbye Stockton showing that weightlifting isn’t just for men.

Conclusion

I’m glad that fitness media is FINALLY catching up! Hopefully all the BS marketing and fluff exercises being pushed as “the next best thing” will start to die down and stay down. It’s also important to notes that you don’t have to do all the “core” movements (squat, bench, deadlift etc…). We all have to make adjustments for our needs and deficiencies. For instance, the squat may not be the best for some fitness clients, so instead of pushing through pain and poor movements patterns to squat, you can easily replace it with exercises such as but limited to: Bulgarian split squat, the split squat, lunges etc…