Month: June 2011

Now before the hate mail starts, let me remind you that I don’t believe movement can be “wrong.”  Running is a fundamental way for humans to express movement.  It’s also really helpful in the event that you need to get somewhere quickly (ie running from killer machines in the event of a robot apocalypse).   However if you hate running and you’re doing it for fat loss… you’re blowing it.

When a fitness professional tries to explain stuff to regular folk, you’re always at risk of being thwarted by “The Curse of Knowledge” (see Chip and Dan Heath’s excellent book, Made to Stick): you start to take it for granted that everyone knows at least the basics.

I recently had the pleasure of attending one of the industry’s premier educational events, the Rhode Island Perform Better Functional Training Summit.  If you’re in the biz, I can only say you’d better try to get to one of these at least once a year.  Not only do you learn tons, you get to meet a ton of awesome folks.

And now for some fitness fact fun.  In the world of strength training (particularly bodybuilding), people are sometimes grouped into 3 different body types, known as somatotypes.  The term comes from the work of mid-20th century American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon.  Although Sheldon originally coined the terms as part of theory called constitutional psychology (Sheldon felt each of these body types were predisposed to certain personality traits), somatotypes have survived in the strength training world as way of classifying trainees body types.  The three main somatotypes are:

1) Create a large enough energy deficit by reducing the amount of food you eat and increasing the amount of exercise you’re doing.  For most people, this could happen in one to three weeks at the most, depending on your current level of leanness and activity.

As is a frequent topic of this blog, I believe a key element necessary to being of value to your society as a fitness professional is a willingness to change your mind.  If new research comes along that is persuasive, it’s foolish to cling to outdated practices, particularly if said practices are demonstrated to be ineffective and/or dangerous.

There are a lot of silly exercises that seem to have little benefit and plenty of risk.  I see people doing what I consider to be silly exercises on a daily basis.  And while I have been known to cry tears of blood and sob softly while watching people working out, I don’t think a movement can ever be fundamentally  “wrong.”  I do think some movements are a poor choice for most people most of the time.  But there is a difference between acknowledging that an exercise is a poor choice and placing a value judgement on the movement. 

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