A Stronger Industry

The fitness industry needs to pull its head out of its ass. Did I get your attention? Excellent.

Now, I will be the first to say that this can be one of the most gracious and supportive professional communities going. I’m talking about the side of the industry that opened its arms to me in a way that helped me get up to speed on the “state of the art” in about a year-and-a-half.

Along with my own study of important books (Anatomy Trains, Netter’s, everything Pavel), the meat of my learning was made up of the incredibly rich websites of Tony, Eric, Bret, Dan, Wil, KStar and his project, Dr. Berardi, Dean, Todd, Shon, T-Nation (useful, despite its ridiculous pictures and jokes), Mike, Dan, all the incredible ladies out of Girls Gone Strong and a dozen others that fit in around the edges.

I feel beyond grateful for what these people--most of whom I will never meet--gave me, willingly and for free. The intention obvious in those folks’ collective gesture is to pay forward your knowledge so that we might all prosper. You won’t catch me badmouthing that for a second.

But what I’m talking about is how most trainers, even as they draw from the same excellent body of knowledge, screw up the moment of integration with the rest of the world. The vast majority of people, the so-called general population (gen-pop for short), that the vast majority of trainers see deserve better.

I think the problem is three-fold:

- Industry folks are skewed by their own passion! Weird, I know.

- Fitness sees itself as the center of the universe. Understandable, but still not cool.

- The industry buys into, and therefore sells itself as, a luxurious habit that each of us should pay for. Fuck that.

So first, I think the very thing that makes so many trainers charismatic, motivated and useful to their clients alienates them from a huge number of people. Someone who thinks about and lives for fitness, their own and other people’s, every day will have a hard time understanding the situation that most non-trainers are in, almost just by definition.

Obviously, being an expert is important, and that should involve serious immersion. But if you’re committed to making this person’s life better, a significant amount of effort must also be paid toward how your ideal programming is going to interact with that client. Can they execute? Will the habit stick? Will they like it? Why or why not? That shouldn't be the only dictating influence by any means, but it should be part of our planning!  Humans are not just a bunch of blood and collagen and levers.

But the part that really gets missed, and that spurned this post in the first place, is the critical moment when a trainer has learned enough. They have studied and worked long enough to know more than their clients--they have achieved the minimum. At this point, most trainers take one of two paths. 1.) They stop studying, and become annoying lumps on the log of fitness-industry-wastefulness, or 2.) they keep studying, but about the finest minutae of percentages and accommodating resistance and optimal timing of supplementation L-carnitine.

For maybe 10% of the whole population of gen-pop, this second group has something extra to offer in terms of knowledge. But for everyone else (9 out of 10 people), those little bits of knowledge are useless--but in the hands of Eager-Trainer McSmartypants they become dangerous tools of distraction, leading folks away from what is most important.

Many, many people have written about this using terminology taken from the field of economics. I’m talking about the Pareto Principle, here, which states, roughly, that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Now, while most days you’d hear me rambling about that 20% group of causes (the “big rocks”: squatting, deadlifting, pressing, etc.), I think it’s also important to remember that there is a flip-side to Pareto.

Another way of saying the principle is that there is a segment of causes (80%) that contribute only 20% of the effects. That means, if you keep looking for effects after working hard on those “big rocks,” you are now in fine-tuning territory. And if you are a competitive athlete, or a professional model, or military special forces, than you should be working on the minutae.

But what happens too often is that a trainer, fashioning themselves to be athletes, begins thinking and reading about those “little rocks,” and is excited at the possibility of extracting that final 20% of effects out of their bodies. And then they bring those ideas straight to their clients who have never touched a barbell, let alone flung said barbell overhead 2.78 times per minute.

This sort of dysfunction very easily morphs into my second point: the fitness industry is self-centered. While many of the passionate, intelligent trainers and coaches out there are doing their best to help, even the best ones seem to forget that many folks who train don’t want to become the world’s strongest woman or sexiest man. Usually, these folks merely want to be healthier--they want to feel better, and keep up with their grandkids, and maybe slim down a few pounds.

This is not to say that Strength & Conditioning can’t help them--in fact, I would say just the opposite. But those people invest a lot of time and energy into their own field or career, and we as fitness professionals should respect that. We should respect it by training them in them most efficient and effective way that we know--with the “big rocks”--and leave “little rocks” (the 80%, the minutae, etc.) on the shelf. And we should respect it by working to fit that great training into their lives, and not demand that it is the other way around.

I can hear the salient disagreement now: most gen-pop folks just plain don't put enough stock in their own health! And it’s true that most of the time we as trainers are trying to convince people to take their wellness more seriously, by eating better and sleeping more and lifting heavy shit on a regular basis. But along with that convincing is a mega-dose of selling.

And this brings me to my final point. The way I see it, we can’t as an industry keep saying that fitness is an integral part of any life and then sell training and gyms generally as a luxury item. It is disingenuous, and ultimately destructive to the premise that would really help people get to where they are trying to go with their fitness. It recalls for me many conversations I have had with manual therapists about the fractured way that massage operates today: clients come for a massage because they see it as a luxury, feel-good session, and therapists feel compelled to give that session. In reality, though, a more effective approach would almost always be less-comfortable--and the client would leave unsatisfied. This is broken.

But of course, revenue is important in this capitalist society. However, back to fitness, I have to believe that money will flow when previously unsatisfied individuals are getting trained in a satisfying way. Being effective (“big rocks”) is one part of creating this flow, obviously, but so is being honest, and portraying fitness as a luxury expense destroys that honesty.

I love this industry, and I think that it offers a way for everyone involved to get ahead: clients improve, trainers make a living, and collective knowledge carries everyone forward. But unless we also work on making the system better in it’s integration with the rest of the world, we will always be stuck either preaching to the choir or deluging the public with big-font marketing. Let’s make fitness something more real than that.  

Simply Stronger, II: Getting Your Head Right

At least 90% of successful improvement of any kind has to do with “where” your head is. I’m sure there are plenty of mental health professionals who would vomit after hearing my simpleton description, but anecdotally and from experience, I know this much to be true: psychological context means (almost) everything. Usually, the process happens in a predictable pattern. A person perceives their life to be off-track in some way, and they decide it is bad enough to invest in changes, with their time and money and emotional capital (they’re ready to trust someone or something new). They make some changes, or do some new things, or learn some new skills, and their world expands.  Possibilities blossom (“Maybe I could do a handstand someday!”), but so does doubt (“Whoa, I am more off-track than I thought!”).  Motivation is fed, yes, but usually that pool of investment is debited, too.  A good teacher/coach encourages consistent practice, outlining a manageable path toward mastery, but pretty soon their new, larger and more exciting world-view starts to be normal--and now that person can only see how off-track they are compared to that.  In the best case, the cycle repeats, and in the worst case desire to improve gradually erodes.  But neither is satisfying according to the original getting-back-on-track goals.

There are some important issues at work here.  First, at every moment except for that initial trusting one, people are concerned with how off-track they are. That is expected--even admirable (wanting to be better definitely beats the alternatives), but it is a decidedly negative way to see the world: you are NOT something. Ouch.

Second, the solution to the problem is assumed to be outside of yourself. Again, while the premise is good (“I am going to be open to new things!”) it is also has some seriously negative potential (“I--with the tools I have--am not enough”).

Finally, while the process seems circular (it returns to where it started), it actually is a collapsing spiral. With each trip around, your world-view gets larger but your sense of self-efficacy rots. Instead of living and working with new skills, you are bombarded with all the things that you can’t do.

While most of the fitness industry is consumed with feeding this cycle (mostly for selfish reasons--that’s what the next post is about), each of us as individuals have the power to break free! And we must. Big surprise, but I think it has everything to do with being committed to getting and being stronger. Here’s why:

1. There are few goals more straightforward than just plain getting stronger, which is one of way of saying that working on it makes your mind quiet.  Strength is easily measured objectively, and progress is easily tracked.  This is hugely important for people on the not-good-enough (not-so-)merry-go-round.  Also, the concrete nature of the results only reflect the concrete nature of the activity itself.  When one trains for strength, they are committing to focused improvement on a few tasks--at the exclusion of others.  If those few tasks are holistic and global and widely-vetted by the experts (squatting, deadlifting, pressing, etc.), you can be secure in knowing that you are doing well by your body without worrying that you are creating gaps in your well-being.

I you can set aside, for a moment, how effective or not-effective such an approach might be physically (that’s what Part I was about...), looking at your training life this way allows you to be at ease with the big picture. No longer does one feel like they have to constantly be looking over their shoulder to see how on-track they are, and they can spend that brainpower on doing things right in the moment. There will always be distractions, but a good coach, a few like-minded friends and a little will-power makes all the difference. With your long-term mind relaxed, getting down to the physical work of squatting and hinge-ing and the rest is pretty cut-and-dried--the “easy” part.

2. The process of simple, straight-forward strength training fits with other paths toward mastery. Think of the concert pianist, practicing hundreds of thousands of hours over their lifetime; the NFL quarterback, taking thousands of snaps/reads in practice and hundreds more in games; the chef cooking a piece of salmon to perfect done-ness, the 8,000th time. Each one of these folks has impressive skills, but that skill is vastly overshadowed by how impressive their work ethic is.

Strength is one of these skills like any other, even if for most of us it is only a means to an end (better movement, better achievement in sport, or better body aesthetics).  And like any skill, long-term commitment and consistency are the main determiner of real success. But since strength is really about creating more mechanical tension, the physiological component is more obvious, in a way. It feels more like building a wall out of bricks than practicing figure drawing. The concreteness of the pursuit, the solidity of changing your muscles and bones helps us make sense of the time it takes to move forward; the patience required seems to flow more easily, too, so long as strength remains the goal.

And once that patience becomes a habit, you have found the real prize. Whether you want to keep working on physical goals or realign your focus, the skill of self-improvement is now yours, and working on strength got you there.

3. The most important bit, though, is still coming: strength shakes up the whole paradigm of trashy self-confidence. Let’s look at body-image as an example:

There a millions of ways to reframe the issue, to shift your perspective so that what you look like somehow means something more tolerable. Then there are a million ways to slash-and-burn, to cut weight or “get ripped,” but that’s worse: when the curtain comes down, all you’ve done is feed the monster exactly what it wanted all along--you’ve given in.

But working on what you can do undercuts the whole fear-breeding operation. Rather than pretending the elephant isn’t in the room, working on something as basic as strength is like politely asking the elephant to get out of the way so that you’ll have room to deadlift, please. Little steps toward being stronger feed a fire in each of us, small at first but growing with each day and month of staying on track. Pretty soon, “you” are a sack of skills and abilities, and your body reflects that. When you look in the mirror, or find yourself surrounded by talented people, your fire of capability warms you; the rest is just noise.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I bet most of you have thought about a lot of these things--because you’re human. What are your thoughts?

Simply Stronger I: The "Easy" Part

One of the exciting parts of moving back in proximity with my family is that I get to be in charge of their training lives, and help them get into better shape.  While they are all 'active' folks, none of them lift regularly, and most of them never have.  For me, the idea of a bunch of untrained and willing individuals is delicious--so much potential! But thinking of working with each of them has made percolate on an old theme for me: people would solve most of their problems if they just focused on getting stronger.  This deserves a little breaking-down, as does any blanket statement that purports to tell people what they "should" do.

So first, let's define people in this case as un- trained or lightly trained.  The same general argument applies to highly trained populations too, but for additional and different reasons than I'd like to discuss today.  Second, by solve...their problems I mean both that many of the problems (sources of pain) in their physical lives would be mitigated and that they would move closer to their goals.  Then, by focusing I mean that their training would be committed to getting stronger and their mind-set would be tuned toward that concrete goal.  Finally, when I talk about getting stronger I mean doing exercises that are directed at making your whole body more effective in resisting weights that are heavy for a given person.  I am talking about squatting, hinge-ing (deadlifts, swings), pressing, pulling and rolling.

This is a big topic that gives me the heebie-jeebies to even think about attacking.  But it's also hugely important, and one that informs and shapes everything that I do, most simply because when you are stronger, life is easier.  For the sake of thoroughness (and readability), I want to break this into three distinct posts.  Today, I will talk about some of the physical reasons that a strength-focused program makes sense for people new to training.  Next, I will talk about why this approach is important for the psychological health of new lifters.  Finally, I want to dig into how such a program faces so much competition from the current fitness industry, and why new lifters (and truly, most of the rest of us) are best served by just keeping our eyes on getting "simply stronger."  I'll throw in a sample program at that point, too.

***

Almost everyone that I work with says during our initial conversation that they'd like to "tone up."  People love this little nugget for the same reason that fitness-industry folks hate it--it is broad enough to include a whole variety of body-fat, muscle tone, muscle size, and strength goals while still sounding small enough to not commit the person too much in any direction.  It is decidedly not a specific and directed goal, but for people who have never picked up a bar, let alone in a controlled way, THAT IS OK!  Why?

It's ok because when it comes to improving, our bodies respond to stress that is outside our comfort zone.  For untrained folks, that comfort zone is pretty small and just about anything will get you there; our first goal should be to just learn how to work hard, a goal that the basic lifts (squat, hinge, etc.) are uniquely designed to accomplish.  And anyone who has ever strength-trained in a real way knows what I'm talking about.  After a few short sets, sweat is pouring, we are gasping for breath, and generally we feel like wrung-out washcloths.  Maybe more importantly, all the big muscles in the center of our bodies feel hot and engaged because they have been called out!  They are being asked (finally!) to do something that is more difficult than can be accomplished by the usual cast of overused muscles that get us through the daily grind; it is decidedly outside our comfort zone.

That feeling of strain, of reaching beyond your current abilities, is a powerful and potentially dangerous thing, which is exactly why it's worthwhile to get some coaching when you are at this first stage.  But living in that space outside of your current comfort zone is the only way to make changes to your current "normal".  Calories are burned, metabolism is sped up, muscles are directed to change their composition, hormones and their receptors are turned up or down, and a thousand other little physiological tweaks take place.  How these different aspects are specifically effected have everything to do with what you do outside that comfort zone, but just working hard ends up being your best tool.  (I think we all intuit this on some level, which is usually why working out seems not so fun, but that's for the next post).

And while doing any one thing will make you better at that specific thing, doing strength will make you better at everything, especially early in your training life.  But while most of those popular programs that you've seen on late-night TV (and that usually involve 3 "easy" payments...) are really good at making you work hard, they put little to no thought toward the sides of training that gradually make movement easier and less painful.  This is the next way that strength as a training focus wins out.

As those big, central muscles start to wake up in response to these new, high-intensity demands problems of of movement start to dissolve.  Issues caused by the imbalance of muscles, like certain pain in your back, hips, knees, neck, and shoulders, often start to ease in reaction to completing movements that reflect efficient patterns well-suited to the human body (squatting, hinge-ing, etc.).  Unlike other movements that are directed toward mere task-completion, these movements are also consumed with completing those tasks well, and in a way that is best suited to your body.  The take-away is that working on these movements in a methodical, intense way yields changes exactly where your body needs them.  That new, targeted work in corners of your body that were weak, unbeknownst to you, suddenly rebalances the status-quo.  Yes, pain sometimes disappears, but many, many other parts start working better, too: flexibility and posture, for example, invariably improve.

And looking ahead, as you get more conditioned to stresses (i.e. stronger), familiarity with those basic, whole body lifts will continue to serve you better than any of the millions of tweaks that the fitness-industry tries to sell you.  As I said before, these lifts have been selected for over the millennia because of their unique efficiency at accomplishing work.  They allow you to do more with what you've got, which gets right back to why we train for strength in the first place: it makes everything else easier.

When you are faced with the plateaus that are inevitable for all of us, keeping your eyes on just getting stronger simplifies the process.  We need not talk about looking all the way to final conclusions (are you powerlifting?! olympic lifting?! doing gymnastics?!); no, just focusing on moving more weight will get us most of the way toward where we want to be.  And while there will be a need to start looking at different variables and alternative methods (I'm mostly talking about programming here), those changes unfold organically, as you need them and not a moment before.

I call all of this, the physical aspect, the "easy" part of getting Simply Stronger because it involves the things that stay put, like muscles and bones, and do what we direct them to do (for the most part).  All the ways that the mind can get in the way, and screw with our perception of improvement will be the subject of Part II.  Stay tuned.

Please, I welcome comments from all you: did I make your day? piss you off? make you curious?  Let me know.

Now, with a nod toward my buddy Mike, go lift some heavy shit!