Recently in my city there has been a surge of people participating in a brand new MLM company.  I’ve been approached by these types of people many times over the years, and to a number they have all been exposed as companies that are not at all interested in your health, they are interested in your money and taking it from you while promising that you are going to be wealthy and have an amazing life if you just work for them and get all of your family and friends to participate.  I’m not totally against MLM, because some companies are more ethical and provide some really good things, while others simply are a method for some good salespeople to make a quick buck and then move onto the next company they choose to represent.

The most recent one has you taking two shakes a day and then eating a small meal for dinner, and promises that you will lose weight, feel amazing and totally transform yourself – all in only 90 days.  I can digress quickly and ask what these people are supposed to do after the 90 days are up?  Go back to their previous eating habits and lifestyle?  In fact, on some blogs for this company, their representatives actually state that “exercise is NOT required to lose weight on this program”.  To me this is completely ridiculous, and just feeds into the idea that you can have a quick fix and get results (while also parting with about $200 a month) and not have to worry about establishing a long term healthy lifestyle.  Digression over.  I’ll rant about that at the end.

So when I see things advertised like this or hear people talk about it, it makes me cringe, and then it just pisses me off.  95% of the time, these quick fixes do not work, and the poor people who have fallen for a line from a salesperson just lose their money, maybe some water weight and then gain it all back plus a bit more.  I have dozens of examples both personal and professional of people losing weight rapidly and then gaining it back just as rapidly (if not faster) plus a few reinforcements just in case that ever happens again.  I’m sure you have too.  One of my clients recently told me of a friend who actually did the Bernstein diet – three times!?  And now her body is still obese because she gained more weight back each time and as an added bonus her kidneys and digestive system are constantly in turmoil and discomfort.  Go figure.

Here is the funny thing about your body.  It doesn’t like rapid change.  There is something within your body called homeostasis.  It is the way that your body regulates everything and “tends to maintain a stable, constant condition of properties”.  In a nutshell, when something changes within your body skews it one way, under the condition of homeostasis your body will do what it can to skew it back.  For example, when we get really hot or exert ourselves, our body kicks in and starts to sweat as a cooling mechanism.  If we exert ourselves too much and drive blood away from the brain, our body makes us fall down (fainting or passing out) in order to put blood back to the brain.  Blood clotting, metabolism regulation, and insulin/glucagon balance are all examples of positive and negative feedback loops.  In a nutshell, your body likes to stay stable as much as it can, even to the point of simply shutting you down if it needs to.  Your body isn’t stupid.  It is a massive supercomputer that deals with trillions of chemical interactions every minute.  You can’t expect it to be happy when you suddenly make a radical change.  If you suddenly decide to go outside and run for 20 kilometers when you never do it you are likely to have a heart attack or get hurt also.

So what happens when you go into caloric deficit like in these diets?  Well, you lose weight.  Of course you do.  Typically on diets like these people are dropping their caloric intake by up to 1000-1500 calories a day while also greatly reducing the amount of crap they are eating on a daily basis.  Then they get where they want to be (or “finish the challenge” with lots of pictures and raving fanfare) and simply change back to what they were doing before.  Most people under report how much they eat and over report the amount of exercise they actually do.  So the weight comes right back to where it was before, and you typically gain more because you feel like you deserve more after all of your hard work.  By the way, the whole “starvation mode” thing is a myth.  If you actually kept your calorie intake the same as it was when you’re on this “diet” then you wouldn’t necessarily gain all the weight back.  But nobody does that.  We magically think everything will stay the same, even though we have radically changed the rules of the game.

In our society today we all want quick fixes.  We want results right now and are willing to pay more money in order to get them faster if we really want something.  That email needs to be returned right away so I get a 4G phone instead of 3G.  That item you want you can buy online in five minutes rather than going to the store.  Results guaranteed in 90 days.  Even my clients expect miracles sometimes with removing their pain and getting them moving properly again or changing their body composition.  Sometimes I’m actually good enough to pull it off, but more often than not, it takes a while to get everything right again after years of abuse and neglect and a lot of work on their part doing everything right to bring it all together.

Olympians train for four years for one event, and we expect our body to change completely in 90 days.  The thing is, you can’t do that to your body.  It’s too smart.  It knows that stress, doing things quickly and trying to push beyond its’ current capacity means bad things, so it takes steps to not have that happen.  I’m going to ask you to simply listen to it.  Take the time to let it adapt, learn and move forward because whether or not you think you have time, you certainly don’t have time to waste.  As a society we need to get away from this idea that everything needs to happen right now and get back to what nature intended – slow, gradual change for the better.  I’m a firm believer that you can do anything that you want to do, but you have to give your body the chance to get there.  Let me know if you agree!

I gained a new perspective this past weekend.  I’m currently going through the stages of the Resistance Training Specialist Mastery program which has really opened my eyes to seeing what we as exercise people do every day in a different way.  Often times I will hear a trainer tell a client or another trainer “that exercise is bad for you.”  They often do this without any other qualifier or they have that perspective simply because they were told it by somebody else and believed it to be true without looking into it themselves, as happens with pretty much everything within our industry.  I have been guilty of this myself.  A good example is this little exchange:

“Leg extensions are bad.”

“Why?”

“Because it puts shear force on your knee.”

Normally then the person being told this will just think shear is a horrible thing and they need to stay away from it forever.  Usually this trainer will follow up the discussion by telling their client how they need to squat instead, because squatting is really “functional”.  Squatting on a BOSU is even better because it’s an unstable surface so it works your “stabilizers”.  The issue is simply that 99% of the time, the person giving the advice has no idea what shear even is, how it is represented as a force within that movement and how it is applied to the joint, or (more importantly) whether or not it should be.  Again, I’ll reiterate that I have been guilty of this too because I don’t want it to seem like I’m completely innocent with conversations like this.  I used words all of the time that maybe I shouldn’t have because it is an easy way to get a point across to a client or co-worker without them looking at you blankly.

Some questions that immediately spring to mind is does that person even know what shear actually is?  Why is shear bad?  Why is it bad for that person?  Is there another way to do the same thing with a different overall result?  Or a way to get the same result doing something different?  Often we as trainers don’t think much beyond “good or bad”.  What we don’t consider is if this is good or bad for that person at that time within the capacity of having no idea what might be going on within that joint beyond what we can find out with our limited ability to check it.  It brings things to a higher level of responsibility, which is where in my opinion people in my profession should hang out.  Unfortunately most of us can’t or even worse, can’t be bothered.

There really is no good or bad exercise, there are simply increasing and decreasing levels of appropriateness of the exercise based on the person involved, what you are trying to do to them and why you are trying to do it.  The great thing about what I am now learning is that I can completely alter the force going through a joint to make it harder, or safer, or apply things there that I want to without causing things I don’t want to have happen.  It’s like magic, but really it isn’t – it is just attention to detail, being as sure of something as you can be and keeping the intention in mind to help the client get what you want them to get.  It brings in the mastery of what we do, which is affect the body and it’s many joints in a way that can either bring something good or something bad.  There is a lot of trial and error involved, but as we get really masterful at it, there might be a bit less error.

I know a lot about the body and how it moves and works and does all of the little things that go on every second of every day that affect your daily living and health.  One of the most valuable things I probably learned this past week was what I don’t know.  And that’s okay – provided that I don’t pretend that I do or just ignore it and do something to somebody anyway without any mindful thought towards what I am doing.  That’s what study and application is for.  You just can’t label things right away without knowing exactly what is going on.  I’m happy to have this new perspective and with any luck I’ll be able to affect people in a much more appropriate way now that I have it.  Feel free to comment on what I’ve said and think about it yourself.  You might be surprised!

Just yesterday I was prompted to write this article because on some downtime I was surfing the internet reading various things posted on my Twitter.  Sometimes when articles come up that are posted on blogs I take a look, and this time what I saw made me just shake my head and wonder how people call themselves “fitness experts” when they have something posted on their web site that is so blatantly idiotic.  This particular article was all about “functional” training which this particular trainer revealed she did with her clients through her boot camps, as a marketing thing of course.  However, she then proceeded to list some exercises that she considered “essential to the functional training of any person”.  Number one on this list was a bench tricep dip.

Just in case you as a ready don’t know, a bench tricep dip requires that you place your hands on a bench behind you, extend your shoulder usually beyond what it should be at and then flex and extend your elbows in order to work the back of the arms while keeping your legs extended and usually stationary.  What I wondered for immediately is what the heck is that possibly “functional” for?  If I had to throw something behind me (and down towards the ground) really hard?  Sure.  If I was going to climb a mountain backwards (ie facing AWAY from the cliff face).  Maybe.

Part of the problem is the whole hype behind the word “functional”.  The first question I always ask is “functional for what?”  Believe it or not, the primary definition of functional is a math term – meaning relating to a function (of, involving or relating to a function).  The second definition is “designed for or adapted to a particular use”.  To me, this means that if you’re going to classify something as functional it needs to be applied towards a specific purpose – therefore in mechanics, your movement should be applied towards enhancing your ability to do a certain joint movement (or series of movements) or strength within those movements.

This person even had a “push up” listed as another of their highly recommended functional movements.  So what is a push up functional for?  What will it make you better at doing?  Pushing your body up with both hands off of the floor?  Sure.  This might apply to seniors who want to be able to pick themselves up if they fall down.  If you are in the military you are required to be able to do push ups.  However, if my goal is to be able to jump higher, how does a push up help me?  Would another type of resisted pushing movement probably help me more?  Push-ups generally are functional for one thing – helping you be able to do more push ups.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.  I like push ups and use them often with my clients to develop strength in their shoulders, elbows and wrists.  But I don’t claim that it is “functional” for anything in their day-to-day life beyond being able to do more push ups.

There are certain words that a person really should be required to have a license to use.  In my industry the claims that I hear and read on a regular basis more often than not make me cringe, but honestly what makes me cringe more is comments written from people who are completely misinformed saying how right they are.  Some of the bigger ones in my industry that trainers use on almost a daily basis:

Functional                                             Imbalance

Core                                                          Tone

Stabilization                                          Isolation

The funny thing is if you actually ask the person in question what these words mean or why they are applying it to anyone they will probably look at you with a blank stare and give an explanation that isn’t even close.  I actually had someone ask me about a course they could take not too long ago where the instructor of the course claimed that he could actually turn muscles on and off.  Of course he had no scientific basis for it and couldn’t even explain how muscles work properly but he decided to charge lots of people over a thousand dollars for a weekend of instruction in it.

So for those of you reading this who are trainers, think about what things mean and make sure you know exactly what you are talking about before you spout off about something you are actually being really inaccurate about.  It takes nine months to become a cigar roller in Cuba and two years to become a massage therapist but we as trainers are allowed to call ourselves experts about exercise after twenty hours over a weekend, a multiple choice test and a 45 minute practical exam.  Find out the real meaning behind your words.  We want the sound bite that makes us sound smart, but we don’t care to learn the actual meaning behind it.  That just makes you lazy.

For you who are clients, please challenge your trainers.  I love it when my clients ask questions because it means they are engaged and they are interested in learning more about what’s going on.  If I don’t know the answer, then I’ll admit it and make sure that doesn’t happen again.  Don’t blindly believe a line of crap, especially when it is about something as important as your body and how it moves.  And don’t do a bloody tricep dip because it is “functional”.  Unless of course you’re going to climb a mountain backwards soon.

Often in the evenings I like to stand back and just take a look around a crowded gym.  There are usually lots of guys and a few brave women lifting weights in various forms.  We all have seen that guy that makes us cringe, who is flailing around with a cable over his head, or guys doing some sort of modified bench press with two inch range of motion, or the guy standing in front of a really heavy deadlift bar thinking about lifting it, but not actually doing so while his buddies stand there staring too.

People doing their own thing in the gym is one thing, but when I see a trainer who is staring off into space while their client is doing a bicep curl standing on a BOSU trainer, I’m always reminded of a very important question that both trainer and client should always be asking.  What is the goal of this exercise?  How does it fit into the overall program and goal for the client?  More often than not, when I ask my fellow trainers this I get a blank stare and usually some kind of generic justification.  Some of my favourites (using the exercise example above) are:

“It works the core.”  Does it?  More so than being on the ground?  More so than doing something a bit more without standing on an unstable surface?  Can you actually tell me what the core is and what it does?  Can you tell me what parts of the core you’re working by standing on that that you aren’t by standing on the ground?  Is there a safer way for your client to be doing that?  Oh, and by the way – how does it apply to the overall goal?

“I’m doing a circuit.”  Okay, why?  Are you trying to get their heart rate higher?  Are you trying to have a light balance movement as part of a conditioning circuit program?  What movement pattern does that contribute to?  Is there a more effective way to do the same thing?  How long is the circuit lasting?  How much rest?  How many intervals?  Oh, and by the way – how does it apply to the overall goal?

“We’re doing upper body today.”  Because you did lower body on another day?  Have they had adequate rest from their previous workout?  Are they okay within their movement patterns in their upper body to be able to take a harder workout right now, today?  Why did you choose to split things like that?  Since you’re obviously doing elbow flexion, are you doing extension as well with them standing on an unstable surface?  Why is their hand position like that?

In any good exercise and strength program, there should be a purpose behind absolutely everything that you do with your trainer.  Whether it is to develop a part of a kinetic chain, working on something that can’t fire properly, or even just as simple as doing a movement in order to achieve a heart rate level or a level of speed and power, there should always be a reason.  When I’m designing a program they normally go through phases of change and different types of movement, but during each and every session there should be a purpose for each exercise and the amount of repetitions, sets, timing, and even breaking it down to things like range of motion and angles.  What this all breaks down to is the ultimate purpose behind each exercise – the intention.

Personally, I love it when clients ask me questions because it gives me a chance to teach, and the harder the better.  It also means that they are actually interested in learning – and that means that they care.  If they care, they will continue to do what they are doing, so they will get better results.  Results come with consistency over time, not with quick fixes and immediate responses.  This applies to many things in life and in nature as well.

So today, if you are going into a workout, ask yourself why you are really doing the exercises that you are doing.  Is it because you want to look good?  Be able to do more?  Work on a weakness or further develop strength?  Recover from an injury?  And if you are working with a trainer, do me a favour and challenge them.  Why are we doing this?  Why this way?  Why with that weight?  The best trainers can answer these questions right away because they already know – they have a plan in place and they are executing it so they should be able to explain the process.  If they can’t, question why you are paying someone to not plan things personally for you when they are supposed to be a “personal” trainer.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go and plan my workouts for the day.  At 8am I’m doing strength and conditioning work with a 25 year old ½ marathon runner.  At 9am I’m doing assessment on a chronic shoulder issue from a physio referral.  And at 10am I’m dealing with an ACL tear and a herniated disc.  Can you guess what exercises these people will be doing?

I don’t have to guess.  I know.  That’s the point.