Everybody comes into the gym with a goal in mind. It may not be a specific, concrete, or well-defined goal, but everybody has something in mind when they join a gym and pick up a fitness and diet plan.
For almost everyone, that goal boils down to losing a little weight and “toning up a little”. A smaller sample, usually younger men, will come in wanting to get bigger muscles (so long as those muscles are in the chest, shoulders, and arms) and, occasionally, to get stronger. And from time to time, I get an athlete, aspiring or otherwise, who’s primary goal is to perform better in his/her sport.
As a personal trainer, it’s my job to parse that client’s request into real, attainable goals, to devise a plan, and then take steps to make sure that plan is followed – and thus that the goal is reached.
Unfortunately, I think that partly because of the name of the business and partly because of my habit of talking up the “strength” component of fitness, I’ve gotten pigeonholed as the “strength guy” or the “powerlifter”. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want to help clear up that confusion, first, and while I’m here I figure I might as well talk about my overall philosophy of training and how it differs from most everybody else
The Problem…
…with most personal trainers is a lack of context and vision. It’s hard for us, myself included, to see past ourselves. Whether we like it or not, our views, beliefs, and biases will effect our outlook on most anything. The best we can hope for is to be aware of this, and by being aware, to try and minimize that impact.
Some trainers specialize in certain activities, like athletic or sports development, bodybuilding, strength training, working with beginners, working with women, and so on. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Finding a niche and offering an all-around experience in that niche can be of benefit to both trainer and client. A prime example would be bodybuilders, who have to run a gamut of different kinds of training, different kinds of dieting (and a whole range of psychological issues that come with it), and the rituals of contest preparation. It can be a huge benefit to have a coach who has been there and consistently helped people through the process. For any sort of specific activity with specific needs, you’d rarely want a generalist.
This is bad when the trainer specializes without realizing that he or she is specializing. In most cases, this is pure situational blindness. The trainer has a singular world-view, a belief rather than an ideology, which dictates all of his advice. When you think there’s only one tool for the job, it’s easy to start looking at all the jobs as fit for your preference. This can be a result of pure ignorance, or it can be a case where the trainer has exposure to other ideas but rejects them for whatever reason.
I tend to blame appearance-obsessed values that promote “looking the part” over thinking and experimenting. I also put a lot of blame on the educational and regulatory bodies, which are fine for churning out cookie-cutter trainers armed with lots of orthodox book knowledge but very little ability to think beyond the generalizations. I can go on at length about the limitations of exercise science research to realistic scenarios, and I have in other places. For now, just leave it at this: the facts about exercise aren’t always as factual as you would want them to be – but you’d never know this based on how the subject is taught and how most trainers recite gems of wisdom as gospel.
If you’re after athletic development or want to get stronger in specific lifts, you’re out of luck if you wind up with a trainer that thinks all resistance training is a split routine starting with chest on Monday, and where each body part is trained with five exercises worth of pyramids. If you’re a woman looking to lose weight, you’re out of luck if your trainer is a 20-something “fitness freak lol!” that has never had to struggle a day in her life to look pretty, and thinks her program will work just fine for you. Results are about context, and very few of your average gym-trainers and self-appointed fitness-experts realize this.
Rarely do these people even understand why they’re putting you on these “fitness programs”, except that it’s what they were told to do. Unfortunately, the style-over-substance nature of the industry and the institutionalized lack of critical thinking means that these guys (and girls) are going to be the face of the industry. The measuring stick should be the trainer’s ability to get you the results you asked for, and very little else.
Specialization is good. Ignorance and dismissal of the wide range of possibilities, and how they relate to differing goals, is not so good.
What you learn is at least as important as how you learn it
It would stun the average person on the street to know how much of both training and diet are still more art than science. Credentials are good in as much as any piece of paper can indicate competence. More often than not credentials indicate a willingness to show up and conform to the rules of testing, rather than any specific quality or amounts of knowledge gained by them.
Exercise science programs are fine for turning out graduates that have memorized a breadth of knowledge on the subject, above and beyond the layman. What they are not well equipped to do is give those graduates the mental tool-set required to think past the rote facts.
This is important because exercise science is not a field of first principles. It’s a specific application of human physiology, which is itself a specialization of biology. Exercise science tells us how our bodies react to the specific circumstances of exercise.
It’s an exceptionally fuzzy area of research. There are many gaps in the knowledge and many difficulties involved in studying the topic in ways that matter. With relatively few exceptions, research from exercise science has little to no direct application to any person that walks into a gym on any given day.
What exercise science does is establish some useful boundaries or give useful hints; but this is equivalent to giving you a map and a flashlight and dropping you off in a cave. It’s better than nothing, but you still have to find your own way out – and there are a lot of crevasses you may not notice if you aren’t paying attention.
I’ve said for years now that I consider education in logical reasoning, critical thinking, and research methods to be far more valuable to trainers – trainers that want to excel – than any specific education in an exercise- or fitness-related subject.
It is not the availability of information that holds back a fitness professional. Information is everywhere, for free. It doesn’t take much more than a trip to Google to get all the information you could ever care to have on just about any subject. When facing that kind of overload, the required skill is not learning. The required skill is filtration. You have to be able to judge a piece of information on its merits.
Most trainers do not have this filter in place. They have confirmation bias: the information they want to believe, which agrees with what they already believe, is accepted. Information that disagrees is ignored.
Being able to think makes the whole cave a little brighter, and tacks up warning signs in front of the really deadly drops. It still doesn’t guarantee you’ll make it out; but you’d be pretty stupid to leave the advantage on the table.
Strength is important, but…
My paradigm is strength. I started lifting weights to “get big”, and soon after I got the strength bug. I freely admit this, because it tells you where I’m coming from. I can admit that this bias influences how I think and how I look at the process. I also try to temper that with all the stuff I just wrote about being a critical thinker.
I like to think that makes me a better trainer.
I try to absorb the science, my own experience, observations in others, and observations by others. I don’t think there really is any one true source of knowledge, not in this field. Science establishes a physiological background, but it cannot tell you “how to train” or “how to diet”. At the same time, recommendations that come “from the trenches” should at least respect science.
I think you need to be able to separate specific rules or details from general principles. A specific rule:
“You must do high reps to tone up”
“You must smash the muscle at each workout and let it recover for a week”
“You must eat six meals a day”
A general principle:
“If you add muscle and drop fat, you’ll look leaner and more athletic”
“Overload the muscle with sufficient stimulus and it will grow”
“Eat enough food to support your goals and activity level”
The general principle explains things better than the specific rule. I like general principles. Specific rules I can take or leave. The drawback is that the general principles are a lot more vague, and people don’t like vague. People like concrete soundbites, even if they’re wrong.
Fitness has very few general principles. This is a good thing, because it leaves the door open for a very diverse range of Things That Work. Most people will argue over specific rules (i.e., diets and programs) without ever realizing that they can both Work because they both follow the general principles.
Most people think of me as the muscle and strength guy. The powerlifting guy. It’d be more accurate to call me the Russian sports-science influenced, science-minded, practical-wisdom guy. But that doesn’t roll off the tongue nearly as well, so I forgive you for shortening it.
The difference: a powerlifter is a guy that competes in a sport with specific rituals and rules. I compete in powerlifting from time to time, but I wouldn’t call myself a powerlifter.
The truth of the matter is that I am, personally, more interested in well-rounded development. I’m impressed by strength, but I’m even more impressed when the guy lifting something impressive also has an impressive physique and can do things besides squat a huge weight.
Thus I am the general strength and athleticism guy. That sounds like CrossFit, doesn’t it? Yes, in broad scope. No, in implementation.
Why do I put so much emphasis on strength, then? Scroll back above and look to the Russian-influenced part. My thought processes on strength and athleticism and general fitness are built on a different foundation that most trainers and gurus today.
I am not an adherent of mainstream bodybuilding, with its split-body-part routines and emphasis on mental “intensity” and “blasting muscles”.
I am not an adherent of “functional fitness”, which has people running around doing quasi-random workouts with no end goal and no plan to reach a nonexistent end goal.
I am not an overly cautious “movement specialist” who invokes misapplied science to put clients on wobble-boards and demands that you must squat high unless you want to hurt your knees.
I am certainly not a fan of pop-culture fitness, which is more about fads and bandwagons than anything else.
My outlook has been constructed from a few key sources. Old-school (pre-equipment) powerlifting and weightlifting is one of those. Lifters from Bob Peoples, John Davis, Reg Park, John Grimek, Doug Hepburn, Anthony Ditillo to Tommy Kono have shaped my thoughts. These were men from a different era, when bodybuilding still had lifting contests, when there was no (or very little) supportive gear, when you had to get both strong and fit using minimal equipment.
Russian and Eastern European sports science has heavily influenced me. The books Supertraining and The Science and Practice of Strength Training contain a wealth of knowledge for anyone that cares to find it. There is more information in those books, good reliable information, than you will find in nearly any other books on the subject.
I am about simplicity. I don’t like stupid rules, and I don’t like stupid nonsense that people pass off as “science”. I want everything to be in the simplest terms possible. Most of the information that is passed off as fitness knowledge is complexified nonsense.
Combine that with my own experience. Repeatedly, my own best results across the board have come when I am at my strongest. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to get bigger, to improve general fitness, or to simply look and feel better. Strength goes with fitness the way a foundation goes with a house. The only trick then is defining strength appropriately for the situation; not all strength is created equal, and the one-rep maximum in a handful of barbell exercises is not the only way to measure strength.
If you want to do anything impressive, physically, you need to have some kind of strength. Even ultra-endurance athletes will benefit from strength in some way. The majority of people aren’t that kind of long-distance athlete, though. They want and need a more concentrated kind of diversity, rather than working at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Those of you that just want to look good? This is where my outlook absolutely shines.
Build a foundation of strength. Strength, and by extension muscle mass, take months to build and years to maximize. This is where your effort should be focused. Barbells are a wonderful and irreplaceable tool. But they are not the only tool and not the only way to measure strength. Competence in moving your own bodyweight and the ability to handle odd objects is also valuable; the more interested you are in general fitness and athletic activities, the more relevant these will become.
Add in other components of fitness as it becomes necessary, according to your sport. Flexibility and joint mobility can be handled in warmups and warmdowns. All of these fitness qualities are important and should be emphasized as needed, according to the goals and weaknesses of the person in question.
Endurance should be handled in separate sessions, or after strength work. Why? Because strength work is more sensitive to fatigue than endurance work. Running five miles and then squatting is a good way to have a really bad squat workout. Squatting then running five miles won’t be nearly so bad.
I emphasize strength because strength carries over to most kinds of “athletic” activities, because it is the hardest to build and because it is impacted the most by fatigue.
In both scientific terms and practical terms, there is little reason to not prioritize strength, and many reasons to do so.
If you just want to be pretty, toned, and athletic-looking, then you need a nice combo of strength training, anaerobic endurance work, and aerobic endurance work. Strength train with barbells, strength train with body weight and odd-object lifts. Do sprints. Push and pull heavy things. Take a long bike ride or do a long run once or twice a week.
This is my paradigm. I am not “the strength guy”. I am the do everything for a reason guy, the think about what you’re doing guy, and the keep it as simple as possible while not being an idiot guy.
