All the wrong things done for all the right reasons: Why picking the wrong personal trainer can lead to disaster
19 September 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
It wasn’t my intention to do a slam piece on personal trainers but chance and circumstance allowed me to observe a squad of well-intentioned, well-meaning PT’s over a protracted period and what I observed was a weird combination of arrogance, horrific ignorance and blind allegiance to an fitness orthodoxy that left clients as the biggest loser. I had been bought in to do some written consulting for a large fitness firm and during my stay I was assigned a desk with a view of the elaborate gym that handled personal clients for big bucks. On day one I happened to look up from my rewriting of a corporate brochure and happened to catch a nice looking personal trainer putting a hugely obese individual through an exercise I would describe as a “modified bench squat.” The poor guy stood probably 6-1 and had to weigh 400-pounds with 50% body fat. It was highly unlikely he could walk up three flights of stairs without becoming totally gassed yet our Bay Watch personal trainer had the big fat guy grab a pair of 25-pound dumbbells in each hand and squat up and down to a high bench; he would dip down roughly a foot, sit heavily on the bench and push himself upward. From my observation post behind the glass I could see them but they couldn’t see me. I lost count after the 25th bench squat repetition, it appeared they were making Fatty Arbuckle do 50-rep sets. Mr. Bay Watch stood and counted reps, not offering much in the way of advice or encouragement. By the time the extended set was complete the poor guy appeared on the verge of having a heart attack. The PT simply walked away. I was ready to dial 911 as the guy was obviously having a helluva time getting his breath back.
After ten minutes Heavy Duty regained his composure and sat on the same bench rubbing his knees. Along about this time Mr. Bay Watch sauntered back over and handed the still flush-faced fellow a pair of 15-pounders – time for another 50-rep set! A look of pure, wide-eyed terror appeared on Heavy D’s face. He made the second set reps usinf a sly tactic but afterwards he sat alone, obviously in great pain in all the wrong places, knees and joints. This training was about as enjoyable as sticking your finger in an electric light bulb socket fifty times in a row: it was just a matter of time before this guy threw the towel in on this torture-fest. Who wouldn’t quit? Back in the Victorian era criminals sentenced to “hard labor” did not (as in America) work on a chain gangs forced to break rocks in the hot sun. Instead English jailers devised a rotating device on which ten prisoners at a time could stand. They would then in unison step up and step up and step up…ad infinitum. They would do this 10 hours a day seven days a week with ten minutes rest each hour. Somehow the plight of the fat man doing the bench squats put me in mind of those pathetic English prisoners walking endlessly, mindlessly, pointlessly on the hard labor rack. The exercise itself was lame from a muscle-building standpoint; dumbbell bench squats an “exercise in futility.” First off the depth of the bench squat was so shallow as to render the exercise totally ineffectual. In order to recruit and stimulate the maximum amount of hip and quadriceps muscle, a full and complete range-of-motion is required. The 12-inch rep stroke used by the big man was woefully lacking the requisite ROM.
The big guy found a way to make the exercise easy – and even more ineffective – by swinging the dumbbells backward as he sat down. He’d sit down and rock back and allow the bells to smoothly flow back and as timed it so as he arose from the bench he used the forward momentum of the bells to help him stand erect. The PT was oblivious to the fact that the Big Guy had found a way to beat the system. Some could argue that the shallow bench squats provided a cardio effect but the effort was to short and too intense to be effective. No doubt his heart struggled to keep up with the oxygen debt but spiking an out-of-shape person’s heart rate to over 200-beats per minute is extremely dangerous and potentially life threatening. The big guy could no doubt generate 80% of his age-related heart rate maximum simply by walking on a flat surface at a rapid pace. The most effective form of cardio elevates the heart for a sustained period of time in a methodical and prolonged fashion. The human heart is approximately the size of a balled fist, regardless the size of the individual, and spiking a heart rate dramatically in a totally out of shape individual flirts with the very real danger of cardiac arrest. But this was just one of many examples of bad things happening to good people: later that same morning I saw another personal trainer instructing a high paying client on how to do dumbbell bench presses while lying on one of those gigantic Swiss balls. The rational was that by fighting for balance while pressing dumbbells not only is the target muscle built but additional ‘core strength’ developed. What a load of crap.
Any halfway reasoned analysis of this proposition would reveal the total and complete factual inaccuracy of this fitness myth. The first problem with Swiss ball bench pressing (or flyes for that matter) is the ball itself prevents lowering the bells deep enough to activate the pecs. The restricted ROM renders this exercise useless. In addition the whole concept of fighting for balance while exercising as being beneficial is undercut by the fact that the poundage used is so radically reduced that the muscle cannot be properly stimulated. If a person is capable of bench pressing 100-pounds for ten repetitions in standard flat bench press using two 50-pound dumbbells can only handle a pair of 20’s “fighting for core-strength infusing” balance while lying on a ball what muscular benefit can that possible provide? Any benefit (debatable) is lost because of radically reduced ROM and radically reduced poundage – how can a muscle grow using 40% of what it is capable of? Insofar and developing ‘core strength,’ training time would be far better spent working on real core strengthening exercises such as standard squats and deadlifts. Doing ridiculous exercises such as partial rep bench presses fighting for balance using pee-wee poundage is about as big a waste of training time as one could imagine. The list goes on and on…stretching for thirty minutes prior to weight training in order to “warm up” for the weight training session. First off, stretching cold muscles is a terrible idea! The ideal time to stretch a muscle is when the muscle is warm, not ice cold. Increased blood viscosity elevates muscle temperature and the warm muscle is loose and pliable and flexible. Static stretching DOES NOT make weight training safer – the best possible preliminary warm-up for any weight training exercise is to perform warm-up sets that target the muscle or muscle group about to be worked. The finest warm-up for heavy squatting is light squatting the finest warm-up for bench pressing is light bench pressing – not free-hand toe touching or hurdler stretches!
Cutting-edge Parrillo strategy is to stretch in between weight training sets. Yet fitness orthodoxy proclaims “stretch before you lift in order to avoid injury.’ Totally false, yet I timed one trainee as they were being put through a 35-minute pre-workout stretch routine despite the actual lifting session lasting only 30-minutes! How much better it would have been to have used that 35-minutes of wasted stretching on more weight training interspersed with fascial stretching that targeted the muscle being trained. One final bit of orthodoxy that I witnessed from my secret vantage point:
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