Doing fewer things better
24 March 2006If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In the big fat world of fitness, things keep getting ever more crazed. The general fitness clientele, to expropriate a musical analogy, are dazed and confused. I keep seeing whacky stuff on TV as personal trainers will do anything to differentiate themselves from other personal trainers…how about sitting on the infamous Swiss Ball, one leg extended as the other fights to maintain balance while pushing a tiny-weenie dumbbell overhead. The only thing missing is circus music and perhaps a mini-car circling the exercising trainee that suddenly stops as eight clowns pile out. Meanwhile a muscle-less “fitness expert” dramatically intones that doing the overhead dumbbell press (with a weight my 90-pound daughter could rep a dozen times) while fighting for balance “builds core strength.” It seems that every crackpot exercise shown as of late builds that elusive core strength…gimme some core strength…gotta have that core strength….of course I’ve never met a person with a 300-pound deadlift that didn’t have more core strength than any of these pencil-necked fitness experts who endlessly proclaim the mystical benefits of more core. These experts keep insisting and proscribing that their clients need more core strength; it’s become the predictable mantra of the new age fitness world. Here’s a flash bulletin: achieving a 150-pound pause squat taken below parallel for 10-reps will infuse more core strength then all the Swiss Ball sit-ups, presses and off-balanced dink-ass exercises combined. That’s a natural fact: mathematically irrefutable and demonstrable.
I love a makeover show on the food network wherein they take 90-days to transform three people, usually coworkers. They have the de rigueur fitness expert, plus a fashion consultant and the low-calorie cook that the show is constructed around. The resident fitness expert loves to make the fat people do agility drills similar to something you’d see at the NFL rookie combine camp. The person is timed at how fast they can sprint 10-yards, round a cone, run back to the start line and do it one more time. “43 seconds. We’ll have to work hard to chop time off that!” The male model PT says. At the end of the three months they run the agility course again to create a 90-day report card that signifies – something – though not quite sure what. “39 seconds! That’s incredible! You’ve chopped 4-seconds off your best time! Congratulations” High fives are exchanged. At the end of this show no one obtains any real results. But so as to not piss in the party punch bowl at the show’s conclusion they gather friends and relatives together in a room. The guys and gals are made up at the salon; hairdos undergo a more radical modification than the physiques of the participants. They dress them in new and sexy clothes. The low cal chef lays out a spread of low calorie food that obviously no one ate because no one has lost any fat or added any muscle. Now the introductions, “Donna has lost six pounds!” A cheer goes up from the gathered assemblage. “Tim has lost three pounds!” You’d have thunk their team had just won the Super Bowl. “Debbie tore the roof off the sucker and lost eight pounds!” Bedlam ensues. Pure Pandemonium. The host introduces the trainees with the fanfare Burt Parks used to use at the old Atlantic City Miss America competitions.
Baffling. No clothes on the emperor but no kid in the audience to go – “Hey, wait a minute; these people go on a fitness regimen for 90-days and lose a combined 17-pounds, an average of 5.5 pound apiece over three months – less than 2-pounds a month - yet we cheer and applaud them as they enter the room?!” This show is symptomatic of the modern fitness industry where minimal effort is expended, minimal results are obtained but no one notices. The paid fitness expert is allowed to grant the fitness equivalent of a presidential pardon: “You might not have made any gains but you’re doing something about your problem and think how much better you feel about yourself.” Round and round it goes…meanwhile using simplistic methods we Purposeful Primitives are able to elicit really sensational results in short order with a minimum amount of time investment on the part of the participant. We weight train hard – but in short intense sessions. We eat simply and plentifully – wholesome foods are eaten often to support the intense training we subject ourselves to. Cardio is critical and done almost daily – but we use low-impact outdoor power-walking as our lone cardio activity. So here we stand, preaching about doing fewer things better while everyone else is pontificating about doing more things easier. We’re an inch wide and a mile deep while the rest of the fitness world is a mile wide and an inch deep. We avoid the latest innovations or variations. In classical music a composer will present a thematic motif then see how many intelligent variations on the basic theme they are able to construct. Bach’s Goldberg Variations presented thirty plus variations on a simple theme. This mental exercise is designed to test the creative and imaginative limits of the composer.
There is an art & science to triggering a true physical renovation and the basic theme from our vantage point is lift weights to reconfigure the musculature - perform cardio exercise to build and strengthen organ function and capacity - eat with discipline using a specific plan, one that provides enough quality nutrients to support growth yet avoids ‘dirty’ calories that can and will end up stored as body fat. Our theme: utter and complete physical transformation, is realized and actualized by performing specific disciplined activities that positively affect each of the three arenas of progress. In this day and age, fitness experts are totally and completely enamored with variations on a theme – yet no one has mastered the basic theme. Let’s get off the Swiss Balls waving tiny dumbbells too insignificant to trigger hypertrophy, let’s stop substituting sub-maximal effort and feeling good about ourselves for substantive physical progress, let’s stop pretending and start actualizing, let’s get freaking serious and that means stripping away all the toys and distractions and get back to bold basics. Let’s start mastering basic fitness themes before spinning off into all the cute little variations that net nothing.
Tags:Popularity: 2% [?]
Related Posts:
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
