As I write this, we are in the thick of the coronavirus lockdown. Gyms and training studios like mine have shut down and many will not re-open due to going bankrupt. To staunch the flow of money hemorrhaging from these businesses, many gyms have adeptly converted to offering online coaching literally overnight. That’s a great thing if they can retain clients and keep them making progress. But that’s the big question, isn’t it? Can you keep them making progress with little to no equipment? Or are these gyms in fact just working to keep their clients dutifully running along on their respective hamster wheels? Keep them working hard and tallying up burned calories so they are too tired and busy to notice they are not really getting anywhere. This might be a good time to reassess how what you’ve been doing has been working for you or not working as the case may be.
Unfortunately, most popular fitness programs today, including the one you may have been doing until recently, are not strength-based, which in my opinion, is a travesty. The trainers and promoters of these kinds of programs are in essence telling their clients that they will achieve their goals by simply whittling away their body mass until what remains is a lithe physique distilled down to muscle and bone. Somehow, the adherents of these programs are also supposed to have become strong when, in fact, nothing has been done in order to appreciably increase their strength. It seems many people today have been convinced that simply being thin is equivalent to being healthy, and many popular fitness programs today are geared to those ends. There is also a broad misconception abounding about what is a reasonable level of strength for a person to achieve. What I consider baseline strength, most others seem to think of as superhuman or simply unattainable. And achieving this level of strength never results in a client becoming bulky or “muscle bound.” It just doesn’t happen that way. After training hundreds and hundreds of clients, I’ve learned empirically that strength is the thing new clients lack grievously and the same thing which their fitness profits from the most when they improve it. Believe me when I tell you, I’ve listened to the popular rhetoric and tried many other methods to help my clients improve their fitness. All of those methods pale in comparison to knowing how to implement a legitimate, strength-based fitness program. So, what happens now that we’re in the midst of the lockdown and no one can go to a gym to work out? Well, working out at home doing something is certainly better than nothing. But my point in writing this blog is to showcase the importance of strength-based training and to encourage you, at this time in history when you may have a little extra time, to rethink some things. Maybe you need to get off the exercise hamster wheel so many fitness programs and trainers are promoting these days and instead embrace some intelligent strength training when it’s time to get back in the swing of things.
Now don’t get me wrong, if a person simply likes to do a certain activity which is not strength-based such as running or yoga or cycling, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I am not trying to convince someone to change their sport or activity from whatever it may be that charms them and makes life worth living. I am however hoping to inspire you, the reader, to think objectively about this matter of how important it is to increase and maintain strength. Even if you prefer a non-strength-based program or activity, it is prudent to do some diligent work toward improving and maintaining your strength for the sake of your overall fitness and longevity.
So why is strength so important? First, the primary way we interact with our environment is physically. Given that first statement, there is therefore virtually no physical activity that is not made better by becoming stronger. In fact, every athlete no matter what their chosen sport, would perform better at it and enjoy it more if they simply got stronger. Over the years, I’ve had clients of all ages and across the board, getting stronger, having decreased back pain, less joint pain, being enabled to perform physical jobs better and be better guarded against work-related injuries, as well as having more stamina to enjoy various hobbies like going dancing or doing yardwork. They did it all without the usual aches and pains previously associated with those same activities. I’ve also had my fair share of clients who, after having various orthopedic surgeries, needed to improve their strength in order to restore them to full physical capacity. Once they left physical therapy, it became evident that their noisy, painful, wobbly knees would only make a full recovery by gaining stronger, more stable hips, as well as shoulders and backs benefitting from similar improvements to getting stronger in the associated areas.
Now we’re at the point of contention. Aren’t there lots of ways to get strong? I mean is there really only one way? Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is only one way to get stronger. Many things that people do for the sake of exercise certainly improve their strength more than from when they were doing nothing. But when I meet with new clients for the first time to assess where they are starting from, I am no longer surprised to see that the vast majority (in the neighborhood of 90% or more) have a level of strength on par with someone who is almost totally untrained. These clients have various fitness backgrounds from triathlon training to yoga to bootcamp fitness and all other forms of “functional” fitness you could name. The take away? There are better methods to get strong than what are currently most popular, and most people and even trainers seem totally unaware of what they are. And it’s no surprise that the way to get strong is elusive for most. It’s just not fashionable these days and myths abound about how to do it, and of course, the warnings about getting “too strong” implying it will make you into a bulky powerlifter. People have been warned away from lifting “heavy” as being injurious and not necessary to improve strength, as well as being a limiter to flexibility. Instead of legitimately improving people’s strength, they are fleeced with erroneous parameters of what an acceptable level of “strength” is, if they are given any real parameters at all. So, most people get stuck in the machine that is the fitness industry as they spin their wheels endlessly through high-repetition, low-resistance exercises. They are coaxed into working longer and harder to burn more calories as they are errantly told they are “sculpting and toning.”
The truth is I have found no better remedy to improve all parameters of my clients’ fitness and the overall quality of their lives than to improve their strength. I’ve never encouraged one of them to worry about how many calories they are burning or what their heart rate is doing. I educate them as to what legitimate increases to their strength will look like then I teach them to set goals and how to work intelligently toward achieving them. They quickly learn they need not perform silly workouts consisting of a dizzying amount of complex exercises performed for hundreds of reps to achieve their goals. In time, they see the elegance of cleverly simple training methods applied consistently over time yield the results they always wanted.