Strange that it’s taken so long to wend our way here on Substack because today we’re going to dismantle two—connected— great fitness falsities.
The two greatest.
By contrast to more malicious messaging in this space, they may be well-meaning, but their universal adoption has the net damage here far exceeding even the most malevolent.
It’s advice you have heard and read so many times that —just like its dietary evil twin ‘weight loss’— it’s imprinted on your mind as indelibly as it’s woven into the fitness fabric of society at large.
The fitness industry lures you in the door with it.
Every mainstream fitness or ‘wellness’ (vomit) article either opens or signs off with it.
Your doctor looks over their glasses to deliver it, again, in a stern yet resigned tone, as if you missed the
Government department infographics in their waiting rooms encouraging it.
Public health watchdogs will jump on your lap and lick you right on the chops with it.
Models who are literally starving will cite it as the secret to their genetic blessing.
Actors newly transformed from months of dedicated training, dietary restraint and often chemical enhancement— not to mention a trainer, a chef and a fleet of other staff—will offer it up as a friendly tip proving just how relatable they are.
And influencers will… I don’t know what influencers will do. Thank God.
But, frankly, I don’t have enough eye rolls.
Because this advice will send you on a fitness wild goose chase that makes last week’s exposé of 10k a day a walk in the park. The wildly mistaken notion that for exercise you should:
Do what you love.
Now before we unpick this insanity, those in the know will offer up the same thin better-than-nothing gruel described last week. Again setting the lowest bar possible as justification for bullshit, but this week it doesn’t fly, because the jab leading this devastating one-two punch of moronic maxims is the idea that:
Any exercise is better than no exercise.
And, that, just ain’t so.
I'll accept that any movement is better than nothing is closer to a useful, if still incomplete, idea but not in any meaningful sense. The more useful and 'truer' truth, as Erwan Le Corre from MovNat tell us, is that - very little movement is terrible for you.
So the answer to how much movement we should do is always, more.
However, the critical distinction between movement and exercise, as I’ve detailed here, is that exercise is intended to elicit a corresponding physiological adaptation.
And that adaptation can be good. However, courtesy of unsuitable exercises, it can also be bad.
The word unsuitable is covering a lot of ground there but an obvious and common example is an exercise that’s too difficult and cannot be performed correctly. As Scott Sonnon warns:
If your technique was so-so, think of it as 5 out of 10 being proper technique, and 5 out of 10 – improper. You get 50% of the results you want, and another 50% that you don’t want.
50% of the results you don’t want. Is any exercise still better than no exercise?
No, you can be doing the wrong exercise. Or you can do the exercise wrong— also making it the wrong exercise.
And I would suggest that for all the frustrations and evident failure in fitness, the widespread lack of uptake, that people are going out of their way to invest time, money and effort into creating problems, into getting worse, is hardly nitpicking.
And that’s before we get to the real trouble here that comes with the fact that if your exercise selection is guided by the heart it is 100 % guaranteed to be wrong.
And, a gentle reminder that ‘wrong’ as used here does not mean you get fit slower, it means you are creating a problem. Your training must address, in order of importance, your needs, weaknesses and gaps. Then—in so far as they can be accommodated by these constraints— you can throw in secondary considerations like goals and preferences.
But, it’s as good a rule of thumb as you’ll find in fitness that most of your problems will ultimately be traced back to preference.
Indeed, it’s your preferences that create those needs, weaknesses and gaps.
Many of you will likely have intermittent neck pain or tension headaches and a sore right shoulder because you ‘prefer’ to use a mouse with your right hand and so your right shoulder is ever so subtly hiked towards your right ear all day.
Exercise can fix that. A spin class, because you love it, won’t. And it will only further exacerbate the problems caused by sitting all day because you are only doing more sitting.
I don’t suggest the spin class is without benefit but you can further appreciate just how damaging this advice is when you start to consider where your own fitness gaps and weaknesses might be. If you are struggling to identify them, just think about the movements, the exercises, the activities that you hate.
So that go-to advice you’ve been hearing from all and sundry is only guiding you to more needs, weaknesses, and gaps. Guiding you to more of the trouble that training is required to fix.
If you find an activity you enjoy, you’re more likely to stick with it— there’s a logic and some truth to it, but when you dig a bit deeper, this is a feel-good statement empty of substance. Quite aside from leading to problems directly it’s this vacuity that creates a suite of further problems.
Implying all exercise is created equal is not a good idea not least because it defies all logic. It denies the obvious. Consider it from your bodies perspective: do you imagine Zumba and powerlifting might leave anything close to a similar impression on body and mind? It's not a question of better or worse —always contextual— it's to understand first that the word 'exercise', like the word 'sport', is a catch-all term so broad as to be meaningless. Are we talking about croquet or Judo?
Here, as ever, this inanity is curiously unique to fitness where we place the emphasis on fleeting emotions rather than concrete results. Fitness isn’t always fun but if you’re guided by what feels good, you’re pre-conditioned to drop out right when things get tough — at the the very threshold fitness demands.
This advice has created a generation of fitness dabblers bouncing from trend to trend, looking for the next hit of novelty and excitement keeping not only any fitness goals unrealised but ruling out any experience of the real rewards of consistent, disciplined effort.
People who start off strong and enthusiastic about fitness only to slowly fall off because they don’t see the results they’re hoping for, and they don’t know why. Poeple who because they have been following the advice to the letter now believe the fault lies with them.
A pattern as obvious as it is common.
We don't suffer any idea that we should eat what we like, right? And we can easily understand why.
What about, teeth cleaning? Do dentists ask if you’re enjoying yourself and further advise that 'you do you' in the oral hygiene department? No, we're all across these things. And not because we enjoy them, that we 'feel' like it much less love doing them, but because they are basic operating instructions.
But as to the remainder of our physiology - the skeletal, muscular, nervous, hormonal and endocrine systems just to name-check a few of the most significant players—here we can forget common sense or pragmatism. No, these warrant a mere gesture in the right direction—a token effort. It is an insult.
A departure from reality made complete by introducing the curiously arrogant and persistent delusion that we somehow get to define 'fitness' individually.
No, you don't. And I don't. Doing only what you love, at best, creates a patchy, unbalanced fitness routine defined by what is missing. Your body and mind have an extensive list of demands that far exceed any expectations of swimming, a martial art, zumba, yoga, or any singular thing. Your job, hobbies, lifestyle and life itself will further demand a requisite degree of strength, aerobic fitness, and mobility. Your job is to meet those demands. You are free to choose within these parameters— you could choose from bodyweight, kettlebells, barbells or machines as tools of resistance, for example. But, assuming some quality of life is the idea, you don't get to decide whether strength training is on the menu.
Your rejection of it only brings it ever closer.
If you don't like strength training, you sure as hell aren't going to like weakness. Then, instead of 3 sessions a week— a measly 3 hours out of 168— your whole life becomes a test of strength. You can puff and pant your way around the park once or twice each week or accept that, sooner or later, you'll be doing it around the living room. Every time you move. And you can tolerate whatever mobility drills your body and life determine are necessary or these same drills will become part and parcel of getting dressed every morning.
We are big boys and girls and— no different to cleaning our teeth and eating our veggies—we can accept this as a physiological reality unmoved by our preferences.
A truth made unpalatable only by the offering of saccharine fantasies in its place, and the onus, as ever, is on us to love what we do.
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI