If you’ve exercised at any point in your life, chances are you’ve been duped by at least one phony fitness trend. In part 1 of this post, I covered four fitness trends that tricked me at one point or another. Here are four more:
1. NEGLECTING YOUR QUADS
Somewhere along the line, it became cool to never train your quads. Instead, powerlifters and athletes alike focused heavily on the hamstrings because they’re powerful hip extensors. No self-respecting strong person would be caught dead doing split squats, lunges or – heaven forbid – leg extensions.
Fast forward a decade or so and we’ve realized that the quads are pretty darn important in lifting and sports. The notion of being “quad-dominant” is somewhat misguided. Yes, many people have pitifully weak glutes and hamstrings, but you shouldn’t ignore the quads just to let the hammies catch up. Why not train them BOTH really hard?
The hamstrings are grossly overrated for squat strength, as strength genius Greg Nuckols explains, so if you want a bigger squat, you’d better train your quads hard and often. If you’re a powerlifter, that means endless glute ham raises and reverse hypers aren’t the secret to a bigger squat.
As an athlete, strong quads help stabilize the knee and single-leg training will have tremendous carryover to on-the-field performance. Split-squats and lunges (forward, reverse and lateral) should make up a big chunk of your lower body training.
2. AVOIDING SPINAL FLEXION
Much like the anti-fat and anti-carb scares of the diet world, fitness aficionados have conjured up unwarranted fear of anything and everything spinal flexion (i.e. rounding of the back, specifically the lower back).
I blame it on the misinterpretation of research that shows that repeatedly flexing and extending the spine under load (like during a sit-up) can cause disc herniations.
Do sit-ups and crunches suck? Yes. Repeatedly flexing your spine can lead to lower back pain and very few people can actually benefit from these exercises. But just because these exercises are poor choices doesn’t mean that ALL spinal flexion is bad.
In fact, we see many athletes and lifters who are stuck in extension (i.e. arched lower and/or upper back) that they’ve lost the ability to flex their spine. This creates a whole host of new issues, most notably a loss of hip mobility and breathing mechanics. They need MORE flexion to restore proper movement.
How do we add more flexion without crushing someone’s spine? We incorporate positional breathing drills in the warm-up and use ab exercises that encourage flexion to and from neutral (rather than end-range flexion to end-range extension as seen with many crunch and sit-up variations).
What’s the take-home lesson? If you sit in flexion all day (i.e. sitting at a desk or in the car), you probably don’t need more flexion during your workouts. But if you’re a lifter or an athlete who lives in spinal extension, flexion can be the ticket to better movement.
3. AUTO-REGULATION
Thanks to rapid advances in recovery-monitoring technologies like OmegaWave and BioForce, we have the ability to measure an athlete’s readiness to exercise.
This is awesome for us coaches, but at the same time, many people have used this new-found knowledge as an excuse to train like wimps all the time because they’re “not recovered.”
There’s certainly a small population of lifters and athletes who push too hard too often. But the people who need to be told to back off a bit are few and far between.
The notion of “work smarter, not harder” doesn’t apply to you if you don’t work hard in the first place.
That’s why I’m such a fan of percentage-based training. You’ve got an assignment every workout to keep you accountable. You know exactly what weights, sets and reps to use and there’s little room for interpretation.
Very advanced lifters learn the ability to auto-regulate based on how they feel. Powerlifting virtuoso Mike Tuchscherer has built an entire training system based on auto-regulation and it works. But not unless YOU work. If you’re a beginner or intermediate lifter, it’s best to put your head down and work hard all day, every day.
4. CONDITIONING FOR MENTAL TOUGHNESS
I recently worked with a college baseball player who put in an entire summer of training with us at Cressey Sports Performance. By the time he headed off to school, he was lifting heavy and moving well. I got a call from him during the first week of school and he explained his pre-season “bootcamp” workouts: obstacle courses, swimming in the ice-cold ocean and death circuits that left players puking and aching.
What was the coach’s reasoning behind these workouts? “Mental toughness.”
Never mind putting players at risk for injury. Or leaving them too banged up to practice their sport. As the late great Yogi Berra said, “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.” With all due respect to Yogi, his statement is far more intelligent than the aforementioned training approach.
For most sports, it’s not the physical aspects that require mental toughness. It’s the skill and strategy components: understanding the situation at hand and how to handle that situation under pressure. None of this can be improved by sprinting til you vomit. It may be flashy (I’ve used it and done it before), but it’s misguided at best.
I’m all for high-intensity conditioning when the time is right. But thank goodness for intelligent coaches like Alex Viada and Joel Jamieson who have brought to light the importance of sport-specific conditioning beyond Prowler suicides and gassers.
Mental toughness is built studying playbooks, watching game film and practicing your sport. That builds confidence that will help you perform when it matters most. Take it from someone who spent way too much time in the weight room and not enough on the practice field: lifting and conditioning won’t make you mentally tough if your skills are lacking.
THE TREND IS DEAD
That’s it: eight fitness trends that, fortunately for all of us, didn’t pan out. Props to you if you’ve avoided these completely (and more props if you picked up on the Pantera references in these past two posts). If you feel victim to any of these, use the lessons you’ve learned to move on and get better.