Humor is a powerful teaching tool. I try to use as much of it as possible in my coaching, mostly because I’m not that funny and it takes a lot of jokes to finally make somebody laugh.
My favorite style of humor is self-deprecation. Maybe I’m just unloading decades of low self-esteem, but I do think there’s value in building client buy-in via vulnerability. Many people walk into a gym for the first time and feel like they don’t belong. Perhaps they’re intimidated by all the big, strong people around them, including the coaches and trainers. If I can make the client more comfortable and make myself seem less intimidating by picking on myself, I’m gonna do it.
If you’ve ever dug back through the archives of this blog (all the way back to 2012 when I first started this website in grad school), you’ll see there’s PLENTY of stuff to pick on. But people can learn, grow and change. I’m not afraid to admit when I’m wrong, so here are three cases when I was REALLY wrong.
Intermittent Fasting is the Superior Option for Fat Loss
I bought hook, line and sinker into the intermittent fasting craze of the early 2010s. A handful of my favorite trainers and online fitness personalities were pushing diets, books and other products related to intermittent fasting, and I was singing their praises for all to hear.
For the better part of three years, I skipped breakfast, ate a light lunch and absolutely gorged myself at night. I firmly believed that I was “tricking” my body into burning fat during the day, then turning anything and everything I ate into pure muscle at night. What I didn’t yet realize was that the only person I was tricking was myself into a modest caloric deficit.
Want a cringe-inducing look into what I was eating on a daily basis in grad school? Read here.
The most embarrassing part of all? I was adding hundreds of calories worth of butter and/or coconut oil to my coffee in the morning in an attempt to ramp up fat burning. How embarrassing. The only thing I was ramping up was how quickly I needed to sprint to the toilet after drinking this coffee concoction.
Like all fad diets, the way intermittent fasting works isn’t by any of the sneaky mechanisms it claims (switching your body into “starvation mode” to burn fat, changing your body’s insulin sensitivity, etc.). Rather, it uses extended periods of NOT eating to create the only thing the reliably results in weight loss: a caloric deficit.
Low-carb diets, low-fat diets, carnivore, vegan, etc., they all do the same thing in the sense that they cause you to omit certain food groups and/or adjust your eating schedule so you consume fewer calories than you burn, resulting in weight loss. That’s it.
In the end, there’s nothing special about intermittent fasting. If it fits your lifestyle to skip breakfast, eat a light lunch and push most of your calories to nighttime, go for it. But for most people (especially those interested in building muscle), more evenly-spaced meals will likely work better for hunger management, consistent energy levels and protein synthesis.
Active Recovery is Actually Important
The concept of active recovery is kind of silly: you’re tired from doing a lot of physical activity, so let’s do MORE activity to help you recover faster. More stretching, more cardio, more foam rolling, etc. The stronger I get (and the more time I spend around other really strong people), the more I realize that the best recovery methods are about as passive as it gets: eating and sleeping. But several years ago, I got duped by the marketing machine behind some of the trendy active recovery products on the market.
Back in the day, I did a lot of freelance writing for websites like STACK, MyFitnessPal and Testosterone Nation. It was a good gig to help build my audience and make some extra cash. Every once in a while, an article would catch the attention of someone who had a product or service to sell, and I’d get pitched a project to help them promote it. I’d almost always turn it down, except for one time where I got a little caught up in the opportunity to make some extra money by pushing a product that I didn’t fully believe in.
It all started when I wrote an article for STACK about some of the myths around using ice for recovery. I still genuinely believe that ice (and cold therapy in general) doesn’t do what most people claim it does and is based on bunk science. It was the ensuing opportunity where I sacrificed some integrity a bit.
I was then approached by a company that makes active recovery e-stim devices to write some articles about why athletes should use their products INSTEAD of ice for recovery. I was sent some free equipment, put in contact with some pretty famous (to me, at least) fitness professionals to interview, and even sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to a national conference.
I wrote an extensive freelance article about why ice and cold therapy don’t work. I still consider it one of the best pieces I’ve written in terms of information and composition, but unfortunately it reeks of puff-piece for a book that’s heavily cited in the article. I then promoted the e-stim recovery unit on my website and even sold some units on commission.
Several years later, my skin crawls as I read through these. Sure, I still believe ice sucks for recovery, but most people using it for pain relief have so little consequences for their “athletic performance” (i.e., moderate-intensity strength training a few times a week) that there are virtually no drawbacks to using ice. And I don’t know a single person outside of the highest-level professional athletes who would actually benefit from using an e-stim unit that costs several hundred dollars. You know what’s a lot less expensive and will do the trick? Eating protein, drinking water and sleeping 7-9 hours a night.
Movement Screens Give You Valuable Information
I have performed several hundred movement screens in my coaching career. I’m grateful to have learned several different screening protocols and table tests from other coaches and physical therapists. They’ve done wonders for improving my understanding of functional anatomy, but to this day, I hardly ever use them anymore.
It’s perhaps a bit of survivorship bias, but I feel like you have to perform a bunch of movement screens and table tests to appreciate the fact that you don’t need them. They help you understand what’s important when performing a certain movement (i.e., coordination, coaching and individualizing the movement to the lifter), what’s NOT important (i.e., mobility, stability, muscle “activation”, etc.) and how to adjust the exercise to work around the “dysfunction” that the test are designed to falsely identify.
Way back in 2012, I wrote an article called 4 Steps to Fix Your Squat where I attempted to lay out a squat movement screen that I’d been using with some of the college athletes I coached. It was the first article I wrote that actually gained some traction on social media, getting shared by some better-known trainers which boosted the views well beyond the handful of people (i.e., my mom and maybe my then-girlfriend) who usually read my blog.
This article follows the typical assess/mobilize/reassess format that many popular movement screens follow, which I now understand is a bit of a farce. It was a solid attempt by me to gather my thoughts on squat technique but is not how I’d recommend someone dissect anyone’s squat at this point.
The problem with most movement screens is that they omit coaching. It forces people into arbitrary positions without room for individual differences, asks them to complete a task without any context or coaching, and then makes sweeping assumptions about mobility, stability, etc. when the athlete inevitably “fails” the test. The screen then usually has a laundry list of “corrective” drills to perform to help the athlete improve qualities that are hard to define (and may not even actually exist) like mobility, stability, core strength, etc.
In reality, most people are about 1-2 steps away from being able to perform any of these tests just fine – all they need is a little coaching and/or external feedback to improve their coordination. For example, you could skip the entirety of the squat movement screen in the article I wrote and simply give people a heel wedge and an anterior load (e.g., goblet squat, front squat, etc.). Boom, squat looks great so let’s go train.
It’s also worth noting that movement screens and table tests are NOT the same. For example, I think the FMS is completely whack, creates a false sense of dysfunction and tries to gatekeep people from training hard. On the other hand, table tests like passive hip internal/external rotation, Thomas test for hip extension, and various impingement tests actually do provide valuable information about a lifter’s individual anatomy and can give a coach insight as far as how to individualize that lifter’s technique. If anything, I’d recommend coaches spend some time with a seasoned physical therapist to learn about these types of tests, what they mean and how they should influence coaching and programming decisions.
Older, Wiser… and Less Dumb
Wow, this was kinda tough to write. The exercise of going back and reading some of these blogs was pretty uncomfortable, but the reflection helped me realize how far I’ve come and how far I still have to go as a lifter and coach. Hopefully you got a few good laughs at my expense and some insight as far as how YOU can continue to learn and improve in whatever discipline you choose.
