Krueg
Master Don Juan
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Thought this was a good article, and possibly worth sharing...
Part One:
Part One:
If strength is the objective – and it should be for everybody – understanding the difference between training and exercising is fundamental to being an effective athlete and an effective coach.
So is understanding the difference between the basic barbell movements – the primary exercises – and the assistance exercises, the ones people seem to worry about the most.
What's the difference between an effective strength coach and a physical therapist pretending to be a strength coach?
What's the difference between a lifter who gets big and strong and the gym rat who's been the same skinny kid for 3 years?
What's the difference between a successful strength athlete and a frustrated P90Xer or CrossFitter?
What's the difference between a productive trainer and a babysitter (highly paid, ineffectual personal trainer)?
In each of the above examples, the former understands the difference between the primary exercises and the assistance exercises; they understand what they're used for and how they're programmed.
And in each of the above, the latter – the physical therapist, the gym rat, the fad trainer, and the highly paid ineffective personal trainer – doesn't have a clue.
The former structure their training around primary exercises and program them for long-term progress, using assistance exercises only when progress has slowed on the primary exercises.
The ill-informed think that variety is the objective and that boredom is the enemy, that the pump, sweat, fatigue, and soreness are the hallmarks and the objective of an effective workout, not realizing that these things are just the side-effects of what happened today, and aren't the indicators of progress.
The uninformed don't understand that athletes getting stronger are not "bore-able," that measurable increases in the weight used on the basic exercises are required, and that the inclusion of new "moves" in every workout – exercises that inherently lack the ability to drive basic strength – don't accomplish a thing if strength is the objective.
They lose sight of the fact that "muscle confusion" is a rather odd concept, and that doing dozens of different exercises actually prevents productive training for strength acquisition. This is the nuts and bolts difference between effective strength training and wasting time and potential.
How many times have you seen the following?
Magazine articles about the variety of exercises available for "doing arms," "legs," "back," "abs," or, worst of all, "The Core." (Ah yes, the ****ing core – the thing that's always stronger on a man with a 500-pound squat.)
Infomercials for weight loss or "ab" development programs that emphasize the number of exercises available to accomplish this miraculous transformation.
New York Times pieces about the new "moves" (exercises) for 2013 for firming and toning your abs/inner thighs/outer thighs/arms/neck/"sidemeat"/"Buttissimo."
Books written by physical therapists that detail the different exercises that are absolutely necessary to strengthen your core – all of them absolutely necessary, none of them programmable for improvement for 6 months, or even 6 weeks, because they can't be.
Success Leaves Clues
Successful lifters, bodybuilders, and strength athletes all have one thing in common: their training is based around six or seven basic barbell movements, and the variables that are manipulated are volume, intensity, and rest, not the number of exercises.
Because there aren't very many exercises that can actually be trained.
First, "Training" and "Exercise" are different things entirely. Training is the process of directed physical stress, which results in an adaptation that satisfies a performance goal.
Since different performances require different physical abilities, and different tasks produce different types of stress, and since stress causes an adaptation (if you can recover from it), different physical abilities are therefore acquired by doing different physical tasks – and the training stresses that facilitate these different adaptations must be specific to the performance goal being trained for.
Duh, right?
Exercise ignores this fact. Exercise is what happens when you go to the gym and do exactly the same thing you did last time you went to the gym, or when you do P90X, CrossFit, or any other randomized program.
These activities are performed for one reason: the effect they produce for you today, right now. ****ing around in the gym is merely punching the ticket – you showed up, moved some stuff around, got sweaty, tired, and maybe out of breath, but you did the same thing Friday as you did Wednesday, and now that you think of it, the same thing you did Monday.
The harder programs like CrossFit and P90X are about the "burn," the sweat, the heart rate, the feeling of being "gassed" or "thrashed" or "fried" or "crushed" – they're about the perceived physical effects of the workout or immediately after the exercises are performed.
The random nature of the exercises ensures that you'll be "crushed" every time, because it guarantees that you won't adapt to the work. Either way, they're really about what happens today.