Where has common sense gone?

We see it on television with reality shows and infomercials that one must exercise to complete exhaustion or even to the point of throwing up to achieve your fitness results. Ask yourself a few easy questions. 1) How does this increased intensity help the remaining part of your day? 2) Why do you need to get your butt kicked and possibly injure yourself in the first place to feel like you had an effective workout? 3) Have we really reached the point in the fitness industry where hurting ourselves has become so commonplace that our injuries are worn like a badge of honor and we can't wait to do it again? Anyone can beat someone up by yelling at them and having them perform silly exercises!  But it takes a lot of thought to implement an intelligent program design for someone to live a more productive and injury free life. Any respectable program’s number one goal should be to take away one’s pain and not deliver it.

Exercise related injuries have skyrocketed in the last couple of years and in large part to the explosion of the high intensity workout till you drop boot camps. Performing high coaching demand exercises with 30 people in a class is a recipe for a disaster. The average person will butcher most of them, so you have an instructor running around correcting poor form all day. There is no consideration for individual need, level, or circumstance. We are so caught up in keeping the intensity going and burning those calories that there is zero time to teach one how to do things correctly. We need to accept the fact that every calorie you expend in your workout will need to be replaced period! If you burn a thousand calories guess what your body wants everyone of those calories back, so why not learn how to do the exercise correctly?  This is why exercise is not for weight loss but rather improving one’s movement and quality of life!

Improving one’s quality of life is not accomplished by completely ignoring the basic fundamentals that one must have before they can perform certain exercises or just “do hard stuff till you're really tired". It’s like saying “I’m not very good at what I do so I will just come up with something new and difficult each session! This is a train wreck approach.  Competency, efficiency and motor control of a movement must be mastered first and foremost.  After millions of dollars in research and hundreds of thousands of hours of application, our knowledge and understanding of performance and injury prevention goes well beyond "doing a lot of hard stuff until you're tired". If Rocky were to come work with me, I'd have to tell him we've moved on from punching beef cadavers in a meat locker. In the real world, intelligent training gets better results.