Just Move
Fitness Programs
"Life is motion and motion is life." - Thomas Plummer
Most people over think exercise and make it much more difficult than it has to be. You may have seen the Planet Fitness "Lunk Alert" commercial with the meathead who keeps saying, "I pick things up and put them down," while on a tour of the facility. While this makes for an entertaining commercial, that one sentence hits the nail on the head. All it takes to get into shape is to pick things up and put them down, or more specifically pick something up from the floor and lift it overhead. There is no specific program, exercise, book, or anything else that holds the magic secret and every fitness program out there is built around this one basic principle.
So how many ways can we lift things up and put them down? All exercises can be broken down into nine categories with some crossover - squatting, bending, lunging, pushing, pulling, bracing, rotating, carrying, and locomotion. Ensuring each workout hits each of these movements in one way or another is all it takes to build a sound fitness program.
What about individualization? Fitness is individualized less than you think. To start with everyone has the same goals - look better, feel better, and perform their activities better. (If they are athletes they all want to be faster and stronger. So these basically can be broken down into two groups' strength/speed athletes and endurance athletes. Yes, athletes will require a more individualized approach based on their sport, but the nuts and bolts are the same.) Rather, exercises need to be leveled and adjusted for the client's fitness level and ability, but thinking that everyone needs to be on their own specific fitness program is nonsense.
This was something we saw when we moved away from doing fitness assessment test on everyone and starting assessing movement patterns instead. Everyone has the same movement restrictions - rounded shoulders, weak upper back, core, and glute muscles, along with tight chest muscles and hip flexors. Of course, there are some exceptions to this but they are the minority.
There is no perfect movement or form and thinking so or trying to coach that way is a mistake. Instead there is good, safe movement, and poor, unsafe movement. "If it looks like a duck, it's probably a duck," is a good rule of thumb. The same is true for correcting poor movements, some things will work for certain people and others won't - this is where the coaching comes in.
So what it all boils down to is just get up off your rear and move! And stop worrying about the details and overthinking everything.
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