Fitness Evil & Diffusing Responsibility

Training with intensity can ruffle feathers. Barbells, though legal, are often positioned as paraphernalia. Key terms like “CrossFit” and “high rep Olympic lifts” continue to trend as problematic sources of “fitness evil.”

There’s a long list of people that can’t wait to say “I told you so” if something happens to someone training strength and conditioning for health and fitness, and it doesn’t seem very responsible to blame the movements, in my opinion.

What would be responsible, in my opinion, are more reactions that sounds like, “Wow! I’m really limited by this and when I experience some limitations, pain, or otherwise in basic human movements, I wonder what flaws I can improve upon,” rather than condemn the entire practice.

If deadlifting makes your back sore, you’ll be alright. Furthermore, you’ll need to stop berating the deadlift long enough to answer the question, “How’s my movement?” If basic squatting gives me knee pain, I find it difficult to understand a perspective that doesn’t ask, “Man, I wonder what’s up with me where I can’t even squat without pain.” Rather, we hear crazy things like “squatting deep isn’t safe” and “heavy weights are destined to hurt your back.”

Some, however, will avoid both because the movements are problematic. Surely, they couldn’t be the broken piece in the puzzle, right? Worse yet, others will berate the act of deadlifting and squatting, because it’s never their fault.

Dr. Kelly Starrett said it best (paraphrasing) when he said, “CrossFit is the perfect training system. We are the one’s walking into it broken and in need of repair.”

Shift your thinking here. Seemingly negative feedback from training can be valuable information and an opportunity, whereas blaming the training seems ill informed and even pessimistic of human capacity.

Own it!

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach