“You Can’t Argue with Results”

Even if I told you that I don’t have a dog in the fight when it comes to what’s trending in fitness, you probably wouldn’t believe me. I’ll try anyway. I don’t have a dog in fight when it comes to holier than thou fitness battles. Sure, my livelihood is largely effected by people opting for our style of training at DEUCE Gym, but this is a boutique experience. Frankly, all we need to do is trick a couple hundred people in a city of eight million people to do our thing and we’ll be successful. All the fitness debates could rage on without us.

What happens, though, is people fight for their dogma. “I do Barre Method,” they’ll say or CrossFit or yoga or boxing, which is great. Pursuing any quality movement practice is a noble effort one hundred times out of a hundred. Yet, if what you’re doing isn’t doing anything for you, then it’s (by most definitions) not actually that great. It’s actually missing one key component: the point of the whole thing in the first place.

One of my best friends can often be heard sarcastically rebutting, “Well, you can’t argue with results,” in response to highly aggressive men and women waving the flag of their fitness dogma in his face with nothing to show for it. It’s the best, deep cutting response to something us humans are so inclined to do. We get attached to our methods and styles and we build up a fortress of defenses (arguments, scholarly articles, key celebrities that agree with us, fairy tale horror stories of other approaches, and our own anecdotal evidence) to maintain our righteousness. The problem with this is the ideology part. After all, no one signs on to a fitness practice for ideology, they sign on for results. The psychopathic connection to ideology only comes later.

I don’t need omnivorism to win and veganism to lose. I don’t need strongman to trend and the Tracy Anderson Method to lose relevance. I need results. In fact, regardless of your opinions the results will sort out the winners and losers by themselves. There’s no need to bend over backwards for your favorite training style. If you want to pick teams and ride your reasons for doing so into the dirt, then, by God, get some damn results along the way if for nothing other than saving face. Hypothetically speaking, you would sound like a crazy person fighting for your all-juice diet when you’re a poster person for obesity. Now, if you’re open to idea that your thing fundamentally doesn’t deliver your desired outcomes, then we can talk about other options.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach