Magic In Exercise

I’ve been reading a lot lately in advertising copy about “magic in exercise.” How someone suddenly found the holy grail that one singular form of exercise has done more for them in the last 35 seconds than the last 40 years of futile attempts at other forms of exercise. How suddenly they’ve seen the error of their ways and become a true strongman. Better looking, even got money back on their taxes since they switched over to whatever their particular brand is. How now they’ve suddenly found the way to become stronger, faster, smarter, live forever injury-free, simultaneously more muscular tougher and stronger… it almost always involves some “secret” way of doing something and yet at the same time they almost always tells you that they get twice the results in half the time and work.

How suddenly by using this one form of exercise and particularly the bodyweight only people are notorious for this, they have become a physically dominant human being in every possible test of strength. How by doing bodyweight only they have become a super-human. Every injury they ever had has completely cleared up and they intend to live to be 130 years old.

Let me set the record straight. Exercise can have nearly magical effects on your health, vitality and strength. But there is no one universal make you good at everything, fix every problem, put no effort in and get all results way of doing anything. There are a few people who have experienced what they term as “magical” results from switching to a particular form of exercise. Generally this is because whatever they were doing before was lacking in a quality that they severely needed.

Let me give you a broad-based for instance. Most mainstream training does not include what I have termed, “Alternative Conditioning.” It is generally based solely on moderate resistance and long slow non-intense cardio. Neither of these two forms of exercises generally has a particularly intense and quickly revealed training result. Therefore if someone is used to training with these particular styles which 99% of the world does, and then suddenly switches over to an exercise form that allows them to do intense combined muscular and aerobic endurance at the same time. Such as high rep bodyweight work, kettlebells, clubbells, sledgehammer, barbell and dumbbell complexes, cable work, hill sprints, sled drags, etc. They suddenly find themselves with a massive gain in useable muscular ability and endurance. Promoting their idea that this sudden form is now “magic.”

It ain’t. It’s just that they haven’t done the combination together with enough intensity to create a real quick result. If you apply the same intensity to any of the above conditioning styles you will get similar results. There is no reason other than marketing to make those claims. I have said this before that the magic is in the work, not the tool you use. The intensity of the effort, the completeness of your concentration, the intelligence of your planning. The decision to make gains no matter what. The magic lies in there.

Something else that bugs me about this whole situation is the claim that without specific preparation their new magic form of exercise has suddenly made them better at everything. There are times and instances where people have improved at non-related strength or sport activities. But for the most part if you don’t have some specific part of your program addressing a particular strength or endurance that you want, you won’t make long term or world class gains in that particular area. You may bridge the gap with a lighter training modality and occasionally make gains in an unrelated activity, but it is not the rule. This is evidenced a lot in the marketing that says, “I quit lifting weights and just started doing push ups and now I’m twice as strong as I was before.”

That’s a flat out lie. It’s all twisted up and wrapped up in how you want to define strength. There is no point in only narrowly defining it with only one tool. If you drop everything and only do push ups, then yeah, your push up strength will go up and in a certain narrow testing capacity your general upper body strength may go up, but don’t be deluded into thinking that you will suddenly become world class in upper body strength by dropping all but one thing. There is no reason to lock yourself into one particular style and live only that one way because some guru says so. There is no point in not using training that pushes into many different areas of strength and endurance. If you ever want to have the real deal to be anywhere close to backing up the wild claims that most marketing makes, then you had better be using some form of combination training that allows you to work strength and endurance together.

If you’re reading this newsletter you’re probably too smart to be pulled in by a lot of that stuff, but not everybody has enough experience to be able to tell the difference from someone who passes himself off as Superman, says that they’ve found the light. From time to time maybe we all need to be reminded of that.

From time to time someone needs to step up and say it publicly and out loud. So… I’m sayin’ it.

Examine your own training.
Make sure you’re firing on all cylinders.
Getting strength and endurance together.
There’s no point in settling for less.

By the way if you want to learn about putting strength and endurance training together and getting world class results then you should be looking at our materials. It ain’t magic, but it might open the door to getting super-human results for you.

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