You Don’t Need To Be An Athlete To Get Out of Bed
Takeaway Points:
Not everyone’s fitness goals need to be about perfection, world record breaking, or that of a high performance athlete. Most people really only need a moderate and consistent movement practice in order to live their life, maintain good health, and prevent injury.
Coaches and trainers may be doing a disservice to their clients by overempasizing “perfect” form and reach goals that may be either uninteresting or not doable for them. It can also create fear in people that getting injured doing any kind of exercise will cause injury.
(Note: This is an updated version of an article originally published on 6/14/16. It has been expanded significantly and brought up to date with modern formatting standards.)
What are you training for?
One problem I see a lot in the fitness industry is when fitness professionals put the cart before the horse and try to force bizarre stretch goals on clients who aren’t prepared for them, don’t need them, and are probably actively worse for aiming for them. I’m not talking about stuff like getting leaner, more jacked, or stronger. These are all reach goals, but they’re reach goals that people tend to want, and that tend to make them happier.
I’m talking instead about accepting the fact that not everyone has to have a perfect squat, and that it’s genuinely OK to have gaps in our fitness. We do not have to be perfect at everything. Hell, we don’t even have to be perfect at even ONE THING. We most certainly don't have to be a miracle athlete who's perfect at everything.
A while back, I wrote an article about how exercise form is sometimes Not That Important. Expectedly, I got a great deal of kickback from that, and it was one of my more popular posts at the time. One comment in particular stuck with me, in that I found it indicative of a pretty annoying tendency in fitness.
The comment was based around my own admission that my form isn’t perfect. In the article I admitted that I suffer from a mild scoliosis, and as a result, I tend not to squat very well. I have to squat pretty wide and don’t have the greatest depth, because ass to grass squats bother my knees.
There’s no pain associated with it, and it’s never negatively affected my life in any way - there’s just a constant popping noise as a tendon shifts around, and it’s a bit uncomfortable. I’ve been lifting for over ten years and managed a best squat of double bodyweight all the same. In short, nothing bad has ever happened nor has it prevented me from doing good things, even if my limits are probably lower than they would have been otherwise.
One commenter on Facebook, however, vehemently told me that it was Absolutely Unsafe for me to squat in any situation without first fixing every potential underlying issue until I had perfect form. I can only imagine how many people in the world would be left capable of squatting if this directive were followed. (Hint: I bet I could fit them all in like, a coffee shop or two.)
It has now been almost ten years since I first wrote this article, so how have things changed? Well, surprise, my knees have not gotten significantly better, nor have they gotten significantly worse. Meanwhile, I’ve continued to get stronger, and am nearing a 2.5x bodyweight squat despite this limitation.
In an article I wrote for the PTDC, I contended that one of the reasons it’s often a waste of time to train flexibility a lot is that we don’t really need that much of it. We need enough flexibility and mobility to perform the motions that we perform regularly, and no more. This, of course, led to an angry commenter telling me that this is Absolutely Untrue and that people actually need a great deal of it.
Here’s the truth: people need some form of activity. In fact, for many people, less may actually be more: provided you perform the right kind of activity, you can exercise just a few times a week and still manage to build and maintain a solid base of physical fitness. This allows you to maximize your return on time spent for additional health benefit, and enables you to - oh heaven forbid - spend more time doing other stuff in your life which makes you happy.
People do not, however, always need to be athletes. Is my weird knee probably going to be a problem if I’m pushing for a world record squat? Absolutely. Is it going to hold my leg back from providing a good source of locomotion to me for the rest of my life? Well that leg is already stronger than that of the vast majority of people in the world, so I’d say probably not. Do I need to be able to squat a thousand pounds with perfect form to get out of bed? No. Do I need to be able to do a full forward bend and wrap my legs around my head in order to make eggs for myself in the morning? No.
Let’s be honest: if the process of everyday life actually required any significant amount of performance, we would already be strong and limber enough to handle it, because the body would adapt to meet those demands. The human body is highly adaptable, and adjusts constantly to suit its environment. In fact, the very reason that we get out of shape is that our body is just being helpful and adjusting to an environment in which we don’t need to lift very much weight or get into any strange positions. People who have jobs or lifestyles involving moderate amounts of physical labor tend to (surprise!) be healthier and stronger throughout their lives - precisely because their day to day lives do require a bit more performance out of them than the average desk worker, and they adapt to meet that demand.
This is actually our body trying to be helpful: since maintaining muscle is metabolically taxing, it’s just getting rid of that in favor of less metabolically taxing fat tissue. In a survival situation, this makes sense: it’s saving energy for the future. We only need to be as strong as the set of stimuli we have to face habitually, so it makes sense to be conservative and only keep what we actually need. People who face extended periods of bed rest lose a lot of muscle and range of motion. People in space have to exercise constantly to offset the loss of muscle and strength that occurs in the zero gravity environment - where demands are even less - so that they can successfully transition back to life on Earth.
Injury is a part of life. It’s going to happen no matter what. Being regularly active, moving through a wide range of motions, and eating a decent diet is going to maximize our quality of life and ensure maximal resistance to unexpected bodily demands that can cause injury. That’s it. There’s no reason to aim to be some mythical perfect athlete that’s amazing at everything to get out of bed. There’s no hidden secret to living forever or never getting injured. Fun fact: we all die in the end. Hurray.
Most people don’t need a lot out of their training. That’s why it’s often ok for people to do weird, wacky exercise programs that aren’t super great from an athletic perspective - because they don't really need to do anything other than get sweating. They don’t need to be athletes, they just need to get off the couch and get in consistent movement, and if they do that, they’re automatically getting 80% of the benefit of exercise, and putting themselves ahead of 80% of the population who doesn’t exercise much at all. We don’t need to be thinking about the perfect way to squat or forcing everyone to do 8 hours of flexibility work a day so that they can squat like a baby and wrap themselves into a pretzel. We need to get people moving first.
Unfortunately, this perspective is often lost on many trainers and coaches, who aim to optimize and perfect athletic activity without bothering to approach the human aspect. This isn't to say that high level athletic coaches shouldn't exist - just that we should understand that they occupy a niche that shouldn't be generalized to training the overall population.
The Hidden Harm
There is a hidden harm to this obsession with perfect form, perfect movement, and being perfectly injury free: the nocebo effect.
Many have heard of the placebo effect, where people will have surprisingly positive health effects from sugar pills or sham treatments even though they have no active ingredients which would help with your illness or injury. This is because belief and mindset have a very strong ability to summon the body’s inherent recovery capabilities, leading to a faster recovery process. For this reason, drugs and potential treatments need to be placebo-controlled, meaning that they are compared up against placebo to ensure that they truly do work better than the power of placebo alone.
What most people don’t talk about, however, is the nocebo effect, the placebo effect’s evil twin. Just as handing someone a sugar pill and telling them it will cure their illness can induce a positive effect, handing someone that same sugar pill and telling them that it would worsen their illness, can induce a negative effect.
Fear has a powerful effect to delay recovery and make our bodies more brittle. Part of the process of recovery from an injury, for example, is about teaching the body that it’s ok to move again, and you won’t get hurt again, and easing yourself back into movement so that you feel confident. Avoiding movement can lead to greater internal fear, resulting in a delayed recovery period.
Likewise, the nocebo effect is present when we fearmonger about movements being likely to cause injury or dysfunction. If you tell someone that they’re going to hurt themselves squatting, then they’re a lot more likely to be fearful and cautious, and a lot more likely to hurt themselves.
This is the biggest problem with this sort of mentality. When you convince people that they need a personal trainer just to teach them the right way to walk up the stairs, they will be fearful of movement, unwilling to consistently exercise, and anxious about the entire process of fitness.
We can ultimately do a lot more good in the world, and help create a lot more healthy people, by teaching confidence and excitement for movement and exercise, rather than by scaring people to sell them on personal training.
I would like to close this out with the caveat that evidently, I do not mean to play down the real risk of injury with exercise, or the good work done by physical therapists in helping during the recovery/rehab process after an injury occurs. I am also not saying that you shouldn’t be somewhat rightfully cautious about certain kinds of movement which may be more likely to cause harm, or which may not be safe in any dosage, or which may not be worth the potential risk.
But in my experience, these situations tend to be a lot less common, than the number of scared and timid exercisers that I have seen across my decade-plus career as a personal trainer and online fitness coach.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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