I just returned from a quick trip to Long Island, NY. My wife’s nephew was getting married. It was a fun trip filled with visits to a couple of my favorite restaurants, discussions of memories from before I moved to Las Vegas in 2003, and a workout at the gym (Bev Francis Powerhouse Gym) which I called home from 1992 to 2003. I always credit this gym to where I got my start in personal training. It was where my interest in training first peaked. The funny thing was that nothing has changed there since I left 16 years ago, and I don’t know if that’s good.
I must give Bev’s, (that’s how locals refer to it), their due. They have been there since 1989, and recently was listed in the “Best Gym’s Hall of Fame” in Men’s Health Magazine. In it’s prime, it was not uncommon to see NFL professionals, nationally recognized bodybuilders and the elite executives of NY training side by side. It houses wall to wall equipment in a 33,000 sq. foot warehouse.
You’d have a hard time swinging a kettlebell in this place. In the 1990’s, this gym was king, but things evolve. Arnold ushered in bodybuilding style workouts in the 70’s and this gym was a true descendant. It’s been nicknamed the “East Coast Mecca” after the original Mecca, the legendary Gold’s gym in Venice, California. Arnold made that gym internationally famous in the documentary “Pumping Iron”. Going back to NY allows me to reflect on how I’ve grown in this industry from when I started training people in the 90’s. Starting with bodybuilding workouts as my base for everything, I shifted to functional training around 2002, using both medicine and stability balls. As with many fitness trends, I also went a little too far with the whole balance thing. The idea behind balance training was that you can engage more muscles training in an unstable environment. Machines, such as the Power-Plate, have built their entire company on this concept. Instability can simply be achieved by changing your body positioning from a standing square stance to a staggered stance or kneeling on a single knee. Standing on a stability ball may be a little extreme, but I’m not ashamed to admit it, I did it.
It may have received a few thousand views on YouTube, but I’m not sure it was better for building strength in my deltoids. I do know it was a little extreme.
It’s in making mistakes that I’ve learn the better way of doing things. If you never try new innovative things, you will never grow. It was after my experiences of balance exercises when I started to appreciate that the body should not be trained by muscle group, but rather movement patterns. Physical Therapist, Gray Cook, recently lectured about the levels of movement. He explains that we are born with a natural health capacity. A medical practitioner will check and monitor our vitals to determine everything is working correctly. We develop a level of movement competency during our functional stage which goes until we’re approximately 21 months old. Then using these patterns (squat, lunge, hinge, push, pull, and gait), we improve our fitness levels. This is where I usually meet people. Manipulation of load is one of the ways we do this. Then once someone has a certain level of fitness, they can improve their skill. Examples of skill are throwing a ball or swinging a tennis racquet. Problems arise when we bypass one of the levels to reach the next. Throwing a ball (skill) before you have a level of strength (fitness) in your shoulder can create a problem. Building strength (fitness) in the shoulder without adequate mobility (function) to properly push vertically can lead to injury. Understanding concepts like this has helped me transform into the coach I am today.
Concepts like this are a long way from doing the endless repetitions of seated leg extensions I used to do to strengthen my legs. I’ll make this analogy. I used to listen to music using a Sony Walkman. That was in the 90’s. I then changed to using an iPod in the 2000s, where I dumped my cassettes for Steve Job’s "1,000 songs in my pocket" device. Today, I use my phone to listen to digitally streamed Podcast.
Back then the goal of the Walkman was to listen to something entertaining and keep me distracted while riding an exercise bike. Now I listen to my podcast learning things as I train. I won’t say my choice of what I listen to is better today, it’s just more evolved.
See you at the studio.