I was recently thinking about how artificial intelligence, AI, is going to affect the fitness industry. Like other industries, fitness professionals and strength and conditioning coaches are using it, but not well. No one has been able to establish a way that AI will enhance, rather than be a passing novelty. It’s more than asking ChatGPT to “Create me an exercise routine”. That’s too vague. You can narrow down the request based upon outcome goals- fat loss, strength, or mobility, but that’s not personalized for the user. You need to add filters to the process to get anything substantial (i.e., movement limitations, strength levels, skill ability, etc.). For the record, I do think it’s going to be a tool fitness professionals use in their daily lives, just not soon. This thought exercise got me to think about what are some of the filters or rules I use when outlining an exercise routine?
Categorize Exercise by Movement Patterns- Program design has evolved over the last twenty years. It’s filled with principles (example- Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand SAID), not laws, and principals are theories that everyone agrees are true. In this hierarchy, principals are argued and debated frequently. One of these principles is that muscles do not engage and fire in isolation. Your body can’t utilize your pectoralis without putting stress on the shoulder as either a stabilizer or secondary mover. Muscles work synergistically. Years ago, I was in the camp of categorizing exercises by muscle group. Thirty years ago, when I started personal training, that’s all we knew. Pull-ups are latissimus dorsi (upper back), incline dumbbell presses are pectoralis (chest), lunges are quadriceps, etc. and then strength educators such as Paul Chek, Gary Gray, and Juan Carlos Santana started speaking at conferences about “Functional movement.” These prominent fitness leaders started suggesting that we, and by “we”, I mean strength coaches and fitness professionals such as myself, had it all wrong.
Muscles in the body play in symphony with one another like the musicians in an orchestra. Sometimes playing louder or softer, but never solo. This concept was built upon when Thomas Meyers authored Anatomy Trains in 2001. This book, using cadaver dissections, shows how the body moves using myofascial meridians. The meridians are developed from birth as we go from lying on our back, to rolling over to our bellies, sitting up, crawling, balancing to stand up, and eventually walking.
The agreed upon movement patterns are:
- Squat
- Lunge
- Hip hinge
- Push (both vertically and horizontally)
- Pull (both vertically and horizontally)
- Knee dominant (flex and extend)
- Elbow dominant (flex and extend) People will take my “Personal trainer” card away without bicep curls.
- Bracing- This is trainer talk for core work.
- Rotation
- Gait
When I create a workout, I focus on including most of these movement patterns. Because of fatigue and time restraints for the participant, it’s challenging to cover every pattern in every workout, but your goal should be to address each pattern somewhere in the program whether weekly or monthly.
You Move in 3 Planes of Motion- Along with accepting that we move in patterns, we have realized that we move in multiple planes of motion. There are three planes of motion- sagittal (front to back), frontal (side to side), and the transverse (rotational). This is the reason behind the popularity of exercise tools such as medicine balls, kettlebells, and cable pullies which allow more freedom of movement. In the late nineties, the gym industry exploded, and gym size grew. A common observation was that these enormous facilities were filled with machines that worked your body in a sagittal dominant plane of motion. Years ago, the classic lower body workout consisted of leg extensions, barbell squats, angled leg press and lying leg curls. Each of these exercises are in the sagittal. This also explains how someone can have large muscle imbalances.
In 1999, I attended my wife’s family reunion. While at the family affair, I did what you do at reunions, eat, drink, and play softball. To provide context, I had won the Junior National Bodybuilding Championships as a light-heavy weight the year prior. I was heavily muscled and carried a sub 15% bodyfat. You can imagine the laughs when I pulled up with a hamstring strain after I took off to sprint to first base at my first at bat. How could this be? I was strong on the leg press and rear barbell squat at the gym. This recreational activity which required me to quickly change direction and accelerate as fast as I could, causes me to be on the side for the rest of the day with a bag of ice on my leg. I may have been considered “gym strong", but my overall movement competency and functional strength was not great. Bottomline, what you do in your workout should have carry over to improving your efficiency in everyday activities.
You Must Cycle your Exercise Intensity- At the studio, we have three signs that designate the exercise intensity for the week. Once every five weeks, we increase the intensity level and urge our members to push a little harder for the week. This is when personal records are made on either strength, heart rate intensity, or calorie burn. Then once every five weeks we back it down. Exercise improvements are not linear, and sometimes like pruning a tree, you must cut it back to allow for new growth. This also combats the chances of overtraining or exercise burnout, either physical and/or mental. I consider active recovery, training with a lower intensity level, a key for consistent improvements. I don’t make a practice of critiquing other gyms or coaches, but I will question the effectiveness of a program that doesn’t include a system for recovery.
Following these rules still allows for tons of creativity when selecting exercises. The internet and social media have provided a plethora of exercises to choose from, but you should know the rules of the game before you combine random exercises when constructing a workout. Training shouldn’t be stringent, but rather fluid, and you should be able to color slightly outside the lines. An example is having a workout where you use most of the movement patterns and train in at least two planes of motion. The goal of every workout should not be to break the records of the previous. Rules should be able to be broken. As they say when cooking or creating music, you must “learn the rules first like a pro, before you attempt to break them like an artist.”
I’ll see you at the studio.