integrity

The challenges facing anyone who wants to share their work with the world, who wants clients to know they exist--who relies on strangers for a part of their business--have been described in many, thoughtful ways. Hell, Seth Godin is taking over (a certain part) the world just because he thinks so deeply about it. 

But something dawned on me today: good marketing, at least in the fitness world, is not adversarial (buyer v. seller), it's not even "just a numbers game" (the more exposure the better). The difficulty with marketing for us lies in the discrepancy between what the trainee knows and what the trainer knows. If the trainee knew all about what they were buying, most of the time they wouldn't need experts to help them--they would be experts themselves.

So the trainee relies on the people selling the stuff for their information. All is well and good if both parties are focused on what they are purportedly committed to: the trainee's best possible interests. Trainers hold themselves to an incredibly high standard (and they know enough to know what that standard looks like), and trainees get good information, improve, and are well served. 

But when trainers don't hold themselves accountable, the whole system breaks down. Trainees don't improve (or get worse) even as they spend dollars based on the advice of the ineffective trainers. Those ineffective trainers start believing that fitness is actually about marketing, in the most pushy sense of the word, and everyone keeps shaking their head, wondering why so much of the fitness industry is a joke.  

It all hinges on integrity. 

sometimes, do it slow

There are special things to be learned when you consciously control and vary the speed of your grinding strength movements. Squatting feels a lot different when you do it for strict, timed intervals (3-count down, 3-count hold, etc.), and so does pressing, pulling and core work. 

And it's worth your while for a few different reasons. First, moving slowly forces some of the same muscle activation required for smooth stabilization around a joint. The same "magic" that comes from giving someone the (appropriately) heavy weight as they learn a new movement can be found in slowing down those movements. Your body simply can't gloss over the phase of the movement that is weak as you might when you move quickly. This brings us to our second benefit: slowing things down in strict way demands that you work at a narrow range of intensity. While you can move a too-light weight slowly (and get lots of the same movement-learning benefits), you just can't control the tempo as the weights get heavy (for you)*. These kind of self-limiting bounds are the bread-and-butter of the bootcamp or small-group coach because they allow us to manage the highly variable and specific loading needs of multiple people in real time. If you can't move the weight with control, then you probably shouldn't be moving it at all!

Finally, tempo work provides a needed change of stimulus for your body. Improvement is only ever the result of recovering from new and greater demands, and varying tempo can provide exactly that sort of demand. Of course, returning back to your natural, undefined tempo can have the same effect, but now at a heavier weight. And so the quest for strength continues...

*and no, we're not talking about setting PRs here. Remember the part about doing most of your training at sub-max loads?!

everything is a spectrum

Whenever I think about a new thing--anything--I find myself "testing" that new thing in a few predictable ways. I will try to understand as much as I can about it before I let that little judgement switch get flipped in a particular direction ("Hell Yea!"/"Fuck No."); I will think about what it's opposite might look like; I will imagine how other people think about it, and how their different perspective might change the thing's nature.

Each of these manipulations are largely unconscious, and are the result of trying to think deeply but quickly about many things. And each manipulation relies on major assumption: that every "thing" exists on at least one spectrum. And usually way more than one. This is important because it means that I am actively, at all times, resistant to binary thinking.

Binary thinking sounds like this: "She's fat." "He smells bad." "I hate pickles." "You are dumb." It's problematic because it defines and categorizes the thing before I have enough information to make an informed decision about it. And that can mean that I miss all the tasty goodness that might be available, just because I happened to notice some of the not-so-tasty aspects first. 

On the other hand, when you start seeing everything--training concepts, art, politics--as a series of spectrums, you are establishing a perspective that is flexible to new information, cohesive with existing understanding and able to contribute to your worldview without blowing everything up in the process.