From Blog
Pick your fights
A WSJ piece on a strongman humbled by a Pilates class misses the point. Adaptations are specific, not everything hard is worth training for, and conviction comes from utility rather than FOMO.
Published
by Adarsh Gopal
“I can’t show my face in there again”—the experience made him reassess his physicality. His ability to hurl 500-pound dumbbells means nothing, he said, if he can’t execute simple bodyweight movements. Loza has since changed his gym routine to focus more on building flexibility.
— The Wall Street Journal
I’ll ignore the WSJ’s 500-pound dumbbell typo. If you’re hurling 225 kg with one arm, I don’t think your training insecurity will run very high.
The article still misses the point. Not everything that’s hard has obvious training value.
Articles like this play on one thing and ignore two others.
1. Insecurity. If you can lift 160 kg, why is that lateral squat isometric so hard for you? Why doesn’t your training prepare you for everything? It’s a silly question. It’s the same logic the morons use when they draw a distinction between gym strength and real-world strength. To punch harder, you practise punching. To hold weird positions, you train by holding those positions. Loza figured this out himself. He changed his routine to train what he couldn’t do. That’s not a failure of strength training. That’s specificity at work.
It’s incredibly easy to make someone feel terrible by testing them on things they haven’t trained for. It takes maturity to help a person feel secure in their training choices and priorities.
2. Specificity. The forces, leverages and demands on the muscle during an isometric hold or a slow movement are quite different from a squat, a jump or even a slightly different squat variation. Climbing down stairs is a different contraction from climbing up, which is different again from hopping up. Adaptations are awfully specific. There’s no cause to feel FOMO or bad about something you haven’t trained for.
3. Outcomes. Some training outcomes are objectively useful: tendons that are pliant yet stiffen well under load, muscles that produce force, dense bones, and a body composition that is healthy, lean and sustainable. Beyond those, no program can chase every adaptation the body is capable of. Do you want to jump well? Maximise your deadlift? Make your quads look jacked? Stiffen your tendons? You can’t chase every outcome the world thinks is trendy or useful. Pick your fights, and if you’re healthy and happy, own it.
My reason for dedicating 80 percent of my training time to strength training and six to eight movements is simple. The other 20 percent is walking and casually moving stuff around. I want strong bones, and the compression and external load of strength training build them. I want to move my joints through the greatest range possible with stability and control, and produce lots of force from those positions. Strength training does that. I want to be able to sprint, jump and be explosive when needed.
Be secure in your training choices and the adaptations you’re pursuing. Conviction comes from utility, not ideology, entertainment or FOMO.