Yesterday, I asked the question on Instagram, “What makes an exercise good or bad for our body?”
To be honest, I threw this out there to see what people were thinking, and it turned out to be pretty revealing. Thanks to all that answered. That said, let’s now clear a few things up:
Part 1
Most of the answers I got can be grouped into 3 main “categories” of answers:
1. An exercise is good when it makes me feel good.
2. An exercise is good if it helps me feel relief after doing the exercise.
3. An exercise is good when it helps me [insert fancy concept].
Let’s dissect those answers:
1. An exercise is good when it makes me feel good.
If this is what you think, here’s the question you have to ask yourself: Drug addicts find that drugs make them feel good.
Does it make drugs a good thing?
Pain management clinics are full of people who were doing things that “made them feel good”… until it didn’t anymore, and they needed surgery to patch their broken body.
Now don’t get me wrong, you obviously don’t want to do something that makes you feel bad (e.g., creates pain), but you might be fooling yourself if your only criteria to determine if an exercise is good for you is based on whether it makes you feel good at the moment or not.
Our brain is biased and will create all sorts of stories to convince us we’re right— even if we’re dead wrong.
2. An exercise is good if it helps me relieve my pain during/after doing the exercise.
This isn’t false in itself, but the follow-up question we have to ask is, “HOW LONG will it provide relief?”
If relief is what you’re chasing, it might work for a while. However, there’s a major difference between doing exercises to get relief VS doing exercises not to need to do exercises to get relief!
So, the keyword here is “sustainability”.
In life, there are many solutions to various problems. However, not every solution is equally sustainable.
3. An exercise is good when it helps [insert fancy concept, such as]:
- Use myofascial slings better
- Create tensegrity
- Deal with compression force
- Hydrate my tissues.
- Be more “connected” with our body.
These are not wrong answers in and of themselves. They are valid concepts and phenomenons taking place in the body.
However, every time I hear those buzzwords, I can’t help be think, “How do you know if it’s really what’s happening in your body? Can you quantify it? Can you Demonstrate it?” Are you relying on some sort of metric to know if you’re actually reaching the desired effect, or you’re simply swinging weights around because you got sold the idea that it will do something extraordinary in your body?
To be fair, some of those people who gave me these answers might actually have a method to measure/observe these concepts, and I simply haven’t given them the chance to elaborate through text; They might actually know what to look for and have a way to at least qualify what they’re seeing.
However, more often than not, when I ask someone who is high on those fancy concepts to analyze their gait… They don’t even know where to start.
So all this to say, it’s fine to keep these ideas in mind, but it shouldn’t be the building blocks of what makes you consider if an exercise is good or not.
If you want to solve tangible problems in your body, getting excited with fancy buzzwords won’t do it. You gotta be scientific about it.
PART 2
Yesterday, I shared common pitfalls we have to be aware of when determining if an exercise is good or bad for our body. However, I haven’t shared my take on the subject, so here it is:
First off, I’ll admit that the question, “What makes an exercise good or bad for our body?”, was a bit of a trick question. That’s because it’s a binary question, while the question actually takes place on a spectrum.
What I mean by this is that the question shouldn’t be:
“Is this exercise good or bad?”
It should be instead:
“For which purpose is this exercise good, and in which context is it relevant/irrelevant?”
And then compare this with what we’re trying to achieve.
Now, don’t get me wrong, In the context where our goal is to reach optimal health, while certain exercises do have SOME positives, the positives clearly don’t outweigh the negatives. So, we can cut the fluff and simply put them in the “bad” category.
I’m talking about exercises such as passive stretching or deadlifting, for instance. These types of exercises have 1 pro for 9 cons; this means you end up with a net loss when doing them. (if you don’t know passive stretching is bad for you, you get check this video out)
But for exercises that don’t fall in this category, this is where it gets a bit trickier:
If you think in a binary way (this exercise is good, and this one is bad), it’s easy to end up doing a bunch of exercises but still fail to have a significant impact on the way you move.
That said, understanding what’s the purpose and what’s the LIMIT of a given exercise is what can make the difference between “doing exercises” and “Improving.”
A good example of this is the plank exercise: When done right, the plank can have many good effects on your body, and it can help you map out many problems you might have.
However, since the plank is done in a VERY specific context, what you gain out of a plank might have minimal transferability in other contexts. Specifically, you do the plank on the ground, in a horizontal position, with barely any motion. So, you can’t expect the plank to teach you how to move better in way more complex contexts such as walking, running or sprinting.
Granted, doing the plank might teach you patterns that might contribute to a small portion of those motions, but its effect will still be very limited.
Think about it: If changing the way we move was as easy as doing the plank, then everyone would simply do planks and their body would get fixed. But that’s not how it happens.
So, this doesn’t make the plank a “bad” exercise per se. Just not a “complete” one.
As a matter of fact, there is no such thing as a “complete” exercise. Just like the plank, every exercise has its purpose and its limits.
To give you an example, think about a nut cracker. A nut cracker is, as the name implies, a good tool to crack nuts. But when it’s time to peel potatoes or sear some steak, a nut cracker isn’t what you need.
So the question is not if the nut cracker is a good tool or not.
The question is, “What are you trying to achieve, and is this the best tool to help you achieve this?”
Well, exercises work the same way:
If you have a problem doing XYZ, you want to do exercises that help you achieve XYZ.
If you have a problem with ABC, you want to do exercises that help you achieve ABC.
That said, while it’s pretty straightforward to identify which kitchen tool we need when trying to achieve something such as cracking a nut, it can be a bit trickier to identify which exercises we need when facing our own movement inefficiencies with our body.
If you feel you need a hand at first identifying what needs to be addressed on yourself and then how to fix it, go check out our Mentorship Program. This program is specifically designed to help you assess how you move, and them come up with a game plan to fix what needs to be fixed.