Exercises Lots of Trainers Like That I Don’t
Over the years I’ve tried a whole lot of different exercises with a whole lot of different clients. Some I’ve found to be unbelievably effective and useful. Others I’ve found to be next door to useless. Despite some other trainers’ love for them, I think the best place for some of these exercises is the rubbish bin.
Burpees. I completely understand why people love to make clients do burpees. Nothing makes you hate life and your trainer more than doing a series of these little devils. Your lungs burn, your legs turn to jelly, and your arms become wet noodles. For making people tired as hell, few things can match the burpee. And yet, I hardly ever use them unless I’m preparing somebody for a competition or event that has them. The reason is simple: movement quality becomes abysmal within about twenty seconds. Elbows flare like crazy and low backs sag in the push up position, low backs round like a dog doing its business on the lawn during the squat, and the “jumps” are barely high enough to clear the puddle of sweat accumulating on the floor.
Instead I like to break the burpee up into its parts: the push-up and the jump squat. Don’t worry, sets of these back to back will still make you want to curse me and all my progeny. The advantage is that movement quality doesn’t degrade anywhere near as much. On top of that, you can actually scale these two movements when they’re separated. This lets you smash both sets of muscle groups as much as possible while still moving well and avoiding injury.
Push-ups on knees. Whenever somebody can’t do a full push-up with good form, one of the first things you’ll see is the trainer asking the person to drop to their knees instead of balls of the feet to make it easier. Yes, this usually makes it easier, but there’s a serious problem with it. It doesn’t translate to regular push-ups. What that means is that doing push-ups on your knees doesn’t help you to be able to do regular push-ups. They’re too different from each other because the knee push-up doesn’t teach you how to brace your lower body for a full push-up. On top of that, people with bad knees will find it agonizing.
The alternative that I’ve come to favor is a push-up with the hands on an elevated surface. This can be a bench, stairs, or another person (though they’re not as stable.) The advantage here is that the mechanics are exactly the same. The only difference is that the load is lighter because more of your bodyweight is in your feet. To adjust difficulty, just bring the hands lower. Eventually, you’ll end up with your hands on the floor doing regular push-ups.
Renegade rows. These are where you get in a push-up position, one dumbbell in each hand, and alternate your hands in rowing. The argument goes that it works your core at the same time it works your back. Kind of like burpees, to me this is the classic definition of multi-tasking: doing multiple things badly at the same time. Yes, both of those things are getting worked. However, the weights are too light to really smoke your back.
If you’re really trying to work the back, get some chest supported rows in and follow them with the hanging leg or knee raises. With the rows you’ll be able to use a lot more weight and really target the upper back. The hanging leg raises will teach you all about keeping your abs tight if you do them slowly. It’s going to take a bit longer, but your abs will be screaming and your back will feel trashed.
Anything on a ball. Whereas the last three things were simply broken up or tweaked to make them better, these belong in the rubbish pile of exercise history. The only reason a person could have for doing this is if they’re in physical therapy and the doctor prescribed it. Everybody else can die happy never having done this family of feces again. The argument goes that it’s done to “make more muscles fire by training on an unstable surface.” Even assuming that’s true, there isn’t a single sport I can think of that is played on a wobbly surface. Unless you’re a runner or jumper who only competes in the middle of an earthquake, you have no use for this.
As for the “making more muscles fire” part, if you’re doing squats on a ball, yes, more muscles are firing. Unfortunately, they’re not the target muscles, your legs. They’re a bunch of things in your ankles, abs, and back. You might say that’s a good thing. Sadly, they’re not firing enough to get any kind of training effect. It’s kind of like if you had a bunch of champagne glasses to fill and your idea was to do it by shaking the bottle and pointing it at the glasses. You’d fill all of them at once, but only a little bit and you’d make a mess.
This brings me to the hopefully obvious concern of “what if you fall and crack your skull?” Holding a weight while on the ball means that you’ll be worse at catching yourself if you fall. Ironically, this will send you to the physical therapist who will probably make you do exercises on the ball. Looks like you get your wish after all. Instead of these circus tricks, just do the exercise not on the ball. You look less ridiculous, you can use more weight and better form, and your chance of injury is a lot smaller.
These are a few exercises that, for me, don’t really belong in most people’s regimens. There are much simpler, more effective options that you can use. Exercises are just tools and there’s no such thing as a wholly good or bad exercise (except the stuff on a ball.) They should be picked based on a variety of factors like your goals, injury status, equipment available, available time, and other practical factors. When done like this, there’s no good or bad, only good, better, best.
