The Most Important Part of Exercise Isn’t the Exercise*
Christopher "Logic" Chilelli RTSm, MATm

“There is always an easy solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong.”
- H. L. Menken

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Before anyone gets a different idea, of course exercise is important – way more so than popularly assumed even. I’m not implying that training is unnecessary or anything of the sort. This is my chosen profession after all. In fact, I seem to be one of the few trainers left who still places an ironclad emphasis on the technical aspects of exercise, the rest of my brethren having succumbed to the Just Do It model of fitness where movement for movement’s sake is the reigning law, little details like form and progression be damned.

No, what I’m getting after here is that whatever exercise you choose, that choice is secondary to the intended goal. The important thing about exercise is the adaptation the exercise induces within the body. Training is a means to an end.

Please read that last paragraph again. This might seem like an obvious observation on my part. “Duh, the important part of exercise is that it makes me stronger/leaner/faster. I get it.” But my sense is that a lot of people don’t get it, that they don’t even come close to getting it, that for all its importance, exercise as a concept is in desperate need of a coherent perspective. Turn on your TV or open a fitness magazine and with few exceptions the advice from professionals in my field or from well-meaning enthusiasts consists of boiling all training down into lists of a few exercises, or into some series of arbitrary rules covering form and effort like moving through a ‘full range’ of motion or lifting heavy 2x per week. Training isn’t a means to an end for most of these people. It is the end: a nice, neat product that they can rearrange and sell you over and over. Seriously, do any of the following statements sound familiar?

‘Want to lose weight? You gotta swing this kettlebell.’

‘You need to squat below parallel. Try to put your ass on the floor.

‘Looking to get faster? You have to do CrossFit.’

‘Don’t use machines. All they do is isolate muscles. You’re not really strong unless you do dips, pull-ups, and deadlifts.’

‘Touch the bar to your chest when you bench.’

For further illustration on this point consider a recent article in Men’s Journal called Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie. It’s actually an interesting read and I recommend you see it all the way through if you have the time. The author describes his firsthand experience training with top strength coaches in an effort to age gracefully and actively. On the one hand the piece was admirable for not skimping on its research – and for telling the truth: most of what ‘we know’ about fitness is bullshit, if not deliberate lies.  It really took ‘gym trainers’ to task for their blatant mythologizing about ‘functional fitness’ and failing to actually teach their clients how to exercise. (My observation: You can’t teach what you don’t really know.) But the article was heavy on a lot of the same tired selling points and unverified formulas that have been the stock and trade of those same ‘gym trainers’ for at least a decade. A major thrust of the piece was that machines, bands, and stability balls are bad, basically, and that training is “…about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure.” Uh huh. I know it's Men's Journal but can you feel the testosterone just dripping from every word? That sentence was written by a rugged cowboy smoking a cigarette.  Midway through the author even reproduces…oh, look at that, a list! This one consisting of client baselines from one of the first ‘real gyms’ he visited:

LIFT:
Front Squat - 1.5x BW
Dead Lift - 2.0x BW
Bench Press - 1.5x BW
(BW=Bodyweight)

Manifest in guidelines like that one and in the statements about form and training selection above is the assumption that specific exercises at specific weights do something just as specific to the body.   Exercise science even has an often repeated and just as often misinterprted rule called the law of specificity.  The exercise, you see, is the important thing. It’s up to you the exerciser to conform to its rules. Seen another way, certain exercises are just; well, just better than others. I might say that a leg press is inferior to a squat. A push-up is superior to a press. Sprinting is more effective than jogging. And a lot of people might agree or disagree with those statements at face value, but all three represent complete logical fallacies. Sprinting is more effective than jogging? At doing what? Certainly not in preparing you to participate in a marathon.

Exercise professionals and enthusiasts, along with the rest of humanity, gravitate toward lists of exercises and exercise rules because they represent discrete products. It’s a lot easier to sell yourself (or someone else) on fitness if you can reduce it down to a tidy little package. The truth, that ‘fitness’ doesn’t even have a simple definition at all and that regardless it presents the individual with a complicated and lifelong commitment, is far less agreeable. But if we ever hope to get a handle on human health and athletic performance we need to abandon our entrenched consumerist mindset and revive that lost art of critical thinking. All of these exercise rules are usually trotted out in support of entirely misconceived ideas about training. We follow Lance Armstrong’s or George St Pierre’s lifting routine because we actually think that doing so will make us look and perform like these athletes. The reality is that the Lance Armstrongs and George St. Pierres of the world, before they ever picked up a weight or got on a bike, hit the genetic lotto in terms of ability. We have this thing exactly backwards. Nutrition and training are essential for athletes, but Lance Armstrong can bike the way he does because he looks like he looks, not the other way around. It’s not simple. It’s not sexy. But it’s right.

I guess my first question is what happens if I can only lift 2/3 of my bodyweight in a deadlift? Does this alleged inadequacy doom me to a lifetime of poor health and inferior performance? Should I fire my trainer? What does a deadlift even have to do with my performance goals? I’d like to offer you all an alternative model for thinking about this: Regardless of experience, the training process should start with you. Yes, YOU! The most important part of exercise is the person doing the exercise. What are your needs and abilities? What do you want to accomplish? What’s the point of any exercise if we can’t see plainly how it will advance our objectives? True fitness, if there is such a thing, derives not from having the most exquisite list of exercises, but from having a clear idea of what you’re trying to do.

Can you see how exercises, or lists of exercises for that matter, hinge on the ability of the person performing them? An exercise is simply a means to challenge the body. And while we all share certain anatomic features, there are significant differences among us. There is no such thing as ‘a squat’ or ‘a pull-up.’ The exercise changes significantly for each person. And an exercise’s superiority or inferiority has nothing to with the exercise itself and everything to do with how appropriate it is to the person performing it.  The same exercise won't do the same thing to a different person

Resist the urge to view these facts as needless complications. This human idiosyncrasy is actually liberating. You need not worry about contorting yourself to fit into the random confines of someone’s exercise rules, but are free to choose (or create) a pitch-perfect exercise, a challenge tailored uniquely to you.

This perspective on training is 180 degrees from generic guidelines about benching twice your weight and, in both my personal and professional experience, exponentially more effective at improving health and performance. It’s not to say that It’s All Good. Some exercises really are just stupid and dangerous. Ever seen CrossFit? But rather than work from some series of fetishized ‘ideal’ exercises, we start from the individual and the individual goal and select exercises to suit it. The exercise-centered model imposes random constraints based on totally made up rules that you or someone else invents as the go along. The individual-centered model eliminates those constraints by subordinating them to the needs of the exerciser. Keep this in mind the next time you hear about the hot, new, ‘scientifically proven’ method of training where you add 10% to your volume every week and is totally focused on core strength. Most of the noise about fitness is just that.

But for the record, I can totally front squat 1.5 times my bodyweight.

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*Big thanks to the Resistance Training Specialist program from making this perspective possible.

Christopher Chilleli is the founder and program director for Logic Performance Conditioning and Mechanics in Motion. He is a strength coach and Muscle Activation Techniques Master Specialist.  He lives in New York City. 
chris@logicfit.com