Never Give Up PT

From the conversations that I heard at PT school I knew that the majority of students were expecting to qualify, earn big money, drive flash cars and own big houses. And maybe if you want to apply for coaching jobs at a Premier League football club then you can do. But there’s another way and it would mean selling my soul. I have seen popular PT’s doing it throughout my career and, to be honest, it’s not something I could bring myself to do.

They’ll go easy on their client’s legs and core because, let’s face it, legs DOMS hurt.

During the consultation phase of the trainer/client relationship it often gets brought up by the client that they hate squats and deadlifts citing that it sometimes hurts their back. When I ask them to perform a squat or a deadlift, 9 times out of 10, I can see why it hurts their back. They’re doing it wrong. In fact when I observe most of the members doing a squat or a deadlift it hurts my back just to watch them. And the majority of these members are male.

Rather than address this issue, knowing as a PT that these essential compound movements would massively improve their chances of success (whatever the client’s goals), they avoid them. Sometimes, a PT won’t put their client through something that they are uncomfortable doing because they want to retain the client. Avoid deadlifts, instead let’s pump up the nightclub muscles (biceps) for an hour. Keep the client happy.

I’m all for keeping a client happy. They are happy when they feel themselves getting stronger. They’re happy when they discover new skills. They’re happy when they achieve new PB’s and they’re happy when they see results. Sometimes, it means coming out of their comfort zone. But I won’t blow smoke just so they don’t leave me. My clients WILL have to squat and deadlift.

You’re wanting to lose a few pounds? Ok let’s squat.

You want to lose some belly fat? Ok, let’s squat.

You want to run a marathon? Ok, let’s squat.

You want to exercise to help you through depression? Ok, let’s squat.

Linford Christie had his student sprinters perform squats before their sprints in training. If they could get 13 seconds after doing a 100 squats, imagine what they could achieve at the Olympics. Team GB aren’t too shabby. They’re doing something right.

The issue with squats and deadlifts with men mostly (in my experience) is their inability to activate their gluteals as easily as the women do. Females spend much more time training their glutes in search of a rounded arse. They might give 10 minutes to a cable facepull towards the end of the session but the first hour is often leg dominant. Of course, the men want a broad back and rounded pecs so that’s their dominant area. They’ll sit on the leg extension machine for a few reps so they can say they trained legs.

Ladies love the weighted bridge, AKA the hip thrust. And they’ve every right to. They work. Which is why I will prescribe these for my male trainees. Not only do they help with the everyday functioning of the body, but they give you a good arse. They might not look cool for men to do unless it’s body weight bridges in the stretching area, but as long as we get glute engagement I’m happy. When I go into the free weights section and start laying down, thrusting myself at a barbell the strange looks I get is amusing. But I’d happily enter a ‘best arse’ competition with them. I’d win.

So I’m not the coolest PT. I don’t perform the go to exercises to pump the biceps up for a couple of hours and I wouldn’t do that with my trainees. But I will perform the exercises that keeps me at a healthy weight, that cures my sciatica and makes me stronger. I’ll perform exercises that will enable me to get in and out of a bath unaided when I’m 80.

And not only will I be independent at 80, but I’ll have the best arse at Evergreen Manor Lodge Care Home.

I’ve been glued to a book recently called Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. Human nature has always interested me, so to read a book that was as informative as this detailing our ancestor’s habits had me gripped.

One thing that strikes me as I read about our Homo Sapien ancestry is that we haven’t developed quite as much as we think we have. A couple of million years ago we developed new ways to communicate, to travel, to hunt, educate and pray. Much like we are doing now. We still fight diseases and find ways to ‘cure’ our illness from viruses. Our ancestors were doing that back then, though I don’t think that lockdowns or masks were ever a thing.

And one part of our make up that is still very much the same is our need to be physically and mentally active. The only difference is that our ancestors HAD to be physically and mentally active. They had to hunt for food. They had to run from danger. They had to fight to protect tribes and land. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t survive. But they had to do that. Now, today, we have a choice. But the fact is that our human bodies need to do it, whether we choose to do it or not is a different matter.

We thrive both physically and mentally when we are active. And when we train, our best results come from moving in a very similar way to how we would have moved millions of years ago. Lifting, squatting, pushing, pulling, running, walking, swimming, climbing, throwing are all the things that we have been doing for years and years. We have become very good at it. So good that we build arenas so that we could watch others perform them. But it wasn’t just kept to a select few people who we could watch, buildings were created so that we could fill them with equipment and apparatus that everybody could use.

Yet as these buildings were being build for our convenience, another type of convenience was becoming very popular. What started out as hunters or farmers catching or growing food and selling it in their villages has turned into shops, restaurants, supermarkets, fast food chains, takeaway’s and UBER. We literally don’t need to leave our house to find food. Our brain, unless we are in the small percentage of people in poverty in the western world, don’t fear hunger or worry about our next meal. We can click our fingers and it will arrive on our doorstep.  Our instinct to grow, fight, hunt and kill our food has been lost.  Not such a bad thing, I hear you say. And you’re right to some extent, but in the UK I am sold beef from New Zealand, strawberry’s from Egypt and bacon from Denmark. I don’t want to see cavemen carrying an axe and chasing a boar down my street, but nor do I want my food to travel across the world to reach my plate. At least our ancestors kept it local.

Because of our desires to have our convenience, we become impatient. In the gym there are ladies who want Beyonce’s ass or men wanting Tom Hardy’s pecs with no thought about genetics, a plan or a time scale to when this might actually happen. They just want it now. But UBER might do just about everything for us, they’ll even take us to the gym, but they won’t get us what we want. That takes discipline, dedication and knowledge. I doubt our ancestors could make a spear and throw it 100 yards with perfect precision first time either, but they had to become disciplined, dedicated and knowledgeable or they wouldn’t have survived.

In the UK we have some of the highest numbers of obesity and depression in the western world. Convenience foods, fat burn pills, diet fads and the celebrity culture all contribute to it. We are overwhelmed with it. So as much as we have advanced as people from a million years ago, we still can’t get to grips with who or what we are. We put fire crackers up our arse when our gladiators reach a final. We have operations or do restrictive diets because that’s what a Love Island contestant does. But we are very willing to abuse them on social media if they fuck up. The equivalent of Cesar giving the thumbs down in Ancient Rome. It was a brutal society then, it’s a brutal society now. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens, meaning ‘wise human’. We’ve still got work to do on that one.

So for all of our advances in this world, we need to keep learning and reflecting. As a society absolutely, but also individually. We don’t need to access the negative convenience that we do quite so much. An Anti vaxer/pro vaxer pisses you off on Facebook? Log off. A cold beer in the fridge? Drink a pint of water. And if there’s a takeaway on your route home today, drive straight past, go to the gym and run like a sabre toothed tiger is chasing you.