Concerning your fitness program, do you know why you do the things you do? Can you explain why you do the movements you do, the loads you use, and the rep plans?

Most people can’t. They repeat some bullshit they read on a forum or a book they skimmed through.

Do you track your progress? Can you look back 8 weeks ago and see exactly what you did? The reps, sets, movements, loads, times?

Can you look back a year ago to this day?

If you can’t, I will bet you’re doing the same shit or worse.

I don’t read fitness web pages any more. there are so few worth looking at, I can count the ones I like on one hand. Mike Nelsons page, Logan Christopher’s page, Dieselcrew, and David Hornes site. I read these ones because they are my buddies and I know they are always up to some new stuff related to their progress and results.

There are maybe 20,000 pages on the web related to fitness with all the blogs and sites. 80% of them are peoples workout blogs and random shit, 17% of them are all saying the same old dumb shit. The 3% left are the ones I am looking for whenever I am feeling retarded and venture out to see more of the freak show of modern fitness.

So my question is this, are the following practices fruitful or pointless?

I don’t know who said it first, I heard it from Frankie Faires:

“For what purpose, at what cost?”

I add on “how much better does it make you?”

I will tell you I have put these items to the test, and I find consistent poor results when I do. If you do these things I will be curious to see if you test these out or if you blindly go forward.

#1  Preworkout & post workout static stretching: I get the idea here, the static stretching is supposed to prevent injury during the exercise. Of course the people who advocate this still get injured. Better still-they are not very flexible.

To double check this one, I drop in to big box gyms in the Minneapolis area every now and again. Every time, there are people static stretching. They move like shit, they still get hurt.

First question, are you training flexibility by static stretching or are you training rigidity?

Second question, do you think you are getting hurt moving through a normal ROM, or could it be related to your excessive tension and effort you use? Could it be the mechanically unsound lifting technique you use? What if it is because you are exceeding your physiological limitations?

hmmmm.

Whatever the case, it is unlikely static stretching is reducing injury. Check out this abstract Mike T Nelson posted here:  Static Stretching.

#2 Nonspecific “warm ups”: most people are doing static stretching as a so called warm up, and some will continue on to do some nonspecific work which has no quantifiable positive effect on performance afterwards.

If you understand application of quality motion testing, than you understand no movement is automatically good or bad for you. With that said, do you test your warm up movements? Are they helping you out?

I have met people who told me they always start every training day off with 10 minutes walking on a treadmill. I am fairly certain this is a waste of time. Unloaded, slow walking is not exercise unless you are severely weak and out of shape.  Walking for ten minutes before squatting or deadlifting several hundred pounds does not make much sense to me.

As with the static stretching, the walking group still gets hurt all the time. They swear the walking is reducing injury…hmmm.

#3 Pyramid warm ups: Alright, its bench press day. Your bench press has been stuck at 205 X1 for months. You are “warming up” and you knock out 135X15, 145X12, 155X10, 175X5, 185X3, on to your “working weight” of 205X1. You grind out 3 shitty reps. You find yourself pissed off when you look at your training log and see last time you did 205X1X7. You can’t figure out why you can’t add weight to the bar….

Tell yourself it's not your fault, it still is.

I have this conversation with a number of people who seem to be to perfectly reasonably, sane people. That is until they say this.

Question, why would you do nearly 50 reps as a “warm up”?

If I needed 50 tries before my strength worked i would not think strength was useful…luckily for me I don’t have an off switch.

Neither do you.

So stop pretending you do.

#4 Cool Downs: Two different explanations have been shared with me for this bizarre shit.

The first one relates to people dropping dead from heart failure from too sudden of a high to a low. Sure, this has happened. If you are out of shape a lot of shit will kill you. See a doctor and get medically cleared before you start training. Do not try on the nerve at full throttle if you think there is something wrong with your ticker.

Better yet test out all your movements, variations, tools, weights, reps, and sets and you wont even need to sweat this.

Second reason for the cool down, this one is real lame- to avoid DOMS.

God we could go all day on this one. Short answer, NO. Cool down random slow paced movements will not avoid DOMS.

The limiting factor we all have is time.

The more time you waste on dumbshit, the less time you have for productive exercise.

If you are fine with that, excellent.

If you want maximum results, then you need to examine everything you do.

Does it make sense? Is it helping you accomplish your goals?

If something you do does not move you towards your goal, why do it?

At the end of the day, I am only concerned with my own progress. I can’t fix stupid, and some people are so stuck on stupid practices they are not worth my time.

What is worth my time? Closing level 18 on the Vulcan gripper yesterday! Heck yes.

Get your goals.

ATG

BTW- I have sent out a new letter to the Industrial Strength Grip list, are you on it? The information will dramatically help you out, if you are willing to test it for yourself.