The Best Are The Best For a Reason

Here’s a few simple questions with a more complex answer:

Why was Michael Jordan the best to ever play the game of basketball (Sorry Kobe lovers, and all the LeBron wagon jumpers, but it’s true)?

Why was Wayne Gretzky the best scorer of all time in hockey?

What makes Peyton Manning and TOm Brady so consistently good (alright, ignore this last season, will you?)?

The best answer you will ever come up with isn’t what company sponsors them, or who their parents were (no one in Jordans family is over 6’2″, and he grew to 6’6″), not their size or strength (Gretzky failed the bench press test. Repeatedly. With 155 pounds). Definitely not their significant others, although you’d be hard-pressed to wake up next to this every morning.

The one tool that they have that no one else has is a very simply one that every grade-school coach in the world drills into their eager young disciples without fail:

An unending devotion to mastering the basics.

Jordan would routinely shoot 5,000 jump shots a day, working on the finer mechanics of his shot. Gretzky would spend hours working on stick handling and skating skills. Manning definitely isn’t as agile as a gazelle in the pocket, but he has a cannon mixed with a snipers rifle for an arm.

God I think I’ve seen better hip mobility in a clam-shell before.

SO for every aspiring fitness enthusiast and trainer out there, the question begs a simple answer as well.

How much time do YOU spend on the basics?

Before you answer, let me give you an example. I have a new client who wants to lift really heavy things (YAY!!!) but he’s got all the mobility of Lindsay Lohan’s ankle bracelet monitor (BOOOO!!!!) which makes for some pretty interesting times. First, he has the strength,but he creates compensation for the movements he’s performing.

After making him go through some joint mobility exercises and altering his warm-up routine and active recovery modalities, his mobility is dramatically improved, and his weights shoot up pretty quickly (Hurraaaaay!!!!). The villagers rejoice.

I have another client who hates doing squats. And when I say hates, I mean she would rather shave her bikini zone with Gary Busey’s teeth than do another set of body weight squats. There’s typically a shrill whine of “I DON’T WANNA!!” coming from the far corner of the gym each morning at 6:17am as we go through mobility drills to get her squat working better. She hates them, puts up a fuss about them, but eventually always does them, because by now she knows that if she doesn’t do them, she won’t have the mobility in her ankle that was fractured a few years ago, and will eventually develop either arthritis or some other muckle imbalance through the leg. To top it off, she likes to lift heavy stuff (YAY!!!!) and knows that she lifts more heavy stuff for more reps when she does her body weight squats and works on getting and maintaining maximal range of motion through her ankle (YAY!!!!).

So let’s look at some of the basic lifts every program should have in them, and see which of the movements you do on a regular basis:

Squat

Deadlift

Lunge

Pushup

Pullup

Row

Single leg squat

Now the interesting thing you’ll see will see with a lot of trainers and training programs in magazines is that the workouts involve fairly advanced movements, additional planes of motion,and complex choreography that would make Baryshnikov say “What the holy hell?”  Sure, they may be fun, and they may make you somewhat more fit, but just like Jordan didn’t spend every waking moment focusing on his dunking abilities, there’s a time for progressions and a time to focus on the basics.

Jim Rohn, the guy who mentored Tony Robbins, wrote that “Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.” So before you decide to pick up the newest toy and hop on the Power Plate and work through your posterior chain with Tabata whatevers and focusing on Time Under Tension, ask yourself if you have a good or great ability to perform the basics, and perform them well.

Once you can do the basics, you can graduate to the more advanced movements, but skipping ahead and trying to use advanced techniques is sort of like working on your dunks and never working on defence or rebounding. You’ll be the best dunking guy on the bench. Sure, everyone will get a great look at half-time and during the warm-up, but you must have the skillz to pay the billz to get in the game, champ!!