Last spring I spent a few weeks building an 8×12 garden plot in my back yard to grow some vegetables and stick it to Mr. Grocery Store in a small but personally meaningful way. In building the garden, I had to use a bunch of different tools: levels of different lengths, hammers, drills, miter saw, skill saw, soil tamper, shovels, mason string, carpenters square and a few other little goodies to make it look right, sit level, and have nice 90 degree corners. The results are pretty good if you ask me.

That previous winter, I did some tile work in my kitchen and living room, and since I was doing a completely different job with different materials in different environments, I had to use different tools. The 6 foot level I used in building my garden would have been overkill and difficult to maneuver around my living room, so I used a 12 inch level to make sure each tile was nice and flat.

Don’t worry, I’m going to tie this back into fitness in a few minutes, so just bear with me here.

Now imagine how hard it would have been if I had tried to use the same tools to do both jobs, or even worse only one tool to do everything. Could I have used a hammer to do everything? I probably could have, but I prefered to not spend hundreds or thousands of extra dollars on materials because the hammer wouldn’t cut the boards or tiles as straight as they needed to be cut. Likewise, my miter saw would do a kick-ass job of cutting through everything, but I would wind up with everything out of level and looking like crap.

I’ve always viewed training as somewhat utilitarian, meaning there is a tool for a specific job, and sometimes you need to use a different tool to get a better result depending on what you’re doing and trying to accomplish. By that end, I tend to view most pieces of exercise equipment the way a carpenter or a mechanic would view a tool: I can use it for these tasks, but it falls short on these other tasks.

This is why I’ve always been fascinated whenever something new comes out promising to do everything for you including delivering your pregnant sisters baby and dressing you in the morning, oh, and getting you more ripped than Bruce Lee on the set of Enter the Dragon, in only 6 minutes a day!!!

On top of that, there’s the trainers who vehemently believe that one piece of equipment is going to help cure AIDS or make an army of super-soldiers out of everyone by simply being in their presence. More puzzling, though, is the fact that there are so many trainers who will say one piece of equipment or machinery is crap and totally useless and the reason there is fighting in the middle east, as well as the root cause of the obesity and low back pain epidemic.

Are kettlebells great tools? Sure, but they aren’t right for everyone and for every goal.

Are powerplates good tools? Sure, but they aren’t right for everyone and for every goal.

Are stability balls great tools? Sure, but they aren’t right for everyone and for every goal.

Do you get where I’m going with this??

Let’s say that I’m building my garden and I’m using my saw. However, as I haven’t used a saw in my life, I don’t make a measurement, I don’t use the sight to find the line to make my cut straight, and I don’t secure the piece of wood before cutting. Odds are the result will be less than pleasant or accurate, and I might wind up wearing an eye patch for the rest of my life, kinda like Slick Rick, but way less slick.

Likewise, if I were to use something like a kettlebell without any knowledge of what I was doing, I would probably rip a disc out of my spine and cause some irreparable damage, kinda like my favorite meat stick in this picture right here.

As any piece of exercise equipment has the ability to make someone fitter, stronger, gain endurance, and more flexibility if used properly, they will all have their merits as well as drawbacks. Using anything wrong will result in injury, or at the least a limited benefit to the individual performing an exercise with it. But that’s where knowledge and experience come into play.

It might freak a few people out to know that I typically will program exercises on things like bosu balls, stability balls, TRX straps, leg presses, barbells, cables, and a variety of isolational machines that are available in the gym. However, it should be noted that I don’t do this with all my clients, and when I do prescribe specific equipment, it is for a specific reason that is important to their phase of training. Say I have a client with a lower leg injury and they need to regain proprioception? Once they master standing on one foot on solid ground, I progress them to standing on one foot on a bosu ball. Have a client who can’t squat with full body weight? I put them in a leg press (barring any low back issues).

Client needs abdominal strengthening? Guess what? I get them doing crunches!! And unfortunately, no matter how many trainers will say that crunches are the fastest way to ruining your spine and causing disc herniations left right and center while quoting Dr. Stuart McGill research to say so, there is a level of misinterpretation regarding this. In fact, if you were to look at his book Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance, in the section discussing spinal flexion, he states that “Repeated flexion-bending of the spine is necessary to cause [disc herniations]. In fact, herniation of the disc seems impossible without full flexion [range of motion].” So to paraphrase, forcing lumbar flexion is bad for the disc, and herniation can’t happen unless the vertebra is taken to a terminal range of motion under load. Does this mean that a crunch is bad? Only if it is performed poorly, like the saw anaology above. If the crunch is performed while taking into account minimizing lumbar flexion with axial loading and less than full flexion of the spine, it can be a great abdominal exercise.

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Does this mean everyone should do crunches all the time? Of course not, but it’s a tool to use in the tool box for the right situations.

Is it possible for one exercise to be better at achieving a desired outcome than another? Of course, but does that automatically make the other exercise less valuable to the individual performing it? Absolutely not. I could argue that the leg press is superior to a body weight squat in a bunch of different scenarios, and that the squat is better than the leg press in a bunch of other scenarios. Likewise, how tools like the bosu ball, stability ball, cable system, and barbells all have their pros and cons in different contexts, but they all have value.

It then becomes up to the trainer to remove their emotional attachment to an inanimate object to program the most effective exercise with the most effective equipment at their disposal for their client for their current state and for their desired outcomes.

By the way, GO CANUCKS GO!!!