The Worst Trends in Fitness
Ever wonder how your training was concocted? Why your trainer or strength coach utilizes certain methods and modalities when it comes to your training? Sometimes it’s put together with years of experience and science, and sometimes it’s merely what’s trendy or hard. Today we’re going to dive into the worst trends in fitness and why these methods are better off dying off.
Public Influence on Physical Preparation
It’s a sad fact that people’s perceptions of what training should be is often times what drives a good portion of the direction this industry steers in. I mean it makes sense, your clientele are what keeps the lights on and the doors open, BUT as a strength and conditioning coach or personal trainer we need to understand that we need to educate the public on what we do, and why we do it. Otherwise, why even go to school or get certified if you’re going to let your clientele dictate 100% of what goes on in your facility? We need our clientele to understand that training isn’t being uncontrollably sore and throwing up, it’s a planned strategy to get you from point A to point B.
Now with this being said, I absolutely let my clientele have a say in their training, but what I’ve learned over the years is that we need to give our clients 100% of what they need, and make a few concessions when it comes to what they want as long as it’s still in the best interest of their overall development. Have a client who thinks they need to do squats on a balance modality because some fitness influencer said so? Step in and educate them as to why it’s a bad idea. Have a client who wants to hit a ridiculous amount of bicep/tricep volume because they want to look like a bodybuilder? We can work with that by creating high volume finishers for AFTER they’ve hit the work they need to. There’s ways to make this relationship work, but uneducated coaches continue to peddle nonsense training in an effort to create a niche for themselves. We’re going to go over some of the most egregious fitness trends of the past couple of decades in this article so buckle up!
CrossFit
I’m not going to spend a ton of time here on Crossfit, however it’s worth noting that CrossFit easily created a lot of the misunderstanding of what training is, not only with the general population but with the parents who are in control of their kid’s off the field training as well. With programming that reeks of throwing darts at a board, lack of proper coach’s education and more volume than the average human can handle CrossFit’s been both a boon and incredibly damaging to the world of physical preparation. While it’s gotten people into lifting legitimate weights and not just machine jumping in the gym, it’s also taught people to chase the instant gratification of destroying yourself in the gym. If you’re more interested in a history on CrossFit and the damage it’s done to our industry, you can find it here.
University/High School Strength and Conditioning Hype Videos
There are a lot of strength and conditioning coaches in the field working at universities that are top notch and train their athletes with long term gain in mind. There are others who are let’s say, less than stellar in their coaching and programming. But ALL these universities create hype videos as a recruiting tool. These hype videos are full of crazy training, sometimes at night, in an environment that they never really train in doing things they don’t often do. Now this can be great for recruiting, you give the impression that your off the field training is hard and different, it’ll help you separate yourself from the rest of the universities interested in these athletes. There’s a BIG problem with this though.
The issue with these hype videos is that they don’t just go out to recruits, they get put up on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube and made available for the masses. High school coaches see these videos and believe that this is how they should train their athletes, after all if it’s good enough for Bama it’s good enough for us, right?! These training videos aren’t meant to give you a blueprint on how to train your team, they’re there to create HYPE around the program.
Videos like these are the reason physical preparation at the high school level is such a cluster. They’re even the reason for some of the deaths in training. A few years ago we had a rash of football players getting rhadbo, and even dying during conditioning prior to the season. One such kid was a high school football player back in 2017 who was carrying a giant wooden pole with his teammates. They had to keep this pole over their head as a team the whole time while they walked the field. Well, there was a weak link in the chain and they dropped the pole on his head. He died doing something stupid that his coach saw on a hype video designed to increase “mental toughness”. Put aside all the data that shows you cannot create mental toughness and understand that this exercise did NOTHING for these kids, but one of them lost their life because of it.
Moral of the story? Don’t watch these hype videos and think these programs train like this regularly, because they don’t.
Functional Fitness
Now functional fitness was a product of physical therapists trying to create a niche within the field of physical preparation. It actually brought some great things to the industry like unilateral training to the forefront. We now had more programs and facilities paying better attention to positioning, and the bilateral deficits their athletes have. We learned to incorporate more movement prep within our training, and we incorporated a lot more rotational movements as well. This seems like a win, right? Not so fast!
The pendulum swung entirely too far towards “functional fitness.” We now had coaches spending 75% of their sessions working on balance, core work, and everything had to be done on one foot. It seemed like it was a race to have the craziest looking training in an effort to create a niche for themselves. This would be all good and well, however this left little space to actually push our athletes. When you incorporate circus tricks into your programming it leaves little space for training that’s going to create the physiological adaptations that are necessary for sport. And while trying to create a training program that decreased injuries the field actually saw a HUGE spike in non contact soft tissue injuries. The reason? There was no longer room within these programs to stress the athlete and create strength and resiliency so they just didn’t.
The field tried to take exercises designed for people going through rehab after injury, and make them for everyone. The truth is that what’s good for early return to play protocols, doesn’t stress the average athlete nearly enough. Incorporating some of these movements into your movement prep is great, and the lingering effect of paying more attention to unilateral work is a great one! But you still have to create enough stress to create the adaptations that will not only help increase performance, but will help keep you on the field. The functional fitness fad absolutely lacked that.
Balance Modalities
You ever walked into a gym and seen BOSU balls lined up against the wall? You can thank the functional fitness fad for that. These half ball/half flat surface pieces of equipment have been around for quite some time and were used on the rehabilitative side of things with good results. They help you increase your kinesthetic awareness and proprioception when coming back from injury where a lot of times that adaptation gets lost due to the trauma. They can be a great tool. BUT, again as an industry we took this fad and ran with it.
Gone were the days where we could just do an overhead press or lunge, we now had to do them on some sort of balance apparatus because “function” or something. This led to coaches telling their clients that we can increase balance (a big part of functional training) and decrease injury. The only problem? There’s actual data to support the fact that balance modalities INCREASE soft tissue injury. This is actually a really solid read if you’ve got the time. If you don’t have the time I’ll give you a little insight here. They performed studies on healthy collegiate female athletes, and compiled the data on injury rates while training with balance modalities and found that it increased the risk of soft tissue knee injuries on the field of play. The reason why, they hypothesized, was because of compensatory actions at the hip and knee in an effort to find stability on the balance balls. As human beings we’re going to find some level of stability within movement and this stability can come from firing muscles OR from resting on joint end ranges. It’s been my experience that the majority of athletes are going to attempt to find this stability by internally rotating their hip during the eccentric portion (the down portion) of the movement. This is a cue for doing the same when decelerating or cutting. It creates a valgus stress at the knee which is a mechanism of injury for both ACL and MCL tears among others. In addition to that we saw a decrease in ground reaction forces which is the basis of speed. Their sprint times went up as a result of the training as well.
Moral of the story? Stay off the balance apparatuses if you’re an orthopedically healthy individual, it will literally only hurt you.
Agility and Speed Gurus
In the mid 2000’s we saw a pretty big book in the field of sports performance. It seemed like there were new facilities popping up all over the place. A lot of unqualified “coaches” saw this as a way to make money, because at the time if you got in early enough it was. But creating a sports performance facility isn’t cheap. Iron, squat racks, barbells, and benches aren’t cheap. Hell the flooring and install of said flooring for a 4000 sq ft facility will probably run you 30-40,000 dollars. So many coaches opted to utilize the free spaces like high school tracks and focus on speed and agility. Zero overhead, probably a $200-500 investment in equipment like agility ladders and cones and BOOM, you’re a speed and agility coach.
Now parents and coaches alike loved this. The kids are outside in the sun, the bulk of the work is cardio so their kids are exhausted, and running around cones and through agility ladders looks really fast. If you’re an average person and you look at someone flying through an agility ladder and watch someone squat 90% of their 1RM fairly slowly which one looks like you’re increasing speed and agility? 9 times out of 10 you’ll answer the agility ladders. The only issue with this is that agility ladders don’t actually increase speed or agility, but squatting and learning to deliver more force into the ground absolutely will it just doesn’t look like it unless you have an understanding of the physics and physiology of movement.
So these speed gurus exploded in popularity, and even with some of them having the best of intentions (with no understanding) screwed up the public perception of speed training. We’ve honestly still yet to recover completely as an industry and a lot of these guys are still lingering around. When deciding on who to trust with your physical preparation, make sure they’re including legitimate strength training within their plan.
Mobility Gurus
This is another aspect of the fitness industry that was a short term mess but left us with some good habits. Back around 2013 a guy by the name of Kelly Starrett seemed to come onto the scene almost overnight with his MobilityWOD company. He was an early CrossFit affiliate (he was the 21st gym ever granted affiliation) and saw that the majority of CrossFit training completely neglected mobility in favor of volume. He’s a physical therapist and former collegiate athlete and honestly a wealth of knowledge. He wrote a book called Becoming a Supple Leopard that probably sits on every good strength coach’s bookshelf to this day. It’s filled with new mobility exercises that NO ONE was using back then. Everything from soft tissue work, to band distracted stretches geared towards the joint capsule as opposed to just the fascia and the muscle.
This information being so readily available for strength coaches and physical therapists was GREAT. It legitimately changed the face of the industry in a lot of good ways. But, this information didn’t just go to coaches and therapists who understood it and could implement it within their own training protocols, it also wen’t to EVERYONE. Suddenly a lot of training shifted towards mobility. Everything was about mobility and actual training took a back seat to 45 minute movement prep sessions as opposed to getting under some weight and creating actual physical adaptations.
While learning new mobility protocols is a Godsend for a lot of people, it isn’t the only aspect of your training that needs attention. It’s just one piece of the puzzle and it should be treated that way. Kelly put it best when he said “you owe me 10 minutes of mobility work for every hour you spend training.” Mobility is just one aspect of your training and should be use IN ADDITION TO training, it shouldn’t replace your training.
SOME Football Strength and Conditioning Coaches
We went over hype videos and how damaging they can be but in all honesty there’s some moron strength coaches at the university level as well. When you think of college strength coaches what do you think of? More than likely some buffoon walking up and down the sidelines jumping up and down trying to create some level of energy. The reason for this is because you don’t see these guys outside of the glimpse the media gives you on game day. Here’s a short video of Coach Cochran formerly of the University of Alabama who now is a special teams coach at Georgia (if he’s still working I honestly have no idea).
He’s a big yeller, and he gets the guys amped up to play. They’ve created traditions at Alabama that were built around this coach due to his energy on game day and in practices. There’s a lot of strength coaches like this I’m just singling him out because he’s honestly the most well known. ESPN even did a Game Day feature that was all about him back in the early 2010's.
Now I’m not saying that you can’t be a great coach AND jump up and down like a dummy during game day. There’s plenty of coaches who can manage both. BUT, from my understanding this particular coach struggled to pass his national boards to even be eligible to be a strength coach. And there’s a lot of coaches like this. Formerly of Oregon, FSU and USF (and now back at USF) Coach Oderinde is another coach who falls into this category. He’s a former football player with no background in exercise physiology or anything. He has his bachelors in Recreation Management and a masters in Sports Management. He’s certified the USAW (a two day cert), the National Association of Speed and Explosion (a certification that’s meant for coaches with 0-3 years of coaching, as mentioned on their website), and a US Track and Field Strength Coach certification (a cert geared towards those working in track and field, it’s a 21 hour course). This coach put together a training session up at Oregon that almost killed some of their athletes by giving the rhabdomyolysis, because he didn't have the understanding that that could be a byproduct of the amount of volume he was putting these kids through. Chris Doyle formerly of Iowa is another such coach like this. Back in 2011 he put the Hawkeyes football team through a training session that included 100 squats for time, and dragging a sled 100 yards multiple times. 13 of those football players also ended up in the hospital with rhabdomyolysis, which can be a life threatening. He was also another coach who wasn’t certified and this situation (in addition to the Oregon situation) has led the NCAA to make sure coaches are certified, even if it’s a one day cert. His name is Chris Doyle and he also happened to be the highest paid strength coach in the world in the late 2010’s.
Some of the most egregious training practices occur in college strength and conditioning programs. Too many football coaches have the final say in their team’s training and it’s left them to hire “yes men” who may or may not have a background in the field. This doesn’t typically lead to good outcomes, and solid strength and conditioning professionals tend to get pushed aside in favor of these uncertified yes men. Now that being said there are a TON of coaches who do things the right way, but the NCAA still has a pretty big problem on its hands.
