Saturday, December 1, 2007

Training for Reality

I've discussed this before but as I was rolling up some hose and putting them away with a former weight lifter, I was reminded of my former admonitions about the weighted dead lift. I think that exercising should have some real-world carry-over. As I watched this guy lift up the rolls of hose, I saw the deadlift movment that he was so used to doing. I've always wondered why the deadlift ever got its reputation as a health builder. Many thousands of posters have been printed up and distributed all over the country where heavy objects have to be lifted telling people to NOT LIFT in a manner that looks, well, like a deadlift.


Then they say that the hindu squat is bad for your knees. That is a curious statement since the manner that most describe to lift a heavy object looks kind of like a hindu squat. It's bizzare to me how the weight lifting world lives in its alternative universe where they'll teach you how to lift an object so contrary to the real world.


Keep this in mind when you decide what to do for exercising. Your workouts should prepare you for the realities of your life. Your training shouldn't exist in a world that you don't live in. Your training ought to make you strong enough to live a prosperous life and should minimize the amount of physical decline that you experience as you age.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow, thats a pretty biased statement, when the deadlift can be done productively. Maybe you have only seen the stifflegged deadlift and not a regular or sumo deadlift, which are just as common yet have tremondous carryover to real life. yeah doing a hindu squat with no weight is much more preparation for lifting a weight off the ground compared to actually lifting weight off the ground right?

Justin_PS said...

Yeah, it is. Still, I don't think it is a productive exercise and I have seen seen both deadlifts that you described. I've also blogged about this previously with my reasons.

As far as H. squats go, I say this: Weight lifters like Calvert and Jowett could lift some enormous, awkward weights and they didn't train with like weights on a normal basis during training. They did much lighter lifts in order to get the mechanics down. That is what I'm refering too here.