Friday, January 11, 2013

Should I use the exercise/equipment that uses more core?

"Pull ups are better than lat pull downs, because pull ups make you use your core more."

"Dumbbells are better than barbells are better than machines because they use your abs/stabilisers more."

"Fitballs are great for abs."

If you've been around gyms and fitness communities long enough, you've heard the above statements (or words to that effect) before. Everything is better if it involves your core more. Although for some reason everyone draws a line somewhere when they make these claims. For one person, dumbbells are great because they use the core more, but one-armed/one-legged exercises (which use the core even more) are just silly fluff. For another person, that line is drawn with fitballs and bosus. For another person, they'll be doing cartwheels and triple jumps on fitballs while pressing a kettlbell overhead with one arm before they'll even consider that they might not be doing the best thing possible.


There are a lot of things to consider before deciding whether an exercise is brilliant or stpid or something in between, but the main question is: "To what end am I doing this?"

If you're doing an exercise that's just for fun, and has no major purpose beyond that, then so long as you don't hurt yourself (or, at the very least, so long as I'm not liable to be sued if you do hurt yourself), who am I to say that it's not a good exercise, or that there are better exercises for you to be doing?

Of course, if you're doing an exercise to achieve a specific result -- and any exercises you do that go under the "serious training" aspect of your routine had better be there for a good reason -- then it's simply a matter of whether or not you're doing the best exercise for the result you're after. So, when someone says you should do pull ups instead of lat pull downs because pull ups use your abs more (which may not be correct in the first place), if the reason for doing that movement is to strengthen your lats, lower traps and rear delts, then increased core activation in one exercise over another is a minor selling point at best, if not irrelevant. More over, if the selling point is that exercise A uses your core/stabilisers/whatevers more than exercise B, but exercise A doesn't achieve the results that exercise B was chosen for, then exercise B is superior.

Continuing with the example of pull ups vs lat pull downs, I've noticed that -- especially to beginners at strength training -- it's typically easier to pull with your back when doing lat pull downs than when doing pull ups, simply because your body isn't moving around much and you can use a light load to focus on technique, rather than heaving with everything you've got just to get out 1 or 2 reps. Using myself as an example, it's literally taken me years to learn to pull with my back for pull ups, whereas lat pull downs didn't take very long at all to figure out once I put my ego aside and stopped trying to move as much weight as possible. So, if I were doing a vertical pull for my back muscles, for a large portion of my lifting history I would have been better off using lat pull downs than pull ups, regardless of what core activation may have occurred one way or the other.

So again, what is the reason why you're doing the exercise in the first place?

Of course, if you have two exercises to choose from, and both do the intended job just as effectively as each other, but one has additional benefits, then it may be wise to choose the one with more benefits, provided it doesn't somehow interfere with the rest of the program or unbalance an otherwise balanced routine. But when an exercise takes you away from the purpose of that part of your program for some other benefit (especially if it's a benefit that's being dealt with elsewhere), then the other benefit may not be worth it.

3 comments:

  1. 'If you're doing an exercise that's just for fun'
    Why else would we do it may I ask?
    I take great pride in doing many stupid things, or at least being capable of these many stupid things, as you already know.
    There is a justification for some of this now, but I have been doing it longer than there has been a reason.
    The guy standing on two balls doing squats with another, what a wuss. Try it standing on one ball with weight discs in either hand, that is truly stupid and has no real world application whatsoever.
    I like unstable training and have found that being able to do squats, etc. on bosu or medicine ball have helped me increase weight stood on the ground. I attribute this to the fact my body is used to accommodating for the imperfections of movement that tend to occur on higher weights. I have however been outstanding wrong before, and will be many more times in the future.
    I love new challenges and often do things in training I would never do in normal life. Ironically my training is still classified as functional in style, even though it will have no real function 99.9% of the time.
    Personal preference has to be a factor. I love compound work because I want to suffer in my training and using more of my body increases intensity. You appear to be equally as insane. Most sane people want moderation so they will go for a sensible mix of compound, isolation and core, makes them prettier than I am too.

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    1. Unfortunately, I wasn't sure on the right keywords to plug into google to bring up someone doing one-arm kettlebell presses whilst performing the triple jump on a series of fitballs....you try to find footage of something specific like that, and all you get is random photos that are completely unrelated to each other :( So I had to settle with the far less interesting guy on two medicine balls. I'm pretty sure I've done that before, too. You would have loved my shenanigans back in my TAFE days. The "functional" things I did back then....

      I guess, when I do rotator cuff exercises, it's (mostly) not because they're fun, but because they allow me to do other stuff that is (although I still get some kind of pleasure out of doing them). But often there are exercises that people will do because they believe that they need to do them, even though they don't find it fun. Sad, but true. Personally, if I have to do an exercise, I'll do my best to find an enjoyable way to do it.

      Your stories make me want to return to bosu squats and getting a small group of people together, balancing on fitballs and passing a medicine ball between us.

      One of my favourite combinations of core work, cardio and fun is to do Tabata-style intervals of medicine ball slams.

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  2. I think for me it's more fun than functional. In my everday life I have never needed to stand on a ball and lift weights above my head etc. But I do love doing stuff like it.
    Ballet was good too, lifting a weight over your head that then started moving and you had to hold there. I never got to the point of having to do a lot myself during a lift but the weight as I have referred to it was always another dancer as you can likely guess.

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