I am not a big fan of the typical New Years Resolution fitness articles. While many of these articles are intended to be motivational, they generally do little to encourage long-term success and the advice provided is often downright ignorant or mediocre at best. Like many other aspects of a healthy lifestyle, success with exercise requires consistency, proper goal setting, and having some basic knowledge of how your actions impact your life. You don’t need some hyperactive “fitness expert” pitching you the latest exercise gadgets and routines in order to succeed during any time of the year, much less New Years. When it comes to exercise, getting back to the basics is one key to success that is frequently ignored. With this said, ask yourself a simple uestion. Does my exercise program better prepare me for situations I may face in everyday life?

Health vs. Fitness

Before we address the question posed above, we need to lay some basic ground work about the difference between Health and Fitness. While being fit is often associated with better health, fitness is not defined by health. You can be fit for a number of different tasks, activities and sports that really have
nothing to do with health.

When your primary goal for exercise is to achieve a higher level of health, you can essentially do anything that involves becoming more active. You can regularly walk, hike, go bike riding, mow the lawn with a push mower, take the stairs instead of the elevator or numerous other activities to achieve better health.

Fitness on other hand is more specific. If you have specific long-term goals such as increasing strength, increasing cardiovascular endurance, increasing lean body mass or training for a half marathon, you must exercise in a specific way to achieve these goals. Another way to think of this is the difference between long distance runners and sprinters. They are both fit but they are fit for the sport they participate in. A sprinter does not make a good long distance runner and vice-versa.

Now, let me clarify something. When you first start an exercise program, you are going to become more fit regardless of the type of exercise you perform. If you use resistance bands you will get a little stronger. If you start walking the dog, your cardiovascular endurance will improve. Even though improvements are made, this does not mean that resistance bands are the best way to develop strength and it does not mean that walking the dog is the best way to develop cardiovascular endurance.

While this is slightly beyond the scope of this article, it is interesting to consider that there are actually instances where being fit is unhealthy. Take NFL linemen for example. Linemen in the NFL routinely get above 300 pounds and though they may be strong and fast, many are also obese. In today’s day and age, NFL linemen must be large individuals in order to be competitive as an NFL lineman. They are fit for the position of lineman, but it would be hard to argue that being over 300 pounds is in any way healthy.

This discussion about the difference between Health and Fitness is relevant for several reasons.

1) If your goal is only to increase health, finding a physical activity that you enjoy doing on a regular basis is sufficient. Don’t stress over the details about the forever changing recommendations from one professional to another; just live an active lifestyle.

2) Many individuals tend to set specific fitness related goals but due to the ridiculous amount of misinformation out there, they are confused about how to achieve those goals.

3) Similar to being fit for a specific task such as running a half marathon, you should be able to look at your exercise program and determine whether it will better prepare you for specific tasks that you may face in everyday life.

Exercise is Specific

I recently wrote an article which covered 10 different exercises that someone should focus on if their time is limited. In this article I suggested exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench presses and several other free weight exercises. A couple of people had ridiculous comments like, “These exercises are not for the obese”, but one comment really represented the fundamental issue of this article. One individual commented with, “Right....these exercises are NOT for obese people or women!” So, since free weight exercises such as squats and exercises are not for women, I guess exercises such as bicep curls, tricep kickbacks and other “toning exercises” are more appropriate for women right?

Let me ask you something. Do women ever have the need to bend over and pic up one end of a piece of furniture to move it? Do women ever need to bend over and pic up a baby out of a crib or off the floor? Do women ever need to be able to press some weighted object over their head to place it on a shelf? My guess would be yes to all three of these and squats, deadlifts, bench presses, shoulder presses and number of other free weight exercises would better prepare someone, not just women, to perform these tasks. Are these exercises for women? Absolutely!

For so long now, many people have been conditioned to think that achieving the best results requires using the latest exercise equipment, gadgets and routines or performing exercises that are “specific to their body type”. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, basic free weight exercises such as squats, deadlifts, lunges, bench presses and rows, which have been done for years, provide a host of benefits that can’t be achieved with any resistance band, machine or the latest “fitness breakthrough”. When was the last time you picked something up off the floor that did not require any balance and slid up and down on a pole or was attached to a big rubber band? I would dare to say never. The free weight exercises listed above require balance, they not only use more than one muscle group, but they require coordinated movement amongst muscle groups and very little equipment is required. These specific movements also mimic many everyday actions such as picking up heavy objects, starting the lawn mower, lifting objects over your head and numerous other situations. Exercises performed using machines and “gadgets” do not mimic what you do on a daily basis.

To further stress the point about about exercise causing specific results, we can look at squats and leg extensions. The primary muscle group used for both of these exercises is the quadriceps. As you expect, if you perform squats on a regular basis you become stronger in the squat. However, even though squats and leg extensions utilize the quadriceps, increasing squat strength does very little to increase leg extension strength. Why is this? Well, because you coordinate the movement of a squat differently than you coordinate the movement of a leg extension. When you compare these two exercise to activities you perform in everyday life, which one would you benefit more from? The leg extension does not resemble any home, sport or recreational activity that I can think of. The squat on the other hand is performed during a number of different home, sport and recreational activities.

The bottom line is this. When you exercise you are going to get better and stronger at the specific exercises and activities you perform. The free weight exercises discussed previously are very similar to movements that you perform everyday. These types of exercises are also very functional since they improve upon how you perform activities you do on a daily basis. Compare this to many supposed “core” and “functional” exercises that use stability balls, BOSU balls, inflatable balance discs and foam rollers. If you exercise using these devices on a regular basis, you will become better at them but does this transfer to your daily life? If you do crunches or chest presses on a stability ball you will get better at doing crunches and chest presses on the stability ball. If you do squats on inflatable balance discs, you will get better at doing squats on inflatable balance discs. The problem here is that in “real life” we don’t lay on big inflatable balls or stand on inflatable discs to pick things or move things around. This type of exercise does very little to make us more functional people. In real life we stand on solid surfaces and pick up or move objects that require us to balance and coordinate our movements and this is how we should exercise.

Summing it up

In this new year, if you have not already, take this time to get back to the basics. There is no reason to use the latest and greatest machines and gadgets to make your exercise program a success. In fact, these devices make things more confusing than they should be and at the end of the day they simply do not work as well basic free weight alternatives. The free weight exercises mentioned previously, while not an exhaustive list by any means, are basic exercises that have been around for years and still result in a higher level of success. The next time someone suggests a new exercise or new piece of equipment, ask yourself, “Will this exercise better prepare me for situations I may face in everyday life?”

Check out ObesityHelp’s new Activity Tracker at obesityhelp.com/myoh/healthtracker/. Using ObesityHelp’s Activity Tracker allows you to track your exercise program in detail and includes, cardiovascular and general activities, individual strength training exercises, combined caloric expenditure, resting metabolic rate and more!