Some of those riding at the front of the current exercise mechanics bandwagon glamourise things being black and white. They’re the same mouths that not long ago called certain movements “THE 5 BEST exercises” and labelled everything else as horseshit. The instagram audience and algorithms love it.
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It encourages students to look to biomechanics education for definitive guidelines and protocols, like the arbitrary ones they were taught in their basic certifications.
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I can see why people are drawn to exercise mechanics - it’s the reason why I took engineering at university and not a subject where someone’s opinion decided my grade. I liked the assurance of knowing there are basic laws of science and thus every mechanics question has a right & wrong answer...
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... except, while forces and angles and moment arms and lever arms and friction are all very well understood mechanics principles (well, by those who actually understand them), the application of them is in the human body which has wild variance. Yes, we are all similar from a general perspective, but humans are like models of cars being produced with a very large factor of error, and the brain operating them has a “use whatever it takes” or “do whatever is easiest” autopilot 🛩
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Even if an exercise setup makes a machine say it somehow isolates the upper third distal fibres of the lateral head of muscle X by an extra 13.7% compared with when done at a 86.1 degrees, they’ve got to be dreaming if they think that has any relevance to someone else’s structure and execution, let alone that they could find me an everyday client to whom it matters.
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It’s why the RTS ethos is so focused on “client-defined exercise”. The person in front of you holds all the answers to how to train them - the key is just having the knowledge to know how to interpret what they’re telling you needs working on and how to use the resistance manipulation options afforded to us by the existence of mass and gravity to help them accordingly.
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Learn the sound scientific principles as deeply as possible and then embrace the fact that every time you look to apply them the circumstances will be different and they might almost feel “wrong”.
