In a follow-up to last week's episode on group training, Kevin address a thoughtful listener email about the pros and cons of group training versus individualized fitness programs. He tackles key points, explores philosophical concepts, and discusses why individual goals may not align with group training environments.
In a follow-up to last week's episode on group training, Kevin address a thoughtful listener email about the pros and cons of group training versus individualized fitness programs. He tackles key points, explores philosophical concepts, and discusses why individual goals may not align with group training environments.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hello listeners and welcome back to the show. Last week, I recorded an episode about a friend of mine and her experience at a CrossFit gym. In response to the episode, I received a very lengthy email from a listener. I think that the points raised were interesting enough that I should respond and also I would thank the listener for the respectful tone of the email. Sometimes it can be very difficult when we have something we love challenged or critiqued because it makes us feel challenged or critiqued. However, a debate allows for me to make a claim, someone to make a counter claim and so on, until really one side has overcome the objections or created a compelling enough case. I would like to remind everyone that listens in, that the show is limited. It’s limited by time. I would love to have a show where I can do really in depth research and present every nuance of a topic. But sadly, the shows are limited to 10-15 minutes. I can’t possibly cover every angle in that time, so I would suspect that every episode, including this one, has left the door open somewhere for there to be a counter argument. But, this week, let’s have a ‘Kevin Responds’ episode. I also want to say to the person that emailed in, it’s not my intention to attack anything that you enjoy or hold in high regard. I don’t operate that way, I am as objective as possible and I also come from a place of knowing quite a lot about how the fitness industry works. So, after this episode, I don’t want you to feel that I have attacked you in any way, but I am going to drop a significant salvo on your email.
Let’s get started with the email. I will respond to each point as we go, so that listeners are able to follow point by point.
“Thanks for a great podcast, Kevin! I have a bunch of comments after your latest episode.
Yes, I've done Crossfit for a while and have had a very good experience with it. I know it's not for everyone, each person has to find something that works for them, something that they'll stick with. I'll try not to blindly defend group training, but I do want to speak in support of it.
It sounds to me that the particular gym you mentioned in your episode was the problem, not group training in general. I would think that if you get a bad personal trainer you could have a similar bad experience.”
Kevin: You are absolutely correct that this gym was a problem. However, for the claim to be made that group training in general is not a problem, then we would need to marshall evidence in support of this claim. Merely saying that group training isn’t a problem is not a compelling argument. No doubt, some listeners will say that I can’t make the claim that all group training gyms are bad. But that would be a misinterpretation of what I said. I made no claim that all group training was bad. My claim is that group training cannot get you to an individual goal and if it does, then it does so by blind luck. This is because individuality and a group are mutually exclusive in meaning. If I want my individual goals to be met, then I cannot possibly claim they could be done so in a group training environment. Furthermore, I will make the bold claim that this argument is undefeatable on epistemological grounds. I hope everyone will forgive me for this, but I am about to go down a philosophy tangent but it is important. Epistemology is the study in philosophy of what we know and how we come to know it. We have a way of looking at things called ‘Hume’s Fork’. Now, again, I can’t cover Hume’s Fork, epistemology, metaphysics and causation in the next ten minutes and do so in a way that won’t trigger existential crises in the listeners by making them question cause and effect and the nature of reality. So, this is a low level explanation.
On one side of Hume’s fork we have necessity and the other we have contingency. So, this might be hard to wrap your heads around, but NONE of you are necessarily listening to this podcast right now. The reason for this is what we call ‘possible worlds’ in other words, for something to be necessarily true, it CANNOT be imagined to be any other way. So, you aren’t necessarily listening to this right now, because it is easy to imagine that you were doing something else. Listening to a different podcast, still in bed, out with friends and so on. So, what this is we call a contingent truth. Necessary truths look like this: Can you imagine a square circle? It’s IMPOSSIBLE to do this. So, we can say that geometry is a necessary truth. What about this one: can you imagine a triangle with more than 3 sides? Again, not possible because if it had more than 3 sides, it would not be a triangle. So, how about this: can you imagine a group of people with only one person in it? The answer to this I’m hoping is no. This is because, just like a triangle means 3 angles, a group means more than one person. The claim I am making that a group training program cannot possibly be as good as an individual training program therefore must hold on the grounds of necessity because of the meanings of the words themselves. Group and individual are mutually exclusive.
You also said that if one gets a bad personal trainer, it would be a similar bad experience. Perhaps, but that’s a fallacious route for the argument because the podcast episode was not about personal training. If I made an episode all about orange juice, a listener cant really email in about apple juice because apples and oranges, just like group training and personal training are different.
“I've been going to my gym since 2013. I'm very satisfied that they're doing group training well. I go to maintain my health as I get older and to complement my main sport, which is ice hockey.
My gym has good coaches who watch our technique closely. We are discouraged from going too heavy, we need to stay light until we have good form. The gym owner and other coaches watch how people are feeling. I talk to the owner periodically and he says he has a general plan in mind with the workouts over time, but he'll tweak them day-by-day as needed. That is, if a workout is harder than he expected it to be, he'll dial back the next day's workout, etc. Or have a lighter day after a few tough days. He varies the muscle groups we're working on as you said, that's a given.”
Kevin: Sounds like you love your gym, it’s hard to find people who have been going to the same gym for over a decade, thats great to hear, the owners are coaches are doing something right and I love that you are so satisfied. I would say that your statement that the owner has a general plan and tweaks it again, would be evidence that this is not perhaps as optimal a scenario as an individual plan, which was my claim. The reason being that its not personal in the same way that if I go and buy a generally well fitting suit off the peg and then have a tailor tweak it to fit, its definitely a better fit for me than it was straight off the peg. However, it’s still not a bespoke suit and that is obvious. There is also an issue of numbers here. CrossFit gyms typically have around 150 members, for some reason, above that number sees the community feel fall apart. So, lets say there are 150 members, is the owner making 150 daily tweaks? Or speaking to 150 members? If not, then I can’t agree that its a good thing on the grounds of thats not how individuality works. Again, if I have a general program and speak to 50 people that say about how it went and then make changes, I have inductively inferred that the remaining 100 people will have the had the same experience. So I run headlong into Hume’s Fork again because I have no necessary evidence for the changes, the only such evidence I could marshal would be deductive and not inductive. In other words: unless the owner is speaking to every single member and tweaking things, then all that has happened is amplification. Which is inductive and merely contingent. This is before we even talk about the program itself. You sent me a further email with the workout which talked about Rx, which is an abbreviation for the Latin word for recipe. It’s used to denote a prescription. So I will put this to you: the tweaking of the program is irrelevant if it is the wrong program. There is no necessary grounds on which I can make the justification that a general program for 50-150 (or more) members is the right prescription because in order to make a prescribed recommendation, I firstly need to make a diagnosis. Group training does not do this. Everyone gets a ‘scale’ of the prescribed workout. I don’t go to a doctor (which is where the Rx terminology comes from) and accept a scaled down or scaled up version of whatever medication the doctor has decided to give out that day. So, tweaking also fails to be a satisfactory alternative to individual design because it may be tweaking the wrong program for me.
“The gym owner is a former Crossfit Games athlete, and it's interesting to see how his programming has evolved over the years. It used to be more predictable: warmup, lifting (with good form, as I said), metcon. But over time he has learned a lot, and now he works in more core work and flexibility work than he used to, with less pure lifting. He talks about diet and nutrition more. He feels that this approach also makes CrossFit less intimidating to newbies and keeps "normal" people coming back--it's more suitable for people in any phase of life (his opinion). Someone looking to just lift heavy or go to the Crossfit Games would be in the wrong place, those are not the goals of his programming.”
Kevin: Sounds reasonable but also, in your second email to me, the gym workout for the day was to build to a heavy single deadlift (or a 1rm) so this evidence from the program would seem to be at odds with the claim that people wanting to lift heavy would be in the wrong place and that is not the goal of the program. If it is not the goal of the program to lift heavy, why is the program of the day to lift as heavy as you can today? Something cannot be A and also not A at the same time, that violates the law of non contradiction.
Your "gaslighting" comment also caught my ear. While there may be some truth to that, I think individuals also need to take some responsibility for their own health. Just because someone says "do this" doesn't mean you have to do it! It's okay to listen to your body and say, hey, this particular movement isn't good for me today. You shouldn't just blindly follow, take some ownership of your own body! Same as in my job, working with electricity. There are safety procedures, but it's on ME to make sure that circuit is dead, I'm not solely relying on some paperwork.
Kevin: I can’t say that I agree with this. I would push back on this on two points. Firstly is a moral standpoint. If someone gets injured doing a movement that they were instructed to do, I don’t agree that we then put it back on them for not knowing enough. I think most reasonable people would balk at the idea that an expert we consult can wriggle free of moral obligation on the grounds that the non-expert should have known more. The second point is that many people lose agency when exposed to social pressure. That is to say that sometimes we know better, but the pressure of the group all doing something leads us to follow. I would therefore argue that the coach should be better in control of this.
“You also discussed entering pain free, but then feeling pain on the way out--and if that's the case you got injured. One of the things I've learned along the way is that what some people perceive as "pain" is just soreness to others. Part of going to the gym is learning to get used to being uncomfortable--soreness is okay, pain isn't. You have to push yourself, all while knowing the difference between pain and soreness.”
Kevin: again, I can’t agree because we are asking a non expert to have too much expertise. Also, can YOU define the difference between pain and soreness? For most people, pain comes during the workout or immediately after, soreness takes time to set in, hours to a couple of days. So, I again would push back on the notion that walking out the door, minutes after performing in pain would be merely soreness. I don’t think that’s reasonable.
“I agree that a 1RM shouldn't be part of a workout; as you said that's testing, not training. But I do think some weight lifting (lighter weight, more reps) is perfectly appropriate for a workout once in a while. Yes, even for some technical lifts, say clean & jerk.”
Kevin: Yes, but although you seem to be in agreement with me here, the workout you sent me from your gym had this very thing.
“You said, "When you get tired, technique is the first thing to go out the window." Perhaps, if you are new and don't know the lift, sure. But if you *do* know the lift, I've found precisely the opposite. WHEN I get tired AND IF I know the lift AND IF the weight is reasonable, I've found that my form actually gets *better* during a Metcon, because proper form is more efficient. It's easier to do the lift correctly (e.g. using my body to get the weight moving, not my arms).”
Kevin: I haven’t yet met anyone, from professional martial artists to winners of the CrossFit Games (because I worked with a Games Winner) who moved better when they totally fatigued. CrossFit calculate work down as FxD/t this is why its always an AMRAP (as many reps as possible) or 5RFT or 3RFT or 21-15-9 reps for time. Has your gym ever had a workout that the coach did NOT start the clock for? My good friends created and founded CrossFit Kids and the CF Kids HQ had NO CLOCK. Reason? They did not want kids moving badly and when people do things as fast as possible, technique is not front and centre. So, if all the workouts are done ‘for time’ and not ‘for quality’, I would have to respectfully disagree. You may be an anomaly whose technique improves as the ability to perform decreases, I can’t make the claim you aren’t because that would be inductive!
“What's reasonable? I'm 54 and my 1RM for a clean & jerk is probably around 215 lbs (98 kg) now. But if there are 135 lb (61 kg) cleans or 95 lb (43 kg) clean & jerks or 95 lb snatches in the metcon, no problem in my opinion. They are also interspersed with other movements so they're not done all at once.
I don't think this is a big disagreement with you, though. It took a while for the above to be true. For someone who doesn't know the lift well, sure, form will deteriorate. It's up to the coaches to spot people with bad form--at any time, including in a metcon. My gym will ask newer members to do different movements and/or scale the weight used. So I don't believe that a blanket statement about not doing certain lifts within a workout is warranted. Just my opinion.”
Kevin: I would argue that the best way to avoid people breaking down in a workout to bad form, which has been highly correlated with increased injury potential is not to ask people to do high skill movements as fast as possible against a clock. In Iceland, I worked in one of the most famous CrossFit gyms in the world. There were sometime 50 students in the class. In a 10 min long workout, this gives me 12 seconds per client. Can you imagine a coach watching a client move, going over, stopping them and giving coaching feedback inside 12 seconds? It’s not possible. So, whilst I understand that may not be the case in your gym, it still holds as true.
“So why do group training? Because the act of doing the workouts together creates a sense of camaraderie and support. I personally find that I push myself harder in that environment, it's what I need to work hard.”
Kevin: Correct. I made an episode before Christmas about training with others and how important it can be for enjoyment. But I would also say that this thing where we push harder in that environment is a double edged sword. Some people are just less resilient physically and if they lose agency in that environment and push too hard, the wheels fall off. Who is responsible? The coach. It's their duty of care.
If you have any questions or would like to just say ‘hi’, please email me at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com.
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, the director of podcasts Brannan Goetschius and Davina Tomlin. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in your podcast app.