Congruent Exercise - Part 1

It is rare that I am truly excited by a book, that writing will really stimulate me intellectually, with sets of ideas that connect and make sense.  I like it when that happens, when you find something "new" but which makes so much sense because it is not really new, it is obvious when you put the pieces together.  It is the logic of it I like, when things hold together in consistent ways.

Bill DeSimone's new book, Congruent Exercise, is exciting me!  I will put up a proper review in a few days, but I am really savouring it at the moment.  As I read each page there is a pencil in my hand and I am marking up key paragraphs.....then I find that I am marking the whole thing!

In this new book, Bill is covering much of the same material that was in his first book - Moment Arm Exercise - but he has refined his presentation and the whole argument is very clearly presented.

Moment Arm Exercise fascinated me and I used to study it like a text book, I still dig it out to check out the worth of different movements.  Congruent Exercise is more like a manifesto, a simple pulling together of premises to give a clear and logical prescription for exercise.  Safety is key to all this, designing movements that reflect proper joint and muscle function, informed not by "feel" or dogma, but anatomy and mechanics.

As I say, I'll put up a proper review in a few days, but for now suffice to say that this is the best book I've read this year.  You can get a copy at Bill's eBay store here, or read about the book on its Facebook Page.

I intereviewed Bill way back here and it is  interesting to see that some of the things we touched on in that interview are developed a bit in the new book - such as the role of postural muscles.


You can see some of his videos here.

Keep it safe

I have been reading Alex Hutchison's excellent book Cardio or Weights.  In it he examines the science around a host of fitness and exercise related issues and presents it in a very accessible well written way.  Alex is a top journalist and his skill as a writer is clear in this book.

He is giving me lots of ideas for my fitness column in TGO magazine!  One of the things he covers is aging and the effect on your body and fitness.  He explains that there is evidence that:

Exercise - particularly running - does not seem to lead to joint damage as you get older.  He writes about it here.  However, if you pick up an injury then you can end up with more pain and aches in the joints than if you had never trained.  The science here is that while the statistics look like sports lead to dodgy knees, that risk is accounted for by the incidence of knee injuries - i.e. it isn't the sports that lead to bad knees, but the injuries that happen as part of the sports.  There is a big difference

If you exercise but do not get injured then you are golden.  You get the benefits.

So exercise but do it safely.  This has made me think yet again about keeping safe as I train especially as I get older.  There is no point in risking injury.  My recreational activities may involve some risk, but my exercise never should.

In 2008 I had a post up: Primum non nocere  in which I was getting at the same idea,

Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase that means "First, do no harm." The phrase is sometimes recorded as primum nil nocere.

It is one of the principal precepts all medical students are taught in medical school. It reminds a physician that he or she must consider the possible harm that any intervention might do.

In particular, as John Sifferman has pointed out , we need to avoid stupid ego driven training.  In response to the video below he noted:

 I have a friend who owns a CrossFit gym and he told me new CrossFitters have about a 2 year training career before they have to quit due to injury.

What is the point in that?


So to the painful video.  This is not exercise.  This is not safe.  This is stupid.  As John says:

• Dropping barbell on head – check
• Filing down teeth from excessive gritting – check
• Knees bowing inward/outward during jerk catch phase of the lift – check
• Breaking spinal alignment – really check!
• Hyper-extending neck – check
• Nearly being crushed by barbell – check
• Trying to do something again that you clearly couldn’t do the first time – check
• Not paying attention while barbell falls to the floor – check
• Bent elbows during the clean portion of the lift – check
• Lifting weights that are clearly too heavy for you – double-check
• Nearly killing oneself in the pursuit of better health – check