I was fairly new to personal training , when a client spoke to me about mountain climbers. Trainers love a good mountain climber, it's a great, whole body, high intensity cardio exercise and at the time I was using them a lot in my own training, putting sets of mountain climbers in between my strength sets. She explained to me that she just couldn't do them. It wasn't a fitness thing, they didn't work for her body, as she put it "my belly gets in the way". We adapted. I discovered that if we did a TRX mountain climber, with her feet raised, she had the space under her body to bring her knees forward. It's a more challenging exercise in terms of core stability, but like I said, it wasn't her fitness that caused the issue, the exercise was just a poor fit for her. That was probably the catalyst that made me think a lot harder about exercises and their suitability for the diverse body shapes of our human population. Who invents exercises anyway? Well...
I was recently asked a really interesting nutrition question, which is great, because I love big chewy questions, and it brought up a discussion of a common issue I encounter with my personal training clients. It goes like this. Most of the questions people ask me about health and fitness, are not simple questions. The simple questions are the sort of thing you pick up at school, or can quickly google for a solid consensus, so it makes sense that those aren't brought to me. The questions people ask are always the tricky ones, the contested issues, the ones where my short answer is "well... yes, and... no". Sometimes it's because the answer is disputed, or there's not enough empirical evidence to support a definitive answer. Sometimes it's because the answer is population dependent; what's good for a pro athlete isn't necessarily right for an office worker who exercises for fun and to ward off heart attacks. And sometimes the topic is derived from a