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Aimee's Soapbox!
November 2004: Do the right thing; do the thing right.

Boy, with a title like that, you can pretty much guess that I'll be on a tear in this month's column. So fasten your seatbelt, get ready, here I go....

This column was inspired by a man I saw working out at my gym recently. He looked very fit and healthy, and seemed to be very comfortable around the machines, like he knew what he was doing. He looked like any other athletic young man at a gym, doing his workout before work. And then, he did it....

He performed an exercise on a machine with such excruciatingly bad form and technique that I nearly leapt off the rower to make him stop before he hurt himself.

Yes, I mean you, dude in the blue shorts and white T-shirt.

So why did I care how he did his bent rows? And why did I feel compelled to write about it?

Quite simply, that man got me to thinking about a few things, and I felt those things were pretty important. First, he made me think about "judging a book by its cover." And second, he made me think about not "practicing sloppy."

Often times at the gym or at a 5K or at a group run, we look at other people and see someone who is thinner or faster or more muscular or more "whatever" than ourselves. We judge that person by the "cover" (appearance) and then compare ourselves to that person. So now we've really committed two errors. We've judged, and we've compared. So I judged that man in my gym to be fit and gym-savvy, but he actually turned out to be not so fit and not so savvy. As he got off the bent-row machine, he was rubbing his low back in that "ooh, that hurt" sort of way. Now I know this wasn't the best analogy, but the point is, I automatically judged this man to be a certain way, and then he wasn't that way at all. So, the moral of this example is not to judge other people by their appearances and then not to judge ourselves by comparing to them. Because invariably, your conclusions about them and about yourself will be wrong. (I'm running into some grammatical difficulties in explaining this, but I hope my point is coming across anyway.)

OK, so there are my quick thoughts on the dangers of judging by appearance. But what about "practicing sloppy" you ask? Well, that's the really important one, in my opinion.

So there was this nice young man, doing what he thought was a good thing, and yet, in the long run, he was really hurting himself. Literally. (I wish you all could have seen this move he did. Really, it was scary.) So he was practicing sloppy.

Practicing sloppy is really a waste of time, if you think about it. First, you are putting bad technique into your muscle memory. And if you do a sport where technique is important (and I dare you to name one where it isn't), then you don't want bad technique ingrained in your memory. Second, you are putting yourself at greater risk for injury. Just like the dude at my gym. If you are doing bent rows (which focus on your UPPER back), you really have to go a long way to hurt your lower back. He was massaging his low back after just one set. Now, I imagine that the one set that I saw was not the only one he had ever done. So for how many sets had he been practicing sloppy and hurting his back? And finally, it's a waste of time because you may not be getting all the benefits of the exercise if you are doing it wrong. To use the poor dude at the gym again, he is not really working his rhombiods and traps and rear delts anymore because of how he performed the bent rows. So he is really just spinning his wheels and not helping the muscles he thinks he is.

Now what does all this mean for you?

This month's column is really directed at all of you who KNOW the things you should be doing and aren't. I mean, really, can you complain about your (tight hamstrings, slow 5K time, sleepiness, weight loss, weight gain, etc.) if you are not (stretching, getting enough recovery, eating properly, hydrating, etc.)?

What I mean is this: So often, we practice sloppy and wonder why we are not getting good results. We don't stretch and we wonder why our hamstrings are a chronic problem. We eat fast food on the run and wonder why our weight is not where we's like it to be. We overtrain and wonder why our times are getting slower.

Where are you practicing sloppy? My coaches always yell at me if I am practicing sloppy, saying I am wasting time (theirs and mine). So be your own coach, and check your own form to see where you could be improving your technique.

To be fair and to give the dude at my gym the benefit of the doubt, he probably doesn't KNOW that he is practicing sloppy. So, the teacher in me is here to tell you that there is probably SOMETHING that you could be improving. Do you want to lower your 5K time? Ask a coach or trainer for some ideas. Do you want to improve your flexibility so that you stop hurting your hamstrings? Take a yoga class. In other words, sometimes we need someone else to give us a different perspective on things in order to improve and move forward.

For this month, why not try looking at your current routine and seeing where you are in a rut or practicing sloppy. And then, find a "coach" who can give you an outside perspective. What have you got to lose, besides a bad habit?

Coming up... Winter training, or how not to succumb to the couch's gravitational pull.

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