Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2020

That one exercise you just hate? Training for diverse bodies.

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...