As some, if not many, of my readers realize, my expertise is physical exercise. And a great part of what I’ve expressed over the past 50 years has been about the language used in this field. This substack is but a mere spin-off of my inclination to expose the miscarriages of thought that become hidden and perpetrated by bad language.
Recently, I did a two-part series on a new treatment for back pain. Therein, I
Ken Hutchins' Back Triad Procedure
mention the decades-old convention of referring to trunk and neck twistings as rotations. Several times during both parts, I have the need to correct myself after mistakenly verbalizing “rotation.” We could have edited out my mistakes, but I preferred to retain them in the videos as examples of how decades of writing and speaking incorrectly can solidify incorrect concepts.
It’s not that I have not made what I consider to be major contributions to neck twist and trunk twist exercise methodologies although I persistently presented technically incorrect descriptions of their movements. But the fact remains: The fundamental concepts that I presented—which thousands of physical therapists and orthopedic surgeons have overlooked and remain unaware—are erroneous.
So far, in the instances of “torso rotation” and “neck rotation,” I have not seen any obvious harm caused by the collective sin of calling a thing by its incorrect name as the late Richard Mitchell (known as the Underground Grammarian) boldly advised guarding against.
While the “rotation” miscarriage is deplorable, it in no way compares to the broad-scale intellectual damage caused in our field by resistance exercise. And it is easy, at least for me, to expose and to ridicule the embarrassing mistakes made due to this nomenclatural folly.
I may have used “resistance exercise” a few times in the early days of my career, but I remember that it grated on my intuition. In those days, I just did not have the analytical skills to criticize it. Eventually, I wrote a treatise entitled The Evolution of Resistance. I also did a slide presentation on this subject at one of the Nautilus Seminars during the 1980s. I still have the slides.
Of course, the presentation was not about how resistance evolves, but was about how the application of resistance for exercise purposes has evolved from walking to running to calisthenics to gymnastics to weight training. In my opinion, the presentation was a flop as I abandoned it. However, it was extremely rewarding to my understanding of the essence of resistance in regard to exercise.
In the process of the scores of hours I devoted to assembling the materials (slides, script) for the presentation, I discovered that resistance is NOT special. Resistance is encountered by the living body in all conditions, even at rest, even in a condition of weightlessness (due to tonus—the tension in a muscle at volitional rest). And how could I be so stupid (duh… ) as to not appreciate this before devoting so much time to a failed presentation. But then it occurs to me that no one else—at least in the exercise arena—is noticing this egregious linguistic and conceptual flaw.
[Note: A functional human encounters resistance in weightlessness, although not from gravity. However, gravity remains present. We have two no-such-things involved in a weightless environment: zero gravity and zero resistance.]
In fact, it’s worse than this. Others do not only miss this important flaw; I can expect them to make excuses for it. When I have pointed out the inaccuracy to a few notable personalities in the exercise industry, they have whined that, “Well, we must speak the language that the crowd relates to.” I’m sickened by this lame rationale, especially when it comes from those claiming to educate others about the subject and from some who ostensibly speak technically about exercise. Resistance exercise is actually pontificated as though it represents lofty intelligence when it is just the opposite.
Today, it is easy to find thousands of articles and research papers with resistance exercise in their titles. And as one should expect, there are hundreds of podcasts and videos wherein this great expression of ignorance is voiced as though it is a tool for distinguishing one kind of exercise from another—especially, to distinguish exercise for strengthening purposes (actually the only legitimate kind of exercise, therefore exercise should not require a qualifier) from exercise for other purposes.
To be Clear: Non-Resistance Exercise is Impossible.
To take one of innumerable possible examples, let’s pretend that one is trying to condition himself by walking on a treadmill. This is an extremely poor way to condition the human body, but it serves our purposes for exposing the conceptual flaw of the prevailing language.
He might not notice that his act of walking is afforded by his effort to overcome the resistance of gravity against his need to lift and swing his legs. And to make the activity more challenging, he resorts to running, instead of walking, on the treadmill.
But since he does not intuit the fact that he has made the treadmill work more challenging by adding resistance via transitioning from walking to running, he will make his supposed non-resistance activity yet more challenging by inclining the surface of the treadmill. Again, in his mind, he does not add resistance by inclining the running surface.
And then to make this nonsense even more challenging, he decides (humorous expression) to add (another humorous expression) “resistance” in the form of a back pack or hand weights or ankle weights as though he was not working against resistance before this apparent supplementation.
And in his mind he is still performing a steady-state activity (he’s finally correct for once) and not quite qualifying for so-called “resistance training.”
Steady-state activity is poor activity for exercise purposes for the simple reason that the quality (or meaningfulness) of the resistance is poor. And inroad technology is the best for exercise purposes because the resistance is meaningful enough to momentarily inroad the strength of a muscle to stimulate an adaptive mechanism. And the lack of this understanding is the reason almost all research in this area is pure crap… not worth reading… not worth the paper on which it might be printed.
Whenever you hear people say, “resistance exercise,” you are talking to someone who does not truly understand the importance of resistance as it relates to inroad, and hence, does not yet deeply fathom foundational exercise principles. I set off yet because this someone might eventually gain command of this subject, but, in my experience, it requires deep rumination.
For somewhat more clarity, I have included my treatise on the definition of exercise at the end of this substack. Note that inroad is the key concept in the definition. I discuss this concept in many of my books, and it is a concept not known to the exercise physiologists, the physical therapists, the medical doctors, or the athletes and coaches. It is truly off their radar. Instead of a legitimate study of inroad, resistance is the focal point of academic as well as vulgate discussions of exercise.
The First Definition of Exercise