[quote]The Mighty Stu wrote:
I’ve worked with a few clients who came to me with zero (ZERO!) gym experience of any kind. As I learned, some folks are so uncoordinated, that even exercises that we would consider basic and simple, can become a ridiculous looking, dangerous to oneself type of movement. One particular fellow (back when I actually worked with people in person) didn’t have the simple body awareness, or even balance to do a body weight squat. In instances like this, you can find yourself focusing quite differently than you would normally approach a beginner trainer.
I know this isn’t the actual intention of the subject at hand, but I thought it was useful to throw out. A lot of us might take certain basic understandings, or abilities as an automatic thing due to the company we keep.
S[/quote]
That makes me think of another point. Has anyone else noticed how much emphasis personal trainers put on “balance training”. I see them training “newbs” with all kinds of stability mumbo jumbo every time I’m at a commercial gym.
Stu (or anyone who knows how to train people!) is there actually merit to doing this sort of stuff? Like for someone brand new to lifting who doesn’t even have the body awareness to squat? Or is it useful for anyone at all?
The way I look at it, when you have someone do squats on a bosu ball, you aren’t really improving their “balance” or their “stability”, all you’re really doing is teaching their brain to get better at squatting on a bosu ball; which could be useful if you really needed to finish your leg workout during an earthquake.
If you take ANY movement that is new to someone they will look extremely unstable doing it (even bench press). Once you teach them how to do it and repeat it with them over and over, they will become better at it and look more stable. You didn’t actually improve their “stability” though whatever that even is.
That’s just my sort of take on it. I don’t know where all the emphasis on stability training came from. As if we were all just walking around falling over all the time or something.
Maybe that was a derail. Sorry.