Generalism

What’s the gym for? I mean really for? You may think you know, but don’t be so sure.

Gym is great for building muscle, for improving heart and lung function, for strengthening bones and increasing blood flow. But here’s the kicker: the biggest benefit of the gym, is to get you really really good at doing gym.

Let’s take an example; rock climbing. Rock climbing can get pretty extreme. People can crawl along walls that are more like ceilings and not break a sweat. The all-over muscle and cardio requirements even to stay thirty seconds on such a surface are insane. So gym sounds ideal, pack on the weights, hit the running machine, roll some dumbells! Well, no. Because of one word: specificity.

Specificity in sport dictates that in order to directly improve your chosen activity you need to replicate exactly what you do in that activity. Any variation, even minor, can eliminate many if not all gains sought. And this is the reason you’ll very rarely see serious climbers down the gym; because larger improvements can be gained by simply doing more climbing, and this doesn’t change irrespective of how many 200kg seated pull-downs they do.

The same goes for running. The cycling machine works your heart and lungs just fine, but the work done on the rest of your body is having little impact on your pavement-pounding capabilities. Even running on a treadmill fails to emulate the ground impact, the different angles your legs and feet have to cope with and therefore the muscles needed to do said coping, and that’s not including the environmental conditions your body needs conditioning on, wind, temperatures, air pressures. You want maximum effectiveness for your chosen activity? Do your chosen activity.

So if all that is the case, who is gym really for? Well for a start gym is excellent for people that don’t have any other activity to focus on. I’ve known a lot of people lacking in sporting skills or facilities, who have gained enormous benefit from visiting the gym, in strength, weight loss and overall fitness levels. It’s also great for rehabilitation, where many of the machines can isolate individual muscle groups for a rapid return to form following injury. It can also be great for supplementary exercising, for instance using cable-rows to emulate a forehand tennis shot, but that tends to be a very specific requirement for very specific reasons by very specific individuals. For most of the rest of us, we’d be better off spending an extra five minutes on the tennis court than five minutes on the cable machine!