FUNDAMENTALS
Getting a base level of strength in the fundamental patterns of squatting, hinging, lunging, pushing/pulling, and carrying has the largest transfer to your health and performance. Layer that with proper sleep and fundamental nutrition such as calorie balance, macro portions, and nutrient-dense food, and you’ve solved 99% of fitness-related problems.
Unfortunately, the industry is full of “influencers” who need to stand out and in order to do so they try to be polarizing. From a nutrition standpoint, it could be eliminating a macronutrient from your diet or claiming that putting butter in your coffee will make you live to be 130 years old.
In training, there is no shortage of “coaches” who rush athletes into exercises that have zero carryover to their function outside of the gym. Walk into many CrossFit gyms and you’ll see people doing atrocious snatches and cleans with PVC pipe when they can’t even squat their body weight for a couple of reps.
Can’t do a pull-up? Swing your legs like this and throw your chin to the ceiling. Boom look how much better you have gotten in one day! Forget spending months developing the musculature and the strength to do a strict pull-up.
Ask yourself this, who is more prepared to handle the demands outside the gym? A person whose training consists of doing as many reps as possible of ugly burpees and empty barbell snatches OR someone who can lunge forty yards while holding 35% of their body weight at their chest then do 10 perfect push-ups and 5 perfect pull-ups?
Better yet.. who has the higher potential to take their training in any direction they want and have better results?