I am sometimes told that I am sometimes too harsh when I write about articles presented by various people. I do not do this on purpose. It happens automatically because of the great amount of misinformation that I continually read in the newspapers and magazines. Sometimes I’m tempted to say that there is more incorrect information being presented than there is solid, accurate, and worthwhile information.
I’ve been in the field over 50 years and I can honestly say that much of the information being presented today is not only less accurate, but it is contradicting much of the well proven, in theory and in practice, exercise information. I see this as a step backward, not a step forward to make effective progress.
I can give an example of this every week, if not every day, for the next year and still not run out of articles to bring out their inaccuracies. My comments are not opinion based; they can be backed up with solid scientific facts.
For example, this week there was an article in the San Diego Union Tribune newspaper titled, Double your pleasure (by doing the mule kick reverse fly). The article states that in this exercise you combine single leg hip extension with a bent over reverse fly.
However, hip extension does not occur because it is impossible to bring the leg behind the hips. The leg goes behind the body due to pelvic rotation, by contraction of the lumbar muscles, with the leg held in the same anatomical position with the hips as when in a normal standing position. This becomes obvious if you simply watch someone do the exercise.
When you stand on one leg and bend over from the hips you do what used to be called a front scale, which was used for balance training. Although the article cautions you not to do the exercise if you do not have good balance, I doubt if you’ll find very many – if any – people who have the balance needed to do this exercise to get the development advertised in this article.
Compounding matters is that it is recommended that you pull the leg behind you against resistance of rubber tubing or low cable resistance while simultaneously bending over from the hips and then doing the reverse fly with dumbbells in the hands. This increases the ability to balance greatly.
As a result, the range of motion for the pelvic girdle rotation and reverse fly is cut almost in half. In addition, you have to use light resistance for the leg movement and for the fly. The end result is that you get half the development that is possible if you did each exercise separately.
But I guess today it is trendy to try and combine two or more exercises with or without balance. But when you do two exercises simultaneously you cannot get maximum benefit from either one. When effective exercise combinations are done, they are usually done in sequence not simultaneously. Thus the question that should be asked is what is the prime objective of the exercise. All other benefits should be secondary.
If the objective is to impress people with all of the benefits that can be gotten from an exercise then we will continue to see more half-baked execution of exercises. Instead of this we should push for the need to write about more simple and compound exercises that produce measurable and effective results.
For more information on exercise execution and the muscles and actions involved read Kinesiology of Exercise. It is the most detailed book available on how to do an exercise together with all of the exercise nuances.