The other day I noticed I was tagged into a Facebook “debate” about the efficacy or value of staggering your stance in a kettlebell swing. Now years ago I might have actually engaged in this debate. Now I mostly just roll my eyes, for the reasons I talked about here.

But, it can be instructive to look at some of the positions folks staked out in the thread, and why they’re so silly.

– “I like to use tools for what they’re appropriate for, so I do stagger stance with sandbags, but not with kettlbells.”

This is one of those absurdly arbitrary distinctions with no basis in reality. Tools certainly alter movements, and in fact tools are one of the five major things you should be testing in your training (I cover all of them in my free ecourse), but tools don’t dictate the movement. There isn’t a set of movements for the sandbag, and a set of movements for the kettlebell. This is a stupid​ position to take.

– “Too much risk for injury. I won’t use them unless there is proven benefit.”

OK, I’ll play. Proven by whom? Proven FOR whom? Proven to what standard? Proven under what conditions? Proven in what environment? What benefit is proven? What costs are there to that benefit? What is the injury risk? What appropriate alternatives are there and what are their risks? What are drawbacks to using those alternatives instead?

You see already how flawed and facile this logic is?

– “Staggering might be fine for targeting an imbalance, but ballistics are inappropriate when there is an imbalance in the first place.”

Really, why? Ballistic movements aren’t special. They’re movements that are different in degree rather than kind to similar non-ballistic movements. So if a staggered stance is useful in a deadlift, it’s equally useful in a ballistic. Further, a ballistic movement isn’t necessarily more stressful than it’s non-ballistic counterpart depending on the load. I’d often feel more comfortable handing a client a 16kg bell to do a swing than a 32kg bell to do a deadlift. It just depends.

– “It’s too awkward to do a hip hinge with a staggered stance?”

Really? Do these people exist in the real world, watch or play any sports, or actually work with clients whose bodies don’t exist in textbooks?

For most people doing a SYMMETRICAL stance hip hinge more awkward than staggering!

This thread was full of classic examples of people regurgitating the dogma they were taught at seminars they paid too much money for without giving real critical thought as how those ideas integrate, or don’t integrate, with the rest of what they know and have experienced.

Breaking out of the “only one way is the correct way” mindset is crucial to your progress. (Literally and metaphorically.)

The other day I was talking to someone I met recently and he was asking me about what I do for work. I said something like well I write a lot and teach seminars and he asked, “What do you teach?”

Normally I’d say something about fitness, etc. but this time for some reason it made me pause and think about it.

The thing is, I do of course teach specific fitness or training techniques and strategies. I can teach you ways to improve your deadlift, or strategies to tweak your nutrition, how to build the strongest possible bent press, how to improve your run times with less effort, and dozens of other specific, discrete, useful things.

But that’s not what I teach.

What I’m (trying) to teach is an entire operating system for how to approach everything you do.

Take biofeedback for example. I can, and gladly will, teach you how to use biofeedback testing in 30 seconds. The juice isn’t in the technique itself, it’s in the application of the technique. After those 30 seconds, you can ascertain in a moment how useful any one of a million different movements or therapy interventions will be most useful to you in any given moment.

It literally abdicates the entire need for long discussions about when and where to use certain things and how they’re good or bad. There is zero point in wasting that time trying to hash out “the evidence” or other rationalistic approaches to determining efficacy.

You can just test it, for yourself, right now.

That’s just one example of how you can apply a new operating system that changes your approach to fitness and everything else. “What is best for me?” is a much more fundamental, interesting, and useful question than “What is best?”

The latter is a great rabbit hole for academics and people with time to waste. But the former is how you figure out what foods, activities, people, jobs, and environments make you thrive.

The only downside to my approach, if you want to call it that, is that I expect a lot more from you. I’m not going to give you a lot of answers, I’m only going to provide you with better questions to ask. It’s more work for you, but you get out what you put in.

I have been remarkably untouched by tragedy and unwelcome struggle in my life. When I was a teenager my dad went through some health issues that culminated in open heart surgery, but I don’t think I was mature enough to truly appreciate the gravity. That is to the best of my recollection as bad as I’ve ever had it. Really there have been surprisingly few deaths and serious illnesses in people closest to me. I’m incredibly, unspeakably thankful for this.

As a result, by and large I’ve been able to do the work I want to do for my whole life, unhindered by the kinds of things that knock you back on your ass and leave you feeling like it’s an accomplishment just to make it through the day doing basic tasks.

And when I say the work, I’m not talking about the labor you do for a paycheck to pay your bills.

The work might be self-improvement, pursuit of a hobby or skill, playing a sport, daily life tasks like cooking, creative endeavors, getting stronger or any other number of the zillion things the modern human can choose to do. The work is the stuff that matters. Filing your TPS reports or not isn’t the work, that’s bullshit that doesn’t matter. Writing your book, making your art, raising your kids, healing your body, that’s the work.

I’ve been so lucky that I’ve pretty much always gotten to choose the work.

And so, it was quite the punch in the gut when on the same day that one of my very best friends started chemo for an aggressive cancer – one of my dogs, Franklin, became completely paralyzed in all 4 limbs by a sudden neuromuscular disease of unknown origin.

The work that my friend wanted to do for the next several months is not to go through chemotherapy and various other treatments, while spending every waking moment thinking about cancer, learning about cancer, waiting for forks in the road, and making tough decisions.

But it’s the work now.

The work I wanted to do for the next several months is not to carry my dog around the house because he can’t walk, and to put diapers on him because he can’t stand to pee, to say nothing of the possibility of having to say goodbye. If he has a chance at running around wagging his tail again it sounds like lots of physical therapy will be a part of it. It’s not the #project I planned for the summer.

But it’s the work now.

The other day, as I was going to the store to buy some PVC parts to make Franklin a cart, I got a message from someone who had read my deadlift book, Off The Floor. He gave me permission to share a screenshot, but I’ll paraphrase instead for brevity. “David, I herniated S1 and L5 and things were terrible. I’m a paramedic so my job was harder. I stopped lifting and doing jiu-jitsu, my hobby, completely. I heard about your book, bought it, and learned about how to test things. I started doing that and it is fixing me. I’ve found certain deadlifts are the only ones that test well, and how to modify my squat for it to test well. I have days where I forget I have a problem. Soon I’m going to start BJJ again. You’ve completely changed my quality of life, and I don’t even think about drugs or surgery anymore.”

Being in back pain is terrible, I’ve been there. And the impetus is to do nothing. It’s the leading cause of disability worldwide for good reason. You just don’t want to do anything when you’re in that kind of pain. But as best as we can tell doing the right type of movement is one of the few things that is correlated with resolving back pain, and from all of my experience what I can tell is using biofeedback testing is the best way to figure out what the right movement is.

The thing to me that’s remarkable about his story is that he did the work. He did the work, I’m going to do the work, and my friend is going to do the work.

There are two sides of this coin I call the work. It’s like a 2×2 matrix of choice. It can choose you or you can choose it, and you can choose to do it or not to do it. Man, when you can, do as much of the work you choose as you possibly can. Make your time count. Don’t waste it.

When the work chooses you, well, you don’t have to do it. You can choose not to.

But, you can be sure of one thing, there’s nothing on the other side.