What to ditch, what to lift and why we fail

There’s a time and a place for whole body movements and there’s a time and place for hypertrophy of a single muscle group. The best approach starts (most people’s eye roll here!) with listening-to your body and to how you respond over time. But there’s an even bigger next step too.

Ditch:

Whole body exercises using a single weight can not only feel so incredibly uncomplicated but help you feel your body moving well, so you can iron out creases. Human bodies are complex things! And a complex system is more than just the sum of its parts, and its behaviour often cannot be understood by looking at its components in isolation. So combo exercises can help you feel into that bigger picture.

Yet many fitness proponents will tell you that combo exercises are the fastest way... to get nowhere when it comes to truly building muscle: your heart is racing, your muscles are burning... but there’s no hypertrophy. And so …

Lift:

A shoulder weight cannot get a glute activated by the same weight. And life is barely even symmetrical, a weight carefully poised in each hand as you attempt to get out equally shaped and weighted shopping bags from your perfectly height adjusted car boot to prevent back pain?!

Conditioning for chaos, training awkward, hypertrophy for size, weights for speed, strength in length and mobility, rehab and corrective means we absolutely must choose weights that will appropriately stimulate ONE target muscle group.

Fail:

Combo exercises will miss the mark if hypertrophy is your goal and focusing on one muscle group will miss the mark for a whole systems check in to ensure you feel good all the way thru. It is near impossible to choose a weight that is right for both a big muscle group like legs and a smaller muscle group like arms. The bigger muscle group will always suffer.

But working thru both (& more!) ways to train is going to get you further than either one alone. Because if we want to understand how our bodies change-how we get stronger, fitter, healthier-we need to stop thinking like engineers and start thinking like biologists.

Being your own fitness biologist:

Your body doesn't adapt to a single workout in isolation. Every run, every strength session, every yoga class happens in the context of everything else going on in your life. Exercise doesn't just affect muscles—it changes hormones, metabolism, your nervous system, and even how your brain works.

• Load isn't only physical-it's emotional, social, and environmental. All of these factors interact.

• Your body doesn't "optimize" for a single thing

• Your body thrives off balances AND trade-offs to survive and thrive.

This is where many training plans fall short. They assume you can work on one thing at a time-strength, endurance, mobility-when, in reality, everything is connected.

Because in the end, health isn't about engineering a perfect plan. It's about guiding adaptation.