Formosa Fitness

Mike Mahler's tukish get up.

There's an interesting link up over at IGX on the Turkish Getup. The Turkish get up (TGU) is an exercise that got blended into the kettlebell mix by Pavel of RKC/dragon door fame. It was taught to him by Steve Maxwell. Thing is, it used to be just a move among a small set of kettlebell movements, but in the DVD talked about in the thread, the hype has now made it into THE ONLY MOVE YOU EVER NEED.

Additionally, the level of detail that IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY OR YOU WILL HURT YOURSELF has sky rocketed. BTW, the caps here are on purpose. This is how this stuff is marketed in the kettlebell world. Everything is the latest MUST HAVE! Or THE ONLY WAY TO DO IT!

I understand marketing to an extent and people are trying to get other people's attention. That's actualy REALLY hard to do (haha, see my use of caps?). People are inundated with media so no one pays attention to anything. You have to scream your head of to be heard. So the claims have to be more and more outrageous to get people's attention.

But something else is going on here and that's taking something that is useful at a certain level of detail and making it overly complicated.

As a taichi teacher,  I could write an entire book and produce a DVD just on the first move of the taiji form. I could say, "It's all the taiji anybody would ever need" or some such garbage. And that might be true to an extent. I could certainly provide a depth of detail and knowledge about it that very few people have.

But of what use is that level of detail to people?

Taichi beginners don't need anywhere near that amount of complexity. They wouldn't understand it anyway. It would bore most people to death. The only people that would want it are kooks like me that do this stuff all day every day.

Same goes for the kettlebell techniques. There's certain details you want so that you don't hurt yourself. Everyone needs these because using the kettlebell relies on technique. But the problem is that you can get consumed by the deeper levels of technique if you aren't careful.

As the thread at IGX says, the kettlebell used to be seen as the "AK-47 of fitness" that the "working man" could use to get fit. Then it became a hyper-detailed geekfest where you needed a PhD. just to figure out what people were talking about.

Bottom line for me is that a certain level of detail is desired but beyond that I tend to reject endless debates about technique because I've been down that road before. Endless BS debates about techniques WILL KILL your spirit and desire to do these exercises.

And that's the whole point in the first place: exercising. Getting out there and just doing it.

So don't get hurt but also don't let technical talk get in your way of exercising. Just because some level of detail is good doesn't mean that a lot is great.