In part 1 of this series we looked at a few of the untenable, totally indefensible, ill-if-at-all-considered positions that people stake out in arguments over fitness function and form. People do this in almost every topic imagine, by the way, so it’s not at all unique to fitness. The question of how we know things and how we know what we know about what we know has stymied philosophers since Thales of Miletus asked if his dog would think it was night when the sun was eclipsed, but I digress.

The predominant way that physical training is systematized and approached is something I’m going to call the mechanical statistical-inferential training gaze, borrowing heavily from an idea my brilliant friend Jahed came up with regarding our approach to medicine.

Basically, most people look at the body as a system of levers and pulleys, informed by statistical generalities across various groups of people. Make sense so far?

An example of this would be what my friend Bret Contreras has done over the past 10+ years to convince people that it made sense to train the glutes in various specific ways including loading them directly with the Contreras hip thrust. If this seems obvious to you now, trust me when I say it was not at all obvious or even accepted as an idea worth pursuing a decade ago. Bret tirelessly collected reams of various types of data to show people that muscle activation was happening, muscles were growing, the movements were getting stronger and so on.

Let’s take a step back for a second to one of the most fundamental principles of the human body that governs all training. If you understand this simple principle, not only are you ten steps ahead of most people who only understand the downstream application, but you don’t need to be taught specific application because you understand the principle.

Wolff’s law (and Davis’s corollary) state that bone (and soft tissue) remodel along lines of stress according to the demands imposed upon them.

You can predict from this that a tennis player with a wicked forehand is going to have a slightly bigger racket arm than their non-dominant. And in fact they do.

As a result of this phenomenon, which will be important to understand later, you will also realize that it’s not just training stress that the body tissues adapt and remodel to – it’s all stresses and loads from everything you do.

Given this understanding (let’s not even call it a fact, maybe there is some other magic happening we don’t even understand), it should become totally unnecessary to collect mountains of evidence that loading the glutes in the hip thrust manner is effective.

One of the things I notice with people who take my biofeedback courses is that they immediately get more creative in how they load their body, because they intuitively understand that to induce a change in the body all you have to do is load it appropriately.

This brings us, in a way that hopefully helps you form a new thought process around it, to the question of staggered stance swings, and why they are no different than a staggered stance anything else. The question is not “Are staggered stance swings useful?” The question is, “Are staggered stances useful.”

Well if you know that the body reforms tissue along lines of stress, you could reasonably conclude that every body is undergoing asymmetrical tissue remodeling all the time. Unless you go through life doing every single thing ambidextrously you are being made crooked by your daily life. In the likely event that you play a sport of any kind, you’re repeating specific patterns for tens of thousands of repetitions and they’re likely unilateral.

You are staggered.

Ipso facto it would be appropriate to load the body in a staggered fashion with any and all movements. You may want to load “in” to the asymmetry. Or you may want to load “out” of the asymmetry.

This is where the statistical-inferential gaze causes a huge rub. It’s hard enough to draw and show valid conclusions from something as simple as loading a bar vertically across the hips.

To do so with the variety of asymmetry that exists across a population is so hard that there’s only one thing to do.

Pretend it doesn’t exist.

You may think I am exaggerating, but I’m not at all. The vast majority of training dogma simply ignores the fact that people are inherently asymmetrical. In fact most of it goes militantly against the idea so much that if there is any imbalance detected at all the praxis is to regress the person to physical therapy.

This is an unfortunate and logical conclusion of top-down thinking where you try to draw inferences and conclusions to apply to individuals by looking at large groups – which the individual may or may not even be a member of.

A better approach, and the one I teach, is to instead start with the individual and look at how they are affected directly.

The questions, and the answers to them, then become much more relevant and applicable.

What benefit will I, specifically, get from this exercise? I can look to simple physiological principles for answers, not vague studies done in far away places on vastly different people.

Is this good for me to do right now? This is really the money question. It does no good to target a specific goal with a specific exercise for a specific benefit in this very moment if your body is going to respond negatively to the stimulus. Fortunately, biofeedback has been shown to be a reliable and powerful real-time predictor of response to exercise.

Looked at another way, have you ever looked at a food and thought “Nope, not right now.” But some other type of food seemed just fine. You may not be able to explain that intuition and why your biological feedback was telling you that it wasn’t going to sit right, but you know to follow it. A study of how great apples are isn’t going to do you any good in that moment.

If this is good for me to do, is there any way I can make it better? Ah now we’re getting into the really powerful benefits of individualizing. Combining these ideas, when you understand the principles behind why you’d lift a weight in the first place, and when you have a way to look at the quality of the response, you can make adjustments to improve your outcomes both immediately and in the long term.

If a swing is good, a staggered swing may even be better. Staggered left or right? I don’t know why don’t you test it?

So you see, this requires a shift in your entire mindset and approach. But, the benefits are enormous.

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.