I used to think that the world had to be perfectly clear. Every question needed to have one answer, every dilemma one solution, every scientific problem one fundamental explanation. I’ll admit, I still think it would be nice, but I have also come to recognize something else – there is beauty in nuance. It can feel uncertain, even uncomfortable at times, but it also creates opportunity.
When I was first starting as a personal trainer, I was looking for formulas. I wanted to have a perfect exercise for every possible scenario. The goal was to have an exercise for shoulder problems, an exercise for hip problems, one for knee problems, and so on. Quickly I discovered something that suprised me and worried me. Sometimes an exercise that works beautifully with one person doesn’t work at all for the next person!
What I was fast learning was that I couldn’t create a formula for something as complicated as a human being. There are just too many variables involved. In fitness, though, we tend to gravitate towards sameness. There are now many mass offerings for someone seeking a workout, but very little personalized information for individual needs. I think this both underserves us all in our goal to have better health and denies us the beauty of accepting a world that is not always so black and white.
THE (TRULY) CUSTOMIZED WORLD
In the book Freakonomics, the authors wrote that anything that “smacks of nuance” is often immediately rejected in our fast paced and sound-bite driven world. (Just look at our political discourse to see it in action) This ‘simple solution for complex problems’ mentality bleeds over into the gym, where I tend to observe it. We have decided in a fairly big way that the key to fitness is sweatiness, intensity, burning muscles, soreness, and of course FUN! We have plenty of cookie cutter offerings designed to deliver those things, but they unfortunately leave a great many people behind, far beneath their real potential.
A person who has knee problems, for example, tends to be relegated to the ‘modify as needed’ category of exercise. All too often, that person ends up dropping their participation level way down, drifting off into the corner, finding themselves forgotten and un-spoken to in the overall scene, and finally giving up on meaningful exercise altogether. This is a real missed opportunity, because that person may not ever be told or understand that they can still double their strength, lose weight, and increase cardiovascular fitness through countless other approaches and strategies than the general wisdom might imply. The tricky part is being open to a different approach and willing to be guided through a totally separate mindset from the current ‘norm.’ For more on that, please check out:
Progressive Training vs. Aggressive Training
CONCLUSION
In current society we often search for the simple answer. This is a natural desire, as anything more complex can also feel intimidating. We can move past this feeling though by recognizing that nuance is not bad, but rather is the very thing that can make the world a place of possibilities. It may be simpler to make cookie cutter solutions for broad swaths of people, but for those for whom the situation does not fit the mold, this can be a tremendous waste. I hope we can begin to change that and to embrace a more nuanced approach to difficult questions.
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