You are not a machine

Take this guy, commenting on a video of atlaspowershrugged  doing a set of zercher deadlifts. He seems to be under the incorrect impression that the human body will get damaged when used in a specific way. Why is this? Where does this come from? I’ll tell you: it’s because in his mind the human body is a car. Like a literal car.

And I can’t blame him really. We will often use car-jargon when we talk about training. We will talk about gassing out, having reps left in the tank, greasing grooves, being machines and pumping the brakes and other phrases that imply we are purely mechanical. We are not, and that’s a good thing.

I’m gonna stay with this car metaphor for a little bit because again, a lot of folks have a complete lack of understanding about what lifting heavy does to you.

Let’s say you cashed in your bitcoins before the latest crash, and decided to purchase a Ferrari Testarossa because you’re into fitness and thought the name sounded a bit like “testosterone”. It’s worth quite a bit of money and, when kept in the same mint condition you bought it in, will only appreciate in value over time.

Now how do you accomplish this? How do you keep a car in tip top shape?

You cover it with a tarp. Put it somewhere dry. And leave it. Maybe run it once in a while to lubricate the engine. Not more. It’s an investment after all. If you drive it every day, the brakes will wear out and the rubber on the tires becomes thinner. The distribution belt and other parts will break and need to be replaced. The oil filter will get clogged up. Even the paint job will suffer from exposure to sunlight and the little pebbles on your huge private driveway.

No, better to not expose it to any outside forces or stress. Better to lock it away and protect it. This way it will be new basically forever.

Now what happens to a human when you treat it the same way? Nothing good.

Humans don’t “wear down” with physical use: we adapt to it. And this extends to ANY type of physical activity as long as we are allowed to recover from the stress it generates. Sure, as we age we may lose some adaptive ability, but the most effective way to fight this regression is to keep exposing ourselves to physical stress. In the context of strength training, there is no type of movement that we can not grow stronger and more resilient from.

That includes movements that put our backs in relatively disadvantageous positions. Like in the aforementioned zercher deadlift: a lift in which the lower back is put into flexion and rounds. It makes the lift a less efficient way to move a barbell than a regular deadlift, but that only means we are forced to start with a lower weight.

If we approach this lift the same way we do more accepted variations (by building up tolerance to gradually increasing loads), we end up with a lower back that is STRONGER in a rounded position than before, not weaker. Just like our legs become stronger in a fully flexed position when we squat ATG, our biceps when we train preacher curls, and our upper backs when we do heavy rows. There is no articulable reason why the same would not occur to the structures in the lower back.

We, unlike cars, have the ability to strengthen each and every aspect of our physical form through a cycle of stress, recovery and adaptation.

And despite what you may have heard, there is nothing inherently different about our spines and lower back that somehow make it exempt from this law.