Microblog Memes

So, to this I would say, yes and no. The actual privilege is the knowledge on the different forms of resistance training.

If the knowledge is in place, actual physical inaccessibility to the practice is incredibly fringe. Even people with pretty extreme pathologies have access (more often than not, it is explicitly medically recommended for them to train).

The key to understanding the accessibility is identifying the movement patterns and how to load them. Right so, you may be thinking things at this point like, “well plenty of people don’t have a car, or can’t afford a gym membership, or don’t even have a gym nearby, or don’t have any time in the day to train.” This is all very valid and will change how your training looks.

But resistance training is available everywhere. For some specific examples,

I had an 80 year old woman who had all but lost the ability to raise her arms above her head. She can’t drive and doesn’t really have access to the gym. But she does have a pantry full of cans of soup! So I progressed her through some isometrics, then eventually got her doing lat raises with the small cans. Then some bicep curls, also with the soup. Triceps ended up being (sorry if this is tough to visualize) laying down in bed with her elbow propped up on a pillow, doing a type of single arm skullcrusher with the soup.

Well it turns out after a few months of training these muscles and adding some reps, with a little work coordinating it all together, she eventually could pick up a soup, curl it to her shoulder, then push it above her head! Then after a while she could do it for reps! In practical terms, at this point she had restored her ability to dress herself independently and take food out of her freezer.

It turns out you can do most things with soup! Started her on seated good mornings (a type of deadlift) with the soup to hit her hinge. Put a can of soup in a grocery bag and hooked it around her foot so she could do seated quad extensions from her dining room chair. Hopefully this is getting the idea across

On the other hand, the biggest barrier in my experience is depression. It doesn’t really matter what is theoretically accessible to you if you simply can’t be mustered to do it. I have one client where I agreed their workouts would basically be optional and I wouldn’t charge them for last minute cancellations. So I basically just set them a time where I have something else I could be doing, and if they show up, great, if not, no big deal.

I set this arrangement up in direct contradiction to my mentor’s advice, who is a great trainer but is very business oriented. And to be fair there’s no way I could take a second client like this.

But you know what, I’ll be darned, even showing up only 30% of the time they have actually totally transformed their body in about 6 months. Huge strength increases and about 20lbs of bodyweight loss as the same time. It’s actually kind of challenged some of the ideas I have about the importance of “consistency”, at least for beginners.

Anyway, sorry for such a lengthy reply. You put me in an awkward position, I can’t exactly just say, “No way bro, just figure out a setup for grandma to start doing deadlifts and skullcrushers bro” even though that really pretty much is the gist of it lmao. A big part of the problem is that people have very deeply rooted preconceptions of training to the point where they end up deeming themselves ineligible before ever really considering they have a ton of options