20 Author Bill DeSimone - Congruent Exercise

The InForm Fitness Podcast

Adam Zickerman and Mike Rogers interview author, weight lifter, and personal trainer Bill DeSimone.

Bill penned the book Congruent Exercise: How To Make Weight Training Easier On Your Joints

Bill is well known for his approach to weight lifting which, focuses on correct biomechanics to build strength without undue collateral damage to connective tissue and the rest of the body.

So, whether you are an aspiring trainer, serious weight lifter, or even an Inform Fitness client who invests just 20-30 minutes a week at one of their seven locations this episode is chock full of valuable information regarding safety in your high-intensity strength training. A paramount platform of which the Power of Ten resides at all InForm Fitness locations across the country.

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To purchase Adam Zickerman's book, Power of 10: The Once-a-Week Slow Motion Fitness Revolution click this link to visit Amazon:

http://bit.ly/ThePowerofTen

To purchase Bill DeSimone's book Congruent Exercise: How To Make Weight Training Easier On Your Joints click this link to visit Amazon:

http://bit.ly/CongruentExercise

Below is the transcription for Episode 20 - Author Bill DeSimone - Congruent Exercise

20 Author Bill DeSimone - Congruent Exercise

Adam: So there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think by the way that I don’t think of something Bill has said to me when I’m training people. Bill is basically my reference guide, he’s my Grey’s Anatomy. When I try an exercise with somebody, I often find myself asking myself, what would Bill do and I take it from there. Without further ado, this is Bill, and we’re going to talk about all good stuff. Joint friendly exercises, what Bill calls it now, you started out with congruent exercises, technical manual for joint friendly exercise, and now you’re rephrasing it.

Bill: Well actually the first thing I did was [Inaudible: 00:00:43] exercise, but the thing is I didn’t write [Inaudible: 00:00:45] exercise with the idea that anybody other than me was going to read it. I was just getting my own ideas down, taking my own notes, and just to flesh it out and tie it up in a nice package, I actually wrote it and had it bound it up and sent it off to Greg Anderson and McGuff and a couple others, and it hit a wave of interest.

Adam: A wave, they were probably blown away.

Bill: Yeah well, a lot of those guys went out of their way to call me to say boy, a lot of what I suspected, you explained here. But when I read it now, it’s pretty technical, it’s a challenge.

Mike: There’s a lot of, I think, common sense with an experienced trainer when you think about levers in general, and I think what you did in that manual was make it very succinct and very clear. I think it’s something that maybe we didn’t have the full story on, but I think we had some — if you have some experience and you care about safety as a trainer, I think you are kind of looking at it and you saw it observationally, and then I think when we read this we were like ah, finally, this has crystalized what I think some of us were thinking.

Adam: Exactly. You know what I just realized, let’s explain, first and foremost. You wrote something called Moment Arm Exercise, so the name itself shows you have technical — that it probably is inside, right? So moment arm is a very technical term, a very specific term in physics, but now you’re calling it joint friendly exercise, and you called it also congruent exercise at one point. All synonymous with each other, so please explain, what is joint friendly exercise or fitness?

Bill: It’s based more on anatomy and biomechanics than sports performance. So unlike a lot of the fitness fads that the attitude and the verbiage comes out of say football practice or a competitive sport, what I’m doing is I’m filtering all my exercise instruction through the anatomy and biomechanics books, to try to avoid the vulnerable — putting your joints in

vulnerable positions, and that’s so complicated which is why I struggled with so much to make it clearer. So I started with moment arm exercise, and then I wrote Congruent Exercise, which is a little broader but obviously the title still requires some explanation. And then — how it happened, as for my personal training in the studio, I would use all this stuff but I wouldn’t explain it because I was only dealing with clients, I wasn’t dealing with peers. Since it’s a private studio and not a big gym, I don’t have to explain the difference between what I’m doing and what somebody else is doing, but in effect, I’ve been doing this every day for fifteen years.

Adam: I have to say, when you say that, that you didn’t explain it to clients, I actually use this information as a selling point. I actually explain to my clients why we’re doing it this way, as opposed to the conventional way, because this is joint friendly. I don’t get too technical necessarily, but I let them know that there is a difference of why we’re doing it this way, versus the conventional way. So they understand that we are actually a cut above everybody else in how we apply exercise, so they feel very secure in the fact that they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but I digress.

Bill: Generally what I do is any signage I have, a business card, website, Facebook presence, all lays out joint friendly and defines it and kind of explains itself. I would say most of the clients I have aren’t coming from being heavily engaged in another form of fitness. They’re people who start and drop out programs or they join a health club in January and drop out. It’s not like I’m getting somebody who is really intensely into Crossfit, or intensely into Zumba or bodybuilding, and now they’re banged up and need to do something different. The joint friendly phrasing is what connects me with people that need that, I just find that they don’t need the technical explanation as to why we’re not over stretching the joint capsule in the shoulder. Why we’re not getting that extra range of motion on the bench press, because again, they haven’t seen anybody doing otherwise, so I don’t have to explain why I’m doing it this way.

Adam: Yeah but they might have had experience doing it themselves. Let’s take an overhead press for example, having your arms externally rotating and abducted, versus having them in front of you. There’s an easy explanation to a client why we won’t do one versus the other.

Bill: But I have to say I do not get people who do not even know what a behind the neck press is. Now in Manhattan is a little bit different, more denser.

Adam: So for this conversation, let’s assume some people know, or understand in a way what the conventional is, but we can kind of get into it. What is conventional and what’s not conventional. So it’s joint friendly, how is it joint friendly, what are you actually doing to make it joint friendly?

Bill: Well the short answer is that I use a lot less range of motion than we’ve got accustomed to, when we used to use ...