I spent a few minutes this morning catching up on the latest from the legendary Alwyn Cosgrove, whose blog contained a nice tidbit that got me thinking.   So, you know--stand back.

As I've mentioned here before, we're deluged with information--some good, some not so good, but most of it at least well-meaning--on how to get stronger, leaner, fitter, whatever-er.  Newsstands are packed with fitness magazines; bookstore shelves are packed with diet books and DVD's; the Internet is a veritable fount of free fitness information, more than most people, save freaks like me, ever care to take in.  If you really want to get in shape, the stumbling block isn't going to be lack of information. 

From where I'm sitting, the reason that there are so many fitness programs (all based on a the same, relatively few, well-worn principles) is that everyone's wired just a little bit differently.  For every person who's motivated by working out in a group, for instance, there's another misanthropic guy like me, who prefers to work out by himself, in off-peak hours, without the pesky interference of other people.  One man's meat, another man's poison, etc. 

I'm not referring to physical differences here; I mean that we get fired up by different things, and that those differences can be subtle.  I mean, how many people were in love with stationary bike-interval training before Spinning?  How many people loved non-contact martial arts drills before Tai Bo?  But dim the lights, add techno music, put a well-built, charismatic coach at the front of the class, and suddenly, it's off to the races. 

Exercise is exercise, folks, and good eating is good eating.  Boy howdy, we love to parse the details, but it's actually a fairly simple formula, and you're either implementing that formula or you're not. What gets us going--what starts a fad, a trend, a craze, a revolution--is context.  The messenger.  The rhetoric. 

And I have no problem with that!  "Rhetoric" has become a nasty word of late, but my Dad's car had a bumper sticker on it that said "Support Your Local Rhetorician!" when I was growing up.  I'm a Shakespeare junkie.  My mother's a published author several times over.  My sister writes for the bloody New York Times Magazine, for Pete's sake.  I'm all about rhetoric.  

What good coaches (and good fitness writers and DVD makers and cobblers and wheelwrights) offer us is not more facts but more strategies.  More ways to make the simple and widely-known facts work for us.  In his blog, Cosgrove quotes his friend Valerie Waters:

Strategy even trumps willpower. Studies show that willpower is actually in limited supply. Meaning, resist the cookie now, it might be hard to resist it later. Therefore, I believe it is more important to build in good strategies. For example, if you eat ice cream every night, rather than trying to "be good" and resist it, simply remove it from the house. If you consistently visit the vending machine because you don’t have time to go to lunch, your strategy would be to pack your lunch the night before and bring it with you. Anyway, you get the point.

Yes, we get the point.  But good strategies--and strategists, like Cosgrove and Waters--are always in short supply.  

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•Two random people asked me about CrossFit recently; in Malcolm Gladwell-ese, I suppose that means it must have 'tipped.'  Chris Shugart of T-Nation looked into it, and came up with a first for the fitness industry:  a level-headed look at CrossFit.

•This piece on rectal exams, by GP Anna B. Reisman of the LA Times, is actually pretty funny, if you're man/woman enough to read it.

•What are you doing there, staring at your computer screen!  Go out and play!  It's the weekend!