A couple of years back, on my old blog--which is really beginning to feel like a long time ago now--I wrote about a seminar I attended in Chicago put on by Perform Better, a fitness equipment/education company.  Mike Boyle, Alwyn Cosgrove, Gray Cook, and many others were in attendance way back then. 

Well, guess what, viewers at home?  This past weekend I attended a little one-day affair put on by the same guys and saw many of the same folks:  Boyle, Cosgrove, and Cook were all up to their old tricks, and this time they were joined by a couple of chaps named Anthony DeLuglio and Todd Durkin. 

Some interesting stuff, as always.  A handful of themes came out of the weekend, in particular order, that I thought I'd share with the one or two of you who couldn't make it.  For the others this will be a nice review:

1)  Everyone now believe in shoulder pre-hab exercises (see last week's blog on this topic);

2)  No one's talking about instability work anymore, except to make fun of it;

3)  The core is now widely seen as a muscle whose primary function is resisting movement and creating stability;

3a) Everyone hates spinal flexion;

4)  The idea that you should treat the site of injury--ie, a hurt leg or back--is falling out of favor in the industry; instead, everyone's talking about fixing 'movement patterns':  how's this or that movement pattern?  A clients squat, lunge, deadlift, pushup...;

5)  Glute activation remains a major concern;

6)  Kettlebells and kettlebell training has fully penetrated the market, and sandbags have too, though to a lesser extent, probably because no one's figured out how to make money selling sand, though I'm sure someone will soon, perhaps this guy.  In 2007, no one was talking about kettlebells at Perform Better.  Now they're just an accepted thing now, like the kid whose family moves to town in tenth grade who ingratiates himself into the popular crowd right off. 

6a) When I invent my brilliant fitness product, remind me to create some archival photos of old-time strongmen using whatever it is I invent.

7)  Todd Durkin is insane.  His presentation on marketing and business success was baffling--an odd mix of quotes and aphorisms and inspirational thoughts ("If A=1, and B=2, and so on, then A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E=100%!  Just think about that for a second, people!!").  I walked out knowing nothing about how he'd built his successful gym except that he used different colored inks on his calendar, coded to stand for things like "Dream Time". 

But then I took an exercise class that he led in the afternoon and discovered that the man could motivate a small, exhausted driveway pebble to exercise:  it was 4 PM, we were all shot, no one felt like exerting themselves.  Durkin fired up the room and turned us all into puddles in 25 minutes.  People were literally jumping up and down, cheering and French-kissing each other when they left. 

Then I went, "Okay, this is how he built his gym." 

8)  Everyone agrees that an exercise exists called the Turkish Get-Up, that it's hard, and that old-time strongmen used to do it.  No one agrees on the right way to do it. 

9)  Alwyn Cosgrove is still funny, informative, business-savvy as all hell, and a pretty darn brilliant program designer.  He put us all through a core workout that I'm still feeling.  He coaches with a great balance between good form and intensity.  At one point he said "It's just exercise, folks, it's not that serious."  Note to self:  I bet I could charge 10% more if I feigned a Scottish dialect when coaching.  Maybe 20%. 

10)  Gray Cook has a way of saying very complex things in a disarming way which, for awhile, makes you think you understand him.  His subtext is always "That's just about the most obvious thing in the world, isn't it?"  In reality I was struggling to keep up the whole time, and when I knew an answer to one of his hypothetical questions (mostly because he had told me the answer in an earlier conversation!), I screamed out the answer like the geek in the front row.   When I leave his seminars my primary thought is "I need to study more." 

11)  Mike Boyle, on the other hand, is a minimalist coach.  He's done it for so long with so many people that he knows exactly what to say and what not to say.  The clarity and simplicity of his presentations are comforting.  Ask him about diet and he'll say "Eat vegetables, fruit, lean proteins, and fish oil tablets."  That's his whole weight-loss diet philosophy:  no chemistry, no dictums, no scientific mumbo-jumbo.  And it works.  I leave his seminars thinking, "well, maybe this isn't so hard after all...".  Watching him after Cook is like watching "Wheel of Fortune" after "Jeopardy."

12)  I never dreamed there was this much to all this training stuff and it remains as fascinating as ever to me.