This article tells the story of Tracy Anderson, a young trainer whose services have been enlisted by the likes of Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow; she has accompanied Madonna on tour, and is opening a high-end fitness studio in Tribeca.  She has at least one quote that I really like: 

You are how you move.

A simple concept, but something that's been seeming more and more true to me lately.  "Body language" analysts will tell you that the way you move says something about your personal history, your mood, your upbringing; a fitness guy or physical therapist will tell you that your movements both reflect and in large part dictate the state of your health.  So score one for the celeb trainer on that one.

Anderson's extensive dance background suggests that she knows that body inside-out, even if it's just on an intuitive level.  You can't spend years upon years in a dance studio, refining the million and one ways that the body can express itself, without understanding movement in a pretty profound way. 

So in many ways Anderson is my kind of trainer.  But then she loses me.  According to the Times: 

She studied the bodies of swimmers, volleyball players and classical dancers and sought to emulate Jane Fonda, for her hybrid videos of dance and aerobics. “She was absolutely dead-on,” Ms. Anderson said of Ms. Fonda. “You never saw her lifting crazy big weights.”

And yet volleyball players perform maximal-effort vertical jumps dozens of times in a game.  Swimmers have to overcome water resistance every time they stroke through the water.  And dancers leap, jump, and dive, as hard and high as they can, all the while pressing, pulling, even hurling one another through space. 

Aren't these athletes 'lifting weights'--crazy or not--simply by engaging in their sport of choice?

The kicker, though, is this:

She said a woman should never lift more than three-pound weights. “Most gym programs overwork major muscle groups,” she said. “Repetition builds and bulks muscles.”

Wha--what?

Whose groceries don't weigh more than three pounds?  Whose baby doesn't?  Whose laptop doesn't?  And if life itself presents these challenges on a daily--maybe hourly--basis, quite apart from sport, shouldn't our recreational activities include similarly challenging movements in order to make us better able to perform them? 

I'm certainly not saying that you can't get a great workout without barbells and dumbbells.  But that's no reason to suggest that training with an external load is across-the-board harmful, especially since the alternative, body-weight training, is not fundamentally different from weight training.  A weight is just another tool.  Saying you never use load is like saying "I build houses, but I don't use hammers."  It's doable--I suppose--but it's kind of arbitrary.

A trainer at the gym where I work said to me recently, "There are no exercises, only movements."  (he was probably quoting someone, but it was apt).  The benefits of exercise rest not in the hoisting of a given load but in the way the body moves while it's doing the lifting.  You can practice and refine any basic movement pattern with or without weight:  the load shouldn't change the movement--it just makes it harder.

The 'harder' part is important, though, because high-effort work is the best--indeed, only--way to hold onto our type-II muscle fibers as the years wear on.  Anderson presumably has roundabout ways of eliciting this kind of response from her clients' muscles, but the easiest and most efficient way of doing it is through weight training:  loading up a barbell with a challenging weight, getting underneath it and cranking out tough-but-perfect reps of the basics. 

And if you happen to be female, it's even more important, because it's the heavier weights that helps prevent--even reverse--osteoporosis.

I wish the word "bulk" were stricken from the English language, because it seems like all you have to do is utter it in the presence of a woman who is tentatively dipping her toes into the much-misunderstood world of strength training and she'll run screaming for the Spinning studio, never to be seen again. 

People do dumb things with weights all the time, including a lot of trainers who should know better.  And lots of people engage in bodybuilding-style programs that end up causing more harm than good.  For these people, a break from poor technique and  outdated training methods is probably a welcome relief.  But let's not throw out the myriad proven benefits of loaded strength training--particularly for women--along with the bathwater.