The one best exercise for... WAIT! The world is not that simple!
Ok, let us start this with an apology for that clickbait(ish) title.
Sorry!
But, here's why we used it.
In this blog post we're going to explain why there's no 1, 3, 5 or whatever best exercises for anything related to the human body. Unfortunately, the people who will probably benefit most from what we have to say are the people who are getting sucked into the multitude of articles on the internet titled "the one best exercise for...". And so we decided to try and appeal to them using similar tactics. It's a despicable tactic, but please understand that we're doing it for positive reasons!
To explain why there's no one best exercise for anything relating to the human body we're going to start with a little analogy.
Think of a spider's web. A spider's web is made up of lots of individual strands, but which is the most important?
Perhaps it's the top most strand connecting to the tree because if all else fails the web could (sort of) hang from it...
Perhaps it's the strand that the spider is currently sitting on...
Perhaps it's the strand that just caught a juicy fly because.... well... dinner...
Perhaps it's the first strand the spider spun because everything else was built upon it...
The reality is that while there are arguments to be made for each of these answers, none are definitive. We could spend hours arguing the merits of each and never reach an answer that we agree upon, let alone one that's right!
And it's pretty obvious why!
Each of the strands in the web rely upon the others for the web to work. Any strand on it's own is just a strand on it's own, and frankly, pretty useless. It's how the strands interact and relate which each other that creates the web and its ability to house and feed a spider. For those of you who want to nerd out on this, that's called an emergent property.
This is exactly how the human body works. It is made up of lots of individual bits that all work together to create the whole and all the amazing things that we're all capable of.
It's also how exercise works. A healthy human body is best developed through a wide variety of natural human movements. Collectively those movements come together to stimulate the body to develop strength, speed, agility, coordination, flexibility, mobility and so on.
When we go and look for the one/ three/ five best exercises for anything, what we're doing is the same as a spider that tries to build a web out of one, three or five strands. Yes, it's better than no web, but it's a far cry from a complete web.
That's why there's no one/ three/ or five best exercises for the human body or any part of it.
Before we go, we're going to pre-empt and address a possible rebuttal to our post.
I predict that some people will read this and think, "I'm really short on time, so I want the one best exercise for whatever so as to get the best results for a limited amount of time." Put another way, these people might want to do an 80:20 analysis of their movement to find the 20% of the movement that gives 80% of the results. They might feel that "the one best exercise for..." is the way to do that. That thinking is somewhat logical, but it also slightly missed the point for two reasons. Let us explain why.
Here's the first reason.
Remember that spider's web? The one we're imagining has hundreds of strands in it. 20% of the most important strands in that web would make an ok web, but it would take 20 strands, not one, three of five strands. And that's where doing an 80:20 analysis of exercise using "the one best exercise for..." goes wrong. One, three or five exercises aren't 20% of the variety of movement that the body needs, they're 1% of the variety, and hence you don't get 80% of the results. If you want to use an 80:20 analysis to find the best 20% of movement for your body, you need to remember that 20% of the variety of movement that your body wants is still a lot of different movements.
And that brings us to the second reason.
Remember when the spider made its web from the most important 20% of the strands? Well, what made those strands the 20% that were most important?
It was how they related to each other to form the simplified web. The individual properties of each strand did not matter, simply that they could come together to build the best web given the constraints.
When we look at articles proclaiming "the one/ three/ five best exercises for...", we're looking at strands in isolation, not in how they'll fit together to build a healthy body. It's far more important to consider how everything fits together than it is to consider the individual components.
And that really does bring us to the end of this post, so let's recap a few important takeaway messages.
1. The body wants lots of variety of movement. Far more than we probably expect.
2. It's how those movements relate to each other that makes for a healthy movement practise, not the movements themselves. So spend a little less time looking for the perfect movement and more time figuring out how it all fits together.
Happy moving!
You might also like…
If you liked this post you might also like these other resources: