When we think of “efficiency”, we’re usually thinking in a positive sense — especially when it comes to exercise.
Traditionally, this comes from the world of sports. If someone was extremely “efficient”, they achieved more outcome per unit of effort. The most efficient athletes could get the job done with minimal effort, or put the same amount of effort in as everyone else and get better results.
This was all down to their ability to recruit as little as possible from as many muscles as possible and put themselves in advantageous mechanical positions.
(You might have heard the phrase “masterful compensation” used to describe an athlete’s ability to achieve results without textbook technique.)
However, we must remember that the main goal of professional sporting endeavours is not to improve internal health and function.
Sure, that may happen as a side effect, but the real goal is to move the body or an object from A to B as fast/far/high/etc. as possible. The focus isn’t on the internal stimulus and tax created in the process. After all, how many high-level athletes have had to retire due to injury?
So if a particular technique achieved better results despite compromising joint health and creating minimal internal muscle stimulus, we’d praise it as “efficient”. (Maybe even give it a special name.)
However — Personal Trainers should be looking at efficiency through a different lens. And this is difficult for those who come from a sporting background.
Personal Training is exercise with a goal: to improve the health and function of internal joint movers and managers. This goal involves creating stimulus to muscles so that they adapt and grow in strength, while avoiding tax on the joints that causes compounding and irrecoverable damage over time.
The more contractile stimulus we can achieve with as little external load as possible, the better.
This is the complete opposite of sports scenarios, where efficiency means using as little internal stimulus to move as much load as possible.
From an external perspective, PTs are trying to be as inefficient as possible.
But it’s not only the magnitude of load that dictates joint stress. It's the direction. So, if we can align resistance with the positions and planes of a joint that have the best tolerance for it, and the direction of contraction of the target muscle, we’re creating more internally efficient exercise.
We’ve also got to consider how the intensity of these sets affects the efficiency of the workout. The general population are trying to cram a day’s worth of movement into 45-75 minutes. Time is of the essence.
You can say with some confidence that the more efficient an exercise is, the more valuable it is. The more gains per minute, the less time that needs to be ‘wasted’ in the gym — and the more results they’ll get from being there.
We can go one step further. If we match the magnitude of the resistance’s leverage over the joints with the position where the muscles have appropriate leverage over the joints, we can make the challenge consistent throughout the movement.
In other words, if we can make the exercise heavy where we’re strong, and light where we’re weak, it’s always appropriately difficult, and more internally efficient.
By challenging every portion of a joint’s range and making every inch of every rep a challenge for the working muscles, we will:
(A very different mindset from externally focused athletic endeavours.)