ACE Fitness Conference 2011 Review
November 13 2011
The American Council of Exercise (ACE Fitness) conference 2011 was held in San Deigo on Nov 2-5. I had ACE certification years back and this was my first ACE symposium. Here are some of the presentations which I thought were interesting.
Thomas Plummer
The keynote presentation titled “Changing lives .. Creating a Fitness Career that matters” by Thomas Plummer. He founded the Thomas Plummer Company and the National Fitness Business Alliance (NFBA). Plummer speaks to more than 10,000 people each year through engagements as a keynote speaker, workshop host and private consultant.
This was a good one. He talked about where the fitness industry was, where it is now and where it is heading towards. The topic was very relevant and he communicated his points really well, I thought.
He talked about the end of traditional training model which was based on the training philosophy of the bodybuilders in the 1980's: the circuit machines and the steroid bodybuilders. It was all about lifting heavy weights, using machines, single joint exercises, crunches, and long cardio sessions, and low fat, high carb diets. The fitness field is moving more towards full body, functional, multi-joint than the one day a body part, single joint exercises bodybuilding model.
I agree with most of what he says. And I have wrote in the past how the majority of what bodybuilders do do not apply to the majority of the people who go the gym. The recent article I wrote about the lat pulldowns is an example of this. We are taking a model which may be good for a bodybuilding population and applying to a completely different population whose goals, priorities, motivation levels are completely different.
And as I always say it always goes back to client goals and preferences. If someone wants to get muscular, it is always better to focus on multi joint exercises, lifting heavy, with a few isolation exercises here and there than just working with ropes, medicine balls,TRX and other functional movement stuff all the time. You can also throw some functional stuff at the end to spice up the workout for your client. You don't have to look at it as an either or situation which is what most people tend to do.
Another good point he talked was the failure of the big box model clubs with lines of circuit machines , ab area, and personal trainers. The new generation club are much smaller,circuit lanes are replaced with functional cable machines, they carry a few dumbells, a few squat racks, a floor area with number of fun tools like kettle bells, medicine balls, bosu balls, ropes, sled pushing, a few treadmills and ellipticals,and group training instead of one- on-one training. This is true and I see these small facilities popping up everywhere. This is basically the Crossfit model which has gained so much popularity these days.
But I am not sure if this is entirely true because places like Planet Fitness, 24 hour, Lifetime are just the typical box model types and they are all just growing. For example, Planet fitness has around 400 to 500 fitness centers in US with around 5K-6K members and almost 95% of them are making profits. Planet fitness does not have contracts and their memberships are around 10-15 dollars. Compare this to an average gym which makes you sign contracts and makes you pay around $49 a month!. Now get this, they have machines, and they also have a designated circuit machine workout area with lights to time your circuits!
He talked about some other few points but I forget. And I am yet to see the presentation slides that the ACE people told they will upload to the website in a few days. Talk about customer service …
Todd Durkin
Todd Durkin, MA, CSCS, is an internationally recognized performance-enhancement coach, personal trainer, massage therapist, author, and speaker who motivates, educates and inspires people worldwide. He is the founder and creator of Fitness Quest 10 & Todd Durkin Enterprisesin San Diego, CA. He is a 2 Time Personal Trainer of the Year (IDEA & ACE) and has received numerous industry accolades
Todd is an excellent speaker and is very motivating and energetic. He was like a Bull on red bull. Hs presentation was titled the “The business of personal training”. It was just an overview about how to make your personal training business better or in his words - 'world class'. He had a lot of good points about how to motivate your clients and your team, but nothing really that I wasn't aware of. If you are really customer focused, if you really want to improve, you would come across these.
I wish the content was a bit more organized, and also he didn't skip content in the slides. Every time when I see presenters skipping content and slides, I just think they didn't care enough to make changes or rehearse it. He gave a lot of good tips and books to read throughout. But I like to focus on concepts and big picture rather than tips. They are like those typical Muscle & Fitness articles like '5 Tips to lose weight or a stronger bench'. If you cannot see the underlying concept, you will be like one of those 16 year old's waiting for the magic bench program in the next Muscle & Fitness edition. Todd was nice enough to raffle out free DVD's and books which I thought more presenters should do than just send a paper around to get people's email addresses.
Michol Dalcourt
Michol Dalcourt is an educator, author, trainer, inventor, and an industry leader in the areas of human movement and performance training. is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Francisco in the Faculty of Sports Science, Director of the Institute of Motion, and Co-Founder of PTA Global.
The tile of the presentation was “Correcting Dysfunctional Movements”. I know where this was going, but I wanted to say what he had to say and if there is anything new. After 20 min of going an exercise of finding joints which are primary and secondary, he went to show some slow, one- legged exercises which was suppose to make your foot pronation right. Somebody who was really smart asked if can we indeed change the foot dysfunctions and as they all say he replied “you can do it, but it will take along time”. Sure if it doesn't work, you didn't do it long enough or you didn't do it right! He also made sure he had some biomechanical explanations for every little twist and degree change you do with the exercise. And I am guessing he did this for every major joint, but I didn't wait for that long.
People always say research is mumbo jumbo. Research is pretty simple. You take a group with back pain or knee pain, make them do exercises to fix pronation or whatever and show that as their pronation improved, their knee or back pain improved compared to a control group. This is the basis of randomized controlled studies (RCT) in research which is the gold standard of finding if a drug or treatment works. They don't care about the biomechanical mumbo jumbo or your rationale for doing the exercise. And the whole correcting movement dysfunctions or posture or FMS field is lacking these basic RCT's. Even the shoulder scapular dysfunction studies show decrease in pain with scapular exercise, but the scapular dysfunction remains the same. There are people with scapular dysfunctions who have no pain and people with no dysfunctions have pain. What does that tell you about 'dysfunctions'?
I went to a few more , but it was mainly group fitness ones and activity type classes. I just wanted to get better at it so that I can train my instructors. You guys wouldn't be too interested in those stuff anyways. ACE fitness conference I felt was more about the 'How' than the 'Why' like at the NSCA conferences. That’s all I have.
