Gym Strength and Life-Based Strength
This blog accompanying the webinar we ran on May 6th, for the recording and slides, please see the foot notes.
If you want to explore this further, check out our Movements for Life course.
We ran a webinar this week that felt a little different to the ones we’d usually do. It wasn’t especially tight and it was a bit more like “thinking out loud.” And in hindsight, that actually felt quite appropriate, because the whole conversation was about what happens when we try to make things too neat and easy to measure…
This isn’t a “gym vs real life” argument. It’s very easy for these conversations to slip into that, to start positioning one way of training as better - that’s not what we’re trying to do here as these are two sides of the same coin.
Structured strength training, the kind most people recognise from the gym, is a really useful tool. It gives you a clear way to build capacity, it’s measurable and repeatable. It’s often one of the most accessible ways for people to start getting stronger, especially if they’re coming from very little.
We’ve built whole courses around it and we still use it ourselves. But like any tool, it has its limits and what we kept coming back to - both in the webinar and in the work we’ve been doing recently - is that it doesn’t always answer a question that people naturally arrive at once they’ve been doing it for a while:
How does this actually show up in my life?
How does this help me move better outside of the gym?
How does it help me deal with the slightly awkward, unpredictable things that come up day to day?
How does it connect to confidence, or social life, or just feeling more capable in general?
That’s where this idea of life-based strength starts to come in - as something that brings back a layer of movement that is harder to measure and much closer to how we actually experience the world.
And in trying to make sense of that, we found ourselves circling around a slightly bigger question:
What gets lost when we try to make movement too measureable?
At some point in the webinar Andrew brought in a story from Kurt Vonnegut about buying an envelope. The idea is that Vonnegut’s wife suggests he should just buy a thousand envelopes at once, rather than going out to the shop every time he needs one. It’s more efficient and saves time but he prefers to go out and buy one at a time. Because in the process of doing that, he sees people, notices things, has small interactions, and ends up part of the world for a bit. The envelope isn’t really the point, it’s everything that happens around getting the envelope.
That felt like a useful way of thinking about movement. When we reduce movement down to something like “three sets of eight,” we get the envelope - or the outcome we can measure. But there’s a lot that falls away in the process. The variability, the unpredictability, the interaction with the environment, the social element, even just the small decisions you have to make along the way.
There’s a line from Steffen Mau that Andrew mentioned, about quantification being a process of stripping away context. You remove the local detail so that things can be compared and measured. And again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it can be incredibly useful, but it does mean that what you end up with is only ever a partial picture.
You can see this quite clearly if you compare learning how to do a pull-up with learning how to climb. Rafe Kelley has a really good blog on this - it’s a very good way to start thinking about skill transfer.
If someone spends a year getting really good at pull-ups, they’ll get stronger. But if someone spends a year climbing, they’ll also get stronger, while at the same time developing coordination, problem-solving, grip strength in different positions, an ability to read the environment, and often a social network that keeps them coming back. The physical adaptation might look similar on paper, but the overall effect is quite different.
This is where we started to talk about the difference between what we called “prescriptive” and “emergent” approaches.
The prescriptive side is what most people will recognise from gyms and traditional training. You’re given a movement, you’re told what it should look like you’re aiming for consistency. Each rep should be the same as the last - you can measure it, track it, improve it.
The emergent side is a bit harder to pin down. It’s less about reproducing a movement and more about solving a problem. Instead of being told how to lift something, you’re put in a situation where you have to figure out how to lift it. The movement comes out of the task, rather than being imposed from the outside.
We tried a very simple example of this during the session. Instead of asking people to do a deadlift, we asked them to imagine picking up a sleeping child from a bed without waking them. Same general action - picking something up from a low position - but the quality of the movement changes completely. People moved more slowly, more carefully. For example they adjusted their grip, they shifted their weight differently, they paid attention in a different way. No one needed to be told what “good form” looked like as the situation itself guided the movement.
What’s interesting is that a lot of the qualities people noticed afterwards - balance, control, coordination, even a sense of calmness - are exactly the kinds of things that don’t show up particularly well in a traditional workout. They’re hard to quantify, so they tend to get sidelined.
These kinds of movements are also quite hard to fit into a conventional class format. You can’t really programme “pick up a sleeping child quietly for three sets of ten.” It doesn’t quite work. So they often get left out, not because they’re unimportant, but because they don’t fit the structure we’re used to. And this is where some of the tension comes from.
Gym environments, by design, tend to constrain movement. They guide you towards specific patterns. Machines in particular are built to remove variability, to make sure you move in a certain way, through a certain range, with a certain load. That can be really helpful, especially in early stages or in rehabilitation contexts. But over time, if that’s all you do, you end up with a very narrow range of expression.
You can become very good at very specific movements, while still feeling slightly out of your depth when something doesn’t quite match that pattern.
There’s an uncomfortable example of this that’s been doing the rounds recently, where very strong, very muscular people try to run, jump, or climb and look surprisingly uncomfortable doing it. It’s not that they’re not strong but it’s that their strength has been developed in a very specific context, and it doesn’t automatically transfer.
This isn’t a failure of strength training but a reminder that strength is only one part of a much bigger system.
As the conversation moved on, we started to look at how we might make sense of all of this without getting lost in endless lists of skills or exercises. There have been plenty of attempts to catalogue everything humans can do, and they tend to become very complicated very quickly. What we’ve found more useful is a simpler way of thinking about it: what is the task, what is the environment, and what are the capacities you’re bringing to it?
In other words, what are you trying to do, where are you doing it, and what can you currently manage?
That framing opens things up quite a lot. It moves the focus away from specific exercises and towards situations. It also makes it easier to see why the same movement might look very different in different contexts, and why that variability is actually useful.
One of the more important threads running through all of this, particularly in the work we’re doing with older adults, is how movement sits within a wider social and psychological context. There’s a tendency to focus purely on physical capacity - strength, balance, bone density - but these things are closely tied to confidence, social connection, and opportunity.
If someone becomes less active, they often become less confident. If they become less confident, they tend to withdraw. That withdrawal reduces their exposure to situations that might challenge them, which in turn reduces their capacity further. It’s a loop that reinforces itself.
But the opposite is also true. If you can create environments where people feel comfortable exploring movement again, often in a social setting, you start to see that loop reverse. They try things they hadn’t thought were possible, because the situation invites it.
That word “invites” is quite important and it’s something we come back to a lot. Rather than telling people what to do, can we create situations that invite useful movement?
It’s a subtle shift, but it changes quite a lot and moves from the position of coach to that of a facilitator. So less “sage on the stage” and more “guide on the side.”
Where we’ve landed, at least for now, isn’t a rejection of structured training. It’s more of an expansion. Keep the strength work, it’s valuable, especially in building a base. But alongside that, create space for movement that is less repeatable, and more connected to real situations.
That might look like carrying awkward objects, playing games, moving with other people, or just paying more attention to how you interact with your environment day to day.
The things that come out of that are harder to measure. They don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet. But they tend to be the things that make the biggest difference when it comes to actually living well.
And that, ultimately, is what we’re trying to get back to.
If you want to explore this further, check out our Movements for Life course.
Also check out Andrew’s blog on Building Capabilities: Thinking about tasks, constraints and capacities which explores how we are developing the new Movements for Life course by moving beyond traditional fitness models and instead focusing on real-world human capabilities.
Slides to follow - check back tomorrow