Don’t worry, I’m not spitting out a post on politics or religion. Let’s be honest, only a small few people who use this site even know what I do for a living. By the way, that’s on purpose.
Bit of advice: careful what you put on the internet while representing your status with an employer!!
And I’m not going to talk about the evolution of Kemme Fitness either. If I did, you would see shifts, especially the dramatic one I took last winter. My point is not that it is difficult to reevaluate and modify specifics about something you believe in order to improve upon it. What I am going to discuss is the challenges and responses to the core belief system, which in this case is my strong belief in Functional Fitness.
Kemme Fitness is all about Functional Fitness. If you haven’t picked up on that yet, you have either not read anything I wrote prior to this post, or have a brain dysfunction. I say Functional Fitness so much, and believe in it so much, that I even have to capitalize the words Functional Fitness. The words themselves and the ideas behind them do not necessarily require Functional Fitness to be an upper cased proper noun. Yet I am compelled to place it as such.
With this background (my obvious obsessiveness with Functional Fitness) we can move onto my main point of the difficultites of questioning this belief system.
To sum it up – I am in the “0bnoxious phase.”
What is the obnoxious phase? It is one of many phases in the development of a belief system. It may not be the technical term used by sociologists, but I feel it describes this stage or phase quite well.
Here is how I got here: I have done years of research, coupled with years of practical experience engaging in a Functional Fitness workout program and the training of a wide variety of others. This was the “learning phase or stage.”
I have come to understand the benefits of Functional Fitness and have developed a strong belief that this workout style (or system) is the best system available. Consequently, I have spent hours of writing and creating programs in an effort to educate others and try to persuade those involved in other systems (runners & weight lifters for example) to change their beliefs so they will be aligned with mine. Why do I want to persuade? My best guess is that I am a teacher at heart and want others to be “enlightened” as I have. Plus, creating, maintaining, and improving a website is tons of fun.
Here is the negative consequence of having a strong and most likely immature belief system. Whenever I talk to somebody or have contact with them in anyway and learn about what they do for exercise, I immediately place them in a box. That box is either my Functional Fitness box or it is a box titled, “wrong.”
See that? You are either right because you agree with my beliefs, or you are simply wrong. In fact, if you are engaged in a well rounded program that has some Functional Fitness components, but is not quite a perfect match for what I believe a program looks like, then you are shoved over into the “wrong” box. You need to do the exercises I do. You need to do workouts like I do. What do you mean, you run most of the time? Are you still isolating muscles with bench pressing? You are seriously only going to focus on strength? What about agility, coordination, endurance, stamina, and the other many dimensions of fitness? Sorry, but you are “wrong.”
I know that this is “wrong” OF ME. For one, I am not allowing for flexibility in beliefs. More dangerously, I am blind to the possibility that my whole system could be flawed. What if the research is wrong? What if my experiences do not transfer to other experiences? See where I am going with this?
So for starters, I want to apologize to you runners and weight lifters. Just know that I am trying really hard to keep you out of that “wrong” box. Plus, if you have research, and or experiences that challenge my belief system, please share them with me. Make me step back and look at the evidence. Don’t let me rationalize or ignore new data. Challenging my belief system is just hard to do and I can’t do it without the help of others. What I want to see in the future coming out of Kemme Fitness is a dialog. I want to get people talking about fitness and about fitness styles.
So what do you say? You ready to help get this discussion going? What do you think of Functional Fitness? Actually, what do you understand are the components of Functional Fitness? Maybe we need to have a better definition of it (by the way I have defined it in my upcoming book, so stay tuned).
Challenge me!
Awesome post, Pete! Unfortunately, very few people are aware of the limitations of their thought process as they become more of an ‘expert.” The more we learn and filter out “bad” information, the more we convince ourselves that our way is the right way. After all, we see ourselves as objective researchers looking for the best possible answer. This process skews how new information is perceived. As you said, we accept ideas that we agree with and reject ideas we disagree with. We’re no longer impartially judging new information, we’re affirming our own beliefs.
This is the reason I oppose most forms of certification- it makes people a lot less objective. Once the cert is earned, we tend to disregard conflicting information because accepting it would create cognitive dissonance. In other words, we’re forced to admit we were wrong. We’re not too good at that.
Interestingly, I’ve found a meta-awareness of this idea is the best thing that insulates people from its ill effects. Since you’re aware of your biases toward Functional Fitness, you’ll be FAR more likely to be objective when presented with conflicting information.
For what it’s worth, I can’t think of a good reason to disagree with the ideas behind Functional Fitness. What can I say, you’re persuasive. 😉
Oh and why don’t you want people to know you’re a professional wrestler?
Thanks Jason. I know you have been working on this issue really hard lately and trying to come to terms with your peers. It is a great deal easier with Functional Fitness, since the topic is really not that controversial.
My main problems comes with keeping an open mind while trying to help others. I have people coming to me, who are not ready to embrace my whole program, but want advice. I am having to decide what is good enough for them since they won’t drink all of my Kool-Aid.
You are doing a great job by the way at processing your new paradigms. Keep it up.
Oh and my stage name is so famous, I would hate to use it on my website because it could bias people who are aware of my wrestling skills.
The only thing I question is the amount of cardio. Most of the workouts I have done off your site leave me well whooped, but I like running too. So I often find myself finishing one of the workouts, then running 2-3 mi just because I want to.
I understand that Kemme Fitness is about the short, intense workouts. Cool part is that since I am free to change the workouts up without getting voted off the island, I just add running when I want to.