A Good Idea But ...

I watched a trainer at the gym last night rig up an interesting exercise for a client. He took a chair that slides easily, tied a long rope to it and stacked one 45-pound plate on it. The client grabbed the rope and pulled it across the floor and toward him from a standing position, which worked a lot of muscles.

When the chair reached a second 45-pound plate sitting on the floor, the client sprinted to it, picked it up, put it on the chair and ran back to the end of the rope to pull again, until it got to a third plate, when he repeated the process. It ended when he pulled the chair to him.

Great idea, I was thinking. It was far different than most of the junk I see trainers doing.

That's the good part. The bad part is when the client picked up the plates to put them on the chair, he bent over at the waist, rounding his back badly and putting pressure on his lower back. The trainer watched and didn't say a word. All he had to do was say, squat down and pick up the plate as if you were deadlifting the plate. But he didn't.

So a good idea, but one more step would've made it even better.