If you think about it, many people's lives are dictated by QUANTITY.
How much money, how big of a house, how many toys, how many channels (my cable provider likes to remind me of this), and the list goes on.
You could say it's a bit of a cultural epidemic.
The fitness industry is also obsessed with quantity. How many steps, how many sets, how many reps, how much weight, how long, how often...
Quantity, by nature, is measurable. It creates an easy benchmark for comparison to others and ourselves.
Quantity isn't inherently bad, but there's something missing.
What is almost always overlooked is QUALITY.
As a guy, I've heard the classic question a million times "How much can you bench?" No one has EVER asked how WELL I can bench.
Sure, it's assumed I can bench with good technique, but the focus is always on the number.
Quality is just assumed.
Quality is something you can't put a number on, but it's something you can FEEL. It's about how your brain controls your body in motion.
You can feel when your body is in a strong position and working almost effortlessly to sustain that strong position.
That doesn't mean the activity itself is effortless - you might be working really hard and sweating like crazy, but the difference is that your body doesn't feel like it's fighting itself.
It's a crazy concept if you've spent years chasing quantity, and it requires some thoughtfulness and awareness of what your body is doing and how it's feeling.
When you build quality in what you do, you're ready for as much quantity as you can handle before the quality starts to fall apart.
When quality fails, you're no longer teaching your body how to get strong and stay strong. When quality fails, you're teaching your brain how to compensate and your risk for injury goes up.
Do you feel strong the whole way through your workout, or do you feel like you get wobbly, or tight, or something starts to hurt? Any of those are signs that quality is failing.
Your challenge is to start paying attention to how your body feels during exercise.
That's a step toward building a body that lasts.
Doug Barsanti
ReInvention Fitness
P.S. In the next article I'll show you how to improve the quality of a common exercise....
