Efficiency in Exercise
Comparing Internal & External Performance Goals
"Efficiency" almost always sounds like praise, especially in exercise.
That instinct comes from sport. An efficient athlete gets more outcome per unit of effort: the same work as everyone else for a better result, or the same result for less work. It comes down to recruiting as little as possible from as many muscles as possible, and finding the mechanical positions that make the task easier. You might have heard it called "masterful compensation," the knack of hitting the target without textbook technique.
There’s a catch, though: the goal of professional sport is not internal health and function. Improvement there is a side effect at best. The goal is to move a body or an object from A to B, as fast or as far as possible, and the internal cost rarely makes the decision. Ask how many high-level athletes have retired early because of it.
So a technique that scores better while quietly compromising joint health and creating minimal muscular stimulus still earns the word "efficient." It might even get a special name.
A personal trainer has to read efficiency the other way around, which is the hard adjustment for anyone arriving from a sporting background.
Personal training is exercise with a different goal: improving the health and function of the joints and the muscles that move and manage them. That means loading muscles enough to adapt and grow, while keeping joint tax low enough to avoid the compounding, irrecoverable wear that appears years later.
The more contractile stimulus you can create for the least external load, the better.
That is the exact inverse of sport, where efficiency means the least internal effort for the most load moved. So from the outside, a good trainer is trying to look as inefficient as possible.
Magnitude of load isn't the only thing that sets joint stress, though. Direction does too. Line the resistance up with the positions and planes a joint tolerates best, and with the direction the target muscle contracts in, and the same exercise becomes more efficient on the inside.
Intensity counts as well. The general population is trying to fold a day's worth of movement into 45 to 75 minutes. Time is the scarce resource, so the more efficient the exercise, the more valuable it is. More gains per minute means less time wasted in the gym and more to show for the time spent there.
You can push it one step further. Match the resistance's leverage over the joint to the positions where the muscle has leverage over the joint, and the challenge stays consistent through the whole range. Heavy where the client is strong, light where the client is weak. Always appropriately hard, never coasting.
Challenge every portion of the range like that, make every inch of every rep cost something, and you:
Create greater stimulus per rep
Require fewer of them to reach fatigue (or “failure” as the industry likes to call it)
Require fewer exercises to achieve results
A very different mindset from chasing a score. We build it on RTS Level 1.