Joy Keller's Blog

Every year I return home from IDEA’s conferences a changed woman in one way or another. Sometimes I feel like I come home a better writer and editor because I’ve been immersed in a new world of experiences. Other times I come back feeling like a better person just because I’ve stepped outside myself, met some amazing people, and allowed my head and heart to expand a bit. I’ve worked at IDEA for almost 9 years, and before that I attended conferences as a staff member at the American Council on Exercise. So you can say I am a fan. Why the obsequious build up?

 I swear this year was different.

 Maybe it’s because I’ve expanded my own expertise as a personal trainer over the past year and the education means that much more to me. Maybe it’s because this sold-out event was packed with high-energy minds. I guess it doesn’t really matter. However, I do want to go out on a limb here and say that I am feeling the undercurrent of a tsunami in our industry. It’s been building for a while, and I think it’s about to hit the “mainland.”

 It seems we have discovered something new and fascinating. It’s a piece of equipment that is intelligent beyond our wildest dreams and imaginings. Harnessing the intelligence of this miraculous fitness device will take us to places we never thought possible. The best part--it’s free! It just needs a little tender loving care to get activated the right way.

 It’s the human body.

 After years of approaching fitness and wellness from an external model--use this widget and that doo-hickey to “fix” yourself, we’ve come home to an irrefutable truth: befriend your body and let it show YOU how to fix it. I saw evidence of this in almost every session. Some of the greatest brains in the business kept driving home this message: deconstruct the physical body to its very essence and there you will find the building blocks for your programming. Address the pain and compensation. Check. Assess the body systems. Check. What’s going on in the attitude and lifestyle department? Check. And finally, can the body be its own weight machine? Well, duh.

 I love it that Geoff Neupert spent an entire hour deconstructing the Turkish Get-up in his session “Rethinking Body Weight Training.” How many people do you know who skip this basic rite of strongman passage to hurl the kettlebell through space? Believe me, attendees got quite a bit of a workout from this session and nary a kettlebell was lifted. Alwyn Cosgrove had people begging for mercy in his combo corrective exercise, strength and metabolic meltdown session. Don’t get me wrong--I’m all for toys and equipment. And many clients want and need this introduction to fitness. But let’s not stray too far from how the body likes to move. Let’s not abandon our joints and fascia. Let’s remember our cells.

 How do I distill the three days of somatic enlightenment I experienced at the IDEA Personal Trainer Institute? Hopefully you’ll see flashes of it in IDEA’s publications and content, so let’s keep in contact. Keep up the excellent work and share your magic with everyone you can.