Recently, trainer to the stars Ben Bruno tweeted "there's no such thing as a bad exercise..just bad application". He then goes on to point out three exercises that he termed dumb: kipping pull-ups, burpees and the American kettlebell swing. It's a very funny tweet and you should check it out. I don't know Ben personally (but for some reason I'm comfortable enough calling him by his first name, weird) but I'm pretty sure he was being tongue in cheek. It isn't that the exercises are dumb necessarily but they are definitely poorly applied.
For instance, the kipping pull up is a gymnastics movement that's supposed to be used to get up on to a horizontal bar. The momentum used is then transferred into whatever the next movement of the routine is going to be. Somehow this movement has entered the strength and conditioning world.
The same thing for the burpee. In my experience, the only reason the burpee was created was to be a punishment during football practice. The crazy thing is when you mention burpees during a workout, you can tell everyone thinks of it as a punishment. Yet it still persists in exercise classes.
Again it's not that burpees and kipping pull-ups are necessarily dumb but they are skills that need to be taught and learned. The thing is trainers/coaches aren't taking the time to teach and people aren't taking the time to learn. Add to it that these exercises are usually done for high reps at intensities. This wouldn't be a problem except that these exercises can and often do lead to injuries.
To be fair this is the case with all exercises. If you do a lot of bad reps of any exercise at high intensities it is a recipe for disaster. Kipping pull-ups, burpees and American swings are just having a moment in time where people are flocking to classes to do them.
So like Ben said (again with the first name), there aren't any bad exercises. There is definitely a lot of bad exercise application on the other hand. When you do exercises badly, you make them look dumb. That's not fair to the exercise. Take the time to learn correct exercise form and execution. Better yet, demand that whoever is telling you to do the exercise teach you how to do it correctly.
Check out my Instagram and Facebook tomorrow for a video on what I call the Better Burpee. Also I don't say a lot here about the American swing. My mom always said "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything."
