Every industry has it’s jargon.
Plumbers have pipe dope, back siphons and S-traps.
Statisticians have their Z-scores, sigma plot and p-values.
Realtors discuss expansion potential, assumable financing and quick possession.
In the time travel biz, most people are already familiar with flux capacitors and the all-important 1.21 gigawatts.
But what makes an industry truly unique is the creative thinking that goes into its acronyms.
The fitness-biz is no exception - and if it was, I sure as heck wouldn’t be writing about it here, now would I. [Would I? Would I? Hairlip, Hairlip!]
For regular ‘fitness-folk’, DB (dumbbell), SB (swiss ball) and OH (overhead) are pretty easy to figure out - at least when put in context as in Seated SB OH DB press.
Like I said, it’s obvious, right?
Over the years, I’ve created a couple of my own. Namely, SMART (stability - mobility - agility - repeat - take control!) and the not-so-pretty-yet-still-incredibly-useful, PFROMASTYCC. I pronounce it with a silent “P”, like pneumonia. Phonetically, that’s FRAHM-iss-tyke.
Nice, huh?
However you care to pronounce it, it stands for:
Pain Free Range Of Motion And Speed That You Can Control
(this acronym/phrase can answer roughly 94.1% of all fitness related questions I’m asked on a daily basis)
(as an aside, at a conference a couple years ago, Alwyn Cosgrove, Bill Hartman, Stephen Holt and I tried to come up with something a little more streamlined to replace Vanna White’s worst nightmare above. With a little thought (and maybe a couple beers?), we did come up with PROMISE and PROMOTE as possible alternatives, but nothing says it like the original).
Now I don’t know who came up with SHELC (supine hip extension leg curl), but glutes and hamstrings around the world will be forever grateful for that one.
Perhaps my all-time-favorite (and again, I have no idea who deserves credit for this) is AMRAP: as many reps as possible.
How could 3 unassuming consonants and 2 vowels (both of ‘em “A”’s even) possibly come together in such universal harmony as to describe the intention of performing a set to complete failure in a non-threatening way?
Ah yes, I still remember the day when I first saw AMRAP on the written page…
<cue dream sequence music>
It was before the war…
Of course, we all wore onions on our belts
because that was the style back then…
<slowly fade to black>
