My Father Dug Holes Wrong for Forty Years

My father was a landscape gardener. Digging holes, swinging an axe, sinking fence posts — work that takes precision, sustained effort, and the ability to keep producing force long after most people would have stopped.

I would help sometimes. On my own garden, or as an extra pair of hands on the bigger jobs.

At that point I was training several times a day. Boxing, kickboxing, working until I genuinely could not stand up. By any measure I was fit.

Digging would finish me.

Not relative to him — in absolute terms. I could not sustain the output. I could not hold anything resembling good postural alignment while doing it. And I was watching a man who had never set foot in a gym, never trained to failure, ate a worse diet than mine, and was decades older, out-work me with what I had been taught to call terrible form.

Rounded back. No neutral spine. No scapular retraction. Nothing I would have accepted from a client for a single repetition.

And he could do it all day.

What I’d Have Done to Him

If I had cued him properly — posterior pelvic tilt, ribs down, shoulders back, neutral spine, a short lecture on scapulohumeral rhythm — I would have made him worse at digging.

Not marginally. Substantially. And I would have raised his injury risk while doing it, because I would have imposed a pattern he had no adaptation for onto a task requiring an endurance capacity he did have adaptation for.

The correction would have been the injury mechanism.

That is an uncomfortable idea if you have spent any time in the corrective exercise world, and I have spent a lot. So let me take the objection seriously, because someone made it to me directly and they were partly right.

The Strongest Case Against What I Do

A professor of sports psychology told me, more or less, that stability training increases fear of movement, alters natural movement patterns, and harms performance.

That is a serious argument, and it deserves better than a defensive answer.

On fear of movement, he is right, and it is well documented. Kinesiophobia is a real and measurable phenomenon, particularly in back pain. Tell someone repeatedly that their spine is vulnerable, that they must brace before lifting a kettle, that bending is dangerous — and you produce a person who moves guardedly, monitors themselves constantly, and does less. The belief that you are fragile is itself associated with worse outcomes, independent of what is happening in the tissue.

The corrective exercise industry has done a great deal of this. Not maliciously — it is the natural consequence of a model where finding faults is the service being sold.

On unstable surface training, he is right again. Squatting on a wobble board does not transfer well to squatting. Balance work on unstable surfaces produces improvements in balancing on unstable surfaces, and rather little else.

On altered natural movement, he is making the point I have just made about my father — and it is the strongest version of it.

So on the three specific claims, I largely agree with him.

Where the Argument Doesn’t Hold

But look at what he is actually describing.

He is describing a delivery, not a concept. Endless regression to unstable surfaces. Constant verbal cueing about fragility. Movement framed as risky. A corrective phase nobody ever leaves.

That is a critique of bad practice, and the fact that bad practice is common does not make it the definition.

Taught properly, and progressed diligently, none of what he describes happens — because the point of the work is to become unnecessary. You do stability work in order to stop doing stability work. It is a phase with an exit, and the exit is loading.

What “Wrong” Was Doing in That Sentence

My father’s technique was not worse form. It was task-appropriate form, adapted over a working life across thousands of repetitions, in which the objective was to move soil at the lowest possible metabolic cost.

Gym technique is deliberately inefficient. That is the point of it. You choose the position that loads the target tissue hardest, and you avoid the compensations that would make the task easier — because making the task easier is precisely what you do not want.

Two opposite objectives. Judging one by the standards of the other is a category error, and I was making it.

And specificity cuts both ways. I was an untrained novice at digging regardless of how fit I was. He would have lasted ninety seconds on the pads. Neither fact says anything about who was fitter. They say we had adapted to different things.

So When Is Correction Warranted?

Three Questions Before Correcting Anything

If the answers are: it is an occupational pattern, forty years, and no — then leave it alone. That is not neglect. It is recognising an adaptation rather than a fault.

Both Things Are True

I am not abandoning what I do. Stability before force is sound, and someone who cannot hold a hip hinge under bodyweight has no business loading it.

But the professor was pointing at something real, and the honest version of my position has to include it.

Correct less than the industry does. Correct with a reason. And have an exit.

The person who most needs correcting is usually someone with a symptom, a goal that requires it, or a pattern failing under load they cannot avoid. Not someone whose posture is merely different from the diagram.

My father dug holes wrong for forty years, by every standard I was trained in. He also dug more holes than I ever will, kept working through angina you could hear worsening on exertion — which is a different conversation, and not one I would frame as admirable — and never once needed correcting by me.

I would have ruined him with a dowel rod and good intentions.