Movement Inc. Official Home Page
I see a resurgence of interest in Indian clubs.
It’s a good tool for rotation and ballistic exercises. It also lends itself to some interesting isometric drills.
But it’s asinine that some of us believe that gyms and dumbbells supplanted Indian clubs.
It always devolves into a simplistic argument about Westerners robbing us of our beloved traditions. They went around grabbing Indian clubs from every single household and made us do pistol squats while holding a pistol to our temples.
Physical activity is not a mystical, spiritual or a cultural endeavour. Training is the systematic pursuit of adaptations. Last I checked your joints don’t care about your race or culture. Shoulders, knees, hips have moved the same way for thousands of years. As our understanding of how they work has improved, so has our capacity to make them stronger.
Activity is not a zero sum game. You doing push ups, squats, leg presses or pull ups does not have to come at the expense of shoulder rotations or swings. You can do all of the above as part of a well formulated program. If that’s what you feel you need to do or want to do. No exercise is indispensable. I don’t feel compelled to do shoulder swings because someone who lived on the same land that I currently live on did it a few hundred years ago. And I definitely will not avoid pull ups simply because sailors aboard British East India Company ships did them.
I select exercises and make training choices based on adaptations and our best understanding of how they benefit us.
Doing the right things is important. It helps if you do them for the right reasons too. And you should not seek to appease your ancestors or your colonial or central overlords through your activity choices.