19d • General discussion
Why That Viral Exercise Isn’t Fixing Your Pain
In today’s world of social media and AI, it’s becoming harder than ever to separate signal from noise when it comes to exercise. Scroll Instagram or TikTok for five minutes and you’ll find countless videos promising that one specific exercise will completely eliminate neck pain, low back pain, shoulder pain—you name it.
So what actually works?
Before we can answer that, we need to step back and ask a more important question: Why are we doing certain exercises in the first place, and what outcome are we actually trying to achieve?
Most of the people I work with are coming from a rehab setting. They’re in pain and looking for a solution. That solution can look very different depending on the person and the situation. Treating someone who can barely walk due to acute low back pain requires a very different plan than working with an athlete who only experiences back pain after long practices or games. This is where the conversation shifts to the difference between rehab and strength training.
These are often treated as completely separate worlds, but in reality they’re much closer than most people think. I prefer to think of them as points along a spectrum. On one end, you have basic rehab. On the other, you have full-blown strength training. The key is progression—using the right exercises at the right time to gradually increase capacity.
The goal is to build someone’s tolerance to load. As that tolerance improves, certain exercises eventually stop being challenging enough to create further adaptation. At that point, they’re no longer effective—and it’s time to progress to something more demanding.
This is exactly why watching a random exercise on social media can be misleading. Those videos don’t account for your starting point. The most important questions to ask are: What is the objective of this exercise? And when does it stop doing its job?
A common example is shoulder pain, often labeled as a rotator cuff issue—whether that’s a tear, tendinopathy, or tendinosis. Many people are sent home with a red resistance band and told to keep their elbow pinned to their side while rotating the arm outward for three sets of ten. On the surface, this isn’t a bad exercise. But what does this plan usually lack?
Progression.
If the goal is simply to rotate the arm at the side without pain, this approach works well. But for about 99% of people, that’s not the real goal. We use our shoulders to wash our hair, lift boxes, reach overhead, and grab objects from shelves. Those tasks require strength, coordination, and control through a much larger range of motion.
That’s why exercises need to evolve. As capacity improves, we should gradually move toward more complex and demanding movement patterns—until the shoulder is strong enough to tolerate real-world tasks through a full range of motion.
This is why there’s no true “silver bullet” exercise. What matters isn’t finding the perfect movement—it’s having a plan that matches your goals, your starting point, and your ability to progress over time.
Hopefully this is helpful for you in your own physical activity. Let me know below if theres ever been an exercise that you found extremely useful from social media or if it was all just temporary fixes.
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Why That Viral Exercise Isn’t Fixing Your Pain
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