The use of the term “Bulletproofing” has come under a lot of criticism recently, mainly because “bulletproofing” exercises don't actually make people immune to injuries. Is that fair? To answer that, I think it would be helpful to look at the original context of the term, the body armor industry. How is the term used there? When is it acceptable to call a piece of armor “bulletproof?”
It isn't. Bulletproof is an archaic term that is no longer used, the correct terminology in the industry is “bullet resistant.” Yikes! Well case closed, I guess we have to stop using the term then.
No, it isn't that simple. The term “bulletproof” used to be used in the early days of the industry when various inventors were trying to cobble together items of armor that could stop bullets. At that time, you'd basically come up with an idea for what might stop a bullet, whether it be layers of silk, steel or whatever, create your armor and fire off some shots at it with whatever firearm you happened to have on hand, and if it stopped the bullets, you called it “bulletproof.”
The terminology changed as the industry advanced and formalized. With more rigorous testing it became clear that nothing would reliably stop all bullets. So instead the industry switched to calling armor “bullet resistant” and using a level system to specify exactly what threats a particular piece of armor was able to reliably stop in testing. For example a IIIa vest, the highest rating for soft body armor will reliably stop almost all pistol calibers, but will not reliably stop most rifle calibers.
So from the perspective of precision and transparency, it is a good thing that the industry evolved. But there's another reason why the terminology shifted, and that is that we now live in an extremely litigious environment where if you manufacture a quality piece of protective equipment that is absolutely capable of saving lives if used correctly, but the terminology you use to describe it could be interpreted by a hostile attorney to mean that it will always 100% make it completely safe to get shot, and some dumbass customer buys it and thinks that means its ok to get shot at, so he goes out and does something he wouldn't have done otherwise to get shot, and low and behold the vest did not make it completely safe to get shot, whether due to a higher caliber or simply getting shot in an area not covered like the side, you will be getting sued into the demiplane of elemental shadow.
Now to be fair, marketing was absolutely wild back in the day, and I'm not trying to go back to the wild west of 0 consumer protections, where you could sell mercury mixed with cocaine as baby powder or whatever, but I think we've definitely gone too far in the opposite direction so I'm not going to get into too much modernist triumphalisim over applying legal precision to all marketing terms. Especially since you can still get away with selling extremely harmful products marketed dishonestly if you're a big and wealthy enough corporation to win at lawfare, just look at the Sackler Family and Oxy. The irony is, you can pwn free market ancap Libertarians and and Nanny-state socialsists with the exact same argument: “Under your system, the rich and powerful can just use their wealth to squeeze out smaller competitors offering better products or prices without actually having to compete.”
Anyway, back to bulletproofing in fitness, should we abandon the term here since the body armor industry did? Well, this industry isn't in the same place. We couldn't switch to the system they use if we wanted to, we just don't have the data to make precise claims equivalent to “This armor will stop 9mm 124gr FMC at 1173 FPS.” etc. We can't say working up to a Jefferson curl with 135 lbs x 5 is rated to prevent x, y, and z injuries under this circumstance but is not rated for a, b, and c. That would be ridiculously complicated to figure out and probably just isn't feasible. Orders of magnitude more difficult than just shooting a reasonably comprehensive selection of loads at some kevlar.
And that's where most of the critics of “Bulletproofing” make their mistake, they advocate for getting away from talking about injury prevention altogether. The logic being that since we can't reliably predict injury, we shouldn't talk about certain exercises “preventing injury.” That is absolute NONSENSE in my perspective. Now sure, don't go on record marketing your product by making 100% certain promises about injury prevention in terms that could get you sued, of course. But that's faulty reasoning. We can't talk about injury prevention in absolutes, but we can ABSOLUTELY talk about it probabilistically. I can't tell you the exact list of scenarios where having a 135 lb Jefferson Curl will prevent an injury, but I will tell you with complete confidence that if you gradually slowly, safely build your Jefferson curl from 45 lbs to 135, that list, whatever it is, will get shorter. It'll get even shorter if you get all the way up to 225. That list will never go to zero, or anywhere close to it, just like with bullets, there are always going to be threats that come in with more energy than you can absorb, or hit you in a spot that isn't protected. But that doesn't mean you aren't demonstrably preventing injuries.
The early pioneers of bulletproof vests could see their vests stopping bullets, could put them on for demonstrations and take gunshots to the chest without injury, so they called the vests bulletproof. Meaning a vest that stops bullets. Because it demonstrably stopped bullets. I don't think they thought it made them completely immune to gunfire, but they were willing to let their buddies shoot pistols at them while wearing them, which presumably they wouldn't have been ok with otherwise. And that's where we are today in fitness, we can build the demonstrable ability to do things safely that would have previously injured us. I can't tell you exactly how many reverse Nordics or Sissy Squats I could have gotten away with two years ago without developing severe knee pain, but I can tell you for a fact that it would have been a tiny fraction of what I currently do which is to spam the hardest variations I can do every week. And I can't tell you exactly what that translates to in terms of knee injury during running, skiing, cricket etc., but it would likely be something equivalent to “it'll protect you from a .45 albeit with a bruise, but a .308 will still go though it like paper.” And I'll take that any day.
So I think we should still talk about exercises preventing injury, because they absolutely do, just because we can't quantify the exact parameters doesn't mean we don't know its happening.. If you've never trained spinal flexion, sensible work on Jefferson curls will decrease your chance of a back injury, same with sensible progressive back bridge training for extension, ect. Ect. Not reduce it to zero, but decrease it in a practically noticeable way. So we don't have to just not talk about it or pretend that isn't a benefit, because it is. If we don't talk about benefits from exercise that we can't nail down and specify with 100% certainty, we'll end up in the nihilistic space of “just train however you enjoy, this is all just for fun lol,” because all the benefits of exercise to the real world are somewhat ambiguous. It is impossible to quantify what exactly putting 100 lbs on your Squat, Bench, and Hang Clean will do for your football performance but that doesn't mean we expect strength coaches to say “eh, we can't really say that hang cleans actually do anything for football performance but they look pretty sweet and personally make me happy so that's why I'm having my players do them. No, its ok to say they make you stronger for football without having specific charts specifying +50 to Squat = +18 to football. We aren't AI (which is probably a scam and a bubble btw) we can deal with a little bit of ambiguity.
So we should definitely talk about injury prevention, just in probabilistic, not absolute terms. I completely reject the idea that we should say just focus on getting stronger, or increasing performance and don't worry about injuries because they're completely unpredictable. To go back to the bulletproofing analogy, armor manufacturers didn't respond to the fact that their armor wasn't capable of stopping all bullets striking anywhere on the body at all times by saying, “People just get bullets in them sometimes, its just a thing that happens, we can't predict it, so just focus on getting better at gunfighting and if you wan't to wear our armor because you think it looks cool go for it, but we can't really say that it has any effect on bullets!” No! As it became possible to specify with greater accuracy exactly what their products could and couldn't be expected to protect against, they did so, but in the meantime, they didn't let the inability to specify exactly what threats their products could protect against stop them from creating and improving their products. So back to fitness. Should we call the somewhat difficult to specify but very real and very beneficial ability of certain exercises to protect against injury “bulletproofing?” I don't mind. Its a catchier marketing term than “bullet resistant.” If someone takes it literally and thinks that doing Jefferson Curls means that they can go get into a dispute over parking spaces with someone in South LA without getting bullets in them (For you europeans who visit this apocalyptic wasteland for some reason, do not get into disputes over parking in LA) I don't know how much that person could have been helped anyway, folks have to have a certain degree of agency.