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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something else — the feeling you get after some kind of strenuous activity that raises your heart/breathing rate. Running, for example. What you're referring to is getting the wind knocked out of you.
For what it's worth I've never heard what you describe called "winded". To me winded means getting the wind knocked out of you. I wonder if it is a regional thing.
Take up a sport that gets you fit as a side effect.
I have two obsessions in life: Rock Climbing and Surfing. I'm pretty good at the first, and borderline hopeless at the other, but I'm committed to the point where I've arranged my life so that I can travel for months at a time to pursue one or the other each year.
When I'm working a contract to save up for the next trip, I'll find myself slowly fattening up on fish tacos and 12 hour days coding in a felt cube with only the occasional after work or weekend fix of rock or salt water. After a few months I'm decidedly soft, and quite a bit heavier. But put me on the beach in Thailand for 5 months and holy crap, what a difference.
It's like Fat Camp out there. There's so much fun climbing to be had right on the beach. Overhanging routes that work you into the sort of shape that lets you literally hand-over-hand your way out a horizontal roof by your fingertips as your feet dangle out in space. Without anybody forcing you, you spend your entire day working yourself silly, then you come back and eat rice. You can imagine what that does for your physique. It's like a convention of Men's Health cover models out there.
I come back to the world, and watch people going to the gym and clearly hating every minute of it. I can't understand why they would do that to themselves, when there's a climbing gym just a few miles away.
The only thing I agree with in the article is that cardio machines in the gym are a waste of time.
When it comes to lifting the only real "fact" is that what works best varies from person to person. People with great genetics can do heavy volume lifting 5 or 6 days a week and make amazing gains. Meanwhile, others will struggle to make any progress even with a low volume 2 day a week routine because their body doesn't recover well. Just go out there, experiment and see what works for you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As it happens it's a pretty popular subject. Hacker Diet ( http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ ) is a book written by Autodesk's Founder, there's a pretty active corner at Reddit ( http://www.reddit.com/r/fitness ), and this is definitely not the first post on the subject I've seen on HN.
...and if you read /r/fitness with any remote regularity then most of this article isn't very surprising at all.
That's what you'd say at least if /r/fitness is anything like /fit/ on 4chan.
If you really want to get fit, there's one easy thing you can do that actually works: Take up a sport that gets you fit as a side effect. I have two obsessions in life: Rock Climbing and Surfing. I'm pretty good at the first, and borderline hopeless at the other, but I'm committed to the point where I've arranged my life so that I can travel for months at a time to pursue one or the other each year. When I'm working…
Just imagine what primitive man would eat. He would spend most of his days eating what grew from the ground and when they finally hunted down meat, they would eat their catch as a group[2]. That doesn't mean you have to do exactly that, but try to keep your eating habits in sync with what it was originally adapted to consume not what hyper stimulates made you believe it wanted to consume[3].
Now don't go about forcing yourself to eat stuff you don't enjoy. In the same manner jasonkester engages in something he enjoys that have the "side effect" of being healthy (I still think these activities are something we were adapted to engage in the first place), find foods you find delicious but also happen to be something that isn't processed. I can assure you that there is plenty of "healthy" or "natural" foods out there that you would enjoy[4].
[1]http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_w...
[1.5]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=eating-made...
[2]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3723678050599653349#
That's right because us hackers really care about fitness
Because I can't downvote you, I'll comment. We do. A lot. Because we're not sitting in our parent's basements eating pizza and chugging mountain dew, we're not hacking the gibson and we're not sweaty, unbathed, pimply losers. We're motivated, we're not planning to die anytime soon, we're concerned with being able to do things, we're social, we're active and we're sick of the stereotypes. I'm going to make a massive a…
Now if you want that thats perfectly alright, but I at least only want to spend as little time as possible caring about my body and as little time as possible with normal people since both things are utterly boring.
That's right because us hackers really care about fitness
Is this sarcasm that hackers don't like being healthy or a kind of pun about AI algorithms?
The problem is that it takes time and is boring. I don't care if it means I live a few years longer since I will be too old and infirm to be able to hack.
Free weights are vital for muscle strength, mass and edurance. That doesn't mean free weights take the place of your other activities such as skiing or mountain climbing. That doesn't mean that you cut out cardio, that's something else entirely, even though some people work on cardio in the gym along with strength training.
Free weights are also great for building the entire structure of your body. There is nothing which can stress the major muscles of the legs, bones and supporting muscle groups like throwing a huge weight on your shoulders and squatting that weight multiple times. Swimming, isometrics and all that other stuff won't do it. Machines also don't do this because you don't have weight to stabilize in both directions. The power move of the squat is to push upwards with your legs but you still have to lower that huge weight in an orderly down movement to start the exercise.
I get the logic and intent behind these kind of articles but at the same time they infuriate me, because this is the kind of crap that people read and use as yet-another-reason as to why they don't try to get fit. Sure, machines aren't perfect, and they railroad your form, but it's better than nothing. I train on machines, _and_ with free weight, _and_ doing bodyweight / crossfit stuff. They all have their place. The…
I wonder if we read the same article?