I hate commercial gyms. Give me a barbell that I can clean and a tire for me to flip and I'm a happy guy.
Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
131–140 of 376 posts
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#132The author clearly equates fitness with strength, and some of his claims are way off. Here's one: "...maintaining cardiovascular fitness doesn’t really take much more than breathing uncomfortably hard for about 20 minutes, three times a week" As a former competitive runner, I've read hundreds of studies and abstracts about improving various cardio-vasuclar metrics. 20 minutes, three times a week is barely enough to g…
You should quote the entire paragraph.
"Cardio machines are innocent enough, as they won’t actually make you any less fit, but maintaining cardiovascular fitness doesn’t really take much more than breathing uncomfortably hard for about 20 minutes, three times a week. And we all know that swimming, hoops, bike riding, and even Ultimate Frisbee can get the job done, and that treadmills or elliptical trainers are a pale substitute."
Perhaps he made an incorrect claim here. But to be fair, you should go for the point of the paragraph as opposed to one sentence from it. What he is saying here is that the cardio machines in the gym are little better than maintenance for cardio and are a poor substitute for other ways to get the same sort of workout. I think this argument still fits within your own here.
The overall point of the article is that for strength, muscle mass and muscle endurance, there is no substitute for the basic free weight exercises. That's not to say that you should only do those exercises and that you can't benefit from more specialized training, but that everyone still benefits from those exercises and should make them part of a core program. The same cannot be said for cardio machines.
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not exactly. In Crossfit times and reps matter more than form. Just take a look at some gyms. The exercises and the philosophy behind is awesome, but the practical appliance is far from great.
There's an emphasis on improving scores and people get carried away for sure. But in the two boxes I've trained at there's a culture for good form and working on technique. "Honesty in motion, honesty in counting". I believe it's a CrossFit thing.
> I believe it's a CrossFit thing.
Based on this claim I assume also that Crossfit invented the barbell, the bumper plate and gravity.
The sudden outburst of anecdotes about how your Crossfit gym rooly trooly emphasises form seems to have come after years of sustained criticism by strength coaches and Olympic weightlifting coaches.
It's as simple as this: nobody -- not me, not you, not your coach, not the pros -- nobody can pump out high rep Oly movements without steady and ultimately dangerous degradation in form. The force plate studies, the EEG studies, the eyeballing of experienced coaches demonstrate over and over and over that it is a flat out stupid idea to do snatches or cleans for reps.
And yet in Crossfit gyms everywhere, this idea of smashing out 20 clean & jerks still keeps getting circulated.
You cannot do this and learn to do the movements precisely enough. You will only train yourselves to do it messily. Under heavy weights you will fuck up and injure yourself.
Given that I love Oly lifting, I don't want people getting injured and then blaming the lifts, when they should be blaming a faulty training technique.
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing I agree with in the article is that cardio machines in the gym are a waste of time. Not sure this is really true or that it matters. A 5 mile run on the treadmill at an x minute pace is the same as a 5 mile run outside at an x minute pace. Advantages of the treadmill include being able to keep a given pace without making any particular mental effort. Advantages of being outside is that it's not boring.
Hmm, well it's more subtle than that. Running on a "real" surface, that is constantly changing gradient and direction, works a lot of ancillary muscles for stability and balance that you don't get on a treadmill. The cardio workout might be the same. But if you trained for a Marathon only on a treadmill, you'd be in for a bit of a surprise when you tried a real one. Without the core strength you'd lose your form, you…
The other thing I've noticed is that when running on a treadmill, it may seem like your legs are making roughly the same motion as real running, but you're not pushing yourself forward, just upward. Your legs definitely don't have to work as hard pushing your body around.
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#135I strongly disagree about the "stretching is bad for you" part... but I guess he did say "without your body warmed up"... you always want to stretch before working out but get your body warmed up first by jogging in place or doing jumping jacks or something for a few minutes. You want ballistic stretching and static stretching. It has without a doubt helped with my overall fitness while reducing soreness.
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#136Prisoners are among the most fit people in the world, despite an absence of good machines, good diet, coaches, and instructional material. If you want to be fit, start exercising--a nice way to get started is to truly understand that any kind of exercise is very much better than doing nothing.
I agree with you if we area talking about Hollywood movie prisoners. If you truly want to get fit, commit a felony.
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#137This was a good read.
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Don't eat what your grandmother wouldn't recognize". is how I've heard it being summarized. :)
So no Indian/Chinese/Japanese/Mexican food? No avocados? No seafood, unless your grandparents are from the coast? (Food diversity sucket in our grandparent's era. )
The Michael Pollan quote is actually:
"Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these."
All those foods that you mentioned, a 19th century mom would recognize as food. Just not her kind of food.
From here: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/ (and his books of course)
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's precisely why the "nature intended us to" argument doesn't really work for me when I hear people trying to convince me to try the Paleo diet. Whatever the benefits might be (besides making the author of those books a good chunk of money), they can be garnered by other means. What I hate even more is when a few devotees of such diets go on a slant about vegetarianism/veganism etc. etc.
Not only that, but our "nature" has changed considerably since those times. Evolution has been far faster, likely 100 times faster the past several thousand years than it was before civilization. 15,000 years ago, nobody was lactose tolerant, nobody had blue eyes and who knows what else was different.
That isn't evolution, it is a diversification of our genetics. There are lots of things that many humans are intolerant to which would have probably been a really big weakness in the past.
Humans are no longer subject to natural selection. There needs to be significant culling pressure for real evolution to happen.
Re: Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
So no Indian/Chinese/Japanese/Mexican food? No avocados? No seafood, unless your grandparents are from the coast? (Food diversity sucket in our grandparent's era. )
My grandmother fed me homemade butter biscuits and sausage with eggs any time I visited. The southeast is full of terror and deliciousness.
There's nothing wrong with eating that kind of food, in reasonable proportions.