My First 80 Days of VR for Exercise

>You need volume and volume before everything else.

There's volume and then there's volume. Obviously five minutes of HIIT between picking things up and putting things down isn't going to do a great deal, but especially in the cycling world there's a lot of research around easy volume work and high intensity sessions (Neal Henderson at The Sufferfest/Wahoo, TrainerRoad etc) and the general consensus is that if you're time crunched, then the long Z2 work is not where you want to be focusing your efforts.

The article isn't about a trained athlete, it's about the untrained/hobbyist for whom getting in sufficient volume just isn't possible.

>Plenty of guys who can squat 400lbs who would be totally gassed after running a few miles or cycling up a moderate length hill. I wouldn't call it fit. I am betting on 45mins per day VR guy.

Picking things up and putting things down barely raises HR. Cardio appears to be a dirty word around these parts.

But also, people who chase those fads and jump from Tae Bo to Jazzercise to boxdance to VR are having fun and exercising the whole time. These people sign up to classes, go, have fun, they get bored with it, sign up again to whatever is new.

Starting new activity is more fun then mastery for many people - you progress faster. And that is actually ok I think.

There is this tendency to turn exercising into chore that tests your moral quality and discipline or what not. But, it is OK to just chase fun.

> Only if you come in telling the Perl programmers that they can’t possibly have written useful code. Which is what i hear when zmmmmm says

In hindsight, perhaps the analogy was poor. Perl and Rust can express exactly the same computations (and no more and no less) and are in some sense interchangeable which is not what I was trying to express.

I am indeed arguing that the utility of the strength training I outline exceeds that of VR exercise and that VR exercise is less useful in developing physical fitness.

> Body weight exercise can absolutely help folks reach all kinds of fitness and life goals, which is all we’re trying to say here

I agree with this and your quote

> bodyweight squats don't make you stronger.

is out of context, since I qualified it with people who already have a decent level of fitness. And that is indeed the case. You cannot increase the loading on the bodyweight squats and--assuming your bodyweight isn't drastically changing--that means you cannot change the intensity and hence you will not get appreciably stronger. Doing more reps just puts you in the realm of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy followed by cardiovascular adaptations.

Doing something is always better than nothing; there is no contention there and I agree. What I disagree with is the degree of benefits (especially in regards to strength) people are claiming things like VR exercise can provide and relative of importance of cardiovascular fitness vs. strength and how to best obtain fitness in each area.

I'm strongly opinionated, absolutely. And I absolutely think a lot of the approaches featured in this comment section are ineffective if the goal is to obtain physical fitness. If your goal is to just have fun and just do something you enjoy, then who cares--have fun! It's fine to not especially care about physical fitness and I have no personal interest in your physical fitness. But I believe that life is better physically fit and that the best path to fitness involves lifting weights in a manner which features progressive overload. A lot of people go to the gym with the intent to become strong and most of them fail--not all approaches are equally valid and a lot of them are ineffective.

HIIT is not meant to train you for long distance and I never ever heard anyone to claim so. How to skate 10kms is competitive athlete program and had literally nothing to do with goals of normal sedentary person exercising.

For a lot of people, actual ability to run up stars higher or be active for 20 mins with kids is what they want and need.

And it is fun. It feels good. You see improvements in own ability to do day to day things. It takes a while till those wear off and you start to stagnate.

I doubt I'll convince the parent, but for the curious about why this comment is utterly wrong and uninformed let's look at how muscles work.

In a given set of muscles you have dozens to thousands of motor units. Each is activated by a motor neuron. When recruited the muscle fibers in a motor unit begin producing (or trying to produce) force. The interesting thing is that they arn't all recruited at the same time, when you use 'a muscle' your actually invoking a complex process of recruitment of sub units within that muscle. Moreover these units are not created equally. Some can produce force for a long period of time and are usually weaker, some can produce force very rapidly but tire quickly. This is why when you try to produce a small static force for a long period of time (e.g. hold your arms out straight) your muscles will eventually start shaking and eventually give out. As one set of motor units begin to fatigue the signal to the whole muscle increases, recruiting fast action motor units which are worse at slow holding, and eventually they and all the units are fatigued and you can't produce continued force.

If you'd like to play around with a simulation of the above process you can, it's older code but it may still check out:

https://github.com/iandanforth/pymuscle

And to specifically address the issue of 'building muscle', as I've noted there are lots of sub components with different roles. Each of those can grow over time for different reasons and fatigue is one of the main signals for growth. Not the only one, but the notion that the only way to build muscle is to 'tear up' your muscles with huge lifts is both outdated and wrong.