191–200 of 209 posts
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If the colleague next to me starts using a thread mill with his standing desk, I'll shoot him in the face. With a nerf gun. Like the violent man I am. Don't need more distractions at the office, damn'it!
Thread mill? He's sewing garments while programming? Kudos!
One statement I take issue with is this line "I put on 40 pounds of muscle one year alone...". This is essentially impossible barring a malfunctioning thyroid. I don't doubt that he put on 40 pounds of weight in a year but I can guarantee it wasn't all muscle. If you are 17-20 and finishing up puberty, using anabolic steroids, working out incredibly hard 5-6 days per week, and eating 4000+ calories per day every day _maybe_ you could put on 30 pounds of muscle in a year. If you are in your late 20s early 30s as he was, not using steroids (I assume), and working out hard your max muscle gain in a year might be around 20lbs. For a normal 30 year old working out 3x a week it's closer to 12-15lbs/year after newbie-gains have ended. I say this not to discourage but rather to give people realistic expectations, I believe the most common reason people fail at exercise is they are overly ambitious and burn out quickly when they don't look like Hulk overnight.
If someone was looking for a good starting point for fitness I recommend scooby1961 on youtube, he has been around a long time and has a ton of videos on fitness and nutrition aimed at newbies, and takes the perspective of an engineer looking at the body as a machine.
As someone who has been into this for a while my advice would be:
1. Start small and ramp up, if you do nothing currently start with walking 20 minutes per day.
2. Do not spend a bunch of money on fancy equipment, like all hobbies until you get deeper into the game you won't even know what you should get.
3. Avoid injury, esp your lower back and shoulders. The best way to do this is perfect form. Always have perfect form, cheating with bad form to get one extra rep is only cheating yourself, the goal is to work the muscle to failure, not hit some number.
4. If you want to do a home gym you can work 95% of your muscle groups with dumbbells, a barbell, and a pullup bar. The only thing you cannot work out well with these is your quads. For that you need a leg press machine or a squat cage (ie: a gym).
5. Most suppliments are unproven snake oil that waste your money at best, and at worst destroy your kidneys/liver or give you heavy metal poisoning. The only supplements I consider proven effective with minimal side-effects are caffeine (pre-workout) and creatine. I will not recommend any brands but look for ones that are quality tested by independent labs (like USP).
6. Cardio with resistance (weights) is best, but if you only have time for one make it cardio. This is more important for your long term health.
7. Sticking to a routine is not about will-power, it's about habits. The first time you work out with weights it's intimidating as hell and you feel like a bumbling idiot, you do that 2 or 3 times a week for a few weeks and it feels like a chore, you do it for a year and it happens on auto pilot, you don't even think about it.
For anyone interested... if you want good posture, if you want to really be in shape, there are a million fads out there, but the best book by far is "Starting Strength" [1]. (It's also one of the best-selling on Amazon.) It essentially focuses on just the squat, deadlift, press, bench press, and (later) power clean, devoting around forty pages to each , and explains why you really don't need much else. They're quite…
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I can vouch for Starting Strength. If your body sucks, read this book. A lot of it will go over your head, and you don't need to read every single page, but once you start, really focus on nailing the three lifts. I went from 45lb on the bar for all lifts to: 350 squat 475 deadlift 260 bench 290 powerclean 180 snatch 225 c&j 315 front squat (the last 4 lifts are because I starting getting seriously into pure olympic…
Before anyone runs to the gym to buy a membership to copy the above, what rfnslyr did takes intense dedication and focus and he likely has very good genetics. Compound exercises that SS teaches are the best method for gaining overall body strength and mass. Just remember that working out is 75% nutrition and 25% lifting. If you don't eat right you wont make gains.
Does that hold for strength, or mostly for building muscle? Does training the central nervous system really rely that much on nutrition as opposed to exercising/lifting?
I'm tired of this type of condescension. I guess because the author writes to a community of programmers, or nerds, or whatever, he feels that he can address them as if they are all sloths. I have not had the impression in the overall debate about this standing/sitting business that people are saying that they are going over to a standing desk in order to not exercise. One can perfectly well imagine that the people that are going over to a standing desk because they think that it brings benefits that are a good complement to an overall healthy lifestyle, like eating and exercising properly (I notice that you say that you don't eat healthily, deanproxy... does this mean that you willingly do this because you think that an exercise routine can fully compensate for a bad diet...?). If someone vows to try to have better posture in their everyday life, does that mean that they think that it is a replacement for something like a good exercise routing for the back muscles? No. So this is standing/sitting contra exercising is a false dichotomy.
In fact, this whole standing/sitting discussion was partly propelled by studies that showed that sitting a lot was bad for ones health, also for active people [0] :
> Even when adults meet physical activity guidelines, sitting for prolonged periods can compromise metabolic health.
To turn deanproxy's baseless condescenscion towards "standers" and their supposed lazyness on its head: deanproxy is simply trying to rationalize his sedentary habits by asserting that having discrete blocks of activity time during the day counteracts his sedentary existence for the rest of the day.
To get the whole picture and in order to be in a position to assert that standing is inconsequential, deanproxy should also have experience with a lifestyle in which he exercises and stands/walks/is somewhat active in his day job. But it does not seem that he does. Perhaps not too surprising when his whole argument rests on standing CONTRA exercising in your free time. And what all of this shows is that the zealots (imaginary or not) who vow to NOT exercise BECAUSE they stand during their day jobs are leading an inferior lifestyle because deanproxy exercises and is able to do WITHOUT standing (and eating healthily... ). So deanproxy can claim victory here, the victory of being an exercise-zealot over the standing-zealots.
Couldn't agree more with the standing desks - no doubt they bring some improvement, but they do seem more like the 'in-thing' and 'hip' rather than genuinely life changing. As it always has been, regular (even if short) exercise sessions are a key part in healthy living.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404815/
Which states that sitting a lot is bad, even if you are an individual who exercises. And this does not imply that people want to replace standing with exercising, which is a false dichotomy proposed in the article.
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You sprinted twice a day? Can you tell me what a sprint workout was like for you? If I do just five 200 meter sprints in a workout, I'm fairly exhausted.
30 second sprint, 1 minute walk, rotate until you can't move. Then do it again. Oh, and do it a few more times. Then do that every morning and every evening. You will shed weight like no tomorrow. Note: SPRINTING, not steady state cardio. As intense as you can for 30 seconds, then walk. That's all.
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Before anyone runs to the gym to buy a membership to copy the above, what rfnslyr did takes intense dedication and focus and he likely has very good genetics. Compound exercises that SS teaches are the best method for gaining overall body strength and mass. Just remember that working out is 75% nutrition and 25% lifting. If you don't eat right you wont make gains.
> Just remember that working out is 75% nutrition and 25% lifting. If you don't eat right you wont make gains. Does that hold for strength, or mostly for building muscle? Does training the central nervous system really rely that much on nutrition as opposed to exercising/lifting?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
30 second sprint, 1 minute walk, rotate until you can't move. Then do it again. Oh, and do it a few more times. Then do that every morning and every evening. You will shed weight like no tomorrow. Note: SPRINTING, not steady state cardio. As intense as you can for 30 seconds, then walk. That's all.
What do you mean by rotate (sprint for one minute and walk for 30 seconds?), and by a few more times (10 minutes, 15 minutes)?
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The best posture is a varied one.
This may be my own pessimistic take, but something about the simplicity and obvious-correctness of that advice makes me think it'll never be as blogworthy as a less realistic goal that you'd have to buy something new to try. Or, it's like the idea doesn't have the magic of an idea that you can't do right now but won't require any effort when the time is right- like "I could get up every few minutes and stretch and wa…
And maybe I am a pessimist as well, but I see your statement as simply a realistic one. :)
Plenty of very experienced and intelligent PTs have repeated the statement I simply regurgitated as well.