Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie
mensjournal.com
mensjournal.com
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.
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#
You could argue that nature intended us to die from Malaria by the age of 30, I'm very glad that for most of the world that's no longer the case.
[Of course, whether a 'natural' life is desirable is debatable.]
Malaria, however, we attempted to evolve away from(sickle cell anemia).
Humans are no longer subject to natural selection. There needs to be significant culling pressure for real evolution to happen.
What? Are you sure? Because we most certainly are subject to natural selection.
A more obvious example of the sorts of changes we can still go through is sickle cell.
Evolution is a slow process. But there is no reason to believe that it is going any slower today than it ever did in the past - we're just being selected for different things than in the past. (For instance carelessness about birth control.)
Think of it this way: we used to be directly reliant our the environment for survival, like animals are. But now, we process our environment to such an extent that small variations in it are overcome by our intellect. Those variations in the past would constantly be exerting selective pressure on us in many different directions. Those pressures are processed out now.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33322719/Cochran-Gregory-10-000-ye... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/science/11gene.html http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/humans-evolving/
And anyway, I completely disagree that we're no longer subject to natural selection. We're always subject to natural selection. We're not immune to everything.
It has changed my life. When I follow the diet, it has been pretty impossible not to lose weight. That's with eating as many eggs, as much butter, and as much natural, delicious, other whole foods as I can stuff myself with.
However, the metabolic science is there if you read it, and I can't argue with the profound effect switching to a diet based on meat, eggs and other sources of saturated fats has had on my body.
I eat as much as I want, whenever I want, I'm never really hungry any more, and I've been losing fat and gaining muscle without thinking about it at all. It's pretty incredible.
Anyway, I'm not discounting the underlying concept of your comment; I'm just saying that malaria wasn't a particularly apt comparison.
Ditto Europe, by the way.
Actually, an awful lot of us do. I see those fucking Anopheles mosquitoes on a regular basis, especially if I venture a bit north from here.
> If you and I were bit by an infected mosquito, there's a very good chance either of us would die in a relatively short period of time.
Actually, out of the 225 million cases of malaria per year, there are only about 1 million deaths.
I'm not discounting the underlying concept of your comment; I haven't gotten malaria yet because of public-health measures like draining swamps, because of cypermethrin on the walls, because of DEET on my legs and head, because of sleeping under a mosquito net or in a room without entrances for mosquitoes, because of sleeping during the day, and because I have enough leisure time to swat the mosquitoes that do land on me.
I'm saying there's no need to stick to some strict diet, just eat a wide variety of foods instead of just one subset. The whole "think like a primitive man thing" is just a helpful starting point to point you towards what kinds of food to look for, but I'm not advocating some strict following. I had three In and Out dinners this past week since I'm too short on time to hunt down a pigeon or pluck mysterious fruits from trees all day.
We're not as fast as most animals out there, but I don't think that means we didn't run a lot in prehistory.
(Food diversity sucket in our grandparent's era. )
"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)
Doubtful. I mean, the vegetables aren't cooked. That can't be healthy!
(Before anyone downvotes me: Look up how we used to cook vegetables. 'Boiled to a mush' just about sums it up. That's neither tasty nor healthy.)
The main issue with obesity is that people can easily afford to be obese and not too significantly impact their lives (aside from all health and social malaise of being overweight).
Eating how a caveman ate isn't a particularly bad diet, but misses out on the major aspect of a day filled with exercise.
Lack of money for food is not a cause of obesity. If your goal is to obtain 2500 calories (assuming that is what you need to maintain a healthy weight) for a little money as possible, you will consume 2500 calories of carbs. You will not become obese. If you instead consume 3500 calories and become obese, you are wasting money on 1000 extra calories. You are not constrained by cost. You could instead reduce consumption by 1000 calories, and spend the money on increasing the quality of the remaining 2500 calories.
There is no significant research that shows adding exercise to an overweight person's lifestyle will significantly reduce their weight - typically just increases their appetite.
Increasing exercise and holding consumption constant will reduce body fat. One of many studies:
http://www.duke.cardiologydomain.com/images/uploaded/dukeh/2...
Do a google scholar search. The only difficulty is that you'll find so many studies which measure additional benefits to exercise that some of the studies measuring only effect on body fat will be buried. (I.e., the majority of the articles have conclusions like "exercise reduces body fat AND increases muscle mass", "exercise reduces body fat AND breast cancer", etc).
I'm curious, did you hear this claim from Gary Taubes? The one time I read a blog post by him, I discovered him to be incredibly dishonest: http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...
Because they're not eating extremely processed foods based on subsidized grains that make them cheaper than real food... yet.
Corn subsidy in the U.S.. Not much else to say.
They are skinny because they eat less. They cannot afford 2500 calories, so they consume 2000 calories (mostly rice or wheat, depending on region) and suffer adverse health as a result. They also get exercise working physical jobs rather than sitting at home and watching TV.
Of course, even if corn subsidies were unique, poverty still don't explain why the US poor waste money on 500-1000 extra calories. If they were optimizing for cost, they would eat only 2500 calories of cheap corn.
When people say that obesity goes with poverty, they're noting that virtually everyone eats until they are sated, and if you eat until you are sated with high-quality, expensive food, you will be far less likely to be overweight than if you eat until you are sated with low-quality, inexpensive food.
High discount rate reduces the propensity for work (most poor don't work much, if at all), particularly work with a career path. Why work hard now just to have a middle class life in the future?
Similarly, a high discount rate cuts against a healthy lifestyle - why suffer through a run in the park and hunger right now, just for future health?
(Also explains correlation between poverty and: drugs, alchohol, unprotected sex, probably other pathologies I can't think of.)
High discount rate is the cause, everything else is an effect.
Of course, a high discount rate has nothing to do with the cheapness of carbs, fat and sugar relative to meat or veggies. Money is not the limiting factor. Willpower/preferences are.
No one is saying that poor people couldn't eat healthy if they wanted to more than they wanted to feel satisfied. They're saying that given two people with the same metabolic genes, exercise level, and discount rate, if one of these two people spends ten times as much on food as the other, they will be likely to be thinner. This is because being sated with more expensive food results in eating fewer calories and better nutritionally than being sated with less expensive food, and this point has everything to do with the cheapness of carbs, fat, and sugar (which taste good no matter how prepared, essentially) relative to well-prepared meat and veggies.
If you're poor, odds are that you're eating fast food. The primary cost of fast food is not the cost of the raw ingredients, it is the time and effort to make the fast food. Furthermore many of the customers there see large portions as a value. Therefore fast food places have found it worth their while to offer large portions at a low price, and to inflate those portions with the cheapest foods that they can - french fries and soft drinks.
As long as fast food places do that, there is no real cost difference between 2500 calories and 3500 calories. Given how addictive most people find food that is high in sugar, fat and salt (which describes soft drink + fries), people tend to finish the portions that they are given. That will make you obese fairly fast, even if you don't "supersize" your portions.
Food banks often offer similar foods to fast food places because it is cheap and what their clientele is used to. This causes similar consequences. So in the USA even if you have no money at all, it is easy to get fat.
If there were cheap, convenient places to eat that made you pay according to calories and were willing to give realistic but smaller portions for significantly lower prices, then your reasoning would be absolutely correct in the USA.
Now you can argue that the underlying cause that makes this possible is that the country is rich enough that we can afford to be wasteful even on poor people. This is absolutely correct. But for practical purposes that detail doesn't matter. If you personally have little money and live in the USA, it is really easy to become fat.
An incidental note on exercise. Exercise burns calories. Obviously. However it takes very little extra food to offset the calorie expenditure from moderate amounts of additional exercise. Luckily exercise also affects appetite for many people, and muscle mass increases your basal metabolism. Therefore exercise is a win, but for moderate amounts of exercise not mainly because it directly burns off calories.
You might be right if the only meals available had 1750 calories. In that case, your only choices are 1 meal (underfed) or 2 meals (overfed). But that simply isn't the case.
It is easy to become fat in the US, rich or poor. The poor are more likely to take advantage of this, it is true. But it doesn't save them money.
Breakfast: Egg McMuffin (300 cals), Hash Browns (150 cals) and Coffee (0 cals).
Lunch: McChicken (360 cals), Fries (380 cals) and Coca Cola (210).
Dinner: Big Mac (540), Premium Southwest Salad with Chicken (320 cals), and Coca Cola (210).
2470 cals/day.
To become obese, you need to add this:
Afternoon Tea: Sweet Tea (150 cals) and McRib Sandwich (500 cals).
Desert: Hot Fudge Sundae (330 cals).
Now you are up to 3450 cals/day.
There is nothing about being poor which compels you to spend money on the McRib Sandwich, sweet tea and the Hot Fudge Sundae.
>Increasing exercise and holding consumption constant will reduce body fat."
I'm not sure you read the sentence you're responding to: "typically just increases their appetite."
Yes, if you lock a person in a room with the exact same meals every day, exercise will reduce their weight. A real world person who exercises though typically eats to compensate.
I'm not sure what your problem with Taubes is; your discovery of his 'incredible dishonesty' doesn't pass the smell test -- surely someone eating 7.5 extra strips of bacon per day would notice? There's a shot at his thesis being 'buy my book'; why is it more unreasonable to buy his cheap Kindle book than e.g. Tyler Cowen's to get the full scientific background? It's not like he's hawking some diet empire.
If you add exercise to a person's lifestyle without adding calories, they will lose weight. It's that simple. There is research to show this. I cited some of it.
your discovery of his 'incredible dishonesty' doesn't pass the smell test -- surely someone eating 7.5 extra strips of bacon per day would notice?
Go read Gary Taube's blog post. He spends thousands of words discussing that, according to the traditional calorie counting theory (which he is attempting to refute), the difference between a fat person and a thin person is "only" 20 calories above their respective maintenance levels. He then argues this must be absurd and incorrect, because how can "only a cube of sugar in your coffee" make you fat. This is an attempt at reducto ad absurdum.
He never, in his entire blog post, mentions the fact that the fat person is also eating 7 extra strips of bacon each day. If you read his article without being extremely careful, you will come away with the impression that the only thing the fat person eats that the thin person doesn't is an extra morsel of food each day.
That's great. There is also research that shows that acceleration due to gravity at sea level is 9.8 m/s^2, but that has little to do with what the OP said, which is that "exercise tends to increase people's appetites." You're refuting something he never claimed.
"He never, in his entire blog post, mentions the fact that the fat person is also eating 7 extra strips of bacon each day."
I'm guessing because that's not the case? You're begging the question by showing that his claims don't work out according to the calories in/calories out model.
From the original post: "There is no significant research that shows adding exercise to an overweight person's lifestyle will significantly reduce their weight - typically just increases their appetite."
I'm guessing because that's not the case?
If you take as given the cals in/cals out model (as Taubes does, in an attempt to refute it via reducto ad absurdum), they do.
I think that the term "poverty" relates specifically to developed countries where fast food is the cheapest way for the poor to feed themselves off the dollar menu.
1. The food was whole. 2. People were very active, particularly where my mother grew up(Shanghai), mothers usually got up at 5am to get the fresh produce from markets everyday, people walked around a lot, bicycles were a luxury item.
Poor people eat fast food. Good food is cheaper than McDonald's, but you have to be able to cook.
Again, good meat and produce (raw materials for cooking) are also accessible for less than it costs to eat out.
The grocery store (and I don't mean some specialty place like Whole Foods -- if we're talking about eating on a tight budget, something like Wal-Mart will be much more helpful).
What's wrong with cheese, or butter? Or sauerkraut and pickles? All processed food. Also, powdered mashed potatoes and puffed rice are just conveniently preserved starch. They're perfectly healthy.
The "processed food" and "mostly plants" stuff is just marketing psychology that taps into SWPLs' inner hippie. The real diet rules aren't mystical:
* Avoid sugar, especially fructose
* Avoid vegetable oils
* Don't be afraid of saturated fat
* Prefer rice and potatoes to wheat/rye/etc
* If you're fat, try cutting out starch, but don't worry about it if you're not fat.
Turns out it's virtually impossible to define it.
Here was one of the exercises we went through:
1) Take an orange, grown in the wild without being touched in any way by the hand of man.
2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all natural"?
3) If you squeeze that orange, and drink its juice, is it still "all natural"?
4) If you strain the juice to eliminate pulp, through a handwoven cloth (or a mat of grass or some other "all natural straining device") is it still "all natural"?
5) If you heat the juice and drink it, ie cook it, is it still "all natural"?
6) How about if you heat it long enough to boil off some of the water?
7) How about long enough to boil off all of the water?
8a) What if instead of boiling you simply dry out the juice in the sun?
8b) What if in addition to boiling it, you dry the remains in the sun?
9) What about drying it in an oven?
10) Suppose I take the dry particles left and through any conceivable natural operation sort them by density? Say, putting the particles into an all natural basket and shake it vigorously until my arms are tired?
11) Now how about I remove particles of a certain density? Is the remaining product natural?
12) Now suppose I add water to the remaining sorted particles, fresh from a mountain spring.
13) Suppose I do the same (#1-12) with other plant sources?
14) Suppose I mix the results into either a mix of powders or a mix of reconstituted liquids?
This is an actual replication of a process for producing an artificial sweetener (not with fruit, but a different plant source). That sweetener is generally not called "all natural" but the process is more or less the above.
At every point in the process we haven't done anything that's not natural. There's some analogy to every step that you probably have to do with any food source to make it edible. Nobody thinks squeezing, chopping, cutting, cutting plants creates a processed food. Or straining liquids or really any of the above. We've been doing all of the above as a species since before writing.
But many people think the result of the specific combination of the above, #14, is a "processed food".
How about cheese? Most cheese, even modern cheese is just milk and bacteria in a controlled spoilage environment. As natural as dirt. And in general the result of very few steps.
Defining "processed food" from "natural food" ultimately ends up trying to set some kind of arbitrary definition delineating the two -- "processed food is any food that has undergone more than 3 processing steps" I have news, chopping and peeling fresh picked garlic takes more than 3 steps.
1) Wash the dirt from the bulb
2) Dry the bulb
3) Remove the outer layers of onion skin
4) Separate the cloves out of the bulb
5) Cut the hard connective bits
6) Peel the layers of onion skin from the cloves
7) Chop to size
Now if I include it in a recipe I'm including it in even more processing steps. I may boil it, grill it, bake it, or some other cooking process.
I may strain it from a broth if all I care about is the flavor.
Before I can actually get the garlic into my mouth, through even an elementary recipe, I've had to process it at least 8 times, likely a dozen.
The In Defense of Food argument is not so much about whether or not the food is still "natural" at that point. The point is you are throwing out much of the orange, and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you.
Pollan talks about how at one point a scientist thought he had isolated all of the necessary parts of nutrition: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.
Then they discovered vitamins. Oops. If you actually believed what that first scientist said, you probably died of scurvy.
So, let's take our food stuff made from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates and inject some vitamins in them! Should be all good now, right?
Except, we continue to discover stuff in the food that grows out of the ground and on trees that turns out to be good for us. (I forget the more recent examples he mentions in his book, but you get the idea.)
So your choice is basically to take the chance that the scientists have finally found all the parts of plants and animals that are good for us, synthesized or extracted them, and injected them into that box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs you are eating. Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it.
Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it.
You don't just grab a potato out of the ground and eat it whole. Or jump out into a field of cattle with a fork and knife ready to go. You can do that with some foods, not so much with others. If the metric is "you must be able to eat it right out of the wild with 0 processing" you're going to eat a lot of raw tomatoes and peppers and not a whole lot else.
In many cases, you have to process the food source to make it edible. Rhubarb for example has poisonous leaves that will kill you. The green bits of the tomato can surpress cardiac functions. For most animals you can't just start biting chunks out of them. You may have to remove internal organs that are inedible, bones (I don't see many paleo eaters advocating cracking open thigh bones to get at the marrow very often btw), etc.
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-10-poisonous-fruit...
In some cases, edible parts may contain bad stuff, pork meat for example is well known to be unsafe raw. I'm pretty sure cavemen ate pigs (or at least boar). Cow brains may contain prions. etc.
I do agree with you that food manufacture from chemical components on up is likely not complete, but there's not really much of that in the industry. Even highly "processed" foods like hotdogs or McDonald's chicken McNuggets are just ground up and cooked scrap meat and connective tissue (all paleo friendly!). They have all the stuff that's in meat anyways. The process to make imitation cheese doesn't generally fall under that kind of manufacturing process.
Many common and cheap foodstuffs also don't contain much nutrition. Vitamin fortified rice has probably improved the lives of a billion people.
People also get all kinds of scared when the chemical names for common food components are used. Should I use "salt" or "sodium chloride"? Should I avoid all foods with Monosodium Glutamate (good luck with that)?
But like anything it all just comes down to moderation. Nutmeg is great and natural, but if you eat too much of it you'll get have hallucinations and may die. Who knows what's in a clam, perhaps if you eat clams 3 times a day for a year (a completely possible scenario for a caveman) you'll have serious health problems like mercury poisoning or some other issue.
Who knows?
and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you.
You may also be throwing out stuff that's very bad for you. It's all conjecture.
What Pollan actually advocates is eating a traditional diet that has been refined over centuries. He says that which one you pick doesn't matter that much.
The traditional diets of people living around the Mediterranean and people living near the Arctic circle have nothing in common, but according to Pollan, either will give you better health outcomes than a normal Western diet.
If people have been eating a certain way over a long period of time, they have probably learned to avoid the stuff that will kill or injure you, and probably have discovered foods that nutritionally complement each other, as well. (He gave examples of such complementary foods in traditional diets, which I can't remember right now.)
One thing I've definitely noticed time and again is how complete traditional diets tend to be. It's amazing, thousands of years ago, with no concept at all of nutrition, people managed to put together fantastically complete (and tasty) diets.
I can't tell if you're being really subtle here, but the causality is probably reversed - people ate whatever they could get away with, and over the course of many tens of thousands of years they evolved to process that food efficiently. Anatomically modern humans evolved approximately 200,000 years ago, and agriculture was only invented 10,000 years ago. And industrially produced processed food didn't become a staple of most Westerners' diets until 65 years ago.
The skills necessary to survive on the local available food in one place don't entirely translate someplace else. Somebody had to look at a squid for the first time and decide to eat it for example. Or that the rotting month old cabbage would be a good meal.
Traditional foods are often preagrarian foods in some cases. You can find expensive wild foods restaurants in South Korea for example that serve only food you can gather in the mountains, mushrooms, pine nuts, pine needles, ferns, wild onions, etc. These are things that people cobbled together before they had any knowledge at all of nutrition and amazingly, when we look at them today with the modern eye find out that they represent a fantastically complete diet, rich in essential nutrients. In Latin America you can still find plenty of pre-Columbian cuisine with similar characteristics. And I'd wager elsewhere as well.
Put another way, why didn't they just settle on say mushrooms? How come the entire diet for a people isn't just one food? Or a combination of foods that represent a diet lacking in a certain vitamin? Amazingly, wherever you go, the traditional foods tend to make up a complete diet.
It seems a modern curse that we can gorge ourselves on singular foods and grow fat and suffer malnutrition at the same time. Only today can somebody eat hamburgers and pizza 3 times a day for years.
I think the poster you replied to was making the point that industrial mangling of our food likely has some detriment to our health. Sure, cheese and kraut are processed (we make both at home, btw), but they're more natural processes than, say, turning corn into corn syrup. In fact, the end products of these natural processes are often argued to be healthier (or at least offer more bioavailble/digestible nutrition) than the original material.
Look at the ingredients list of your average loaf of store-bought wheat bread. All of the continuant ingredients have been refined, had preservatives added, then re-mixed to make "bread". The list is typically a mile long! Take my wife's home-made bread, as a counter example: whole wheat flour (ground minutes before making, from home-grown wheat), salt, maybe a dash of sugar or honey, water, and our sourdough starter.
He was the first to admit that nutrition sciences were largely confused. All of those years of studying cholestrol and various other substances in isolation had led to a ton of barely viable nutrition advice that didn't seem to work in practice.
He has come to believe that the research continues to point in a single direction. It's more or less what the OP said, with a bit of twist. The problem isn't processing in the traditional sense... it's processing in the industrial sense. Modern processed foods contain a whole litany of preservatives that seem to have a profound impact on food in two ways.
1. It often more or less removes much of the health benefit of actually eating. Vitamins, minerals, and a whole range of amino acids magically disappear. Post-processing foods tend to be left high in carbs and so called "empty calories". This is why, in his mind, McDonalds and the like are so damaging. It's why TV dinners (even the 'healthy' ones) are terrible for you. By eating more "whole" foods (as the OP suggested) you avoid so much of this.
2. Those preservatives themselves trigger body processes that cause all sorts of strangeness. Why can you drink Coke Zero everyday and not lose weight (or Stevia, Splenda, etc..)? Because your body has a natural metabolic reaction to the sweetness. It's still calorie-in/calorie-out, your just sabotaging the calorie out. The prevailing theory about this has something to do with energy storage back in our caveman days. When eating sweet fruits and the like, our bodies would go into energy storage mode for the coming winter. In those days fruits represented one of the few times that we would experience a calorie surplus. Apparently many common preservatives trigger that same response.
For the last couple of years I've essentially followed the OP's advice. I eat as close to "whole" as I can. I eat quite a bit more meat than he's advertising, but I try to make sure it as unprocessed as possible. I eat a lot of whole vegetables and a bit of fruit. Nuts and the like are a staple. I eat fewer refined carbs, but I don't necessarily try to stay far away from them either.
I'm healthier, fitter, and all around in better shape then I ever have been.
Ugh, I hate this concept. Primitive man also died in their 20s and 30s. No thanks.
You can see similar trends in other non-agrarian societies.
http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly...,
There are studies that go along with your POV
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...
but they are, to date, very much in the minority of research in the area.
The other component of that is of course that we're all fat and out of shape today because we eat foods that cavemen never had access to.
One measure of health is of course weight, but so is life expectancy. If we follow a life-plan where we're around some normal weight but die at 30 I'm not sure that's a great plan. We evolved to die around 30, most research into aging agrees with this (some say ~40), and that's "natural" I suppose, but I think I reject that notion that we should only do things in the modern world that fit what we were required to do a million years ago because it's what we evolved to cope with and eek out 3 or 4 decades of life.
Another is infant mortality, we evolved to reproduce pretty fast because we evolved to maintain population with lots of dead infants. We also evolved to produce slightly more males than females since men die faster, which is okay since fewer men can reproduce with more women.
We also evolved to be able to bear children in our early teens, to grow beards, hair and nails, and to have bad eyesight in some large percentage of the population. Should we lower the age of consent to 13? Not shave or cut our hair or nails ever and not wear glasses?
I'm not sure any of these notions work today, but extending the central argument out:
If we should eat like our ancient ancestors did since we evolved to eat like that and therefore it must be healthy, should we not live like our ancient ancestors did since therefore that must be equally valid by the "it's all natural so it's good" principle?
And I think it's a straw man to say that accepting a "caveman" or "hunter gatherer" diet means we need to accept -every- aspect of "primitive" life.
EDIT: http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/pdrdraft04182...
"I think it's closer to the truth to say that cavemen...lived a natural lifespan closer to modern man." Test it! I honestly don't know the answer, the data I managed to find in 10 minutes of searching says that hypothesis is incorrect -- but as you rightly point out my data includes infant mortality in the averages (I believe). But if you can find data that says "excluding infant mortality, pre-agrarian cultures have an average lifespan of 70-80 years" I'll be more than happy to accept that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
According to the entry above, there's a measure called e5 that should supply the relevant figures.
And I think it's a straw man to say that accepting a "caveman" or "hunter gatherer" diet means we need to accept -every- aspect of "primitive" life.
I'm not really attacking the diet per se, many of the recipes are actually pretty tasty and are generally pretty healthy. I'm attacking the faulty line of reasoning given as to why one should do this.
"it seems to be pretty healthy" is wishy washy, but okay
"You should eat this way because evolution made you to eat this way therefore it's healthy" is not, it present a long chain of reasoning that falls apart at almost every link, but it's presented as a kind of science, which it's not by this reasoning.
I eat whatever's cheap and tasty, as much as I want, mostly meat— the literal antithesis of Pollan's catchphrase. If I've fallen into his trap, it's a very cunningly hidden one.
(serious question, though I appreciate the fact that I just asked the most base question in this entire comment page)
In seriousness, there was an adjustment period of "intestinal irregularity" when I first switched, presumably due intestinal flora etc. adapting from substantial amounts of carbs and fiber to all fats and protein. These days I'd say I'm on the infrequent end of normal, pooping once every day or two, which I think is pretty typical for paleo folks.
If I do end up eating a substantial amount of carbs, usually at a restaurant or dinner party, it does often give me the runs later, which is my primary reason for strictly avoiding grains moreso than health or philosopical concerns. And if I drink too much (which is easy to do when you eat low-carb) all bets are off.
All of a sudden I even enjoyed planning my diet just on the chance that it would make me strong/faster in the next workout.
So, yes, like all in things in life, put the right incentives there (and just getting fit/healthy, obviously doesn't cut it for millions of Americans) and make it fun and it's a piece of cake.
And for those of you who haven't found your muse yet, I urge you to give crossfit a try. It lets your inner 5 year old run wild. You'll get to run/jump/climb/swing/throw heavy things until you crumble in a sweaty heap at the end. It is pure unadulterated fun. Plus, fat will run screaming from your body (but that's just a happy side effect).
That said I'm currently taking a break from it due to a jumper's knee that won't go away.
It's a bit opposite of what you are saying, in the sense that you want to do alternative/strength training next to your sport to improve your game. This mentality and way of training has radically improved my own game the last year.
That's my dream right there.
Book your flight for the end of November. Round trip to Bangkok before the peak will run you $600-$800 from the west coast. Make your way to Tonsai and negotiate yourself a good monthly rate for a bungalow. If you show up before the main tourist season and plan to stay until March, you can usually get them down to around $200/month.
Even with all the Beer Chang and Massuman Gai you can handle, you still won't be able to spend more than five grand all in.
Don't forget to send us a postcard!
Food was probably comparable in price, but a Bintang being slightly more expensive than an 80Baht Chang :)
It does, however has some truly amazing rock climbing on the beaches in Krabi Provence. That's why I spend every other winter there.
I think I took from your original post that you do both, hence my confusion. Regardless, congrats on the pursuit, its something I am very envious of!
How do you address the fact that your point is actively contradicted by the article? Did you even know your point is actively contradicted by the article? I'm not even saying that proves you're wrong; what bothers me is that you just ran off to post your own stuff with no apparent engagement of the topic. That's not a recipe for learning anything.
I'm not contradicting anything that he says. I used to lift weights in much the manner that he describes, and it'd be difficult to deny that it works.
The thing that he misses is motivation. Most people simply have none of it. I certainly don't for weight lifting.
In my experience, climbing rocks and surfing, while possibly suboptimal as workouts, will absolutely get you into great shape. And they have the added benefit of providing their own motivation.
Eh, I don't find rock climbing at all enjoyable. But I love running marathons. I've even been known to put in 22 miles _on a treadmill_. Different strokes for different folks.
If you love (insert sport/fit activity that you cannot stop thinking about) then do that and be super fit because you love it. That was the op's point.
All on their own supply. ;)
The author's incentive for going to the gym was so that he could go climb or surf or ski or whatever and be both "fit" and injury-free. It's a critical distinction. There was probably a time when all he had to do was go out and make those activities a part of his existence, but I would wager that as he has aged and had different responsibilities come up just making that fitness a side effect wasn't possible. Instead, he probably tried to go ski X times a year, but got hurt the first time, and the subsequent trips never happened. He probably tried to go climbing weekly, but something tweaked and suddenly he was only climbing monthly. When it's harder to go out and run 5 miles like you used to, you're less inclined to go run 5 miles, and might slip to 3. When 3 is eventually harder than before, you might just not run at all.
I think the article is speaking more to concerns as you age and you can no longer get away as easily with just participating in the sport. Rob Shaul and his mtnathlete.com and militaryathlete.com sites address those problems quite directly, and unfortunately it involves a lot of painful work that is mostly gym based. He's designing the mtnathlete workouts to help skiiers stay healthy and be ready when the season arrives. He's training military personnel to be more durable and harder to kill. To explain, the site is a few years old, but when he started it it was as Crossfit was just starting to ramp up in popularity. Despite the advertising that it makes you better at everything athletic, Crossfit is usually all about Crossfit - there are Crossfit games now and it is in many ways its own sport now. Rob's site was very specifically geared to mountain athletes who wanted to perform their sport at a high level possible with less injury. It's not a gym program just for the sake of being a gym program.
There was a time when I could go out and make my life about doing whatever sport it may be - climbing, running, basketball, etc. - and recover quickly and easily from the activity. Now my body has aged a little, I sit in a chair too much, and suddenly a small nagging injury never goes away, and I'm less motivated to go run several miles or play basketball or climb. By incorporating durability training like the article discusses, I'm more able to avoid those prolonged periods of inactivity and keep motivation up.
You're right: there are always people crawling out of the woodwork suggesting one approach or the other. Whenever someone gets evangelical about something, it proves that it's working for them, for the moment at least. How else could they think that their mundane and unoriginal approach is "the" solution that will change lives? There are evangelists for everything from walking an hour a day on a treadmill to rock climbing. Ergo, almost anything works for some people sometimes. However, no new or old exercise idea has had widespread acceptance and staying power. Therefore, every idea fails for most people, either immediately or eventually.
Conclusion: Certainly educate yourself about all the options and their benefits, but right now, do whatever you find compelling right now. Don't worry about whether it will for someone else, or whether it will work for you next week. Just do what works for you right now.
For example, I thought I was bored with kettlebells (lately I've been trying to learn Olympic lifting) but one night last week for some reason I didn't want to leave my apartment, so I did a kettlebell workout. That worked for me on that particular night. For some people, that wouldn't work at all, because they like to have every workout scientifically planned out: exercises, reps, weights, etc. Sticking to the plan is what motivates them, so they would have dealt with the situation differently.
Some people really get off on the idea of having a "treat" occasionally. For them, maybe they can motivate themselves by signing up for a triathlon in some exotic location. Or they might take a day off and visit a national park, or treat themselves to a beautiful evening wandering around with a friend, splurging on a show and a nice dinner downtown. (Two or three hours of walking may not be challenging, but health-wise, it beats the hell out of sitting at home.) Or maybe they would sign up for an expensive activity such as riding lessons.
It all depends on your situation. Do you have outdoor recreation nearby? Do you live in a walkable or bikeable city? Can you afford Crossfit or an expensive gym? Do you have a garage where you can put a few hundred dollars worth of weight equipment? Do you have enough money to become an equestrian? Do you get off on consistency, or is boredom your bane? Does measurement of your progress motivate you or demotivate you? Do you like to geek out over your fitness, or relax and let your mind wander? Do you like it if your workout activities express your trendiness or your wealth and status, or would you prefer a "no bullshit" workout at a grimy gym surrounded by tattooed guys in sweat pants?
There's no answer that fits everyone all the time. Different people will thrive with different choices, and next month you may be a different person than you are now. Just do whatever works for you right now. (If that means forcing yourself to do something you don't want to do, well, that is a paradox. Best to just do it and not think about it.)
It's also important to keep in mind timing and the training cycle (break down, recover, supercompensation) as the author points out. If you really want to "optimize" your training, or at least take steps in that direction, doing the same thing over long periods of time will result in a longtime plateau. I think the way most people manage their fitness - do the same lifts at the gym or the same 45 minute routine on the treadmill, for years in a row - results in many people treading in plateau zones and generally underwhelmed by their fitness despite putting in the time.
The article says, essentially, that a basic strength and conditioning program is the way to go. The GP says that picking a sport that makes you fit is the way.
To add another opinion, that ties the two together, to the mix: think of the fittest people you know. To a person, they're probably obsessed with their chosen sport (which may be soccer, or bodybuilding, or weightlifting, or running, or ...). These people live and breathe their sport, and when they're not doing it or training for it, they're thinking of how to get better at it.
At some point, thinking of how they can get better at it is probably going to lead them to doing, well, a basic strength and conditioning program. That's because squats and presses and the rest of what the article outlines are still about the best the exercise world can come up with for almost all the athletes out there.
(For what it's worth, I'd strongly second the recommendations of the article for Starting Strength and Olympic-Style Weightlifting. They're both fantastic books.)
For paragraph comparison:
NYTimes: font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; width: 600px;
Men's Journal: font-size: 12px (small); line-height: 15px (tight); width: 800px (I lose which line I'm on);
And problem is???
Usually these folks' discussions are more interesting than the original article.
I value hn because it has a variety of quite interesting individuals. Somehow some percentage have interesting take on physical fitness and physical culture - I have talk movement classes professionally in between hacker gigs and find the hn's folks' idea interesting and challenging.
Fitness is a very individual thing. If talking about individual experience with it is evil, give me more evil, please.
I locked up my care for a summer and biked to the coffee shop and grocery store every day.Before long I was taking 5 mile bike rides on the spur of the moment. I lost about 35 pounds that summer. Unfortunately, I live somewhere that has a winter which makes biking impossible. I should have switched to cross country skiing or something I guess... if only they groomed ski paths on the side of the street.
Hyperbolic headlines are intensely irritating.
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.
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.
I don't think anyone is saying that it's not possible, it's just much more likely that your average lifter is going to run into injury.
The Olympic lifts require:
1. Precision.
2. Power.
In that order.
The problem is that the motions happen so fast that even at light weights you quickly deplete the central nervous system's ability to provide sharp signals. Ideally the signal conveyed to muscles looks like a square wave. However as repetitions mount, it becomes more and more to resemble noise, leading to sloppy form.
Repetition is the basis of learning, especially for complex movement. If you are doing 20 reps, and 15 of them have degraded form, what will you wind up learning?
And it doesn't help that the emphasis is doing the 20 reps in the minimum time possible, which discourages lifters from taking the time to set themselves in the correct position off the floor.
The weight is almost, but not quite, irrelevant to my main point. My main point is that the body learns what you make it do. If you continue to work through degraded form you will only learn to make the lifts sloppily. As you increase the weight (Crossfit calls this "scaling the workout" as if they were the first to think of changing the weight on the bar), you will only increase your risk of injury.
crossfit does make use of some of the principles outlined in the article, yes. but you could say that about almost any workout scheme, including 20lb weights balancing on a bosu ball. there are bound to be some similarities.
crossfit is frenetic, with exercises that vary daily. this routine is advocating a more static set of consistent core exercises.
crossfit mixes up the styles of exercises pretty frequently -- some are strength, some are endurance, some are timed, etc.. again, this routine is more about slow, steady, consistent improvements on a single set of exercises.
crossfit is a single workout track that gets everyone "fit", while this routine is pointing out that you need to approach the exercises differently based on your personal goals.
etc etc.
> Hyperbolic headlines are intensely irritating.
Jason Fried said yesterday: "Something I didn't know when I started writing for Inc: The authors don't write the headlines. The editors write the headlines and subheads."
(from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271625)
Perhaps it's the same at Mens Journal.
By getting yourself winded do you mean being punched in the stomach hard enough to lose your breath for a moment, or something else?
What you're referring to is getting the wind knocked out of you.
Curiously, in my karate dojo, we are taught to learn to fight whilst being winded - as in, having the wind knocked out of you.
It is.
I would think the rest of the US uses it the same way, just based on talking with friends throughout the country. I'm not sure if our brethren to the north use it the same way.
The fundamental business model of most gyms is to sign up as many members as possible, irrespective of whether those members then attend (that is why you have membership 'contracts', direct debits, etc...)
Hence, gyms are optimised for increasing sign-ups - not for getting you fit. So things look shiny, modern, relaxing, appealing to some imagined lifestyle. Then in reality you end up sitting on your couch eating crisps ('chips' Americans) and feeling guilty.
So there's a silver lining but there's still a cloud.
My observation: the vast majority of those "mostly-large-males" are extremely nice, even if they do sometimes make scary faces while lifting and look like Danny Trejo. If you pick the right gym (typically in lower class neighborhoods), they might even critique your form, which is incredibly valuable.
Most of the very large men have no need to harass random women - all they usually need to do is walk into a bar and say "hello". And I've never met a guy at the gym who would even be tolerant of such harassment, let alone participate.
tl;dr Fitness is too important to let a one-in-a-million bad event deter you. Statistically speaking, your biggest worries are poor fitness > harming yourself due to poor form/bad luck > getting harassed at the gym.
Honestly, I know a lot of VERY big guys who lift a heck of a lot of weight. Without exception, every single one of them is the nicest, most even-tempered, welcoming fellow you could imagine. The stereotype of a angry, musclebound meathead is just that, a stereotype.
If you're really too scared, go find yourself the most convenient Crossfit gym and drop by for a free workout. You'll find that MOST Crossfit gyms are well over 60% female and that there are several women there that are leading a lot of the men in weightlifting and overall athleticism. I'm a guy and I've most definitely been shown up by a lot of the women at my particular box and I'm not alone.
Believe it or not, weightlifting/getting fit is going to make you VERY uncomfortable for non-trivial periods of time. You might as well get used to it. Seeing a whole cadre of women lifting heavy and doing it fearlessly might really do you a lot of good from a psychological perspective.
Greg Glassman always said that the biggest adaptation a Crossfitter experiences is between their ears.
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.
As well, you should exercise 'weak muscles' to avoid injury, for people sitting in front of computers a lot it really helps to exercise the back muscles.
I'm a former endurance athlete and used to train twice a day
Personally I heavily favour cardiovascular fitness over muscular fitness, and would choose the former in a heartbeat (ahaha) if I had to pick one. Currently I cycle and do astanga, though I plan on adding some low-rep strength training to the mix too.
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.
Also, I don't know about you, but I don't personally know anyone in jail, so other than perception that guys in jail are huge, I'm not really sure its true.
Training Behind Bars Pt. 1: http://goo.gl/epno3
Training Behind Bars Pt. 2: http://goo.gl/ppvHU
Easily two of the best articles on T-Nation.
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.
Suffice to say I strongly prefer the real surface.
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.
Running on the ground you push yourself forward. On a treadmill the amount of work you are doing can vary quite a bit by technique (ie. how much contact you are making with the treadmill) because you are not actually propelling yourself.
Mark a dot on the treadmill track.
How is the person moving relative to that dot?
How is the air in the room moving relative to that dot?
That's basically all that can distinguish between running at constant speed on a treadmill vs. on level (non-treadmill) ground.
If you're running 8mph on a treadmill, it's like running 8mph on level ground, with an 8mph tailwind.
How do you fail so badly at physics?
Treadmills have their place - for warming up a bit before some other kind of exercise, or as a replacement when the weather or traveling keeps you indoors - but they just aren't equivalent to real running. 5 minutes on a trail will tell you that.
That said, the treadmill can be a fine tool for training. It allows you to totally ignore weather conditions, and actually for speed workouts it can have the advantage of forcing you to stay on pace. A common rule of thumb is that a 1% incline on the treadmill compensates for the lack of wind resistance.
I can't stand the damn things myself, but there are runners, including some guys I know personally, who train exclusively using the treadmill and still do well in races up to marathon distance (I've never heard of any ultramarathoners who train exclusively on the treadmill).
I get FAR more tired running 2 real miles than 2 "miles" on a treadmill.
On a treadmill, both of your feet are in the air for a significant amount of time, and you're not being carried backwards. Yet, I bet that distance still gets counted.
Also squats will improve your bone density.
Don't be fooled that suffers like Laird get their physique from surfing. All of them dead lift and squat.
The best thing about squats would be that they "insure" your knees for old age.
Do them right and they are easily the best exercise ever invented IMHO.
Having said that, if you "like" some other exercise, like cable chest presses, dumbbell flyes, standing barbell bicep curls, crunches, or whatever, then fine do them (I do), but do so knowing that the Big Three should be the core of your exercise, and whatever else is complimentary.
(I'm a novice, genuinely curious.)
Lots of great info at t-nation.com .
Dumbbell presses are fine. But bench presses are better, and if you do them, you don't need to do dumbbell presses (but do, if you like them, I do too, as a complimentary exercise).
Injuries are nothing to scoff at of course, and you should always make sure to not put on more weight than you can safely manage. Regardless of exercise method.
You need to do pullups if you do benchpresses else you'll have a big chest and weak back muscles. This will pull your shoulders in. And which will eventually lead to injuries. Yo
In fact I've increased my bench by just working my back.
Lots of people only work the "mirror muscles" (ie ones you can see when you check yourself out in the mirror) and this leads to shoulder injuries.
The areas you mention are covered by the dead lifts, especially shoulders and upper back. The bicep is a relatively tiny muscle that we tend to over train because of its "reputation" so to speak, but at a beginner to intermediate level, it really does get enough from just the dead lifts. You might want to re-evaluate that when you can dead lift at least 2x your body weight though.
The thing to do to build biceps without doing curls are pulling motions - rows and pullups.
Thing is that 5k is really really really short distance for a human. I honestly can not be bothered with gym anymore so I just run about 10k a day with longer weekend runs, 5 times a week.
A body which has been doing squats is not going to be a great runner at a professional level.
But at our "weekend warrior" levels it does very much translate. I infact did this exercise on purpose to prove to myself that squats would translate.
And it very much did increase my sprint speed.
Dont take my word for it... Email a few strength coaches - Eric Cressey, Mike Robertson. Ask their opinion.
How fast were you?
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.
There's no way I'd try to pull the rep max on a free barbell that I would on a smith machine, but it says nothing about how effective one or the other is.
It's like the whole internet self defense huff. A billion words written on the technicalities of all the different martial arts but most fights are won by punching the other guy repeatedly hard enough to stop him hitting you. Sure it's not perfect, but its taking action and it gets results.
Why not? So long as you're not being stupid, a spotter and/or the safeties built into the cage/rack or bench should do fine.
From anecdotal experience - the training plan he describes is something I did when I started out mountainbiking and ran straight into a probably best coach in vicinity.
My training program was a lot like the one described in the article - It was longer, but I was too lazy to do all of it - so I landed right where he suggests 3-4 times lifting weights a week. And boy did I get strong. But then I started fiddling out with trendy programs and fuxxored it all. :)
I guess that not using machines wont make such a difference, its more the training regime (reps, measuring your maximum, doing the pyramid). It's just that they are unnecessary.
So there are 3 things I have learned about fitness:
1. Your basic training / off season training should be exactly as described in this article.
2. Most people work out waaay too much.
3. If you are serious about your sport: do interval training twice a week (max).
That's it - that's all are there is. Everything else you can do your sport or whatever.
Not a unique attitude at all. What got me down to the 200 mark though was just joining a gym, pushing out squats / deadlifts / presses (on machines for the first few months), utilizing the trainers, getting some buddies on board, eating less and getting the job done.
Average joe doesn't have room for gear at home, or the motivation to independently structured programs, or they just flat out get intimidated by hanging around training camps or gyms. I don't think there's room to discourage anything that has potential benefit for people.
I wonder if we read the same article?
Overweight people don't need any reason to not turn up a gym or think they know better. Anything that provides benefit is better than nothing. If the entry barrier is signing up to a gym and having a trainer run you through a program, that's pretty low.
If it's finding obscure training venues with hardcore types and being broken down as a weakling (which yeah, works better than anything out there, and it's what I sign up for these days), then people won't touch it with a hundred foot pole.
Most uber-chunkers already feel like shit day in day out without coming up against further entry barriers or reams of information. Just find the closest venue or activity that will make you sweat and do it.
Now I only sport outdoors and for muscle strength I use kettle-bells: http://www.amazon.com/Kettlebell-Strength-Secret-Soviet-Supe...
Just read http://www.amazon.com/Kettlebell-Strength-Secret-Soviet-Supe... and you know enough. No expensive equipment needed and it takes only 3 times 30 to 40 minutes a week to gain considerable strength and cardio!
Here's another anecdote: No lifting weights, only running & cycling and lately swimming. Pretty much the opposite of what the article is arguing. Since I started this I'm doing I'm doing fairly well, six pack included. I went to the gym once, and saw bulked up guys getting 5 pull ups. So I tried that and could easily do 30. Lifting weights may make you look like a bodybuilder, but are you really fit?
The really bulked-up ones most likely train for muscle mass, not for any useful activity.
My second point is that yes, this is an anecdote. So is the article. Don't take either as a scientific inquiry.
As it stands, all you've done is point out that there are different tasks and depending on your target task the ideal body composition and training routine differs.
If you want to be good at pullups you should probably let all your leg muscles atrophy and just build lats and biceps.
Funny thing is that I still could only do 10-20 pushups but they were effortless, completely different then at the time I was slacking.
I think it's also worth noting that not all weight training has the goal of "looking like a bodybuilder."
If you just learn this 'fact', then some of the facts you know about fitness will of necessity be true, consistency willing.
This describes just about every issue of "Mens Health" magazine, by the way.
Last summer I did some arm wrestling with my friend. I lost. I thought what's wrong. I weighed less than my friend, but he didn't do any weight training. So I started looking how to get more strength.
I started doing core strength (Squat, bench press, dead lift, press, power clean, pull-ups). No more machines, biceps curls, calf raises, wrist curls, etc. Also, I started eating much more. With last 2 months I've gained 4kg (8-9lbs). My squat is currently 102.5kg (226lbs), that is ~1.4x of my body weight. I've gained more strength and weight with 2 months than I usually did in a year. And what's most important, now I beat my friend :).
What I actually do: Take walks and do isometrics on convenient bars, poles, etc. Max power, 5-10 second holds, multiple angles. The better I am about those rules, the more progress I make. More effective than any gym I've ever been in.
But don't confuse those results with the results from classic big lifts. Like I said, I do isometrics all the time, but squats, deadlifts, benchpress and pullups are going to develop your musculature in ways isometrics never could.
What I'm doing now is a class lift style of back squats, deadlifts and benchpress 5x5 program for strength. Progress 5 pounds each session (make sure you start very low so you can build up) and end the each session with a circuit of your choosing x 3 (I normally do something like BW to failure of pullups, pushups, dips, plank, bridge/mule kick, ...then break and do it all again). Total workout including warmup takes 45 minutes max (I warm up for about 20 minutes).
This will build tons of muscle and you will gain strength very quickly. Though, make sure you eat right (Paleo) and cut out the crappy foods like grains/glutens/sugars and you will see fantastic results (if you still eat grains and the like, you'll gain weight, but you likely won't lose any fat .... some people call this "shitty weight" akin to drinking 2 gallons of milk a day).
As for me, I prefer the version on one page, with no ads. Clicking "cancel" is not too high a price to pay (for me).
I say cut it, nobody is going to miss it.
I didn't realize how complicated this was until I tried to explain it to my grandparents.
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 generate even modest VO2 max improvements. Ideally it takes 40-60 minutes, five times a week, plus an extra long session of over 90 minutes. This is about the minimum training you'll see in a 5k runner or 1000m swimmer. Top 10k runners generally require 70-90 minutes a day, even when doing interval work and have long runs of over two hours. The results of this sort of training are measurable. LT, VO2max, resting HR and a variety of other metrics show a dose dependent response.
Many studies[1] have also demonstrated that even recreational distance training results in a wide variety of benefits that weight training does not, even including increased rates of neurogenesis and longer telemeres than average for one's age.
Weight training clearly is superior for increasing muscle and bone mass, but it isn't a magical silver bullet that improves everything.
[1] I've cited all of these on hn before, most don't have paywalls and they should be googleable.
"My car broke. No problem. I'll just run 5 miles to work." situation does not occur very often.
Yes, running will make running easier for you. That's great if you play sports. But sports aren't the only time people might get winded. It may be more common here in Asia where people aren't as reliant on cars but I, for example, have to about 20 minutes of walking and several flights of stairs involved in my daily commute. So do most of the other people I see in the subway. I've moved a fridge maybe once in my life and as for your other example... I haven't ever been involved with anyone that heavy. YMMV.
I go out of my house about once a week and I can do that. I don't think running 5km is necessary to achieve it since maximum distance I ran in my life was 1km and after that I was spitting my lungs for longer time than I actually ran.
Even long after leaving serious training behind and getting a bit heavier, I continued to go for a 3-4 hour run in the mountains every other week or so and did shorter runs at least a couple of times a week. As recently as two years ago, I had a resting pulse of 48 BPM. I lived at the top of a 6 floor apartment building. Unlike my guests, I was rarely winded at the top, even going up the stairs with a backpack. I even played pick-up games of basketball in the park after pub crawls with my buddies. It felt like my energy was boundless.
My habits changed after moving to Beijing. The air here isn't so good, so I don't enjoy running anymore. Instead, I've been going to the gym and doing something very similar to what the article recommended, actually! I'm stronger than ever before, squatting about 170kg. I'm not fitter, though. I'm fatter. My resting pulse is up to 70 and while the subway is no problem, several flights of stairs are off-putting. A full-court game of basketball would probably make me feel ill.
I can totally relate to how air quality influences all outdoor sports.
"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.
However, I completely disagree that weights are more important for general fitness than cardio. This was one of the primary claims of the article, and it wasn't backed up in any meaningful way. The part I quoted was just one illustration of the the author's attitude. His entire focus is on strength, not fitness.
I didn't quote the entire paragraph because I figured everyone read it and I just wanted to point out the most objectionable part. However, looking back at the paragraph you quoted, I realized I don't just disagree with the incorrect claim that 20 minutes gets the job done. The claim about bike riding "getting the job done" and treadmills being a poor substitute is also objectionable. Many studies have shown that running generates a higher VO2 rate than biking. This holds true even for tri-athletes, who typically have more cycling than running training. Swimming is much harder to measure, but I sure wouldn't take the author's word for it with all the other unfounded claims in the article.
I could probably find another half-dozen issues with the article and quote them all, but that would make a really long comment, wouldn't it?
You are referring to cardiovascular training which is barely mentioned in the article. He probably shouldn't have mentioned cardio at all except he wanted to make a point that cardio machines shouldn't even be in the gym. You mention routines of running which should be anywhere from 40 minutes to 2 hours, would you do that sort of routine on a treadmill in a gym?
The delta in benefit is not worth a back injury.
At first i followed Stronglift 5x5's advice: start with the bar only, concentrate on proper form for at least 2 weeks and increase the load slightly for each workout. I'm also lucky that there are sport students working as tutors at my university gym. They are taught proper (olympic) weight lifting so I asked them to correct my form if I did the exercises wrong. After that it's like riding a bicycle, once learned you will never forget how to ride.
Either way, the article completely glosses over the "oh, by the way if you do this wrong you will ruin your shit" aspect of squats and deadlifts, which is a pretty compelling argument for machines in my book.
My personal experience (which includes a lovely meniscus blowout during squats) is that even given perfect form, once you get up to heavy weights (2x-3x bodyweight for deads and squats) you are starting to push the limits of your body and need to realize that occasional injury is part of the total picture.
That said, I still stay away from machines. I feel even if you're working with light weights, the balance factor of free weights adds so much more to the workout.
I just hate when someone posts something like this and goes 'Everything You Know Is A Lie!" No, it's not. I just happen to have read this shit eight years ago, and that was late already.
Also haven't heard it mentioned yet so I'll share some other good ideas for the geeks. One is to move about a mile or two from work ... arrive every morning refreshed instead of cursing traffic. Two, take up salsa dancing and chat up the hot latinas. Three, get a cheap bike and ride the local hills. Catching a beautiful sunset with a view is a fantastic reward. Also helps me catch up with my podcasts.
Don't get me wrong, I still try to eat healthy (and I'm lucky to live in San Francisco where there are more healthful options). But, the nice thing about exercise is that you only have to make ONE DECISION every day. And that is to do it. Once it's done, it's done. And it's not too hard to find a fitness activity you really enjoy doing, plus the endorphin rush you get from a good workout is amazing. When you build exercise into your lifestyle as a healthy habit, it's not even a decision anymore, it's automatic.
I'd much rather live a healthy lifestyle with a daily (or almost daily) fitness routine than to painstakingly count calories or awkwardly ask the waiter to 'hold the bun, please, and remove the excess butters, sugars, fats, and salts..' every time I go out to eat. That just makes it awkward for you and everybody else.
Additionally, I've been doing deadlifts, and just this weekend I pulled a muscle in my back doing 245 lbs (and no, I was not rounding my back).
As you can tell, I am becoming hugely dissatisfied with these so-called "core" exercises. I haven't seen much improvement from them at all, and I've only ever gotten injuries from them.
For squats, you should make sure to go parallel and "sit back" at the bottom of the movement, while pushing your knees out to the sides as you go down. This takes the stress of the weight off of your knees and onto your posterior chain. Otherwise you'll get hurt knees just as you described.
Not sure what could cause that deadlift problem, other than maybe trying to lift with your back before the bar clears your knees (which until that point your legs should be doing most of the lifting).
FWIW, it took me a long time to really get comfortable with my technique in the heavy compound exercises, but I've seen remarkable gains from them once I learned proper technique.
If you're really serious about doing the core exercises with proper technique, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Mark Rippetoe's "Starting Strength" book. It goes into great detail the correct technique and mechanics behind the exercises.
For a massively-super-summary: that's all they said, in 6 pages.
The rest of it is a lengthy exposition about how his motivating force was someone who told him how pathetic he was, made him realize it instead of just hear it, and then made him do the above.
Just go out there, experiment and see what works for you.
The big news here, is that there are many kinds of such mental fog. You can read this article and learn how to get fit more effectively, but there is an even deeper lesson here.
Of course, stretching in and of itself can (and should) be done as an excellent standalone workout!
It's body-weight only, unlike gyms no machines, unlike crossfit no other weights.
BENEFIT: keep travelling without buying equipment you don't want to carry in your luggage. Don't maintain x gym memberships around the world.
It burns fat (don't really need that too much yet) faster and more efficiently in less time than hours doing aerobic running / swimming / cycling would. Aerobic exercises may be good for heart and lungs, but for calory burning they're laughable.
BENEFIT: muscle building and calory burning in one workout.
(Of course, if you wanna look like The Hulk you'll need to have weights at least kettlebell dumbell or indian clubs, daily protein counting and all the bodybuilding stuff. BUT you will look incredibly impressive with just bodyweight / Tacfit after only 20-30 days of good form, and it only gets better from there -- you even retain a good amount of the goodness after pausing from it up to 2 months afterwards, which a longer hospital attendance may force upon you).
No rep-counting, time-under-tension matters. This matches your bodily clockworks. Your muscles don't count reps either. Time under tension, whether you only get 2 reps under perfect form (important) or 20.
BENEFIT: no counting, just stopwatch.
There are no off-days, you cycle through 4 consecutive days (no intensity day 1: 20 mins, low intensity day 2: 20 mins, moderate intensity day 3: 40 mins, high intensity day 4: 40 mins) all the time. After 4x7 days, it is time to level up, adding sophistication, more challenging movements etc. to keep the body from adapting. TacFit in my view is a pretty unique mix of exercises and movements recombining elements of martial arts, yoga, classical bodyweight exercises and more, that help you on joint mobility, flexibility, core strength, muscle building, posterior improvement and both injury prevention and proofing -- all in a pre-defined package that will last you 9 months in a row without having to customize, modify or tweak the program. Afterwards, add weights, take 5 days off and start from scratch, mix or match, etc.
BENEFIT: minimum time investment gets you results in all areas that matter, including but not limited to mere appearance and looks.
Boy I sound like a marketer but this is really hacker-friendly, entrepreneur-friendly, productive-but-time-pressed-busy-person friendly. It revolves around so much research and experimentation done by the coaches who composed this after decades of experience. They're on Facebook, real people giving sensible advice to everyone and anyone dropping by asking questions. They get 70-80 year old people incredibly fit that couldn't survive neither a gym nor a crossfit session. (But rest assured their exercises are not granny material, they will kick your butt no matter your stage of physical development.) I'm seriously impressed with their stuff. You can browse my past comments here over the last 3 years, I'm not usually writing marketing copy for commercial digital goods around here at all. So this is really simply "everything I need to know about fitness" and I really do think it's the most hacker-suitable option out there.
Maybe better to start from here:
http://www.rmaxinternational.com/forum
The TacFit coaches are also RMAX coaches or somehow connected but sell their own TacFit creation under their own label it seems.
1. Do something you like. This way you stick to it. 2. Don't overthink it, if you are just doing fitness for your health. There is not such thing like a perfect fat burning workout, etc. 3. My ideas don't count if you are an athlete who wants to improve on performance.
No go out and do something, dont read this crappy article
smashes forehead, why has everyone been keep this a secret for so long :)
To keep the analogy from the original post, do you trust a first year CS student to tell you the best way to learn coding? That student finally had a competent teacher and went from zero to writing a lisp compiler in C. What he doesnt realize is so did every other first year college CS student, and they may have had an entirely different curriculum and experience. And they are all at the beginning of a journey, not the end.
If the article were written by a pro athlete, for example, that had experimented with lots of different fitness regimes over that course of a life in which he was clearly successful in being fit, I would take it a lot more seriously, just as I would be more interested in hearing about the best methods of learning to write commercial applications from long-time practitioners that had trained many teams over the years in production environments.
So, in the analogy, I guess it would be for people who have tried to learn to code but couldn't get past basic syntax , and coders who are always chasing the latest language/platform but never really learned the fundamentals...? The analogy might be starting to fail at this point.
And in the end the author was vastly more fit than the majority of people trying to be fit. The majority of people trying to be fit go to the gym once in a while, do a few cardio exercises, and go home. He was among them before meeting with this guy. He's still well below a lot of people, like professional athletes, but the people he is still below only represent a small fraction of the population.
I get your point though. He still can't say whether or not his trainer is the best or if his ideas are the best. What he can say, though, is that his trainers ideas are much better than those of the typical gym trainer at a franchise gym. This article is clearly not targeted at Michael Phelps. It's targeted at the average gym-goer.
What? Everything I know about physiology and the effects of cold exposure make me believe that this is the opposite of the truth.
Ten years of doing this professionally led to shoulder/neck problems, culminating in a pinched nerve between my C6 and C7 vertebrae. It improved with physical therapy, but was never truly fixed, and has bothered me off and on for two years now, despite my adherence to the therapist's rubber band and stretching routine.
I heard through a relative about "Upper Cross Syndrome". Whether that's specifically what I have or not, I don't know, but the symptoms match quite well. Read about it, and you'll probably see that it perfectly describes so many tech people:
http://www.active.com/fitness/Articles/Avoid_upper_cross_syn...
Exercise 6, "External rotation top to bottom" has literally changed my life, and it did so within the first week. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I maintain proper posture at the keyboard (and while walking around). I still get nerve issues if I spend too many days in a row at the computer, but I can't describe to you how much better I feel now than I did after physical therapy!
http://www.mensjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/picture-81.jpg
I find that maintaining the posture that my 8th grade typing teacher enforced is solving all of my neck issues. It's just difficult to maintain awareness of posture when I'm concentrating really deeply on a bit of code or documentation. Weight training helps me overcome the changes to my musculature that occurred from a lifetime of such computer use.
Incidentally, my sister, who is obese, wants to take your plan one step further by going to the treadmill desk. I'm told that there is no problem interacting with stationary desk items after a period of adjustment.
I find the idea of a treadmill desk very interesting. I bet that would really help lose weight and keep one in shape.
While that will help, I would not call someone who exercises at that level "fit" or "in shape". I'd call him something less than out of shape.
There are a lot of weight-lifting people who have convinced themselves that weights are the key, and that aerobic exercise is an afterthought.
Here's the funny thing, though: how many fat weight-lifters have you met in your life? I've known plenty.
How many fat runners have you ever met?
That is to say, fitness + good eating = many years of happy hacking
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.
Besides, the energy benefits right now and the impact that has on how much you can hack is far more easily noticed than the potential lifespan differences.
It just takes too much energy to go hard enough to achieve big things, I wouldn't even consider it practical if you don't have some degree of physical fitness.
Stuff like Muay Thai and Karate's pretty good too.
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 assumption that your sarcasm was intended to hide the fact that you yourself are ashamed of your fitness. You can't hide behind your profession, your job or your peers. You are the reason you are unfit, unhealthy, eat badly and don't exercise. There truly is no-one else to blame.
But since you're here I assume you have a desire to change the world somehow, so I truly hope you're able to get past any shame and fear you may feel and do something about your problem.
If a feeling of inadequacy is not the problem, they you need to socialize more with hackers... Being a slob in the basement went out the window with the Apple Lisa and Gen X having hair.
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.
You do have a point. Conformity is not the way. But, at the same time, I'm sad you feel those things are boring. Allow me to explain.
I used to be in your shoes, at least in the fitness aspect. I was a bit of a curmudgeon who'd figured life out at age 24 and decided that I'd be happy programming for, well, ever. That worked well until about age 27, when it started to wear thin. Deadlines, feature creep, a billion new technologies...who cares? It was losing its luster quickly. When I turned 28, I came down with carpal tunnel-like symptoms stemming from an overuse injury. I had to leave my job to give my body time to heal. I learned the hard way that I had to respect my body, and respect myself more.
The time I've put in on fitness has enhanced the rest of my life a disproportionate amount. I'm much smarter about what I eat, and I feel better, and I sleep so much better now. Because the sleep is higher quality, I don't need as much of it. I awaken ready to engage the day, rather than slinking through it. The secret of this is that the body was never meant to be disconnected from the mind. The two are engaged in an continual feedback loop whereby one is reinforcing the actions of the others with beliefs/chemicals. You just need to gently prod the two into better habits in order to feel better.
As for people, well, that's what life's all about.
I'm still happy to eat out with friends, mind you.So I suppose you could say I became more aware of what I was eating, rather than remaining apathetic about it.
I hate to break it to you man, but we're all normal people around here.