Examples of Barbell Strategies | Hacker News Reader

Examples of Barbell Strategies

dwarkeshpatel.com

51 pointsjger1524 comments

> Instead of meditating twenty minutes every day and getting marginally better over time, spend 10 days every year at a meditation retreat making giant leaps towards enlightenment, and just live your life for the other 355.

Hehe, if only meditation & enlightenment actually worked that way. A lot of things worth practicing or doing are much more effective done 20 minutes per day and not in sparse lump sums. It’s like saying don’t work out or train, just run a marathon twice a year. Exercise, meditation, learning new things, playing music, even writing code, are all activities where consistent practice will unlock big long term goals. Trying to optimize away the day-to-day work by consolidating it is counter-productive.

“Barbell Strategy” is a hedge against rising interest rates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbell_strategy), so what reasons are there to think it applies to any other topics where we don’t even have something analogous to interest rates?

Yeah that’s a crazy one. I think the appropriate barbell strategy is to meditate 10 minutes a day and go on a 5 day meditative practice. But most of the benefit probably comes from the 10 minutes per day.

Something about 0 minutes leads to decay for human habits.

This is certainly one extreme way to organize your life.

If I had to pick what I think is the most important of the reasons that this isn't going to work for most people, it's probably that most people live their lives in a certain default rhythm and with a certain default temperament.

Win the lottery? Experience a tragedy? After a few months or years you'll return to your baseline.

Most successful and well established life advice seems to try to help one methodically improve that baseline, little by little.

I don't think whiplashing back and forth between extremes is going to be very sustainable for most people.

Please bear in mind this post is OPs speculation and some of this advice goes against well established strategies e.g. spaced repetition for learning.

OK, I went looking for workout strategies but this is something else.

Yeah I was expecting a list like linear progression, periodization, bro-split etc.

Though I do like the concept, but as someone who tends to hyperfocus its something I already do anyway. One I didn’t see mentioned is learning cooking different cuisines by buying all the local ingredients you can and cooking only that kind of food for weeks or months. It works way better than trying to make a dish here or there.

Squat, deadlift, bench, overhead press with good form, heavy enough so you can do 3 sets of 5 repetitions and just barely finish the last two.

Do this 2-3x a week.

This is not great advice, according to what we know from both the research literature and people who are successful in (and successful coaches of) barbell sport. Namely, it's too much intensity, and not enough variety and volume.

One good reference to learn more is https://www.strongerbyscience.com/complete-strength-training..., and other articles on that site.

It's good advice for a novice (it's the Starting Strength program) because it's easy to remember and stick with. It's true it will only take you so far, and you will eventually need a more nuanced program depending on your goals.

The original poster did not have the "for a novice" qualifier.

Right… anyone who wasn’t a novice, by definition, has their own routine/program.

Greatly depends on your definition. In the communities I frequent "novice" means a strategy like that will still get you progression. There are also a lot of people complaining about having plateaued or even regressing but still sticking to non-periodized programs, i.e. they're intermediates trying to train like novices.

IMO the period through which SS is appropriate is shorter than the period over which it's effective. It's altogether too common for people to come to the conclusion that weight on the bar is the only progression that matters. Something like a double progression is almost as simple and at least introduces the idea that there are other dimensions that are worth progressing in. The other thing is that because novices can improve session to session, they can go a long time where they're legitimately close to their 5 rep max but don't have the practice to maintain good technique especially through the later sets, and end up ingraining bad practice.

That eventuality of needing a more nuanced program comes before most novices realize it, and definitely before SS starts running out of steam.

>One good reference to learn more is https://www.strongerbyscience.com/complete-strength-training..., and other articles on that site.

The site's author seems to have really done the research, but man he really needs to spend a bit more effort converting all that research into a one or two page summary. I just want to know what the most effective training strategy is, not when my tendon elasticity is dropping.

Not if you're trying to build mass

That is a recipe for a variety of nagging injuries, at best, that will almost certainly get exacerbated.

Exercising only highly-restricted movements by themselves looks nice on a training log, but isn't really effective.

Heck, I've long suspected that a person could get a significant benefit just from deadlifts alone. Works basically all the muscles.

No, I'm not really advocating that as a real plan. No, this is not backed up by expertise. Just an observation that deadlifts are super simple and yet manage to work damn near every muscle from the neck down.

If you are beginner, the simple program works ("starting strength"). Just ignore the critique for 2months/year and focus on technique + linear progression. It is much simpler to get gains than the critics want you to believe. Here's good summary for nutrition, training intensity, volume https://youtu.be/EbfdMaV7qqM

I didn't assume it was about working out but I don't even get the barbell analogy. Working with a barbell is something that demands effort and control, and slowly, steadily working up in weight and/or repetition depending on your goals. It's is not at all "lay on the couch all week and then lift 500lb on Sunday"

There's weights on either end of a barbell but nothing in the middle. The barbell strategy is likewise about seeking the extremes (the ends) and avoiding the middle.

It's a reference to the shape of the barbell. Like how the "bathtub curve" (a common experience in organizations that have a years-long hiring freeze) is not about bathtubs, but the shape of the curve (lots of young people, lots of old people, and almost no one in the middle).

"Instead of meditating twenty minutes every day and getting marginally better over time, spend 10 days every year at a meditation retreat making giant leaps towards enlightenment, and just live your life for the other 355."

The premise was good (applying barbell outside of the finance world) but the benefits of some activities don't come from a one off effort.

>> swipe until your fingers ache (physical training necessary to prepare you for future success).

Hah. Sure, why not throw some bad sex advice in with the other half-baked nonsense.

Just because someone showed you a hammer doesn't make everything a nail.

From the examples given barbell strategy only work on very select things

Reply on news.ycombinator.com