A little exercise each day improves muscles more than one big weekly workout

Saying stuff like 'we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories' is a pretty bad take if you ask me. Contrasting that immediately with 'a body builder prepping for a show' is just ridiculous. One is good advice to form part of a healthy lifestyle, the other is a way of life for a tiny group of professional athletes.

There goes more into a healthy diet than just eating lots of whole foods - although whole foods are obviously awesome and healthy. Notice that the linked article compares two groups eating processed and processed with the one eating the processed foods eating 500 more calories a day. They don't gain weight magically but because they ate the less satiating food and as a result ate more calories.

And simply saying 'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' is such a weird take. Have you ever considered that some people enjoy going to the gym? On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises. In the end it is up to the individual to chose the lifestyle that they enjoy, so please stop selling your personal favorite as if any other choices 'are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere'. I very much enjoy my time spend at the gym, thank you very much.

This is just plain false. You can “focus” on eating whole foods and if you consume more calories than you burn you will gain weight. If you consume less calories than you burn you will lose weight. The science has not changed on this point. No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight.

As for the calories debate, all i can say here is that evidence is needed for some of these claims you and your article have made. I'm seeing links to quotes and videos but no real evidence that a calorie is not a calorie. If the point they're clumsily trying to make is that practically speaking you cannot track every single calorie in your day-to-day existence then yes i would agree with that but no one who tracks calories would tell you their goal is 100% accuracy. It all comes out in the wash over averages.

That said, I do not think most people need to track their calories if they just want to be at a healthy bodyweight. Merely eating whole foods and adhering to the guidelines above should get them there just fine. This is not the same thing as saying a calorie isn't a calorie.

[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/336656/9789...

I totally agree, for the record. For the majority of people counting calories and recording reps isn't something they'll be interested in doing their entire lives, any more than they'd be interested in updating new device drivers and reflashing their OS if an easier, brainless alternative existed. And it does! Walk, bike, or run a little bit every day; eat less carbs than you'd prefer, and try to eat more vegetables than you would otherwise. I'm no expert whatsoever, but I've travelled all over the world and that advice seems to be the only constant amongst all the healthiest people I've seen.

You do what works for you, others should do what works for them.

The people I know on that list would absolutely agree with this. E.g. Mike Israetel from Renaissance Periodization; he'll often say that one of the best ways to lose weight is to try to get your step count up, e.g. move around more in the day, without necessarily doing formal exercise. The best thing is that you can be running around doing "chores" or whatever, and this will help with your weight loss goals and get more stuff done during the day.

That said, the question is, as always, what are your goals. If your goals are to be healthier, that requires a very different approach than if your goal is to, e.g., look more muscly, bodybuilder style. They're not completely incompatible goals, at least for novices, but they are different goals. Some strength training and cardio, with an emphasis on maintaining a body fat percentage <20%, is probably the best for maximizing long term health.

This is it for me, absolutely. I've always been a bike commuter, so that was my cardio for decades— 10x 20min bike ride to and from work each week, year round. When I lost the commute with pandemic WFH, I fairly quickly shot up 15lbs.

The journey back was in finding ways that I could recreationally get that same experience, which for me has been a combination of walks, distance cycling, and lane swimming. All of these are things I enjoy for their own sake, and are great mental health resets. They're also things I can do with others, so there's that little bit of accountability woven into it as well. I'm not really watching what I eat, though I did cut out a bunch of snacking (especially at bedtime), and I switched my breakfast to a protein smoothie.

Now I'm down 30lbs+ from my pandemic high, and probably the best shape I've been in since my early twenties.

Whole foods work well because they tend to hit the calorie and nutrient milestones without much tracking being necessary, but we only know that because other people have done the tracking for us.

I think the information these people put out should be used to inform a lifestyle that one constructs, not to construct it directly.

People get obese on "whole foods" just fine if they do not count calories. For some it is not needed since they live physically active life and naturally do not eat all that much. Yet others can barely fit in their cars on the same food.

I fully agree. If some of that fun actually involves going to the gym, then great. But there are a lot of "play" activities which are compelling and fun while also making you healthier. Sports is an obvious one, and dancing is a less obvious one.

One hour of salsa dancing (with breaks and partner changes) is a good cardio exercise which is also lots of fun. And as or more importantly, the mental and emotional boost is something many of us need more than bigger muscles. I like both.

Modern man so screwed even if everything is done right.

If you're going to eat processed junk food, you should at least eat less of it. That's step 1.

Meanwhile, most of us find ourselves in a shitty current situation where a healthy diet and a healthy level of activity feel weird and counterintuitive to us, and we have to trust reason and evidence to guide us to a healthy way of living, despite deeply engrained aversions, deeply engrained compulsions to engage in unhealthy behavior, and powerful external forces arrayed against us.

For people who are unhappy with where they're at and are looking for answers, telling them that there's an easy healthy way to live that caters to their current desires and aversions sends them on a lifelong journey of being disappointed by one set of false promises after another.

A more honest thing to tell them is that their life up to this point, their experiences, the norms they grew up with, the food ecology of the world around them, has warped their perceptions to the point that what is actually good for their body will feel unpleasant and psychologically unsettling. The unvarnished truth, which you might not want to dump on them right at the beginning, is that at times it will be fucking miserable. It's analogous to having a substance abuse disorder. Many, many times the only choice that feels comfortable and natural is the one that physically harms you, and resisting the compulsion to harm yourself feels awful. It can feel sad and scary not to eat every single donut in the break room, even if you've already had a generous healthy breakfast. At times like that, the "if it isn't easy, you're doing it wrong" message comes off like an unfeeling flex, like telling a depressed person to just snap out of it.

People may stigmatize difficult lifestyle changes as "restrictive" or "joyless" or "unrealistic," but it's not the fault of the lifestyle itself. It's the fault of what you've been fed your whole life and what the world continues to shove in your face and dangle in front of you every day. It doesn't kill joy not to eat cake. It kills joy to say no to cake eight times a day while a billion dollar industry wages war against your efforts to care for yourself by constantly reminding you of the momentary pleasure and relief you will feel if you give in, and people who care about you unwittingly act as their accomplices in all the spaces that are supposed to be safe for you.

> https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...

People who work in public health are not giving advice to help you make a significant change in your life. They are giving advice that will do the most good for the most people, which realistically means moving the needle a tiny bit. That's what they're shooting for. They don't expect you to succeed at living a healthy life. They expect you to be overweight and to live a lifestyle that makes metabolic disease a likelihood, because the societal context is stacked against us. They've accepted that their power to help people currently struggling with their health is limited to changing a fraction of a percent here and there, and to achieve significant results we need to focus on changing the context for the next generation. Which we do need to do, but meanwhile, if you don't want to write yourself off as a victim of the times, don't let people tell you that easy is the only healthy way. You won't regret doing your best to take care of yourself, even if it's a struggle and you can't pretend it's easy like everyone tells you it's supposed to be.

As a new (but middle aged) CS student I think this could be a fun way to encourage my fellow students and myself to exercise more between study sessions.

It's a bit of a PR problem to say positive things about them, and it feels. The consensus, the one we get to hear, is pretty clear: they work very well, but they have side effects that make using them a bad idea. And I actually trust this consensus.

Unfortunately, what I don't see is obvious next steps like "ok, so how about we lower the dose and see if there's a useful dosage without long term side-effects". Or "how about we try to test if a certain person has risk factors to side effects" and so on. That kind of conversation is unfortunately... well, not verbotten, but at least self-censored.

Anyways, this is just intellectual curiosity. I'm not into bodybuilding enough to try, and tbh I actually doubt they're using it either. It'd be too much like cheating - the whole point is to find out what works, and everybody knows steroids work so there's nothing to find out there.

Steroids a fact of life in strength sports and not even really considered cheating, as long as you compete in "untested" divisions. Training for a top-level competition is not the same as exercising for health, even if you don't take PEDs. The people doing it consider it an acceptable tradeoff.

This video on counteracting the myriad harms from excessive sitting is particularly relevant to the HN audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqcOCBb4arc

As always, experiment and adjust

When I do pause, I can stop and do a few pushups. It helps me focus a bit better, and there's no context loss because I'm not doing or thinking about anything new. It's not much different from leaning back in my chair to think for a minute.

You can do a huge body recomp with just push-ups + pull-ups. You just have to do them.

After two weeks of 40 or so push ups a day it’s incredibly unlikely you’ve gained muscle mass in your chest (or at least not noticeable) what you are probably seeing is increased water retention in the muscles and other associated exercise related side affects.

I’m a fairly muscley guy and if I stop working out for a couple of weeks I look “flatter” when I’m training regularly my muscles look fuller and rounder after a week or so back at it.

True muscle gains take a lot of time.

Both of those turned out to be huge fallacies. I'm 40 now and not very serious about working out, but I do it reliably (on an irregular schedule) and I don't target specific muscles etc to try to make myself look a certain way. The result is that I am just plain healthier and feel great. That has many second order effects.

And 10 reps is not low reps either. It's on the upper end of what people usually use in their workouts.

When training for muscle size the important thing is to fatigue the muscle itself, which is easier to do with 5-20 reps, maybe 30 at the most if exercising small muscles.

Regarding "low reps", that usually refers to sets of 1-3 reps very close to your maximum potential. Once you go above 5 reps or so, the risk of injury is much lower. There are lots of beginner programs using sets of 5 reps, and people aren't getting injured left and right on those.

One way to measure perceived exertion is how many additional reps you think you can do - if you're doing 10 reps at a weight where you can only do 10, then you're obviously at some risk of having worse form / injury; if you're doing 10 reps at a weight that you can lift 12-15 times, you'll probably get stronger, if you're doing 10 reps at a weight you can lift 25-30 times, you likely won't make a lot of progress.

Also train less.

Yet strength and mass have gone up.

50lbs is only just over the weight of the bar anyway. Weakness is never a strength.

When I re-scanned myself after about 2 years off, I had gained quite a bit of fat and lost muscle in most places, but gained muscle in my arms/upper body. I felt notably stronger from carrying her (and her growing older sister) and that confirmed it.

Westside was a very specific training methodology, and neurological adaptations matter, and Louie cared a lot more about performance in competition (which has a fair amount to do with one's mental state) than whatever the science says.

Supercompensation is a real thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=supercompensation+strength+w...

That is -- a period of NO or virtually no activity for a week can actually increase performance above the peak for a small window where your body has had time to repair the muscular damage but the neurological adaptations haven't faded. Two weeks is just about the end of that window, but it's completely at odds with what Louie believed.

Louie and or the Conjugate Method have absolutely nothing to do with Abadjhiev or the Bulgarian/Soviet methods, despite whatever his claims are. The Soviets/Bulgarians never used any of the things Conjugate is known for (bands, chains) or the periodization. Those nations focused on the classic/olympic lifts, or the sport of "weightlifting". Bands and chains are antithetical to everything they'd do there.

Bulgarian was, specifically: snatch or clean to a max for the day, do 5 singles, drop 10% and do 3 triples || drop 5% and do 3 doubles, do a power/hang/block variant of the lift you didn't do earlier, same scheme but higher reps, some squat variant (front/back), some pull variant (snatch/clean).

For the vast majority of people -- those who are not training for competition, or those who are not training to compete at an elite level -- all of this is useless and borderline counterproductive. Competing in (or training to compete in) a sport WILL eventually cause injuries.

The best advice you can give to people is "find something in the gym you enjoy enough to keep you going until it becomes a routine", because after 5+ years, if you're not aiming to win medals/break records (locally, state-level, nationally, whatever), the best overall outcomes will be from those who stayed in the gym, and getting injured is a big deterrent to that.

that's probably not because of muscle mass loss, but body doesn't conserve glycogen, because think it doesn't need anymore, and this is fixable with 2-3 trainings.

I've found stretching also is important prior to exercise.

That said, I imagine you also aren't making a habit of it. Maybe training every day and then accidentally taking a week off give you some recuperation you didn't realize you needed.

You can earn money without a 9-5. Hell, a person can just have money and not need to earn it.

You can't get fit or maintain fitness without putting in the work.

That's part of the reason it's so valued, there is no cheat code.

> I'm here for no reason. Now that I'm here, I'll optimize happiness while creating as little harm as possible to others.

Same, but I enjoy having my bodily maintenance, and the semi-sculpted look I've achieved. Different people will have different fitness goals.

If you're happy (can have a good life) not being fit, you can just follow advice that will not make you fit.

If you're unhappy not being fit, then it is essential to fix that, because unless you are a depressive it is essential to fix any fixable issues that are making you unhappy.

(I didn't know TRX is a brand name too - but I mean the suspension training in general...)

I.e., just exercising on the weekends may be enough to live longer, but spreading weight training out throughout the week is more effective for muscle growth than the equivalent sum of the training on the weekend only.

when I stop working out for several days in a row (like on travel), I'm always sore after the first workout upon resumption (whereupon I'll usually skip the next day, then be back to normal)

tl;dr: feels like conditioning can help with soreness

I also jump between the hot tub and pool a few times for 15-20 minutes after every workout, so maybe that's a bit of recovery (in addition to getting enough protein before and after the workout)

It’s probably connected with muscle protein synthesis which in trained people peak in 24 hours and basically goes back to basal level after 72 hours [1]

After that, without exercise, all gained muscle growth starts to negate.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1474228/

If there are any real complaints for strength sports (I've done strongman as well) are the high usages of PEDs. Not that I am against people using them but it makes it difficult to have apples to apples comparison, particularly when competing.

If someone wants to do an ultra wide sumo DL or quarter squat 500 pounds how does that effect you?

By far the biggest difference is between the unfit and the moderately fit. Just start slow, take it easy and do something. Doing yoga four hours a week beats no exercise by a lot.

I also walk 3 miles, every morning. It helps the old ticker to keep ticking. I used to run, but kept injuring myself, resulting in long breaks.

Because I can certainly agree that whenever you know what you are doing and have a task that needs to be done hammering it out all at once is much better than splitting it up and doing parts of it each day. Now imagine you have to study for a python test coming up in 2 weeks as an absolute begginer beginner and you have the option of looking at stuff in 30min chunks per day or 3.5 hours per day all at once. Which option would you pick?

Sports https://sportscienceinsider.com/massed-vs-distributed-practi...

Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_practice

that, and I'm really impatient, and the 30-minute workout 6-7 times a week gets me results faster than the same workout less frequently would