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It's true, a perfect training and exercise regimen will include increasing loads. But given the general sorry state of fitness and health I see daily on the streets, getting people to understand that ANY exercise, even as little as 7 minutes a day, is beneficial will go along ways towards making people healthier and stronger.

"Then progressive resistance is required. Simply adding reps does not increase strength past initial accommodation."

But initial accommodation for many people might be 6 months. I have trainees who struggle to squat past parallel for weeks or months, who can't do a Tabata cycle of more than 8 squats and who struggle to do real pushups after weeks of training. The base level of fitness for most people is so abysmal that getting them to understand the benefits of 7 minutes of high intensity exercise can be life changing. Sure, to be truly strong, you're going to have to eventually lift heavy weights but for majority of the people out there, a simple body weight routine will give them an amazing fitness boost.

Any exercise is better than no exercise. For years, people have thought they needed to spend hours at the gym to lose weight when in fact, solid nutrition combined with short intense workouts can in fact lead to enhanced strength and fitness. When the baseline is so low, anything is helpful.

A key advantage of barbell and dumbbell exercises is that they can be progresively loaded in small increments. Bodyweight exercises tend to have larger jumps in difficulty.

Most of the most popular weights programs for beginners are linear progressions. You literally add a fixed amount to each exercise, each session, until you can't. Folk are amazed at how quickly they can progress from struggling with a bar to squatting their own bodyweight.

I totally agree with you. But I think of exercise programs like the described blog post as the gateway drug to real strength. For most people, the idea of getting into a strength program is intimidating in the same way that doing a waltz in front of 200 people is. But if you can get someone dancing in their kitchen, eventually they might turn to real lessons with real instructors.

If I can get people doing 7 minute exercise routines in their living room, eventually they will see the results and want more which leads them to the next step, a true strength program.

Furious agreement!

I feel differently: that training at home makes it easier to give up. "Oh, I'll just sit on the couch for a minute. Hmm, I'll just check facebook for a second".

A gym, meanwhile, is an environment dedicated to training.

Still, we're both spitballing. Each trainee has their own path to exercise. I would prefer to put them onto something that won't run out of room to improve within a month or two.

The way I see it you should treat it like any other UX problem: The user is going to be at home anyways, so if you can get a "conversion" (even a short 7-minute one) that can easily bridge them into the next step. Just like video games start you off in tutorial levels and help you develop the skills you need (e.g. Mega Man X [1]).

For example I tried out the 7-minute exercise simply because I could, it was easy. If I can't even be bothered to spend 7 minutes on exercise there's no way I'm going to the gym, so it's not as if the short exercises are interfering with work at the gym.

[1] http://youtu.be/8FpigqfcvlM?t=5m53s

The problem with bodyweight training is that there's no smooth gradient from wall sits to, say, pistol squats. The difficulty increases lumpily and frequently requires a new motor pattern to be learnt.

Whereas going from a 20kg squat to a 100kg squat can be done 1kg at a time with the same movement pattern throughout.

For people who genuinely can't or won't go to a gym, I'd first suggest installing a power cage, adjustable bench, barbell and some plates. Failing that kettlebells and resistance bands. Only after those are exhausted would I suggest a purely bodyweight training regimen.

Totally agree on the casual thing. I don't even think it takes a full 7 minutes. It can be done in much less.

I don't agree on "true strength", whatever that may be. I don't care to be any stronger than I am, frankly. I can pull myself up anything; I can easily lift my dates. I don't need to impress on the beach. And I don't enjoy gyms, I'd rather do something else. So "getting strong" really isn't on my priority list.

> Bodyweight exercises tend to have larger jumps in difficulty.

What's worse is that the exercise actually changes. So you're doing a exercise that requires more strength, that you haven't and cannot practice at a lower level of difficulty.

When the baseline is so low, anything is helpful.

Spot-on. People think they need to throw themselves into a weight-lifting program, or P90x, or crossfit, or running 5 miles a day. It's all garbage unless they can develop a habit and see personal gains. All this method requires is a timer, a room, and a chair, which makes for a much less intimidating introduction to fitness.

> It's true, a perfect training and exercise regimen will include increasing loads. But given the general sorry state of fitness and health I see daily on the streets, getting people to understand that ANY exercise, even as little as 7 minutes a day, is beneficial will go along ways towards making people healthier and stronger.

This is what is wrong with "fitness" today - the harder you work out the more "bad ass" you are, and the fitness-is-my-hobby crowd are notorious for their "go hard or go home" attitude (yes, massive generalization here). And since these people are the go-to 'experts', people who only want to not-suck when it comes to fitness probably get easily discouraged because there is a real and tangible barrier to entry: you have to "work out" which means to go to the gym, or go to the park and jog, go home, shower... while for some people, simply some more activity would be better than nothing. Simply walking more, or doing the odd push ups during down times.

But evidently - that is not good enough. Go hard or I will make you feel worthless for not being as dedicated as me.

"the idea that you can achieve any kind of serious strength gain through high repetition circuit training is, frankly, a joke."

I guess the joke's on all the extremely fit, strong people who do yoga, then.

(I've personally gained strength and muscle mass doing yoga, and when I looked at this routine, I saw most of the poses in a basic vinyasa class. Seven minutes is perhaps a bit aggressive, but the exercises do work. The notion that you can only get intensity with weights is the obviously silly one. All you really need for a good workout is your body, and maybe a mat.)

I'm sorry to tell you that you are terribly misinformed.

Athletes get stronger with yoga, because improved flexibility helps them to do compound exercises with better form, and that allows them to activate the correct muscle groups for better leverage. In other words, they have the same muscle mass - they can just activate those muscles more effectively. This is most likely what happened to you, unless you were so unfit when you began yoga that even simple poses worked the hell out of your muscles.

It's a bummer to be terribly misinformed, but I'll take my own muscle mass gains as a consolation prize. We can't have everything, I guess.

It's good that you got stronger (for the reasons I explained). But unless you are doing some hardcore yoga, it is extremely unlikely that you actually gained muscle mass. (As proof, you can look at any long-term yoga instructor who wasn't muscular to begin with.)

Or, you know...as proof, I can use the gains I've measured in my own body.

No, that can't be it...

I addressed this in my original post:

"unless you were so unfit when you began yoga that even simple poses worked the hell out of your muscles."

I was not unfit when I began yoga.

Okay, so let's get down to specifics. Two questions:

1. How did you measure your lean muscle mass? 2. How did you conclude that it increased due to yoga and not something else?

Which are? Genuinely curious.

I don't see people using yoga alone to win powerlifting contests or Olympic medals in weightlifting. That makes me suspect that perhaps yoga's ability to elicit strength adaptations is limited by leverage and bodyweight.

Edit: I agree with you that weights are not the only way to elicit adaptation. But they're easy to scale up in small increments and a lot of the movements don't require much in the way of skill acquisition.

I have no doubt that you have gained significant strength doing yoga. It should be noted that the poses in yoga do involve holding bodyweight, and the increasing complexity and difficulty of the various poses involves progressively more bodyweight resistance per muscle group.

There is no question that intensity can be achieved without weights. I believe what the gentleman was referring to is the science of building significant strength increases over a fit level of baseline strength.

The science on this one is very much settled, courtesy of the not very ethical, but scientifically valid, studies from the Soviet Union in the height of the Cold War.

The science is this:

Lower # of reps at 80 - 90% of a weight you can only lift once builds strength most effieciently.

As you progress up the curve to higher reps at 60%, you are still building strength, but not as efficiently, and you are moving more towards increasing endurance.

Endurance, of course, is most efficiently gained with high # of reps at low percentages. However, this will typically be at the expense of raw strength.

Note: For people who are not at all fit, with atrophied muscles, strength will be gained very easily from almost any use of their muscles, high reps or not.

While the responses to different sorts of training (as in intensity/volume tradeoffs) is considered well-settled, there's still a lot of controversy about the actual physiology, the most efficient programming and so forth.

I guess when someone can do five reps of one armed push ups, five reps of pistol squats and five reps of pull ups (one arm?) then they can say "well, maybe time to drop this scheme and hit the weights"#. But the vast majority of people don't come close to this, so it is completely and utterly absurd for the grandparent to dismiss anything other than barbells for strength training.

#Admittedly it's hard to find a replacement for something like olympic barbells when it comes to exercises such as the deadlift. And of course weights have their benefits with the easier progression, etc etc...

> I guess the joke's on all the extremely fit, strong people who do yoga, then.

Yoga isn't the same thing as high repetition circuit training. Strength gains from yoga are caused by the increasing resistance found in more difficult poses. Out of all the people you've seen become extremely fit and strong, how many stayed in beginner classes doing the easiest poses the whole time?

The primary difference between class levels is not the poses. You get a few fancy new ones as you gain flexibility, but those are icing on the cake. Probably 90% of what you do in any given class is the same.

The primary differences between a beginner class and an advanced class are the frequency (repetition), rest time and hold times used. Advanced classes will easily work 2-3x more asanas into an hour than beginner classes.

This has nothing at all to do with strength training. They specifically note in the cited article that this is to 'manage and expand their physical energy, prevent fatigue, and sustain engagement'. Simple barbell and kettlebell exercises do not address this in the least. (Well, kettlebell helps, but you're lacking a lot of lower-body plyometrics).

And I don't see why you would argue against increasing strength at the joint angle. It's very important for people with the potential for joint pain or injury to strengthen supporting muscles around the joint.

I agree that there's little to no science in the article. It seems like everything i've seen concerning athletic performance is based on cherry-picked ideas distributed by non-scientists.

> This has nothing at all to do with strength training.

Their first criteria for exercise selection was to "promote strength development for all major muscle groups of the body".

As for developing short term fatigue resistance (as opposed to straight up endurance), kettlebells are excellent. My favourite tool for such a job: compact, widely available, and evil.

> And I don't see why you would argue against increasing strength at the joint angle. It's very important for people with the potential for joint pain or injury to strengthen supporting muscles around the joint.

Because joints move through, and must support load, at a variety of angles. Being really really good at a particular 10 degree band is not very useful for most folk.

> It seems like everything i've seen concerning athletic performance is based on cherry-picked ideas distributed by non-scientists.

Well in their defence, sports science sucks. Like software engineering research and for the same reasons: small and biased samples, poor experiment design and not much funding to fix either.

>>Because joints move through, and must support load, at a variety of angles. Being really really good at a particular 10 degree band is not very useful for most folk.

This is so true it bears repeating. A lot of people who focus on limited joint angle strength end up injured when they work their muscles beyond the angles that they are trained for.

A lot of people don't ever get a trainer to show them the right way to do things and get hurt. The people who do learn the right way will find benefit in isometric training. Telling everyone to ignore it benefits neither group.

It's certainly important to exercise muscles with a full range of motion, but even people who don't do isometrics hardly ever train to their full range. Watching people at gyms do push-ups, pull-ups, squats, lunges, hell even lat raises with only a specific range of motion is sad.

Isometrics are a specialist tool, they don't make much sense for the general case. Turning to them first is like saying "gee, our web server is a bit slow. Let's tinker with making cron run faster".

>>A lot of people don't ever get a trainer to show them the right way to do things and get hurt.

Man, don't even get me started on trainers...

"Sports science sucks"

Yep. So does nutritional science and anything else that involves measuring humans over long periods of time. It's expensive and we make lousy lab rats.

>Because joints move through, and must support load, at a variety of angles. Being really really good at a particular 10 degree band is not very useful for most folk.

And this is part of why you see bulgy weightlifting types at the rock climbing gym getting shown up by skinny "DYEL" types.

From the ACSM article:

"Although HICT can be an efficient means by which to improve health and decrease body fat, it may be inferior to [sic] creating absolute strength and power, specific endurance, and other specific performance variables. If these are the goals of a program, as with competitive athletes, traditional programs may elicit greater absolute gains."

Thanks for quoting. I'd like to add that the workout the blog post cited was the ACSM article's "sample workout" based on HICT (an efficient, common sense approach commonly used by personal trainers), that also required no specialized equipment.

>Given that the studies done on high intensity interval training were initially done with elite athletes, I'm not certain it shows that at all.

There was a study recently released of HIIT (8s sprint/12s relax on a bike) on overweight males, showing it to bt very effective [1]. Not that I pretend to know how this relates to this program in particular.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3375095/

To add to the barbell exercise theory, I've found Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength to be a great mathematical based source of strength training, focusing on full body barbell exercises.