Exercise is good. Everyone should do it. This post is about the limits of exercise.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when the whole exercise thing was on the rise. Exercise was going to make you lose weight, and you would even live forever! No cardio was too much. Jogging! Running! Those were the shit. Lifting weights was kinda for those dumb meatheads, but man, put some time in at the gym, and you too could be a “buff hunk”!
Well, live and learn. While the cult of Crossfit has risen only in recent years, 30-40 years of people actually exercising a lot has shown us that the results are often less than originally advertised. In my time, I’ve done cardio, lifting, and Pilates. Today, I do all three in moderation, since that’s all that’s really good for you. Here’s my deconstruction.
General
There is no system that “just works.” Everything needs to be tuned to your particular body and your particular goals. There is a human tendency to want to believe in a system like a religion. This is dumb.
Doing an exercise makes you good at that exercise. It doesn’t necessarily make you “fit” or good at anything else. Example: I ran stairs like a beast in college. I thought I was cardiovascularly fit. To a certain extent, I was. But when I tried running laps on a track, I found it quite hard. The body is adaptive. It will work to get good at exactly what you’re doing and no more. That’s why you have to hit your body in a multi-faceted way in order to have a well-rounded physique and fitness (if that’s what you’re going for).
The relationship between exercise and weight loss is quite complicated, but it is not the panacea it was once naively believed to be. Personally, I have put on maybe 15 pounds of muscle since 2012 and been able to keep off a similar amount of fat, resulting in weight loss that I nevertheless find not quite satisfying (I want to lose about 15 more pounds). Losing that final 15-20 tends to be hard for anyone, no matter what you do, and burning calories tends to increase hunger. Hence the phrase, “Abs are made in the kitchen.”
You will probably peak in any given exercise pretty quickly unless you are massively dedicated, like a professional athlete. So-called “noob gains” will thrill you, and then the law of diminishing returns to scale quickly kicks in. The 80/20 rule or something close to it applies here. You will get 80 percent of your gains in mass and fitness from about 20 percent of your theoretical maximum effort. The good news is that “noob gains” are a thing. The bad news is that anything above that requires rapidly increasing effort.
A lot of exercise methods will get your injured. Crossfit and running are pretty much guaranteed to get you injured. The problem then is that those who don’t get injured or who get only slightly injured continue to extol the virtues of the particular system. Beware selection bias. This blogger, who unfortunately quit this year, has an excellent site dealing with this and related issues, and here is a pertinent post: https://criticalmas.com/2015/06/we-dont-share-the-same-fitness-values/
The evidence is now overwhelmingly clear that things like marathon running are horrendous for your body. They damage your joints and your cardiovascular system. Plus, the runner’s physique is garbage, unless looking emaciated is your thing. Per General point #2, running makes you good at running. The cardiovascular benefit comes from extreme moderation; anything above that is simply to be a member of the running cult. (And it is indeed like a cult. I had a financial advisor that ran, and of course
Intense cardio performed to the point of vomiting (Crossfit, etc.) isn’t tough or manly or anything good. It’s just stupid.
So what really is the goal of cardio? Personally, I want to be able to walk up several flights of stairs or run through the airport to catch a plane without collapsing. Be peppy, be active. A level above that is being able to play beach volleyball or some sport (though that is probably best gained by doing the actual sport, since doing an exercise means practicing that exercise). But what about all the Zumba and TRX and other cardio classes, what are they worth? Well, I did some of those classes in my Pilates studio and saw what the women looked like who did them. And you know what? They looked like pretty regular, reasonably thin women on average. Women who probably never use that extra cardio to do anything of that intensity elsewhere. (And that is no doubt true of the men and women in Crossfit: that’s the toughest thing they ever do, so where can they use that extra “fitness”?)
Lifting/Bodybuilding
Any time in the media you see a guy who is “diced to the sox,” the chances are very high that he is taking some type of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs = steroids and related shit). Any time you see a guy who is shredded and very big, that probability approaches 100%. Then, since these drugs are illegal, everybody lies about it. See: www.nattyornot.com. This reality creates a huge distortion in the way we perceive fit bodies and fitness itself.
As said above with respect to the 80/20 rule, men will gain a chunk of muscle and then find it hard to gain much more. There is a set limit, based on one’s testosterone and other factors, to how much muscle one can carry. And it’s not that high. Some men find it much easier to gain weight than others. In general, if you are naturally thin in the first place, it is tough.
Lacking testosterone, women are extremely limited in how much muscle mass they can put on, though lifting will make you stronger with what muscle you do have and gain. I have done a lot of pushups in classes in my former Pilates studio, and I never once saw a woman do a full chin-to-ground pushup. I also talked to a jacked-looking woman who did Crossfit, and she said that she couldn’t do a single pullup. If you are a woman, it’s best to start out with reasonable expectations for upper body strength improvement. (Not that most guys can do a pullup either…)
It is very difficult to have low body fat and be big at the same time. Even IFBB pros on all kinds of gear have to “cut weight” before a competition using dangerous fat loss methods that take their metabolism to frightening lows (I have read their heart rates get down in the 30s… yikes!). There is a reason that, traditionally, muscular dudes like lumberjacks were beefy. Moreover, powerlifters don’t have to be shredded, and carrying the extra fat is actually an advantage to them. The moral of the story is that, if you are envisioning looking like a big, shredded beast, see point #1 above about 'roids.
Squatting is worshiped for some stupid reason. It’s an exercise I hate and won’t do. It’s uncomfortable, relatively dangerous, and requires a spot (which is also why I don’t bench press). It’s a requirement of powerlifters (it’s one of their events), but not of anyone else. Plus remember the 80/20 rule. If leg press, deadlifting, and the hack squat machine put you short of theoretical perfection, how short are you really?
That said, lifting is really great exercise for men and women. It feels good, genuinely makes you look better, can actually put some muscle on your body, and has a beneficial cardiovascular effect. You can also see genuine results from a few hours a week, even without doing anything too extreme.
That’s my deconstruction of exercise. Tell me what you think!
Consider the costs and benefits of any exercise and the program that exercises add up to. You “pay” in the form of time, pain and fatigue during and after the exercise, and actual money. Are the benefits you are getting commensurate with that?
I am not against the motion (if it works for you) but the fact that it is dangerous and you need a spot.
The “real” lifters will laugh at someone using a squat machine, but if it delivers say 80% of the value with a lot more safety, then why not?
But there is something about my cardiovascular system that makes me feel like shit when I squat or do lunges, so I just don’t do them. That’s why I say: Never do an exercise you don’t want to do. There is always a replacement.
I am arguing with you for academic enjoyment, mind you. You are touching on some interesting points.
That’s the dogma: free weights are the shit, and machines are shit.
In some cases, I agree, but I agree with respect to my body. I love deadlifting. I deadlift with a hex bar so it is actually more of a squat/deadlift (that doesn’t make me feel like shit like a squat). There isn’t a machine that can replace that for me. I also do weighted pullups (not a machine) and weighted pushups (not a machine).
But the balance aspect of squatting gets back to what I mean about doing the exercise means training to be good at the exercise. You are in effect training the balance aspect of squatting. I won’t say that that has no value in other aspects of life. But I also won’t say that that has some sort of magical value in other aspects of life.
Of course, I am not against squatting. I am against the weird worship of squatting that’s out there.
I have seen many such claims, but I have never seen numbers attached to them. Effective as measured by what? The thing is, leg press lets you take your back out of the equation. For most people lower back strength ends up being the “bottleneck” in the squat. I.e., they can leg press a lot more weight than they can squat. So the two exercises end up being quite different and hard to compare.
If your goal in weight lifting is to increase your ability to apply strength in the real world, then free weights are the best way to go.
I can leg press much, much more than I can squat. Why? Because I don’t have to keep myself from tipping over. I can just press, the machine does the balancing for me.
Manipulating a real world object, I have to worry about balance. So a free weight bench is a closer approximation than a machine bench.
I think those two are heavily related. I tell people that I don’t run because my religion forbids me from doing it, and they often ask which religion is that: well, I’m Catholic, and one of the rules is “don’t do things that you know to be bad for you”. Since experience shows running is very, very bad for me, I don’t do it; other people who can do it without needing medical assistance are welcome to do it, though. I come from a long line of short, thick-legged, long-distance, high-speed walkers: we’re not good runners. Young gym teachers see my legs and think “fat”; then they see how much I leg press and say “wow” - that is an exercise my body is good for. Running, not so much. The best long-distance runners get that “hound” look partly through their own genetics, like I get these quadriceps from mine: no amount of running would ever get me that look, all it would get me is out of breath and with my ankles in pieces.
it feels good to you , maybe. But not to all of us.
Yes, you can improve, lift more, run faster, and feel good , too—but only IF you have a body that is right for it.
People who claim that everybody can get fit if they just work at it remind me of teachers who told every child that they can get good grades if they just work at it.
Or, maybe a better analogy: musicicans who say that anybody can learn to play an instrument, or that anybody can learn to sing.
I took a weight lifting course one semester in college. I was a skinny, scrawny kid ( weighed about 115 lbs,5 ft 7 inches tall). I increased by about 10% the number of pounds I could put on the barbell, but I was still a skinny scrawny kid. I couldn’t have worked as a baggage handler at the airport,eiither before or after the weightlifting.
I worked hard, and tried hard. But the results were barely noticable to me, and totally unnoticeable to anybody else.
And it did NOT feel good!
When I needed to get into shape before starting military service, I forced myself to go jogging. Started with 1km at a slowish pace, worked up to 6 kms about 2-3 months later. It was hard work, painful, and…
… IT DID NOT FEEL GOOD!!!
I do understand that’s the theory. It’s not that it’s wrong; it just doesn’t take into consideration every possible fitness goal a person might have. Also, not all exercises scale the same.
If you are a noob, squatting light weight is probably a really great exercise. That balance you are talking about means that the person will be working all kinds of stabilizer muscles, etc. They are likely to gain a lot of strength across the body fast.
But they will also hit a bottleneck faster than with legpress, which basically has none: you’re working the legs, that’s it. Squatting huge weight is not the same as squatting light weight, whereas leg-pressing large weight is a more or less linear extension of leg-pressing light weight. If your goal is really huge legs, at some point leg press is probably better (or should be used in combination with squatting). But, again, the average person will probably never reach the point of needing to do huge weight on the leg press.
Yeah, the importance of selection bias in exercise is simply not taken into consideration very much. People gravitate toward the exercises that they are better at. Runners have a runner’s body but then advocate their religion to everyone, lol.
I do think there is a minimum that the vast majority of able-bodied people should do that fits their particular “sweet spot.” It might be just a walk around the neighborhood.
My point in that brief preamble was really to dissuade the misrepresentation of my post as saying “exercise sucks!” or “exercise is worthless!”
I agree, and I am also deconstructing the concept of “fitness” as well. If you can run a marathon, are you fit? Well, the one thing we know is that you can run a marathon! You will probably not get winded on a few flights of stairs and can probably hike for several miles without a problem. I can do the latter two things, but I can’t run a marathon, so am I fit?
Are you fit if you are 6’0", weigh 240 lbs., and have 7% body fat? OK, but what if you do get winded on two flights of stairs, which sadly is true of many body builders on gear.
I’m not sure what the answers are. What I personally don’t want to be and thankfully never have been is a couch potato with a huge gut who feels that walking a few blocks is a big effort. I think it’s fair to say that fitness is not that.
Yeah, some guys can’t put on any muscle at all, and if you are not noticing any strength gains either, it’s probably not worth the effort.
Yep, don’t do any exercise that you don’t want to do, say I.
And in fact one thing that would be a great improvement would be better work on the part of sports professionals at pointing people to those types of exercise that are more likely to be a good fit.
Years ago I caught a piece of the European Junior Weightlifting Championship (female). Boy, was that a revelation. Unlike the petite girls doing gymnastics or the tall, thin ones on most track and field competitions, those girls looked like me! There was this Turkish 14yo who could have been my long lost sister, had I still been 14. But, nobody has ever told me to try weights (either free or machines): I have to ask for them and too often I have to insist that yes, it’s what I want to do. Having tits does not automatically make someone interested in aerobics, which is what everybody pushes at me ever since they got invented (whichever variety happens to be in fashion at that point, but aerobics).
Yep, powerlifters tend to be short with short legs and arms, since that gives them a shorter range of motion in the bench and squat; though longer arms combined with a short torso are better for the deadlift, for the same reason.
Not really sure that I understood the point of OP, but my understanding is that we are saying excessive exercise is not all its cracked up to be. My two cents:
Exercise sucks. No other animal exercises, and humans have been getting along for thousands of years without taking an hour of the day to cram in as much exertion as possible. Most folks could be strong and healthy just with the labor of walking around the forest, hunting and gathering and building little huts. Now we suffer from diseases of civilization, because we live sedentary lives. Therefore, we try to cram a day’s worth of labor into an hour because that’s all we can afford to give. The rest of our day is spent sitting in front of computers.
I agree with OP that doing an exercise makes one good at that exercise, but not necessarily “fit” in a general sense. This is not to say that exercise is irrelevant, but rather that a fit person needs to perform of a variety of different exercises throughout the week. As others have observed, a person who runs four days a week will not be as fit all-around as someone who performs many different cardio exercises (eg mixing jogging up with sprints, hills, swimming, etc)
Weightlifting to build mass requires a lot more effort than just lifting weights. A person can lift weights all day long and still gain nothing if they do not follow it up with proper diet. People who expect to gain many pounds of muscle weight have to eat vast quantities of food… Far more than a person would normally eat for simple sustenance. Bodybuilding to get huge muscles is impressive, but it is not a naturally healthy way to be.
Training the balance aspect of squatting makes the exercise more appropriate to create functional strength. With the leg press you are just training legs. Squats train legs, lower back, balance, and stabilizers in your core.
Being a good squatter has more transferrable value to other aspects of life than being a good leg-presser.
Unless you like leg-pressing better than squats, in which case you are more likely to stick with leg-pressing, and that will do you more good than not working legs at all. IYSWIM.
OTOH, I have a bad back, so I can’t squat or deadlift or do cleans anymore. It sucks to get old.
It’s refreshing to read this thread. All of you sound like you have normal, healthy bodies and you have this experience with exercise. I have had rheumatoid arthritis for my whole life and exercising has been a complete struggle. They tell me to do both cardio for “heart health” and also weight lifting for joint “health”. But it’s always people who have never experienced arthritis who recommend these things and they think I’m just making excuses and justifying being a couch potato when I try to explain my experience with exercise.
First of all, it’s hard to understand if you’ve never experienced it but imagine if someone lined your joints with sandpaper. All of them, not just hands or one knee. It’s systemic and after 50 years of disease damage the only joints that I don’t have some damage in is fingertips and a few toes. On a good day, it’s fine-grit sandpaper and is uncomfortable but ignorable. On bad days it’s coarse-grit and actually painful. It’s a very rare day when there is no sandpaper at all. There are also days when it feels like earth’s gravity has doubled and it’s a struggle to even stand or walk around, let alone do any specific exercise.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I struggle to keep my weight down. I have done exercise programs at various times. They always hurt my joints in a most unpleasant way. I’ve never lost weight when doing these programs, even when combined with dieting. When I tell people this they roll their eyes like I’m just making lame excuses. I don’t understand why describing my actual past experience is making lame, whinging excuses. Very frustrating.
(And I do exercise off and on. I just enrolled in a yoga class for the summer so at least I can stretch my joints. I also walk my dogs every day. I do have a desk job, but I also do some minimal amount of exercise rather than being couch-bound.)
I guess in a nutshell what I’m saying is that I’m very frustrated with my own body. To have exercise fans with normal bodies preach to me about things I “should” do but can’t only increases my frustration.
