A more creative person would turn this into a good Pit rant but I have not that sort of mind. Not funny enough and more of annoyed than angry. But the behavior is too common and not just here. People who with evangelical zeal proselytize that only the exercise plan that they do is *the *right one to do and that everything else is wasting time. Oh plenty of supportive people too, especially I think on these boards, but what why do these people do such obnoxious behaviors?
Because life is a continuous learning experience, and people like to help others get more out of life, by contributing to their continuing education. Some people are less adept than others at offering advice, and can seem overbearing.
Sometimes you want encouragement, not to hear that you’re doing it wrong.
Or because lots of people are new to working out, and will listen to anyone bigger or more muscular than they are if they sound confident. So Joe Muscles gets into bad habits.
Plus changing your routine can trigger new gains just because it is different, and thus it is tempting to decide “I finally figured out the sure way to fitness” and new converts are evangelical.
Plus, a paraphrase from The Princess Bride “Working out is pain, Princess. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Like supplements, or personal training services.
Regards,
Shodan
Exercise is chock full of pseudoscience. I’d say the vast majority of exercise and diet information is complete garbage. If someone you knew thought wearing a crystal around their neck would cure their BO and halitosis, wouldn’t you at least try and respectfully steer them towards deodorant and toothpaste instead? No need to be a dick about it, but by itself, saying “hey, that’s not going to work” isn’t a dick move.
You left out the story here… what were you doing wrong and what did somebody say to you?
True, OP. You did seem to conveniently overlook the possibility that you were, in fact, doing something objectively ineffective or pointlessly dangerous. The fine line between meddling and helping comes down to where the greater harm lies.
Re telling people they are exercising wrong, I just bite my lip like 98% of the time and say nothing when I see it. However, I do make exceptions when I see someone performing an exercise in a way that could really hurt them.
The bolding (which is mine) is why. it’s not about the exercise. it’s the mindset that “my way is the One True Way.” Exercise is just the one you’re encountering now.
pretty much any interest/lifestyle group has the “Capital Letter” members. for example, there are cyclists, and there are “Capital-C” Cyclists. The former ride bicycles. The latter do things like participate in Critical Mass, ignore stop signs/traffic lights, and generally get in everyone’s faces about it. There are vegetarians and vegans, and there are “Capital-V” Vegetarians and Vegans. The former simply don’t eat meat or use animal products, the latter are constantly criticizing and harassing people who do eat meat. And probably have the rear of their Prius plastered with bumper stickers like “I’m Vegan because I THINK.”
if it wasn’t exercise, these people would (and probably do) find something else to evangelize.
This. Unless someone is imminently going to hurt themselves, I leave them be. People I am friends with, I’ll provide some feedback to from time to time, and of course I’m happy to help people out when they ask me for advice.
In my experience, the number of people that go around giving unsolicited advice is actually pretty small, as most people are just there to do their thing and leave. The problem is, they’re usually obnoxious about it. Hell, I’ve had people “correct” me when they clearly had no idea what they were talking about. Like one I remember who said I had my deadlift form was wrong (he insisted that if it wasn’t sumo it was wrong, whereas I do a standard), then proceeded to jerk the weight off the ground and catback the hell out of it.
Still, there are some times when someone looks to be doing something wrong, but they aren’t. Sure, someone doing bicep curls with a ton of momentum, is pretty obviously wrong. However, I’ve seen people, whom I know are knowledgeable, do some bizarre stuff, like limited range of motion or otherwise odd movements, and when I’ve asked, it made more sense in context.
Anyway, if you don’t want to deal with obnoxious gym-goers, wear headphones. I have quite a few people I’ll have brief chats with at the gym, but I still bring headphones that I wear otherwise, especially when the obnoxious guys are around.
I don’t think this happens at the gym, I think it happens in the breakroom: someone says they are walking after work, someone has to tell them they need to be running or it’s pointless. Someone is lifting weights, someone has to tell them that they’d be better off doing cardio. Do cardio, someone wants to know why you aren’t lifting weights or cross training. Someone starts going to the gym, someone tells them that bootcamp is an absolute requirement.
It’s the same thing with diets. If you change your eating habits at all, everyone notices and sweeps in to tell you what you SHOULD be eating. So you’ve made your diet 50% better in a sustainable way, but all the goddamn attention and “advice” is enough to make you go back to eating what you started with.
Exercise and eating are intensely personal for a lot of people, but others seems to feel like they are fair game for commenting on in a way they’d never comment on your family choices or religion or politics.
Similar behavior is seen in many places. You can’t enjoy wine unless you do all the sniffing and swirling to identify at least 5 subtle flavors. You can’t enjoy boating unless you’re striving to win regattas. And so on.
However, exercise is different in one way–it’s often not done for enjoyment. It’s done to achieve certain goals, like be fitter and lose weight. Although any exercise has some benefit, not every exercise will produce enough benefits or be the benefits the person is looking for. So often someone can benefit from some education to ensure the exercise they perform produces results and they’ll be motivated to continue.
But that desire to educate often morphs into unjust criticisms of other forms of exercise. The powerlifter criticizes the runner because running doesn’t build strength and the runner criticizes the powerlifter because weightlifting doesn’t provide the same aerobic benefits. Or the advanced person criticizes the beginner because they’re not passionate enough about working out. The reality is that people have different goals and different levels of passion for exercise. What works for someone often won’t work for someone else.
I guess some of it is the person is looking for validation that what they are the best. The more people that work out the same way, the more validated they feel that they are working out the best way.
Not sure what exercise you were doing or if it was wrong. But if you are lifting weights wrong you can seriously hurt yourself. If someone saves you from a ruptured disc or being pinned benching in the smith machine that’s a good deed.
It’s obvious from the OP that he’s not talking about himself and he said “exercise plan”, so it doesn’t seem like he’s talking about when someone is performing a particular exercise incorrectly.
I agree with free weights you can really do stuff wrong, likewise getting yourself caught in a weight machine but if you’re going to get your finger caught doing that it’s a bit more generic than ‘you’re exercising wrong’.
I took it to mean the usual kibitzing another poster ran down: whatever cardio you’re doing that’s too much/too little, you should be be weight lifting (no doing more cardio), you shouldn’t run, no you shouldn’t just walk you have to run, etc. I have to say though whether it’s the ‘no judgement policy’ or just the cheapness and the crowd it draws, I’ve never been corrected at Planet Fitness whereas it happened a couple of times at a tonier gym I used to go to. No one I don’t know otherwise has ever spoken to me there, thank heaven (I run into some people I know otherwise, if I don’t see them first and avoid them). It’s just not where I go to talk to people, about anything.
As to my routine, I stick with mainstream medical advice, like American Heart Association’s
"At least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity at least 5 days per week for a total of 150
OR
At least 25 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity at least 3 days per week for a total of 75 minutes; or a combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic activity
AND
Moderate- to high-intensity muscle-strengthening activity at least 2 days per week for additional health benefits."
My cardio is somewhere in between first and second in intensity and duration, same ballpark. I never run, walk briskly or stationary bike. And I do some weights and abs stuff nothing special. Late 50’s, just keeping the ticker healthy if possible and trying to delay loss of muscle a bit. If somebody else’s theory is something totally different, I really can’t be bothered to analyze it, and definitely don’t want to hear it in person unsolicited.
Yes, and it’s corollary: It worked for me therefore it will work for you. This one comes up constantly in diet/nutrition discussions.
Dammit. I just typed up this big long thing and lost it. Let me try to summarize:
Exercise and nutrition, for some reason (money), are prone to a lot of fads. Like CrossFit, Jesus Christ just shut up about it. So you’ve got a lot of “Experts” running around trying to get everyone to buy into what they have bought into to reassure themselves. So, you’ve got the ill-informed but well-intentioned. Then you’ve got the people who get into fitness for the vanity aspect of it, with the attendant big egos, so of course they’re going to talk at you about it. Those are probably the two big groups, out of all these groups that I’m pulling straight out of my ass right now. Then you’ve got the typical Internet Warrior/general know-it-all that you’ve got with any aspect of life. Finally, you’ve got the people who know enough about it to know when someone is Doing It Wrong and are trying to help them avoid frustration and/or injury. I probably missed some but since I’m making this up as I go along (Just like most fitness advice! Ha!) well, whatever.
Personally, I have only said something to someone’s face twice, both times with friends of mine trying to lose weight. The first time it was a guy who was literally twice my size, and I was diplomatically trying to explain that his caloric intake wasn’t doing him any favors, since for work we just sat ass-in-chair for eight hours a day. He was having none of it. He’s still 350lbs. Second time was a mom who went gung-ho with CrossFit. I was like, Dude, maybe you don’t wan’t to start with power cleans if you’ve never lifted weights before. She was having none of it. Two months later she had stop because she had jacked up her shoulder. On the internet however, I am prone to occasional low-level dickishness. I don’t know why. It’s not fitness related.
As has been properly deduced, no, nothing said to me. It’s more as below. One recent one was where a poster was berating someone for using machines for strength training, morphing into that only the Starting Strength way is The One True Way and exercise physiologists and sports medicine doctors and their “studies” don’t know nuttin’ But it is a recurrent theme.
Clearly, you don’t know the first rule of CrossFit.
Until relatively recently, I would have said : “because people are noisy and like to flaunt their alleged superior knowledge”. Since I’ve been with a woman who is a big fan of exercising, and takes it very seriously, my answer would be : because those people are actually doing it wrong, that it isn’t without consequences (potentially serious), and the “proselytizers” want to be helpful.