Unsolicited criticism is seldom welcome, whether it be correct or not.
I think OP is referring to people who criticize/question the type of exercise you’re doing, or proselytize their own preferred one. E. g. people who are constantly asking “why don’t you get into running?” or “You know, you should really take up running” and have “13.1” and “26.2” stickers plastered all over their cars.
that’s a lot different than intervening when you see someone doing something with poor form which can cause them to hurt themselves.
If someone is telling you that your exercise is wrong, that’s bad.
If someone is telling you that your exercise FORM is wrong, that’s okay. Wrong form can lead to injury or not working the muscles the right way.
However, I’m not going to tell someone that treadmill is better than the elliptical. I will gently point out to someone that I’m friends with that their form may need some adjusting. Just this morning in Body Pump the instructor asked one of the ladies to not use weights during lunges, but to concentrate on doing the exercise the right way. Doing weights with bad form can hurt you.
And while I, again, am specifically referring to the former, not to unsolicited corrections on form, even the latter is more often than not better left unsaid with the the person who wants to say it doing some exercise of their own - exercising restraint.
I do not personally exercise in public gyms very often and when I do I have not actually seen the latter much. Some shaking their heads at poor form but little said. People mind their own business and worry about their own programming or their work-out partner’s if they have one. This really is about the latter. People who cannot comprehend that others may have fitness goals that are different than theirs or that The Way that they have accepted as Revealed Truth is not the only possible path.
Sharing what works for you and why you believe it is the best approach for you to hit your own fitness goals? That’s a wonderful thing. Claiming that people who approach it in any other way are just wasting their time? Not so wonderful, no matter how much you are sure you are right. Oh a few fitness devotees arguing in a fitness nerd fight about which periodization protocol works best for which goal at that more advanced level getting heated is not bad, but usually these are targeted at those closer to novice levels with the believers proselytizing for new converts to their specific denomination’s church and it ends up driving the novices away from exercise all together.
Often enough, people are actually wasting their time, though. The problem is that you see or know someone trying to lose weight, and you know that they’re going about it the wrong way. I mean, you KNOW that they really want to lose the weight. You know it. You can see it on their face. Yet you also know that what they’re doing to lose it is going to do fuck-all for their weight loss goals. They are not going to get it done. On the one hand, you’re like, “Well, they’re doing something and that’s great!” while on the other, you’re like, “They’re not going to get anywhere and get frustrated, then give up, and I want to prevent that.”
The woman sitting behind me right now has been trying to lose weight since January. I could have told you when she started that she wasn’t going to lose any weight, and she hasn’t. I sit here and listen to her talk about “Paleo” and her Fitbit, and I get so sad about it! It’s hard to watch! I mean, what do you do? You want to be supportive, but at the same time you’re like, Dude, you’re killing me here.
On the other end of the spectrum you’ve got people who say dumb shit like “I don’t do cardio because I’ll lose muscle.” or “I don’t want to lift weights because they’ll make me bulky.” and it’s just like running into an anti-vaxxer. Kinda hard not to say something.
Anyway, it seems like your issue is basically with unsolicited advice. Why does it bother you more in this context, you think?
I agree that this is the problem often seen in message boards: a fitness fanatic completely dissuades the beginners with overbearing advice that only a single exercise is valid and it must be done in one specific way. Beginners are often only tepid about exercise anyway, and the intense advice gets them flustered and they give up altogether.
CrossFit is often brought up as an example of this. I know I’ve seen threads where someone wants to get into exercise with something like yoga or Zumba, but the CrossFit fanatic will not shut up about how CrossFit is better than anything else. Even when it’s clear the beginner does not want CrossFit, the fanatic keeps talking about the benefits of the jumps and pullups or whatever they do. You can see the motivation draining away from the beginner the longer the thread goes on.
With beginners, advice should be first about getting them to make exercise a habit more than getting them to do the most effective exercise. Even if they’re inefficient at first, hopefully they get to the point where they’re exercising regularly. Then if they’re not getting the results they want, they’ll be more likely to search out ways to make their exercise more effective.
Lowdown,
Probably because this an area that I actually do know some modest something about and almost invariably the people arrogantly spouting off how their way is the only right way (and this goes for nutrition stuff too) actually are pretty damn ignorant, at best parroting some guru’s mantras. Their teardown of the positive things people are doing because it is not their approach often discourages the relative novice from sticking with exercise altogether.
The anti-vaxxer analogy is a fail. The anti-vaxxer is potentially harming others. The person who you mock because her chosen nutrition plan is to paleo, one, is, if she sticks with it, likely eating healthier than she was before (assuming she was eating more standard American crap) and quite possibly will lose some fat over time, and two, certainly is harming no one else, even if you think paleo is an ineffective approach.
Problem #1: you assume you know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It’s rather arrogant to butt in on someone else’s business just because you think you “KNOW” what they want.
you mind your own business unless she asks for your advice.
nothing of the sort, this does not affect you in any way.
God, the Irony of this question coming from this particular poster.
Eh, nobody gets this worked up over something that has no relevance to them personally. Maybe OP just read something that triggered him or her but whatever, if he or she doesn’t want to share, that’s fine.
The analogy works just fine for “People who believe something despite scientific evidence to the contrary.”
I get that you’re worked up about this but, you’re reading a lot more than I put in there. I don’t have many problems with Paleo, or Fitbits, or whatever else. Where did I mock anyone? Hmmm, maybe you got triggered by the quotes? I put those in there because she talks about Paleo, but then we also talk about what we cooked/ate and those two things don’t match up. Well, either way I’m not mocking her at all! Take it easy!
It’s not really assuming if someone tells you what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, is it? Work with me here.
Which is, as I said above, exactly what I have done. That doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to want to help. I mean, if I see you working on your car and I know how to fix what you’re trying to fix, but instead I watch you make a mess of it, I’m pretty sure you’d think I was an ass for standing there and not saying anything. Tell me you wouldn’t.
But it does(!), because I listen to you talk about how you’re trying to fix your car but you can’t get it right, while I have to sit there and not tell you how to fix it! I want to help you get to work, man! We’re friends! I don’t like seeing you stuck at home!
Again, I don’t go around spewing fitness advice!
I have a specific condition which means I need to eat certain things like fruit, nuts, leafy greens, and fish. It’s not for weight loss; it’s for vision retention. As a matter of fact, I have lost weight on it cause it’s mighty hard to get fat on kale. But I’ve had a few people make assumptions that I don’t know what I’m doing.
“There’s more sugar in that drink than you realize”
No, genius, there’s not. There’s an orange and a cup of berries, and 1.5 tsp of honey in this drink. Yes, I know how much a tsp is. No, I don’t get it confused with a tablespoon.
“That drink won’t help you lose weight”
“Good thing I’m not drinking it for that reason. I’m drinking this because the National Eye Institute’s ARED’s study shows that daily servings of leafy greens, fruit, and nuts help intermediate dry macular degeneration from developing into wet macular degeneration and vision loss. Since I’m not crazy about getting shots injected directly into my eyeballs for thirty or so years, I decided that I’d live with gross looking drinks and people who think they know my motivations. Both are getting old.”
Ooh! I have a related anecdote!!
About six months ago, I was on a quest to squat 1.4 times my body weight by the end of the calendar year. I was about 20 lbs. away from my goal, and I thought that it might be my glutes that were holding me back, and if I could use more of my glutes in the motion then I might be able to add the weight on. So I told my friend/coworker about how I wanted to get my butt better.
A new girl who had just started assumed I meant a nicer looking butt, and proceeded to tell me about how if I do 100 air squats every night, then I’ll get a nice butt, because that’s how she did it. Which irritated me because I am so far beyond doing body weight exercises, and anyways this girl didn’t even have a nicer butt than me!! And so I just nodded my head and didn’t really say anything, because I didn’t really want to engage in further conversation, I just wanted this annoying new girl to go away. But when I bitched about it to a friend later, I asked why a person would offer such advice to a person as if she were the expert and I were the novice, and someone pointed out, “She’s new. She probably just thought it was a way to make conversation and make a new friend, and didn’t realize how off-the-mark her attempt was.” Which I thought was a good point, and likely the cause of many other irritating interactions with know-it-alls. A lot of people want to make friends and just have piss-poor social skills.
When I see someone at the gym doing something egregiously wrong, or completely ineffective, I will sometimes say to them “do you mind if I make a suggestion?” I only do this to people who I know, and talk to on a regular basis - never strangers. I sometimes see people doing exercises so incorrectly, it’s clear that they have no idea what muscles they are supposed to ne working, but I just zip my lip and look away (e.g. - people on the seated triceps machine who are keeping their arms locked and using their legs to move their bodies up and down).
Gosh. I feel like I’m on the old Leave It to Beaver show with the kids talking about how Dad was yelling at them.
Annoyed. Not worked up. Not enough to rant, just barely enough to comment.
The most recent was a thread in which a poster who described him/herself as a fitness novice was, as part of a series of questions, asking about machines and free weights, and like clockwork another poster had to come in to state categorically that those who use machines are just wasting their time and that only Starting Strength was the path. Scientific studies and guidelines by panels of sports medicine experts that machines can be effective as well, especially at novice to intermediate levels, and when used for specific fitness goals at higher levels, well what do they know?
And interestingly enough it usually comes for those who think that they, or their guru, has a better grip on the science than the expert consenses. Which is not to claim that an expert consensus is infallible. New evidence emerges all the time.
When it comes to cars probably there is a right way and quite possibly you know what it is. Most certainly I do not. You offering to help and not taking offense when someone says no is fine.
As a doctor I personally will with acquaintances and friends only offer an opinion about their approach to their health care, which I do sometimes know something about, if specifically asked for it. Okay once I did hound a nurse’s aide in my office to see her doctor about an issue she was talking about but wanted to ignore.
More so though human bodies are not cars.
When it comes to nutrition and fitness plans there are lots of different right ways, ways that work better for one person and not for another, different priorities and goals, and lots of people claiming, with great personal confidence, that everyone else, especially the medical experts, has it wrong. IMHO each person needs to figure out what their goals are. No question I have a bias that they should consider long term health as a major portion of that goal, at least the one on the horizon (even if there are short term training goals along the way). And then figure out which right way is the best right way for them to get there despite all the “experts” on MBs and at the next desk telling them that they have missed the true path because they know.
Good point, indeed.
I do believe pictures are required here. 