# Why don’t you lift weights? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Tags:** diet-weight-loss\ **Created:** [August 15, 2020, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-don-t-you-lift-weights/918144 "2020-08-15T01:48:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 299
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2023, 6:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-don-t-you-lift-weights/918144/299 "2023-02-11T18:15:51Z")
How goes your alternate strength training approaches @Spice_Weasel? Elbow feeling better yet? FWIW, to heck with you, _I_ benefited from sharing those Swiss ball (balance ball, yoga ball, whatever) exercises … 😀 Got me looking up others and am now using some more as part of my routines! Lots of progression possibilities. Meanwhile I’m going to vent a little about trendy fitness. Today’s rant, anyway, is everything that gets called “Tabata”. There is real research by Dr. Tabata and his colleagues using a very specific protocol. His own recent review is available on line. It’s a good read (IMHO). > **[Tabata training: one of the most energetically effective high-intensity...](https://jps.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12576-019-00676-7)** > > For decades, high-intensity interval/intermittent exercise training methods have been used by elite athletes to improve their performance in sports. One of the most effective training methods, i.e., ‘Tabata training,’ is reviewed herein from the... Search “Tabata” and you’ll see doing multiple rounds of these four minute protocols, and claims that you can do anything that gets you breathing hard, just go all out. Those may be fine workouts, likely are, but they are definitely not Tabata, and the research of Tabata does not apply. Tabata’s protocol used elite athletes with an intensity that _exhausted them_ after seven or eight cycles. By definition they could not do another round of it in a minute … or more. 170% of VO2 uptake max! Us regular folk aren’t going to hit that eight times with 10 second rests. Again not to say those workouts are not great workouts. Maybe they are body weight high intensity interval training, or a form of sprint interval training, or something else. All are great and each effective in slightly different ways. But calling them “Tabata” is just a marketing device that tries to use real research to sell something that that research does not have to do with. Rant over. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-don-t-you-lift-weights/918144)._