Probably relevant for the HN crowd: there's a bunch of very geeky next gen fitness guys that keep up with the cutting edge of fitness research, and occasionally expand it themselves. If you're reading them, this kind of thing is being discussed for years, with new studies just moving the odds a bit in favor of the current hypothesis. Yes, they're very Bayesian, explicitly so.
A few names/links, pick and mix as you will - they're all good:
The focus of the people you have linked is about exercise in the context of a gym and diet is about calories. I would like to argue that being healthy and fit is not about the gym, or investing time in tracking calories.
Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle. This could fall under different categories such cardio (walking , cycling) and some resistance training like body weight exercises. These are called Micro workouts, and can be done during the day. A great (nerdy) guy who is quite far on that path is the bioneer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuKIlbybqY
And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories and almost no-one should try to diet like a body builder prepping for a show. They feel terrible and you are priming the body to store energy in the fat cells.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
Humans have been healthy for very long without the gym or calorie counting. Both are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere
Being healthy and being fit is mostly about being healthy and being fit. There are obviously countless ways to get closer to that goal, the gym and calorie counting being one way.
Saying stuff like 'we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories' is a pretty bad take if you ask me. Contrasting that immediately with 'a body builder prepping for a show' is just ridiculous. One is good advice to form part of a healthy lifestyle, the other is a way of life for a tiny group of professional athletes.
There goes more into a healthy diet than just eating lots of whole foods - although whole foods are obviously awesome and healthy. Notice that the linked article compares two groups eating processed and processed with the one eating the processed foods eating 500 more calories a day. They don't gain weight magically but because they ate the less satiating food and as a result ate more calories.
And simply saying 'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' is such a weird take. Have you ever considered that some people enjoy going to the gym? On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises. In the end it is up to the individual to chose the lifestyle that they enjoy, so please stop selling your personal favorite as if any other choices 'are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere'. I very much enjoy my time spend at the gym, thank you very much.
Seems like you misread the thread. The comment is against the training schedules that have been provided that are only about gym and calorie tracking.
And that we "could" also do other things. Like in the video from the bioneer.
But it seems you read "should".
My comment is not against training of any kind. And if the gym is your place where you get it done great, but if you have busy life and your unable to find the time or are unable to commit regularily. Then there are other options that will fit anyone schedule.
This post contains some very odd gaslighting: your earlier post says "should"—twice—but you are claiming here that the person responding to you incorrectly read "should"?
Perhaps you meant to write could but wrote should instead?
If someone likes to go to gym, then that would fall under movements that they like.
We are currently in obesity epidemic. That's only getting worse[0]. Lets try some new ideas instead of calories which is based of steam engines in 1800. The human body is much more complex.
What research is showing is that daily excersice is great for the overall health and strength like as the article posted.
And that excersice can help the brain[1][2] with aging [3] and much more.
Is the body "much more complex" than calories in/calories out though? If you are overweight, shouldn't calories in/calories out come first, followed quickly by eating healthy to achieve that deficit?
A lot of people, economically, cannot afford the latter while still being able to perform the former. Seems like we should be encouraging people how to lose weight and then educate them on healthier ways to do it...but at the end of the day it's all thermodynamics.
I can recommend the book Burn by Herman Pontzer on this:
The human body can adjust the Basal Metabolic Resting Rate quite a lot in the face of exercise. Spending an extra 500 kcals on exercise can easily only lead to 200 kcals higher total energy expenditure. The body apparently will for instance reduce sex drive and immune functions when under regular exercise. So to achieve weight loss exercise alone is a very hard path unless diet is also modified.
On the other hand it has been shown that dieting alone without exercise also makes it very hard to maintain a lower weight because for instance exercise seems to curb feelings of hunger.
So yes: human bodies definitely are complex adaptable machines. CICO alone doesn't cut it.
Correct, and has to because the evolutionary time that we had at least 3 meals a day has been really short. The body is made for extreme conditions, conditions that it's no longer exposed to.
So it had to be smart with when to store energy and when to spend it.
Great question, because the latest science is pointing to that hormones determine the states of body. Example Insulin triggers storage in cells, and t3 from the thyroid has influence over the metabolism. Testerone has many influences and there many more
For feeling full and feeling tired there are different hormones. And they are finding out how little we actually know. Turns out for example the out understanding of cholesterol was incorrect[0] and like calories the wrong focus.
So research into the marvel that is human body is very basic at the moment.
thermodynamics is made for steam engines. Just like calories. Its science from 1800, a moment time where everything was powered by steam engines. So understanding how much we need of something to increase the heat of water by 1 Celsius is very important.
But cells are not like steam engines, they don't burn energy. They use atp, mitchondria create atp with the kreb cycle.
Our gut biome plays very important role in digesting food.
Turns out that its different for every person even twins.
The gut biome is one the readons everone reacts a bit different to food.
Calories are still used as a proxy. Eat less Calories within a given dieet also means eat less food.
Then the question what should we do to lose weight. Many people have been helped by low carb dieet or intermittent fasting and even prolonged fasting. So in the end you could say that's still Calories. And to that I would have to agree. But it's how we get to same point.
There was actually a study that forced the participants to adhere to low calorie dieet. Hint it turned out really bad for them.
the physics of weightloss is straightforward (CICO), the chemistry isn't as much, the biology is mind-numbingly complex, and that's before we get to the psychology.
> Lets try some new ideas instead of calories which is based of steam engines in 1800. The human body is much more complex.
Sorry but in terms of obesity and weight loss, it's really not more complex. The most surefire way to lose weight is to make sure calories in < calories out, and vice versa for gaining weight.
>Sorry but in terms of obesity and weight loss, it's really not more complex.
No, it is extremely complex. "Calories in < Calories out" isn't even stating the principle you think it is. You want to make a statement about fat balance depending on calorie deficit, independent of what type of food you eat, and even that is completely wrong. Different foods take completely different paths through the human digestive system (e.g., fructose vs. glucose) and thus have completely different effects independent of their "calorie" count. Most people on a calorie deficit are not also exercising, and their weight loss is 25% muscle loss, which is a disaster for their future health.
Peter Attia makes a careful statement about "calories in/calories out" in the first few minutes of this lecture: https://youtu.be/31g94p5J2gE
Doug McGuff covers med school biochemistry and metabolism in the last part of this presentation, and mentions "internal starvation" where obese people crave food at regular intervals, but the food goes directly into fat tissue. https://youtu.be/2PdJFbjWHEU
Hey, if it is just calories in < calories out, why is Bill Gates so much richer than me? All he did was spend less than he earned, right?
That sounds simple, but only one of the variables in that equation is readily knowable, and the other is a function of the first. Meaning, only by counting calories- and all the calories, including cooking oil, salad “toppings”, etc do you know what the calories in is but then how do you determine what they should be, knowing that if you eat too little, your body slows down to preserve homeostasis? It turns out to be a far more complex situation that involves exercise to preserve the calories out part despite the drop in calories in. There is an ideal deficit below which it is counterproductive to go, certainly if you’re interested in body composition and not just losing “weight”. That ideal depends on activity and a variety of other minutia.
Basically, control your calorie intake via calorie counting, measure your sliding weight average, and adjust your calorie intake up or down accordingly. It doesn’t matter how accurate your calorie counting is, as long as it’s consistent. That is, you can ballpark a lot of things as long as you’re repeatedly using the same estimates.
Counting calories is the only way I personally manage to lose weight, and it works very well. A simplified version of the Hacker’s Diet I use is the following: First count your calorie intake for a week or two without changing your diet, to establish a baseline of your average calorie intake, and then reduce the intake to 80-85% of that baseline. You’ll slowly be losing weight.
You can go lower (e.g. 70%) if you are able to sustain it and are in a hurry. It helps to pick food that is easy to calorie-count, of course. Reducing carbs generally helps with sustaining the lowered intake, and increasing the ratio of protein (and doing resistance training) helps with not losing muscle (or even building up some).
The mechanics aren’t difficult. You only need to muster the motivation.
It would be a very long writing trying to explain it properly, so i’ll just use my experience as a long time gym rat. It takes a very heavy calorie deficit to enter “starvation mode” all bodies are different but counting calories is the easiest approach, lower your actual intake by 20% and monitor weight for 2 weeks once your curve starts flattening increase by 10% for one week then lower to the previous. I guarantee you that you’ll lose weight without losing muscle mass.
Despite the challenges in knowing calories in, much less calories out, agreed, just lowering your intake, and adjusting based on the outcome works, and is the only way to do sustainably do it. I was just challenging the assumption that calories out is fixed. In my case, I'm currently at a calorie deficit and losing weight (at 195, starting at 220), and at one point, I was at (or slightly below) 1000 calories a day for a month and did not lose a pound. (It was physically and emotionally miserable.) I went up to ~1500/day (and 2000 on gym days), and have lost 1.5 lbs/wk or so for months now. I don't think I "ruined" my metabolism, nad don't know if that was starvation mode or not, but I am convinced there's a calories "in" range in which your body will try its best to match calories "out", if only temporarily, and that I was in that range for a while.
Of course I only know my weight and that it wasn't changing for a while despite an extreme calories deficit (from my previous norm, if not my expenditure at the time). I'm assuming that my calorie expenditure dropped, and not, for example, that I wasn't just retaining water sufficient to match the weight I would otherwise lose at the time.
You would calculate your total daily energy expenditure, TDEE, and use that to figure out how much in excess or deficit you'd need to eat. That the body slows down homeostasis is not such a huge reason as to abandon the calories in calories out approach wholesale.
How do you account for the fact that people can lose weight by increasing the number of calories that they consume while reducing their exercise if they eat only ground beef and sardines?
2) Limiting what kind of food you eat usually leads to limiting how much you eat. Feel free to try this with eating only lentils, beans and broccoli, you can eat as much of it as you want.
Then why can't people lose weight by just drinking fewer calories of gasoline than the calories that they burn in a day through exercise? Is it possible that the kind of calories one consumes effects the burn rate of calories by the body's metabolic system? What if some calories are consumed but not burned because they are instead used for rebuilding bones or muscles -- how do you account for that?
This does seem like even more gaslighting, you said:
" I would like to argue that being healthy and fit is not about the gym, or investing time in tracking calories."
Instead we should focus on on daily fun movements that we like to do."
Now those daily fun movements include the gym if you like the gym? But you still are saying they should do something daily instead of periodic gym, not that they could.
Jesus Christ, why be so petty about him slightly confusing his point. I think the point he tried to make is that people often go to the gym and don't enjoy it, because they think it's the only or best option, but that those people should instead just look for a physical activity that's fun/enjoyable to them instead. HOWEVER if someone enjoys going to the gym, then that is perfectly fine. And that was the point they tried to make. Just use a little bit of empathy, people.
My fault - I started this whole thing, and wish I hadn't. The actual point is totally reasonable, but poorly communicated.
But the issue is not about the poster confusing their point, it's about them blaming the respondent for misunderstanding what the poster was saying, saying the respondent read "should" instead of "could", but the poster actually wrote "should".
"I wasn't being confusing, you just misunderstood!" is a pretty bad-faith argument to make in general, that's what I was trying to point out. But there must be some language barrier thing going on, because the original poster just doubled-down on the bad faith argumentation :shrug:
I think the post is arguing for a superset of the definition of exercise which includes the gym as opposed to a set definition of exercise defined by the gym exclusive of other activities. A superset definition would also include lifting my child for piggyback rides, a brisk walk with a friend, or practicing a flash mob.
There is allot research about daily exercise and the enormous health benefits. If we focus on trying to incoperate more movements throughout the the day.
It will be easier to maintain, and if we miss a day we will have the next day.
But if we would do both it will even be better:)
The bioneer in the youtube video explains it way better then this post.
Man that poster is trying gaslight us into healthy habits. Let's get him boys.
/s
What is going on with these comments. Going to gym could be part healthy lifestyle but it's not needed, when the lock downs happened many found out that it was single point of failure for them. And shouldn't have been that way.
Maybe the comment isnt written well enough to get the point across. We should focus on, doesnt exclude anything.
If anything my point is that both is even better.
Then the second should is about the latest science. I didn't elaborate on that.
The latest science is pointing towards daily exercise. Therfor we should ideally have some form of movement each day.
It's beneficial not only to overall health, and longevity. But also your brain health:)
In general, saying "I would like to argue that being X is not about doing Y. Instead we should do Z" is going to make people, quite reasonably think that you are arguing against Y, and that people should do Z instead of Y.
"We should focus on Z" does indeed suggest to most readers that you are excluding things that are not Z, whether you meant that or not.
Highly recommend going with "I'm sorry, I meant ..." rather than "You read it wrong, I didn't say ABC ..." to avoid confusion, especially when you do indeed use the phrase ABC.
Although that's great point about the confusion. But you could observe it as being only a logical statement, such as.
"
You should focus on your tie the next time instead of your shoes.
"
Doenst mean you should only have tie on the next time. That would be rather awkward.
Atleast that is what I meant, thanks for the explanation.
Sure, but “next time” isn’t what you said — you said, in effect, “to look sharp, focus on your tie instead of your shoes.”
That has a pretty different meaning, implying that the tie matters more and the shoes don’t matter as much.
It’s not a super reasonable read to then infer “oh, the shoes matter a lot, but the tie matters more”, because if that’s what you were trying to communicate, you’d say something more like “to look sharp, don’t just focus on your shoes, focus on your tie too” rather than using “instead of”. Instead of really communicates substitution, “do X instead of Y,” implies “don’t do Y.”
"""
"This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
"""
edit:
| And simply saying 'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' is such a weird take
'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' Yep, I watched the beginning of the video and totally agree with the guy. I feel like my next sentence :
'Have you ever considered that some people enjoy going to the gym? On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises. In the end it is up to the individual to chose the lifestyle that they enjoy, so please stop selling your personal favorite as if any other choices 'are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere'. I very much enjoy my time spend at the gym, thank you very much.'
basically sums up the guys take in the video. The guy who posted the video on the other hand seemed to think (Or at least seemed to imply) that going to the gym was a waste of time and that everybody should do these 'Micro workouts'. Which is the opposite of the video guy, who expressly said that some people love power-lifting, some other stuff. And that everybody should try to find their flavor and enjoy doing that kind of exercise because doing sport is great and it helps your health in many ways.
If you still think that I wrote something that videoguy would disagree with please write again and I'll check the part of the video you mean. Because he seems like a pretty cool dude, and I certainly don't feel like I disagree with him.
The poster didn't imply that from what I understand.
It's response to links training methodologies that solely focus on the gym and calories. As such is saying "there is more then the gym and calories". and you seem to agree with that statement. that was the context of the comment, and looks like you missed it.
Yes? And even in that article there is the following paragraph which implies that the number of calories consumed is important:
'"People who ate the ultra-processed food gained weight," says Dr. Stanford. Each group was given meals with the same number of calories and instructed to eat as much as they wanted, but when participants ate the processed foods, they ate 500 calories more each day on average. The same people's calorie intake decreased when they ate the unprocessed foods.'
I am *not* saying that 'losing weight is a matter of simple math' by counting calories as the article suggests. That is a a stupid thing to say and kind of a strawman. I am saying that 'investing time in tracking calories' (A thing the other guy implied being a waste of time) is a great tool in a tool-kit. I am also saying that eating whole foods is a great idea, but - by itself - not the ultimate solution either. I'd further say that eating healthy isn't just about losing weight, it is about a number of things for different people - some need to gain weight for example.
In addition to that, I think the article does a disservice to counting calories and is just generally written in a sloppy way. While obviously nothing it says is wrong, it also doesn't tell you a lot of other true things. For example that it can be quite easy for some people to eat enough healthy whole food to grow quite fat or at least to not lose weight (If that is the goal). It also doesn't mention that counting calories helped countless people lose a lot of weight.
But the most important flaw is that it doesn't tell you the intended target audience of the information.
Do I need to eat tons of McDonalds and be way overweight? Or do pasta and pesto twice a week count while eating lots of vegetables on the other days? Will I magically lose weight if I don't eat those two meals a week? What about if I lead a very active lifestyle and work in construction? What if I am a hobby athlete and just want to lose 10kg while already eating healthy whole foods? Depending on you personally the information in this article is probably useless.
I mean for gods sake, they use The biggest loser as an example, hardly relevant for most people (Outside the US? I don't know).
Also note that in the 3 reasons they list, only *1* is something you are actually able to control, and that one reason breaks down to *people eat less calories*. If they want to convince me that counting calories is a bad idea they should really find better arguments.
'putting the emphasis on improving diet quality and making sustainable lifestyle improvements to achieve a healthy weight.' as described in the article is such a non-committal take. No surprise, eating good food and making livestyle improvements (Whatever that is) is a good idea.
Reality is obviously way more complicated than a small essay on the internet can do justice. As such I personally kind of despise these articles, whether they be from Harvard Medical or Mens Healthy. Especially if they don't acknowledge this and instead write the article in a way that seems to imply that it contains all the information you need.
Losing weight isn’t even particularly desirable in itself. It’s a reduction in fat mass, especially visceral fat, that’s going to improve health. Gaining muscular and skeletal weight is going to improve most persons’ well-being.
The metric to target is body composition, not weight. And for that metric, there is a whole lot more than calories in or even nutrients in. Endocrine profile has a huge effect on nutrient partitioning, just to name one thing.
If experts from reputable sources won't change your mind, I don't think any post on HN will either.
The points in the article are pretty clear.
The gut biome, your metabolism, sleep, exercise , and stress all play role.
Calories in / calories out is a model. To paraphrase a famous quote: all models are bad, some are useful. You won’t find a a much simpler discipline than calorie logging. It /generally/ works, teaches people about their food habits and lets them start understanding things like macros. If you are doing it (weight loss) on your own it is an amazing starting point.
Except that body is unable to sense calories, but it's capable of sensing protein and blood sugar levels.
but calories can works as a proxy, "more calories" == "more food" but calories are not all the same.
A calorie derived from a carbohydrate is the exact same as a calorie derived from protein. Are you talking about more caloric densities of different macronutrients? Aka, there's more caloric density in fatty foods vs proteins, for instance?
Kinda like with running. Our hearts have no pedometer. It just works however hard it needs to for however long. The numbers, paces and such are things we add to gain insight into what that performance means. Calorie counting is often also the first introduction many people have to what their macros are like. And there is some wisdom here, around individuals and “calorie quality”, but you can ultimately still use calorie and macro counting as a baseline measurement to start understanding your body. I should caveat, when I say calorie counting I mean, tracking key macros too: protein, carbs, fat, fiber, etc.
FWIW the calorie counting model has worked well for me where others have failed. Anecdata, of course. But counting calories, as well as making some general, loosely-held shifts of what I eat (near zero liquid calories, minimize sugar, more fruits and veggies, max one fist-sized portion of meat per meal) have gotten my weight down significantly, and it feels easier than other methods I've tried.
He's got a valid criticism though. The article says one thing and then contradicts itself. Most of the advice is of the nature "This causes people to eat more".
Being stressed causes you to eat more. Poor sleep causes you to eat more.
There is some variance, but it's nowhere near significant enough to really matter in the face of the largest contributor: the number of calories you consume.
The criticism comes from someone who not a expert or even basic knowlegde of role of hormones in the body. Such as insulin on cells or thyriod t3 hormone on metabolism.
Maybe I didn't explain myself very well, if so I am very sorry. English is obviously not my first language.
The gut biome, your metabolism, sleep, exercise , and stress all play role.
Yep. You can't control your gut biome and your metabolism as far as I know so while interesting, those are irrelevant for most people. Everybody will tell you that no stress, sleep and exercise are great. Combine all of these if you want to live a good, healthy life - great, but you probably didn't need an article for that. But wait, there are lots of people who do all those things (Whole food, no/little stress, sleep, exercise) and still don't lose weight.
There are tons of reasons for that. Maybe they still eat way more than they should - people are horrible at estimating how many calories a meal has. Maybe they are sick, either in mind or body. Maybe they don't train as well as they think (A lot of people think that jogging for half an hour equals a whole meal, instead of one slice of bread). Maybe there is another reason out of the myriad of reasons that exist.
But this article makes it seem like the most important thing is Put the focus on food quality and healthy lifestyle practices to attain a healthy weight. By the way, here are other 'experts from reputable sources' (The same journal) who pretty much say the same thing I do:
Don't always believe what a single, hastily written and completely non-sourced (Not a single source/quotation in that article!!! How is that reputable??) in a weird online magazine claims. Even if the print Harvard on the top.
Oh please. To quote your much loved Harvard Medical Journal (https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/do-gut-bacter...): 'We are just beginning to understand the role of gut bacteria in obesity, and the science hasn't led yet to treatments that will make it easier to lose weight. However, I believe that day is coming.'
And to quote it again (https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-abo...): 'How fast your metabolism works is determined mostly by your genes.' and also saying: 'But you can't entirely blame a sluggish metabolism for weight gain, says Dr. Lee. "The reality is that metabolism often plays a minor role," he says. "The greatest factors as you age are often poor diet and inactivity."'. Sure, they then list a number of ways to 'boost it', but they all come back to the exact same tune I have been talking about. Exercise and food (And apparently Green tea. Huh, a 100 cal a day isn't great but isn't horrible either).
So if you know of some great way to control either of them, please link me a journal or paper, I would love to learn more.
Yeah, I'll give up. It is quite obvious we won't come to an agreement, though I am still not sure what you actually take issue with. Especially since we obviously both agree that obesity is a big problem and should be tackled.
On metabolism: 1. & 2. seem to indicate that you want to do hormone therapy with triiodothyronine? I don't know how we got to hormone therapy from 'eating healthy food' but sure. If you want to go that far I obviously was wrong in saying you can't change your metabolism. I assumed you meant by doing something that didn't involve something as extreme. Like: 3. Exercise increases metabolic rate. Which I thought was obvious. But yes, I should have expressed myself more clearly by saying 'besides the things we are doing anyways because we are in a fitness thread'. That is my fault and you are right here.
On gut biome: 2. 'Overall, further research on long-term diets that include health and microbiome measures is required before clinical recommendations can be made for dietary modulation of the gut microbiota for health.' 3. is on mice but interesting. 1. Is pretty interesting as well. Still, none of those papers have actual recommendations for the common individual.
I mean I readily admit that there might be some amazing cutting edge academic research that already points to a great new way to lose weight by either increasing your metabolism or changing your gut biome. But I haven't seen it yet and your linked stuff doesn't convince me that it is there yet. Sure, I have never heard about triiodothyronine therapy, but that honestly sounds very, very experimental to me.
That isn't true, though. Neither the article nor the comment you're referring to say anything at all about weight loss. In fact, while most of the links in the top comment are guys who care somewhat about staying lean, Mike Israetel explicitly does not. His goal is just to get as big as humanly possible given his genetic constraints (but also while doing steroids). That is entirely legitimate when the topic of the study being discussed here is whether infrequent or more frequent lifting builds more muscle.
Your comment is non-sequitur. Perhaps weight loss is the majority fitness goal in industrialized nations of the world today, but it is still a legitimate and separate topic worth discussing for people who succeed or were never fat in the first place, but still aren't necessarily all that "fit," to think about what they can do to achieve some goal beyond just not being obese.
You'd think Hacker News of all places would understand this. For the majority of the world, simple tech literacy is a goal and presumably a whole lot of research and think pieces discuss that kind of thing, how to best promote it and what not. But everybody here is already tech literate. We want to be technically excellent, not literate. That is a different goal and the tools you need to get there are different.
The above resources are not promoting how to not be obese. They're promoting how to be athletically excellent.
The links provided themselves point to programs, the information is to sell courses.
If you take steroids your body will respond different then normal people. Using steroids and then to promote your programs that act like it's possible to achieve them without is dangerous.
The strain they will be able to put on their bodies are not the same as without. Even with steroids the strain is so high it can lead to serious life changing injuries like at least one the some of the linked have found out.
There many young people that have used steroids and have completely worn out joints.
> On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises.
I’m with you here. I can push and pull a respectable amount for my age and body weight on a barbell, but with the exception of pull ups and dips I also find body weight exercises to be boring.
I do wish though I’d trained as a gymnast in my youth. Somehow I don’t think I’d find ring planche push ups boring. But sadly the progression from where I’m at to there is way too much without a daily coach.
> And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories …
This is just plain false. You can “focus” on eating whole foods and if you consume more calories than you burn you will gain weight. If you consume less calories than you burn you will lose weight. The science has not changed on this point. No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight.
"No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight."
That's not realistically true. If I watch actual calories, I wind up hungry all the time because I spend so much time thinking about food. On the other hand: I can do things like make sure I eat enough vegetables. Replace some meat with veggies or legumes. With some things, I can use less fat than my mother would have. Eat slightly smaller servings, change the items I eat for food during the day, or wait just a little bit before having the snack so I don't wind up eating two snacks instead of one.
The end result is that I'm changing out higher calorie stuff with lower calorie stuff without actually worrying about the calories I take in. You simply need to know that some things are lower in calories than other, and that's not exactly "worrying" - and it definitely isn't counting. And this was based on honest advice from folks. It also means that this is a way to actually change a diet: Few folks want to count calories for the next few decades of their life, after all.
these arguments aren't at odds. In fact, your strategy is an excellent way to diet with calorie counting. One of the best ways to improve satiety in a hypocaloric setting is by replacing high calorie density foods with low calorie density foods (such as vegetables and fruits, as you mentioned).
You still need to count calories for maximum accuracy and efficiency of weight loss, but it doesn't have to be as painful as eating one big mac and fried a day and starving the rest of the day since you hit your calorie limit
> for maximum accuracy and efficiency of weight loss
That's the point though... "ain't nobody got time for that" is the reason most of us fail at high performance diets. We need the simplest, most minimal first step which can become habit (and which also likely leads to _some_ weight loss, even if not maximum). Once that very significant behavior is changed (choosing better foods), then it can be refined.
If you focus on eating whole foods (instead of focusing on calories), you're more likely to consume fewer calories simply because whole foods are less calorie dense than packaged/processed foods. Plus you'll be getting less sugar and salt (although salt's harm is up for debate).
It's also likely that the body behaves differently depending on the quality of food consumed. Consuming less than 2000 calories of processed food may cause the body to operate less efficiently for any number of reasons (not the least of which involves your gut bacterial balance). So the end result might be less weight loss than a 2200 "whole food" diet would result in.
People are busy in modern times. Perfecting and managing a diet is hard work, so "hacks" like just choosing whole foods are a pretty great way to make positive progress.
If you religiously limit yourself to only eating beef, eggs, and sardines, then you will consume the fewest calories with the greatest return in terms of nutrition of any possible diet plan.
And if you min/max in that way, you're likely going to be introducing some other problem (perhaps one that takes a long time to recognize) into your complex biological system which is accustomed to having a variety of inputs.
Granted, for non-plant protein, small/young sardines are probably the best. Not only do you get fish oil, but you get load of calcium which is difficult to get elsewhere unless you consume a lot of dairy.
Beef and eggs are trickier, because their downsides tend to be related to how they are produced/raised. Also there's the animals in captivity factor which does not scale well (or humanely).
Pumpkin seeds are an amazing source of protein (and some other minerals which we don't normally get much of). Dried, I think they taste horrible. But roasted with a little seasoning, they are quite nice. And they can be added to other dishes to give extra texture.
Chickpeas are good. Peas are good. Cashews and peanuts are good.
And if you consume a variety of vegetables, you can get the complete assortment of amino acids (so usable protein).
There is virtually no way someone could get fat from eating the foods I have listed. If they do, then they have some other underlying health issue or a gut biome that's way out of whack (which most of ours are pretty far out).
Way too much fiber in that diet -- you'll end up pooping a lot more and you'll probably also fart. If you stick to a meat-only diet then you will literally never fart.
Also, you might be able to get protein from plants, but you won't get protein with all the amino acids in the appropriate ratios unless you combine different plant sources, thereby increasing your overall calorie consumption because those additional amino acids will be accompanied with carbs if they are plant-based.
So you'll just end up under-nourished if you try to follow a plant-based diet. You may not end up obese, but you're not going be as strong and healthy as you would be if you ate only red meat.
The reason it's so difficult, to almost impossible to get fat on those foods you have listed. Is because you'll become too full to overeat. Not only is it healthier for plethora of reasons. But you'll eat less.
On top of that, if eating for long enough your gut biome will change and you'll start craving whole food.
You must fart a lot with all that fiber in your diet. One of the blessings of switching to a diet that is appropriate for human beings is that your digestive system will operate a lot more smoothly and you'll stop farting so much. You basically never fart on a diet of only red meat. Also, a red-meat-only diet has far more vitamins and other micronutrients than a plant-based diet.
> "This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. The truth is that even careful calorie calculations don't always yield uniform results. How your body burns calories depends on a number of factors, including the type of food you eat, your body's metabolism, and even the type of organisms living in your gut. You can eat the exact same number of calories as someone else, yet have very different outcomes when it comes to your weight.
This is just plain dishonest writing. Just because there are other variables, or that different people burn different amount of calories, does not make 'calorie in and calorie out' wrong. If John burns 2000 calories a day and has different organisms in his gut from Sarah who burns 1500 calories a day, in no way disproves calories in / calorie out. All it proves is that people are different, a premise that the modern science community seems to find a challenging notion.
The theoretical concept of CICO is thermodynamics and indisputable, but the point that the data demonstrates and that these Harvard scientists are discussing is that all of the parts of the equation are so error-ridden and faulty that to combine them together in practice is not effective. Everything from the faulty results of burning food in a calorimeter, to users guesstimating the ingredients in food they cook, to the wide amount of false data inputted to calorie tracking apps, to the extremely complex and still not well understood G.I. tract, to measuring how much each individual can absorb, to how much cooking effects it, to how much the personal biomes between gut and colon play an effect, etc all add up to the reality that there is too much error to pretend the system is useful.
If using the system got you to eat differently, and eating different made you lose weight, then congratulations, but that doesn't prove that the food you ate was actually X calories or that you actually burned Y calories, and that that deficit is why you lost weight, nor does it mean that someone else who ate as much as you did would have their body change in that way.
Note the caveat in your quote. It's not that calorie in/out is theoretically wrong, it's that it is an unhelpful/antiquated strategy "whenitcomestoweightloss".
First, note that the calorie estimates on food packaging can be off, sometimes by as much as 25%.[1] Restaurant foods have an even wider discrepancy. [2] And as you point out, different people will digest them and absorb different nutrients from the same food making comparisons difficult. For example, I absorb a small fraction of the calories from dairy products because they unfortunately pass through my digestive system quickly and remain largely undigested.
And as others have noted, accurately estimating calorie expenditure can also be difficult without professional equipment, so in practice measurements of calories expenditure can be off by a significant margin as well.
Combining all of these sources of error can result in excessively wide error bars. Someone who relies on calorie in/out estimates to dictate their consumption may end up eating significantly more or less than is optimal.
Of course, even if counting calories in/out is wildly inaccurate it might still have a positive effect if it causes people to be more aware of the food they eat. Unfortunately I'm not aware of research that teaching people to count calories results in better health outcomes than other diet strategies. (Though it does seem to increase people's odds of developing eating disorders. [3])
It's one of those cases where the theory may be correct in theory but that doesn't make it particularly useful in practice.
The fact that counting calories is difficult, or that some food labels might be wrong, is not evidence that CICO is incorrect. Just as the fact that different people burn different amounts of energy does not disprove CICO.
I'm astonished how many commenters are desperately trying to find loopholes in simple laws of physics.
I said above, it's not that CICO is wrong. No point I have raised could possibly disprove CICO because CICO is obviously correct from a physics perspective, and I'm not sure if anyone here is trying to find loopholes in simple laws of physics.
I (and most of the other commenters here it seems) keep trying to communicate that it is possible to be both technically correct and simultaneously not useful as a weight loss strategy.
CICO isn't about counting calories, all you have to do is to gradually eat less until you start losing or maintaining the weight you want. CICO guarantees that to work, and lots of people have used that strategy to lose weight, it works 100% of the time if you follow it properly.
It wont work for everyone though, since many people can't make themselves eat less without following some rituals, the problem there isn't CICO but that those people can't implement a CICO diet properly. But that doesn't mean that CICO is a useless concept for losing weight, it just means that those people needs more help to keep their psychology in check.
Saying that CICO isn't useful when CICO is the basis for every single weightless diet in existence is just ignorance or a lie. All weightless diets either makes you absorb less calories by some method, or make you burn more calories, so the first thing when looking at a diet is asking how it relates to CICO. Trying to sweep that under the rug as some old school nonsense principle that has proven to not work just proves how much nonsense there is in nutritional "science".
CICO has limited use. Boiling everything down to a single physics based metric doesn't give us all the information we need.
Knowing what mechanisms and processees go into losing weight can make the journey much more intellectually stimulating, satsifying for the participant and smooth out incredibly rough bumps in the road to losing weight. CICO can't fill this need for tailoring weight loss to smooth out the efficiency losses you get with brutal cuts into one's life and psyche.
Pumping out a single metric and hammering flat all the differences in personal process with psychology and ritual screams of unnecessary suffering. It's probably wrong to use oneself like that.
Very few people live according to the physics based description of what their life should be... However one would derive that idea without hiding or ignoring personal presuppositions?
The "CICO diet" most here are referring to is when people attempt to estimate their "calories in" and their "calories out" and keep the former slightly lower than the latter. To my knowledge this has not been demonstrated to be generally effective, possibly due to the challenges with estimating these values with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
If you're simply referring to the physics of CICO that underpin most diets then I have already acknowledged it is correct.
But being correct does not make it necessary knowledge for people looking to lose weight any more than Hamiltonian mechanics is necessary knowledge to play tennis.
If I still haven't managed to convey the distinction between technical correctness and practical utility yet then I have to conclude this is a gap I cannot bridge and I wish you luck.
I think you are missing their point. Calories in and out is a piece of the puzzle and net calories is often not enough to make a good prediction. Two similar people can consume precisely the same number of calories and have the same level of physical fitness and physical activity and have different outcomes.
People are indeed different and the scientist you quote is saying precisely that.
Calories in vs out is wrong because those who tote it assumes that only physical exercise has an effect on calories "out". New research shows that the human body is keenly aware of the amount of energy available and adjusts many bodily functions (tissue repair, heat, hair growth, immune defense, etc) accordingly. This is why just restricting calories in and exercising more won't necessarily mean you loose weight.
Taken literally calories in vs out is of course true.
> Calories in vs out is wrong because those who tote it assumes that only physical exercise has an effect on calories "out".
No, they actually dont assume that only physical exercise has an effect on calories burned. In fact, CICO is agnostic to the means by which calories are burned.
> This is why just restricting calories in and exercising more won't necessarily mean you loose weight.
Actually, so long as you burn more energy than you consume, you will lose weight. Again this is agnostic to how the energy is burned. What the body does to adjust is merely effecting the amount of energy burned. It does not effect the formula concerning CICO.
> Two similar people can consume precisely the same number of calories and have the same level of physical fitness and physical activity and have different outcomes.
You are trying to find a loophole here that doesn't exist. If two people burn the same amount of energy E_O ("out") and take in the same amount of energy E_I ("in") with E_I < E_O, then both of them must take those calories from somewhere else in their body and must therefore undergo weight loss. There is no way around that.
Now, notably you didn't specify E_O, you only said
> the same level of physical fitness and physical activity
which can mean a lot of things.
All the supposed loopholes work in exactly the same way: It might not be entirely clear what the values of E_I and E_O are, so "calories in, calories out must be wrong". (Which, again, is impossible because it's just conservation of energy, i.e. a law of physics.)
In any case, just like you can bound E_I from above by counting calories, there are ways to constrain E_O from below: If both people have the same mass (say 100kg) and walk up the staircase in one of the towers of Cologne cathedral (~150m), then they will both have spent at least E_O >= 100kg * 150m * 10m/s² = 150,000 J.
How can you possibly read GP's comment and think they don't realize this? Stop nitpicking. Calories In vs Calories Out is correct. Period. It doesn't matter if Calories out is hard to calculate.
Calories In vs Calories Out is mediated by a factor, usually labeled S, which accounts for the individuals own metabolic factor.
Meaning if you are naively doing calories in vs calories out, or doing desired estimated calories out based on a table, you have an error factor significant enough to skew your results.
What we call it doesn't matter, but what GP said is actually incorrect as written.
> What we call it doesn't matter, but what GP said is actually incorrect as written.
Please do point out which part of my comment is incorrect.
> Meaning if you are naively doing calories in vs calories out, or doing desired estimated calories out based on a table, you have an error factor significant enough to skew your results.
What does "naively doing calories in vs calories out" mean exactly? I agree that some people do it naively but where exactly was my comment naive?
> Calories In vs Calories Out is mediated by a factor, usually labeled S, which accounts for the individuals own metabolic factor.
Yes, the metabolic factor affects the numeric value of E_I and E_O (I never disputed that), but once you have determined their value (or bounded them as in my comment – which, as demonstrated, is orders of magnitude easier), the statement "weight loss occurs if E_O > E_I" remains correct.
"Calories In vs Calories Out is correct". Maybe it’s correct but I doubt it’s useful. How do you explain that people who do not count calories maintain their weight ?
Maybe, but in this case I don't think it's fallacious. She publishes, is cited all over the place, teaches at a well regarded school, and has explicitly and plainly said CICO is wrong when it comes to weight loss.
This[1] is a good summary of a talk she gave about a year ago and in it she talks a bit about the non-CICO factors in weight gain or loss. Here's one example:
“The gut microbiota of those that are lean versus those that have obesity are quite different, so much so that we can often take the gut microbiota out of individuals that are lean and place it in those that have obesity and see weight shifts with no other modifications."
> She is the director of diversity and inclusion for the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard (NORCH)
Why did I know this before I even looked?
>“The gut microbiota of those that are lean versus those that have obesity are quite different, so much so that we can often take the gut microbiota out of individuals that are lean and place it in those that have obesity and see weight shifts with no other modifications."
Yeah, so all that effects is CO (calories burned). This does not disprove CICO. I see Fatima has a limited grasp of logic.
Where in my comment did I use or refer to the resting burn rate? This is precisely the point: If you can bound the total calories burned (E_O) from below (by means of the laws of physics), individual variations of metabolism don't matter – the calories must have been burnt by the person in question no matter what.
it's not that the values E_I and E_O might not be clear, it's most certainly not clear and surely not easy to estimate for people trying to lose weight
CICO is a great model for 3rd parties in your diet. If you have someone watching your dietary intake, they can count calories for you and you will succeed at losing weight nearly 100% of the time if they can monitor everything you eat. Most individuals cannot count calories even reasonably close to what they are consuming due to a number of factors.
The model is also an abject failure when it comes to the individual psychology of overeating. This is where people like the above doctor says it's "just wrong". CICO as the only method of weight loss is about as effective as quitting smoking cold turkey (3 to 5% success rate). In general getting people to stop eating high caloric density / high glycemic index foods and replacing them with something else is a good starting point. You're effectively lowering the CI but not requiring a cutoff point for the individual.
when they said CICO is "just wrong" they should have said "just different for every person". My wife listens to a pretty entertaining podcast called Maintenance Phase and they did an episode on CICO where they basically call it BS because of all the other variables. I have a hard time dealing with CICO being wrong because I just don't see getting around the physics. In my mind, what's missed in CICO is the numbers and measurements are different for each person. A calorie limit for one person that results in weightloss may not work for someone else. It seems pretty obvious to me that calorie counting has to be done on an individual level and has to be done accurately ( a whole other problem ) but that seems to be missed on a lot of people.
EDIT: i wanted to mention something someone downthread hit on and that was also in the Maintenance Phase episode. Calorie burn is not constant and your body will adjust, so for you to effectively count calories and stay below some threshold you have to track what your body is burning as it adjusts which is probably very difficult.
I actually suspect CICO being wrong or right is actually bikeshedding technicality. The question is "Is CICO helpful to yell at a fat person?" and not in the technically if you can control every facet of a person's life they will lose weight under CICO, but whether or not a regular busy obese person potentially with health barriers, children, a full time job, and whatever other issues would find statistical use in it or is it just something that makes sense for thin people to yell about because its technically correct.
Lots of people just need to think in terms of CICO and no dumb diets to lose weight, they just eat less. Other people need to create arbitrary rules to eat less calories since they are addicted to some foods, so they need to cut out all the foods they are addicted to in order to reduce calories in. For example, people addicted to carbs do low carb diets to curb their calories in, people addicted to desserts do a no dessert diet and they will lose weight etc.
The only thin that makes this complicated at scale is that different people are addicted to different foods, so need to cut out different things to start losing weight. But CICO is the basis for all of those.
The duo on that podcast asserts gems like: we don't actually know if being fat is bad for you. Worth a chuckle.
I can imagine the podcast took off because people are hungry (pun unintentional) for something that validates inaction on improving their bodies. That show treats any sort of ambition about one's body as an eating disorder or unrealistic goal.
I know this is late but I was going back through my comments and found yours. Yeah , i have problems with the podcast on those terms too. I get their point that fat-shaming is harmful and I totally agree however, if someone is overweight then it's very much a good idea to try and reduce weight and not just consider it normal and healthy like the podcast sometimes implies. Granted, overweight people are a favorite prey for every charlatan out there and i feel like the podcast does an acceptable (but not perfect) job of calling them out.
oh and we (my wife and I) found the Maintenance Phase podcast by following Michael Hobbes from You're Wrong About which is another entertaining podcast. I don't always agree with his politics but if I ever met him i'd shake his hand, he does a really good job.
Every single piece of advice listed can and should be done in addition to counting calories.
The single best heuristic we have for weight loss continues to be “calories in - calories out” simply because you cannot escape thermodynamics.
Yes, your base metabolic rate may be different than others and may change over time. Yes different foods are processed differently by your body. This changes the variables, but again, does not change the calorie arithmetic.
I recently learned that the science has changed and I can recommend the book Burn by Herman Pontzer on this:
The human body can adjust the Basal Metabolic Resting Rate quite a lot in the face of exercise. Spending an extra 500 kcals on exercise can easily only lead to 200 kcals higher total energy expenditure. The body apparently will for instance reduce sex drive and immune functions when under regular exercise. So to achieve weight loss exercise alone is a very hard path unless diet is also modified.
In other words the mechanistic model of "calories in minus exercise calories minus resting calories" doesn't work well or at least it is harder to assess "calories out" than it seems at first hand.
It saddens me that it is not universally understood that the way to get in shape is not to exercise but to stick religiously to a diet of only fatty beef, eggs, and sardines.
Not sure if properly highlighted, though the science is uncertain about calorie absorption. In other words, not all food-source calories are equal, further a persons metabolism and their GI tract play a role as well. These additional variables have sparked my interest quite a bit, I'm very interested to learn more if others have more information/links about these variables to calorie intake.
The World Health Organization recommends (for adults) 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity OR 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity a week. They also recommend at least two days a week of "muscle-strengthening" activities at moderate or greater intensity that involve all major muscle groups. [1] If anyone can meet or exceed these guidelines solely through things they enjoy then absolutely go for that. However, most of us tend to enjoy one thing more than another, I've noticed. We might be highly into rock climbing and less-so willing to go for walks or bike rides. We might be a 10k runner who neglects to do their pushups. My point is it is likely you're going to need to do some stuff you're not thrilled about. If you don't do them then fine, but don't make the argument that just doing things you like doing is enough because it very well might not be.
As for the calories debate, all i can say here is that evidence is needed for some of these claims you and your article have made. I'm seeing links to quotes and videos but no real evidence that a calorie is not a calorie. If the point they're clumsily trying to make is that practically speaking you cannot track every single calorie in your day-to-day existence then yes i would agree with that but no one who tracks calories would tell you their goal is 100% accuracy. It all comes out in the wash over averages.
That said, I do not think most people need to track their calories if they just want to be at a healthy bodyweight. Merely eating whole foods and adhering to the guidelines above should get them there just fine. This is not the same thing as saying a calorie isn't a calorie.
Not all of those blogs are about being healthy. Some of them are just about reaching and maintaining the popular societal understanding of appearing "fit". I mean damn, one of the blogs is literally called Look Great Naked!
I totally agree, for the record. For the majority of people counting calories and recording reps isn't something they'll be interested in doing their entire lives, any more than they'd be interested in updating new device drivers and reflashing their OS if an easier, brainless alternative existed. And it does! Walk, bike, or run a little bit every day; eat less carbs than you'd prefer, and try to eat more vegetables than you would otherwise. I'm no expert whatsoever, but I've travelled all over the world and that advice seems to be the only constant amongst all the healthiest people I've seen.
The point of the article on which we are commenting is that training each day is more beneficial than once a week.
It's a huge time investment to go to the gym each day. But you could do some pushups or squats right now, and the great thing is. The time investment is small, and short term and long term is great investment. you'll immediately get a small dopamine boost and in the long run your health and appearance will improve.
And according to the article it's better than once heroic day in the gym, that will leave you feeling sluggish.
But everyone can benefit from even simple body exercises, and maybe buy some dumbbells and lift them up each day for 5 minutes, if they become light, increase the weight or reps. Its that simple.
The point I'm trying to make is that exercise doesn't have to take place in a gym, it could. The bioneer link above can expain it much better then me.
My understanding is that training every day is good for hypertrophy and perhaps endurance, but that it is not the best way to gain strength. The underlying notion is that the more work you do, the more capacity for work you can do. And that recovery time is nonlinear to the amount of work done, so that more but less intense excercise leads to ablarger capacity for work. However, if you are double fast-twitch and you want to play to your strengths (pun intended), you are going for peak power, not average capacity for work over time. In that case you get stronger by doing things that require more strength. That is going to still require recovery time that will not typically allow work every day. In fact, for strength training, best practice is still to avoid getting out of breath on recovery days.
Hypertrophy is a different goal entirely, and always had more volume than strength or power workouts, this data simply takes that to the logical conclusion. Whether its bro-splits or lots of compound work. You want to maximize average volume over any interval you could pick.
I've found that few adults think this way. A lot of them avoid exercise and healthy eating because they perceive these as hard and complicated, and they are afraid of doing the work and likely failing anyway. Mainstream advice doesn't help this situation at all.
I get a lot better results at helping people when I show them that health can actually be fun and easy.
I mind doing most chores, and I don't think I'm alone: How many people would choose to do dishes for a family of four if they have a dishwasher to do it for them?
I even like to cook, but most days it is simply a chore and not something I particularly want to do that day.
> Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.
The people I know on that list would absolutely agree with this. E.g. Mike Israetel from Renaissance Periodization; he'll often say that one of the best ways to lose weight is to try to get your step count up, e.g. move around more in the day, without necessarily doing formal exercise. The best thing is that you can be running around doing "chores" or whatever, and this will help with your weight loss goals and get more stuff done during the day.
That said, the question is, as always, what are your goals. If your goals are to be healthier, that requires a very different approach than if your goal is to, e.g., look more muscly, bodybuilder style. They're not completely incompatible goals, at least for novices, but they are different goals. Some strength training and cardio, with an emphasis on maintaining a body fat percentage <20%, is probably the best for maximizing long term health.
"So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle."
This is it for me, absolutely. I've always been a bike commuter, so that was my cardio for decades— 10x 20min bike ride to and from work each week, year round. When I lost the commute with pandemic WFH, I fairly quickly shot up 15lbs.
The journey back was in finding ways that I could recreationally get that same experience, which for me has been a combination of walks, distance cycling, and lane swimming. All of these are things I enjoy for their own sake, and are great mental health resets. They're also things I can do with others, so there's that little bit of accountability woven into it as well. I'm not really watching what I eat, though I did cut out a bunch of snacking (especially at bedtime), and I switched my breakfast to a protein smoothie.
Now I'm down 30lbs+ from my pandemic high, and probably the best shape I've been in since my early twenties.
How do we know if we are moving enough or eating the right amount if we do not use some quantifiable basis? Moving for fun is all well and good, and exercise should be fun as opposed to a chore, but the dose dependency needs to be accounted for.
Whole foods work well because they tend to hit the calorie and nutrient milestones without much tracking being necessary, but we only know that because other people have done the tracking for us.
I think the information these people put out should be used to inform a lifestyle that one constructs, not to construct it directly.
>"And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories"
People get obese on "whole foods" just fine if they do not count calories. For some it is not needed since they live physically active life and naturally do not eat all that much. Yet others can barely fit in their cars on the same food.
"""
"This idea of 'a calorie in and a calorie out' when it comes to weight loss is not only antiquated, it's just wrong," says Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity specialist and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
"""
An absurd statement. If you put someone on a calorie deficit they will lose weight, period. If I work you 12 hours a day at a gruelling physical job and don’t increase the amount you eat then you will lose weight, end of story. All this faffing around about with metabolism and gut bacteria is only applicable when people have the absolute luxury of sitting all day with their only physical activity being walking to the kitchen to get another bowl of pasta. The human body was designed for long distance running and a fast/feast diet of mostly fruit and meat, of course you’re going to get fat if you don’t move and just eat pure carbs for every meal.
It's not absurd, quite the opposite. "Calores-in, calories-out" on the other hand is laughably reductive.
If the body was an actual furnace, calories in calories out would be an excellent mantra.
But it is not. It's a complex chemical machine with complex feedback loops. You do not ingest pure energy, you ingest matter that might be processed into food and stored using a ton of different chemical pathways, some more efficient than others.
If I ingest 2000 kcal of cellulose, I indeed get 2000 kcal of cellulose out, not as energy but as undigested faeces. If I ingest 2000 kcal of fat, my body behaves completely differently than if I ingest 2000 kcal of pure carbohydrates, than if I ingest 2000 kcal of pasta.
So, please let's stop with his reductive CICO meme. We all know thermodynamics, but it's a very bad model for explaining how the body handles food, hunger and long term energy storage. Focusing on calories is like comparing vehicle speeds by solely focusing on their horse power. There's a relation, but it conveniently ignores hundred of other variables that might show an opposite outcome.
No, it is also absurd. To carry your example forward, it would be like someone saying "the idea of horsepower when it comes to vehicle speed is not just antiquated, it is just plain wrong!'
The shape of the car, as a variable effecting the vehicle speed, does not make horsepower plain wrong.
I'm not saying thermodynamics is wrong, and I've never said CICO is wrong, please re-read my comment. I'm saying it oversimplifies.
An RC car with 10 bhp is faster than a truck with 20 bhp.
Putting 1000 kcal of kerosene in your engine has a completely different effect than 1000 kcal of diesel.
A 2000 kcal diet is not like another 2000 kcal diet, unless it is composed of the same foods, and the two subjects have a similar genetic makeup and gut flora.
Right, and my comments are not about your POV. They are addressing the claim of the doctor from the Harvard article who is saying that CICO is wrong, and then responding to your comments about whether or not her claim is absurd. In truth, we cannot prove or disprove whether the claim is absurd as this is a subjective claim. And so I suggest we focus instead on the validity of the claim rather than our subjective opinion of it. To that end, it seems we are in agreement that the doctor's claim is not true.
Actually that is right. Horsepower is quite meaningless, engines of today with same horsepower will out perform 40 years old engines in all metrics that are important to us.
Agreed. The proof of the claim in the article is effectively that people are different. John and Sarah burn calories differently, which means that calorie-in/calorie-out is wrong! You heard it here here first - soon Harvard will decry calorie counting as a form of white supremacy. Joking aside, the Harvard article is hardly more than clickbait. It appeals to people who refuse to put in the work to maintain an effective diet. They merely need to label what they eat as "whole" and can then eat as much of it as they want.
This post strikes me as weird because it clearly glanced at the article but it misses a major point which is ensuring a healthy diet and regular exercise which this post is criticizing as if that entire section of the article isn’t there
I don't understand this post. "CICO is wrong", they say. "We put people on two different diets, one group ate 500kcal more and gained weight". So, CICO is wrong? How does it make any sense? Nobody has ever said that food with the same amount of calories gives you the same feeling of satiety.
It is like saying that Newtonian mechanics is wrong because we now have smart bombs.
Everyone who reduces their caloric intake below their expenditure will lose weight.
Those that try to eat their daily intake in pure sugar will 1) feel like absolute garbage and lie in a comatose state further reducing their expenditure 2) overeat.
Those that eat something at least close to being actual food. Like.. a potato that hasn't been fried in palmoil will feel full and less like a bag of shit.
I do not give a flying fuck about what she says. I can see how "Calorie in calorie out" works on my own example and with some tolerances it is definitely a case. I keep myself in a nice shape and am physically active but since I have very healthy appetite I have to curtail it. Otherwise I just gain weight. And yes since I can afford it I do eat "whole foods".
> we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do
I fully agree. If some of that fun actually involves going to the gym, then great. But there are a lot of "play" activities which are compelling and fun while also making you healthier. Sports is an obvious one, and dancing is a less obvious one.
One hour of salsa dancing (with breaks and partner changes) is a good cardio exercise which is also lots of fun. And as or more importantly, the mental and emotional boost is something many of us need more than bigger muscles. I like both.
One of the person I was following was basically saying “don’t diet to lose weight, create muscles and your body will naturally need to consume more calories”
While it’s true that more muscle mass requires more calories it also has an impact on your appetite so if you aren’t conscious of what you’re eating you can also gain a lot of fat while gaining muscle. There’s no way around it if you want to look lean you need to balance your diet and eat an appropriate number of calories for your weight and activity level.
The thing is if you get lean without having put on plenty of muscle first, you'll look like a bag of bones, which is neither healthy nor aesthetically pleasing.
You wont look like a bag of bones unless you start to literally starve yourself into underweight levels, like BMI less than 17. Healthy weight people at around BMI 22 don't look like bags of bones, they either have significant amounts of muscle or fat, that is roughly the level where most athletes are so you either have that amount of muscle or the equivalent in fat or somewhere in between.
I think what you're describing is the best case, the world we should shoot for. But getting there for most people will take a generation of social change.
Meanwhile, most of us find ourselves in a shitty current situation where a healthy diet and a healthy level of activity feel weird and counterintuitive to us, and we have to trust reason and evidence to guide us to a healthy way of living, despite deeply engrained aversions, deeply engrained compulsions to engage in unhealthy behavior, and powerful external forces arrayed against us.
For people who are unhappy with where they're at and are looking for answers, telling them that there's an easy healthy way to live that caters to their current desires and aversions sends them on a lifelong journey of being disappointed by one set of false promises after another.
A more honest thing to tell them is that their life up to this point, their experiences, the norms they grew up with, the food ecology of the world around them, has warped their perceptions to the point that what is actually good for their body will feel unpleasant and psychologically unsettling. The unvarnished truth, which you might not want to dump on them right at the beginning, is that at times it will be fucking miserable. It's analogous to having a substance abuse disorder. Many, many times the only choice that feels comfortable and natural is the one that physically harms you, and resisting the compulsion to harm yourself feels awful. It can feel sad and scary not to eat every single donut in the break room, even if you've already had a generous healthy breakfast. At times like that, the "if it isn't easy, you're doing it wrong" message comes off like an unfeeling flex, like telling a depressed person to just snap out of it.
People may stigmatize difficult lifestyle changes as "restrictive" or "joyless" or "unrealistic," but it's not the fault of the lifestyle itself. It's the fault of what you've been fed your whole life and what the world continues to shove in your face and dangle in front of you every day. It doesn't kill joy not to eat cake. It kills joy to say no to cake eight times a day while a billion dollar industry wages war against your efforts to care for yourself by constantly reminding you of the momentary pleasure and relief you will feel if you give in, and people who care about you unwittingly act as their accomplices in all the spaces that are supposed to be safe for you.
People who work in public health are not giving advice to help you make a significant change in your life. They are giving advice that will do the most good for the most people, which realistically means moving the needle a tiny bit. That's what they're shooting for. They don't expect you to succeed at living a healthy life. They expect you to be overweight and to live a lifestyle that makes metabolic disease a likelihood, because the societal context is stacked against us. They've accepted that their power to help people currently struggling with their health is limited to changing a fraction of a percent here and there, and to achieve significant results we need to focus on changing the context for the next generation. Which we do need to do, but meanwhile, if you don't want to write yourself off as a victim of the times, don't let people tell you that easy is the only healthy way. You won't regret doing your best to take care of yourself, even if it's a struggle and you can't pretend it's easy like everyone tells you it's supposed to be.
I highly recommend looking at Kyle Boggeman.[1]
He focuses on exercising for long term health using calisthenics and really opened my eyes at looking at exercise volume differently e.g. from fixed volume per exercise to accumulated volume over a week.
Calisthenics is great, but these guys always seem to forget they have legs. Of course extra weight on their butts and legs would mean their calisthenics skills would suffer. But to me it always seems a bit weird to have such a built out torso and arms, and then a tiny waist and legs.
I glanced through the video list that GP linked to, and there were a number of exercises targetting the legs. You just recycled a standard assumption without really looking. Pistols, in particular, can build very powerful legs.
A lot of gym rats really slag on calisthenics, but there are several one-legged squat type movements that are quite difficult and provide more than enough challenge for most people with typical fitness goals.
For people who want to become especially strong, specialized weights and machines become more important, but as a percentage of the population this group must be vanishingly small. The "do a little each day" thing certainly lends itself better to calisthenics, which can be performed almost anywhere, than to a gym.
I expect a typical person would have better luck doing body weight squats 5 days a week at home than trying to stick to a gym schedule to do barbell squats regularly.
> I expect a typical person would have better luck doing body weight squats 5 days a week at home
I would think so too, but in practice it seems that gyms work for people because it's a whole function that's easy to compartmentalize unlike doing push-ups next to your bed. I think it's less mentally taxing.
e.g. I would wager that going to the gym to use the chest press machine is more realistic for most people than suddenly being able to do push-ups in their living room during a TV commercial or whatever.
These reflections come from my own experience trying to get friends to do body-weight exercises with me, and my own journey from going from a gym guy to the guy who is doing push-ups while waiting for my HEB steamables bag of edamame to cook in the microwave. For various reasons due to, I think, our human nature, the latter is a lot harder and requires more personal transformation. Doesn't seem like it should be though.
I think one way to begin thinking about this is: to everyone in these comments who is supposedly very opinionated on exercise and health, what stopped you from doing 20 push-ups on your apartment floor today? We have all sorts of reasons.
Bodyweight exercises aren't nearly stressful enough to build strength in the lower body. The muscles of the thighs and hips are just too big, they need to be loaded.
> Bodyweight exercises aren't nearly stressful enough to build strength in the lower body.
exaggerated disfunctional super strength is not the only goal in fitness. That guy has good legs, and likely much better endurance than those who are focused on weighted squats.
Disfunctional super strength doesn't happen by accident, it's typically the result of many years of hard training and drug use. Most people who lift weights regularly will never develop super strength, they'll simply develop "normal" strength and have a better life. There are reasons to believe that focusing on conditioning isn't a good idea.
I think hundreds bodyweight squats and lunges, which that guy promotes, is closer to "normal" strength, endurance, mobility and better life. Those who do heavy-weighted squats are more moving towards goal of lifting compact car once in a while.
Lifting light weights for high reps does nothing for strength. In fact, it's detrimental to strength, unless you also do strength training, which consists mainly in low reps at high intensity.
It's easy enough to get legs(and everything else) by doing crawling routines. I basically replaced the gym with crawling, pull-ups and cycling. Most of the time, I just stick with bodyweight though I suspect I could optimize the progression with load. It's just really easy to be in the habit of a short crawl each day.
Body-weight squats, lunges, and Bulgarian squats are part of any normal body-weight routine. On the other hand, "skipping leg day" is not a meme that targets calisthenics but all guys who work out in general because the legs aren't as visible/vain as arms.
I'm currently building a service for exactly this. It's still in Alpha but it allows you to take short 4-5min breaks with friends (+ voice chat) with instructed stretches + strength exercises. https://www.pausewith.me
As I said, still in Alpha, but I'm always happy for constructive feedback.
How do you get past the 'before starting any workout regiment consult your doctor' most workout programs use to make sure you aren't taking on liability in a corporate environment? Especially doing things like good mornings for an older non-mobile person man, that looks like a ton of liability to me.
Corporate added a morning stretch routine on our factory signage and I had to point out we had to be SUPER conservative on the stretches we had people do because making it a corporate thing meant we took on a ton of liability.
This is interesting. I would like to mention: don't forget students in your future subscription model!
As a new (but middle aged) CS student I think this could be a fun way to encourage my fellow students and myself to exercise more between study sessions.
Which ones and how do you know? I'm actually curious, the reaction to steroids is a bit... one sided.
It's a bit of a PR problem to say positive things about them, and it feels. The consensus, the one we get to hear, is pretty clear: they work very well, but they have side effects that make using them a bad idea. And I actually trust this consensus.
Unfortunately, what I don't see is obvious next steps like "ok, so how about we lower the dose and see if there's a useful dosage without long term side-effects". Or "how about we try to test if a certain person has risk factors to side effects" and so on. That kind of conversation is unfortunately... well, not verbotten, but at least self-censored.
Anyways, this is just intellectual curiosity. I'm not into bodybuilding enough to try, and tbh I actually doubt they're using it either. It'd be too much like cheating - the whole point is to find out what works, and everybody knows steroids work so there's nothing to find out there.
Because I've actually watched their content, Some of them are open about it, some are not. Other commenters in this thread now about it. But you are not aware while linking their content?
But selling programs based on pictures that have been achieved with steroids is not helpful for getting people to optimal health.
Some of the people behind linked programs even have life altering injuries from the strain of working out with steroids.
The original article is about daily exercise.
The issue with steroids is that they can alter your body organs permanently.
Not what I was asking. I know the effects of steroids. I don't know what every person on that list is saying about them because, frankly, I don't really care about steroids that much. They're way beyond my reasonable cost-benefit window, I just barely started taking creatine. And what I do know of their opinions are squarely against them - this is why I was asking for concrete examples, because I'm curious.
But since you changed the topic, just for fun and the sake of the conversation. From your link:
> A variety of side effects can occur when anabolic steroids are misused, ranging from mild effects to ones that are harmful or even life-threatening. Most are reversible if the user stops taking the drugs. However, others may be permanent or semi-permanent.
This can actually apply to a wide variety of things. Remember all the drug scare about "drug abuse"? It's technically true - you can abuse most recreational drugs, including cannabis, and you can definitely fuck up your life on meth. And yet now, 10-20 years later, we have cannabis cookies free for sale, and quite a lot of ADHD people medicating themselves quite successfully with Adderall. There's a big difference between use, misuse and abuse.
Part of my (very idle and intellectual) curiosity is if steroids can be used safely. My instincts say "yes, probably, but no idea how". The people in the list above pretty uniformly say "no". Which is why I was hoping you'd point me to different opinions.
"I just barely started taking creatine. And what I do know of their opinions are squarely against them - this is why I was asking for concrete examples"
That is great example you found, there way more.
Because creatine is one of most research supplement. It is safe with clear benefits[0]. Since they are using steroids they might miss the clear effects of creatine and are giving information that is incorrect and therefor harmful. What science is actually saying that creatine is safe and can not only help with muscles it can also help with brain performance[1].
> Creatine is one of the most popular nutritional ergogenic aids for athletes. Studies have consistently shown that creatine supplementation increases intramuscular creatine concentrations which may help explain the observed improvements in high intensity exercise performance leading to greater training adaptations. In addition to athletic and exercise improvement, research has shown that creatine supplementation may enhance post-exercise recovery, injury prevention, thermoregulation, rehabilitation, and concussion and/or spinal cord neuroprotection. Additionally, a number of clinical applications of creatine supplementation have been studied involving neurodegenerative diseases (e.g., muscular dystrophy, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s disease), diabetes, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, aging, brain and heart ischemia, adolescent depression, and pregnancy. These studies provide a large body of evidence that creatine can not only improve exercise performance, but can play a role in preventing and/or reducing the severity of injury, enhancing rehabilitation from injuries, and helping athletes tolerate heavy training loads. Additionally, researchers have identified a number of potentially beneficial clinical uses of creatine supplementation.
For almost anyone that is not training hard their body is still in what is called the nooby phase, where incredible growth in power, size, endurance can happen. After 1 of 2 years of training this will stop however and gains will be become more difficult. Within that period anyone can get the feeling as if they are taking steroids.
unto your question:
> Part of my (very idle and intellectual) curiosity is if steroids can be used safely
If you are able to source Medical grade steroids, from reputable sellers.
And you have health professionals, and doing regular blood work. Then yes it can be safely done. And you'll need good sporting coach to make sure you won't strain your joints too much.
Many athletes take them without the above, because their livelihood depends on it. But there are young people dying because they buy programs that only work for enhanced people. And they are failing to progress with that program and start using weird pills from the internet that are containing many weird substances. You don't know what you are going to get. And with drugs you can at least feel the effects, but can't feel the difference between different steroids or other molecules interacting with your organs.
Mike Israetel is very vocal and open about both his own PED use and its health risks, and how taking them is a very bad idea for 99.9% of people. That does not make his content about exercising and nutrition for general health any less superb.
Steroids a fact of life in strength sports and not even really considered cheating, as long as you compete in "untested" divisions. Training for a top-level competition is not the same as exercising for health, even if you don't take PEDs. The people doing it consider it an acceptable tradeoff.
The original article is encouraging that even little bit of daily exercise is great. But the links are about doing conventional gym stuff.
If you take steroids your body will respond different then normal people. Using steroids and then to promote your programs that act like it's possible to achieve them without is dangerous.
The strain they will be able to put on their bodies are not the same as without. Even with steroids the strain is so high it can lead to serious life changing injuries like at least one the some of the linked have found out. There many young people that have used steroids and have completely worn out joints.
Obviously since some of them dance around the topic, and won't say outright say it. We just have the occasional hiccups during interviews where they give it away.
naturals shouldn't take advice from people that juiced up. The amount of volume they can do bizarre, and way more then naturals can do. The wear and tear on the ligaments, joints and spine is dangerous.
It's even dangerous for them, at least one of them got very badly hurt.
It's worth emphasizing that what's especially exciting is that a lot of this research really is very new. As you said, there's a whole "next gen" fitness guys, people who grew up with bodybuilding as it was always practiced, but who are also working at the science behind it.
The result is that as far as I can tell, the last 20 years of research has given us most of the results we know. It's really a burgeoning field.
Earlier this year I wanted to start a gym routine to gain some muscle mass and lower my body fat percentage. I found Jeff Nippard's youtube videos to be a good resource for my purposes:
He's a bodybuilder/powerlifter/coach with a focus on evidence-based exercise and diet advice. I've heard him cite people like Mike Israetel and the MASS report at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/mass/
I like that his videos tend to be concise, and he does a good job of being clear about which of his recommendations are backed up by research and which are opinions based on his personal experience/preferences.
For a few bucks a month you get articles by several of the people you mentioned, Alan, and others that evaluate public research on nutrition and training.
it maximizes building the body, which comes with it's own appearance, sure, but the functionality of a muscle (what you can do with it) is in large part a function of the size
I'd add Dr. Ted Naiman to that list. He advocates for quick workouts each day and prioritizing a favorable protein:calorie ratio for eating. He's also down to earth and entertaining to listen to IMO.
Even though your just referencing the articles of Macrofactor, I’ve gotta say the app itself an absolute pleasure to use. It’s been instrumental in my current bulk cycle.
Incidentally I've been doing this the past three months.
I have an athletic background and I tend to go full-on workouts etc. But I decided to take it easy this summer, stopped training in general but I would set an alarm every 30 minutes and take short brakes (2-5mins) from work.
In that time I do a few pushups and a couple exercises with the kettlebell. Nothing fancy or tiring, I stop just before I feel any type of resistance or "burn".
This happens 5-8 times a day. On weekends I do none of that.
Of course It's anecdotal but my body has FOR SURE changed. It's like when I did two times a day workouts.
Of course I'll go back doing full workouts because I enjoy them. But anybody who dislikes devoting big chunks of time just for workouts should definitely experiment with micro workouts.
A 3 minute interruption e.g. a phone call risks dropping the context. But if I just step out of my office chair and do some excercises I'm sure I could keep the context in my head while making a few pushups. Since I'm not really distracted perhaps the break can be a thinking break. Some times it's hard to avoid "thinking with your keyboard" and use your head. When I'm stuck on a really hard problem I go for a walk or take a shower or something. I think this could be the same thing.
Taking a short exercise break like this is also a great procrastination killer for me.
When I feel the urge to distract myself I'll just get up and do some kind of light bodyweight exercises that require coordination and balance, and then I'm ready to continue the work I was starting to dread.
It could be even better than that, it could be used to solve distraction problems we already have: if, during compile breaks (I'm sure some other professions have similar downtime), instead of slacking off on hn or trying to squeeze in some multitasking productivity we'd just do some body stuff, our brains would retain focus much better than without that exercise.
It could be even better than that: if, during compile breaks (I'm sure some other professions have similar downtime), instead of slacking off on hn or trying to squeeze in some multitasking productivity we'd just do some body stuff, our brains would retain focus much better than without that exercise.
If anyone reading is into launching maker stuff: consider putting some hardware/software pair on crowdfunding where the hardware connects to a workout detector (kettle bell with accelerometer, treadmill, DDR mat, whatever, my personal favorite would be a comically big crank on a resistance unit, even just a smartwatch with an accelerometer would do) and the software hooks into the computer's power management, detecting heavy load and enforcing some extra throttling unless the workout detector is worked. I believe that this could fool our motivation/reward system quite nicely.
Everyone is different and has different routines.
If I'm in the middle of important work or experiencing flow I will not break it. But we all do have repetitive tasks or housekeeping work to do. This is the time I do it.
Exercise, stretching, and things like that don't need to take you out of your context at all. You can continue thinking about your work while you do it and come back to the work ready to go and maybe with some problems solved.
true.
The reasoning was pomodoro technique to keep the mind/eyes fresh (20-30mins)
+
a time-frame that is enough for the body to restore all the necessary "ingredients
". (> 15-20mins)
I think volition is the difference. Me wanting to get up and get some water and stretch my legs is something I plan on doing and carry it at a time that I chose. Me being interrupted by someone to ask me something while I'm deep in thought or/and trying to make a feature click is not the same.
The equivalent for sedate people like us might be a couple of squats or one push up. If you do it every 30 minutes it has to be maintainable. It could even be walk and get some water. (You get a free squat if you had to stand up, just sit down slowly when you get back)
Do you ever just stop and think for a moment after reading or writing something? I do, taking small pauses to think in between looking at things is a regular part of my workflow.
When I do pause, I can stop and do a few pushups. It helps me focus a bit better, and there's no context loss because I'm not doing or thinking about anything new. It's not much different from leaning back in my chair to think for a minute.
Thing with repetitive exercise is you don't need to think about it and actually there can be time to think in your original context without the distraction of, in my case, the IDE and code I'm working on.
Am I an anomaly? I hear this often among engineers but I don't seem to have this issue. I can literally pick up from the line of code or document I left off from last evening. The only type of work where I need to "rebuild context" is when dealing with financial spreadsheets.
I find it depends heavily on both the nature of the problem I'm working on and my mental state, and also the nature of what I switch to.
If I haven't slept all night, context switches are total killers.
If the problem requires me to keep in mind a ton of factors and dependencies while I develop (design or code), context switches can be quite bad.
If the distraction require me to drag up a ton of context from a couple of weeks ago, then it can be quite bad.
If I'm well rested and someone comes with a technical question that's hard but limited in scope, it's mostly fine and I can get back to it within a minute if not less.
For a while, I kept a pair of shiny chrome dumbbells atop table, and could impromptu pick them up and use, when pacing and thinking about a design problem, without thinking much about the exercise itself.
If I resumed this, doing it several times a day, for only a few minutes at a time, it'd have a big impact?
(I also used to have a Concept2 erg in my work area, but somehow using that was more interrupting.)
The thing is variance, if you just do a small range of movement (say only bicep curls), it might be unbalanced. The idea is good though. I do a whole range of exercises from yoga, fitness, a few weightlift-y exercises and functional movement which make a nice practice during the week.
Of course it would work. Though I recommend one of those door frame pull-up bars. You'll be amazed how fast you progress when you're just using it to burn time while thinking, Zoom calls, and other dead time.
You can do a huge body recomp with just push-ups + pull-ups. You just have to do them.
And I've experienced some embarrassing moments when during a zoom call I'm doing burpees and I hear my name and I have to talk in front of 5 people with very deep, loud breathing and someone asks me.... What were you doing man?
Two weeks ago I decided to try reps of 20 push-ups whenever I thought about them. I haven’t thought of doing so more than twice a day BUT I’ve noticed an increase in my chest mass.
I want to get back into exercising regularly but that large chunk of time isn’t conducive to my personal projects…I just don’t want to dedicate so much time to exercise.
I’m relatively healthy so it’s not a big deal but you know how it is. Your biggest bully is yourself.
Great work! Keep it up. This method is called Greasing The Groove and is a well used method to break through pull up plateaus.
After two weeks of 40 or so push ups a day it’s incredibly unlikely you’ve gained muscle mass in your chest (or at least not noticeable) what you are probably seeing is increased water retention in the muscles and other associated exercise related side affects.
I’m a fairly muscley guy and if I stop working out for a couple of weeks I look “flatter” when I’m training regularly my muscles look fuller and rounder after a week or so back at it.
The several months of consistent exercise I was doing a few months ago helped, I think. This time last year, I struggled to do 10. Now, I start to feel the burn when I reach 16 but I just power through.
Sounds a lot like high volume training like 8x8s or 10x10s where you use much lighter weight and leave a lot of reps on the table but do twice as many or more sets.
For anyone interested, the simplest form of that is to use 60% of your one rep max and do 10 sets of 10 repetitions with adequate rest periods in between, 4 minutes minimum. Focus on form and don’t rush the reps.
Depending on how hard you're pushing yourself this is commonly known as "greasing the groove" and is often used to get passed performance plateaus. The key is to never train to failure, increase the total volume of fresh/quality reps(spread through the day), and switch up the routine after x weeks to avoid overuse injuries.
Are you not scared about skipping warmups? This sounds like you aren't doing any. I was sick for a few days and decided to do some TRX rowing (20) and my elbow started to hurt the next day :)
Just do the first few at low intensity. A few push-ups or light kettlebell swings are a warmup for folks with a good strength baseline. For less fit folks, push-ups off the knees or body-weight squats would work the same way.
A think a lot of the reigning wisdom in the fitness world is created by serious strength trainers, for serious strength trainers. They aren't wrong, and their advice will become useful to you if you also get seriously into strength training. But for people starting from neutral, the advice in this article is better than anything your most enthusiastic gym friends will tell you about protein intake or leg day or training to failure. Just workout specific muscles several times a week and you will get stronger and bigger muscles over a few months, regardless of diet.
Yes! Everything I learned when I was young told me a) you have to be *very serious* about working out if you are going to do it and b) it's mostly about looking good.
Both of those turned out to be huge fallacies. I'm 40 now and not very serious about working out, but I do it reliably (on an irregular schedule) and I don't target specific muscles etc to try to make myself look a certain way. The result is that I am just plain healthier and feel great. That has many second order effects.
100% agree. The most important point is to make exercise enjoyable; the more it feels like a chore, the more you will not be getting out there doing it.
A corollary to that is to not overdo it, even if you have an enjoyable time while you do it. You shouldn't be too tired or sore when it's time for the next training session.
Most people would be better off lifting a 10 lb weight 50 times instead of lifting a 50 lb weight 10 times. High weight, low reps is a great way to injure yourself if you're like 99% of people out there.
Source for 10-rep sets being particularly injurious please. And 10 lbs x 50 is much less stimulative than 50 lbs x 10, bordering on being not particularly effective.
99% of people have bad form, because nobody showed them good form. 1 set of 50lb dumbbells on shoulder press with no warm up & bad form, by a middle aged dad with no gym experience, can def mess up a rotator cuff.
I don't think that means the solution is to recommend they do 10lb sets with bad form though; it's more like they should learn proper technique instead, regardless of what their target weight is.
25 pounds for 6-10 reps, always stopping before any pain, is a good middle ground. Dont do curls with 2-5 pound weights. Find something that is actually a bit difficult, but most people shouldnt pile on weight or even continue to increase it unless their current weight feels like it isnt very difficult.
Holding a heavy weight overhead is an inherently unstable position. Even if you can lift it overhead (using momentum), doesn’t mean you can hold it overhead. Even if you can do a few overhead presses, you need to be very careful not to do it to failure, as you need enough strength to safely bring it back to the ground.
If you lose balance and the weight swings back, your shoulder is fucked, especially at that weight.
The overhead press is usually done off of hooks or pins, you don't have to start or end on the ground. The front rack position is very stable, I've never felt it to be the least bit sketchy lowering the bar even after a failed lift, either strict or with leg drive.
If you do start off the ground, it's going to be a weight you can clean up into a front rack position; if you can clean the weight you can certainly lower it back down.
Ah, right, I always did overhead dumbbell press so I first thought of that. Yeah 50lbs barbell press is trivial, and using pins or even Smith machine it’s completely safe.
Mmm, yeah I don't like going too heavy on dumbbell presses, but heavy is really relative to your max, and sets of 10 is about where they start feeling good to me.
Yes, but essentially no-one tries to do a high weight overhead press without training. If anything, most people are less likely to even touch a barbell because it looks like "serious work".
For most adult men lifting the bar (44lbs, so almost 50) above their head after studying the form is not "injurious".
I occasionally use 50-lb dumbbells for one-hand overhead presses. It takes some mindfulness of form, but otherwise is perfectly safe for me. I like it for when I don't have a lot of time, since I can only do a few reps with each arm.
Part of lifting weights is raw strength, another is proper form. If I can't perform a lift 'the right way', I take off weight until I can. It took a fair bit of practice to
They could be talking about dumbbell weight, as 10lb is entry level but 50lbx10 requires some shoulder development.
Either way, I don't see the issue with doing 50 reps of something if you're failing at the end. The main issue is that it's boring and more mentally taxing than 6-10 reps I think.
There's a Huberman Lab podcast with some expert who also says the ideal rep range is anywhere from 6 reps to 30+ reps to make the point that we overly fixate on it. Lifting something until you can't is the operative goal.
I personally like drop sets for this purpose (decreasing weight until failure) because you end on a lighter weight that won't hurt you if something goes wrong, but you aren't stuck lifting one weight for too long.
50 times is a bit too much for me, and probably a lot of other people. It leads to mental or cardiovascular fatigue, which is not what I'm after when building muscle/strength. If you're an endurance athlete it would be more appropriate.
When training for muscle size the important thing is to fatigue the muscle itself, which is easier to do with 5-20 reps, maybe 30 at the most if exercising small muscles.
Regarding "low reps", that usually refers to sets of 1-3 reps very close to your maximum potential. Once you go above 5 reps or so, the risk of injury is much lower. There are lots of beginner programs using sets of 5 reps, and people aren't getting injured left and right on those.
You still need a minimum level of intensity. You won't be improving strength with something that you can lift 50 times.
One way to measure perceived exertion is how many additional reps you think you can do - if you're doing 10 reps at a weight where you can only do 10, then you're obviously at some risk of having worse form / injury; if you're doing 10 reps at a weight that you can lift 12-15 times, you'll probably get stronger, if you're doing 10 reps at a weight you can lift 25-30 times, you likely won't make a lot of progress.
If you can lift what you need to 50 times, do you need to improve strength?
For most people, exercise is about health and about being functional in their life. If you have a baseline level of fitness and an exercise habit that supports it, it is OK to plateau at that level and just live your healthy life.
It's not ok to plateau at that level. You will get old, your strength and bone density will go down and it is a lot harder (but still possible) to improve those when you are old.
Much better to start with a lot more than the minimum so you have a decent safety margin (and lifelong habits that will keep you healthy for as long as possible).
I always had problems doing full pushups. Now I'm starting slow, doing upright pushups against the wall.
Have to thank this youtuber for the motivation:
https://youtu.be/zkU6Ok44_CI
Somehow I just knew it would be Hampton’s video. Yes, this guy and his channel, hybridcalisthenics, is amazing at breaking workouts down into progressive sets for beginners .
Yeah, if you want an old age filled with weakness and fragility. If you build up to it and you have the strength and lift with good technique there is nothing wrong with it.
50lbs is only just over the weight of the bar anyway. Weakness is never a strength.
While I do like the idea of HNers having to post their physique in any thread related to nutrition and fitness, the topic of this thread is what's ideal for most people who aren't as serious about lifting. Whether they are right or wrong (I don't think we have a way to know), it's kind of a different point.
Besides, I don't think your body is going to be any different from your clone doing massive reps to failure with the same conviction.
We all know Pavel's "Grease the Groove" works from experience; this is just scientific back-up.
If you want to be in marginally better shape, set between 4 and 10 timers every day, and do one set of push-ups, or squat jumps, or both, when the timer goes off. If you're not used to this, do half push-ups or lower-down push-ups. For the squat jumps add some weight (i.e. dumbbells) over time. You can play around a lot with push-ups and squat jumps, both to make them more interesting and work different muscle groups.
That explains my muscle development after having kids. Basically just doing squats and lifts throughout the day. Lots of tag based cardio to round it out and those multiple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day probably helps as well.
One of the best things my dad taught me was to have fun doing push-ups and squats randomly throughout the day like any time there's downtime. I hope you pass it on to your kids. It's like teaching your kids to enjoy a raw carrot when they feel for a snack (something I also thank my parents for).
Not a bad idea... Round it out with some leap-frog for plyo, animal crawls. You could turn burpees into a fun game. (Where is the parent-kid playtime-workout video that we all need? Tire the kids out and give the parents a couple sets)
I actually got real evidence for this recently. I used to do regular strength training, but when my second child was born I stopped for about 2 years. I had also been doing occasional (1-3x/yr) DEXA scans to check my body composition.
When I re-scanned myself after about 2 years off, I had gained quite a bit of fat and lost muscle in most places, but gained muscle in my arms/upper body. I felt notably stronger from carrying her (and her growing older sister) and that confirmed it.
I had a shoulder injury a couple years back and I used this method to rehab it. I'd do about half my max on pull-ups 5-6x per day 3-4x per week.
When I started, my max was low and I was only doing about 2-3 pull-ups at a time. After a couple months of doing it I was easily at a max of 15 or so pull-ups per set.
Lately I've been doing Pavel's "simple & sinister" kettlebell program and it's very effective. At first I had to really stop myself from wanting to do more reps and sets, but I really love how it keeps you from wearing yourself out. Slowly and with consistency is the best method for most things in life.
As someone who goes to gym at least 3 times a week (I find that the bare minimum to feel good), I think going only once a week must be actually damaging to the body... even when I miss one day and go only twice in a week, I can feel that the body has had enough time to "lose" much of the power it gained from the previous visit several days before, so it just kind of tries to regain that power back... it's like your energy levels going up and down from basically sedentary to just barely active, then back down... I imagine going only once a week would be like that, but with larger swings up and down, which surely can't be good for you. About 3 times a week, to me, is the sweet spot where I don't feel constantly tired, but also feel like my energy levels remain more or less stable.
According to Louie Simmons, strength athlete at top shape can lose about 20% of 1RM weight in two weeks of inactivity.
Regular people also lose their shape, at slower, but increasiingle faster rate, as they gain shape. It is enough to lose 2%-4% (usually around 2.5%) of progress per week to hit a plateau in typical chest-back-legs split.
But, the fact that body can lose some shape can be beneficial. For example, hypertrophy-specific training [1] recommends 7-9 days rest period between end of one training period and start of next one. During this time body loses resistance to growth stimulus but does not detrain too much.
Also note here that HST recommends to abandon the typical split and perform all body training each training session, but with smaller number of sets, two sets maximum. More or less in line with what article talks about.
And, having mentioned Louie Simmons, I should mention Bulgarian Method: just train every day, using your max for a day, rest one day a week, make a world record. ;)
> According to Louie Simmons, strength athlete at top shape can lose about 20% of 1RM weight in two weeks of inactivity.
Westside was a very specific training methodology, and neurological adaptations matter, and Louie cared a lot more about performance in competition (which has a fair amount to do with one's mental state) than whatever the science says.
That is -- a period of NO or virtually no activity for a week can actually increase performance above the peak for a small window where your body has had time to repair the muscular damage but the neurological adaptations haven't faded. Two weeks is just about the end of that window, but it's completely at odds with what Louie believed.
Louie and or the Conjugate Method have absolutely nothing to do with Abadjhiev or the Bulgarian/Soviet methods, despite whatever his claims are. The Soviets/Bulgarians never used any of the things Conjugate is known for (bands, chains) or the periodization. Those nations focused on the classic/olympic lifts, or the sport of "weightlifting". Bands and chains are antithetical to everything they'd do there.
Bulgarian was, specifically: snatch or clean to a max for the day, do 5 singles, drop 10% and do 3 triples || drop 5% and do 3 doubles, do a power/hang/block variant of the lift you didn't do earlier, same scheme but higher reps, some squat variant (front/back), some pull variant (snatch/clean).
For the vast majority of people -- those who are not training for competition, or those who are not training to compete at an elite level -- all of this is useless and borderline counterproductive. Competing in (or training to compete in) a sport WILL eventually cause injuries.
The best advice you can give to people is "find something in the gym you enjoy enough to keep you going until it becomes a routine", because after 5+ years, if you're not aiming to win medals/break records (locally, state-level, nationally, whatever), the best overall outcomes will be from those who stayed in the gym, and getting injured is a big deterrent to that.
> strength athlete at top shape can lose about 20% of 1RM weight in two weeks of inactivity
that's probably not because of muscle mass loss, but body doesn't conserve glycogen, because think it doesn't need anymore, and this is fixable with 2-3 trainings.
Having mentioned the Bulgarian Method, we should mention too that those guys were roided out of their minds - it's crazy what being a guinea pig can do to a world record!
I lift one time per week and this works very well for me. Every body is different :) It must be said I do do light aerobic exercise the rest of the days, but I would not call that "working out".
I do strength training exactly three times a week, and there’s at least 48 hours between each session for much needed rest. Reducing that time has often been a recipe for injury.
And if I miss a couple of sessions, even if it’s due to something like travel rather than illness, performance declines to some extent. I just don’t realize it until I’ve pushed too hard, which again can result in injury.
So as another piece of anecdata, three times a week seems like the sweet spot.
Everybody is different. I've come back from a week's rest a felt way stronger. I justified this as the rest letting my body fully recuperate, but who knows why this happens.
Yeah, same. Maybe it's all mental, but it doesn't feel like it.
That said, I imagine you also aren't making a habit of it. Maybe training every day and then accidentally taking a week off give you some recuperation you didn't realize you needed.
Most fitness advice is "how to not get fit, for people who don't want to get fit".
It's honestly not that hard once you treat physical health as being an _essential_ part of the human experience. It's not a chore, it's not a task, it's fundamentally important, it's what you are on this planet to do.
You "don't like it"? I'm sure you do loads of other things that you like even less (8 hour work day?) - society just supports those things more.
If someone told you that you could become a great chess player by playing 30 seconds a day would you buy it or would you think they were completely full of it?
> I'm sure you do loads of other things that you like even less (8 hour work day?) - society just supports those things more
Well, it does not merely supports those things. It almost coerces you into them. There are few ways to get enough money so you can live. I would not work the same 8h/days if I could.
> it's what you are on this planet to do
Not at all. I'm here for no reason. Now that I'm here, I'll optimize happiness while creating as little harm as possible to others.
Doing sports would at best be a means to this happiness if it helps me feel better, longer. Even knowing it is not quite enough to like it and be motivated to do it enough. I say this as someone who likes hiking, does most of their trips by bike, and runs regularly, as long as I'm not too tired and it's not extremely hot or cold outside.
I don't like practicing, and I won't lie to myself about it. I only do it because I believe it makes the rest of my life better. I guess considering it as essential helps indeed, but that's a very abstract idea, to be honest.
The threat of suffering and death are the threats used both to make you work for money, and to make you eat healthy and work out. However, the consequences of the former are much more imminent, while the consequences of the latter can take years to show up. Unfortunately, we find delayed reward or punishment to be a much weaker motivator.
The context of the article is that you should work out a little each day and is about advice on how to keep basic fitness. In that case, no, steroids do nothing for you. If you go ahead and take steroids and do your (from the article) “ Just lowering a heavy dumbbell slowly once or six times a day is enough.” nothing is going to be different.
Steroids are going to help ppl who need extreme performance.
I am a meat-based robot, and see exercise as a natural form of maintenance. The gym is my favorite physical activity, and I see it as performing physical upkeep on myself, to offset my hilariously sedentary lifestyle.
> I'm here for no reason. Now that I'm here, I'll optimize happiness while creating as little harm as possible to others.
Same, but I enjoy having my bodily maintenance, and the semi-sculpted look I've achieved. Different people will have different fitness goals.
Yes, that's advice for if you want to not get fit.
If you're happy (can have a good life) not being fit, you can just follow advice that will not make you fit.
If you're unhappy not being fit, then it is essential to fix that, because unless you are a depressive it is essential to fix any fixable issues that are making you unhappy.
I am doing some body weight exercises like this daily. It is to combat chronic fatigue so I need to be very careful not to over do it. I am using a daily tick list and to get a tick for exercise I need to do 10 reps of something. If I am very ill it could be ten shrugs. If I feel super it might be 10 pushups, 20 squats and a pull up.
Following this Laissez faire system has increased my strength. Carrying a 10kg item in the shop feels quite light, and picking up my kid about 40kg is possible now. It is those things I am super happy about.
I am using TRX (aka some rope hanging from the ceiling) and the earths gravity, I don’t need any weights yet. But I have some dogs and kids if I need them :-).
While I don't like TRX, it was originally designed by a Navy Seal to provide a full-body workout. So long as it helps you achieve your goals, it may be all you need.
I like big, chunky weights, and want big muscles. I enjoy having a bit of bulk, and that doesn't mix the best with bodyweight exercise. In my head, bodyweight exercise is best for maintaining a more lean physique.
Note that the study participants were healthy young individuals who were untrained ie. didn't do any regular resistance training prior to the study.
Untrained people, particularly if they are young and healthy, often show large effects with exercise. The big difference between the training schedules cannot be extrapolated to well trained individuals.
Studies about exercise and weight loss are like the ones about red wine and chocolate. There's a contradictory article every other week.
These sorts of things are accepted or rejected totally based on subjective opinion. If you're a type A person, you're thinking, "This sounds right, I guess I better find a 15 minute slot in my daily schedule." and if you're type B like myself, who shudders at the thought of the monotony of another daily task, you immediately think, "Hey, waitasecond! I thought we could just leave it to the weekend??"
Not that there aren't contradictory studies, but I don't see that here - this study focuses on muscles while the weekend study focused on all-cause mortality.
I.e., just exercising on the weekends may be enough to live longer, but spreading weight training out throughout the week is more effective for muscle growth than the equivalent sum of the training on the weekend only.
I agree that these things are subjectively accepted/rejected, but you should know that there is no such thing as « type a » and « type b » person. Type a/b is a primitive typology based on old research funded by the tobacco industry.
I can't remember what episode it was but there was a really interesting chat between Joe Rogan and David Goggins on the Rogan podcast where David said in his view it's better to work out every day and ensure that you don't wake up the next day sore.
His logic was that daily 80% threshold workouts are better than 2-3 times a week at 110%. Consistency is key - and that stuck with me.
There's something nice about having muscle ache but it's counter productive to wanting to get back in the gym for most people!
What I've heard is the exact opposite, you should wait until the muscle soreness is on the way out (2-3 days if you are a beginner) until training that muscle again, to give it time to build new muscle. I've also found that I only get bad DOMS when I haven't trained a muscle in a while. If it happens every time, I am training slightly different spots every time because my execution is not clean.
(Side note, I find the highly technical term DOMS funny, as if that is some syndrom that has just recently been discovered. It's just plain old muscle soreness, the German term translates even roughly to "muscle hangover").
I guess it's horses for courses. One person's pain as a measurement of success in the gym is another person's reason not to work out until the pain is totally gone - which might mean they never get off the starting blocks.
Literally yes. However the soreness you get after working out for the first time in a while (or a new muscle from a while) is DOMS and not the same as the soreness from a good workout of a muscle group you regularly exercise
I do full body strength training 6-7 times per week normally, and am rarely sore anymore
when I stop working out for several days in a row (like on travel), I'm always sore after the first workout upon resumption (whereupon I'll usually skip the next day, then be back to normal)
tl;dr: feels like conditioning can help with soreness
I also jump between the hot tub and pool a few times for 15-20 minutes after every workout, so maybe that's a bit of recovery (in addition to getting enough protein before and after the workout)
On the other hand, I've also heard that threshold workouts are better because people don't even get near to maximal exertion (certainly not "110%"). We consistently overestimate how much effort we put in.
So, a 60% workout every day is better than the "high intensity" workout a few times per week that actually just clocks in at 75% effort.
Just another reason to stick to daily consistency, and not the only reason.
His view on other things though. Damn. I don't know the guy. I searched his name on youtube to see if he'd go into more detail in another interview. I won't say it takes something away from what he says about training but damn I kind of feel like it does anyway. :)
I got very interested in this kind of stuff a few months ago in an effort to get better at climbing.
I can't access the full paper but going from the abstract, this result isn't super surprising for two major reasons: mainly that once a week isn't often enough, and the once-a-week workout group might also be doing unnecessary muscle damage with such a heavy workout. It would be interesting if they had included more groups that did more reasonable workout schedules like twice or three times a week with three sets a day. I imagine those groups would see better results than the 5-days-a-week group. A further caveat is that the abstract doesn't mention if the individuals are untrained. Assuming they're untrained, that often explains a lot of the gains you see in these papers.
That's not to say this is unimpressive. For sedentary people, it means that just a small amount of non-exhausting exercise can make significant changes to the body. These researchers actually have another paper from earlier this year that shows that just squeezing your muscles can result in 10% strength gains (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sms.14138?af=R)
This is talking about muscle building, but this is basically the same reasoning that is used to explain why gardening and a cycling are really good at extending longevity and increasing health (including mental health), it's something you can do fairly consistently year round and through the week.
So it might not help you have bulging biceps, but any kind of physical movement you can integrate into your daily life is valuable.
But they are the people who least need to optimize their routines towards muscle gains. Any remotely sensible routine will get them huge gains if they stick to it.
Beginners need to optimize for a routine that they can consistently follow, not for the most effective exercises.
I've found that the easiest way to work out is to make it entirely incidental to your everyday life in a manner that exploits your weaknesses.
My distracted mind loves fidgeting with a doorway pullup bar or living room dumbbells as I go about my daily life moving between rooms, having conversations with roommates or waiting for my coffee to pour.
Biking and brisk-walking everywhere is great for getting that cardio in. Hobbies are the most obvious example where health is a secondary benefit. Climbing and hiking do that for me. That way, working out never feels like a chore.
There is a factor usually left out: tendons and ligaments.
Lacking blood vessels they can't improve as fast as muscles (tendon/ligament improvement/repair is happening thanks to electric potential gradient generated by piezoelectric effect of stretching/compression), but are part of muscle control system. If a tendon signals overload the attached muscle won't be able to generate full power.
Dan John's Easy Strength, that he originally developed with Pavel Tsatsouline whose Greasing the Groove was also mentioned in the comments, follows a similar idea. It consists of workouts done 5 times a week, and lasting no longer than 15 minutes (for me, in practice, ~20 minutes was closer to the truth).
The basic idea is to do 2 sets of 5 in push/pull/hinge/squat followed by a loaded carry at loads that feel almost too easy, 5 times a week, for 40 total workouts. There is some detail/progression added in his texts, but the basic idea is short, frequent, repeatable workouts that seem to lead to pretty good strength gains when run once or twice.
He does say that you might want to do more volume-intensive program before/after, as everything tends to work for some time but not forever.
I don't know what to think of this. One wonders whether the load and rate of exertion are controlled for. If I know I am going to have to work out 5x/week, I sure as he'll don't go as hard on day 1 as I would if I had a whole week to recover on a 1x/week regimen. Maybe 5x/week is still overall more load, and that's why it works, but taking the time to do this week after week is also tricky. Not to mention, there's periodization to control for too. If all of the participants had been doing something closer to 1x/week per body part before the study, the 5x/week regimen had an unfair advantage purely due to novel metabolic and neuromuscular challenge.
These — every day vs once a week — are both extremes.
Muscles need around 24 hours to restore but already start to “cool” after around 2 days.
Problem is that nervous system needs at least 2 days to recuperate (if we’re talking about any meaningful workout with free weights for lifting, bench pressing, squalts, etc).
So one should balance these two recoveries: too long — muscles will cool back down, too short — nervous system is not restored which quickly leads to squeezing yourself out and easy illness due to weakened immune system.
So 72 hours are the golden interval both in terms of recovery and practicality so one doesn’t live in the gym.
I’m by no means an expert in the field, so short answer is I don’t know.
It’s probably connected with muscle protein synthesis which in trained people peak in 24 hours and basically goes back to basal level after 72 hours [1]
After that, without exercise, all gained muscle growth starts to negate.
Does anyone have any idea how to retain muscle mass for longer? I was previously strength training daily, but took a week off (a dangerous combination of a tooth extraction and internet fearmongering) and my arms are already looking noticably slimmer. As soon as I can I'll get back to my daily routine, but I can't imagine this will be the last week I have to avoid it, these things happen, so I'd like to keep more of what I've got if/when that happens again.
People vary a lot. One of my friends lost 10kg of muscle mass in less than a month without being sick. He just stopped going to the gym every day and went on holiday. If your natural build is skinny as a rail and you’re buff and you stop some people just deflate like a balloon.
No they didn’t, lol. If you lose 10 kg of MUSCLE mass in a month, you’re seriously sick, like starving sick.
And there’s no “natural skinny as a rail”, you either eat and workout enough, or you don’t.
> And there’s no “natural skinny as a rail”, you either eat and workout enough, or you don’t.
Just as some people are short and others tall people produce different amounts and proportions of hormones which leads them to put on muscle easily or not.
For the most extreme ethnic examples of this consider the Kalenjin of East Africa who are skinny and wildly over represented as marathon runners and Polynesians who are wildly over represented as rugby players and in US Football, who are more muscular.
In that case, there should be fat losses too (fats are like 2x more energy dense). for reference - 1hour of running is ~650kCal. Also so much water retention (50%) is really high, lots of steroids?
If they're starting out at a decent size I could definitely believe someone dropping 10kg after a month. However I have a hard time believing anyone would be visibly different after a single week's worth of working out. However I can sympathise, I was in that position myself and I guess I had a sort of (very mild) body dysmorphia where I felt like I looked chunky and bloated if I missed just a couple of sessions in a row. I realise now that I was being ridiculous, I was in very good shape and it was all in my head. I picked up running and gym again earlier this year and I'm making a conscious effort not to fall into that trap again
Unless theres other factors (probably), I'm not sure my "brick shithouse" (not my words) build matches this. Also of course, sods law, this week didn't seem to have any effect on my overall weight
It could be that they previously were inflame from training and thus held more water. Or, if you've been eating less (seems likely) your body might have had to take some glycogen from the muscles which also binds water. Lastly, sure, you may have atrophied some but probably not a substantial amount. Do something, if you can, that exerts the muscle (heavy being preferable over 15+ reps) to retain muscle tissue.
I lift weights and do strength training 3 times a week (Julian, if you are reading this, thank you for getting me started on this! [0]).
In my experience, you won't experience muscle loss for up to like ~2 weeks as long as you eat your daily calories including your protein requirements. Going on a calorie deficiency is a big problem for your muscles; hence if you want to lose weight after gaining muscles, you should lose it slowly and include daily protein in your diet.
I know this because I measure and keep all my metrics as I'm a data geek as well and I've had several periods where I had to stop (vacation, family, etc).
Also, I agree with everyone else, I've noticed that consistency is king. You can pretty much take any strength training program you want and it will grow your muscles assuming that you get enough protein, calories, sleep and keep lifting heavier (or the same weight if you want to maintain).
That is completely normal. For example, I lose about 0.5-1kg of weight after a week of not training, and I look pretty flat. That will mostly be water tho.
After two weeks without training and while eating a shit (but oh so tasty) diet and drinking wine everyday for one of those two weeks, I lost about 20% of strength on the main lifts. And it felt way worse than that. But it’s just a temporary loss, and I was back up after a couple of weeks.
My unsolicited advice is to not worry about it and just start from what you end up being capable of after a break. It probably is not your first, and it definitely won’t be your last because life happens.
Once a week was never enough, they should have compared group that exercises 3x a week compared to little exercise every day. I would guess 3x a week will be much better.
I really like the thought of doing 6 curls a day. Yet I go into the comments and people here are talking of doing 5 minutes of curls every 30 minutes, which sounds insane.
I started having back issues during covid probably because I didn't have a proper place to work. I now lift or do some cardio for 10 minutes a day 4-5 days a week and have seen pretty drastic improvements. Much more than I thought I would experience given that 10 minutes feels like nothing and is the opposite of what I've been told by my more fit friends. I just bought a cheapish weight set and haven't gone above 15lbs on each dumbbell but my arms and shoulders have gotten noticeably bigger and my legs slimmed down quite a bit. Of course my back is much better and my posture as well.
I was not big to begin with 5'11" 170lbs and I am not into fitness. I really don't enjoy doing it but 10 minutes usually will fly by and I can get on with doing things I enjoy more.
It's different for everyone based on how fit you currently are. 6 curls a day wouldn't do much for me, for example-- I would hardly notice. But even 20-30 would give them a nice workout. I assume some of the people talking about more rigorous schedules are people that are already pretty fit and therefor need more intense workouts
The body can handle any exercise regime you desire, given the time the feature most people lack. Either being afforded the time to exercise, will power to exercise or interest to exercise. Then there are those who see strength training or long-distance running as being detrimental to long-term health.
Where I believe most people fail is not setting an objective goal; to get fit is vague. You need a goal that is measurable, preferably not body weight as your body will structure itself properly for your goal. I suppose your goal could not be ambitious enough but I assume people seek to push themselves.
At the beginning of Covid I was a 235 lbs powerlifter, then I started boxing (gyms opens 6-weeks in Covid) training to compete, dropped to 185 last November with a 10k run at 53:23. Now I am working towards my own goal the 15-50 project; to be able to have powerlifting total of 1500 lbs and run a 50 miler within a weekend. Current lifts are squat - 555, bench - 405, deadlift 605, with my one mile run at 8:43. I have to build my run slow (running at 220 lbs) while I maintain my lifts. I have planned for this take 3 years.
It won't always be pleasant but given time the body will adjust and you will have a much healthier life!
I feel like Powerlifting has become such a crap shoot. You have ppl doing ultra wide sumo on DL, crazy back arch on bench, squat suits, wrapped knees, ultra wide foot placement low bar squat blah blah. To me these lifts no longer even remotely resemble what I do in the gym. That being said I love John Haack - conventional DL, relatively narrow/normal grip on bench, doesn't the dude even high bar? Wish that shit was just the standard.
I have started this year using knee sleeves once I go above 400 lbs on squats. At 37 it keeps warm and secured, better for longevity.
If there are any real complaints for strength sports (I've done strongman as well) are the high usages of PEDs. Not that I am against people using them but it makes it difficult to have apples to apples comparison, particularly when competing.
Let’s be honest, by “healthier life” you primarily mean you will look good and feel good. It’s not really about living longer or keeping your organs in good shape or any of that, you can accomplish that with just light cardio. The real reason men lift weights is to pick up women and gain respect in the eyes of other men.
Just like everything else today, the “consensus” fitness advice is shaped to optimize profit, since it’s made up and distributed by the sales reps(personal trainer) it’s pretty much all bullshit. Like you’ll see a bodybuilder proclaiming that this new exercise is the best ever for training abs, and the “proof” is “look at my abs” but obviously the exercise didn’t get the person to that point and it wasn’t made up until the person starter as a personal trainer and needed to sell people on “one secret the establishment hates”.
In a 4-week training the trainer would rather have you come in every other day or once a week because it’s easier to schedule more clients. Makes you feel like your getting more for your money, And the trainer is going to make sure you’re sore because that makes you “feel
Like it’s working” which is easier to pitch to people than to find an objective measure you can change enough in 4 weeks that the client is certain it works and feels the cost is justified.
Well, what is your goal? The best bang for your buck in terms of time spent is weight training, just do Starting Strength, Mark Rippetoe, and once you’ve maxed that out, go for maintenance. Three hours a week. But cardio exercise is probably near as good and might be just as good for most purposes except maintaining muscle mass as you age. For that just do a Couch to 5K programme and then run regularly. If you feel like running more than three times a week do it. If you feel like running longer distances, do it. Or don’t.
By far the biggest difference is between the unfit and the moderately fit. Just start slow, take it easy and do something. Doing yoga four hours a week beats no exercise by a lot.
531 Forever for a person willing to read, and read again, for someone that wants a framework for resistance training+conditioning that they can use for the rest of their life.
Paul Kelso's Powerlifting Basics, Texas-Style: The Adventures of Lope Delk for the person that want a few different routines that are more geared towards strength.
If I was a person starting anew though I'd place less emphasis on strength initially and use a more varied set of exercises. My personal recommendation would be John Meadow's Baby Groot, it is written so well it could just about be understood by a computer program. Few, if any, ambiguities. Helpful examples. And video links to each exercise.
That could all be true. I wouldn’t know. But SS is absolutely sufficient to get all your beginner gains and then switch to maintenance which would get you 80% of the gains for 20% of the effort. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Better any plan to become fit that’s not actively harmful, executed, than someone putting it off to find the perfect plan.
If you want to avoid the bullshit and the broscience, strongerbyscience.com. Ignore the paid products, all you need are the articles and the strength training guide.
Work out every day. 2x a week do high intensity cardio to your limits. The days after, do revovery like yoga, light swimming, walking, stetching, and build up to the next hight intensity day. Do heavy weights once a week for bone density.
Sleep. Listen to your body, if you need a week off, do it. get sunshine,go ouside. Eat whole foods.
From what I've heard (and my own very little experience) the ideal is somewhere in the middle. You need to allow 1-2 days after excercise for muscle growth. So doing the same excercise every day might actually inhibit growth a bit, and once a week is too infrequent.
You also don't need to do crazy long workouts. It is possible to set the muscle stimulus pretty quickly. The idea is that you train right up till muscle failure (which sounds scarier than it is). What's I've seen recommended is about three sets of each 8-12 repetitions per exercise. You choose the weight so that you cannot do more than 12. Splitting it up in sets helps you edge closer to the point of exhaustion. It is important that you don't overdo it of course.
In the end though, any exercise is better than no exercise, and as long as you have something you can stick to and works for you, it's fine.
Walking is underrated. I've intentionally walked at least 3 miles every day (not without fail!), at top speed, in addition to whatever else is part of daily life. I don't intentionally do any other exercise (though apparently I'm strong enough to get asked to move things).
My resting heart rate (in my 30s) is 48 bpm. Forty-eight! (As measured on multiple occasions by genuine hospital equipment that I happened to be using in the course of testing/working on it.) For someone who used to be a fat guy, that seems incredible. And yet there it is.
But read what I wrote: “This is not the case for me.”
I won’t speak to programming only 30 minutes a day, or only three and a half hours a week. I don’t do it, and don’t know anyone that does. It’s a strawman argument that doesn’t really apply to any real-world scenario. I simply used it as a fulcrum to make a comment, based on my own, real-world experience. I also used it to mention something that has a bit more relevance to the article, itself.
When you say "programming" do you mean "acquisition of skill" programming or "I need to use existing skills" programming?
Because I can certainly agree that whenever you know what you are doing and have a task that needs to be done hammering it out all at once is much better than splitting it up and doing parts of it each day. Now imagine you have to study for a python test coming up in 2 weeks as an absolute begginer beginner and you have the option of looking at stuff in 30min chunks per day or 3.5 hours per day all at once. Which option would you pick?
If that was true it would be the only example of that in skill acquisition ever found. Distributed practice beats massed practice for the same time expenditure.
If you program for 30 minutes you spend first 15 minutes filling your short-term memory with all the relevant details to do 15 minutes of work and throw it away.
I think it is understood that there's a lower total bound for it to be useful, like it's pointless comparing ten seconds of daily fitness with 70 seconds of one time weekly fitness
I may be reading it incorrectly, but it seems rather strange they are counting the eccentric (decline / negative) portion of the Bicep curl as the only stimulus. It begs the question, how did the trainees get the weight back up to the top to do the next rep? Lab assistants?
It is also interesting because negatives are super-effective when you are too weak to manage a whole rep, this is often the case with pull-ups and the trainee can easily jump up to the bar, lowering themselves slowly as the stimulus, and soon enough will become strong enough to perform a complete rep. But after that point, the eccentric portion alone will not be enough to improve further.
Couldn't access the original paper easily, but in studies like this they might use specialized lab equipment -- that allows 'maximal voluntary eccentric contraction' more safely and easily than traditional dumbbell/barbell lifts. Basically it would complete the rep in, say, 1 second, while measuring the force you put out, but the machine is powerful enough to resist whatever force you put against it.
They probably used the same machine to measure the results, that is, 'MVC-ECC, isometric (MVC-ISO), and concentric contraction (MVC-CON) torque of the elbow flexors' -- which would also be harder to do in a traditional gym setup.
I'm less convinced by studies that use an unconventional control group. What I mean by unconventional is primarily the single set of 30 reps once a week, which is not representative of conventional wisdom in weight training (conventional wisdom would be 3-5 sets of 5-8 reps, with a rest of at least a minute between). Another factor is that they are doing maximal eccentric movements. This means lowering a weight slightly heavier than the subject is able to lift slowly. Does this make the study invalid? Not clear, but it makes it less clearly applicable.
> One group did this six times a day for five days a week (6×5). The other group completed all 30 contractions in a single day once a week (30×1)
While this may appear effective for complete noobies, I suspect that the hailed effect will quickly go to 0 when you get even just a little more advanced. To make progress then you can't avoid longer "Time under Tension" sets for your muscles. Which also becomes increasingly impractical to spread 5 times over a day as you first need to properly warm up each time.
For the last few years I've been moving most months to a new area and have limited access to gyms, or at least affordable access. I've been doing pushups, split squats, and pull ups. 6 sets of 10 during the day. I alternate between each exercise. One per day.
It's an incredible way to have a baseline of fitness and make sure I'm getting up from my chair during the day. I typically find I'm more likely to do some cardio later in the day as well because I've already done some exercise.
How do you do pull-ups when you don't have gym access and there's no home equipment? Do you travel with one of those door frame pull-up bars? Do you search for local parks with pull-up bars?
Travel with a door frame pull up bar. I've bought a half dozen over the last two years. If I cant bring it somewhere for some reason they are like $20 on Amazon.
This seems to align a lot with the grease the groove concept (I heard it mentioned earliest by the kettlebell dude, Pavel Tsatsouline, but not sure if he's coined that phrase or not).
Humm this sounds too much like "one weird trick" and I would not be surprised if the researchers fumbled this a bit
For one, doing 30 reps in the same day (with no details about if/how this was split into sets) is different than 6 reps in the same day (in terms of weight/intensity)
Plenty of workout routines have days per week devoted to focusing on particular muscle groups ("leg day" etc), the study seems aimed at looking at their effectiveness.
Its a study where they controlled variables to learn how the body responds to different types of stimulus, not a workout plan. It can inform the design of a workout plan but someone just naievely adopting this study design is
Yes, it is possible that the study helps in that sense (and yes, I'm skeptical of "leg day" workouts), I feel it is more productive to work out a muscle at least 2x week
Yeah, it seems fishy. If 6 reps of something is difficult enough to do such that it has in impact on muscle growth, I can't see how they could manage 30 reps of the same thing. I wonder if the 6 reps 5 days people were untrained, while the 1 set of 30 people could manage it because they were trained enough so that it was possible (and therefore too easy)? Or maybe the 1 set of 30 was with a lighter weight to make it possible?
I found this site in an hn comment and its been my goto for training for 5+ years now. gmb.io
if you are out of shape, elements is gold. I've been through elements countless times. Its body weight training that focuses on movements and is very beginner friendly, but can also be scaled up. I own multiples of their programs, all pretty great. You can also get a lot of value out of their free stuff on YouTube.
>One group did this six times a day for five days a week (6×5). The other group completed all 30 contractions in a single day once a week (30×1). Researchers also had a third group do six contractions once a week as a control.
>Results show the 30×1 group did not see any increase in their muscle strength over the four weeks. However, they did see their muscle thickness (an indicator of muscle size) grow by 5.8 percent. The control group doing six contractions a week did not see any change in muscle strength or muscle thickness.
This is already known. High reps will build muscle size. Low reps near max will build strength. These researchers need to lurk more.
Power lifting routines will gradually increase weight during a training cycle, with the goal of hitting a new 1 rep max (1RM) toward the end of 6 weeks or so. In weeks 4 and 5 you'll be doing sets of 2 or 3. Body builders will normally do lower weight for sets of 12 or more, targeting specific muscles.
I have a daily routine: 3x5 second horizontal handstands, 10 pull-ups and balance on one leg with eyes closed. It takes less than 5 mins, easy to make a habit of and really makes you feel and look better. Sometimes I throw in some stretches too.
It is nice to see some data behind this. Intuitively it makes sense and you can prove it out with a simple question - have you ever met a carpenter that didn't have an iron handshake?
Which is part of why we (programmers) get paid so much, we are doing work that is objectively unnatural and unhealthy (hunching over a desk in a sedentary position for the majority of the day).
As with all regimen-based health/nutrition studies, the results can be ignored.
Instead, use these studies for ideas, and experiment yourself to find out what works for you.
If you go to the gym, you pretty much have to get into the habit of going every day, and around the same time every day. Eventually you get to the point where missing a day (on purpose or otherwise) gives you the feeling that you've forgotten to do something.
That doesn't mean you have to have a significant workout each time you go - 30 minutes on an exercise bike with low resistance won't significantly impact recovery times if you're focusing on strength training, but it'll still get you to the gym and help reinforce the practice that it's a normal part of your day.
Same here (Canadian prairies). Everything seems possible in the summer. The autumnal equinox hits hard. The only thing that ever worked for me was getting out to the pool regularly in the morning. Getting to the pool was much less effort than exercising, and once I was there, I was more awake, more pressured for sure to put in a decent effort. Early morning cardio and some cold exposure was invigorating (I know it's ironic to suggest this to a comment that mentions being too wet and cold, but it is different) and kept binge/emotional eating in check.
I won't doubt that muscle mass can be increased this easily, but to get the mental benefits of exercise does require a longer medium or high intensive practice.
IMO a lot of these studies on untrained are fairly pointless, this one on extra strength particularly so. Reality is basically anything works for novice lifters and unless you're genetically blessed in hypertrophy department, moving bluntly bitch weights and slight more bitch weights doesn't meaningfuly impact end results for gen pop. I've forgot the exact numbers but I recall metastudy of strength to muscle mass to longevity/health ratio, i.e. entire strong people live longer narrative pointed that the baseline of strength and muscle mass one needs to benefit from meaningful health affects is greater than (from what I've observed after years in the gym and especially those who don't progress/quit before reaching ) novice tier fuckarounditis workouts. Granted ultimately it's about finding routines one can consistently stick to but also one that builds up the base of strength and hypertrophy for health effects. And that's totally possible doing a little exercise once a day, if little = enough.
However if exercising lackadaisical a little everyday and after a year you're stalled doing a dozen pushups and a couple pullups then maybe try something else that raises your baseline so that you can now trivially perform 50 push ups and 5 pullups everyday. Sometimes it's even better spend a little time doing methods you don't enjoy because with respect to strength and muscle mass, they can typically be maintained by methods you do enjoy, i.e. I trained myself to bench/deadlift 2/3x bodyweight, but I can take a long barbell break doing not much sets of max pullups and dips and squats to maintain most of my muscle mass, which is more than most people need for optimal health and probably detrimental. Point is, spend a few months to do basic barbell novice progression, maybe put in effort to milk some intermediate gains, the entire 80/20 rule and find yourself suddenly able to perform better in other domains and maintain performance through methods more amenable to your life style. For gen pop, probably good to set goals to weight + bf% and some minimum level of strength according to age and weight, especially lowerbody/hip strength if we're worried about old folks dying from falls. Surprised there aren't recommended fitness standard like military fitness minimums.
I find it easier to go to the gym 7 days a week than 2-3 times a week -- there is no decision involved, and no chance to "oh I'll just do it tomorrow".
When I fall off the wagon I can skip a few weeks or months easily though.
Same here, it's just part of my morning routine at this point, rise and grind. It's enough of a workout that it makes a difference in the day, and that difference is enough to convince me to keep going (even though I'm always panting and occasionally feeling nauseous during the workout)
that, and I'm really impatient, and the 30-minute workout 6-7 times a week gets me results faster than the same workout less frequently would
A bit ago, there was another study stating the exact opposite of this: that weekend-only workouts showed better results than daily workouts.
I think the real TLDR here is "the workout you do is better than the workout you don't."
Just do something consistently, and there's a good chance you'll get some sort of results. There are some universal principles - but not many - and there are many paths to realizing them.
A few names/links, pick and mix as you will - they're all good:
https://mennohenselmans.com/high-resistance-training-frequen...
http://www.lookgreatnaked.com/fitness_articles_by_brad_schoe...
https://macrofactorapp.com/articles/
https://rpstrength.com/team-member/mike-israetel-phd
Probably not the best links for each, but it's morning and I got work to do. Should be enough to get you started tho.