What I appreciate about this piece isn't just the fitness knowledge (more below), but the business insights:
Here's the problem: If you're in the fitness-equipment business, free weights are a loser. The 2010 model looks too much like the 1950 model, and they both last forever. Far better to create gleaming $4,000 contraptions that can be reinvented every two years, and then hire a PR firm to promote some made-up training theory claiming that machines are the answer...
Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense....
But the personal-training business model doesn't include teaching (or even learning) the fundamentals anyway. Trainers make a living by keeping clients coming back; fundamentals liberate clients to train themselves. So the savvy trainer tells you that these days, it's all about "functional fitness," a complex integration of balance and stability and strength....
Shaul gave me a great gift that day, cluing me in to a little secret: True sport-specific training, for literally everybody except elite athletes, isn't sport-specific at all. It's about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure.
Distilling the essential lessons:
- Anything works, especially over nothing, initially. Further progress adds to this with progression, specificity, technique, modalities, programming, and above all, consistency.
- Corollary: newbies often fall into the One True Religion trap, thinking that what works for them is 1) best for everyone and 2) the Best Thing Evar. There's substantial replicated science on non-newbie gains which is worth referencing.
- Physical fitness is far more than aerobic fitness, which much of the world still seems focused on. Strength and resistance training remain under-appreciated and under-utilised many decades after first reaching public awareness.
- Freeweights (stuff like dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, and even cable machines) offer the biggest bang for the buck. As do compound movements (those in which multiple joints are flexed simultaneously), as opposed to isolation movements. Chin-ups are a compound movement (elbow, shoulder), arm curls are an isolation movement, both engage the biceps, but chins engage much more (forearms, lats, delts, rhomboids...).
- Movements (the specific exercise you're doing), sets, reps, rest, progression (usually increasing resistance over time), and programming (how you vary all of the above over a training year or longer) are the basic building blocks of strength training.
- Benefits are enormous at any age. Enjoy the easy gains in your 20s, revitalisation in your 30s and 40s, heading off metabolic diseases in your 50s and 60s, and slowing old-age demise in your 70s and beyond.
I'm going on my third decade of strength training, with ups and downs and pauses, but what I know with certainty is that I feel far better when I have regular access to weights. And some form of cardio (which I've been doing several decades longer).
The fundamental information is neither terribly complicated nor controversial, but clear presentation is at odds with business models, as noted at the top of this comment. I'm a fan of ExRx (<https://exrx.net>), and find the New Rules of Lifting books (Schuler, Cosgrove, et al) good introductions, though there are of course many other websites and books.
Many submissions over the years, with particularly good discussions here:
March 10, 2014, 66 comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7371478>
Dec 26, 2012, 334 comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4971196>
What I appreciate about this piece isn't just the fitness knowledge (more below), but the business insights:
Here's the problem: If you're in the fitness-equipment business, free weights are a loser. The 2010 model looks too much like the 1950 model, and they both last forever. Far better to create gleaming $4,000 contraptions that can be reinvented every two years, and then hire a PR firm to promote some made-up training theory claiming that machines are the answer...
Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense....
But the personal-training business model doesn't include teaching (or even learning) the fundamentals anyway. Trainers make a living by keeping clients coming back; fundamentals liberate clients to train themselves. So the savvy trainer tells you that these days, it's all about "functional fitness," a complex integration of balance and stability and strength....
Shaul gave me a great gift that day, cluing me in to a little secret: True sport-specific training, for literally everybody except elite athletes, isn't sport-specific at all. It's about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure.
Distilling the essential lessons:
- Anything works, especially over nothing, initially. Further progress adds to this with progression, specificity, technique, modalities, programming, and above all, consistency.
- Corollary: newbies often fall into the One True Religion trap, thinking that what works for them is 1) best for everyone and 2) the Best Thing Evar. There's substantial replicated science on non-newbie gains which is worth referencing.
- Physical fitness is far more than aerobic fitness, which much of the world still seems focused on. Strength and resistance training remain under-appreciated and under-utilised many decades after first reaching public awareness.
- Freeweights (stuff like dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, and even cable machines) offer the biggest bang for the buck. As do compound movements (those in which multiple joints are flexed simultaneously), as opposed to isolation movements. Chin-ups are a compound movement (elbow, shoulder), arm curls are an isolation movement, both engage the biceps, but chins engage much more (forearms, lats, delts, rhomboids...).
- Movements (the specific exercise you're doing), sets, reps, rest, progression (usually increasing resistance over time), and programming (how you vary all of the above over a training year or longer) are the basic building blocks of strength training.
- Benefits are enormous at any age. Enjoy the easy gains in your 20s, revitalisation in your 30s and 40s, heading off metabolic diseases in your 50s and 60s, and slowing old-age demise in your 70s and beyond.
I'm going on my third decade of strength training, with ups and downs and pauses, but what I know with certainty is that I feel far better when I have regular access to weights. And some form of cardio (which I've been doing several decades longer).
The fundamental information is neither terribly complicated nor controversial, but clear presentation is at odds with business models, as noted at the top of this comment. I'm a fan of ExRx (<https://exrx.net>), and find the New Rules of Lifting books (Schuler, Cosgrove, et al) good introductions, though there are of course many other websites and books.
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