Everything you know about fitness is a lie
Let’s start this newsletter installment off with an admission of guilt: I stole this title from the article that inspired it.
The title itself is a bit of hyperbole - but not that much - which actually underscores a larger point about the way that we communicate about important parts of medicine, health, and overall wellness.
It’s one of the most important things I’ve read - and not just about exercise - partly because of the information contained in it, but partly because there’s a meta-point in there that I’ll get back to a bit later on.
The article tells the story of a man who “does all the right things.”
He goes to the gym a few times a week, does cardio, works his abs, and uses a stability ball to train balance and coordination. He works with a trainer, learns a lot of new exercises, and even invents his own stability ball exercises to engage his core while strengthening his legs.
The article describes how the author learns about the “miasma of lies and misinformation that we mistake for common sense” in the fitness world.
Fitness can feel complicated - you walk into a gym and there are a million things to do. Everything is set up to make it feel confusing. The machines look complicated. There are two dozen different stations. No instructions anywhere. How do you figure out what to do?
What did he learn on his fitness journey?
The number 1 thing he learned that best cuts through the nonsense misinformation that the $19 billion fitness injury doesn’t communicate clearly - there’s no substitute for strength.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a 25 year old man or an 85 year old woman. Strength is the most important of the physical domains (the others being flexibility, speed, and endurance).
Why do I say that?
Strength prevents frailty. And frailty is what dooms people when they get sick.
After a medical set back, strength is often difference between recovery and convalescence:
Muscle withers away if you're not constantly building it, and muscle withers faster as a man ages. Fading muscle mass gives way to fat gain, stiff joints, stumbling-old-man balance, and a serious drop-off in weekend fun, not to mention self-esteem. But if you fight back right, it can all go the other way. And this means getting strong. The bottom line is that not only can lifting weights do as much for your heart health as cardio workouts, but it also provides you with a lean-muscle coat of armor against life's inevitable blows – the way it did for my own father, who broke his back in a climbing accident at age 69, spent months in bed, and recovered strong only because he'd been lifting for 35 years.
You can’t measure what you don’t track
The author describes his strength journey in a really engaging way, but he doesn’t emphasize something that I think it really important:
Tracking your progress.
He talks about keeping tabs on what he was doing each session, trying to improve on his numbers each workout. But he doesn’t describe this concept by its name: progressive overload.
Progressive overload, the concept that each workout you try to “beat the training log,” is a keystone principle for life.
Perhaps you’ve heard the apocryphal tale of Milo of Croton, the Greek wrestler who carried a calf over his shoulders every day until it became a bull. That’s progressive overload - do a bit more each time, and when you look back in a few months or a few years, you’ll be blown away by what you’ve accomplished.
Progressive overload doesn’t just apply to fitness. It applies to everything that we do, from strength training, to knowledge acquisition, to skill development.
Progressive overload is life’s compound interest - and there’s a reason that Einstein described that as the most powerful force in the universe.
The “miasma of lies and misinformation that we mistake for common sense” is a line I wish I had come up with myself
The real meta-point of this article - that most of the information we get that has been filtered through popular media sources is nonsense - is perhaps the most crucial.
Having spent time working in the TV industry, I viscerally understand how useful information gets filtered, simplified, edited, and eventually bastardized before it makes its way onto your TV set.
But it’s the constant need for something new that is the driving force behind most content creation. And since we’re not constantly discovering “new” workouts anymore than we’re discovering new treatments for heart disease or new organs in the human body, we’re left with nonsense creation.
So you end up repurposing the same old information in repackaged ways.
The ultimate effect is that the important messages get lost as content creators flood the zone with shit.
That’s part of what made COVID such a firehose of information at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s a generational rarity that we’re actually in a situation where the information is truly novel rather than the same old crap that’s just repackaged.
It’s a real challenge to be an educated consumer of information in the current age - filtering through this miasma is not easy, and it often takes quite a bit of expertise to figure out the small parts that aren’t actually bullshit.
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