What You Look Like Shouldn’t Matter
Feeling good in our bodies is often wrongly conflated with “looking good to other people.” Many people start working out because they want to change how they look, but there is a genetic limit to what we can change about our bodies. Finding something at the gym that makes it fun and rewarding to do the actual work of working out is much more rewarding and often leads to feeling good even if there aren’t big visual changes to the body.
Women In The Weightroom
Assumptions about the differences between men and women, as well as the emphasis for women’s exercise being focused on being attractive to men, have been used as excuses to exclude and alienate women from the weight room. Although weight lifting and strength training has become more popular among women, there is still room to be more inclusive and welcoming.
The Death of ‘Functional’ Fitness
The trend of ‘functional’ fitness aims to train exercisers with movements that are supposedly more likely to carry over to practical everyday uses. However, in doing so, many ‘functional’ recommendations contradict long-standing, well-researched and evidence-based practices in fitness, to the detriment of their followers. Unfortunately, there is something that functional fitness is uniquely good at - gathering attention on social media via highly viral, unusual movements likely to attract attention because of their novelty.
Are Jumps A Good Training Exercise?
Jumps are an excellent exercise for developing explosive power, and are absolutely essential in many athletic programs. At the same time, they have some serious drawbacks that make them less good of a fit for most other exercisers. Despite this, jumps have a popularity that seems to exceed their general usefulness, in part driven by social media.
The most important factor in exercise for weight loss is simply showing up
There’s a lot of argument about what the right kind of exercise is, if you want to lose weight. The answer is, it probably doesn’t matter - so long as you’re actually exercising consistently. Different activities can certainly have different secondary effects aside from burning calories, and this should be considered in the context of what goals you have for your training aside from weight loss.