The Mainstream Still Doesn't Know Strength Training Beats Running. Why? | PJ Media
The comments are always the best part. People who don't know what they're talking about, talking about an article they haven't read.
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The Mainstream Still Doesn't Know Strength Training Beats Running. Why? | PJ Media
The comments are always the best part. People who don't know what they're talking about, talking about an article they haven't read.
The comments are great in this one. A bunch of weak and clearly insignificant people talking about things they don't know anything about while pretending to be experts. I would love to see any of them attempt to do a heavy set of five. It is amazing that people like this are able to function in this world.
How about the guy talking about you going to his golf course and trying to walk a round of golf while carrying a golf bag? Wow. He thinks a golf bag is heavy and obviously doesn't understand the first thing about strength. It is very sad how weak these kind of people are. And they don't even care about trying to do anything about it. Unbelievable.
And I'm very fat.
This is actually a well nuanced article I can present to my mom. I have not read all the PJ media articles. This one doesn't mention the cardiovascular benefits of strength training but looking the comments another one does. Really, the only weakness of this article.
Also, in looking at the comments some people just won't get it no matter how hard you try.
Comment From PJ
Yup he claims it alright because well it is.Quote:
And yet, he claims lifting is cardio. He also claims that injuries are fewer which is just silly.
Thanks for this.
the golf guy got me too.
wonder if he realises how easy it would be to carry around 25lbs when you can easily put 10 times that on your back and put your arse considerably closer to the ground with it than walking requires.
funny thing is if you got an engineer to explain to them that a machine can lift a 400lb thing easier if its max lifting capacity was 600lb compared to a machine with a max lifting capacity of 500lb they would actually get it and say 'of course!'.
Those commenters are proof that facts don't stand a chance against a prefered narrative.
I might have the slightest respect for some of those nitwits if they at least had an N=1 experience of doing at least a BW squat.
All their arguments about cardio would have to wait until their heart rate came back to gardening and walking the dog levels.
How are the book sales?
Steady.
I wear a heart rate monitor when I lift to keep an eye on the "quality" and "value" of the cardio I am getting. Even on the more moderate loads of a 5-3-1 routine it ranges from peaks of 90% of MHR to never less than 70%. This includes the 3+ minute rest periods between sets. My log shows it. Although I have been remiss the last couple of weeks recording those figures.
Anyone who believes there is no cardio benefit from lifting has never bothered to keep an eye on what's really going on with their body when they lift.
You might be amused to note that my favorite left-wing blog (Naked Capitalism) has linked to this (with very positive comments). Sometimes the truth transcends politics.
I wish i could keep calm and indifferent on those comments but
I just hate when people waste they lives like that.
Could this lack of familiarity in the mainstream media and mainstream academia also be found in the detrained portion of society? In conversation with my older brother about fitness, he brought up the fact that "running around a box and doing an increasing amount of pushups after each lap" tired him out. He wouldn't hear of the benefits of lifting following the idea of progressive overload and seemed to hold endurance in higher esteem. I've also heard of crossfitters asking the question of "but can he run X distance in Y time?" as a response to a feat of strength as though proving themselves to be "more balanced" seemingly irrelevant things in context (vide "but can it read" from South Park and the nonsensical "but can he throw a football"). You could say the media and academia account for this warped view of fitness, but, in some cases, I'd posit that people's own unwillingless to look beyond single personal experience to a broader picture is perhaps more damaging in the long term ("eigen kind, schoon kind" as we say in Belgium; "my child's better than yours [because it's mine]").
Yeah, those heart rate spikes after deadlift and squat 5s are huge. I also sometimes get mild hypoglycemic headaches during rest periods (only after squats though).
Maybe people can't differentiate between one's cardiovascular system getting better and being able to run 10km in 40 minutes every second day. Maybe people can't tell that the latter isn't necessary in light of the former. That's what I pick up from the comments on PJMedia. People have this obsession with moving at relatively slow speeds over long distances.
There was some talk about cycling, so here is an Olympic cyclist squatting 440lbs for 10 reps: TOTAL LEG DAY Bodybuilder VS Cyclist feat. Robert Foerstemann - YouTube
Honorable mention goes to:
The weakness and stupidity required to think that carrying 25lbs around is difficult is quite spectacular.Quote:
Mr. Rippeto is hung up on power lifting as the end all, be all of fitness. If all you want to be is a very strong couch potato then weight lifting is the answer. A combination of aerobic exercise and strength training is better than one or the other alone. I would challenge him to play a round of golf at my club carrying a mere 25lb bag for the 4 mile walk. My guess is if he is really only lifting he would have a very difficult time finishing.
I didn't wear a heart monitor, but checked my heart rate several times during rest periods the other day during my training session. I didn't check it after my first two or three squat warmups, but periodically after that.
I'm weak and out of shape, so the weights were low (squats were 175lbs), but every time I checked my heart rate was between 160-170. The session took 45 minutes to complete (squat/press/deadlift). I used to jog (bouncy walk) for heart health, never more than 35 mins, and my heart rate was similar. Why try to run when I could lift and get stronger as well, while working my heart just as (if not more so, especially DURING sets) well in the process?
Here's an anecdotal example of endurance that's associated with strength training. I shingled a roof this past summer after having not done one since I started training a couple years ago. At the end of a hot, twelve hour day I had noticeably more endurance. My untrained brother was about useless towards the end of the day, but I was able to continue lugging around 80 pound bundles of shingles with little drop off in performance.
Good article. Hopefully, it will continue the trend of more people lifting weights and/or questioning the prevailing wisdom so that more PHDs will lift weights and undertake studies with real value. The pendulum has already started to swing, in no small part due to your writing Rip.
This article post on FB has gotten 81,852 shares, a PR for an article posting. Why? I don't understand it.
DonkeyLips? Quickly now.
"Rodents do not like to lift weights."
That got a laugh out of me.
It always amuses me when I see those phrases. Exactly what constitutes 'balance' and 'moderation?' 99% of the time, when someone says this, it means they don't have any real answers and they don't want to be called out on it later. "But it didn't work for me!" "Well, your training clearly wasn't balanced enough."
The next time someone tells me I shouldn't squat 3 times a week because I should have a 'balanced' training program...
My favorite line: "Rodents do not like to lift weights." :)
For much of my adult life I juggled way too many sets and reps and lifting sessions a week "balanced" with 5-7 days a week of running 3 miles or more a day. Unsurprisingly I did too much of both and didn't do particularly well in either in terms performance. Just a lot of going through the motions and a lot of fatigue. And wasting time.
In my late 50's I figgered out how much cardio was really necessary for that level of cardiovascular fitness because I couldn't keep putting in all the time, pounding, and effort on my previous regimen. I actually thought that balance was indicated by minutes per week spent at cardio and lifting. Not so.
Sorry - work/gym. I know im commiting suicide here, but: exercise science is a narrow field. How much is left to figure out now that we have a model for optimum training?
Of course, people will still need to study exercise science in the future to master this knowledge. But all the big stuff is taken care of.
A while back some dude was proudly announcing how he was representing our company at a corporate marathon. As I said to him at the time, what the hell was the point of this? "Why?"
They had to get up at 5 in the morning on their Saturday, and mince around all sweaty and emaciated looking.
Dude wound up crashing into someone and broke his femur. I hear he's out for about 6 months paid leave, work is no doubt covering his medical bills.
I'm still lifting and working my ass off at the office. That brittle femur fund should be going towards my raise.
Not that they haven't tried:
http://www.theissnscoop.com/wp-conte...ng-weights.jpg
Rip will surely have his opinion on this, but I see the Moment Model as a framework to talk about strength training. It's a beginning, not an end. If SSBT were the "Final Answer," there wouldn't be 3 editions of the book. By talking in terms of joint angles in 2 and 3 dimensions, moment arms, centers of mass, and the like, we can at least argue with clear points on falsifiable grounds... as we seem to do pretty regularly. We're not necessarily the only ones talking in these terms, either. There just aren't nearly enough.
Besides, SS is primarily focused on the development of strength (hell, it's in the name). There's still a vast field of sports and movement that we don't really deal with that should be studied. Lots of work needs to be done on the interaction of different training methods and health, and more scientific rigor should be applied to the SS model itself to identify what's really optimal (that was a blatant plug for Jordan's registry project, BTW).
Yes, I think this is so true. I just want to share my experience because I think this article is about people like me: average gym goers who just don't know what they're doing and run because they think they're supposed to.
Some people just don't have the right information, and once they're exposed to it, it will resonate sooner or later. I literally tried everything else in fitness (from zumba to pilates to running 20 minutes a day) for years. I realized cardio wasn't working for me, but I didn't know how to do strength training. When I finally ran across SS on some online forums and blogs, I realized it was the one thing I had never tried in all my years of going to the gym. And something inside me said, if what you're doing isn't working then try something else.
I think that until people get to a point where they realize what they're doing isn't working for them, they might not get it. If cardio stuff like running is keeping them thin and that's their primary goal, they don't have the incentive or motivation to change. For me, that kind of exercise made me lose weight, but didn't make me stronger, and yet I had no idea why I was unsatisfied. When I was finally exposed to SS and read the book, it just resonated with me because it matched my own experience, just like this article does.
Anecdote for you.
8 years ago I was more into cardio and I decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (the trail in the movie Wild, but this was before the book came out). I quit my job where I used to ride my bike to work, and spent 6 weeks doing training hikes to get ready. Then I got on the trail and hiked about 10-15 miles per day to begin with. It was really hard and I suffered and struggled a lot.
Two weeks ago after a few years of sitting on my fat ass at a desk and being too tired most of the time from lifting to do much else but watch TV when I get home from work, I hit the same trail at the Mexican border and the first day I hiked 21 miles. I kept up a steady 20 miles per day pace, some days more like 25, other days maybe a little less than 20. It was easy. Ridiculously easy. I wasn't tired at the end of the day. It didn't bother me one bit that water in the desert is 15-20 miles apart. I only ever needed 2 liters, maybe 3, because the effort seemed so minimal. My pack never felt oppressive. My cardio endurance was fine.
This shit works. But damn, you just can't convince anybody. They all believe running is the answer.
Getting stronger didn't improve the improve the performance of your cardiovascular system. You struggled initially because you were too weak to deal with the strength requirement of lugging around your own body weight and additional gear. When you reattempted it without that limitation you experienced that such a hike is not a real stress to your cardiovascular system.
It is common to think of the performance of the cardiovascular system in terms of the length of time one can do some mundane activity, but it really needs to be thought of in terms of the speed at which an activity can be sustained. Increasing your walk from 4 to 5 miles is rarely a reflection on the improvement of the cardiovascular system. Improving your 5k time from 30 minutes to 25 minutes is.
This has been addressed before but it's difficult to get too much meaningful information from the HR response to this sort of activity. HR response is very useful when the activity is sub-maximal (relative to aerobic capacity) and relatively steady state. When you get on your cross trainer and start your cardio it will take several minutes for your HR to stop climbing and reach the level required to fuel that level of activity. When you do even a warm up set of squats you are working at an intensity far higher than can be achieved by just ramping up the aerobic system and it will be over long before HR even stops rising. Sure, your HR may remain elevated during your rest periods, but simply experiencing an elevated HR does not mean it is an adaptive stimulus like the elevated HR achieved during "cardio" is.
A marathon-runner friend tried to preach the virtues of running over strength training to me a few weeks back. I explained to him that both he and I could run a marathon. He'd beat me, sure. But we'd both start and finish. But if I took him to the gym and asked him to deadlift 405 he couldn't even start the exercise, much less finish.
He does have a nifty bumper sticker and a bunch of free shirts though.