The reason the exercise culture is broken is because it’s framed as the will triumphing over the body. Movement isn’t for pleasure, and it isn’t for self-maintenance. The thing that really gets praise is proving how tough you are—that is, your ability to ignore your evolved safety signals.
I usually don’t participate in these discussions because it’s all too easy to commit the typical mind fallacy. The implicit assumption seems to be that working out and lifting weights must be uncomfortable for most people. I offer myself as a person for whom this is not true: I take pleasure out of lifting weights in a way that I haven’t yet experienced from most other sports. As for ‘toughness’, well it’s true that if you start experiencing extreme pain you should stop doing what you’re doing, but any kind of medium-intensity exercise is always going to come with some mild discomfort. Some people tend to exaggerate this discomfort. Just because something is uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s an ‘evolved safety signal.’ You could just as easily argue that it’s the body merely trying to conserve energy because in the past energy was hard to come by. Evolutionary explanations don’t hold water here.
Personaly story, hoping you can make head or tails of it or come up with an idea:
A) at 17, traditional body-building stuff felt well, by that I mean doing one composite and one isolation exercise for every major muscle group.
B) at 35+ I learned about these new powerlifting oriented trends, squat-and-deadlift, SS, SL 5x5, and it felt really bad, my whole body felt stiff and inflamed.
It is probably hard on the joints, and one needs to take more care about doing it gradually and make sure about correct form. A) was better because those exercises are simply less dangerous, if you e.g. do dips and cable extensions for triceps, you rarely if even get any problems even if you are impatient like me and not warm up, take too much weight, use momentum, cheat using shoulders, not stretch afterwards etc. at least with a 17 years old body and not doing it long enough to use massive weights (say, unweighted dips and cable extensions with 30-40 kg) it was safe enough to be an impatient fool at it. And all this made me feel the pump, which has little to do with hypertrophy, but it is a fast dopamine reward and motivating.
Doing the powerlifting stuff at 35 is the opposite, you must be very careful, you have to do it absolutely right and not be impatient at it, and you (not at the beginner level before joints and stabilizing muscles catch up to major muscles) don’t get the instant reward of the pump. So basically you go there for weeks and do it and nothing really happens. No reward. So every time I started this I quit after 3-4 weeks because it was just work, work, no reward.
The reason I did not go back to the original kind is twofold, I was too fat to see the pump and get the instant reward, and ultimately being old (yes, 35 can feel old if you are not fit in the sense of flexibility and cardio and all), stiff, groaning when getting up from sitting on the floor and knees cracking… at this point I just did not feel being a stronger and stiffer mofo does me any good. I felt immobilized in my body.
So at this point I wanted a completely different me. A lithe, limber, fast, anti-gravity me who jumps around a sandbag punching (or jumps around the volleyball court, you get the idea) light a ligthweight Ricochet Rabbit, feeling young and full of energy and flexibility. This part of the reason why I looked int actual sports—plus the reasons explained in the article.
Don’t do squats. back squat...it’s one of the most dangerous exercises for your low back, hips, and knees, even when done with perfect form. Check this out. Id repurpose any leftover bars and weights as a barbell and dumbells (or kettlebells). I haven’t checked if that is safe, but I assume it is. If anyone knows better, please chime in.
The type of damage you’re talking about only happens with extreme levels of exercise that less than 1% of the population ever attempt. For the vast majority of people, “exercise more” is always good advice.
For example, if someone inactive and obese decided out of the blue to run five miles every day, I would expect it to end badly.
It is nearly impossible for a low-willpower (obese and inactive) person to suddenly get so much willpower. He will be panting at 300m, feel his legs are made of lead at 500 and the rest would be sheer will? Nope. Okay there are always outliers and some drug users, but generally, no.
The thing that really gets praise is proving how tough you are—that is, your ability to ignore your evolved safety signals.
I can’t speak for everyone, but this is not the case in my experience. I used to attend my old university’s boxing club and anyone caught ignoring his evolutionary safety signals would have been told to go home, safety was extremely important there, primarily because the university could potentially be legally liable for anything that went wrong.
There certainly was an element of machismo in being able to grit your teeth through the last fifteen minutes of an intense round of cardio, but it’s about defying the voice in your head that tells you to give up, you’re kidding yourself, you’re too weak to be doing this, rather than defying the voice that tells you that you are seriously in danger of cardiac arrest if you don’t stop skipping rope.
A large part of the experience is learning to separate those voices out, know which is which, and know what your real limits are, and what you are in fact capable of as opposed to what you think you’re (in)capable of.
anyone caught ignoring his evolutionary safety signals
How can they tell that, and how is that even possible that there is not for ever 1 such case a 1000 cases of people just being lazy or weak-willed and over-react?
I usually do 1.5 hour box trainings mainly consisting of sandbagging as I am not yet good enough to reliably to hit the mittens as of yet, without having been in any sort of shape except round before that, didn’t run, can’t jump rope, and at 35 I know all the excuses my laziness and weak will wants to throw at me, and yet, despite it all, the only signal that looked more serious than bathing in sweat with a red face was pain in the front shoulder, from keeping my hand in the front and high position all the time, but it felt like just muscle pain and using diclofenac (brand: Voltadol) gel every evening seems to keep it in check. Just what kind of survival signals are 20 years old people who are fit supposed to have from this? It is IMHO not that hard. When I am occasionally allowed the mittens or spar (with trainer only) that is actually easier as I don’t go as hard on them as the bag (I like to prove my strength by making the heavy bag swing 1 m and hit the wall behind it with a back hand straight or hook punch. Ego thing. And tiresome.)
When you state out loud that you think you may have injured yourself, or if you show outward signs of such (e.g. clutching your chest during cardio) or if you’re sparring too heavy, mainly. Ofcourse trainers aren’t psychics and anyone can be ignoring his safety signals and concealing it, but in that case the trainers could hardly praise them for doing it any more than they could be telling them off.
how is that even possible that there is not for ever 1 such case a 1000 cases of people just being lazy or weak-willed and over-react
Well everyone is there of his own free will and his for his own sake. If you under-train you’re only cheating youself, so there’s an incentive not to be a molly. And the fact that you bother to show up to training means it’s probably an effective incentive - at least it was for me.
In the absence of information about what the optimal amount of exercise for general well-being is with regards to joints or anything else, I fail to see what more could be done than to take the ordinary precautions. If you know what the signs are that you’re damaging your joints or any other part of your body, and you’re vigilent in looking out for those signs, the benefits seem to me worth the risk, especially since abstaining from exercise has its own associated risks, e.g. heart-disease.
I think a lot of people override the relatively subtle information that they’re hurting themselves
Well, why? If these signals are subtle then how can we know when we might be overriding them?
Hmm. To what category of values does the value “toughness framed as the will triumphing over the body” belongs to ?
Since I got a lot of these kinds of stuff from my father, my first instinct was “masculine values” but on the other hand, actually enjoying physical challenges is a part of the very same set of values, too, and in fact he spent much of his youth pursuing whatever shiny sport happened to strike his fancy—kayaking, long-distance biking, basketball and skating amongst them. So if I categorize it this way, I get some contradictions.
Maybe “puritanical values” ? Although my upbringing has little if ever to do with Protestantism, it was a fairly big relevation for me to learn a thing or two about Taoism and Buddhism, starting with The Tao of Pooh, the kind of teachings that doing things in an effortless way, being “fluid” may be a good idea at least sometimes. This sounds like the opposite extreme from Puritanism. And if it was such a new thing for me, maybe I was raised a bit puritan in a non-obvious way, clearly no influence from Calvin.
I remember an experiment I did at maybe 16? when I have learned a bit about these Tao-stuff. We were at the Mediterrean sea holidaying and I was lying at the inner edge of the water on the beach and toying with trying to resist the meter-high waves to not throw me out nor to move me. I did i the usual way, flexing all the muscles. Didn’ work. Remembered wu-wei, and tryed to relax completely and submit, give me over to it, not resist and become one with the force of the waves, and to my surprise, it worked, it actually could not move me, because I somehow counter-acted the force with micro-movements or something. A bit later I was biking up some hill and my thigh was burning and my usual reaction was to double down hard, flex that thigh harder and grit my teeth and push, and instead I relaxed my thigh and tried to make the movement fluid, as if I was not exerting force but the pedal itself moving my leg or more like my leg being one with the pedal, and that worked, too.
These are very surprising things for me. Apparently the blog you linked also discusses similar stuff, thanks.
I am probably the most religion-friendly atheist here with an interest in its history, so I have to challenge this :)
Basically mind-body dualism was invented by Descartes and the Catholic Church always believed and AFAIK still does in Aristotelean hylomorphic dualism, where everything consists of matter and substantial form, basically information. So in this view, very roughly a plant consists of matter and DNA, an animal of matter, DNA and info stored in the brain, and so on. It is the substantial form or the information that was called originally “soul”. The reason for the general misunderstanding is that Catholics also argued that part of the human substantial form, substantial form is supernatural, because human cognition can see abstractions, not only specific things, like it can see trianglehood not only triangual objects. For this reason they think a small part of the soul, the abstract thinking part which we may call Little Mathemathician survives death and links up after death with the Big Mathemathician, which is called beatific vision. But as this is not really fun in the longer run, to be a purely abstract thinking agent without emotions and memories and everything that died with the brain, that is why they also teach the resurrection of the body later on. But this not mind-body dualism, this is a small—if superior—part of the mind vs. everything else dualism. BTW, if not obvious, why is it wrong: because abstractions are invented, made, abstracted away, modelled, not discovered, they have a map-terrain problem here.
However, it is also true that they teach that for every being a good life means living according to his nature and for a human being this abstract thinking part is a unique part of our nature, the only thing other animals don’t have, and thus living according to it means overriding our instincts with abstract, general principles, like ethics or laws.
So, practically yes, but not in the Cartesian dualism sense, and it is more like the abstract thinking, general-principles part of the mind ruling the other parts mind. But since both Catholics and atheists agree in the other parts of the mind being natural and biological (obviously, in reality the abstract part too, because abstractions are made, not discovered, hence they do not require a supernatural organ for their discovery), obviously we may as well call natural, biological minds as well bodies, so literally speaking you are right, and I don’t even know what I am objecting about really. I just wanted an excuse to tell it because I think Scholasticism is one of the best fantasy worlds ever made, as long as you don’t take it as something that wants to be true (unfortuantely they want to take it so), it is fairly cool, way more logically consistent than Middle-Earth for example.
Tentative theory: the Puritan (or possibly Protestant work ethic) thing never went away, but at some point it got mated with gaining status through self-expression, and with gaining status through your clothes getting to seem too easy, which is why people shifted to high-maintenance bodies.. That’s why running ultramarathons on multiple continents seems cool rather than weird and extravagant.
This isn’t about philosophy, exactly, though you may be able to deduce a plausible philosophy to explain what people are doing. It’s about cultural shifts.
Reverse correlation between fitness vs. dressy fashion? Kinda-sorta of true for Europe (Sweden: fitness, France, Italy: dressy fashion), can someone compare the muscle-beaches of California and Rio de Janeiro to NY fashion?
Have a rant.…
The reason the exercise culture is broken is because it’s framed as the will triumphing over the body. Movement isn’t for pleasure, and it isn’t for self-maintenance. The thing that really gets praise is proving how tough you are—that is, your ability to ignore your evolved safety signals.
Here’s someone who’s sensible on the subject: http://www.moveandbefree.com/blog
I usually don’t participate in these discussions because it’s all too easy to commit the typical mind fallacy. The implicit assumption seems to be that working out and lifting weights must be uncomfortable for most people. I offer myself as a person for whom this is not true: I take pleasure out of lifting weights in a way that I haven’t yet experienced from most other sports. As for ‘toughness’, well it’s true that if you start experiencing extreme pain you should stop doing what you’re doing, but any kind of medium-intensity exercise is always going to come with some mild discomfort. Some people tend to exaggerate this discomfort. Just because something is uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s an ‘evolved safety signal.’ You could just as easily argue that it’s the body merely trying to conserve energy because in the past energy was hard to come by. Evolutionary explanations don’t hold water here.
Personaly story, hoping you can make head or tails of it or come up with an idea:
A) at 17, traditional body-building stuff felt well, by that I mean doing one composite and one isolation exercise for every major muscle group.
B) at 35+ I learned about these new powerlifting oriented trends, squat-and-deadlift, SS, SL 5x5, and it felt really bad, my whole body felt stiff and inflamed.
It is probably hard on the joints, and one needs to take more care about doing it gradually and make sure about correct form. A) was better because those exercises are simply less dangerous, if you e.g. do dips and cable extensions for triceps, you rarely if even get any problems even if you are impatient like me and not warm up, take too much weight, use momentum, cheat using shoulders, not stretch afterwards etc. at least with a 17 years old body and not doing it long enough to use massive weights (say, unweighted dips and cable extensions with 30-40 kg) it was safe enough to be an impatient fool at it. And all this made me feel the pump, which has little to do with hypertrophy, but it is a fast dopamine reward and motivating.
Doing the powerlifting stuff at 35 is the opposite, you must be very careful, you have to do it absolutely right and not be impatient at it, and you (not at the beginner level before joints and stabilizing muscles catch up to major muscles) don’t get the instant reward of the pump. So basically you go there for weeks and do it and nothing really happens. No reward. So every time I started this I quit after 3-4 weeks because it was just work, work, no reward.
The reason I did not go back to the original kind is twofold, I was too fat to see the pump and get the instant reward, and ultimately being old (yes, 35 can feel old if you are not fit in the sense of flexibility and cardio and all), stiff, groaning when getting up from sitting on the floor and knees cracking… at this point I just did not feel being a stronger and stiffer mofo does me any good. I felt immobilized in my body.
So at this point I wanted a completely different me. A lithe, limber, fast, anti-gravity me who jumps around a sandbag punching (or jumps around the volleyball court, you get the idea) light a ligthweight Ricochet Rabbit, feeling young and full of energy and flexibility. This part of the reason why I looked int actual sports—plus the reasons explained in the article.
Does this make any sort of sense?
Don’t do squats. back squat...it’s one of the most dangerous exercises for your low back, hips, and knees, even when done with perfect form. Check this out. Id repurpose any leftover bars and weights as a barbell and dumbells (or kettlebells). I haven’t checked if that is safe, but I assume it is. If anyone knows better, please chime in.
I agree that there are a lot of people who like exercise better than I do, and there’s a reason I said I was ranting.
However, there are also a lot of people who damage their connective tissue and bones, and possibly their hearts without being at short-term risk. Reasons that the studies might not prove much.
The type of damage you’re talking about only happens with extreme levels of exercise that less than 1% of the population ever attempt. For the vast majority of people, “exercise more” is always good advice.
There is a long list of exceptions.
Isn’t that subject to a lot of caveats? Most would be common sense, but I’m sure there are nuances.
For example, if someone inactive and obese decided out of the blue to run five miles every day, I would expect it to end badly.
It is nearly impossible for a low-willpower (obese and inactive) person to suddenly get so much willpower. He will be panting at 300m, feel his legs are made of lead at 500 and the rest would be sheer will? Nope. Okay there are always outliers and some drug users, but generally, no.
I’m pretty sure you’re mistaken about joint damage.
How could we check this?
We first have to define terms. What do you mean by ‘joint damage’?
I can’t speak for everyone, but this is not the case in my experience. I used to attend my old university’s boxing club and anyone caught ignoring his evolutionary safety signals would have been told to go home, safety was extremely important there, primarily because the university could potentially be legally liable for anything that went wrong.
There certainly was an element of machismo in being able to grit your teeth through the last fifteen minutes of an intense round of cardio, but it’s about defying the voice in your head that tells you to give up, you’re kidding yourself, you’re too weak to be doing this, rather than defying the voice that tells you that you are seriously in danger of cardiac arrest if you don’t stop skipping rope.
A large part of the experience is learning to separate those voices out, know which is which, and know what your real limits are, and what you are in fact capable of as opposed to what you think you’re (in)capable of.
How can they tell that, and how is that even possible that there is not for ever 1 such case a 1000 cases of people just being lazy or weak-willed and over-react?
I usually do 1.5 hour box trainings mainly consisting of sandbagging as I am not yet good enough to reliably to hit the mittens as of yet, without having been in any sort of shape except round before that, didn’t run, can’t jump rope, and at 35 I know all the excuses my laziness and weak will wants to throw at me, and yet, despite it all, the only signal that looked more serious than bathing in sweat with a red face was pain in the front shoulder, from keeping my hand in the front and high position all the time, but it felt like just muscle pain and using diclofenac (brand: Voltadol) gel every evening seems to keep it in check. Just what kind of survival signals are 20 years old people who are fit supposed to have from this? It is IMHO not that hard. When I am occasionally allowed the mittens or spar (with trainer only) that is actually easier as I don’t go as hard on them as the bag (I like to prove my strength by making the heavy bag swing 1 m and hit the wall behind it with a back hand straight or hook punch. Ego thing. And tiresome.)
When you state out loud that you think you may have injured yourself, or if you show outward signs of such (e.g. clutching your chest during cardio) or if you’re sparring too heavy, mainly. Ofcourse trainers aren’t psychics and anyone can be ignoring his safety signals and concealing it, but in that case the trainers could hardly praise them for doing it any more than they could be telling them off.
Well everyone is there of his own free will and his for his own sake. If you under-train you’re only cheating youself, so there’s an incentive not to be a molly. And the fact that you bother to show up to training means it’s probably an effective incentive - at least it was for me.
There’s the risk of joint damage, and I think a lot of people override the relatively subtle information that they’re hurting themselves.
In the absence of information about what the optimal amount of exercise for general well-being is with regards to joints or anything else, I fail to see what more could be done than to take the ordinary precautions. If you know what the signs are that you’re damaging your joints or any other part of your body, and you’re vigilent in looking out for those signs, the benefits seem to me worth the risk, especially since abstaining from exercise has its own associated risks, e.g. heart-disease.
Well, why? If these signals are subtle then how can we know when we might be overriding them?
But that framing is very appealing to some people (although perhaps not you).
It’s appealing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Hmm. To what category of values does the value “toughness framed as the will triumphing over the body” belongs to ?
Since I got a lot of these kinds of stuff from my father, my first instinct was “masculine values” but on the other hand, actually enjoying physical challenges is a part of the very same set of values, too, and in fact he spent much of his youth pursuing whatever shiny sport happened to strike his fancy—kayaking, long-distance biking, basketball and skating amongst them. So if I categorize it this way, I get some contradictions.
Maybe “puritanical values” ? Although my upbringing has little if ever to do with Protestantism, it was a fairly big relevation for me to learn a thing or two about Taoism and Buddhism, starting with The Tao of Pooh, the kind of teachings that doing things in an effortless way, being “fluid” may be a good idea at least sometimes. This sounds like the opposite extreme from Puritanism. And if it was such a new thing for me, maybe I was raised a bit puritan in a non-obvious way, clearly no influence from Calvin.
I remember an experiment I did at maybe 16? when I have learned a bit about these Tao-stuff. We were at the Mediterrean sea holidaying and I was lying at the inner edge of the water on the beach and toying with trying to resist the meter-high waves to not throw me out nor to move me. I did i the usual way, flexing all the muscles. Didn’ work. Remembered wu-wei, and tryed to relax completely and submit, give me over to it, not resist and become one with the force of the waves, and to my surprise, it worked, it actually could not move me, because I somehow counter-acted the force with micro-movements or something. A bit later I was biking up some hill and my thigh was burning and my usual reaction was to double down hard, flex that thigh harder and grit my teeth and push, and instead I relaxed my thigh and tried to make the movement fluid, as if I was not exerting force but the pedal itself moving my leg or more like my leg being one with the pedal, and that worked, too.
These are very surprising things for me. Apparently the blog you linked also discusses similar stuff, thanks.
Christian :-) It’s the typical Western mind-body dualism with the goal of the (superior) mind triumphing over the (beast-like) body.
Hmm. Is it possible at least certain kinds of socialism inherited that? Since religion had such a little influence on my upbringing...
Well, Christian ideas formed much of Western culture and Marxism is certainly a Western-culture phenomenon.
Also, socialism wanted cogs in a machine and it was useful for cogs to be physically fit and overcome physical hardship through love of .
I am probably the most religion-friendly atheist here with an interest in its history, so I have to challenge this :)
Basically mind-body dualism was invented by Descartes and the Catholic Church always believed and AFAIK still does in Aristotelean hylomorphic dualism, where everything consists of matter and substantial form, basically information. So in this view, very roughly a plant consists of matter and DNA, an animal of matter, DNA and info stored in the brain, and so on. It is the substantial form or the information that was called originally “soul”. The reason for the general misunderstanding is that Catholics also argued that part of the human substantial form, substantial form is supernatural, because human cognition can see abstractions, not only specific things, like it can see trianglehood not only triangual objects. For this reason they think a small part of the soul, the abstract thinking part which we may call Little Mathemathician survives death and links up after death with the Big Mathemathician, which is called beatific vision. But as this is not really fun in the longer run, to be a purely abstract thinking agent without emotions and memories and everything that died with the brain, that is why they also teach the resurrection of the body later on. But this not mind-body dualism, this is a small—if superior—part of the mind vs. everything else dualism. BTW, if not obvious, why is it wrong: because abstractions are invented, made, abstracted away, modelled, not discovered, they have a map-terrain problem here.
However, it is also true that they teach that for every being a good life means living according to his nature and for a human being this abstract thinking part is a unique part of our nature, the only thing other animals don’t have, and thus living according to it means overriding our instincts with abstract, general principles, like ethics or laws.
So, practically yes, but not in the Cartesian dualism sense, and it is more like the abstract thinking, general-principles part of the mind ruling the other parts mind. But since both Catholics and atheists agree in the other parts of the mind being natural and biological (obviously, in reality the abstract part too, because abstractions are made, not discovered, hence they do not require a supernatural organ for their discovery), obviously we may as well call natural, biological minds as well bodies, so literally speaking you are right, and I don’t even know what I am objecting about really. I just wanted an excuse to tell it because I think Scholasticism is one of the best fantasy worlds ever made, as long as you don’t take it as something that wants to be true (unfortuantely they want to take it so), it is fairly cool, way more logically consistent than Middle-Earth for example.
Tentative theory: the Puritan (or possibly Protestant work ethic) thing never went away, but at some point it got mated with gaining status through self-expression, and with gaining status through your clothes getting to seem too easy, which is why people shifted to high-maintenance bodies.. That’s why running ultramarathons on multiple continents seems cool rather than weird and extravagant.
This isn’t about philosophy, exactly, though you may be able to deduce a plausible philosophy to explain what people are doing. It’s about cultural shifts.
Reverse correlation between fitness vs. dressy fashion? Kinda-sorta of true for Europe (Sweden: fitness, France, Italy: dressy fashion), can someone compare the muscle-beaches of California and Rio de Janeiro to NY fashion?