Good article pulling the covers from a cultural blind spot. We do obsess over exercise as though it were something you set out to do, instead of something that is part of an activity. The logic of sports has always been more appealing to me: drive to compete and do well leads to desire to hone specific skills that will unable success in the particular context of that sport. What’s exercise… can you even win that game?
You never took a turn in this article towards manual labor. I hope to hear your thoughts on gardening, home improvement, and volunteer work as they relate to exercise. What ‘household/handyman’ activities meet the exercise threshold, or are there any?
I consider it interesting how whenever I write about this, it tends to be a bit misunderstood. Competing is a very high level thing, and it was not on my mind really here. Going from a computer chair nerd to someone who can seriously compete is a huge move and I am not even sure if it is realistic at 30+. It takes not only strength or cardio (which are fairly straightforward to develop) but also skill, speed, accuracy of movement, so motoric control, balance, and so on. I am not sure how much it is possible to develop these later if they were left to rust at a childhood and teenagerhood. What I mean under sports is more like getting at the level where you can take some enjoyment out of playing / sparring / doing it, where what you do seems roughly correct and your movements are fairly smooth and coordinate, so it is starting to get something fun and not like in the first months where you spend most of your time cursing because you are unable to accurately imitate a movement even after 5 times of having been shown it. So this is mostly what I mean under sports, to be able to do them at all, not to be able to compete, competing is a very high level.
For example, I invested about… 80-100 hours into boxing and later kick-boxing so far, at about 3-4 hours per week, and even friendly sparring seems very far as of yet, I am still at the stage where if I execute techniques slowly they are more or less correct, but if I try using realistic speeds I tend to screw them up. The next stage will be adding speed, the next stage adding strength, the next using combos, and after that some friendly sparring, which we tried actually, but I was simply overwhelmed that I am not “allowed” to stop and think after parrying 4-5 punches but there are dozens and dozens more coming. Going from there to any sort of competition, where it is not even friendly but the other person is seriously trying to win, sounds like a very high level thing and I think it is beyond the reach of people who are not young anymore. Add to it the sheer pyschological pressure of competition, of someone seriously not trying to be helpful to you but actually working against you, this is fairly scary even if it was a nerdy competition about Star Wars trivia.
In my 37 years I’ve yet to have an experience with people working against me instead of trying to be more or less helpful. For example, when we occasionally tried playing table tennis, ping pong, it was usually about trying to give each other easy serves, easy balls that are easy to hit back. Because if we try to be competitive and give each other difficult balls like aiming at the edge of the table or going low over the net, we would spend 80% of the time missing the ball and then having to retrieve it, and where is the fun in it? While if we give each other easy ones, we can have a more smooth game where most of the time is actually spent playing. To me the difference between being able to play table tennis on easy level, giving each other easy, high, slow balls, and between trying to be competitive and giving difficult ones, sounds rather enormous and at some level unfriendly… So I never really tried anything competitive so far, be that at sports, at work / career, or any activity. My life so was playing friendly with each other. I guess it is a bit boring at some level… for example the idea that business compete is something I saw in textbooks but does not reflect my working experience much.
So no, I mean sports mainly in the sense of active hobby, of getting to a level where doing / playing / sparring it is fun, not to that very high level that competition means.
Manual labor: pretty much all the men in my family except myself (I was the nerd, who was excused from it) were doing it and it seems it does not help much. Basic gardening is nothing, something like building a house and carrying 50kg sacks of materials up the first floor, that is more like exercise. Yet, nobody was well built from this. Partially perhaps due to poor nutritition (poor blue collar lunch in my dads youth was milk and bread from the corner shop for example), partially because working men tend to see this an excuse to drink and eat like a pig and get fat. But those who didn’t were simply wiry. This things burns calories, but is surprisingly bad at building muscle.
However, on the not getting fat level some blue jobs help. My wife is actually a cook at IKEA and she does not want an office or cashier job pretty much because she fears it leads to ass ballooning. It seems things like unloading 400 kg Swedish meatballs into the steamer help burning calories. But this is far harder than something like gardening, they literally sell metric tons of food (well, “food”) a day and moving that weight around is what apparently helps. Wherever everything is packed into 12-20kg crates and needs moved around, in these industrial kitchens. So it is almost like the construction described above. (I wonder why do people described industrial kitchens as “burger-flipping”, it seems “heavy carton / sack moving” is closer.)
When I tried un-nerding myself, I tried to volunteer at building buddhist meditation centers. My experience was that 90% of construction is carrying heavy stuff to the place they are used. The unskilled guy, like me, keeps doing that all day and perhaps it counts as exercise. The skilled guy just uses the materials and that is hardly an exercise at all. Laying bricks is physically not hard when a volunteer / apprentice heaps them up in the right places. Painting is physically not hard when the volunteer / apprentice carries the bucket of paint.
The next stage will be adding speed, the next stage adding strength, the next using combos, and after that some friendly sparring, which we tried actually, but I was simply overwhelmed that I am not “allowed” to stop and think after parrying 4-5 punches but there are dozens and dozens more coming.
You’re not feeling overwhelmed because sparring requires a level of skill that you haven’t built yet. You’re feeling overwhelmed because you wandered into a completely different skill set. The only way to get comfortable with sparring is to do a lot of sparring—although partnered kata can be helpful in drilling responses to specific situations, and a lot of weapon and grappling arts spend most of their time doing that.
This actually touches on one of the big problems in martial arts pedagogy: there’s a large body of skill that doesn’t come without freeform competition, and you can’t simply ignore that without throwing out application entirely; but the earlier you start sparring seriously, the more likely it is to build in bad habits or to lead to injury. Martial arts’ approaches to squaring that circle often define their styles more than their actual technique does; you’ll find almost all aikido techniques in jujitsu, for example, but their pedagogical approaches couldn’t be more different.
You’re feeling overwhelmed because you wandered into a completely different skill set.
Yes, but you don’t send people to train for marathons as long as even their walking is wrong. Just yesterday we had this simple exercise to quickly hop back and forth over a pool noodle. I counted 5 different ways I was able to screw it up: not always landing on toes, sometimes landing on the noodle, being slow and stopping to think before a jump, feet not flying parallel but more like a step over, accidentally kicking the noodle away. Basically poor motoric coordination, the result of 37 years spent thinking living in a computer chair and doing some body-building to put on muscles optimized for the mirror equals “fitness”. It does not, and it is a tough lesson. I think this needs to be sorted out with further practice before sparring.
Just so you know, I think a lot of people (or maybe its just me) use competition in a wide sense, e.g. I would consider casual basketball a competition simply because there is a winner. But the motivation for playing in the first place isn’t winning, the desire is, as you say, to be actively getting better at some exercise-sport with your peers.
Yeah, I guess that’s true about manual labor. It burns calories, keeps you fit-ish, but doesn’t build muscle (except for bailing hay, to hell with hay). Although, I would feel a lot more manly if I could restore a bathroom competently.
I would consider casual basketball a competition simply because there is a winner.
My point is that I am used to playing in a way that we don’t keep score at all so there is no winner. But generally yes.
except for bailing hay, to hell with hay
People still do this manually? I spent significant amounts of my life in rather poor regions in Eastern Europe and still I see these probably machine-made, rolled-up or cubical piles of hay.
The most heroic level of manual work I saw was when a guy who could not afford a car inherited a rather crappy house built of stones. He disassembled it, hauled the stones to the other edge of the village on a hand cart (why did not he rent a truck for an hour is beyond me, they were not that poor), and built a wing to their house. As his main job shift was 12 hours 15 days a month he had 50% of the days to work on it so not just weekends—but it meant no free time at all, even not a decent sleep schedule. BTW I would like working such shifts. After 8 hours of work not so much gets done in the evenings at home. Might as well do another 4 and have more free days.
Although, I would feel a lot more manly if I could restore a bathroom competently.
This reminds me of Jack Donovan’s four masculine virtues, Strength, Courage, Mastery, Honor. This is the mastery part. But it is more of an inherited romantic view than something of actual utility. If we had any sense, we would not assemble houses on the spot, we would have everything prefabricated, like with every other consumer item. We don’t hand assemble cars in a garage, this makes no sense. But for houses it is still like it is done in 1880. As a contrast, I saw in an old house in London converted to a hotel, where bathrooms were added to the rooms, and they were one big cast plastic item, walls, floor, basic, toilet, shower, everything part of one huge plastic shape. This was fairly ugly and rickety, like an in-room Toi-Toi, but if low-quality prefab is possible, perhaps higher-quality prefab would also be possible.
For some reason, I notice certain people, myself included, crave a certain amount of manual labor. Better prefab stuff would be great, however, you still need someone to install the stuff. And just mixing instant concrete and laying a small foundation is enough to make me feel like I’m a contributing member to the physical infrastructure of society. Despite my belief in specialization, I still want for myself what you called ‘Mastery.’
This is very understandable. That is also why people grow vegetable gardens. There is millions and millions of years of evolution behind our feelings wrt to what feels like a job well done, and obviously it does not have a lot to do with what are actually the most productive and lucrative works today. Wifey named it all “adult LEGO”. Also, assembling IKEA furniture. That is when she coined the term first. This used to be work, but today more like play that is made to feel like work.
Good article pulling the covers from a cultural blind spot. We do obsess over exercise as though it were something you set out to do, instead of something that is part of an activity. The logic of sports has always been more appealing to me: drive to compete and do well leads to desire to hone specific skills that will unable success in the particular context of that sport. What’s exercise… can you even win that game?
You never took a turn in this article towards manual labor. I hope to hear your thoughts on gardening, home improvement, and volunteer work as they relate to exercise. What ‘household/handyman’ activities meet the exercise threshold, or are there any?
I consider it interesting how whenever I write about this, it tends to be a bit misunderstood. Competing is a very high level thing, and it was not on my mind really here. Going from a computer chair nerd to someone who can seriously compete is a huge move and I am not even sure if it is realistic at 30+. It takes not only strength or cardio (which are fairly straightforward to develop) but also skill, speed, accuracy of movement, so motoric control, balance, and so on. I am not sure how much it is possible to develop these later if they were left to rust at a childhood and teenagerhood. What I mean under sports is more like getting at the level where you can take some enjoyment out of playing / sparring / doing it, where what you do seems roughly correct and your movements are fairly smooth and coordinate, so it is starting to get something fun and not like in the first months where you spend most of your time cursing because you are unable to accurately imitate a movement even after 5 times of having been shown it. So this is mostly what I mean under sports, to be able to do them at all, not to be able to compete, competing is a very high level.
For example, I invested about… 80-100 hours into boxing and later kick-boxing so far, at about 3-4 hours per week, and even friendly sparring seems very far as of yet, I am still at the stage where if I execute techniques slowly they are more or less correct, but if I try using realistic speeds I tend to screw them up. The next stage will be adding speed, the next stage adding strength, the next using combos, and after that some friendly sparring, which we tried actually, but I was simply overwhelmed that I am not “allowed” to stop and think after parrying 4-5 punches but there are dozens and dozens more coming. Going from there to any sort of competition, where it is not even friendly but the other person is seriously trying to win, sounds like a very high level thing and I think it is beyond the reach of people who are not young anymore. Add to it the sheer pyschological pressure of competition, of someone seriously not trying to be helpful to you but actually working against you, this is fairly scary even if it was a nerdy competition about Star Wars trivia.
In my 37 years I’ve yet to have an experience with people working against me instead of trying to be more or less helpful. For example, when we occasionally tried playing table tennis, ping pong, it was usually about trying to give each other easy serves, easy balls that are easy to hit back. Because if we try to be competitive and give each other difficult balls like aiming at the edge of the table or going low over the net, we would spend 80% of the time missing the ball and then having to retrieve it, and where is the fun in it? While if we give each other easy ones, we can have a more smooth game where most of the time is actually spent playing. To me the difference between being able to play table tennis on easy level, giving each other easy, high, slow balls, and between trying to be competitive and giving difficult ones, sounds rather enormous and at some level unfriendly… So I never really tried anything competitive so far, be that at sports, at work / career, or any activity. My life so was playing friendly with each other. I guess it is a bit boring at some level… for example the idea that business compete is something I saw in textbooks but does not reflect my working experience much.
So no, I mean sports mainly in the sense of active hobby, of getting to a level where doing / playing / sparring it is fun, not to that very high level that competition means.
Manual labor: pretty much all the men in my family except myself (I was the nerd, who was excused from it) were doing it and it seems it does not help much. Basic gardening is nothing, something like building a house and carrying 50kg sacks of materials up the first floor, that is more like exercise. Yet, nobody was well built from this. Partially perhaps due to poor nutritition (poor blue collar lunch in my dads youth was milk and bread from the corner shop for example), partially because working men tend to see this an excuse to drink and eat like a pig and get fat. But those who didn’t were simply wiry. This things burns calories, but is surprisingly bad at building muscle.
However, on the not getting fat level some blue jobs help. My wife is actually a cook at IKEA and she does not want an office or cashier job pretty much because she fears it leads to ass ballooning. It seems things like unloading 400 kg Swedish meatballs into the steamer help burning calories. But this is far harder than something like gardening, they literally sell metric tons of food (well, “food”) a day and moving that weight around is what apparently helps. Wherever everything is packed into 12-20kg crates and needs moved around, in these industrial kitchens. So it is almost like the construction described above. (I wonder why do people described industrial kitchens as “burger-flipping”, it seems “heavy carton / sack moving” is closer.)
When I tried un-nerding myself, I tried to volunteer at building buddhist meditation centers. My experience was that 90% of construction is carrying heavy stuff to the place they are used. The unskilled guy, like me, keeps doing that all day and perhaps it counts as exercise. The skilled guy just uses the materials and that is hardly an exercise at all. Laying bricks is physically not hard when a volunteer / apprentice heaps them up in the right places. Painting is physically not hard when the volunteer / apprentice carries the bucket of paint.
You’re not feeling overwhelmed because sparring requires a level of skill that you haven’t built yet. You’re feeling overwhelmed because you wandered into a completely different skill set. The only way to get comfortable with sparring is to do a lot of sparring—although partnered kata can be helpful in drilling responses to specific situations, and a lot of weapon and grappling arts spend most of their time doing that.
This actually touches on one of the big problems in martial arts pedagogy: there’s a large body of skill that doesn’t come without freeform competition, and you can’t simply ignore that without throwing out application entirely; but the earlier you start sparring seriously, the more likely it is to build in bad habits or to lead to injury. Martial arts’ approaches to squaring that circle often define their styles more than their actual technique does; you’ll find almost all aikido techniques in jujitsu, for example, but their pedagogical approaches couldn’t be more different.
Yes, but you don’t send people to train for marathons as long as even their walking is wrong. Just yesterday we had this simple exercise to quickly hop back and forth over a pool noodle. I counted 5 different ways I was able to screw it up: not always landing on toes, sometimes landing on the noodle, being slow and stopping to think before a jump, feet not flying parallel but more like a step over, accidentally kicking the noodle away. Basically poor motoric coordination, the result of 37 years spent thinking living in a computer chair and doing some body-building to put on muscles optimized for the mirror equals “fitness”. It does not, and it is a tough lesson. I think this needs to be sorted out with further practice before sparring.
Just so you know, I think a lot of people (or maybe its just me) use competition in a wide sense, e.g. I would consider casual basketball a competition simply because there is a winner. But the motivation for playing in the first place isn’t winning, the desire is, as you say, to be actively getting better at some exercise-sport with your peers.
Yeah, I guess that’s true about manual labor. It burns calories, keeps you fit-ish, but doesn’t build muscle (except for bailing hay, to hell with hay). Although, I would feel a lot more manly if I could restore a bathroom competently.
My point is that I am used to playing in a way that we don’t keep score at all so there is no winner. But generally yes.
People still do this manually? I spent significant amounts of my life in rather poor regions in Eastern Europe and still I see these probably machine-made, rolled-up or cubical piles of hay.
The most heroic level of manual work I saw was when a guy who could not afford a car inherited a rather crappy house built of stones. He disassembled it, hauled the stones to the other edge of the village on a hand cart (why did not he rent a truck for an hour is beyond me, they were not that poor), and built a wing to their house. As his main job shift was 12 hours 15 days a month he had 50% of the days to work on it so not just weekends—but it meant no free time at all, even not a decent sleep schedule. BTW I would like working such shifts. After 8 hours of work not so much gets done in the evenings at home. Might as well do another 4 and have more free days.
This reminds me of Jack Donovan’s four masculine virtues, Strength, Courage, Mastery, Honor. This is the mastery part. But it is more of an inherited romantic view than something of actual utility. If we had any sense, we would not assemble houses on the spot, we would have everything prefabricated, like with every other consumer item. We don’t hand assemble cars in a garage, this makes no sense. But for houses it is still like it is done in 1880. As a contrast, I saw in an old house in London converted to a hotel, where bathrooms were added to the rooms, and they were one big cast plastic item, walls, floor, basic, toilet, shower, everything part of one huge plastic shape. This was fairly ugly and rickety, like an in-room Toi-Toi, but if low-quality prefab is possible, perhaps higher-quality prefab would also be possible.
For some reason, I notice certain people, myself included, crave a certain amount of manual labor. Better prefab stuff would be great, however, you still need someone to install the stuff. And just mixing instant concrete and laying a small foundation is enough to make me feel like I’m a contributing member to the physical infrastructure of society. Despite my belief in specialization, I still want for myself what you called ‘Mastery.’
This is very understandable. That is also why people grow vegetable gardens. There is millions and millions of years of evolution behind our feelings wrt to what feels like a job well done, and obviously it does not have a lot to do with what are actually the most productive and lucrative works today. Wifey named it all “adult LEGO”. Also, assembling IKEA furniture. That is when she coined the term first. This used to be work, but today more like play that is made to feel like work.