Physical performance is one thing that isn’t really “needed” in any sense of the word for most people.
For most people, the need for physical activity seems to boil down to the fact that you just feel better, live longer and overall get less health related issues if you do it.
But on the whole, I’ve seen very little proof that excelling in physical activity can help you with anything (other than being a professional athlete or trainer, that is). Indeed, it seems that the whole relation to mortality basically breaks down if you look at top perform. Going from things like strongman competitions and american football where life expectancy is lower, to things like running and cycling where some would argue but evidence is lacking, to football and tennis where it’s a bit above average.
But it’s basically a bloody book, I personally haven’t read all of it, but I often go back to it for references.
Also, there’s the much more obvious problem with pushing yourself to the limits, injury. I think this is hard to quantify and there’s few studies looking at it. In my experience I know a surprising amount of “active” people that got injured in life-altering ways from things like skating, skying, snowboarding and even football (not in the paraplegic sense, more in the “I have a bar of titanium going through my spine and I can’t lift more than 15kg safely” sort of way). Conversely, 100% of my couch-dwelling buddies in average physical shape doesn’t seem to suffer from any chronic pain.
To some extent, this annoys me, though I wonder if poor studies and anecdotal evidence is enough to warrant that annoyance.
For example, I frequent a climbing gym. Now, if you look at climbing, it’s relatively safe, there’s two things people complain about most sciatica and “climbers back” (basically a very weird looking but not that harmful form of kyphosis).
I honestly found the idea rather weird… since one of the main reason I climb (besides the fact that it’s fun) is that it helps and helped me correct my kyphosis and basically got rid of any back/neck discomfort I felt from sitting too much at a computer.
I think this boils down to how people climb, especially how they do bouldering.
Hurling limbs at tremendous speeds to try and crab onto something tiny.
Falling on the mat, often and from large heights. Climbing goes two ways up and down, most people doing bouldering only care about up
Indeed, a typical bouldering run might look something like: “Climb carefully and skillfully as much as possible, hurl yourself with the last bit of effort you have hoping you reach the top, fall on the mat rinse and repeat”.
This is probably one of the stupidest things I’ve seen from a health perspective. You’re essentially praying for articulation damage, dislocating a shoulder/knee, tearing a muscle (doesn’t look pretty, I assume doesn’t feel nice, recovery times are long and sometimes fully recovering is a matter of years) and spine damage (orthopedics don’t agree on much, but I think all would agree the worst thing you can do for your spine is fall from a considerable height… repeatedly, like, dozens of time every day).
But the thing is, you can pretty much do bouldering without this, as in, you can be “decent” at it without doing any of this. Personally I approach bouldering as slowly and steadily climbing… to the top, with enough energy to also climb down + climbing down whenever I feel that I’m to exhausted to continue. Somehow, this approach to the sport is the one that give you strange looks. The people pushing themselves above the limits risking injury and getting persistent spine damage from falling… are the standard.
Another things I enjoy is weight lifting, I especially enjoy weighted squats. Weighted squats are fun, they wake you up in the morning, they are a lazy person exercise when you’ve got nothing else in during that day.
I’ve heard people claim you can get lower back pain and injury from weighted squats, again, this seems confusing to me. I actually used to have minor lower back pain on occasions (again, from sitting), the one exercise that seemed to have permanently fixed that is a squat. A squat is what I do when I feel that my back is a bit stiff and I need some help.
But I think, again, this is because I am “getting squats wrong”, my approach to a squat is “Let me load a 5kg ergonomic bar with 25kg, do a squat like 8 times, check my posture on the last 2, if I’m able to hold it and don’t feel tired, do 5-10 more, if I still feel nice and energetic after a 1 minute break, rinse and repeat”.
Loading a bar with a few hundred kg, at least 2.5x your body weight, putting on a belt so that your intestines don’t fall out and lowering it “ONCE”, because fuck me you’re not going to be able to do that twice in a day. You should at least get some nosebleed every 2 or 3 tries if you’re doing this stuff correctly.
If you weigh 165 pounds and have one of the following fitness levels, the standard for your squat one-rep max is:
Untrained: 110 pounds
Novice: 205 pounds
… etc
To say this seems insane is far fetched, basically the advice around the internet seems to be “If you’ve never done this before, aim for 40-60kg, if you’ve been to the gym a few times, go for 100+”
Again, it’s hard to find data on this, but as someone that’s pretty bloody tall who has been using weight to train for years, the idea of starting with 50kg for a squat as an average person seem insane. I do 45kg from time to time to change things up, I’d never squat anything over 70kg even if you paid me… I can feel my body during the move, I can feel the tentative pressure on my lower back if my posture slips for a bit… that’s fine if you’re lifting 30kg, that seems dangerous as heck if you’re lifting more than your body weight, it even feels dangerous at 60kg.
But again, I’m not doing squats correctly, I am in the wrong here as far as people doing weight training are concerned.
I’m also wrong when it comes to every sport. I’m a bad runner because I give up once my lungs are burning for 5 minutes straight. I’m a horrible swimmer because I alter styles and stick with low-speed ones that are overall better for toning all muscles and have less risk of injury… etc
Granted, I don’t think that people are too pushy about going to extremes. The few times people tell me some version of “try harder” phrased as a friendly encouragement. I finish what I’m doing, say thanks and lie to them that I have a slight injury and I’d rather not push it.
But deep inside I have a very strong suspicion that I’m not wrong on this thing. That somehow we’ve got ourselves into a very unhealthy memetic loop around sports, where pushing yourself is seen as the natural thing to do, as the thing you should be doing every day.
A very dangerous memetic loop, dangerous to some extent in that it causes injury, but much more dangerous because it might be discouraging people from sports. Both in that they try once, get an injury and quit. Or in that they see it, they think it’s too hard (and, I think it is, the way most people do it) and they never really bother.
I’m honestly not sure why it might have started…
The obvious reason is that it physically feels good to do it, lifting a lot of running more than your body tells you that you should is “nice”. But it’s nice in the same way that smoking a tiny bit of heroine before going about your day is nice (as in, quite literally, it seems to me the feelings are related and I think there’s some pharmacological evidence to back that up). It’s nice to do it once to see how it is, maybe I’ll do it every few months if I get the occasion and I feel I need a mental boost… but I wouldn’t necessarily advise it or structure my life around it.
The other obvious reason is that it’s a status thing, the whole “I can do this thing better than you thus my rank in the hierarchy is higher”. But then… why is it so common with both genders, I’d see some reason for men to do this, because historically we’ve been doing it, but women competing in sports is a recent things, hardly “built into our nature” and most of the ones I know that practice things like climbing are among the most chilled out dudes I’ve ever meet.
The last reason might be that it’s about breaking a psychological barrier, the “Oh, I totally thought I couldn’t do that, but apparently I can”. But it seems to me like a very very bad way of doing that. I can think of many other safer better ways from solving a hard calculus problem to learning a foreign language in a month to forcing yourself to write an article every day… you know, things that have zero risks of paralysis and long term damage involved.
But I think at this point imitation alone is enough to keep it going.
The “real” reason if I take the outside view is probably that that’s how sports are supposed to be done and I just got stuck with a weird perspective because “I play things safe”.
Indeed, it seems that the whole relation to mortality basically breaks down if you look at top perform. Going from things like strongman competitions and american football where life expectancy is lower, to things like running and cycling where some would argue but evidence is lacking, to football and tennis where it’s a bit above average.
Yeah but elites athletes are at the tails, and The Tails Come Apart. I’d expect pro athletes to be sacrificing all sorts of things to get extreme performance in a particular sport, but that the average person who is working on general athletic performance won’t have that issue.
Handicap principle. Publicly burning off excess health is a better use of it from your genes perspective than just sitting on what is ultimately a depreciating asset.
This just boils down to “showing off” though. But this makes little sense considering:
a) both genders engage in bad practices. As in, I’d expect to see a lot of men doing cross fit, but it doesn’t make sense when you consider there’s a pretty even gender split. “Showing off health” in a way that’s harmful to health is not evolutionary adaptive for women (where it arguably pays off to live for a long time, evolutionarily speaking). This is backed up by other high-risk behaviors being mainly a men’s thing
b) sports are a very bad way to show off, especially the sports that come with high risk of injury and permanent degradation when practiced in their current extreme (e.g. weight lifting, climbing, gymnastics, rugby, hokey). The highest pay-off sports I can think of (in terms of social signaling) are football, american football, basketball and baseball… since they are popular and thus the competition is both intense and achieving high rank is rewarding. Other than american football they are all pretty physically safe as far as sports go… when there are risks, they come from other players (e.g. getting a ball to the head) not from over-training or over-performing.
So basically, if it’s genetic miss-firing then I’d expect to see it misfire almost only in men, and this is untrue.
If it’s “rational” behavior (as in, rational from the perspective of our primate ancestor) then I’d expect to see the more dangerous forms of showing off bring the most social gains rather than vice-versa.
Granted, I do think handicap principle can be partially to blame for “starting” the thing, but I think it continues because of higher level memes that have little to do with social signaling or genetics.
Physical performance is one thing that isn’t really “needed” in any sense of the word for most people.
For most people, the need for physical activity seems to boil down to the fact that you just feel better, live longer and overall get less health related issues if you do it.
But on the whole, I’ve seen very little proof that excelling in physical activity can help you with anything (other than being a professional athlete or trainer, that is). Indeed, it seems that the whole relation to mortality basically breaks down if you look at top perform. Going from things like strongman competitions and american football where life expectancy is lower, to things like running and cycling where some would argue but evidence is lacking, to football and tennis where it’s a bit above average.
If the subject interests you, I’ve personally looked into it a lot, and I think this is the definitive review: https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/32723/Lemez_Srdjan_2016_PhD.pdf
But it’s basically a bloody book, I personally haven’t read all of it, but I often go back to it for references.
Also, there’s the much more obvious problem with pushing yourself to the limits, injury. I think this is hard to quantify and there’s few studies looking at it. In my experience I know a surprising amount of “active” people that got injured in life-altering ways from things like skating, skying, snowboarding and even football (not in the paraplegic sense, more in the “I have a bar of titanium going through my spine and I can’t lift more than 15kg safely” sort of way). Conversely, 100% of my couch-dwelling buddies in average physical shape doesn’t seem to suffer from any chronic pain.
To some extent, this annoys me, though I wonder if poor studies and anecdotal evidence is enough to warrant that annoyance.
For example, I frequent a climbing gym. Now, if you look at climbing, it’s relatively safe, there’s two things people complain about most sciatica and “climbers back” (basically a very weird looking but not that harmful form of kyphosis).
I honestly found the idea rather weird… since one of the main reason I climb (besides the fact that it’s fun) is that it helps and helped me correct my kyphosis and basically got rid of any back/neck discomfort I felt from sitting too much at a computer.
I think this boils down to how people climb, especially how they do bouldering.
A reference as to how the extreme kind of bouldering looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7brSdnHWBko
The two issues I see here is:
Hurling limbs at tremendous speeds to try and crab onto something tiny.
Falling on the mat, often and from large heights. Climbing goes two ways up and down, most people doing bouldering only care about up
Indeed, a typical bouldering run might look something like: “Climb carefully and skillfully as much as possible, hurl yourself with the last bit of effort you have hoping you reach the top, fall on the mat rinse and repeat”.
This is probably one of the stupidest things I’ve seen from a health perspective. You’re essentially praying for articulation damage, dislocating a shoulder/knee, tearing a muscle (doesn’t look pretty, I assume doesn’t feel nice, recovery times are long and sometimes fully recovering is a matter of years) and spine damage (orthopedics don’t agree on much, but I think all would agree the worst thing you can do for your spine is fall from a considerable height… repeatedly, like, dozens of time every day).
But the thing is, you can pretty much do bouldering without this, as in, you can be “decent” at it without doing any of this. Personally I approach bouldering as slowly and steadily climbing… to the top, with enough energy to also climb down + climbing down whenever I feel that I’m to exhausted to continue. Somehow, this approach to the sport is the one that give you strange looks. The people pushing themselves above the limits risking injury and getting persistent spine damage from falling… are the standard.
Another things I enjoy is weight lifting, I especially enjoy weighted squats. Weighted squats are fun, they wake you up in the morning, they are a lazy person exercise when you’ve got nothing else in during that day.
I’ve heard people claim you can get lower back pain and injury from weighted squats, again, this seems confusing to me. I actually used to have minor lower back pain on occasions (again, from sitting), the one exercise that seemed to have permanently fixed that is a squat. A squat is what I do when I feel that my back is a bit stiff and I need some help.
But I think, again, this is because I am “getting squats wrong”, my approach to a squat is “Let me load a 5kg ergonomic bar with 25kg, do a squat like 8 times, check my posture on the last 2, if I’m able to hold it and don’t feel tired, do 5-10 more, if I still feel nice and energetic after a 1 minute break, rinse and repeat”.
But the correct squat, I believe, looks something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLVJTBZtiuw
Loading a bar with a few hundred kg, at least 2.5x your body weight, putting on a belt so that your intestines don’t fall out and lowering it “ONCE”, because fuck me you’re not going to be able to do that twice in a day. You should at least get some nosebleed every 2 or 3 tries if you’re doing this stuff correctly.
I’ve seen this in gyms, I’ve seen this in what people recommend, if I google “how much weight should I squat”, the first thing I get is: https://www.livestrong.com/article/286849-normal-squat-weight/
To say this seems insane is far fetched, basically the advice around the internet seems to be “If you’ve never done this before, aim for 40-60kg, if you’ve been to the gym a few times, go for 100+”
Again, it’s hard to find data on this, but as someone that’s pretty bloody tall who has been using weight to train for years, the idea of starting with 50kg for a squat as an average person seem insane. I do 45kg from time to time to change things up, I’d never squat anything over 70kg even if you paid me… I can feel my body during the move, I can feel the tentative pressure on my lower back if my posture slips for a bit… that’s fine if you’re lifting 30kg, that seems dangerous as heck if you’re lifting more than your body weight, it even feels dangerous at 60kg.
But again, I’m not doing squats correctly, I am in the wrong here as far as people doing weight training are concerned.
I’m also wrong when it comes to every sport. I’m a bad runner because I give up once my lungs are burning for 5 minutes straight. I’m a horrible swimmer because I alter styles and stick with low-speed ones that are overall better for toning all muscles and have less risk of injury… etc
Granted, I don’t think that people are too pushy about going to extremes. The few times people tell me some version of “try harder” phrased as a friendly encouragement. I finish what I’m doing, say thanks and lie to them that I have a slight injury and I’d rather not push it.
But deep inside I have a very strong suspicion that I’m not wrong on this thing. That somehow we’ve got ourselves into a very unhealthy memetic loop around sports, where pushing yourself is seen as the natural thing to do, as the thing you should be doing every day.
A very dangerous memetic loop, dangerous to some extent in that it causes injury, but much more dangerous because it might be discouraging people from sports. Both in that they try once, get an injury and quit. Or in that they see it, they think it’s too hard (and, I think it is, the way most people do it) and they never really bother.
I’m honestly not sure why it might have started…
The obvious reason is that it physically feels good to do it, lifting a lot of running more than your body tells you that you should is “nice”. But it’s nice in the same way that smoking a tiny bit of heroine before going about your day is nice (as in, quite literally, it seems to me the feelings are related and I think there’s some pharmacological evidence to back that up). It’s nice to do it once to see how it is, maybe I’ll do it every few months if I get the occasion and I feel I need a mental boost… but I wouldn’t necessarily advise it or structure my life around it.
The other obvious reason is that it’s a status thing, the whole “I can do this thing better than you thus my rank in the hierarchy is higher”. But then… why is it so common with both genders, I’d see some reason for men to do this, because historically we’ve been doing it, but women competing in sports is a recent things, hardly “built into our nature” and most of the ones I know that practice things like climbing are among the most chilled out dudes I’ve ever meet.
The last reason might be that it’s about breaking a psychological barrier, the “Oh, I totally thought I couldn’t do that, but apparently I can”. But it seems to me like a very very bad way of doing that. I can think of many other safer better ways from solving a hard calculus problem to learning a foreign language in a month to forcing yourself to write an article every day… you know, things that have zero risks of paralysis and long term damage involved.
But I think at this point imitation alone is enough to keep it going.
The “real” reason if I take the outside view is probably that that’s how sports are supposed to be done and I just got stuck with a weird perspective because “I play things safe”.
Yeah but elites athletes are at the tails, and The Tails Come Apart. I’d expect pro athletes to be sacrificing all sorts of things to get extreme performance in a particular sport, but that the average person who is working on general athletic performance won’t have that issue.
Handicap principle. Publicly burning off excess health is a better use of it from your genes perspective than just sitting on what is ultimately a depreciating asset.
This just boils down to “showing off” though. But this makes little sense considering:
a) both genders engage in bad practices. As in, I’d expect to see a lot of men doing cross fit, but it doesn’t make sense when you consider there’s a pretty even gender split. “Showing off health” in a way that’s harmful to health is not evolutionary adaptive for women (where it arguably pays off to live for a long time, evolutionarily speaking). This is backed up by other high-risk behaviors being mainly a men’s thing
b) sports are a very bad way to show off, especially the sports that come with high risk of injury and permanent degradation when practiced in their current extreme (e.g. weight lifting, climbing, gymnastics, rugby, hokey). The highest pay-off sports I can think of (in terms of social signaling) are football, american football, basketball and baseball… since they are popular and thus the competition is both intense and achieving high rank is rewarding. Other than american football they are all pretty physically safe as far as sports go… when there are risks, they come from other players (e.g. getting a ball to the head) not from over-training or over-performing.
So basically, if it’s genetic miss-firing then I’d expect to see it misfire almost only in men, and this is untrue.
If it’s “rational” behavior (as in, rational from the perspective of our primate ancestor) then I’d expect to see the more dangerous forms of showing off bring the most social gains rather than vice-versa.
Granted, I do think handicap principle can be partially to blame for “starting” the thing, but I think it continues because of higher level memes that have little to do with social signaling or genetics.