Probably relevant for the HN crowd: there's a bunch of very geeky next gen fitness guys that keep up with the cutting edge of fitness research, and occasionally expand it themselves. If you're reading them, this kind of thing is being discussed for years, with new studies just moving the odds a bit in favor of the current hypothesis. Yes, they're very Bayesian, explicitly so.
A few names/links, pick and mix as you will - they're all good:
The focus of the people you have linked is about exercise in the context of a gym and diet is about calories. I would like to argue that being healthy and fit is not about the gym, or investing time in tracking calories.
Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle. This could fall under different categories such cardio (walking , cycling) and some resistance training like body weight exercises. These are called Micro workouts, and can be done during the day. A great (nerdy) guy who is quite far on that path is the bioneer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuKIlbybqY
And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories and almost no-one should try to diet like a body builder prepping for a show. They feel terrible and you are priming the body to store energy in the fat cells.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
Humans have been healthy for very long without the gym or calorie counting. Both are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere
Being healthy and being fit is mostly about being healthy and being fit. There are obviously countless ways to get closer to that goal, the gym and calorie counting being one way.
Saying stuff like 'we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories' is a pretty bad take if you ask me. Contrasting that immediately with 'a body builder prepping for a show' is just ridiculous. One is good advice to form part of a healthy lifestyle, the other is a way of life for a tiny group of professional athletes.
There goes more into a healthy diet than just eating lots of whole foods - although whole foods are obviously awesome and healthy. Notice that the linked article compares two groups eating processed and processed with the one eating the processed foods eating 500 more calories a day. They don't gain weight magically but because they ate the less satiating food and as a result ate more calories.
And simply saying 'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' is such a weird take. Have you ever considered that some people enjoy going to the gym? On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises. In the end it is up to the individual to chose the lifestyle that they enjoy, so please stop selling your personal favorite as if any other choices 'are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere'. I very much enjoy my time spend at the gym, thank you very much.
> And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories …
This is just plain false. You can “focus” on eating whole foods and if you consume more calories than you burn you will gain weight. If you consume less calories than you burn you will lose weight. The science has not changed on this point. No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight.
The World Health Organization recommends (for adults) 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity OR 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity a week. They also recommend at least two days a week of "muscle-strengthening" activities at moderate or greater intensity that involve all major muscle groups. [1] If anyone can meet or exceed these guidelines solely through things they enjoy then absolutely go for that. However, most of us tend to enjoy one thing more than another, I've noticed. We might be highly into rock climbing and less-so willing to go for walks or bike rides. We might be a 10k runner who neglects to do their pushups. My point is it is likely you're going to need to do some stuff you're not thrilled about. If you don't do them then fine, but don't make the argument that just doing things you like doing is enough because it very well might not be.
As for the calories debate, all i can say here is that evidence is needed for some of these claims you and your article have made. I'm seeing links to quotes and videos but no real evidence that a calorie is not a calorie. If the point they're clumsily trying to make is that practically speaking you cannot track every single calorie in your day-to-day existence then yes i would agree with that but no one who tracks calories would tell you their goal is 100% accuracy. It all comes out in the wash over averages.
That said, I do not think most people need to track their calories if they just want to be at a healthy bodyweight. Merely eating whole foods and adhering to the guidelines above should get them there just fine. This is not the same thing as saying a calorie isn't a calorie.
Not all of those blogs are about being healthy. Some of them are just about reaching and maintaining the popular societal understanding of appearing "fit". I mean damn, one of the blogs is literally called Look Great Naked!
I totally agree, for the record. For the majority of people counting calories and recording reps isn't something they'll be interested in doing their entire lives, any more than they'd be interested in updating new device drivers and reflashing their OS if an easier, brainless alternative existed. And it does! Walk, bike, or run a little bit every day; eat less carbs than you'd prefer, and try to eat more vegetables than you would otherwise. I'm no expert whatsoever, but I've travelled all over the world and that advice seems to be the only constant amongst all the healthiest people I've seen.
> Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.
The people I know on that list would absolutely agree with this. E.g. Mike Israetel from Renaissance Periodization; he'll often say that one of the best ways to lose weight is to try to get your step count up, e.g. move around more in the day, without necessarily doing formal exercise. The best thing is that you can be running around doing "chores" or whatever, and this will help with your weight loss goals and get more stuff done during the day.
That said, the question is, as always, what are your goals. If your goals are to be healthier, that requires a very different approach than if your goal is to, e.g., look more muscly, bodybuilder style. They're not completely incompatible goals, at least for novices, but they are different goals. Some strength training and cardio, with an emphasis on maintaining a body fat percentage <20%, is probably the best for maximizing long term health.
"So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle."
This is it for me, absolutely. I've always been a bike commuter, so that was my cardio for decades— 10x 20min bike ride to and from work each week, year round. When I lost the commute with pandemic WFH, I fairly quickly shot up 15lbs.
The journey back was in finding ways that I could recreationally get that same experience, which for me has been a combination of walks, distance cycling, and lane swimming. All of these are things I enjoy for their own sake, and are great mental health resets. They're also things I can do with others, so there's that little bit of accountability woven into it as well. I'm not really watching what I eat, though I did cut out a bunch of snacking (especially at bedtime), and I switched my breakfast to a protein smoothie.
Now I'm down 30lbs+ from my pandemic high, and probably the best shape I've been in since my early twenties.
How do we know if we are moving enough or eating the right amount if we do not use some quantifiable basis? Moving for fun is all well and good, and exercise should be fun as opposed to a chore, but the dose dependency needs to be accounted for.
Whole foods work well because they tend to hit the calorie and nutrient milestones without much tracking being necessary, but we only know that because other people have done the tracking for us.
I think the information these people put out should be used to inform a lifestyle that one constructs, not to construct it directly.
>"And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories"
People get obese on "whole foods" just fine if they do not count calories. For some it is not needed since they live physically active life and naturally do not eat all that much. Yet others can barely fit in their cars on the same food.
> we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do
I fully agree. If some of that fun actually involves going to the gym, then great. But there are a lot of "play" activities which are compelling and fun while also making you healthier. Sports is an obvious one, and dancing is a less obvious one.
One hour of salsa dancing (with breaks and partner changes) is a good cardio exercise which is also lots of fun. And as or more importantly, the mental and emotional boost is something many of us need more than bigger muscles. I like both.
One of the person I was following was basically saying “don’t diet to lose weight, create muscles and your body will naturally need to consume more calories”
I think what you're describing is the best case, the world we should shoot for. But getting there for most people will take a generation of social change.
Meanwhile, most of us find ourselves in a shitty current situation where a healthy diet and a healthy level of activity feel weird and counterintuitive to us, and we have to trust reason and evidence to guide us to a healthy way of living, despite deeply engrained aversions, deeply engrained compulsions to engage in unhealthy behavior, and powerful external forces arrayed against us.
For people who are unhappy with where they're at and are looking for answers, telling them that there's an easy healthy way to live that caters to their current desires and aversions sends them on a lifelong journey of being disappointed by one set of false promises after another.
A more honest thing to tell them is that their life up to this point, their experiences, the norms they grew up with, the food ecology of the world around them, has warped their perceptions to the point that what is actually good for their body will feel unpleasant and psychologically unsettling. The unvarnished truth, which you might not want to dump on them right at the beginning, is that at times it will be fucking miserable. It's analogous to having a substance abuse disorder. Many, many times the only choice that feels comfortable and natural is the one that physically harms you, and resisting the compulsion to harm yourself feels awful. It can feel sad and scary not to eat every single donut in the break room, even if you've already had a generous healthy breakfast. At times like that, the "if it isn't easy, you're doing it wrong" message comes off like an unfeeling flex, like telling a depressed person to just snap out of it.
People may stigmatize difficult lifestyle changes as "restrictive" or "joyless" or "unrealistic," but it's not the fault of the lifestyle itself. It's the fault of what you've been fed your whole life and what the world continues to shove in your face and dangle in front of you every day. It doesn't kill joy not to eat cake. It kills joy to say no to cake eight times a day while a billion dollar industry wages war against your efforts to care for yourself by constantly reminding you of the momentary pleasure and relief you will feel if you give in, and people who care about you unwittingly act as their accomplices in all the spaces that are supposed to be safe for you.
People who work in public health are not giving advice to help you make a significant change in your life. They are giving advice that will do the most good for the most people, which realistically means moving the needle a tiny bit. That's what they're shooting for. They don't expect you to succeed at living a healthy life. They expect you to be overweight and to live a lifestyle that makes metabolic disease a likelihood, because the societal context is stacked against us. They've accepted that their power to help people currently struggling with their health is limited to changing a fraction of a percent here and there, and to achieve significant results we need to focus on changing the context for the next generation. Which we do need to do, but meanwhile, if you don't want to write yourself off as a victim of the times, don't let people tell you that easy is the only healthy way. You won't regret doing your best to take care of yourself, even if it's a struggle and you can't pretend it's easy like everyone tells you it's supposed to be.
I highly recommend looking at Kyle Boggeman.[1]
He focuses on exercising for long term health using calisthenics and really opened my eyes at looking at exercise volume differently e.g. from fixed volume per exercise to accumulated volume over a week.
Calisthenics is great, but these guys always seem to forget they have legs. Of course extra weight on their butts and legs would mean their calisthenics skills would suffer. But to me it always seems a bit weird to have such a built out torso and arms, and then a tiny waist and legs.
I'm currently building a service for exactly this. It's still in Alpha but it allows you to take short 4-5min breaks with friends (+ voice chat) with instructed stretches + strength exercises. https://www.pausewith.me
As I said, still in Alpha, but I'm always happy for constructive feedback.
This is interesting. I would like to mention: don't forget students in your future subscription model!
As a new (but middle aged) CS student I think this could be a fun way to encourage my fellow students and myself to exercise more between study sessions.
Which ones and how do you know? I'm actually curious, the reaction to steroids is a bit... one sided.
It's a bit of a PR problem to say positive things about them, and it feels. The consensus, the one we get to hear, is pretty clear: they work very well, but they have side effects that make using them a bad idea. And I actually trust this consensus.
Unfortunately, what I don't see is obvious next steps like "ok, so how about we lower the dose and see if there's a useful dosage without long term side-effects". Or "how about we try to test if a certain person has risk factors to side effects" and so on. That kind of conversation is unfortunately... well, not verbotten, but at least self-censored.
Anyways, this is just intellectual curiosity. I'm not into bodybuilding enough to try, and tbh I actually doubt they're using it either. It'd be too much like cheating - the whole point is to find out what works, and everybody knows steroids work so there's nothing to find out there.
Mike Israetel is very vocal and open about both his own PED use and its health risks, and how taking them is a very bad idea for 99.9% of people. That does not make his content about exercising and nutrition for general health any less superb.
Steroids a fact of life in strength sports and not even really considered cheating, as long as you compete in "untested" divisions. Training for a top-level competition is not the same as exercising for health, even if you don't take PEDs. The people doing it consider it an acceptable tradeoff.
It's worth emphasizing that what's especially exciting is that a lot of this research really is very new. As you said, there's a whole "next gen" fitness guys, people who grew up with bodybuilding as it was always practiced, but who are also working at the science behind it.
The result is that as far as I can tell, the last 20 years of research has given us most of the results we know. It's really a burgeoning field.
Earlier this year I wanted to start a gym routine to gain some muscle mass and lower my body fat percentage. I found Jeff Nippard's youtube videos to be a good resource for my purposes:
He's a bodybuilder/powerlifter/coach with a focus on evidence-based exercise and diet advice. I've heard him cite people like Mike Israetel and the MASS report at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/mass/
I like that his videos tend to be concise, and he does a good job of being clear about which of his recommendations are backed up by research and which are opinions based on his personal experience/preferences.
For a few bucks a month you get articles by several of the people you mentioned, Alan, and others that evaluate public research on nutrition and training.
I'd add Dr. Ted Naiman to that list. He advocates for quick workouts each day and prioritizing a favorable protein:calorie ratio for eating. He's also down to earth and entertaining to listen to IMO.
Even though your just referencing the articles of Macrofactor, I’ve gotta say the app itself an absolute pleasure to use. It’s been instrumental in my current bulk cycle.
Incidentally I've been doing this the past three months.
I have an athletic background and I tend to go full-on workouts etc. But I decided to take it easy this summer, stopped training in general but I would set an alarm every 30 minutes and take short brakes (2-5mins) from work.
In that time I do a few pushups and a couple exercises with the kettlebell. Nothing fancy or tiring, I stop just before I feel any type of resistance or "burn".
This happens 5-8 times a day. On weekends I do none of that.
Of course It's anecdotal but my body has FOR SURE changed. It's like when I did two times a day workouts.
Of course I'll go back doing full workouts because I enjoy them. But anybody who dislikes devoting big chunks of time just for workouts should definitely experiment with micro workouts.
A 3 minute interruption e.g. a phone call risks dropping the context. But if I just step out of my office chair and do some excercises I'm sure I could keep the context in my head while making a few pushups. Since I'm not really distracted perhaps the break can be a thinking break. Some times it's hard to avoid "thinking with your keyboard" and use your head. When I'm stuck on a really hard problem I go for a walk or take a shower or something. I think this could be the same thing.
Everyone is different and has different routines.
If I'm in the middle of important work or experiencing flow I will not break it. But we all do have repetitive tasks or housekeeping work to do. This is the time I do it.
Exercise, stretching, and things like that don't need to take you out of your context at all. You can continue thinking about your work while you do it and come back to the work ready to go and maybe with some problems solved.
I think volition is the difference. Me wanting to get up and get some water and stretch my legs is something I plan on doing and carry it at a time that I chose. Me being interrupted by someone to ask me something while I'm deep in thought or/and trying to make a feature click is not the same.
The equivalent for sedate people like us might be a couple of squats or one push up. If you do it every 30 minutes it has to be maintainable. It could even be walk and get some water. (You get a free squat if you had to stand up, just sit down slowly when you get back)
Do you ever just stop and think for a moment after reading or writing something? I do, taking small pauses to think in between looking at things is a regular part of my workflow.
When I do pause, I can stop and do a few pushups. It helps me focus a bit better, and there's no context loss because I'm not doing or thinking about anything new. It's not much different from leaning back in my chair to think for a minute.
Thing with repetitive exercise is you don't need to think about it and actually there can be time to think in your original context without the distraction of, in my case, the IDE and code I'm working on.
Am I an anomaly? I hear this often among engineers but I don't seem to have this issue. I can literally pick up from the line of code or document I left off from last evening. The only type of work where I need to "rebuild context" is when dealing with financial spreadsheets.
For a while, I kept a pair of shiny chrome dumbbells atop table, and could impromptu pick them up and use, when pacing and thinking about a design problem, without thinking much about the exercise itself.
If I resumed this, doing it several times a day, for only a few minutes at a time, it'd have a big impact?
(I also used to have a Concept2 erg in my work area, but somehow using that was more interrupting.)
The thing is variance, if you just do a small range of movement (say only bicep curls), it might be unbalanced. The idea is good though. I do a whole range of exercises from yoga, fitness, a few weightlift-y exercises and functional movement which make a nice practice during the week.
Of course it would work. Though I recommend one of those door frame pull-up bars. You'll be amazed how fast you progress when you're just using it to burn time while thinking, Zoom calls, and other dead time.
You can do a huge body recomp with just push-ups + pull-ups. You just have to do them.
Two weeks ago I decided to try reps of 20 push-ups whenever I thought about them. I haven’t thought of doing so more than twice a day BUT I’ve noticed an increase in my chest mass.
I want to get back into exercising regularly but that large chunk of time isn’t conducive to my personal projects…I just don’t want to dedicate so much time to exercise.
I’m relatively healthy so it’s not a big deal but you know how it is. Your biggest bully is yourself.
Great work! Keep it up. This method is called Greasing The Groove and is a well used method to break through pull up plateaus.
After two weeks of 40 or so push ups a day it’s incredibly unlikely you’ve gained muscle mass in your chest (or at least not noticeable) what you are probably seeing is increased water retention in the muscles and other associated exercise related side affects.
I’m a fairly muscley guy and if I stop working out for a couple of weeks I look “flatter” when I’m training regularly my muscles look fuller and rounder after a week or so back at it.
Sounds a lot like high volume training like 8x8s or 10x10s where you use much lighter weight and leave a lot of reps on the table but do twice as many or more sets.
For anyone interested, the simplest form of that is to use 60% of your one rep max and do 10 sets of 10 repetitions with adequate rest periods in between, 4 minutes minimum. Focus on form and don’t rush the reps.
Depending on how hard you're pushing yourself this is commonly known as "greasing the groove" and is often used to get passed performance plateaus. The key is to never train to failure, increase the total volume of fresh/quality reps(spread through the day), and switch up the routine after x weeks to avoid overuse injuries.
Are you not scared about skipping warmups? This sounds like you aren't doing any. I was sick for a few days and decided to do some TRX rowing (20) and my elbow started to hurt the next day :)
Just do the first few at low intensity. A few push-ups or light kettlebell swings are a warmup for folks with a good strength baseline. For less fit folks, push-ups off the knees or body-weight squats would work the same way.
A think a lot of the reigning wisdom in the fitness world is created by serious strength trainers, for serious strength trainers. They aren't wrong, and their advice will become useful to you if you also get seriously into strength training. But for people starting from neutral, the advice in this article is better than anything your most enthusiastic gym friends will tell you about protein intake or leg day or training to failure. Just workout specific muscles several times a week and you will get stronger and bigger muscles over a few months, regardless of diet.
Yes! Everything I learned when I was young told me a) you have to be *very serious* about working out if you are going to do it and b) it's mostly about looking good.
Both of those turned out to be huge fallacies. I'm 40 now and not very serious about working out, but I do it reliably (on an irregular schedule) and I don't target specific muscles etc to try to make myself look a certain way. The result is that I am just plain healthier and feel great. That has many second order effects.
100% agree. The most important point is to make exercise enjoyable; the more it feels like a chore, the more you will not be getting out there doing it.
Most people would be better off lifting a 10 lb weight 50 times instead of lifting a 50 lb weight 10 times. High weight, low reps is a great way to injure yourself if you're like 99% of people out there.
Source for 10-rep sets being particularly injurious please. And 10 lbs x 50 is much less stimulative than 50 lbs x 10, bordering on being not particularly effective.
50 times is a bit too much for me, and probably a lot of other people. It leads to mental or cardiovascular fatigue, which is not what I'm after when building muscle/strength. If you're an endurance athlete it would be more appropriate.
When training for muscle size the important thing is to fatigue the muscle itself, which is easier to do with 5-20 reps, maybe 30 at the most if exercising small muscles.
Regarding "low reps", that usually refers to sets of 1-3 reps very close to your maximum potential. Once you go above 5 reps or so, the risk of injury is much lower. There are lots of beginner programs using sets of 5 reps, and people aren't getting injured left and right on those.
You still need a minimum level of intensity. You won't be improving strength with something that you can lift 50 times.
One way to measure perceived exertion is how many additional reps you think you can do - if you're doing 10 reps at a weight where you can only do 10, then you're obviously at some risk of having worse form / injury; if you're doing 10 reps at a weight that you can lift 12-15 times, you'll probably get stronger, if you're doing 10 reps at a weight you can lift 25-30 times, you likely won't make a lot of progress.
I always had problems doing full pushups. Now I'm starting slow, doing upright pushups against the wall.
Have to thank this youtuber for the motivation:
https://youtu.be/zkU6Ok44_CI
Yeah, if you want an old age filled with weakness and fragility. If you build up to it and you have the strength and lift with good technique there is nothing wrong with it.
50lbs is only just over the weight of the bar anyway. Weakness is never a strength.
We all know Pavel's "Grease the Groove" works from experience; this is just scientific back-up.
If you want to be in marginally better shape, set between 4 and 10 timers every day, and do one set of push-ups, or squat jumps, or both, when the timer goes off. If you're not used to this, do half push-ups or lower-down push-ups. For the squat jumps add some weight (i.e. dumbbells) over time. You can play around a lot with push-ups and squat jumps, both to make them more interesting and work different muscle groups.
That explains my muscle development after having kids. Basically just doing squats and lifts throughout the day. Lots of tag based cardio to round it out and those multiple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day probably helps as well.
One of the best things my dad taught me was to have fun doing push-ups and squats randomly throughout the day like any time there's downtime. I hope you pass it on to your kids. It's like teaching your kids to enjoy a raw carrot when they feel for a snack (something I also thank my parents for).
Not a bad idea... Round it out with some leap-frog for plyo, animal crawls. You could turn burpees into a fun game. (Where is the parent-kid playtime-workout video that we all need? Tire the kids out and give the parents a couple sets)
I actually got real evidence for this recently. I used to do regular strength training, but when my second child was born I stopped for about 2 years. I had also been doing occasional (1-3x/yr) DEXA scans to check my body composition.
When I re-scanned myself after about 2 years off, I had gained quite a bit of fat and lost muscle in most places, but gained muscle in my arms/upper body. I felt notably stronger from carrying her (and her growing older sister) and that confirmed it.
I had a shoulder injury a couple years back and I used this method to rehab it. I'd do about half my max on pull-ups 5-6x per day 3-4x per week.
When I started, my max was low and I was only doing about 2-3 pull-ups at a time. After a couple months of doing it I was easily at a max of 15 or so pull-ups per set.
Lately I've been doing Pavel's "simple & sinister" kettlebell program and it's very effective. At first I had to really stop myself from wanting to do more reps and sets, but I really love how it keeps you from wearing yourself out. Slowly and with consistency is the best method for most things in life.
As someone who goes to gym at least 3 times a week (I find that the bare minimum to feel good), I think going only once a week must be actually damaging to the body... even when I miss one day and go only twice in a week, I can feel that the body has had enough time to "lose" much of the power it gained from the previous visit several days before, so it just kind of tries to regain that power back... it's like your energy levels going up and down from basically sedentary to just barely active, then back down... I imagine going only once a week would be like that, but with larger swings up and down, which surely can't be good for you. About 3 times a week, to me, is the sweet spot where I don't feel constantly tired, but also feel like my energy levels remain more or less stable.
According to Louie Simmons, strength athlete at top shape can lose about 20% of 1RM weight in two weeks of inactivity.
Regular people also lose their shape, at slower, but increasiingle faster rate, as they gain shape. It is enough to lose 2%-4% (usually around 2.5%) of progress per week to hit a plateau in typical chest-back-legs split.
But, the fact that body can lose some shape can be beneficial. For example, hypertrophy-specific training [1] recommends 7-9 days rest period between end of one training period and start of next one. During this time body loses resistance to growth stimulus but does not detrain too much.
Also note here that HST recommends to abandon the typical split and perform all body training each training session, but with smaller number of sets, two sets maximum. More or less in line with what article talks about.
And, having mentioned Louie Simmons, I should mention Bulgarian Method: just train every day, using your max for a day, rest one day a week, make a world record. ;)
> According to Louie Simmons, strength athlete at top shape can lose about 20% of 1RM weight in two weeks of inactivity.
Westside was a very specific training methodology, and neurological adaptations matter, and Louie cared a lot more about performance in competition (which has a fair amount to do with one's mental state) than whatever the science says.
That is -- a period of NO or virtually no activity for a week can actually increase performance above the peak for a small window where your body has had time to repair the muscular damage but the neurological adaptations haven't faded. Two weeks is just about the end of that window, but it's completely at odds with what Louie believed.
Louie and or the Conjugate Method have absolutely nothing to do with Abadjhiev or the Bulgarian/Soviet methods, despite whatever his claims are. The Soviets/Bulgarians never used any of the things Conjugate is known for (bands, chains) or the periodization. Those nations focused on the classic/olympic lifts, or the sport of "weightlifting". Bands and chains are antithetical to everything they'd do there.
Bulgarian was, specifically: snatch or clean to a max for the day, do 5 singles, drop 10% and do 3 triples || drop 5% and do 3 doubles, do a power/hang/block variant of the lift you didn't do earlier, same scheme but higher reps, some squat variant (front/back), some pull variant (snatch/clean).
For the vast majority of people -- those who are not training for competition, or those who are not training to compete at an elite level -- all of this is useless and borderline counterproductive. Competing in (or training to compete in) a sport WILL eventually cause injuries.
The best advice you can give to people is "find something in the gym you enjoy enough to keep you going until it becomes a routine", because after 5+ years, if you're not aiming to win medals/break records (locally, state-level, nationally, whatever), the best overall outcomes will be from those who stayed in the gym, and getting injured is a big deterrent to that.
> strength athlete at top shape can lose about 20% of 1RM weight in two weeks of inactivity
that's probably not because of muscle mass loss, but body doesn't conserve glycogen, because think it doesn't need anymore, and this is fixable with 2-3 trainings.
Having mentioned the Bulgarian Method, we should mention too that those guys were roided out of their minds - it's crazy what being a guinea pig can do to a world record!
I lift one time per week and this works very well for me. Every body is different :) It must be said I do do light aerobic exercise the rest of the days, but I would not call that "working out".
I do strength training exactly three times a week, and there’s at least 48 hours between each session for much needed rest. Reducing that time has often been a recipe for injury.
And if I miss a couple of sessions, even if it’s due to something like travel rather than illness, performance declines to some extent. I just don’t realize it until I’ve pushed too hard, which again can result in injury.
So as another piece of anecdata, three times a week seems like the sweet spot.
Everybody is different. I've come back from a week's rest a felt way stronger. I justified this as the rest letting my body fully recuperate, but who knows why this happens.
Yeah, same. Maybe it's all mental, but it doesn't feel like it.
That said, I imagine you also aren't making a habit of it. Maybe training every day and then accidentally taking a week off give you some recuperation you didn't realize you needed.
Most fitness advice is "how to not get fit, for people who don't want to get fit".
It's honestly not that hard once you treat physical health as being an _essential_ part of the human experience. It's not a chore, it's not a task, it's fundamentally important, it's what you are on this planet to do.
You "don't like it"? I'm sure you do loads of other things that you like even less (8 hour work day?) - society just supports those things more.
If someone told you that you could become a great chess player by playing 30 seconds a day would you buy it or would you think they were completely full of it?
> I'm sure you do loads of other things that you like even less (8 hour work day?) - society just supports those things more
Well, it does not merely supports those things. It almost coerces you into them. There are few ways to get enough money so you can live. I would not work the same 8h/days if I could.
> it's what you are on this planet to do
Not at all. I'm here for no reason. Now that I'm here, I'll optimize happiness while creating as little harm as possible to others.
Doing sports would at best be a means to this happiness if it helps me feel better, longer. Even knowing it is not quite enough to like it and be motivated to do it enough. I say this as someone who likes hiking, does most of their trips by bike, and runs regularly, as long as I'm not too tired and it's not extremely hot or cold outside.
I don't like practicing, and I won't lie to myself about it. I only do it because I believe it makes the rest of my life better. I guess considering it as essential helps indeed, but that's a very abstract idea, to be honest.
The threat of suffering and death are the threats used both to make you work for money, and to make you eat healthy and work out. However, the consequences of the former are much more imminent, while the consequences of the latter can take years to show up. Unfortunately, we find delayed reward or punishment to be a much weaker motivator.
I am a meat-based robot, and see exercise as a natural form of maintenance. The gym is my favorite physical activity, and I see it as performing physical upkeep on myself, to offset my hilariously sedentary lifestyle.
> I'm here for no reason. Now that I'm here, I'll optimize happiness while creating as little harm as possible to others.
Same, but I enjoy having my bodily maintenance, and the semi-sculpted look I've achieved. Different people will have different fitness goals.
Yes, that's advice for if you want to not get fit.
If you're happy (can have a good life) not being fit, you can just follow advice that will not make you fit.
If you're unhappy not being fit, then it is essential to fix that, because unless you are a depressive it is essential to fix any fixable issues that are making you unhappy.
I am doing some body weight exercises like this daily. It is to combat chronic fatigue so I need to be very careful not to over do it. I am using a daily tick list and to get a tick for exercise I need to do 10 reps of something. If I am very ill it could be ten shrugs. If I feel super it might be 10 pushups, 20 squats and a pull up.
Following this Laissez faire system has increased my strength. Carrying a 10kg item in the shop feels quite light, and picking up my kid about 40kg is possible now. It is those things I am super happy about.
I am using TRX (aka some rope hanging from the ceiling) and the earths gravity, I don’t need any weights yet. But I have some dogs and kids if I need them :-).
While I don't like TRX, it was originally designed by a Navy Seal to provide a full-body workout. So long as it helps you achieve your goals, it may be all you need.
Note that the study participants were healthy young individuals who were untrained ie. didn't do any regular resistance training prior to the study.
Untrained people, particularly if they are young and healthy, often show large effects with exercise. The big difference between the training schedules cannot be extrapolated to well trained individuals.
Readit News
A few names/links, pick and mix as you will - they're all good:
https://mennohenselmans.com/high-resistance-training-frequen...
http://www.lookgreatnaked.com/fitness_articles_by_brad_schoe...
https://macrofactorapp.com/articles/
https://rpstrength.com/team-member/mike-israetel-phd
Probably not the best links for each, but it's morning and I got work to do. Should be enough to get you started tho.
Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle. This could fall under different categories such cardio (walking , cycling) and some resistance training like body weight exercises. These are called Micro workouts, and can be done during the day. A great (nerdy) guy who is quite far on that path is the bioneer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWuKIlbybqY
And for food we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories and almost no-one should try to diet like a body builder prepping for a show. They feel terrible and you are priming the body to store energy in the fat cells. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
Humans have been healthy for very long without the gym or calorie counting. Both are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere
Saying stuff like 'we should try to focus on whole foods and not calories' is a pretty bad take if you ask me. Contrasting that immediately with 'a body builder prepping for a show' is just ridiculous. One is good advice to form part of a healthy lifestyle, the other is a way of life for a tiny group of professional athletes.
There goes more into a healthy diet than just eating lots of whole foods - although whole foods are obviously awesome and healthy. Notice that the linked article compares two groups eating processed and processed with the one eating the processed foods eating 500 more calories a day. They don't gain weight magically but because they ate the less satiating food and as a result ate more calories.
And simply saying 'Instead we should focus on daily fun movements that we like to do. So it doesn't feel like a chore and easy to maintain within your lifestyle.' is such a weird take. Have you ever considered that some people enjoy going to the gym? On the other hand I personally couldn't imagine anything more boring than body weight exercises. In the end it is up to the individual to chose the lifestyle that they enjoy, so please stop selling your personal favorite as if any other choices 'are large time investments that can be better spent elsewhere'. I very much enjoy my time spend at the gym, thank you very much.
This is just plain false. You can “focus” on eating whole foods and if you consume more calories than you burn you will gain weight. If you consume less calories than you burn you will lose weight. The science has not changed on this point. No one giving honest diet advice should tell people not to worry about the calories they consume if the individual has the goal to increase, lower or maintain their weight.
As for the calories debate, all i can say here is that evidence is needed for some of these claims you and your article have made. I'm seeing links to quotes and videos but no real evidence that a calorie is not a calorie. If the point they're clumsily trying to make is that practically speaking you cannot track every single calorie in your day-to-day existence then yes i would agree with that but no one who tracks calories would tell you their goal is 100% accuracy. It all comes out in the wash over averages.
That said, I do not think most people need to track their calories if they just want to be at a healthy bodyweight. Merely eating whole foods and adhering to the guidelines above should get them there just fine. This is not the same thing as saying a calorie isn't a calorie.
[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/336656/9789...
I totally agree, for the record. For the majority of people counting calories and recording reps isn't something they'll be interested in doing their entire lives, any more than they'd be interested in updating new device drivers and reflashing their OS if an easier, brainless alternative existed. And it does! Walk, bike, or run a little bit every day; eat less carbs than you'd prefer, and try to eat more vegetables than you would otherwise. I'm no expert whatsoever, but I've travelled all over the world and that advice seems to be the only constant amongst all the healthiest people I've seen.
You do what works for you, others should do what works for them.
The people I know on that list would absolutely agree with this. E.g. Mike Israetel from Renaissance Periodization; he'll often say that one of the best ways to lose weight is to try to get your step count up, e.g. move around more in the day, without necessarily doing formal exercise. The best thing is that you can be running around doing "chores" or whatever, and this will help with your weight loss goals and get more stuff done during the day.
That said, the question is, as always, what are your goals. If your goals are to be healthier, that requires a very different approach than if your goal is to, e.g., look more muscly, bodybuilder style. They're not completely incompatible goals, at least for novices, but they are different goals. Some strength training and cardio, with an emphasis on maintaining a body fat percentage <20%, is probably the best for maximizing long term health.
This is it for me, absolutely. I've always been a bike commuter, so that was my cardio for decades— 10x 20min bike ride to and from work each week, year round. When I lost the commute with pandemic WFH, I fairly quickly shot up 15lbs.
The journey back was in finding ways that I could recreationally get that same experience, which for me has been a combination of walks, distance cycling, and lane swimming. All of these are things I enjoy for their own sake, and are great mental health resets. They're also things I can do with others, so there's that little bit of accountability woven into it as well. I'm not really watching what I eat, though I did cut out a bunch of snacking (especially at bedtime), and I switched my breakfast to a protein smoothie.
Now I'm down 30lbs+ from my pandemic high, and probably the best shape I've been in since my early twenties.
Whole foods work well because they tend to hit the calorie and nutrient milestones without much tracking being necessary, but we only know that because other people have done the tracking for us.
I think the information these people put out should be used to inform a lifestyle that one constructs, not to construct it directly.
People get obese on "whole foods" just fine if they do not count calories. For some it is not needed since they live physically active life and naturally do not eat all that much. Yet others can barely fit in their cars on the same food.
I fully agree. If some of that fun actually involves going to the gym, then great. But there are a lot of "play" activities which are compelling and fun while also making you healthier. Sports is an obvious one, and dancing is a less obvious one.
One hour of salsa dancing (with breaks and partner changes) is a good cardio exercise which is also lots of fun. And as or more importantly, the mental and emotional boost is something many of us need more than bigger muscles. I like both.
Modern man so screwed even if everything is done right.
If you're going to eat processed junk food, you should at least eat less of it. That's step 1.
Meanwhile, most of us find ourselves in a shitty current situation where a healthy diet and a healthy level of activity feel weird and counterintuitive to us, and we have to trust reason and evidence to guide us to a healthy way of living, despite deeply engrained aversions, deeply engrained compulsions to engage in unhealthy behavior, and powerful external forces arrayed against us.
For people who are unhappy with where they're at and are looking for answers, telling them that there's an easy healthy way to live that caters to their current desires and aversions sends them on a lifelong journey of being disappointed by one set of false promises after another.
A more honest thing to tell them is that their life up to this point, their experiences, the norms they grew up with, the food ecology of the world around them, has warped their perceptions to the point that what is actually good for their body will feel unpleasant and psychologically unsettling. The unvarnished truth, which you might not want to dump on them right at the beginning, is that at times it will be fucking miserable. It's analogous to having a substance abuse disorder. Many, many times the only choice that feels comfortable and natural is the one that physically harms you, and resisting the compulsion to harm yourself feels awful. It can feel sad and scary not to eat every single donut in the break room, even if you've already had a generous healthy breakfast. At times like that, the "if it isn't easy, you're doing it wrong" message comes off like an unfeeling flex, like telling a depressed person to just snap out of it.
People may stigmatize difficult lifestyle changes as "restrictive" or "joyless" or "unrealistic," but it's not the fault of the lifestyle itself. It's the fault of what you've been fed your whole life and what the world continues to shove in your face and dangle in front of you every day. It doesn't kill joy not to eat cake. It kills joy to say no to cake eight times a day while a billion dollar industry wages war against your efforts to care for yourself by constantly reminding you of the momentary pleasure and relief you will feel if you give in, and people who care about you unwittingly act as their accomplices in all the spaces that are supposed to be safe for you.
> https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/stop-counting...
People who work in public health are not giving advice to help you make a significant change in your life. They are giving advice that will do the most good for the most people, which realistically means moving the needle a tiny bit. That's what they're shooting for. They don't expect you to succeed at living a healthy life. They expect you to be overweight and to live a lifestyle that makes metabolic disease a likelihood, because the societal context is stacked against us. They've accepted that their power to help people currently struggling with their health is limited to changing a fraction of a percent here and there, and to achieve significant results we need to focus on changing the context for the next generation. Which we do need to do, but meanwhile, if you don't want to write yourself off as a victim of the times, don't let people tell you that easy is the only healthy way. You won't regret doing your best to take care of yourself, even if it's a struggle and you can't pretend it's easy like everyone tells you it's supposed to be.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Kbogea/videos?view=0&sort=da&fl...
As I said, still in Alpha, but I'm always happy for constructive feedback.
As a new (but middle aged) CS student I think this could be a fun way to encourage my fellow students and myself to exercise more between study sessions.
It's a bit of a PR problem to say positive things about them, and it feels. The consensus, the one we get to hear, is pretty clear: they work very well, but they have side effects that make using them a bad idea. And I actually trust this consensus.
Unfortunately, what I don't see is obvious next steps like "ok, so how about we lower the dose and see if there's a useful dosage without long term side-effects". Or "how about we try to test if a certain person has risk factors to side effects" and so on. That kind of conversation is unfortunately... well, not verbotten, but at least self-censored.
Anyways, this is just intellectual curiosity. I'm not into bodybuilding enough to try, and tbh I actually doubt they're using it either. It'd be too much like cheating - the whole point is to find out what works, and everybody knows steroids work so there's nothing to find out there.
Steroids a fact of life in strength sports and not even really considered cheating, as long as you compete in "untested" divisions. Training for a top-level competition is not the same as exercising for health, even if you don't take PEDs. The people doing it consider it an acceptable tradeoff.
The result is that as far as I can tell, the last 20 years of research has given us most of the results we know. It's really a burgeoning field.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC68TLK0mAEzUyHx5x5k-S1Q
He's a bodybuilder/powerlifter/coach with a focus on evidence-based exercise and diet advice. I've heard him cite people like Mike Israetel and the MASS report at https://www.strongerbyscience.com/mass/
I like that his videos tend to be concise, and he does a good job of being clear about which of his recommendations are backed up by research and which are opinions based on his personal experience/preferences.
Mind Pump: https://youtube.com/c/MindPumpClips Jeremy Ethier: https://youtube.com/c/JeremyEthier
This video on counteracting the myriad harms from excessive sitting is particularly relevant to the HN audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqcOCBb4arc
For a few bucks a month you get articles by several of the people you mentioned, Alan, and others that evaluate public research on nutrition and training.
Dead Comment
I have an athletic background and I tend to go full-on workouts etc. But I decided to take it easy this summer, stopped training in general but I would set an alarm every 30 minutes and take short brakes (2-5mins) from work.
In that time I do a few pushups and a couple exercises with the kettlebell. Nothing fancy or tiring, I stop just before I feel any type of resistance or "burn".
This happens 5-8 times a day. On weekends I do none of that.
Of course It's anecdotal but my body has FOR SURE changed. It's like when I did two times a day workouts.
Of course I'll go back doing full workouts because I enjoy them. But anybody who dislikes devoting big chunks of time just for workouts should definitely experiment with micro workouts.
As always, experiment and adjust
When I do pause, I can stop and do a few pushups. It helps me focus a bit better, and there's no context loss because I'm not doing or thinking about anything new. It's not much different from leaning back in my chair to think for a minute.
For a while, I kept a pair of shiny chrome dumbbells atop table, and could impromptu pick them up and use, when pacing and thinking about a design problem, without thinking much about the exercise itself.
If I resumed this, doing it several times a day, for only a few minutes at a time, it'd have a big impact?
(I also used to have a Concept2 erg in my work area, but somehow using that was more interrupting.)
You can do a huge body recomp with just push-ups + pull-ups. You just have to do them.
I want to get back into exercising regularly but that large chunk of time isn’t conducive to my personal projects…I just don’t want to dedicate so much time to exercise.
I’m relatively healthy so it’s not a big deal but you know how it is. Your biggest bully is yourself.
After two weeks of 40 or so push ups a day it’s incredibly unlikely you’ve gained muscle mass in your chest (or at least not noticeable) what you are probably seeing is increased water retention in the muscles and other associated exercise related side affects.
I’m a fairly muscley guy and if I stop working out for a couple of weeks I look “flatter” when I’m training regularly my muscles look fuller and rounder after a week or so back at it.
True muscle gains take a lot of time.
For anyone interested, the simplest form of that is to use 60% of your one rep max and do 10 sets of 10 repetitions with adequate rest periods in between, 4 minutes minimum. Focus on form and don’t rush the reps.
Both of those turned out to be huge fallacies. I'm 40 now and not very serious about working out, but I do it reliably (on an irregular schedule) and I don't target specific muscles etc to try to make myself look a certain way. The result is that I am just plain healthier and feel great. That has many second order effects.
Deleted Comment
Most people would be better off lifting a 10 lb weight 50 times instead of lifting a 50 lb weight 10 times. High weight, low reps is a great way to injure yourself if you're like 99% of people out there.
And 10 reps is not low reps either. It's on the upper end of what people usually use in their workouts.
When training for muscle size the important thing is to fatigue the muscle itself, which is easier to do with 5-20 reps, maybe 30 at the most if exercising small muscles.
Regarding "low reps", that usually refers to sets of 1-3 reps very close to your maximum potential. Once you go above 5 reps or so, the risk of injury is much lower. There are lots of beginner programs using sets of 5 reps, and people aren't getting injured left and right on those.
One way to measure perceived exertion is how many additional reps you think you can do - if you're doing 10 reps at a weight where you can only do 10, then you're obviously at some risk of having worse form / injury; if you're doing 10 reps at a weight that you can lift 12-15 times, you'll probably get stronger, if you're doing 10 reps at a weight you can lift 25-30 times, you likely won't make a lot of progress.
Also train less.
Yet strength and mass have gone up.
50lbs is only just over the weight of the bar anyway. Weakness is never a strength.
> "Days of are still good."
Have a look (or rather listen) here: https://hubermanlab.com/dr-peter-attia-exercise-nutrition-ho... Interesting discussion.
If you want to be in marginally better shape, set between 4 and 10 timers every day, and do one set of push-ups, or squat jumps, or both, when the timer goes off. If you're not used to this, do half push-ups or lower-down push-ups. For the squat jumps add some weight (i.e. dumbbells) over time. You can play around a lot with push-ups and squat jumps, both to make them more interesting and work different muscle groups.
When I re-scanned myself after about 2 years off, I had gained quite a bit of fat and lost muscle in most places, but gained muscle in my arms/upper body. I felt notably stronger from carrying her (and her growing older sister) and that confirmed it.
When I started, my max was low and I was only doing about 2-3 pull-ups at a time. After a couple months of doing it I was easily at a max of 15 or so pull-ups per set.
Lately I've been doing Pavel's "simple & sinister" kettlebell program and it's very effective. At first I had to really stop myself from wanting to do more reps and sets, but I really love how it keeps you from wearing yourself out. Slowly and with consistency is the best method for most things in life.
Regular people also lose their shape, at slower, but increasiingle faster rate, as they gain shape. It is enough to lose 2%-4% (usually around 2.5%) of progress per week to hit a plateau in typical chest-back-legs split.
But, the fact that body can lose some shape can be beneficial. For example, hypertrophy-specific training [1] recommends 7-9 days rest period between end of one training period and start of next one. During this time body loses resistance to growth stimulus but does not detrain too much.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201111175258/http://hypertroph...
Also note here that HST recommends to abandon the typical split and perform all body training each training session, but with smaller number of sets, two sets maximum. More or less in line with what article talks about.
And, having mentioned Louie Simmons, I should mention Bulgarian Method: just train every day, using your max for a day, rest one day a week, make a world record. ;)
Westside was a very specific training methodology, and neurological adaptations matter, and Louie cared a lot more about performance in competition (which has a fair amount to do with one's mental state) than whatever the science says.
Supercompensation is a real thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=supercompensation+strength+w...
That is -- a period of NO or virtually no activity for a week can actually increase performance above the peak for a small window where your body has had time to repair the muscular damage but the neurological adaptations haven't faded. Two weeks is just about the end of that window, but it's completely at odds with what Louie believed.
Louie and or the Conjugate Method have absolutely nothing to do with Abadjhiev or the Bulgarian/Soviet methods, despite whatever his claims are. The Soviets/Bulgarians never used any of the things Conjugate is known for (bands, chains) or the periodization. Those nations focused on the classic/olympic lifts, or the sport of "weightlifting". Bands and chains are antithetical to everything they'd do there.
Bulgarian was, specifically: snatch or clean to a max for the day, do 5 singles, drop 10% and do 3 triples || drop 5% and do 3 doubles, do a power/hang/block variant of the lift you didn't do earlier, same scheme but higher reps, some squat variant (front/back), some pull variant (snatch/clean).
For the vast majority of people -- those who are not training for competition, or those who are not training to compete at an elite level -- all of this is useless and borderline counterproductive. Competing in (or training to compete in) a sport WILL eventually cause injuries.
The best advice you can give to people is "find something in the gym you enjoy enough to keep you going until it becomes a routine", because after 5+ years, if you're not aiming to win medals/break records (locally, state-level, nationally, whatever), the best overall outcomes will be from those who stayed in the gym, and getting injured is a big deterrent to that.
that's probably not because of muscle mass loss, but body doesn't conserve glycogen, because think it doesn't need anymore, and this is fixable with 2-3 trainings.
For example, squatting gives the worst DOMS. The solution is to just squat more frequently.
I still have push, pull, and leg days. They just emphasize different muscles.
I've found stretching also is important prior to exercise.
And if I miss a couple of sessions, even if it’s due to something like travel rather than illness, performance declines to some extent. I just don’t realize it until I’ve pushed too hard, which again can result in injury.
So as another piece of anecdata, three times a week seems like the sweet spot.
That said, I imagine you also aren't making a habit of it. Maybe training every day and then accidentally taking a week off give you some recuperation you didn't realize you needed.
It's honestly not that hard once you treat physical health as being an _essential_ part of the human experience. It's not a chore, it's not a task, it's fundamentally important, it's what you are on this planet to do.
You "don't like it"? I'm sure you do loads of other things that you like even less (8 hour work day?) - society just supports those things more.
If someone told you that you could become a great chess player by playing 30 seconds a day would you buy it or would you think they were completely full of it?
Well, it does not merely supports those things. It almost coerces you into them. There are few ways to get enough money so you can live. I would not work the same 8h/days if I could.
> it's what you are on this planet to do
Not at all. I'm here for no reason. Now that I'm here, I'll optimize happiness while creating as little harm as possible to others.
Doing sports would at best be a means to this happiness if it helps me feel better, longer. Even knowing it is not quite enough to like it and be motivated to do it enough. I say this as someone who likes hiking, does most of their trips by bike, and runs regularly, as long as I'm not too tired and it's not extremely hot or cold outside.
I don't like practicing, and I won't lie to myself about it. I only do it because I believe it makes the rest of my life better. I guess considering it as essential helps indeed, but that's a very abstract idea, to be honest.
You can earn money without a 9-5. Hell, a person can just have money and not need to earn it.
You can't get fit or maintain fitness without putting in the work.
That's part of the reason it's so valued, there is no cheat code.
> I'm here for no reason. Now that I'm here, I'll optimize happiness while creating as little harm as possible to others.
Same, but I enjoy having my bodily maintenance, and the semi-sculpted look I've achieved. Different people will have different fitness goals.
I'm here to sit on my arse and get fat eating chocolate and makeing games, then kill myself at age 34, actually.
Dead Comment
What does that even mean?
> it's what you are on this planet to do.
Source?
Maybe. But that breaks down quickly when you realise that it just isn't. It's perfectly possible to live a good life in mediocre health.
If you're happy (can have a good life) not being fit, you can just follow advice that will not make you fit.
If you're unhappy not being fit, then it is essential to fix that, because unless you are a depressive it is essential to fix any fixable issues that are making you unhappy.
Following this Laissez faire system has increased my strength. Carrying a 10kg item in the shop feels quite light, and picking up my kid about 40kg is possible now. It is those things I am super happy about.
I am using TRX (aka some rope hanging from the ceiling) and the earths gravity, I don’t need any weights yet. But I have some dogs and kids if I need them :-).
(I didn't know TRX is a brand name too - but I mean the suspension training in general...)
Untrained people, particularly if they are young and healthy, often show large effects with exercise. The big difference between the training schedules cannot be extrapolated to well trained individuals.