The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I don't think its an apples to apples comparison.
You would have to be in a much higher percentile of calisthenics (how many people do you know can do a muscle-up?) ability: relative to lifting ability to achieve the same amount of muscle mass.
I'm skeptical.
Headstands, handstands, frog stands, and all the other isometric poses in yoga are challenging (for an unfit person). But they are not very difficult to pull off. Not as difficult as even a 3-plate dead lift.
So those movements do build some muscle mass but don't hold a candle to weights when it somes to muscle/strength building.
This is anecdotal but, I am saying this as someone who spent a good portion of his teenage years physically upside down. I was very into "bboying" which is 100x more physically challenging than yoga. And no I wasn't into it for the dancing, I was into it for the cool athletic movements like flips, handstand hops, windmills, etc. And it still doesn't compare to lifting.
Embrace the dancing buddy. Glad to know there are two of us on here. Maybe three if @fivehourmarathon dances too? ;)
I did it for the flips and other athletic movements. I wanted to learn them and the only people willing to teach you those for free were the bboys, lol.
They were less pretentious as well, they would practice wherever there was grass on even sometimes on concrete. The gymnasts wouldn't do much outside of their bouncy gyms that required a hefty membership fee.
Why aren't you interested in dancing? It's pretty damn manly. Depending on your type of woman, it impresses much more than lifting heavy weights. (Assuming you're in decent shape ofc)
There are a lot of things you and I find inherently uninteresting even if they are great things to do and have so many benefits. For me dancing for the performance art is one of those things.
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Actually, learning to dance is an unfulfilled new year's resolution for me, I've been trying to drag my wife to classes together all year. So if anything, I'm jealous. I feel like an inability to dance is a basic human failure for me.
Try West Cost Swing. It's a good starter dance and teaches you good connection. Too many people start trying to learn all the ballroom dances (waltz/foxtrot/tango/quickstep/east coast swing).
They quickly find that there is practically no social scene for any of the dances except tango and east coast swing. Other problem is that the way most of these classes teach you is NOT the way it's done socially, because they dumb it down for old people. Vast majority of dance studios just milk retirees who do endless back to back classes.
Go for a 6 week West Coast Swing dance series and try to find one that has at least middle aged folks in the class or teaching it.
Same goes for Latin like Salsa/Zouk/Bachata etc but in my experience leading is significantly harder, especially to learn as a first dance.
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Teenage boy develops muscle less efficiently than grown man, more at 11. But like, I'm curious, are you worried that you'll be mocked for dancing? Being a good dancer is probably a rarer skill among Motte-demographics than is deadlifting 3 plates! That's awesome! But muscle building is highly variable on modality; my arms get jacked when I climb a lot, other guys climb the same stuff and stay string beans.
But I think you're defining lifting as "intelligent power/barbell lifting" and yoga as "the common yoga studio." But I think the average guy who "lifts weights" is still doing something unbelievably dumb, when I find myself in a commercial or college gym I see very few guys actually pulling 315 from the floor. Somebody who follows Starting Strength religiously is going to be much stronger than somebody who goes to Intro to Power Yoga and spends half of it in child's pose; but I'd probably take a guy who can do planche push ups over a guy who screws around at Planet fatness once a week.
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