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Wellness Wednesday for November 9, 2022

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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So...last week I expressed skepticism at the idea of exercise boosting one's mood. I got some good responses about what to do (lift, more intense exercise, etc.) but I wanted to hold off on some of them because it's basically a law of the gym that, if I do any strength training, I overreach and injure myself.

So...I overreached and injured myself! I can't even be mad this time because it's so absurd: I deliberately didn't touch weights and injured myself doing...Kegels - which was supposed to be light work. I was literally doing 5 a day and I still managed it. Low WIS + CON is a helluva combo.

But! It did give me an opportunity to test out if I feel worse without exercise and...eh?

I was annoyed on Monday, but I honestly can't tell if that was just my usual cyclical moroseness and depression and stress at work.

One thing I did notice was that fasting was harder without the cardio. Not much harder (a 16:8 schedule is pretty easy) but I just feel hungrier (which might explain why I'm more irritable). Still not sure exactly why moderate-to-vigorous cardio would make me less hungry. Maybe it's that I'm just wasting an hour and a half working out and walking home that I would otherwise been thinking about food?

Anyways, besides that I do feel somewhat uncomfortable not being able to go to the gym because working out early was becoming a keystone habit and I feel like I'm losing that progress. But I don't feel significantly worse.

In retrospect I should have kept a log right after the injury. But low WIS strikes again...

I struggled for years with injuries every time I did strength training. I’d recommend yoga and starting real slow. I made more progress in six months than I had in four years of trying to strength train with lifting.

Plus I get euphoria too.

I made more progress in six months than I had in four years of trying to strength train with lifting.

The gym bro in me wants to say "how unfit are you fuckers?" That you made more progress doing yoga than lifting. That too in 1/8th the time.. That's kind of like saying "I got more tired swimming end to end on my swimming pool than swimming across the Atlantic Ocean".

  • Either you are some kind of genetic outlier where your body is that much more receptive to yoga., and that much less receptive to lifting.

  • Or, What you mean by "lifting" is very different from what most people mean.

  • Your diet,sleep and exercise is REALLY out of whack.

  • Your definition of progress is not the kind of progress lifting gets you.

  • Your hormones are fucked.

I'll volunteer, as a gym bro in good standing, that your definition of "Yoga" may be just as fucked. Yoga can be an incredibly physically challenging practice, isometric and leveraged poses and flows done correctly and intentionally can build a great body. It's pretty rare to see someone who builds their body purely through bodyweight and gymnastics training reach a similar degree of musculature as someone who uses weights today in the west, but it's very possible to do it. The barbell is just a simpler tool to provide necessary resistance compared to the skill and balance required to achieve a similar result with bodyweight.

who builds their body purely through bodyweight and gymnastics training reach a similar degree of musculature as someone who uses weights today in the west, but it's very possible to do it.

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.

Yoga can be an incredibly physically challenging practice, isometric and leveraged poses and flows done correctly and intentionally can build a great body.

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.

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.

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.