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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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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.