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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Person goes to hospital with cancer. Is stuck in a bed having their bum wiped for them. Loses muscle mass. Dies. Clearly they just needed some whey and squats. Or hospitals cause cancer.
Actual weightlifters have bad life expectancy outcomes, on par with athletes that get punched in the face regularly.
https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/what-is-the-optimal-body-type
This guy is talking about "Olympic bodybuilders" so I am immediately skeptical that he has any idea about what is going on in the data. Looking at data that involves all Olympic weightlifters is going to be confounded by the super heavyweights with enormous fat mass.
I'm sure you could find any number of reasons to ignore anyone you feel like - why not a typo or minor terminological error?
It's really more of a major error because the body composition of a bodybuilder is totally different from the body composition of a weightlifter. Olympic weightlifters are also (at least nominally) drug tested while top bodybuilders are not.
Again, if you choose not to be interested in this, you could find any number of rationalisations. That he wrote Olympic bodybuilder instead of Olympia bodybuilder does not really seem important to me. It's not even the only typo in his post.
Olympia wouldn't make sense in the context. He's not even talking about bodybuilders.
It's ironic that you are doing what you are accusing me of doing (nitpicking and ignoring the message) when I actually made substantive criticisms.
Your substantive criticism is that Olympic weightlifters are all massively overweight and fat. This is plainly not true and just a stereotype. Most weightlifters are in weight classes and actually stay pretty lean. They don't quite look like bodybuilders but they're pretty close. If you look up say, Li Dayan, he looks fantastic.
So whence the poor outcomes? Obviously, they're still too big. Li Dayan isn't going to Olympia any time soon but he's still considered overweight, bordering on obese.
This is so obviously not what I said.
What I said is that when you measure the outcomes of weightlifters, the average is overall dragged down by the SHWs.
Again, the SHWs are a minority. But it's not clear what your point is. Weightlifting as a sport rewards and encourages people to get big and strong - and getting bigger, for a lot of people, will shorten their lifespan. That's the entire point. Having lots of muscle - as even the SHWs have - doesn't change that. The general trend isn't just that weightlifting is uniquely deleterious, but that all power sports are - cycling is nearly as bad, even though there are no SHW cyclists.
I simply don't really see any direct evidence that carrying lots of lean body mass, beyond a marker of general health and propensity to exercise, does anything for lifespan. Healthy men carry substantially more muscle mass than healthy women but live shorter lives. And if we take it as true that most people will maximise their lifespan by maintaining a BMI of about 18-23, well, it's pretty easy even for an amateur lifter to escape that range, and indeed it is encouraged by most people in the lifting community.
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