A Note To “Victims” Of Body Shaming.

Athlete Mark Smith

Humiliation is the only proper response to self destructive behaviors. No one has the power to shame you. Only you can decide whether to feel shame about something or not. Your feeling of shame is voluntary.

Whether we experience “shaming” by friends, family or co-workers due to our admirable progress with regards to fitness and/or weight loss—and their feeling threatened or shamed by our success—or due to the opposite, not making progress in fitness and/or weight loss—it’s our choice whether to shrug off their criticism, or not.

Those who have made the decision to allow themselves to deteriorate need to own this decision. For most, allowing their house or automobile to deteriorate to the point that their intended purpose to shelter or transport them was being irreversibly compromised, resultant criticism from others would be fully expected, like it or not. However, you can always buy a new car or house.

Your one and only body is not replaceable. Allowing it to deteriorate is a voluntary act. Pretending that your willful deterioration, your voluntary partaking in smoking, drinking, drugging, obesity and all the other self-destructive behaviors is excusable due to extenuating circumstances only compounds the humiliation. Genetics? Nope. Metabolism? Old age? Nope. Look at the guy pictured above. You think YOU have obstacles?

Yes, it is your fault. Yes, it is wholly your decision. Yes, your excuses make you look a fool. Yes, people are judging you for the awful things you choose to do to yourself. Yes, the world does judge us by what we do and how we look and that will never, ever change, so get used to it.

Claiming your entitlement to do and say whatever you want while demanding that others accommodate you, when at the same time you deny others their right to say and do what they want, is called hypocrisy. 

If you get to do and say whatever you want, then so does everybody else.

Clickbait Is Desperate

(From mensfitness.com)

Speaking for myself, websites that stoop to engaging in clickbait scams lose a good portion of my respect instantly. It’s desperate.

Men’s Fitness presented this clickbait image/headline seen above. But when you click on it and read the associated article, they backtrack and state these featured exercises are really not bad after all.

Clickbait is insulting to the reader/customer, period. I for one would like to see what these self-appointed “experts” who write this crap LOOK like, wouldn’t you?

When Your Favorite Online Trainer gets it Wrong.

Even those online trainers who I think are excellent overall sometimes express views that, because of my experience, I do not at all agree with.

This is because those trainers and others who have not yet experienced negative results from their technique believe the reason is due solely to their doing it correctly, and that others’ warnings against that same technique amount to nothing more than “myths.” Unfortunately for such people, poor technique is not recognized until the damage is already done.

The opposite is also true. Another favorite online trainer of mine warns against the leg extension machine. In fairness, each manufacturer has a different design, so it could be he was just using a poorly designed version. My gym has two, each made by a different company, and one of these is awful IMHO. However, overall I always include leg extensions in my leg workout, and this particular trainer, from what he described, told me he simply wasn’t using proper technique. Leg extensions should not impact your knees unless you are using your knees rather than your quads to move the weight, which you should never do. The knees’ one and ONLY function is to BEND.

Knees (like all joints) are merely hinges. They are not muscles, but merely cartilage and bone. Knees are not designed to bear weight. Knees are not designed to lead an exercise. Knees are not designed to absorb shock. Knees are not designed to overextend. Knees are not designed to endure wear and tear: that's what the surrounding muscles—quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves— are all designed to do. Muscles are active; joints are passive.

Putting knees at risk in one's quest for stronger leg muscles is counter productive to say the least. Knees have one function only: to bend—and do so only within a predetermined range or arc.

No Matter What Our Age, We are The Sum Of All Our Choices Up Until Now.

No Matter What Our Age, We are The Sum Of All Our Choices Up Until Now.

23 And Me: What’s The Use?

Richard Sullivan @ Age 53

The US Marines have a great slogan: “Be All You Can Be.” Fitness is not about who or what the other guy or girl is or has, or about regaining the body and tight skin you once had as a 20-year-old, or erasing the so-called ravages of time. It’s about doing the best we can with what we have right now in the present time. 

People who have come to view their body as already “wrecked” or “hopeless” reject weight loss or strength training or stopping smoking using the same disclaimer: “What’s the use? It’s too late for me.”

Carting around 50 lbs. on your ass or waist 24/7 is crazy enough if you’re 20, but at 60 it’s both exhausting and potentially deadly. At best it diminishes your physical ability to perform everyday tasks. At worst it shortens your lifespan, either by initiating otherwise avoidable health problems, or by preventing you from escaping a crashed automobile, a burning home, a mugger.

The cure for “what’s the use?” is usually a good fright, one’s emerging intact on the other side of a situation that scared the shit out of them. People shouldn’t be required to nearly die in order to have that wakeup call. If you’re over the age of 23 and you are not strength training, you are deteriorating. If you are 23 and not strength training, your metabolism is slowing down. The downhill slide begins for us around age 23 when we have finished fully developing from child to adult, but it doesn’t have to.

Richard Sullivan Age 57

Mature Muscle Via Instagram

Today's Ultimate Challenge:

Talking on your cell phone while "working" the leg press machine might explain the complete lack of muscle on those pencil legs.

Priority: Tend To Your Lawn Or Tend To Your Body?

When I was a kid, in my town it was unusual enough to see a 20 year old guy with an awesome physique, let alone a 40 year old married man with kids—and that local Tarzan happened to be my next door neighbor Helen’s sister’s husband, and whenever he visited, I was in awe.

The men in my neighborhood, looking nothing like that, predictably were not at all impressed or influenced to follow his example—at least not outwardly. But his influence on me has far outlived him.

The culture in my neighborhood while growing up was lawn-pride. Men spent all weekend buying multiple sacks of varying amendments and spreading them on their lawn, clipping and edging and trimming and renting heavy equipment such as lawn rollers and a heavy gizmo that punched hundreds of holes in the lawn to aerate and hydrate. Men would spend 6 hours on a Saturday tending to their lawn, watering and weeding, and zero hours working out or engaging in athletic activities.

Then, as a grown up I’d watch This Old House and similar TV programs in that genre and there too would be men spending their entire weekend in quest of the perfect lawn, struggling to bend over due to their giant bellies and huffing and puffing after relatively little exertion.

It made me wonder at the logic applied by these lawn men for not providing the same care to their one-and-only forever body as they did their temporary lawns. It clearly was foolish to waste so much time, effort and money on something as fleeting as a lawn, especially in a climate where it snowed 7 months out if the year, when their bodies, which were called upon to perform 24/7/365, went ignored and disrespected.

That was the culture back then, and although things have improved remarkably in that respect, basically that remains the culture: people applying outsized disproportionate importance to the unimportant while ignoring what was truly important, crucial and irreplaceable: their body, their strength, their health and physical ability.

People’ priorities tell their story.

...And They Say Bodyweight Exercise Doesn't Build Real Muscle

Really, the more time we spend online, the more foolish people get. Take the “arguments” that the blowhards and know-it-alls engage in pertaining to strength, fitness and muscle.

Resistance is resistance, whether it takes the form of dumbbells, pulleys, body weight, resistance bands, isometrics or whatever. Resistance builds strength. Resistance builds muscle.

People debating the issue means they aren’t engaged in the very thing they are arguing against. Can resistance bands build real muscle? Can body weight exercises build real muscle? Go to Google Images and search “men’s gymnastics” and similar search terms to see with your own eyes the awesome muscle that gymnasts have built utilizing only body weight exercise.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. People wasting their time debating is a obviously just a distraction from their actually doing. The Nike slogan is more pertinent today than ever: Just Do It.