New York Times – What’s the Single Best Exercise?

A family member recently sent me a link to this article published in the New York Times.  It asks, “What’s the Single Best Exercise?”  In the article they ask a number of physiologists this question and each has a different answer.  Some conclude that it’s walking.  Other answers included squats, calisthenics, and high intensity interval training.

As far as I’m concerned though, I deemed this article worthless before I read beyond the title.

When we were younger and infantile (yea, I know… I’m older but no less infantile), my friends and I would pull our cars up to people walking, jogging and bicycling, roll down the window, and ask, “How do you get there?”

Anytime someone pulls their car up to you, rolls down the window and starts out asking, “how do I get….” there’s a knee jerk reaction to start thinking about where you’re at currently so you can respond helpfully. Or, depending on the neighborhood you’re from, you might be thinking, “Drive-by!!!! Get down!!”

We’d get a kick out of the confused look glaring back at us as the exerciser’s wheels spun trying to come up with an immediate answer.  Eventually they’d retort with, “Get where!?”

Now if only the physiologists interviewed in the above-referenced article were so bright.  Maybe then the New York Times would have had a meaningful article on their hands.

To ask “what’s the best exercise” without concluding the question with “for THIS particular goal and for THIS particular person” is akin to the mindless game we used to play above.

Get who where and how? Oh, and when does he need to get there?

See what I mean?

Specificity means something.  Over the weekend someone emailed me looking for help – she was trying to “transform her body” into something resembling “toned.”  Her exercise schedule started and ended with marathon training each and every day.  When I told her to do a google image search for “female marathon runners” and asked, “Is that that body you’re shooting for?” she got the point.

And that’s not a jab at female marathon runners or any women who do in fact strive to have that body type.  The point is, form follows function.  How you train your body will directly impact how it looks, neverminding genetics and nutrition for the sake of brevity.

There’s certainly an optimal way to exercise, but it’s always going to be context specific to the individual, goals and circumstances.  Don’t ever forget this.

Good Reads 4/18/11

Matt Perryman recently wrote about patience in the game of strength training.  In this blog post he attempts to redefine “progress” for the sake of sanity.  The noob in the weight room can bank on weekly gains in strength and even size.  As experience under the bar accumulates though and you venture closer to your genetic limits, whatever that might mean, framing how you look at success in the weight room makes a heck of a lot of sense.  Matt offers up some very sage wisdom here.

The starvation mode caused by excessive cardio?  That’s what Tom Venuto discusses in his most recent article which you can read here.  It seems that many of today’s exercisers become a tad neurotic when it comes to volume and calorie intake.  Slash calories as low as possible while ramping up exercise volume to the moon and I’ll get the best of both worlds, right?  Wrong.  I can’t explain how many times I’ve had women email me asking for help with their plateaus who were training for a marathon while eating 1200 calories.  Tom does a great job explaining why this simply isn’t The Way.  Energy availability matters!

Anthony Colpo isn’t subtle when he wrote Why Most People are Overweight, Out of Shape & Likely to Stay that Way.  Rightfully so, too.  It gets tiring telling people to focus on what we know – the basics – all the while they’re out throwing their money at con men in hopes of a quick fix.

I reviewed Jamie Hale’s book, Should I Eat the Yolk, back in October.  It’s a fun, easy read that dispels a lot of the myths that plague the fitness industry.   He covers this topic in the book, but he also wrote about Is Bottled Water Safer Than Tap Water on his site, which is an eye-opening read.

In this article, James Krieger answers the question, Why Is It So Easy to Regain Weight?  In reality he’s really doing some investigation into what many of my readers label as the “starvation mode.”  He explains how a reduction in basal metabolic rate might not be the primary culprit at play in adaptive thermogenesis.  Instead, a reduction in non-exercise activity thermogenesis may play a greater role.  Put differently, people who lost considerable weight were expending less energy than what would be predicted given their weight simply because they were moving less.

Lyle McDonald is one of the best writers out there in the fitness field in my opinion.  Most of his articles and all of his books go into great detail about the topic he’s writing about.  Amusingly, one of my favorite articles of his has to do with “subordinating” the finer details to the fundamental principles.  This is something you always hear me harping about – “You’ll get most of your mileage out of the basics so focus on them.”  Lyle’s Fundamental Principles Versus Minor Details is definitely worth a read.