1. Thou shalt feel the love
It’s impossible to sustain something you hate long term, so don’t concern yourself with what is the better calorie burner or muscle builder, but instead experiment with a variety of things. Embrace that which feeds your fitness soul and eschew others. If it is fun and enjoyable you will want to keep doing it.
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Without further ado, I have asked some incredibly amazing female health and fitness professionals to discuss what fitness trend they dislike. While on any other occasion, I would have made sure that I represented an equal amount of males and females, the fact that females were completely excluded from the article made me want to give women as much exposure as possible. Enjoy!
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An Introduction To Female Fitness as We Know It
When it comes to attaining a svelte, athletic, and powerful physique, while simply feeling confident and healthy, women have to overcome a massive barrage of mental and physical hurdles. Unfortunately, in today’s physical society, including our fitness industry, women and young females are incessantly pressured or shamed into feeling like they should work out, or diet, solely to change their appearance. That they should strive to become a smaller, skinnier, more ‘’feminine,’’ and subservient version of their current self. Though that may seem a bit rash, this is the harsh reality that we need to start facing in order to make a market difference for the future.
In women’s-focused fitness marketing, you will generally hear or see the words – “diet”, “shrink”, “lose”, “tone”, “sculpt”, “calories”, “detox”, etc. However, rarely do you hear/see the words “stronger” and “fitter”, “adding muscle”, and “gaining confidence”.
Dr. James Andrews, who has performed countless career-saving surgeries on top-level athletes and is perhaps the most famed sports surgeon on the planet, was recently quoted in the Orlando Sentinel as saying, “Don’t treat 6- and 7-year-old kids like they’re professional athletes. They’re not ready for that level of high-intensity training.”
He extended that message for youth athletes at older ages, pleading for time off between seasons and within sports to help curb the rash of injuries incurred by young athletes.
As humans, we move our bodies to express our wants, needs, emotions, thoughts, and ideas. Ultimately, how well we move — and how much we move — determines how well we engage with the world and establish our larger purpose in life.
If you move well, you also think, feel, and live well.As someone who was initially motivated to move by aesthetic reasons, but quicly transitioned to enjoying the movement itself, I wholeheartedly endorse everything she says here.
Muscles heal. Bones grow. It’s the mental part of injury that haunts us – that keeps us awake at night. It’s the demons and the voices in the head – the fear that we’ll “never get back” to where we once were, or we “threw away all that hard work and training” or that we were in the “best shape of our lives” and now can only sit by as first-row spectators to watch as we lose our muscle, our endurance, our speed, our V02Max, and, at the core of it, our sense of self and our confidence.
And, if you really, truly, love your sport, what eats at you day and night is the overwhelming sense of losing a part of yourself. You mourn those missed opportunities. Toeing that start line. The joy of a hard training session and the feeling of accomplished soreness. You feel…lost. A ship without an anchor. Or fries without ketchup.
People tend to resort to the “sexy” fitness and diet trends because they promise quick results that not only go against the science of strength training and nutrition but also are not sustainable. The “unsexy” takes some effort and planning; it’s so much easier to take a diet pill, make a shake, or follow a juice cleanse (even if it doesn’t work in the long run!) instead of to prepare a healthy meal with real foods and follow a regular exercise routine that includes strength training and some high intensity interval conditioning. People say they “don’t have time,” and don’t want to put forth the effort.I encourage you to avoid focusing on the pictures of this super-fit woman, which are irrelevant to the actual content of the post. Sure, she looks amazing, but the whole point is that she's healthy as fuck - which is entirely achievable for all of us.
Most people only look at the training performed in the gym or on the track when assessing levels of fatigue. However, the body doesn’t differentiate between mental, emotional, or physical stress. As far as the systems of the body are concerned, stress is stress.
https://haroldgibbons.com/2016/03/25/in-defense-of-the-burpee/
The narcissistic atmosphere of the fitness industry and the focus on the aesthetic has combined with our lack of understanding of human psychology and motivation to destroy our ability to improve people’s health and fitness.
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WE ARE DRIVING THEM AWAY. People want to belong to the group. To do what everyone else is doing. We live in a culture that loves to believe in individuality and that everyone is unique. Unfortunately, this is just not true. People actually want to fit in, not stand out, and be a part of the group. That is basic human behavior.
I see lots of moves being performed wrong, explained wrong, and attributed to the wrong muscles. I see a tragic lack of understanding of anatomy and kinesiology being demonstrated by anyone who says an exercise will “tone up those inner thighs” or “melt those love handles.” I see a complete disregard for the principle of Specific Adaptation, and progressive overload. Because these girls have enviable bodies and are being regarded as “experts” and “gurus” however, they are helping this inaccurate information become even deeper embedded into pop fitness culture.
I have always had people become extremely uncomfortable with the size of my legs and derriere. This led to me having somewhat of a complex about them. I would dream of having smaller legs that people would stop looking at. I’d look in the mirror and cry that they were so B I G!Sound familiar? Read how my girl Holea got over that nonsense.
