16kg is pretty standard for a male. Personally, with getting older I really love higher reps for conditioning with a 12kg but they all have their use.
I think most people are delusional though to believe they are going to stick with home kettlebell workouts if they don't like the gym. Most likely the kettlebell will be an expensive door stopper in a few months.
I have just met so few in shape people in my life that don't go to a gym. I have a pretty decent home gym and a good assortment of kettlebells but the external gym I go to just has so much more.
He makes some good arguments and is certainly better read in economics than the youtube conspiracy theory video level/back cover summary of the Creature from Jekyll Island economics most crypto enthusiast stochastic parrot back as truth.
The 24/7 crypto is a scam community is extremely odd though. I can't stand the sport of NASCAR but I can't imagine enveloping my entire thought and identity around how much I think NASCAR is a bullshit sport and trying to convince people to stop watching NASCAR.
Finding an anti-passion to that degree seems extraordinarily unhealthy mentally.
Crypto might well be the biggest vehicle for financial fraud the world has ever seen.
Whatever you think of Crypto more broadly, millions of innocent people are being prayed on, who have lost collectively, literally billions of dollars, some more vulnerable to the impact of that than others.
To a lot of (good) people, it’s unacceptable to allow that to go unchallenged.
So yeah I think I can see how it’s a bit different.
It’s an extension of the culture war. Tons of right wing culture warriors got really rich off crypto without doing anything to deserve that wealth, so left wing culture warriors are naturally opposed to it. You check out /r/Buttcoin, they also hate GameStop (valid) and Elon Musk (much less so, he’s doing great work outside of Twitter despite his immaturity) for those same fundamental reasons. It’s more of the same social media derangement cycle that sucks in so many people on both sides, even if they fundamentally have a point about a lot of crypto being based on nothing
I think it would be more accurate to say his companies are doing great work.
He's an idea guy, but mostly he's just an investor. A toxic, thin-skinned, sometimes fraudulent investor, but it's hard to argue with the work being done by companies like SpaceX and Tesla (not just what's being promised, but what has actually been done). IMO it's important to understand both sides of that coin.
Nah. Tesla is doing good work. They're far from perfect, but it's an interesting product, and they were first to market in many ways. I can't see it lasting that much longer in it's current form, but that doesn't undermine the work they've already done.
It's also important to note that Musk isn't the founder of that one. He just has a contract that gives him the title "founder".
And there's definitely a trend where his earlier companies were less likely to be scams. Zip2 and Paypal were both successful AFAIK. Boring Company is a bust unless it's radically reorganized (without underground vacuum tunnels), OpenAI is probably BS too. It's a little hard to say right now.
Elon Musk, personally, is an asshole. He is also majorly addicted to Twitter, which toxifies him, and his acquisition of Twitter is the equivalent of a severe alcoholic buying Anheuser-Busch.
Nevertheless, Teslas are great cars and SpaceX is doing phenomenal work in space travel. Hating Musk with a passion is extremely weird, and tons of online people really do
The reasoning is sound. It's not about being allowed to say things but rather show that the company controlling the AI is manipulating the output. This will have major consequences as AI become a part of our daily life and is an important discussion. It's what the Google employee tried to highlight but everyone just ran with it being sentient which was a ludicrous claim primarily to get people to talk about it.
We will automate some bullshit jobs but create all kinds of new bullshit jobs that have titles that start with AI.
Thousands of titles like "AI ____ ____ Manager" that also does nothing but schedule meetings about meetings about AI.
The mistake to me is to believe bullshit jobs are the end result of some systemic inefficiency that AI is going to automate out of existence. I just don't think that is at all the case because otherwise we would just cut so many bullshit jobs right now without AI.
It is because you don't know what you are talking about when it comes to economics.
A currency that doesn't inflate, doesn't get spent. It gets horded and stops acting as a medium of exchange. Exactly what we see with crypto and why the currency part is bullshit with it.
It is just embarrassing how ignorant people into crypto are with economics. This is economics 101 stuff, most basic ideas.
To say it is a random walk is confusing a model of reality with reality.
Totally agree with the other poster though. You can pretty much prove whatever you want in the market depending on the start date and window size.
I would think the driving factor is after market earnings releases, expectations for those releases and how many there randomly happen to be during the window in question.
The standard bullshit line in the fitness industry has always been "everyone else is wrong". Practically what every single trainer ever in the world has said.
The reason is because of all the things I have done in my life, lifting is the most trivially simple activity there is. It is as complex as shoveling dirt. The only way to differentiate if trying to make money is to bullshit. Pick the weights up, put them down, eat food. It just not that complicated.
Yup. Everything else is either bull shit or an attempt to optimize. Unless you are a body builder or a pro athlete you really should focus on consistency more than optimization.
Getting 1% better results for the average person is going to be nullified by the beers they drink on the weekend/the multiple days they skip because they dont feel like working out/any number of other normal life actives that are not optimal.
Find a way to exercise that you enjoy it and do it often. After that don't think about it too much.
Recently I've been riding an exercise bike after work while playing a video game on my computer with an xbox controller. Every 5 minutes I hop off the bike and do some weight training then get back on the bike. I ride for an hour. Doing this most weekdays has lead to far better results than when I used to go to the gym because I actually do it everyday/most days and I don't rdread it.
Unless you are a body builder or a pro athlete you really should focus on consistency more than optimization
This is the best general advice I've read on here. Follow a fitness routine, stick with it. Whatever makes that easier for you, that's your secrete sauce.
Another tip in this vein that I've found helpful when it comes to strength training, especially on days you feel tired or unmotivated, is to not count the reps. Just do as many as you can with good form and then stop. Trying to always hit some number creates unnecessary stress and frustration when you can't get there, and causes injury when form breaks down and/or you push too far.
The point is to fatigue the muscle, not do some particular number of reps. If you're feeling good and want to test yourself or go for a PR, that's great, but if it makes you feel bad or you start dreading workouts, stop counting!
While this is better than not working out at all, the only way you're going to get your muscles to grow is by progressively overloading consistently over time, and if you have too many sessions where you aren't pushing more weight or doing more volume than the previous session, you'll be leaving a lot of gains on the table.
Yeah, you’re right of course about progressive overload being necessary for gains. You don’t need to count reps every workout to achieve it though. If you listen to your body and go to form breakdown, are consistent, and eat/sleep well, both the number of reps and weight you can do will naturally go up over time. It’s not at all linear though—depending on biorhythms, there will be ups and downs in the short term. My point is mainly not to sweat it on the many ‘off’ days when you can’t get a PR or might be well below. These are a normal part of the process. The important thing on these days is to just put the work in.
Darn, I can't find it. There's a guy who claims his only form of workout is just moving a massive pile of dirt back and forth in his yard. Significant because he's a pro athlete of some sort but I forget what he does -- NFL, UFC, strongman...
One day I'll stumble upon it again and come back here and share. Just thought it was funny to compare it to shoveling dirt when that's actually what an elite athlete does somewhere out in the world lol
The problem here is that there really are many little optimizations that could be applied to "pick up, put down" and some do work. Injury avoidance and recovery in particular are easy to overlook.
Of course the magnitude of the effect from most optimizations is small, so it's pretty easy for con artists to claim some secret or new breakthrough.
At the very highest levels people want every edge they can get, but it's silly for most of us who aren't devoted to competition to go down these rabbit holes. Pick up / put down / don't get hurt goes quite a long way.
No offence, but as someone who worked in construction, shovelling is actually not simple at all. And working with a pick is even more complex. There are all kinds of optimizations you can introduce to avoid back injury and to maintain a steady rhythm over an eight-hour workday.
This is one of my all-time favorite HN quotes: "Pick the weights up, put them down, eat food. It just not that complicated." Sincerely brought a smile to my face.
> The standard bullshit line in the fitness industry has always been "everyone else is wrong". Practically what every single trainer ever in the world has said.
I find YouTube trainers' flame wars quite enjoyable. They tend to get triggered by comments or other trainers' videos and publish angry (to me - funny) videos in response. Recent clip from Athlean-X (something about "worst fitness youtuber") is a good example. So much energy wasted on nagging.
When I want to listen to someone who appears to know their shit, I put dr. Mike from Renaissance Periodization[1] on.
> lifting is the most trivially simple activity there is
Lucky you. For me, I always hit plateaus after a couple of months, and then in the past have given up several times after no progress over many months.
This time, starting 13 months ago, I'm determined to stick with it, but still it's sloooooow, despite hours at the gym every other day (no exceptions!) putting in the work. So I'm definitely interested in seeing if there's some other approach that might be better -- more reps, higher weights, more/less variety, less rest period, more frequency, ....? Maybe the answer is I just need to be at the gym lifting hard 3 hours a day, 7 days a week.
There's a lot of different strategies you can employ when you hit a plateau. Try de-loading (e.g. 10% less weight) and working back up to the weight you plateaued at. Try adding drop sets after your main sets. Try implementing a periodization program. It could be related to your diet; perhaps you're not eating enough. It could be related to your sleep; perhaps you're not sleeping enough. It could be a result of supporting muscles that are lagging behind the main muscle utilized for a given lift, so do some research into supplemental exercises that could shore up those supporting muscles. Good luck!
You may not see any progress, but that doesn't mean there isn't any.
You are perfecting the moves you are making, and strengthening your bones, ligaments and tendons, which just don't develop nearly as fast as muscles.
Staying at a plateau for a while is sometimes great to avoid injury.
I would argue the complexity is in finding the simplicity. It's very easy to get overwhelmed with all the contradictory advice and information out there and become paralyzed by the fear that you may be dumping months or even years of effort into a sub-optimal plan. You're not wrong about the answer actually being very simple, but it's important not to trivialize the difficulty in arriving at that conclusion for a lot of people (myself included).
Getting healthy and looking good is the base line. If you workout for 6 months and don't see immediate changes you probably did something wrong. If you workout for 12 months and aren't looking better youre not proficient
This 100%, but I think it is also just the proliferation of information today.
99% of the gain is about a very simple set of exercises. I maintain that most people would get a superb musculature with just cycling/running, squats, deadlifts and bench presses (ignoring pre-existing injuries). 4 exercises where the most complex machinery is a bike, and even that can be replaced with running. Doing it consistently is the key.
But then two problems happen:
1. People try to find shortcuts to make things easier. This is basic human nature.
2. While looking for ways of making it easier, a huge pile of salesmen insert themselves into people's attention, peddling the latest program, diet, fad, complex equipment (hello Peloton), etc. At that point, anyone who doesn't have >10 years of experience with their own body will simply be lost and unable to discern true good advice from drivel.
As pointed out before, there's no money to be made, no "value to be added" to 4 dead simple exercises with a one off expenditure. There's no subscription to be sold, nothing can be turned into a service if the equipment lasts several lifetimes. The weights you buy yourself can be passed down to your kids, and they will likely be able to pass it down to their kids. A hunk of chromed steel can last a very long time, the only thing you have to buy is maybe running shoes or gears for your bike.
> most people would get a superb musculature with just cycling/running, squats, deadlifts and bench presses (ignoring pre-existing injuries).
FWIW, you just described the essence of the Tactical Barbell system here. I've been using it to great effect over the last ~4 years. I will probably never touch a different strength and conditioning program as long as I live.
Yeah, but at some point an LP stops being a productive use of time. I prefer wave/block and undulating periodization programs because I never feel like I'm anywhere in the vicinity of failure and I'm always fresh for hard conditioning the day after a strength or hypertrophy session.
The other bit you’re potentially missing is folks just want to emulate the “big” workouts that folks show off on social media. Which conveniently ignores the bread and butter boring stuff that’s actually critical to building effective fitness/whatever.
I forget what lecture it was but Feynman thought the idea of "computer science" as a bit bogus and that it is really all computer engineering.
To me, it is that at our core we are a society of marketing bullshitters. The vast majority of daily activity is marketing falsity as truth to each other in basically all context.
The problem is that it is obvious how useless and misconfigured our entire corporate management structures are with remote work so the easiest solution is to go back to the office.
The pandemic was a fun exercise in forced, real efficiency but we need to get back to the Dilbert cartoon version of life because the Dilbert cartoon characters call the shots and put a ton of time into becoming those characters.
I think most people are delusional though to believe they are going to stick with home kettlebell workouts if they don't like the gym. Most likely the kettlebell will be an expensive door stopper in a few months.
I have just met so few in shape people in my life that don't go to a gym. I have a pretty decent home gym and a good assortment of kettlebells but the external gym I go to just has so much more.