Thought for the day (2): The luxury of working out:
I have been reading T-Nation since 2006. Over the years I have read a couple of articles on the “best time” to work out. I always thought what a luxury to be able to pick your on time to go to the gym. It seems my life always been someone telling me when to run, when to train (Basic, academies). In the work world is was always when I could, not when I wanted to. Anyway, I thought was an amusing rant:
Another view:
QUESTION FROM SOCIAL MEDIA: “Here’s a topic that’s come up a lot recently in discussions around me: Exercise timing. I hear opinions of all sorts around me: “Don’t lift until the evening.” “Don’t do cardio before you lift. Not even on the same day! (something, something, different pathways and will make you gain less in both).””
I have a term for the sort of things the questioner has heard or read: “the incoherent ramblings of people who have never done a day of real work in their lives.” The “fitness industry” is full of this foolishness propagated by the masses of trainers and self-proclaimed “researchers” who know nothing about human beings.
Here is the straight answer to the question:
NONE OF THAT MATTERS!
None of it. Nadda. Zip. Zilch. noise, noise, noise, words, words, words, blah, blah, blah.
Oh I can hear the clamor of angry voices from the fitness industry stuttering out, “but, but, but, but….”
But nothing! I’m tired of this lunacy.
You’re muscles don’t care what time it is, neither does mother nature, the tiger chasing you, the job, or the enemy.
You know what matters? What ACTUALLY matters? Proper specificity, enough general activity, and your ability to properly recover from your exertions (good food, good sleep, good tissue management, good mindset, good schedule). That’s it. Newsflash! You can go all the way to world champion with that while violating every one of those stupid articles. Anyone who has bothered to be a manual laborer or an actual athlete knows this.
The thing we must never lose sight of is the primal side of things. We are animals like any other. The facts of life and natural law govern our existence. The people writing these idiotic fitness articles about exercise timing understand little to nothing about the human being or how to train i
Our society idolizes and adores warrior societies like the Spartans. North America is Spartan-crazy and the fitness industry has hundreds of “Spartan fitness” challenges.
Men by the thousands flock to gyms to exercise to exhaustion in a frenzy of pathetic virtue signaling. In their heads they are training to be just like those epic warriors. There’s just one problem… These little smoke sessions have nothing to do with the military fitness Spartan Hoplites had.
For example, not a single one of these fitness programs involves marching with combat loads or even locomotion of any kind. For that matter none of them train you to fight either. Thermopylae is 210 miles from Sparta and the Spartan Hoplite carried over 70lbs of armor, weapons and equipment. It would take any army then or now at least 20 days to march there. Yet none of the virtue signalers could march for a full day with half that load if their lives depended on it.
So where is the loaded march training? The Spartans walked and ran no less than 10-20 miles per day in training and daily living. Where is that activity? Now for the real kick in the teeth. The Spartans were doing hundreds of times more “cardio” than the average person today. Were they known for being weak and poorly muscled? Were they only able to fight in the morning, or only at night? Did all that marching and running kill their awesome gains? Were they known for their inability to maintain power output because that cardio got in the way?
History tells us that the Spartans broke almost every fitness rule known to modern man, and:
Could march faster and further than any other army in the region, possibly the world.
Fought with the highest level of skill in the entire world at the time.
Could fight with the same high level of skill with little fatigue for days on end without relief.
Were the strongest and fastest men in the entire region as they always dominated the original Olympic Games
.
Trained for 6-12 hours per day.
Later the Romans went on to be as good, and then better than the Spartans as evidenced by the fact that Rome was the state that finally conquered Sparta. Rome adopted most of the same methods and made them more scientific. Within a generation of their founding, the Roman army became the fastest foot-mobile army in all of human history known for the same things as the Spartans listed above. They were also
Yet, according to the keyboard commandos and “fitness professionals,” none of this is possible.
Many people wonder what sets our training apart. What is it that allows us to get the results that we do? Well… I hate to give too much away, but we train using the same principles the Spartans and the Romans used and that’s why we get the same results they did.
_s for exercise timing… It’s the stuff of weakness. You had best be prepared to be able to give 100% at any time. You had best be prepared at all times to run for your life or fight hard or lift something heavy. Worse still, the way real life usually plays out is you have to run first, then fight and or do heavy lifting. That’s another thing they say simply cannot be; yet that’s real life. You don’t get to schedule fights, wars, emergencies and in many cases your personal schedule. You don’t get to decide which thing you
do first. Train when you can and make sure you recover well. End of story.
