Why I Love & Hate Pinterest
Following on from last week, where we started looking at the poor understanding of realistic attainment displayed by pinners on Pinterest, this week we have the 2nd and 3rd examples of this heinous crime. Starting with...
“4 Moves for Sculpted Inner Thighs!”
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against working one area specifically, but these advice pins are just going about it the wrong way pretty much all the time. They’re promulgating this ‘if you focus on one area for ridiculous lengths of time with a select few exercises and mega reps then you will make them slimmer!’ mentality. Most of these things will suggest a few odd exercises (4 in the example) that focus on the offending area and then basically give you huge rep counts to do.
One quick question – what happens when you do massive reps on one area?
It floods with blood.
What happens when an area becomes engorged with blood?
It looks fuller and bigger.
Want to know what doesn’t happen? It doesn’t magically shock the fat clinging to that specific area, causing it to suddenly give up the ghost and begrudgingly disperse.
Sometimes I think that’s what they’re hoping will happen, and of course that’s where they fall short in their goals – they’ve focussed on the shape of one specific area, instead of focusing on a) the musculature of the area, b) the fat content of the area, and c) the role that area plays in the function of the body. They’ve tried to disguise this myth we call spot reduction behind exercises that will fool you into thinking you’re getting a great workout. When you focus on the fat in that area obscuring the beautiful musculature beneath it then you will start to understand the real way to make a healthy change – lower your body fat percentage!
Handy tip: you can’t choose where your body loses fat, sorry. Usually you’ll lower your body fat percentage (through caloric expenditure being greater than your caloric consumption, metabolic conditioning workouts, and tracking macros) and the fat will fall off in multiple areas, not just the area you stare at really hard every day. As that fat gets stripped away the muscle beneath will be revealed, and that’s where appropriate resistance exercise comes in. Know why I hate that abduction/adduction machine? Because a simple squat will do the exact same thing, better, and with LOADS more added into the bargain (fuller and rounder butt, stronger and sexier thighs, tight and defined hamstrings, etc).
Plus, squats have loads of variations to keep it interesting, unlike the abduction/adduction machine, which is one-dimensional and hellaciously boring.
I’ll sum this point up because I’m going on for way too long
with each of these.
Doing loads of reps of weird exercises on one specific area does not guarantee that area will become more ‘sculpted’ (to use the pin’s vernacular), eating a good diet that allows you to lower your body fat percentage, and then utilising a sensible resistance training programme to build the area’s musculature, does.
Doing loads of reps of weird exercises on one specific area does not guarantee that area will become more ‘sculpted’ (to use the pin’s vernacular), eating a good diet that allows you to lower your body fat percentage, and then utilising a sensible resistance training programme to build the area’s musculature, does.
“300 rep abs workout!”
Until I saw what the actual content of the pin was.
Now, the construction of the workout is not horrendous, it’s
really not. It just took me just under 5 minutes to get through (I’ll admit my
form may have been poor at points), so it’s a great blast workout for the core.
The issue comes in two places.
Firstly, how many of those 300 reps are spinal flexion and how many are spinal extension?
Well, that’s 300/0 then (well, not strictly speaking as the oblique stuff isn’t quite the same, but still). There’s the first issue.
The jury is still out on whether or not our spines have a finite amount of spinal flexion movements we can do in our lifetimes (I’m not convinced, as the studies haven’t accounted for breaks between loads, muscular adaptation, and natural recovery – Schoenfeld & Contreras, 2011), but if they are right, surely it becomes extremely important to not focus solely on spinal flexion but also spinal extension.
Additionally, even if the research is disproven conclusively enough and thrown out eventually, surely it just makes sense to treat the core as a whole? If you’re interested in having a strong core, then you need to hit the whole thing, not just one plane of movement. I mean, I don’t really think lying down and doing variations of crunches will ever make someone athletic (how often are you doing those movements in sport, really?), so I tend not to advocate that style of ab training anyway. What DOES make someone athletic is being able to move their body cohesively, powerfully, and be in control of it regardless of circumstance. You take ‘a cruncher’ (someone who exclusively crunches) and say “here, fight off this double-leg takedown” and they’ll probably go down like a sack of hammers. Do the same with someone who works their core as a whole and they’ll most likely fend it off far better, because they’re strong in every direction.
Okay, moving on.
Secondly, see that small writing beneath the header? It says “do this exercise every other day in addition to cardio or strength training”.
How can that be a recommendation?
Do they mean to do this workout every time you train, roughly every other day? Or do this every other day and just whether it falls on a training day is irrelevant? How long should people keep doing this? What happens when this is easy?
Why does someone need to do 300 crunch-type exercises every other day anyway? How is that functionally helpful?
There’s so many issues with that advice, and I think this once again highlights the issues that anyone who posts this type of thing on Pinterest has to try and think of ahead of time – ‘how will this be interpreted?’
The author might have meant every other day for 3 weeks, or they could have meant do it forever (I’d rather not believe this is the case though, because it would make them poorly informed and potentially dangerous).
Also, how do we know this hasn't been taken out of context? It could be part of a much broader training programme that has been periodized to include this at appropriate times. That’s another issue with reliance upon Pinterest for training input, there’s no way of knowing if you’re getting the whole picture.
Firstly, how many of those 300 reps are spinal flexion and how many are spinal extension?
Well, that’s 300/0 then (well, not strictly speaking as the oblique stuff isn’t quite the same, but still). There’s the first issue.
The jury is still out on whether or not our spines have a finite amount of spinal flexion movements we can do in our lifetimes (I’m not convinced, as the studies haven’t accounted for breaks between loads, muscular adaptation, and natural recovery – Schoenfeld & Contreras, 2011), but if they are right, surely it becomes extremely important to not focus solely on spinal flexion but also spinal extension.
Additionally, even if the research is disproven conclusively enough and thrown out eventually, surely it just makes sense to treat the core as a whole? If you’re interested in having a strong core, then you need to hit the whole thing, not just one plane of movement. I mean, I don’t really think lying down and doing variations of crunches will ever make someone athletic (how often are you doing those movements in sport, really?), so I tend not to advocate that style of ab training anyway. What DOES make someone athletic is being able to move their body cohesively, powerfully, and be in control of it regardless of circumstance. You take ‘a cruncher’ (someone who exclusively crunches) and say “here, fight off this double-leg takedown” and they’ll probably go down like a sack of hammers. Do the same with someone who works their core as a whole and they’ll most likely fend it off far better, because they’re strong in every direction.
Okay, moving on.
Secondly, see that small writing beneath the header? It says “do this exercise every other day in addition to cardio or strength training”.
How can that be a recommendation?
Do they mean to do this workout every time you train, roughly every other day? Or do this every other day and just whether it falls on a training day is irrelevant? How long should people keep doing this? What happens when this is easy?
Why does someone need to do 300 crunch-type exercises every other day anyway? How is that functionally helpful?
There’s so many issues with that advice, and I think this once again highlights the issues that anyone who posts this type of thing on Pinterest has to try and think of ahead of time – ‘how will this be interpreted?’
The author might have meant every other day for 3 weeks, or they could have meant do it forever (I’d rather not believe this is the case though, because it would make them poorly informed and potentially dangerous).
Also, how do we know this hasn't been taken out of context? It could be part of a much broader training programme that has been periodized to include this at appropriate times. That’s another issue with reliance upon Pinterest for training input, there’s no way of knowing if you’re getting the whole picture.
That’s enough out of me for now!
I’ll see you all next week, when I discuss Pinterest’s occasional lack of
ACTUAL information.I'm currently working on a new series, one that will not go from week to week, but rather be an 'every now and then' type of thing. It's going to be cool...
If you want to know more, then drop me an e-mail and I'll send you a sneak preview...
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