Winning The Mental Battle of Physical Fitness

AnnPT77

NorthCascades wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

NorthCascades wrote: »

kshama2001 wrote: »

kshama2001 wrote: »

NorthCascades wrote: »

I finally got around to it. This was great, I'll have to find other talks he's given.

I disagree about it can't be fun if you're doing it right, but that's a minor quibble. I'd urge anybody to try a bike and Nordic skis, going fast and being competitive are fun and require intensity. Otherwise, not really much to disagree about.

Yes, the only disagreement I can recall was also that exercise isn't fun.

Did anyone dig up his checklist for physical fitness? There was something about stairs...

From the transcript I mentioned above:

"I want you to have enough [bad transcription / cardio something] to be able to step up and down on a 16 and quarter inch box chair or stool or an 8-inch stair for three consecutive minutes.

Take the pulse for 15 seconds and multiply the beats by four. If your pulse is higher than 144 beats a minute for men, or 156 beats a minute for women on a sixteen and quarter-inch step, you just failed the test. And 75% of the people in this room, if you’re typical, will fail that test.

A lot of you runners don’t have good cardiovascular fitness, but no one has been able to explain that to you, that test will.

And it’s not my test. I didn’t make it up. It’s out there being used by the research community."

I'd like to hear more about runners having poor cardiovascular fitness, because it doesn't ring true for me, so maybe he's talking about something other than what seems obvious?

I'm curious to see how I'll do in the step test. I'm healing well and this will have to wait a bit, but I'm going to try it. Question is how fast do you step up and down? I'm sure I could pass or fail this test depending on my pace. My LTHR is about 165 bpm.

Speculating: Perhaps typical runners have poor CV fitness on this test because of the sport-specificity of conditioning? I kinda raised an eyebrow at that, too.

Besides not saying how fast to step, he mentions nothing about different standards about the two different sizes of steps. Huh?

I'm no expert, but I can't think of a reason the female standard is so different from the male one, either - common to see sex differentiation in some fitness standards, but not so sure about this one.

The fittest person I know is a woman, for what it's worth. And a runner.

I'm not disputing that there a fit runners, not at all. I know bunches of them (some quite-competitive marathoners and regular Iron Man competitors, for example). I was just admitting that physical results from unfamiliar activities can produce results not reflective of total fitness, because some aspects of conditioning are sport-specific (some transferability, of course, but not total). We can underperform a little or a surprising lot when doing something novel, as a consequence. But I don't think, in case where that occurs, it means that the result is accurately reflective of "fitness" as an abstract quality.

But it seemed whacky to me that he said that, too. And that he distinguished female heart rate from male, since heart rate charts are not something I've commonly seen separately by sex (unlike body fat, which - from now-fading memory of a video I'm also unwilling to re-watch, I think he didn't differentiate by sex, though that usually is targeted differently for men vs. women in mainstream sources). If he derived that from the ACE test for VO2max, as Duck_Puddle suggested he might have, that makes a little more sense, because V02max targets do do differ by sex (in the usual statistical senses, of course) . . . but also by age, which he doesn't mention, so still weird.

I guess I'm still trying to be fair and give him the benefit of the doubt that there was some sense in there somewhere, since so many people really liked what this guy said and seemed to find the talk helpful/insightful, when it didn't strike me that way at all. As a whole, I found the talk ultra-prescriptive, and in certain respects inconsistent with my understanding of what other mainstream (not random blogosphere) sources say about certain technical details . . . but I'm not a professional in the field like he is, nor am I likely to be asked to give a TED talk. Well, a TEDx talk, which is a little different. So I figured I just had a strange take on it.

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NorthCascades

AnnPT77 wrote: »

NorthCascades wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

NorthCascades wrote: »

kshama2001 wrote: »

kshama2001 wrote: »

NorthCascades wrote: »

I finally got around to it. This was great, I'll have to find other talks he's given.

I disagree about it can't be fun if you're doing it right, but that's a minor quibble. I'd urge anybody to try a bike and Nordic skis, going fast and being competitive are fun and require intensity. Otherwise, not really much to disagree about.

Yes, the only disagreement I can recall was also that exercise isn't fun.

Did anyone dig up his checklist for physical fitness? There was something about stairs...

From the transcript I mentioned above:

"I want you to have enough [bad transcription / cardio something] to be able to step up and down on a 16 and quarter inch box chair or stool or an 8-inch stair for three consecutive minutes.

Take the pulse for 15 seconds and multiply the beats by four. If your pulse is higher than 144 beats a minute for men, or 156 beats a minute for women on a sixteen and quarter-inch step, you just failed the test. And 75% of the people in this room, if you’re typical, will fail that test.

A lot of you runners don’t have good cardiovascular fitness, but no one has been able to explain that to you, that test will.

And it’s not my test. I didn’t make it up. It’s out there being used by the research community."

I'd like to hear more about runners having poor cardiovascular fitness, because it doesn't ring true for me, so maybe he's talking about something other than what seems obvious?

I'm curious to see how I'll do in the step test. I'm healing well and this will have to wait a bit, but I'm going to try it. Question is how fast do you step up and down? I'm sure I could pass or fail this test depending on my pace. My LTHR is about 165 bpm.

Speculating: Perhaps typical runners have poor CV fitness on this test because of the sport-specificity of conditioning? I kinda raised an eyebrow at that, too.

Besides not saying how fast to step, he mentions nothing about different standards about the two different sizes of steps. Huh?

I'm no expert, but I can't think of a reason the female standard is so different from the male one, either - common to see sex differentiation in some fitness standards, but not so sure about this one.

The fittest person I know is a woman, for what it's worth. And a runner.

I'm not disputing that there a fit runners, not at all. I know bunches of them (some quite-competitive marathoners and regular Iron Man competitors, for example). I was just admitting that physical results from unfamiliar activities can produce results not reflective of total fitness, because some aspects of conditioning are sport-specific (some transferability, of course, but not total). We can underperform a little or a surprising lot when doing something novel, as a consequence. But I don't think, in case where that occurs, it means that the result is accurately reflective of "fitness" as an abstract quality.

But it seemed whacky to me that he said that, too. And that he distinguished female heart rate from male, since heart rate charts are not something I've commonly seen separately by sex (unlike body fat, which - from now-fading memory of a video I'm also unwilling to re-watch, I think he didn't differentiate by sex, though that usually is targeted differently for men vs. women in mainstream sources). If he derived that from the ACE test for VO2max, as Duck_Puddle suggested he might have, that makes a little more sense, because V02max targets do do differ by sex (in the usual statistical senses, of course) . . . but also by age, which he doesn't mention, so still weird.

I guess I'm still trying to be fair and give him the benefit of the doubt that there was some sense in there somewhere, since so many people really liked what this guy said and seemed to find the talk helpful/insightful, when it didn't strike me that way at all. As a whole, I found the talk ultra-prescriptive, and in certain respects inconsistent with my understanding of what other mainstream (not random blogosphere) sources say about certain technical details . . . but I'm not a professional in the field like he is, nor am I likely to be asked to give a TED talk. Well, a TEDx talk, which is a little different. So I figured I just had a strange take on it.

I think you and I are in agreement. I posted about my ultra fit friend to question the talk, not your thoughts.

On the whole though I did enjoy it.

CSARdiver

NorthCascades wrote: »

I finally got around to it. This was great, I'll have to find other talks he's given.

I disagree about it can't be fun if you're doing it right, but that's a minor quibble. I'd urge anybody to try a bike and Nordic skis, going fast and being competitive are fun and require intensity. Otherwise, not really much to disagree about.

I believe he's referring to this philosophically - that one does not enjoy working out, but enjoys the benefits, over time the mind accepts that suffering is necessary and you begin to enjoy the suffering realizing the joy which comes later. Not sure if I agree with this breakdown, but I understand the rationale behind it.