site banner
PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2021 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 4, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Anyone here tried doing DDR/Stepmania for cardio? I am thinking about it because it get the hardest part of cardio - total and utter boredom out.

I play underwater hockey for my cardio. Definitely solves the boredom problem. I never really exercise unless it is a sport of some kind.

Problem with sports is you nees adversaries to be interesting - and that means communicating with people.

There are many people out there doing sports already. They advertise, too, and are very open to newcomers. Possibly the easiest avenue for communicating-with-people out there.

DDR is pretty bad for your knees. I love DDR, but one of the problems is DDR optimization is basically moving as little as possible to maximize accuracy and or/speed.

DDR is pretty bad for your knees.

I always disable jumps. mostly mercy for my neighbors downstairs, but I guess it mitigates the worst load on the knees.

basically moving as little as possible to maximize accuracy and or/speed.

Isn't that true for any sport?

I guess that's true, but moving efficiently in other sports still requires a lot more effort than in itg. Compare running efficiently vs stamina Stepmania players https://youtube.com/watch?v=mnI9GuKWp1k (sorry too lazy to hyperlink rn)

I am against using the bar because then you miss the whole balance switching and keeping. That is massive core workout and big energy expenditure

I don't think it works for losing weight, but it's a good stamina builder for sure. I base this on the fact that for at least six months in the early noughts when I worked across from Timezone I watched giant men move their feet impossibly to edm every single day and never lose weight. It was spectacular to watch, almost physics defying seeing these 180kg guys do Paranoia on expert, and I was sure they'd lose weight just from sweating (the arcade had big industrial fans everywhere but no a/c) but if they did lose any weight it seemed marginal. But they definitely improved their stamina, going from not being able to finish a track to completing tracks and not even being out of breath by the end of the year.

yeah cardio just does not burn much fat. Runners and cyclists are thin because they do not eat much to begin with, not that running induces much weight loss. the sort of person with the discipline to take up running as a habit probably has the discipline to eat less.

You never lose weight from cardio. That is an axiom

How is that possible?

Googling it only gives me people arguing over CICO.

CICO is descriptively correct. Basically everyone agrees with that. There are huge disputes about whether it's prescriptively correct, with adjacent arguments about what constitutes "prescribing" it. One might even say that prescribing ozempic is, in a roundabout way, prescribing CICO, because the primary mechanism by which it causes you to lose weight is that you eat fewer calories than you use.

The meme is that you don't lose weight from cardio, or more pithily, "You can't outrun a bad diet." Harvard has some estimates of calorie usage by weight/activity here. Double them if you're thinking, "I'm going to do this for an hour." Well, are you going to do that every day? 500cal/day ≈ 1lb/week. I have a good friend who is an MD and a prof in public health who just flatly said, "We've known that number in the literature for a long time." It is descriptively correct. Many of those activities get you ≈500cal/hr. IF you do that every day AND eat at what is otherwise your maintenance, you will lose ≈1lb/week. Oh, you're only doing it three days a week? Reduce that rate by half. Oh, you're having an extra bottle of gatorade while you ride your bike (on top of what is otherwise your normal maintenance), that's 140cal (just whatever random flavor came up first in a search, 20oz bottle), taking you down another third. "I exercise all week so I can eat good"? ROFL.

One cannot determine whether a sink will overflow just by looking at the rate at which water is going down the drain. You need the rate that water is going in, too. Implicit in the meme is, "You don't lose weight by cardio alone," because if that's your plan, and your plan is to completely ignore what you're eating, it's extremely likely that you're just going to eat more.

Herman Pontzer has shown that the body adapts by burning fewer calories at rest, so your total CO is constrained. This is assuming you don't overeat due to hunger after working out. This goes to show why weight loss is so hard. The only viable option is to eat less, which is uncomfortable and unsustainable for most people.

Ah, see, we were in the land of memes, not the finer points of research. This is a fine point, indeed, and most people should probably mostly ignore it. The meme version of the constrained daily energy expenditure model is mostly wrong, anyway (as opposed to the real version). It's certainly not 100%. It's dose dependent, etc. One can get into the estimates of this and that, but it's probably mostly swamped by individual variability for most people, and most people are probably not taking a genuine step function with their exercise in a way that lends itself to making these sorts of estimates useful. If anything, if someone is actually paying close enough attention for this sort of thing to matter, the step function is likely to be a step down function, where a normally-highly-athletic person who is paying close attention to their energy balance gets injured or something and their physical activity level goes down significantly for an extended period of time.

Ah, see, we were in the land of memes, not the finer points of research. This is a fine point, indeed, and most people should probably mostly ignore it.

I literally cited someone's research

Yeah, and like I said, before that, we were in the land of memes. I went on to talk about the research that you sort of kind of cited. You didn't actually cite it in enough detail to tell if you were just invoking the meme version of that research or the real version of that research.

The human body is really really efficient. It is just hard to burn a lot of calories doing it. And there are quite a bit of people that do really hard work - construction worker for example - and you will see quite a bit of them that are chunky. And it is really easy to compensate for the calories burned with a couple of spoonfulls of something.

CICO works, but people have really hard time dealing with the CI part. And you rarely could CO a wrong CI. And if you get the CI under control you don't need anything else - as ozempic faces show.

The human body is really really efficient. It is just hard to burn a lot of calories doing it. And there are quite a bit of people that do really hard work - construction worker for example - and you will see quite a bit of them that are chunky. And it is really easy to compensate for the calories burned with a couple of spoonfulls of something.

this times 100x. It's not like laborers are overwhelmingly thin compared to office workers. Bill Gates was wire-thin in his 20-30s despite his job literally entailing sitting at a computer all day. Gyms are full of people who are overweight and never lose much. The body adapts by slowing metabolism (CO) or increasing hunger (CI).

I lost 35lbs in 2.5 months with cardio

It just depends how big you are

Diet came later

(I rode my bicycle two hours a day to / fro work in the South Florida sun in August @305lbs lol)

I do generally think bicycling is superior to running as a form of cardio for weight loss. Most people who are overweight are also not good enough runners to minimize the impact or avoid repetitive stress injuries.

For serious road cycling there is also a social aspect that bicycling has over other forms of cardio. It's possible to ride with a group that will push you, but by utilizing the aerodynamic draft sucking doesn't hold up the group. You have to be much more closely match to keep pace running. You can also hang out in a peloton where you are relatively strong and replace some of the idle chat you would do in a bar. For what I assume are work schedule reasons, fast group rides are often at dinner time. If you get sufficiently thrashed, it's possible to just be too tiered to cook and eat a proper dinner after a ride. From personal experience, replacing dinner with a 2-3 hour group ride and a protein bar 4-5 times a week is good for like 4 lbs/week. Probably not optimal for health, sustainability, or performance though.

I have done this on and off for a couple of decades now and for your exact reason. I have a PS2, several different DDR games, and 3 different dance pads in varying states of disrepair for this purpose, and IME doing x amount of minutes on standard/heavy step songs can indeed give me a great cardio workout. I love it! That said, for the last couple of years I've been taking advantage of the greenway trail right down the road from where I work and walking that after work when I can.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats