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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1730 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.

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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.

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 a 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.

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 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.

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