site banner

Wellness Wednesday for March 20, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

confounded by the super heavyweights with enormous fat mass

Not just that, but if you look at the methodology they do not control for any confounders. Particularity the fact that countries that focus on Olympic weightlifting typically do so because it's relatively inexpensive to have a program compared to other sports. Look at any of the medals tables and you see a bunch of North Korea, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Belarus, etc. None of which are famed for longevity of the population. That lifespan chart is absolutely useless without controlling for confounders, unless you think equestrian and sailing has some magical protective powers other than being a sign of affluence.

They also fail to quantify the likely effect of steroid use, which is absolutely rampant in top level weightlifting. "...in the past decade, more than 600 lifters have tested positive." This is particularity relevant because the steroids used are chosen for their ability to avoid doping control and make the athletes stronger not for safety

Also agree, you should probably not take training advise from someone who does not understand the difference between general strength training for health, weightlifting the sport, and bodybuilding.