Formosa Fitness

We don't have to quit our desk jobs and work as peasants to reap the benefits of movement. Instead we need to look beyond the sitting-type fitness that many people are doing. Think about it this way: if you're sitting hunched over a desk all day, why would you choose fitness that also has you sitting and likely hunched over? It just doesn't make any sense. Your fitness makes the problems WORSE, not better.

Sitting types of fitness have many problems. One of them is that the stabilization muscles aren't used. Sitting isolates most muscles except the few being worked -- that means fewer calories are being burned. It's an extremely inefficient way to work out.

Functional fitness, on the other hand, gets you up out of your chair and doing all those movements that you don't do all day long. Using the basic human movements of deadlift, squat, lunge, push, pull, jump, etc. will burn one heck of a lot more calories than sitting fitness, insure that you maintain muscle mass throughout the body, retain quality of movement as you get older, etc.

And let's be honest: sitting-type fitness is extremely boring. Whenever I hear from someone that fitness is boring, I ask what they're doing and it's always some form of fitness that minimizes movement and variety. Running like a rat on a treadmill, sitting on an exercise bike, using weight machines, etc. doesn't provide the variety of human movement that we're capable of doing because it locks you into one movement. That's why they have so many TV's in places that provide this stuff: you need something else to keep you entertained.

Another missing piece is that because movement is minimized, you're limiting your fitness to that single movement or small set of movements. Your body will eventually adapt -- meaning you're going to have to go to further extremes to keep making it work for fat loss or fitness. In order to keep getting results, you'll have to do more, go harder, etc. at something that people likely already find boring.

The alternative is to get outside the box and do movements that you NEVER do. Because you don't do them much, you're likely very weak in them. You'll see very quick results because your body is starving for squatting, lunging, pulling, etc. when all you've been giving it is the same sitting you do all day anyway.

There's a final major reason NOT to choose sitting type of exercises and it's a big one: sitting type of exercises do little to fight muscle wasting associated with age and the concurrent drop in testosterone in men.

Rates depend on who you talk to but muscle loss of half a percent a year in the sedentary starting around the age of 30 seem about right. This loss is cumulative, meaning that by the time you're in your 50's, you're going to be in deep trouble if you've waited that long to start working out. A 10-15% loss of lean muscle (most people have little to start with) is serious business.

Several interesting points need to be made here:
1. Aerobic exercises do little to nothing to preserve muscle mass. This type of exercise does not promote muscle hypertrophy, in fact it does the exact opposite. Muscle wasting happens even to older runners and cyclists. This especially sets women up for osteopenia and then osteoporosis. There's a strong relationship between muscle and bone mass.

2. Quality of movement greatly declines. Once this muscle loss takes place, you're below a neutral point in terms of fitness. Many activities become risky because you don't have the muscle to support the movement, meaning you'll have to exercise to remove the deficiency before engaging in them or risk injury. The older "weekend warrior" is particularly susceptible to this problem.

3. Testosterone production and maintaining muscle mass in men are strongly correlated. Maintain one and there's a strong likelihood you'll maintain the other. Once the sex hormones start to drop, you're more at risk for a host of diseases. Not to mention watching your sex life wither away (yuck).

4. The exercises that maintain muscle mass and testosterone production the most are the compound lifts -- deadlift, squat, clean and press, jerk, snatch, etc. These exercises are the very opposite of the sitting type of exercise.

5. Couple all this with a corresponding decrease in protein consumption for various reasons and you've created a perfect environment for muscle wasting. Lack of sufficient protein leads to loss of lean muscle mass even in younger individuals. For the elderly it can be devastating.

Decreased protein consumption, aging, muscle wasting, engaging in aerobic/sitting exercise only, osteopenia/osteoporosis, decreased sex hormone production, obesity -- every single one of these is interrelated.

Obesity becomes very hard to fight when all these factors are in place.