Commercials and infomercials for "fitness" products have been around for decades. Clearly, people are buying them! Even though they're almost always useless. (Hence, the post title. If you're not up on your Star Trek, here's some background.)
I've written before about the myth of spot reduction. But it's not the only claimed benefit used to tout "fitness" products.
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The last entry in this series was about barbells. For barbells to be useful, you need plates for them.
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An old article over at painscience.com includes this gem:
A common mistake is to give up instead of just making it easier.
Yes! Although it wasn't used in reference to strength or aerobic training, it applies very well here.
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Our last installment discussed dumbbells. Sticking with the weights, it's on to barbells this time. In particular: straight bars.
Barbells are probably what most people think of as "weights." They're used in powerlifting and the Olympics and for all the heaviest lifts. You don't have to go heavy with a barbell but it's nice that you can. And it's so fun!
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Last Christmas, I asked Santa for a Garmin Forerunner 35 to replace my good ol' Forerunner 305. The 305 still worked fine--I even bought a snazzy new band for it last year--but Garmin stopped supporting the software so it lost some of its usefulness.
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Continuing our series on equipment you can use at home, we move to one of the most common items used at home for strength training: dumbbells (DBs).
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A few weeks ago, whilst lunching with Sensei Hutch, he mentioned reading an article on stretching being worthless--or worse--which contradicted all he'd believed about stretching for so many years. This article surprised me since I'd seen lots of pro-stretching articles over the past year or so. Plus the rise of dedicated stretching centers where you can go to be stretched by a "licensed coach." Some other practices, such as massage therapists, have also jumped on the stretching bandwagon.
Recently I read another pro-stretching article and thought: why all the confusion? So let's take a look...
