Kamal Ghorui
Many of us prefer reading about exercise, rather than doing it. We also cherrypick bits that suit us
If only reading about exercise counted as exercise, we could all be as fit as Ronaldo. And of all the reading we looove to do on the topic, nothing hits quite like studies reporting the yuge health benefits of just a liddle exercise. Yummm, it’s the perfect accompaniment to a breakfast of chole bhature, LPG availability permitting. We have also trained ourselves to read different studies in a very specialised way. Take the American College of Sports Medicine’s new strength training guidelines. It’s a complex document, but we have plucked from it a shifty takeaway – that just two sessions of basic strength exercises every week, are way superior to sweating five days.
C’mon, isn’t this a funner read than India being the diabetes capital of the world? And it’s no different than Indians watching sport obsessively, but passively. Only 9% of adults say they play a sport at all. Even that number would likely come down dramatically, if we checked how many people did what they said they do – today. There’s a special type of person who has read approx 4,000 articles about VO2 max training, can quote Bryan Johnson chapter and verse, but whose main physical activity is scrolling through said articles, while horizontal on the couch. All too often, consuming content about fitness is not a precursor to it, but a substitute. One gets the high of ‘I picked up a great life hack’ – absent any hard work whatsoever.
Enjoyable as it is, this false sense of accomplishment is hella dangerous. Without the followthrough – eating whole foods, walking, working out, yoga, taking the stairs, day after day – all that content consumption is like a junk diet. And, contrary to the shifty reading, the core of the above guidelines is that exercising twice weekly consistently, is far better than pushing yourself to exhaustion daily, and quitting midway. The message is not to exercise only twice a week, but to do it like clockwork.
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