Insane

Like with most of my blogs, this blog comes from having answered a particular question a few thousand times so clearly it’s a large enough issue that I can get it out there for everybody.

Today’s (and yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s) question:

Are all these “extreme” workouts such as Insanity, Tapout XT, Crossfit, etc., effective?

Answer: No.

The reasons for that are numerous and mostly have to do with bio-mechanics, physiology, and programming (or lack thereof, which is the real issue) which bores the heck out of most people.  So I’ll focus on one of the major rebuttals from people who promote these workouts when I say “No”.

Typically, the rebuttal goes something like this:  But the people who do it look great, they have low body fat, they have muscles, etc.

And I find myself saying this often:

The people doing those workouts can do them because they are in great shape.  They are not in great shape because they do those workouts.

Which is why when average John and Jane Doe, who don’t start off in great shape try things like plyometrics to exhaustion, power moves to exhaustion, or anything else that marketing geniuses (not trainers) call “extreme” or “insane”, they invariably attain chronic or acute injuries or reach a state of diminishing returns pretty quickly.

The people you see doing those “insane” workouts are generally young, and generally fit based on their structures.  They can get away with risky exercise behaviors.  The other 99.9% of us cannot.

I know there’s something in our ever transforming society that finds anything “extreme” or “insane” appealing.  When I was doing a little research for this I saw ads for “Extreme Couponing” and “Intense Dance”.

Seriously? Come on...

But that doesn’t mean because there is an appeal that it makes any sense because anything insane is…well…insane.