A Purposefully Primitive irresolvable contradiction in terms?
28 July 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
A lot of readers have taken me to task for, one the one hand, stressing starkness and minimalism in training and nutrition — yet on the other incongruously and unreservedly recommending the Polar heart rate monitor. As one hardcore buddy eloquently put it, Dude, you tell these people all they need is a bunch of weights and regular food purchased from the grocery store to trigger a transformation then you tell them they need to purchase a heart rate monitor. This is expensive and uncharacteristic; whats up with that? Its truemea culpa. In the same breath that I preach you dont need fancy cardio machines (but you do need cardio) I inform readers they need a heart rate monitor. Not only do they need one, they need a good one one that not only captures the blended session heart rate average but one that can guesstimate calories. Not cheap but in my estimation irreplaceable. You get tired of hearing me say it but performing cardio without using a heart rate monitor is akin to lifting weights without knowing the poundage. Its a perfect analogy. Modern hi-tech fitness experts mindlessly insist out-of-shape clients jog or use repetitive-motion inducing exercise machines.
The experts pride themselves on being cutting-edge and ahead of the pack and mindlessly endorse every fad exercise routine, supplement or worthless equipment that comes down the pike. Yet they have a collective blind spot and remain blissfully ignorant about the impact of exercise on the heart rate of out-of-shape clients. Why should an obese person be forced to jog and risk stress-impact injury when simple walking can generate an 80% of age-related heart rate maximum? Do the expert personal trainers realize that making a fat person jog is incredibly dangerous? Tendons and ligaments of untrained individuals are susceptible to damage and when the person goes from doing nothing more physical than sitting on the Lazy-boy working a TV remote control to suddenly being thrown into some insane five day a week jogging regimen, injury looms large. Were not even taking into account the heart stress associated with suddenly subjecting an untrained body to high heart stress. If you can generate a high heart rate walking (as any obese individual can) why would we insist they jog, run or commence a step aerobic class? Is this not an invitation to injury or cardiac disaster?
But ignorance is bliss and since the heart rate does not enter into the fitness prescription mindlessly dispensed by experts, they feel free to jam fat square pegs into cookie-cutter round holes: consequences be damned. On a positive note the use of the heart rate monitor allows the Purposeful Primitive to apply periodization principles, used extensively by elite athletes in progressive resistance training to cardio endeavors. The result is an entirely new approach to aerobic training. Suddenly the cardio emphasis shifts from mode (what type of exercise is used) to a neutral mathematical benchmark.
The use of a heart rate monitor allows us to cross-compare exercise efficiencies. How do 40-minutes of power walking stack up to 40-minutes of racquetball or tennis? Now we have a way to determine what mode works best for us. Past sessions can be compared to current ones and future sessions can be predicted and cycled. Just as we use creeping incrementalism to gradually raise progressive resistance performance, we can now apply incrementalism to cardio. Just as savvy weight trainers set up programs weeks and months in advance, through the intelligent use of a heart rate monitor we can apply periodization to cardiovascular exercise.
This is an actual program I set up for an out-of-shape individual. The exercise mode was walking and over a six week period we went from barely being able to complete a 20-minute walk to six weeks later having to hold the individual back; they were capable of going faster, further and more often but in the interest of systematic progress I purposefully prevented them from doing so. By the end of week six they had lost 30-pounds of lard, gained 8-pounds of muscle and were in great shape to begin real training as our remedial phase was complete. This type of approach is impossible without using a sophisticated monitor with caloric oxidation guesstimation capabilities. In my opinion every Purposeful Primitive needs a heart rate monitor: this is my one concession to our modern era - but what the hell, would you lift weights without knowing the poundage?
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