Aerobics myths

For as long as I can remember, my mother has been persistently and continuously dieting for certainly 28 years now, and I have a strong suspicion that she wasn't doing anything differently before that either. During this time, she acquired everything, tried everything, and I can say without exaggeration that she bought every book that promised weight loss. By now, my mother's home functions as a kind of diet museum; a decent library could be run from the diet books, a block of flats' video rental store could operate from the aerobic and body shaping DVDs, and as for our basement, well, truly everything that the incompetent Teleshop has put on the market since the early 90s can be found there. Stepper and ABS machines, a dusty exercise bike, a rubber contraption for strengthening inner thighs whose name I don't even know, but just by looking at it, it perfectly embodies the category of useless crap. Unfortunately, due to renovations, I was forced to move back in with my parents for 3 weeks, into the 6-square-meter room I moved out of in 2004. A great experience, to say the least. During my stay, in my idle hours, I looked around a bit to see what was happening at home, what had changed in the past 12 years, because ever since I moved out, I tried to keep parental visits under a 10-minute limit, which I strictly managed to adhere to over the last decade. Since then, of course, a lot has happened, among other things, I became the "lifetilt guy," and what I hadn't noticed before, and didn't give a damn about, now affected me with elemental force. Sometimes one just looks but doesn't see, and doesn't attach much importance to the objects around them until they start to delve deeper into a particular area. For years, my father and I listened to my mother talk about some revolutionary diet she found in Nők Lapja (Women's Magazine), and we opened the door to the postman with an impassive face, who regularly rang our doorbell weekly with a scheduled slimming device. During my stay, I had the opportunity to look around a bit, exploring the apartment with a nostalgic touch. I gradually immersed myself in my memories, and as is often the case, I started by looking at family photo albums, then in moments, I found myself in front of the family bookshelf. Alongside all the major editions of world literature, all of Agatha Christie's novels were neatly arranged, as they should be, and then, glancing at the lower shelves, I was confronted with that certain hell, where the aforementioned diet and lifestyle counseling books stretched in endless rows. Every single one published in the 80s and 90s, the entire content of which consisted of bone-chilling, concentrated bullshit. If there was even one useful sentence, or even an interpretable conjunction, it was ruined in the subsequent lines by incredibly pretentious female chatter, thereby delivering perfectly useless information to the masses of women at the time, including, of course, my mother. Since the books contained pure, and I mean pure, bullshit, even if someone followed what was written in them, they couldn't lose weight, because they really wrote such nonsense that I seriously felt like crying. Those doctrines, which are now considered legendary stupidity, such as "don't eat after 6 PM," or even the "you can eat anything, just less" type of madness, we owe to these books; it was under their influence that they became ingrained in the female public consciousness. And these false absurdities were passed down from mother to daughter, because just as girls put on their mothers' high heels at the age of 8, the mothers' vast knowledge is passed on during mother-daughter conversations, thus perpetuating the eternal myth of not eating after 6 PM, to mention only the greatest ridiculousness. The purchase of these books, of course, was not the fault of the women of that time, and certainly not my mother's. It would be a mistake to measure the knowledge of 25-30 years ago against our current understanding, and it wouldn't be fair to compare a 1988 Ica Bíró video to Shaun T's 2009 Insanity program. Nutritional science, sports research, and what was heard about lifestyle moved at the level they did back then; these were considered the top information, and let's not forget that in the past, accessible information was much more limited than it is today. In the 80s, there was Nők Lapja and the health section of Élet és Irodalom, we had an Ica Bíró, and that was it. Nowadays, after 2 days of internet use, one can already humble a dietitian, who, by the way, are still learning about healthy eating according to 1972 directives. Just like the information described in the books of the 80s and 90s, of course, the Ica Bíró videos were also ridiculous from today's perspective, but even those now amusing sequences of movements were considered a huge innovation after the torso rotations and Indian jumps of morning exercise. Of course, I don't mean to diminish Ica Bíró's merits, as her work at that time was a real innovation and a real breakthrough on the path to effectively shaping the body. As the 90s arrived, something seemed to dawn on the horizon. Weight training in gyms, albeit at a minimal level, began to emerge, but at that time bodybuilding was synonymous with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and there was a general belief that anyone who set foot in a gym would at least be injecting themselves with steroids. Of course, this was far from the truth, but public opinion could not yet be convinced otherwise, and there was hardly any media platform that could even attempt to prove this. The spread of the massive bullshit "I don't drink protein because I don't want to be muscular" and "I don't drink protein because I don't need steroids" can also be attributed to this period. To this day, I meet women who are still capable of chanting these mantras, which is all the more striking because 24 years have passed since then, and these absurdities are still ingrained in public consciousness. I always look with sincere admiration at women who are still able to regurgitate these absurdities, but then I immediately get answers to my questions about who calls into EZO TV shows, and why it is still possible to sell even a single box of turbo diet powder to this day. In the early to mid-90s in Hungary, sports and a healthy lifestyle were still unknown concepts, and frankly, I can't even imagine how women kept themselves in shape back then. Of course, a few self-proclaimed, still anonymous aerobics instructors capitalized on Ica Bíró's successes, with sequences of movements that were probably as ridiculous as Zumba or Kangoo are today, but more on those later. This is an interesting journey through time, by the way, and it perfectly illustrates not only certain stages in the development of training methods but also clearly demonstrates the state where what we once thought was good and effective, we only realize years later how much it was not an alternative for us or our bodies. The aerobic craze in Hungary had to wait until 1995, when Alexandra Béres won the European and World Fitness Championship titles. I remember it was a huge craze; back then, only m1 and m2 channels were available, and the TV, even if not the championship itself, broadcast Alexandra's ascension endlessly from then on, and deservedly so. Alexandra was in incredibly good shape, and women automatically associated her appearance with aerobics, which Alexandra capitalized on, carefully omitting the fact that she would never have achieved that physique with aerobics alone, because it also required weight training, but in the 90s, as I mentioned, weight training was impossible to sell not only to women but even to average men. Alexandra built herself up excellently and made aerobics the number one form of exercise for female transformations. Aerobics became ingrained in public consciousness, and the belief became widespread that if a woman wants a very good figure, she definitely needs to do aerobics. And with this statement, we have immediately arrived at the third legendary misconception, closely following the absurdity of not eating after 6 PM and women getting muscular from protein. There was a huge demand for aerobics, and Alexandra started pushing these aerobic bullshit videocassettes like crazy, but she wasn't the only one; a certain Norbert Schobert also entered the "body shaping" business. The aerobics fever raged, literally engulfing everything, and no other form of exercise could even be considered. Alexandra's successes and Norbi's meteoric rise burned the correlation between body shaping and aerobics into people's minds, which unfortunately cannot be knocked out of their heads to this day. Just like at my mother's, I believe that in every household where at least one woman is present for an extended period, an Alexandra, Norbi, or Rubint Réka aerobics DVD or cassette can be found under the TV. The topic "why aerobics as a form of exercise is useless," especially its home-based variant, would deserve a separate post. The problem is that there is no argumentative technique with which I could convince women that classical aerobics done in front of the TV is truly worthless, it only yields results for a while, and unfortunately, that "for a while" period comes quite quickly. And why can't women be convinced that it's not effective? Well, because they start it and feel muscle soreness. And if they feel muscle soreness, they immediately think it's so good and useful. It doesn't bother them anymore that after the third at-home clowning session, they don't feel any muscle soreness, the presence of which is essential, because if it's not there, the body doesn't develop either. The body gets used to home aerobics just as it does to walking, and after a while, it becomes completely useless. Not to mention that a very high percentage of women do not force their bodies into a range that is no longer comfortable but would definitely be advisable to reach. So what's left? Lolling around in the living room, imitating a movement that roughly resembles what they see on TV. That movement in itself is crap, but if we only imitate it, one can imagine how effective it will be. Here, for example, are these Fitbalance events and Coca-Cola Body Awakener gatherings, where everyone from Katus to Czanik holds their own aerobics ridicule. But what happens then? The person stands on stage, facing 3000 people, and everyone pushes through those 30-40 minutes as they see fit. Nobody stops, nobody gives up, but it wouldn't hurt to look at the crowd, focusing on individual people, to see who is doing what and with what intensity. Now, of course, you can say I'm talking nonsense, so be it. You can just die on the beach with your +10-15-25 extra kilos, having four months of home aerobics under your belt. Whether you agree with me or not interests me about as much as what's currently on Duna TV. I'll write down what you need to know, and from then on, you can screw yourself over the hurdle however you want, or however your talent allows. There are many ways to lose weight and shape your body. You can do it well and effectively, achieving excellent results, or you can do it badly, ridiculously clowning around, achieving minimal results. LifeTILT is nothing more than an alternative. If you have the brains and are capable of understanding that I'm writing these for you, not against you, then maybe you have a chance at the physique you've long desired. If not, then read it, then dismiss it by saying my style is disgusting vomit, and you can indignantly move on to a site where they'll pat your soul and clap enthusiastically for you, for how cleverly you lost 3 kilos out of 34 in 4 months. That's roughly it for now. I'll continue later, but I think this much will be enough for one go. In the next post, I will address spinning as the biggest misconception of overweight women, and I will elaborate a bit more on the fact that any form of exercise that becomes popular among women and masses of women start doing it is absolutely certain to be worth less for body shaping than if you opened 10 bags of chips one after another.

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Aerobics myths