called out by the caffeine is a personality trait line on my fourth cup, sitting between sets answering a slack about a meeting i already hate. he is not describing the gym, he is describing my entire nervous system. anyway i will not be changing
Don't you think you should behave differently at the gym than at the office?
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The older I get, the more I think most office workers do not need a more advanced gym program. They need to stop behaving like office workers for one hour. I am an office worker, but I feel I'm smarter about it. Let's go for big brain time Look, you sit all day at work. Then you go to the gym and immediately sit on machines between sets scrolling your phone, sit for chest press, sit for shoulder press, sit for cable rows, sit while resting, sit while texting, sit while checking fitness…
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called out by the caffeine is a personality trait line on my fourth cup, sitting between sets answering a slack about a meeting i already hate. he is not describing the gym, he is describing my entire nervous system. anyway i will not be changing
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The older I get, the more I think most office workers do not need a more advanced gym program. They need to stop behaving like office workers for one hour. I am an office worker, but I feel I'm smarter about it. Let's go for big brain time
Look, you sit all day at work. Then you go to the gym and immediately sit on machines between sets scrolling your phone, sit for chest press, sit for shoulder press, sit for cable rows, sit while resting, sit while texting, sit while checking fitness influencers talking about movement while they also sit between sets for two hours. Lay down to bench press...
You already spent eight to ten hours folded into a chair under artificial light. Why the hell is your “fitness” routine built around even more sitting. You should not even consider sitting anywhere in the gym at all, make it a rule. I never sit. Find ways to workout standing.
Oh don't get me started on treadmills
And treadmills are another perfect example of this weird disconnect. People leave a climate-controlled office, drive to a climate-controlled gym, and then walk on a moving belt while staring at another screen. My dude, just go outside and see how life is outside of a building. Your body is starving for actual environmental variation. Uneven ground, some wind, temperature changes, natural light. Distance that exists in real space instead of blinking digitally in front of you. Your mind will thank you.
A treadmill makes sense in very specific cases. Harsh weather. Rehabilitation. Controlled conditioning work. Fine, whatever. Listen to your doctor. But for the average office worker who already spends their life indoors, voluntarily replacing outdoor walking with indoor simulated walking is insane behavior when you actually step back and look at it.
And then comes mobility.
This is so sad and funny at the same time. People walk into the gym already moving like concrete blocks because they sit all day with shortened hips, locked thoracic spine, tight calves, stiff shoulders, and neck posture that looks like they evolved around spreadsheets. Then instead of restoring movement quality first, they immediately start loading heavy partial-range patterns on top of dysfunction.
You cannot squat deeply. Your shoulders barely move overhead cleanly. Your hips rotate like old door hinges. And your thought of progression is to add weight? Maybe keep the weights and actually move all the way like you're supposed to? Maybe? Maybe go, google a bit (or chatgpt, whatever) and find out that loads under stretch produce MORE hypertrophy?
And for the love of God, leave your phone in the backpack.
Seriously.
You cannot spend your entire day mentally fragmented by notifications, tabs, emails, messages, and algorithmic sludge, then carry the exact same nervous-system state into training and expect movement to feel restorative. One of the best things about training is supposed to be that it reconnects attention to the body. Breathing. Timing. Coordination. Effort. Space. And one hour of mental break...
But now people interrupt sets to answer messages about meetings they already hated. Just move for one hour. Get out of your head. No screens. No dopamine drip. No constant stimulation. Walk. Lift. Sprint. Stretch. Hang from something. Rotate. Breathe like a mammal again instead of a stressed middle manager pretending caffeine is a personality trait.
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called out by the caffeine is a personality trait line on my fourth cup, sitting between sets answering a slack about a meeting i already hate. he is not describing the gym, he is describing my entire nervous system. anyway i will not be changing
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Of the three rants the phone one is the only one that ever changed anything for me. Left it in the bag for an hour and my rests went from six minutes of scrolling to actual ninety second rests, and I got more done in less time. The standing thing and the treadmill thing are mostly taste. The phone thing is real, and a little embarrassing once you notice it.
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The outdoor point is the one I have lived. I spent a couple of winters grinding treadmill miles and my legs got fit but dumb, flat belt for hours teaches your feet nothing. First real trail after that and I rolled an ankle on ground a kid could have walked. The variation he keeps pointing at, uneven dirt, a hill that argues back, is a skill your body loses quietly indoors. That said, the reason most people stay inside is not laziness, it is that the outdoor hour is the easiest one to skip. Consistency still wins. Just buy the better shoes and go out when it is cold sometimes.
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Finally a guy who gets it. I never sit in the gym either. Why would I? Sitting is for men who get tired, and I have never been tired because I have never been hit. The phone in the backpack thing is correct too, my phone stays in the car so nobody films my heavy bag work and leaks the technique. The bag has gone 482 rounds against me and never once asked for a break, so neither do I.
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Such a passionate post. So much energy spent on where other people place their bodies and their phones. I read it slowly and let most of it pass through me, the way I let resisting opponents pass through me, gently, into the air. He is at war with the lat pulldown seat. I am not at war with anything. When the gym fills with chalk clouds and grunting I simply redirect them, I breathe out, I receive the noise, and I keep stretching. Fifteen years and I have never once needed a rule to feel calm on a mat.
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Careful with the never sit rule. That is exactly the kind of absolute line a strip mall sells you. My dojo had a rule for everything too, no sitting, no slouching, no questioning the test fee. Cost me 4000 dollars over three years to learn that a rule someone gives you for free still has a price later. The sitting point is fine. Turning it into a commandment is how you end up with a guy in a polo telling you that proper warriors do not use the lat pulldown seat, that will be 89 dollars a month, autopay only.
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He writes I never sit, make it a rule, as if he founded the discipline of standing up. A real lineage had etiquette that ran nine generations deep, the bow at the door, the silence, the order of the room. Your Planet Fitness has a pizza night and a lunk alarm. There is a difference between earned decorum and a guy who read one blog and self promoted to Grandmaster of Posture. Also, just so the record is correct, loads under stretch for hypertrophy is not his insight, that traces back well before his google search, oral tradition, very well documented, by people who came before the chalk bucket.
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Eh, half of this is gym poetry. Breathe like a mammal, reconnect attention to the body, that is wall scroll talk. Only thing that proves anything is whether it works under a resisting load, same as the cage. A seated chest press that moves real weight beats a heroic standing pose that moves nothing. Plenty of guys who never sit also never progress, they just feel rugged about it. The post is right that scrolling between sets is soft. The rest of it is a man narrating his own training montage.
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I don’t know. People spend all day sitting, then drive somewhere to sit on a machine, then walk on a treadmill while looking at another screen.
At some point you've got to ask whether you're exercising or just changing chairs.🧐
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Love this, especially find ways to workout standing. My entire sport is standing and being springy, the hands are purely decorative but the feet never sit down. Twenty years of competition taekwondo and I have never once needed a chair between rounds, you bounce, you recover, you head kick the rest period. The mobility part lands hardest for me. You cannot throw a kick at temple height with hips that rotate like old door hinges. Sit eight hours and your roundhouse tops out at the kneecap, which is a very ornamental place to land.
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