Is resistance training overhyped?

The Kevin Bass Show

When it comes to promoting resistance training for health, lifting bros want it both ways.

They refuse to let anyone criticize any of their current lifting practices—despite an injury rate between 1-2 injuries per year for most strength sports [1]. They downplay increasing rates of body dysmorphia among men [2], eating disorders [3], and the psychological and physical risks associated with the lifestyles idolized by their communities [4-6].

In the same breath, they extol the health benefits of resistance training, comparing it to medicines, listing endless benefits.

Now imagine that there was a drug that produced 1-2 substantial injuries per year and did so for as long as the person took the drug.

Imagine that some of these acute injuries would eventually culminate in lifelong, chronic injuries. That’s 10-20 acute injuries per decade and some chronic injuries.

And that’s just on average.

And that’s just injuries.

Would many people forgo the drug, especially if it required a large amount of effort, every single week, to take? You bet ya.

So what explains the contradictions here:

Treating resistance training as if it were an extremely important tool for longevity, yet being extremely resistant to changing the culture around resistance training in order to reduce risk of harm and make it optimally healthy for the average person?

The answer is pretty simple: lifting bros simply enjoy resistance training and positive messages about it. But they don’t want to question what they are doing or promoting to make their messages fully coherent. They promote good news about resistance training, claiming that they want everyone to engage with it, but they don’t want to do the actual work of making it more accessible to the person who finds the toxic bro culture off-putting

This is not unlike the health communities that I have criticized in the past. In fact, it’s exactly the same phenomenon.

For making resistance training more popular, the resistance community is its own worst enemy.

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[2] 27930760

[3] 34712596

[4] 24494162

[5] 31818274

[6] 17506239

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