You Aren't Built for It

Conventional exercise can hold you back. With lifts or even cardio selection, skeletal lengths matter. A man with a long torso and short wingspan could be completely wasting time training a lot of standard deadlift. A more common example would be how upright cycling keeps the hip in a closed and flexed position, which isn't really good for any body type, though some can tolerate it better than others. At some point, everyone needs to encounter advantageous leverage for PROGRESS. In health, intensity matters. No matter who you are, you have type 2 muscle fibers; so a lot of people are wasting a lot of time on cardio and light weights. If you always avoid intensities that you can only endure for 5, 15, 40 seconds, then you are getting weaker. No opinion here. It’s biology.

Once you embrace this reality, however, you still have to find lifts and exercises that jive with your build, your skeletal bone lengths, your strengths. I recommend sooner than later. I have increasingly learned to “reward” myself with lifts like this weighted hip thrust (video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CF2L7MGn5nL/), where I’m “naturally” good or strong at them. I didn’t even know you could put enough weight on a ceramic competition bar to make it flex; NOW, I do 21 reps. The first 20 years of working out, I avoided most movements where I was “good”, not really taking into account that some lifts I might always be “bad” at because of factors which cannot be changed. You cannot change your ratio of reach to torso length to femur length to tibia/fibula length. Some ratios just straight up don't work for many versions of many exercises.

People burn up lots of time pursuing fitness in a way that doesn’t fit them. I know this firsthand, as coach and as client. People with the wrong levers pursue the wrong activity. People with the wrong muscle fiber makeup train loads and ranges which don’t work. People who are overtired and stressed train too much volume and too long of walks/workouts. Weak people avoid strengthening. Adults with low activity eat carbohydrates. And worst of all, heavy people copy light people.