I once sat on a zoom call with a vision impaired user to do some accessibility testing on our site.
First, it was enlightening for me to see how she navigated through our site using her screen reader.
Second when she landed on our booking page we got so embarrassed because she couldn’t use our date picker. A basic HTML version would have done the job. But a few weeks back we had debated over which fancy jquery date picker plugin we should use without considering the impact. It was fancy alright, yet it wasn’t usable at all for this user.
I learned and felt many things that day as an engineer. Thinking in depth, across many different personas is a difficult thing to do, let alone building a tool that works well.
At my job we worked with an accessibility agency to train our devs and designers on web accessibility. It's really enlightening to see someone navigating smoothly with just sound or with 800% zoom. And very embarrassing when your menus just repeat the same "list item" label 5 times because of poor use of semantic HTML.
The devs of a site (or an application) are in a video call, with screen sharing or whatever is useful, with a user who has accessibility needs and is using their site/program. A bunch of other devs sit in on it, muted, just learning. Then the devs throw some money in the pot and the user who did the testing gets paid for their time. Everybody wins.
Oh, and if all participants agree, the stream is made available for subscribers, and then the user gets royalties off that, too.
You just described what is known as "user testing". They can happen in person, like a focus group, or remotely. Companies reach out to the public for "random" users that fit the given criteria and are paid for their time. You can also use a 3rd party service who will pair you with random testers, for example https://www.usertesting.com/
It's been a while, but I'm not convinced there is a truly accessible date picker out there. Allowing manual typing of the date seems like the best and only viable option.
Also just typing the date manually is almost always faster than using a date picker. Or at least that's how I perceive it, which is all that matters. I hate apps that force me to take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse.
As soon as we solve the whole US-using-a-different-date-format-to-the-rest-of-the-world problem, absolutely.
Having it automatically display the day of the week as you type the date would be a big help though.
The problem is that "just typing the date manually" actually has quite complex i18n issues. It can be done well, but that generally means you make the user explicitly confirm the date they just typed.
As input, any permutation of full year, full month name, and day of the month is unambiguous wrt any date on or after January 1, 100 CE* and therefore sensible, no matter how unusual/obscure. (The issue of handling multiple languages isn't a rejoinder to this, because that's just localization, which is an umbrella that should already exist so treating it like a new requirement would just be double counting.) This is how every browser-native datepicker should already work, although regretfully they do not.
Noone would expect that so you'd need to explain it and get people to spell correctly. Not convinced it is a good UX.
"Just localization" isn't "just". Many people have the wrong localization on their computers. Partly because they don't always communicate in their native language. But also because google et. al. are doing such a piss poor job of it.
It is also always weird if your are on an international site. Enter everything in English and then suddenly is expected to enter some fields in your native language.
> "Just localization" isn't "just". Many people have the wrong localization on their computers.
Think about this for a minute longer. Do you have an example or scenario for the use of a Web site where the author can fall into a pit of success (despite having the user's wrong localization) on all things except for dates and that would be broken by allowing* this date input method?
Even ignoring that:
What I said was that "any permutation of full year, full month name, and day of the month is unambiguous". There are a finite number of months and a finite number of localized tokens for representing those months. Do you have an example of two different locales that use the same token (or token sequence) to denote different months on the calendar?
> As input, any permutation of full year, full month name, and day of the month is unambiguous wrt any date on or after January 1, 100 CE* and therefore sensible, no matter how unusual/obscure
If you are using a proleptic Gregorian (or Julian, but why on earth would you do that) calendar, sure.
If its not one of those (but its still the Roman-derived Christian calendar in some form), there are ambiguities, and if its any other calendar, it may have ambiguities and/or the elements needed to specify a date may be different, and the CE/AD year is likely not an element and not relevant to whethe or not their are ambiguities.
The comment I replied to specified ISO 8601. The Gregorian constraint is a given.
I put in a whole clause in my original comment to preempt this flavor of pedantic sniping that involves applying double standards. And yet here we are.
Only if you use a proleptic calendar. If you are entering dates from historic documents, you need to know which calendar the author of the document was using
That makes me think, how does one learn to use a screen reader? (Or alternatives for other handicaps)
It seems fairly technical and challenging to learn, but I feel it would make sense for abled engineers to practice using those.
I personally wouldn’t even know where to start, I only enabled the screen reader a few times by mistakes and have no idea how I could learn to be effective with it if I need to at some point in my life.
I've been learning screen readers in my spare time because it seems like a nice screen off way to browse content in bed. It's servicable and maybe even viable way to work if more of the web was tailored for it.
Surprised it isn’t more common, I would expect nerdy abled people to show off to their friends their cool screen reading skills, just because it’s such a niche, technical, and weird thing to do.
You can also learn Linux by just uninstalling Windows. 15 minutes of good starting material will save you untold amounts of unnecessary headache though.
I don't want to overdo it with high-falutin' theorizing, but I think your firm's definition of "fancy" might be missing some crucial aspects, or maybe "fancy" isn't the right term. Maybe it was "flashy," or "gaudy," or "decorative"? Maybe it was "branded"? Or did it actually offer sighted users a more effective UX?
In terms of web UX, one disability that hardly anyone considers is intellectual disability - but really many people who work in development (design, project management, programming) are outliers in terms of intellectual ability (albeit probably not as much as they think they are)
But we're all just temporarily smart as well, many people are not that bright before that first cup of coffee or if they are going through lots of stress (hence crunch time often decreasing productivity)
One of the problems I have is encountering design decisions that I think that must be a bug, only to have it turn out to be a real thing. This quirk in my character cost me a lot of money with the Danish department of business registration, - long story short when I said I filled out what they wanted filled out and speculated maybe their site was broken they said oh you probably made this specific mistake, everybody does that - but in the end I still had to pay thousands of dollars in fines and close down the company (it was when Denmark decided you had to specify the legal owner of an LLC or face forced closure with fines, about a year later they closed down all LLCs anyway)
on edit: of course a lot of devs have specific intellectual differences in ability - like ADHD.
My daughter has a very serious learning disability and she loves to swipe through home photos or videos on an android phone or on an ipad. She can mostly get on OK but when you look at it from her point of view, its _amazing_ how complicated 'swiping through pics' has become.
Swipe from the top? that brings the notifications
Swipe from the bottom? Brings up photo options. Press on one of those by accident and you end up in a nest of menus and features that can be hard to get out of.
Want to play a video? Tap once, the video controls fade in, you've then got to tap the play button in the middle of the screen within half a second or so, or it fades out again
Long press while scrolling through list of photos? Now you're in 'select mode' and every photo you press gets added to the selection rather than getting displayed. Can be very confusing.
Press the wrong button in IOS and you end up in very confusing picture-in-picture mode
One great thing about iOS is the 'guided access' feature, you can use it to lock the ipad into one app and even disable parts of the touchscreen so that a child can use the ipad without accidentally finding their way out of the app and into your email. I dont think Android has an equivalent. edit: ah yes it does - App Pinning - thanks
Yep, imagine how difficult it is for the blind. I had to explain that tapping and swiping this light brick in their hand could order pizza. Pretty much witchcraft.
Android does have that feature on some phones, it's called App Pinning.
Insisting on just one button for basic interactions and swipes for the rest was a mistake.
On top of that apps (looking at you, Instagram) are often simply buggy. You can have the same video play or not play depending on how the winds of load balancing blow. No graceful degradation or anything.
I friend of mine a few years back once said to me, "Some days ADHD is my most disabling condition." This is a person who often can't walk.
I was properly medicated (with non-stimulant medication) for ADHD a few years ago and looking back to my life before that, I realize how much ADHD has negatively effected my life. And yet never along the way did anyone look at me with any sort of compassion. It was always seen as a moral failing on my part, a "Why can't you do this? Everyone else can." And I had been given those messages so consistently that I came to believe them about myself.
It was really eye-opening to have someone with a visibility tell me that sometimes their intellectual disability hampered their life more than their physical disability.
I use an adblocker, DarkReader, and reader mode, because of my ADHD. Even minor distractions or asinine GUI "features" can make it impossible for me to focus on the content of the page. I don't tend to think of myself as disabled, but I absolutely rely on accessibility tools (in all but name) to navigate the web.
I don't have ADHD but I have some neuro-visual impairments and movement + visual crowding are huge problems for me. It's basically really easy to turn things into an I Spy or Where's Waldo page for me where I can't see anything because there's too much going on. Lots of websites are problems.
One thing I also really like in addition to what you mentioned is greyscale mode.
Don't forget specific learning disabilities, either. I, personally, have a deficiency in visual-spatial processing. I can't say that it's come up in a web UX context before, but I can certainly imagine it doing so if a site decides to implement some kind of fancy spatial UI.
One of the things I gained an appreciation of was the editorial rule most newspapers had, but have now abandoned on the web, to write at or below an 8th grade level.
I know someone who has a 134 IQ (well above average) but also has a comprehension disorder. They work in tech, but often need to send articles/instructions to a peer for summary/interpretation. They have an extensive vocabulary but if there is an unnecessarily complex paragraph they just get lost between the beginning and end.
It’s greatly made me appreciate simple straightforward technical documentation beyond my existing appreciation because simplicity doesn’t waste my own time.
when I was in high school they gave me some sort of advanced IQ test, I scored in the top 1% of the population for reading comprehension and logic, and in the lowest 5% for visual spatial processing - I have however improved quite a bit since that time in the latter area.
We take it for granted. But intellectual decline is a real thing. My memory was superior before. And my work processes revolved around superior memory. Then I got sick for 19 days with severe headaches. And I was not the same after.
I deserved it too. I was too proud and demeaning others for not being able (like me) to remember things.
I became disabled after a music festival last year. The music was too loud and something broke in my ear.
Now every sound hurts me, my voice is far too painful, going for a walk outside is too painful. Basically I can't do anything but sit in a silent room and browse the internet.
Pain hyperacusis sucks. I wish I'd been more careful with my hearing.
Sorry that you're going through that. As someone who once had severe hyperacusis, I sympathize with your situation as my own whispers as well as keystrokes would hurt my ear. It was challenging to browse the web due to the inability to type in a website URL or input into a search bar.
One of the hardest parts of this disability is that it is invisible and so difficult to explain to a third party. People think you are overly dramatic.
In many cases, hyperacusis does get better on its own with time, so keep hanging in there.
These things can happen suddenly and without warning. When I was 18 I was in a nightclub, my mate shouted a bit too loud into my ear (because the music was loud) and permanently damaged my hearing in my right ear, it hurts to hear certain frequencies in that ear now, and sounds like water stuck in there when it happens.
I'm sorry to hear you have it (or something worse) in both
Got Tinnitus from working as a concert photographer. It's not so bad. I've learned to live with it. But yeah... It's permanent. So, to not make it worse, I've bought protection that I carry with me when I go to loud clubs or concerts. I use it religiously. Highly recommended! Especially if you work in a bar or club, or in some capacity at concerts. Do it now, because Tinnitus doesn't go away. Some of them are very discrete, but if you like making a splash there are ones that look quite stylish as well.
Original comment was talking about Hyperacusis, and it sounds like for them it's way worse than Tinnitus, causing them physical pain just going outside for a walk. I have Tinnitus also and going outside is actually soothing for my ears, as the ambient noise of nature masks the ringing a bit.
Tinnitus does interfere with my ability to concentrate from time to time, though. Not great for a job where concentration is required most of the time.
Is there any particular type or brand of earplugs you recommend, that are comfortable enough to wear for multiple hours and don't make the music sound too muffled (while still reducing the volume to safe levels)?
If you can see an audiologist, they should be able to get you custom molded ear plugs. You can buy filters for different sound levels, so that you can reduce the volume and still be able to hear enough to enjoy music at a concert etc. If they're well made, you can probably wear them for a few hours without too much discomfort.
They're more expensive than something that is off the shelf, but being able to choose the appropriate filter for the venue you're in is really helpful. Also, the filters should give cut down the volume more evenly across the spectrum. If you get cheaper ear plugs, loud music may not be as enjoyable because certain frequencies may be more aggressively filtered than others.
I'm quite happy with mine. I can play with a loud band and still be able to hear enough of my own amp and everyone else to be able to play along, but my ears aren't ringing at the end of the evening.
To add to this, expect to pay around $200 or so for custom earplugs, plus the cost of the audiologist exam. If you live close to a company that makes these, you may be able to visit them for an in-person exam at a bundled price.
While obviously this isn’t cheap, it’s well worth paying for if you’re a musician or you go to concerts frequently.
I got mine from Sensaphonics, they’re in Chicago. They also make in-ear monitors for professional musicians using the same molding process.
I've been wearing BTE (behind the ear) hearing aids since I was a kid. So I have the custom molded ear plugs (with hole for tubing) like you mention. I enjoy that they're a magical always-ready pair of earplugs.
But recently trying to use some actual ear plugs to help sleep at a noisy location... I thought they weren't helping, and then I learned from my wife that I wasn't using them correctly. It seems the trick was getting them further in the ear (I think further in than my ear molds go), and voila, more of a difference; better than turning off my hearing aids. I've also noticed the difference recently, using ear plugs when using power tools in the garage (dremel, jigsaw).
So I'm curious if the fitted ones are all equivalent to properly inserted earplugs or not. It's also possible the hole for tubing is the culprit of my observations.
Just another anecdote that might be interesting: audiologists have been doing molded ear plugs since at least the 90s. I remember the posters of cool colorful "swim plugs" back then.
...re-reading: I see now your mention of using various filters. I'll have to read up on that too.
From using regular ear plugs, my experience is that you really need to get them in there quite far. Also, I find that the disposable ones are really basically single use. After they've compressed and expanded I find they don't seem to work as well on subsequent uses. So, taking them out and putting them back in is something I would try to minimize. Maybe they've improved in the meantime?
The molded plugs to me do feel a lot like a properly inserted ear plug and with the filters in, there should be no gaps. It should be a very snug fit. I've got 10db, 17db and 26db filters. The 17db filters are the sweet spot for me, but it's nice to have options.
With (high power) hearing aids, it's reasonably easy to know if you have a gap in the mold: I'll get a feedback loop (annoying noise, naturally) if one is loose or a poor fit. Interestingly, for the past few molds (a 4-6 year life per pair these days) the left ear definitely has more of a problem with feedback loops when my jaw is opened wide (i.e. eating) - the shape evidently varies more with this movement than the right ear does.
From what I hear a lot of audio techs wear Alpine MusicSafe Pros, so if anything wearing ear plugs will make the music sound better since you're matching what you're hearing to what the audio tech is hearing.
I got myself a pair and if nothing else they are decently comfortable to wear.
I got Loops on Amazon based on someone's recommendation and they work pretty well for me. They're cheap enough to try once and see if they work for you.
Standing too close to a speaker at a house party gave me permanent tinnitus. Took me a long time to accept it mentally and emotionally. Now I’m a lot more careful with my hearing.
A baby's (or toddler's) voice, the meowing of a newborn kitten, quieter sections of my favorite songs, the sound of a car that's backing my way while I'm not looking in its direction...
I don't care about that as much as never hearing silence, or near silence, without a constant ringing sound. Man do I miss the "sound" of silence.
And no, that one Tinnitus trick of thumping the back of your head with your fingers that everyone shares doesn't really work for that, at least not for me. For me it just turns the volume down on the ringing a slight bit, and even then only lasts about 30 seconds, which isn't really worth it.
I, too, miss silence. My tinnitus is in one ear and is like a roar of cicadas/grasshoppers with an extra harmonic an octave above that that gets louder as my environment gets louder. Then unfortunately stays at the elevated volume for a good duration afterwards.
Some people have tinnitus worse than others, making it harder for them to ignore. In addition, some people become acclimated to it; my tinnitus used to make it impossible to sleep without some form of white noise, but nowadays I only remember that it's there when I read comment threads about people discussing their tinnitus. Time for some white noise...
Same here. Reading about people anguishing about it online only made me sink further into despair about it. And white noise, while it helped at first, eventually became sort of a crutch and didn’t really help me get over it in the long term.
What eventually worked for me ironically was reading a study that the vast majority of people with tinnitus do improve over time, whether it’s an actual reduction in the noise or at least the perception of it. Tinnitus is funny in that it bothers us because the brain sees a sound it is creating itself as a threat, and eventually it learns to longer treat itself that way.
Mine did eventually get better. I don’t know if it actually got better, or if I just stopped caring about it so much. But I do enjoy silence again because for me, this is my new form of silence. It’s still there in some form, and some days like when I’m stressed it is noticeably louder. But it no longer bothers me.
Would recommend to everyone / have bought as a gift a pair of ear plugs that fit onto your key chain. They are like $10 and are honestly the most useful thing I carry on that ring aside from the actual keys. Plus they can be useful in random situations (Needed them to sleep while camping recently because the wind was so strong)
I realize this is going to sound dumb, but please also consider that we all (almost all) carry natural ear plugs with us in the form of our hands/fingers. When sound gets loud, do not hesitate to plug in quickly. Damage to our hearing apparatus depends on intensity and duration, so the sooner you plug the better.
It may be safer to plug your ears with your fingers quickly than to spend a few seconds looking for your fancy -33 dB ear plugs, as unexpected loud noises tend to surprise us but not last very long (ambulance, fighter jet, honking, etc).
In addition to this, there are lots of sound level measuring apps for our smartphones and it can be helpful to measure long lasting levels at venues (concerts, bars, etc). Airplane cabin noise is surprisingly loud. Noise canceling headphones are a great tool for this scenario.
Finally, remember that hearing damage is cumulative: what many of your peers will tolerate fine may not work for you and vice versa. Watch for "the straw that breaks the camel's back".
If your hearing apparatus has already been insulted, treat it with lots of care. If it hasn't already been insulted, treat it with lots of care.
I was standing near a speaker at a concert, and all of a sudden my ear just sounded like an amp that was overdriven, all distortion, fortunately I recovered, but I don't go near speakers at concerts any more.
I’m really sorry. I got temporary hyperacusis from a similar situation a few years back and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It did eventually subside, and I hope it does for you too, although the time scale of recovery varies. I’m hopeful that people start finding ways to treat this as it’s probably becoming a bigger problem as our generation ages.
I have got my right lung busted by a sub-woofer at the techno rave party in 2011. Still hurts from time to time as there are some wierd scars left inside.
I think the concert\rave\nightclub sound levels should be revised globally. It is so stupid to blast mostly shitty music that loud. It will not make it better...
This is off topic but the last ten or so years, the volume level at shows has gone over the top. I did indoor and outdoor shows in the 80s and 90s without plugs and worst case was a little ringing the next day. I mostly did outdoor concerts in the 2000's so I don't know what indoor shows were like but in 2013 I started taking my daughter to shows and holly shit balls it was loud. The last show that I went to I had to step outside to get a break even though I was wearing -32db plugs.
So this is how I live my life - knowing that your good health and ability can always just end at no fault of your own. It still haunts me that my father had plans we always talked about, he was very active and loved going outdoors and travelling, mountain biking, hiking etc, he spent a crazy amount of time getting a Land Rover done up as a Camel Trophy replica for a big adventure we were meant to go on, and then basically got cancer and died couple months after his 50th birthday.
That's not to be gloomy and depressing - just that if you:
1) want to do something
2) have the physical health to do it
3) doing so won't put your family in a difficult situation financially or otherwise
Just do it. When my friends say "oh I'll do that when I'm retired" or even just "oh I'll start activity X maybe in a couple of years" I'm like.........why. You don't even know if you'll be fit and healthy next year, making plans for your retirement in 20 years or even postponing simple outdoor activities like mountain biking or camping for a couple years "when the time is better" is.....unreasonable to me.
Like the article says - we're all just temporarily abled. Maybe some of us if very lucky will remain abled for a long time. A lot of people will not. If you have the good fortune of being abled now, use it now.
Good advice, one of my dear family friends father passed away during Christmas in 2021.
I think the saddest thing was that they had been planning a trip to Spain and were putting it off to do other things instead, he was nearing retirement as well.
Since that day I've been more willing to do things instead of putting them off.
While I don't disagree there are certain activities (skydiving etc.) I'm happy to wait until retirement to try, given the consequences of something going wrong - if I miss out on my last decade or so of growing old peacefully, so be it. But I'm not quite so cavalier about it when I'm hoping I still have another 30 years of good health ahead of me.
I worked very hard to get into a very physical job and I made it. It was the beginning of my professional career, I wanted to do this since I was a kid. I was 22.
A few weeks went by, still couldn't believe they were paying me to do something I loved so much :) Of course, one regular day going to work on my motorcycle a distracted pedestrian crossed illegally and without looking. It jumped from behind a big truck, impossible to avoid.
Due to the collision I fell right on the corner of the curb. I was driving slowly, the height of the seat to the curb was high enough to break a vertebra and bruise my spinal cord. I became a paraplegic at that instant, for life.
He got a small crack in his arm.
My professional career and all my dreams vanished. I watched my colleagues and friends move on enjoying life and the fruits of that effort. I was very envious, but nobody could do anything about it. I felt robbed.
Obviously I can't walk but it's so much more than that. Surveys among fellow paralyzed tend to show "walking" as the last "feature" we'd all like to have back.
I can't feel anything from the belly button down either. Simple things like going to the bathroom are no longer simple. I enjoyed sex a lot, goodbye to any of that. I get regular annoying spasms. I hava to take a bunch of pills every 8h
I have severe chronic pain for which I have to take morphine regularly, which does not come without major side effects. I have to have surgery from time to time for adjustments and other stuff secondary to the injury.
Fortunately, I am happy. I was already a person who didn't grate at things out of my control, but learning stoicism cemented it. Just for the fact that I was born and have been able to look at the stars in our galaxy and others, I feel it has been worth it. I feel privileged.
I live with my amazing girldfriend, I enjoy stimulating hobbies and a day-to-day life that I don't take for granted.
It's heartbreaking to read! :( But thanks for sharing it. It's also a terrific reminder to those of us who are still "able" yet are dissatisfied with our lives for a variety of foolish reasons. And a good reminder that our lives may be turned upside down in an instant. I respect how you dealt with it while still enjoying life. Also good to hear that your girlfriend still loves and supports you. I wish you all the best!
How many people I know got hit by a car and had their life ruined horribly. Or a bad surgery. Things totally out of their control.
We need to see disability as a cost to society we must pay, not a failure of individuals which is more or less what were treating it.
The American disability system is basically proving (very painfully) that life is barely livable to get scraps of help. Like below poverty levels.
I really wish that we moved away from pain oriented policy - - how much pain are you willing to tolerate so we can get you basic assistance and into some sort of way to guarantee that people live an okay life as a default. My dream is to see this sometime in my lifetime.
I have a child with autism. The American system is cruel beyond imagination.
To qualify them for social security and Medicaid I have to leave them impoverished. They can't have more than $2k worth of assets in their name. Instead it's a complex lawyer game of trusts to give my child any sort of inheritance. Yet they are basically guaranteed to end up in a group home (Even though I own my own home) because a caretaker after I go is unlikely. Further, what the trust can pay for is things not covered by Medicare and SS. So housing and food are limited to what the government would pay for.
And then there's the concern of how this all plays out if I get dementia or disability which requires substantial finances.
There's a reason people with autism tend to end up homeless.
I feel like the biggest thing the US could do is remove means-testing from our disability aid programs. Means testing usually does not feel like an effective way to distribute services.
I want millionaires to be using government aid to help their children: just like with free education, when everyone who needs help uses it, the richer parents will demand, and ensure we pay for, higher quality for all. Everyone who is currently able to can all just pay a bit more in taxes to cover everyone’s accessibility and aid needs. I don’t want it to be possible for a child’s needs not to be met just because the state thinks the child’s family has too much money.
Aid services should be treated like sidewalks and fire departments: almost everyone is going to need them at some point, why would you want to make it difficult to access?
> I want millionaires to be using government aid to help their children: just like with free education, when everyone who needs help uses it, the richer parents will demand, and ensure we pay for, higher quality for all.
Beautifully summed up.
I don't want people to have to impoverish themselves, burning through entire life savings, to 'qualify' for small assistance. IME, it reinforces a 'why bother trying' attitude amongst people struggling on the lower end, and reinforces an 'I got mine, I'll protect it at all costs' attitude from people who've managed to save more.
Money saved from reducing means-testing from the administration of benefits/services might not be massive, but it would be a move towards "more efficiency", something many folks claim to value/support.
I don't really see that working. The rich might use the government benefits to the extent they exist, but they will always have the option of paying more privately, or buying additional private insurance, etc.
You see this every day in public school, where the more well-off families pay for math tutors or extra coaching or other out-of-school opportunities for their kids.
That's the point though. The rich already have all the benefits, plus more, but we also make the poor spend a lot of time, money, effort, and stress on "proving" they are poor to get the baseline benefits just so the rich "can't" use them (even though the truly rich have access to better and more services). If the rich already have plenty of access to stuff why are we forcing the poor to go through all these extra "proof" steps? Of course, rich people will cheat and take the 'free stuff" too (because they can, because many of them penny pinch too). So why not just make it for everyone and avoid all the tests and stress and administrative overhead of "prove you are poor to get this service"?
(A very similar thing applies to things like public school "free lunch" programs. The poor have to do a bunch of paperwork to qualify every year and lots of real poor people fall through the cracks of the system because they miss the paperwork or get some small detail wrong. The rich are generally going to pack better, healthier lunches anyway, so in some cases the time and cost of that paperwork would be better spent on "free lunch for all" programs, even if that means a few rich kids get free lunch sometimes.)
Unfortunately, the desire to soak the rich is a thing.
(A sentence that is not seen very often.)
Of course, the problem isn't really the rich. There aren't enough of them to strain the assistance budget even if they do all take the free lunch. The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them, and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.
> The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them, and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.
But it does though, because those are the people the existing system is screwing the most.
If you're all the way at the bottom, whatever the government provides is what you get because you have nothing else.
If you're all the way at the top, you have the resources to buy whatever the best of the best is.
But if you're in the middle, you can't afford to pay the taxes to fund public schools you don't use and pay for private schools, so you get stuck with public schools. And then we end up with this catastrophic districting system where you buy into a better public school system by spending more money on housing -- and making sure that there is more political support for keeping housing unaffordable because it's the way the middle class gets their kids into a better school district.
If you just give everyone the same amount of money, someone at the 40th percentile income doesn't have to massively overpay for a house, they can just add 20% more of their own money to send their kids to a better school. And someone at the 25th percentile income who is willing to sacrifice more for their kids can do the same thing, instead of having no path to do it at all because it would require them to get mortgage approval for a single family house in a suburban school district which is forbidden at their income level.
Given that children are our future, making sure all of them get a good healthy nutritious lunch behoovs us all. Even the not destitute, and not wealthy ones. If we have to have fewer stealth bombers and aircraft carriers to pay for that, then so be it. But of course trading one for another in order to be able to afford it makes sense if you think of the whole of the US economy as a one househole, with no control over monetary policy like the interest rate. Except it isn't. Look at how willingly spending is increased on military projects, and not the projects themselves. If we wanted to have the money to pay for it, we could.
It's just this idea that someone undeserving might get something for free. This makes sense for adults, but children, for whom we have laws preventing them from having jobs, can't have jobs.
Don't buy into the idea we don't have the money to pay for it, we do. Monetary policy allows us to create money out of thin air. If we treated this like the emergency it is, we could afford it. We don't do it for other reasons, but it's not a money thing.
> Of course, the problem isn't really the rich. There aren't enough of them to strain the assistance budget even if they do all take the free lunch. The problem is the people who are richer than the ones who are eligible, but aren't actually rich. There are a lot more of them
Welcome to the squeezed middle. Don't make enough to be truly comfortable but too much to be eligible for government assistance.
> and the money to give them all free things may just not exist.
Though if we had a functional legislature we could make this money exist simply by bumping the tax rate in the relevant income bands so that the extra expenditure is covered by the higher taxes.
Not to mention means testing can be used for discrimination
Growing up one thing I realized was white privilege, for lack of a better term, was my families access to welfare programs.
My father passed when I was young and my mom was left to raise us on our own. When he passed she made just barely above the poverty level, and you know what the government agent did? He fudged a couple things on the paper work and my mom got SSI and Medicaid for us until we turned 18.
I’ve heard the hell non white families go through in similar situations in my home state and I don’t imagine they got that privilege
At very least, it'd be nice if the means tests were tied to inflation rather than being increased based on congressional whims.
I'm certainly pro universal health care, it would GREATLY simplify mine and my son's life. Private insurance is simply garbage when it comes to services for people with disabilities. With that in place, a much simpler trust system would work for my kid. It wouldn't be this complex system of checks to make sure they stick in line with current legislation standards. I wouldn't have to spend a large chunk of my child's funds on lawyers and trust administrators just to ensure legal compliance. I could cover basically all my kids needs other than medical, that stuff is just too expensive for anyone to afford.
Exactly - universality is why Social Security and Medicare haven't been politically destroyed (yet) and remain the most popular public programs in the history of the US.
Means testing is not only inimical to the concept of shared benefits, but it's actually expensive to perform the means-testing. And some people who should qualify don't get the benefits.
> I feel like the biggest thing the US could do is remove means-testing from our disability aid programs. Means testing usually does not feel like an effective way to distribute services.
This was an argument for "libertarian" universal income.
Huge government edifice which exists to determine who, where, and how aid is distributed. Much glad-handing, acrimony, and inefficiency.
Just cut out the middle-man and cut everyone a check, or implement something like Richard Nixon almost did, the reverse income tax.
The issue with Univeral income is it's easy to dismantle or not fund.
Let's say we set the level at $1k per month for everyone. Great, until it's 2050 and that level is still $1k. Without inflation adjustments it eventually turns into giving people the equivalent of a penny, only now there aren't other safety nets in place.
But also, you'll have politicians saying "This is a huge cost to the government and everyone should just take care of themselves. So let's cut back the spending for people born in 2023". Just like they did with SS.
> The issue with Univeral income is it's easy to dismantle or not fund.
Completely the opposite. Because everyone gets it, lowering the funding requires you to fight everyone. The average income is moderately higher than median income, so the median person (i.e. the majority) receives more than they pay, even if it's funded with a flat tax. (Which also allows you to vastly simplify the tax system, because flat tax + UBI is progressive but requires much less privacy-invasive financial tracking than other forms of progressive taxation.)
> Let's say we set the level at $1k per month for everyone. Great, until it's 2050 and that level is still $1k.
So index it to inflation, or better yet, GDP per capita.
> But also, you'll have politicians saying "This is a huge cost to the government and everyone should just take care of themselves. So let's cut back the spending for people born in 2023". Just like they did with SS.
They only get away with that because the people born in 2023 wouldn't have received SS until ~2088, which doesn't concern their parents, and the infants are too young to put up any resistance.
With a UBI, everyone gets it, and then every parent will object that they're cutting funding for children.
>But also, you'll have politicians saying "This is a huge cost to the government and everyone should just take care of themselves. So let's cut back the spending for people born in 2023". Just like they did with SS.
Yes, one of the most important parts of making a healthy, empathetic, caring, and functional society is removing those people from office.
> I feel like the biggest thing the US could do is remove means-testing from our disability aid programs.
The problem isn't the means testing the problem is it's applied with broad strokes like all well meaning but inevitably awful government work. First, everyone pays into disability. So everyone should be able to get their share when necessary. Second, means testing includes things like housing, retirement accounts (which will be penalized severely if accessed), assets, and other things than just raw cash available. Just having a half decent computer is enough to make you fail means testing. So people who are on disability are almost universally forced to be poor. Don't try to hide your assets either. Shifting money/assets/etc to a family memory will still disqualify you.
In a practical sense we also need to prevent the exploitation of disability programs. For example, self-inflicted disability (morbid obesity for example) should be subject to a different test of means than birth defects. If you're only disabled because you eat too much and can't be bothered to exercise I question whether you're actually disabled. Every "class" of disability is not equal and so we shouldn't treat them exactly the same. But, like all things, because the government runs it disabilities must be treated this way and as a result everyone suffers.
Something my therapist pointed out to me is that obesity is directly linked to childhood and intergenerational trauma; calling it self-inflicted is not accurate. Even if we're focused on healthy eating, food deserts exist. No man is an island, &c.
Also, to cite an HN darling[0], obesity is, at the very least, a lot stranger and more complicated than CICO.
> we also need to prevent the exploitation of disability programs
What if we _encouraged_ the "exploitation" of disability programs? What if everyone who wanted or needed it got help, regardless of whether someone thinks they "deserve" it? What if people didn't have to worry about failing to re-prove they still need help? I would rather that myself & my disabled friends live in that world.
> Something my therapist pointed out to me is that obesity is directly linked to childhood and intergenerational trauma; calling it self-inflicted is not accurate. Even if we're focused on healthy eating, food deserts exist. No man is an island, &c.
The idea that obesity is self inflicted runs contrary to our current understanding not just of psychology but of physiology. Most people don't have a constant struggle to maintain a healthy weight generally people with obesity even if they lose weight have to work extremely hard to not regain that weight and most fail.
> The idea that obesity is self inflicted runs contrary to our current understanding not just of psychology but of physiology.
Eating your feelings (emotional eating) is commonplace. I'm saying it's a uniform cause, but common enough to pass the bar of "contrary to current understanding of psychology".
i'm late replying but i'd argue that emotional eating isn't entirely self inflicted. It's partially biological (our bodies naturally crave higher calorie foods during times of stress), partially down to learned behaviours that you may not be able to break without outside help.
> What if everyone who wanted or needed it got help
That's always the ideal surely. But there are at least some cases where simply providing people with material necessities and access to medical care etc. doesn't always feel like it's really helping them - I have one such friend, and while I genuinely sympathise with his very real mental illnesses, it's hard not to think sometimes the fact there's no expectation he will ever need to provide for himself at all might be part of what's stopping him turning his life around.
Controlling the motion of your hand to your mouth is entirely within the powers of even amoeba. No one forced you to eat yourself to death.
It's strange how we are so tolerant of the obese but alcoholics who climb into a bottle because of PTSD are considered derelicts. "Healthy at any size" has been the most effective form of long term population control.
> For example, self-inflicted disability (morbid obesity for example) should be subject to a different test of means than birth defects.
I don't really agree with this.
First, I don't see "abuse" of the system being a major problem that needs to be defended against. If someone wants to destroy their future health by Homering, let 'em. They aren't extending their life by eating themselves to death.
But even if that's the concern, I'm pretty sure we could circumvent a lot of those issues simply by subsidizing disability causing conditions (such as building/maintaining public gyms). We can prevent people from getting there in the first place which would greatly reduce the problem of "abuse".
Strong means tests are expensive to run and ultimately will filter out people that actually need assistance. If we are going to apply a social filter, I'd rather side with letting those that don't deserve it in than keeping those that deserve it out.
This is born out with homelessness studies. Applying sobriety or religious tests before sheltering the homeless ultimately keeps people homeless. Housing first, on the other hand, has a tendency to make people sober.
The dreaded “welfare queen” trope has cost so many lives, so much misery. We’d rather countless needy people suffer than dare give someone else more than he/she is due.
Yup. I support expensive social programs with minimal means testing. I'd rather give every kid a school lunch on my tax dime than have kids go hungry because their parents weren't poor enough to get a free meal. The wealthy kids parents are already subsidizing meals so why not let them have a free meal as well?
It's silly to bill people twice for the same product to make sure the underserved aren't accidently helped.
> First, I don't see "abuse" of the system being a major problem that needs to be defended against. If someone wants to destroy their future health by Homering, let 'em. They aren't extending their life by eating themselves to death.
Absolutely. No one should have to pay for it, though.
> If you're only disabled because you eat too much and can't be bothered to exercise I question whether you're actually disabled.
Okay... how do you then prove this? Is preexisting medical issues considered legitimate? What about medication changes? What about [insert any of many possible causes]? What if you have one of those causes but are missing one piece of paperwork to prove it? What if what if what if? I worry that trying to put legitimacy tests on disability just leads to "you're not disabled enough to deserve health" the way it does now.
> If you're only disabled because you eat too much and can't be bothered to exercise I question whether you're actually disabled.
Perhaps there's a distinction between chronic/permanent disabilities and transient disabilities? If I'm obese to the point where I can't walk, I am, indeed, disabled, but don't necessarily have to be for the next 20 years. Diet/exercise/surgery/etc could all reduce the obesity, but in the immediate 'now', I'm disabled and need assistance.
The point of government assistance isn't to make everyone the same, it's to provide a baseline. Someone in such a poor state that they can't work at all still gets a roof over their head.
Someone else can use the money to go to college or start a business, and society has an interest in promoting that because it yields returns. There is even an argument for investing more in people with more potential.
But in both cases the government is terrible at doing the evaluation as a result of politics and bureaucracy, so the right answer is for everyone to get the same.
You should also look into an able account. Your son can have up to 100k in assets invested in what's basically a 529 for people with disabilities. It can go towards housing and food. Get them on snap as well. Every little bit helps.
They aren't very old, so whether or not an able account is a good idea will depend on if they can manage money as an adult.
The issue with able accounts is they are under the sole control of the account holder with few checks in place. Further, crossing that 100k line really sucks. If they let the funds ride and they appreciate past that level, they can lose their qualifications for Medicare/SS.
For now, there's no rush, but it's something I've considered.
If they're unable to manage it themselves, they'd need to have it managed by someone with power of attorney. That can probably be the manager of the SNT if you have one of those as well. Actually the SNT trustee can probably transfer funds from the SNT to the able account as needed. I'm not a lawyer, so it'd probably be good to talk to one about this.
Right, but what happens when I die and there's 90k in the account? In 2->5 years, you'll need to start rolling money into the SNT, yet the only person that can do that is my kid. What if they don't have the wherewithal to know they have to do that?
Able works if my kid can make ok financial decisions. It's a bad idea if they can't.
I didn't say I'm not preparing things. I'm saying an able account isn't a slam dunk.
An able account, if mismanaged, can disqualify my kid from Medicare. That means costly and time consuming legal intervention to correct while my kid misses out on medical care they need.
The third option is waiting on the able account (not the SNT). There's little harm in waiting.
If you don't know already, go look up ABLE accounts. If your child became disabled before the age of 26, they can create an ABLE account and keep much, much more money in their ABLE account than they would otherwise be allowed to keep. ABLE account funds can be used for living expenses that cover the majority of expenses for most people- housing, healthcare, transportation, etc.
I'm aware. My kid is severe and whether or not that is a good idea is something I'll have to wait on. They aren't far enough along to really make the call on setting one up.
This seems like a lot of work that still leaves your child at the mercy of the American system. Have you considered acquiring a second passport for your child somewhere with better social policies? If you have the capital to setup a meaningful trust fund many CBI programs should be within reach.
> Single Applicant for Nursing Home Care
Idaho seniors must be financially and medically eligible for long-term care Medicaid. They must have limited income, limited assets, and a medical need for care. A single individual applying for Nursing Home Medicaid in 2023 in ID must meet the following criteria: 1) Have income under $2,762 / month 2) Have assets under $2,000 3) Require the level of care provided in a nursing home facility.
>The American disability system is basically proving (very painfully) that life is barely livable to get scraps of help. Like below poverty levels.
Yep, SSI disability is a system designed to keep you in poverty. The current max benefit is a little more than $900 / mo. That's basically unlivable unless you also happen to have section 8 housing, which when I asked, had such a huge waitlist it was unusable. $900 / month is certainly not enough to have any sort of dignified life. It's a grim existence punctuated by constant worry over every purchase.
I was on it from 18 to my mid 20's. Thankfully voc rehab helped me scrounge enough grants and scholarships together to pay for me to get a CS degree in '08. I've done quite well for myself since, but it's been a long road.
Also, the second you have slightly more than pocket cash to your name, all your disability and SSI type benefits go away. You cannot work yourself out of disability, because getting a job that can't exclusively pay for all your needs will still kill your benefits, leaving you worse off than the horrid poverty of exclusively relying on the government.
So many people in America who are on government benefits for life would LOVE to work odd jobs or part time and contribute to the economy and buy like an xbox or something but they cannot, because they would then be kicked out of their housing program. It's absurd.
Then these people on fixed, abysmal incomes are preyed upon by an entire industry who exists to skim off fees from the poor for everything from cashing checks, to hounding them for debts, to things like Dollar Tree where you can pay double the unit rate to buy a small portion of a normal product.
Mostly agreed on all of this. The only real way out for people on SSI, based on my experience, is to get a degree in a field where your disability doesn't hold you back. For me, this was computer science.
However, I'm not about to go tell everyone on SSI the way out of that poverty trap is to simply 'learn to code'. I'm fully aware that 'learning to code' isn't even an option for most of the able bodied population, much less those dealing with disabilities.
I simply don't hold out much hope that governments will ever allow those 'on disability' to live a dignified life.
The majority of disabled people would much rather work a significant amount, but employers will turn away a hundred willing disabled employees over spending even ten bucks on accommodating their disability. I have a dwarf friend (his preferred terminology) who has a chemistry degree, and had to interview at fifty different places, including ten interviews at the same place where many of the managers knew him by name and wanted to hire him, before he finally got a job. This insanity included a previous place that he interviewed at that explicitly told another company not to hire him because he requires accommodation.
That accommodation? A fucking tall stool for the lab bench.
Yeah I have cerebral palsy. My one request for accommodation is that I be allowed to 'whiteboard' seated with pen and paper. This is often ignored. In the past, I didn't push the issue until I found myself solving a hard problem at a whiteboard in front of a panel of 7 people who peppered me with questions for the better part of an hour. Stress makes my spasticity worse, so by the end I was literally shaking. Afterward they provided feedback to the recruiter that while my solution worked, I didn't seem confident enough or cool under pressure.
These days, I've done well enough for myself that I can push back. Remote interviews are especially nice. My current boss didn't even know I had a disability until we met in person months after I started.
>to things like Dollar Tree where you can pay double the unit rate to buy a small portion of a normal product.
It seems like you're implying that Dollar Tree is unethical for putting forward an investment in order to take advantage of economies of scale and then paying for overhead, shipping, and retail space to sell their goods at a profit.
What do you propose as an alternative to this? Should these goods be taken from those who are able to produce them at a wage set by the government and then distributed to those who need them, as prescribed by SSI, after nationalizing Dollar Tree and its ilk? How will the amount that the producers are owed for their labor be determined, or does this even matter?
Or maybe if this kind of discount store is immoral, maybe it should be banned. Are you suggesting that the customers of Dollar Tree would be better off if they simply went without whatever wares Dollar Tree has? Or that individual consumers should somehow gain access to the economies of scale that arise with being able to afford, eg, an entire container ship full of junk coming from east Asia?
It is possible to think something sucks without thinking it needs to be regulated away with force.
In the best possible world, their niche would not exist (would not be profitable) because they would have no target market, because everyone would be able to acquire basic necessities at regular grocery/big-box stores. A UBI scheme is far more productive in achieving that world then either of the (likely facetiously suggested) ideas you mentioned.
The Canadian system for disability isn't much better... about the same. I grew up as a child of a single parent who was physically disabled and unable to work. I had to hold a job down on top of school from the beginning of high school onward. My grades suffered terribly and I couldn't get into university. My parent has been dependent on us our whole lives since then: poverty is forced on people in these situations and it becomes a vicious cycle.
The Canadian system has been systematically dismantled by the conservative movements for decades. Long term care was privatized and has been in a slow decline. I've been writing our ministers here for years urging them with solutions to fix the system. Meanwhile my Nan in her 90's, living with Type 1 diabetes, had to go hungry during the pandemic when they couldn't get workers who understood her dietary needs to prepare food she could actually eat. It's been a huge drain on her health in these years of her life and has left a terrible mark.
Definitely worth advocating for and joining movements to push for social programs and human rights. When everyone's quality of life improves so many other things are raised up with it.
It's not even pain-oriented. It's visibility-oriented.
I deal with chronic migraine and it's extremely difficult to get on SSDI for that disorder (unless it is secondary to something more visible, like a TBI). Other invisible chronic pain conditions (e.g. fibromyalgia) are similarly dismissed.
Or diagnosed as something they clearly are not, like depression. There are doctors who are willing and interested in doing the necessary investigative work to figure out what is going on, but they are an extremely small minority.
My experience suggests that the transactional nature of modern medicine is part of what makes these types of investigations so hard. A doctor will be booked solid all day without time to reflect or investigate and that really only works with one-off problems.
A chronic condition is not transactional, it's narrative. Someone needs to manage that narrative and mine it for insights. The only way the American medicine system was eventually able to help me was after I started managing my own narrative, but that has challenges for most people -- especially when experiencing reduced functionality due to disability.
This is a very concise way to put it. And what's worse is that if you do try to take the narrative into your own hands and bring the whole story into appointments, there's a fair chunk of those doctors that will take offense at you trying to lead the conversation or decide that all that effort is evidence of some sort of malingering disorder. Even with lots of effort and information organization, it's still often a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of thing.
> My experience suggests that the transactional nature of modern medicine is part of what makes these types of investigations so hard. A doctor will be booked solid all day without time to reflect or investigate and that really only works with one-off problems.
I'd argue that has more to do with the sheer number of variables and our limited understanding of how they interact.
Patient resilience is also a factor. Few have the resources to eliminate all possibilities at their own expense while accepting the risk of having nothing to show for it. The opposite end of the spectrum are people who show up expecting to walk out with Vicodin and SSDI after the initial consultation.
Using chronic migraines as an example, that shit is a response to something-- and it may not even be medical in origin. Worst case: if you're a diabetic homebody living with six cats' dirty litter boxes, have mold in your basement and bats shitting in your attic, drink no water, smoke meth and eat only takeout Chinese food, any single one (or combination) of these could cause chronic migraines, and are far from being the only causes. Stipends and Oxy won't fix any of this.
Doctors are not investigators. They are scientists. Trained investigators are presumed unqualified to "manage that narrative and mine it for insights" because they are not Doctors (credentialism/"you're not a doctor" is literally the response any disability attorney would suggest you raise against skeptics, failing to notice the irony in a non-doctor attorney/client team touting the validity of a self-authored medical narrative).
> chronic migraines as an example, that shit is a response to something
Sort of. I think the _chronic_ aspect of chronic migraine often ends up being a response to something, but migraine itself is considered a primary condition.
In my case, I respond to many stimuli that are out of my control or hard to control all the time — weather, seasonal allergies and stress to name a few. I also have stimuli that I can control, and by controlling those I reduce the impact to those things I can’t control.
FWIW, I’m not shitting on doctors, here. I actually think that there is some evolution of our medical system that takes the narrative into account, perhaps by process or an intermediary that helps a patient manage their “case”.
I’m not sure transactional is the right word. The problem you are identifying is physician bandwidth, or more fundamentally, insufficient physician supply to meet medical demand, which leads to lower quality care.
That doesn't sound quite right to me. There is a lack of physicians, especially family/general, which makes everything harder.
But that doesn't nearly account for everything. It is also true that the system is set up very transactionally, and that this makes it difficult to address many chronic issues as well as they could be.
If you are lucky, you have an involved general practitioner who has a long history with you, good notes, and time to get into difficult analysis. For many people currently this is a pipe dream. Hell, many people are reliant on ER for basic care - a system that is fundamentally incompatible with this sort of baseline and evaluation.
There are problems beyond just supply and demand. The reason in my experience that someone might use the term transactional is that at any given appointment, most doctors will only choose to focus on one or two topics or concerns. And generally, to get any sort of treatment option for those they'll need some sort of code for insurance to reimburse for the visit. This is especially true for specialists, whom if you visit enough doctors you'll realize push procedures or specialized tests very heavily because that's what makes money. In the current system every single aspect of medical care must have a price tag attached, must be composed of transactions and codes, or the doctors won't get paid. When the concept of "what is the diagnosis" implicitly morphs into "what is the billing code", medical care becomes a fractured and transactional experience rather than a holistic assessment. (And for any doctors reading this, I know that "holistic" is one of those quack trigger words, but those quacks are responding to an unmet need even if their treatments and diagnoses are pure bunkum.)
I think you’re absolutely right that that physician bandwidth is the cause, I think you could characterize the transactional medical experience as a side effect of that problem.
When I say transactional, I mean that each interaction has a cause (“what brings you in today?”) and an action (“try this medication”, “see this specialist”); each visit is like a full story arc from start to finish.
Compare that to psychotherapy where each visit is more like a continuation of the previous session — a narrative. IMO, people who suffer from chronic conditions would benefit from a model that draws on the narrative aspect of therapy.
Off-topic, but have you tried a CGRP Inhibitor? That's a newish class of drugs specifically developed for migraine. Aimovig has been game changing for me.
Like many folks with chronic migraine, though, my approach has multiple facets.
Emgality is part of my management strategy and it significantly improved my total number of headache days per month. It got me to the point where I could start realistically making some lifestyle changes that helped as well.
Botox has also been great. It seems to do less for total number of headache days but it does a lot of duration and intensity. Many days I’m functioning even though I’m dealing with some pain in the background.
It’s not perfect but it’s still a much better place than I was before. :-)
My fiance had intercranial hypertension. Which is a complex way of saying "we don't know the root cause of why your spinal fluid is causing so much pressure in your head that you want to take a ice pick and poke a hole in it!" which also decreases EVERYTHING due to brain pressure, so more tired, less ability to think, less sensitive to all senses, less emotional control (especially because you're in constant pain / fear of sudden motions causing a lot of pain).
Hard to explain to people that she's not just lazy. Thankfully a relatively easy procedure helped and now she's on the road to a slow recovery.
Edit: Maybe it is just empathy. It is hard to see my tax money going towards turning brown kids into skeletons, and not making people who's life already sucks suck a lot less.
Hi, this was enlightening. I'm a dude who has IIH myself for now almost half a decade and I was at no point told this could reduce my cognitive abilities. I take Diamox just in case (to reduce the intracranial fluid).
It was a heering experience to get this diagnosed. One day all of a sudden my head started hurting and didn't stop, for months. But I had no other symptoms so doctors didn't take me seriously and my neurologist appointment was several months AFTER the onset of the symptoms (yes, months!).
That was until I accidentally went to an ER ophthalmologist who saw my optic eye nerves and went holy smokes. I went through so much pain. All of this at a very young age. I developed severe anxiety and depression.
I haven't done well academically speaking compared to my peers. I feel shitty about this everyday, since all of my friends are better off than me.
I'm on HN but not in IT (I am inept at programming, tried several times, I am just not capable of it), but various friends of mine are in IT and make 5x my salary and it makes me feel worthless, because they enjoy life at a different level than I do because of their income. Nicer homes, cars, stability in finances, etc... It makes me feel like I'm just not worthy of life because hey, if they can make it, why can't I? I am supposidly as capable as they are... right?
Thank you for making me aware I have an illness that can make me a bit less capable compared to my peers.
I'm going to use this to be less harsh on myself and hopefuly find something in which I find myself better off one day within my own limitations.
> It makes me feel like I'm just not worthy for life because hey, if they can make it, why can't I?
Honestly though, nobody should have to earn a decent living, regardless of level of ability. They're alive, and not by choice, so they should be able to enjoy it. Meritocracy is just cruelty when extended to the conditions of one's life - we want those with the fewest intrinsic resources be made to suffer? I don't.
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." - Buckminster Fuller
I've never liked that quote because without context the criticism of inspectors and their tools sounds foolish to me. Inspectors generally serve an extremely useful role, I think the friction is that they're people. I compare them to a linter. We should probably have more inspectors unless AI can do it more easily, because capitalists will cut corners, risking the health and lives of others, at basically any opportunity.
I don't think the quote was a specific dig against Inspection-related professions, but more a criticism of make-work (or so-called bullshit) jobs. Maybe a more modern version of the quote would replace "inspectors" with "administrators".
This element of our society being so stingy with our bottom economic half hurts everyone as that half spend their money quickly and locally. The cutting taxes of the wealthy since "they'll invest more in 'creating jobs' and grow the economy" hasn't worked. That 'investment' went mostly to sweatshops in other countries. This is compounded with other draining tax breaks lije carried interest and the scam where corps by their own shares at a tax advantaged situation. The middle class has shrunk and standards of living have declined for I'd guess 2/3 or more of Americans.
I've had something so very similar. At one point I started having a lot of 'pressure' headaches after coming of Zoloft. It lasted for about 4 months. Just constant throbbing pain in the temples, and prevented me from doing critical thinking or working on my software projects. It was a horrible brain fog that basically crippled me mentally. I could do physical labor fine, but anything requiring me to use mental skill just left me sitting there like I was brain dead.
After 4 months I went to the ER, got a MRI scan, went to a neurologist, and none of them could figure it out other than say it's because of anxiety.
They put me on some blood pressure medication, and it seemed to mostly go away over a few months. I still have some headaches with the same type of pain but not lasting all day.
I am not really in IT either, although for a few years I worked for a software company (as customer support, not programming or engineering). I've only ever posted 2 things here, and they were things I was sharing, not my own writing:
In 2013 I was in a very serious motorcycle accident (coma for 1 month, 2 broken legs, broken hip, broken left arm, several broken ribs, collapsed lung, multiple skull fractures, inner ear bones damaged on both sides. My brain damage was such that my short-term memory was basically zero for a long time, as well as damaged nerves that control vision. The road to recovery was/is long, I still have what are referred to in the medical world as "sequelae", which just means "ongoing effects or symptoms", but, long-story-short, I really, really, really believe that we can all improve our lives and our brains if we A: want to, and B: try. I highly, highly recommend the book "Atomic Habits" by James Clear: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/atomic-habits-an-easy--proven-...
And Jordan Peterson's books "Maps of Meaning" and "12 Rules for Life" were pretty life-changing.
Jordan Peterson has a LOT of really helpful content on YouTube (a lot of people don't like him bc I guess he's kind of "conservative", but I think it's more the case that he thinks postmodernism and "wokism" are detrimental to a healthy society.
> Which is a complex way of saying "we don't know the root cause of why [...]"
A thing a lot of people don't seem to be aware about modern medicine. We can treat many things, we know a whole lot more than we used to, but a lot of this knowledge is often incomplete. Many of the body's systems are very badly understood. Treatment for most of those issues is symptom management more than anything else.
This is true. We know experimentally that certain drugs are helpful for certain symptoms. In some cases we have some idea of why they work, but far more often than you might think, it's a case of "we know it works but really don't know why."
It's empathy, but also literally the smarter/cheaper/more humane way to do healthcare, free at point of service. An ounce of prevention vs a pound of cure.
what really makes me see red is the fact that how we do healthcare is worse, more expensive, and less helpful than were it given to all, and STILL, people vote against universal health care. The only benefit to our system as yet is its ability to enrich a few rent seeking billionaires in the middle of us and our doctors. But because crab in a bucket Billy Joe in rural kansas "don't wanna pay for sum un elses helfcare". Evil, stupid, individualistic self harming fucking animals we are in the US. Barbarians to let our citizens in the richest country in the world go bankrupt because they got sick. Evil.
Any system can be hacked, including empathy. We call it "fraud" and unfortunately it seems that the number of humans who can keep two concepts in their head at the same time are vanishingly rare. So you end up with a useless "empathy vs fraud" debate repeated endlessly, roughly corresponding to the left and the right, and it doesn't go anywhere. Of course, what we need is a synthesis. The left needs to be more attuned to fraud that targets empathy, and the right needs to stop using the risk of fraud as an excuse to do nothing.
Unfortunately, "risk of fraud" is a cover for the belief that giving their money to people who haven't worked as hard as they have is theft. Many want to decide who deserves their money more than themselves.
Being poor or disabled is effectively a character flaw.
Another example of the fundamental attribution error on the right. In the same way, many on the left believe that having money means that you've stolen it and don't deserve it. So it cuts both ways.
One side : use our immense wealth as the richest nation on earth to provide basic services to all citizens by maybe taxing billionaires so they only have 1/10 b instead of 100.
Other side: if you're poor, it's your fault. Get fucked.
Laughable you can consider those two positions in any way comparable or equitable. Absolutely silly the enlightened centrism I'm seeing here. Gross and dishonest to even pretend like there's more than one viable non ecology destroying, democracy preserving political position in the us.
Stop obsessing over what marxists think of profit, consider what they want to do with the wealth they redistribute. Make all our lives better for literally zero quality in life change for the rich who we'd tax. Tell me who's going to have any discernible decrease in quality of life if wealth was capped at 1b or 10 vs infinite and I'll call you a silly little child.
You highlight the difference between zealous advocacy and debate. The advocate cannot admit the flaws of their own position, or the merits of the other position. You characterize the left in a moderate way, and the right in an extremist way, even though extremism exists on both sides.
I miss the cultural norm that privileged debate over zealous advocacy, leaving the latter to lawyers and politicians.
>Zealous advocacy
is centrist handwaving that ignores material realities on the ground. Acting as if noting one side is reasonable with faults and the other are lunatics not fit to old office is empirical, here's some proof.
Side A are passing a 4% tax on millionaire's and passing universal school meals for kids. [0]
B are forcing 12 year olds to carry their rapists' child to term. [1]
You're mistaking empirical pragmatism with "zealous advocacy" because you've probably bought a little too much horseshoe theory nonsense or some other centrist silliness.
[0]https://www.npr.org/2023/08/18/1194424563/free-school-lunch-...
[1] https://theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/14/mississippi-aborti...
Please, tell me what extremism is there from the left outside of twitter??? Because I can list dozens of articles like [1] that the right are doing on the ground, right. now. Please, privileged debate away.
Sharing someone else's dream is empathy. Wanting people to be treated with dignity is just plain decency.
The issues the parent poster brings up are policy choices. I think it is good to believe people when they say they are suffering, but a better start is to vote for folks who are willing to treat people like people.
> We need to see disability as a cost to society we must pay, not a failure of individuals which is more or less what were treating it.
You frame this as a binary choice, but it's clearly both.
I understand the desire to destigmatize and focus on systemic problems. But I really hate when health issues are framed as only societal/systemic problems. Doing so is factually incorrect and worse, robs individuals of their sense of agency.
One of the main failure modes I see of progressivism (which I am otherwise happily a member of) is treating all problem's as society's fault. And then progressives wonnder why they feel so dispirited and defeated all the time. Maybe it's because we adopted a worldview that gives us no sense of agency over our own lives?
(Of course, one of the well known failure modes of conservatism is blaming individuals for everything.)
The right answer is that it's both. Like the serenity prayer says, do the stuff you can and accept the stuff you can't. Both are equally important.
> We need to see disability as a cost to society we must pay
Nonparticipating Product Hunting lifehacking hustlebros don't see things that way. They are the worst voters: they don't care about other people's problems and they don't care about problems that are even likely to affect them personally. They only care about the now.
ACA enabled nonparticipation. 18-26 year olds got insurance and checked out. Why do you think Republicans supported it? It got passed but it wasn't radical. That's the point.
> My dream is to see this sometime in my lifetime.
Make the radical thing happen by picking a side. If you feel strongly about this, align with something that activists have been advocating for for decades instead of "pain oriented policy" or something idiosyncratic like that. You have way more agency than you think.
My dad went from someone I can chat with every day about something or build something together to partially disabled due to first stroke and now unable to communicate fully or easily due to the second stroke at 65.
He lost his job and sadly there are few things to help with those who are unable to communicate.
That sucks. If it happened recently, though, don't completely lose hope. My mother-in-law had a stroke with a poor prognosis, and years later she's fully recovered and teaches piano!
Indeed. And we are all born disabled (in that we are unable to sustain our own independence and wellbeing without assistance), and will likely all be disabled at the door of death. For such a universal experience, you’d think healthcare was more central a tenet of civilisation… As available and freely usable as the roads we drive on. Not just that, but our very way of work. 40+ hours a week is plainly ableist yet it persists as an almost unshakable norm. If my brain can only handle a couple hours a day, finding regular employment is nigh impossible.
The problem is you can’t go into a “healing tube” like from sci-fi movies and get fixed. Medical workers are real people with their own wants and opinions on their compensation, just as we are as technologists. It’s so funny that everyone on HN expects to make tons of money for little effort, but when doctors and nurses want to be paid huge bucks society balks.
America’s model is where the UK, Canada, and other subsidized healthcare systems are going. Our doctors make way more, but there is recognition that every doctor is not a replaceable cog - the good ones build up names and reputations for themselves. We have quietly built a large system of cheaper options including tele health, urgent care, and primary care (like CVS Minute Clinic) while enabling nurse practitioners to handle ever more procedures and tests. This is how the system will have to scale given the increasing safety net and huge immigration inflows.
Medical care costs money. I’d rather have choice and options than pretend it’s free, which it isn’t.
Private and well-compensated medical workers still don't offer a sci-fi "healing tubes". Private healthcare is maybe marginally better for 1% of the population, but far more expensive.
Of course there are diminishing returns, the world famous brain surgeon billing at $10k per operating room hour isn't going to deliver a 20x better outcome then the average brain surgeon billing at $500, or however much the ratio is.
Yet some folks still choose to seek out the world famous brain surgeon when they desire that extra quantum of assurance and if they can afford it.
No. I am pointing out that rich people still can and do spend all their money on private healthcare for some tiny increase in countries with public healthcare.
It's possible for at least 1 person in any given country to hop on a plane or recruit world experts to come, with enough money, even in Somalia or Afghanistan, which don't have functioning systems of any kind.
I wasn't making any claims to the contrary, if you misread.
Medical tourism into the US is extremely common. I own a rental unit near a major hospital and rent to many foreigners who travel in for treatment, particularly Canadians. Everything has trade offs.
USA is world-best of many things. But I don't think the healthcare is so good because it is funded by exploiting the poor. And if so, that would be quite a macabre defense.
“Exploiting the poor” is one of those philosophical arguments I disagree with. The US is supposedly so bad for the poor yet they are breaking down the door to come here, month after month.
> The US is supposedly so bad for the poor yet they are breaking down the door to come here, month after month.
The hope of most poor coming into the US isn't that the US is better for poor people, it's that by coming to the US they can stop being poor. And in most cases it doesn't work.
In fact, the American dream of "anyone can become rich" is a lie which exists specifically to justify why we've let America become such a shitty place for poor people. After all, why do we have to improve conditions for the poor if they can just become rich? It's their own fault they've chosen to be poor--they must like it, right?
Really, rich people have no idea what's going on with poor people, and you should really stop talking about things you don't understand.
There is also medical tourism the other way to EU, Mexico, and other countries.
US is really good for the top 10%, who can afford it. However, a minimum wage worker has a really tough time getting good results because the cost is astronomical even with decent insurance.
> America’s model is where the UK, Canada, and other subsidized healthcare systems are going
Well there are other ways to scale - look to China' system - which has a massive throughput of patients in large regional medical centers - primary doctors there see like hundreds of patients a day - but don't do anything but recommend and if you can't get it resolved, they have an escalation mechanism where you see more and more specialized doctors (same day) until you either stump the most specialized docs or they have an action plan for you.
So you could automate the work away or you could create a system that scales through production-line efficiency.
> it’s easy to misunderstand ability as a binary thing.
Yes. And also the notion of ability/disability has too many connotations, it makes it really hard to discuss the subject.
One could posit that having less than perfect vision is a disability (for whatever value of "perfect"). But people will fight tooth and nail to not fall into that category, they'll explain how much they still can do without correction, or straight refuse the definition because glasses compensate their vision.
I think at the very basis, accepting that there isn't a "norm" in the first place could help a lot. If there's no normal people, we can start discussion how we're all different and will be good or bad at different things.
Another funny lens: people entering a foreign culture where they can't read nor speak should also fall into the (temporary?) disabled bucket. And same for so many other mindane situations.
Some years ago, I probably never would have thought of myself as "disabled" in any way. But, like you mention, I wear glasses, and, depending what the activity is, I can either continue on with little issue, or end up completely useless. I've also learned that I have ADHD and a learning disability.
A "disability" is generally defined as a condition that limits one or more "major life activities," which is a term that has its own definition, but it's pretty common sense. One of my disabilities is myopia, which limits the activity of "seeing." My learning disability limits my ability to process visual-spatial information.
Without accommodation in certain tasks, I absolutely am disabled. Ask me to navigate an unfamiliar neighborhood alone without my phone, and I'll end up lost, frustrated, and probably not find where I'm supposed to go. Ask me to do it without my phone and my glasses, and it's just a pointless exercise in futility then.
But, let me have those tools which I know can help me do the tasks, and I'll be just fine. I am still a person who has some disabilities even with my tools, but they're what lets me manage. It says something about American culture, I think, that being seen using something as a "crutch" is a sign of weakness, when, in fact, a crutch is nothing more than a tool that can let someone who would be otherwise unable to do an activity be able to do so, no more or less than my glasses or my phone.
At the end of May, I started suffering from Achilles tendonitis in one of my feet. Because I was exercising too vigorously too early in the morning while my body was not properly warmed up. Never a problem when I was younger.
It has been a long, slow recovery. With a few relapses into tightness because I tried to walk too fast or carry too much weight. Even now, almost 3 months later, I can just glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel.
I definitely took my health and my able-ness for granted when I was younger. Don't know how to teach my kids not to do the same.
If your tendonitis bothers you in the future, you can get a prp injection which does wonders for the healing process.Tendons are funny and don’t really heal back as well as they were before. Putting your own blood back in let’s them get the blood flow they need to heal better.
Holy shit, that's what I have! Thank you for naming the thing, now I can figure out what to do about it. (For me, it was biking strenuously without stretching, apparently.)
zomglings: what have you done to help your ankle(s) recover?
Last Monday, I think tightened a tendon on the front part of my right foot because I had tried to walk too fast the previous evening. Thankfully, understanding the principles of stretching and icing helped me recover from that in 2 days (it wasn't as serious as the Achilles tendon tightening).
Just take it slow and give yourself time to heal. The good news is that this isn't chronic (what the physiotherapist told me). After you heal, just take care to be stretched and warmed up before putting repetitive stress on your tendons.
Edit: When you are injured, the rest of your body has to put itself under extra stress when you move to offset the lack of mobility that the tendonitis causes. So you increase the probability of other injuries (in my case, the tightening of other tendons). Try to be super careful and super patient.
Achilles tendonitis is very popular side effect of flouroquinolone antibiotics(cipro, avelox, levaquin and others). The symptoms can show up to 12 months after last dose.
There are many other side effects. If this applies to you, you should never take this drug again.
We are born totally helpless and die in various states of disrepair but the bulk of our moral disposition as expressed during our temporary window of "ability" does not at all reflect this fundamental truth.
This contradiction is at the heart of social and political frictions. How much does an individual at their peak owe to the collective that "abled" them. Why should anyone take care of them during decline?
Its not a trivial problem. The feeling of invincibility in our youth, ignoring - if not despising - the weak and adulating the strong and capable is probably an evolutionary adaptation.
Yet our predicament as an intelligent and moral species is to understand this core reality and find the right balance. Use the various forms of invented technology to push the limits of ability (augment) without forgeting how it is all bootstraped and held together.
I'm really big on accessibility support. The demographic that I Serve tends to have a statistically higher level of challenges than your average audience.
One trick that I'm doing, in the app that I'm working on now, is that I have a "long-press help" feature.
I have a long-press gesture recognizer attached to the main view, and, when a long-press event is received, I find the shallowest view under that press, and examine it for the accessibility label and hint support. If it does not have any, I back up to its parent, etc.
If I find a label and hint, I use them to populate a popover, pointing at the target, and trigger a haptic. This popover has whatever is in the label (the popover title), and hint (detailed popover body).
This encourages me to make sure that as many items as possible, have accessibility support. It also is a lot easier to test, than running voiceover (which I need to do anyway, as sometimes, text does not speak the way we think).
Before my 30s all my injuries took a week or two to heal.
Now, I'm running around months with a pulled muscle.
I don't even get them from lifting too heavy in the gym, I usually get them when I rotate in the dumbest possible way, grabbing some paper in the office.
I'm not OP but I'm in my 40s and their tale is very familiar to me.
If you live an active lifestyle in your 20s and 30s and try to keep up with the same pace as you age, over time you will just find yourself "tweaking" things. This could be small injuries, like a pulled muscle, or tendonitis, or joint pain.
You are still physically capable of many of the same things, but if you deviate from the "happy path" injury is much more likely and takes way longer to heal.
This reminded me of 5 daily remembrances from Buddhist cannon.
1. I am sure to become old; I cannot avoid ageing.
2. I am sure to become ill; I cannot avoid illness.
3. I am sure to die; I cannot avoid death.
4. I must be separated and parted from all that is dear and beloved to me.
5. I am the owner of my actions, heir of my actions, actions are the womb (from which I have sprung), actions are my relations, actions are my protection. Whatever actions I do, good or bad, of these I shall become the heir.
> 1. I am sure to become old; I cannot avoid ageing.
It's unfortunate fact though that there is rather large chunk of people who do not get to grow old. In the same vein there are people who will not get ill anymore before their death.
It's just reality. Both Buddhists and stoics say it's better to deal with it as it is, rather than putting your head in the sand.
Buddhists celebrate and actively cultivate joy (pīti, a stimulating and joyful mental factor that you develop through meditation). For lay people, any wholesome kind of joy derived from life that doesn't lead to craving and addiction is also considered good.
That joy is transient and ultimately in its transience a cause for suffering. Perfectly fine if you take it for what it is, but not something to cling to. 'Life is suffering' is kind of the whole deal of Buddhism - first, it teaches you to recognise how bad the problem really is, then gives you mechanisms for solving it (detachment).
I don't see that as depressing at all. I find that once you accept that human life and health aren't limitless, it allows you to enjoy every day a lot more than when you think that the days are unlimited. Everything you do and own exists in this time and space which you also temporarily occupy - enjoy it while it lasts, because it will end at some point. It's not depressing, it's more like giving you permission to enjoy life and material things to the fullest while you can.
But seriously it can be the opposite of depressing. Instead of hating getting old, you realise it is like hating that the sky is blue and then you can enjoy it.
I was born with sort of disability. From relatively early age I was presented with the reality that I would have to have heart surgery later in life. So I have tried to enjoy life till that moment. And then the moment came. It was not that bad and, even if I'm not Wout Van Aert, I can still enjoy things like bike commuting. I do not consider my self unlucky but privileged. It is not ideal but it is how it is. I'm not waiting for afterlife.
I think this is a valid critique. One of the primary reasons I dislike stoicism is that reminding myself at every passing moment that I'm going to lose everything I love is awfully depressing. Certainly there is a place for it, particularly around forming and working toward long term goals, but I believe there's also a place for hedonism and escapism and good humor. I don't think that pursuit of rational truth is the goal of being alive.
I think though the point is to accept these realities. Once you do, you can move past them, past the constant worries and actually enjoy what life has to offer, what every moment has to give.
You don't focus on these realities and stop there. You move past them, with a clearer mind.
I don't think it's depressing. It is the reality of life. It is a constant reminder that you must enjoy life today and don't wait for that perfect day. I find it anti depressing because it motivates me to do more today.
I suppose the implication is to enjoy what you can before those things take hold, or during them as best you can if that's the hand you're dealt with. To me this implies the importance of a work/life balance. Working with the hope that it will pay off later has to be traded off with the knowledge that your later life may be inherently less joyful or may not even happen.
The buddhist philosophy (bumper sticker: compassionate skepticism) is very much about joy and reducing suffering. But being ignorant of your likelihood to grow old/ill and eventually die is not a recipe for joy either.
These are things to remember so you can decide and live that. Putting things in perspective, highilighting what you shouldn't take for granted.
If those sentences are grim then those are things you value.
I had a less traumatic experience at the beach. I lost my glasses to the waves.
Working on a laptop for the few weeks while my new glasses that I ordered online arrived was painful. At least something good came off of it. I'm all for building more accessible websites now.
Good example of social model of disability too, which I find the most useful way to think about it. You have an impairment, but because of access to an accommodation it doesn't normally prevent you from doing the things you need and want to do eg is not disabling.
But in other circumstances, like not having financial access to vision correction, it would be. Whether a specific limitation is a disability or not isn't a feature of your body, but a function of your society's relationship to you.
This is enormously true. You know it's true, intellectually. So did I, before it happened to me. But after November 2014, I knew it MUCH MORE INTIMATELY.
I broke my hip cycling, at 44. This is not an easy thing to do at 44, apparently, short of car crashes or explosions, but we were going (too) fast in the rain, and the person in front of me lost their line and went down, and I swerved to avoid running over them, and lost control and went down hard without being able to shed any speed first.
I say "broken hip" but they were pretty consistent about noting that what I had was a "high energy fracture of the femoral neck." Apparently, a "broken hip" is what happens if you're 75 and slip in the shower, but it's the same bone either way. A plate and several pins put me back together, but I couldn't put any weight on the leg for THREE MONTHS, using a walker. Even after PT, I used a cane well into the following summer -- ironically, because of atrophy, not the actual injury.
It was a life-changing period of time for me. I was already pretty aware of accessibility needs -- my mom was a physical therapist in her working life -- but you don't notice the little things until it's YOUR skin in the game.
The two best weeks of my recovery period were actually weeks we were out of town. See, we live in a three-story townhouse in an urban area. It's not big; it's just tall. That's no bueno if you can't really walk.
However, at Christmas we spent a week with my mother and stepfather in the home they had modified years before intending to live there until they died. The main hallway was wide enough to maneuver with my walker. The master bath was 100% accessible. And it was all on one level.
Then, towards the end, we took a cruise. We'd thought we were going to have to bail on it, but my surgeon pointing out "you know, you can rent wheelchairs on cruise ships, and it's really cheap." He was right; it cost me like $120 for the week, and I could GO ANYWHERE AND DO ANYTHING all on my own for the first time since before the accident. Think about it; what's more accessible than a vacation mode traditionally popular with older people?
Everything should be designed with accessibility in mind, not only because one day we might be permanently disabled, but also because everyday we might be temporarily disabled.
For example, you might be carrying something in one hand, and only have 1 hand free.
Or your wrist might be sore from a tough sportsball game and you can’t squeeze a grip at all.
Or you don’t want to turn on the light and wake up baby so you are trying to read in the dark. Or you don’t have your reading glasses at the moment.
I think about this a lot as I get older. what I've realized is that being young (like under 30) is a pretty big deviation as far as physiology goes. the rest of life is a long slow decline, so you gotta set yourself up to manage it.
I think about this a lot with regard to software accessibility. We easily fall into this trap of thinking that it's only needed for a small minority of people- but all of us will age and lose the dexterity and senses we rely on to use computers and phones, not to mention that capacity to learn quickly.
Not that a selfish motive should be required, but prioritizing accessibility features today is very likely to serve you tomorrow.
The article hit home for me, since I injured my left knee in June. I was rehabbing pretty good, to the point where I could do exercise bike and leg work, including light squats. I was set to try a fast walk or slow run in a week, and I could still do yard work. Then last week I reinjured the knee mowing the lawn (if the mower sticks on turf, don't try to force it), and tweaked it again over the weekend (just reaching down to pull a damn weed!). It feels like the meniscus tear I had years ago in the other knee, or it might be an MCL sprain. No instability, just discomfort walking. I've concluded that yard work is more dangerous than strength training or running, particularly if you're stupid.
I saw a lot of comments about squats. I gave up power lifting after college, and just do higher reps/lower resistance stuff, and a lot of variety. But when I had a meniscus tear in my other knee, the orthopedist told me I didn't need to go all the way down to parallel to get the strength benefits for the quads - just 45 degrees was enough. Since I'm in my late 60s, I probably should be a little careful anyway. Suggestions are welcome.
The point of the original article about disability hitting everyone was the big takeaway. Suddenly I have to think about hiring someone to mow the lawn and do yard work for a while. I can still get to the grocery store, but what if the injury had been worse and I couldn't? For me this will probably resolve itself in a while, but for some people disabilities are permanent. Injuries are humbling, and an opportunity for us to gain empathy for others.
Sometimes when you can't do some things it helps you appreciate the things you can do. So the time I would have spent running or working in the yard gets spent reading or doing math, or doing different kinds of strength work. Doors close, doors open - do what you can.
You may have already heard about KneesOverToes guy - his programs scale down for his mother and up to NFL/NBA athletes. Can definitely recommend, he's helped many people.
I thought about that when I read this in the blog post:
> ...and tried something that, looking back now, maybe I’m too old for
I don't know how old he is (not that old judging by the photo, but maybe it's an old photo?), and I don't know what he tried to do, but thinking like that is a slippery slope. Regular exercise is more important when growing older, not less - otherwise, you might become disabled because of your sedentary lifestyle rather than because of an injury.
Exactly my thoughts, people slow themselves down as they age and it's surely a combination of reasons, and you can do what you want. But use it or lose it rings true.
When you break your collarbone, the majority of your recovery is actually healing the joints and muscles that atrophied while you were in a sling (exceptions for surgery etc.) The bone takes care of itself, but your shoulder and arms freeze up and wither away alarmingly fast.
If you have a bad joint and the pain causes you to reduce movement, it's very worthwhile to see a physio and keep the joints moving while it heals, to avoid further damage.
I think you assume way too much out of this: The way I usually hear this expression is like "I have tried to do a backflip, failed and broke my arm", or so. So the blog writer likely did something way out of his league, like a fancy trick, and it is not a fair assumption to think that he lives such a sedentary lifestyle that any kind of movement would cause him harm, or even thinks that way. One can be very sporty, yet do some stupid one-off movement that will cause harm.
And it's amazing how long these things can take to recover once you're in your 30s. I got patella tendinitis in both my knees, after a decade of sedentary indolence, followed by an extreme reentry into exercise. It took nearly a whole year to get my knees right.
I have a genetic degenerative joint condition. Ever since I had COVID, I've been on a speedrun to decrepitude. I have my leg braces and a cane, and I can still do my job. BUT IT'S EXHAUSTING. And Frustrating.
80% is my new 100%, and it's been a real struggle to adjust my current reality to my former expectations. I keep having to temper my ambitions for what I can reasonably accomplish. My geneticist says that as long as I keep doing my exercises, I should avoid a wheelchair, so that's nice.
I had major surgery a bit over six months ago. Here's a fun trick: try using a mobile phone. The high-grade opioids keeping the pain in check blunt your thinking. Post-op anesthesia cognitive disfunction on top of that makes things even more confusing. Oh yeah, there's also loss of fine motor control. Don't even try going without your reading glasses if you use them.
It takes days to weeks to return to function well enough to begin rehab. After that it can be weeks to months for full function to return.
Yeah, accessibility matters all the time, it's not just a special thing to slap on after your MVP. It is your MVP for many people.
> Through all of it, I’ve found myself noticing “accessibility” helpers more than ever before: that railing on the stairs, that ramp off to the side of the building, that elevator tucked away in the back.
The title got me because I was fortunate to have this revelation too. I'd sprained a foot joint jumping off a small staircase. A day later I could barely limp into a med supply place to buy crutches. My "outdoors" vacation changed completely.
Suddenly I'm worried about people judging me, and I'm intensely grateful for ramps, I care about parking spots, and it dawned on me that I'd ignored all this infrastructure that I now needed.
Same. at twenty something i sprained my ankle playing basketball. it's unbelievable how hard concrete sidewalks feel to a tender recovering bag of flesh. i sought out dirt and grass for relief. And getting up and down stairs hugging the rail, the world in slow motion as the youth rushed by.
i'm grateful that such a small experience helped me see so much.
Peter Attia explores the same notion in his recent book called "Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity". I haven't finished the book yet, but the key point so far is that our modern medicine, as he calls it "Medicine v2", is in need of an upgrade to v3. Most people expect to become frail or senile in their late years, but it doesn't need to be that way.
This new type medicine will focus on preventing injuries like that of Jim Nielsen's knee, as well as illnesses. For example, blood sugar levels considered normal have increased over the years as the general population got fatter. If your levels are measured 125 mg/dL, maybe you'll get a suggestion to change your diet. But if they're 126 mg/dL, suddenly this is viewed as serious and you're prescribed medications.
Attia argues that there's too much focus on putting out fires like treating a stroke, but not nearly enough prevention and almost no individual long-term course correction for patients. He also argues that we have all the tools to collect the data and to make it possible. The book also delves into the science of "the 4 horsemen of death" as he calls them: atherosclerotic disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease and the type 2 diabetes with the related metabolic dysfunction.
We’ve all had to open a door with our hands full and thanked the wheelchair button by the door, or tried to watch a movie with the flu and a stuffed head so we snapped on CC.
This is very timely for this post to appear on the front page because I just suffered a pretty bad injury. I broke my clavicle in a cycling race. I can hardly move, my sleep is constantly disturbed by pain, and I am only able to type this with two keyboards – one resting on my right shoulder so I can use my left hand in the sling, and one for my right hand on the desk.
I'm only able to function because my partner is taking such great care of me. I would otherwise be toast. I can't drive like this. I can hardly walk due to road rash on my legs.
Take your health seriously. You can only truly realize how lucky you are once it is gone.
i had a similar realization when i shattered my humerus, one arm completely out of commission for a month then a year of recovery. The only things i could do were TV/video games with a controller, ive always been a gamer but struggled with the idea: is gaming net positive on peoples lives or society? Lots of people "waste" tons of time gaming when they could be improving their situations. Having no ability to work/cook/exercise i noticed that gaming is a MASSIVE boon to disabled people. Im not sure how well id have managed without to be honest.
I had a bout of gout recently for the first time in my life.
The pain in my foot was beyond anything I've experienced. I couldn't drive, I bought a cane and hobbled with the side of my foot. I was miserable every hour I was awake, and was even woken up by it a few times. Thankfully it only lasted 10 days but it was incredibly eye opening.
Mea culpa as well. To the extent I've successfully developed empathy for disabled and marginalized people and some degree of understanding, it's mostly been because my privileged life was interrupted by injury, or something else happened to impact myself personally.
I read this article on HN recently about trying to cultivate these experiences deliberately, I'd be curious what you thought of it. It seems like an interesting idea but I have mixed feelings about cosplaying as a person with a disability I don't actually have.
I've read it...at least part of it and skimmed the rest.
From what I have read -- and this article cites the same stat -- roughly 15 to 20 percent of people self-identify as disabled. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. At least one study found that about 60 percent of people would benefit from better accommodation if you ask them if they have difficulties with X without asking them to self-identify as disabled.
Both the officially disabled and people with milder limitations get really cranky about where to draw that line. People with mild limitations often go out of their way to say they are definitely not disabled and merely have a little trouble with these things and officially disabled jealously guard the label because they need it to have any hope of making their lives work at all and don't want people who can make their lives work without that label horning in on any limited benefits available only to them or diluting what the word means.
It's a really thorny topic.
I had a class from SFSU in Homelessness and Public Policy and it has a similar exercise, like "Spend one day pretending you are homeless. Figure out how to go to the bathroom while carrying everything you own. Figure out how you will get around without a car."
And then I spent nearly six years homeless.
There are plenty of people with actual disabilities who are perfectly capable of telling you what they need if you will only listen to them. If you are unable or unwilling to listen to them and take them seriously without trying to "walk a mile in their shoes," well, sure, go ahead and try it out for a week or whatever if you think that will help you.
But sometimes all it takes is one person willing to say it over and over so you keep it in mind when it's time for you to make coding decisions or whatever. And if/when that happens, it probably won't ever get noticed, acknowledged nor appreciated.
It will promptly be forgotten like when programmers of an old, "useless" language fixed Y2K and the world did not have a global financial meltdown on January 1, 2000. We shrugged, acted like "Someone must have been wrong." and moved on to hand-wringing about the newest bad news.
I am probably the only person on the planet who sometimes goes "Thank God we aren't living in the Y2K Post Apocalypse!"
The internet has made my life as a disabled person vastly more workable. Are there things I wish were even betterer? Sure, there are and we certainly shouldn't be dismissing the completely valid complaints of anyone who can't do x because it's not designed with their needs in mind and there is no means whatsoever to get it done.
I certainly do not dismiss such people.
But perhaps it would help to understand that when they complain about, for example, the internet not working for them, part of what they are telling you is that the internet is vital to their lives and has expanded their life beyond what it likely would have been in decades past. So when it doesn't work, it's like taking away their oxygen or sunshine.
It's hard to do anything well. It's often not appreciated at all nor rewarded. Try to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It’s true. But also perhaps more nuanced. Many people see disability as a purely negative experience, something to avoid at all costs, synonymous with illness. But it is a slightly different axis: Both medical and societal in nature. Thus we have the idea that it is not the person who is disabled, but society that disables the person. And separately many people have it as a central part of their identity, something to be proud of. Hence identity first language: “disabled person” vs “person with disability”. I am a person who holds it both as a burden of sorts, but also an identity, and a constantly fluctuating commentary on the ableism in the way we’ve built society. Disability is a complex framework.
It should be noted that not all disabled people or communities like the social model. I despise it, for example. I have MS + visual impairments and society isn't why I'm disabled. I find the social model is adopted more by people for whom accommodations/cures exist and who don't have physical difficulties/pain.
I feel very conflicted when seeing young people who are out of shape. They have the best possible potential for increasing fitness due to fast recovery. An investment that pays massive dividends in a very very short time. A fit body pays back on so many levels it is a paradox why would anyone not be fit.
The world has changed. The built environment has changed. I look at unfit young people and part of what I feel is that they are victims of a broken world getting blamed for what their elders did to them.
Paradox? Declining to experience torture several times a week in perpetuity is not a paradox. I have never ran a mile, not when I was young or today; not all of us have the genes that release happy chemicals from physical exertion.
Yes, I think people sometimes underestimate how much people’s experiences differ. I find weight lifting boring but enjoy running; many people report the opposite and others hate both.
So while the long-term benefits of exercise are well-established, it’s up to the individual whether the benefits outweigh the cost for them personally. And in the context of disability, some of those benefits might not apply or may be counteracted by the exercise exacerbating a chronic condition.
The benefits of exercise are great enough that I would encourage people to try to find an activity they like and accommodates any disabilities. Unfortunately, this isn’t feasible for everyone.
I think that would just be a matter of practice. Many things are uncomfortable/difficult in the beginning, but if you do them enough then they can become rewarding.
Well what's your reason for running? To lose weight? To be healthier? To sleep better? Can you run longer distances? Can you run faster times? Can you compete in races?
I mean if you have run for 5 months and haven't progressed towards any of your goals ... then it seems like your routine needs to be improved. Or maybe you want a different activity that would help you reach your goals.
For most people, if you don't enjoy running just to run, the reward would be the progress towards your goals.
The main point of this article is to inspire a bit more empathy and consideration for those with disabilities. He knows he's privileged, and that the 4/5 people who aren't currently disabled (by Sarah's count) are too; he's trying to help the 4/5 see themselves in the 1/5, too. Doesn't feel constructive to call him out for it
I used to work at a Fortune 500 company. While there, I gave up my car and began walking to work.
A teammate offered to pick me every morning but our schedules were a little different, so she couldn't take me home. There was a program for people ridesharing, some goody-two-shoes, pie-in-the-sky, "Let's promote the idea that people need to drive less" thing and she qualified for a special parking space for ridesharing with me.
And then someone else offered to take me home and also applied to this program and did not get the special parking space she was hoping for. Instead, the first woman lost her special parking privileges.
After that, I stopped participating in all the company programs aimed at rewarding people with cars for driving less by walking, biking, ridesharing, etc. for fear that as someone entirely without a car, no matter what I did, I would somehow be in violation of the rules which were geared towards people who owned cars and by default drove alone.
I happen to be seriously handicapped myself and my condition is congenital. If he is more entitled to give his views on this topic than I am, then something is extremely wrong.
Any solutions to this will be demonized as socialism, communism, Marxism, or disruptive to the economy by elected Republicans, their top corporate/rich donors,and a good chunk of Corporate Democrats. Popular news sources will largely nod along and keep being a carrier of a dishonest narrative.
One of the best things I ever did was get strong through a basic barbell training program called Starting Strength.
Squat, deadlift, overhead press, bench press, chinups, eat, sleep. It really is that easy.
Highly recommend it for anyone interested.
1. Any back pain I had disappeared completely.
2. When I have to lift something awkward (eg, furniture), I don't injure myself. If you can deadlift 200KG, awkwardly leaning over your lawn mower to grab a 20KG bag of concrete is pretty easy.
3. It is really really handy being able to move heavy things.
4. Basically everything else improves. Going for a tough hike uphill? Your legs will be a lot less sore if you can squat 150KG. Need to hold your screaming baby for 40 minutes? Easy!
I powerlifed for years, with a truly excellent coach for much of that time. For what it was worth, she was Starting Strength certified and a successful international masters competitor. She fixed a subtle problem with my deadlift using nothing but the wrinkles on my T-shirt; my recovery improved dramatically.
At 40, I was stronger than I was as a high school wrestler. I loved lifting. I remember casually picking up a piece of equipment that took two burly guys to lift and jumping down from a pickup with it.
But over the course of several years, I picked up several small but persistent injuries lifting. Two can be worked around. One makes it very hard to squat for more than a few weeks of training. None of the injuries, fortunately, affects me noticeably in daily life. But I'll never wide-grip bench press again, either.
When I was coming to terms with these injuries, I had a long talk with the oldest natty lifters in my gym. The powerlifers were all dealing with various chronic injuries. (Seriously, Rippetoe has published a bit of his medical history. He's a mess of injuries.)
But you know who was still lifting in their 60s and even 70s, injury-free for decades at a stretch? The natty bodybuilders. One of the oldest looked over at me one day, and said, "You know, I don't like the risk/reward on heavy squats. You do them flawlessly for years, and then one day, a group of muscle fibers decides to misfire for a moment when you're under the bar."
So, enjoy Starting Strength, or whatever other beginner program Reddit likes this year. And the two Starting Strength certified coaches I've known were excellent. Good technique is absolutely worth it. But once you've gotten those sweet beginner gains, talk to the old lifters, and think long and hard about where you want to go next. Because nothing is as important as remaining injury-free. And every older powerlifter I met was dealing with chronic injuries.
Once gains get difficult, think about what you really want out of lifting.
Man I wish somebody told this to a young me (although I probably wouldn’t have believed them).
Once you start making gains it does become addictive especially if (like me) you have some uh let’s call it mental health challenges.
After sustaining a number of injuries I finally learned to stop looking at the numbers, to stop comparing myself on exrx or symmetric strength. I just go to the gym and have fun. I still do the major movements but I always make sure to leave a little in the tank. I always listen to my body first and foremost. If it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel right.
Your experience is surely valid, but I wouldn't just generalize this to the population at large.
When you say "powerlifters", are those people who compete or just people who train? I can imagine this to make a difference.
And in any case, I wouldn't take Rippetoe as an example of good scientific programming these days. It's good for getting people into lifting, but Starting Strength has a powerlifting fetish for no good reason, and the advice to aggressively gain weight is also not appropriate for everyone (GOMAD etc.).
Then recently I saw a Starting Strength video in which they claimed that the really grindy reps at the end of the set are the ones that make all the difference (for strength anyway), which as far as I'm aware is false and probably harmful, as you can do way more training volume with less risk of injury (I would expect) if you keep some reps away from failure.
> and the advice to aggressively gain weight is also not appropriate for everyone (GOMAD etc.).
Yeah, don't do GOMAD unless you're a 17-year-old teenage boy with a BMI of 18.5 who wants to be a linebacker or something. Some of the Starting Strength advice is... very situational, to put it politely as possible.
Their coaching certification, however, means more than 95% of the "personal trainer" certifications you'll see in the average gym.
> When you say "powerlifters", are those people who compete or just people who train? I can imagine this to make a difference.
The oldest powerlifer I knew well who wasn't dealing with chronic injuries was a 40-year-old women's masters competitor. She competed around 135 or 139 lbs bodyweight, I think? She was absolutely a beast, with near flawless form and an excellent coaching eye.
Besides her? Almost every other long-term powerlifter I met was nursing some injury. But what really stood out to me was the absence of old powerlifters in my local gyms. There were old lifters in amazing shape. But none of them were grinding out the really heavy squats and deadlifts.
But don't take my word for it. All I'm recommending is that when new powerlifters max out their newbie gains, they take a good hard look around their local gym, and see who has decades of happy lifting under their belt. Ask those folks about their training plans and injury histories and PED use. You may see different patterns than I did. But for lifelong fitness, avoiding chronic injuries is everything.
It’s a very interesting shift in fitness culture as you age. In my teens and twenties I was adoring people like Ronnie Coleman and thinking that’s the life. Now I see him in clips often in a wheelchair - still with a great attitude but obviously not healthy.
Seems like in your 30s you start to realize the limits and tradeoffs and by your 40s most have accepted that longevity is the main goal - if it’s not too late and they destroyed a knee or back or something else.
How does one know when newbie gains are maxed out? I mostly do calisthenics because I actually got into working out because it was part of injury-recovery. I'm enjoying my gains and would like to push myself to get bigger gains, but lifelong fitness maintenance has always been #1 in my mind. I'd like to figure out how to identify what the "maximum maintenance point" is.
This depends on lift frequency, the lift itself, etc.
In general, for a compound lift (squat/bench/deadlift/overhead press) most would consider newbie gains exhausted once you can no longer linearly add weight/reps on a weekly basis (assuming a normal weekly schedule). This is the point when various forms of periodization (waving weight/reps/frequency up/down in many possible ways) need to start to support the increase of weight/reps over time.
> most would consider newbie gains exhausted once you can no longer linearly add weight/reps on a weekly basis
This is likely to happen after about 3 months.
I don't really agree that the kind of weights you can achieve after 3 months pose a meaningfully elevated injury risk, unless your form is terrible or you have some existing condition.
I can review myself in ekidd's experience. I've been in the gym for 20 years and plenty of stronger (but not competitive) people I know picked up injuries from grinding out tough sets of 5 or 3. Heck I have two abdominal hernias and a 'sensitive' back that gives me problems from time to time that I can directly blame deadlift PRs for, even with great technique.
The gym is generally a safe hobby, but scientific bodybuilding, with its large sets, slow eccentrics and focus on the stretch is definitely the safest way to lift for longevity.
Layne Norton is another if you want more of a natty point of view (IFBB pro). Mike is very enjoyable but I do find his advice often leans toward enhanced people and might not be the best for natties
About grinding reps, I look to the example of Lasha Talakhadze, arguably the strongest weightlifter ever. Of all the clips I've seen of him training I don't think I've ever once seen him grind a rep. It's always submaximal(though huge by normal standards) weights done at such high speed it looks easy.
I used to do karate. There were all these character who had seemingly superhuman physical fitness yet they would die really early. I always wondered why was that?
Now I believe that a lot of physical training isn't that healthy. And if you put your whole personal identity on your physical abilities then when your abilities start to decline, as they naturally do from age 40 and up, you may spiral out of control and literally die.
Anything to an extreme is unhealthy, and making your whole personal identity any single thing - being an athlete or a pilot or a parent or gay or disabled or a Christian or whatever - is a bad idea. But the statement "a lot of physical training isn't that healthy" is pretty objectively wrong.
I know several martial arts practitioners who had to have hip surgery at a relatively young age. It’s really easy to overestimate what your body can handle.
Going from a black belt in Taekwondo (age 7-16) to doing Isshin-Ryū karate (with some BJJ, aikido, and budokai in between) was really eye-opening. Taekwondo is all about sharp form, clean lines, high kicks. Punches and kicks go to full extension, and the stances are fairly deep.
In Isshinryu, there's none of that. You stop the punch/kick before the joint goes to lock. The stances are much shallower. The movements are less dramatic. My sensei told me it is much more sustainable this way, and many of the old taekwondo folks end up with joint issues specifically in knees and elbows. I don't know if it's related, but my knees and elbows are the two parts of my body which are most problematic.
It's also possible my taekwondo instructor just didn't know about this, that was a long time ago.
Were you referring to people like Andy Hug of Kyokushinkai?
I believe he suffered from an illness, but in general I suppose having a full-contact punching and kicking bouts with gigantic men isn't very good for your long-term health anyway. Especially in Kyokushin where they have (had?) no weight classes.
I actually don't think it is the direct damage from fighting that gets them but more the inability to stop and scale your commitment to what you can and can no longer do.
Direct damage from combat sports can catch up to you eventually. CTE is pretty serious, but unfortunately you probably don't realize the extent of that damage until it's far too late.
Thanks for this! Do you (or does anyone) have any suggested resources for transitioning out of powerlifting into something more maintenance/lifestyle?
I got a good base of coaching in high school and later in life came back to lifting through Starting Strength. Recently I’ve gotten a lot out of Stronglifts 5x5 and a modest garage barbell setup to reach kind of a local maxima. I could keep going with it, and it would be nice to continue taking advantage of the simplicity of that program to stay in shape (or move to madcow, or something similar) but there’s no value to me in getting any bigger/stronger - I’d rather “diversify” a bit into other activities and avoid the injuries that come with heavy weights, but I would like to maintain what I’ve got.
I’m not sure if the answer is simply “just stop increasing weights” or if there’s something better I can do that would further reduce chance of injury, conserve energy for other activities, save time etc.
Well, one of the easiest paths is to stop doing oly lifts and start using DBs instead of a bar where possible. If you don't think you might have great form with DBs, just spend a few sessions at the beginning with a coach. The one thing it's hard to emulate with DBs are heavy deadlifts. For that, I built myself a resistance band platform similar to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/homegym/comments/kx57ho/i_made_a_re...
My experience is that it becomes equally fun for a data driven person to start tracking aerobic performance (rowing was where I started because we have a C2 at home, and then diversified into running and biking).
Oly - The competitive sport of Olympic weightlifting, which has 2 lifts, the snatch (bar from floor to overhead in one explosive movement)and the clean and jerk (from floor to chest height and from there to overhead).
Those who do it tend to just refer to it as weightlifting (one word), but we sometimes say Oly weightlifting when talking to others to avoid confusion with the more general weight lifting/lifting weights, which encompasses powerlifting(another competitive sport consisting of bench press, squat and deadlift), weightlifting and general resistance training.
Weightlifting is more dynamic and requires a lot of skill to control the timing and momentum, whereas powerlifting is closer to a test of raw strength(not that it doesn't require some technique).
Oly is Olympic weightlifting, a set of weightlifting movements/lifts. In various workouts, like in dieting, some folks decide on a subset of all the things (movements, food) which is good (or bad) and focuses on them. Powerlifting is another opinion of a good set of movements which focuses on weightlifting abilities.
I’ve found Marcus filly to be a great starting point for “functional bodybuilding”. He is an ex cross fitter with amazing physique but after rehabbing many injuries his programs and youtube videos emphasizes functional movements as a key foundational principle to all workouts.
That's why I appreciate starting strength. It's a novice program and the gains come fairly quickly and easily. Rippetoe himself in Practical Programming makes the point that after the novice phase, you need to assess what your goals are and program accordingly. A football player will have different goals from a runner, who will have different goals from the general sedentary public.
I myself am pretty happy with where I'm at and don't plan on trying to squat 300KG. I appreciate there's a higher risk of injury pushing myself to my limits. And the amount of investment (time in the gym, getting a coach or learning enough to program for that level) is not worth it.
I'm not suggesting that everyone goes and tries to become a powerlifter. I'm just suggesting that for anyone who isn't strong and is looking to become strong quickly, Starting Strength is the best method in my opinion. And as others have pointed out, going from a 20KG to an 80KG squat will make a huge improvement to your life, and is very manageable for pretty much anyone.
yep, as i got older chasing the 1RM became something that wasn't worth the risk/rewards. i would tweak something every once in a while and set back weeks as i recovered. wasn't competing and didn't make any difference in my health or how i was perceived.
at some point it becomes less about progress and more about being injury free and CONSISTENT (which can't happen without being injury free lol). it scares me that this margin becomes even less as you get older. i can imagine someone in their 70-80s being diligent and all it takes is some minor injury that takes you out for a week to begin a downward spiral.
Injuries are not talked about enough on the internet. And they should be the number one topic for amateur fitness enthusiasts of any kind. Everybody is focusing on impressive performance results but:
- you will never achieve anything resembling impressive as an amateur natty no matter what you do. PED use is so common now they're the standard for comparisons
- your pay check does not depend on achieving certain results. Look at the pros when they stop competing, they know it's not worth pushing it any more
- any persistent injury significantly affects your life quality. A very mild shoulder RSI makes sleeping and sex complicated
- training 3 times a week for decades offers plenty of opportunities to make mistakes so you need to leave a big margin for safety
- 80/20 rule applies to the effort and results and to the risk and rewards
I think the number one topic should be actually doing it at all. Too many people just talk about getting exercise, or endlessly watch videos about it, or endlessly read blogs and articles and guides, but never actually do it, or do very little.
I think it should be injuries, because of the reasons mentioned above.
It's better to not work out and not be injured than it is to work out and be injured, so the focus should first be on avoiding injury and second on actually going out and doing stuff. Same reason we watch safety videos before we do the thing they concern.
I'm 36 and I've now transitioned from being a natty quasi-powerlifter to a natty bodybuilder. I should have done it earlier. I haven't hit a strength PR in years.
I started with a strength programme called Greyskull LP which descends from the Starting Strength school of thought (although far superior IMO). I got some really good results with it. I'm naturally quite strong, so it took less than a year before I was doing things like 200kg deadlifts. I would watch other natties in the gym and, according to my own observations, I was usually the strongest guy in the room.
But the easy progression quickly stops. Once you get to lifting 2.5x your bodyweight off the floor, or dipping with 100kg attached to your waist, it starts to become really hard. I mean, yes, you've trained for it, but it's still incredibly taxing on the system and, let's be honest, not reflective of any real work anyone might carry out. Real work involves lots of toing and froing, not lifting one enormously heavy weight then going home.
I developed a really hard to change mindset that said if it's not heavy there's no point. I was still doing 3x5 reps of everything, often to failure, after years and years of lifting and never making any strength gains anyway. I eventually developed an elbow injury thanks to too many weighted chin ups. I prided myself on being able to chin up 3 plates when most people can't even do bodyweight. Well, now I can't do bodyweight either (not without pain at least).
I made the change after watching some of Scott Herman's more recent videos on Youtube. He's now 39 and still in excellent shape. Unlike most on Youtube, I believe he is natty too. He does high volume work which, naturally, will be nowhere your strength limit. I was still doing 3x5 reps, now I'm doing 3x8 with drop sets. Way more volume, way more variety of movements, way less weight. It's been so much better.
I'd still recommend a starting strength programme to beginners, but you really need to get off it after a year or so and decide whether you want to be a bodybuilder or strength athlete. And before you decide to be a strength athlete, look at seasoned strength athletes and decide if you want to look like them when you are their age, or not.
As for juiced bodybuilders/athletes, don't even consider it. You think you'll get more women (be honest, that's why you do it). But, in fact, the love of your life doesn't care how strong you are or if you are 10% body fat. All you'll do is destroy your body. Lifting heavy just destroys it even more (see Ronnie Coleman).
> As for juiced bodybuilders/athletes, don't even consider it. You think you'll get more women (be honest, that's why you do it). But, in fact, the love of your life doesn't care how strong you are or if you are 10% body fat.
Agreed. It also occurred to me while reading your comment that there are a lot of parallels to this in the auto enthusiast world- guys going deep into debt on a depreciating asset, sometimes overtly to look cool for women, when in reality all they end up with is a sausage-fest of guys rubbernecking and coming up to them in parking lots.
I want to add to this. I'm also a Starting Strength alumni, moved on to the advanced programs and last stopped at 5/3/1.
One thing I learned: When I was peak-ego my DL/SQ/BP was ~1300lbs. I remember actively thinking the people on the machines and especially the "Smith" machine were wasting time.
Then after awhile, I switched gyms and noticed the biggest/oldest guys were not olympic lifting, they were all on machines. I got to talking to them and they said the same thing, they weren't chasing power numbers, they wanted to stay safe and the machines allowed them to do that.
You can still get injured on a leg press machine, but it offers most of the advantages without the huge risk of 350lbs dropping on your neck.
I partially agree - pushing limits is plain stupid given enough time, every single time injuries happen, to everybody out there. If they say not to them they are either lying or just begun the sport recently.
I have different approach, with similar result so far to those bodybuilders without actually doing it - don't lift your max, but do it with free weights as much as possible, in good form (the most important bit long term). You don't need to look ridiculously bulked, say well-defined is more than enough, even for women's attractivity. Those massive muscles always hide very unhealthy eating habits (ie > 200g of protein every day will mess up your organs and joints badly over decades) and tons of injuries, plus they are very hard to maintain if you actually want to be happy in your life and do other stuff.
I strongly recommend removing some weights and adding repetitions, you can still reach failure threshold if you want, but in much safer way. Easier to maintain perfect form for each exercise too. You mention lifting heavy stuff in weird positions - that's recipe for injury regardless of age or shape, rather just be a bit smarter with lifting.
What is much better to be able to have some stamina - weightlifting on the limits alone ain't going to give you much of that (saw more than once a ripped guy who didn't do any cardio trying to make >1000m altitude difference hike, well he struggled a lot, on a way up and then knee pain started say in the middle of descent).
There are tons of things apart from main, most visible muscle groups that you really want to train - small stabilizing muscles, tendons, ligaments, joint flexibility, and stamina for all of those. Body is a complex and interconnected system, no point overdeveloping just few main parts for the show or mirror look, rather work on everything.
I think it makes sense to get started exercising, using any kind of good program at all, and to pay attention to technique.
I don't have injury stats on machines versus free weights. Almost all the serious lifters I knew (bodybuilders or powerlifters) did plenty of free weight work. This included one 67-year-old bodybuilder in amazing shape who'd been injury-free for decades. He used a mix of free weights and machines, but he didn't squat the kinds of weights the serious powerlifters did, either.
You can make yourself a lot stronger than the average person with pretty low risk of injury, if your technique is good. As far as I can tell, you can do it pretty safely with a squat rack, some safety bars, a bench, a bar, and some weights. According to BroScience(TM), lol, the advantage of free weights is that if you have good technique, then you wind up working large parts of your body as a unified system, or something. (Bro science is like blog posts on unit testing; everyone's got a theory and almost nobody has numbers.)
But once you hit "a lot stronger than the average person", where do you go next? Do you maintain? Do you keep trying to lift more? Do you decide to go for a bit of hypertrophy?
And that's where I think it makes sense to talk to the old lifters, and look for patterns. Don't believe me. I'm just some guy on the Internet. Go talk to the old guys who've been doing it for 40 years and who aren't wearing tons of wraps and tape. By the time you need to make these decisions, you'll likely know some old guys at your gym, anyways.
I am not sure if you minimize risk of injury that much. You might get injured on machine or dumbbell if you go heavy.
Anyway with most machines you won't be able to load it heavy enough quite soon.
I think there is also happy middle ground where you train for strength but not into extremes - you progress at slower pace and prioritize form. I would say bodybuilders can also be strong and healthy but they can't use that strength properly (because of the type of training they do) and destroy their health with drugs.
> I am not sure if you minimize risk of injury that much. You might get injured on machine or dumbbell if you go heavy.
The thing machines have that free weights don't are in-built safeties, either by design or as a discrete component (e.g. smith machine). The only machine I can think of that you can get seriously injured on is a leg press machine, whereas there are a multitude of ways to hurt yourself with free weights, especially any exercise where you're under the bar. I say this as someone who has historically trained with a ton of emphasis on the Big 5/Golden 5 compound movements (i.e. not machines). The safety aspect is a big reason casual fitness clubs (e.g. Planet Fitness) have no barbells on the premises.
You are right. I meant it if you do excercises “properly” it shouldnt be big difference. But of course that already means freeweights are more dangerous.
I mean, if they are the type that are using steroids and such things, sure.
The other sort that are into drugs just gets stoned and lift weights. The risks just aren't the same: Sure, you are going to do some damage with pot, but not the same sort and you'll certainly not be so much worse than the person that gets stoned and plays games a lot of the day or gets stoned and works at a gas station.
(I worked with an ex-professional body builder: He was the second type and couldn't compete with the steroid crowd. He was OK with that)
My focus has been on calisthenics, but I still do some lifting. My thoughts have been that lifting free benefits from increasing the strength of all the stabilizing muscles. machines take away a lot of that so that you can target a particular muscle/group very effectively.
So my completely uneducated opinion is, machines might be worse in the long run.
"Natty" means natural, and describes those who lift without performance enhancing drugs such as steroids, although some questionable supplements might be allowed. The opposite, describing those who use such drugs, might be "enhanced".
What's the questionable supplements allowed? Herbal stuff like ashwagandha or whatever, or not-technically-steroids-but-close-enough substances like SARMs?
Creatine is common among people who've maxed out their beginner gains but who are still chasing PRs. You get a fair bit of it naturally in food, and it's been studied to death by nearly every sports medicine program in the world: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/17674-creat...
Creatine will let you push an 8 rep set to 9 or 10. And when every pound on the bar is bought with two weeks of complicated periodization, that little bit helps. And creatine is allowed by basically every athletic league.
Real PEDs are a whole different ball game. Much bigger risks.
I think most people would count anything not forbidden for Olympic athletes as natty (not that most Olympic athletes actually are, but that's another discussion).
Yes. Bodybuilding (big muscles and low body fat, for aesthetics) is very much a place where chemical assistance is common. But there are those who prefer to do it natural (and are way less likely to die young).
If your squat problem is knee or back related, I recommend checking Ben Patrick aka KneesOverToesGuy and his programs. I'm not affiliated to it by any mean but I've been a paying customer for a year and a half and his method of training has been life changing. My knees and legs are now robust and bulletproof, they used to be weak and painful
His approach to shoulder training might be of interest too if one of your injuries is shoulder related
Thank you for the thoughts! My injuries have all been professionally rehabbed, some of them by MDs who treat competitive lifters. I didn't give up easily. :-)
But to take an example, there's not much you can do to rehab a partial TFCC tear in your 40s. There just isn't enough blood flow. I could get surgery, but my TFCC is already better than 90% of surgical outcomes.
It rarely affects me in daily life, but I can't train wide grip bench presses without immobilizing the wrist with a steel brace.
Once you hit 40, you can still get strong. But sooner or later, a doctor's going to sit down with you and say, "There's nothing I can do to fix this that won't make things worse."
But as another doctor told me, "Look, you have a choice. As you age, you can spend too much time talking to your orthopedic surgeon, or too much time talking to your cardiologist." Physical activity is essential, but it comes at a price. Staying as injury-free as you can manage is everything.
I think it's important to point out to people that are hesitant to lift due to the perceived risk of injuring themselves is that lifting has a much lower injury rate than most other activities (with proper coaching and programming).
Citing from Bigger, Leaner, Stronger by Michael Matthews, he points to a review of 20 studies performed by Bond University that found the average injury rates for the following activities:
I'm personally committed to progressively lifting heavy until I turn 40 at which point it becomes more difficult to add muscle. At that point, I'll look into transitioning into a sustainable program that will let me preserve as much muscle as possible as I age with minimal risk.
This seems about right? Let's say you powerlift 6 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. (This is believable after a year or so.) That's 300 hours. And you're picking up an injury every 170-500 hours. That seems... plausible?
What matters is how quickly and completely those injuries heal. If you tweak something, maybe you can just ice it, and maybe you're all healed up in two weeks, no problem.
But once you've been powerlifting seriously for a year, you're moving around real weight. Granted, you know you can handle the weight, you're moving it carefully, and you've got safety bars to catch anything you drop.
But some of the injuries you might pick up don't go away so easily. And over 40 years of heavy lifting, those numbers can add up.
> 1. Bodybuilding - 1 / 1000 hours
This represents a 2-6 fold reduction in injury. And you'll be working slowly with lighter weight, so physics probably offers fewer chances for disaster.
So I'd guess that bodybuilding has a lower baseline injury rate, and possibly less severe injuries on average?
You can either choose to lift until you find a sweet spot of strength you are content with and not push past it, avoiding injury from ever-heavier lifts. Or you'll want to progress slower when you are at intermediate-advanced level, lifting is pretty safe as a sport if you do it with proper form until you get to the upper boundaries.
Rest well, eat enough, don't push it when something is feeling a "little weird" with some muscle. My worst injury as a beginner 10+ years ago was to finish a deadlift routine after feeling a muscle slightly pulled after the first rep, I had a bad lower back pain for weeks that left me uncomfortable doing anything: laying down, sitting, walking, etc.
If you don't know any bodybuilders I'd recommend getting a good coach on your beginner phase to fix your form, you don't need to keep a coach after you learn the basics, and bad form is the #1 source of injuries at lowest levels. Starting Strength is a decent beginner routine but over time you'll want to add some auxiliary exercises to work smaller muscles, in my routine I like to start the training session with big lifts (deadlift, squat, standing barbell rows, chin ups/pull ups, bench press, and overhead presses) and after those I follow with auxiliary movements (face pulls, dumbbell presses/curls, calves, etc.).
I chose to not push myself past a level I got comfortable with, never tried a deadlift heavier than 220kg, my squats hover between 130-140kg, bench press around 80kg, military press around 55-60kg. I feel strong enough and been injury-free for years, it's a good maintenance level and my goal with lifting has always to just keep mobility in older age, not to keep growing muscles/strength as far as I could push.
Also for most people being able comfortably deadlift even 1x of their weight in a set would be big improvement and they would probably get most of the benefits.
The problem is once people get to that - why would they stop?
I’m 40. I do 3 sets of 8 deadlifts about 5-10% over my body weight. This routine wears me out but each single rep feels easy. I can do this routine every day. You could say I’m maintaining, but I’m still reaping benefits years later. I consider it effective cross training for cycling. In between sets I do bicep curls and tricep kickbacks. My goal is to find a routine that will follow me until old age.
Especially if you're a cyclist, I think maintenance weight training like this is huge. Cycling, for all it's benefits, seems to be more likely to have a negative impact on bone density than a positive one.
For me it was when I start noticing that the bad days where I'd fail my intended lift happened more often than the days I progressed.
An example, when I was trying to push my bench press over 87,5kg I was going with 1-2 sets of warm-up (~8-10x 70kg then adding 5kg to the 2nd warm up), followed by: 1 set of 5x85kg, 5x87,5kg and trying to go 3x90kg but noticed I was failing the 3x90kg set for 4+ weeks in a row, I kinda knew it was going to take more effort and a different approach than just my very basic way to increase load, I was happy with lifting 87,5kg on the bench and just stopped trying to push it further.
Age has definitely affected my recovery time, stamina, etc. but because I've been lifting on-off since my teens playing tennis, and only focusing on strength training for its own sake later in my 20s. I do have a "baseline" that I can reach in about 4-6 months even when I stop training completely for a while, the strength you gain changes your muscles (I think it creates extra nuclei in muscle cells, unsure how true that is, lots of pseudoscience in fitness-world) and it comes back. That's one of the main reasons I recommend all of my sedentary friends to try lifting for a while, it will help when one is older.
-Develop excellent technique.
-Learn to stop at technical failure, never muscle up reps at any cost.
-Focus on slow eccentrics, deep stretches under load.
-Keep your sets over 10 reps.
From some age on (40-50?) you have to train to maintain, not to improve. Some can train really hard up to old age but most people tend to accumulate nagging injuries that can take away the ability to train at all.
Don't exceed your recovery resources. Anecdotal reports are not helpful when determining injury risk.
Overall injury incidence in strength sports is very low. But if you do it to compete, maybe there is an argument to be made that pushing the limits increases it.
Overall though, the much greater risk is to not train. Whether you do barbell movements or machines is not a determinant of of health outcomes, as far as we know.
I would not put stock in anecdote without some numbers on injuries among non-competing powerlifters.
Am I right to assume there aren't any PEDs that are useful without having negatives?
I have no interest in competing/fairness, the only weight training I do is a) very light and b) just to have slightly stronger muscles to make the life I want to live easier (from going on nice walks to cycling to being able to pick up a heavy object without stress etc.)
So I don't care about stats or achievements or how my muscles look, but if there was a pill that could make me stronger for less effort without any side effects or risks I'd be more than happy to take it. But I guess that's still a pipe dream and I just need to keep on putting up with doing exercise more than I particularly want to?
There are always negatives to PEDs- some of the impact can be mitigated, but you're taking a long-term risk for a short-term result. If your goal is healthy longevity, I would steer clear.
That said, one supplement (not a PED) that is widely used and well-studied in the body-building world is creatine. Just make sure you drink enough water, as it causes you to retain a bit of water (I learned this the hard way, waking up with a bloody nose it dried my sinuses out so much).
Creatine has the advantage of being well supported by science, and safe for most people.
But for a beginning lifter, I wouldn't bother. Early on, literally every single workout will bring you bigger gains than creatine will. Do your 3x5 or 5x5 sets, go back a few days later, add 5 pounds. Easy.
Creatine makes the most sense once you've been lifting for a few months, and once you've figured out your diet, and your progress is starting to slow. As I understand it, it's tweaking your intramuscular energy storage just enough to turn a 9 rep set into a 10 rep set. Which is a good deal once you've exhausted your newbie gains.
But it's not going to do much for someone who's exercising casually.
Agreed on all counts- those gains when you first start on a 3x5 or 5x5 are exhilarating and, short of making sure to eat enough, I wouldn't recommend anyone waste effort complicating that magical phase.
They are all varying levels of dangerous. The most common warning I hear is that the heart is also a muscle. But there are many complex issues that come with PEDs. Anyone who had used them and is a serious person will tell you, a) don’t do it, b) if you really must, do it after you’ve reached your genetic peak as a natural with 5-10 years of heavy training.
I think people get into the mindset of needing to go nuts when exercising/health or they need to be at a gym. All they need to do is be active for about 30 minutes each day by going for a walk or biking.
Many cultures and countries ranked as healthy, and I mean overall like children to elderly are places where people walk everywhere. They aren't all power lifting or even going to gyms.
Strength training is good but overall daily activity is best.
True, but statistics has nothing to do with correctness. Something done in excess, in either direction, is done in excess regardless of how many people do it.
The via media comes with difficulty as it requires reason and discernment, whereas extremes are easy and mindless, and people either under-exercise (the more common case) or over-exercise.
But historically, I would argue that we see more extreme "fitness" fads today than we did previously. Really dumb stuff that no longer has anything to do with health or fitness or beauty and more to do with some weird obsession.
To put it in programming terms, you're likely to improve more with the slow grind of an hour or so an evening side-project, rather than competing in a hackathon every 3 months.
One observation I had was that people coming to the gym to spend majority of their time on the treadmill are mostly women. I'm not sure if it is to lose weight, or simply because with infrastructure hostile to walking, the likelihood of problematic encounters increases greatly. Though I wouldn't feel entirely safe walking around at 23:00 without my dog either.
This is essentially the same as telling folks to stop driving because eventually you'll be in an accident running your life.
Lifting should always be taken seriously and "your muscles misfiring" is not a legitimate excuse for a lapse in judgment and lifting more then you should.
I think that is missing the point a bit; regardless of how healthy a lifestyle you live you still will end up suffering from some kind of disability. Perhaps of a cause completely outside your control (stroke, heart problem, accident).
Not to say that strength training isn't good for you of course. But it may not actually prepare you for things to come (unlike having a healthy family life, an identity outside work and physical fitness).
Its not a binary thing. On my dad's side, there is a history of hip issues, sciatica, upper back and shoulder mobility issues.
One of his siblings is in his early 60's, retired, and can only be described as "active". He's not powerlifting or anything like that but gym, cycling, gardening, every day or other day. He's on his second hip, soon to be third.
His other sibling is late 50's, also on their second hip about to get their third. They're limited to 2-300 yards of walking, can't really stand unaided for long periods of time, struggle with their sleep, etc etc.
The easiest comparison is that the older one is, and always has been more active. Sure it's complicated, sure you can't prepare for an unexpected diagnosis, but I'd you're 60 with no active health scares, your quality of life is going to be dictated by how much you looked after yourself, not just luck.
just because at some point you might (or I guess you and the author are arguing will) get injured doesn't mean strengthening yourself is invalid. in fact healthier and in better shape you are the less likely you are to suffer debilitating injury.
tweaking my strong knee that is used to squatting heavy weights and otherwise supporting active lifting is way different than my father tweaking he's knee with artificial joint.
at least for me the problem is lettings things get worse. I should learn to seek help/corrective action right away, but I always just want to "see if I can ride it out" which can then turn into months of unnecessary suffering with long lasting issues. pre-emptively starting resistance training is very beneficial for most people.
Strengthening yourself is beside the point. I don't think anyone is saying that that strength training is invalid. You're trying to debate a point that no one is disagreeing with.
Lifting weights isn't going to do much to prevent your hearing going bad, or eyes degrading and needing corrective lenses, or not being able to move otherwise you'll wake the newly born baby who's finally gotten to sleep.
This article is a rebuttal against the myth that "accessibility" is for "other people", that "disabled" and "abled" are two different camps, and accessibility tech is only something used by completely blind people in wheelchairs, which will never happen to me. We're all just temporarily abled. Even throughout the day we go through a range of ability with our physical body - even if it's just needing to respond to a phone while cooking and your hands are covered in raw chicken.
"We all die" yes, yes, but you can die gracefully or pitifully.
Lifting weights won't help you with your eyes or ears, but being in better physical health translates to better mental health, which translates to better ability to cope with all limitations.
People who just sit still as they age deteriorate incredibly fast in more ways than one.
I guess this article can be eye opening for anyone who has lived in a bubble without them, their relatives, or friends suffering from any issues, but that has to be exceedingly rare.
You can prepare for injuries. You can strengthen your body and joints to prevent physical injuries, you can keep active mind to prevent mental issues, you can wear PPE to protect from most sudden sight and hearing losses. You should wear gloves while handling raw meats, it is more hygienic and makes cleaning a lot faster and more pleasant.
Eating a good meal today doesn’t prevent you from going hungry 6 months from now.
Of course you know how to put food in your mouth and eat, but do you understand how to deal with the physical/emotional/mental challenges of living as a person who’s without enough food?
> Eating a good meal today doesn’t prevent you from going hungry 6 months from now.
Sure it does. Angus Barbieri fasted for 382 days successfully.
In the same vein, working on one's body strengthens future potential disabilities, but not all, such as sight and hearing. However, most people who become disabled later in life begin to have orthopedic injuries rather than completely losing sight and hearing, which of course they lose but not to the same extent as getting arthritis etc. So the point of strengthening one's body is still valid.
I read the article. And guess what, I also injured a limb recently so not only have I read the article, I have and currently am experiencing the same issues the author is experiencing. Even still, I can recognize that the points made in the article and the points made by those you're replying to are not incompatible, so they're not "still missing the point," they're adding on to it.
>Of course you know how to put food in your mouth and eat, but do you understand how to deal with the physical/emotional/mental challenges of living as a person who’s without enough food?
I think we are so far ideologically from each other that we can't even communicate. I can not follow this logic at all.
This is advice HN tends to trot out periodically, but I find it off-topic at best here.
The point of this blog post is to elicit empathy, something often lacking in healthy people who cannot envision themselves suffering from some ailment. Eventually everybody's bodies and minds will fail. Whatever specific mitigation strategies you deploy will eventually become ineffectual and your capabilities will degrade, either by means of age or disease or accident or all three.
We can and should do more to make things better for people who have differing levels of physical and mental capabilities because it is the right thing to do, but if that isn't enough, we should also do it out of our own self interest.
I'd suggest that bringing out "just get strong with these easy steps" as a response to a person who suffered an injury is particularly missing the point.
I 100% agree. You mention some pretty scary KG numbers there though (but we’ll done)! I just wanted to mention to readers that even squatting a ‘measly’ 50KG or deadlifting 30KG can immensely help with back pain and the physical challenges everyday life throws at you.
> I just wanted to mention to readers that even squatting a ‘measly’ 50KG or deadlifting 30KG
Yes -- this is really important to contextualize.
Barbell resistance training is actually two things:
1) A method of exercise that has a variety of well-quantified health benefits including improvements in strength, bone density, and connective tissue. More muscle also means you can eat more without getting fat.
2) A competitive strength sport (generally called powerlifting; weightlifting usually refers to the explosive overhead lifts seen at the Olympics).
Your strength goals can, and should, depend entirely on your objectives. If you're aiming to compete, a 150KG squat and 200KG deadlift would put you around the median in the lowest male weight classes.
It's also relative to your body weight. A 150 kg squat for someone who weighs 118 kg (i.e. me) is not that impressive. Whereas an 80 kg squat if you weigh 80 kg is extremely impressive. You should be aiming to lift 1x-1.5x your body weight, over time.
Yeah i thought if you look at the top performers it actually gets harder if you are heavy to keep with lighter performers in terms of multiplier. The lighter performers win the multiplier game.
As someone who came very late to this from an unfit childhood: annoyingly, they're right. I started lifting at _40_, and after a couple of years I can deadlift 100kg vs my own weight of 90kg. All the tables of "expected" lifting values are laughably high and clearly compiled on enthusiastic 20 year olds. But it's been very helpful for my energy levels and to balance against my sedentary job.
For me, bearing in mind all this injury discussion, I've focused on form 100%. When doing free weight exercises, this forces a whole bunch of other, secondary, "stabilization" muscles to some work. It's those, especially if they end up spending all day "locked" because of your posture, which can produce a lot of the minor pains of age, so give them a workout.
These numbers seem off? Everywhere I look online even the numbers for untrained men are higher than that. I just came back to the gym, am the weakest person there, slightly weaker than 'untrained' numbers on the internet and I can do more.
That link lists the averages among the 21,000 users of StrengthLog. I'm sure the average normal human who doesn't use a weight training logging app is way lower.
For example the beginner on there is 76kg. I think it'd be a bad idea for a guy who's 40 years old, untrained and out of shape to rock up and deadlift 50kg, even just for one rep. He wouldn't know what to expect, he'd get the form wrong, he'd probably hurt his back. People who aren't trained should start with the bar, sometimes they're better off starting with even less than the bar and that is fine!
I believe beginner here is not untrained. There were a few links with different categories (all above the 30kg deadlift, 50kg squat for the lowest one). I only shared the first one in my comment.
30kg DL is 5kg on each side of a 20kg bar which is less than I've lifted my very first time and I was pretty unfit and I'm sure the vast majority of untrained people can lift that. Hell, that's easier than bar-only bench press, which most people can also easily do on their first try.
I am not clear on what conclusions we are discussing exactly.
* 20kg-30kg makes sense for an untrained person's first lift, it sounds like we agree. With DL you need some plates on the bar to get the right height so 5kg bumper plates or something is common.
* All of this is still way below the numbers even for beginners on the site you linked, which again I stress, is a self-selected group of people who were hardcore enough to opt into a performance tracking app of some kind, this is way different from the general population.
* I actually don't agree that the vast majority of people could just bust out, let's say, 10 reps at 30kg of any lift. Women and older men who have never lifted? I really doubt it. A year ago it was hard for me to do 10 body weight squats, no bar no nothing, and most of my middle aged friends who have never exercised are probably still in the same boat. 40% of the US is obese... I think this perspective is biased basically towards young men (lets say under 40).
Numbers are really personal. At 60kg I found it really easy to get strong enough to deadlift even 120kg, cited as between intermediate and advanced on that table, despite in no way being an even intermediate lifter. More like novice at best.
Relative difficulty of different lifts also varies. I found squats and deadlifts extremely difficult, to the point that I reached 1x bodyweight bench press before 1x bodyweight squat.
As usual, Hacker News presents the anti-human take in the top few most upvoted comments. Although this is an unusually subtle one.
I say this as a guy who still works a Starting-Strength-based program. Power lifting is great--it changed my life. But it's NOT a solution to disability and it's NOT a foolproof prevention. The implication that "if people just got off their asses and did some exercise they wouldn't be disabled!" is disgusting.
This is an extremely cynical take. (As usual, Hacker News!)
> The implication that "if people just got off their asses and did some exercise they wouldn't be disabled!" is disgusting.
I don't know how you got that implication. It seems like you agree that lifting is great. Many people don't do resistance exercise. The article itself is about the process of aging, and resistance exercise helps as a prophylactic. We all understand it's not a solution to all disability. But if it turns some people on to lifting, then net-net there's less disability in the world.
Great! What's the problem? (While we're talking about implications, your comment does seem to imply you haven't read the linked article.)
> The article itself is about the process of aging, and resistance exercise helps as a prophylactic.
Aging is relevant to the author's case of disability because they mention that they " tried something that, looking back now, maybe [they're] too old for". But a lot of disability has nothing to do with age.
I think the point of bringing up age is that a lot of able people are selfish and assume that disability is someone else's problem, when in fact, the vast majority of people will become disabled in their lifetimes.
Do you really not see how bringing up a way to prevent disability (which is at best, a small-percentage probablistic solution) sounds like an attempt to refute that point?
> But if it turns some people on to lifting, then net-net there's less disability in the world.
Sure, and that would be a good thing. But you've gotta understand that in every conversation about disability, many people's only contribution to the conversation is to talk about how people could be less disabled, with almost no non-disabled people willing to engage with actually accommodating disability.
It's at best extremely condescending, as if people who are disabled aren't trying their best to not be disabled. There are exceptions, of course, but even in those cases, I tend toward more compassion because there's likely underlying mental illness going on there.
Fundamentally, there just isn't a massive societal problem with people not doing enough to not become disabled. The problem is we don't do enough to accommodate disability. Constantly bringing up ways we can avoid being disabled is insensitive and distracts from the real problems and real solutions.
At a more basic level: stop trying to present your solutions to a problem you don't have, and listen more to people who have the problem. This is particularly true if your "solution" is to arrogantly tell people how to not have the problem.
A similar vein but muuuuch simpler for anybody who isn't up for weights.
Each day, before anything else:
1. 3 mins stretching
2. 20 (real) situps (3 mins)
3. 10 pushups (2 mins)
I actually usually do a good bit more exercise more than this, but this is my minimum day starting routine, no matter where I am, or what I'm doing. It takes less than 10 minutes and keeps a bare minimum of strength in your lower back and arms. The lower back part is key for people who work in chairs all day. You can do a lot of types of exercise and still not maintain those lower back muscles which are so key to ensure your lumbar is protected.
Got 5min? Try this, it's much more complete*, engaging the back a lot.
Title is a catchy "burn belly fat" but it's more like core training + cardio. It looks scary but anyone (without a precluding condition) can do it.
It's only HIIT if you make it so, the key is to pace yourself according to your level, going slow if needed so as to complete each of the 30s.
If you can't do the full range, do a partial range, but do that range with proper form so as not to hurt yourself, don't force through it, it'll get better over time.
Aim for consistency, not short term record.
Side note: lubricate joints before (do rotations and flexing), stretch after exercise: stretching before increases risk of injury. If you really want to stretch before, do dynamic stretching, not static.
* doing only sit-ups and push-ups strengthens frontside massively, so front-back is not balanced, further increasing the forward arching position (starting with nerd neck) induced by long term sitting. Front training is important for all-day sitters as these muscles (which should be engaged all along the day but are not) atrophy, but overtraining front (vs back) amplifies the issue.
As someone who was not born 100% able, I have been lifting for 10+ years and I attribute my ongoing robustness to it. I wouldn't be doing half the stuff I do without strength conditioning providing such a robust foundation.
Injury defence is a benefit of lifting that is undersold I think. By strengthening all the muscles that support your movement, and limbering up connective tissues you are much less likely to get injured in general life like you said.
* I've done both BBR and SS. I prefer BBR but they're both fine places to start. They both basically have you cycle through the staple compound lifts and if you're not already trained this is the best thing you can do for your body. The health benefits of simply doing each compound lift at least once a week plus eating a ton of protein cannot be overstated, they are life changing.
* I'll editorialize here but I feel both BBR and SS are designed for younger, fitter, more hardcore "beginners" than me, especially SS. I was a 40+, out of shape desk jockey and the cadence at which they want you to increase weight was too much for me. Also with these big lifts you NEED to get the technique right or you WILL hurt yourself.
What would you recommend to someone older to start with? I've done SS in my late 20s but I do feel like I'd like to try something new as I get closer to 40 and considering some exercise.
Context, I wfh, am overweight and extremely sedentary. At the moment have been purely working on my diet but exercising is next.
Honestly you should start again with starting strength or a beginner program like it if you haven't been actively training in the last few years. Go slow, start with the bar, let the increases happen until you hit a wall where you need to reassess. Listen to your body. Once you're back to "intermediate", i.e. 6 months to a year of reasonably consistent training, you can transition to a different program or just maintain at 2x a week if you like where you've ended up.
That's in addition to very gradually adding some sort of cardio like walks around the block. Being sedentary is going to be more of a struggle to overcome than strength - you will find that the strength you used to have will come back quickly when you start training again, but as a guy in the exact same boat, the cardiovascular side is the tough part. I am getting strong again really quickly but I am getting winded half way through a strength workout, let alone actually trying to jog.
I wouldn't recommend any changes to it, other than taking it easy if you need to.
The biggest struggle I had when I was totally out of shape was just how tough even a light workout was. It's fine to take it easy and not increase the weights you're lifting aggressively, for instance. Or even to go to the gym twice a week instead of three times. If it's not an easy and fun part of your life you'll fall off the wagon.
Basically you can be a physical wreck at 40, to a degree that a 23 year old guy can't even comprehend. All simply because you didn't exercise.
Just keep showing up regularly, doing the compound lifts SAFELY but heavy enough to tire out your muscles, and eating your protein (100g+ daily, there are formulas to calculate it precisely).
It might take a little longer for us older sedentary guys but everything will come together.
A good personal trainer (or physical therapist if you start hitting issues?) is absolutely worth it if you can get one, one advantage we older guys have is we're more likely to have the spare cash for this.
For my job, I was fit and strong until 28, COVID gym closures and a career change later into wfh tech I was 31 and out of shape and verging on unpleasantly so. I was worried if I could get back into shape easily, but did the below. Only hard part was the discipline tbh, as I started at very low weights/just the bar in some cases.
If you’re familiar with SS, what worked for me was a modified version. I threw out the linear progression and squat 3x times a week goals, and focused on lifting 3x a week come hell or high water and hit 5+ increases if I was able. 30-60 days of that, you’re back at an easy point to decide to get “really fit” or just stay active.
Day 1: squat 3x5, DL 3x10, lunges (the second week, DL 1x5, squat 3x10)
Day 2: bench 3x5, press 3x10, push-ups (swap bench and press same as above week 2)
Day 3: row 3x5, pull-ups, arms/w-e else.
I’m nowhere near when I was strong but my numbers make
Me feel ok about things now, as I know I’m now out of the dangerzone of out of shape AF
I read the critique. It's basically "you don't do enough volume for certain exercises", "you'll end up doing too many squatting and looking funny", "their approach to stall isn't optimal".
It sounds like a www.bodybuilding.com forum rant. Someone arguing why micronized whey is superior to non-micronized. It's ultra-optimization.
If you're someone looking to get started, you're looking to get started, not optimize for a bodybuilding competition. If you like SS, and it gets you actually lifting, then it's good.
If you really get into it, then great! You can continue to refine what you do, read up on all the arguments, try different things. But if you just want a workout that makes you stronger that you can keep doing, then SS works fine.
It reminds me a bit of audio enthusiasts. Somebody wants an amplifier recommendation for a certain budget and people jump in telling them "you'll regret going solid state, the purity of tube amps can't be beat" and the person is like "I just want an amplifier so my kids can watch Disney in surround sound".
And the really good thing about SS is the focus on proper technique. It's more important than how much you lift.
Starting Strength is fine for a beginner. It's not an optimal program, but it's simple, easy to understand, and built on good foundational principles. As an on-ramp into resistance training, it's better than a complex program that'll scare beginners off or burn them out.
It still doesn't change the fact that a suboptimal program which keeps beginners engaged and moving forward is infinitely superior to a more complex one that they fall off of.
This is survivor bias; SS keeps some beginners engaged but there's no count of those who drop off or never start it. I was in the latter group; it was the first program recommended to me, but I was leery of it because I don't have medical insurance and was skeptical about the feasibility of the suggestions based on what I knew about my own body, so I just did nothing about it. When I did start lifting, I started out with light weights and spent months figuring out a program while getting a kinetic understanding of the different muscle groups and how they worked together, spamming volume for a while and gradually adding more weight.
I don't mean that SS is a bad program, it works for lots of people and it's very accessible. But I also think it's way oversold and not magic.
It's definitely not magic, but it's on the 80 side of the 80/20 split, IMO.
It isn't the right starter program for everyone, but then, nothing is. The best program for the beginner is whichever one keeps you consistently showing up and moving forward.
It does actually. The program is so poor that beginners might not even see enough progress that they're put off from working out, because "what's the point if I've been at it for a month or three and still don't have any gains?" That's why it's better to actually pick a good program, one that shows consistent gains as motivation rather than plateauing as a demotivational force.
Other recommended programs like 5/3/1 are not "more complex," that's a false dichotomy. They're just as simple but with different sets of exercises.
This is a very silly argument to be made against a lifting program which has verifiably moved countless people off the couch and into resistance training. The reason people recommend Starting Strength is because it's what successfully got them into lifting.
I train 5/3/1 now, I have for years, I love it, and I absolutely do not recommend it to beginners. I've tried. Their eyes glaze over when you start talking about "training maxes" and "periodization". They get confused and lose whatever sliver of motivation they had. Save the optimization for when they're bought in. Any beginner is gonna make progress on essentially any structured program just due to neuroadaptation. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
I did SS too in the beginning. I didn't see much progress and that has also been verifiably the case for others too, if you are using anecdotes as your verification process. That SS works is despite its quality, not because of it. And so what? Should we not try to improve programs just because they work in some cases? We don't have to use 5/3/1 then, we can use even the basic beginner routine as recommended on r/fitness, it is pretty good while discarding the problems of SS.
But you're still lifting, presumably. That sounds like success to me.
I tried to start lifting multiple times. SL 5x5 is what actually made it click. Now that I know what I'm doing, I could write volumes on its flaws, but what I needed wasn't a technically optimized program, but one which gave me a clear goal for each workout and an easy way to see what the path forward looked like.
As the reddit beginner program correctly notes:
> The primary goal is to be a simple, easy to follow routine that will help beginners get into the gym, start training with the standard barbell lifts, and build a habit of going to the gym consistently. Consistency over time is the biggest point of failure in making progress, and the aim is to lower the barrier as far as possible to starting and staying consistent.
The point of a beginner program really isn't the volume moved or optimizing the particular split, but to give the beginner a structure on which to build routine and learn good habits. It helps no one to crap on Starting Strength, when it has an established history of achieving exactly that goal. Offering things like the reddit program as a potentially superior alternative is fine to the eager newbie, but telling people that Starting Strength is a bad way to start is just counterproductive.
My advice to every new lifter is that the best program for them is the one that gets them going back to the gym consistently, and I'll continue to stand behind that. It's not SS for everyone - and that's fine. But it is SS for a lot of people, and that's also fine.
Have you even done SS or read the book, actually end to end?
Comparing 5/3/1 or a reddit post to SS indicates a complete lack of familiarity.
You can use dismissive like survivorship bias all you’d like, but end do the day Rip knows and runs a tier 1 program to get in life shape. It’s very difficult to read SS and execute it as designed and not come to that conclusion.
Sure, but at that point even going for a run is better than Netflix and burgers. Don't strawman the argument, just because SS is ostensibly better doesn't mean it's actually good.
I know reddit loves 5/3/1 and pretends that nothing else exists. Great example of the reddit echo chamber for something that isn't a political topic.
5x5 program got my bench to 275 when I was younger. I think it's fine.
Really after years of trying all these systems the only that will work for sure is getting in the gym consistently and lifting heavy. Everything else is mostly a distraction. Like min/maxing in wow
Yes I have gone through these, started with SS, saw basically no progress, then moved to 5/3/1 and did some other routines over the past several years. At my peak before a recent injury I was at 225 bench, 325 deadlifting and 275 squat.
If you have never seen anyone in your gym bench 2 plates...well...I am not sure what to say to you. Maybe find a different gym?
The person I was responding to is talking about SS, why 5/3/1 is more appropriate, and things of that nature.
If he MAXED out at a 225 bench, a 325 deadlift and a 275 squat, he has no business really talking about this sort of stuff. You don't even need a structured program to hit those numbers...you just need to do it.
Why would I find a different gym just because people around me aren't lifting as much as you want them to be? I'm a 28 year old man and I can only bench 35kg (~77lbs) so why would I want to be around a bunch of people lifting 100kg+?
> If he MAXED out at a 225 bench, a 325 deadlift and a 275 squat, he has no business really talking about this sort of stuff. You don't even need a structured program to hit those numbers...you just need to do it.
I think you have a severely skewed idea of what it is common to lift.
225 is about the low end of taking lifting seriously as a hobby. Hes right, you can get to those lifts without much structure. just eating right, and being consistent for a couple years will get you there without trying to optimize beginner programs.
Your view of what can be done in the gym is distorted by the gym you are in.
Why should I take lifting seriously as a hobby? What has lifting as a hobby got to do with anything? I don’t want to lift as a hobby if it means I’m doing it wrong until 100kg
It is part of r/Fitness, a very reputable resource for fitness as many top weightlifters are there too. The article addresses why it's not a good program and why beginner programs are generally not well designed: https://web.archive.org/web/20200528135350/https://thefitnes...
Ultimately, while I never reached the 200 kg / 440 lb he mentions on the deadlift I got to: (in lbs)
Back Squat 275 2 rm
Front Squat 225 2 rm
Deadlift 375 2 rm
Bench 175 5x5
OHP 135 5x5
C&J 125 1x5
Snatch 105 1x5
With my primary program being SS and then SS like (do the set 5x5 or appropriate at the work weight, advance by appropriate increment). That's the rough master plan at least.
Not advising. Merely sharing my experience. Simplicity of adherence maximized adherence. Visible progress increased adherence.
Just add sledgehammer workout to the routine. It's the foundation of all combat sports. You have your core strength, upper body strength, arm strength well trained.
Arguments there are bullshit - talking about stuff that's completely irrelevant to beginners to make things sound complicated - personal fitness trainer playbook.
If you're a couch potato dev who sits all day and does no physical activity - just doing random shit with your bodyweight or empty bar will get you sore for the first month.
Overloading yourself with pointless movements that are meant to target specific muscle groups is completely irrelevant for the first year. Go to gym - find heavy stuff you can pick up - try not to do anything stupid.
SS is great because it has a low number of movements, volume is irrelevant when you get sore from a barbell squat, learning how to lift is deceptively complicated (breathing/bracing/muscle activation).
The article keeps straw-manning "longterm" this and that - SS is your first year in the gym (or less). By the time you're trough with it, unless you're totally oblivious, you'll pick up on other stuff when you have the time. And you'll have a decent intuition of how to lift, understand recovery implications, consistency in training, and a decent base strength. It's a great base to get you started and have an achievable progression framework that doesn't require much tutoring or time.
I've seen plenty of people get from 0 to nice lifting strength in ~1 year by doing SS. The only thing that's relevant is consistency - if you come in 2-3x a week and do something difficult for an hour for a year - you will see results - it can be total fucking around - you will still get results. It's good to start with SS type exercises because those well defined movements target your entire body, and if you learn to execute them correctly you reduce your chance of injury.
TL;DR - for any newbie out there that's in bad shape and looking to start gym - save yourself time and avoid "optimal muscle development" crowd. None of those arguments apply to you and are completely irrelevant. Don't trust me ? Go to the gym and do 5x5 with an empty bar and see if you're sore after the workout.
I think they are referring to fitness-related advice on Reddit, but, yes, there are a number of quite high quality subreddits out there among the not so great ones.
do you have a phd in history to judge that?
I said I wouldn't trust, I'm sure there is some good resources but they are mixed with bad ones, I just know that r/philosophy is a terrible resource for anyone studying philosophy
I am doing weight training for fatigue. The idea is 55%, 65%, 75%, 85% weeks. The % is perceived effort. That might be bench pressing just the bar sometimes. And I go twice a week, and do about 7 different exercises. It is not "perfect" but it is f'ing consistent. Knowing there is a 55% week coming up, and it is OK and that it is perceived effort so you can lower weights if you feel shit, makes this very stick-to-able.
Yeah, about that: I started with a solid bodyweight fitness regime and after 10 good workouts over 4 weeks, two of my finger hurt to the point of feeling like they're damaged and the palm of my hand feels overtrained and constantly tense or something. Gives me pain with every pushup.
So, "it's really that easy" actually causes pain that I also feel when I hold a cup of tea.
I'm not saying that one shouldn't start lifting weights, but no matter what you do, you can be (temporarily) disabled for any reason, which is precisely what the article is about.
I really enjoyed the Starting Strength program (I was going to abbreviate it at first, but then realized that sounds a bit sketchy out of context), and I noticed the benefits too. The only reason I quit a few years ago is because of my concerns about the strain it puts on the cardiovascular system. Especially for someone already doing mostly desk work, I wonder how healthy it really is.
I still do resistance training, but with higher reps and less weight. Not incrementally increasing the weight as SS prescribes.
On the flip side, I did SS in my twenties (15 years ago) and, while doing a deadlift, my back popped and started hurting. I've had back pain since.
I wouldn't recommend deadlifts. The worst part about it is that everyone always says "you didn't have proper form!" but, in that case, if you can follow all the advice in the program and still have bad form, it just sounds like a way to dismiss injuries as "your fault, not the program's".
I'm personally a fan of the Greyskull Linear Progression or GSLP. I'm pretty much a fan of any LP since if you stick with it you get a ton of strength gains.
So you are only squatting twice a week and deadlifting once a week, versus SS with squats everyday.
A typically schedule following M-W-F for two weeks could look like the following:
M: Squat & Bench
W: Deadlift & OHP
F: Squat & Bench
M: Squat & OHP
W: Deadlift & Bench
F: Squat & OHP
I highly recommend purchasing 1.25 plates so that you can increase weights by 2.5 pounds versus 5. I did this for bench and OHP and that was when I really started seeing gains!
AMRAP stands for as many reps as possible and works as a good metric for moving up a weight or staying at a weight. If you do 5 at the end, you may want to stay. If you do 10 or more, you can double the weight increase.
The other cool part of AMRAP is that you now have another metric besides weight - you can try to break previous rep records, especially if you deload and are working your way back up to previous working weights.
At the end of the day, sticking with any LP would be good. I just like GSLP since I'm not squatting every day.
All that being said, I started off with SS and that was what got me to a 315 pound squat.
Doing GSLP is what got me to 220.5 bench and a 135 OHP (all for reps)! I think the tiny incremental plate (1.25 plates) and AMRAP sets are what helped me the most.
I'm 40, I've had two knee surgeries, and have genetically terrible knees. Squatting incorrectly made them hurt, but I went to see a sports PT and he taught me how to squat correctly (I was overloading my quads and not using my posterior chain like...at all - a proper low-bar squat with the glutes engaged was a total gamechanger), and not only did it fix my knee pain in squats, it fixed my knee pain in general. I went from being functionally crippled in my 20s to competing as an amateur powerlifter and training Brazilian jiujitsu in my late 30s, and I absolutely attribute the foundation of that to squatting and deadlifting.
In my personal experience, as a now more seasoned lifter, most people have knee pain in squats because they load the quads and arrest the squat early with the quads rather than hitting full depth. Once your hip crease is below the top of your kneecap, your quads are no longer bearing the load! If you're stopping the lift prior to that, then you're applying a ton of torque to the knee directly with the quad, rather than letting the much more robust posterior chain absorb the energy of the descent.
If you haven't tried squatting low-bar, you might give it a go - it makes it much easier to move with the posterior chain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs_Ej32IYgo is my single favorite squat video on the internet. Lots of really good info in it.
But, if you don't see improvement, I highly recommend seeing someone who can diagnose and correct how you move.
How are you squatting? Technique is really important. I recommend watching some videos by Mark Rippetoe [1], and also filming your squats to review them. The low-bar back squat is a hip-dominant exercise, and when done properly should not put undue stress on the knees. [2]
I myself had _terrible_ knee pain from squatting. Then my knee started randomly buckling when I would walk.
So I started filming myself. I also used TUBOW [3] to figure out that my knees were drifting far too forward. I corrected my technique accordingly, and started engaging the hips properly. My knee pain went away and I've been pain-free ever since.
- [1] Learn to Squat, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhoikoUEI8U
- [2] Squats and Your Knees, https://startingstrength.com/article/squats-and-your-knees
- [3] Using the TUBOW with Mark Rippetoe, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P_w6dpDC2I
What sort of range of motion are you using? Obviously consulting a physio/exercise physiologist may be helpful, but you may have less pain if you squat to just below parallel. Or other squat variants may be better for you, e.g. front squats (or zombie squats), box squats. Slant board squats are also very good. You could also look at pin squats as it deloads the weight from your body at a very precise depth so no risk of going too deep with the weight and causing pain
Check out "knees over toes guy", he has a wealth of good free information on knee recovery.
I'm 30 and I squat pain free twice per week despite 3 knee dislocations. Good luck friend
There might be several reasons for this, poor technique and insufficient time for adaptation are probably the most common ones. Though previous injury is certainly another possibility. In general, squats are good for your knees, and will protect your knees from injury. Not only will they strengthen the structures of and around the knees, they will also (literally) lubricate the joints.
It takes time to develop a good squat. Many people seem to be limited by their range of motion, especially in the ankles, at least to start off with.
I'm 63 and have to stay completely away from cheese or the arthritis in my left knee gets so bad I cannot operate the clutch in an manual-transmission car without doing what feels like permanent damage to the knee.
I used Starting Strength to learn how to squat roughly 12 years ago, do squats regularly and have never injured myself even temporarily doing squats although I use much less weight than grandparent does.
Knee pain can be from a variety of causes, some of which have to do with the actual joint and some of which don't. For example, medial knee pain can be, to name two options, an MCL tear or just an inflammation of the bursal sac. I had the latter when getting back into exercise after a long break (I'm now 40), and was really worried I had busted my knees. In the end, switching to front squats for a bit and working on mobility as well as paying attention to posture when lifting helped with it.
Point being, if you don't know what's causing your knee pain, it's probably a good idea to figure it out first, then think about what could help.
I'm in my early 40s and have been squatting for ~20yrs. I've just started to notice a bit of a twinge in my knees when squatting, particularly if I'm getting close to my 1RM. Knee straps seem to alleviate it, though I'm not particularly keen on using them. I think I likely need to work a bit more on stability and flexibility, both of which are diminishing faster than raw strength.
This is why god invented physical therapists! Had minor knee pain a couple years ago, saw doctor for X-rays just as sanity check, and he referred me to a physical therapist. Got a knee strengthening routine, followed it, and all was good after a month or two.
My knee pain improves when I squat. For context, my legs are different lengths, and I've had a left medial meniscectomy in the shorter leg. I'm in my late twenties, and the pain is bilateral.
I had the same. In my late 30's even kneeling hurt.
That goes away once the muscles gain strength.
I've had a personal trainer for years now and in my early 40s I can squat merrily with no pain. Also my neck and back pain have vanished, along with headaches I used to get that would start around the back of my neck and move over my head.
Strength training really is amazing. My only regret is 20 years as an adult not doing it.
My wife taking every excuse to touch my leg muscles is just an added bonus!
How did you strengthen them in that scenario? We may be a little different as I've had surgery in both knees(ACL and MCL). I'm interested in doing leg work, but physically can't squat...at least yet.
I started by holding onto a stair bannister and squatting slooowly until I could actually get the full range of motion, then unsupported air squats, then I moved to an empty barbell. If you can't go straight to a barbell, or you have back/spine issues, belt squats are a great way to increase your workload as your capacity increases.
With those surgeries, starting under the supervision of a PT is a great idea, though. They'll know how to build you up safely.
Though I agree with your point, I would advise against this. Instead I would advise someone to master body weight exercises. Pull ups, push ups, hand stands, etc.
Master motor control, balance and ability to control your own weight. The problem with lifting is no matter how good your form is, injuries are inevitable and made worse due to the extra resistance.
Why? They’re not that difficult, especially if someone is there to assistance or you have a wall. It’s also a yoga position.
Now obviously I wouldn’t start out with hand stands since you need to be in pretty good shape (like a pull up you probably can’t do it unless you’re in decent shape anyways).
It’s certainly safer than having literally hundreds of pounds above your neck.
My dad did a lot of bodybuilding, and martial arts, and swam miles a week too. Just loved physical activity.
Last year he slipped a disk putting gas in his car. Backs are really arbitrary and you can do a lot to finesse the dice, but you're still gonna roll snake eyes on something.
Keeping strength up, especially in old age, is crucial.
My father was admitted to hospital for something, and spent a few weeks on the ward. When he was released he was super frail and had to use a walker. Losing strength is easy, getting it back (especially in your 80's) is damn hard.
Absolutely right, although I cannot lift the amounts you list. For me, weight lifting has nothing to do with "power lifting"..
I have a weight-machine and a few barbells in my house, and use them 2-3 times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. I am older, I have no six-pack, I am not particularly muscular. It's not about that. It's about keeping what you have, and keeping what you have reasonably fit.
Muscles support your joints. Weight training also strengthens the ligaments and tendons that hold everything together. If you do it as "circuit training" (only a few seconds between different exercises), it also serves as cardiovascular exercise. All of this is important for everyone, especially as you get older...
If you are a beginner and want to start with calisthenics, I recommend the Hybrid Routine[1]. It has really nice progressions for all exercised mentioned above (and it's free!)
1,2,3 are intermediate level though. After a year I cam do 6 reps of 1, 0 reps of 2, probably 15 of 3 and 90s bridge. But a sedate person might enjoy a gym better or TRX maybe to assist as these are hard for average Joe.
You have to be pretty abled already to even start a basic lifting program. I have a nerve impingement in my neck/shoulder, if I even lift 10lb dumbbells over my head a few times, my left arm literally goes numb.
This looks good for power, less for endurance (like hike/bike uphill), for a computer job we also need endurance, not big muscles, so I walk, sometimes run, climb trees and rocks, (forage figs), squat for hours (static), and surely no added weight. In short I think selling your car, and using your legs daily as much as possible is what's best
For normal people, please lift, it's amazing, but just don't go too heavy, especially with squats & dead lifts. The risk is too high.
Get to squat 150kg is highly likely to cause back injuries for a vast majority of the people.
Whereas lifting 50% of max reps with higher reps will get you similar benefits, in most cases even more muscle growth, without the high risk of injuries.
Not reading the article or engaging with the points it makes also makes things weird. Each of us has a fragile body and at any moment, you might become broken in a way you can't fix. When you can't walk up a hill, hold a job - the world becomes hostile. Even going down a road that isn't asphalt but stones is a challenge for some people. That is a consequence of young and healthy people designing our world and the things in it, while others have to adapt. It is not about privilege, it's about smart design and understanding that the problem can very easily apply to us all. One fall down the stairs, one stroke, one bad day at the gym - you have injury for months or for life. It's a real danger.
I did read the article. We are all incredibly fragile and also strong creatures. I am quite regularly injured due to sport, and broken for months so I understand fragility and also that strength comes with hard work and focusing on what one can do with what we have instead of what we cannot do.
> 1 in 5 people currently have a disability. 100% of people will have some form of disability in their lifetime.
That would mean no one will ever die in their best abilities. I think that is a claim that can easily proven wrong, for any reasonable definition of best abilities.
I think if you went even more pedantic you would come back again to the idea that it's right, the idea being that someone dies an untimely death, fine, but it takes like 5 minutes for them to die and several of those minutes they are technically disabled.
So then you get ultra pedantic about, maybe that doesn't make sense if you are vaporized over a timescale less than a human reaction time, 100ms or so, and probably that has happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or suicide bombers, or when the twin towers fell, or when a submarine catastrophically collapses, or certain falling deaths perhaps... But likely less than 0.5% of the people who have been alive, so when rounding to the nearest percent you would indeed say 100%.
All of that is for lols, probably the original quote attached some sort of caveat that was lost in the note-taking, but even without it it's reasonable for the reader to be expected to add the necessary caveat, “ignoring people who happen to very suddenly die in the prime of their lives,...”
Sure in some sense, and we can always be over pedantic in any topic. Maybe I felt in the trap here, though I still feel that the sentence is over selling the author point, which is not the end is the world either.
What I mean is, from what I get, the author point is that we shouldn't disregard people with permanent disabilities, as it's a faith we will all eventually reach.
While I agree with the ethical goal of not disregarding people with some disabilities, I wouldn't take the path of founding that on average human faith.
All the more the point is not how long will we agonize in an obviously near death situation, but how comfortably and socially integrated we can live once we have some disability, taking for granted that yes we will all necessary have the luxe of such a situation.
It's about something which happened to limit this person's mobility and how it give them more empathy for people with impaired mobility and other disabilities. The point is that accessibility is important for each and every one of us.
Accessibility is an important part of software design. I also found it compelling rather than banal (and clearly I'm not the only one, given the 200+ upvotes and deeply personal comments people have shared).
The audience for a given Hacker News article is the people who show up and find it interesting, rather than some platonic ideal of a Hacker News user. Participating in a system based on voting (such as HN) means accepting you won't always get your way. There are stories on the front page that aren't inappropriate/flaggable but which I would rather weren't there every day.
It should be completely apparent im not criticizing accessibility issues but instead the blog post, which resembles a revelation a 10-year old has when having had a bit too much cough medicine
It's more accurate to say: we're disabled in various ways because big medicine and pharma gatekeeps useful treatments. Regenokine and anabolic agents like Deca-Durabolin can completely reverse joint damage. But your doctor will not allow you to take them, even if you insist upon it. In fact they will often report you to insurance and classify you as a drug abuser.
First, it was enlightening for me to see how she navigated through our site using her screen reader.
Second when she landed on our booking page we got so embarrassed because she couldn’t use our date picker. A basic HTML version would have done the job. But a few weeks back we had debated over which fancy jquery date picker plugin we should use without considering the impact. It was fancy alright, yet it wasn’t usable at all for this user.
I learned and felt many things that day as an engineer. Thinking in depth, across many different personas is a difficult thing to do, let alone building a tool that works well.