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The replies are fascinatingly deeply engaged with the topic. There’s no bigger modern religion than personal fitness/bodyastempleism (somaticism?). Usually when I ask questions in poll-form, few bother to elaborate or offer ‘other’ options in replies. Here, there are many.
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Poll: If you’re targeting 150 minutes of break-a-sweat exercise a week, what would you consider the ideal breakdown, regardless of practicality?
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I’ve never been into somaticism as a religion. Like most people I’m in the mediocre middle between the extremes of body-as-temple and body-as-trash-can. Which means phoning-it-in is the most sustainable mode for me, over either a rigorous regimen or letting the body go derelict.
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Somaticism is body-nerdery. It’s weird to see extremely earnest nerdy/geeky dispositions manifest in Greek god/goddess bodies these days. Body-culture as an anti-intellectual jock-cheerleader thing is getting disrupted by some sort of Straussian scholar-warrior-dancer subculture.
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There have always been not-very-bright “science says/research shows” uncritical students of body-knowledge of course. This is not that. This a new critical breed of autodidact that has more spiritual affinity to Unix neckbeards than to Olympic athletes or pro-sports/modeling.
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The old breed was indiscriminate and uncritical consumers of body-ideas; people who would unironically quote a study on insulin in one breath and something about chakras in the next, seemingly unaware of galloping across epistemic boundaries. Bullshit consumers.
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Aside: bullshit needs a companion consumption concept. If bullshitting is talking or writing without regard to truth or falsity, what is listening/reading without regard to truth or falsity? (Usually confirmation/validation seeking, or just unconscious “vibing”). Shit-eating?
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I’d argue this *is* new, fueled by the explosion of online information. In the past “nerdy jock” was hard: if you had access to serious body knowledge, chances were you were naturally talented enough to get on sports teams and stuff where pro/institutional support was available.
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Replying to @vgr
You have the mood right, but profoundly mis-understand the different kinds of people who go to the Olympics, and mistake this for new.
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Amateur nerdery without a team of coaches, doctors, physiotherapists, and nutritionists attending to you has on,y recently become truly possible. Before, the best the untalented could do was read a book or two, get into some fad, and hope for a mentor.
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2010: old-fashioned jocks/cheerleaders in institutional body-culture settings (sports, modeling, military) 2014: crackpot fringe of nerds 2016: broscience quantified self n=1 sketchiness 2020: genuine amateur science nerdery based but with strong religious overtones
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body nerdery is one of the best ROI signals because in the old days jocks just put in massive amounts of work and so we all thought it was too costly to pursue, but now it turns out you can get 90% of the benefits / hot bod for like 20% of the effort, just by reading a wiki