Weekly Recap 10/12 - 10/19

Here’s what we are reading, watching, and liking.

The article of the week is “On Perfect Technique” from Barbell Medicine. The video of the week is a short video on some tasty “after school” snacks.

Our first social media post of the week is from Precision Nutrition about strategies to start listening to your body and building more self-awareness. To conclude, we have a post from Claire from Barbell Medicine talking about the idea of thinness in the fitness and performance space.

Article of the Week

On Perfect Technique

Belief that you can perform a task is an essential component to beginning the process of mastery. There are a host of both internal and external motivational factors that can either help, or hinder those beliefs. In this article, we will primarily focus on the relationship between demands and resources. The perceived demands of the task (overall workload & degree of skill required to complete) contribute to the typical willingness to begin or continue a task.  We typically think of this more in the domains of work or education, but the same applies to sports. As this is a Barbell Medicine Review, the rest of this piece will be framed through athletes and exercise, although there is ample evidence demonstrating this principle in other domains.

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Video of the Week

Instagram Posts of The Week

🧐 Being deeply aware of your body and able to understand things like your hunger cues, how your emotions drive your movement and eating decisions, and how stress manifests in your body is highly valuable.⁠⁣⁠⠀⁠⠀ ⁣⁠⠀⁠⠀ 💥 In fact, it's one of the differences between people who struggle with diet and exercise their whole life, and people who develop a healthy relationship with their bodies, food and fitness.⁣⁠⠀⁠⠀ ⁣⁠⠀⁠⠀ 🔍 The successful folks have built the skills, through practice, that allow them to be mindful, pay attention to their emotions, and tune into their body's signals.⁠⁣⁠⠀⁠⠀ ⁣⁠⠀⁠⠀ 🔑 Fortunately, the skill of accumulating self-knowledge-what we might call listening to your body and learning what works for you-is just that, a skill.⁣⁠⠀⁠⠀ ⁣⁠⠀⁠⠀ 🧩 And, like other skills, it can be developed with a series of strategies and practices.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ ☝🏽 For more on building your self-knowledge superpowers, hit the link in bio. ⁠

Thinness isn't fitness. Thinness also isn't performance. Women's sports and the health & fitness space are plagued by the idea that the thinner we are, the better we will perform regardless of other factors. I hear about it in basketball, in powerlifting, I saw it in diving, and I experienced it in soccer. Even today, I have to remind myself that my weight is not the only thing directly related to my performance. Being lighter doesn't necessarily make us faster or stronger or better at what we do. I was talking to an athlete, and we were discussing how women talk about their bodies, how they assume, if they are smaller they will perform better. This isn't just in powerlifting, its in sports, it's perpetuated by the media. I see women cut rapidly to low weight classes, I see women refuse to ever go up a weight class, I hear world class athletes talk negatively about their bodies. The way we talk about our bodies impacts how we train and how we perform. The way we talk about our bodies impacts how other women think about theirs. We have a responsibility to talk about and treat our bodies positively. Celebrate your body for what it can do. You are powerful and strong. When you have put on muscle mass and need to go up a weight class, it's ok to move up and train at a weight where you are gaining strength and remaining competitive. Where you reside in your competitive field is more important than automatically assuming you need to stay in (or drop to) the lower weight class. The reverse is true too. I see women shovel themselves full of food to fill out a weight class, when sitting where they do normally might be better. Weight classes are arbitrary (in terms of health and performance) and don't confer any population wide rule to performance, training, ability, or health. Train where you are competitive, compete where you are competitive.