Fitness Overreaction – Use Some Common Sense

I tend to boil fitness down to its simplest points and there’s a reason why I do that.  It’s not that I don’t understand more complicated methods, it’s that they aren’t necessary or any more effective.  For the great majority of fitness, athletic pursuits, and most of life’s other endeavors, the basics work just fine.  It’s only when you are looking for extraordinary results and have already exhausted the basics are extraordinary means necessary.

High school athletes ask all the time which supplements they should be taking to get bigger or what secret Bulgarian periodization program they should follow to become freakishly strong.  Usually the answer is:  “More food and lift more than you did last session”.  Obviously there can be a bit more to it than that, but the bottom line is that they’re just not ready for some strange East Asian root or a complicated training protocol.

What’s wound me up today is a post I recently saw on a popular weight loss program.  The poster was worried about her “cankles”, in that she has thick ankles.  I’ve not seen said cankles, but usually it means that the calf doesn’t have much definition or taper, rather than a lean ankle and muscular overall shape.

She was asking how to fix this aesthetic issue and one of the responses she received was to try Lasix.  ARE YOU F-ING KIDDING ME?  We have a slightly overweight young lady with thick ankles and the recommendation is a very dangerous pharmaceutical diuretic?  I almost can’t get through all of the issues with that.  What made it even worse is that other posters in the thread didn’t even address it!

Got cankles?  Here’s what’s probably going on:  1) You have big ankles, as in your bone structure is big.  There’s not a lot you can do.  2) You’re still carrying a fair amount of body fat.  Lose more fat.  3) Your calves are under-developed.  Get bigger calves.  Now, if you manage to have small-structured ankles, are lean, and have muscular calves, but still are somehow retaining a lot of water in your ankles (I’d be amazed) to the point where you have “cankles”, then move on to situation 4) You have a potentially severe medical condition and you should go see a doctor.  That’s it.

This girl had a very simple and innocent question and somehow it got turned into a recommendation for a very powerful drug.  Common sense should have kicked in somewhere long before that, and apparently it didn’t.  This is one of the worst examples of what I see every day, especially online.  You’ll find that a lot of people who aren’t experts look to solve simple problems in the most complicated manner.

Here’s a tip for you:  If there’s a simple answer to a situation, then probably that’s the one to use.  Just because the “expert” doesn’t use the most complicated available method doesn’t mean that they don’t understand it, it means that they understand the problem.  99% of the time, simpler is better.