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63: Dismantling Long and Lean Part 2
1.3k Plays1 year ago
Welcome to Season 4 and Episode 63 of the Movement Logic podcast! This is part 2 of a much requested series titled Dismantling Long & Lean. In part 2, Laurel and Sarah discuss the phrase "long and lean" from a science-based, as well as sociological and racial perspective. They cover whether or not you can actually make anyone’s body “longer” and/or “leaner” through formats like Pilates and barre. Additionally, they unpack the harm that appealing to this narrowly, aesthetically-idealized body shape has on students and teachers.
You will learn:
- Common code words used to show preference for thinness in exercise.
- Is there a way to make limbs or muscles longer?
- How do we change the shape of muscles?
- Can we make muscles tone without making them bulky?
- How hypertrophy works and whether or not Pilates or barre are particularly effective for building muscle.
- What does it mean to be bulky versus lean?
- The constrained energy model for metabolism and how it explains why exercise is a poor tool for weight loss and why it’s more complex than calories in and calories out.
- How human metabolism is a product of evolution, not engineering and more like a business on a budget rather than a car that runs on fuel.
- How the science of metabolism explains why exercise is so important for long term health and longevity.
- Whether building muscle makes you burn more calories at rest.
- That fast and slow metabolism doesn’t mean what people think it does.
- Whether or not you can burn fat specifically from “problem areas” on your body.
- How the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of Protestantism influenced the way we think about fatness and thinness.
- How fatphobia and a preference for thinness has been used to craft and reinforce racial, sexual, and socioeconomic hierarchies over the centuries.
- Why “long and lean” is to the 1990s and 2000s as “white and nordic” was to the 1800s and 1900s.
- Why using "long and lean" as a marketing ploy does harm to the teaching profession of Pilates and barre.
And more!
Sign up here to get on the Wait List for our next Bone Density Course in October 2024!
Reference links:
Episode 60: Dismantling Long & Lean Pt. 1
Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories…
Episode 43: Nutrition Facts vs. Fiction with Dr. Ben House, PhD
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sound Quality Issues
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, it's Laurel. This episode does have a little bit of sound quality issues, similar to episode 60, which we kicked off season four with. It is not so bad, but wanted to give you a heads up that there are some less than ideal sound quality issues at points. We have figured out the sound issue, so this should hopefully be the last time that it's like this. All right, enjoy this episode.
Meet the Hosts: Laurel and Sarah
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to the Movement Logic podcast with yoga teacher and strength coach Laurel Beaversdorf and physical therapist, Dr. Sarah Court. With over 30 years combined experience in the yoga, movement, and physical therapy worlds, we believe in strong opinions loosely held, which means we're not hyping outdated movement concepts. Instead, we're here with up-to-date and cutting-edge tools, evidence, and ideas to help you as a mover and a teacher.
Season Four Launch
00:00:57
Speaker
Welcome to season four of the Movement Logic podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Sarah Court. Before we get into it, we are going to brag about ourselves.
Student Testimonial and Feedback
00:01:09
Speaker
No, we're going to let other people do the bragging for us. We are going to read a testimonial.
00:01:14
Speaker
that we got from a student, Suzanne, in the bone density course Facebook group, which by the way, again, I'm just going to say, Sarah, that was one of the best ideas that you had that I really was against, actually. I was like, no, I am not going to be on Facebook on a regular basis. That is not a part of, that is not a thing I do. And Sarah was like, she didn't ask. She was like, I started a Facebook group. And I was like, oh no.
00:01:43
Speaker
And then it ended up being like the, it's not the course, but it is such a hugely beneficial part of the course. And it is actually really, really good tool for this type of a thing because students are submitting their form check videos in the chat. And it's actually really easy to kind of see what they're doing in the exercise and then respond. And everybody can see the feedback, which multiple people have remarked that they are learning so much from the feedback Sarah and I are giving.
00:02:12
Speaker
the people who are submitting their form check videos, then there's inspirational and humorous discussions happening on the main page. And so anyway, it's just been wonderful. And we have not requested any of these testimonials. We have not been like, Hey, Hey guys, could you say something positive about the course, please? Cause we need testimonials. They just pop up and we're like, wow, people are so generous with their praise. And so we've collected some and we're going to read some.
00:02:41
Speaker
at the top of the show just because we're going to pat ourselves on the back. Frankly, that's what we're going to do. This one's from Suzanne. She writes, I checked out the downloads. This is the very, very beginning before we even started getting the ball rolling. We had opened up the portal of the two bonus courses and everything to
00:02:58
Speaker
everyone to check out before we started the live classes. And so she writes, I checked out the downloads and started watching the videos today. And I'm blown away by the volume of content you've crammed into this course. I've struggled to stick with strength programs in the past, partly because I didn't understand the logic behind anything and because I was intimidated. Thank you for all the work you've put into breaking this down into accessible lessons for those of us who are beginners. Woo hoo!
00:03:28
Speaker
That's so nice. It's so nice to hear. I mean, she basically, all of the things that we were like, we want this to be this way for these people. She was like, you need this, this way for these people. Like, it's very exciting.
00:03:41
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, that was what I wanted to do anyway, because I'm interested in the topic of strength training, like what goes into the thought process of strength training. And I, and I really wanted to give with strength training one-on-one, I really wanted to give people the fishing pole, right? Rather than just the fish. Yeah. So that they understood why we were, we'd be asking them and coaching them in certain ways. And yeah, I'm so glad that it, that it landed and it resonated. So yeah.
00:04:07
Speaker
And I should say also, big shout out to Laurel specifically because the lion's share of the work of this volume of content was done by her.
00:04:15
Speaker
And I'm grateful that I didn't have to do that. Oh, well, you know, I I'm sure you can tell how much I like doing it because I went into a lot of detail, which I can be a very detail oriented person. But I'm glad I'm glad that, you know, folks took away from it what was valuable for them and helping them understand, like, basically, this is what we're going for. This is how we're going to do it here. The all the ins and outs of the details of what goes into this. And now you understand it so that it's not a foreign language. Really, I wanted to
00:04:45
Speaker
teach the language that they would be using and we would be using.
Debunking 'Long and Lean' Claims in Fitness
00:04:48
Speaker
Okay, so we've entered into a conversation about long and lean, the phrase long and lean. We're really spending a lot of time unpacking this phrase because there is frankly a lot to unpack. And so Sarah started us off in part one with an extensive history of
00:05:08
Speaker
the way that the female form has been viewed, picked apart, shaped, changed, talked about over the centuries.
00:05:17
Speaker
And in this episode, we are going to get a little bit more into the scientific background that you would want to have in order to understand what is being asked of a person's body when it's suggested that exercise will make them long and lean. And is that possible? Is it possible to become longer and leaner from exercise?
00:05:41
Speaker
and why or why not according to how the body works, right? So that's kind of what this episode's about. So I want to just start off asking you, Sarah, where do you tend to hear this language long and lean used most? So in what fitness or movement context do you tend to hear this language of like, we're doing this so that we can get longer and leaner? I think most overtly,
00:06:08
Speaker
I've heard it in the sort of group class scenario, but group classes that are more sort of like cardio and dance and maybe small dumbbells, not a like kettlebell class or something like that. They have their own words. They're still talking about what you look like, but they'll use their own. They're not talking about long and lean so much with heavier weights like that.
00:06:30
Speaker
It has come up a lot in the Pilates world. And my interview with Adam Macatee, we talk about it in terms of how it, you know, where it exists in the Pilates world. So I think those more than yoga overtly, but it is sort of in a
00:06:47
Speaker
less explicit and more kind of insidious way it is implied in the yoga world as a sort of goal close to the skinnier or the more spiritual art or something like that. Yeah. And I've definitely heard the word to have a yoga body. Mm-hmm.
00:07:09
Speaker
to have a Pilates body, to have a dancer's body, which, you know, Barr draws heavily from dance. There's all types of dance fitness modalities. Pilates also draws heavily from dance, right? Was Joseph Pilates a ballet dancer? He was not, but sorry, just to break in, because I am going to talk about this. But the reason why, part of the reason why is his first studio in New York City was directly next door to like the New York City Ballet. Okay. So all these ballerinas started coming in.
00:07:37
Speaker
That's the association, right? So this idea that a yoga body looks a certain way, a Pilates body or a dances body looks a certain way, and overwhelmingly, I think what we're talking about is like a thin or lean, however you want to say it, and long or whatever. There's a shape that we kind of unpacked in part one. In this episode, we're going to take a closer look
00:08:02
Speaker
at the claim that these movement modalities. So I'm going to focus a lot in this episode on Pilates and Barr because I personally have seen this phrase used much more frequently in those two modalities, those two formats, not as much in yoga. Although I don't think that it's true that no one in yoga is saying long and lean or talking about the aesthetics of what their body is going to look like from doing yoga. But really this is going to be focused on Pilates and Barr. And I actually don't have anything against
00:08:28
Speaker
Pilates or bar as exercise formats in any way shape or form, apart from what it appears to be at times, sometimes this focus on aesthetics that I think can actually get in the way of actually helping people. And I know teachers who, you know, very smart teachers who teach both. So just as a disclaimer, like I am going to dish a little bit on Pilates and bar for the purpose of really just unpacking this emphasis on long and lean, this emphasis on this very specific aesthetic.
00:08:57
Speaker
But we're going to take a closer look at whether or not these movement modalities can actually change our body appearance by emphasizing a longer and leaner. Look, we'll evaluate this claim through the lens of whether or not it's scientifically accurate.
00:09:12
Speaker
in terms of how the body works. And for this, we're going to draw Sarah and I both on our knowledge how the body works per our understanding of that. But I'm also going to share with you what I've learned in researching for this episode about human metabolism and weight loss from a book I read called Burn. New research blows the lid off how we really burn calories, lose weight, and stay healthy by Herman Ponser.
00:09:33
Speaker
This book takes an evolutionary anthropologist look at human metabolism to challenge outdated models and to challenge conventional wisdom around the role exercise plays in energy expenditure and weight loss, which is basically that we can just exercise more or exercise in this special way, and that will burn the fat.
00:09:55
Speaker
wherever we needed to be gone on our body. We're going to look at that claim. We're also going to evaluate this claim long and lean through a cultural and sociological lens investigating how this promise of longness and leanness is actually quite harmful. It has a very problematic past.
00:10:14
Speaker
remains nevertheless a popular marketing device for many movement formats to this day. To do this, I'll be drawing heavily from another book I read while researching for this episode titled Fearing the Black Body, The Racial Origins of Fatphobia by a foremost scholar on this topic, Dr. Sabrina Strings. Strings explores the intersection of race, gender, and body image, examining the ways in which societal norms and expectations over the centuries
00:10:42
Speaker
have shaped perceptions of black female bodies, but also female bodies and Sarah also went into a lot of depth on this in part one. So we'll link that as well in the show notes. This book, Fearing the Black Body, traces the origins of fat phobia.
00:10:59
Speaker
highlighting the impact of colonialism, slavery, xenophobia, eugenics, and various other socio-cultural factors. Both books, Burn and Fearing the Black Body, are highly recommended, so they're linked in the show notes for you to definitely check out.
00:11:15
Speaker
And we're going to bring it all back to movement, exercise, fitness, and yoga to examine the harms that this message of don't you want to be long and lean has on folks coming to these formats for exercise, as well as the harm that it does to the profession of teaching Pilates bar yoga or any fitness modality that suggests that it will alter body appearance towards some longer, leaner,
00:11:40
Speaker
ideal. Will Pilates, will bar, will yoga as well actually make us long and lean?
The Myth of Muscle Lengthening
00:11:45
Speaker
So to start out, I asked Google, right? I like to Google these things, right? Because when we, when we Google something, we see kind of what people are asking and wondering about right at the top, right? So a Google does Pilates or bar make you long and lean. And here are some samplings of what came up at the top of the search. And I want you to listen for some keywords that we're going to unpack in this section, right? They are, of course, long and lean, but also bulk.
00:12:10
Speaker
or bulked up, tone defined and tightened. So here's one, okay? Quote, the look of a Pilates body, someone who does Pilates consistently and with skill is long and lean. The Pilates method builds endurance, strength and flexibility at the same time, resulting in muscles that are supple and long versus bulked up.
00:12:37
Speaker
Here's another one, quote, Pilates is a great way to build strength and endurance in your legs without adding the bulk that comes with weight training. In fact, if you're looking for a good workout that will help tone your legs without bulking them up too much, Pilates may be exactly what you need. Here's one that was listed as the seven benefits of bar workouts.
00:13:02
Speaker
Words like long and lean come to mind when we think of a dancer's body, but defined should also have a spot atop the list. And as your thighs, butt, abs, arms, and back work harder, they gain amazing definition. The header for the paragraph that I'm going to read to you next, the header for that paragraph is this. Tone, tighten, triumph. Quote.
00:13:32
Speaker
I'm barely holding it together over here, by the way. Bar workouts are designed to tone your muscles in order to give them a more sculpted look. This is done by tightening them so they stand out more when you flex or move around. Okay. Sarah is, are you breathing? Her face is very red. She's very upset.
00:13:56
Speaker
Her face is very red. So don't Google this question, how to become long and lean. I don't recommend it for your mental health. Okay, so long, lean, bulk, bulked up, tone defined, tightened. Let's get into it and let's get super literal.
00:14:11
Speaker
and scientific about it, shall we? Let's also use some logic because that is after all the name of this podcast, Movement Logic. Knives out. We're going to dissect the hell out of this phrase and I am so excited because if there's anything that amps me up, it is just getting super literal and scientific and logical on
00:14:36
Speaker
Bullshit like this. All right. So here we go. Getting longer. All right. How might we make our body longer through exercise modes like Pilates and bar? Well, I think we should start with a excellent anecdote and end of one, we've got Sarah court here. Here she is. There are no listeners. You might not know this, but Sarah is six feet tall. So she's a good, good example of someone who is very talented at having long limbs. Thank you. And therefore, I think she's the perfect spokesperson.
00:15:05
Speaker
to ask about becoming a long person. Sarah, how did you get so long? How did you get such a long set of arms, legs, such a long spine? What's your secret? Wait, wait, wait. Let me guess. You do a lot of bar and pilates, don't you? That's right.
00:15:25
Speaker
No. I just as a small sidebar, I've never heard as much actual, literal bullshit wrapped in semi-scientific like attempt to make it make sense as I have in a bar class. My favorite one ever was that we were doing a certain exercise and the teacher said, this is going to burn the fat on the inside of your body.
00:15:51
Speaker
And I was like, what, opposed to the fact that I brought in my bag? Like, what are you talking about? Anyway, the word that I got long is genetics, as it turns out. As it turns out, it was just science. I did nothing.
00:16:06
Speaker
I, my father is six foot four. He might've shrunk a little bit now that he's almost 80, but he used to be six foot four. My mom is or was five foot nine. I was guaranteed to come out somewhere in the middle. My, my both sides of my family, my mom's and my dad's side of the family have a lot of tall people in them. And that's just kind of how it is. My brother's six one. Uh, so that's my secret. I was born into the right family.
00:16:32
Speaker
Okay. Sarah, Sarah, fine. Fine. Fine. Let's say someone was born with shorter limbs, like me, for example. Okay. So I want to be long, Sarah. So how do I do it? Come on. Is there at least a bone surgery I could get? Could I get a bone surgery? Well, in fact, the only person I know who has ever, this is a serious story. I don't know why I'm laughing. The only person I know that actually has done that is a woman that I have known who is a double amputee.
00:17:02
Speaker
from a horrible car accident. And when they were sort of forming the legs that she has that are remaining, there was some attempt, I don't know exactly what they did, but there was an attempt to actually make them longer because the longer the remainder of leg that you have, the easier it is to use. In that instance, that was a valiant attempt. So I don't think there's any doctor
00:17:26
Speaker
who if you walked into their office and said, I'd like to do some surgery to make my bones longer, that would A, do it and B, know what to do. I've actually heard that it is possible and it has been done for aesthetic purposes. People who want to be taller will actually have their femurs lengthened. Yeah. It's extremely expensive and risky surgery. And very painful. Yeah. Yeah. So it's possible. Okay.
00:17:53
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if I'm willing to invest that much time and energy and money into getting longer. Okay, but so maybe they don't mean bones longer. I mean, of course they don't, right? That's what I mean about being really literal. I think what I often hear is like, we're going to make your muscles longer, right? So long and lean, like your muscles are not going to look bulky, they're going to look longer. Can we make our muscles longer, Sarah? If I have
00:18:17
Speaker
You know i don't i'm not i don't have short i'm not like particularly short i'm like pretty tall actually by average but like my my femurs are probably shorter than yours to be a fibula is human eye radii all my long bones are shorter than sarah's so in order to look a little longer could i make my muscles longer. How is muscle length actually determine sarah well the short answer is no because your muscles attach at one end of the bone and they attach either
00:18:45
Speaker
the other end of that same bone or onto another bone, depending on the muscle, and that's how long they are. Yeah. So muscle origin and insertion is what determines muscle length. Sometimes I wonder if they're actually talking about posture, right? So if we change your posture with these modalities, you will just look taller, therefore, aka longer in some respect. Do you think this might be what they mean? I mean, oftentimes when I read
00:19:09
Speaker
about these formats online and their websites and things like that, they list improving posture as like a separate benefit. It's a whole separate benefit. And then it's also you will become long and lean, you will develop a long and lean physique, right? And so when we're talking about physique, we're really talking about muscles, I really think they're talking about muscles somehow shaping differently to be long. But is it maybe it's possible to look longer by changing your posture? What do you think about that?
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if you take someone who usually sort of sits and stands in what we would call like a slouched posture, which is fine. If they suddenly start standing like a dancer where they have the corner of like very, very upright spine, and they're thinking about lifting their head away from their shoulders and all these things, you might using posture appear to be longer. Yes. And certainly lunar for sure.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yeah, OK, there you go. I mean, maybe that's what they're getting at. I've noticed that it's listed as a separate benefit, so I don't think it's actually what they mean, especially with all the focus on toning the muscles to be long and lean, right? Right. So yeah, let's talk about how there's this dichotomy. There's this comparison between making muscles long, and that's the positive. And the negative counterpoint to that is bulky.
00:20:28
Speaker
right? This word bulky is what I want to talk about next, because it's often held up as the thing you don't want to be, right? You don't want to be that. So that's why you should do these modes of exercise instead of weightlifting, because that'll make you this bad thing. But come over to Bar and Pilates and we'll make you this good thing, which is long and lean. What does bulky mean to you, Sarah? Like really kind of describe it as though you were looking at a picture kind of what does it mean to you?
00:20:51
Speaker
Well, bulky in this context, I mean, it can mean a lot of things, but if we're gonna kind of zone in on this context of bulky on a woman's body, right? If we're gonna stay that sort of granular and specific, I immediately go to like woman bodybuilders and massively oversized muscles and sort of a deep tan and the tiny bikini and the posing, all that kind of stuff. Like that is the image that I think a lot of people have in their head
00:21:21
Speaker
as this negative connotation of bulky on a woman's body. Yeah, and we're going to talk a little bit about bodybuilding in this episode because it is held up as the counterpoint, the negative counterpoint to how you should want to look from doing bar and pilates. But basically, there is only two ways to change the shape of a muscle. You can either make the muscle bigger or you can make it smaller. That's it. Yeah. When we make a muscle bigger, this is called hypertrophy.
00:21:48
Speaker
Okay. And it's really adding protein to the muscle, which is what makes it bigger. And then there's, there's the opposite of that, which is to make a muscle smaller. And that's called atrophy. Right. That's called atrophy. So we have hypertrophy or atrophy. These are the only ways that you shape a muscle. You either build tissue or you lose it. And that's basically what's going on at different rates every second of the day to all of your tissues. Okay.
00:22:11
Speaker
The activities we do, as well as other factors like age, sex, what else is going on in our body, determine how rapidly we are either building or breaking down, right? We're either creating more tissue or atrophying tissue. But for the most part, that's it. That's how it works. You're either making more or making less. So when we make a muscle bigger, what we do is we're increasing its CSA, which stands for cross-sectional area.
00:22:35
Speaker
Cross-sectional area of a muscle is the measure of the area of the belly of the muscle, which is usually the center of the muscle. So if we were to cut the center of the muscle perpendicular, you think of cutting through a grapefruit, and then we would measure the inside of the fruit, the circular area of the inside of that grapefruit, we would measure the area of the muscle. This is what we're talking about. We can determine muscle size by measuring cross-sectional area using imaging like ultrasound, MRIs, CT scans, things like that.
00:23:04
Speaker
sometimes bodybuilders just use a tape measure around their arm or their chest or whatever to get a rough idea of have they gotten bigger, muscularly speaking. This is an area that is important to measure because it directly relates to force generating capacity of the muscle. It's not just for aesthetics that we would want to know if our muscles got larger. Larger muscles with greater cross-sectional areas generally have the potential to generate more force. We're stronger. Typically, when our muscles are bigger, we're stronger.
00:23:33
Speaker
And so this is a very common adaptation that we see from resistance training or strength training, where when muscles are subjected to repetitive stress through lifting weights, they do grow in size to meet the demands that are being placed on them if we're applying progressive overload. But this has been called bulky. Actually, bulking and bulk are positive terms in bodybuilding.
00:23:58
Speaker
They're what we're doing. We're going to bulk. We're in our bulk phase. And we'll talk a little bit about this. But they are negative terms in bar and pilates. So here's my question. Bar and pilates often say that they're going to make you sculpted or toned. So then what I think of when I think sculpted of tone is the shaping of muscles. Well, muscles can either get bigger or smaller.
Limitations of Pilates and Barr for Strength Training
00:24:20
Speaker
So we must be talking about making muscles bigger to some extent.
00:24:23
Speaker
we must be talking at least to some extent about hypertrophy muscles unless to your point in part one we're really just talking about like getting rid of the fat so that whatever muscles are underneath it can kind of shine through i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm not sure they're sure either that's why we're having this conversation but sarah our yoga pilates bar dance fitness modalities are these effective formats for hypertrophy i mean the short answer is no
00:24:51
Speaker
The medium answer is only if you started any of these formats from a really deconditioned state where you either were not exercising at all or have been sedentary or have been bed bound and walking across the room is exhausting to you. Then, yes, and those are the kind of patients where I start with all of these kind of exercises because a lot of body weight is all, a lot of the time at that point, body weight is all they can handle.
00:25:21
Speaker
it's going to very quickly not be enough to cause any amount of hypertrophy in muscles. So for your average person looking to, you know, tone or whatever, no, it's not going to happen from, from these exercise formats.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah, and people will disagree with us, but I think there's quite a bit of consensus in the scientific community as well as the fitness professional community that there's a reason why bodybuilders and people who are interested in getting as strong as possible don't just do Pilates and bar, or they might not do those things at all. What do they do? They're strength training.
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah. And I just want to butt in and say, I've had enough of like, well, everybody's views. No, some people's views are bullshit. And anyone who's walking around out there being like, yoga and Pilates and bar are going to put muscle on your body. No, they're fucking not. Sorry, but they're not. Strong opinions. Yes. That, that when I'm holding strong, it's a strong privilege, strongly held. You signed up for this. You press play. Okay. You press play.
00:26:25
Speaker
What I find deeply amusing is the talking out of the both sides of the mouth, which is a phrase I love to use. We will build muscle, but not too much. We are good at putting tone in your body, but up until a point. So really, we're not good at it because we don't because no, your muscles aren't going to get much bigger. In fact, if you're bulky, the goal is to atrophy you so that you can be long and lean.
00:26:52
Speaker
which made me think like Sarah and I both lift heavy shit. And if we stopped, just stopped lifting heavy shit and only did Pilates bar and yoga, which by the way, like I do yoga and I lift heavy shit, right? I'm not saying I'm gonna have to choose at any point in my life. I hope I never have to choose. But if we just stopped lifting heavy shit, we would atrophy, we would lose muscle. And maybe that would be like,
00:27:19
Speaker
the goal, I guess, right? So yeah, they're suggesting we're going to build muscle to a point, but not past that point. It's questionable if they're even going to build muscle to a point. And it's also questionable from a health standpoint that they are so against building muscle past a point because there's a really strong relationship between muscle mass and longevity and muscle mass and health, right? Metabolic health.
00:27:39
Speaker
So while it's true that you don't need to lift heavy weights to hypertrophy muscles, that is true. You can lift light weights and hypertrophy muscles. The thing that's not happening in these formats, and we've said this a lot in many episodes, is there's just no progressive overload. So you can lift light weights that are by exercise science standards considered to be light weights in terms of percentage to 1RM.
00:28:00
Speaker
lots of times, and you can build muscle. In fact, a lot of bodybuilders work in a 15 to 20 rep range. They're building muscle just fine. Thank you very much. Lots of research has supported that load is not as important for building muscle. It's volume that drives muscle building, but you need to progressively overload volume just like you do
00:28:20
Speaker
every other exercise parameter if you're looking to build strength. So that's not happening when you're going to three different classes and it's just not happening. Okay. And that's okay that it's not happening, but let's not claim that we're muscle building, but not too, not too much muscle building. Right. A lot of the argument from the Pilates world is that the reformer is resistance training, which is true because there is an external load in the shape of the springs. However, you know, there's a series of exercises called footwork and I do them with all of the springs on.
00:28:49
Speaker
I can never make it any heavier than that. There's a real ceiling on springs. You're going to run out of springs. Again, if we're talking to severely deconditioned, that's going to feel like a lot, but it's pretty quickly not going to be enough. I have a person that I'm working with after a hip replacement and they are older and we started with
00:29:13
Speaker
one red and one blue and now we're on three red springs and a white spring. This person is increasing, but I'm going to hit a point with this person where we get them off the reformer and we start using dumbbells and barbells. We started dumbbells already, but the barbell is coming soon. They don't know it. I'm going to surprise them with the barbell. Nice.
00:29:32
Speaker
All right so we we spent a good a bit of time talking about getting longer okay and and how like are we talking about bone are we talking about muscle are we talking about posture. Probably talking about muscle cuz there's a lot of emphasis on like making the muscles longer and not bulky we talked about their others only two ways to change the shape of muscle it gets bigger smaller now let's talk about getting leaner okay so what does it mean to be lean sarah.
00:29:56
Speaker
I mean, okay, so there is a real thing called lean muscle mass, but that is not the way that the word lean is being used in this context when it's not used particularly scientifically. Lean, like I, in my head, my association, I immediately go to like a lean cut of meat.
00:30:15
Speaker
Like, oh, I got this nice piece of pork from the butcher, nice lean cut of the tauro, something something about buying meat. You know, so the idea is that the loon, loon means not a lot of fat.
00:30:29
Speaker
Yeah, to have this conversation about what it means to look lean or be lean, we have to talk about body composition. So body composition refers to the distribution of different tissue types that make up the human body, and it's a binary. There's two that we're talking about. We're talking about fat, fat mass, so non-lean mass, and we're talking about fat-free or lean mass. So fat mass includes both the essential fat for crucial normal physiological function,
00:30:59
Speaker
as well as non-essential fat or excess fat stores that different individuals have in different amounts for various reasons. When we're talking about fat-free mass, we're talking literally about everything that is not fat. So this includes everything like muscles, organs, which are made of muscle, bones, connective tissue,
00:31:20
Speaker
blood, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, fascia are all connective tissue and it also includes neural tissue as well as a lot of water, right? All right, so to become lean, we are typically looking to either decrease fat mass, increase lean mass muscle, right? Which Pilates and Barr claim they won't do too much. They're not that good at. They're just the right amount of not good at. Or both.
00:31:45
Speaker
both right so typically it's both especially in bodybuilding it's definitely both you'd want both if you have low muscle mass and high fat mass because in this case you'd be losing fat but that wouldn't give you the lean appearance it would give you the skinny appearance right so you need to actually add muscle too right lean describes the presence of muscle
Bodybuilding and Aesthetic Goals
00:32:06
Speaker
but not too much, according to Pilates and Barr, and according to bodybuilding, as much as possible. And the elimination of fat, tone and sculpted, which we hear in Pilates and Barr seem to imply kind of this long and lean aesthetic goal.
00:32:21
Speaker
So let's set a Pilates and Bar aside for a second because I think we should talk a little bit more exclusively about competitive bodybuilding because it does offer a really nice perspective on like what we're talking about. Basically that is all that competitive bodybuilding is trying to do is become bulkier and leaner at the same time. So you talked about this at the beginning of season three, in the first episode of season three, pink dumbbells in the shrinking female body, pink it and shrink it.
00:32:51
Speaker
And you talked about bodybuilding. So Sarah, tell us about the sport of bodybuilding. What's the goal? What's it about? So the sport of bodybuilding is an aesthetic sport. So it's not like competitive weightlifting where
00:33:06
Speaker
The winner is the person who can lift the most in whatever the exercise is. Bodybuilding is very much, is 100% appearance. And so because of that, when you are training as a bodybuilder, you are training to create as much hypertrophy all over your body as you can.
00:33:27
Speaker
And there are a lot of things that people do who are competitive bodybuilders, including when, uh, when they cut, like they'll right before competitions, you want to shed as much like, you know, water mass and things like that as possible. So they'll get severely dehydrated and they will possibly stop eating completely like right before competitions, because you're trying to have as much muscle and as little fat as possible or anything that gets in the way of the appearance of the definition of the muscle.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yeah, typically they're achieving their body composition through an intense engagement with both weightlifting and periodically switching between a calorie restricted diet and a calorie surplus diet. Yeah. So they'll enter an energy surplus when they're in their bulking phase. So they'll eat more calories than they expend for a while ahead, a while ahead of a competition, because this is a very good way to build muscle. You take in more calories.
00:34:24
Speaker
so that your body can use that to create more tissue. And then before, it's sort of like a taper in running or it's sort of like a taper in a string.
00:34:34
Speaker
competition, they kind of back off on the food intake and they cut. And they often enter into an energy deficit restricting calories in order to lose fat. But what they do in order to not lose muscle is they try to eat a shit ton of protein, right? So they make themselves want to vomit by eating so much protein. I listen to lots of podcasts and someone whose podcast I like to listen to,
00:35:01
Speaker
she used to be into bodybuilding and she would talk about waking up in the middle of the night starving and going to the refrigerator and pulling out slices of turkey. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to go eat something and I'm like, that is not, I am not looking for protein. Tell you what, I'm not looking for protein when I'm hungry and I can't sleep.
00:35:18
Speaker
Becoming long and lean with Pilates and Barre is this aesthetic goal that we've discussed, not for competition purposes. So we're talking about very different things. But here's where I want to ask, right? Can Pilates and Barre help us change our body composition by helping us burn fat to appear more lean? What do you think, Sarah? Can we lose fat from doing these exercise formats?
00:35:41
Speaker
It's a bit of an, it depends if you were somebody who was already doing a lot of other types of exercise, I would be suspicious that adding these types of exercise specifically would be like the magic component that suddenly you lost all this weight. If you have been much more sedentary, if you have not been doing any sort of exercise, I think certainly in the beginning, yes, because it's going to.
00:36:06
Speaker
it's going to be a challenge to your body. It's a different activity than it's used to doing. But again, I think it's also the sort of thing that I think sometimes it's hard to separate out in real life because it might be you're doing yoga, you like how you feel, you want to make
00:36:23
Speaker
you know, food choices that are in line with how you're feeling. So you may also be altering your diet in positive ways, eating more whole foods, all of that kind of thing, right, which in itself probably is going to make more of a difference. Yeah, there's there's a lot of different behavior modification that come that can come from
00:36:42
Speaker
starting a new type of exercise, but also about being a part of a culture that does a certain type of exercise, right? So yeah, it would be hard to study that. But here's where I want to talk to you about this book, Burn by Hermann Ponser. The new research blows the lid off of how we really burn calories, lose weight, and stay healthy.
00:36:59
Speaker
this book taught me a lot because I hadn't prior, you know, I've done a lot of reading about weight loss and metabolism, things like that, although I really enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Ben House. But this book is fascinating. And it challenges these conventional ideas that I certainly had very deeply ingrained in myself about exercise's role in energy expenditure, and how that plays into weight loss.
Exercise vs. Diet in Weight Management
00:37:22
Speaker
So basically, energy expenditure is just another way to say metabolism. And so through
00:37:28
Speaker
Hermann Ponser's findings and other scientist studies that included observations of modern day hunter gatherer people. Okay, so he specifically studied a group called the Hadza who live in Tanzania. Ponser is a, again, he's an anthropologist, right, who focuses on human evolution. He's studying human metabolism
00:37:49
Speaker
through this evolutionary lens. The premise of the book is that our metabolisms have been shaped during the millennia when humans lived exclusively as hunter-gatherers, which is the majority of the time that we've been in existence. That is how we've lived.
00:38:07
Speaker
starting around 2 to 2.5 million years ago up until the advent of agriculture, which was only 12,000 years ago. So that's millions of years that we were hunter-gatherers and then just about 12,000 when we kind of transitioned into not for most of us being that way, right? As hunter-gatherers, our metabolisms evolved to be very flexible, primarily for the purpose of helping us not starve.
00:38:31
Speaker
And I have to say we've been extremely successful at not starving. If I do say so myself, I'm going to pat all of us on the back. Good job, everybody. Ponser explains that this very same metabolism that has done such a good job of preventing us from starving is the same one that currently also makes it very difficult for people to lose weight and keep it off.
00:38:56
Speaker
using either diet but really it's very difficult to use exercise to lose weight and that's what we're going to talk about. Ponser argues that exercise, and by the way he has a lot of scientific consensus, right, it's not just Ponser, that exercise is especially a poor tool for weight loss.
00:39:18
Speaker
and that just because, and this is very, contradicts conventional wisdom, so you heard it from me, but you gotta read the book, okay, because I'm not the expert on this, that just because someone is more active does not mean they will burn more calories.
00:39:31
Speaker
The Hadza, which are a modern day hunter-gatherer people, are extremely active every single day of their life. They walk like 10 miles a day on average, they are always moving, and they are far, far more active than someone who is sedentary, living in an industrial society. But nevertheless,
00:39:53
Speaker
They burn about the same amount of calories daily as we do when you control for body size. Basically, this book explains in a number of really well-written ways that we are not like cars. We think, okay, the more work we do, the more exercise, the more physical activity we do in general,
00:40:10
Speaker
the more fuel we're going to burn, right? So let's exercise more so that we can burn more calories so we can lose weight. But our bodies, he writes, quote, don't work like simple fuel burning machines because we aren't products of engineering. We're products of evolution. Our bodies work actually, and I love this analogy, more like a business on a budget. We cut costs when we've outkicked our coverage, right? We cut costs when we've started to spend more than we're bringing in.
00:40:34
Speaker
So what does it mean to cut costs? It means that all the places that our body uses energy, so energy for active expenditure, we think of that as physical activity and exercise, but also all the ways that it powers our organs, that it powers our immune system, plays a role in reproduction, right?
00:40:54
Speaker
There are a number of places. It's putting energy and if we start spending energy more on one aspect of that energy budget It just cuts costs from these other aspects of the budget so that the budget stays pretty balanced now It's a very simple way of saying what?
00:41:10
Speaker
Ponser explains in great detail in this book, but basically the takeaway is exercise is a poor tool for weight loss. And the reason is that your body is very good at not letting you starve, right? Your body is going to be like, oh, hey, I noticed you've been working more lately. I noticed that you've started, you've taken up running. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut energy expenditure on these other things so that you can keep doing that. And that way you won't starve. You're welcome.
00:41:35
Speaker
When exercise is approached in moderate healthy amounts, this reduction in any energy expenditure on other things is actually a really important way that exercise promotes health. This energy that was put toward inflammation
00:41:51
Speaker
and a chronic stress response is withdrawn. So this is one of the main reasons exercise is so good for us, which is that it reorganizes how our body uses energy. Instead of using energy to get stressed out about stuff, instead of using energy for chronic inflammation, it actually has to instead use that energy for the exercise we're doing, and therefore we experience better mood. We experience reduced inflammation.
00:42:21
Speaker
We experience less chronic stress in our life and all of these things reduce disease risk. Yes, energy is reduced, but oftentimes on the things that were making us sick or making us hurt or making us feel bad. This is why exercise is so good for us, but we don't hear that with long and lean. We don't hear that with long and lean. We hear, let's lose weight.
00:42:44
Speaker
right? And so if energy is approached in extreme and unhealthy amounts, then we might experience things like burnout, inability to sleep, depression, low fertility, amenorrhea, which is the abnormal cessation of getting your period, right? You know, obviously, there's such a thing always is too much, right? But if exercise is approached in a healthy way, it just makes us better at not getting sick, honestly, and it helps us feel healthier, happier, and better in general. But at any rate, our metabolisms are flexible, and they respond dynamically
00:43:14
Speaker
And this is explained via the constrained energy model, which is now the widely accepted model for understanding metabolism.
00:43:22
Speaker
The constrained energy model suggests that total energy expenditure, how much we burn, and all the things we need energy for, so that's active energy, but also resting energy, the things that power our organs and our immune system, is relatively constrained, meaning there is a limit to the amount of energy the body can expend in a day. Quote, he writes, kilocalories spent on physical activity, but also organ function, growth, thermoregulation, digestion, and rest, cannot be added up like a grocery bill.
00:43:51
Speaker
because all of the processes involved in these activities interact and affect each other in dynamic and complex ways. If you increase physical activity, this increase in energy expenditure on this particular function will result in a decrease in other functions. So your expenditure really just ends up staying in a pretty limited range.
00:44:10
Speaker
And he often repeats the refrain, our metabolism is more than the sum of its parts. So some questions some listeners might have, which I definitely did, is does adding muscle to your body help you burn more calories at rest? We've heard, we've probably heard that it does and it does, but not, but actually not by much.
00:44:28
Speaker
Oh, interesting. I've heard that a lot. Yes. There's other bigger benefits to adding muscle to your body. And yes, you will burn a little bit more, but that's not the big plus side of having more muscle. There are other things that we talk about a lot on this podcast that you're going to benefit from more, right?
00:44:47
Speaker
Basically, muscle is a sink for glucose. Your metabolism will work better because you have more muscle, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to burn more calories. You see there's this constant conflict between wanting it to be about looking a different way and then having it actually be about being healthier. We're not hearing about the being healthier part. We're hearing about the looking a different way part.
00:45:11
Speaker
Another question people might have is, do people have metabolisms that operate at different rates? Is there such a thing as a fast versus a slow metabolism? The answer is yes. This is largely due to body size, but if we control for body size, people with bigger bodies burn more. They eat more too.
00:45:28
Speaker
But when we control for body size, yes, it's true too that some people have faster and some people have slower metabolisms. Here's another question people might have, which is, can a single person experience a relatively slower or faster metabolism shift in their lifetime? And again, the answer is yes. But this has no bearing at all on whether or not that person is thin or fat. Quote, he writes, blaming weight gain on slow metabolism gets cause and effect wrong.
00:45:54
Speaker
Our metabolism doesn't dictate energy balance. It responds to it. Energy intake dictates energy balance. It's about diet, in other words. It's about what we're eating.
00:46:08
Speaker
If we have energy surplus, we're eating more than we're spending, our metabolism actually speeds up. Makes sense, right? If we have energy deficit, our metabolism slows down. Makes sense, right? Because energy intake diet dictates energy balance.
00:46:26
Speaker
If we look at this through the lens of evolution, it makes sense that our metabolism works this way, because evolutionarily speaking, a slower metabolism is desirable in an energy deficit. If we're starving, if we instead, while starving, had a faster metabolism response during these times of scarcity, we'd be more likely to die, right? We wouldn't be here.
00:46:50
Speaker
is a poor tool for weight loss because energy is relatively constrained. A better tool is diet, but not in the ways many people think.
00:46:59
Speaker
And also diet is not that simple of a way to do it either. Because if we're trying to lose weight, we need to burn more than we eat, but the body is very good at making us not eat. We're going to feel hungry. We're incredibly bad at tracking our calories. Genetics play a big role in weight loss and how easy or hard it is for someone to lose weight. There's very complex. But for the most part, here's something else that's important to say.
00:47:26
Speaker
which this is not an opinion, this is a law. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Weight change is about energy balance. If we eat more than we burn, we will gain weight and vice versa. It's the second law of thermodynamics.
00:47:38
Speaker
That's just, that's how it works, right? Like, I've seen so many, you know, insta posts about you can lose weight. It's just, you know, calories in versus calories out, right? But that's a different thing. Calories in and calories out. Yes. Here's what Ponz are saying is that you think that exercising more is going to cause more calories out and you're wrong.
00:48:02
Speaker
because your metabolism will just adjust it will change the budget it will allocate energy to different things that's why i mean i've seen lots of people who are dealing with like a lot of stress in their lives and they're like i'm gaining weight and i don't understand why and i'm like well your body is having an experience that's not evolutionarily dissimilar to
00:48:24
Speaker
freaking out and not being sure where your next meal is coming from. Therefore, you are keeping energy on your body. Absolutely. Chronic stress, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I also want to make this point too, which is that exercise is crucial for health. Just because exercise is a poor tool for weight loss doesn't mean
00:48:44
Speaker
that it doesn't play a role in weight loss. It does. And in fact, it's been shown to be really important for the maintenance of weight loss. So people who exercise after losing weight are more likely to keep the weight off. And it's important for all these other factors. He writes, quote, our bodies have evolved to support and depend on high levels of physical activity that were the norm throughout the past 2 million years of hunting and gathering. We have evolved to require exercise. Without it, we get sick.
00:49:13
Speaker
Absolutely, so additionally and fascinatingly when we increase physical activity Or active and metabolic expenditure the energy we expend while active right so that that'd be exercise physical activity Rather than the energy expend while resting our body in a sense as I said it shunts energy away from these processes and
00:49:31
Speaker
that can run contrary to health, like chronic inflammation and the stress response. So that is also detailing what he means by if we don't engage in physical activity, we get sick. But here's the deal. Unfortunately, methods like Pilates and Barre, which are forms of exercise and a great way to be active, spending an awful lot of time on weight loss benefits
00:49:53
Speaker
and this idea that they will make you lean. But according to the constrained energy model, exercise is a poor tool for weight loss. So now we got a problem with accuracy of that claim. Not only is that claim, unfortunately,
00:50:09
Speaker
giving aesthetics a lot of air time, it's also not correct. So if we want to talk about burning more than we take in, we've got to instead focus on diet, right? However, now we have another problem because Sarah, are Pilates and barre diet systems?
00:50:24
Speaker
Not overtly. Ponser points to the importance of diet for weight loss. Also, as I said, cautioning readers to know that it's not as simple as just saying eat less. He warns against the bullshit tactics of fad diets like keto, raw food diets, intermittent fasting, South Beach,
00:50:42
Speaker
My favorite is the carnivore diet, which is like literally just eat meat. And the myriad of other fad diets out there. No, no, carnivore is big. The myriad of other fad diets out there that makes certain foods villains and other foods heroes, Dr. Ben House, linked in the show notes, calls this food religions, which I think is a very apt name. The rules around each of these diets are very distinct and at times bizarre and extreme. And none of these diets, none of them are particularly special. They're not, because they are all just ways to restrict calories.
00:51:11
Speaker
Okay. And that is, and that puts us in an energy deficit. And yes, that is, that is a good way to lose weight. Okay. You could also theoretically lose weight on highly processed foods, just as long as you consume fewer calories, then you burn, you'll feel like shit, but you could do it. Right. You might feel better than you did if you just ate meat though. I don't know. Like it's a toss up there in my mind, fad diets, similar to boutique fitness formats are not metabolism hacks.
00:51:39
Speaker
at all, in any way. I mean, there's really, it's sounding like there is no metabolism hack. So if somebody's coming at you with a quote unquote, metabolism hacked, hack, that's a really good sign that you should unfollow them or get them out of your life. Yeah, get the hack out of there. Okay. And while diet does play a more crucial role in weight loss than exercise, weight loss is complicated for a number of reasons, three of which four of which have to do with people
00:52:07
Speaker
shockingly bad at keeping track of the calories they eat. Research shows that people under report the equivalent of one entire meal's worth of calories per day.
00:52:15
Speaker
Two, when you diet, reduce calorie intake, your body has a lot of tricks up its sleeve to get you to eat more increasing hunger signals being a big one. Some folks want to lose weight, but they don't really have access to whole foods because they live in food deserts. It's hard for them to get foods that have nutrient density. Number four, food quality matters when we're trying to lose weight. Processed foods are calorie dense and nutrient deficient.
00:52:40
Speaker
And we seem to have a preponderance of access to this type of highly palatable, absolutely fucking delicious food everywhere. And currently, science is looking closely at the role that highly processed foods may play in weight gain, how they are actually very addictive, and how they may affect other aspects of our physiology that would make losing weight challenging. And oh, here's another one. Body composition is very genetic. So it's not so easy as just eat less, right?
00:53:10
Speaker
As it pertains to our question for today's episode, that Pilates and Barr will get you lean, which implies that at least in party, they will help you lose weight. According to Ponser and the well-established scientific findings of researchers like him, which mostly seem to have consensus, this is just not the case. Exercise is not a great tool for weight loss.
00:53:33
Speaker
Now, if you happen to lose weight after starting Pilates and Barre, to your point, Sarah, there are a number of additional uncontrollable factors or what they call confounding variables that might have influenced your weight loss. Like maybe you started exercising and your sleep improved and your stress was reduced and your diet improved, right? So it's possible
00:53:53
Speaker
that you can start an exercise and lose weight. It's also, I've heard from many folks, this has happened to me too, that like I'll start exercising and I'll actually gain weight because I start to eat more because I'm hungry, right? So, Sarah, what other modes out there, exercise formats, do you hear claiming to be good for weight loss?
00:54:10
Speaker
i mean i feel like most of them do only because it's such a good marketing tool that like whether it's true or not let's just slap on weight loss and and sometimes it's not so overt as saying weight loss it's sort of the you know dog whistle language used for women so it's things like
00:54:28
Speaker
feel better, stand taller, look something. It's all sort of like all of that language that implies there's going to be some loss of weight that is surrounding that terrible weight that's just surrounding those beautiful muscles underneath or some such worship. But all sorts of cardio exercise
00:54:46
Speaker
has historically claimed to be good for losing weight. So I think more of those types of exercises like the sort of group class formats for women in particular are seen as weight loss places to be versus something like where their focus is not on
00:55:02
Speaker
your weight like crossfit isn't walking around being like do this you're gonna lose weight they're like do this you're gonna pack on muscles you know i mean there i don't see a marketing like a big marketing pushes crossfit for losing weight you know i agree and i think strength training in general though it does help you lose weight that's not what people see it for.
00:55:22
Speaker
And a lot of women, in fact, I think are afraid of it because they think it's just going to like, they're going to maintain the weight they are, but now just be bigger because they have bigger muscles. And there's this sort of idea like, well, first I have to lose the weight, then I can put the muscle on or something like that, which is a total horse shit.
00:55:38
Speaker
Oh, yeah. It's really very confusing, honestly. I think fewer people believe this one than used to, but Sarah, remember when people thought they could spot reduce? Like they could burn fat in the problem areas or on the inside of your body per your bar story.
00:56:01
Speaker
Yeah, and so what do you have to say about spot reducing? Well, it is well documented now that that is not a thing. You can't get rid of your, quote unquote, spare tire by doing more crunches, right? This is idea that if I exercise in the area of what I've decided is a problem, that will get rid of the problem. But some people do still believe it. I still get patients in the clinic sometimes asking me.
00:56:27
Speaker
Like, how do I get rid of this? And I'm like, how long do we have for this conversation? But I do sort of sum up for them that there's no way to spot train. People are usually just very disappointed by that because that's what they'd like it to be.
00:56:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So when you're in a calorie deficit, people lose weight in a calorie deficit, and everyone will appear thinner in different places on their body, right? So you can't really select on your body where you're going to lose weight first. It's probably going to be usually at the same place every time. But that's different from building muscle, actually. So you can select where you want to build muscle on your body. You can just train your biceps and get bigger biceps, and you won't get bigger quads from that, right?
00:57:09
Speaker
There is a principle of specificity that applies to building muscle, but not one that applies to fat loss. Yeah. One of my favorite things with that is seeing the big dudes in the gym. When I used to work at Equinox and I would walk through the training area on the way to the studio and I would, let's say, look at various people and you could tell. It was the men in particular because a lot of the men were doing
00:57:33
Speaker
muscle hypertrophy for appearance weightlifting, not like, I actually really want to be strong. So there'd be the people where it was like, oh, well, you're just training the muscles you can see in the mirror. So the front of their body would be super developed and then have no butt. Yeah, that's super common. Or it's like all upper body, but no lower body. It's like huge biceps and twigs for calves. Yes. And so that was always kind of entertaining to me. Yeah.
00:58:00
Speaker
Yeah, I find this focus on this exercise format will help you lose weight, and they use different language than lose weight per your point. Like kettlebells, if it's about fat loss and kettlebelling, they're going to use different language than Pilates and Barb. But I think it causes more harm than good, Sarah. First of all, it's not accurate.
00:58:18
Speaker
right it's just scientifically it's not true and the way that they try to explain it just isn't how the body works yeah but i think it's it's harmful beyond just it being you know a falsehood how do you feel about it sarah well at its at its core there's an assumption that
00:58:35
Speaker
And I'm just going to talk about women in particular because that's who this is usually aimed at. There's an assumption that the shape of your body is deeply moldable, like in a big way, like you can transform it into something else. And while
00:58:51
Speaker
Let's say you had an amount of weight on your body that was causing you harm for some reason, and it's a healthy choice to try to reduce it. Your essential shape, for the most part, stays pretty much the same. If you're in the like, I want to lose five pounds, I just want to get rid of this belly, I want to slim up for the summer or whatever, all of that BS.
00:59:17
Speaker
It just continues, it's this fear-based marketing scheme that continues to play into this idea that has been forced upon us that as we are physically right now is incorrect. It's not enough and it's wrong and you should be trying to change it. And I can speak for Los Angeles and New York where I've lived, which are these big obviously cities where there is, I mean in LA in particular, there's a huge emphasis on appearance, like really, really big.
00:59:47
Speaker
to the point where I almost don't even notice it anymore. And then someone will come visit me and they're like, God, does everybody have plastic surgery? I'm like, Oh yeah, I guess they do. But playing into this idea that, you know, basically, if you're a woman, you should be trying to look better no matter what. And that the goal of this, this conflation of
01:00:07
Speaker
thinness with healthiness, which we talked about before, where it's like the appearance of healthiness by being skinny doesn't actually mean that your heart loves this, or your hormones love it, or whatever. There's sometimes, and I always love when I see this, when women who are either influencers, or they lift weights, their social media platform is about their physical appearance, and every now and then you'll get someone who's kind of like,
01:00:32
Speaker
flipped it. And I still remember seeing this one. I can't, I wish I could remember this person's name, but she showed herself looking like the sort of like Instagram ideal. She was wearing a sports bra and booty shorts. And she says to look like this, here is what I had to do. And she listed out everything. And it basically included not ever eating any fat, working out multiple hours a day, working out while injured, because who cared if you're injured, if you look good, right?
01:01:00
Speaker
I really loved it because you just blew the lid off the idea that this was an easily attainable goal that everyone should aspire to. It's not easy to attain because you shouldn't aspire to it because your body at this point thinks you're in a deficit and it's going into panic mode. You end up with things like injuries, you end up with things like eating disorders or orthorexia or
01:01:23
Speaker
any of those number of problems that women are just hounded by around eating. And I just wish more exercise formats just said, you know what? It feels good to feel strong in your body. It feels good to have
01:01:38
Speaker
more energy, have more endurance, have more of that kind of stuff. And that's what you're going to get from this class. 100%. Yes. Yes. I think, you know, first of all, another thing I want to say is like, it's not wrong to look long and lean. Like if you have that body type, there's nothing wrong with being long and lean, tall and thin.
01:01:58
Speaker
you know, I don't want to like reverse body shame people who have this body type and be like, like me. That's, that's right. Like Sarah. Why are you so not Paul? Could you just, could you just like have a slower metabolism and also like shrink your bones so that when you do gain weight, we can see it. I mean, one of the cheats in a way, if we're going to call it that, I mean, that's stupid language, but I can
01:02:23
Speaker
gain and lose between five to ten pounds and I don't look any different. Because I have so much topography upon which to spread it, basically. And that's, in this culture, I would call it deeply unfair. But I do remember when I used to, I don't think I told this story already, but if I did, you can just delete this. I remember when I used to work at Equinox and I'd go in the locker room afterwards to change or whatever, and more than one woman, maybe someone who had taken my class or something would say to me,
01:02:52
Speaker
god i wish you had your body and i would generally say thank you that's very kind and then i would also reply with it comes with three hip surgeries and lower back problems and at this point i could add it comes with breast cancer because
01:03:07
Speaker
And inevitably, when I would say that, women would sort of go, oh, because they're not considering. I mean, that's what they're thinking about, right? So not to say like, oh, boo-hoo, I have my problems. But it is unfair that I look the way I have. And I honestly never really had to work that hard at looking like this. It was a luck of the draw. And I kind of think that's true for a lot of people who have the
01:03:30
Speaker
body that they have that happens to be an idealized body. Exactly. You didn't really have to do much. I didn't really have to do much. So something that Ponser brings up in his book is like his wish that people recognize just how fabulous exercise is for health and longevity.
01:03:48
Speaker
and how it can improve so many different aspects of our lives simply by improving our mood and reducing chronic stress and reducing inflammation right we are less likely to get sick if we exercise get get metabolic diseases like cardiovascular disease diabetes and whatnot but he had i think heard
01:04:09
Speaker
From some other expert in the field that like nobody's ever gonna exercise for health They're only gonna exercise if they think that it will change their appearance in some way for the better because people are vain or whatever and I was like I echo his feeling that that's just such a pessimistic take on humanity like really
01:04:30
Speaker
And I definitely feel like it's possible to exercise to look different. Because you can't change the way you look with exercise. It's more about building muscle, right? That would change that. And then diet, that would potentially help you lose weight. Like, I'm certainly not saying this is impossible. I'm just saying that diet plays a bigger role in weight loss. But I think that the phrase long and lean and ones like it, I think they're particularly harmful because they're like a dog whistle, right? Yeah.
01:04:56
Speaker
That covertly signals or overtly signals this explicit message that there is one narrow right appealing acceptable way to look and you should you should join that club or our club where we're going to help you be like us.
01:05:11
Speaker
because that's how you want to be, right? You want to be the people that look like us because, and this is where we're going to get into Sabrina Strings' book, Fearing the Black Body, because we're the people in power, right? We're the ones with the money. We're the white, wealthy people in power. And we've wielded fatphobia for that purpose, right? So unlike all these other people who aren't long and lean,
01:05:34
Speaker
right? The riffraff, right? Don't you want to be in our club? And so that's really where we can start talking about the harm to society and the way that long and lean phrases like it cause harm on a societal level and contribute to the marginalization of certain groups, right?
Sabrina Strings on Fatphobia and Race Science
01:05:51
Speaker
We'll also talk about the harm to the profession, right? Why Pilates and bar teachers touting long and lean
01:05:56
Speaker
They're spouting claims that lack accuracy, but they're also positioning exercise in this way that is exclusionary to folks who maybe don't already fit that description. So I think these claims implicitly body shame and fat shame. Fat shaming specifically is very much wrapped up in our long, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, eugenicist, and classist history as a country.
01:06:22
Speaker
So this is where Sabrina Strings fearing the black body, the racial origins of fat phobia come in. Fat shaming is about more than hating on fat, actually, historically. In her book, Sabrina Strings examines the history behind our now current preference for slenderness slash our phobia around fatness in the United States, specifically examining how the development of race and class status influenced predominantly by
01:06:47
Speaker
the transatlantic slave trade, and the rise of Protestantism, which I found very interesting because I was raised Protestant. They coincided but not causally. How these two phenomenon gave rise to this attitude shift of, if we go back to your episode, part one, Sarah,
01:07:04
Speaker
going from preferring fat to hating it or being afraid of it, right? What gave rise to this attitude shift? So Sabrina focuses a lot on the slave trade and she focuses a lot on the rise of Protestantism. She writes about the role race science
01:07:20
Speaker
eugenics and misogyny all played in this development of thin-spired fatphobia. Some definitions are in order here. So race science is the historical and discredited field of pseudoscientific study that attempted to categorize and rank human races based on purported biological or genetic differences. And it did this in order to justify a lot of social and political hierarchies
01:07:46
Speaker
discrimination, race inequality, and it did this by falsely attributing certain characteristics, abilities, behaviors to different racial groups. Here's what Strange writes. She writes, quote, racial scientific rhetoric about slavery linked fatness to, quote, greedy Africans.
01:08:04
Speaker
and religious discourse suggested that overeating was ungodly. So in other words, fatness became black and sinful. The preference for thinness has not principally or historically been about health.
01:08:20
Speaker
And I hinted at that in part one when Sarah asked me to talk about the history of the body mass index, which is a non-scientific heuristic used to assign people into different weight classes from underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese. Instead, a preference for thinness has been, and again, I'll quote Strings, quote, one way the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies. Fat phobia has repeatedly been used
01:08:49
Speaker
to degrade black women and to discipline white women. String states that to create her analysis of fat phobia over the centuries, she drew from the work of social theorists. So one was Pierre Bourdieu. Sorry if anyone can actually speak French who's listening to me. Hi, Canon. Would you like me to do it? Yes, please. Thank you. Bourdieu. Pierre Bourdieu. There you go.
01:09:15
Speaker
Social theorists are scholars, so they study and analyze social phenomenon like race, class, and power, and they help explain these by developing conceptual frameworks to do so. Strings writes, quote, according to Bourdieu, elites are constantly working to differentiate themselves from the lower classes. In doing so, they often distinguish themselves by cultivating tastes, diets,
01:09:43
Speaker
and physical appearances that are in opposition to those of the subordinate groups. These social distinctions serve to naturalize and normalize social hierarchies. One distinction the elite made was this preference for thinness. They established a distinction between wealthy and poor, as well as white and other, but mostly black.
01:10:06
Speaker
One chapter in her book titled, quote, thinness is American exceptionalism, gets into Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics. He basically made it up eugenics in the early 20th century. Now, this guy, believe it or not, was Charles Darwin's cousin. That's so nuts.
01:10:25
Speaker
No joke, which I find almost too much to take. It makes my head want to explode because what a family. Charles Darwin, theory of natural selection guy, and then his cousin, Francis Galton, who invents eugenics. Wow. Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population by selective breeding.
01:10:49
Speaker
or other forms of genetic manipulation, eugenicists advocate for policies and practices aimed at promoting the reproduction of individuals with desired traits and discouraging or preventing the reproduction of those deemed undesirable. So if you want to understand eugenics, just read up on the Nazis and that'll probably give you a pretty clear idea of where you and your society will end up when you pull on that thread for long enough.
01:11:14
Speaker
quote Long and Lean, here's what I think. I think Long and Lean is to the 90s and 2000s as White and Nordic was to the 1800s and early 1900s. Yeah, I think that's about right.
01:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's about right. I'm reading this book right now. I haven't finished reading it, but I'm still in the sort of historical, I'm into like the Reformation period and it's, I couldn't recommend this book more. It's brilliant, but it's really fascinating to see like there is this deeply ingrained within white culture belief that it's not even just about your appearance that there's a almost like black people are alien, like they're not even human.
01:11:52
Speaker
And that all of the differences and the traits and all of that kind of stuff, there are sort of explained away by like, well, why would you want that? You want to be a good white person. I mean, it's full on fascists, Nazis. It's insane. It's insane. It's super fascist. What stood out to me is when they referred to Africans as greedy. Meanwhile, they're bringing them over on ships to work as slaves. I'm like, wow.
01:12:19
Speaker
like a super narcissistic gaslighting thing to say. I'm going to describe you in ways that anyone could objectively describe my own behavior. So yeah, it's almost like when you hear long and lean, think of it this way, do Pilates bar and yoga so you too can be white and Nordic.
01:12:39
Speaker
It's not the same. I don't want to pay a false equivalency, but because that's not obviously like what Pilates and Bartheser are saying is not that, but I read Strings' book and I see this phrase long and lean in a very different light. It's given the phrase a larger sociological context in which to interpret this appeal to thinness and tallness. And whiteness.
01:13:07
Speaker
And I would say as well, like, you know, to your point about yoga and Pilates teachers not, you know, when they're saying long and lean, they're not like, we're Nazis, come join us. But no, there's a there's a lack of knowledge. I mean, I didn't know this. There's a lack of knowledge of where that actually came from and how the roots of it are so unbelievably racist and xenophobic. And, you know, I mean, you I think it's not a hard
01:13:32
Speaker
line to draw between eugenics and long and lean. I really don't. I think it's a pretty straight line. Either way, it's not that they're saying, do Pilates and bars so you can be white and Nordic. But it's not a good look. This phrase is not a good look for the profession. It's pretty cringe, as the youth say. It is cringe.
01:13:51
Speaker
So let's talk about harm to the profession. Sarah, I'm not a Pilates or bar teacher, but it's so cringe for me when, for example, I hear yoga teachers spreading false claims about the asanas and what they can do. Like, twists will detoxify your body.
01:14:09
Speaker
because I'm a yoga teacher and now I'm grouped in with these yoga teachers saying this stuff and I feel like it does harm to me because I work in this profession. Do you ever have that experience as a PT? Yes, but far less. Honestly, if I had to dig into the psychological reasons why I'm a PT, I think a decent
01:14:30
Speaker
slice of it is because I wanted to differentiate myself from the people who were currently my peers. In that, I was like, I don't want to be glommed in with these people who are saying insane things. I do still hear things, but the stuff that I hear is less... It's not about appearance.
01:14:51
Speaker
because PTs are not concerned with the parents. The things I hear might be something like an explanation of like, we need to make this muscle work so that this muscle can work, where I'm like, yeah, I'm not sure that that's exactly accurate, like that kind of stuff. Or I'm like, well, I'm not sure the research actually shows that, but you're in the middle of your session with your patient. I'm not going to waltz over and be like, actually, let me make you look stupid in front of your patient.
01:15:13
Speaker
It's more of that kind of stuff. I don't see PTs generally talking about appearance because that's not the purpose of our profession. Our profession is very clearly laid out in our morals and ethics and things like that that we have to follow. There's a good bit of pseudoscience in PT though.
01:15:32
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Yes, there are definitely PTs that are crap, but there's everything that are crap. There's crap doctors. I think in any field, you end up getting lumped in with the full mix of the people in the field. There's always part of your job where you're differentiating yourself from the people who are not as good at your job as you are.
01:15:51
Speaker
Yeah, and I feel like that is probably the case for a lot of Pilates and Barr teachers who would rather their colleagues not be using long and lean and appeals to certain very narrow body shapes and aesthetics. What harm do you see long and lean doing to the professions of Pilates and Barr, Sarah?
01:16:08
Speaker
I think it's, well, and it's actually, I have an interview with Adam Makati that I do where we talk about this and how he does not use that language and why not. And I do think it is sort of starting to decline in some areas. I think in any format, if we are dog whistling our clients, our students about their appearance, we're automatically doing harm. And I think there needs to be a sort of come to Jesus moment probably.
01:16:39
Speaker
in a national way, in an international way, I don't know that this would ever happen, where there's something from the PMA or some sort of larger institution, like Yoga Alliance being like, hey, stop telling people stuff that is not true about their appearance, things like that.
01:16:55
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, I think it's harmful all over. Barr is a class that is supposed to make you look like a ballerina. So it's probably the worst offender because its whole premise is that you will, by doing these exercises that only very vaguely, like with your eyes closed halfway and you look at them, like, do they look like anything you do in a dance class? But they purport to build you these long and lean muscles by doing these tiny mini movements over and over again.
01:17:23
Speaker
The Pilates body, the dancer body, the idea we have about these bodies, what they look like or what they should look like, creates an implicit link in people's minds between someone's body type and, I think, their teaching proficiency within these styles as well. Advertising these practices in this way acts instead as a sort of, as we've used this term a lot, dog whistle.
01:17:48
Speaker
favoring teachers who already physically match this description. It covertly or even overtly ends up excluding the teachers who don't. It incorrectly suggests that teachers who don't physically match a long and lean body type aren't skilled at teaching these modes, aren't as knowledgeable, or they just don't practice these modes correctly, otherwise they would have the long and lean body type. They're not dedicated enough, or they're just somehow not qualified to teach.
01:18:17
Speaker
based solely on the appearance of their body as it relates to being long and lean. What happens then is that we get a lack of representation of people in bigger bodies and or people of color teaching these formats.
Inclusion in Fitness: Pilates and Barr
01:18:32
Speaker
We get a whole lot of white people, thin people, and a lot of times wealthy people because
01:18:41
Speaker
group fitness pays for shit so you better have somebody who's bringing home the bacon to support your career doing that. We get a lack of representation and then that trickles down because when students don't see people who look like them leading a certain type of format, teaching it, they're less likely to do it themselves. So not only is this bad for folks who might really benefit from Pilates and Barr, they might really love it,
01:19:08
Speaker
if they were included, it's also terrible for business because you basically alienated an entire section of your customer base. Absolutely. It don't make no sense. It doesn't make any sense. There is some great pushback now, especially in Pilates, I'm saying, but in yoga as well where we're seeing teachers who are in a variety of bodies and are a variety of skin tones and starting to make it a more friendly place for that reason.
01:19:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yep. It's good. Very good. Long and lean as it's used as a marketing device for Pilates and bar businesses, I think should signal to prospective practitioners and teachers to steer clear.
Challenging Misleading Exercise Marketing
01:19:49
Speaker
Be cautious of these particular enterprises who lean into this way of selling their services. You don't have to make it about weight loss or vocally show preference for a very narrow body type. That is always a choice.
01:20:02
Speaker
I know Pilates and bar teachers who not only don't make it about weight loss, they speak out against people in their profession who do. What's implied in leadership's choice of messaging long and lean as a selling point is simultaneously either a total lack of awareness or a total disregard for evidence-based information about how the body works
01:20:25
Speaker
The harm this preference for long and lean does to women, but more so black women and women of color, in light of our fatphobic and racist and eugenicist past.
01:20:36
Speaker
So, while Pilates bar and yoga asana as forms of exercise, definitely have benefits. Exercise of all kinds, especially when we do a variety of different kinds, is incredibly beneficial to our health. It's possible that these health benefits are somewhat nullified with this harmful gospel of long and lean. All right, end rant. Not a rant, this is facts.
The Hope for Inclusivity with Gen Z
01:21:04
Speaker
You know, one of the things that I feel hopeful about is that as much as Gen Z uses language that I cannot understand sometimes, like my nephews will say entire sentences and I'm like, I caught maybe one or two words of that and what that means, no cap on God. But I think I used that correctly. But at the same time, what I think is kind of great about these
01:21:33
Speaker
young folks, oh God, that makes me sound ancient, about younger people today is that there is such a, the youth of the day, the youths, that there is so much more acceptance of all kinds of difference, whether it's sexual preference, gender, you know, understandings, definitions, or lack thereof, bodies, body types, body shapes. I see that the kids,
01:21:59
Speaker
The kids give me hope for the future in that sense because I just do see there's just so much more acceptance around every type of body and every type of person. Right on. All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode about our top secret tips for how to get long and lean. Just kidding. Check out the show notes for exclusive discounts on bone lengthening surgery so you can get longer body hacks on how to outsmart the constrained energy model of metabolism. No, no, no. Really, just kidding.
01:22:28
Speaker
You can check out our show notes for links to references we mentioned in this podcast, including the book Burn by Ponser and Fearing the Black Body by Strings. Please also, if you appreciate the time and energy Sarah and I put into these episodes, you can express that appreciation through subscribing.
01:22:46
Speaker
rating and giving us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, don't forget to get on our wait list for bone density course lift for longevity. You will get exclusive wait list only discounts. So we are not giving this discount to anyone who is not on the wait list and you're going to want it because it's a good discount. Yep. Get on our wait list via the link in our show notes. And you're also going to get periodic freebies in email form just for being on the wait list. Yeah.
01:23:16
Speaker
All right. See you in two weeks.