10 Things I Was Wrong About, Part 1

If you look back at what you thought a decade ago and don’t make this face, you’re doing it wrong.

Somebody once asked me what the best diet was. I told him, with utter certainty, some variant of low-carb. Years later, the subject came up again with this same person and I was talking about how I thought it would be best to structure a diet for fat-loss. I included rice, potatoes, and even some bread in the mix. Literally anything was OK as long as the right calorie number was hit. This person’s jaw hung open like the lid on a neglected mailbox in front of an abandoned house. Sure enough, the big question came “You told me low carb was the best back then. Now you don’t believe that. What happened?” The curious part wasn’t the words, but the strange feeling imparted in them. It was almost like I’d betrayed him by switching sides. Like when you decide you’ve had enough of the Yankees and are now cheering for the Red Sox. I’d love to tell you some earth-shattering revelation had happened. That my eyes were opened and I’d seen the light. I like fiction just as much as you do, but that’s not how it went. It turns out I just was wrong. So, in the interest of self-effacement, let’s have a look at some of the times I was totally sure about something and turned out to be embarrassingly wrong.

1. Machines are bad. When I first started lifting kind of seriously (and not just to chase “da pump”) I was taught to do big lifts with free weights because they’re better for overall strength. As the old cliché goes, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Being the sensible, thoughtful, rational person I was, I took this way too far and to its extreme. And I also thought I knew it all, kind of like your friend who started a new diet a week ago and is now lecturing you about nutrition and health as though he has three PhD’s and a Nobel Prize in the subject. I preached the gospel of “All machines are bad.” They don’t teach you stability. You need your stabilizers to be strong. I’m pretty sure “stabilizers” could’ve been my middle name. I held on to this one for a long time. Then I realized that machines do something free weights have trouble doing: they can target a muscle really well. Feel free to say “Uh, yeah. Duh,” at your leisure. So how did I learn this breathtaking information? I wanted a bigger deadlift. My hamstrings were weak. Somebody recommended a lot of direct hamstring work, some with machines. At first, I stood aghast that one would even suggest something as blasphemous as using a machine. Then he played his trump card, “You want a bigger deadlift, right? Try it. If it doesn’t work, then you can always stop.” The poor soul that deigned to help me had a point. So, I tried it…and it worked perfectly. Since then, I use machines pretty regularly.

2. Insulin = you get fat. In the early 2010’s I was convinced high carbs raised insulin, and insulin is why you get fat, so therefore insulin is the demon hormone meant to be exorcised by low-carb diets. To be fair, a lot of the science at the time was saying this. Still, I really should have looked at the other side’s argument instead of bashing big business, accusing them of messing with the studies. I subscribed to this with all the fervor of a newly converted religious adherent until I started listening to a couple of bodybuilders, who were also nutrition scientists, talking about how the whole getting fat thing works. With the help of their explanations, a bunch of science experiments, and Wikipedia to learn all this new vocabulary, I came to the conclusion that insulin doesn’t make you fat. Eating too much does. I know, completely earth-shattering.

3. Stretching is a waste of time. I don’t know exactly how I ended up with this idea, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with the fact that a) I was always terrible at it and b) it was always that boring thing we’d do in gym class before the good stuff like dodgeball. So, I ended up lifting a ton and not stretching because stretching is boring, I suck at it, and “I don’t have time.” Well, after several years of this, touching my toes became challenging and my hips got so locked up that sitting cross-legged on the floor became something I had to really struggle to achieve. How did I change my mind? Part of it was sheer embarrassment. My Thai friends would all sit on the floor cross-legged to eat and I’d be all hunched and contorted because of how locked up my hips were. They were gracious enough to not say anything, but I didn’t need to be able to read their minds to know “Are you alright?” was going through them. Now I spend five to ten minutes before every workout stretching my hips. Five to ten minutes is far from ideal, but I move better and can sit on the floor and not looks like I’m in contorted agony. I can even touch my toes too.

4. You don’t have to track food. Just eat more (or less.) Oh, did I ever try that one. I was always the skinny kid. But somehow I “ate a lot.” Parents, friends, and acquaintances would point out how I could really put it away. There was just one problem: I only did that for one meal. The rest of the time I didn’t. As a result, I was just making up for what I missed earlier in the day. It took me a lot longer than I’d like to admit that to add size, you have to eat a lot, and not just at one meal. To make matters worse, if I eat a lot, I’ll fidget, pace around, talk more, and overall just become a ball of energy. I end up burning off everything I ate because I can’t sit still. There was only one real answer to this problem: track everything I eat and make sure I was well above what I needed for the day. To my surprise, and literally nobody else’s, it worked. However, because I’m a dope, I had the same problem when I tried to cut down. I tried doing it without tracking and, obviously, I made no progress. The opposite set of things was happening compared to when I was getting bigger. I thought I ate less than I did and I subconsciously moved around a lot less. The solutions were more or less the same, but in the opposite direction: track food and make sure I move enough (a step counter was gold for that.)

5. There are good and bad exercises. Once again, I thought I knew it all. “Bench pressing isn’t functional.” “Upright rows are bad for your shoulders.” “Isolation exercises are bad.” You get the idea; I was a jerk. Fortunately, as it tends to do, reality slapped me in the face. My squat was going nowhere and I was at a loss. I tried squatting more often, heavier, for more reps, etc. None of it worked. I was stuck. Finally, some generous, more experienced soul suggested, “Do some good mornings.” “But good mornings are sent from Hell to destroy our lower backs,” I said (well, maybe not that exactly.) His response? You guessed it. “Your way isn’t working. Try it out. If it doesn’t work, stop doing it.” Though I feared that if I did good mornings all five discs in my low back would explode at once, I tried it. Within a month, my squat went up again. And again. And again. Turns out if you do an exercise right, it’s probably not bad for you.

So there it is. The first half of the erroneous ideas and thoughts that occupied my head at one point or another. Don’t forget that just because you were wrong, it doesn’t mean you’re stupid. Sometimes we get caught up in feelings, get carried away with an idea, or just don’t have enough information. The important part is that you’re open to learning and growing. Keep doing that, and the bad ideas and wrong concepts will get kicked out of your head like the guy at the bar who’s had too many shots at happy hour. Check in next week for Part 2. We’ll have another good laugh then.