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Spotting Bad Fitness Articles: Dinosaurs Go Extinct

17 Feb 2010 01:10

As you peruse the internet you will come across fitness and strength writers who have written a great many articles or at least whose opinions are freely available in some form. Chances are you'll find someone who was writing articles in the year 2000 and is still writing them today, in 2010. Pay attention to the dates. Pay attention to the evolution. Ten years is a long time. Heck even five years is a long time and for me one year is long enough to turn my thinking on a subject one hundred sixty degrees.

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Bodyweight Exercises: The Wide Eyed Effect

13 Feb 2010 18:51

The bodyweight boom is on. To hear people talk you'd think that calisthenics and body weight exercises in general had just been invented last year and were the best thing since the camp fire.

Gymnastics skills have been joined to the traditional and well known exercises to create a very popular market. A perfect example is the handstand pushup. A google search will reveal countless articles and also a great many very expensive products supposed to teach you to achieve one.

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Spotting Bad Fitness Articles: Assumptions are Critical

29 Jan 2010 21:59

Assumptions are a perfect subject for this third post in the series. The first two I think held no real surprises. For this one, I wanted to write about something that would challenge your assumptions so I decided to write about assumptions themselves.

A good fitness article must make assumptions. There, I'll bet that threw at least some of you. I mean, aren't the best fitness writers omniscient?

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Controlling Anxiety During Lifting

28 Jan 2010 16:30

Much of the Getting in the Zone series of articles are focused on areas of sport psychology. Having psychologists help athletes perform better is a relatively new thing. While I have drawn from that, as I read some of the articles on this subject (controlling anxiety, etc) from sport psychologists, I wonder if many of them really "get it". Sure they understand the statistics and have a background in the psychology affecting performance, but have they ever been there? Do they know what it feels like? I read with interest an article in the "Mind Games" section of the NSCA's performance training journal by Suzie Tuffey Riewald entitled "Help, I'm Nervous". It's related, of course to my Getting in the Zone series of articles.

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Spotting Bad Fitness Articles: Unusual Words, Jargon, and Journalese

24 Jan 2010 22:37

Bad fitness articles are a nickel a dozen. True, this is only my second post on how to spot bad articles but I have enough ideas to keep this going for a long time. You may be wondering where this guy gets off talking about bad writing. Well I am not talking about bad writing per se.

Although there is much overlap between these things and bad writing in general, the spots aim to uncover bad articles, not bad writing. My writing may not always be up to even my standards for instance but while I have written articles that I would consider poorly written not very often have I written something which I consider to be bad content.

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