Skilzat85X
Oct-15-07, 11:42 AM
For English we had to choose a persuasive essay based on an article we read in a magazine. I don't care that much about schooling, so I decided to take the cheap easy way out and write about an article in a women's fitness magazine which is obviously full of bs. Anyways, have a read if you want:
Oh by the way, I already knew all this information off the top of my head, but I still quickly googled a bunch of related articles just to bs it so I could have some sources and thus get a good grade lol.
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Aaron Leonard
English 101
Prof. Monica Riley
October 15, 2007
Modern Day Mythologies – A Bunch of Booty
When one desires to read mythological literature, they may be inclined to look over such famous pieces as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. But for a very colorful and visual alternative, one can quickly browse over some of today’s most mythological texts available: women’s fitness magazines. I can safely assure the reader of the validity of my claims, given a little more insight to be provided in this paper.
I picked up one of my mom’s copies of Prevention magazine, and was quickly and mercilessly bombarded with “get-fit-quick” schemes plastering the front cover. I opened towards the table of contents in search of an article with which I could easily make my point: the point that these magazines are filled with gimmicks and incomplete facts, in order to keep sales flying high. But, this was not that easy of a task, for as I perused for the appropriate article, I was under constant attack from promises of “toning and sculpting” your body, “revving your metabolism”, and magically “looking younger” after becoming old. Perhaps I would be able to make my argument, given my head didn’t explode first.
And just when I thought I couldn’t make it, I finally arrived at my desired article on page 120, “Sculpt a Beautiful Backside.” The subtext offers to “boost your butt in just 4 moves that can tailor to your fitness level.” Well, I should immediately disqualify them for using such words as “sculpt” and “boost”, but that wouldn’t be helping anyone. So, I continued looking through this article. The first sentence, that was not part of a picture caption, asked the reader if they thought gravity had affected their butt since they became 40, causing it to droop down obviously. My first thought was, “What in the world would a woman older than 40 be doing trying to have an attractive butt?” It seems some people just don’t know when to give up, for apparently having an attractive backside when you’re over 40 will make the difference between whether you’re healthy, young, beautiful, and going to live forever with than man of your dreams, or whether you better be ready to die alone at the age of 50.
Getting back to the point, the article then goes on to state that these 4 “targeted toners” will fight against “age related drop”, using every bit of, dare I say it, “sculpting power” in each movement, and that in just one month, they’ll have a “sleek, shapely silhouette at any age.” Well, thank you Prevention magazine, now every time I see an attractive woman in the moonlight, I’ll have to worry if she’s really 50 years old.
The article then suggests for a woman to make use of 3 to 5 pound dumbbells for these exercises. But heck, why use those dumbbells when you can do the same amount of work lifting air? It says to do each workout 3 times a week, with 2 sets of 10 repetitions for each workout. And finally, it says “for quicker results”, do 3 sets (oh man, what a huge improvement!) and then add 30 minutes of, good lord, “butt-targeting” cardio. Yes, butt-targeting cardio ladies and gentlemen. Apparently, someone’s going to try to bust a cap, specifically aiming at your behind while you’re on the treadmill.
Finally, the rest of the article consists of pictures, descriptions, and instructions for the 4 exercises to help us sculpt our butts. Oh would you look at that, they even give us instructions for making each exercise easier and harder, how nice of them. And now, after putting my face in my palm many times from dismay, I have completed reading this article. Sure, I couldn’t help but cringe after every sentence, but at least I made it.
The exercises presented in this article most likely do target the muscles of the butt, such as the gluteus maximus, everyone’s favorite. However, it’s very safe to say that doing this routine will help you “sculpt a beautiful backside.” In fact, it’s safe to say it most likely won’t do something your butt is very good at: crap.
The first problem with this article, at least for the women over 40 it targets, is that your butt isn’t going to start falling because your muscles aren’t strong enough to hold your derriere up. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? They’d be holding up all the flesh on your butt for your entire life, so they would only get stronger, especially as you gain more weight. And we all know that nobody would be reading this magazine if they didn’t feel they had gained weight. What this article speaks nothing of is the fact that one’s skin will be stretching and getting weaker. Thus, the mass of one’s rear is allowed to fall, since the skin is not as strong as it used to be, thus it could not hold up ones assets as well as it used to.
Well, there you are, proof that this article is full of it. Wait, what is this you say? You aren’t a woman over 40; you just want to sculpt your backside? You want to do it in a month like the article promises? Well then, it’s time to pull out the big guns.
I will first start off plainly by saying that spot reduction is a huge, gargantuan myth. By working out one part of the body, you will not, at all, ever, be able to target fat loss specifically to that region of your body. Exercising your butt muscles, even if done with the most effective, perfect exercises ever in the history of the universe, will not decrease the fat around those areas. It doesn’t matter how much “burn” you feel. And I don’t care how many times you’ve read that it’s actually possible in magazines, because those are all out to tickle people’s ears, and give people what they want to hear. And I don’t care if you’ve even heard a personal trainer, or someone with a gimmicky DVD say that it’s possible either. It’s obvious those aren’t true personal trainers, they’re just salesmen. If you want to lose fat in one area, get a liposuction. Other than that, you’re going to have to do things the hard way, or what we like to call, the right way.
In relation to this, this article also speaks absolutely nothing of nutrition and calories, which both have a direct impact on muscle gain and fat loss. I must mention this to back up my spot reduction claims. If one has consumed more calories (in food, of course) than their body needs to sustain itself, then they will gain weight. If they have consumed fewer calories than their body needs, they will lose weight. Those are scientific facts. The weight gain or lost will either be in muscle and fat, the amount of gain or loss in each depending on how active or inactive a person and their respect body parts are.
The fat stored on your body is all just calories that never got used. So, when one person has a calorie deficit, the body then has to take energy from somewhere. Thus, it has the body’s stores of fat it can use to sustain its caloric needs. And for some, this may be a heaping load of goodness that the body can use, hurray! By the way, one pound of fat is 3,500 calories (kilocalories, if you want to get technical), so fat loss takes a lot of work and a lot of time. Now, when the body takes its energy from fat, do you think it cares where it takes it from? Is it going to say, “Oh look, we just did a bunch of blasphemous butt blasting workouts, I think I’ll take fat away from that are.” No, it does not work that way. One’s fat and muscles are in no way inter-related, in terms of using a muscle having any effect on the fat surrounding it. To that end, if your butt is sagging full of fat, these exercises are not going to do a darn thing for you in terms of losing fat from that region. And there is yet another point discrediting this article.
But, wait just a second, this article offers to build up our butt muscles too! We’re going to sculpt ourselves, right? Not possible. By doing these exercises, you’re not going to get shapely butt muscles and lower your fat. This is the “toning” myth, a myth which basically states that you can build muscle and burn fat at the same time, usually with the same workout. This is impossible. As said before, you lose weight when you have fewer calories than you need, and gain weight when you have more than you need. So you can only do one or the other over a period of time, and this is excusing the fact that we already proved that you cannot lose fat from just one area. Depending on your dieting habits, you’re either going to lose weight, which means you may lose fat in that area, since you’re going to learn it evenly from all over your body. Either that, or you’re going to be gaining more weight, and you just might be gaining muscle in that area. Either way it happens, you are not going to be toning that area.
These exercises will most likely not even result in any increase in muscle size. Why? Ok, they have you handling 3 to 5 pound dumbbells. I will tell you this now; 3 to 5 pound dumbbells for anything will be close to completely useless. You might as well just put on another shirt, because it will have about the same effect as those miniscule dumbbells.
For muscular hypertrophy, which basically means a growth in the size of the muscle, my sources from acefitness.org and buffdirectory.com recommend 70-85% of the weight of one’s one rep maximum, or basically how much they’re able to lift for whatever exercise. Now if 5 pounds is what this article recommends for weight, that would make the one rep maximum about 7-8 pounds. Now if any non-crippled human being, of any gender, cannot lift any more than 7-8 pounds, they must have severe flesh eating disorder eating away at their muscles as we speak.
From a chart on ExRx.net, a completely untrained woman weighing around 124 pounds should still at least be able to deadlift 70 pounds. I used deadlifting for an example because it is a very good exercise which focuses greatly on the gluteus maximus muscles. So there we see, there is absolutely no excuse for the pathetic amount of single-digit weight which is commonly recommended by these types of magazines. Lifting the weight should be strenuous, because let’s face it, if building muscle was as easy as lifting something that weighs as much as a book, America would be filled with strong, buff, fit people. But instead it’s filled with the greater majority of unfit, sedentary people, no offense to anyone of course.
The article recommends 10 reps for each set for each exercise. Well, even if we were using reasonable amount of weight for it, the recommended amount of repetitions for muscle size gain is 6 to 8 repetitions. My sources at hypertrophy-specifc.com and ericcressey.com confirm this. These exercises will most likely not provide for any increase in muscle mass.
And finally, this article states that you can get your perfect, peachy butt in one month, as well as slim your thighs. Well, don’t ask me where “slim your thighs” came from, though I can probably picture the scenario as they were editing this magazine: “Gee, Prevention Employee #2, how else can we make people reading this magazine believe that this crap we’re writing will actually do anything useful?” “I don’t know Prevention Employee #1. Wait a second, let’s throw in the obligatory ‘it will slim your thighs’, since apparently all women want that result, too.” “Good thinking Prevention Employee #2! Even though it is completely unrelated to any of these exercises, as long as we tell them it these workouts will give them something they want, we’re bound to get very high sales and increase the amount of people we have doing stupid looking exercises all over the nation. And what’s more, we’ll have them pretend they can get it all done in one month. Ha ha ha!” And the laughter of the two employees fades into the night…
At any rate, whether it’s building muscle or losing fat, it is always going to take much more time than one month. My source at acefitness.org said it took four to six weeks to notice any result at all in one study. And that’s with people actually following a proper structured workout plan, along with a proper diet. This article, or magazine, gives no guidelines as to either of those. In fact, this magazine is centered on losing weight and controlling calories, so there’s almost no way that any of woman reading this magazine and actually, God forbid, taking any of it seriously, will be eating enough calories to expedite muscle growth.
So there you have it, much undeniable proof that you should prevent yourself from following the workout plans in Prevention magazine, much less any other women’s fitness magazine. Actually, many men’s fitness magazines are just as bad; it’s just that the fitness industry tries to target women more so they can stay young, slim, sexy, and able to get that young guy down the street for the rest of their life, even if they’re already old and married.
My suggestion to you if you want to “sculpt a beautiful” backside is simple. First, do lots of cardio and maybe weight training (for metabolic increase reason only, don’t expect to get any bigger muscles while you’re losing weight), along with eating fewer calories. This will help you lose weight in fat over the course of a few months. After that, hit the weights and do lots of stuff like deadlifts, with 6-8 repetitions per set, done regularly. And eat a lot. There you are: a sculpted backside in one paragraph. And you didn’t have to buy a magazine, subscribe to a magazine, or sit through an article using a bunch of gimmicky and deceiving terms. Hopefully next time you look at those “toning” and “sculpting,” exercises in commercial fitness magazines, you’ll think twice before being tempted to try any of them. For further reading on proper fitness techniques, please visit some of the websites provided in my bibliography.
Oh by the way, I already knew all this information off the top of my head, but I still quickly googled a bunch of related articles just to bs it so I could have some sources and thus get a good grade lol.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron Leonard
English 101
Prof. Monica Riley
October 15, 2007
Modern Day Mythologies – A Bunch of Booty
When one desires to read mythological literature, they may be inclined to look over such famous pieces as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. But for a very colorful and visual alternative, one can quickly browse over some of today’s most mythological texts available: women’s fitness magazines. I can safely assure the reader of the validity of my claims, given a little more insight to be provided in this paper.
I picked up one of my mom’s copies of Prevention magazine, and was quickly and mercilessly bombarded with “get-fit-quick” schemes plastering the front cover. I opened towards the table of contents in search of an article with which I could easily make my point: the point that these magazines are filled with gimmicks and incomplete facts, in order to keep sales flying high. But, this was not that easy of a task, for as I perused for the appropriate article, I was under constant attack from promises of “toning and sculpting” your body, “revving your metabolism”, and magically “looking younger” after becoming old. Perhaps I would be able to make my argument, given my head didn’t explode first.
And just when I thought I couldn’t make it, I finally arrived at my desired article on page 120, “Sculpt a Beautiful Backside.” The subtext offers to “boost your butt in just 4 moves that can tailor to your fitness level.” Well, I should immediately disqualify them for using such words as “sculpt” and “boost”, but that wouldn’t be helping anyone. So, I continued looking through this article. The first sentence, that was not part of a picture caption, asked the reader if they thought gravity had affected their butt since they became 40, causing it to droop down obviously. My first thought was, “What in the world would a woman older than 40 be doing trying to have an attractive butt?” It seems some people just don’t know when to give up, for apparently having an attractive backside when you’re over 40 will make the difference between whether you’re healthy, young, beautiful, and going to live forever with than man of your dreams, or whether you better be ready to die alone at the age of 50.
Getting back to the point, the article then goes on to state that these 4 “targeted toners” will fight against “age related drop”, using every bit of, dare I say it, “sculpting power” in each movement, and that in just one month, they’ll have a “sleek, shapely silhouette at any age.” Well, thank you Prevention magazine, now every time I see an attractive woman in the moonlight, I’ll have to worry if she’s really 50 years old.
The article then suggests for a woman to make use of 3 to 5 pound dumbbells for these exercises. But heck, why use those dumbbells when you can do the same amount of work lifting air? It says to do each workout 3 times a week, with 2 sets of 10 repetitions for each workout. And finally, it says “for quicker results”, do 3 sets (oh man, what a huge improvement!) and then add 30 minutes of, good lord, “butt-targeting” cardio. Yes, butt-targeting cardio ladies and gentlemen. Apparently, someone’s going to try to bust a cap, specifically aiming at your behind while you’re on the treadmill.
Finally, the rest of the article consists of pictures, descriptions, and instructions for the 4 exercises to help us sculpt our butts. Oh would you look at that, they even give us instructions for making each exercise easier and harder, how nice of them. And now, after putting my face in my palm many times from dismay, I have completed reading this article. Sure, I couldn’t help but cringe after every sentence, but at least I made it.
The exercises presented in this article most likely do target the muscles of the butt, such as the gluteus maximus, everyone’s favorite. However, it’s very safe to say that doing this routine will help you “sculpt a beautiful backside.” In fact, it’s safe to say it most likely won’t do something your butt is very good at: crap.
The first problem with this article, at least for the women over 40 it targets, is that your butt isn’t going to start falling because your muscles aren’t strong enough to hold your derriere up. I mean, why wouldn’t they be? They’d be holding up all the flesh on your butt for your entire life, so they would only get stronger, especially as you gain more weight. And we all know that nobody would be reading this magazine if they didn’t feel they had gained weight. What this article speaks nothing of is the fact that one’s skin will be stretching and getting weaker. Thus, the mass of one’s rear is allowed to fall, since the skin is not as strong as it used to be, thus it could not hold up ones assets as well as it used to.
Well, there you are, proof that this article is full of it. Wait, what is this you say? You aren’t a woman over 40; you just want to sculpt your backside? You want to do it in a month like the article promises? Well then, it’s time to pull out the big guns.
I will first start off plainly by saying that spot reduction is a huge, gargantuan myth. By working out one part of the body, you will not, at all, ever, be able to target fat loss specifically to that region of your body. Exercising your butt muscles, even if done with the most effective, perfect exercises ever in the history of the universe, will not decrease the fat around those areas. It doesn’t matter how much “burn” you feel. And I don’t care how many times you’ve read that it’s actually possible in magazines, because those are all out to tickle people’s ears, and give people what they want to hear. And I don’t care if you’ve even heard a personal trainer, or someone with a gimmicky DVD say that it’s possible either. It’s obvious those aren’t true personal trainers, they’re just salesmen. If you want to lose fat in one area, get a liposuction. Other than that, you’re going to have to do things the hard way, or what we like to call, the right way.
In relation to this, this article also speaks absolutely nothing of nutrition and calories, which both have a direct impact on muscle gain and fat loss. I must mention this to back up my spot reduction claims. If one has consumed more calories (in food, of course) than their body needs to sustain itself, then they will gain weight. If they have consumed fewer calories than their body needs, they will lose weight. Those are scientific facts. The weight gain or lost will either be in muscle and fat, the amount of gain or loss in each depending on how active or inactive a person and their respect body parts are.
The fat stored on your body is all just calories that never got used. So, when one person has a calorie deficit, the body then has to take energy from somewhere. Thus, it has the body’s stores of fat it can use to sustain its caloric needs. And for some, this may be a heaping load of goodness that the body can use, hurray! By the way, one pound of fat is 3,500 calories (kilocalories, if you want to get technical), so fat loss takes a lot of work and a lot of time. Now, when the body takes its energy from fat, do you think it cares where it takes it from? Is it going to say, “Oh look, we just did a bunch of blasphemous butt blasting workouts, I think I’ll take fat away from that are.” No, it does not work that way. One’s fat and muscles are in no way inter-related, in terms of using a muscle having any effect on the fat surrounding it. To that end, if your butt is sagging full of fat, these exercises are not going to do a darn thing for you in terms of losing fat from that region. And there is yet another point discrediting this article.
But, wait just a second, this article offers to build up our butt muscles too! We’re going to sculpt ourselves, right? Not possible. By doing these exercises, you’re not going to get shapely butt muscles and lower your fat. This is the “toning” myth, a myth which basically states that you can build muscle and burn fat at the same time, usually with the same workout. This is impossible. As said before, you lose weight when you have fewer calories than you need, and gain weight when you have more than you need. So you can only do one or the other over a period of time, and this is excusing the fact that we already proved that you cannot lose fat from just one area. Depending on your dieting habits, you’re either going to lose weight, which means you may lose fat in that area, since you’re going to learn it evenly from all over your body. Either that, or you’re going to be gaining more weight, and you just might be gaining muscle in that area. Either way it happens, you are not going to be toning that area.
These exercises will most likely not even result in any increase in muscle size. Why? Ok, they have you handling 3 to 5 pound dumbbells. I will tell you this now; 3 to 5 pound dumbbells for anything will be close to completely useless. You might as well just put on another shirt, because it will have about the same effect as those miniscule dumbbells.
For muscular hypertrophy, which basically means a growth in the size of the muscle, my sources from acefitness.org and buffdirectory.com recommend 70-85% of the weight of one’s one rep maximum, or basically how much they’re able to lift for whatever exercise. Now if 5 pounds is what this article recommends for weight, that would make the one rep maximum about 7-8 pounds. Now if any non-crippled human being, of any gender, cannot lift any more than 7-8 pounds, they must have severe flesh eating disorder eating away at their muscles as we speak.
From a chart on ExRx.net, a completely untrained woman weighing around 124 pounds should still at least be able to deadlift 70 pounds. I used deadlifting for an example because it is a very good exercise which focuses greatly on the gluteus maximus muscles. So there we see, there is absolutely no excuse for the pathetic amount of single-digit weight which is commonly recommended by these types of magazines. Lifting the weight should be strenuous, because let’s face it, if building muscle was as easy as lifting something that weighs as much as a book, America would be filled with strong, buff, fit people. But instead it’s filled with the greater majority of unfit, sedentary people, no offense to anyone of course.
The article recommends 10 reps for each set for each exercise. Well, even if we were using reasonable amount of weight for it, the recommended amount of repetitions for muscle size gain is 6 to 8 repetitions. My sources at hypertrophy-specifc.com and ericcressey.com confirm this. These exercises will most likely not provide for any increase in muscle mass.
And finally, this article states that you can get your perfect, peachy butt in one month, as well as slim your thighs. Well, don’t ask me where “slim your thighs” came from, though I can probably picture the scenario as they were editing this magazine: “Gee, Prevention Employee #2, how else can we make people reading this magazine believe that this crap we’re writing will actually do anything useful?” “I don’t know Prevention Employee #1. Wait a second, let’s throw in the obligatory ‘it will slim your thighs’, since apparently all women want that result, too.” “Good thinking Prevention Employee #2! Even though it is completely unrelated to any of these exercises, as long as we tell them it these workouts will give them something they want, we’re bound to get very high sales and increase the amount of people we have doing stupid looking exercises all over the nation. And what’s more, we’ll have them pretend they can get it all done in one month. Ha ha ha!” And the laughter of the two employees fades into the night…
At any rate, whether it’s building muscle or losing fat, it is always going to take much more time than one month. My source at acefitness.org said it took four to six weeks to notice any result at all in one study. And that’s with people actually following a proper structured workout plan, along with a proper diet. This article, or magazine, gives no guidelines as to either of those. In fact, this magazine is centered on losing weight and controlling calories, so there’s almost no way that any of woman reading this magazine and actually, God forbid, taking any of it seriously, will be eating enough calories to expedite muscle growth.
So there you have it, much undeniable proof that you should prevent yourself from following the workout plans in Prevention magazine, much less any other women’s fitness magazine. Actually, many men’s fitness magazines are just as bad; it’s just that the fitness industry tries to target women more so they can stay young, slim, sexy, and able to get that young guy down the street for the rest of their life, even if they’re already old and married.
My suggestion to you if you want to “sculpt a beautiful” backside is simple. First, do lots of cardio and maybe weight training (for metabolic increase reason only, don’t expect to get any bigger muscles while you’re losing weight), along with eating fewer calories. This will help you lose weight in fat over the course of a few months. After that, hit the weights and do lots of stuff like deadlifts, with 6-8 repetitions per set, done regularly. And eat a lot. There you are: a sculpted backside in one paragraph. And you didn’t have to buy a magazine, subscribe to a magazine, or sit through an article using a bunch of gimmicky and deceiving terms. Hopefully next time you look at those “toning” and “sculpting,” exercises in commercial fitness magazines, you’ll think twice before being tempted to try any of them. For further reading on proper fitness techniques, please visit some of the websites provided in my bibliography.