Originally Posted by
rdenney
Let me try again: I didn't provide you with enough description for you to determine whether I was or was not causing an overuse injury by doing squats every day. You think that is enough information, but only because of your mental image of squats in relation to your own fitness and knowledge.
I did, however, outline a long history of endurance sports and training activities.
I did not outline for you all the discussions I have had with professional trainers and doctors about a wide range of issues. You are assuming blindly that I have not had all those discussions many times. I have not engaged the topic of recovery with you at all, because that is not the point.
My thesis is that people who are describing their own fitness program or experience as the implied standard for who is qualified to hike in remote areas (with our without cairns) are really just bragging about their program or experience (or toughness). If people actually took those implied standards to heart, they would not achieve anything--you have to push through the periods when you don't meet standards in order to attain them, which means taking risks.
You keep reinforcing my point by extrapolating what works for you, or what you read in a book and applied to your own program, or that even you heard from your doctor, and making it TRVTH for everyone else. Recovery is for intense exercise taken to the limit. World-class runners, including those who run successfully into old age, run every day. They don't run fast every day, but their slow days may be fast to you or me. Yet they never stop running. What makes it work for them? Good genes, for one thing, and good biometrics for another. Guys who train in the gym at a high level, even into old age, don't take every other day off. When I worked out in gyms, the same guys were in there every day I was in there. They may work light on legs today and heavy tomorrow, but I think you'll find they take at most one day a week off. Do you think Lance Armstrong only rides every other day to allow his legs to recover? Do you think he avoids sprints on a given ride because it's an easy day? He may not focus on sprints or do hill repeats every day, but 13 days out of every fortnight he's on the bike. When he's fit, his poke-along recovery days would kill many of us. There are ways to do squats that are intense and require recovery, and there are ways to do them that are not and don't. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially when it becomes the prescription for everyone else.
To bring the point back to topic explicitly, just because many don't need cairns doesn't mean they aren't useful to some. And those who dismiss the arguments made by those who appreciate the cairns as reflecting inadequate experience should remember that the experience they have was never as good as it is now, and may not even now be as good as they think it is.
Rick "Edward Abbey was lucky to survive some his his mistakes" Denney
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