Muscle confusion

There are some extreme fitness workout regimes dealing in a notion calling itself muscle confusion. Your body adapts to a regular set of exercises so if you keep switching them you'll 'surprise' or 'shock' your muscles into a greater response. Taking your fitness to greater levels, as it adapts to this new stimulus, more than if you kept going with your same old routine.

It's the surprise that is said to 'confuse' your muscles. This came about due to a plateau effect occurring when dedicated gym goers stall in their progress towards their fitness goals.

The general idea should sound pretty familiar especially to fat people who've had a career of using dieting and fitness regimes to attempt to become slim dandy. You'll have noted that when it happens to you, to your body it is not happening  it is dismissed as examples of your laziness. You plateau because you are not doing it right or you're shirking lying and kidding yourself about what you're doing.

Only when it happens to the slim gym devotees, does it actually attain validity becoming observable and worthy of  response. That last bit should especially be emphasised worthy of response.

It's how progress happens, one thing leads to another this is a microcosm of how fat hating can induce a punishment of boredom and mental stagnancy on being being fat, overall. I'd be surprised if this effect was not being parlayed into 'fat people's smaller brains/stupid' trope.

Sometimes it is you that becomes 'confused', often you can get to the point where you don't actually feel sure yourself what you are and are not doing, not sure enough to stand your ground in any open discussion.

So you go on with your life and eventually somebody 'valid' enough can give voice to your experience. When this occurs, fat people are never referred to of course ever. Never "This is what so many (fat) people have been talking about/ referring to in the past" etc., Nor is there much doubt amongst the devotees that they're too lazy or incompetent to be able to describe the things that happen to them as if they are real and define human experience.

Such can be the strange spectating role of a fat person, removed from their own experience. Only having it confirmed for sure by others. When this effect builds to a certain point, you get that haunting lack of credibility effect that we mention so much, in varying guises.

Imagine if we'd been able to be as human as we were, how could we have innovated and added to the fitness genre? How could we have shaped a more generally inclusive fitness culture by merely responding directly to our needs and therefore others not fitting the gym bunny ideal?

How much better off would we have all been?