Don't be stupid.

Just for the record: group fitness classes are for jobless middle-aged housewives with too much time on their hands and no ambitions, or metrosexuals who are more concerned about whether their workout clothes get wrinkled or their hair gel maintains maximum hold through a workout than getting and staying strong and functional. If you’re investing even half of your time at the gym in these classes, then you need to ask yourself what the hell you think you’re doing. I shouldn’t have to elaborate on these points, but I’m going to anyway because it brings me no end of pleasure to rip on those classes.

Just the other day, it was brought to my attention that the gym is offering a “strength training” class. I’ve never considered myself a violent person, but right then I felt like I could shoot white-hot light from my eyes, disintegrating everyone and everything in the vicinity because, well, false advertising of this nature is, to my mind, about as bad as waiting, poised with club in hand, for the last surviving female gorilla to give birth then clubbing the newborn to death (both involve high repetitions and little resistance, unless you end up having to fight the mother gorilla off, in which case I would have to bow down to you, after all). Both are abominations in God’s eyes, I assure you.

Look, you don’t design a class around low weight and high repetitions using classic strength training exercises and get to call it “strength training” just because it sort of resembles something you saw on ESPN2’s latest strongman broadcast. Strength is trained when you perform movements with a weight heavy enough that you can only do 1-5 repetitions, END OF STORY; anything more and you’re only stimulating relatively transient gains in muscle size and endurance. This is not even a subtle point that I’m addressing, here. While it’s true that strength, hypertrophy and endurance all fall on a sliding scale, once you travel far enough away from the strength end of the spectrum, your strength gains are going to be minimal to nonexistent.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never said that these classes aren’t challenging: 100 unweighted squats, performed at whatever half-assed depth you choose, does cause immense pain and discomfort after a while, but the argument I’ve been making all along is that you’ve only got so much time and energy on your hands each week, so you might as well spend it in the most beneficial way possible; and since I’m not aware of any big prizes being handed out for the most unweighted squats performed in a row, let’s just stop this silly bullshit right now, okay?

My detractors will say that lifting heavy weights is dangerous. Perhaps under certain circumstances, like those found in competitive circles, where practitioners perform “limit” lifts on a regular basis, it is. You and I aren’t concerned with winning prizes, just getting reasonably strong. Driving a car is more dangerous, I’d wager. Having said that, I can’t guarantee that you won’t ever experience an “injury,” but granted that you lift weights with correct form, applying appropriate increases in weight as tolerated, you should only experience minor tweaks and strains and sore muscles every now and then, some of which might very well linger an aggravating while, but never anything of a catastrophic nature such as what one risks when lifting competitively (i.e. disc ruptures, broken bones, torn muscle bellies and tendons).

Stop wasting time. Given time and leisure enough to rationalize, you could come up with hundreds of reasons why not to lift heavy, but they all issue from the same insecure mental space where fear and doubt, those twin ogres, live.

Come to think of it, while I’m at it, why don’t I address some other common excuses:

I just want to lose weight, isn’t cardio all that I need? Okay, you’re first mistake is wanting only to lose weight. Ladies, and some of you gentlemen out there, the opposite sex doesn’t like it when you transform yourselves into walking, talking skeletons whose skin sags like taffy. Anyone past the age of adolescence actually enjoys someone with a little meat on his or her bones. So you’ll probably want to spend some time strength training since performing heavy sets of 5 on whole body movements like the squat has exhibited a muscle-sparing effect under conditions of weight loss. But that’s not all: building and/or maintaining lean muscle mass means increased energy expenditure because more muscle burns more calories at rest. Oh, and let’s not forget how important strength becomes as one gets older. Your late-life independence rests not just on your stamina but on your ability to manipulate your environment, and there’s no better way to prepare for that than to become STRONGER. Strength is the one adaptation that makes all other values possible: being stronger means that you don’t have to work as hard to accomplish the same tasks, which means that your stamina rises because you don’t become as tired as quickly as you once might; AND you become faster because your ability to overcome inertia has increased in proportion to your strength as well. Overall, being stronger makes you sharper.

But I’m afraid I’ll develop unsightly man-muscles! Wrong. Ladies, you don’t have the same hormonal profile as men, so while you will get stronger if you train heavy, your muscles will not have the same appearance as a man’s, which is not to say they won’t look more sculpted--they will. Chances are, if you see a woman with muscles the size of a man’s, she has gotten a boost from an illegal source, or else she was just born with elevated testosterone levels, which isn’t very often the case. I know some very strong women who nevertheless are very petite--my wife is one of them.

Wait, my trainer says I don’t need to worry about training heavy. He or she says as long as I keep moving, I’m doing fine. You’re trainer is either lazy or misinformed. It is very likely that he is both. A trainer who believes that low weight, high repetition exercises are as good or superior to their high weight, low rep cousins isn’t aware of the incontrovertible science behind the body’s varying adaptations to differing kinds of stress. If you’ve not been doing heavy full-depth squats or deadlifts with your trainer, then you’re trainer is too lazy to teach you any differently and you should seek out another trainer immediately. Now, it could also be the case that your trainer is under time constraints, and suffers constraints on resources, etc., which could preclude his training you in a superior manner, but that trainer also has a moral obligation to seek out a better training environment for you. And YOU have an obligation to see out a good trainer who can train you under these optimal training conditions. You deserve nothing less.