This article is men-focused and a bit misogynistic, but the advice doesn’t really differ for women. The below is 100% the case.

TRUTH 1: YOUR GYM IS YOUR ENEMY

You’ve seen it a hundred times – the same thing I saw upon walking into my first brand-name franchise gym: roughly 5 percent taken up by free weights; 5 percent by stretching areas; 50 percent by cardio machines; 50 percent by weight machines. Any reasonable person might conclude that cardio and weight machines are the best gear for getting fit. They’re not. Nobody thinks they are – not even the people who make them or the gym owners who buy them.

So glad I learned all this in the military, and have been safely ignoring standard fitness baloney since then. What’s in that article is how you actually get strong, resilient and more capable. Everything else is just wasting time.

I know, as with most “intellectuals” and with (for example) Ian Welsh, there is huge bias against weightlifting. And part of that is I think because it fucking works. And it’s hard. That combo makes most people hate a thing before any other factors even come into play.

Not everything in this article is correct. For instance, dumbbells are also a great way to train and hit your stability/secondary muscles even harder (for certain lifts) than barbell lifts ever do. And getting to 10 percent body fat isn’t all that difficult. But the piece gets most of it right and that’s better than 99% of fitness articles.