The reason why the article is good to read and not just going to the site[1] it talks about is that it tells you why getting rid of JavaScript is sometimes just fine for your user base:
> ExRx makes its organizational logic plain. Its pages adopt the structure of unordered lists—uniform and sturdy...unlike elsewhere on the modern Internet, on ExRx you are never lost.
> the site’s plain face lends it a certain authority. In a fitness ecosystem dominated by new- and old-school flash, from personal trainers on the hard sell to influencers with soft power, exrx.net treats me like an adult. If Instagram Reels and TikTok videos are the solicitous pusher on commission, ExRx is a librarian—or, better yet, the library itself.
> - No popups asking you to subscribe, register, or download a mobile app
I’ve been wondering why ad blockers aren’t better about blocking these. I’m not sure when the last time was when I got a popup on a website that was something I wanted to see.
I know very little of the subject. But maybe since ads generally arrive from other domains, making them easy to differentiate from the site’s content, while these popup are part of the website and are much harder to distinguish reliably, making it harder to build such a tool (which I assume does exist).
Adblockers usually apply a combination of a network filter and a CSS filter to block the offending 3rd party script, and make the HTML element containing the ads invisible.
While network filters are still working well, it's getting harder to block on-site elements like popups because web frameworks often generate nonsensical class names to apply on divs, to prevent Developer A's class names and styles from conflicting with Developer B's. So if previously you could successfully hide the HTML email popup container by looking for the class/id "ad-container", you won't be able to do that if the class/id changes to "xxgsgshhmahbgsg"
I let my personalized Google feed on Android open links in Chrome and it is astounding how hostile some of these sites are getting in regards to their advertising.
I had no idea it had gotten this bad again without at least some ad blocking. Popups haven't returned to any meaningful degree but even so surely this isn't sustainable as I would imagine a sizable portion of web users are not using ad blocking.
Why did the Turks tolerate crappy construction in an earthquake zone? Large businesses are by definition hard to compete with.
As for why they do it, businesses are fundamentally amoral. Take your average Silicon Valley entrepreneur and transplant them into Somalia with no way to leave, and they'd be figuring out the ideal way to capture cargo ships and hold their crews for ransom. Then if said crews were raped by some misbehaving underlings, they'd try to disguise it to maximize the profits.
It's the meta joke behind the entire Silicon Valley TV series. Some characters are more likeable than others, but almost all of the key players are fundamentally incompetent/insecure/exploitative people that you wouldn't want in your life given the option.
It isn't just large businesses that are adding these dialogs to their sites though. Even some blogs or websites built by individuals have cookie consent and newsletter popups because that's what people are used to building. It's a cultural issue and it's maddening that people just put up with it when most have experienced a better web.
Those loading skeleton irritates me to no end. Sometimes they don't go away, and I'm left wondering what is going on. This is just so much better. Solid, dependable, nothing shifts around.
Yeh this was an ad riddled nightmare. I would call it more an example of how to subvert modern ad blockers than an example of great web design. The bullet point lists are literally broken up with targeted ads that look like relevant info to the page itself.
I am wondering who pays for it. Most of the free websites from that era disappeared because their business models went belly-up during the dotcom boom.
It’s time-expensive and not easily automated to write “rewrite” logic for sites. Think an order of magnitude more difficult than Reader Mode, because you need to incorporate the nav links and forms.
Premium features and gated content are not inherently bad. We all want to make money. Gaudy and intrusive pop-ups, banners, and things that try to pull me to that content is bad.
The difference between being pulled into it and seeking content myself is an important one. Services that annoy people into doing what they want may get short term results but are generating a lot of ill-will for the medium and long term.
This website even has reasonable advertisements in the side-bar. No floating videos that auto-play, no ads injected right in the middle of the content I'm reading. Just a plain old ad on the right side of the content.
When I was using this site a lot back in 2009, it really was ad-free. Even more minimal than what it is now. Each exercise page had a super-small dithered GIF image of a person doing the exercise. Those seem to be gone now.
That's funny, I see GDPR popups as serving two functions: a daily reminder that Europe has better privacy protections than I do, and website project managers would rather plague the world with unnecesary bullshit than just stop serving unnecessary cookies.
Yes, and considering removing the cookie popup will move metrics, is easily A/B testable, and improves the design it isn't hard to organize an internal effort to remove cookies that aren't actually essential so you can remove the popup.
Consider that not only do these pop ups still exist, but the “accept all” button is often prominently displayed or highlighted so it’s the easiest to click. And that looking for the “essential cookies only” button still results in a working website. Also consider that these guys are always A/B testing. A previous employer of mine had multiple features under test at any time.
You also don’t think that a whole bunch of developers never thought of just removing all the stuff that wasn’t essential?
>the “accept all” button is often prominently displayed or highlighted so it’s the easiest to click
Yes, they try and optimize for as many people to accept.
>A previous employer of mine had multiple features under test at any time.
This isn't an issue as long as participation is chosen such as being in one group doesn't make you more likely to be in a group of another experiment.
>You also don’t think that a whole bunch of developers never thought of just removing all the stuff that wasn’t essential?
I think you are missing the point of what the law considers essential and what the business considers essential is different. If the definitions matched I do believe that developers would be removing the banner.
>a daily reminder that Europe has better privacy protections than I do
So you're seeing the popups but not benefitting from them? What are the "better" protections that these popups are giving European users that you aren't getting by being served them as well (that isn't just better served by a good cookie / ad blocker)?
Please restrict your answer to the POPUPS specifically, as these are your daily reminder.
I'll respectfully decline your arbitrary limitations on my speech, primarily because to follow them would render me incoherent.
I said they serve as a reminder, and here you demand to know what protections the popups provide. They can remind me of things without delivering those things directly, which is why I used the phrasing I did. Hope this helps.
When I drill down to an exercise, there’s a 10 second GIF of someone doing the exercise. Not a 13 minute YouTube embed of someone first begging me to “like and subscribe” followed by a 6 minute sob story describing how this exercise helped dealing with the loss of his mom to a disease while in-line ads play.
I really enjoyed this comment about a month ago or so from "Why the conventional wisdom on how to grow muscles is wrong,"[1] so much so that I favorited it.
"I have lifted for 30 years.
The standard bullshit line in the fitness industry has always been "everyone else is wrong". Practically what every single trainer ever in the world has said.
The reason is because of all the things I have done in my life, lifting is the most trivially simple activity there is. It is as complex as shoveling dirt. The only way to differentiate if trying to make money is to bullshit. Pick the weights up, put them down, eat food. It just not that complicated."[2]
Lifting is complicated for the same reason that dating is complicated. Not everyone is starting from the same place. Not everyone will see the same results, in the same time. That is where the complexity arises. People will see others doing better, and try to find shortcuts, or magic panaceas.
Response depends on your proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers. The more you have the better you'll respond. It really is almost effortless for some. It's genetic. If you're predominantly slow twitch it's going to be a fight. You can make progress, but it will come far more slowly and your potential is limited.
You lift incorrectly, you get trauma, injuries, I've seen a guy in a gym lose an eye. I've seem people leaving weights where they shouldn't, others trip over them.
You choose your date poorly, you could get trauma and injury too I guess.
The reply you’re quoting could be written by me, though I’m a decade short. It gets complicated for people that compete (bodybuilders, powerlifters, weightlifters, strongmen, crossfitters… and insert the most of the sports), but that is around nationals level specialization. And it gets complicated because the actual problem space varies a lot from sport to sport. But to get there up to that point, one needs the consistency that the most of the people don’t have.
Edit: For an example a bodybuilder, an olympic weightlifter and a greco-roman wrestler all have muscle, but the problem space is very different even though they all share some common set of tools. But in any of these three you’ll get pretty far and see quite a lot of progress just keeping it simple. Optimization is needed only at the very top.
Lift or train about every other day, try to improve from the last time. Eat. If you feel extra tired, rest. If you dont seem to progress, change your regime a bit. Human body is built for adaptation, it’s the only thing we have. It is not complicated.
Yes most of fitness industry isbullshit. But simple =/= easy. Past , for 80% of the 20% rule, the easy simple methods are exhausted and progress generally requires increasingly complex methods when simple methods become too hard. Lifting / growing muscle especially - fatigue / diet management to optimize stress / recovery cycles especially if you're not full time athlete.
Was anyone else expecting bodybuilding.com? Not that I spend much time there, but I’ve always liked the forums. One of the few old 2000s style forums left complete with avatars, quote text, shared shibboleth. and a healthy skepticism of newcomers.
For me it was longecity that got me into nootopics . I got in the first group buy , it was nsi-189 since then I've been invited in underground groups that go far beyond that .
Also, back in the day there were some legacy bodybuilders giving free advice on those forums. I remember discussing with serge nubret around 2008ish, good old days :)
Not me, no. I decided to be formally educated in sports science precisely because the internet is awash with disinformation regarding fitness, bodybuilding.com included (and, honestly, HN). There are some posts there that get the science right, but there’s a lot of falsehoods too, or unindividualized, “over-engineered” advice.
On a more on-topic note: I’ve never consciously held ExRx in high regard, but considering how exhaustive and encyclopedic its curation of exercises is, perhaps I should have. One also couldn’t argue that it contains false content because it merely collects exercises instead of prescribing them (unless of course they’ve added some section where they do, which I don’t know of and cannot comment against).
>There are some posts there that get the science right
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be uncharitable, but 'exercise science' is not an empirical scientific field like physics or chemistry. It's very difficult to conduct genuine experiments or isolate causes in the human body. It's pretty well-known that lots 'exercise science' studies that prove X were conducted with relatively untrained undergrad volunteers, who would probably gain on any program because they're a) young and b) exercise newbies. Political science has 'science' right in the name too, but I think everyone understands it's not an actual empirical field either (which is fine!)
I'm certainly open to hearing contributions from exercise scientists, but I weight folk wisdom from say the bodybuilding or powerlifting fields at least as heavily
Look, questioning everything is OK but you need to have the initiative, too, to understand what it is that you’re questioning. And by the looks of it, you don’t seem to have read any reference book on sports science, otherwise you’d know that it uses the same anatomy/physiology foundations upon which the medical field stands, and that it is not the case that there are zero repeatable findings in the field of exercise physiology for you to invalidate the entire body of knowledge.
But the broader reason why this analogy doesn't work is that most medical treatments (medical devices, drugs, etc.) are subject to a really stringent approval & evidence of efficacy process. As they should be! But there just isn't anything similar in exercise science. Studies that prove, like, plyometric wall bounces make you more explosive or something are just incredibly underpowered versus the level of evidence required for the FDA to approve a medical device or drug.
If ES studies were somehow conducted with that same level of funding & rigor, I would take them a million times more seriously. In practice, it's an n=10 or 20 study with a bunch of undergrads for a p value of .0501 or something
What studies, exactly, prove that plyometric bounces make you more explosive “or something”? More explosive for the purposes of what? Do you even know the principle of specificity? Are you saying that what we call “knowledge” of anatomy and physiology and nutrition are actually invalid because they’re just derived from college students? Are you even aware that meta-analyses exist and that it takes that degree of veracity before studies make it to reference books, or are you really just complaining about pop fitness articles and discussions that you’ve read from bodybuilding.com? I have to ask, sorry, because your line of questioning is so devoid of rigor that you can only be coming from a position of arrogant ignorance, and it’s glaringly obvious.
I feel like every field where science is lagging behind has this problem. Is this not the case? It seems to me that we know very little about how the body works, processes food, etc. Saying "Sports science" feels very different to me than saying (for example) "rigid body physics". The latter can predict the behavior of objects very precisily, the former struggles a lot and can hardly use the scientific method to begin with.
Scientists and "put up or shut up" people optimize for diff things. People who get results, in my experience, do the right things but don't usually have correct explanations.
Part of it is the subconscious figuring out what works, and hanging it onto the closest known concept. The other half is that false beliefs are practical and helpful sometimes.
The results I want are long term health. That is much harder to measure and study. I can see which exercise methods results in competitive wins quickly (though some may be a few years), but what will my efforts today change about my life span or old age quality of life?
I got a dog recently, have been out on walks a lot and talking w other owners. Met a guy with an old dog a few weeks back, she was grey in the muzzle + stiff in the joints, but still moving around happy + unencumbered.
He said she was 20 years old, and his second 20+ y/o one. His said he went by:
- a balance of positive + negative reinforcement
- regular dog food, nothing fancy
and that
- if she was a seeing-eye dog she'd have been dead by 10
My takeaway is that mental stress is a killer. He was letting her have her "dog-nature". Roam around, sniff things, unburdened.
But the #1 has to be people. Everyone withers away alone + takes cues from our environment. The dream is having people around who make it feel natural to be healthy.
Sorry, what do you mean we know very little about how the body works and processes food? That sounds to me like fields like medicine or physical therapy or nutrition should be impossible, and yet they exist.
And correct me if I’m wrong but it doesn’t sound like you know the scope of sports science? It’s a combination of the fields that I made an example of above plus physics, too, and many more (such as business and psychology), but oriented specifically for the purposes of sport and recreation.
The article includes the link in the first paragraph and is worth reading if this type of thing [exercise/websites] interests you more than a no context link.
Ha, I fell victim to the same issue (not including my opinion) in my comment! The portion you quoted may as well have been directed at me.
I am indeed being very pedantic here but the parent to your initial comment as you quoted did not exclude the additional context noting the relevance of the link (as per my quote) but rather emphasized leaving out the opinion portion. The difference between "just posted" and the theoretical "posted just" you seem to be implying.
ExRx [0] has been a very valuable resource in my study of exercise science. I found it after developing an injury because of wrong training program given by a trainer in the gym. The site let me discover almost everything to learn about physical exercise better than all trainers in my gym. I’m thankful to everyone who has contributed.
If you don't mind me asking, how was that injury-recovery journey for you?
I'm in the same spot — injured myself because I foolishly trusted an incompetent trainer. It's been weirdly difficult to pick myself back up; I'm still stuck at the "blaming myself for trusting bad advice when I should have known better" phase.
Of course I don’t. That injury was an inflammation because of overuse. I take it seriously applying prescribed topical anti-inflammatory medicine, however inconvenient it might be to do so for up to six times a day. I, of course, updated my exercise selection not to hit the same muscle in consecutive days, but to give rest days. I reduced the weight hitting the affected muscle to almost nothing and progressed slowly from there.
Funnily enough, the error message [0] looks far more modern than the rest of the site. I guess they updated the backend (a PHP framework called Doctrine, I think) without updating the design ;)
The title of that page is "concrete has encountered an issue". Concrete is a PHP based CMS and Doctrine is a PHP ORM used in all kinds of modern (and less modern) web frameworks. The stack trace specifically shows concrete5-8.5.7, released November of 2021.
So it's outdated alright, but not quite as ancient as the article makes it feel. The HTML may feel hand crafted but that's often because PHP frameworks often rely on templating languages to set up a base theme for the website, which then gets filled in by content generated by a WYSIWYG editor, saved to the database.
It's quite possible that they've used their old website as a basis for their theme/templates, keeping all their old HTML in place.
I like that it helpfully disgorges the source code where the exception was thrown. Very old school. I hope there are no database credentials hard-coded in PHP.
Is this what they mean by submarine marketing? Because I've been a gym rat since the 80s and never heard of this site, and never heard anyone at the gym mention it, and never heard anyone in any other fitness group mention it. Other than that, sure.
This site is from the OG Web 1.0 era. Plenty of people know about it; in fact I would say that they've modernized it quite a bit from what I remember from back when I used it 2009.
Some content is only for premium subscribers. When you try to log in/subscribe the site throws php exception with error stack as if it is running on dev environment.
I was a part time fitness instructor from 2000-2012 and the ultimate gym rat. How did I not know about this site?
Now, for $reasons, I’m not as much of a gym rat. But I am training to at least run 5Ks again (as opposed to 10Ks and a couple of half marathons). I’m going to make myself get into resistance training again and this is going to be a great resource
Ha! I’m curious to know where you got your vocabulary of exercises without ExRx.net (of course the site also merely curates from other sources such as the books that came before and along it). I don’t remember the exact search keywords, but I’m pretty sure I found it while building my own program and looking for exercises for specific muscle groups.
I worked for an organization that contracted out fitness instructors to various gyms, apartments, churches, etc.
So I would go to their classes to pick up moves. There were also various certifications and conferences (SCW).
I got started in lifting weights ironically enough because I was a short (still short), fat (I got better), kid with a computer (still a software developer…sort of) and had cerebral palsy (still do).
While I didn’t have any coordination to play sports (my CP basically effects my left hand and a very slight limp), I could “lift things up and put them down” with the best of them and my “physical therapy” turned into weight lifting at 12 and I was paired with a personal trainer early on.
When properly conditioned as an adult, I found that I could run up to 9 miles (a 15K) in races and come in the middle of the pack (a little more than 6 miles an hour) before my legs gave out on me.
At my old age of 49, I wouldn’t put my body through the kind of training it takes to do anything above a 10K and probably no more than a 5K.
I also took advantage of remote work to buy a “Condotel” unit in a resort in Florida for half the year specifically because it had 3 pools (swimming is much easier on my body) and a gym.
The other half of the year, I “nomad” and fly around the US and stay in hotels instead of AirBnbs partially to have access to gyms and pools.
My wife took up the mantle a few years ago and now she teaches dance/fitness classes.
Similarly, the best source for nutrition information used to be whfoods.org. Unfortunately it's been down for a while now, and while there are some imperfect archives, you can't easily search through the site anymore.
The information is out of date, but I still occasionally use the pdfs i have from whfoods. You can find them on archive.org under TheWorldsHealthiestFoods.
It's a shame exrx.net doesn't rank higher on google searches. It just shows that SEO and search engine company priorities have moved away from what people are looking for when they use the internet.
It depends on your athletic goals. Exrx is geared towards athletes and coaches more than the normal folks who, as you said, would benefit from a simple, limited slate of fundamental movements.
One of the advantages of old-school websites like these is that they were desktop-first, so they actually made use of the width that a laptop screen offers. It's nice to see multiple columns of content, rather than the usual mess of ad sidebars and "readers also liked" blocks interrupting the content.
I used to use examine to find direct links to medical journal articles about the latest supplement research, but they've locked away all the details so I have to run dual monitor with examine as a lead generator and search for articles on real websites in the other window.
Regardless of the above usability issues, examine is a pretty good supplement research site.
Edited to add: I don't like examine's pricing. Examine is essentially the "consumer reports" of supplements and I'd expect to pay magazine subscription rates, not a month of gym membership annual rate. Its not that I can't afford it or it doesn't fit in the budget, it doesn't fit in the worldview of this is how much you pay for that kind of service. Even $50/yr and I'd sign up, but two hundred? Really?
