If You Can Add 5 Pounds To the Bar Every Workout Why Do Anything Else?

Wrong Question!

We often say that there are no such things as stupid questions. We say this to encourage people to ask questions and to encourage ourselves to ask questions. Of course, deep down, we often feel that there are at least some silly questions.

You Must Start With The Right Questions

Yet, at the same time, when thinking critically, we realize that the questions you begin with are of utmost importance. Ask the wrong questions about a problem, you come to the wrong conclusions, or find the wrong solution (well, I guess it wouldn't be a solution, but you know what I mean).

There are, therefore, wrong questions. But, as well, there are FALLACIOUS questions. If you are a person, like myself, who doesn't mind a good debate, you have been asked many fallacious questions, of a rhetorical sense.

Fallacious Questions

Often, these questions assume the truth of a thing that cannot be assumed to have been proved. I once gave the example of a Martial Arts "Master" selling a course that uses ancient Kung Fu secrets to "train you to jump onto the roofs of buildings." Now who wouldn't want to be able to leap onto a roof?

A sensible and skeptical man says, "I think a ladder is more likely to be successful."

And the Martial Arts master says, "Why would you use a ladder, when you can leap up in one bound?" He has therefore "proven" that his course is better than a plain old ladder.

These sorts of rhetorical and fallacious questions are asked about strength training all the time. For instance:

"If a beginner can add 5 pounds to bar every workout, why should he (do anything else)?"

Using Your Argument As Your Argument

That question uses the very argument it wishes to prove as an argument! By asking it, you haven't shown that this is the best way to progress or certainly that everyone can and should do it, you have simply assumed that. It's circular logic.

After that assumption and its acceptance you can easily reason away all other arguments. For instance, it implies that NOT adding 5 pounds to the bar every workout is always undesirable and always bad for a beginner.

So any argument that doesn't assume that a beginner should do this is shouted down as "bad". It's all ludicrous and it has no authority because it stifles discussion by a rhetorical means. And, it stifles questions.

So, we see that these kinds of questions are often designed to stifle the very thing we wanted to encourage by saying "There is no such thing as a stupid question."

There are, of course, other rhetorical methods that are just as stupid. One other method is the pairing of ideas so that one idea becomes synonymous with another idea that is not actually necessarily a parallel idea.

Fast and Efficient Training

For instance one that you see regarding the beginner training and just about everywhere else, including technology, is "fast and efficient".

Usually, when we use this kind of pairing it is to emphasize an idea in two different ways or express the same emotion or general idea. This is how we are used to hearing it.

For instance, when I say, "it’s nice and cool out today", I could say the same thing by just saying “it's cool out” or “it's nice out.” To say its nice AND cool, is just to provide rhetorical emphasis to the idea. Both nice and cool refer to the same thing and we are assuming that the person we are speaking to understand that ‘cool’ is ‘nice.’

With “fast and efficient” you turn that around on people by making them assume that fast means efficient and efficient means fast. But it doesn't. The fastest way to add weight to the bar is not always the most efficient way to progress.

The most efficient way to progress is not always the fastest way to add weight to the bar. As soon as I start seeing that these things are not synonymous, I stop having unreasonable expectations about my training.

But let's go back to fallacious questions. Headlines often trap us by using such questions:

"Have You Stopped Strength Training Like a Moron?"

It starts with the assumption that we trained like a moron, or are training like a moron, which would have to be observed and somehow qualified to be "true." But, it traps us in a situation where both possible answers are wrong!

If we say yes, we admit to training like a moron at some point, and if we say no, we admit to training like a moron at present. Since, we don't want to be a moron, we give the article more weight than it deserves, when, in fact, we should have stopped when such a fallacious question was asked by the author.

So, we see that fallacious questions are meant to befuddle us or cause us to trip up. There is a concealed question in the question, that must also be answered at the same time, and it may be that the answer to that question is presupposed, as in the training like a moron question.

The classic example of this type of question is "Are you still beating your wife?" or "When did you stop beating your wife?" as in a courtroom when a yes or no question is expected. If there is any sort of presupposition like this in a question, you are justified in questioning the presupposition, rather than answering the question.

This kind of question has been called the "fallacy of many questions" or "fallacy of complex question." We know it as a "loaded question."

What other kinds of fallacious questions have you encountered in the fitness, nutrition, or health realms?