Exrx.net is little changed since the days of Yahoo GeoCities and dial-up and saying “www” aloud. Yet beneath its bare-bones interface is a deep physiological compendium.
In twelve years of lifting weights, I can’t say that I’ve ever attempted a sissy squat. Yet the name intrigues me, like a tickle in my brain. I know that it is an exercise of some kind, working out some lower portion of the body. I know, too, where I can go to be filled in on every detail of the sissy squat, should I wish to learn more. Not the nearest personal trainer nor her virtual equivalent—not YouTube, not Instagram. Lord only knows what TikTok would proffer. No. Instead, I fire up my browser, ignore my million other open tabs, and type the following: “exrx.net.”
What you’ll find if you do the same is a Web site that by all appearances has been forgotten by the wider Internet. Exrx.net, which bills itself as an online “exercise prescription,” launched in 1999, and indeed, were it not for the updated copyright notice at the bottom of its pages, new visitors would think they’ve happened upon a site of antiquity, abandoned in the rush toward a brave new Web 2.0. The home page is an anticlimax of a greeting, stale and still except for the bare-bones gif of a small, perpetually running blue figure that serves as the site’s logo. Below it is a most perfunctory choose-your-own-adventure: twenty-four squares denoting twenty-four destinations (“Weight Training,” “Injury Management,” “Nutrition”), displayed in a thick, nondescript font and accompanied by what look like stock images. The site’s hyperlinks glow in the brilliant default shade of blue; there are banner ads. All of it suggests an amateur HTML from the days of Yahoo GeoCities and dial-up and saying “www” aloud. It is my favorite fitness resource on the Internet.
Exrx.net’s seeming lack of >>> Read More
