Great advice! Whatever the regime insists you do, doing the opposite should be your default. They want you weak? Make yourself strong. I'm doing a little but need to do much more, much more consistently! Thanks for the motivation!
I started weightlifting just before the New Year. We've got a home gym in the basement and I've spent most of our time living at this location feeling like a piece of shit for *not* using it--"Look at it, you fat asshole. It's just sitting there, promising to make you better, and every single day you make the decision to decline that offer. Stupid idiot."
I don't know what exactly finally changed and helped me move past the point of being afraid of the work, afraid of the commitment--something along the lines of a dawning comprehension that I'm not a kid anymore, that I'm about to enter one of the last decades of life where you can really meaningfully change the *kind* of person you are. So what do I want to be? A soft whinging ball of dough in a state of constant disappointment with herself? Or someone who says, "I want to do it--therefore it's going to be done" ?
Up front, I'm sure I'll never be truly cut. My very endocrine system might not allow for it, even if I didn't have about seven other ongoing projects that prevent lifting from being my highest-priority pastime. My workouts are also short and relatively easy--my priority, here at the beginning, is to build the habit of working out at all, and that's a lot easier with a 10-minute commitment instead of a 40-minute one. But every day that I go downstairs to do my girly horizontal bench press and rowers, I remember that I'm already pulling more than twice the reps I could manage in late December. When I feel the burn the morning after squats, I comprehend that the discomfort makes me strut. Shit, I feel good--I'm just proud of myself. It's healthy, it's natural, to gain fulfillment from overcoming a physical obstacle.
When the day comes, I might not be able to wrestle a stag into submission on a hunt; but I hope to be in good enough shape to help get it back to the village after.
Momentum. This is key. An object in motion will tend to remain in motion. Once the habit is established, it takes very little willpower to continue ... you only need it to get over those little bumps.
And remember, you don't need to be in better shape than a professional athlete. You just need to be in better shape than you were yesterday. Keep that up and you're ahead of 99% of the normies.
Go keto-paleo and you'll reset your endocrine system. It's 80% epigenetics, ie diet. Add heavy weights snd cold showers and you will reset the entire thing.
The online right’s bodybuilder aesthetic has been so successful because you cannot effectively argue against it.
Saying “post physique” has unironically become the perfect retort.
The ability to simply post a picture of a leftist or “conservative”, without comment, and for it to immediately discredit them is one of our most powerful tools.
Illustrative Urban Dict entries 😁 ↓↓ Yay, nothing is lost yet! 🤸
#1 Post Physique = The destroyer of plebian arguments on the internet. Whenever some degeneracy takes place in a comment section from a weak male tell him to Post Physique to support his arguments (👍428 👎34)
#2 Post Physique = The ultimate peasant argument and the internet equivalent of "you wanna arm wrestle, bro?" Used often as a cop-out when someone has been backed into a corner and has no retort. A last-ditch desperate attempt to try and assert dominance. (👍45 👎335)
Forgive me for boomer-posting, but Arnold has a good and relevant quotation:
"A well-built physique is a status symbol. It reflects you worked hard for it; no money can buy it. You cannot borrow it, you cannot inherit it, you cannot steal it. You cannot hold onto it without constant work. It shows discipline, it shows self-respect, it shows patience, work ethic, and passion. That is why I do what I do."
Even though Arnold inspired millions of young men - including myself - to hit the gym, he pretty much lost his Conan cred with his now infamous speech - comparing the MAGA 1/6 insurgence to Kristallnacht. It is no big surprise, considering the ethnicity of his early patrons, Joe Weider and Joe Gold (father: Abraham Mordechai Goldglejt). Seems like money runs thicker than blood. I don’t believe that, but damn. Keep lifting that iron, man.
My guess is that Arnie's fall from grace had three sources. One, hormonal collapse due to whiplash from all the roids - he just turned into a fag. Two, money - he knows who signs his checks, and if you say anything pro-Trumpish you'll never work again in Hollywood. Three, tribalism - Hellmouth Rich People tribe is its own insular thing, and the concerns of the poors are beneath them and low status.
As regards the third element, when California's smoking bans started to become really punitive, Arnie got all hot and bothered when the state tried to come for his cigar club. It didn't bother him in the slightest that the little people were to be prevented from smoking cigarettes, but his rich people vice being stamped out? This could not be allowed.
As Michael Jackson sang before he died, "All I wanna say is, they don't really care about us."
This idea had me chortle: thinking with your belly-rolls; your brain is merely there to rationalize what your abdominal padding has already decided upon.
I'm more into hunting, fishing, firewood making, planting trees that provide food, habitat enhancements, and such muscle building activities. In the old days lifting weights was probably not needed.
I also changed my diet which resulted in weight loss. the fascists have most coming and going, make profits producing poison food then make profits on the caused sicknesses.
I haven't done a pushup since high school 44 years ago. I just now dropped and did ten, could have went longer but I'm going ice fishing shortly and didn't want to pull a muscle to find out how tough I am. Hahaha!
You're absolutely correct: farmers and woodsmen do not need to lift weights, they get everything they need from daily life. Farm muscle will almost invariably beat gym muscle in terms of functionality. There's a reason armies have preferred yeoman farmers since the days of Xenophon and before.
" Socrates fought in the Peloponnesian War, and no historical accounts suggest that his build was especially muscular."
This is fucking psychopathic. War at that time meant intense hand-to-hand combat, and the Greeks were famed for it. You don't roll up on the Thracians with stick-arms and cottage-cheese ass, unless you're planning on a slow death.
I think you're right, too, that it's a mistake to approach the idea of exercise with too much intellect. It's a way to train the will, to fully inhabit one's biological being, and to ground in material reality.
Also, I've learned to get skeptical when people start talking about narcissism and individualism. Yes, consumerism thrives on individualism, but it's a low-grade trash vision of the individual, in which you try desperately to affirm your self-identity through prosthetics.
Engaging in actual self-improvement seems to mostly a threat to those who buy their lives through Amazon and Netflix.
Imagine, if you will, facing an army of 10,000 Bill Gateses, their bronze breastplates perfectly sculpted to fit their hairy, pendulous breasts, arms trembling as they grip their pikes....
“and all the rest of the influences that have depressed the serum testosterone of the average zoomer down to what would have been normal for a sexagenarian a generation ago.”
What’s the normal for a sexagenarian these days?
We septuagenarians are not ALL soft. (Maybe most)
Body fat 11%, muscle rate 84%.
6’ tall, 170#
Intermittent fasting, high fat and protein, low carb, lots of eggs, cruciferous greens and branch water.
Extensive sunshine exposure, 100% coverage.
Homemade weights and doing as well as an old man can.
Met a 74-year-old in the gym the other day. Dude was jacked. Recovering from prostate cancer and doing heavy squats. I was very impressed, asked to take his picture to inspire frens.
What you miss in all of this is that you are not a brain in a jar.
This is the key point. Physical training isn't about posting selfies so that you can get laid on spring break. It's about being a strong and useful human being who embraces *the totality* of his humanity. Attempting to ignore either the physical or spiritual sides of human nature always ends in disaster. Completing a set of heavy squats that you weren't sure you could do teaches you things about yourself that you cannot learn any other way.
Exactly so. That which is solely intellectual remains mere theory, nothing more than a daydream. To know you must know in your gut, and the only way to do that is to do.
Excellent piece, and that's coming from a soft-spoken fag marathoner/mid-level manager who traveled a different road to arrive at the very same destination.
Interesting also that the best humorous memes seem to blow in from the Right Pole. The effete may presume they would “theoretically” rule funny by presuming they are somehow “smarter” but...wrong again! Yogi Berra, the “jock,” came up with quips like, “In Theory, there is no difference between Theory and Practice. In Practice, there is.”
I think this is simply because the right is the party of truth. The left cannot be really funny, because they must lard their statements up with the correct interpretations, to ensure the audience does not draw the wrong conclusion, while at the same time avoiding a minefield of sacred taboos.
Also, in humor, timing is important. There is something here about the left “trying” to be funny without realizing that they already ARE funny, but they just haven’t noticed it yet.
Very inspirational! I need to get back in the weight training game. Been too focused in punishing Mark Z for rigging elections to get out of my chair and lift.
With that written, I am going to write some quibbles which can be extremely useful to some of you and annoying to others. (Biological individuality is a thang.)
Your description of training resembles that of the High Intensity Point of Failure school. Training in this fashion works for some people, else the school would have faded long ago.
For me, that style of training fails utterly. No gains, and days of brain fog. And I don't think I'm alone.
For me, a Farmer Strength style of workout is far more effective. A farmer intent on moving a large amount of weight through space purposefully AVOIDS going to the point of failure. Instead, a farmer "saves some for the next set" and does a shit-ton of sets. Also, a farmer handles irregular weights. There is no Perfect Form.
A farmer strength style workout would be way more sets while avoiding going to failure. It would also include intentional imperfect form or even imbalanced barbells in order to actively recruit stabilizer muscles. (But this imperfect form would be with low enough total weight to avoid injury.)
I'm a hard gainer. Even with regular weight training I could not do a single pull up in high school. Then I spent a week with relatives loading sheets of tobacco onto conveyor belts. Incredible strength gains in just one week. Could do pull ups afterwards.
A farmer strength style workout may not produce the same beauty muscles of a point of failure style workout. But keep in mind that if you let you muscles to too big for your heart and lungs to support, you are functionally weaker. Mr. Olympian Scott Abel has written how when he asked friends to help him move furniture, his bodybuilder friends gave out faster than his skinny friends.
Anyway, a workout consisting of short circuits below the point of failure can create incredible endorphin surges without willpower. (But they can also send your heart rate through the roof! Be careful! People die from shoveling snow, which has similar effects.) And such workouts can produce
some serious soreness for the out of shape. But they don't produce the same brain fog as Point of Failure workouts -- at least not for me.
This is indeed a valid path, albeit hard to systematize. Although that may be a strength, as it requires a degree of creativity.
Hard gainers require nutrition to be on point. If your body was extremely sore and you had brain fog after, I suspect you weren't getting anything like enough protein. Whereas, when you were on the farm, they were likely feeding you like a farm hand.
It took me a while to get a good handle on diet. Initially I was not eating enough, getting maybe half the protein I needed, and muscle soreness was far worse than it was when I made a deliberate effort to get the canonical 1 g/lb daily - which is more than people often realize.
The farmer style workout can produce worse soreness than high intensity. Total force times distance work is far higher. And it can send the heart rate through the roof due to total lactic acid accumulation. Not a good workout for those with clogged arteries or a recent COVID booster.
But it doesn't burn out the nerves from trying to invoke emergency level output.
It's also closer to how many animals work out. Go at it. Take a breather. Go at it again. Never going to failure.
So much to chew on here. My favorite line, "but you are not a brain in a jar."
My kids love Pixar movies, you know, before Pixar destroyed themselves. But Wall-E is a constant favorite. I always kinda considered it a pre-Woke didactic story, but when I rewatched it recently, it made me cry. The people floating in chairs because everything was handed to them so they didn't even have to walk. Finding the drive to get back to the Earth so they could grow stuff and remake themselves and throw off their technological shackles that had made them soft and subservient. Ugh. I hate it when I cry at cartoons.
I discovered weights about four years ago. There's something about the early-morning hours, alone in my basement, willing myself to lift something heavy. (Or congratulating myself for not skipping leg day. Which I really, really want to do quite often.) It's therapy in a way that I've never bothered to sort through. It's ridiculous that pursuing strength is considered dangerous by the loons in charge.
Life is too safe? Your doctor is trying to kill you. There is poison in your shampoo and toothpaste. It's very difficult to access food and water that isn't poison. There are people sitting around in rooms trying to figure out how to kill everyone of us. The DOD has attacked America with poison shots through their manipulation of Big Pharma, and attacks on the food supply continue to increase. There is an ongoing ecological disaster in East Palestine, OH, probably caused by the sabotage of federal agents. We don't know the extent of the poisoning that has taken place from this single incident, but the attack seems to target the area between NYC and Pittsburg with very deadly poisonous and acidic gas. War is not safe.
I wanted to also express my appreciation for the time and effort that it took to produce this worthwhile and artful piece of writing, as well as sponsoring a lively and inclusive debate. It's very talented writing coming from an ethically based place. A little long winded maybe.
Mishima's redemption arc is a useful illustration of principle. He didn't start lifting until middle age, I believe. Before that he was your typical soft artist type. It's never too late.
This is the article on physical culture I wanted to write, but never got around to doing it. Now I'm beyond glad you have done it, and so much more eloquently than I could.
It is a moral, political, cultural and physical IMPERATIVE that we train. Train not for vanity or even for sport -- but for life itself. A man can do little better in his free time than to work on becoming Stronger, Faster, and Harder To Kill.
I think of it this way. Body, spirit, and mind must all be trained. Each relies on the support of the other. When you train one, you train them all, and use them all. Effective gyming requires that you use your brain to guide your movements, check your form, plan your sets; and your spirit to power it.
But the same also applies when training the spirit, for example using meditation or prayer: you should pray not just with your soul but with your mind and especially with your body.
Likewise when training the mind. One's thoughts should be guided by the gut and open to the spirit.
Great advice! Whatever the regime insists you do, doing the opposite should be your default. They want you weak? Make yourself strong. I'm doing a little but need to do much more, much more consistently! Thanks for the motivation!
Beast mode: activate.
I started weightlifting just before the New Year. We've got a home gym in the basement and I've spent most of our time living at this location feeling like a piece of shit for *not* using it--"Look at it, you fat asshole. It's just sitting there, promising to make you better, and every single day you make the decision to decline that offer. Stupid idiot."
I don't know what exactly finally changed and helped me move past the point of being afraid of the work, afraid of the commitment--something along the lines of a dawning comprehension that I'm not a kid anymore, that I'm about to enter one of the last decades of life where you can really meaningfully change the *kind* of person you are. So what do I want to be? A soft whinging ball of dough in a state of constant disappointment with herself? Or someone who says, "I want to do it--therefore it's going to be done" ?
Up front, I'm sure I'll never be truly cut. My very endocrine system might not allow for it, even if I didn't have about seven other ongoing projects that prevent lifting from being my highest-priority pastime. My workouts are also short and relatively easy--my priority, here at the beginning, is to build the habit of working out at all, and that's a lot easier with a 10-minute commitment instead of a 40-minute one. But every day that I go downstairs to do my girly horizontal bench press and rowers, I remember that I'm already pulling more than twice the reps I could manage in late December. When I feel the burn the morning after squats, I comprehend that the discomfort makes me strut. Shit, I feel good--I'm just proud of myself. It's healthy, it's natural, to gain fulfillment from overcoming a physical obstacle.
When the day comes, I might not be able to wrestle a stag into submission on a hunt; but I hope to be in good enough shape to help get it back to the village after.
You've got it.
Momentum. This is key. An object in motion will tend to remain in motion. Once the habit is established, it takes very little willpower to continue ... you only need it to get over those little bumps.
And remember, you don't need to be in better shape than a professional athlete. You just need to be in better shape than you were yesterday. Keep that up and you're ahead of 99% of the normies.
Go keto-paleo and you'll reset your endocrine system. It's 80% epigenetics, ie diet. Add heavy weights snd cold showers and you will reset the entire thing.
Good advice, although I'd caution against keto except as a short-term hack. Hard on the liver I hear.
I could stand to eat healthier, no doubt. But I don't think diet is going to allow me to fully overcome the hormonal handicap of being a woman.
Well obviously you don't want the hormonal profile of a dude.
Be me, 5'3", positively bristling with stubble and listening to Aerosmith on the weight rack.
The online right’s bodybuilder aesthetic has been so successful because you cannot effectively argue against it.
Saying “post physique” has unironically become the perfect retort.
The ability to simply post a picture of a leftist or “conservative”, without comment, and for it to immediately discredit them is one of our most powerful tools.
The propaganda of form is indeed the most powerful argument.
Illustrative Urban Dict entries 😁 ↓↓ Yay, nothing is lost yet! 🤸
#1 Post Physique = The destroyer of plebian arguments on the internet. Whenever some degeneracy takes place in a comment section from a weak male tell him to Post Physique to support his arguments (👍428 👎34)
#2 Post Physique = The ultimate peasant argument and the internet equivalent of "you wanna arm wrestle, bro?" Used often as a cop-out when someone has been backed into a corner and has no retort. A last-ditch desperate attempt to try and assert dominance. (👍45 👎335)
urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Post%20Physique
Those voting stats lmao
DYELcels BTFO
😂 It's starting to look like I should keep UD handy, parked on an open tab at all times 🤭
UD is an essential resource.
Amen (post fizeek).
Forgive me for boomer-posting, but Arnold has a good and relevant quotation:
"A well-built physique is a status symbol. It reflects you worked hard for it; no money can buy it. You cannot borrow it, you cannot inherit it, you cannot steal it. You cannot hold onto it without constant work. It shows discipline, it shows self-respect, it shows patience, work ethic, and passion. That is why I do what I do."
I knew I stole that from somewhere.
Of course Arnie also kinda cheated what with the roids and all. And paid the hormonal price later on.
Even though Arnold inspired millions of young men - including myself - to hit the gym, he pretty much lost his Conan cred with his now infamous speech - comparing the MAGA 1/6 insurgence to Kristallnacht. It is no big surprise, considering the ethnicity of his early patrons, Joe Weider and Joe Gold (father: Abraham Mordechai Goldglejt). Seems like money runs thicker than blood. I don’t believe that, but damn. Keep lifting that iron, man.
My guess is that Arnie's fall from grace had three sources. One, hormonal collapse due to whiplash from all the roids - he just turned into a fag. Two, money - he knows who signs his checks, and if you say anything pro-Trumpish you'll never work again in Hollywood. Three, tribalism - Hellmouth Rich People tribe is its own insular thing, and the concerns of the poors are beneath them and low status.
As regards the third element, when California's smoking bans started to become really punitive, Arnie got all hot and bothered when the state tried to come for his cigar club. It didn't bother him in the slightest that the little people were to be prevented from smoking cigarettes, but his rich people vice being stamped out? This could not be allowed.
As Michael Jackson sang before he died, "All I wanna say is, they don't really care about us."
This idea had me chortle: thinking with your belly-rolls; your brain is merely there to rationalize what your abdominal padding has already decided upon.
I'm more into hunting, fishing, firewood making, planting trees that provide food, habitat enhancements, and such muscle building activities. In the old days lifting weights was probably not needed.
I also changed my diet which resulted in weight loss. the fascists have most coming and going, make profits producing poison food then make profits on the caused sicknesses.
I haven't done a pushup since high school 44 years ago. I just now dropped and did ten, could have went longer but I'm going ice fishing shortly and didn't want to pull a muscle to find out how tough I am. Hahaha!
You're absolutely correct: farmers and woodsmen do not need to lift weights, they get everything they need from daily life. Farm muscle will almost invariably beat gym muscle in terms of functionality. There's a reason armies have preferred yeoman farmers since the days of Xenophon and before.
" Socrates fought in the Peloponnesian War, and no historical accounts suggest that his build was especially muscular."
This is fucking psychopathic. War at that time meant intense hand-to-hand combat, and the Greeks were famed for it. You don't roll up on the Thracians with stick-arms and cottage-cheese ass, unless you're planning on a slow death.
I think you're right, too, that it's a mistake to approach the idea of exercise with too much intellect. It's a way to train the will, to fully inhabit one's biological being, and to ground in material reality.
Also, I've learned to get skeptical when people start talking about narcissism and individualism. Yes, consumerism thrives on individualism, but it's a low-grade trash vision of the individual, in which you try desperately to affirm your self-identity through prosthetics.
Engaging in actual self-improvement seems to mostly a threat to those who buy their lives through Amazon and Netflix.
Is it more likely that Socrates and Plato at one point looked similar to the Riace Bronzes or Peter Griffin?
Imagine, if you will, facing an army of 10,000 Bill Gateses, their bronze breastplates perfectly sculpted to fit their hairy, pendulous breasts, arms trembling as they grip their pikes....
Both of these comments are on point.
“and all the rest of the influences that have depressed the serum testosterone of the average zoomer down to what would have been normal for a sexagenarian a generation ago.”
What’s the normal for a sexagenarian these days?
We septuagenarians are not ALL soft. (Maybe most)
Body fat 11%, muscle rate 84%.
6’ tall, 170#
Intermittent fasting, high fat and protein, low carb, lots of eggs, cruciferous greens and branch water.
Extensive sunshine exposure, 100% coverage.
Homemade weights and doing as well as an old man can.
Oh, and testosterone levels?
How does one test them?
Without her objection,
At least once a day
And twice on Sunday.
You may fear I’m bragging,
But that’s with no fapping.
That's impressive.
Met a 74-year-old in the gym the other day. Dude was jacked. Recovering from prostate cancer and doing heavy squats. I was very impressed, asked to take his picture to inspire frens.
It’s past your bedtime.
I’m definitely not “jacked”, just determined not to be soft.
What you miss in all of this is that you are not a brain in a jar.
This is the key point. Physical training isn't about posting selfies so that you can get laid on spring break. It's about being a strong and useful human being who embraces *the totality* of his humanity. Attempting to ignore either the physical or spiritual sides of human nature always ends in disaster. Completing a set of heavy squats that you weren't sure you could do teaches you things about yourself that you cannot learn any other way.
Exactly so. That which is solely intellectual remains mere theory, nothing more than a daydream. To know you must know in your gut, and the only way to do that is to do.
Excellent piece, and that's coming from a soft-spoken fag marathoner/mid-level manager who traveled a different road to arrive at the very same destination.
Interesting also that the best humorous memes seem to blow in from the Right Pole. The effete may presume they would “theoretically” rule funny by presuming they are somehow “smarter” but...wrong again! Yogi Berra, the “jock,” came up with quips like, “In Theory, there is no difference between Theory and Practice. In Practice, there is.”
I think this is simply because the right is the party of truth. The left cannot be really funny, because they must lard their statements up with the correct interpretations, to ensure the audience does not draw the wrong conclusion, while at the same time avoiding a minefield of sacred taboos.
The right can simply point, and laugh.
Also, in humor, timing is important. There is something here about the left “trying” to be funny without realizing that they already ARE funny, but they just haven’t noticed it yet.
Funny, but unintentionally, and for all the wrong reasons.
Fantastic writing as always.
Very inspirational! I need to get back in the weight training game. Been too focused in punishing Mark Z for rigging elections to get out of my chair and lift.
With that written, I am going to write some quibbles which can be extremely useful to some of you and annoying to others. (Biological individuality is a thang.)
Your description of training resembles that of the High Intensity Point of Failure school. Training in this fashion works for some people, else the school would have faded long ago.
For me, that style of training fails utterly. No gains, and days of brain fog. And I don't think I'm alone.
For me, a Farmer Strength style of workout is far more effective. A farmer intent on moving a large amount of weight through space purposefully AVOIDS going to the point of failure. Instead, a farmer "saves some for the next set" and does a shit-ton of sets. Also, a farmer handles irregular weights. There is no Perfect Form.
A farmer strength style workout would be way more sets while avoiding going to failure. It would also include intentional imperfect form or even imbalanced barbells in order to actively recruit stabilizer muscles. (But this imperfect form would be with low enough total weight to avoid injury.)
I'm a hard gainer. Even with regular weight training I could not do a single pull up in high school. Then I spent a week with relatives loading sheets of tobacco onto conveyor belts. Incredible strength gains in just one week. Could do pull ups afterwards.
A farmer strength style workout may not produce the same beauty muscles of a point of failure style workout. But keep in mind that if you let you muscles to too big for your heart and lungs to support, you are functionally weaker. Mr. Olympian Scott Abel has written how when he asked friends to help him move furniture, his bodybuilder friends gave out faster than his skinny friends.
Anyway, a workout consisting of short circuits below the point of failure can create incredible endorphin surges without willpower. (But they can also send your heart rate through the roof! Be careful! People die from shoveling snow, which has similar effects.) And such workouts can produce
some serious soreness for the out of shape. But they don't produce the same brain fog as Point of Failure workouts -- at least not for me.
This is indeed a valid path, albeit hard to systematize. Although that may be a strength, as it requires a degree of creativity.
Hard gainers require nutrition to be on point. If your body was extremely sore and you had brain fog after, I suspect you weren't getting anything like enough protein. Whereas, when you were on the farm, they were likely feeding you like a farm hand.
It took me a while to get a good handle on diet. Initially I was not eating enough, getting maybe half the protein I needed, and muscle soreness was far worse than it was when I made a deliberate effort to get the canonical 1 g/lb daily - which is more than people often realize.
The farmer style workout can produce worse soreness than high intensity. Total force times distance work is far higher. And it can send the heart rate through the roof due to total lactic acid accumulation. Not a good workout for those with clogged arteries or a recent COVID booster.
But it doesn't burn out the nerves from trying to invoke emergency level output.
It's also closer to how many animals work out. Go at it. Take a breather. Go at it again. Never going to failure.
So much to chew on here. My favorite line, "but you are not a brain in a jar."
My kids love Pixar movies, you know, before Pixar destroyed themselves. But Wall-E is a constant favorite. I always kinda considered it a pre-Woke didactic story, but when I rewatched it recently, it made me cry. The people floating in chairs because everything was handed to them so they didn't even have to walk. Finding the drive to get back to the Earth so they could grow stuff and remake themselves and throw off their technological shackles that had made them soft and subservient. Ugh. I hate it when I cry at cartoons.
I discovered weights about four years ago. There's something about the early-morning hours, alone in my basement, willing myself to lift something heavy. (Or congratulating myself for not skipping leg day. Which I really, really want to do quite often.) It's therapy in a way that I've never bothered to sort through. It's ridiculous that pursuing strength is considered dangerous by the loons in charge.
Wall-E is a redemption story, yes. It would be interesting to revisit that world, a century hence, as they begin to resurrect their heroic roots.
Leg day is both a terror and a pleasure. It's exhausting, but the testosterone rush of a heavy squat or deadlift set is so very worth it.
Life is too safe? Your doctor is trying to kill you. There is poison in your shampoo and toothpaste. It's very difficult to access food and water that isn't poison. There are people sitting around in rooms trying to figure out how to kill everyone of us. The DOD has attacked America with poison shots through their manipulation of Big Pharma, and attacks on the food supply continue to increase. There is an ongoing ecological disaster in East Palestine, OH, probably caused by the sabotage of federal agents. We don't know the extent of the poisoning that has taken place from this single incident, but the attack seems to target the area between NYC and Pittsburg with very deadly poisonous and acidic gas. War is not safe.
I wanted to also express my appreciation for the time and effort that it took to produce this worthwhile and artful piece of writing, as well as sponsoring a lively and inclusive debate. It's very talented writing coming from an ethically based place. A little long winded maybe.
I think it was Mishima who said it best: “I cannot think strong thoughts in a weak body”.
Great essay, as always.
Mishima's redemption arc is a useful illustration of principle. He didn't start lifting until middle age, I believe. Before that he was your typical soft artist type. It's never too late.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
This is the article on physical culture I wanted to write, but never got around to doing it. Now I'm beyond glad you have done it, and so much more eloquently than I could.
It is a moral, political, cultural and physical IMPERATIVE that we train. Train not for vanity or even for sport -- but for life itself. A man can do little better in his free time than to work on becoming Stronger, Faster, and Harder To Kill.
Bravo, John Carter!
I think of it this way. Body, spirit, and mind must all be trained. Each relies on the support of the other. When you train one, you train them all, and use them all. Effective gyming requires that you use your brain to guide your movements, check your form, plan your sets; and your spirit to power it.
But the same also applies when training the spirit, for example using meditation or prayer: you should pray not just with your soul but with your mind and especially with your body.
Likewise when training the mind. One's thoughts should be guided by the gut and open to the spirit.
Agreed.