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The Zen of Lifting
I posted a couple of these on the EF Anabolic board a couple of months back, but they got buried pretty quickly, and I thought I'd put 'em out here. (Sorry to repeat these to you, WCP. I'm just trying to get this board up and running with some decent threads.)
I was wondering whether or not anyone on the list would like to share some of the - for lack of a better phrase - "moral lessons," lessons in life, the Zen wisdom of lifting that they've collected and that they find transfer well to other areas of life. Working out in the gym has impressed several of these lessons on me. I have a clear memory, for example, of a morning when I began lifting seriously about five years ago. I was standing around briefly with a guy who'd just asked me for a spot. He looked out across the gym, scanning the other people at the bench press stations and the weight machines, and said rather abstractedly, "You know, very few of the people you see here will be here a year from now. You're just getting started, so you're about to find out that building muscle is a long-, long-, long-term project. Most people just don't have that kind of discipline. That's why they don't look like us."
He was right. Very few of those folks were still there a year later. And I've never doubted that I was still there, and am still there five years later, in part because of the implicit challenge in that first moral lesson that my friend taught me. So, here are some of the moral lessons, the Zen of lifting, that have come my way. I'm not trying here to articulate things I've learned that apply only to lifting, but rather things I've learned from lifting that help me understand other areas of my life.
1. Good results take time - and they're worth working for!. As a physiologist/weightlifter friend of mine says, "Hypertrophy? Now there's a bitch to induce!" You can speed the process up with well-planned routines, smart nutrition, supplementation, and certainly with drugs, but these 300-pound steroidal monsters didn't get that way overnight, or without a helluva lot of hard, hard work. I see the same principal at work in my career (I'm an academic researcher): The people who do the best work, publish the most important results, and train the best students are those who operate against long time-horizons. I see the same principal in my private life, too: After a bunch of kids and more than 20 years, my wife and I are more in love than ever, because of all the hard work we've put into our relationship over all these years. So, after a long, long time, you can stand in front of a mirror, or you can look back on your work or examine your relationships and say, "Yeah! I couldn't have gotten here quickly, but this has been worth the effort." I don't think anything teaches that more effectively than lifting, where it might take a year and untold amounts of pain and strain to add a measly inch of muscle to a lagging bodypart.
2. Consistency is everything. There are several guys I know at the gym who come in regularly for a month, or even a couple of months, and then disappear for a long time, only to show up again for awhile, and then repeat the process over and over. In terms of physical condition, they seem to hold their own (no small feat), but they don't seem to add much strength or size over time. The people who really seem to progress nicely are the ones who come in, rain or shine, all the time, never missing except for a serious illness or a planned recoup. When they're out of town or on vacation, they buy a daypass to a gym or they improvise somehow and manage to get in a few good workouts. When they're injured, they concentrate on working a different bodypart until the injury clears up, or if they're really racked up they dive into the literature and bone up on something that's training-related. In short, they live this stuff, and they're consistent, year after year. I see the same principal in my career and in my private life: The best results happen from consistent pressure, long applied.
3. Men can nurture one another. I don't know how women ironheads feel about this, but in my experience the weight room is one of the very few places where we men generously help one another out, and actually, yes, nurture one another. We do that when we take time out of our own routines to spot another lifter. We do that when we greet our fellow "regulars" everyday with a handshake and a "What're you training today?" or when we help a questioning newcomer learn the form of a difficult lift. Unfortunately, I don't see much of this in my career or my private life - as I say, the gym is one of the very few places where we men nurture one another - but I see it can be done, and that's a good thing to realize.
4. There's no single right way. Time and again, I've become convinced that a certain way to train, a certain form to use for squats, shrugs, whatever, is the single "best" or "right" way, only to change my mind after experimenting with a different form, or after my training requirements have changed. For a long time I looked down my nose at my age-mates (I'm pushing 50) who never lift but always have time for a bike ride or a swim, until one of them explained to me that he didn't want to get any bigger or stronger, he just wanted to stay flexible so he could play ball with his kids. Fair enough. I don't look down my nose so much anymore. I don't give advice on what routines to use, or even help someone correct their form in a lift, unless safety is involved, or unless they ask me to critique them. I'm nothing special to look at, so not many do. Anyway, I might like to lift, but that's my thing, not yours necessarily. That lesson is easy to transfer to other areas of life.
5. Masculinity emanates from the inside, and is not worn on the outside. The most annoying, and in some ways the most effeminate, guys I know are the ones who strut around the gym with their chests thrust out like pouter pigeons, their arms akimbo like they're carrying a volleyball under each arm. By contrast, the most macho "guy" I see in the gym is a scrawny little gal whose right arm ends halfway between her shoulder and her elbow (a congenital defect, I think), but who does hack-squats, flys on a Cybex machine, killer sets of crunches, and in general works around her physical defect to be, not a famous specimen, but surely the very best specimen she can be. The strutters wear their machismo like a shirt. She lives hers. I've never talked to this gal, and she's not physically impressive, mind you, but I have no doubt about who I'd want on my side in a fight, you keep the pouter pigeons. Watching her work out has helped me on the job and in my private life to identify the guys who are truly macho, and those who are just pretending.
6. Physical culture itself has a certain dignity. Having just torpedoed the strutting types at the gym, I would also say that I've learned that "physical culture," a love of training and conditioning and of the physical attributes it confers, has itself a certain dignity and inherent value, just as the culture of the mind, just as the ability to produce fine art, has dignity and value. Take even the biggest prick strutting around the gym, you still have to hand it to him that he has some kind of quality, some discipline, something ineffable about his character, or he could never have put in the hard work to get into good shape like that. Some pro bodybuilder called this "the nobility of muscle," and I think there's some truth to that, whatever blemishes the carrier of that muscle has on his or her past or character. I've seen this sense of the nobility of muscle in my work, where most of my fellow professors are, shall we say, strangers to the gymnasium. They're really missing something. I hang out with my fellow faculty members, of course, but nothing is more enjoyable than walking across campus and hearing a horn honking at me from a passing truck, and recognizing the driver as one of the maintenance guys or groundskeepers, a guy or gal I see in the gym, who has recognized me as a fellow lifter and is honking a hello. That man or woman has the same dignity and nobility as the most accomplished professor, though he or she expresses it in a different way.
I've got a few more Zen lessons, but they need to "settle" some before I can articulate them. I'd be interested in some of the other moral lessons that are out there in the weight rooms, which you've learned and can express.
Be well, and lift heavy, brothers.
Bjaarki
I posted a couple of these on the EF Anabolic board a couple of months back, but they got buried pretty quickly, and I thought I'd put 'em out here. (Sorry to repeat these to you, WCP. I'm just trying to get this board up and running with some decent threads.)
I was wondering whether or not anyone on the list would like to share some of the - for lack of a better phrase - "moral lessons," lessons in life, the Zen wisdom of lifting that they've collected and that they find transfer well to other areas of life. Working out in the gym has impressed several of these lessons on me. I have a clear memory, for example, of a morning when I began lifting seriously about five years ago. I was standing around briefly with a guy who'd just asked me for a spot. He looked out across the gym, scanning the other people at the bench press stations and the weight machines, and said rather abstractedly, "You know, very few of the people you see here will be here a year from now. You're just getting started, so you're about to find out that building muscle is a long-, long-, long-term project. Most people just don't have that kind of discipline. That's why they don't look like us."
He was right. Very few of those folks were still there a year later. And I've never doubted that I was still there, and am still there five years later, in part because of the implicit challenge in that first moral lesson that my friend taught me. So, here are some of the moral lessons, the Zen of lifting, that have come my way. I'm not trying here to articulate things I've learned that apply only to lifting, but rather things I've learned from lifting that help me understand other areas of my life.
1. Good results take time - and they're worth working for!. As a physiologist/weightlifter friend of mine says, "Hypertrophy? Now there's a bitch to induce!" You can speed the process up with well-planned routines, smart nutrition, supplementation, and certainly with drugs, but these 300-pound steroidal monsters didn't get that way overnight, or without a helluva lot of hard, hard work. I see the same principal at work in my career (I'm an academic researcher): The people who do the best work, publish the most important results, and train the best students are those who operate against long time-horizons. I see the same principal in my private life, too: After a bunch of kids and more than 20 years, my wife and I are more in love than ever, because of all the hard work we've put into our relationship over all these years. So, after a long, long time, you can stand in front of a mirror, or you can look back on your work or examine your relationships and say, "Yeah! I couldn't have gotten here quickly, but this has been worth the effort." I don't think anything teaches that more effectively than lifting, where it might take a year and untold amounts of pain and strain to add a measly inch of muscle to a lagging bodypart.
2. Consistency is everything. There are several guys I know at the gym who come in regularly for a month, or even a couple of months, and then disappear for a long time, only to show up again for awhile, and then repeat the process over and over. In terms of physical condition, they seem to hold their own (no small feat), but they don't seem to add much strength or size over time. The people who really seem to progress nicely are the ones who come in, rain or shine, all the time, never missing except for a serious illness or a planned recoup. When they're out of town or on vacation, they buy a daypass to a gym or they improvise somehow and manage to get in a few good workouts. When they're injured, they concentrate on working a different bodypart until the injury clears up, or if they're really racked up they dive into the literature and bone up on something that's training-related. In short, they live this stuff, and they're consistent, year after year. I see the same principal in my career and in my private life: The best results happen from consistent pressure, long applied.
3. Men can nurture one another. I don't know how women ironheads feel about this, but in my experience the weight room is one of the very few places where we men generously help one another out, and actually, yes, nurture one another. We do that when we take time out of our own routines to spot another lifter. We do that when we greet our fellow "regulars" everyday with a handshake and a "What're you training today?" or when we help a questioning newcomer learn the form of a difficult lift. Unfortunately, I don't see much of this in my career or my private life - as I say, the gym is one of the very few places where we men nurture one another - but I see it can be done, and that's a good thing to realize.
4. There's no single right way. Time and again, I've become convinced that a certain way to train, a certain form to use for squats, shrugs, whatever, is the single "best" or "right" way, only to change my mind after experimenting with a different form, or after my training requirements have changed. For a long time I looked down my nose at my age-mates (I'm pushing 50) who never lift but always have time for a bike ride or a swim, until one of them explained to me that he didn't want to get any bigger or stronger, he just wanted to stay flexible so he could play ball with his kids. Fair enough. I don't look down my nose so much anymore. I don't give advice on what routines to use, or even help someone correct their form in a lift, unless safety is involved, or unless they ask me to critique them. I'm nothing special to look at, so not many do. Anyway, I might like to lift, but that's my thing, not yours necessarily. That lesson is easy to transfer to other areas of life.
5. Masculinity emanates from the inside, and is not worn on the outside. The most annoying, and in some ways the most effeminate, guys I know are the ones who strut around the gym with their chests thrust out like pouter pigeons, their arms akimbo like they're carrying a volleyball under each arm. By contrast, the most macho "guy" I see in the gym is a scrawny little gal whose right arm ends halfway between her shoulder and her elbow (a congenital defect, I think), but who does hack-squats, flys on a Cybex machine, killer sets of crunches, and in general works around her physical defect to be, not a famous specimen, but surely the very best specimen she can be. The strutters wear their machismo like a shirt. She lives hers. I've never talked to this gal, and she's not physically impressive, mind you, but I have no doubt about who I'd want on my side in a fight, you keep the pouter pigeons. Watching her work out has helped me on the job and in my private life to identify the guys who are truly macho, and those who are just pretending.
6. Physical culture itself has a certain dignity. Having just torpedoed the strutting types at the gym, I would also say that I've learned that "physical culture," a love of training and conditioning and of the physical attributes it confers, has itself a certain dignity and inherent value, just as the culture of the mind, just as the ability to produce fine art, has dignity and value. Take even the biggest prick strutting around the gym, you still have to hand it to him that he has some kind of quality, some discipline, something ineffable about his character, or he could never have put in the hard work to get into good shape like that. Some pro bodybuilder called this "the nobility of muscle," and I think there's some truth to that, whatever blemishes the carrier of that muscle has on his or her past or character. I've seen this sense of the nobility of muscle in my work, where most of my fellow professors are, shall we say, strangers to the gymnasium. They're really missing something. I hang out with my fellow faculty members, of course, but nothing is more enjoyable than walking across campus and hearing a horn honking at me from a passing truck, and recognizing the driver as one of the maintenance guys or groundskeepers, a guy or gal I see in the gym, who has recognized me as a fellow lifter and is honking a hello. That man or woman has the same dignity and nobility as the most accomplished professor, though he or she expresses it in a different way.
I've got a few more Zen lessons, but they need to "settle" some before I can articulate them. I'd be interested in some of the other moral lessons that are out there in the weight rooms, which you've learned and can express.
Be well, and lift heavy, brothers.
Bjaarki
