Happy Turkey day, beotches!

No, you're wrong, and besides, you're funny-looking.

Where to begin…?

The recent election furor got me thinking about the American people a little bit, and started me wondering whether all people everywhere share the same faults as us. I’ve come to the conclusion that, no, only Americans are this backward, despite all of the advantages of money, leisure and power that we enjoy. One thing I know for certain, now: the American people have a fear of--nay, an outright hatred for--rational thought.

Go ahead, try this experiment if you don’t believe me: start a discussion with someone regarding some contentious point or other, then start using “sophisticated,” intelligent language to make your point, and (voila!) watch how quickly his or her temper doth flare. This is particularly true if you live in the South, which is populated by he-man woman-haters sinisterly clutching onto their cornbread values (I should know, I come from a long line of the aforementioned Neanderthals). There’s no quicker way to get branded a “know-it-all” or a liberal pinko commie than to communicate with anything other than grunts and farts (don’t get me wrong, grunts and farts are lovely, but even chimps and some carnies can rein in their animals instincts when the situation calls for it). It’s as if they believe that you’re trying to dupe them into agreeing with you because you’ve acted on anything other than stubborn passion for your beliefs.

Let me say again: intellectuals and in fact anyone exhibiting rational thought are feared and hated automatically in this country. Go ahead, prove me wrong, I DARE YOU. Let’s examine how some of my Republican friends reacted to the persona of Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential “debates.” (Before you label me a “liberal,” I should go on record saying that I am in fact more libertarian than either liberal or conservative). It wasn’t uncommon for them to revel in how thoroughly Palin had kicked Joe Biden’s ass the previous night during the debates. If kicking Biden’s ass meant using emotionally-charged rhetoric to the exclusion of even a single reasoned, thoughtfully-presented argument, then they’re right. I’m not claiming that Biden’s arguments, or even the “facts” used to make them, were especially accurate, sound or compelling, but at least the Democratic camp put forward an effort to appear thoughtful.

“What in all Hell does this have to do with fitness?” you may be thinking. I find that most people approach their “training” inside the gym the same way they do their viewpoints outside of it: gut feeling, passion. Most gym-goers operate on whim, relying on their instincts, if you will, which consist of impressions about fitness that they’ve gathered from the media, fitness magazines (fed by ad revenue), infomercials, or fellow gym-goers. They do a thing, knowing only that it feels right for them at that moment, never stopping to consider whether they should do that thing, and if they should, then how they should about doing it. To prove this, observe gym members as they go about their “training,“ note the way most wander from machine to machine, or room to room, thinking about what to do next.

Now, should you try to show them the error of their ways, presenting the facts and using that cool, rational, no-nonsense manner of yours, prepare to be told to fuck off. Even worse than these folks are the ex-football players.

Because their coach--who, let’s face it, probably coached his athletes to lift the way that he was taught, which is to say imperfectly--taught them to train a certain way, they will swear by his methods as if they were the Gospel. Most coaches aren’t students of physics nor do they understand biomechanics as well as they should, and the majority only landed their jobs because they were once decent football players themselves, not consummate lifters, and they new someone who new someone who got them hired to that position in the first place. But, no, ex-football players are expert lifters--just ask them if you don‘t believe me. Or just have one of them tell you to fuck off.

Look, we have to do better, BE better. Let’s find reasons, good reasons, INFORMED reasons, for the way we behave as we do. Let’s adopt a pact of open, rational inquiry and develop a discerning gaze to be directed at everything that we find worthy of attention. And let’s not allow ourselves to become driven by fear. Open, rational inquiry is the antidote to fear, because it shows us the how and the why of our little universes, gives us the peace of mind that, pass or fail, we have made the best choices based on the information available to us at this time, and grants us a bit of distance from our problems so that we may then decide how best to avoid making the same or similar mistakes again.

-S.

Don't be stupid.

Just for the record: group fitness classes are for jobless middle-aged housewives with too much time on their hands and no ambitions, or metrosexuals who are more concerned about whether their workout clothes get wrinkled or their hair gel maintains maximum hold through a workout than getting and staying strong and functional. If you’re investing even half of your time at the gym in these classes, then you need to ask yourself what the hell you think you’re doing. I shouldn’t have to elaborate on these points, but I’m going to anyway because it brings me no end of pleasure to rip on those classes.

Just the other day, it was brought to my attention that the gym is offering a “strength training” class. I’ve never considered myself a violent person, but right then I felt like I could shoot white-hot light from my eyes, disintegrating everyone and everything in the vicinity because, well, false advertising of this nature is, to my mind, about as bad as waiting, poised with club in hand, for the last surviving female gorilla to give birth then clubbing the newborn to death (both involve high repetitions and little resistance, unless you end up having to fight the mother gorilla off, in which case I would have to bow down to you, after all). Both are abominations in God’s eyes, I assure you.

Look, you don’t design a class around low weight and high repetitions using classic strength training exercises and get to call it “strength training” just because it sort of resembles something you saw on ESPN2’s latest strongman broadcast. Strength is trained when you perform movements with a weight heavy enough that you can only do 1-5 repetitions, END OF STORY; anything more and you’re only stimulating relatively transient gains in muscle size and endurance. This is not even a subtle point that I’m addressing, here. While it’s true that strength, hypertrophy and endurance all fall on a sliding scale, once you travel far enough away from the strength end of the spectrum, your strength gains are going to be minimal to nonexistent.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never said that these classes aren’t challenging: 100 unweighted squats, performed at whatever half-assed depth you choose, does cause immense pain and discomfort after a while, but the argument I’ve been making all along is that you’ve only got so much time and energy on your hands each week, so you might as well spend it in the most beneficial way possible; and since I’m not aware of any big prizes being handed out for the most unweighted squats performed in a row, let’s just stop this silly bullshit right now, okay?

My detractors will say that lifting heavy weights is dangerous. Perhaps under certain circumstances, like those found in competitive circles, where practitioners perform “limit” lifts on a regular basis, it is. You and I aren’t concerned with winning prizes, just getting reasonably strong. Driving a car is more dangerous, I’d wager. Having said that, I can’t guarantee that you won’t ever experience an “injury,” but granted that you lift weights with correct form, applying appropriate increases in weight as tolerated, you should only experience minor tweaks and strains and sore muscles every now and then, some of which might very well linger an aggravating while, but never anything of a catastrophic nature such as what one risks when lifting competitively (i.e. disc ruptures, broken bones, torn muscle bellies and tendons).

Stop wasting time. Given time and leisure enough to rationalize, you could come up with hundreds of reasons why not to lift heavy, but they all issue from the same insecure mental space where fear and doubt, those twin ogres, live.

Come to think of it, while I’m at it, why don’t I address some other common excuses:

I just want to lose weight, isn’t cardio all that I need? Okay, you’re first mistake is wanting only to lose weight. Ladies, and some of you gentlemen out there, the opposite sex doesn’t like it when you transform yourselves into walking, talking skeletons whose skin sags like taffy. Anyone past the age of adolescence actually enjoys someone with a little meat on his or her bones. So you’ll probably want to spend some time strength training since performing heavy sets of 5 on whole body movements like the squat has exhibited a muscle-sparing effect under conditions of weight loss. But that’s not all: building and/or maintaining lean muscle mass means increased energy expenditure because more muscle burns more calories at rest. Oh, and let’s not forget how important strength becomes as one gets older. Your late-life independence rests not just on your stamina but on your ability to manipulate your environment, and there’s no better way to prepare for that than to become STRONGER. Strength is the one adaptation that makes all other values possible: being stronger means that you don’t have to work as hard to accomplish the same tasks, which means that your stamina rises because you don’t become as tired as quickly as you once might; AND you become faster because your ability to overcome inertia has increased in proportion to your strength as well. Overall, being stronger makes you sharper.

But I’m afraid I’ll develop unsightly man-muscles! Wrong. Ladies, you don’t have the same hormonal profile as men, so while you will get stronger if you train heavy, your muscles will not have the same appearance as a man’s, which is not to say they won’t look more sculpted--they will. Chances are, if you see a woman with muscles the size of a man’s, she has gotten a boost from an illegal source, or else she was just born with elevated testosterone levels, which isn’t very often the case. I know some very strong women who nevertheless are very petite--my wife is one of them.

Wait, my trainer says I don’t need to worry about training heavy. He or she says as long as I keep moving, I’m doing fine. You’re trainer is either lazy or misinformed. It is very likely that he is both. A trainer who believes that low weight, high repetition exercises are as good or superior to their high weight, low rep cousins isn’t aware of the incontrovertible science behind the body’s varying adaptations to differing kinds of stress. If you’ve not been doing heavy full-depth squats or deadlifts with your trainer, then you’re trainer is too lazy to teach you any differently and you should seek out another trainer immediately. Now, it could also be the case that your trainer is under time constraints, and suffers constraints on resources, etc., which could preclude his training you in a superior manner, but that trainer also has a moral obligation to seek out a better training environment for you. And YOU have an obligation to see out a good trainer who can train you under these optimal training conditions. You deserve nothing less.