Flashback to the year 1999. I weighed in at a sloppy 200 lbs. And I felt like shit. I’d spend sometimes two to three days at a time hardly moving except to stand up, walk to the refrigerator, grab some food or drink and sit back down. Other times, I’d get up only to walk to the car in order to make my twice weekly pilgrimage to Burger King. At the time, a brisk walk up a hill would leave me exhausted, the blood vessels in my legs throbbing and aching for an at least an hour afterward.
Ahh, poor me, right? The truth was that I didn’t give a damn about myself or others, and every decision that I made revolved around stealing a little pleasure here and there, one bite of food at a time. But the pleasure never lasted.
Really, this lifestyle was just a symptom of a larger problem: I’d had nothing better to do at the time, and no real sense of purpose, or of self-worth. Because if I had, I’d have realized that service to a higher good, whatever your area of expertise or interest, requires one be in the best shape that he can be in, mentally and physically (there‘s no separating them, really). But that’s not what I was thinking at the time. At the time, all I knew was that I looked and felt like shit, and I was pretty sure everyone else around me could see that, too. Around this time, I also went through a pretty traumatic break-up, but instead of resorting to further eating and lying about, I began to exercise in order to deal with the stress. I’d had enough.
I started to lose weight. It was a no-brainer, even for this sack-of-shit. This was before the days of Jared the Subway spokesman, but I’d already come to the conclusion that ordering from a (relatively speaking) “healthy” set of menu items would make portion control and calorie counting easy. It did. And I started to jog a little. At first, I only ran twice a week, and started including some basketball on my days off. Two times a week became three times a week, and the pounds melted off.
Losing weight is easy, especially if you don’t care where the weight comes from. If, for instance, you don’t give a shit if you lose lots of lean muscle tissue along with all the fat, then literally running yourself in circles is about all that you need to do. And cutting your caloric intake helps, also. But the pounds would come off, even if you did nothing else.
Don’t let shows like the Biggest Loser fool you. While the contestants on that show perform exercises that look a little like strength training, because they involve the use of weights and weight machines, the intensity and duration of their workouts (Biggest Loser “workouts” involve high repetitions performed with relatively light weight over several hours a day) will yield a very specific set of physiological responses, resembling what we might expect to see from frequent, prolonged bouts of running, as was my case. In other words, what we have is aerobic exercise (and the worst, most physically abusive kind, at that) masquerading as strength training.
Yes, in the beginning contestants can expect to see some lean muscle gain because they are so tremendously overweight, but after the first month or so, their terrible training practices can only result in one thing: catabolism. When a trainee enters a catabolic state, he or she begins to break down lipids (fats), but if the process continues long enough, muscle protein is then sacrificed as well. Unless the body recovers adequately (and the contestants on the Biggest Loser are NEVER adequately recovered--they can’t be), this process will only continue.
If the body is in a state of catabolism, it CANNOT build lean muscle tissue. But anyway, it wouldn’t really matter if the contestants on Loser were allowed more recovery, because the style of training employed by trainer Gillian is so atrocious, so fundamentally at odds with the proper methods for strength-building--and, therefore, the optimal production of lean body mass (a point I’ve tackled here previously).
Why is lean body mass so important? God, if I only had the time to name all the ways in which enhance strength and muscle mass are important! A physically stronger individual is a better individual. It’s not just the end result--heightened physical strength--that makes this true, but also the way disciplined, rigorous training prepares you mentally for the stresses that you are likely to face everywhere. A heavy set of squats is just hard in a way that walking or running on a treadmill for an hour is not. I’ve never gotten a case of the butterflies from before running, but I have before a heavy set of squats.
And that’s why strength training, true strength training, will never become extremely popular. People will continue to try to find shortcuts to better health and healthier living. They’ll continue to opt for strength training’s less effective and less intimidating cousin, cardiovascular exercise.
Of course, I couldn’t have appreciated all of this back in 1999, if you’d told me. In fact, exercise just became another form of pleasure-seeking, no less pathological than my terrible eating and laziness had been before. I shirked college and work-related responsibilities for the sake of exercise, even neglected loved ones, and I exercised myself to the point of emaciation. I thought I was fit, but I wasn’t. I thought I was happy, but I wasn’t that either. You see, happiness and pleasure have taken on different meanings, as has fitness. Happiness and pleasure on the one hand, like an improved physical appearance on the other, shouldn’t become ends in themselves because these qualities only come around once you’ve plotted a journey and chosen your destination. They’re byproducts, and anyway, they’re only meaningful in the context of this higher purpose: to be a stronger, therefore better, individual, more useful to yourself and to others in general.
