What I’m saying is: I’m eventually going to take a poop on machine training (and most mainstream ways of training). We start here though: You hear it all the time: Wanna’ become a better athlete? Get strong. Wanna’ built more muscle? Get strong. But what does it mean? “Get strong.” Let’s piece together this mental model [...]
What I’m saying is: I’m eventually going to take a poop on machine training (and most mainstream ways of training).
We start here though:
You hear it all the time:
- Wanna’ become a better athlete? Get strong.
- Wanna’ built more muscle? Get strong.
But what does it mean?
“Get strong.”
Let’s piece together this mental model strength, performance, and physique.
Starting with “strength” itself.
Is strength the entry into meatheadism? Someone that spends all day at the gym? With muscles so big you can’t scratch your own back? Accompanied an unnecessarily and unseasonably dark skin tan? And perhaps a commensurate amount of unnecessary hair gel?
Strength is best under understood by its opposite: the absence of strength.
This is why I wrote about Gertude. And astronauts.
I also wrote about Hume, but, well, I’d rather not bring up bad memories…
I wrote about these things to get here: consider strength to be your ability to overcome or deal with physical resistance within in a movement or a position.
The resistance in everyday life = gravity.
Most of us are strong (to varying degrees) thanks to antifragility. Remember the enlightening yet confusing ball of mess from before?
You’re physically strong because you’ve existed in an environment (Earth) that demanded you to be physically strong.
In the year 2156, your grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand son might be born on a ship, in the vacuum of space. And he won’t have nearly as much physical strength as you do because his environment doesn’t demand physical strength.
No wonder aliens are so scrawny!
To quantify the relative-ish stress of gravity…
- Earth = (0)
- Space = (-1)
Now let’s take B3-5C, you’re a grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand grand son that was born in space, and throw together a thought experiment.
If B3-5C wants to upgrade his physical abilities (-1), he’d come to Earth (0). He’d arrive in a wheelchair. But he’s human. He’s antifragile. His body would adapt.
Soon he’d be cruising through Earthly space-time. He’d be “upgraded” in relation to what his former environment gave him. And if he ever decided to go back to space, his friends would be all sorts of jealous of his huge muscles and new physical stature.
Now take yourself. You want to upgrade your physical abilities.
What’s one way to exceed normal Earthly physical adaptations? Flip the switch. Go to a (+1) environment, like, uhh, Jupiter. (The gravity is 2.4 times that of Earth’s. Close enough.)
This is the Hyperbolic Time Chamber in a nutshell. You go exist in supergravity, you come back and everything is easier that you’d normally do in the “real” world.
Unfortunately, we can’t go to Jupiter. Kami’s Lookout doesn’t exist. We don’t have a hot blue haired genius chick friend that can create a space capsule equipped with the ability to create artificial supergravitational situations.
But we do have a practical way to replicate the kind of stress that our body would be exposed to in a supergravity environment.
(Ready for the incredibly shocking punchline?)
Free-weight and bodyweight training are the best ways to replicate a supergravity environment.
Now…
Pay attention here, because this part is important.
We’ve been so infiltrated with so many bogus ideas of “working out.” Or with what a “workout” is. Or how a “workout” is supposed to feel. Or something…I don’t even know anymore.
But I do know I’ve been throwing around the idea of gravity for a reason.
The idea of overcoming gravity is important because gravity doesn’t judge. It’s a holistic downward force (quite an intense stress) atop your entire body from head to toe, spine to extremities. We have muscles and bones worth a salt because of Earth’s gravity. We are strong because of gravity.
We are strong because gravity is STRESSFUL.
Yet there’s often disrespect for honest to goodness HOLISTIC STRESS based training methods…(and simultaneous respect for non-stressful training methods).
Case in point: machine training. But I’m not ready to squat down on machines just yet.
At first glance, and what mainstream media tries to bake into your brain (probably because the perpetrators themselves don’t even know any better): physique and performance are all about muscles.
Feel the burn. Get a pump. Work those muscles hard. Squeeze those muscles. Muscles this, muscles that. See your body as individual muscles. Rest individual muscles 48 hours. Get on this machine, that machine. As long as your muscles are contracting, you’re good.
But muscular stress isn’t the lone gunman.
Reductionism is trying to understand things by breaking them into smaller pieces. (Here I’m obliged to use the analogy that 99.9% of people use because it works oh so well and because I’m not exactly Mr. Creative.)
Want to understand how a clock ticks? Take it apart. See how the gears inside interact with each other. Want to understand humans? By the same logic, break them into systems, organs, and then atoms. See how the bits and pieces mingle.
But humans aren’t clocks. Humans are more like clouds. Clouds have no discernible shape. You can’t slice a cloud into chunks with a knife. Or break it into its itty bitty pieces. You can’t predict their shape.
Yet this is what we do when trying to understand our physical selves. We focus on muscles, likely because they are easy to see.
And we love things that are easy to see, don’t we?
The word you often hear muttered in the same breath as reductionism is emergence. Emergence, in philosophy, has been around since the days of Aristotle and is best said as: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can’t understand the whole in full by looking at the pieces of an emergent system.
Training can’t be understood with solely a muscle view. Especially if you’re interested in sports training and juggling different types of training stressors either now, or in the future.
The umbrella it all falls under is stress.
Stress.
Remember, stress is information. And your body reacts to certain kinds of information better than others. See a bear. See a wasp. See a fly. Which is going to get your attention? Which is going to send the best signal?
I’ll let you think on this. (Hint.)
Next letter, we’ll continue.