I've been in and out of gyms for 30+ years, and one thing I have consistently noticed among most people is that they go to great lengths to avoid the floor. The lower the exercise, the less they want anything to do with it. This is especially common with men. There is a huge tier of "men" who don't even train their legs because women typically can't see them, then there is the "end ROM" tier (leg pressers, often,) and then there is the much smaller tier of men who do ATG squats, lunges, all the courageous lower limb work that is largely invisible....you know, basically the same stuff a lot of women do. Lol. That's right. Women are often tougher than men when it comes to leg and hip training. To be fair, they put that shit on display more than we do though. But showing off is not the only reason to train, unless you're dense.
But even among those who leg train, traditional trainees and athletes seem to think everything worthwhile must happen on the feet. The floor is dirty, stuff down there is hard, we're likely to encounter small muscles that don't work well, and maybe some mobility issues. Everything good happens near end ROM knee extension, right? Bullshit.
We are grapplers. There is nothing so beneficial to grapplers as being super strong in full knee and hip flexion, at the most mechanically disadvantaged ROM (in the hole, as they call it in squatting.) There is nothing so beneficial as having good single leg strength and power for scrambles and shots, for turning people over, bridging and escaping.
I am constantly thinking in terms of "how can I put more of a hurt on my butt, hips, and lower legs." Low, single leg training. The stuff that grapplers REALLY need includes: Low handle sled pushes. Bear crawls. Deep squatting or Anderson squats. Duck walks. Weighted duck walks. Lunges. Animal drills and sit out drills.
I have one goal in the weight room--to be able to take down a full sized man in my weight class from my knees. Not by standing up and running with him, literally with the reduced leverage hip power that comes from being strong on your knees. In most things, like sprints with sled drags, if you train handicapped, you will compete with a practical super power. And that is my goal.
It's not that I actually feel that I need to take someone down from my knees, I want to be able to chase them from a knee scramble the way Jordan Burroughs does, get my grips, and then stand them up with so much force that they can't even resist. You can obtain that from practicing regular shots, developing a nice deep squat, etc. But my aim is to train even lower. The box squat, the Anderson squat. Low handle sleds or even turf plate pushes.
Low, low, low. Leg attacks and leg strategy in wrestling seems to be all about who is more comfortable and more mobile in a lower squat--who can get under and stay under the opponent's lines of defense better (head, the lower arms, and the hips) and for longer. So being super comfortable super low should be the goal. A normal squat is, in a sense, for a grappler, an ego exercise. The excuse for squatting a lot bilaterally is that you can "use more weight" which increases overall load and thus adds more mass, but that is bullshit. The reason for it is feeling like a bad ass. They say "I want to take advantage of the stretch shortening cycle at the bottom of the squat" as an excuse for bouncing parallel or half squats, instead of employing ass to grass Anderson squats, box squats, or partials out of the hole.
People say the sticking point in the squat is parallel, which seems like it would mean that this is where the ROM is the weakest, but that is based around the false pretense of the stretch shortening cycle being important to the movement, and it is only important for competitive powerlifting, not for general athletic strength training (unless you are specifically doing speed/power/jump squats that depend on bar speed through full ROM.) If you are someone who box squats or Anderson squats from ATG, you know the REAL sticking point is the BOTTOM because everyone is naturally the weakest at full hip and knee flexion, not at some mid point where "the bounce" wears off.
People don't Anderson squat and then miss at parallel. It either moves or it doesn't. Note how in the bench press and the deadlift, people have different sticking points, depending on their experience level, and their biomechanics. New deadlifters are weak off the floor. Good squatters and advanced deadlifters actually often have problems at the deadlift lockout. The barbell back squat always has the same sticking point--the hole. Because after that bounce wears off, the mechanics suck. Get strong THERE to get strong everywhere. Which is why guys like Louis Simmons were always frothing at the mouth about box squats--they eliminate the cheaty bounce and build you an actual ass.
And then people act like cross training with Anderson squats is some form of magical plateau breaker for the "real squat." Well no shit, the traditional dive bombing back squat depends on a bounce through a deep low flexion range where you can't actually lift your 1RM. I would like to start an Anderson squat social movement that believes if you can't Anderson squat it, you can't actually squat it.
The second problem, which is being addressed by people like Mike Boyle, is that bilateralism is kinda shit for actual sports. When do you ever hop around like a bunny on two feet in sports? You are cutting on one leg or the other, using one more than the other, suffering from the vagaries of asymmetrical movement. You aren't perfectly balanced.
To this end, it would seem that the best athletic strength training in the world would then be single leg exercises that occur near complete knee and hip flexion. Pistol squats come to mind, of course, who does pistol Anderson squats, right? Hurry back up to standing, or people might figure out that you can't actually do it!
The Cossack squat is pretty bad ass. Try to find a video of someone doing it with a barbell, with any weight on it. Few and far between. Because everyone actually sucks at single leg, full ROM squat movements where you can't cheat with a bounce, or depend on balance gained from bilaterality and symmetry. Another exercise that has gained a lot of momentum over the past 10 years is the Bulgarian Split squat.
The only people in the world who are really consistently doing this kind of extremely asymmetrical low work--are dancers and ballerinas, and yoga and Pilates people. Ironically, people that are often viewed as "feminine" by people who think they are tough. People who can "squat" (usually half squat) 405 but who can't Cossack squat 135. People with robot hips.
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Monday, December 12, 2016
The BJJ community is flooded with people who have stupid ideas about strength training.
I just ran into a guy who thinks that shit like stability board work and wall pushups are the best use of strength training time for BJJ.
I don't understand why there is so much ignorance and quackery in a scene that has such a good model as wrestling. Wrestling S&C is pretty extensively studied and staffed. Lots of credentialed people working in collegiate wrestling S&C. BJJ is not very different. Why do people think it is so different? Because they can't abide the idea that "grappling is grappling?" They never wrestled and so they think they are inventing a wheel? There is a reason that wrestlers mop up normal BJJ players--because their coaches knew what the fuck they were doing, and their knowledge was built on top of the knowledge of other coaches who knew what the fuck they were doing. There was no folklore of the "ailing wrestler who succeeded using only technique." Ever.
When people talk about strength development, I think they should speak accurately and in context. And something like stability and coordination work is only ever "the best" thing an athlete could be doing if he already has above average coordination, balance, agility, mobility, cardio, absolute strength, body comp, and relative (body weight) strength. In other words, he is already a rounded and advanced to elite grappler. Not because this stuff is not hard work (it still is), but because it's diminishing returns stuff that competes for time with more important stuff, for people with limited gym time and more pronounced weaknesses.
When someone is not elite, "the best" thing to be working on is always their most underdeveloped crucial attribute, and it's always specific the individual's circumstances, so there is no blanket "best thing." If a grappler has no other major weaknesses in his athleticism (absolute strength, absolute power, power endurance, cardio/metcon, body comp, etc.) then spending extra time striving for "long tail" refinements and little improvements in coordination and balance and isometrics MIGHT make sense.
But then again, superior balance-board abilities might not mean shit when someone comes up against a guy with a 2x-3x BW squat or a 1.5-1.75x BW power clean who is also at the same technical level, not only due to the risk of being ragdolled, but because strength endurance is very much related to absolute strength and power, as they relate to that attribute of one's opponent. If I am stronger than you, then all other things being equal, you tire faster. If an athlete has neglected to work on strength and power training in favor of spending precious gym time on balance boards, he will probably lose, all other things being equal.
So this kind of stuff is a waste of good training economy unless a player is already a very advanced (usually pro) athlete, and the average grappler is better served by eschewing additional balance and coordination tranining unless he has a lot of extra time and recovery capacity to waste. Literally the last thing I would add to a normal person's training program. Dumb as fuck to direct this kind of program at beginners and intermediates.
I don't understand why there is so much ignorance and quackery in a scene that has such a good model as wrestling. Wrestling S&C is pretty extensively studied and staffed. Lots of credentialed people working in collegiate wrestling S&C. BJJ is not very different. Why do people think it is so different? Because they can't abide the idea that "grappling is grappling?" They never wrestled and so they think they are inventing a wheel? There is a reason that wrestlers mop up normal BJJ players--because their coaches knew what the fuck they were doing, and their knowledge was built on top of the knowledge of other coaches who knew what the fuck they were doing. There was no folklore of the "ailing wrestler who succeeded using only technique." Ever.
When people talk about strength development, I think they should speak accurately and in context. And something like stability and coordination work is only ever "the best" thing an athlete could be doing if he already has above average coordination, balance, agility, mobility, cardio, absolute strength, body comp, and relative (body weight) strength. In other words, he is already a rounded and advanced to elite grappler. Not because this stuff is not hard work (it still is), but because it's diminishing returns stuff that competes for time with more important stuff, for people with limited gym time and more pronounced weaknesses.
When someone is not elite, "the best" thing to be working on is always their most underdeveloped crucial attribute, and it's always specific the individual's circumstances, so there is no blanket "best thing." If a grappler has no other major weaknesses in his athleticism (absolute strength, absolute power, power endurance, cardio/metcon, body comp, etc.) then spending extra time striving for "long tail" refinements and little improvements in coordination and balance and isometrics MIGHT make sense.
But then again, superior balance-board abilities might not mean shit when someone comes up against a guy with a 2x-3x BW squat or a 1.5-1.75x BW power clean who is also at the same technical level, not only due to the risk of being ragdolled, but because strength endurance is very much related to absolute strength and power, as they relate to that attribute of one's opponent. If I am stronger than you, then all other things being equal, you tire faster. If an athlete has neglected to work on strength and power training in favor of spending precious gym time on balance boards, he will probably lose, all other things being equal.
So this kind of stuff is a waste of good training economy unless a player is already a very advanced (usually pro) athlete, and the average grappler is better served by eschewing additional balance and coordination tranining unless he has a lot of extra time and recovery capacity to waste. Literally the last thing I would add to a normal person's training program. Dumb as fuck to direct this kind of program at beginners and intermediates.
Friday, October 21, 2016
"Fitness Bloggers" are "Narcissists Among Narcissists"
I get the irony of writing that in a fitness blog. But my point is that if you are going to start from the point of being an uber-narcissist to begin with, what you have to say should be succinct, helpful, technically and scientifically accurate, and largely devoid of confusing jargon. In my case, I also don't expect to reach an audience, this is more of an online journal than a "blog for consumption."
I guess it's just supply and demand. The average trainee can't cope with the idea that success in athletics is 80% patience, consistent hard work, and program compliance--and 20% "special knowledge," so the demand for the consumption of "special knowledge" articles is high. In a lot of cases, I think the immersion in "topical writings" actually helps to maintain the commitment. Cultural immersion can help people to "indoctrinate" themselves into activities and lifestyles, but ultimately "fanatical" activities need to be allowed to ebb and flow in life, like anything else, or else burnout can ensue.
Nobody can maintain the energy to remain the "poster child" for forever. It is the definition of fundamental values that causes real commitment. If you profess to love a thing, you should be able to leave that thing and still know in your gut why you must come back to it. It is part of you. You do not require "constant re-enforcement" of your commitment to keep it alive. You don't need to go down the "cult funnel" by abandoning all friends and family who do not practice the thing you like. As they say, its never the successful people who are posting the image macros of pithy success quotes.
Anyway, back to the excess of "fitness writers." The way to succeed in almost any sport is to train hard in the true strength basics in a gym, and then to devote a lot of time to the technical practice of your sport. Nobody writes articles about that stuff because it's too boring. The three hottest items, the three biggest keys to success in anything--are hard work, patience, and continued compliance.
Then again, the 20% of ongoing knowledge refinement does matter--because people undertake dumb things like "every day is upper body day," or "BJJ doesn't require strength" training programs, and while they may have hard work, patience, and compliance handled, they still under-perform. They may not fall flat on their faces, but their training is off the mark.
The thing is, hard work, patience, and compliance are so important that you can practically apply them to the WRONG things and still achieve a measure of success. A grappler could convince himself that the best way to become a better grappler is to master the goofy elliptical trainer at the gym, and over the course of 3 years of intense elliptical training, he will actually probably amass some incredible cardio that will hugely improve BJJ.
It's sort of like a sail or a rudder on a boat though. Or a steering wheel. You're not always adjusting these things. You orient them, and then most of your time is spent following the course. The waiting and/or rowing, not the steering, is the hard part, and is also most of the journey. Sure, you make course corrections when you perceive something to be flatly wrong, but even a navigator doesn't spend his entire journey with his face buried in the map. The focus should be on moving forward, not falling out of the boat, and making sense of the journey by constantly improving philosophical understanding of why you are who you are. Steering is not the meat of it.
I guess it's just supply and demand. The average trainee can't cope with the idea that success in athletics is 80% patience, consistent hard work, and program compliance--and 20% "special knowledge," so the demand for the consumption of "special knowledge" articles is high. In a lot of cases, I think the immersion in "topical writings" actually helps to maintain the commitment. Cultural immersion can help people to "indoctrinate" themselves into activities and lifestyles, but ultimately "fanatical" activities need to be allowed to ebb and flow in life, like anything else, or else burnout can ensue.
Nobody can maintain the energy to remain the "poster child" for forever. It is the definition of fundamental values that causes real commitment. If you profess to love a thing, you should be able to leave that thing and still know in your gut why you must come back to it. It is part of you. You do not require "constant re-enforcement" of your commitment to keep it alive. You don't need to go down the "cult funnel" by abandoning all friends and family who do not practice the thing you like. As they say, its never the successful people who are posting the image macros of pithy success quotes.
Anyway, back to the excess of "fitness writers." The way to succeed in almost any sport is to train hard in the true strength basics in a gym, and then to devote a lot of time to the technical practice of your sport. Nobody writes articles about that stuff because it's too boring. The three hottest items, the three biggest keys to success in anything--are hard work, patience, and continued compliance.
Then again, the 20% of ongoing knowledge refinement does matter--because people undertake dumb things like "every day is upper body day," or "BJJ doesn't require strength" training programs, and while they may have hard work, patience, and compliance handled, they still under-perform. They may not fall flat on their faces, but their training is off the mark.
The thing is, hard work, patience, and compliance are so important that you can practically apply them to the WRONG things and still achieve a measure of success. A grappler could convince himself that the best way to become a better grappler is to master the goofy elliptical trainer at the gym, and over the course of 3 years of intense elliptical training, he will actually probably amass some incredible cardio that will hugely improve BJJ.
It's sort of like a sail or a rudder on a boat though. Or a steering wheel. You're not always adjusting these things. You orient them, and then most of your time is spent following the course. The waiting and/or rowing, not the steering, is the hard part, and is also most of the journey. Sure, you make course corrections when you perceive something to be flatly wrong, but even a navigator doesn't spend his entire journey with his face buried in the map. The focus should be on moving forward, not falling out of the boat, and making sense of the journey by constantly improving philosophical understanding of why you are who you are. Steering is not the meat of it.
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
PSA: Warning about the dangers of calf muscle specificity
This applies less to younger people because calf tears are more common in older populations, but it's good advice in general. If you're a power athlete, never undertake leg training without including some sort of power training for the calves in dorsiflexion and plantar flexion. Even for a little while.
I found out the hard way that training only heavy and maximal closed-chain flat-footed leg exercises relatively weakens the calves. In 6 months of hard training for my legs, I practically doubled my quad, glute, and hamstring strength, but I neglected calves because I supposed they would be getting enough training from other stuff, and that calf training was mostly cosmetic. I also added like 10 pounds of muscle, which is even more stress on the calves.
The problem is, my legs overpowered my calves. The first time I tried to sprint in 6 months, I immediately tore a calf muscle. This could be due solely to the rest of the leg putting down too much force, but also is due to the lack of heavier ROM training for the calves. They are strong at middle ROM but not end ROM, and one of them (right medial gastrocnemius) ripped (grade II.) it was also complicated by the fact that I had finished a heavy 5x5 session two days earlier.
It seems to be getting better pretty quickly, but the semi-obvious takeaway is to not get so obsessed with strength in certain exercises that, as an athlete, you are ignoring important sport-specific ROMs for medium to long periods of time. Even if you just sprint (if your sport involves sprinting) or do box jumps, jump squats with a barbell or trap bar, etc. When it comes to calves, shoulders, knees, etc, this is even more applicable to older athletes.
I found out the hard way that training only heavy and maximal closed-chain flat-footed leg exercises relatively weakens the calves. In 6 months of hard training for my legs, I practically doubled my quad, glute, and hamstring strength, but I neglected calves because I supposed they would be getting enough training from other stuff, and that calf training was mostly cosmetic. I also added like 10 pounds of muscle, which is even more stress on the calves.
The problem is, my legs overpowered my calves. The first time I tried to sprint in 6 months, I immediately tore a calf muscle. This could be due solely to the rest of the leg putting down too much force, but also is due to the lack of heavier ROM training for the calves. They are strong at middle ROM but not end ROM, and one of them (right medial gastrocnemius) ripped (grade II.) it was also complicated by the fact that I had finished a heavy 5x5 session two days earlier.
It seems to be getting better pretty quickly, but the semi-obvious takeaway is to not get so obsessed with strength in certain exercises that, as an athlete, you are ignoring important sport-specific ROMs for medium to long periods of time. Even if you just sprint (if your sport involves sprinting) or do box jumps, jump squats with a barbell or trap bar, etc. When it comes to calves, shoulders, knees, etc, this is even more applicable to older athletes.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Add to Dictionary: Testosterone Replacement Therapy is a Perfectly Legitimate Disease Treatment
I'm in my mid 40s, and I've been on and off Testosterone Replacement Therapy for 10 years now. I have fought so hard to get to where I am, to do the things I do. I have endured a ton of overtraining, injury, fatigue, metabolic disturbance, and just sheer misery because I have dared to want to be an athlete while possessing an anomalously shitty pair of balls.
People have a lot of misconceptions about TRT, and some of them are downright ugly and bigoted. The most prominent being the stigmatized way TRT is treated by the UFC. Fighters who NEED TRT to function as well as their compatriots end up having to give up on a medically necessary medicine just to stay "legal" and to preserve their public image.
To be fair, part of the problem is that the medicalization of T levels may kind of obscure the testing process for the illegal stuff being used in illegal amounts. A guy can cycle 500mg of street test for a year and then back off it to normal "TRT levels" like 600-1100 ng/dl and it will be much harder to detect him as an illegal user than if going off it were to plummet him to the frank hypogonadal and agonadal range of say 25ng/dl.
But here's the problem--a lot of people DO need TRT for very real HEALTH reasons. ESPECIALLY combat athletes. Primary hypogonadism can occur genetically, or it can just occur as a result of a single hard trauma. I don't think all the causes are currently understood, but the fact is that by age 30 or so, a goodly percentage of guys balls have stopped working almost entirely. So if they come in at 200 ng/dl and they are expected to train and recover like someone else who has naturally 1200 ng/dl, they have it effectively 6 times harder than that person, if their free testosterone reflects the total testosterone differential!
Eugenics became really unpopular during the third reich, because of the way the Nazis used experimentation to exploit people. The ways they abused it. It scared us all away from it for a long time, but some aspects of our society still reflect its preference. Given how there is a sort of stigma toward eugenics, it does seem weird to me that a lot of people still equate "fairness" in athletics with a type of "lottery" mentality, which amounts to accidental eugenics.
What do I mean? If someone is born with 1200 ng/dl of T naturally, they weren't "bred" to have that, but they do have a [correctable] advantage they DID NOT earn. So it would be more fair to set a baseline standard of 800 ng/dl and then bring ALL competitors up to that range. If testosterone is SO important to performance that it is the most well known performance enhancing drug, then since it's a natural chemical that is controllable, actual competitive "fairness" would involve making sure ALL combatants had roughly the same fucking amount of it!
Duh! It's not "fair" for one person to have 6x (for the sake of argument) the recovery capacity of another contender. "Fair" is when you level the playing field in every way within your control, such that each competitor has an equal opportunity to leverage his actually unique and cultivated attributes--his practice and his mindset--so he can WIN. TRT just levels the testosterone field.
It blows my mind that thousands of doctors and medical researchers can call something like hypogonadism an illness; that hundreds of studies have been conducted on its risks and disadvantages over the past few decades; that it has been documented to confer a clear HANDICAP in competitive sports, but that we continue to regard people using it to "get well" as cheating!
Testosterone is so stigmatized by the Barry Bonds and Lyle Alzados of the world that cycling's innocent cousin, TRT, gets lumped in with it. But anyone who knows anything about T will tell you that not only is 1000 ng/dl a natural level for a competitive athlete, but that there is NO COMPARISON between the performance "boosting" attributes of 1000 compared to 5000.
"Getting well" is not roiding. The closer you get to agonadalism, the more severe and potentially life threatening the symptoms become. Most non-athletes can function on 300 ng/dl, but they will probably be lower energy, tired, more irritable, and less sexual. They will have a harder life than the average guy. Then you take a guy who regularly beats his body up and recovers from it because that's his passion in life, and you want him to have the same amount of recovery capacity as a couch potato?
Can you imagine what it would be like to go for a 5 mile tempo run with your other male friends of your same age, and to be unable to participate in the next run 2 days later because your body still hasn't healed from the first run like theirs? All because you got a bum set of balls. And there are people who think you should be happy with that. Can you believe the ignorance? What if we took that attitude toward polio or allergies? "I know you have rhinitis 100% of the time, but antihistamines are cheating, sorry, sniffle away!"
There are so many anti-male assholes in this world. I wouldn't want to get anywhere near an MRA soapbox here, but testosterone is NOT evil. It is the hormone that makes men into men--whether they are macho men, or soft spoken and gentle men. Straight men, or gay men. It is a health stabilizer.
People so often associate it with rage, anger, and machismo, but the truth is that LOW testosterone makes men angry, not normal levels. The rage we associate with roiders comes from them cycling improperly--the rage comes from abnormally high estradiol or ESTROGEN levels, not the testosterone. The right amount of testosterone has a CALMING influence on men, similar to an SSRI in a serotonin deficient human of either sex.
People have been saying this stuff forever, but those who smugly disregard men's issues continue to ignore the truth, and continue to see the world through whichever lens they wish. Even in an era where we have relatively effective transgender transformations, where female to male transgenders NEED testosterone to become and stay healthy, people still act like testosterone is a poison chemical that ruins the world.
The truth is that as much as we like to bend gender, the human body does better by being firmly placed into one hormonal camp or another. Again, transgenderism has shown us this. Be hormonally male, or be hormonally female, but the middle ground is not safe for our health.
Hypogonadal men and athletes are expected to dutifully inhabit that dangerous middle ground because there is simply no valid social excuse for a "cis" man wanting to become more male. If a woman wants to become male it's progressive, but if a deficient man wants to become fully male, well he is "up to something," trying to cheat, trying to exploit someone or something. Granted, not everyone views it this way, and I don't want to come across as angry or bitter like an MRA douche, but then again, I have too little of the mellowing hormone testosterone in my blood, so it could be related.
This funny bias is even inherent in the browser I am using. As I type this, the Chrome spell checker underlines the word hypogonadism in red (a word which has been in the medical and public lexicon for both sexes, for decades) as if it's a non-word. If you right click on it, it suggests "hypothyroidism."
Hypothyroidism is an interesting comparison because it is something with which a lot of women are diagnosed. Its diagnosis is as a result of a direct correlation to an under-functioning thyroid. There is almost never any secondary cause, just as with primary hypogonadism. Plain and simple--your thyroid doesn't work well, it's a hazard to your health and metabolism, so we supplement you with synthetic thyroid hormone. Cut and dry: "Thyroid's busted. Here's a better quality of life, you are welcome."
Everyone recognizes this as a real thing--and yet, the impetus for treating it in a lot of women is a desire for a "normal" basal metabolic rate. Now you can't TELL me that when a hypothyroid woman finds out her body burns fat more SLOWLY than a normal woman, that the aesthetic and potentially "vain" aspects of the health issue don't factor into her decision to supplement. Women chase leanness the same way men chase muscularity--it's just how our culture largely works. Low thyroid is not only a health threat to women, but a threat to their opportunity to subscribe to the [contentious but real] female "beauty standard" of being thin, which a lot of women submit to willingly.
So why is that any more valid than a guy wanting to supplement testosterone in order to pick up a bit more muscle or strength than his sick self would ordinarily have? Not only will he have less of a risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other comorbidities by going on TRT, but he will be able to have a fair shot at being as "MANLY" as a normal man can. Both men and women deserve a fair shot at the kinds of bodies and lives enjoyed by other normal men and women, if they are medically possible, the same way any biped deserves a shot at knee surgery so he can get back to walking like a normal person.
In conclusion, in Chrome, I right clicked that unrighteously underlined word and chose "Add to Dictionary." Every anti-TRT ignoramus on the planet needs to add hypogonadism to their dictionary.
People have a lot of misconceptions about TRT, and some of them are downright ugly and bigoted. The most prominent being the stigmatized way TRT is treated by the UFC. Fighters who NEED TRT to function as well as their compatriots end up having to give up on a medically necessary medicine just to stay "legal" and to preserve their public image.
To be fair, part of the problem is that the medicalization of T levels may kind of obscure the testing process for the illegal stuff being used in illegal amounts. A guy can cycle 500mg of street test for a year and then back off it to normal "TRT levels" like 600-1100 ng/dl and it will be much harder to detect him as an illegal user than if going off it were to plummet him to the frank hypogonadal and agonadal range of say 25ng/dl.
But here's the problem--a lot of people DO need TRT for very real HEALTH reasons. ESPECIALLY combat athletes. Primary hypogonadism can occur genetically, or it can just occur as a result of a single hard trauma. I don't think all the causes are currently understood, but the fact is that by age 30 or so, a goodly percentage of guys balls have stopped working almost entirely. So if they come in at 200 ng/dl and they are expected to train and recover like someone else who has naturally 1200 ng/dl, they have it effectively 6 times harder than that person, if their free testosterone reflects the total testosterone differential!
Eugenics became really unpopular during the third reich, because of the way the Nazis used experimentation to exploit people. The ways they abused it. It scared us all away from it for a long time, but some aspects of our society still reflect its preference. Given how there is a sort of stigma toward eugenics, it does seem weird to me that a lot of people still equate "fairness" in athletics with a type of "lottery" mentality, which amounts to accidental eugenics.
What do I mean? If someone is born with 1200 ng/dl of T naturally, they weren't "bred" to have that, but they do have a [correctable] advantage they DID NOT earn. So it would be more fair to set a baseline standard of 800 ng/dl and then bring ALL competitors up to that range. If testosterone is SO important to performance that it is the most well known performance enhancing drug, then since it's a natural chemical that is controllable, actual competitive "fairness" would involve making sure ALL combatants had roughly the same fucking amount of it!
Duh! It's not "fair" for one person to have 6x (for the sake of argument) the recovery capacity of another contender. "Fair" is when you level the playing field in every way within your control, such that each competitor has an equal opportunity to leverage his actually unique and cultivated attributes--his practice and his mindset--so he can WIN. TRT just levels the testosterone field.
It blows my mind that thousands of doctors and medical researchers can call something like hypogonadism an illness; that hundreds of studies have been conducted on its risks and disadvantages over the past few decades; that it has been documented to confer a clear HANDICAP in competitive sports, but that we continue to regard people using it to "get well" as cheating!
Testosterone is so stigmatized by the Barry Bonds and Lyle Alzados of the world that cycling's innocent cousin, TRT, gets lumped in with it. But anyone who knows anything about T will tell you that not only is 1000 ng/dl a natural level for a competitive athlete, but that there is NO COMPARISON between the performance "boosting" attributes of 1000 compared to 5000.
"Getting well" is not roiding. The closer you get to agonadalism, the more severe and potentially life threatening the symptoms become. Most non-athletes can function on 300 ng/dl, but they will probably be lower energy, tired, more irritable, and less sexual. They will have a harder life than the average guy. Then you take a guy who regularly beats his body up and recovers from it because that's his passion in life, and you want him to have the same amount of recovery capacity as a couch potato?
Can you imagine what it would be like to go for a 5 mile tempo run with your other male friends of your same age, and to be unable to participate in the next run 2 days later because your body still hasn't healed from the first run like theirs? All because you got a bum set of balls. And there are people who think you should be happy with that. Can you believe the ignorance? What if we took that attitude toward polio or allergies? "I know you have rhinitis 100% of the time, but antihistamines are cheating, sorry, sniffle away!"
There are so many anti-male assholes in this world. I wouldn't want to get anywhere near an MRA soapbox here, but testosterone is NOT evil. It is the hormone that makes men into men--whether they are macho men, or soft spoken and gentle men. Straight men, or gay men. It is a health stabilizer.
People so often associate it with rage, anger, and machismo, but the truth is that LOW testosterone makes men angry, not normal levels. The rage we associate with roiders comes from them cycling improperly--the rage comes from abnormally high estradiol or ESTROGEN levels, not the testosterone. The right amount of testosterone has a CALMING influence on men, similar to an SSRI in a serotonin deficient human of either sex.
People have been saying this stuff forever, but those who smugly disregard men's issues continue to ignore the truth, and continue to see the world through whichever lens they wish. Even in an era where we have relatively effective transgender transformations, where female to male transgenders NEED testosterone to become and stay healthy, people still act like testosterone is a poison chemical that ruins the world.
The truth is that as much as we like to bend gender, the human body does better by being firmly placed into one hormonal camp or another. Again, transgenderism has shown us this. Be hormonally male, or be hormonally female, but the middle ground is not safe for our health.
Hypogonadal men and athletes are expected to dutifully inhabit that dangerous middle ground because there is simply no valid social excuse for a "cis" man wanting to become more male. If a woman wants to become male it's progressive, but if a deficient man wants to become fully male, well he is "up to something," trying to cheat, trying to exploit someone or something. Granted, not everyone views it this way, and I don't want to come across as angry or bitter like an MRA douche, but then again, I have too little of the mellowing hormone testosterone in my blood, so it could be related.
This funny bias is even inherent in the browser I am using. As I type this, the Chrome spell checker underlines the word hypogonadism in red (a word which has been in the medical and public lexicon for both sexes, for decades) as if it's a non-word. If you right click on it, it suggests "hypothyroidism."
Hypothyroidism is an interesting comparison because it is something with which a lot of women are diagnosed. Its diagnosis is as a result of a direct correlation to an under-functioning thyroid. There is almost never any secondary cause, just as with primary hypogonadism. Plain and simple--your thyroid doesn't work well, it's a hazard to your health and metabolism, so we supplement you with synthetic thyroid hormone. Cut and dry: "Thyroid's busted. Here's a better quality of life, you are welcome."
Everyone recognizes this as a real thing--and yet, the impetus for treating it in a lot of women is a desire for a "normal" basal metabolic rate. Now you can't TELL me that when a hypothyroid woman finds out her body burns fat more SLOWLY than a normal woman, that the aesthetic and potentially "vain" aspects of the health issue don't factor into her decision to supplement. Women chase leanness the same way men chase muscularity--it's just how our culture largely works. Low thyroid is not only a health threat to women, but a threat to their opportunity to subscribe to the [contentious but real] female "beauty standard" of being thin, which a lot of women submit to willingly.
So why is that any more valid than a guy wanting to supplement testosterone in order to pick up a bit more muscle or strength than his sick self would ordinarily have? Not only will he have less of a risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other comorbidities by going on TRT, but he will be able to have a fair shot at being as "MANLY" as a normal man can. Both men and women deserve a fair shot at the kinds of bodies and lives enjoyed by other normal men and women, if they are medically possible, the same way any biped deserves a shot at knee surgery so he can get back to walking like a normal person.
In conclusion, in Chrome, I right clicked that unrighteously underlined word and chose "Add to Dictionary." Every anti-TRT ignoramus on the planet needs to add hypogonadism to their dictionary.
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Strength DOES matter in BJJ. But the answer is not as simple as people think.
Powerlifting can be potentially important in grappling, because it develops absolute strength. Absolute strength directly correlates to your ability to perform technique, because it helps to enable good "relative strength," but it does this along with a dependency on body composition.
Good relative strength (your strength/weight ratio) is a prerequisite for good athleticism, especially in grappling sports. IOW, if you're a fat guy with weak legs, good luck with standing guard passes. Likewise, if your abs/glutes are made more of beer than muscle, good luck chasing with an open guard, or getting out of side control, or squatting for mount armbars. A lean guy with a good diet and less fat is going to need less absolute strength to obtain good relative strength, a fat guy is going to need more. You can improve the S/W ratio either by getting stronger or by getting leaner, or both. A lean guy (unless super weak) is going to have good relative strength, and a "fatstrong" guy might too...but the former will have better cardio because his body is simply going to be better at exercise metabolite clearance.
Beyond the point where the body is strong enough [strong relative to body comp, thus "relative" strength] to support the ability to execute techniques correctly, then extra amounts of absolute strength are just a bonus [that can be converted through RFD training to power, and thus greater explosive speed/RFD] but that is not really necessary for the average player for three reasons: 1) because technique tends to be the main differentiation between two "equally fit" (relative strength capable) people of equal weight; 2.) because powerlifting at a high enough frequency in-season (above a maintenance level) tends to interfere with the ability to train BJJ with the necessary frequency and intensity to maintain mat cardio, and 3) because PL gains tend to hit a point of diminishing returns at or above the level of advanced totals*, so you end up doing a lot more work for less recovery and time value.
There is such a thing as "strong enough" when the point of barbells/dumbells/kettles is to support a sport, rather than to be the sport itself. However, that "strong enough" point is higher than a lot of people think, AND, for grappling, it totally depends on your body comp (diet.)
Do you want to know the simple truth? Unless you intend to be a serious BJJ competitor, in a lot of cases because of the way that powerlifting intensity and rolling intensity tend to interfere with each other, you're probably a lot better off chasing relative strength by way of dietary restriction than by trying to get super strong while also rolling a lot. You CAN hit great advanced totals while rolling 3x+/week, but you have to either have great recovery to be able to do it quickly, or else you have to be willing to wait 1-3 years to get there slowly with something like 5/3/1. Not many people can do the Texas method or Madcow and 3x/week BJJ at the same time.
Honestly, wrestlers have known this for a long time. That's why they diet so carefully in-season, because they know they can't just hulk out in the weight room while also having to practice an intense sport. It's also why they hit the weight room twice as hard off season--because that's their chance to make good progress toward "strong enough." Because players with advanced level strength AND advanced level technique usually defeat players with average level strength and advanced level technique.
So you have a few basic choices that can affect your rate of athletic improvement--get strong slowly with a slow progress plan like 5/3/1, get strong faster by creating for yourself a virtual "off-season," and run some kind of self-abusing Smolov or Sheiko shit, or enhance either one with an improved diet and body composition. Frankly, the middle road is probably the smartest.
*Cliffs: Get to 2x/2.2x/1.5x BW PRs in squat/DL/bench (optionally 1.75x/2.0x/1.0x is probably fine) and then from there, just maintain your strength and and build power (5/3/1 is fine, but barbell/kettle power complexes are better) and then focus on BJJ.
Good relative strength (your strength/weight ratio) is a prerequisite for good athleticism, especially in grappling sports. IOW, if you're a fat guy with weak legs, good luck with standing guard passes. Likewise, if your abs/glutes are made more of beer than muscle, good luck chasing with an open guard, or getting out of side control, or squatting for mount armbars. A lean guy with a good diet and less fat is going to need less absolute strength to obtain good relative strength, a fat guy is going to need more. You can improve the S/W ratio either by getting stronger or by getting leaner, or both. A lean guy (unless super weak) is going to have good relative strength, and a "fatstrong" guy might too...but the former will have better cardio because his body is simply going to be better at exercise metabolite clearance.
Beyond the point where the body is strong enough [strong relative to body comp, thus "relative" strength] to support the ability to execute techniques correctly, then extra amounts of absolute strength are just a bonus [that can be converted through RFD training to power, and thus greater explosive speed/RFD] but that is not really necessary for the average player for three reasons: 1) because technique tends to be the main differentiation between two "equally fit" (relative strength capable) people of equal weight; 2.) because powerlifting at a high enough frequency in-season (above a maintenance level) tends to interfere with the ability to train BJJ with the necessary frequency and intensity to maintain mat cardio, and 3) because PL gains tend to hit a point of diminishing returns at or above the level of advanced totals*, so you end up doing a lot more work for less recovery and time value.
There is such a thing as "strong enough" when the point of barbells/dumbells/kettles is to support a sport, rather than to be the sport itself. However, that "strong enough" point is higher than a lot of people think, AND, for grappling, it totally depends on your body comp (diet.)
Do you want to know the simple truth? Unless you intend to be a serious BJJ competitor, in a lot of cases because of the way that powerlifting intensity and rolling intensity tend to interfere with each other, you're probably a lot better off chasing relative strength by way of dietary restriction than by trying to get super strong while also rolling a lot. You CAN hit great advanced totals while rolling 3x+/week, but you have to either have great recovery to be able to do it quickly, or else you have to be willing to wait 1-3 years to get there slowly with something like 5/3/1. Not many people can do the Texas method or Madcow and 3x/week BJJ at the same time.
Honestly, wrestlers have known this for a long time. That's why they diet so carefully in-season, because they know they can't just hulk out in the weight room while also having to practice an intense sport. It's also why they hit the weight room twice as hard off season--because that's their chance to make good progress toward "strong enough." Because players with advanced level strength AND advanced level technique usually defeat players with average level strength and advanced level technique.
So you have a few basic choices that can affect your rate of athletic improvement--get strong slowly with a slow progress plan like 5/3/1, get strong faster by creating for yourself a virtual "off-season," and run some kind of self-abusing Smolov or Sheiko shit, or enhance either one with an improved diet and body composition. Frankly, the middle road is probably the smartest.
*Cliffs: Get to 2x/2.2x/1.5x BW PRs in squat/DL/bench (optionally 1.75x/2.0x/1.0x is probably fine) and then from there, just maintain your strength and and build power (5/3/1 is fine, but barbell/kettle power complexes are better) and then focus on BJJ.
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Corrective exercise is what most of us need the most--and the brain needs the most correction of all.
You can probably safely ignore this post if you're a yoga teacher for a living. Or if you're a 15 year old kid who tends to walk 20k steps per day, just as a result of your active school/sport/fun lifestyle. But if you spend 8 hours a day sitting at a desk, unless your posture is perfect and you get up and walk around every 15 minutes (how do people concentrate on deep thinking tasks if they do that?) then chances are you need corrective exercise MORE than any of your favorites.
So many men out there think their arms need to be bigger, their abs need to be flatter, or their chest needs to be puffier. Women tend to think they should cycle through the entire lexicon of available glute exercises until they get a perfect buttock, or they will spend endless amounts of time on an elliptical or treadmill trying to make sure they stay thin.
Both suffer from gender bias. Women's tendencies are actually healthier than men's, but you'd be hard pressed to tell me that obsessing over your ass is inherently LESS vain than obsessing over your biceps, just because it happens to incidentally hit the mark by aiding hip health.
People want to be liked. And accepted, and loved, and fucked, and chosen. They want to stay relevant to their lovers, they want to have the confidence to find new ones. They tend to associate certain self-image stuff with that confidence. For men, it's having a commanding presence. That is almost uniformly associated with a muscular upper body.
On a primal level, our ancestors who were either more naturally endowed up top, or whose rough lifestyles incidentally caused hypertrophy probably WERE better able to defeat other men in a fight. All things being equal (and that includes a complete lack of skill, and the absence of leg training) a guy with a big upper body probably still WILL win an unskilled 1 on 1 fight.
The problem is, that's not the world we live in. That type of self-image, rooted in primal dominance, is only really true in the absence of: 1) grapplers, 2) boxers, MMA fighters, or just about anyone else with skill, 3) guns, gunfire, weapons, etc, 4) friends of your enemy to kick your face, 5) significant differences in leg strength.
It's an outdated vibe. I'm a gen Xer so my generation came right after the Arnold generation, and we probably got the worst of the bodybuilding aesthetic. Everything was mass, size, arms, etc. Bicep day, tricep day, forearm day. I mean some people probably even had a separate forearm day.
The millennials are a little smarter than we are, but not without the benefit of our mistakes and knowledge. People bag on Crossfit but a lot of the fundamental principles are sound for sport science and health--even if individual boxes sometimes do take it to dangerous or frivolous extremes (which comes more down to individual personalities than a problem with the idea itself.)
Now we are in a third, new era. Post-Arnold, post-Yates, post-Coleman, even post-kipup, post-"squat every day", post-"all types of lifting machismo". Stuff like Gray Cook's FMS and the idea of true functional fitness, the value of balanced physical attributes based on personal assessment, is starting to really take firm root.
This is frankly not as important if you are 20 because your body hasn't even been alive long enough to accumulate significant amounts of wear and tear and large muscle imbalances. Where this matters most is for aging athletes.
The saying "Fast is slow, slow is smooth" is popular in the BJJ community. This could not be more true when it comes to attribute self-assessment. Fitness is a concept based on purpose--fitness to a task. Health is a concept based on feeling and well-being. They largely intersect at this balance point. Baseline fitness IS health, and baseline health is fitness--for life.
A strength athlete that can't run 100m is not fit for life. He is not healthy. He is also ultimately not even fit for his sport, because that cardio matters DURING lifts. Likewise, a grappler who sits on his butt for 8-14 hours a day is only suffering from a lack of strength IF strength is the leading attribute that is putting him at risk for either being unfit, or unhealthy. So if you are so pelvic tilted that you look like a centaur, there is no benefit in being able to bench press 405. If you can't touch your toes, you may still be able to wrestle, but if you play guard long enough, you'll get hurt.
A woman who stretches and runs 40 miles a week on a treadmill is not fit for life if she can't hoist a 30lb bag of dog food for her German Shepard and walk it to her car. Given the fucked up world we live in, I am also of the mind that most women are fundamentally unfit for life (police dependent) if they don't either carry a gun, or learn some basic grappling, because a man's upper body is about 50% stronger than a female's, and 1 in 3 women gets raped at some point in her lifetime, so learning to deploy your legs to protect yourself is as essential as other health attributes. As a big guy who lifts weights and fights, I just can't imagine how so many women walk around every day in this bubble of security, while probably 10% of men eyeing them on the street contemplate hurting them. And many don't--some women just walk around, living in fear, almost all the time. And they don't have to. Enough of that tangent.
So in terms of correctives, the most important thing is constant assessment. Where am I? What weakness is my lifestyle and genetics imposing on me, how do I fix it? How can I combine it with the stuff I like? What other attributes need to be emphasized, based on where I would like to compete with others?
In addition to assessment, the second most important thing in the whole world is compliance. How much time do people really spend creating a personal ideology that permanently commits them to the routine practice of exercise? Is it discipline? Belief systems? What can you do to make your exercise programs not only balanced and assessment-based, but also so firmly ingrained in your mind and your values such that doing them is virtually the same as brushing your teeth, or taking a shower--a form of hygiene. An ante, a non-negotiable price of admission for being alive.
These two problems--biased self-assessment, and a lack of long term compliance, are the top two reasons that people never reach their fitness and health goals. So doesn't it make sense that a LOT of energy should be devoted to making sure you end up having a bias toward working on THEM?
Sometimes, smart people hire athletic trainers to help them eliminate their personal bias. This is great. Sometimes people even do it themselves, after enough trial and error (or after an injury.) But when it comes to compliance, you can't rely on a trainer to yell at you long term (unless you're wealthy) and likewise, relying on group exercise is ok, but it's still an external motivator, and as soon as you lose interest in the group, you will probably lose interest in the exercise.
These concepts are not just native to exercise. They are true in life. Success is created by focused hard work. The hard work part is actually easier--nearly anyone can "slave away" at "hard" things they enjoy, in order to feel a sense of movement and accomplishment in life, but that's an illusion. The "focused" part is the actually "difficult" part, because blindly putting a lot of effort into something is neither "focus," nor "difficulty." Anyone can waste energy. We all generally have plenty of it. Willpower, however, is the limited resource. Values generate willpower, but only introspection generates REAL values. Introspection is, therefore, the true "hard" work.
Selectively working "hard" in directions that are mentally easy for you and your ego is tackling intensity, not tackling difficulty. Things that are actually difficult are most often mentally hard to endure in SUBTLE ways that challenge the self-image, not just in a "pain tolerance" manner. The key to balanced success is to develop a personal discipline and dogma that allows you to consistently subject yourself to necessary kinds of pain that you DON'T like, not just the kinds you do. Nobody is fooled when you "sacrifice" for intense "difficulties" which happen to serve your ego and self-image. A lifter who loves to lift intensely is not doing "hard" work by lifting "hard." "Hard" work is the inner work.
Think hard about what you REALLY want out of exercise, obliterate the trite, petty gender normative ego devices and defense mechanisms, dig deep and get a strong "why" for your choices, make it part of your soul, routinely re-examine the biases and skew that creep in, and consistently EXECUTE based on a personal version of self-discipline that doesn't just exist for its own robotic sake, but that is borne of a very strong and EMOTIONAL belief that what you are doing is a very important and permanent part of who you are and who you NEED to be, forever. "God put me here to do this," is not the worst idea an athlete ever had, but even a secular athlete can find equally strong reasons to become who they want to become and to stay who they wanted to be.
So many men out there think their arms need to be bigger, their abs need to be flatter, or their chest needs to be puffier. Women tend to think they should cycle through the entire lexicon of available glute exercises until they get a perfect buttock, or they will spend endless amounts of time on an elliptical or treadmill trying to make sure they stay thin.
Both suffer from gender bias. Women's tendencies are actually healthier than men's, but you'd be hard pressed to tell me that obsessing over your ass is inherently LESS vain than obsessing over your biceps, just because it happens to incidentally hit the mark by aiding hip health.
People want to be liked. And accepted, and loved, and fucked, and chosen. They want to stay relevant to their lovers, they want to have the confidence to find new ones. They tend to associate certain self-image stuff with that confidence. For men, it's having a commanding presence. That is almost uniformly associated with a muscular upper body.
On a primal level, our ancestors who were either more naturally endowed up top, or whose rough lifestyles incidentally caused hypertrophy probably WERE better able to defeat other men in a fight. All things being equal (and that includes a complete lack of skill, and the absence of leg training) a guy with a big upper body probably still WILL win an unskilled 1 on 1 fight.
The problem is, that's not the world we live in. That type of self-image, rooted in primal dominance, is only really true in the absence of: 1) grapplers, 2) boxers, MMA fighters, or just about anyone else with skill, 3) guns, gunfire, weapons, etc, 4) friends of your enemy to kick your face, 5) significant differences in leg strength.
It's an outdated vibe. I'm a gen Xer so my generation came right after the Arnold generation, and we probably got the worst of the bodybuilding aesthetic. Everything was mass, size, arms, etc. Bicep day, tricep day, forearm day. I mean some people probably even had a separate forearm day.
The millennials are a little smarter than we are, but not without the benefit of our mistakes and knowledge. People bag on Crossfit but a lot of the fundamental principles are sound for sport science and health--even if individual boxes sometimes do take it to dangerous or frivolous extremes (which comes more down to individual personalities than a problem with the idea itself.)
Now we are in a third, new era. Post-Arnold, post-Yates, post-Coleman, even post-kipup, post-"squat every day", post-"all types of lifting machismo". Stuff like Gray Cook's FMS and the idea of true functional fitness, the value of balanced physical attributes based on personal assessment, is starting to really take firm root.
This is frankly not as important if you are 20 because your body hasn't even been alive long enough to accumulate significant amounts of wear and tear and large muscle imbalances. Where this matters most is for aging athletes.
The saying "Fast is slow, slow is smooth" is popular in the BJJ community. This could not be more true when it comes to attribute self-assessment. Fitness is a concept based on purpose--fitness to a task. Health is a concept based on feeling and well-being. They largely intersect at this balance point. Baseline fitness IS health, and baseline health is fitness--for life.
A strength athlete that can't run 100m is not fit for life. He is not healthy. He is also ultimately not even fit for his sport, because that cardio matters DURING lifts. Likewise, a grappler who sits on his butt for 8-14 hours a day is only suffering from a lack of strength IF strength is the leading attribute that is putting him at risk for either being unfit, or unhealthy. So if you are so pelvic tilted that you look like a centaur, there is no benefit in being able to bench press 405. If you can't touch your toes, you may still be able to wrestle, but if you play guard long enough, you'll get hurt.
A woman who stretches and runs 40 miles a week on a treadmill is not fit for life if she can't hoist a 30lb bag of dog food for her German Shepard and walk it to her car. Given the fucked up world we live in, I am also of the mind that most women are fundamentally unfit for life (police dependent) if they don't either carry a gun, or learn some basic grappling, because a man's upper body is about 50% stronger than a female's, and 1 in 3 women gets raped at some point in her lifetime, so learning to deploy your legs to protect yourself is as essential as other health attributes. As a big guy who lifts weights and fights, I just can't imagine how so many women walk around every day in this bubble of security, while probably 10% of men eyeing them on the street contemplate hurting them. And many don't--some women just walk around, living in fear, almost all the time. And they don't have to. Enough of that tangent.
So in terms of correctives, the most important thing is constant assessment. Where am I? What weakness is my lifestyle and genetics imposing on me, how do I fix it? How can I combine it with the stuff I like? What other attributes need to be emphasized, based on where I would like to compete with others?
In addition to assessment, the second most important thing in the whole world is compliance. How much time do people really spend creating a personal ideology that permanently commits them to the routine practice of exercise? Is it discipline? Belief systems? What can you do to make your exercise programs not only balanced and assessment-based, but also so firmly ingrained in your mind and your values such that doing them is virtually the same as brushing your teeth, or taking a shower--a form of hygiene. An ante, a non-negotiable price of admission for being alive.
These two problems--biased self-assessment, and a lack of long term compliance, are the top two reasons that people never reach their fitness and health goals. So doesn't it make sense that a LOT of energy should be devoted to making sure you end up having a bias toward working on THEM?
Sometimes, smart people hire athletic trainers to help them eliminate their personal bias. This is great. Sometimes people even do it themselves, after enough trial and error (or after an injury.) But when it comes to compliance, you can't rely on a trainer to yell at you long term (unless you're wealthy) and likewise, relying on group exercise is ok, but it's still an external motivator, and as soon as you lose interest in the group, you will probably lose interest in the exercise.
These concepts are not just native to exercise. They are true in life. Success is created by focused hard work. The hard work part is actually easier--nearly anyone can "slave away" at "hard" things they enjoy, in order to feel a sense of movement and accomplishment in life, but that's an illusion. The "focused" part is the actually "difficult" part, because blindly putting a lot of effort into something is neither "focus," nor "difficulty." Anyone can waste energy. We all generally have plenty of it. Willpower, however, is the limited resource. Values generate willpower, but only introspection generates REAL values. Introspection is, therefore, the true "hard" work.
Selectively working "hard" in directions that are mentally easy for you and your ego is tackling intensity, not tackling difficulty. Things that are actually difficult are most often mentally hard to endure in SUBTLE ways that challenge the self-image, not just in a "pain tolerance" manner. The key to balanced success is to develop a personal discipline and dogma that allows you to consistently subject yourself to necessary kinds of pain that you DON'T like, not just the kinds you do. Nobody is fooled when you "sacrifice" for intense "difficulties" which happen to serve your ego and self-image. A lifter who loves to lift intensely is not doing "hard" work by lifting "hard." "Hard" work is the inner work.
Think hard about what you REALLY want out of exercise, obliterate the trite, petty gender normative ego devices and defense mechanisms, dig deep and get a strong "why" for your choices, make it part of your soul, routinely re-examine the biases and skew that creep in, and consistently EXECUTE based on a personal version of self-discipline that doesn't just exist for its own robotic sake, but that is borne of a very strong and EMOTIONAL belief that what you are doing is a very important and permanent part of who you are and who you NEED to be, forever. "God put me here to do this," is not the worst idea an athlete ever had, but even a secular athlete can find equally strong reasons to become who they want to become and to stay who they wanted to be.
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