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It's an outdated vibe.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.
No comments:
Post a Comment