This Sunday I attended a seminar in a CrossFit Box, centered around the basic powerlifts, and some applications of more explosive movements (derived from the Olympic lifts) to stregth training, imparted by three very knowledgeable true masters in their disciplines (Felix Saman, Jorge Pérez and Andrés Mata).
It was a wonderful experience, although it was aimed at a somewhat more basic level than mine (not that I consider myself advanced, I think I'm still a rather intermediate lifter) I took a lot of tips from it, and it was good to confirm that my overall technique is good (less so in the dynamic lifts, where, specially if tired, I tend to collapse upper back and have difficulties keeping a proper upright posture under heavier loads). A vey good plus for me was getting to know in person some of the more experienced lifters in the Spanish scene (Felix happens to be the founder of the forum where I post more: Foro fuerza, and both Jorge and Andrés are extremely well accomplished lifters in their respective areas), and getting to know a bit about how they train and what they do for a living.
Another good thing I took away from the seminar was getting to see firsthand how crossfitters train, as there were a number of sessions going on (and of athletes doing their WO by themselves) in tha absolutely stunning installations. I came out with the impression that these guys are pretty damn serious about their training, and at least in that particular box pretty damn proficient in the Olympic lifts, so I have another option to go for some classes after I finish the main body of my dissertation (hopefuly by the beginning of next year)
From a training perspective, it was also good to confirm I'm in a pretty decent shape, as I could keep a good pace for the whole session (starting at 10:30, and lifting until 18:30 with just one hour rest for lunch) and went to a 1RM in the three powerlifts (for what it's worth, after not going heavy in any of them since April, I reached a not too shabby 160 in the squat, 115 in the bench press and 190 in the DL... both suquat and BP were followed by failures with 5 kg more, so that's definitely my current limit, whilst in DL I probably could have gone 10 kg heavier for a truly limit rep), so I totalled 465 kg... time to get back to slow, steady, grinding work and regain those 35 kg that should get me back above 500 (and experiment how that gain of "slow" strength affects my shot putting)
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Friday, October 31, 2014
Shot putting again!
I'm going to get more personal than usual in this post, and share some of my own history (as nobody but me reads this anyhow, there is no great risk involved in sharing) as the context it provides ties nicely with some of my recent concerns.
When I was a kid, I considered myself first and foremost a shot putter (well, maybe a reader, and then a shot putter, but reading voraciously was such an integral part of almost everybody around me that I considered it just part of what being human consisted in, and not something that set me apart). Because I developed Osgood-Schaltter syndrome (pain in the insertion of the patellar tendon) running was painful most of the times (and, to be honest, I was not that good at it), and being moderately big and burly putting the shot was a reasonably good fit for me, and I got acceptably proficient at it. Fron my early teens to my first year at Uni I trained it twice a week (basically lots of puts, plus some sprints here and there), lifted weights once or twice a week apart from that (just clean&jerk -w the awfulest technique you may have ever seen; bench press and squat -with no rack, so had to clean and press overhead the weight first; with an occasional snatch here and there), and competed almost every weekend when in season that lasted from spring to early summer, plus the odd contest in the winter months.
Because it is such a minority sport (kids that go to train athletics usually are lean, spry, and think of jumping & running, be it short distances insanely fast or long distances very fast, not the chubby kind that succesfully transfer most of their momentum to an iron ball or such similar implement) the competition was minimal, and I always did well, finishing most contests in podium positions and winning a couple medals in regional championships (both silver, one outdoor and one indoor). Not bad, definitely not outstanding and absolutely not national level.
Which was OK, as I realized soon I did not have the genetic endowement to shine (you need to be a real monster for that, once growth finishes well over 6 feet -I reached 6 by the nick of a dime- and above 240 pounds, when I never passed 190 then), and it never occured to me that consistent overeating and a much more systematic approach to weightlifting could have gotten me much closer to that "monsterness" that I thought possible (however, who that is not already wants to be fat & big as a teenager? I always prized myself of not caring about looks, or what others thought about my image -being an old fashioned rockabilly and all that, but may be excess bodyfat was just a beach too far). When I started my university career my puts had stalled for over a year (w a best put of 13m 41cm), I was becoming less and less competitive and I found rugby, so I stopped putting altogether when I was around 19 years old, and never ever putted again. In came an absorbing job, marriage, family, kids, as Zorba put it, "the full catastrophe"... some running (as Coach Rip puts it, LSD, "Long Slow Distance") once or twice a week not to completely crumble physically and the acceptance that my best days (fitness wise) were well behind me, such was the order of things and nothing could be done about it.
But when I was 36 I went to live to Mexico City, and the apartment we hired had a small gym with a few basic machines, a few treadmills... an a barbell w free weights. I started dabbling w the machines, as that is what I was familiar with (have had a few attempts at going to gyms in Madrid and Chicago, and "knew" that was the proper and safe and rational way to train), but the memories of grabbing a bar loaded with more than your own bodyweight and powerfully launching it overhead kept coming back every time I looked at the empty bar. Soon I was already using all the plates in the machines, and the heaviest dumbells in the rack (which probably weighted a paltry 20 kg or so), so I decided to give that poor, forgotten bar some use, and started searching in the Internet for some guidance on how to perform the basic exercises, and what kind of routines to use, and what I found blew my mind. There was a whole sport, called powerlifting, of whose existence I had previously not the slightest inkling, where people essentially my age lifted from the floor the equivalent in weight to a small car (and squatted and benched similarly ridiculous amounts). And there were lots of evidence that machines didn't do anything for you at all, but training with free weights had an almost miraculous effect (a little later, I found it nicely summarized -including the Zorba quote- in Dan Duane classic article for Men's Journal: Everything you know about fitness is a lie).
I've recounted elsewhere how in five years I went from a relative weakling dreaming of deadlifting what he once clean & jerked (100 kg) weighting at 94 kg with above 25% body fat to a robust guy who deadlifted more than twice his bodyweight, squatted 150 and bench pressed 110. 3 years later I was deadlifting 215, and clean & jerking 100 again (wheight was back to 92 kg, but this time mostly functioning muscle that showed very apparently every time I went to the swimming pool or the beach). I got pretty absorbed in powerlifting and weightlifting, and thought that it was one of the most fulfilling things I had ever done (it still comes after being a good husband, good father and good son & brother), just for the fun of it. At that point I believed I had always enjoyed lifting, no need to do it for the sake of something else (like put the shot farther).
But then, a couple of months ago, I decided to try shot putting again... Almost as an accesory movement to help progression in the barbell lifts, as I wanted to get faster (mostly to be able to change direction after the 2nd pull in the Olympic lifts in less time, so I could end up moving under more weight), and that means using lighter weights, plyometric training (jumps, depth drops, depth jumps, etc.) and... throws. I asked my father to lend me his master's shot (only 6,25 kg vs. the 7,257 I would use in competition, and had used all my life, but you make do what you've got), went to the park in front of my home, drawed a circle 2,134 m in diameter in the floor (no toeboard, but again, you use what you have) and after minimal stretching I started putting again, 25 years after my last puts.
I'll be reporting in a following post how it went, and how it links with the evolution of my current training philosophy
When I was a kid, I considered myself first and foremost a shot putter (well, maybe a reader, and then a shot putter, but reading voraciously was such an integral part of almost everybody around me that I considered it just part of what being human consisted in, and not something that set me apart). Because I developed Osgood-Schaltter syndrome (pain in the insertion of the patellar tendon) running was painful most of the times (and, to be honest, I was not that good at it), and being moderately big and burly putting the shot was a reasonably good fit for me, and I got acceptably proficient at it. Fron my early teens to my first year at Uni I trained it twice a week (basically lots of puts, plus some sprints here and there), lifted weights once or twice a week apart from that (just clean&jerk -w the awfulest technique you may have ever seen; bench press and squat -with no rack, so had to clean and press overhead the weight first; with an occasional snatch here and there), and competed almost every weekend when in season that lasted from spring to early summer, plus the odd contest in the winter months.
Because it is such a minority sport (kids that go to train athletics usually are lean, spry, and think of jumping & running, be it short distances insanely fast or long distances very fast, not the chubby kind that succesfully transfer most of their momentum to an iron ball or such similar implement) the competition was minimal, and I always did well, finishing most contests in podium positions and winning a couple medals in regional championships (both silver, one outdoor and one indoor). Not bad, definitely not outstanding and absolutely not national level.
Which was OK, as I realized soon I did not have the genetic endowement to shine (you need to be a real monster for that, once growth finishes well over 6 feet -I reached 6 by the nick of a dime- and above 240 pounds, when I never passed 190 then), and it never occured to me that consistent overeating and a much more systematic approach to weightlifting could have gotten me much closer to that "monsterness" that I thought possible (however, who that is not already wants to be fat & big as a teenager? I always prized myself of not caring about looks, or what others thought about my image -being an old fashioned rockabilly and all that, but may be excess bodyfat was just a beach too far). When I started my university career my puts had stalled for over a year (w a best put of 13m 41cm), I was becoming less and less competitive and I found rugby, so I stopped putting altogether when I was around 19 years old, and never ever putted again. In came an absorbing job, marriage, family, kids, as Zorba put it, "the full catastrophe"... some running (as Coach Rip puts it, LSD, "Long Slow Distance") once or twice a week not to completely crumble physically and the acceptance that my best days (fitness wise) were well behind me, such was the order of things and nothing could be done about it.
But when I was 36 I went to live to Mexico City, and the apartment we hired had a small gym with a few basic machines, a few treadmills... an a barbell w free weights. I started dabbling w the machines, as that is what I was familiar with (have had a few attempts at going to gyms in Madrid and Chicago, and "knew" that was the proper and safe and rational way to train), but the memories of grabbing a bar loaded with more than your own bodyweight and powerfully launching it overhead kept coming back every time I looked at the empty bar. Soon I was already using all the plates in the machines, and the heaviest dumbells in the rack (which probably weighted a paltry 20 kg or so), so I decided to give that poor, forgotten bar some use, and started searching in the Internet for some guidance on how to perform the basic exercises, and what kind of routines to use, and what I found blew my mind. There was a whole sport, called powerlifting, of whose existence I had previously not the slightest inkling, where people essentially my age lifted from the floor the equivalent in weight to a small car (and squatted and benched similarly ridiculous amounts). And there were lots of evidence that machines didn't do anything for you at all, but training with free weights had an almost miraculous effect (a little later, I found it nicely summarized -including the Zorba quote- in Dan Duane classic article for Men's Journal: Everything you know about fitness is a lie).
I've recounted elsewhere how in five years I went from a relative weakling dreaming of deadlifting what he once clean & jerked (100 kg) weighting at 94 kg with above 25% body fat to a robust guy who deadlifted more than twice his bodyweight, squatted 150 and bench pressed 110. 3 years later I was deadlifting 215, and clean & jerking 100 again (wheight was back to 92 kg, but this time mostly functioning muscle that showed very apparently every time I went to the swimming pool or the beach). I got pretty absorbed in powerlifting and weightlifting, and thought that it was one of the most fulfilling things I had ever done (it still comes after being a good husband, good father and good son & brother), just for the fun of it. At that point I believed I had always enjoyed lifting, no need to do it for the sake of something else (like put the shot farther).
But then, a couple of months ago, I decided to try shot putting again... Almost as an accesory movement to help progression in the barbell lifts, as I wanted to get faster (mostly to be able to change direction after the 2nd pull in the Olympic lifts in less time, so I could end up moving under more weight), and that means using lighter weights, plyometric training (jumps, depth drops, depth jumps, etc.) and... throws. I asked my father to lend me his master's shot (only 6,25 kg vs. the 7,257 I would use in competition, and had used all my life, but you make do what you've got), went to the park in front of my home, drawed a circle 2,134 m in diameter in the floor (no toeboard, but again, you use what you have) and after minimal stretching I started putting again, 25 years after my last puts.
I'll be reporting in a following post how it went, and how it links with the evolution of my current training philosophy
Thursday, October 23, 2014
The Olympic lifts and their power versions
This last Sunday, in my Intensity day I got a new full snatch PR lifting 60 kg. Still less than my power snatch PR, where a couple months ago I made 70 kg (equalling my all time best). Similarly, I got a new all time full C&J of 90 kg, which again compares unfavourably with my all time best power clean (and ultra shitty jerk that defies any labeling) of 100 kg.
That got me thinking to what extent was it wise to devote my energy to improve on the full lifts, when I probably could get more benefits from using the heavier (for me) power versions, with the added advantage of not abusing my troubled knees so much. Actually, you search the interwebz and for each article extolling the virtues of the Olympic lifts you can find a hundred saying how the power versions are just as good for most purposes (including even the improvement of the competition version of the lifts).
However, being the rationalist asshole I am, I wanted to find some reason (that could be successfully defended in front of my fellow humans, as a reason is only such to the extent that it can be shared, discussed and accepted by someone in similar circumstances to ours) for keeping on performing the lifts, apart from their overall awesomeness and badassery, and this article from Joel Smith on Juggernaut gave me jsut what I needed: Joel Smith on his assitance to Become Unstoppable 3
Essentially, what he harps about, what resonated most with him of the seminary he attended, was how to be fast you need to learn to relax very quickly some muscles, so you can contract others. That's exactly what the full lift gives you that the power version does not: in order to catch the bar low you have to accelerate it through a much shorter range of motion and then completely relax the muscles you have just contracted hard so you become flexible enough to adopt a very flexibility-demanding position.
Taking the snatch as an example, in the full snatch as soon as I feel the bar passing the navel I have to stop pulling to change direction and start going down in order to arrive there before it reaches its zenith, when I have to be already much lower than the bar so I can straighten my arms and start stabilizing it while I finish riding it down. In the power snatch, on the other hand, it is just pull, pull, pull, then pull some more, and finally try to straighten the arms when the bar is already overhead (something similar applies to the clean).
Now, it could be argued that this "pull faster 'cuz you have less time and less range to do it, then relax completely the muscles you were pulling with to be able to stretch them insanely" has very little transference to anything outside the ultra-limited realm of Olympic weightlifting (the actual sport, not the recreational application of it), and that developing the ability to just pull fast w more weight, damn the torpedoes about relaxing anything during the movement, has a more direct application to most sports... maybe, maybe not. I'm guessing that for the particular endeavor I'm currently involved with (throwing a 16 pounds iron ball as far as possible) it may come in handy, as I have to accelerate the implement in a relatively short time and space, and have to go through a number of positions that also require some stretching in order to better impart speed to it before I let it go.
I could be more scientific and run a couple of training cycles, the first one performing the full version of the lifts, the second one focusing on the power version w more weight, and seeing which ones correlates with longer throws, but for now on I'll just go with my gut and keep receiving as low as I can in the gym (which is not that low, given the limited flexibility of one of my knees, but as for now I'll just run with it)
That got me thinking to what extent was it wise to devote my energy to improve on the full lifts, when I probably could get more benefits from using the heavier (for me) power versions, with the added advantage of not abusing my troubled knees so much. Actually, you search the interwebz and for each article extolling the virtues of the Olympic lifts you can find a hundred saying how the power versions are just as good for most purposes (including even the improvement of the competition version of the lifts).
However, being the rationalist asshole I am, I wanted to find some reason (that could be successfully defended in front of my fellow humans, as a reason is only such to the extent that it can be shared, discussed and accepted by someone in similar circumstances to ours) for keeping on performing the lifts, apart from their overall awesomeness and badassery, and this article from Joel Smith on Juggernaut gave me jsut what I needed: Joel Smith on his assitance to Become Unstoppable 3
Essentially, what he harps about, what resonated most with him of the seminary he attended, was how to be fast you need to learn to relax very quickly some muscles, so you can contract others. That's exactly what the full lift gives you that the power version does not: in order to catch the bar low you have to accelerate it through a much shorter range of motion and then completely relax the muscles you have just contracted hard so you become flexible enough to adopt a very flexibility-demanding position.
Taking the snatch as an example, in the full snatch as soon as I feel the bar passing the navel I have to stop pulling to change direction and start going down in order to arrive there before it reaches its zenith, when I have to be already much lower than the bar so I can straighten my arms and start stabilizing it while I finish riding it down. In the power snatch, on the other hand, it is just pull, pull, pull, then pull some more, and finally try to straighten the arms when the bar is already overhead (something similar applies to the clean).
Now, it could be argued that this "pull faster 'cuz you have less time and less range to do it, then relax completely the muscles you were pulling with to be able to stretch them insanely" has very little transference to anything outside the ultra-limited realm of Olympic weightlifting (the actual sport, not the recreational application of it), and that developing the ability to just pull fast w more weight, damn the torpedoes about relaxing anything during the movement, has a more direct application to most sports... maybe, maybe not. I'm guessing that for the particular endeavor I'm currently involved with (throwing a 16 pounds iron ball as far as possible) it may come in handy, as I have to accelerate the implement in a relatively short time and space, and have to go through a number of positions that also require some stretching in order to better impart speed to it before I let it go.
I could be more scientific and run a couple of training cycles, the first one performing the full version of the lifts, the second one focusing on the power version w more weight, and seeing which ones correlates with longer throws, but for now on I'll just go with my gut and keep receiving as low as I can in the gym (which is not that low, given the limited flexibility of one of my knees, but as for now I'll just run with it)
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Some problems with typical leftist critique of current socioeconomic system
Just finished reading "Unequal Freedoms" by John McMurtry, for which I had the highest expectations, as I (wrongly, it turns out) believed it would come from a similiar philosophical background (Francfortian interest in understanding how the dominant reason shapes our perceptions of reality, biasing them so we are more accomodating of the system's multiple drawbacks and have our critical capabilities more blunted -indeed, the leitmotiv of the whole Francfortian effort is probably to determine how it is possible to still think critically in a world of different totalitarianisms, be they forcibly imposed or voluntarily accepted by the masses, but I digress) and reach similar conclusions to the ones I'm approaching, some of which I've been sharing in recent posts.
To say I was disillusioned would be a gross understatement. The arguments were crude (the criticism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, specially, seemed mostly based on a cartoonish misreading of fractions of their works, selected more by its polemical content than by its coherence or alignment with their whole worldview, and its influence on their contemporaries; the constant recourse to quotes of Milton Friedman was also characteristic: we get it, the guy was a monster, a champion for selfishness and a wicked anthropology -man as maximizer, although I would use more the work of Gary Becker to pounce on that..., there is no need to come back again and again to his pretty shallow and in the end uninteresting ideas to advance an argument, although it probably has its uses to rally the troops and arouse the animus of the like-minded), the philosophy almost nonexistent (the book is a litany of depressing facts, which would have benefited from some editing and proof reading, as it contains some blatant errors likestating that 60% of American seniors live below the thrshold of poverty -they are actually wealthier than the average of the whole population, or that the world population is approaching 56 billion -it actually reached 9 billion this year) and the alternatives pretty schematic and not much flesehd out (out of generic calls to "organize from the ground up" ¿around what principles, to fight for what causes, according to what organization: political parties, civic groups, friends & family?, "resist the money-code" ¿doing what, voting for different education, starting a commune, taking pro bono work? or "stand up against big corporations and their government lackeys" ¿not paying taxes, not buying their products, what when they are utility or communications monopolies?).
Its dubious use of the term metaphysics to denounce what he perceives as the deification of the market also made me cringe a number of times... I've grown used to progressives having no clue whatsoever of what believers think or understand of their faith (actually, even aknowledging there may be different takes on what there really is "out there" that seriously consider alternatives to the dominant materialism seems to be already too much of a stretch for most so-called philosophers nowadays), so it was no surprise to find here the same misconceptions (about the fundamentalism of the market, which any religious fundamentalist would find quite puzzling to see compared to his attitudes toward God, knowledge and fallibility), what disheartened me was to see it coming from somebody supposedly steeped in philosophical discourse (just shows the pityful state of fragmentation of academic philosophy that a professor on the subject can so utterly misconstrue what metaphysics is all about).
At least, reviewing my furious scribblings on the margins around that paragraphs that I disagreed more strongly with, I came out with a better understanding of my dislike of most of the "radical" criticism of the system coming from the left: it is the (seemingly) unavoidable tendency to personalize, or rather, homunculize, what is a complex set of institutions, practices and modes of thinking and reasoning (that, admittedly, are faulty and frankly improvable, although not from a naive and misinformed ideology with too many debts with supposed alternatives from the past that shared most of its problems). I very soon grew tired of reading how "the market" was cruel, evil, selfish, etc. Sorry, but an institution (and even less so one that encompasses almost all of Today's smaller institutions inside it) cannot be any of those things. A thinking person, what used to be called "an agent" can be any of them, as they presuppose freedom, intent, a perceptual apparatus that can give feedback on the results of her actions and the ability to set goals, understand symbolic signals (and usually also be able to create them) and use them to adjust those goals accordingly. If someone has a "bad character" (like that homunculized market definitely seems to have in the eyes of its leftist critics) that in turn leads him to perform bad actions, you can discuss how to improve it through education, providing the right stimulus (or, in market parlance that may give the author under analysis an apoplexy, the right incentives), reasoning, or even deterrence through the threat of punishment.
But you can not use any of those responses on an institution (what I'm saying about "the market", or "the market mindset" would apply equally well to "the big corporations" -I'm really fed up with people stating naively how evil, destructive, misbehaving, corrupting, perverted, etc. they are... sorry but no, maybe their top executives, or even all their employees, share in some of those character traits, but not for sure the juridical fiction that only metaphorically they "work for"-, the "money code", or, from the other side of the political spectrum, "terrorism", "feminism", "environmental absolutism"...). This is why their proposals to end what they perceive (rightly, I happen to think) as a sad and intolerable state of affairs are normally so lame, and end up being no more than empty wishes that humans would change and end up "seeing the light" and rejecting wrong ideas about selfishness, greed, excessive individualism and utility maximization. Sorry again, but even if proclaiming it may be (marginally) better than doing nothing, it is not going to take us very far, specially in light of the (typically unaknowledged) fact that even through the current recession/ depression the last two to three decades have been pretty good for the majority of the world population. It can be discussed how big is that majority, and to what extent the increase in all the measured variables of well being (from caloric intake to monetary income to average height to life expectatino) has been equitably distributed (it has obviously not), but the "brute truth" is taht the awful, irresponsible, hateful, distasteful, deceiving, lying, scurrilous, detestable, anti-humane, life-denying world system we live within has been actually pretty decent for at least the 2 billion people who have stopped being poor in the last decades, plus for the 3 billion people that were already out of poverty back then, the vast majority of whom stayed out...
I do know that "progress" has come at a price, in terms of environmental degradation, continuing pockets of violence (which, however, has declined substantially from historical standards) and cultural impoverishment, but negating its very reality is as blind and idiotic as focusing one sidedly on its advantages.
So from now on I forsake any leftist tendency I may still had. The system is indeed "improvable", but not through naive calls for its demise, not by naive calls to revolutionary tactics that stopped being viable a century ago, not by naive denunciations of its exagerated evils (I think the true ones aer justification enough for wanting to replace it with something better)... Not by naive calls that in the end change nothing, but through detailed changes in the legislation and in the organization of society that can be actually achieved, be it through the existing political process or by other alternatives that would in turn need to be clearly laid out. That is from now on my litmus test for any book I read on political philosophy (or sociology, or politics, or anything at all now I come to think about it). I'll consider them good insofar they map out a realistic path towards achievable improvement, and I'll discard as useless those that confort themselves and their readers with vague appellations to improve human nature or educate the public better (the public condones all the evil and undersirable features of the current system not because they are misinformed and require an enlightened pundit to clarify how things really are for them, but because they still derive more benefits than discomforts from the system, in their own terms, according to aht they really value... until that calculus is materially changed by actually modifying those benefits and discomforts no change will ever be forthcoming).
To say I was disillusioned would be a gross understatement. The arguments were crude (the criticism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, specially, seemed mostly based on a cartoonish misreading of fractions of their works, selected more by its polemical content than by its coherence or alignment with their whole worldview, and its influence on their contemporaries; the constant recourse to quotes of Milton Friedman was also characteristic: we get it, the guy was a monster, a champion for selfishness and a wicked anthropology -man as maximizer, although I would use more the work of Gary Becker to pounce on that..., there is no need to come back again and again to his pretty shallow and in the end uninteresting ideas to advance an argument, although it probably has its uses to rally the troops and arouse the animus of the like-minded), the philosophy almost nonexistent (the book is a litany of depressing facts, which would have benefited from some editing and proof reading, as it contains some blatant errors likestating that 60% of American seniors live below the thrshold of poverty -they are actually wealthier than the average of the whole population, or that the world population is approaching 56 billion -it actually reached 9 billion this year) and the alternatives pretty schematic and not much flesehd out (out of generic calls to "organize from the ground up" ¿around what principles, to fight for what causes, according to what organization: political parties, civic groups, friends & family?, "resist the money-code" ¿doing what, voting for different education, starting a commune, taking pro bono work? or "stand up against big corporations and their government lackeys" ¿not paying taxes, not buying their products, what when they are utility or communications monopolies?).
Its dubious use of the term metaphysics to denounce what he perceives as the deification of the market also made me cringe a number of times... I've grown used to progressives having no clue whatsoever of what believers think or understand of their faith (actually, even aknowledging there may be different takes on what there really is "out there" that seriously consider alternatives to the dominant materialism seems to be already too much of a stretch for most so-called philosophers nowadays), so it was no surprise to find here the same misconceptions (about the fundamentalism of the market, which any religious fundamentalist would find quite puzzling to see compared to his attitudes toward God, knowledge and fallibility), what disheartened me was to see it coming from somebody supposedly steeped in philosophical discourse (just shows the pityful state of fragmentation of academic philosophy that a professor on the subject can so utterly misconstrue what metaphysics is all about).
At least, reviewing my furious scribblings on the margins around that paragraphs that I disagreed more strongly with, I came out with a better understanding of my dislike of most of the "radical" criticism of the system coming from the left: it is the (seemingly) unavoidable tendency to personalize, or rather, homunculize, what is a complex set of institutions, practices and modes of thinking and reasoning (that, admittedly, are faulty and frankly improvable, although not from a naive and misinformed ideology with too many debts with supposed alternatives from the past that shared most of its problems). I very soon grew tired of reading how "the market" was cruel, evil, selfish, etc. Sorry, but an institution (and even less so one that encompasses almost all of Today's smaller institutions inside it) cannot be any of those things. A thinking person, what used to be called "an agent" can be any of them, as they presuppose freedom, intent, a perceptual apparatus that can give feedback on the results of her actions and the ability to set goals, understand symbolic signals (and usually also be able to create them) and use them to adjust those goals accordingly. If someone has a "bad character" (like that homunculized market definitely seems to have in the eyes of its leftist critics) that in turn leads him to perform bad actions, you can discuss how to improve it through education, providing the right stimulus (or, in market parlance that may give the author under analysis an apoplexy, the right incentives), reasoning, or even deterrence through the threat of punishment.
But you can not use any of those responses on an institution (what I'm saying about "the market", or "the market mindset" would apply equally well to "the big corporations" -I'm really fed up with people stating naively how evil, destructive, misbehaving, corrupting, perverted, etc. they are... sorry but no, maybe their top executives, or even all their employees, share in some of those character traits, but not for sure the juridical fiction that only metaphorically they "work for"-, the "money code", or, from the other side of the political spectrum, "terrorism", "feminism", "environmental absolutism"...). This is why their proposals to end what they perceive (rightly, I happen to think) as a sad and intolerable state of affairs are normally so lame, and end up being no more than empty wishes that humans would change and end up "seeing the light" and rejecting wrong ideas about selfishness, greed, excessive individualism and utility maximization. Sorry again, but even if proclaiming it may be (marginally) better than doing nothing, it is not going to take us very far, specially in light of the (typically unaknowledged) fact that even through the current recession/ depression the last two to three decades have been pretty good for the majority of the world population. It can be discussed how big is that majority, and to what extent the increase in all the measured variables of well being (from caloric intake to monetary income to average height to life expectatino) has been equitably distributed (it has obviously not), but the "brute truth" is taht the awful, irresponsible, hateful, distasteful, deceiving, lying, scurrilous, detestable, anti-humane, life-denying world system we live within has been actually pretty decent for at least the 2 billion people who have stopped being poor in the last decades, plus for the 3 billion people that were already out of poverty back then, the vast majority of whom stayed out...
I do know that "progress" has come at a price, in terms of environmental degradation, continuing pockets of violence (which, however, has declined substantially from historical standards) and cultural impoverishment, but negating its very reality is as blind and idiotic as focusing one sidedly on its advantages.
So from now on I forsake any leftist tendency I may still had. The system is indeed "improvable", but not through naive calls for its demise, not by naive calls to revolutionary tactics that stopped being viable a century ago, not by naive denunciations of its exagerated evils (I think the true ones aer justification enough for wanting to replace it with something better)... Not by naive calls that in the end change nothing, but through detailed changes in the legislation and in the organization of society that can be actually achieved, be it through the existing political process or by other alternatives that would in turn need to be clearly laid out. That is from now on my litmus test for any book I read on political philosophy (or sociology, or politics, or anything at all now I come to think about it). I'll consider them good insofar they map out a realistic path towards achievable improvement, and I'll discard as useless those that confort themselves and their readers with vague appellations to improve human nature or educate the public better (the public condones all the evil and undersirable features of the current system not because they are misinformed and require an enlightened pundit to clarify how things really are for them, but because they still derive more benefits than discomforts from the system, in their own terms, according to aht they really value... until that calculus is materially changed by actually modifying those benefits and discomforts no change will ever be forthcoming).
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Love more!
Not very original, I know (I have openly stolen the title from a recent post by James Steel mourning the loss of his elder sister). These past weekend I went with my familia to Vitoria (North of Spain, although in the Basque Country they consider it "The South, and have some slight dislike for them for being too Spanish, but I digress) to spend time with a close friend from our teenage days, whose husband had been diagnosed lung cancer, and had one lung surgically removed.
The man was taking it like a real champ, showing his usual good humour and, although it was obvious he was still going through a lot of pain (which, thanks to high doses of painkillers, was still barely bearable) and had gone previously through a real ordeal, brushing aside his illness as if it were not that important. However, the prognosis is still uncertain, and he has to go through heavy chemotherapy in the following months (which I know from close experience can be a very daunting prospect).
Of course, being the thinking type I am, that got me in quite some considerations about how fleeting life is, and how even the things we consider a more substantial part of our being (physical vigour) can be taken from us at a moment notice. And that brought me to the subject of my last post: what has real value and what not.
The dominant reason in our society tells us that almost only the possession (and exclusive enjoyment) of material goods have value. The "economic problem" (as still formulated by Keynes), once subsistence is more or less guaranteed (more in social democratic societies, European style, less so in pure market oriented ones, American style), is understood to be, at a collective level, how to produce the maximum possible amount of those goods, while at an individual level to grab for oneself as much as possible of that social product, or at least to grab moer than one's neighbors and in-laws...
But of course, even when material comfort can buy some minor advantages in treating a serious illness (again, less so in a single payer system as is more or less prevalent in Europe), when we confront our own fragility, and our necessarily mortal condition (still waiting to see Ray Kurzweil croak, btw, so I can safely state that he wasted a monumental amount of effort and money for nothing) we tend to see more clearly that just accumulating things is a very poor excuse for a life.
Shaftesbury said it best, when in his "Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times" he wrote that of all pleasures we grow tired, except of the pleasures of giving and helping others. Having dense, fullfilling relationships (something that is difficult to do when participating full time in the "rat race", as society forces us to do) trumps having money and job recognition every time (specially because job recognition and social status are the ficklest of emotions). So, as I said in the title, go out and love more...
The man was taking it like a real champ, showing his usual good humour and, although it was obvious he was still going through a lot of pain (which, thanks to high doses of painkillers, was still barely bearable) and had gone previously through a real ordeal, brushing aside his illness as if it were not that important. However, the prognosis is still uncertain, and he has to go through heavy chemotherapy in the following months (which I know from close experience can be a very daunting prospect).
Of course, being the thinking type I am, that got me in quite some considerations about how fleeting life is, and how even the things we consider a more substantial part of our being (physical vigour) can be taken from us at a moment notice. And that brought me to the subject of my last post: what has real value and what not.
The dominant reason in our society tells us that almost only the possession (and exclusive enjoyment) of material goods have value. The "economic problem" (as still formulated by Keynes), once subsistence is more or less guaranteed (more in social democratic societies, European style, less so in pure market oriented ones, American style), is understood to be, at a collective level, how to produce the maximum possible amount of those goods, while at an individual level to grab for oneself as much as possible of that social product, or at least to grab moer than one's neighbors and in-laws...
But of course, even when material comfort can buy some minor advantages in treating a serious illness (again, less so in a single payer system as is more or less prevalent in Europe), when we confront our own fragility, and our necessarily mortal condition (still waiting to see Ray Kurzweil croak, btw, so I can safely state that he wasted a monumental amount of effort and money for nothing) we tend to see more clearly that just accumulating things is a very poor excuse for a life.
Shaftesbury said it best, when in his "Characteristicks of men, manners, opinions, times" he wrote that of all pleasures we grow tired, except of the pleasures of giving and helping others. Having dense, fullfilling relationships (something that is difficult to do when participating full time in the "rat race", as society forces us to do) trumps having money and job recognition every time (specially because job recognition and social status are the ficklest of emotions). So, as I said in the title, go out and love more...
Monday, August 18, 2014
Of value and wages
Back to work after a couple weeks on Holiday in which I had neither time nor desire to post (not for lack of ideas, as I was furiously engaged with my doctoral dissertation, which has received a substantial ooomph).
During this time I finished the "Principles of Political Economy and Taxation" by Ricardo, an almost neccessary sequel to my recent re-reading of Capital's first volume; the "Essays on Persuasion" by Keynes, and a quite stimulating book on essays about one of them ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"), edited by a couple of Italian proffessors with some very interesting contributions (those by Stiglitz, Phelps, Fitoussi and Boldrin come immediately to mind) and a very dissppointing one (by Gary Becker, no less).
Now what this relatievly intense dabbling in the arcane realm of classical (and in the last case, post-classical) economics has left me with is the fact that none of the authors mentioned (and, apparently, none of the ones they, in turn, reference) have the slightest explanation of what the value of merchandise is, or where it comes from. If you have no way of adscribe, calculate or anyhow assign a value to something, be it a material good or a service (labor) it is obvious that you will be hard pressed to come up with a plausible defence of whatever system to allocate those goods/ services you happen to favour, and it that sense both the Ricardian and the Marxian analyses of how society should be organized from an economic standpoint (i.e., how goods should be distributed, and what the proper wage level, interest paid to capital and rent should be) utterly lack plausibility (in favour of Ricardo we can say that when you are defending the status quo -a status quo that has been exceptionally favourable to you- you can at least claim that the onus of the proof lays on the other side... Marx can not claim such a defence). What has really surprised me is that they all fall back on the (quite unsubstantiated, if I recall correctly) claim originally made by Adam Smith in the "Wealth of Nations" that all value comes from labor...
Of course, such an origin flies in the face of our commonest experience: why would then more fertile land be more valuable than less fertile one, even before being worked on? (this is less of a problem for Ricardo than for Marx, as for him rent is a separate category, with its own separate explanation). Why would gold be more valuable than iron (the explanation that Ricardo gives about it requiring so much more work for its extraction reminds me of the Aristotelian dictum that heavier objects fall so much faster than light ones, in proportion to their weight... it was not so difficult in both cases to disprove such easily quantifiable fallacies) Why would, of course, be some labor, according to the skill required to perform it, more expensive than other (if both took the same amount to reproduce, specially in an era of expanding mandatory education)? My best attempt at an answer is that in the case of Ricardo it was due to intellectual laziness (surprising, I know... but the whole issue didn't interest him so much, as for him use value was a metaphysical abstraction, all he needed to care about was exchange value as expressed in prices, regardless of how it was originally justified), for Marx it was absolutely essential to substantiate his claim that only the proletariat creates value, that it was forced to undersell to the bloodsucking capitalists, and that being such a foundational feature of capitalism the only way to evercome such injustice was to overthrow the system wholesale and abolish exchange value altogether.
Which leaves us with the question of why Adam Smith, who was neither lazy nor interested in the system's overthrow, formulated the difference between use value and exchange value in the first place, and declared the only source of the second to be (in equilibrium conditions) the amount of labor required for the creation and transportation of the exchanged good... A question that will require a separate post (and a re-reading of the "Wealth of Nations", a perspective almost as dreadful as continuing with the 2nd and 3rd volumes of "Capital")
During this time I finished the "Principles of Political Economy and Taxation" by Ricardo, an almost neccessary sequel to my recent re-reading of Capital's first volume; the "Essays on Persuasion" by Keynes, and a quite stimulating book on essays about one of them ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"), edited by a couple of Italian proffessors with some very interesting contributions (those by Stiglitz, Phelps, Fitoussi and Boldrin come immediately to mind) and a very dissppointing one (by Gary Becker, no less).
Now what this relatievly intense dabbling in the arcane realm of classical (and in the last case, post-classical) economics has left me with is the fact that none of the authors mentioned (and, apparently, none of the ones they, in turn, reference) have the slightest explanation of what the value of merchandise is, or where it comes from. If you have no way of adscribe, calculate or anyhow assign a value to something, be it a material good or a service (labor) it is obvious that you will be hard pressed to come up with a plausible defence of whatever system to allocate those goods/ services you happen to favour, and it that sense both the Ricardian and the Marxian analyses of how society should be organized from an economic standpoint (i.e., how goods should be distributed, and what the proper wage level, interest paid to capital and rent should be) utterly lack plausibility (in favour of Ricardo we can say that when you are defending the status quo -a status quo that has been exceptionally favourable to you- you can at least claim that the onus of the proof lays on the other side... Marx can not claim such a defence). What has really surprised me is that they all fall back on the (quite unsubstantiated, if I recall correctly) claim originally made by Adam Smith in the "Wealth of Nations" that all value comes from labor...
Of course, such an origin flies in the face of our commonest experience: why would then more fertile land be more valuable than less fertile one, even before being worked on? (this is less of a problem for Ricardo than for Marx, as for him rent is a separate category, with its own separate explanation). Why would gold be more valuable than iron (the explanation that Ricardo gives about it requiring so much more work for its extraction reminds me of the Aristotelian dictum that heavier objects fall so much faster than light ones, in proportion to their weight... it was not so difficult in both cases to disprove such easily quantifiable fallacies) Why would, of course, be some labor, according to the skill required to perform it, more expensive than other (if both took the same amount to reproduce, specially in an era of expanding mandatory education)? My best attempt at an answer is that in the case of Ricardo it was due to intellectual laziness (surprising, I know... but the whole issue didn't interest him so much, as for him use value was a metaphysical abstraction, all he needed to care about was exchange value as expressed in prices, regardless of how it was originally justified), for Marx it was absolutely essential to substantiate his claim that only the proletariat creates value, that it was forced to undersell to the bloodsucking capitalists, and that being such a foundational feature of capitalism the only way to evercome such injustice was to overthrow the system wholesale and abolish exchange value altogether.
Which leaves us with the question of why Adam Smith, who was neither lazy nor interested in the system's overthrow, formulated the difference between use value and exchange value in the first place, and declared the only source of the second to be (in equilibrium conditions) the amount of labor required for the creation and transportation of the exchanged good... A question that will require a separate post (and a re-reading of the "Wealth of Nations", a perspective almost as dreadful as continuing with the 2nd and 3rd volumes of "Capital")
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Progress in the snatch!
Last week I finally repeated my best snatch ever, lifting 70 kg in a single, seamless movement, above my head. A puny number for those steeped in the art and lore of weightlifting, but a significant milestone for me, as the last time I performed such modest feat of strength was about 24 years ago, at the tender age of 20, in my 2nd year of college (the last year I consistently trained w weights for maximal strength, as afterwards I focused more on rugby, which demanded less peak power production, and which led me to less consistent training and finally to leave barbells altogether).
When I started lifting again, about 7 years ago (being 37 YO), I couldn't even dream of regaining the strength level of my youth, and back then I thought just being able to DL (thus, lift from the floor to about hip level) what back then I clean & jerked (thus could put violently over my head) would be just the shit.
Three years after that (40 YO) I was deadlifting 100. Two years more and I DL'ed 180 (the big breakthrough came, obviously, when I learned how to train for steady, consistent, strength gains, thanks mostly to "Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe and 5/3/1 by Jim Wendler), and I was C&J'ing above 80 kg, and wondering if I would get to 100 before ripe old age took away most of my type II muscle fibers, rending me unable to move explosively overhead anything heavier than a toothpick. But the snatch always posed a significant challenge, as it seemed to be much less dependant on brute force, and much more on subtler and harder to develop qualities, like speed, coordination and even, dare I say it... grace.
So while my brutest and most basic lifts (squat, bench press and deadlift) soared my advances in the C&J were slower, and in the snatch nonexistent... until now. A mix of pure accumulation (snatching two and three times a week, alternating volume orientes sessions -but still based around singles and doubles between 80 & 90%- w intensity oriented sessions, going to a daily max), better technique (so yep, seeing lots of videos in the interwebz, plus reading a ton of articles may pay off, if you are willing to, in addition to passively watching and reading, put the ton of work required to actually apply what you learn) and quite some mobility work (to be able to better adopt the right position from which to pull efficiently).
I'm not saying that technique wise (or even speed wise) I'm anywhere near where I want to be, as my form is still somthing quite ugly to look at, but you put in the hard work with a totally different mindset when you see results coming and that effort paying off... next lofty goal: a bodyweight snatch! (that requires a modest additional improvement of 20 kg, when the last three years have taken me from 50 to 70... but hey, if you want to reach the moon, aim for the stars)
When I started lifting again, about 7 years ago (being 37 YO), I couldn't even dream of regaining the strength level of my youth, and back then I thought just being able to DL (thus, lift from the floor to about hip level) what back then I clean & jerked (thus could put violently over my head) would be just the shit.
Three years after that (40 YO) I was deadlifting 100. Two years more and I DL'ed 180 (the big breakthrough came, obviously, when I learned how to train for steady, consistent, strength gains, thanks mostly to "Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe and 5/3/1 by Jim Wendler), and I was C&J'ing above 80 kg, and wondering if I would get to 100 before ripe old age took away most of my type II muscle fibers, rending me unable to move explosively overhead anything heavier than a toothpick. But the snatch always posed a significant challenge, as it seemed to be much less dependant on brute force, and much more on subtler and harder to develop qualities, like speed, coordination and even, dare I say it... grace.
So while my brutest and most basic lifts (squat, bench press and deadlift) soared my advances in the C&J were slower, and in the snatch nonexistent... until now. A mix of pure accumulation (snatching two and three times a week, alternating volume orientes sessions -but still based around singles and doubles between 80 & 90%- w intensity oriented sessions, going to a daily max), better technique (so yep, seeing lots of videos in the interwebz, plus reading a ton of articles may pay off, if you are willing to, in addition to passively watching and reading, put the ton of work required to actually apply what you learn) and quite some mobility work (to be able to better adopt the right position from which to pull efficiently).
I'm not saying that technique wise (or even speed wise) I'm anywhere near where I want to be, as my form is still somthing quite ugly to look at, but you put in the hard work with a totally different mindset when you see results coming and that effort paying off... next lofty goal: a bodyweight snatch! (that requires a modest additional improvement of 20 kg, when the last three years have taken me from 50 to 70... but hey, if you want to reach the moon, aim for the stars)
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