Of D Minor and Snatches (Arts & Crafts)

As I’ve said many times (and any casual reader of this blog can confirm by perusing through the numerous posts), I normally don’t speak much about my life in here. I write to get better at writing, and when I have lots of writing to do in other venues (like preparing class materials or finishing a book) I can spend multiple months without posting without feeling I am missing on something. Sounds a bit autistic, but that’s how things are. However, today I intend to make an exception, and provide my readers with some data about what I’ve been doing lately in a number of fronts this last couple of years, for reasons that will become apparent es the post progresses. The apparently banal (or self-centered data) I’ll be providing at the beginning will serve (I hope) to put in context some more universal reflections on the nature of art, and the pursuit of the good life (that, consisting in a conscious application of artistic skills, the more difficult to acquire the better, constitutes an art in itself).  

2019 was for me a good reading year. Not stellar, but pretty close. I finished 85 books (a bit more than 7 per month, even if by saying so I risk being labelled as more of a frequency-obsessed guy than with my previous post) and 10 comic books (or graphic novels, although I’m not a great fan of that label), totaling a bit more than 24,000 pages (for an average of 67 pages per day). Not awful, but slightly below what I read in 2018, when I finished reading less books (just 76) but on average much thicker, as I went above 26,000 pages then (topping 70 pages/day, something I hadn’t done since I finished my first university career). I confess that I was a bit pissed by that, as since the birth of my last son, eight years ago, every single year I had managed to read a bit more than the previous one, as taking care of the young one demanded less time (as he became more independent, started attending school, and enjoyed more playing alone, or with his friends, than with his parents). SO, the fact that I had read less in 2019 demanded some introspection to find out what I had been doing that kept me from reading as much as I used to.

First place I looked was physical activity. On the weightlifting front, I continued consolidating my recovery from a semi old injury (tear of biceps tendon) trying not to fall prey of a much older one (replacement of ACL and removal of meniscus of left knee). I kept a fairly high volume of training (moved a bit more than 625 tons in the year, spread in 17 microcycles, which compares favorably with a bit less than 440 tons in 23 MCs in 2018) after leaving, in July 2018, a very Oly-centric training methodology that was really doing nothing for me (it kept me mobile and moderately fit from a cardiovascular perspective, but I was slowly losing peak strength), so in 2019 I ended up doing less microcycles (they went from during roughly a week to being planned for two weeks, allowing for better recovery between sessions) but moving many more kg in each of them. Although my left knee keeps degrading (the unavoidable wear and tear of old age) and losing mobility (apart from being a pain in the ass, aching now almost continuously, and giving me a really hard time after long hikes in the mountains) I have recovered a semi-dece level of base strength, and without breaking any lifelong PR I’ve put up some numbers in the squat, the deadlift, the bench press and the press that don’t compare too unfavorably with said PRs. All of that sounded good, but definitely I couldn’t say I had been devoting more time to training, as I went from training almost every single day to training 3-4 times a week, and just 2-3 when the teaching workload became higher (due to class material preparation or exams correction).

That pointed me to another potential culprit. On 2019 I started teaching the same subject (business ethics and corporate social responsibility) to a new set of students, less mature in theory (undergrads, instead of graduates within a masters degree), but that turned out to be extraordinarily engaged and enthusiastic, and also showed to have a quite solid background (I would say in some areas they could even teach some things to my masters’ students of previous years). However, I considered such different target population required a complete overhaul of the materials I had used in previous years, so I invested an inordinate amount of hours in preparing them, with all that such change entails (changes in exercises, continuous evaluation exams, group exercises and the like). Which was very rewarding, and lots of fun, but didn’t yet provide me with an explanation of why I read less, as it surely didn’t absorb me as much as the writing of a whole book did, which is what I did back when I started teaching this subject (by the way, such book was only published in December of 2019, and yes, proofreading it and making the final adjustments did consume quite a sizable amount of hours), in a year when I also managed to read more than this last one!

So maybe part of the explanation was the teaching load, but, on the other hand, I didn’t start learning a new language in 2019, as I had originally planned when I set out my course of language acquisition in 2015 (the plan back then was to consolidate French between Jan/15 and Sep/16, learn Italian between Sep/16 and Aug/17, learn German between Sep/17 and Aug/19, consolidate Latin between Sep/19 and Aug/20, consolidate classical Greek between Sep/20 and Aug/22, and learn Hebrew between Sep/22 and Aug/24, at which point I would recalibrate and set new goals). So in September of last year I should have started with Latin, but German proved to be a tougher nut to crack than I expected, and although I now read it quite fluently, it’s not as effortless as I wanted it to be, and still require substantial queries at a dictionary to fully grasp the content of either some pieces of news or some specially convoluted books. So I decided to give me some slack, and prorogue my German learning, which should have meant that I ended up reading more pages per day, as in 2019 I read much faster this new language than in 2018, and approximately half of the books I read are in the language I’m in “learning” phase, which means that both in 2018 and in 2019 half the books I’ve read were in German, but in the latter year I could coast through them much faster. As an aside, I’ll probably insert Russian before Latin as the next language I learn “voluntarily” (I may need to give a honest go to Chinese, due to work demands, but I’m not 100% sold on it, I’ll have a clearer picture in a couple months), but decade-long plans are intended to give wide guidelines, to be adjusted as we evolve and mature and adapt to the unexpected vagaries of life.  

However, at that point in my enquiry I had already seen the real culprit of my diminished reading performance. One of the things I wanted to do in my strategic plan for the decade was consolidate my combat skills by learning to box properly (something I could then pass onto my children, as I’ve recommended any reader of this blog to do repeatedly, to better prepare them for the more likely than not societal collapse in the coming 50 years, which I will probably not see, but they very well may). But, I’m ashamed to recognize to my attentive readership, that is something still in my “to do” list (towards the end of this year I may reconsider giving it a try), as after clearing my schedule in May last year to start searching for a convenient time and place to start boxing (the place I had already scouted, near my current job) I had kind of a bout of inspiration, went to a couple of music academies, and signed up for guitar lessons.

Now, anybody who has known me for just a couple of minutes would attest that I may well be the person less endowed with musical talent in the whole world (slightly paraphrasing David Hume, I’ve thought many times about myself and musical abilities something similar to what he thought of his cousin, Lord Kames, and arrogance: “when you say of someone he is the most arrogant person in the whole world, you normally only mean he is very arrogant, except when you say it of my Lord Kames, in which case it is the exact enunciation of the unvarnished truth”; in my case “when you say of somebody he is the most devoid of musical talent in the whole world you normally only mean he has no ear for tune and a limited sense of rhythm, except when you say it of the Vintage Rocker, in which case it is the mere truth”). Be it as it may, I’ve also enunciated many times (some of them in this same blog) that one of the measures of a life well lived is continuously striving to do difficult things, to master areas of practice that require conscientious application of our abilities, be they mental or physical; that take ourselves outside of our areas of comfort, and force us to experience again the agony and the frustration of being piss poor at what we do, and to have to struggle against things that a five-year-old does without much effort or attention. Seen in retrospective, I couldn’t think an activity that fit that bill better than me learning to play a music instrument.

I have to recognize that I probably underestimated the level of commitment that such endeavor would demand. In my original plan of learning to box competently, I assumed that 1 hour a week in class, plus some tweaks to my usual training routine (which is already optimized to keep me as explosively strong as possible at my age) would be enough. Not so with playing the guitar. The half hour I spend in class is but a minimal fraction of it, as if I really want to progress, I have to devote much more than that practicing at home. Between half an hour and one hour a day. Which I cannot detract from work (although I was freed from my responsibilities in the subsidiary of our company that builds thermal Hw for satellites, thanks God, as if it were not for that I wouldn’t have been able to do much outside of working like crazy, as I had been doing in previous years), and I can only partially detract from strength training (as I do not devote that many hours a week to that particular pursuit), so the time for doing my scales, and my following of a remorseless metronome with very basic rhythm patterns, and my occasional toying with some simple lick or other, had necessarily to come from reading.

Which is all well and good, and a price I’m more than willing to pay. I wouldn’t be entirely disingenuous if I said I’m loving every minute of learning to play the guitar… but I wouldn’t be far from the truth, either, as it is indeed a most enjoyable activity. And it’s already giving me enormously valuable insights into what art consists of (more about that in a moment), into the way the human mind works, and into the plasticity and adaptability of the brain. Specially when I compare my learning journey with that of my middle son, who started a few months before myself (and was one of the main sources of inspiration for me deciding that I wanted to do this). He “gets” complex rhythm patterns in seconds, and is able to replay riffs and long sequences of notes and chords with just a few repetitions after seeing other people play them (by just looking at their fingers running along the fretboard), while I need to see them written down in a tab, attempt to memorize them, then clumsily try to reproduce it continuously looking at the tab, the hand in the frets, the hand that strums, and sometimes the infinite in front of my, exasperated by how complex and challenging the whole thing is.

So if I think how far I still am from stop being an “absolute noob” and start being an “advanced novice” I may despair. Which I do not, because I think instead of how far I already am from “has never in his life touched an electric guitar” (which is where I was just seven months ago), and I’m nothing short of utterly amazed. My small advances may look laughable to any intermediate player (I can play three or four simple riffs, keep the rhythm and the tempo of another three or four famous tunes, still with a lot of interruptions and failed chords and missed beats), but are huge to me because, frankly, I never thought I could get this far. And I see better things coming my way in the future, just by sticking with it. As in weightlifting, perseverance, in most cases, trumps innate talent. And I may be distinctly short on the latter, but few people can beat me in the former (and, anyway, this is not a contest, I have absolutely no gripe with 90% of the population of Earth being better guitar players than me… as long as at some point I can play Johnny B. Goode, Sweet Home Alabama, Only Daddy that will walk the line and Summertime Blues I’ll be happy as a clam and more than satisfied).

Finally, let’s get to the deepest lessons I’m learning, fulfilling the (implicit) promise I made in the title of this post. The first thing that drew my attention in this process of learning an entirely new ability was how similar it felt to learning how to lift weights. It is a very physical activity, where you have to let the body deal with the little details as autonomously as possible, without having to pay conscious attention to every minute move, because consciousness is flexible (which you don’t need much, as you are doing repetitive, strictly patterned tasks) but slow, and you need to be distinctively fast both to lift well and to play well. Which is a nice illustration of Daniel Kahnemann theory of mind’s two systems, one “fast” (automatic, unconscious, based on quick heuristic rules, that feels effortless) and one “slow” (that engages our consciousness and attentiveness at the price of taking much more time to accomplish whatever it is directing us to do). But of course, to be able to delegate tasks to the “fast” system you need to train like crazy. When I started playing, I didn’t know (by heart) the position of a single note in the fretboard, much less where the fingers had to be to play chords. So before I played notes or chords I had to look at my hand, look at the fretboard, and slowly try to put each finger in turn where it had to go, then tentatively strum the string (or set of strings), which may require another look to the strumming hand, and usually find that the note was not right, the chord didn’t sound harmonious at all, and required some adjustment (move some fingers a few millimeters up, or down, or right or left). Needless to say, that took forever (a few seconds for barre chords), and such limitation on speed made the playing of any identifiable melody nigh impossible.

But, again, it felt oddly familiar, because it was not that different from learning to clean and jerk, where you first learn how to position the body under the bar in different moments of the lift (starting position, power position, receiving position of the clean, power position again with the bar on delts, receiving position of the jerk), and then practice how to go from one position to the next in the most efficient and fluid manner, and finally to start increasing the load on the bar whilst letting the body “do its thing” and keep the speed or even increase it (there are no “slow” movements in weightlifting). And to let the body do such moves reliably and solidly and producing the expected results you had to rely on countless repetitions, until the whole motor pattern becomes ingrained, and you could do it in your sleep (indeed, I found years ago that a good training method was to complete the Oly lifts blindfolded, I may reconsider doing that one of these days), and stop paying attention to the little details (“Are my shoulders sufficiently in front of the bar? Are my hips rising at the same speed as the shoulders? Am I extending enough the hips and knees at the end of this second pull, and thus should I start changing direction to get under the bar?”) and focus on the big picture, as if seen from the outside. You stop living each individual lift in the present tense, and start considering them once completed as a finished whole, that may require some adjustment in the next iteration (so when you crouch to grab the bar again you may say to yourself one or two cues, like “remember to finish the pull” if, after the last pull you have judged that indeed, you didn’t extend your hips and knees enough… something that you were unable to notice, and even less to correct, in the midst of doing it).

There is even an equivalent to the difference between the powerlifting moves (squat, bench press, deadlift) and the weightlifting ones (snatch and C&J). The powerlifting moves are like individual notes, where you just put one finger over one string in one fret, and strum that single string. You then put another finger over another string (in the same or other fret), and strum that other string, and so on. Thus, playing a scale is like completing a set. You try to play the scale faster, as you try to complete the set with more kg on the bar. Jeez, come to think about it, when I play I increase the bpm in my metronome in neat jumps of 10, as when I warm-up I increase the load on the bar by increments of 10 kg. When I approach the bar for a powerlifting move, I know in advance if I will complete the set (which I do 99.9% of the time, as I program conservatively), as there is no real “technical” difficulty involved. The moves are slow enough to allow for minimal adjustments of form during their execution, and they don’t really require the “fast” system to be in command. You can complete them as consciously as you want. Similarly, when I start a scale, unless I’m attempting a new speed, I’m pretty confident I’m going to complete it (almost faultlessly), as each single movement of the fingers is pretty short and easy, and can be kept under the control of the conscious mind. I have to go to really insane (for me, be somewhat indulgent here!) speeds to really have to rely on the “fast” system taking over, as it becomes impossible for the “slow” one to keep pace.

But of course, although most riffs and some melodies are just successions of notes, individual notes are like words in a poem, while chords are the verses that really define a lot of what they can express (starting, unsurprisingly, by the internal rhythm and cadence of the whole poem). And chords are an entirely different beast from notes. There is really no way you can consciously think where each finger goes and then setting them carefully in the fretboard before strumming the strings. You just put the hand the best you can, all at once, and there you go, and just pray it wasn’t too far off. And, if you have practiced enough, it normally isn’t, so instead of a dissonant jangle that offends even the most uneducated ear what you obtain most time (amazing as it still seems to me!) is a heavenly, melodious, harmonic tone full of resonance and grace and suggestive, like a good gulp of craft beer, with its aftertaste, its main notes accompanied in the right proportion by the secondary ones that enhance and underline it, making the whole experience even more intense and satisfying. Quite similar to what you feel when you complete a demanding snatch, in which every muscle has started contracting exactly in the right sequence, so the whole body moves through space in the most efficient manner to put the barbell overhead in a seemingly effortless flow, with each limb, like each note, underlining and enhancing the effort of the trunk to position itself stably under the load, so it can triumphantly rise it in a glorious sign of mastery and domination of mind over brute matter.

The most interesting element of the analogy, though, has to do with what it reveals about art itself, and the way to both produce and enjoy it. Artistry in guitar playing has a lot of additional components beyond just getting your chords to sound right, but it absolutely ride on getting that absolutely nailed. You can add color, and chromatism, and texture, and sub-rhythms and whatnot to your basic chords… once you have absolutely mastered them. And within that mastery there is always an element of uncertainty. You really are not sure, every time you move the hand on the fretboard, that you are going to get it right, because you have “outsourced” the execution of each chord playing to the fast system, to the subconscious mind (there is no way you could play artistically if you wanted to keep full conscious control of the position of the hand in each chord). So to reach the highest point of artistic expression (in order to be able to focus on the most sublime consequences of the action), to really let the spirit (or the deepest levels of the mind, or of the brain, I’m not taking sides in the whole monism vs. dualism argument here) you have to pay the price of renouncing a certain level of control, of delegating a certain level of the execution… to forsake a bit of your freedom (understood as the opportunity to judge and consciously decide how you take each step) and suffer, unavoidably, a considerable level of uncertainty. Even the most seasoned performer is nervous before walking into the stage, because she is not sure (and, furthermore, she cannot be sure!) of how things are going to turn out, if, regardless of how many hours she has practiced it in advance, she may not forget some element, or have a misstep, and end up delivering a very poor performance. Even the most seasoned lifter, doesn’t matter how many top-level competitions he has been through, is nervous before walking on the platform to confront the barbell, because he is not sure (and, furthermore, he cannot be sure!) if he is going to successfully complete the lift. I’m not saying with this that Olympic weightlifting is as artistic as music (although it is my opinion that it is, indeed, much more artistic than a lot of what passes for music nowadays), or that it has a similar social worth (however that is measured), or allows for a similar expression of the depths and powers and wonders of the human condition.

What I’m saying is that creating art, attempting to express the hitherto unexpressed, in addition to require a certain mastery of some mechanical skills that are foundational for each type of art, requires the assumption of certain risk, is just not amenable to the mere application of a predefined formula, needs to go beyond the application of those repetitive, quantifiable, consciously controllable skills. The writer that embarks in a great novel (not a piece of genre that just ticks all the right boxes to satisfy the public) is, when he starts writing, mostly unaware of how the final work is going to look like. He has a very vague idea of what he wants to accomplish, but he throws himself into the act of writing like a weightlifter throws himself into the act of lifting, knowing he will not be able, to a great extent, to consciously control where the writing process, where the work, are going to take him, to be sure of what the final result is going to look like (remember, furthermore, he cannot be sure!). He should have put on the time to master the “mechanical” elements of his craft: how to transcribe a dialogue between hos characters, how to describe the physical environment where the action takes place, how to give a lively impression of the feelings and emotions of the participants. If he is not solid enough at those (each one of which can be done carefully and conscientiously, are “craft” more than “art”) the final result will be clunky, disjointed, will not flow graciously, and will ultimately fail. But it well may happen that he is a master of the craft, but ends up producing a very subpar work, not very inspired, with a feeble structure, maybe because he attempted to play it safe and constrained himself to just weave those elements he was most sure about, not taking the risk to completely lose himself in the narration, and let it take him where it may. Like a guitar player that is competent in his handwork, can meet the right notes at the right time but is somewhat lacking “spirit”, lacking “inventiveness”, lacking “feeling”. Again, not taking the risk to take the melody to wherever it may, pushing the application of each unit to its emotional extreme. Like a very strong man doing a “somewhat power clean & press” (and lifting, slowly and under control, a very respectable amount of weight, way more than I for one will ever lift) for lack of… adventurousness? to really throw himself under the moving weight and be uncertain of how or if it may end up in the right place.

So there you are, I now understand better not just how to weightlift (I approach my snatches and C&Js like chords, to be played first competently, and then, God willing, sublimely), but how to write, or to paint, or to draw… or to live a good life, although that may require some additional explanation that I leave for another post.

Optimal training strategies for each of the four main skills of life II

In my last  post I analyzed the most effective ways of developing four skills I had identified as foundational for a good life and most conductive to human flourishing. I had time to develop the first two, having to do with how to improve our ability to build relationships, applied to forging deep human bonds understood as good in themselves, and not as means for a further goal like ascending the corporate ladder or bagging a trophy wife to be deployed as status symbol; I also proposed what I considered the most effective path for intellectual enhancement, applied to increase one’s ability to concentrate and identify underlying relationships between apparently disjointed concepts and narratives. In this one I intend to finish the job by proposing the optimal methods to develop the remaining two foundational skills: physical fitness and openness to the transcendental.

Git yer body functioning, Bro!

Consider the following three situations:

·         Like recently happened in Hawaii, you hear in TV (and in the radio, and in every means the government has to communicate important news to the population) that nuclear war has broken out and missiles are flying towards your beloved city. You check in the internet and every news channel (fake or otherwise) is blaring it out loud and unambiguously: the end is nigh, the little hands finally did press the red button and rocket man is retaliating (or whatever other nightmarish scenario you may prefer to consider, feel free to add apocalyptic ayatollahs, crazed jihadists, the Pakistani military finally overrun by millenarian fanatics, the Chinese crossed by some maneuver in their side of the globe, the Russians overstepping their natural taste for mischief and havoc and whatnot). You look through the window and, understandably, the streets are packed with the greatest traffic jam history has ever seen, with people honking, crying, shouting, fist fighting, trying to cut corners when there are no corners left… Not a single vehicle budges, and most people trapped inside them will surely still be there when the bomb strikes. You have about 15 minutes left. Assuming you live 3-4 miles from the city center (the most likely target of the incoming missiles), just getting another 2 miles away may be the difference between life and death (the annihilation ratio of an average nuclear bomb, in a densely constructed city like yours, is about 3 miles, and you want a couple more for safety, and not be too contaminated with the highly radioactive particles that will shower and percolate everything in a radius of a couple more miles. 2 miles in 15 minutes is well within the means of every half functioning human being, and, contrary to cars, nothing impedes you to run away to your heart’s content…

·         You may have stroke gold this night: started a conversation with the cutest blonde you had seen in years, and you really hit it off and both seemed really interested in each other (and you are still sober, so she’s not “beer beautiful” and “beer interesting”, but legitimately so!). You propose to go to the bar to ask for another drink, ask her what she would like, and head off to the bar hoping to get the waiter’s attention, order, pay and be back on a moment’s notice. But a brute standing between you and the only available spot by the bar has been giving you hostile looks since you started your conversation with the beauty, and now he openly pushes you aside before you can even rise your hand to make your intention clear to the busy barman. You stumble but regain your composure without falling down, and stare right at your sudden opponent. He is not much taller than you, and not physically that impressive. His eyes look a bit beady, so he’s not probably that sober either, although not too intoxicated. You judge that a forceful shove would probably put him down for good, and he doesn’t look like the kind that would seek to retaliate and cause a real fight, so if successful you could resume your courting without much ado. The thing is, are you sure you could truly send the guy to the floor with a single push, letting him know it is best for him not to make a fuss about it?

·          You are adroitly strolling with your wife (fiancée, girlfriend, romantic interest… you name it) when a little thug grabs her purse and runs away with it! The kid is smallish and doesn’t seem to be armed, and unfortunately the neighborhood at that time of the day is deserted, so there is no point in screaming for help (for my male readers: screaming is simply undignified unless you have a major limb severed and are about to die if not immediately tended to… that would be the only occasion in which it would be OK to scream for a man, and even then I’d encourage you to do it in a subdued, appropriately low-key manner). You judge that a fast sprint would put you at striking distance of the mugger, but consider that if you fail to reach him you would really look like a fool (a more charitable view is you don’t want to depart from your partner’s side, traumatized and shaken as she surely is by the assault, unless absolutely justified; running after the perpetrator and failing to catch him doesn’t qualify as justification, although actually catching him and recovering the purse does). Do you gallantly dash towards the robber, or stay besides your paramour to jointly complain afterwards about the vileness and decadence of Western civilization, and how society is going to hell in a breadbasket? 

I could think of almost infinitely more examples, from the everyday and trivial (your aging mother hands you the proverbial pickle jar she cannot open expecting your powerful grip will do) to the improbably heroic (like Jean Valjean, you witness a car tripping over a passerby, and his only chance of surviving is for you to lift the hood a few centimeters so other pedestrians can drag his body off the wreckage), in which having a functioning body makes all the difference in your life prospects. Not being so dramatic, the three qualities I’ve highlighted (endurance, strength and speed) are all improvable (if we devote enough time to them) and make a tremendous difference in the quality of the life you can lead when possessing them.

Indeed, our fitness crazed age seems convinced enough of the importance of physical fitness as not to need much justification. A word of caution is required, however, as our age may superficially seem fitness crazed, but what it is really is beauty obsessed, and by a dysfunctional, unhealthy conception of beauty at that. Being strong, fast and resistant to fatigue are all important traits that will allow you to live a more fulfilling life, a life more in accordance with your conception of the good, whatever that conception turns out to be. Having visible abdominal muscles (or 22 inch biceps) are not. Which essentially means that I can endorse and heartily recommend a training program conductive to the former, but not to the latter. Doing a sensible amount of big compound lifts with progressive overload makes sense. Doing rest-pause sets of 20 reps with occluding resistance bands to restrict the blood flow to the muscles, so they grow more, does not.

So, once we’ve taken that off the way, what is the best way to develop that life enhancing fitness? That’s a doozy: lift weights regularly (three times a week), with an Olympic bar, adding a bit of weight in each session (until you cannot add more weight, when it is time to start either cycling your lifts or periodizing, more on that here: Periodization 101). Occasionally, do some steady state cardio or HIIT to keep cardiovascular capacity in peak condition (it doesn’t need to be some super-fancy, crazy aggressive routine: just go for a longish walk, 1 to 1,5 hours, twice a week, but pushing a prowler, doing hill sprints, jumping rope, cycling or jogging are perfectly valid substitutes). The key thing here is consistency. Not do it one week, and then find a gazillion excuses for three weeks about how busy you are at work, how demanding your family schedule is or how the flu season has hit you really bad. Those are, more times than not, rationalizations. It’s OK to lose one workout (if you are having chemotherapy for an otherwise terminal illness I may consider acceptable raising the bar to two missed sessions in a row), but never more. You can train (thrice a week plus cardio, remember) when working 80-100 hour weeks (not ideal, I know, just go to the gym and do 10’ of cleans and 10’ of squats, as many reps of each as you can with 70% of your 1RM, more than enough to keep on progressing and staying in mint condition). You can train and still be a caring spouse and nurturing parent that has breakfast w the kids, regularly phones his elderly mother and has meaningful conversations about the deep meaning of life w his siblings (I guess, not that I’ve been such saintly person ever for very long).

I’m not a tremendous fan of CrossFit, they are just too dispersed, and most boxes have turned a very basic, no-frills training philosophy (just do the WOD as intensely as you can) in a smorgasbord of incompatible goals (do the WOD, plus conditioning, plus mobility work, plus cooldown, plus follow one fad diet or other) which end up producing very subpar results. But they have one element which I still respect: they repeat as a mantra their motto of “no excuses”. Indeed, an overabundance of excuses is one of the defining features of our time. I didn’t go to the gym as I was supposed to do? Well, my boss had been mean to me, so I needed to indulge in some “me time” to recover… I had an unpleasant conversation with my girlfriend so I rather went to my home and spent 4 hours playing a FPS videogame to decompress… The last chapter of the TV show I’m following was unsatisfying so I ate a bathtub of chocolate ice cream, and couldn’t move for 20 hours… excuses, excuses, excuses. You can indulge, eat excess ice cream, binge watch TV or play videogames until your eyes pop out of their sockets from overexposure… after completing your planned workout, that is.

And you don’t need to overthink that workout, again. Lift a barbell and put it back on the floor. Either more times or loaded with more weight than the previous time. In movements that involve most of the body. And walk, or cycle, or run for longer periods every now and then.

Is this all that there is? Probably not, but that’s not the point

Which takes me to my last, and most controversial point. I hope you remember I mentioned in my previous post, when I enumerated the four basic skills, that I would justify the fourth chosen one later on, advancing that it would be the one most readers (of a certain bent) disagreed with. Time to comply with that promise. I’m assuming, by the way, that being engaged in a denser, truer network of relationships, being mentally more acute and being physically more fit are all are universally considered worthy goals, deserving of our time, effort and commitment (we may question the sincerity of such opinion, though, when the majority of people is dragged into lives of solitude, mental torpor and obesity without much apparent resistance, using work as the universal justification for letting go of all the other abilities, but that would be the subject of another post). But “transcendence”? isn’t that kinda old? Something only people of ages past cared about? And that because they were primitive and unenlightened, they didn’t have modern science, which has provided conclusively all the evidence and knowledge that those benighted religious folk thought was contained in the bible (Qur’an, analects, dao te ching, whatever) but we now know for certain was not (the whole content of such books having been debunked and proved false). If such were the case, the ability to consider a possible reality “beyond” this one would be just so much evolutionary dead weight, something we have grown out of, and we shouldn’t keep caring about. Just the three previous skills, plus a well-paying job (or a generous safety net in a modern welfare state) would be more than enough to leave a perfectly fulfilling, plentiful, happy and contented life.

Only of course, that is into the case. Not that the dominant culture wouldn’t try to convince you, unsuspecting reader of mine, of the contrary. The most read authors, the most respected opinion makers, the most publicized of public intellectuals, the most discussed philosophical currents seem to point towards the consensus view I call dominant reason, like in here: God, godlessness and dominant reason and here: ontology, epistemology and free will and which I criticized in a series of posts culminating here Sketch of dualist metaphysics III . According to dominant reason, religions and science attempt to do the same: “explain” what there really is, and provide guidelines about how to behave to lead the “best possible life” there is. Only science is true, and can succeed, and religion is false, and cannot. Science provide us with knowledge, and religion attempts to provide us with knowledge, but is really a bunch of lies, that have failed any serious attempt at verification by resorting to the “it was a metaphor all along, that is “true” (or at least not false) in a “different sense” (not subject to empirical verification).

To construct such narrative (indeed, I‘m very grateful to one of my teachers, the great Amelia Valcárcel, for pointing out to me that the scientific discourse legitimated by Darwin’s theory of evolution as epistemic model could very well be the only “grand narrative” that had escaped unscathed from the general wreckage brought about by post-modernism, although she saw it as a still open question) its proponents only required one strong previous commitment: none of them could have ever seriously participated in the practice of a religious tradition, because if they had they would immediately recognize the blatant absurdity of their position. It is one thing to denounce every transcendental belief (and its believers) as retarded, incoherent, incongruous, anti-humane and diametrically opposed to the best tool we have developed, as a species, to distinguish between true and false. It is a very different one to understand what those beliefs actually consist in, and then necessarily to ascertain that they pertain to very different aspects of reality (what Stephen Jay Gould called the only partially overlapping “magisteria” of religion and science). Be it as it may, I’m not interested now in denouncing the inconsistencies of the materialist-scientist view of the world, only in pointing out that it relies as much on an insufficiently founded set of previous epistemic commitments (of acritically accepted beliefs) as any good ‘ol revealed religion. The most obdurate of the “new atheists” cannot personally verify the validity of each experiment and the demonstration of each theorem that fundament his worldview, and has to take them on faith, exactly as the most obdurate evangelical believer in the literal truth of the bible (not the most original of arguments, I know). He does believe his faith is better founded, and is more open to refutation and adjustment by the constant encounter with reality (a highly domesticated reality, highly distorted and set in artificial conditions so it can indeed validate whatever set of beliefs it is asked to, as that is what we call “experiments”) but we simply shouldn’t lose sight that such belief itself is not amenable to empirical validation. It is a precondition of how he approaches reality, or the external world, or the community of likely-minded individuals he interacts with.

Which is not to say that every belief is equally unfounded, and thus equally valid. I don’t expect books supposedly revealed by the gods long ago to add much to my knowledge of how the physical world works (things like the electrical charge of the electron or the universal gravity constant are better determined by careful measurement in a controlled setting), and similarly I don’t expect physics or chemistry to provide me with arguments for or against the essential goodness (or evil) of the whole creation, or of every separate aspect of it. There is not a “normative astronomy” as well as there is not a “descriptive moral reasoning” (moral reasoning is normative through and through, if we attempt to describe how it works in everyday life we may engage in psychology, or anthropology, or politics, which is an entirely different field).

Now, if I’m roughly correct in that understanding (and I’ve most assuredly thought about it longer and harder than you, my dear reader, please accept my word for that) that means that there are a number of things that the scientific outlook, admirably suited to the description of the material world, is not the right tool to illuminate. Minor, unimportant things like how to live, or why there is something instead of nothing. And the really key concept to apprehend is that the second concept influences the first: we shouldn’t live the same way in a universe with purpose, meaning and value than in one produced randomly as a result of utter chaos where “one damn thing after the other” is all there is to it. And the ability to identify such meaning, such (possible) purpose and such values is what I’ve called “transcendence”. Again, a number of people will doubtlessly insist that such is a wrong approach. Feuerbach started it (in recent times, his precursors were Spinoza and Hume, and a whole coterie of French philosophes like D’Holbach and La Mettrie), Marx took Feuerbach’s torch enthusiastically (you already know how that ended, don’t you?), Nietzsche gave it a patina of tragic respectability, and after Nietzsche (an intellectual giant, albeit a very twisted one) we have nowadays a plethora of intellectual dwarfs droning along the same lines: “it is wrong, wrong, wrong to look for meaning and value outside material reality, that is just life-denying, worn-out idealism, that leads to nihilism, that is just a justification for a parasitical priesthood’s exploitation of the masses, slave morality, yadda, yadda, yadda…”

Fair enough, some of that criticism is warranted, some less so. If we try to separate the (sparse) wheat from the (abundant) chaff, we recognize that there simply cannot be something like a normative physics. Back to Hume, the “is-ought divide” is as wide and as unbridgeable as ever. In Moore terms, trying to derive how things should be from how they actually are is a “naturalistic fallacy”. Squeeze the hard sciences as much as you want, you won’t extract from them a single drop of value. You may accuse me of looking in the wrong field and combatting a straw man: it is not to physics, but to the “human sciences”, towards where we should turn our attention. Bollocks. First, there is no such thing as “human sciences” (in a Popperian sense, there may be in a Collingwoodian sense, but then so is numismatics), second, the observation of what people declare to value, or even of what people actually value is of as much import to determine what is rally valuable in itself as the consideration of the positive connotations of the word “positive” is towards the measurement of the electrical charge of a proton (that is to say: no evaluative or normative physics, just as there is no descriptive ethics). Appealing to “human nature” or to what “an animal of the natural world that happens to have the genetic makeup of a human being” to determine what is good for him simply show a lack of understanding of what “good” is. They are playing an entirely different “language game“ (and sorry for the Wittgensteinian quote). Evolution, nature, our genetic makeup and whatnot seem to predispose us to cheating our partners if we can avoid detection, altruism only towards those who can reciprocate and giving more weight to our short-term gratification than to long-term one. None of those things are good, and a life lived according to those precepts is not a good life.

So, again, if we want to search for value, meaning and worth, we have to resort to tools other than the ones provided by the scientific method. We have to turn, that is, to the transcendent (in Rudolf Otto’s words, the “numinous”, the “entirely other”). You may dispute it as much as you want, ‘til you are blue in the face, that’s simply how things are. So back to the original purpose of this post, how do you improve your ability for turning towards that “entirely other”? Well, this is probably the simplest one of the series: go to religious services every week. I’m not that interested on the denomination you choose, but try, as in all other areas, to be consistent.

“Whaaaaaaat?” I can almost hear my readers saying “You can’t be serious about this one… your are really trying to tell us to…. Go to mass every Sunday?” Yep, exactly so “But that’s just so… retrograde! So old-fashioned! How can you preach autonomous self-imposition of rational maxims and developing your critical thinking skills and then propose to go to the most anachronistic, heteronomous, acritical institution there is, to waste away one hour every week hearing the most irrational, anti-modern, sheepish, inegalitarian, chauvinistic discourse??????” 

Well, I would dispute the inegalitarian and chauvinistic part, but essentially yes. I’ll explain. Remember I explained why I didn’t need to tell you to pay attention to your “job performance” abilities because a) nobody truly knew what they consisted in or how to improve them (other than being socially nice, hard-working and mentally sharp, which we had already covered) and b) the whole culture was already telling you enough to focus on it, to the unhealthy exclusion of everything else. Exactly the opposite is at play here. The one thing almost every element of the culture is almost yelling in your face right now, since you are born, is not to pay attention to transcendence: Live for the moment! Carpe Diem! Follow you desires, your interests, your passions! Grab whatever you can, as life is fleeting and there is no tomorrow! Enjoy your youth, as it is the most valuable moment in life! When you grow up, keep on living as an adolescent jerk, as it is more pleasurable! And what I’m telling you is to create a minimal space for getting away from such yelling and consider there may be more things to living a good life than to have as much money as possible to buy as much attention as possible from others (which really means for boys to get laid as much as possible and for girls to be envied by their peers as much as possible -slightly stereotyping here, I know, but you get the point). Where do you have more chances to find such a space? In an old-fashioned church (not a modern mega-church that preaches the gospel of affluence, by the way, that’s just the negation of transcendence by those who should be affirming it).

You don’t need to believe all the detailed dogma of the denomination. Heck you don’t even need to believe any of it! Just show up, disconnect mentally when the priest starts preaching, and just let your mind fly to wherever it wills. Probably, at some point, it will touch on things that are distinctly non-material: what is the sense of it all? Why is there so much suffering? Is there something that really counts for something? Why are we here? What is this “here”, in the first place? As opposed to what, to a “there” that is somehow outside of it? Is this life of struggle, of striving, of never being really truly contented, truly sated, all that there is? And if not, what is, what else can there be? Again, I’m not saying structured, formal religion has all the valid answers. Believers (and please note, it is telling that voluntary participants in established religious institutions consider themselves “believers”, which they experience internally as very different from “knowers”) have been struggling with those questions for millennia, without being able to settle in an ultimate, self-evident, automatically-convincing answer. What I contend is that struggling with them is a non-negotiable, essential component of a life well lived. Not that the dominant culture would let you know. Once more, we are bombarded by messages insisting that those questions are ultimately outdated, that you can have a perfectly fulfilled life without ever considering them. But it’s just not true, we all consider them, we may just unthinking, unconsciously settle on answers that are aligned with the age and the zeitgeist and assume that is all there is to it.

Again, there is no substitute to drag your sorry ass to the services and ponder them afresh every week. Not just for you. We believers are a picky, grumpy lot. We recognize the importance of volition in belief, another point that completely escapes unbelievers… for them you have no choice at all in what to believe, you just react unwillingly to the evidence presented by your senses… what shortsighted, dumb misunderstanding! And such volition is strengthened not just by individual practice, but by collective one. By going to a collective ceremony you not only ensure a space for strengthening your commitment, curiosity, openness to the individual concept of transcendence you may harbor, but you send a signal to your co-religionaries that they are not alone in their own struggles. That the things they value are also important for other people, that their faith is not dying. “Ah!” You may say, “but it is dying indeed, secularization is an unstoppable tendency of modern society and it is only a matter of time until all religions are but a fading memory”. Maybe, maybe not, I’ll wait for the judgment of History (with a capital H) on that one, and do my part to postpone such outcome as much as possible. I don’t find much solace in the fact that a society that is committing demographic suicide, that has passed judgment on the ultimate value of life and decided that it is not really worth it, so much so that it has stopped reproducing itself, may be wrong on that issue as it is on so many others… I’ll just resist going with the flood, and educate my sons to also avoid it.   

What I’ve been up to

Man, does time fly! I look back at the good ol’ blog and it’s been almost a month with no posting at all. An unpardonable lack of politeness to my increasing audience! Well, time to take up the metaphorical pen and get back to work. My writing is as shabby as ever, as convoluted and baroque and circuitous and muddled, and it would benefit from a bit of practicing and cleaning up as much as in any other moment of my life. And how do I clean up my writing? Well, practicing it, in long-winded posts that almost nobody reads, of course! Although I swear I try to make ‘em less long-winded and more to the point, less derivative and meandering and more precise and focused, I recognized I’ve not been so far an exemplar of pithiness and grace…

Now before we get back to the ill-starred fate of our global society, its many evils and more or less imminent demise, I feel like I owe to my readership an account of what has kept me away from the keyboard these last weeks, as it touches (tangentially as ever) in many themes of the blog, like how to live and what pursuing a worthy life looks like nowadays.

First, in the intellectual front, I started a new university career in September, and had been taking the first batch of examinations until recently. Yup, after a lot of reflection of what I wanted to learn and develop after getting my PhD in philosophy, I settled in mathematics. I considered retaking my studies of Economics (having almost three courses completed, that’s the degree I was closer to, and the one whose achievement would have costed me less, both in time and in money), but I’ve come to see the whole discipline as so muddled, so essentially dishonest, so useless and so lacking in the basic decency to acknowledge its uselessness as to make every single minute devoted to it a complete waste of time (you may find the beginning of my musings about such dishonesty here: Economics suck I, for a less-dishonest than usual take on the limits and shortcomings of the discipline, from one devoted practitioner I’ve quoted other times, John Cochrane, see: Economic humility? Hah!). So Economics was discarded. I had enjoyed researching sociology and history for my dissertation, and both seemed entertaining, but pretty full of bullshit and baloney overall, so I also discarded them.

I have not entirely abandoned the idea of doing a PhD in history later in life, specializing in some truly obscure subject matter, period and geographic area (peculiar versification in Norse sagas developed in the first stages of Greenland settlement, between 1000 and 1200 AD, say, or distinctive guerrilla tactics of the Saracen raiders from Andalusian origin that built a holdout in Fraxinet, in Provence, between 889 and 973 AD), but right now I know myself, and I would immediately hover towards universal history, the whole of humanity, in a period during no less than a hundred centuries, trying to discern the currents, the tendencies and the drifts in such an enormous mass of facts and events (something serious historians tend to dismiss, and to confine to the later years of a life previously filled with what for me now seems like uninteresting and trivial minutiae).

I also toyed with the idea of studying something truly alien and even tinged with some utilitarian argument, as it could be used to improve my professional prospects. To be more specific, I toyed with the idea of studying law (and, being an all-or-nothing sort of guy, taking the bar exam so I could practice as a barrister). But it just seemed a) too practical, b) too serious and c) boring as hell.

So I really had to dig deep within what motivates me, what makes me tick and what I thought would be a valuable commitment of my all-too-scarce time. I went back to what a life well lived should look like for my particular circumstances. And two immediate features of such life came to my attention: it had to be a life of achieving difficult things and of deep understanding and pursuit of the absolute (absolute truth, absolute beauty and absolute goodness). After six years immersed in philosophy I had a passing familiarity with words and thoughts and how whole societies had ended up believing a bunch of noxious balderdash and thinking it formed a sacred description of naked facts revealed by Nature herself. So it seemed to me like pursuing more words and ideas people happened to have had wouldn’t take me much closer to that absolute truth I was endeavoring after…

But if words wouldn’t cut it, imprecise and biased and amenable to misinterpretation and manipulation, what could work? What symbols had humanity devised that were devoted to precision, to exact communication, to rigorous reasoning not subjected to ideology or propaganda, to certain verification, regardless of what sorry state the world may be in? Numbers and mathematical operators, of course! When Aristotle thought about the best life for man, he concluded that the life of an Athenian gentleman, slave-owning and all was objectively the best. When Hagel did the same exercise more than twenty centuries later, surprise, surprise, it was the life of a Prussian bureaucrat of his day and age, with exactly the same worldview and set of beliefs as himself, what he clearly “saw” was best. Ditto for Thomas Jefferson, David Hume, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Wittgenstein and all the philosophers of a conformist bent. There were revolutionaries, sure (what I have called “critical” thinkers, starting with my much admired Kant, and following with Schopenhauer and Marx and Nietzsche) but even them, it’s difficult not to admit, ended up validating the old Protagoras dictum “man is the measure of all things” (every single man considered in himself “and his circumstances” we may add, quoting my countryman Ortega y Gasset).

Something you can hardly say of Euclid, Cantor, Leibniz, Hermite, Lebesgue, Riemann, Cauchy or Fermat. In general they did not give a rat’s patootie about their fellow men circumstances or opinions (or they fellow men full stop), as they didn’t much care about their own. They carefully constructed their trains of thought, identifying with exacting precision what followed from what, and invented new ways of reasoning in the process. More than that, they defined what reasoning consists in, what is the proper way of doing it and what ways, sensible as they may seem, end up guiding you astray. They definitely knew a thing or two about how to discover truth. Stupendous truth, undeniable truth, self-evident, kick-you-in-the-teeth truth. No matter if you’re black or white, a man or a woman or something in between, rich or poor, liberal or conservative, an ISFJ or a ENTP, a proper demonstration is a proper demonstration, and a logical fallacy is a logical fallacy. 2 + 2 = 4 here and in China, today and 30,000 years ago (and in another 30,000 years, even if there is nobody left to appreciate it).  

As is normally said, what can be used to explain everything doesn’t explain anything. A set of knowledges that obtain whatever the state of the universe doesn’t describe much at all, and then the universality of mathematics is not its main strength, but its Achilles heel. Bollocks, I say. The more I learn the more I realize that apparent discrepancies between mathematical order and the deepest structures of reality only reveal our insufficient grasp of such structures, and once the veils are removed and the errors corrected we find an even deeper agreement. That is what guided me back to a very peculiar and highly idiosyncratic form of belief in an all-powerful (and likely all-benevolent) mind in the origin of reality itself many years ago, but that would be a topic for another day.

What I mean with this, as usual, tortured and full of circumlocutions discourse, is that the clearest path for me in my search for truth was to deepen my understand of mathematics. Not this time by reading a bunch of books and reaching my own conclusions. Mathematics is subtle and complex and vast and branching. So I paid the tuition fees, and enrolled in a full degree, to ensure I get the basics right. Slow and steady, as I’m not leaving my day job, or my training, or my family (God forbid!) but surefooted and disciplined as always. Do not be surprised, then, if more rigorous reasoning occasionally creep in this blog, and if some numerical concept shows its head every now and then. Not that the blog couldn’t benefit from some more streamlined and logical argumentation, mind you.

And is maths difficult! Specially if you haven’t practiced it formally for years (or rather, for decades, as in my case). I may work in an engineering firm, but I don’t remember having done anything more challenging than basic algebra (add, substract, multiply and divide) for most of my career (I’m in quality and organization, after all). So this is like having been all your life in a “toning/ weight loss” program in the gym and suddenly starting a powerlifting routine to take you in a short time over 1,000 pounds competition total (for those not in the know: tough!) But that is the other reason I chose maths. It is difficult, and doing difficult things, mastering complex and challenging subjects, is what a life well lived looks like.

But of course, that’s not the only thing that has kept me away from posting. Doing difficult things with your head is allrighty and well, but we shouldn’t forget the old Greek adage about the healthy mind requiring a healthy body (funny that we all think that comes from the Greeks, whilst the sentence used to convey it is in latin…) And since the end of last year I was thinking in what physical skill to invest into once I finished the brunt of preparing the first examinations (in mid February).

Although my initial inclination was to learn how to properly box, and had been informing myself about boxing gyms close to my work location, an unexpected opportunity opened up with the creation of a weightlifting club in the Crossfit box of one of my loved ones. Weightlifting is something I’ve been doing (awfully) since I was about 12 years old, without much progress in the last twenty five years (well, I clean and jerked 100 kg again, something I hadn’t done since I was 23, and I also equaled my best snatch soon afterwards, but just couldn’t keep the momentum and let my PBs fall again). And if you intend to do something for, roughly, the rest of your life (as I do), you better learn to do it right.

So a month ago I also enrolled in a weightlifting team, with a coach and all, and for the first time in my whole life have been following a program written by someone different from myself. A program that has me snatching, clean & jerking and squatting basically every friggin’ day of the week (and then somehow trying to recover in the weekend). Not half assedly performing the power versions of the lifts every now and then, or doing three or four 90% lifts and calling it a day, but doing 6-8 sets of 6-8 reps of each one day in day out.

I’ll devote considerable more space to what I’m learning, about the lifts and about myself, but I’ll just advance here that I’m a) loving it and b) being thoroughly challenged by it and c) adjusting to the new rhythm, trusting in the process and the coach and trying not to rush it, as I’ve done so many times before, just to reach a plateau faster, and then paying attention to a different thing and having to start all over again a few months later. And having somebody actually knowledgeable in the lifts watch me clumsily try to perform ‘em and correct my many, many failures, so my inconsistent and inefficient snatch starts being more predictable and focused:

Not yet the nicest view, I know. I’m old and rusty and slow and not that strong and specially not that mobile (in the muscles and joints required to move the weight stably and with agility and grace… I’d be happy with just doing it competently).

The thing is that with such an increased demand on my time (studying mathematics plus weightlifting every day plus job plus family plus regularly reading to try to understand how the world and the mind work) I haven’t had that much time to blog, hence my lack of posting. But despair not, o faithful readers! Even if I have to write much shorter posts, writing is one of the characteristic features of my life, one of those things I’ve been doing from as far as I have memories (I still keep the reams of paper that received my first musings, and occasionally reread them and smile by how naïve, but also how intellectually daring and curious and most definitely unconventional I was at such early age), and I do not intend to interrupt it. I may write more haphazardly, more touch and go, more discontinuously, but you can keep coming back here for some scathing social commentary, some amused advice on the barbell sports and some abstract musing about what this human life may be all about. 

Keep lifting after the honeymoon phase is over

As princess Irulan, daughter of emperor Shaddam IV Padisha famously states at the beginning of the first tome of Frank Herbert’s Dune, “a beginning is a very delicate time”. Indeed, in my bookish childhood beginnings were a dreary business. Every time I immersed myself in a new book (that was many times a week) I had to first find my bearings. I read mostly fiction then, and a good deal of science-fiction, and God knows that science-fiction beginnings are dazzling and confusing and disorienting. It’s not just entering in a new place, populated by people you still don’t know anything about, but on a whole new universe where the usual laws of physics may not entirely apply, where societies are systematically imagined to work differently (but in the end not that differently) from your own, and where customs and mores and unspoken assumptions can’t be relied upon to guide you through the plot.  

To this day, acquiring a new skill is a bit like starting a new book: you feel clumsy and insecure, you soon realize you are woefully inadequate to perform it, especially when compared with more experienced practitioners, and there seem so be an unbridgeable chasm between what you can actually achieve and your aspirations. As the traditional wisdom would have it, if you persevere and keep honing your ability, you end up having a reasonable level of mastery, and you can actually start enjoying the application of such skill. Be it writing poetry, reading in a new language, playing a sport, developing web pages or drawing comics, what I’m essentially saying is that beginning sucks, but overcoming such sucking enables the patient practitioner to reap the rewards of his application and become that “better version of himself” that so many times I’ve propounded as the ultimate finality of human life.

As an aside, there are a couple activities where the beginnings are not that tough, and for some they may even result to be even more enjoyable that what comes after. The first of them is dating: when we start going out with a new prospective couple everything is peaches & cream. Everything the other person says or does is charming, amusing, interesting and a source of endless fascination. Her utterances and comments and suggestions are deep and thoughtful. Her face is an inexhaustible well of wonder, each gesture and countenance a trove of suggestions, of rich signals to be deciphered and treasured. If she happens to smile, or even more to openly laugh, what a joy, what inexpressible happiness and exultation! But as is well known, after a (sometime shorter, sometimes longer) period of time the initial wonderment wears off and the relationship has to either find a more stable, better rooted footing or wither away, to be replaced  by some new one (and we all know of people that seem unable to make their relationships grow beyond that first phase of elation and settle in a more sustainable and mature form).

The second kind of activity blessed by nature with an easy beginning, I will argue, is lifting weights. And as with relationships, it is likely to be followed by a more mature, more stable phase when there is not so much exultation and fun but, if pursued consistently, is apt to give us much firmer benefits. Now some readers may argue that the beginning of a lifting career is not that different from other complex pursuits, as we soon realize we are not that skilled, and definitely not that strong to begin with. BS, I say. Most moves are so easy a kid can learn to do ‘em in a technically sound way in 10 minutes (believe me, not only did I learn myself in such a timeframe -and I’m no genius of kinetic self-awareness- but I’ve taught my own kids to do it without much fuss), and every session brings with it the wonder of being almost effortlessly able to move more total weight than the previous one. A most exhilarating feeling, as becoming gradually (but sure-footedly) stronger is a solid foundation for a host of additional pleasurable and rewarding mental states (more self-confidence, better ability to do in a sustained way difficult thing, more tolerant to pain and discomfort, etc.)

But like in sentimental relationships, there comes a time when it is just not so fun anymore, when the prospect of going to the gym and complete the planned schedule does not fill you with joy but either leaves you somewhat indifferent or, worse, what it fills you with is dread of how difficult and painful and exhausting it will be. My contention, and what this post will argue for, is that such wholly expectable moment has to be overcome, for it is by overcoming it that we not only become better persons, but learn a valuable lesson that unlocks additional possibilities of personal growth and improvement.   

First, let’s take a look at the underlying cause of most people disenchantment. When we start lifting progress comes naturally and easily (as every experienced coach say, at the beginning almost everything “works”). Making a weak and detrained person half strong is comparatively easy, as long as you do not prescribe some utterly asinine program based on an excessive volume (or highly ballistic moves that can prove dangerous and lead to injury), regardless of age.  As long as you do not expect a 90 year-old lady to do full snatches on her first day, or ask a detrained guy of any age to do 10 sets of 10 reps each of half a dozen moves, they will be OK, and will improve from one session to the next. Some will do it at a slower pace, some will do it by leaps and bounds (young females and, especially, young males become stronger just by breathing, eating normally and sleeping well, so if you add a few compound movements it’s amazing how insanely strong they can become really fast) but all and every weak human beings have the potential to gain some strength no matter how asininely they are coached (unless they get injured, of course, so the basic boundary to effectively train them is “do not do stupid shit that can get them harmed”).

But after a few months (or may be quite a lot of months, if progress has been slower) people are more than halfway in their way to reaching their full genetic potential (a somewhat slippery concept, but bear with me for a while) and can be considered to have overcome their novice phase (that phase has a very precise meaning in Mark Rippetoe’s terminology, which we will come to in a moment). That means that to continue progressing it is not enough to do just any combination of sets and reps of nay move. Recovery within each training session, and recovery between sessions become a priority (more so the older the trainee), and if things are not balanced properly it is very common to stop progressing altogether: too much volume and little recovery and instead of being stronger and moving more weight every single day you find that what you could lift a week ago feels like it is stapled to the ground. Reduce the volume substantially and increase the rest periods (decrease frequency substantially) and you meet the same result. What gives? No wonder a lot of people in forums and seeking advice end up thinking that this lifting thing is an arcane science (or more like a dark art) that requires paying some guru a lot of moolah to be able to keep on adding a few paltry grams to the bar.

And when the required effort keeps on increasing whilst the measurable improvements keep on becoming smaller and smaller (the almost omnipresent law of diminishing returns) it is not surprising that so many people quit entirely, and stop lifting altogether. Hell, even some of the greats turn to other interests (there is a very specific transition from lifting for “performance” to lifting for “aesthetics” that take many former powerlifters to end up in bodybuilding shows which I found deeply disheartening, but I will not go into such deviancy for now) as finding the willpower to keep on punishing oneself in the gym after many years in the iron game is understandably difficult, and that’s why you see comparatively few people able to squat over 400 pounds or deadlift over 500 (something that, according to Justin Lascek, any healthy male who puts his mind to it should be able to accomplish). When it starts being difficult to further approach those numbers, they raise the foot from the gas pedal, and when understandably the car slows they let it stop altogether and divert their straying attention to other pursuits, like Pilates or Zumba, “toning” their muscles, “leaning” and other sorry excuses for working less hard and not having to push themselves so hard.

Well, I’m not here to criticize anybody, but I will say this: lifting heavy weights beats, hands down, any other form of physical activity. I’ve played rugby (great for conditioning, and much, much more fun), I’ve run until my reconstructed knee told me in not uncertain terms to shove it, I’ve shot putted (which is really a lot of heavy lifting plus jumping oddly with a cannonball that then you let go a couple times a week) and cycled and swum and rowed and skied and skated, and let me inform you they are not even close. Any other activity is probably funnier, and as such I fully understand it can be a deeper source of joy and contentment for many. That is not what I’m arguing about. But if you want to be “fit” (whatever that means), if you want to ensure you fully function as a normal human being is intended to function (with well-oiled joints, reasonably strong and balanced muscles for moving thick, dense bones around them and a sense of balance and coordination to direct them) there is simply no substitute to lifting repeatedly a heavy barbell, in “big” compound movements that involve most of the body, and doing it frequently. Again, I’m not saying swimming, or running, or cycling are not great exercises. They are, and chock full of benefits for your body and most likely for your mind. Hell, even Zumba and Pilates, which I can not help but see as glorified versions of 70’s aerobic and old school calisthenics beat by a mile stayin’ in the couch watching TV and eating Doritos all day. And if that is what makes you tick, by all means go for it. But just don’t think you are making the most efficient use of your time (and especially, don’t try to proselytize me into following your latest fitness trend, thank you very much). Not that everything must be decided based on efficiency, and as I’ve said a number of times now, if balancing on a Bosu ball with pink dumbbells in your hand is what lights your candle, have at it to your heart’s content.

Obviously, I’ll stay lifting, and lifting frequently, and going heavy now and then, and for sure “pushing it” well beyond the point of noticeable discomfort (and every now and then right into the realm of all out effort, and occasionally in that of questionable sanity). And hope to counteract the unavoidable setting in of old age ‘til the day I croak, not necessarily setting new PR’s (unless I start using the Sinclair coefficient for calculating it, but I’ll still wait a few years for that) but programming my lifts judiciously so I can keep on improving, no matter how hard it is (no matter how dark an art I have to learn in the process) until that very last day. A few pieces of advice for those who are, like myself, past their prime years and thus need to apply some sound judgment:

·           Don’t get too obsessed about sets and reps and percentages of 1RM. If you have been some years in this game you already know what your body tolerates and what you can get away with. Periodize and program some undulation (start your “waves” with more reps with less weight, and slowly add weight while reducing reps per set… when you reach a high enough number start again, if possible slightly higher) but leave yourself some leeway to accommodate changes in your baseline strength

·         Be consistent, but don’t get obsessed about it. Allow for some slippage in your schedule caused by more load at work, bad sleep because of the kids, longer intervals due to attending family events, etc.

·         As you grow older, it may be advisable to notch the intensity down a bit. Still go heavy now and then, push it when you feel like it, but don’t impose on you many sessions above 80-85% furthermore, 85% of a 500 pounds DL is significantly more taxing than 85% of a 300 DL (Duh!) You should be pretty strong by now, that level of strength only grows when used judiciously, not so much when called upon frequently with no rhyme or reason

·         Assume that it may take longer to recover from the same effort you recovered easily from just a few years back. Specially from moves with a marked eccentric component. Heck, I’m talking about squats. Low bar back squats can be wrecking (again, not exactly big breaking news here), so as you will be doing them (heck, what kind of program does not include lots of heavy squats? A shitty program, that’s what!) you better program some extra recovery measures afterwards (be it foam rolling -which, btw, has never done anything at all for me- deep tissue massage, or plain ol’ eating a ton of carbs)

·           Probably it pays to break your training in more sessions of shorter duration. Instead of very depleting couple of full body sessions twice a week, of almost two hours each it may pay to do four sessions of 50’ in which you stay focused from the beginning to the end, and instead of leaving the gym like the cast of The Walking Dead (and I’m not talking of the “live” part of the cast that tries to escape from the zombies here) leave sprightly and full of energy, itching to come back for more as soon as you can, but…

·           Pay attention to your joints. Past certain age, I’d be surprised if you don’t have at least one or two ligaments and tendons either surgically replaced or chronically inflamed or at least giving frequent and clear signals of protesting all the abuse you have heaped upon them. Be gentle to them and accept that you better be picky and take some aggravating exercises off the menu, rather than keep pushing beyond the point of no return. And frequent training seems to make that condition worse (unless you choose the exercises in each session to provide for adequate rest of the aggrieved joint), so balance your programming accordingly

Just apply some common sense and you may enjoy a long, productive lifting career. I’m not telling you following those simple rules will ensure you become your country’s IPF champion and/ or record holder, but they sure can make you have a physically more rewarding, fuller life. And that, my friends, is what a life well lived should be about.