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Feats of Strength: Strength Is Ephemeral
I’m a strong guy. It’s one of my vanities. In a profession of strong men, I was considered strong. The Army is big on running. One-third of one’s fitness evaluation is a two-mile run. Because combat so often requires a long-distance, totally linear run for 10-15 minutes at a time.
I figured out pretty quick that, amongst the wolf pack in which I ran, I’d always be mediocre — maybe high mediocre, if I worked my tail off — when it came to running. But strength? I can do high-end strength. Took me a while to learn, though. For too many years, I followed the insane advice of magazines like Muscle & Fitness, which extols the workouts of pharmaceutically enhanced bodybuilders who were chasing hypertrophy, not strength. Eventually, I figured out that fighters back in the day had a vested interest in building real-world strength (because otherwise they’d, uh, die) and consciously eschewed any workout that wasn’t at least a couple hundred years old. This led me to bodyweight exercises, kettlebells, and clubs and maces.
The best description of strength training I’ve heard is that it is a “grind.” Whether volume or intensity, you grind it out. No shortcuts. No “hacks.” Just time and effort and will.
Just as I began to get stronger, I also started going full obsession into martial arts. While I’ve got some ability at various striking arts, I loved/love grappling — judo, jujutsu, jiu-jitsu. And I learned a whole new dimension of strength. Strength not focused and applied efficiently and effectively is wasted effort. It is inelegant. Strength focused, and applied with the surgical accuracy of a clinician, is a thing of beauty. It is art. I can’t do any better at describing it than @danhanson did in his post.
A pretty strong guy who was also a fair dinkum martial artist was a cat named Miyamoto Musashi. He said, “from one thing, learn 10,000.” My dad gave me a copy of The Book of Five Rings when I was a kid, and that line always stuck with me. If what you learn in the gym stays in the gym when you walk out the door, you’re wasting your time. Doubly so with the dojo.
We should all dedicate ourselves to expanding and building and improving strength. Strength is the attribute from which all virtues flow.
And in the end, it means nothing. Strength will leave you. It is ephemeral. Should you live long enough, you will be weak. And frail. And vulnerable. Yuck.
But, it’s worth it. The human continuum consists of body, mind, and spirit. If you’ve trained your physical strength correctly, as your body fails the strength you’ve built of mind and spirit will compensate. You just can’t throw people through the ceiling anymore. <sigh>
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OH, I see. Phrasing? ha.
As with Copenhagen.
Yes but don’t you have to spit that stuff out at some point? I don’t know how that works obviously. I mean you have to spit gum out too, but you can just stick it back in the wrapper.
@mikelaroche
Stop it.
Cool.
I never spit it out. Was I doing it wrong?
I worked as a mason tender one summer, before my freshman year in college. Had no idea what I was doing, which I think was the point. But I still haven’t met a group of people who were so consistently, freakishly strong – the masons, and the guys on that crew.
They were all shapes and sizes. But basically indefatigable. Gym muscles can’t compete with real-world strong. I call it “farmer strong”. It’s strong earned from work.
A couple of years ago I had a knee injury from running, I was basically dead in the water. So I started doing pushups daily, just to do something. Started out with 1 set of 20, then 2 sets, then 3, then it was how many sets to get to 100? Finally got to the point where I could do 50 pushups, sometimes more, in one set. And I’m not the kind of guy, the kind of build, where you would have guessed I could do that just by looking at me. Not at all. But I physically felt GOOD when I was at the peak of that. Different from running. Strong is good.
I did the pushup thing at age 47 or so. Anything is possible.
Getting out of the Army has let me fall in love with the push up all over again. For years, it was just part of my fitness grade to get as many as possible in 2 minutes. I pretty much knew exactly where I could cut corners, and the test lets you take breaks. You can’t move your hands or feet off the ground, you can’t let anything but your hands n feet touch the ground, but you can break. Thing is, the more/longer breaks you take, the more they take out of you because of the rules. I had the evolution down to a science so that I could knock out 100 as expeditiously as possible: 1 set of 50, quick breather break, one set of 20, quick breather break, one set of 10, break, two sets of 5, and then just gut the rest out until you hit the magic triple digits. I hated that.
Now, push ups are a prime part of my fitness routine, and I can do them slow–not super slo-mo sets or anything scientific, but slow enough that I’m not using any momentum–and feel the straight-up, no kidding goodness of the push up. It is truly a “total body” exercise.
* Oh, and @chriscampion, the numbers I hit are not a humble-brag or in any way a disparagement of your numbers: Imagine if your job mandated showing up to work at 0630 everyday, and the first 1.5 hours were mandated work-out times. You’d stack numbers, too. Unless, of course, @dajoho were grading you. Then you’d just listen to him count: “1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4–c’mon, cupcake–4, 4, 4…”
When I was working, I would outlast every single guy in both strength and stamina by hours. Most of them looked really strong. They just weren’t .
Even in my sixties I have been able to out-dig every kid I’ve hired to help in my garden. I need someone to move about two cubic meters of compost heap soon; so that the structure can be rebuilt. I have a strong suspicion that whoever it is will last a couple of hours at the most and I’ll end up doing it myself.
My sons just seemed to be naturally strong in their teens. Something weird is going on with young men these days. I was told by a friend involved in Army basic training that many young men do not have the bone density to make it through. I can believe it.
You may be surprised to learn that I’m not Herschell Walker. But I heard, years ago, when he was playing football, that his primary workouts were running drills and pushups. I think this is just urban legend at this point, but you can become much stronger, all over, just by doing pushups – and yeah, not rushing through them, either.
I’m more of a running guy, though. That’s how cowards survive. By running away? And possibly tinkling in their shorts as they do so? You catching my drift here?
The endurance thing is different, but it still makes me feel strong, motivated, energetic, etc. It just gives me smaller biceps to self-smooch when I’m out with the ladies. Because chicks dig that.