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Who’s Body is This?

Hello everybody! We’re back with “season two” of the blog, featuring 50% more metaphysics! Apologies for the hiatus on posting articles, I’ve been having a bit of a hard time getting words to paper. But I’m told the best way to write is to…write, so I’m back at it.  We’ll be posting a couple of articles a month again, covering anything and everything that could be useful or interesting. Today’s article is something that preoccupies a decent amount of my attention, hope you find it interesting. If you have any comments feel free to reach out to us! Anyways, here it is. 

Who’s Body is This? 

We spend a lot of our time framing our training as a battle against the body, we are attempting to shape it and change it according to our whims. The body is the opponent. But is it really our body that needs overcoming? I believe that the sensation of living in one’s head, and operating the controls of the machine we call the body isn’t an accurate reflection of reality. The body and the mind are intertwined, you don’t operate your body, you are your body. I find it hard to rationalize any sort of true dualism, the mind and the body may feel disconnected, but there is nothing to say that this feeling is anything but subjective. I find this idea interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I find it fascinating that my first person experience doesn’t seem to have a rational explanation. Is it possible to find a feeling of unity between the mind and body? I don’t have any sort of answer here, but it’s interesting to think about. Second,  it helps me in training to remember that I’m not fighting against my body, but that I am it, and it is capable of expressing my will. In this way I find myself finding more comfort and confidence in the positions required to lift, and really connecting to the experience of movement. In some ways you can think of training as integrating the movement into yourself, and becoming an expression of the ideal snatch. Knowing you have control can help with mental preparation and even allow you to relax into positions during mobility work and training. 

There are several situations in which this distinction between self and body are broken down, one of which being a flow state. There are times when you are training or doing any sort of activity that is all encompassing that you can start to approach what feels like a pure experience of the moment, all attention is directed towards a task, and it is not divided. In these moments one can catch glimpses that it is not a mind controlling a body but an integrated system capable of single focus and pure experience and enjoyment. I think these states are what people find so fulfilling about physical training, it allows for a quieting of the illusion of the self and brings you back into being a part of the world, rather than something separate from it. Learning to connect and experience your body as you rather than something you own can be rather meditative. For instance often I’ll take walks and try to solely focus on the sensations of walking. Can I feel the action of my calves, quads, hamstrings? When the sensation is the sole focus I can often feel more connected to the world and have an easier time quieting rapid fire anxious thoughts. 

I had an odd experience this week. For the first few days of this week nothing felt quite right, the only way I can describe it is that it felt like my body had turned off. Weights that were light a few days before felt heavy, I was sore in areas I hadn’t been, and was having trouble sleeping. Two days of this and workouts where I failed to achieve any close to ideal positions I was gifted my first migraine headache and had a fun morning trying not to vomit. All morning post migraine I felt at war with myself, even a heels elevated squat felt grueling, and I couldn’t maintain any sort of core tension. I decided to give warming up a go and spent a good amount of time doing some breath work (90/90 supine breathing) and over the course of 20 minutes, I felt good enough to take the bar. The first few sets were difficult but as I progressed I started to fall into a groove, I was waking up. I went on to hit some PR’s in the session and moved the weights better than I ever have. I was shocked the rest of the day that it felt like I had an entirely different body than six hours beforehand. Nothing had changed physically, bodies do change but not over the course of hours, all that had changed was me reintegrating and becoming all of myself through connecting physically. So much of what we perceive about the ready state of the body is actually under our control, integrate yourself and you’ll unlock better performance and peace of mind. You are your body, act accordingly.   

“ ‘Body am I, And Soul’ – so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: ‘Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.’ ” – Frendrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra  

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The Importance of Routine

Routine

For a lot of people there is a certain amount of disdain for the routines of a well ordered life. They worry about feeling caught in a rut, or are bored when faced with doing the same things again and again, but they are missing some of the bigger picture. Do you have to be an automaton and forgo any plan that doesn’t directly fit into your routine? No. However, if you want to really get the most out of your training there is a certain amount of discipline involved. You don’t need to go crazy with your planning but there are some things that you should hold as non-negotiable parts of your daily plan, your routine.  The routine can take many shapes, and is not one size fits all. Some may need far more structure, others may need more of an outline to get things moving into the right direction. Either way, here are some things you should take into account when planning your routine.

Where to begin

The first thing I would look at when planning your routine is what time of day and days of the week you will be training. I think that it is important for you to choose a set schedule for your training days, and keep that schedule as constant as you can week to week. For instance if you train Monday-Thursday and Saturday, try to keep that Friday and Sunday as your rest days for the remainder of the cycle. It’s not the end of the world if you need to change things up, but your body will settle into the habit the more consistently you stick to a schedule and getting outside of that groove can feel a little odd. Personally I feel a bit off trying to train on a Sunday for instance. Time of day is also an important factor, generally speaking people tend to lift better in the late afternoon or evening, so this is when I would advise you to set up your training. The other important factor in time of day is the availability of your coach. If the coached practice is from 4pm-8pm, if you have any interest in getting feedback on what you are doing it would behoove you to train when coaching is available. And now you have a training schedule, from here we can move onto structuring things around it.  

Do you even job

Clearly, the second most important thing is going to be whatever it is that pays the bills while you do all of this weightlifting. Your job will and does impact your training, and that must be taken into account. If you work a swing shift, or spend most if not the whole day in a seated position, we have to take that into account when building up your routine. If you are working long hours and missing out on sleep it may be best for you to follow a three day per week program, to ensure that you are actually recovering from the training you are doing. If you spend all your time at work sitting or driving (me) you are going to need to budget some more time for warmup and mobility to make sure that you are actually getting into the proper positions when you are making your way through that days session. Everyone need not put their lifting at the absolute front of the priority list, but for those who wish to lift at the highest level there will come a time when it will be optimal to pick a job that works around your lifting schedule. If your job is robbing you of sleep, or is wearing down your body, you have to make the hard choice and make lifting the first priority.

Other things

Now that we know when we are training and working we can now piece together the rest of the daily routine. First and foremost, it is important to schedule your sleep in order to perform optimally in the gym and ya know, just not feel like garbage all the time. For strength athletes it is recommended that they sleep for eight to ten hours per night and never drop below seven, for optimal recovery. This means you have to go to bed, and early. Dial back the Netflix and catch up with your shows on the weekend, sleeping should be a priority. You’ll notice that with that nine hours of sleep, eight of work and two of training we have already eaten up much of the day. This is why it is important to prepare the majority of your meals ahead of time, make sure to have a meal before and after training, and that you are not leaving performance on the sidelines by under eating calories or protein. I may be biased, as I am woefully inflexible, but I believe it is important to do 20-30 minutes of flexibility work every day. I choose to do this before bed, but it can just as easily be performed directly following training. Stretching relaxes you, can help reduce injury risk, and is important if you would like to stay ambulatory as you age.  

Conclusion

I can see why people hate the routine, it can seem daunting and most of all boring. Nobody wants to be boring, but nobody wants to be weak either. The hours you spend in the gym are important, that is where you hone your skills in the lifts, and generate enough fatigue to induce an adaptation within the body. However, if the only thing you have down is making into the gym, and are not making sure that you have the rest of your schedule set up in a way to facilitate the recovery from your workouts you are shooting yourself in the foot. You do not have to lock yourself up, blow off all your friends and family, and become a meal prepping hermit. But if you want the most out of your training you may want to start turning down Wednesday night happy hour, and get to bed early. You may want to save some minutes by cooking ahead of time rather than making dinner every night, so you can have some time to stretch before bed. Make a schedule or an outline and try to stick with it, the more consistent this plan the more consistent your training will be. Weightlifting is hard, there is no need to make it harder by failing to plan.

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This is Your Hamster Wheel

The Problem

First things first, we have to acknowledge the unnatural insanity of our modern world. Our species evolved as tribes of hunter gatherers, living communally, and working only enough to secure our next meal, on average around twenty hours a week. The rest of our time was spent within the community building relationships, playing, talking, and watching the stars. As we have progressed, we have piled on more and more work and removed a lot of our involvement in our communities. We may have split the atom and increased communication via the internet, but our needs as individuals haven’t really changed. We need physical activity, meaningful work, and a community to fit into. We can see the sickness of our current state when we see the various forms of tribalism manifesting themselves in our lives today.  We are in essence a wild animal, caged in a society that barley fulfills our needs, and projects its heightened value of personal possession onto us. The memes that have replicated themselves throughout our societies are those that prize things over meaning. We live in a world where we value our possessions more than finding real contentment in our lives.

What do we do?

At least once a week I find myself in traffic, and I am punched straight in the face by the absurdity of my daily routine. Why do I really need to go through these motions every week, are they really helping me achieve a life of true meaning? Am I being an authentic human being? In those moments I have the strong urge to check out, and run away to live a simple life as  Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond. But let’s be realistic. We cannot simply opt out of our caged existence, we have people who count on us, things we want to accomplish, new seasons of Game of Thrones to look forward to. We have to make our cage more enjoyable. We’ve all seen videos of wild animals in third rate zoos, sitting in their concrete cells, looking miserable. That is essentially where we are living today, disconnected, locked into mundane jobs, eating poor quality food, making money for our corporate masters. We need to spruce up our zoo, and enrich our environment.

Weightlifting

Animals are happiest when they have playthings in their environment, others to interact with, and a life that somewhat resembles their natural habitat. As human beings we can do this in a variety of ways, however I’m going to talk specifically about how we can use our time within the walls of the gym to enrich our lives. This is our hamster wheel, an approximation of the physicality, play and community that we’ve lost to modernity. When you are a part of a team you get more than the mere physical activity you could at a twenty four hour fitness center, you get a tribe. A group with common goals, struggling and celebrating together, becomes a family. The interactions you have with your team in real time gives us personal interactions that the social media age has taken from us.  Our training sessions are group play, serious play, but play nonetheless.

Physical achievements help to build our confidence, and give us something to look forward to that gets us through the nine to five grind most of us have to deal with. They give us the strength to overcome the absurdity, a mental toughness that has to be earned in a world where we expect so much to be given to us. We can restructure our lives to maximize these real experiences that require you to be both physically and mentally present. The material world won’t understand this adjustment, for it does nothing to get you a better wardrobe, or nicer objects. But the depth of meaning is there, we are enriching our cage, making our lives more fulfilling which in the end is what matters. The relationships and strength you form within the walls of the gym will be carried with you wherever life takes you. Spit into the face of society and do your own thing; only we can decide what is truly important.      

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Life, Suffering, and Weightlifting

Let’s get sad

If there is one thing in life that is certain, it’s that you will suffer. Emotional and physical pain are part of our lovey existence on this chunk of rock hurtling through space. No matter how hard you ignore it and  try to “be happy”, the pain will always be with you. We’ve all lost friends, loved ones, suffered through sickness or trauma and the worst part is that we know one day it’s all going to end, and our blip of a life will be lost to history. You can have an otherwise perfect week, no work drama, good training sessions, time with people you love and still be crushed out of the blue with self loathing and depression. Today, I want to talk about suffering, and how important it is to your life no matter how much you despise it.

Anguish

Firstly, pain and anguish provide us with a counterbalance to happiness and pleasure, every yin has its yang. If you lived your whole life without loss or struggle, you wouldn’t have any way to know when times are great. Everything would be one level flat existence, not bad, not good, no highs, and no lows. A life without suffering is most certainly an inhuman life. The bad times make us appreciate the good, and going through a hardship can make you more appreciative of the things that you’ve still got.  A loss of a loved one or friend can bring the rest of your group closer and make remaining relationships more meaningful. Now, I don’t mean to make it sound like you should write off your suffering as something that will always lead to a greater good, sometimes things are demonstrably unjust, and bad things will happen to good people for no other reason than they are alive. You cannot avoid it, and if you try to you’ll only make it worse when it hits you how cruel and meaningless our universe is. The suffering can make you so angry you can’t breath, or so depressed you cannot get out of bed, but what’s important is that you carry on. Because our struggles are what make us human, our pain is what highlights our joy, our perseverance is what proves our character.

Weightlifting

Okay, so what does weightlifting have to do with any of this? In my mind it has everything to do with it. By choosing to get physically stronger, you are choosing to go through a certain degree of pain and suffering in training, in order to get the strength you desire. We weightlifters self impose literal burdens, and push our bodies and minds to do the things we never thought possible, but that’s not to say every day is pleasant. When training you will have days you don’t want to lift, but you will anyways; days when you are so sore you can hardly move, but you will anyways; days when it feels like the bar is mocking you, but you keep going. The self imposed suffering of the training is all worth it for that one perfect workout, that PR attempt in a competition, just a good day of training with your teammates. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth a thing, the challenge and occasional misery is what makes it worthwhile in the end.

In short

Don’t lie to yourself and try to be happy all the time, sometimes being alive is miserable. Be genuine and accept the pain as it comes, don’t blow it off, or try to look on the bright side, take the time to feel that crushing sadness. Feel hopeless, feel tired, feel sore, feel like you totally forgot how to snatch. Because we are lucky to be feeling anything at all. Our time is so short and every horrible experience is still one you were able to have because you’re alive. The suffering will bring all the more meaning to the next time your lover holds your hand, you see an old friend, or you finally snatch over 100kg. Don’t ignore your pain, acknowledge it, feel it, but be resilient and endure. I’ll leave you with a quote.

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

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Let’s Talk About Eating

Confusion

Listen, I understand, nutrition is confusing. There are five hundred types of diets out there, and every single one of them insist that the others are attempting to kill you. Are we supposed to be eating a low fat diet with ample carbs to fuel our training, or trying to become fat adapted and avoid carbs like the plague? Most studies that make a big splash contradict one another and are based off of correlations within epidemiological data, its hard to boil down whats important. It can become so much noise that we tend to blow them all off, and eat whatever is convenient. But for many of us looking to improve our body composition or strength it starts to be pretty important that you are eating in a way that supports your training goals. This will be the first of what I expect to be several posts dealing with nutrition.  My goal today isn’t to tell you what the best type of diet is because I don’t believe that one exists. Rather I want to give you three steps you can take to begin making your diet fit into your training goals.

You need to eat

Weightlifting training requires a huge amount of energy. Eating enough food is an essential piece of the pie to continue to gain muscle and strength. Eating at least enough calories to maintain your current weight and recover from training has to be the first goal, before trying to find any particular blend of macronutrients. Even if your goal is to lose weight, we still don’t want to restrict calories to a point that performance tanks, because the goal should be to maintain as much strength as possible while cutting weight. Everybody is different, and that is reflected in the daily caloric needs of people, but there is a ballpark number that should serve as a good place to start. First you’ll want to determine your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), this is how many calories it takes for you to exist laying on a couch all day.  There are many online calculators available and I’ll provide a link at the bottom. Once you have your BMR worked out we need to consider your level of activity, for most of us who are doing exercise or sports 3-5 day per week, you would multiply your BMR by 1.55. For instance in my BMR is 2,000 Kcal per day, 2,000×1.55=3,100 Kcal/day. This number should be right around what you need to maintain and recover from training without gaining or losing weight. For many people this looks like a lot of food, and they may feel like they cant eat that much, this is common in chronic under eaters. However in my experience, most people after moving their calories up to a reasonable maintenance level have improved workout performances and generally felt better. If your goal is to move up or down a weight class your should add or subtract 300-500 Kcal from maintenance calories. There are always exceptions and some people may have to troubleshoot more than others, but for most, this is a good place to start.

Protein

We are all strength athletes in one way or another, and as participants in what is essentially a muscle sport, we would hope to be on the same page in that we want those muscles to be bigger and/or stronger. Protein is our cornerstone for ensuring that we have the adequate materials to repair and grow between workouts. Protein, carrying 4Kcal/gram, is composed of Amino Acids, and you guessed it, so are our muscles. Protein ingestion, along with resistance training, can up-regulate the MTOR pathway and leads to the deposition of amino acids into the muscle tissue. This means that just eating protein itself triggers muscle repair, and coupled with resistance training is a powerful growth stimulus. As a strength athlete you should be shooting to eat around 1.8-2.0 grams/kilo of body weight to maximize your recovery and strength gains. For a lot of folks this will be a bit of a challenge at first, protein tends to make you feel full for quite a long time, but if you ensure that you have some kind of protein at every meal and are eating enough food you’ll hit that number fairly easily. Before you go out and spend money on expensive supplements, make sure that you are getting enough protein from real foods in your diet. It will take you further than taking creatine, under eating, and wondering why you aren’t getting the results that you want.     

Vegetables

If you are making changes to your diet in pursuit of performance or body composition i have one last task for you to get started. Eat some vegetables at least three times a day. Seriously. It’s not that hard, I know you think they are gross but there are a lot of vitamins and phytochemicals in them that help you recover, and are probably just good for your long term health. If you look at most diet trends, regardless of macronutrient breakdown, almost all of them have one thing in common, eating a lot of multi colored vegetables. You don’t even need to worry about breaking the bank buying every organic thing at the co-op, just make sure you have a couple of salads and some broccoli a few times a day. Serving size should be about a cup or small handful three to five times a day.  If you think it’s gross, do it anyway.

In Conclusion

Diets are like training programs, there are beginner, intermediate, and advanced techniques to figuring out what works best for you. Outlined here are first steps you can take to measuring how you can manipulate your eating to support your performance. Once you have a couple of basics down you can try a variety of diet types, its fun, like a science experiment manipulating the organism that is you. You don’t need a fancy or complicated nutrition plan to make gains in the gym, you just need to make the essentials your focus and the other aspects can be layered on as you get more experience.

 

http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/

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Go To Sleep

What kind of creatine should I take? What sort of diet should I follow? What mobility routine will help my lifts in the right direction? These questions are all too common and flood every fitness discussion. I believe this is a misdirection on our part, we are looking for that one easy thing that will make “all the difference” in our strength or body composition.  While we seem to overlook the most valuable asset we have. What is the one thing you can do everyday to help put 20kg on your back squat? Sleep. To help you lean out on your new diet? Sleep. To solidify all the hard work you’ve put into your technique? Sleep. You. Have. To. Sleep.

You’re Drunk

First of all, if you’re chronically depriving yourself of sleep you have the motor functions of a drunk person. Sleep deprivation can decrease reaction time, increase losses in focus and generally makes you feel weaker. The olympic lifts are extremely technical, and require you to be at the top of your abilities to get them down. If you are battling with a foggy brain from only getting five or six hours of sleep the night before; you probably aren’t going to be at your best trying to master the lifts  and drive your strength upwards. Secondly, sleep will help you out with your diet goals as well. Getting a good night of sleep can help reduce the risk for insulin resistance, and other metabolic diseases. Alternatively sleeping poorly can have negative impacts on the bodies ability to lose fat, gain muscle, and regulate hunger. Last but not least, sleep is when we etch new memories and motor patterns into our brains. If you put in a couple hours of solid practice on your snatch pull, but you don’t sleep that night… you won’t be retaining as much as you could with a full night sleep. So in short losing sleep will make you weaker, worse at lifting, and potentially at greater health risks in your day to day life.  

Quantity

Listen. I know, the new season of Kimmy Schmidt is pretty good, but you’re probably going to have to watch less tv and get off your phone. Traditionally we hear that the sleep standard we should be shooting for is seven to eight hours, and for your average person this might be okay. If you are a training in a strength sport three to five days per week, you are not the average. It is recommended that lifters get between nine to ten hours of sleep. Does that mean you will? No, probably not, but it should show you how far off base you are with the five or six hours you’re getting. You need to try to get as much sleep as you can every night if you want to make the best progress you’re capable off. If you have a crazy schedule, try to find time for a nap a couple days per week. Make sleeping a priority. If you slept poorly all week, be conservative on heavy workouts and stay safe, it’s not worth risking an injury.

Quality

 Here are a couple of things that can help you improve the quality of the sleep you’re already getting. First, limit screen time. For the two hours before bed refrain from watching tv or looking at your phone, the blue light can stimulate wakefulness. Some people will wear blue blocking glasses to use their devices, but then you have to be the guy who wears sunglasses inside at night, so it’s your call. Second, it can be helpful if you keep your room designated as a sleeping only room. Try to refrain from working, eating or watching movies in your bedroom, make is associated purely with sleep. Lastly, you’ll want to make sure that your room is as pitch black as it can be, and cool to boot. Blackout curtains and a fan go a long way toward improving sleep quality. Again, if you want to be that sort of person, you can go as far as to put tinfoil all over your windows to block the light.

Wrap up

We all want the quick fix, but there is no replacement for sleep. No supplement regimen, detox drink, or fad diet can help you if your sleep is dreadful. Sleep keeps you healthy, makes you stronger, and encodes the difficult technique we are all trying to master.  It’s not admirable to sleep only four to five hours a night, it’s unhealthy and limits your success in the long run. Try making sleep a priority, you’ll be shocked by how much better you perform.

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We Are All Sisyphus: Weightlifting and the Absurd

Our would be mascot at Albuquerque Strength Academy is the infamous Sisyphus. The story of Sisyphus begins at the end of his life, wishing to postpone his journey to the underworld he developed a scheme. Sisyphus tricked the god Hades, and having bound him, left him in a closet within his home.   When the gods discovered what had happened, they were furious. They sentenced him to an eternity of rolling an enormous boulder to the peak of a mountain, only to watch it roll down to the base and the process began anew. His eternal afterlife was to toil and strain only to accomplish nothing in the end, adding to the madness of his sentence. Imagine yourself in this position, exerting yourself day after day in a never ending loop, knowing full well that at the end of the day that boulder will once again be at the bottom of the mountain.  If you are a weightlifter you already know this feeling all too well.

 

The Absurd

 

It is natural for us as human beings to seek meaning in the universe, you want to believe that what you do matters in a real way. Our time on this earth is short, and our pursuit of meaning is a way to make our inevitable demise seem less frightening. But the universe doesn’t care that you are scared, and the world as we know it is chaotic and lacks any true objective meaning. This clash between our pursuit of meaning and the lack of our ability to find it in any measurable way is what is referred to as the absurd. Trying to find meaning in a meaningless world. The use of Sisyphus as a metaphor, by Albert Camus, for the absurd is what draws me to him as an icon. In a world without purpose, we are all like Sisyphus. Working day after day, knowing deep down that in the end what we are doing lacks meaning.

At first this realization can be met with despair, and leave you feeling like there is no reason to continue with the futility of our modern lives, but don’t you worry. If nothing matters, we are free do determine our own meaning for the world, giving ourselves our own purpose. You don’t have to listen to the herd and blend in, you can choose your own path. A path that gives your life meaning and isn’t dependent on the universe giving you anything. The idea is Sisyphus, knowing his task is meaningless, chooses to spite the gods by enjoying the details of his work.  

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”- Albert Camus

And so must we find the things in our daily struggle that we can enjoy, the feeling of the chalk on our hands, the weight of the bar on our backs, the numbness in our faces after a heavy lift, all forming a world. In this way we can live in our present moment, and choose what gives us meaning on a personal basis.

Weightlifting

The most obvious connection to Sisyphus is how his struggle relates directly to the challenges of daily training. Success in Weightlifting is fleeting at best, and if you are seeking happiness through only your results, your satisfaction will be short lived. We train, three to five days per week for weeks on end, for the chance to spend six minutes on the platform. Holding our achievements over our heads for the fraction of a second needed to get a down signal, only to watch them fall to the ground once again. To someone on the outside it may seem futile to work as hard as we do, day after day, seeming to get little to nothing in return. However, we lifters know the truth. It is not the weight being overhead that matters in the end, it is the process that gives us meaning day to day.

Meaning

Sometimes the world seems bleak, unfair, and devoid of meaning. Like many people, I occasionally struggle with depression. Before I found Weightlifting I frequently felt adrift and lost, having nothing to pour myself into. I won’t say that after training I never struggle with despair, but in those moments having time focused on Weightlifting has been more meaningful than I can express. Those times when it is just you and the bar, everything else fades away, and for a moment all that exists is the next lift. The universe won’t provide me a meaning, so I choose that meaning to be a pursuit of physical strength, and helping others to find the sense of fulfillment I find in the training process. Don’t worry yourself about what the herd tells you is important, they are no more right than anyone.  While our passion may seem arbitrary, tedious, and meaningless from the outside, we know that every atom of that barbell creates a world. We create our own meaning. We create our own happiness.

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How did I get here?

The year was 2010 and I was a skinny and scared private in the US Army, heading to Afghanistan. My company was tasked with working for the NATO training mission, helping to build the Afghan Army, a task that nearly ten years later appears to have been very fruitful (sarcasm). While the days were long, my job was about as safe as you can get for an infantryman, and we had enough down time to chain smoke, read, and of course hit the gym. I was always somewhat insecure about myself, and lacked confidence in a variety of areas, and I saw the muscularity of some of my peers and wanted to try to achieve that myself.

I had no idea what I was doing in the gym, and was essentially following the instructions on the exercise machines, and training almost exclusively my upper body. After a month or so of trying to figure things out on my own (and ordering an excessive amount of supplements off bodybuilding.com) I began training with one of my friends in the platoon. He was an imposing figure (until you saw his legs) and he had a better idea of what to do than I. We spent the next eleven months training for three hours a day, six days a week (not a single squat was done). What my program, if you can call it that, lacked in structure and balance was made up for in the intensity we trained and the amount of food we ate. Over the course of my deployment I went from 175to 200 lbs, and certainly increased my strength and confidence. I for the first time found an internal stillness that I can only tap into while training. When in the midst of a workout, the world drops away, the ego dissipates and all that is left is the task at hand, and for the first time the world appeared without the blinding layers of my neuroticism.

Upon returning from Afghanistan I kept up my routine, but the addition of mandatory physical training in the morning quickly brought my bodyweight down from the heights it reached on deployment. The gym became a habit, an obsession, not from the results I was trying to achieve, but with the process of training itself. I began to realize that my methodology was not the most efficient way to conduct training, and I began to look for new information to further my strength. Around this same time, I was promoted to sergeant and was tasked with writing workouts for my squads daily training sessions. I owed it to them to create a quality program, afterall fitness in the infantry means life or death. I began to drift our morning workouts away from long distance running and into “functional” training with kettlebells, jumps, sprints and plenty of body weight workouts. And thus it went for the better part of a year, functional training and running in the morning and bodybuilding style splits in the afternoon. (still…no squats).

Toward the end of my time in the Army, I began a program focused around the big three (squat, bench, deadlift) as I had reached a stalling point with the split style training. I began to do full body workouts, with progressive overload, after reading about the idea of linear periodization. I was blown away. Not only was the training harder and heavier, but progress was no longer measured by the look in the mirror but the weight on the bar. My obsession was renewed, I wanted to be the strongest I could possibly be. It was at this time I first witnessed the the performance of the Olympic lifts. Strength training inherently made more sense than physique training, I appreciated the simplicity. You master the movements, and add weight, no gimmicks, just simple hard work. When you being to follow a strength program your concerns about how you look wash away, and you are left with a feeling of accomplishment at the end of each workout. I lifted five more pounds, I did two more reps, it was simple. I had found my home.

Upon my exit from the Army, I wanted to learn how to do the Olympic lifts. I joined a CrossFit gym and I learned the basics of the movements. For the first time had help with developing my technique in all aspects of lifting (something that was severely lacking). I knew fitness and nutrition were what I wanted to study; therefore, I began a program focused on nutrition and exercise science at the University of New Mexico where I graduated in 2015. Eventually the gym I attended started a Olympic lifting program, and I immediately abandoned my crossfitting and threw myself wholeheartedly into Weightlifting.  The technical difficulty of the lifts and training was unmatched for quieting my mind. More importantly though, it began to give my life structure outside the gym. I focused on eating right, doing mobility work, and getting to bed early. My single minded focus allowed for my insecurity about social relationships, physical appearance, and demands of society to drift away. This left only the task at hand, adding one more kilogram to the bar. I had structure. I had routine. I had a passion. I had freedom.

I began working as a CrossFit coach in 2013, and soon after attended my USAW level one seminar so I could begin assisting to coach in the very program I had grown up in. I trained as much as I could, read every article I could find about Weightlifting, listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, and focused all my research in school around lifting performance. When the time came that our current head coach was moving, I was ready to step in and take over as the head Weightlifting coach. Beginning with coaching at as many local meets as I could, I slowly but surely began having athletes achieve high enough results to attend National level weightlifting meets. My passions began to shift as my athletes abilities  quickly began to exceed my own. Coaching the lifts became my priority.

And here we are at the beginning the next chapter. Albuquerque Strength Academy will serve as the home for continuing to develop lifters of all ages, and skill levels. We will ask you for hard work, you will experience joy and pain, and through the process we will aid you in achieving your strength goals. I want you to feel the inner calm and belonging that training has brought me. Society will try to impose its values and priorities upon you but you needn’t give in. We live in a world that lacks objective meaning, and thus, we are free to decide what is truly important. There is freedom in the practice.  Come train with us, and discover yourself.