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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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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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Episode .5

New IWF Weightclasses, Competition Goals, NM LWC Championships

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Lift Between Anarchy and Order

People have a tendency to divide things into categories, it just makes the world around us more manageable. Most of the time, these categories are pairs of opposing perceptions. Good and Evil, Yin and Yang, Logical and Creative, Anarchy and Order. The brain itself is divided into two hemispheres, one geared toward the logical and systematic, the other toward the creative and chaotic. The place that exists between those categories is what people refer to as balance. Balance is what most people strive for, in almost any category you can think of. Order in a good sense creates rules, laws, structure, and a system to thrive in. Order as a downside is strict routine, absolute uniformity, and paperwork. Chaos in a good sense is creating a piece of art, visiting a new place, trying a new food, learning, growth. The downside of Chaos is uncertainty, the darkness in an unlit parking lot, the wreck on the side of the road, drinking too much coffee before heavy squats. On that note, let’s bring Weightlifting into the picture.

 

Weightlifting requires balance. Not just physical balance, but mental and emotional balance as well. You must find the place between Anarchy and Order and plant your feet on each side. Grayson has this cue for the Split Jerk, “50/50.” When he says it, he means to have equal balance between both feet, front and back, both legs bearing weight in an even manner. I think this is applicable for the entirety of Weightlifting, not just the Split Jerk. On one side you have Order. Order is following the program, at the prescribed percentages, reps, and sets, predictability. Order is doing the accessory work and stretching. Order is sleeping and eating enough to optimize performance. Too much order will cause boredom, burnout, and the look that assembly line workers used to have in the Industrial Revolution. On the other side is Anarchy. Anarchy isn’t really in our control, but when a small portion is, it’s living on the wild side, YOLO (You Only Lift Once), and doing handstands in a truck stop bathroom (probably for Instagram). Anarchy is adding a little more weight than was prescribed, going for an extra rep, full effort maxing out, testing your limits. Anarchy at the far end is losing all emotional control after lifts don’t go the way you want them to, hoping that pain in (name a body part) doesn’t turn into an injury, jumping straight to a working weight without warming up, taking 4 scoops of pre-workout.

 

Weightlifting requires you to ride the line if you want to know what your potential is. Too much Order and you’ll be scared to try a heavier weight, because Order brings comfort, and you won’t grow much being comfortable. With just enough Order, you will be disciplined enough to keep yourself calm when you miss, get enough sleep and eat what you need to, and make sure there is enough time for accessory work, stretching, and recovery. Too much Anarchy and you’ll end up in one of those fitness fails videos, because Anarchy is unpredictable, and what you don’t know (or aren’t aware of) can be really dangerous. With just enough Anarchy, you can push out fear and doubt with an appropriate bit of reckless abandon, and you can test yourself maximally. I can’t tell you where that line is for you, but I’ll tell you how I found mine. When I come into the gym to train, I know what I need to do already, I’ve already looked at what’s in store for me. I know what numbers I am supposed to hit for the amount of reps and sets, and how tired I am going to be once I’m done. I’ve already done the entire training session in my mind. I follow a routine for my warmup, and my body knows when I start that warmup, I am going to be putting heavy things over my head. That is Order. Sometimes things don’t go as planned, or I have to make adjustments. I could have gotten less sleep than I thought I needed, or maybe I ate too many slices of pizza the night before. The percentage I was supposed to work up to felt too easy or too heavy, I’ll round up or round down. I have a little pain in my hip and shoulder, I make a choice to keep going or allow myself some rest. This is the most weight I’ve ever attempted on this lift, PR time, I’ve got this. That is Anarchy. This applies emotionally as well. Too much Order in your emotions and you won’t know when to let loose the rage and fury that sets in when someone is walking really slow in front of you, you’ll just Clark the bar and tell yourself it was too heavy to get under it fast enough. Too much Anarchy and you’ll punch a wall or end up crying in a corner. Find the line. The line in which lies a calm and controlled lift executed with the ferocity of a mother pulling a car off her child trapped underneath. Lift between Anarchy and Order.

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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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Progress, Not Perfection

People have this idea that perfection is what should be strived for. The perfect mate, the perfect career, the perfect diet, the perfect life. In sports, the perfect jump shot, the perfect batting average, the perfect game, the perfect season. I’ve heard that practice makes perfect. I’ve also heard that perfect practice makes perfect. This is all assuming that something can be perfected. I don’t believe in perfection, it’s an undefinable concept, like dividing by zero. Nothing can be perfect because nothing has ever been perfect. Why does that matter in Weightlifting? I’m glad you asked. Here’s the thing, there is no perfect lift. There’s the lift you barely made. The lift you kind of pressed out. The lift you nearly chased off the platform. The lift that felt wobbly. The lift that felt fast. The lift that was better than the last one. None of these are the perfect lift though. Let’s say someone was tasked to create a computer simulation of the perfect lift. How would the Lifter be put together? Height, age, body weight, body proportions, mobility, years of training, range of motion, mindset, the list could go on. The barbell and the weight on it are a constant, you my friend, are the variable. Let’s set the idea of perfection aside and focus on a better concept to aim for…progress.

 

Progress is something that can be achieved and continually worked toward. Progress isn’t sexy though. Progress can take time, a lot of time, and that requires patience. Patience with yourself and with the process of advancement. There are times when your advancement feels like a bumper to bumper traffic jam in 100 degree weather as you see a tumbleweed roll right past you. At the very worst, it can feel as if we are regressing. This happens in Weightlifting. It’s all PR’s and rainbows when you first start, but then plateaus arrive like dark clouds over your summer barbeque. The leveling off of progress. This is the point where the real work starts, and where people start to feel a little bit of despair. I’ve been there. Until recently, I had been on an uphill climb in first gear with the emergency brake on, and it sucked. I got through it though. How? One word, Kaizen.

 

Kaizen is a Japanese word for improvement. Continuous improvement. The concept is this: systematic improvements through small incremental changes to processes. What does this concept have to do with Weightlifting? Have you not been paying attention? Progress is continual improvement. Boom goes the dynamite! As long as you make continual improvement, even if it’s one small incremental change at a time, you are winning. You get injured and have to start at the beginning, the moment you get back to training in some way, you’re making progress. You haven’t made any PR’s in a year, but you rarely miss any lifts, you’re making progress. You missed a bunch of lifts and had a lousy training session where you wanted to quit but you didn’t, you’re making progress. You are on the verge of injury or having a complete meltdown and you throttle your training back to recover more, you’re making progress. Progress is the river, through time and effort, that created the Grand Canyon. If your only metric is perfection, you will continually be disappointed and eventually give up. Ever hear that if you aim for the stars and you land on the moon, you’ve still achieved something great? There it is, what you aim for determines where your effort is placed and how close you get to your goal. If perfection is the only measure of success, and you miss the mark, by that logic the result is that your effort has been wasted. Focus instead, on learning from every mistake, every failure and setback, and seek mastery with DELIBERATE practice. Aim toward Better, and you’ll make progress. Who knows, if you make enough progress, you might be the first to hit perfection. Perfection is the enemy of Progress, because if you wait until something is perfect, you might be waiting longer than it takes your crush to text you back. Progress, Not Perfection.

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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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Get Under It or Die Trying

You’re looking at the barbell. Sitting there with your final heavy single loaded on the bar, which if successful, will bring that new PR. You look at it, that still small voice telling you it might be too heavy, the doubts start creeping in. The weight felt heavy on that last rep, you’re not sure you can make another one, even if it’s just one kilo more. Coach’s eyes wander in your direction, you can’t procrastinate any longer, you stand up and begin your setup routine (which you should have by the way). You close your eyes before you begin your pull, waiting just a moment longer than you usually do, hesitating in that final moment where you would normally just rip the bar from the ground on a lighter lift. The doubt has doubled at this point, and as you pull you’ve already given up, it’s just not going to happen, and it doesn’t. The people cheering you on in the background shouldn’t make a difference, it’s just noise. “Big pull, stay tight, c’mon!” None of that will help you in that moment, if you hear those people, it’s because your focus has left the lift and drifted off to whether or not you left the stove on at home (which you probably did, and your front door is unlocked too). I can’t say for sure what causes people to turn a potential lift into a heavy pull. I’ll give you my take on it…fear. A dictionary definition of fear is: a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined. The first time you attempt to put your body weight over your head can instill panic, I get it, I experience it too. If you never get scared, cool story bro, become a guru and teach the rest of us your secret techniques. However, if you’ve felt like a child staring at a storm drain with a clown in it, and you want to be a successful Weightlifter, you’re going to have to get comfortable with that feeling. There comes a time where you have to acknowledge and set that fear aside, it has to be compartmentalized and fiddled around with later, but not when you’re standing in front of that barbell. If you’ve never been skydiving I highly recommend it, it’s a lot of fun. Some people can’t fathom jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, but you can never appreciate what fear is, and isn’t, until you do something that would make the average person squeeze their glutes tighter than a prison inmate in the shower. Same thing with Weightlifting, who in their right mind would take a bunch of weight and try to put it over their head. If you haven’t Snatched your own bodyweight, you’re still a beginner, you have a lot of room to grow (unless you’re 80 years old, even then, you’d be surprised). I’m not even going to comment if you aren’t able to Clean & Jerk bodyweight. I’ve seen some people that are really strong and have the mobility and technique to accomplish a bodyweight snatch, but one thing stops them, fear. I like to laugh at motivational quotes, especially cliché ones. “Feel the fear and go for it, ‘There is nothing to fear but fear itself,’ ‘False Evidence Appearing Real.” If it helps you to see those quotes, and they drive your fear away, that’s good, whatever works for you. For the rest of us, you just have to pull like you’re trying to wrench the Devil out of hell and pray to Pyrros Dimas that you get under it. It could be, that you need a stronger mental attitude toward the whole idea of getting under the bar. What if you lifted like your life depended on it, like someone had a gun to your head? If that was the case, which would you fear more? How would you overcome your fear? I don’t have those answers for you, nobody is coming to lift it for you, you’re going to have to figure it out yourself. Find something though, it could even be nothing (like learning to clear your mind, aka mindfulness). Whatever you choose to motivate yourself to get under that bar, do it. As for me, I tell myself…Get under it, or die trying.

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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.