Hey hey!
Hope the year has gotten to a good start - a long weekend to kick things off is certainly a fun way, right.
Let’s kick things off with my first post for this year.
The 3 things for today
on a story about hulk arms and saboteurs
a few quotes featuring Rumi and Marcus Aurelius
on confusing bodybuilding and strength training
hulk arms and saboteurs
One of my students, we will call her HA, was as good as they come. For the 5+ years, she's trained with me, she's probably missed five classes. I've probably missed more! Her focus on form and technique was phenomenal. Never rushing anything but never shy to put in the effort, she made progress every quarter.
40, mom, strong, consistent. I have a large group of women who check that off. She was doing double kettlebell front squats with 2x20kgs (that's a big deal!) consistently and obviously cleaning them as well. Her conditioning was insane and after a couple of years of just brilliantly consistent training, she was on top of her game. She was muscular, incredibly strong, and with her insane discipline, she toned down as well after a Daily9 challenge
Then, one fine day, she happened to meet a group of her high-school friends, most of whom weren't physically active and most certainly do not do any form of strength training. And they remarked on how muscular her arms were and called them Hulk arms.
Even the best of us cannot ignore everything. And this comment got to her.
We have saboteurs all around us. Many times, we are our own saboteurs. But most other times, it is the people immediately around us. Some knowingly sabotage us. Most unknowingly sabotage us. Maybe without meaning to but some deep, dark emotion comes out of being envious of someone else doing something that we are not able to.
Despite my best attempts to convince her otherwise, HA wanted to lose some more weight and set a rather stiff target. She wanted to get rid of her Hulk arms. This meant going from a healthy and strong weight to a much skinnier one.
What I learned from this,
Saboteurs are all around us. Just coz they are related to us or have the best of intentions for us does not alter the fact that they will sometimes sabotage us.
Even the best of us slip up.
But that’s not permanent at all. At that time when this happened, I felt like I had failed and was unhappy. I could’ve been a better coach and helped my student go through her journey in a more supportive fashion.
All of us need to contextualise and learn in our own way. While I want you to learn from my mistakes and not repeat them, the more we experiment and listen to ourselves and try things out - the stickier it is.
HA is back in business and has been, and is much wiser today. Her experimentation has made her smarter and what to me seemed a bad decision in the short-term is not a bad one in the long-term.
Most things are reversible. Except when they are not. Play around with things that can be reversed. Don’t mess too much with irreversible stuff.
a few quotes to mull about
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
– Marcus Aurelius
Control the controllable. Which basically means my own actions. Am I happy with what I am doing? If not, fix it. There's nothing else to think about.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.
– Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
This quote comes from a dear reader and an old student of mine. And I absolutely love this.
Marcus Aurelius talks about listening to your nature. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about doing what you are capable of doing. Likewise, Steven Pressfield.
One of the most straightforward things I did was quit my job in tech and move back to India to start The Quad. The level of clarity I had back then made things quite simple.
Taking the time to listen more to what's going on internally is the key. Shut out the noise.
We are constantly consuming our thoughts. Cows, goats, and buffalo chew their food, swallow it, then regurgitate and rechew it multiple times. We may not be cows or buffalo, but we ruminate just the same on our thoughts - unfortunately, primarily negative thoughts. We eat them, and then we bring them up to chew again and again, like a cow chewing its cud.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh
Yeah, that's me. The past year, I've become a bit more aware of this and tried to work on it. It is interesting and frustrating. But I think I've made tiny forward progress with this.
This is not just about overthinking, which I do. This is about constant buzzing in the head, repetitive thoughts that just never seem to go away. What a waste of time!
I had the opportunity to connect with a couple of my students who are extremely knowledgeable in these affairs and they were able to point me in a couple of directions.
I stumble along. I've caught myself making progress. It is slow. It is work. But it feels good. Most times.
bodybuilding aka getting big and bulky is not the same as strength training
Just like how cricket and baseball, or rather, cricket and football are two completely different sports played with a ball. Or how Carnatic music and western music are similar yet distinctly different.
There's a sport called bodybuilding. Just like how cricket is not baseball, or football in the USA vs football in the rest of the world is rather different sports, bodybuilding - think Arnold Schwarzenegger - is different from what we want to play.
The point of the sport of bodybuilding is to get big and showy muscles. Strength is not a requirement. You don't need to have a triple bodyweight deadlift, you just need to look like it. You are judged on aesthetics and physique and how well you can show your muscles.
A legitimate sport and a lot of hard work. Except that's not what most of us want or are working towards.
Again, you wouldn't try to take a cricket bat and do a forward defence in baseball.
Different goals, different methods. The complications arise because most gym trainers are/were bodybuilders and they did not know much about the field of strength and conditioning. And most gyms outfitted themselves with machines, which are great for rehab and doing high-rep isolation work (working muscles in isolation) which helps you balloon up.
what is strength training
Strength training is about getting stronger.
This means you are training your body and your mind to work as a unit to lift more weight.
As Coach Dan John says, that essentially boils down to
- put weight overhead
- pick weight up off the floor
- carry weights for distance
When we do lift weights, we will put on muscle. And we will tone up (body recomposition i.e. lose fat and gain muscle).
But unless we try rather hard and train specifically for it, we will not blow up into a big beefy dude or gal.
Analogy time.
Just coz you pick up cricket does not mean you will become a fast bowler, a good spinner, a great batsman and a superb fielder. They are all different skills and all of them take practice and it is hard to get and a constant process.
Or if you know to sing Carnatic, you cannot just randomly sing western.Different skills. Different methods. All with a steep learning curve and continuous.
The strength work we prescribe at The Quad is low repetition strength work i.e. you will lift heavy weights not too many times (around 5-10 reps). This means your muscles get denser and stronger and a wee bit bigger but won't blow up. The jargon for this is myofibrillar hypertrophy versus sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.
It is hard work, especially as we get older, to put on muscle.
It is harder for women because of how our bodies are i.e. producing testosterone and all that.
For men and women, it takes sensible and consistent strength training to get strong. And with good coaching, one can get amazingly StrongEnough in a process that seems smooth and immensely enjoyable.
When combined with a good lifestyle of eating like an adult and getting enough sleep, we end up looking better as well.
I was confused and put off by strength training as I thought bodybuilding was the only option. It is not.
You can get much stronger than you thought possible and you won't look like those people on those hoardings outside a gym.
Thanks for reading/listening. If you have any questions or thoughts or feedback, I’d love to hear from you.
