DON’T BE A MEME

My loathing for memes has been well documented on this blog.  Yes, I realize I use them as a means to break up the words in my posts with humor, and I’ll most likely end up doing it in this very post, but stick with me here.  Memes are employed by the uncreative as a means to replicate humor without actually investing the time or energy necessary to understand how comedy occurs; the necessary sense of timing, irony and absurdism required to elicit a laugh.  Instead, it’s just plug and play and repetition; we just keep posting the same memes and laughing at the same jokes.  It absolves the user of the need to think.  Well goddamn if people aren’t trying to live their lives like a meme, and it’s having the same outcome; stale, with no progress and no thinking.

There is literally a meme about the topic of memes being overused underthought comedy...have we reached critical mass yet?

Memes in training have become super pervasive.  People don’t want to think critically when it comes to training and nutrition, and they look for the quickest 4 word solution to live their lives around.  Want to gain weight?  GOMAD, duh!  For those of you at home that haven’t been exposed to that insanity, GOMAD is the abbreviated way to say “Gallon of Milk a Day” because, of course, in our quest to save as much time and put as little effort as possible in communication, we of course came up with a helpful acronym for a non-helpful answer.  And I say this as someone who DID drink a gallon of milk a day while running 20 Rep Squats; but it wasn’t the only damn thing I did to gain weight.  I ate big and well on top of that, with a focus on protein rich foods and much non-junk carbohydrates, AND I trained with as much intensity as possible.  I did all this because I actually read the nutritional section in Super Squats.  GOMAD isn’t a weightgain solution; it’s a goddamn meme.

We see this crap in training too.  “Everything over 5 reps is cardio”.  HAROFL!  Good one dude!  Oh wait, you’re seriously living your life off of a throwaway joke?  You’ve become a caricature of an actual athlete.  A parody of an actual functioning human.  You’ve become the meme of the “fat powerlifter” which doesn’t actually exist, because those dudes don’t make it through a full meet.  Even the SHWs at Westside were pulling sleds and working in greater than 5 reps, but you went and decided to remove critical thinking from your training plan and deduce that both reps above 5 AND cardio are bad for you.  Yeah, good luck with that one champ; you decided to become a meme.

And now memes about the results of following memes...I just...I just...

This is pervasive everywhere in training; I’m only scratching the surface.  IIFYM bro!  Are you serious?  Yeah, I get it; it came about as a revolution against people that were sticking to strict diets of “clean” foods...which I guess was just awful?  Oh yeah, first, I’m sure there are some chuckleheads reading going “Clean foods?  Does that mean you washed it first?  HAHAROFLS” Yeah shut up for a second, you sound stupid.  The rest of us all know what the hell we mean by clean foods, and many kids that embraced the IIFYM meme want to pretend that micronutrients and fiber aren’t real things.  Yeah, there are people out there that GET the intent behind it and are able to eat a diet rich in nutritious foods WHILE still finding room for ice cream and pop tarts, but there are just as many that decided to embrace the shield of IIFYM because it absolves them of the need to think.

We see this with the Keto zealots, who have decided that, as long as it puts them in ketosis, it must be magic.  We see this with strongman who refuse to bench because “I’m a strongman bro!”  Guys with ripped and bleeding calluses who skip days of training rather than wearing gloves because “I don’t have a matching purse!”  For Christ’s sakes people; these a jokes!  They were never meant to be taken seriously.  The people in the know made them as a brief shorthand to summarize a greater series of ideas, and the cliffnotes scholars of the world decided to ignore the textbooks and just look at the highlights.

Those of my readers who regularly skim my blog probably think I REALLY like this movement

You get what you put into this, and that includes the mental activity.  When you invest a little brainpower and spend some time actually thinking about WHY you do the things you do, you do yourself a service.  If you want to turn your brain off and spout memes, at least hire a capable coach that can allow you the freedom to do that!  Pay some cash and get a good prescription that you can memorize and regurgitate and zombie through on your way to success.  You either put in brainpower or you put in cash, but either way you gotta pay something.