EMBRACE THE OGRE: I WANT TO BE STRONG, NOT SMART

Bringing back some DnD again, because that seemed to be popular with my nerd-based readers, and in a point of irony I intend to go against the nerd stereotype and embrace ignorance.  It’s amazing how, the further along we get in training, the more we tend to forget the original reason we started lifting in the first place.  At least for me, the goal was always to be big and strong.  It’s so incredibly simple and easy to grasp.  I grew up watching Arnold in 80s action flicks, Hulk Hogan’s 24” pythons as the WWF champion, Popeye beating up Bluto with his ridiculous forearms after eating his spinach, etc, and I wanted to be these men.  I wanted to be so big and strong that I was physically unstoppable.  At no point did I ever think to myself “I want to KNOW everything there is to know about being big and strong”; it was “I want to BE big and strong.”  So why the hell did so many of you abandon your goals in the hopes of being smart instead?  Embrace the ogre here; be strong, not smart.

Hah!  Different Ogre.  But same point.

Seriously, I don’t get you people.  What is your reward for being the smartest person in the room about lifting?  Did you watch Arnold throw a phone booth in “Commando” as a kid and think to yourself “Man, when I grow up, I want to COACH someone to be able to do that”?  Were you watching Hulk Hogan tear off his shirt and thinking “One day, I’m going to train a ton of wrestlers to be that strong”?  I can’t understand your ambitions.  What inspired you to give up on personally achieving these wondrous feats of strength and to instead relegate yourself purely to possessing the knowledge of HOW to achieve these things, rather than the sheer ability?

“Well how can I achieve these things if I don’t KNOW how to get there?”  Goddamn man, just how smart do you think Hulk Hogan is?  And I’m not saying that Terry Bollea is an imbecile, but he’s certainly not winning any Nobel Prize.  Arnold was born in the 40s, immediately post WWII, in war torn Austrian (which, spoiler alert, they had LOST the war, so things weren’t going so good over there); what sort of exercise science information do you think he had access to?  Paul Anderson was a high school kid that wanted to get bigger for football.  Bob Peoples was a farmer.  The Saxon Trio were a professional circus act; goddamn CARNIES people.  Somehow, ALL of these people managed to figure out how to get big and strong without the internet, 800 hours of research, exercise science degrees, a nutritional program put together by MENSA, etc etc.  Why do YOU need all of this nonsense?

This looks SO stupid, but those women are digging it

Is it, perhaps, because intellect is so much more difficult to prove compared to strength?  You can go round and round citing poorly performed studies with dumb control groups and stupid variables (and really you’re only citing the abstract anyway) and then disprove someone else’s study for having the same flaws as your own, and the first person to resort to a logical fallacy “loses”, because you both took 1 semester of logic in undergrad (or you googled “logical fallacies”) and learned that this was the only way an argument can be wrong.  You can shout down someone else as a fanboy or for using “broscience” or get the internet hivemind of your current forum to rally against the interloper and get them banned and feel like you “won”.  But man, if you only deadlift 225 and another dude pulls 700…f**k, he’s stronger than you.  You can’t outangle him, use Instagram filters, play with lighting, photoshop, etc etc; you just have to be at peace that you are weaker than that person.  And it’s no fun losing, so why not pick battles where victory is far more nebulous?

Stop picking the easy battle here; you don’t get better at football by curb stomping a bunch of 5th grade pop-warner players.  You settled for being smart because it was “easier” than being strong.  Bring back that desire that was in you before and endeavor to be the strongest guy in the argument, not the smartest.  When someone cites 500 studies for how you’re wrong, take solace in the fact that the person arguing with you deadlifts 400lbs less than you do.  Be uninclined to argue because you gain nothing from the experience.  Have nothing to prove because it’s already out there, ready to be verified.  Be accomplished enough that your word is enough to carry the weight of your argument.

Technically, the kid on the right is usually superior technique right now

What does this mean?  It means those hours spent pouring over obscure lifting journals and arguing with other lifting nerds are hours better vested in training, eating, and planning how you will succeed the next time you need to train and eat.  “B-b-but overtraining!” Hey, look at that; your big brain is getting in the way of getting some big muscles.  Embrace the ogre and quit being so goddamn smart for a second.  You are at severe risk of undertraining right now, because you’ve already decided to limit yourself before you even tried.  Exercise science is a fledgling field, and it’s basically in the process of currently discovering what we already know, if that.  There is still much undiscovered wisdom which is deridingly called “broscience”, yet it managed to WORK for decades.  Spend more time training, get in some daily workouts, or make your current workouts longer, or figure out how to get more volume in your current workouts in less time.  When I ran Building the Monolith, I spent a day planning out how I was going to run the program in less than an hour, which was a day many would piss away arguing about MRV and whatever the current fact-du-jour is.  Spend those hours cooking a week’s worth of food in a slow cooker and packing it so you can just grab and go in the morning, rather than spending hours on the internet lamenting about how you DON’T have time to eat, so could someone PLEASE tell you about all the hidden foods out there that are cheap, fast, easy to make and ALSO taste good.  Spend that time grocery shopping and finding good deals on cheap cuts of meat, spend it doing all that conditioning that you’re neglecting, spend it pushing your limits so that you can FIND them and THEN program around them, rather than waiting for someone to FINALLY released the definitive study on all human limits.

Embrace the ogre, go be strong, and beat some smart kid over the head with a club.