“I DIDN’T WANT ANY PART OF MIKE TYSON”

Folks, today is gonna be about boxing rather than lifting, but it’s really all the same.  The quote for the title of today’s post comes by way of George Foreman, in a recent interview.  For those of my readers who only known Mr. Foreman as the guy who sells electric grills, George was a 2 time heavyweight champion boxer, 2 time being significant in this instances as he experienced a 20 year gap between reigns as the champ.  This means that George got to fight in what many would argue to be the greatest era of heavyweight boxing ever: The era of Muhammad Ali, wherein George got to fight Ali, along with Joe Frazier (having beaten the latter twice, both to win and retain the heavyweight title) but ALSO means that, during his comeback era, he was around during the time of a prime Mike Tyson.  Mike and George never fought, despite how amazing of a match up it would have been.  George has been regarded by many to be one of, if not THE, hardest punchers to exist in the sport of boxing, with devastating power in both hands and a total willingness to stand and trade with any man, having weathered the punishing shots from Joe Frazier.  Tyson is a man who needs no introduction, and his rise to the top of the sport was like watching a sentient buzzsaw tear through unready heavyweight fighters.  How did this matchup never occur?  Because, as George said “I didn’t want any part of Mike Tyson.”

Starts at 14m and 45 seconds

https://youtu.be/4-incOaF0dE?t=14m45s

Before I go on, I am not going to hide, nor apologize for, my Mike Tyson fandom.  If you grew up in the 80s and early 90s like I did, you most likely feel the exact same way I do about Mike Tyson as a fighter (reviews are, I’m sure, mixed of him as a person, but it’s not what we’re here to discuss today).  Mike Tyson ruined pay-per-view parties, because his fights ended in 80 seconds.  Fighters could not form strategies to fight him based off fight tapes, because fights did not last long enough to figure out how he fought.  People always wondered if he could go the distance because he NEVER had to.  For the love of God, in the late 80s/early 90s, the most feared video bosses were Ganon, Dracula, and MIKE TYSON.  We were effectively conditioned to be afraid of this man, and in truth, before the UFC became REALLY big the whole world pretty much agreed that the baddest man on the planet was always going to be whoever held the heavyweight title in boxing, and Mike held ALL the titles.  Mike Tyson could be on chemotherapy and men my age would STILL be afraid to fight him TODAY.

HOWEVER, Mike never tends to get ranked as the best of the best in boxing, and it’s due to a fair critique: during his reign as champ, he didn’t fight anyone that was particularly skilled.  He tore through all available opposition: it just so happened that the opposition that was available wasn’t great.   He beat an over the hill Larry Holmes, but that was about it, and his loss in the Buster Douglas fight proved that he COULD be stopped by someone that had a solid gameplan against him.  Foreman, with his many decades of experience, to including against fighting some of the best to have ever lived, means he very well could have put together a solid plan against Mike.  To the point that, when asked, Foreman in the same interview is assured he would have won.  He doesn’t waffle on it, he doesn’t go back and forth, and doesn’t even say that on a good day Mike would have had him: he is very confident that, if they had met up in Tyson’s prime, he would have won.  And yet, within the same interview, he said he wanted nothing to do with Mike Tyson.

Quite possibly due to dialogue like this

Why?  “Because he is a monster.  Mike is something you see in nightmares.  And you just hope you wake up.”  George went on the say “If he misses you with the left, he hits with the right, and if he misses with the right…he bites you!”  And it fundamentally showed what made Mike so much different than anyone else in his era, or really, anyone else in his profession.  Some boxers showed up to box, and some showed up to win, and some even showed up to fight, but Mike, quite frankly, showed up to hurt people.  He had “bad intentions”, to quote Jack Dempsey (who, in his fight with Jess Willard, showcased such brutal domination that, quite frankly, in today’s combat sporting era, he would have actually been charged with assault, battery and attempt murder in the ring).  And even if you are the superior boxer, even if victory is assured, even if you’ve fought “better” people: no one wanted to fight a man like Mike Tyson.

Because of this, Mike so often won his fights before they even began.  His opposition was so terrified of Mike that they froze up, abandoned their gameplan, and went limp as soon as they were hit to try to make the pain stop.  Fighting him became like riding a rodeo bull: dudes were just holding on for the bragging rights of longest time.  And now we observe that he even had a shield to protect his legacy built in with this mentality.  There was George Foreman, on his comeback, still a contender, eyeing up the heavyweight title, seeing Mike Tyson there, KNOWING that he could win, and saying “…nah, I think I’ll wait this one out.”  As I wrote about before, Mike became “more trouble than he was worth”, and in doing so, he crushed those that were beneath his skills and even defeated those allegedly superior to him through just sheer, unbridled nastiness.

Every Mike Tyson fight came with free facial reconstructive surgery

I love this, because it shows just how much one can be simply by changing how they THINK about something.  I’ll cop to Mike having not been the best boxer ever.  Hell, he may not have even been the best boxer Cus D’Amato trained.  Floyd Patterson was an intelligent and well regarded student of Cus that obtained Olympic gold and was the youngest man to hold the heavyweight title PRIOR to Mike, having made very effective use of the exact same “peek-a-boo” style of boxing employed by Mike.  However, Floyd never got to win the fights before they started, and, in fact, endured such horrific mockery from Muhammad Ali that some argue that it may have been responsible for the ending of his boxing career as a whole.  Put that same skillset (or a lacking one perhaps) in Mike Tyson and pair it with Mike’s “bad intentions” and suddenly things flip.  Suddenly the boxing “style” takes a back seat to the boxer himself, and now it doesn’t matter if he’s a slugger or a boxer or a puncher or a counter fighter: he’s got bad intentions, and he came here to hurt you. 

You have the same ability.  You are born with your own limitations.  Your genetics, height, structure, etc etc.  There are some things you do not have the power to change.  But you ALWAYS have the power to change how you think about things, and how you approach them.  And if you approach them like a monster, like a nightmare, like a man with “bad intentions”, like someone who came here to hurt people, you’re not just going to beat those that are worse than you: you’re going to beat those that are BETTER than you that don’t want any part of you.  Some folks can make themselves bigger, stronger, faster and better than you: make it so that no one can make themselves nastier than you.              

HIGHER POWERS, FAITH AND IDOLATRY

I’ve written before on how my formal educational background is politics, with an undergrad and masters focused on political science, and that, prior to that, I was the top theology student in my Catholic high school, which was somewhat scandalous being that I achieved that having not been Catholic.  I bring all that up because, as a high school student deciding on what major to pursue in college and having zero interest in going into any sort of theology related field, I picked politics because it appeared to be the next closest thing.  I bring all THAT up because one of the key characteristics of both areas is the determination and control of what one believes in.  The parallels and overlaps are honestly rather fascinating, and a mastery of one tends to allow a significant understanding of the other.  And you, as a trainee, can take the lessons from these two fields to understand the significance of what you vest your faith in as a “higher power” and how it controls the way you think and act.

For instance, now I'm just confused...

What (or who) we believe in is always the most important part of Western religions, and this is easily observed in the 10 Commandments.  Start with number 1 (paraphrased, because it’s funnier that way): “I am your God: don’t have any other gods”.  Ok, cool, what’s the second?  “Don’t say my name in vain”.  Ok, this guy is a real big deal, got it.  Number 3?  “Block off your Sundays (or Saturdays if you’re sticking with the Old Testament…or Fridays if you want something slightly more “modern) for me”.  Alright alright, so apparently this dude is a REAL big deal.  Ok, let’s just skip to the middle here.  What’s number 5?  “Oh yeah, hey, don’t kill people.”  Well f**k me, we spent a 3^rd of our commandments just spelling out how big a deal God is and it’s only halfway through that we find out we shouldn’t be killing each other?  You’d think that would be pretty high up there, no?  But that’s the point: figuring out what and who we believe in is HUGE, and needs to be established before we can move on to the important stuff.

The US Bill of Rights has a similarly hilarious bent to it.  First, it should be understood that the Founding Fathers never saw fit to include a Bill of Rights because everything that was in the Bill of Rights was already IN the Constitution: you just had to read the damn thing.  But, just like how folks won’t spend an afternoon reading a training manual to avoid spending 5 years screwing around in the gym, people demanded a “cliffnotes” for their doctrine of government.  And again, what do we see in the first amendment to the Constitution?  Freedom of religion.  The citizens of the United States KNEW the significance of being told what they could and could not believe in, and they wanted to decide that for themselves.  They knew that, once the government started controlled who and what we believed in, the controlled pretty much everything.  This was the FIRST amendment, meaning it was the very first thing they came up with when they were deciding “what protections and freedoms should we be allowed”.  Know where they decided to protect themselves from cruel and unusual punishment?  The 8th amendment.  Meaning they first went “Hey, the government shouldn’t get to tell me what I believe in” and then, several hours later, they said “Oh yeah, also, the government shouldn’t be allowed to rip out my fingernails”.  Know when they decided that humans shouldn’t own other humans like property?  The 13th amendment: in 1865, about 80 years after they wrote the original Bill of Rights.  THAT is how crucial they felt it was to determine what they believe in.

When you can write "all men are created equal" while owning 80 of said men, you get to have a smug look like that

I bring up all this rambling history to point out that for millennia people understood the significance of believing in a higher power and the sheer power such belief held, and it’s why you, as a trainee, need to embrace the significance of this.  Faith is an incredibly powerful tool in the toolbox, and its absence hamstrings several trainees.  Some folks out there are training atheists: they refuse to believe in anything.  In turn, these folks constantly undermine their own progress, because as soon as they read or hear about an effective method, they immediately spring into action to find something that disproves this very same method.  And there’s no shortage of that information out there: if you want to find it, you can.  Soon, these folks exist in a world with no higher powers: nothing to vest their faith in, and they suffer existential torment and an inability to self-actualize.  In their attempt to be “too smart to be fooled”, they’ve robbed themselves of the power that faith and fanaticism grant to so many others.

In the middle of the spectrum, there are those that have faith in “the way”.  This is to say, those that have vested all their faith in the higher power that is their program or coach.  You’ve seen these before, and we’ve had derogatory terms for them as well such as “HIT Jedis” and “Cultfit”, but it’s also true for the Westside or Die crowd, Deep Water, 5/3/1, Juggernaut, etc etc.  And as I wrote above: you can EASILY find something online that “disproves” all of these methods if you were so inclined.  HOWEVER, those that are truly “bought in”, the real deal fanatics and zealots, those that have fully vested their faith in the “higher power” that is the program, simply don’t care.  For sure, those that are simply paying lip service in their attempts to “get into heaven” will always have that lingering doubt and never get to fully realized the benefit of this real deal faith, but we’ve frequently observed the benefits that the real fanatics experience with their faith in “the way”.  If you can find a way that you are willing to give yourself to, you will be all the better for it.

I bet the Mentzer brothers would feel PRETTY silly to find out now that HIT doesn't work

However, I suggest one alternative course of action: make yourself your own higher power.  Have faith in oneself, and a strong, firm, unflinching belief that, no matter what, you will overcome and succeed.  Have an ego, be prideful, be arrogant, all of those things that other entities tell you are sins and evils.  Why?  Because THOSE entities want to have control over you, and they do so by not allowing you faith in yourself.  Nietzsche wrote about this in his Genealogy of Morals, of how the ruled are taught one sets of morals while the rulers another, and what you choose to believe in will greatly alter where you fit in those categories.  If you believe that, no matter what course of action you take, you will somehow make it work, chance are, you’ll be right.  If you’re always doubting yourself, wondering if you’ve made a wrong decision, using “I can’t”, coming up with excuses, examples and justifications for why you will come up short and fail, that’s exactly what you will do. 

You are the only being on this planet like you.  You have so much potential and ability if you choose to tap into it and employ it.  But, ultimately, you need to believe in yourself FIRST before you can do so.  And, specifically, as your own higher power, you have to believe in the thing you can BECOME, rather than the thing that you are.  Sure, who you are now may be small, weak, frail, etc, but that is not who you can become.  So long as the belief is there that there is something great within you that needs to be realized, you have the ability to accomplish great things.  Put your faith in yourself and worship at your own altar. 

MIYAMOTO MUSASHI & LIFTING: DON’T FOCUS ON THE DETAILS (OR YOU COULD DIE)

As I’ve confessed many times through my writing, I am a complete and total unabashed nerd.  In addition, those of you familiar with my age and constant references are aware that I grew up in the 90s.  As such, I imagine you’re all just as shocked as I am that this is the first time I’ve decided to bring up Japanese philosophy in the blog, as by all accounts I should be a complete and total Japanophile, steeped in anime, JRPGS, and manga.   And though I admit I do tend to indulge in all those manners of debauchery, I just was never super big into eastern philosophy.  However, irrespective of where you fall in the philosophy spectrum, you have to know and appreciate Miyamoto Musashi, the Ronin that fought and won about 60 duels to the death with a sword in each hand, making up his own style and ending the lineages of many other styles he deemed inferior.  Musashi was so focused on perfecting swordsmanship that he would kill entire schools of certain swordfighting styles so that they would no longer pollute the population with their inferior methods: and you thought I was a fanatic about the signal to noise ratio.  Musashi literally lived by the sword, risking his life on scores of occasions for nearly 50 years, he lived and breathed swordfighting, it was his focus, his life, and his ultimate tome on swordfighting, “The Book Of Five Rings”, Musashi had this to say regarding the fine details of swordsmanship

“If you concentrate on details you will neglect the important factors, and you will become confused.  This will make it impossible to win.”

People will listen to your quotes if you have a sword in each hand

I am reproducing this from the Ashikaga Yoshiharu translation, first published in 2003, so I apologize if your version reads different, but let all of that sink in for you.  Musashi, arguably the greatest swordsman to ever walk the planet, the winner of around 60 duels to the death, who put his very life at risk when he fought, felt like focusing on the details was unimportant.  In fact, doing so was detrimental.  If you focused on details, it is impossible to win.

And what happens when you don’t win?  Typically, that means you lose.  And what does it mean when you lose a fight to the death?  You die.  Focusing on the details was how you die.

Musashi understood this about 400 years ago.  And he understood it without the miracle advances in science, technology, and education we have today.  And yet, somehow, with how smart we’ve all become, we’ve grown so very very stupid, because we all forgot this lesson that he learned.  People WANT to focus on the details so bad.  They want to AGONIZE over every little detail in their training and their diets.  They want to account for every macronutrient, they want to be able to quantify, measure and evaluate every single rep performed and ensure it was an “effective rep”.  They want to make sure they consume their quick carbs in the right window and take out tendo units to calculate their speed and plug it in a spreadsheet to map progress…all for what? Because it’s important?  Motherf**ker what could be more important than NOT DYING?! 

Not all of us get an extra life

Let it continue to sink in!  Musashi wrote a book about how to win in swordfights AND how to win in large scale full on assaults, and his advice was “don’t focus on the details or you will die”, and 400 years later some pubmed glasses pusher is daring to say “Well ACKTHUALLY…”  No, oh my god, shut up, you sound SO stupid right now.  The details are not how you win fights: it’s the foundational guiding principles that matter.  If you read the rest of Musashi’s book (and I highly encourage you do, it’s an easy read, because Musashi was also smart enough to know that it’s important to communicate complicated ideas simply, and it has tons of great little gems in it) he constantly explains that it’s less about fine and precise details of how one holds their pinky and to what precise angle one steps and more about mastering the core concepts, ideas and principles of combat and being able to apply them.  He explains how individual combat is a microcosm of combat between armies, and how the same principles apply universally because they are GOOD principles, and, in turn, you as a lifter/athlete/whatever should be able to ALSO apply them toward whatever pursuit you have.

In fact, Musashi has an entire section dedicated to debunking those schools that DO focus on the details: demonstrating exactly how and why they fail in their pursuit of doing so.  And Musashi wasn’t blowing smoke: he knew their stuff didn’t work because he KILLED THEM when they tried to use it.  Could you imagine a world with such scientific rigor!?  Think about how many self-proclaimed geniuses are online cranking out numerous evaluations on programs they’ve NEVER run, simply because they think they can look at a pirated e-book and measure effectiveness by how many sets and reps a movement is performed at a certain intensity.  These folks aren’t out there winning swordfights: these dudes don’t even own a sword.  How about we take up arms and see who survives before we start saying what does and does not work.

Pretty sure Musashi would have slaughtered everyone in this town for good measure

How about we get things back in perspective, shall we?  You folks that “live training”: do you really?  Is the consequence of you not achieving your goals actual, literal death?  Because that’s what it was for the dude who was one of the best ever at killing other dudes with a sword, and he said that focusing on the details was how you die.  If your passion doesn’t result in death if you fail, you DEFINITELY don’t need to be sweating the details.  Whatever fate your failure has could not possibly be worse than death, so maybe you can quit worrying about getting all the details right and focus more on getting your principles and fundamentals squared away.  What’s the worst that could happen?   

GPP: DON’T OVERCOMPLICATE IT

In light of my most recent post, wherein I discussed my concurrent training for a strongman competition and a half marathon and praised the value of General Physical Preparedness (GPP) as it related to both, I’ve received numerous questions regarding how one goes about acquiring this GPP.  And right away that question just confuses me.  Folks, it’s in the name: GENEREAL physical preparedness.  We used to just plain call that “being in shape”.  That’s what GPP is.  When you have good GPP, you’re in good shape, and when you’re in good shape, you can do things that people who are in good shape can do: run, jump, throw, climb, swim, etc. You’re “physically fit”, you’re ready and able, you have GPP.

If you grew up in the 90s, this was already in your head.  And, if not, you have no idea what this means.

Short post right?  No, I suppose we can talk some more on the subject, because there are still more questions.  Much like “The Tao Te Ching”, the GPP that can be written of is NOT the true GPP.  What I mean is, inevitably, someone wants to know what program to follow to develop GPP and what metrics to use to evaluate their GPP.  This mentality is proof of concept of how vital GPP is, because everyone has become a specialist and the notion of simple unquantifiable fitness eludes people.  It’s a weird thing too.  I remember growing up and you could see a dude and flat out say “he’s in great shape”.  AND we could even tell the difference between guys that were in good shape vs guys that were specialists. I remember being able to look at gym rats with 500lb benchs and 50” guts and going “Yeah, that dude is strong, but he’s not in good shape”, but apparently, now, we are confused.

And so, if you’ve been afflicted with a terminal case of specialization, that’s a sign of exactly what you need to do in order to start developing some GPP: do something DIFFERENT than what you’ve been doing.  If you need a start, do something COMPLETELY different.  That doesn’t mean go from low reps to high reps in the weightroom: it means go from lifting to swimming, or running, or cycling, or hiking, or anything that isn’t standing in one spot and lifting something.  If you are a rower, go wrestle someone. If you’re a fighter, go skating.  Just go do something DIFFERENT that you’re bad at.  If you’re bad at something, it means you have room to improve, and typically one observes RAPID and exponential growth when they first begin a new activity.  Lifters call these “beginner gains”, but they exist with all physical activities.

That guy in the first lane has LOTS of room for improvement

But how long?  And what program?  And reps and sets?  THIS is why your GPP is bad: you keep wanting there to be rules.  This is GENERAL physical preparedness: it’s your body’s preparedness to perform general physical activity.  When you need to have everything planned, structured and organized, you’re defeating the purpose.  You need to be able to respond to situations on demand, irrespective of what or when that demand is.  Can you jump when you need to jump, or do you need 14 hours of foam rolling and a slingshot before both feet leave the ground?  If someone throws a ball at you without warning, are you going to have a broken nose?  If someone takes a swing at you, are you going to block it with your face, or can you bob and weave? 

You know who has great GPP?  Children!  Or, at least, they did.  Sedentariness is sadly affecting our youth as well, but if you remember back in the day, kids played all the time, and they played a diverse and WIDE range of games, exposing themselves to physical activities.  In any given day, a child could be expected to go swimming, climb a tree, go across monkey bars, play a game of football, and ride a bike, skateboard or scooter.  Think about if you tried to make an office drone live that kind of day: they’d chalk it up as some sort of Instagram victory and talk about “living that life”, demanding a free t-shirt and a medal.  We drift so far away from the things that we all KNEW made sense when we were kids. 

Somewhere a bunch of adults are doing this EXACT same thing, except covered in mud and calling it "obstacle course racing"

And those kids didn’t approach these activities with a fixed and rigid training program.  Have you ever tried to train a kid?  They have ZERO attention span: they just wanna do what seems fun at that moment and then move on to the next fun thing.  Allow yourself to be afflicted with the same attention span.  Carve out some time in your schedule for GPP and just go find something to do.  Hell, go to a dollar store and grab a handful of cheap sporting goods.  Get a Frisbee, a football, a softball and some cones, and set up obstacle courses and throwing stations.  Throw in a jump rope somewhere.  Go shovel a few extra driveways this winter and mow a few extra lawns this summer.  GO FOR A WALK.  When’s the last time you went walking just for the experience of walking?  And hell, you can do it in a mall like an octogenarian: malls have air conditioning and a food court, it’s awesome.  But just go out and have some sort of fun.

And yeah, you’re never going to be good (or even decent) at EVERYTHING out there.  I’m an awful athlete: full stop.  My throwing and catching skills are terrible, lateral movement is poor, skillwork is lacking on anything that isn’t fighting, but I’m “good enough” at enough skills that I can fake it with something else when the need arises.  It’s one again about GENERAL physical preparedness, so as long as you’re creating a broad spectrum of physical excellence to pull from, you do yourself some favors.  As soon as you settle in to a rut and decide “this” is going to be your GPP, you’re missing out on some of the benefits.  Go find something different and weird and go try to suck less at it.