Welcome back readers! In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the basics of the game Magic the Gathering and it's application to the world of physical transformation. Read up here, if you missed out
https://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2025/10/its-not-science-its-magicthe-gathering.html
Let’s just keep on exploring this metaphor now. If mana is our power source, we tap it to cast spells, and then we have to wait until our next turn to be able to untap the land and then play another one from our hand, we just observed how MtG explained progressive overload, recovery and work capacity…in a game BLATANTLY for nerds. Check out the cycle: you start with 1 land, you play one basic spell, and now you’re out of mana until the next turn. The next turn, you get to untap that land (recover), play a new land (build your work capacity), and play a BIGGER spell (progressively overload). And this cycle will continue each turn ASSUMING you keep drawing lands to play. What does drawing lands to play mean? It means SMARTLY doing the programming necessary to ensure that your work capacity improves to be able to match the output you wish to achieve. If you didn’t put enough lands in your deck to be able to ensure you’re able to keep playing lands each turn, you’re going to eventually exhaust your ability to play bigger and bigger spells. We see this phenomenon in physical transformation: dudes who REFUSE to take a GPP phase in their training, who just keep running up against the same wall over and over again because they quite simply don’t have the physical capacity to recover from their training and put in MORE input to receive more output. This is the dude that has had only 3 lands in play for the past 17 turns and has a hand FULL of cards requiring 4 or more mana: they’ll just keep casting the same 3 mana spells and discarding better cards because they’re unfit to play them.
Eventually you need to do a training cycle that hits the legs Strong Guy...
The metaphor
just keeps going though, because check this out: in the old days of Magic, we
had something referred to as “mana burn”.
Basically, if you tapped a land for mana but ended up not using it, you
would end up losing life equal to the amount of unused mana you had at the end
of the turn. Sometimes, we’d use this
mechanic to exit out of a game we no longer wished to play, but otherwise it
was a mechanic that could be carefully manipulated by crafty players to ensure
the demise of their opponent. But in the
world of physical transformation, we see that MtG has explained the concept of
overtraining/overreaching to us. Mana is
the source of our power: it’s our energy vested toward our goal of “winning”. Consequently, if we put more effort than our
spells can handle, we end up losing some of our own life in the process. Mana burn is one of the clearest
demonstrations of the axion “just because you can doesn’t mean that you
should”. If you are running a “3 mana
workout” as it were, you do NOT benefit by putting in 5 mana worth of effort
into it. If your training program calls
for 3 light sets of 60% because it’s dissipating fatigue to set you up for a
bigger effort, doubling the reps or upping the percentage just because you
“feel good” is just giving you some mana burn.
Oh my goodness I really love how this keeps on working.
In fact,
let’s just discuss how life works in Magic and in…well, life. The life total of Magic is a total
representation of our training age, whereas the deck that we’re playing with is
a representation of our chronological age.
Just as we observed with mana burn, some training decisions are going to
make us age a bit faster than others.
The game ends when our life reaches zero, and depending on how some of
you play the game, you may only be on card 14 of a 60 card deck by the time you
get there: never even coming CLOSE to realizing the potential that was within
your deck. Other, smarter, craftier
players may actually find themselves at risk of losing the game by running out
of cards in their deck while their life total is STILL quite high. These are those folks in life who found a way
to train up until the day they die: the Jack LaLannes of the world, who made
fitness a lifetime priority.
Consequently, there are some spells in the game specifically designed to
give us MORE life: these are those smart training/nutritional/lifetime
decisions that give us a bit more of an extension on our training age. Basically, Dan John these days is a white
mana Magic player, giving us all the tools necessary to try to draw the very
last card out of our deck. Inversely,
the black mana of Magic is known as the “sacrifice” color, where players
frequently trade away their life total in order to obtain greater power and
ability within the game. These are those
training, nutrition, lifestyle and (most likely) pharmacological decisions we
make that allow us to fly quite possibly too close to the sun in our pursuit
for physical transformation.
Though water is typically associated with blue mana, make no mistake: this is pure black mana madness
But let’s
dive into THAT discussion a little bit as well.
I’ve written previously on this very topic of MtG, how “not losing is
not the same thing as winning”, and it’s worth exploring the interplay that can
exist between black and white mana (yes, there are other colors in MtG, but
they don’t have the duality we’re looking for here, especially when we consider
black and white are the exact “yin and yang” colors). As we discussed, those white mana spells that
give us life can most certainly allow us to make fitness a lifetime activity,
playing until we run out of cards…but that means we still lost the game. We WIN the game by reducing the OTHER play to
0 life or exhausting THEIR library of cards.
Which is exactly what the black mana cards can do for us: we can make
some sacrifices to our own life total in order to achieve greater power in the
game and actually achieve some sort of victory.
But, of course, we run the risk of sacrificing TOO MUCH in the pursuit
of victory and ultimately self-destructing before we ever actually achieve our
goal. Quite clearly, we need some
semblance of balance between the two forces here. We need to tactfully employ those black mana
spells in the right time and situation WHILE having some manner of white mana
spells readily available to undo or, at least, reduce the damage we do to
ourselves in the process. We don’t need
to make recovery THE highest priority of our training: RESULTS should be the
priority. However, self-preservation
needs to at least FACTOR into our planning process. If we just spam black mana spells all the
time, we burn out, and if all we do is focus on gaining life, we get to die
having not actually achieved our goal.
Somewhere in the middle is a reality wherein we got to actually
accomplish some physical transformation while also living long enough to
actually enjoy it.
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