in memoriam Riley Gale, who passed away this week… donations can be made to Dallas Hope Charities.
Leg Day Observer is back on Inverse.com:
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/lifting-weights-muscle-genetics-study
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/lifting-weights-muscle-genetics-study
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/lifting-weights-muscle-genetics-study
In which I respond to and critique a study by a bunch of scienc̶e̶tists with PhDs. I talked to the main guy on the phone, he has been working out for decades. I should mention re: the note in the story about Ryan Lochte and Chad Ochocinco’s McDonalds diets—Lochte subsisted off McDonald’s at an Olympics, and Ochocinco said, at the height of his career, on HBO’s Hard Knocks, that he ate McDonald’s three times a day forever. Did he? Who knows. Too good to check; the point is they ate a lot. Which is all great stuff of course. My favorite McDonald’s endorsement is that Anthony Lane always ate at McDonald’s (and wrote about it) when he covered the Olympic games for The New Yorker. Here he is in 2008:
As I dined, one day, on a Big Mac in a thunderstorm, seeking and failing to find refuge in a packed McDonald’s beside the Olympic Green subway station, I heard the Olympic theme song, playing on a tape loop inside, and watched a Chinese teen-ager in the doorway. She sucked on her milkshake and then sang along, swaying; she was, at once, everything that the capitalist corporation could hope for, and everything that the Communist Party had planned. I tried to talk to her, but she spoke no English; besides, what young person wants to be asked if he or she feels free? What kind of question is that?
And in 2012:
…I would become an honorary resident of Budapest. Had my own country been performing, I would have been no more ardent—a touch less so, perhaps, for I would have felt stirred by charity, sympathy, and other lukewarm emotions, whereas the innate Hungarian rage for water polo was able to raise me, however briefly, to boiling point, and my plangent mid-European desolation, when my adopted team lost 10-14 to the Serbs, was such that I almost sent out for a violin.
Instead, I had a Big Mac. As I sprinted through a furious lashing of rain towards the golden arches, I had my only Proustian spasm of the Games so far; had I not done precisely the same in China, seeking both sustenance and shelter from the elements in the embrace of medium fries? To be sure, there were other parallels; in both capitals, the tone has been set by the massed ranks of volunteers who act as a benign antidote to the glum bureaucracy of the International Olympic Committee, and who spring up at every turn to shepherd you towards your destination.
People love to give Lane a hard time about one thing or another but to my mind this is one of the finer journalism leitmotifs of the past decade.
If a pill existed that allowed people (me) to digest McDonald’s in the same nutritional and muscular capability as foods from a macrobiotic diet I would take it daily. But my unproven thinking is capably digesting McDonald’s is like volume training: it can be done by anyone but only after a lot of sweat and pain. If you’re an Olympic athlete (or in the NFL) then your body comp and activity rate is such that you can really eat whatever you want. Your caloric requirement over the week (which is all that matters anyways, everyone knows that) is so high such that a Big Mac is completely meaningless; the trans fats/grey meat/what have you in McDonald’s are a drop in the ocean too. Right? And while regular folks might get tired or sick after eating McDonald’s (because it is poison), an Olympic swimmer might not: they’re young and active to the point that their bodies have been exhausted thousands of times by exacting workouts. Exhaustion and tiredness are different things—they’re felt differently—by people with professional training schedules. Though I wonder if Lochte ate as healthy as Barry Bonds did if he would have won every gold medal there was; similar questions arise for Ochocinco’s teams’ success, and I also wonder what Anthony Lane’s max front squat is.
Thanks for reading. rest in light Riley.
Snake
Other work:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit