New Leg Day Observer SHIRT:
And COLUMN:
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/can-you-lift-too-much
From yesterday…. about whether it’s possible to lift too much…
Which, in a sense is an amazing rhetorical question…
Since not even this guy can lift too much:
But in a sense he can…
Lifting is a more complicated and multifaceted problem… with more elegant solutions… than just about anything in the natural world… or perhaps it is one of the more natural things in the unnatural world, the one we live in… you can be a student of fitness/human movement, a deceptively unintellectual concept at first blush, but a deep well of questions and humility, and stimulate your brain for your whole life. (Listen to none, hear all…) There are not many problematiques like lifting in the modern world… or maybe there are, but they’re not everywhere… baseball is one… religious study another… I used to think clothing was one but I don’t think so anymore… music, obviously… I hear good things about running but I’ll take my friends’ word on it… stamp collecting, like in Part X of the Dekalog… come to think of it there are a lot… but you have to look.
Which are the types of sentences I can’t well put in my column.
Can you lift too much?
In one sense, no—you can only lift what you can lift. If the weight is too much, it cannot be lifted. If your RPE 10 max is a 300 kilo squat (read the article for the definition of RPE), then you cannot squat 301. Or even 300.000001. Like in the real world, form breaks down under max weight.
But… in another, just as true, perhaps truer sense… yes. You can lift too much, since growth occurs when a set or exercise pushes you, and when you lift more than you thought you could, or perhaps, could just a day or an hour ago… which draws into question the very nature of a max, or the words “too much,” and makes numbers melt like the ice cream cones and giveaway ballpark watches in a Salvador Dali painting. Today’s max is tomorrow’s working set… but like, actually. In the sense that fluid velocity-based maxes (weights calculated, with work, off how a lifter feels that day, close to the Bulgarian max) seem to be some way of the future, or at least more recoverable than a static max set at start of training.
Which creates a dichotomy. Lifting less, based on velocity maxes, can do more, and maxes are flexible numbers. Lifting is constrained by gravity, which is cruel and binary… but it is also about making something out of nothing… So which is it? Both, obviously, or neither. Which is an unsatisfying answer, and the deep philosophical truths at the edges of lifting are really only true over time. Most of the time.
But this is all pie in the sky stuff. What I found tremendously interesting when researching this column was the whitespace around eccentric movement — these are exercises, or the part of the exercises that lengthen the muscle, e.g. going down in the squat — and how folks doing weekly eccentric-based workouts (including some Russians) saw comparable results to five day a week powerlifting programs. Feels like the future. Really feels like it’s something.
Which sort of tempers all this lovey dovey discussion. It’s really just moving weight up and down. But it’s black and white and it’s not/. There’s a Scorsese interview about Passion of the Christ where he says Jesus (played by Willem Defoe) is not half man, half god, he’s all god, all man, which is the point of the film… so too is lifting stark and not. I understand why people want to work out all the time and think about working out all the time and work out all the time and wear athletic-inspired lifestyle clothing….. working out… trying to figure it out, growing, getting bigger, stronger, is the truth… one of the few truths out there that can be accessed easily, and for relatively little money, and completely on your own. Which is the key. I find this stuff infinitely more interesting than clothing or furniture, though, to be frank, I find those things pretty interesting still. I just think this stuff occupies a higher plane.
(hey Snake, find video of Nuclear War Now pull-ups regimen and place here. thank you-editorial intern 000007)
This is all hinted at in the column. Shirts are still for sale too.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Other work: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit