It seems to me that political correctness exists to enable people who have no respect to fake it. If you have respect for other people, you don’t need to worry about political correctness, because your default position will naturally be to treat people with respect. So the whole concept of political correctness becomes redundant. The thing is, very few people these days are taught to have self-respect. Instead, we are taught to have contempt for ourselves and our fellow humans. We are taught that we only deserve love and respect when we qualify – when we achieve, when we lose weight, when we triumph over others. We are played off against each other for a sense of worthiness. But if you can learn to respect yourself, not because of your achievement or sex or how you look, or because of the race or family you were born into, or because of your behaviours – the way you exercise and what you eat – if you can have respect for yourself because of the simple fact that you are a human being, born to this earth, and you deserve love and respect, it becomes very easy to have respect for other individuals too. When you respect and cherish yourself, you can have respect for other people without feeling threatened or diminished, because when you have self-respect, having respect and admiration for others doesn’t make you feel inferior. It makes you feel accepted. It makes you feel like you’re home. It frees you to value your fellow human beings, not to judge them. And you start to reach a place where you can appreciate whatever luck and privilege you have been blessed with, without judging others who might be less fortunate.
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I recently, on facebook, saw a picture of a woman in a sorta-kinda handstand. It was captioned: why practice yoga? With the following reasons dotted around the poster: for energy, for longevity, for health, for physical strength and flexibility, and for love. These are all great concepts, but I’m surprised ‘for fun’ didn’t make the list. It makes me think about the difference between the reason and the benefit. A benefit of training – I’ve mentioned this before – is health, more specifically to my interests – increased insulin sensitivity. But the reasons are something else. I go to the gym for fun, and to challenge myself, and for development and fitness, and feeling good, and other things – sometimes to prove something, or because of shame or insecurities, yes they do still come up, but I am better at negotiating them than I used to be, and in an overall sense, my training experiences are much more positive and ‘healthy’ than they used to be – and sometimes I’m pleased, sometimes disappointed – but not once have I gone to the gym fired up because I was going to stimulate some insulin sensitivity in my skeletal muscle. Health, for me, is a benefit – but it’s not the reason I train. It’s too vague. Even improved insulin sensitivity, which is quite, quite specific and important to me, is still too vague. ‘For health’ in a general term, is certainly too vague or abstract a reason to get me to the gym, or the yoga studio, the dojo, or a park. What’s wrong with modern fitness training? We take desperate people, with low self-worth, who've been ostracised and bullied, and then tell them the path to success (and happiness and improved self-esteem) is the path of obedience, not the path of self-discovery. People seek to lose weight because they want to be free of their vulnerabilities. But even if weight loss occurs, the vulnerabilities remain, because when you take a weight-centred approach, the judgement and hatred remain.
You see it all the time at gyms: if I can remain muscular or toned, and lean, then I’m strong. I’m not vulnerable any more. I’m not weak. So we equate fatness to weakness, to sloth, but it’s a misnomer. It’s not that fat makes you vulnerable – it’s that training doesn’t make you invulnerable. Welcome to the human condition. Being strong, fit, benching heavy, going to the gym – working for health in a bubble, in a closed environment – it’s like being an A-Grade student and then expecting everyone else in class to be the same. If I can do it, anyone can – all that statement reveals is an ignorant mind-set, and a low sense of self-esteem. It’s like training for a test at school and expecting that to make you better at life. Training doesn’t make you better in the same way grades don’t make you better. It’s privilege. The same old prejudice. Some people are better at some things, others are not, and who are we to judge? Training and fitness make some things easier, but that doesn’t mean you get to be a prejudiced dick about it. Exercise doesn’t make you better than someone else. Being a ‘better version’ of yourself is a moral judgment, and last I checked, being sick or disabled doesn’t make you less worthy, or less moral, than someone who possesses full function of their limbs. Having sporting abilities doesn’t make you worth more – whether you measure that in ultimate or relative terms – to society, to your loved ones. A ‘better version’ is moral. A more sportier version is simply a more sportier version. I have a lot of problems with goal-focused training, and goal-focused living for that matter. I’ve also achieved a lot because of that mindset, but it’s not without problems. Primarily – when you’re supporting a goal, it doesn’t mean you’re supporting the person. The goal is the thing that becomes important, not the individual. Progress becomes important, rather than the individual. Growth loses meaning. I often say your training serves you – you don’t serve your training. What’s important? This used to come up a lot in martial arts. You go to a new school, and they tell you to forget what you know – you’ve got to start again at the beginning. There’s truth to it, and if you hold the system to be the important thing in this equation, then yes – it’s obvious you need to ‘relearn’. But if you see yourself or your education as the important thing in this equation – then it’s not about forgetting what you already know, it’s just about learning new skills. Because you don’t serve the training, the training serves you. People seem to think it’s okay to cut out carbs or fat, but there are only three macronutrients. Nutrients like zinc and Vitamin C and what have you are necessary, but they don’t provide you with energy like that – calories – the energy your body requires in order to function. The energy we use in our day to day lives comes from fat, carbohydrate and protein. It’s not like there are nineteen different options and you’ll be okay if you just eat eighteen of them. Only three. You can manipulate ratios to a point, but if you eliminate one, bad shit starts to happen. Carbohydrate can be complex – fibre – or simple – sugar – but it’s all carbs. Occasionally you’ll hear someone talk about how proud they are of eating “zero carb” and then they’ll talk about the broccoli they had with their steak. It’s bullshit – broccoli is full of carbohydrate. They mean they’re eating zero grains. Talk like that just contributes to misinformation. As much as I may be oversimplifying like crazy in this post, I’m not contributing to misinformation – not like that. I attempt to fight misinformation. That’s kinda what this whole thing is about. I'm sorry it’s not more simple, but all the time people try to reduce human physiology to a simple equation. Really? That’s supposed to work? People study Masters and Doctorates in this stuff. Anyway. I find the UFC distasteful – it’s too excessive, and put simply, I don’t quite see the point, but I have my wacky theories about how this stuff fits in. Does my distaste for the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) make me a girly-man? Do I care? No. In the 1880s Judo was born. People talk these days as if Jujutsu (in its various styles) is the traditional form, and Judo is the simplified – and therefore inferior – sporting equivalent. But Jujutsu was a military system. If you were training a warrior or soldier class, what makes sense to me is to give them a competition with strict rules where the risk of injury or damage is relatively low. In competition you can tell if a practitioner is skilful, if they can endure a certain degree of stress – mental and physical – if they’ve been training and if their training serves them properly – you can tell if they have a deep and practical understanding of their art. The actual training they would be doing – military training – would not be limited to what yields competitive success – it would include a whole bunch of other stuff that would only be applicable on the battlefield. And you’d test that in other ways, ways which didn’t run the risk of crippling your pool of best warriors. For me, the reason for training is to become better at moving. I mean training in a formalised sense - because the reason for movement itself may be to embrace the joy of a challenge or to express human emotion, or all kinds of things. But formalised training - it's about movement. It's what makes sense - because training is movement, and repetitive training is repetitive movement. And that all comes down to skills, function and efficiency, which include concepts like strength, power, endurance, mobility, flexibility and cardiovascular conditioning.
If you want to get better at running, you run - if you want to get better at throwing, you throw. But if you want to get thinner - what's the movement you practice? There is none, and maybe this is why our training is so vague these days, why it lacks substance and maybe it's why we're striving harder to find an authentic experience of training. The modern cult is to be found in fitness. We seek thinness and so we hop from one exercise to the next, trying new things, expecting to be entertained because we're not working on anything - then feeling bored and feeling bad because we don't love it like we're supposed to. But who could possibly love working at nothing? "I'll try to keep motivated". I heard that said at the gym today. I like to specialise, and I like to have my skills appreciated. I don't believe in deprivation any more, and I'm motivated by things that I enjoy. So for me, it's not really an issue. What are you working towards? An image? Would you resist that? I would, because I hate to conform, as much as I might yearn for acceptance. Ah, internal conflict. People speak as if this is in some way self-destructive, but I think it's the yearning for acceptance that does us damage, not our urge to rebel. My urge to rebel reminds me of who I truly am. But I'm not defined by what I reject in the same way as I'm not defined by what I accept. The thing is - our individuality is not discovered in our sameness, but I understand how terrible it is to be ostracised. It seems to me, in an attempt to preserve itself, the patriarchal status-quo will emasculate men and trivialise women. I’ve been thinking about masculinity and femininity. It’s funny how the masculine sets itself up as totally badass and invulnerable, and then collapses when the smallest hint of femininity is thrown into the mix. Hair’s too permed? Drink isn’t dudely enough? Bam! It all comes crashing down. Maybe that’s why I never felt like I quite fit in with men, or maybe there are other reasons too... It breaks my heart when I see women emasculating men by accusing them of having a vagina. They’re participating in their own oppression, under the guise of being cool and progressive and shit. And some men applaud it. But this isn’t an essay on feminism and I’m certainly no specialist. When you object to the status-quo, you are accused of weakness – and you are trivialised. It’s the first defence – trivialise the objection, or the person voicing it. It reveals the vulnerability not of the dissident objector, but of those who serve the status-quo. Grab the bar, stand up straight. Pull the bar back against your thighs. Drop and repeat I was at my gym, preparing for a deadlift session, and The Sound of Silence started playing. I commented to the other guy who was there about what a good training song it is, and that launched us into a lengthy conversation about appropriate training music. The Sound of Silence is a great example of something that helps me to focus – with that music playing I find it easier to achieve a single pointed focus, a Zen-like concentration if you will, or a calm attentiveness, and this serves me perfectly. It helps me to pay attention, to train truly. The last thing you want, when lifting heavy, is to be distracted. I used to work at a different gym – it was new and not very busy and I was sick of the usual radio stations, so I used to play ABC Classic FM when I was there early in the morning. Lots of classical music, no ad breaks. A number of people commented favourably on the selection, but as the gym became busier over time, the demand pushed the radio station back to more poppy, upbeat, energetic music. Which is to say – boring or distracting. |