Have you ever watched a space shuttle takeoff? Think about the amount of energy being dispensed before the whole apparatus begins to lift off the ground. And, once it does, it’s slow. It takes an insane amount of energy before momentum is on the side of the launch team.
Specifically, around 44 million Newtons of energy is pulling the shuttle, boosters, rockets, and payload to the ground. Every single newton of thrust until beyond 44 million will lose the battle to gravitational pull. Imagine if we did a cost-benefit analysis at 1 million newtons and decided it’s impossible to propel the shuttle into space. Or 10 million. Or 40 million. No hint of movement. It can’t be done, right? There are physical, chemical, biological, economic, and psychological thresholds and constraints. They are real. Some are easily quantifiable and measurable. None give a damn what you think is hard, reasonable, or possible. They just exist; and if you come up even one nanoparticle shy, the shuttle won’t budge. In market adoption of new technology, people call this the tipping point. In launch engineering, it is precisely the point at which thrust is greater than gravity. And there’s another constraint later connected to escape velocity. Weight loss, muscle gain, behavioral alteration, pain management, lifestyle implementation, nutritional changes, emotional state, new language acquisition, sport or art/instrument proficiency, most skills are just like this. If you come up one micronewton short, it feels like you haven’t done anything at all. Instant gratification destroys our personal space-launches. We may indeed throw 44 million newtons at an endeavor. That’s a lot. It “should be” enough, right? Whoa whoa whoa. “Should”? This journey has no place for “should.” There is “is.” And there is “isn’t”. There is no “should.” You’re confusing the feedback of “insufficient” with “impossible.” Confronted with insufficient thrust, people want to shut off the boosters. Start again later, this time with 43 million newtons. “See,” they say. “I’ve tried everything.” Well, you’ve tried a lot. But by definition you haven’t tried sufficiency. So there the rockets remain, seemingly welded to the ground. Take it a little further. Imagine someone crosses the 44 million newton mark. The entire ship breaks off the ground. This is a 12 week success story. At 1000 feet in the air, we deem the effort a little much, and cut the boosters. Oops. Take it further yet. Imagine you’re going 20,000 miles per hour. This is a 6-12 month success story. You overcame stop inertia. You have momentum. But guess what. Escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour. You will not cruise in orbit on low effort unless you have another 25% increase in velocity. “But I’ve already worked so hard,” you reason. You have good trajectory. You are cookin. But physical laws don’t care about any of that or your opinion. Orbit still requires support. Not anywhere near as much as launch. But still some. Obtaining orbit? That’s equivalent to a 5 year success story. It’s rare. It’s difficult. But it’s not impossible. And when we alter expectations, it’s no big deal. If, however, we’re looking for escape velocity when we haven’t even done pre-launch checks, we’re being fools. People skip the math (nutrition), skip the astronaut training (lifting), skip the system checks (sleep and stress management), burn up a few newtons (no more than basic lab tests), and then desperately cry out, “this thing cannot be moved!” Oh it can. It does. It will. You just gotta know: fitness is a space-launch.
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Stem Cell/PRP Aftermath: too tight to flex - I can’t straighten my leg or contract quad and lock the knee. It’s too full. I also can’t bend it even close to 90 degrees. You may not be able to tell, but the leg is awash with extra blood and fluid, 7lbs to be exact. Yes, the inflammation is so acute, I picked up 7 extra pounds overnight. Despite morphine, the pain prevented any real rest or sleep to boot.
This is what growth and healing looks and feel like. Swelling, aching, exquisite pain. You know: the stuff people normally take to mean “bad” or what we avoid only to find we’re doing worse than if we embraced the suffering. It’s too soon to tell what the outcome will really be, since I’m hobbling about. Giant needles jabbed into the capsule and ligaments less than a day ago. But stay tuned and we’ll see if this thing can finally be 100% restored 5 years after Lyme and the initial dysfunction Actually, it’s not just good. It’s great. People don’t tend to improve as challenges decrease. Look at the studies on American retirement and how it worsens people’s health. There are only a handful of statistical outliers whose internal wellbeing are amplified when they reduce demands. Mental health problems have linear relationships with affluence and wealth. Maximal options and unbridled freedom itself is perilous. Think about a time when you were presented a vast array of food options when already tired. Did that infinite number of choices REDUCE your fatigue? No. Endless freedom without palpable consequence is the opposite of good for us. On the contrary, when things get dire and options few, that’s when humanity shines most brilliantly.
A few years ago Lawrence Livermore Laboratory attempted to make sense of a multi-year trend in the OPPOSITE direction from predicted climate change. For a several year span, the warming decelerated or possibly reversed. Global temperatures cooled on average for 3 or more years in a row. Before the climate deniers laugh contentedly and before the alarmists dismiss this verifiable fact, listen to what the Lab discovered: increased volcanic activity placed more sulfates in the upper atmosphere, thereby reducing our capacity to accept solar energy into the lower atmosphere. We can replicate this effect. We can aerosolize sulfates into the stratosphere to reduce solar energy to whatever degree we like in variable increments dependent on our appraisal of where we are in a given climate trend. Without the first alarming notion, how would we have ever studied this problem and concocted the possibility of climate/weather engineering? Even today it sounds a little sci-fi. But so does every breakthrough beforehand. In supreme comfort we see the worst of humanity. Think kings, and slaveowners, and lottery winners. Ugly. In supreme challenge, we see the best of humanity. Think peasant uprisings, and enslaved people who escaped, and underdogs. We know this intuitively when we observe any other animal. We pity a creature in captivity, even in a comfortable enclosure, cared for by humans, with every natural predator and danger removed. We pity their safe, stress-free, sterilized life. We stand in awe while we observe animals in a natural habitat with every danger at their doorstep. Yet, somehow for humans, we think we’re going to get more fulfilled in our spirits by putting ourselves in a safe, stress-free, sterilized life. No. It corrupts our sense of self-worth. It deducts our motivation and creativity. The sky may or may not be falling. But if it is, it provides an opportunity to be the best version of ourselves possible. And that’s a good thing. I had the great fortune, at a point in the “tween” part of my life, suffering in deep depression and anger, to be surrounded by my family. At the dinner table, while I was struggling to figure out “who I am” or what purpose there is in continuing to live, my mom and dad and sister would recount their days. My dad had been up through the night on-call doing psyche evaluations for criminals and people who’d hurt themselves. My mom had spent a day in social work where her organization could aid some homeless and impoverished families, but couldn’t aid others. My sister just ended a day where she had moved abused children from an abusive home of their upbringing to a hopefully-safer foster care situation. It was heavy. Meanwhile, I faced my mind.
It was a two-for. I had this wonderful opportunity to suffer in a depression so deep that no one for the rest of my life could say something worse about me than I had thought about myself. As a consequence, I’m impervious to others’ estimation of me forever. The fate I’ve wished on myself at several long periods of my life is worse than the ugliest curse someone could cast my way. There was an upside to the downside. And at the same time I was every single day confronted with the reality of widespread palpable suffering. It didn’t negate mine. But I couldn’t ignore the stories - so many of them - of people who had no real advantages in life. It made me begin to formulate questions about upside inside of downside. On a denser work day, I may have 16 hours of appointments. More than half may be sit-down coaching, or distance coaching calls. And there are times all 16 hours of coaching is hearing people walk through pain: eating disorders; health conditions; relational suffering; hormonal imbalance; adversarial work environments; hostile internal self-talk. It can be heavy. But we never accept defeat. The option to make things WORSE might as well not even exist. We just work steps, from where we are, because we can’t step from any other starting place. Over the course of doing this professionally for 15 years, I don’t have the answer. But I have found some valuable questions: What are the upsides to this downside? What is a sustainable next step? What will you do on the “worst week”? Long ago, I found that people want to interface with health and fitness as if you can live in an ideal scenario and an idyllic environment. It’s the wrong approach. People say they’re going to lose X pounds in Y weeks, based on Z workouts with Q nutrition. Ok. What happens when you get laid off, the flu, lose a loved one, sink into clinical depression, and all odds are stacked against you? What if that’s next week? What if that’s today? You see, some days are heavy. Maybe most. And if you don’t confront yourself with questions about how to think and how to operate in the heavy days, you have no strategy for life. You are willfully unequipped. Maybe there are some people who are blithely fit. I don’t know who. Maybe some celebrities. For everyone else, there have to be some painfully honest assessments about how to step forward when all the winds are blowing you back. It’s not eternal optimism. It’s just truth. Some days are heavy. Today is the first Father’s Day without my dad, and I’m good - I was simply reflecting on my interviews with him last year and one theme he had running throughout his beliefs was an unwillingness to give up on people. He had an eternal hope in the worst of the worst ultimately being reconciled.
My father made many mistakes, as we all do; but when I listened to his life story told so matter-of-factly, I kept thinking, “how did he not give up at that point?”, and a few minutes later the same thought crossed my mind, and a few minutes later, and so on. One thing he did not do was render a final verdict on a person. He lived incredibly free in his heart that way. Situations which he faced were genuinely unreasonable, unthinkable and unimaginable to most of us. Yet, his ability to soldier forward versus our general readiness to give up is sobering. I asked him about acutely vindictive people in his life who had harmed our family overtly. He said, “I hope they find peace in their hearts.” You’ve heard the sentiment to “pray for your enemies.” He honestly did that. People whom we should’ve sued at the least or “taken out” if this were the Wild West, he just wished them the best. I’d start a sentence, “remember that dirtbag who...” and my dad would interject, “that’s a person.” From a certain point-of-view, one could call this resourcefulness. Not many people could see the opportunity hidden within “impossible” odds. It’s a skill to be sure. I think about how it applies in emotional management and the health and fitness domains. There is always hopeful possibility. But you must train your brain to see it. I’m not pretending there aren’t genuine challenges or enemies. I’m merely stating that my own propensity to label a person or situation was counterproductive. I was really used to thinking of enemies as “evil” or “idiotic” or “uninformed.” But now I see it more like enemies are “damaged” and “hurt” and “scared.” Rather than destroy them, I pity them. I try to figure out a way for compassion toward them. You can apply this concept however. Trying to pretend like you know the future, and it must be “impossible” is immature thinking. You have seen the worst leaders on earth give rise to the best. You have seen the best leaders give rise to the worst. You have seen yourself go from weakness to strength and vice versus. It’s all impermanent. In fitness, I’ve worked with some of the most physically and psychologically damaged people on earth. The breakthrough is often a mere step away. But the location of that step is in the ONE place where that person won’t place her foot. There’s pain in that step. There’s a history in that step. Or on that step there’s a label which we refuse to change. No matter how great the challenge, the threat, or the enemy, there is always hopeful possibility. We can see it. And we can make it true. Or we can fight indignantly to make it untrue, occupying our minds in a never-ending series of witch hunts and victim narratives. I still have a stubborn part of my heart which believes most people won’t try to unburden their hearts, or they won’t challenge themselves to love an enemy, or they will fly first to a set of thoughts which reinforces personal victimhood. But my dad would say “that’s a person” and “I hope they find peace in their hearts.” Happy Father’s Day Yesterday my brother-in-law raised a good point about something I hadn’t addressed in a post, namely that there are people who ARE willing to try many different programs but still come up empty-handed with maintenance of body composition achievement. I would argue that though there are many programs, the only widespread or popular ones operate from deficiency not sufficiency.
The crux of maintenance relies on sufficiency. People often don’t think about this, but when you deplete body fat you generally deplete the very micronutrients which support hormones and neurotransmitter levels. Serotonin and dopamine and gabba and acetylcholine don’t just magically take care of themselves. So, whether you abide by paleo or raw vegan, as you eat less caloric support, you will eat less brain support. This includes the pituitary and consequently other organs. Conversely, I like people to protect the brain first and lose fat later. Some influencers called attention to this idea very recently in the wake of published research which caught headlines: “Dirty” Keto Dieting Is Questionable. Someone can indeed hit macros, achieve weight loss, and be in a worse position for long term health. It’s true. In avoidance strategies, we don’t usually seek MORE nutrients. If someone goes months and months with deficiency, surprise! It isn’t just weight that’s depleted. As someone runs into a wall where they aren’t “deficient enough,” the common theme is to “move more.” Great, except more movement means using up more acetylcholine and constituents for mitochondrial health at the very least. But if you were already eating less, then these were already underfed. Now we’re woefully injured, in the brain and in the body. While people think they're erasing fat they're unlikely to be doing so; and they're much more likely to be erasing the brain. The remedy? There are a few different ways to go about it. Bloodwork on hormones and neurotransmitters helps. Calculating protein and fiber sufficiency helps. Micronutrient-dense superfoods help. In the end, being aware of sufficiency as primary helps to guide these other items. See, here’s the thing: in weight loss research, there are repeated studies on test groups where they are matched on the caloric equation, but something other than caloric intake/expenditure changes the outcomes in one group versus another. Ironically, HIGHER protein intake and MORE sleep/rest result in better results. Diversity of gut flora (the bacteria which eat fiber) also correlates to better results. The exact inverse of every popular program is the only scientifically supported tactic: eat more; move less. This gets to a deeper societal problem: lack of specificity. Eat less of what? Eat more of what? Move more how? Move less how? Catchphrases work well on the human psyche for marketing, politicking, and rants. Clearly, however, they aren’t fruitful for health. Let‘s simplify: Why are elite sprinters who run for 9 seconds or weightlifters who exert themselves for less than one second so lean while average people starving and running for hours are so fat? Sufficiency defeats deficiency. I have done just about everything I can to improve knee strength and stability. It’s taken me all the way back to full range of motion lower body exercises and near my best strength records. Even this 6 inch deficit Sissy squat (video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/ByJ8pg0jWuj/) isn’t something I could do well prior to Lyme disease. And from 2014 to 2017 I couldn’t reliably bend right knee beyond 90 degrees without locking.
But, alas, the ligaments and joint capsule still have some laxity in them from when I had the infection. Thus, rapid rotation and certain twisting pressures dislocate me excruciatingly. It’s seldom, and it’s far better than even a year ago, let alone 2-5 years ago. Today I’ll be undergoing a PRP and/or stem cell treatment in order to reduce (hopefully eliminate) the last remaining laxity in the knee. Stay tuned. In my introductory college course on cosmology, the professor was an actual astrophysicist. When we began covering the universal constants, I couldn’t shake this idea that light couldn’t be a constant. The physics definition of acceleration is the rate of change of velocity per unit of time. And shortly before I took this class there were research teams running packets of photons through filters which resulted in “slowing down light.” Some had evidence they could speed it up, though their findings were in question. Directional change too can be considered a form of acceleration. Without debate light does these. Why not increases or oscillations in rate of light speed?
The professor scoffed at my naivety. I leveraged the fact that before Plank time there must’ve been very different physics, and that there are massive bodies like black holes so great that light doesn’t escape them. Doesn’t this solidify the notion that light speed HAS to change? He rebutted, “no; because the resting mass of a photon is zero.” Every observable finding I brought up which bolstered the concept that at some point somewhere in our universe light must change speed, he always responded the same way: the resting mass of a photon is zero. When I pressed the expert on his response, his underlying reason was vexing. I said, “how do we without question know this to be true, especially when the great hope is to find a subatomic particle that can explain the mass problem which plagues most models?” His answer, “without a photon’s resting mass as zero, the math for special relativity won’t work.” Why isn’t special relativity up for revision? It has had observable confirmation. Why can’t one of the underlying ideas in special relativity be wrong while as a model it gets things right? Crickets. Thus it is in weight loss. We relinquish the fundamental empiricism of science in order to “stick to our guns” on a once-sensible theory. That is, when people are confronted with the bald reality that they are doing things the wrong way, instead of viewing this through the lens of cold empiricism, the general response is “I don’t get it; this SHOULD work.” "It shouldn't be that bad for me." "I should be skinny." "I should be losing weight with how much running I do/how little I eat/how hard I work." Empiricism has NO PLACE for "should." Oh, and by the way, likewise in physics we’ve still got not unifying theory. So, something somewhere is amiss. It’s simple really: consider being wrong. Consider revising your approach. Breakthrough can come from break down. That is the most fundamental constituent of science. And refusal to consider any other possibility isn’t just non-science, it’s nonsense. I haven’t written off any nutritional tactic, because at once I can both question its authority AND see its practical application for different people. If you are unwilling to consider even the experiment to “try something else,” then you are always left with the same problems, the same disjointed beliefs, the same non-unified physics. Calorie counting is like this. It CAN work, but generally doesn’t because of underlying things it gets wrong. That doesn’t mean that a calorie isn’t a calorie isn’t a calorie and so on. It means that the contribution to body composition change in APPLIED science has more going on than the description of calories. People unwilling to address stress generally don’t make progress on the calorie model. People unwilling to experiment with other eating styles, clinging to the truth of “the calorie model”, tend to make no progress. This doesn’t invalidate the theoretical usefulness of a calorie in human biology. It just means the empirical feedback is telling us there’s MORE to the story. Weight loss, just like any scientific discovery, hinges upon our willingness to consider something wrong and something new. Rejecting the proposition leaves us every single time with the same old. That’s fundamental. People: what do YOU eat?
Me: whatever I want. It’s varied throughout the day, week, month, year. I like high nutrient density. I like high quality. I add in Cypriot sheep cheese, duck eggs, unflavored collagen from grass fed cattle, and jackfruit from time to time. . What I never do is operate from a perspective of “can’t”. People ask if I “can’t” have certain foods. I can have whatever I want however I want whenever I want. But from time to time, with certain foods, I just DON’T. Big difference. If you need to gain bone density and muscle, DO protein. If you need to get lean, DON’T overeat processed crap, sugars, high starches, etc. CAN anything. DO productive. 330lbs x 15 reps
I dropped the weight substantially, in hopes of getting 20+ reps. There was more in there at 15; but I let fear end the set. Fail. BUT I didn’t get hurt; so I can come after it again next week. . Fear and perception play a vital role in fitness. What people think of as possible or impossible dictates outcomes. A lot of people are weak because they believe lifting is unsafe or hard or fill-in-the-blank-here. A lot of lifters are weak because they believe a certain range or loading or form is unsafe. All of us are not as strong as we could be because of belief about the “limit” or the fear we’re at the limit. . If you can’t wrap your head around a certain strength performance, you will never even approach it. When you do go for it, fear may still cut you off. If so, the good news is you lived to fight another day. |
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