I am equally grateful for all of our writers, our readers, and supporters. If you have been monetarily supporting us—thank you. I’d urge you to discontinue your support at your earliest convenience.

While this means the end of the journal, it doesn’t end my own career of writing and pontificating on my general message of mind and body. Next April, I’ve been invited on another UK-based podcast to discuss lifting and philosophy. News of that to come later in the spring once the host feels the episode is ready for publication.

I sincerely wish each of you many great workouts, thoughtful ruminations, and a meaningful Lent for those who celebrate.

Yours in strength,

Joe

But I’m exhausted and can’t concentrate. Running through my head is the unsuccessful CPR we performed only an hour ago, that blank expression in the old man’s tan and wrinkled face. His eyes flash in my head as I think about his ribs crunching from the chest compressions I gave.

I shake it off and try to focus. I hook the dark skinned twelve-year-old girl with braids up to our blood pressure cuff, but from everything I’m seeing on our vital sign monitor, she appears stable. No wheezing, no hives, she doesn’t even look scared. Just bored and ready to go home. It’s just another obscure EMS call where there’s nothing we can do other than offer the patient a ride to the hospital. The girl’s parents were called to come pick her up, so no ride. We just wait for them.

That’s when the call went out over the radio for a high-rise fire in our response area. Only problem is that we aren’t parent of the response line-up, because we’re here, at a middle school nurse’s office.

Chen, the driver of the fire engine, checks his phone and reads us the dispatch notes: Caller says flames coming from behind the oven and spreading.

“Is it anything good?” asked Lieutenant Hertzel, our jacked bodybuilder of an officer who had been filling in for our Captain. Hertzel looks like a meathead, but he has the wits of a trial lawyer.

“I mean, it’s an oven fire.” Chen thought for a second. He knew most oven fires never turned into anything significant when they came from inside the oven because they were contained and ovens are designed to be hot, but from behind the oven? That doesn’t seem under control.

“Actually, we should add on, fire is coming from behind the oven. Plus, its Peachy Keen towers.”

“Oh, the place without sprinklers?” said Hertzel, who knows the area. “Alright, let’s go then.”

As I’m helping take care of this little girl, I see Chen wave me and the paramedic riding on the fire engine, Jay, over to the exit. His eyes are gleaming with intensity. “Yo let’s go, we got a box!” Box is code for fire.

My eyes widen, becoming alert, “wait, what?” I start heading towards him. “Where at?”

“Peachy Keen towers.”

My adrenaline immediately spiked.

“Medic crew, you need us for anything?” Hertzel asks as we make our way out.

Moe, the laid back, charming paramedic on the Ambulance, waves us off. “No, you guys go, her parents are coming to take her home so we’ll just wait with her.”

Hertzel gives Moe a thumbs up and the fire engine crew and I scramble out of the nurses office to the fire truck.

 My heart is racing because we’ve all been waiting for something big to happen at this apartment complex. No unit sprinklers, no hallway sprinklers and a lot of strange, lonely residents all housed in the same tinderbox. How has nothing gone wrong before?

The way our dispatching algorithm works is different for every call. For a high-rise fire, there are going to be a ton of units responding to it, typically, five fire engines. But the ones tasked with making the first charge towards the fire depend on which station has that building in their designated response area. This is what is called being first due in the fire service. And Peachy Kean towers belongs to us, but since we were still dealing with this girl in the nurse’s office, the dispatchers were unable to officially use us for the high-rise fire. So, they had no choice but to make the next closest station the first arriving unit and they were our rivals.

Chen hated them. Their captain used to work here, and Chen can’t stand him. Knowing that they were assigned as the primary unit is pissing Chen off and lighting a fire under his ass

We all jump into the fire engine, and Chen guns it out of the middle school parking lot with a ferocious tenacity. We hear the captain of our rival station, John, make an announcement over the radio.

“All units be advised we have a column of smoke showing from route 77.”

Yup. This is real.

I shift to firefighter mode. I stand up and hoist my fire trousers on, pulling the suspenders tight while trying to not get thrown side to side as we swerve around traffic and through red lights.

“Fuck!” Raskin said, “They’re gonna fucking beat us in.”

“Yea, looks like they’re about to pull in. Guess we’re gonna be second due. It’s all good.” Hertzel grabbed the radio mic, “Command from E314, we’ve added onto the incident, we’ll be your second due Engine.”

“Alright, I copy that 14, you’ll be our second due engine.” The battalion chief, the commander in charge of the whole incident, responded over the radio.

I fish my hands through the shoulder straps of my air pack, sinch the waist strap down, buckle my seatbelt, and take some deep breaths. I already know my next step: grab the high-rise packs, portable bundles of hose, detached from our fire truck so that we can carry to the fire floor and use it to connect to the building standpipe.

As we pull into the six-story brick apartment’s parking lot, a chubby out of shape woman frantically waves at us, then points to where the fire was. Around the corner, a small amount of smoke is coming from a fifth floor unit, and our rivals are standing below it outside of the tightly locked stairway door.

“Ok, that is not a fucking column of smoke.” Hertzel said, “Also, what the fuck are they doing over there?”

“Its fucking John, what do you expect? All this time here and this fucking idiot still can’t run a high rise.”

They were trying to go directly in through the stairwell, but the exterior door was sealed shut.

“So, are they gonna force entry or just stand there and fiddle their dicks?”

“I don’t give a fuck, this is our box anyway.”

“I mean, I announced we were second due.” Hertzel said, “I gave it to them…Fuck it, I tried.” He said sarcastically. “Guess we’ll take it from here.”

Chen drives over speedhumps to the front entrance of the building, blasting the air horn at a car who is just trying to leave.

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY!” He yells urgently, trying to secure his spot next to the hydrant and get us inside so we could beat our rivals. As the air brakes hiss, Jay and I hop out and grab the high-rise packs and all the necessary tools for our ascent.

I smell the thick, grimy scent of smoke in the air. No doubt this is real. I just got to let instinct take over now.

Chen, unscrewing the hydrant caps, yells something at me.

“Ok! Got it!” I reply.

“What did he say?” Jay asked me.

“I have no idea.”

Chen stays outside connecting the hydrant to the exterior fire department connection outlets while Jay, Hertzel and I go inside. A confused, elderly resident with glasses is holding the door open for us as we hastily run through carrying one hundred pounds of equipment. Sales representatives at the leasing office were working out contracts with prospective residents when they heard our thundering footsteps rushing into the awkwardly silent lobby.

Looking at us wide eyed and in confusion, I can only imagine what those new residents about to sign the lease are thinking. These guys clearly don’t know what’s going on, which makes sense because the fire alarm isn’t going off.

Jay led the pack, darting to the left down the hall, carefully noting the direction of the unit numbers that would be stacked on top of one another.  He’s short, but agile with incredible endurance because he’s training for an iron man competition next year: a 2.5 mile swim, 115-mile bike ride and a marathon all in one day.

In his newly issued, flexible, light weight fire gear, he strides down the hall like a gazelle. He dashes past the elevators, cuts right at the intersection and sprints to the stairwell at the end of the hall.

Fuck I should have gotten the new gear. I think, breathing deeply. It feels like every part of my body is being dragged down by the sag and bulk of my coat and pants. Not to mention, the high-rise pack slung over my right shoulder, flopping up and down and crushing my right side at the same time.

But through my experience, adrenaline fueled energy propels me forward.

We stomp up the poorly lit, narrow, gray stairwell all the way to the 5^th floor, the unsettling fluorescent lights humming above us. I’m holding onto the railings and taking it one landing at a time, so I don’t psych myself out; six floors feel like fifty with this much weight and pressure.

When we finally get to our floor, Jay drops his equipment on the landing and opens the door to the hallway as a dark haze of smoke seeps through the top.

“Oh! We got smoke showing LT!” Jay announces without a change in his high-pitched voice.

“Smoke showing?!” Hertzel says marching up to us. “Alright, mask up guys.  Get the hose flaked out, I’m gonna go do some recon.”

A sense of urgency floods my body. I toss my high-rise pack onto the floor, drop down to one knee and put my face mask on without the regulator to conserve air. I bounce back up and jump over to the standpipe right next to the hallway door for step one, which is unscrewing the cap.

Step two: drain out dirt and debris possibly sitting in the standpipe to make sure it doesn’t gunk up our hose. I grab the wheel valve and try to twist it, but it’s glued shut. I quickly crouch and grab a specially designed wrench shaped like an F from our standpipe bag for extra leverage. I place the prongs through the wheel and crank down. Black water gushes out of the pipe, staining the white hose, black.  

I shut it back down, and quickly move to step three. I screw our flowmeter device onto the standpipe outlet, turn it on and then connect Jay’s section to it. Everything is almost ready; we just need to unravel two-hundred feet of uncharged hose in a cramped stairwell. 

Meanwhile, Hertzel runs down the hallway. Up ahead, he sees smoke pouring out of the room and as he gets closer, an overweight, scruffy third man in his thirties still in pajamas. “WHAT. THE. FUCK—Hey man, what are you doing?”

“I’m holding the door open, so you guys know where the fire is!” The mysterious neighbor said coughing through the thick smoke. Eddleman knows that all he’s doing is feeding oxygen into the rapidly spreading fire and polluting the hallway.

“WHAT…GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE MAN, THE SHIT IS ON FIRE!”

“I just wanted to help.”

“You’re a hero, man—the stairs are down the hall!”

“Ok! Thank you for what you guys do!”

As smoke pushes out of the apartment and the man scurries away, Hertzel stands there, flabbergasted “FUCKING PEOPLE MAN, FUCK.” He crouches and unclips his thermal imaging camera from his coat. He goes inside and sees the entire kitchen consumed by fire and charged with black smoke. Fire is creeping out of the galley window, starting to light off the ceiling to the living room. He knows it won’t be long before the entire living room flashes over and the sliding glass doors to the balcony shatter from the heat, allowing gusts of wind to turn the fire into a blow torch. Knowing it could be only a minute before the flames spread to the hallway, he knows, this is about to be a good one.

Backing out of the apartment, he looks down the hall to the stairwell. What is taking them so long?

 Knowing he has to do something; he sees a fire extinguisher encased in the wall. He opens it up, pulls the safety and aims at the fire. He shrugs and sprays the galley window where the flames are licking the ceiling, which temporarily diminishes them.

 Holy Fuck it worked!

 The extinguisher empties and he shakes it, then stares into the eyes of the fire. He shrugs again and chucks the canister into black smoke crashing into cabinets. Ok…Hose should be here any second now.

Back in the stairwell, I bring the nozzle and a coupling (a marker of a 50-foot connection point) to the hallway door as Jay scurries up and down the stairs, spreading out the hose. Time is ticking, and it looks like he’s about ready for me to charge it with water.

I run over to the standpipe, but realize the wheel wrench I used to open to the stubborn valve with is missing

Oh. Fuck. Oh Fuck. Where is it?!  

Now I’m panicking, which is cardinal sin since you’re the one that the panicking people called to get rid of the thing their panicking about.

Its not about the mistakes you make, it’s about how you recover from them. I remember Luke drilling this into my head. I had to think of something else.

I see the fourteen-pound Halligan bar, our main prying tool up against the wall and grab it. Its two and a half feet long of forged steel with a jagged pick and flat head end called adze that can crunch down on doors with extreme force. The other side has a prong like end called forks that are six inches long. It’s an extremely powerful tool.

 I’ll stick the fork end into the wheel valve, and then turn it. Shit. I’m getting pretty resourceful. I’m excited my quick thinking found the solution. I’ve come a long way.

 At an awkward angle, I shoved the forks into the wheel valve and twist it, causing the plastic wheel to break.

Fuck. Me.

My wide eyes shift side to side.

 I’ll let jay recover from this one.

“Ok, you ready Jay? Imma’ get on the nozzle I’ll let you charge it!” I said trying to pass off the problem to him. He’s more experienced so I’m sure he’ll figure it out.

“Hey Danny, don’t charge it yet I’m almost done though!”

“Alright, you charge it when you’re ready, I still gotta flake my shit out!”

I started spreading out the rest of my hose when I see the wheel wrench buried beneath it all. SON OF A BITCH.

Behind me, the first “truck” company, tasked with search and rescue, came up the stairs.

“Are y’all ready to go inside, what we got?” The country boy truck officer asks me.

I glare at them. “HEY! HELP ME GET THIS SHIT FLAKED OUT!” I grab a part of the hose and throw it at them.

“Ok, we got you!”

That’s when Hertzel came back through the hallway door. “Hey, are we almost ready in here, because I guarantee we got no victims in there, but we do have a fire that’s about to get out of control.”

Jay came down the stairs. “Danny, I’m all set up here, I’m going to charge the line.”

“Alright copy that, you’re charging the line!”

Everything right now just feels like controlled chaos.

Once we finally get it filled with water, I click in my breathing regulator. “We’re all set LT!” I yell.

 I grab the hose and charge down the carpeted hallway through the dark haze. I follow Hertzel and the truck crew into the apartment. Through gray clouds of ashes and smoke, I see sunlight creeping through the balcony doors and a cat scratching post in the corner.

I push a little further where the galley window is engulfed in a raging ball of smoke, a violent hue of orange bursting through its core. Somone’s house is possessed, and I’m the exorcist.

“Hey! We gotta move around the corner!” Hertzel relays to me.

But instinctively, I open the nozzle and blast the fire, black water slamming the cabinets.

Hertzel lets me do my thing as the flames taper down. He shows me the screen from his thermal imaging camera.

“Hey, we gotta move around the corner now!”

“Yes sir!” I turn over my shoulder to talk to my partner. “More hose, Jay! More hose!”

“You said more hose? I got you!” Jay vanishes back into the hallway and starts pulling more fire hose into the unit.

On my knees, I explode forward to the kitchen entrance, dragging the hose with me across the fuzzy carpet. Hertzel crouches beside me and shows me the thermal imaging camera again.

With the hose pinched between my legs, I aggressively whip the nozzle, hitting all sides of the room to leave no trace of smoke or fire. I douse the entire kitchen in the polluted water for the next thirty seconds until the entire emergency came to a halt.

Another rescue crew walks into the kitchen and violently tears out the cabinets, checking for heat extension into the dry wall, but there is nothing. Over the radio, the crew operating on the floor above us relays that the fire had gotten so heavy that it began to burn through the ceiling, making its way to the floor above. They quickly extinguished it.

“LT, you want me to keep spraying just in case?”

“Naw, we’re good here. Head to the balcony so we can get some air.”

Hertzel, Jay, and I all walked out to the balcony and unclip our breathing regulators. We inhale the remnants of the filthy haze as it wafts outside. I try to expel it from my throat, but to no avail.

The ladder truck had put its one-hundred-foot hydraulic ladder stick up to the edge of the balcony we rested our arms over. A safety officer on the ground walks over and points his phone at us.

“Oh shit, we’re about to be on the Instagram page!” I point.

“Oh shit, that’s right!” Jay laughed. We all give a big pose with our thumbs up.

When we make it back outside, we walk up to Chen outside the fire engine.

“Hey, what were you trying to tell us when we got out?” Jay asked Chen.

“I said to chock the doors open, because these ones don’t open back up.”

“Oh, that’s what you said.” I said. Chen shook his head in disappointment.

“Did you guys make it there first?” Chen asked.

“Yea, we smoked them in.” Jay says, “As soon as we got there, I thought, they can’t be that far behind. But they didn’t even make it in until after the fire was out!”

“So, you put the fire out?!”

“Hell yea!”

“Did you hook up to the standpipe, Danny?”

“What else was I supposed to use?”

“Nice bro!” I can tell Chen is proud, it always helps when I’m on his good side, “That’s how you save a fucking incident—John was outside the whole time dealing with the dead cat when he was supposed to be up there with you.”

“Oh…the cat died.” More death today. That makes me sad. I think about my own cat.

Chen shrugged. “Yea.”

“That sucks.”

“Yea. But then this motherfucker, John, goes around the lobby just trying to pull all the fire alarms and none of them went off.”

“Wait, what?”

“Bruh, I’m telling you this place is gonna burn down one day.”

A middle-aged Indian man with fascination and fear in his eyes walked up to us from the sidewalk.

“Excuse me, but was there a fire here?”

We all just look at each other.

“Not anymore.”

Later that day while lying in bed at the station, goosebumps begin to crop up long my forearms as it dawns on me just how sideways that whole thing could have gone. No sprinklers, not even the fire alarms worked, and the damned standpipe system was filled with sludge. Had we not decided to respond to this incident ourselves, people would have died. That fire would have grown much bigger and eaten up the hallway, since our rivals, led by Captain John, made the wrong move on where to go first and never made it inside. And if Hertzel never had the presence of mind to use that fire extinguisher when he did, the inferno could have taken out the whole floor. Residents wouldn’t even know they were being barbequed until it was too late. So much shit to consider.

All I know for certain is that we didn’t respond to this call because we wanted to save the day. We added onto this call because it’s our fire to take, and it was pride alone that rushed us to the scene.

Danny Wang is a professional Firefighter/EMT, writer, and an avid practitioner of Brazilian Jiu-Jijtsu.

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While my generation may not have been the first to be awarded the green ribbon of participation, its association with Millennials was notorious. Summer recreation camps were the breeding ground of the green ribbon, where the unathletic were crowned for their mediocre performance. Meant as a form of encouragement and perhaps even bolster some fading post-event self-esteem, the green ribbon had the opposite effect. Children, like adults, understand and are highly attuned to false pretense and subterfuge. Nobody adores fourth place, the first rank of the non-meritorious, non-awards. But more than its unsalutary effect, the green ribbon runs downstream of the kind of watered-down, “just for fun” events which are a hybrid performance in which the nerves of competition remain intact, but shuffled under a thin guise of play. For actual athletic children, it is wholly unserious and a way to flex their talent before an assembly of mixed skill levels. For the mixed skill levels, it is unenticing and unwarranted—in short, embarrassing. It is perhaps only the counselors, themselves children, who get any joy out of watching uncoordinated pre-pubescents flop all over themselves.

The late Christopher Lasch, a US historian who held strong views on these kinds of setups, presents a critique of the ideology surrounding this form of semi-athleticism which continues to find purchase on the world of fitness today. In his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Returns, Lasch excoriates the navel-gazing 1970s as a period of unvarnished cultural and social vanity in America. Lasch’s label of narcissism, however, was less psychological diagnosis than it might suggest. Narcissism is a lens through which the latest chapter in the long story of American capitalism could be understood. In typical Marxian analysis, Lasch tells the story of how the ethical and social morass of the 1960s continued to bleed out an already anemic social arrangement of traditional values. A certain class of post-radicals would enter the 1970s stripped not only of those values—they had long since casted them aside—but the larger progressive narratives which dictated societal change on a mass scale. While these individuals happily wandered down the trail of self-reverence and various therapies (including fitness), it would also contribute to the larger condition of anxiety and excitement brought on by the collapse of deep-seated ethics. What was left was a sort of febrile state, in which the individual could discover that the sky above his head was as limitless as much as it was bottomless beneath his feet.

In one particular section of the book, “The Degradation of Sports”, Lasch excoriates the transformation of sports under this new phase of American life. Games and athletic play did not neatly fit into a well-defined category throughout American history, or at least in the last century and a half, according to Lasch. Their “function” was that of release, he says. “Games simultaneously satisfy the need for free fantasy and the search for gratuitous difficulty” he claims. At the same time, they allow man to enlist all of his mental and physical faculties towards an end that has no discernable value or output in advancing a civilization. Thus, states Lasch, they were dismissed by the prudish Protestant social reformers of the late nineteenth century as utter distractions in the march towards a more orderly (and sober) society. Less than a century later, athletic games would be castigated from the opposite end of the political spectrum by the left, who slammed their competitive nature as practice runs for “militarism, fascism, sexism…you get the idea.

What is arguably more interesting was Lasch’s ruminations on spectatorship, and the changes it underwent as sports became increasingly professionalized as they became televised throughout the twentieth century. Thick into his critique of the prevailing literature at the time, Lasch pauses to consider what role spectators bring to sports, and their own sort of virtue:

It is by watching those who have mastered a sport, however, that we derive standards against which to measure ourselves. By entering imaginatively into their world, we experience the heightened form the pain of defeat and the triumph of persistence in the face of adversity. An athletic performance, like other performances, calls up a rich train of associations and fantasies, shaping unconscious perceptions of life. Spectatorship is no more ‘passive’ than daydreaming, provided the performance is of such quality that it elicits emotional response.

Lasch then goes on to hammer amateurism—the sort of type mentioned earlier—where “just have fun” becomes the main object, declawing, if you will, the competitive spiritedness of the game. Indeed both angles of Lasch’s critique are evident then as they are now. It’s also hard to know if there wasn’t a time when this kind of attitude prevailed, even if it was found in smaller doses and at smaller scales in pre-modernity (or at least before the nineteenth century). What Lasch does identify is how narcissism is found even when it decides to speak in the context of sports. Praising amateurism in games or athletic competition does not excite the senses of the athlete, it dulls them. When the rules are softened, concern for personal well-being is scaled to become the collective lens through which all participants are viewed. It displaces the game’s competitive spirit—the social “uselessness”—of why we play games as a means to escape the mundane and ordinary, as Lasch suggests earlier in the chapter.

Narcissism today appears as a virtually inescapable phenomenon. Were he alive today, Lasch would most likely nod that everything he observed in the 1960s and 1970s has now come to bear. This new phase of narcissism, however, ceases to retain its quality as something distinctly American. The Internet effuses on a global scale, not just the selfie, but the particular, narcissistic rules of how do properly do one, and how to project a narcissistic persona. Marshall McLuhan’s point behind his “the medium is the m[e]ssage” with the arrival of TV and the coming telecommunications revolution decades earlier. Even “scandal” and negativity associated with are handled in such a narcissistic way, that much of the so-called social media apology is mere entertainment and performance.

We witnessed this kind of digital narcissism and amateurism during the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics with the performance of Rachel “Raygun” Gunn, the thirty-seven-year-old Australian breakdancer and academic. Gunn’s complete mockery of breakdancing. Team Down Under suffered for weeks, after Gunn hopped like a kangaroo, orchestrating the kind of moves a teenager might do for a laugh in front of his friends. As expected, Gunn was poetically awarded no points, and became the subject of national embarrassment for weeks and months in various memes.

Gunn’s otherwise dismal rating did not seem to go unpunished, when Martin Gilian, the top judge of Olympic breakdancing, offered her consolation. “Breaking,” Martin informed the BBC, “[Is] all about originality and bringing something new to the table…and this is exactly what Raygun was doing.”

These are not simply kind words. In effect, they are a justification in minimizing one of the key components of the Olympics, of why the Games are considered the zenith of athleticism. Gunn completes the circle as she defends her performance in a manner that has now become all-too familiar among Millennials, and the younger generations more generally:

I am very sorry for the backlash that the community has experienced, but I can't control how people react. Unfortunately, we just need some more resources in Australia for us to have a chance to be world champions... I don’t think that’s just on me. I have trained so hard.

Notice the passive construction, when she states, “the backlash that the community has experienced” followed by the utter lack of responsibility which summarily follows: “but I can’t control how people react.” What is more telling however, is the odd tie-in to a kind of international, macro-level structural deficiency latent in the Australian breakdancing scene which she deploys to further distance her performance from herself: “Unfortunately, we just need some more resources in Australia for us to have a chance to be world champions.”

It’s tough to imagine that breakdancing, a sport of poor and working-class Bronxites who would quite literally drag out a flattened piece of cardboard box to use as their safety mat on concrete or blacktop pavement, as a game which requires a lot of resources to perform properly. This kind of subterfuge Gunn invites us to fall victim to represents the latest phase in Laschian narcissism. The predictable cadence of academia-derived grievance discourse, which attempts to drag out the tired excuses of victimhood, is then wedded to the larger structural deficiencies of Australia, a wealthy Western nation, as being on the wrong side of breakdancing-privilege. It is narcissistic amateurism at its finest. This attitude seeks to infect the ecology of Olympic competition, with all of its bloodless national rivalries, spectator-thronged roars of victory, and heartfelt stories of triumph overcoming defeat. Gunn’s green ribbonned excuses cannot survive in such an arena. They are perhaps better left elsewhere, condemned to a shoebox of irrelevancy.

Joe Lombardo holds a PhD from the New School for Social Research and is an avid writer and strength enthusiast. He is the Editor of Ultraphysical.

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American dominance in the Olympics is an old story—since the modern Olympic games began, the United States has taken home over thirty-one hundred medals, between two-and-a-half and three times the next most-winning country (the Soviet Union).

We’ve managed that despite competing against dictatorial powerhouses like the Soviet Union and Communist China that handpick athletes, house them, train them, feed them, and sometimes dope them, while our athletes are not given any material or financial public support. In years past, this meant that many athletes were poor, working multiple jobs to scrape together the cash to go to the Olympic Games. Today, because the Games have been opened to professionals, athletes either come from major sports teams or are sponsored by brands, or both.

In either case, the athletes’ salaries, their training expenses, their food and housing and travel and incidentals, and their athletic needs are financed by advertising. The athletes sell shoes and sports drinks. They wear uniforms from Nike or Adidas. They star in McDonalds ads. They promote athletic equipment. They hawk gear and cookbooks and supplements and training advice. Their teams exist in large part because of corporate sponsorships, and because television and radio advertisements subsidize ticket sales.

There are those who bemoan this relationship between athletics and marketing. They prefer the “purity” of athletic competition untainted by the need to sell products. They hear about the amounts involved in the Olympic Games – tens of billions to host the Games, billions for the IOC, over seven billion for NBC to broadcast the Olympics —and wonder what ill effect big money has on sports.

But the truth is that the professionalization of the Olympics has made the competitions better and improved the lives of the athletes. And romanticizing the days of amateur athletics propagates a false narrative about the past and diminishes our appreciation for great athletic performances today.

Top Athletes Can’t Perform Well Unless They Focus Exclusively on Their Sport

This should go without saying, but the romantic view of amateur athletics holds that it’s actually better when athletes have to work a real job because doing so either instills character, or it makes them more relatable to regular people like you and me. So, it’s important for me to address this up front, before going into the history of professionalization.

To perform at the highest level, an athlete can’t work a job. All effort must be dedicated to training and preparing. It is impossible to set a world record in any mature sport unless you are solely focused on the world record. The only reason it was possible in the past is that the world records weren’t very hard to beat. Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954 despite working as a junior doctor, because running wasn’t a mature sport. Today, high school boys routinely run under four minutes in the mile and to be a world-class athlete, a man needs to run much faster than that. (The women’s world record is 4:07.64.)

Since distance running is the sport I know best, I will focus on runners. To prepare for the Olympics, Cole Hocker and Grant Fisher needed to spend seven days a week training multiple hours a day. Top runners will typically run anywhere from eighty to one hundred and twenty miles in a week, with two or three hard days on the track and a long run. Many of them will add in some cross training (usually cycling) to increase their volume of aerobic activity without adding miles.

In 1978, runners could get away with just running. But in 2024, top runners need to be in the gym strength training and doing preventative physical therapy for their joints and core. The shorter-distance athletes will also be doing plyometrics and explosive lifts.

On top of that, they need to meet with their coaches, watch videos of their form, and fix any inefficiencies in their stride. All of that takes time. Between hours spent running or in the gym, and hours spent watching videos or meeting with coaches, we might be talking close to a full-time job.

And we haven’t even mentioned the word recovery. Athletes training multiples hours every day need to spend even more time recovering. The human body can handle hundred-mile weeks, but only if allowed to rebuild itself. The primary obstacle setting elite athletes apart from talented individuals who work ordinary jobs is that the latter can’t handle the same volume and intensity of training because they don’t have time to recover. This includes stretching, massage (and other soft-tissue work), mobility drills, and preparing nutritious food. All of which take time.

The most important aspect of recovery is sleep. Elite runners usually sleep ten to twelve hours every day. Most individuals can’t recover from ninety-mile weeks on eight hours of sleep.[1] But the average American worker sleeps much less than that. Add to that the fact that most working runners are training at suboptimal times for their circadian rhythm (i.e., before sunrise or after sunset), and you can begin to see how difficult it is to train well while keeping a job.

All of which is to say that the gap between elite athletes and talented athletes who have to work a job is very large, because the obstacles in the way of the latter are prohibitively difficult to overcome. The best evidence for this is the difference between Japan and the United States in elite and semi-elite running.

While the United States has more runners who can run under sixty-two minutes for a half marathon, Japan has more who can run under sixty-four and sixty-five, despite being a much smaller country. In The Way of the Runner, Adharanand Finn explains that Japan’s system of corporate teams–runners paid by their companies to spend part of their workday training for national races–allows for a flourishing of the semi-elite tier of distance runners, a flourishing wholly unlike the situation in the United States. In America, only the very best runners can get sponsorships. Even many very good runners–athletes who would be on national television in Japan–have to say goodbye to their running careers after college. Some former collegiate athletes who lack corporate sponsorships may do their best to train hard during their twenties in the hopes of winning races, but most will give up their careers. Those who continue to train hard on their own will find that the obstacles of working life impede their performance.

Thus, as Finn explains, there is a wide gulf between the top runners and the best recreational runners in America. In a nation of 340 million, we should have many more runners capable of going under sixty-four minutes in the half marathon, under fourteen minutes in the 5k, and under 2:30 in the marathon.

Without the corporate-sponsored infrastructure of Japan (or some other funding source for professionalizing “minor league” running), most American athletes are amateurs, not professionals. And since amateur athletes can’t perform as well while juggling other priorities as professionals can when devoting all of life to preparing for competition, America has a shallow bench of talent compared to a country a third of our size. In other words, America’s relative lack of professionalization outside of a highly-selective tier has hindered our ability to compete globally in sports like running.

And if American Olympic athletes were still required to be amateurs, America’s performance would be hindered even more. The professionalization of Olympic sports has led to better competitions, improved records, more spectacular performances, and simplified lives for the athletes. It has allowed athletes to train properly, unhindered by the obligations of work life.

In order to see that, it’s important to take a look back at the transition from amateur Olympics to professionalized Olympics.

The Amateur Athletic Union

Olympic athletes used to compete as part of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which worked with the United States Olympic Association to run qualification trials and coordinate the national team. It determined amateur standing–banning American athletes from competing in the Olympics if they were earning money from playing or coaching their sport.

This rule came out of an older era when certain sports were the province of the monied classes, whose members didn’t need to train for money because they didn’t need to work for money either. Amateurism was considered noble. It was the hallmark of a gentleman. Sports were played for the love of the game. Earning money detracted from that ethic. It demeaned the spirit of competition.

But many people didn’t see it that way. Working-class athletes often saw amateurism as arbitrary or unfair, something which was nice if you had enough money to live on, but wouldn’t pay the bills if you didn’t. Increasingly, they pushed back on the AAU, insisting that they deserved to be able to make a living from their talents.

In 1978, the Amateur Sports Act removed the AAU from its role. Athletes can now be voluntary members, but the AAU no longer controls who participates in the Olympic Games, and on what terms. The 1998 Olympic and Amateur Sports later removed the amateurism requirement entirely, making official what had been unofficial ever since the passage of the Amateur Sports Act: the professionalization of American Olympic athletes.

These laws were passed partially in response to widespread cheating from other countries (especially the Soviet Union), but they were also passed due to anger from Olympic athletes towards the AAU.

Famously, Steve Prefontaine fought hard against the AAU. Though he was “the one who [has] made all the sacrifices,” he was being asked to suffer more (“if I decide to compete at Montreal, to make all the sacrifices necessary, I'll be a poor man. If you're not a millionaire, there's no way”).

Prefontaine wasn’t exaggerating that he would be a poor man. Poverty was the norm for runners in the 1970s. While today’s Boston Marathon winners typically earn comfortable salaries from their corporate sponsors, Prefontaine’s compatriot Bill Rodgers (who won Boston and New York four times between 1975 and 1980) could be found putting mayonnaise on a pizza because he was too poor to afford more nutritious high-calorie food.

Prefontaine was right that Americans were at a financial disadvantage compared to the rest of the world. The Soviet Union paid their athletes (who had been selected for natural talent) to train while listing their occupation as “soldier,” in order to pass them off as amateurs. They weren’t the only ones.

Today, American athletes earn fifty thousand dollars from World Athletics (the international governing body for Olympic sports) for winning a gold medals. That might sound like a lot of money, until you realize that it usually only comes once or twice a lifetime, and that it typically accounts for decades of training. Moreover, it’s a lot less than many people think American athletes are earning for winning gold medals. Olympic athletes aren’t usually multimillionaires. Some of them make decent salaries. Others make enough to allow them to focus on their training. But they aren’t living Hollywood lives of luxury. Olympic swimmers don’t get the contracts NFL or NBA players do. More money goes into putting the Olympics on than to paying the athletes.

But Isn’t Money Corrupting?

Some will still argue that something was lost when the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act opened up the American Olympic team to full professionalization. After all, money can be corrupting. The Olympic ideal was originally about the love of sport.

But lack of money can be just as corrupting as too much money. In “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” Amor Towles tells the story of a fictional young writer trying to make it in New York City while working in a used bookstore, who is presented the opportunity to forge authors’ signatures on rare first editions. The gifts he will receive for this work are modest—fifty dollars will not make him rich—but he is struggling to get by, and an extra fifty dollars one week means the difference between a cheap burrito and dinner at a French restaurant.

“At each crossing, faced with the decision of whether to go left, right, or straight ahead, the young man may rely upon the advice he has been given as a child, or the sum of his experiences, or the flip of a coin. But of all the forces that are likely to influence him as he proceeds from one fork to the next, there are few more powerful than the moderate increase in income… ‘But,’ you may well ask, ‘is this incremental improvement in daily life really enough to make a difference? Is it enough to enhance a young man’s happiness, boost his ego, and silence the nagging voice of envy, if only for a minute?’ Suffice it to say that at the fork in the road, offer a young man an extra fifty dollars a week in exchange for a modest adjustment to his dreams, and you will have him by the throat [emphasis added]” (Towles, A Table for Two, 51-52).

Good fiction shows us the world as it is, not as we imagine it to be. It tells us what we already know in ways which we can’t deny as easily as we can direct evidence. Poverty, and that stage of limbo between poverty and lower middle-class in which an individual or a family can hang uncertainly, makes temptation hard to resist. When you need money, you think about it all the time. When an athlete is hard up and a little bit of money could go a very long way towards easing her stress, she will find it much harder to resist than when she doesn’t have to worry about where she will get her next meal. When an athlete has to worry about how he will possibly afford to attend the Olympics, to the point where he can’t focus on his training, he will more easily manage to convince himself that petty corruption is neither petty nor corrupt. Indeed, if he didn’t need the money, a sudden offer of ten million dollars in exchange for taking that third lap of the 1500m a little slow would provoke his righteous indignation. But when he is working two jobs just to make ends meet, one hundred dollars in exchange for a taking his competitors out for a drink or three the night before the race might not even strike him as corruption. The players who took bribes to lose the World Series in the infamous 1919 “Black Sox” scandal weren’t offered life-changing fortunes. But they were poor, and the modest sum they were offered was enough.

Prefontaine’s comments to the New York Times from 1975 come off as selfish and unpatriotic. Especially when you compare them to the comments of some athletes today, who express gratitude towards their country and family for sending them to the Olympic Games. But when you realize that Prefontaine’s country had given him no reason for gratitude, that instead he was being forced to join an organization which essentially mandated poverty, that he was being asked to pay his own way, that he had to find coaches and train on his own, and that he was being given no help or aid, you might see that if anything had encouraged selfishness in Prefontaine, it had been the amateurism requirement of the AAU. If anything had caused his lack of patriotism, it had been the expectation that he make all the sacrifices without any support or encouragement from his country and that the gold medal belong (metaphorically speaking) to the United States. It seems only fair that if he was the one sacrificing, the medal should be his.

Moreover, before the Amateur Sports Act, many athletes were already taking money under the table in order to support their efforts.

In other words, it wasn’t money that corrupted the Olympics and led to rule-breaking, but the lack of it.

Just as it isn’t fair to ask people to work hard without any compensation, for no other reason that industriousness is a virtue and working builds character, it isn’t fair to ask athletes to break their bodies and endure years of pain and hardship for nothing other than the love of the game. Jobs do provide meaning in people’s lives. They do instill important lessons. But we still expect compensation from our jobs for our time and effort.

Likewise, athletic competition has intrinsic value, as do the sports played at the Olympics. But athletes work very hard, spend a lot of time, expend tremendous effort, and make sacrifices few other individuals make. It is only fair to expect that they be compensated accordingly, too.

Moreover, many of us love to watch the Olympics. We love to cheer on our favorite athletes. We enjoy their performances. Their hard work creates some small measure of value in our lives. Given that there are millions of people who enjoy the Olympics every two years, and these athletes create value in the lives of millions of people, if the athletes are to be compensated accordingly, they should be paid well. Since we enjoy the fruits of their efforts for free, sitting through advertisements is the least we can do to ensure they can live comfortable lives dedicated to the pursuit of excellence within their chosen sport.

Sources Cited

Finn, Adharanand. The Way of the Runner, Faber & Faber, 2015.

Towles, Amor. Table for Two, Penguin Random House, 2024.

[1] Most elite runners use naps to supplement their sleep at night, so they may not sleep all ten or twelve hours in one nighttime stretch.

Ben Connelly is writer, runner, and personal trainer based in Virginia. Ben can be found on Twitter and on his Substack, Hardihood Books, where he publishes short fiction and essays.

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One day, while sitting in mass, I found my pain so excruciating that I had to get up towards the middle of it and drive home to lay on my bed, being unable to even sit without the left side of my upper back feeling as though there was an iron rod piercing it. Reluctantly, I went to an orthopedic, who had ordered some x-rays of my shoulder to find that it was not in fact my shoulder, but that the disks in my cervical spine were beginning to lose their integrity, and that bone spurs had begun to develop, pinching the nerve which runs down from my neck through to my left arm. Shocked, I began to rifle through the catalogue of all of the ill-advised lifts I had done over the past few years: Zercher squats with freshly-cut trees, high-bar back squats which at times felt as though they were placed closer to my neck than resting along my traps, and then finally, my stint in the fire academy, where for months a heavy pack was positioned on my back for a good third of my day. The doctor, however, didn’t seem to indicate that any of this was trauma-induced. “You have the neck of someone in their 70s” he said, which irritated me. “It could be genetics, bad posture, we don’t know.”

Roughly a year later, the cause is still up for debate. Regardless, it put a damper on my workouts. I was told to stop working out, and I dutifully obliged. I was told that I could either have surgery, which would basically fuse part of my c-spine, thus limiting the mobility of my neck, or continue to have a round of two or cortisone injections. I opted for the latter, and after a month or so, the pain began to subside. But I noticed that in the five or so months of not working out, the pain reemerged, and, starting to become irascible from not lifting, I decided to go back to the gym. And within a few weeks, the pain decreased even more.

I speak for perhaps most lifters when I say that lifting is both cause and the cure for most of what ails the body. In my case, lifting most likely exacerbated the injury. The human body, while certainly designed to express our muscular endowment from our ancestors, also seems to not enjoy being under a near constant regime of stress. Once we do force it upon ourselves to get stronger and more fit, we become obliged—committed, really—to then approach that level of exertion, lest we begin to see our gains recede and the cells shrink from misuse. Lifting is a fickle game. One that earlier on in my fitness journey, I realized doesn’t have an end. It is repetitious, exhausting, and by its nature, misunderstood. The body has no instructions, it remains non-verbal.

In discovering the body, however, I found myself remarking on just how wonderful getting stronger has been. Apart from the aesthetic appeal, or even the enhanced functionality of moving through space, there is a recognition that some of the narrowest parts of the anatomy are at the same time, the most important conduits of being sentient. Apart from my neck—which admittedly I am now more cognizant of training—I’ve noticed that another anatomical isthmus is my wrist. Second to the neck, it is the most fascinating, if not paradoxical part I’ve grown to appreciate, especially whenever I deadlift.

It’s comprised of eight bones which attach to an additional set of twenty-seven bones of the hand and opposite of that, the rest of the body’s one hundred and seventy-one. I can remember the first time injuring my wrist while catching a clean, the sour note they played as they bent backwards, hyperextended, inches away from my shoulders. A sense of dread came over me when I realized I wasn’t able to put weight on them in quite the same way.

The wrist controls the very function of writing, of gesticulating, assistance in eating, of manipulating a phone, gripping a garbage bag or a coffee mug; it helps push away unwanted advances as much as it embraces wanted ones. A powerlifter once told me that a weak wrist is a gateway to having a weak body, and vice-versa. And so, as a joint, the wrist is capable of holding hundreds of pounds of weight in a relatively small part of the body. It is the first thing I can’t feel in the morning when I’ve slept on my arm all night. My wrist is arguably the most underappreciated, overused joint I have come to know in my life as a writer and as a lifter.

I adored A Walk in the Woods--it's one of those books I wish I could read again for the first time. I've been meaning to start this one for some time and I'm excited to finally dig in. From what I know about it, it mixes Bryson's brilliant writing and wit with actual feal (and sometimes delightfully odd) facts about how our bodies function.

Maggie Mertens's Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women

I just received a copy of this book in the mail from the publisher and it seems like exactly the kind of book I love! It's about how women broke into competitive running and the many hurdles (pun sort of intended) they have faced along the way. 

—Alyssa Ages

My kids would say I have my nose in a book all year round, and they would be right. But much of my reading in the school year is driven by a kind of frantic energy, because it's to prepare for class or to stay on top of our ever more stressful news cycle. The summer, by contrast, is all about slowing down and taking time with a text (or ten). The first sign school is out is that I am reading fiction or memoir. So far this summer, I have read (and really enjoyed) The Memo by Lauren Mechling and Rachel Dodes, a new time-travel novel that is a real sendup of our girlboss/productivity culture, and I just started Miranda July's All Fours, which I can't put down. Even the books that are more work-related are not necessarily historical monographs: I am working on a new curriculum on Jewish-American history for the New York City Department of Education, and in that vein, just finished A Bag Of Marbles by Joseph Joffo, a memoir that was assigned as part of Holocaust education in France for years, and I am about to start work on a podcast that is in my wheelhouse of sport and leisure, but requires that I immerse myself in the unfamiliar world of mountaineering, so I also have Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (I know, it's terrible I haven't read it yet) in the queue, as well as a few other climbing memoirs. The two topics of the book projects I am working on--the educational culture wars and eastern Long Island, aka "the Hamptons"--have spawned so many interesting reads, and I am excited to dive into Mike Hixenbaugh's new book They Came For The Schools as well as some painstaking local histories of East End towns like Montauk and Sag Harbor. And yes, I plan to do as much of this reading as possible on the beach!

—Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

My reading has been focused on resolving a project on the Eugen Sandow Sculpture. To do this certain reading has had to get more expansive that I originally imagined. The basics of anatomical knowledge became essential. It seems comically obvious, but don’t underestimate Gray's Anatomy, offering intricate details on muscle and body functions that are absent in typical bodybuilding or fitness books. For those who have only explored anatomy through training books, I highly recommend this to elevate you to the next level. 

In addition, Donna Haraway's Primate Visions has been instrumental in contextualizing the Sandow Sculpture within London's Natural History Museum. The museum's current mission emphasizes the climate crisis, issues most acutely felt in global areas exploited by empires. The Sandow Sculpture, created in the tradition of the “object lesson,” served to affirm these values. Haraway’s deconstruction of museum displays, our relationship to animals and nature, is an excellent way to consider how all aspects of physical culture old and new are connected to both the environment and issues of global equality. Lastly, Taste and the Antique, by Haskell and Penny, explores the study of classical idealized bodies in sculpture, like those Sandow sought to emulate, such as the Farnese Hercules and the Doryphoros. This is a discussion of repetition and copying—fundamental activities in the gym where we lift, count, repeat, learn movements, copy, and teach. This mimetic process is part of human nature, exemplified by the very limited sculptures from the Greco-Roman canon, which, enabled by plaster cast technology in an era preceding photography, became ubiquitous in the nineteenth century. This book outlines the facts as to how a Western culture become obsessed with a select few bodies originally produced by a society long lost to time.

—Graham Hudson

I generally have two books going at once, one fiction and onenon-fiction. For the first part of summer, I’m reading Emma Cline’s The Guest, a limpid and engrossing novel about a young woman adrift in the Hamptons during the final week of summer.A great literary beach-read. My non-fiction tends to be work-related. At the moment, I’m swimming through Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, by the philosopher Agnes Callard. She’s wonderfully readable, insightful, and persuasive. But, so far, I don’t know that the book will significantly contribute to theproject that prompted me to read it: an examination of the ways people try to perfect themselves, and how individual perfectibility both contributes to and inhibits civic perfectibility.

—Daniel Kunitz

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Why bother with a journal on these topics, when they appear to be well into the wide-open eye in the media and social media? Because the general conversation on the body grossly lacks any real discussion of substance.

Quick to adopt knee-jerk polemical stances, the two camps which ostensibly emerge in the debate rarely meet their opponent on the field. They seem to prefer shouting from the sidelines, rarely making eye contact. One side goes into considerable apoplectic rage, sputtering invectives against fat people for lacking motivation, while the other, socially-savvy resorts to a kind of standpoint epistemology which seems to almost smirk and respond: “my body, my truth.” Perhaps the reason for such high volumes in these debates is that at their core there is something innately familiar, a kind of deep-seated mood which resides in our intellectual genes. Our bodies are not neutral encounters. Neither in terms of how we directly experience them, nor how others perceive them. There is always a critical aspect of how we and the other makes sense of our very physicality, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthy of considering why that is so.

Consider Plato’s Republic where Socrates relates how the proper functioning of the body is analogous with the proper ordering of the just society. It is a society in which each individual tends to their own development in pursuit of the good. And it is in this text where we find the body politic, the oldest of metaphors which establishes our very mortal anatomy as a means to explain governance. Is there any wonder, then, that most of today’s discussions on the body necessarily take on the personal and political tones that they do? 

Ultraphysical remains committed to political heterodoxy because we the editors have found as a common point of departure, that in putting our bodies through voluntaristic regiments of pain and discomfort in hopes of achieving an athletic aim, they become less terra incognita and more of a proper category worthy of reflection. Physical training for us brings into sharp relief a whole swathe of existence to ponder and consider–converse, even–with our wholly rational and intellectual selves. It comes as no surprise that in many of the essays we’ve published since launching the journal last July, each captures some form of political sentiment, a philosophical insight, and mind-over-matter struggle. 

The active body is the body in motion, one that helps jog our ideas. It was no wonder that Nietzsche once advised his readers to “never trust a good idea sitting down.” We too, prefer the glistening clarity of thought after a hard workout. We therefore want to thank you for reading Ultraphysical, and hope that it has provided you with insight into your own fitness journey. If they have, we also invite you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription. By becoming a paid subscriber, you’ll not only be helping to grow the journal, but have exclusive access to new and exciting content, like a podcast, conversations with athlete-writers, and more. So make a monthly or yearly contribution now, and don’t miss our midsummer reading list coming soon.

We’ll return with more thought-provoking essays and short stories in September.

Train hard,

Joe and Dan

First, I was struck by the many points on which we agree.

Like Mr. Stangler, I have a problem with the phrase “my truth.” I hear it as steel being raked down a blackboard: you own your lies, truth is everyone’s or nothing at all. In other words, the phrase is an oxymoron, it’s also repulsive in suggesting that the world is purely solipsistic, and that the speaker of the phrase has no responsibility to convincing others of their perspective. I suppose I see truth as a scientist might see it: as very real but always provisional, something we work toward and course-correct as we go. That’s what I hope we’re doing here.

I agree, too, that the problem of asserting one’s “truth” is evident in the Healthy at Any Size Movement (and while I don’t see HAAS as having much traction in the culture at large, it can serve as a useful example). Like Stangler, I do not believe one can be (or, rather, is likely to be) healthy at any size, and in the case of children, I think promoting any sort of obesity amounts to abuse.

Further, I agree in proclaiming the “moral worth” of the advice one gives in the gym, when it’s worth is moral. Often, however, we are merely offering probabilistically better choices (as with someone who says they prefer being fat to lean), not morally better choices. But I strongly agree that, as he says, “some choices are better than others.”

I also tend to agree with the assertion of the power of “shared terms,” especially in the fitness space, where words like healthy, strong, fit, clean, etc., serve as prompts to action. But here a problem arises because, although we (meaning fitness culture) share these terms, I doubt we ever mean exactly the same things by them. Certainly, they are “uniting ideas” and “spacious,” as he says, but I remain skeptical of “traditional and generally agreed-upon definitions.” Traditional for who, precisely? The word freedom has traditionally meant very different things to different cohorts, say Black Americans and White Americans. Traditional is a word frequently used to cover up all sorts of perspectival biases. And “generally agreed-upon definitions” similarly exist only for brief periods among narrow coteries of like-minded folk. In fact, all of the terms cited in the essay are relative, unstable, and constantly changing: what one meant by healthy or strong or fit was very different in 1840, 1920, 1960, 1995, and 2024, and what one meant at those times was also determined partly by socio-economic status, geography, gender, and education.

My point about history is important, because it seems Stangler’s argument relies quite often on a hazy and pleasant Golden Age, which I am apparently too young to recall. (And arguments that stem from appeals to that time, back when things were great, are called golden-age fallacies.) In the essay, there was a time when “traditional” definitions held sway; of agreement on universal categories; when there was “an existing order” that has now given way to “a new order of personal feeling.” Since he doesn’t specify when these eras occurred, I’ll limit my response to: I’m unaware of any such times. But I’ll add that I am also unaware of any time when metaphysical truths underpinned shared definitions of words. I love history but can’t seem to find such instances: words like virtue and God and transubstantiation were very much contended in 16^th century England and remain so today; words like democracy and liberty along with a multitude of others were hotly contested since the 18^th century. How about equality? What universal understanding undergirds that hot potato?

In the case of HAAS, Stangler posits a time when “We once had generally agreed-upon definitions of things like minimum healthy levels of activity.” When was that? The guidelines he cites (150 met minutes per week) were instituted in 2008 and, if anything, there is broader agreement on them now than then because social media has made many more people are aware of those guidelines. Oddly, he also mentions the food pyramid and nutrition labels as “social developments.” Those things were products of the government, and that’s a word in which we have completely lost all sense of shared meaning: for large swathes of the country, it has become an abstract scapegoat for all sorts of grievances. Including being too fat. That’s right, many people today are far more likely to blame the government, blame the food pyramid for their adipose tissue. Yet I don’t believe there was a mythical era (say, before Reagan hypnotized half of America into believing government is the problem) when everyone knew what the word government meant and agreed on it. There have always been demagogues and charlatans trying to convince us that are problems are caused by unseen forces, that we are not responsible for our fates. What I will argue is that we need constantly to reset our terms (as Stangler does in his essay) and thereby, perhaps, think a little harder about how we use them.

Of course, the problem of obesity continues to grow too. The essay argues that our waistlines are expanding at least in part due to a breakdown in spacious ideas and moral choices, that if fat people were simply to “sacrifice” more, work harder at eating better (“regular labor and effort”), and have “the backbone to withstand unhealthy temptations” we wouldn’t be dealing with an obesity epidemic. As numerous doctors have pointed out, the faculty of willpower did not suddenly decline over the past forty years. Unfortunately, I think here Stangler falls victim to the very “emotivism” he decries: he feels it is true that the obese simply need more backbone, willpower, and moral rectitude. However, we have boat-loads of data demonstrating that this is not the case. Organizations like the NIH and the AMA have determined that the causes of obesity are multi-factorial, including environment (what foods are available), knowledge, socio-economic status, stress, activity levels, genetics, and social and cultural norms. Just look at history. We’ve been shaming fat people and denigrating their moral abilities for centuries—and not only does it not work (because it is wrong) but it has backfired. People are not fat because their peers are too politically correct to moralize their behavior.

We can all make better choices when we talk about health.

Moralizing individual foods is, I think, similarly misguided. Stangler writes that, “We simply know, based on all available history and data, that kale is better for your body than a doughnut.” Okay, we all know what he’s talking about—but I’m going to disagree. If you wake up after your 12-hour fast and are going for a 20-mile run, you are better off eating the doughnut; same thing if you’re taking a test that morning. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that in almost all cases labeling a food good or bad without stating the caloric context (maintenance, deficit, or surplus) is meaningless. Furthermore, thinking of foods as good or bad doesn’t work very well. Better to think in terms of dietary patterns: for a vegetarian, one who actually eats vegetables and not processed vegan foods, who also gets sufficient protein and is eating at maintenance, a doughnut is neither good nor bad, just calories.

I would add that there’s a subtle but ugly condescension in saying that obviously kale is better for you than a donut. I very much doubt that the obese mother trying to feed her child doesn’t know that kale is probably a better choice than a donut. But what if you have to drive 30 miles out of your way for kale, and you can’t really afford the gas or the time? Also, kale vs. donut is an awfully easy binary. What about cheese? Eggs? Meat? Are they good or bad?

In and of themselves, neither. What you’ve eaten for the last three weeks is far more indicative of what a food might do to you than whether we think of it as good or bad. And there are more than a few healthy dietary patterns to choose from (and which depend, like much else, on context, like activity level and type, individual responses to various foods, etc.), so I don’t think uniform standards will help us much here.

So, yes we ought to communicate the moral worth of the choices we make and the words we employ, but chief among those choices ought to be the decision to get outside of our own limited perspectives and get things right. And for that we need to work together to determine the truth, because that work never ends—a new golden age is not on our doorstep.

Daniel Kunitz is the author of Lift: Fitness Culture from Naked Greeks and Amazons to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he is the editor at large of Ultraphysical as well as editor in chief of Sculpture magazine.

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We live in destabilizing times. Traditional and generally agreed-upon definitions—of gender, of race, of the very notion of borders and nations—have found themselves weakened by the effects of secular modernity and the steady expansion of liberalism. (By “liberalism” here, I do not mean Western political progressivism, but rather the philosophy of liberalism extending out of the Enlightenment and emphasizing the emancipation of the sovereign self from traditional constraints: the liberalism that one finds in both free market theory and transgenderism). There are many forces underpinning our much-bemoaned moment of polarization, but surely one of them is the failure to agree on definitions of shared terms.

This is not something that merits much attention in the world of fitness, focusing as we do in that realm on the embodied self and perhaps by default rejecting the Cartesian dualism and distinctions between mind and body that endure in the “mind over matter” and “pain is weakness” mindsets. The gym, the studio, the Crossfit box: these are places of physical unity, and questions of linguistic epistemology tend to take a backseat to the unity of the matched rep and the mastered pose. Shared terms and their philosophical currency, in other words, seem to be of secondary concern in that setting, where they are exceeded in importance by the arts of physical excellence.  

But the power of shared terms in social stability should never be understated. Cultures tend to cohere and endure as long as there is general agreement upon shared terms—justice, fairness, even man and woman—and they tend to fragment when cracks appear in that terminological firmament. The midcentury conservative philosopher Richard M. Weaver described such uniting ideas as “spacious”: those shared terms that provide the foundation for social solidarity.

Weaver located the threat to that spaciousness in the ideas of William of Occam (he of razor fame), whose doctrine of “nominalism” posited that there can never be a unifying agreement on terms, and that things simply are what we say they are. By denying that there are metaphysical universals and that all things only have particular nature, William of Occam began the process of moving terms like “humanity” from universal categories upon which we could all agree to mere linguistic classifications that are shifting and arbitrary. 

Even if you are unfamiliar with the source material, you will know this idea from living in America circa 2024. Nominalism manifests itself in ideas like “speaking my truth” and they/them pronouns for the singular self; regardless of how one reacts to those concepts, it’s tough to dispute that they reflect a dis-uniting effect on shared terminology. Your Gen Z coworker with they/them pronouns in an email signature block is, almost literally, speaking a different language than, say, your grandmother.

You may not find such ideas pernicious on their face, but Weaver’s point is that a common culture cannot long endure with such disunity. Consider the once-unifying term democracy: does that mean the right to vote? The right to a mail-in ballot? The right to vote without a photo ID or Social Security number? If presidents are governing by executive order fiat in a frenzied few weeks before leaving office, is that “democracy”? What about “border”? Is that simply an idea? Is it only a border if there is a physical barrier to entry? These are all, as you have likely noticed, debates that are playing out in real time. Political problems, once you start examining them, tend to reveal themselves as terminological problems. If you doubt this, consider that roughly the last 60 years of American welfare state debates are essentially debates over the term “fairness.”

How does this apply to health and fitness? If you have paid even slight attention to currents of fitness thought in roughly the last decade, no doubt you are aware of the “body positivity” movement. This idea reflects a merited discontent with years of airbrushed models and six-pack abs: the fit woman as waifish size zero and the fit man as muscular Marvel hero. Beyond the unreality of these archetypes, from the basic unhealthiness of a twig-thin woman to the cartoonish carving of That Guy at the gym, the effect on young people skews negative in how it creates impressions of what a person should look like. But the impressions are long-lasting and powerful: I went to college in the early 2000s, when it seemed that every young woman in my dorm had a poster of a shirtless Brad Pitt in Fight Club, and I can tell you that image still holds sway in my brain when I look in the mirror.

The danger of the body positivity movement is that, like many reactionary forces, it has evolved from necessary correction to unmoored tyranny, in which proponents no longer want to change traditional strictures but rather see any attempt at uniform standards as oppressive. We once had generally agreed-upon definitions of things like minimum healthy levels of activity: 150 minutes of cardio a week, some strength training with increased levels as one ages, a diet that leans broadly Mediterranean, and so on. 

As Weaver would put it, these shared ideas–now regularly challenged by the body positivity and “fat studies” movements that see any guidance, however well-intentioned, as somehow colonialist and patriarchal–were the spacious ideas uniting our idea of how a healthy human lived. These are the spacious ideas that broadly underpinned social developments as disparate as the food pyramid, nutrition labels, questions at your annual physical, and so on. It is critical to note that these spacious ideas do not arise ex nihilo; they come from decades of scientific confirmation, historical evidence and longevity studies, and even contemporary anthropological study of other cultures. 

For evidence of how these ideas have been torn down, peruse virtually any article in the Well section of The New York Times—still the world’s most important media organization but indisputably the house organ of our intellectual elite—and note how often one sees the “something is good if it feels good, and vice versa” sentiment. Yes, you should lift weights—but not if it’s unpleasant! Sure, take a walk around the block for health—unless it’s strenuous, then return to self-care! Okay, there has been a traditional definition of “obese”—but you are always as healthy as you feel, and you should reject those oppressive definitions anyway! 

Besides the obvious problem that standards for health and fitness exist for a reason—because we have a wealth of data over time showing that they are likely better than not—the danger here is that the body positivity movement has drifted into what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism,” in which a thing is true because we feel it to be true. Rather than emphasizing necessary sacrifice, success through regular labor and effort, and the backbone to withstand unhealthy temptations (all hallmarks not just of health but also a life of virtue and excellence) the new fitness regime stresses first and foremost what I feel to be true. Maybe my waist size has ballooned to 44 and two-thirds of my calories come from ultraprocessed foods, but hey—I feel good and authentic to my true self, so who are you to dispute that?

The Times recently profiled, at great length, the “fat activist” Virginia Sole-Smith, who has sparked much positive and negative reaction for her divisive views on health and especially shaping children’s health. Sole-Smith, along with activists such as Victoria Abraham and the academics writing in scholarly journals such as Fat Studies, is decidedly unafraid to speak the language of prescriptive behavior. Consider these lines:

In Sole-Smith’s house there are neither “good” or “bad” foods nor “healthy” or “unhealthy” ones; doughnuts and kale hold equivalent moral value and no one polices portion size. By relieving herself and her family of rules about eating, Sole-Smith believes she will have a better chance of raising children who are proud of their bodies, trust themselves to enjoy their food and leave the table when they’re full. She serves dessert and snacks, like Cheez-Its, along with the dinner entree; her kids can eat their meal in any order.

Now, yes, perhaps the world of wellness has gone a bit heavy into assigning moral value to certain foods and activities (I say that as a vegan with one of those annoying faux-collegiate KALE shirts). But consider the logical consequences of Sole-Smith’s moral position here—and by assigning value to criteria it is a moral position—and the downstream effects of such thinking. 

We simply know, based on all available history and data, that kale is better for your body than a doughnut. We could get into nutritional value and ingredient lists, but no one can truly dispute this fact with a straight face. Kale is therefore “good” in a way that a doughnut is “bad.” By making a moral equivalence between the two—and, most importantly and most disturbingly to me as a father trying to raise two kids in an alarmingly unhealthy country—Sole-Smith and her fellow travelers in our intellectual elite are endorsing emotive living and giving tacit endorsement to what we know to be bad for most people.

“Revolutionary” is not too strong a word to describe what is happening here. An existing order that has endured because it works for most people and leads to the best individual and social outcomes is being torn down as we watch, and replaced by a new order of personal feeling, individual preference regardless of fact, and by default an endorsement of a corporate food system that emphatically does not have our well-being anywhere in its mission. Where once we had, even just a few years ago, a spacious idea of the moral and practical choices a person should make—maybe pass on the doughnut and have a kale salad, then take a walk and lift some weights—we now have voices of power loudly declaiming that those of us in fitness should dare not tell another person how to live.

Clearly I believe this to be a net social ill, and because I am a conservative willing to endorse the superiority of certain standards of behavior, I believe you should also find it to be such. It can be a difficult and lonely path to navigate the shoals of dominant opinion, but if you work with clients you should not shy away from giving practical advice but also communicating the moral worth of that advice. Some choices are better than others; we may publicly dispute this in order to save face with the new order, but we all reveal this core belief in our own actions. Be sensitive to individual differences, but do not be afraid to tell someone “You should not do that” as long as you can demonstrate and explain why.

Weaver’s most famous book is called Ideas Have Consequences, a title he disliked but a concept that becomes more obviously true the older one gets. The once-spacious ideas of health, from moderate movement to eating plants, have been disrupted. They are being replaced by ideas that we know to be bad for people. Responding to that effort takes individual action and, yes, defense of uniform standards. Whether we have the stomach to mount that defense remains to be seen.

R.M. Stangler holds a PhD from the University of Kansas and worked for five years as a professor of English and communication before joining the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, where he is Director of Foundation Relations. He is also a certified personal trainer and natural movement coach in Kansas City.

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With all due respect to my friends who run a few miles once every couple of weeks, there are some things that can only be known by experience, and one of those is “the trial of the miles, miles of trials,” to quote Quenton Cassidy of Once a Runner. 

Many who haven’t experienced this would like to know what it is like. They wonder what it would be to be out there, moving through the world over hills and along paths. It seems terrible to many of them. They tell runners, “I hate running,” and the honest runners will have to reply that we don’t blame them. But there is something about the experience that, for all the toil and struggle, we wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. 

Running nearly every day, for many miles at a time, for years, acquaints one with the weather and the seasons in a way that is unfamiliar to most people who do not work outdoors. When you are out, you are in the world and you are a part of the world and you experience the world in a way which you cannot vicariously. When the world is hot, you are hot. When it is cold, you are cold. When the world is wet, you are wet. 

There are days when the weather is kind to you, and there are days when the weather is uncomfortable. There are days when it is painful to be outside. 

And there are days for which the only word is cruel. Barbaric cruelty. Some combination of circumstance and conditions and perhaps some mistake on your part combine to consign you to suffering that builds until it becomes torture. You learn on those days that it does not matter what you can or cannot take – you will not die and the suffering won’t cease, despite your wishes for both – you will take what you will take until it is over. Veteran runners know that there need not be any intentionality to the cruelty of the world. 

You learn, too, that if you aren’t bothered by mild discomfort, there is tremendous freedom for you. You will be wet and cold at times, but you will not be dangerously cold. You need not worry about the mild discomfort, for your skin is waterproof and you will be dry and clean again sometime in the near future. You will be weighed down by the oppressive heat at times, and it will build until you carry a great burden, but your body will grow used to processing such heat and you will eventually find that you can run on very hot days without great difficulty. 

But even as you build up tolerance to heat and cold, there is always a point beyond which you will encounter great, even unbearable, difficulty. Weather so hot it makes you sick and you feel hungover the next day, though not from alcohol. Cold so intense you never warm up. 

But you will come to know intimately those points, and you will know when it is just cold enough outside that your body will sweat after a few miles, and when it is so cold that you won’t. And you will know when it is so warm outside that you won’t process it effectively, but will instead begin to succumb the longer you endure it. 

You will come to know intimately the after-drop – the time, minutes after a run, when your body stops working and your temperature plummets. There is the initial warm-up, those seconds of serious heat and sweating, followed by the drop: the shivering and the inability to keep warm. This can persist for hours if you do nothing about it. Or it can go away quickly. 

But even when the weather is mild and pleasant, there is something deep and visceral about running that must be experienced to be understood. When are out in the world, stripped down to as few layers as you can wear, alone, listening to the sounds of the land around you, you experience life in an immediate and physical way. Traveling on foot, walking or running, especially in the woods or in the desert, will come to feel the most natural thing in the world, as though thousands of years of civilization and technology disappeared in the blink of an eye and your evolutionary programming took over. Your body evolved to travel this way, not in a car or a plane, and your brain will respond accordingly. This, it tells you, is right. 

And when you go to the track, or to the racecourse, or to some other site of great testing, some place where you hurl your body forward until it hurts enough to drive all thoughts from your mind, you will experience something else. Sebastian Junger explains that when soldiers come back from war, they often feel jarringly out of place. After the intensity and immediacy of combat, nothing in contemporary American life seems like it matters. Many soldiers are haunted not by their memories of combat, but by their desire to return to war, where decisions meant life and death. 

Running is not war. But there is something intense and immediate and all-consuming about running, and when you run hard enough, everything outside of that moment is stripped away. Some people try this once and vow never to do it again. Others find it intoxicating. 

There is a danger here for a certain type of runner, who will experience something a little like the soldier returning from battle. You come back from an ordeal and walk into a building and you are struck by thoughts of unreality and absurdity. You feel as though you do not belong. “What am I doing here?” you ask yourself. “Who are all these people?” You feel you have seen something of the wildness of the world. It is no exaggeration to say that sedate, climate-controlled surroundings will feel at first a little alien. 

The danger is that, like the soldier returning from war, you begin to feel as though none of this – this living indoors, working a job, going to school, meeting people, posting online, etc. – none of this matters. Everything other than running is anticlimactic. The danger is that you let your feelings guide you here, which if you do will lead you to the conclusion that you should stop taking “life” seriously, for life is lived out there and these things you do in between are merely the conventions you must observe to survive. One of the most striking features about Quenton Cassidy, the protagonist of Once a Runner is how little he really cares about anything other than running. 

With luck, you will strike a balance. You will run just enough to feel you have satisfied those primal urges which if they went unsatisfied might drive you mad, but you will not run so much that you stop caring about basic tasks like working and personal grooming. You will run just enough that you feel you are truly alive, but not so much you lose touch with those “in-between” bits of life (eating and sleeping and so forth). You will run just enough so that you sleep well each night, but not so much that you struggle to stay awake the rest of the day. 

Sometimes the miles fade into the background, merely a part of your life that you do not consider. After all, you would not say you are a sleeper, though you sleep every night, or an eater, though you eat every day. You can run every day without spending time thinking of yourself as a runner. The miles stay in the background until you remember, sometimes with a little horror, that other people don’t run. A certain type of runner must repress this knowledge, which can make you nervous if you let it, and which can even cause a stab of cold fear if you aren’t careful. 

At other times, the miles wear on you. And when you are indoors and your hollow eyes glance out the window, you shudder in fear. 

And still other times, you will glance out the window and you will long once again for the moment when your blood begins to flow, because then you really won’t care about anything else anymore. That moment when you hit the line on the track and spring forward and the world falls away until all that is left is the sun and the track and the cadence of your legs and the suffering that courses through your body. In that moment, as terrible as it is, the only things that matter are right there. And any baggage or façade or persona or trappings that you have accumulated will vanish, and what will be left is yourself.

Recently, a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche came to my attention (thanks to Joe) which captures this rather nicely. “You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this, although you would not believe it, is your body and its intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.”

Many people in our postmodern age worry about finding themselves, discovering themselves, or defining themselves. At bedrock, they are worried about whether or not they exist, whether there is some “I” there underneath personality, appearance, clothing, and the roles we play in our lives with other people. But if you have run sufficiently hard enough for any great length of time, frequently enough, you won’t have this worry. Your body won’t just feel “I.” It will know “I.” 

When your knuckles ache from the stabbing cold, when the freezing rain lashing your skin goes on and on despite your fervent wish that it would stop, you may wish to be anywhere other than here, but you will know that you are alive. When you are in the final lap in the final interval of a crushing workout, your body and mind racked with exertion and suffering, you will know that you exist. When you stumble across the line and drop incoherent and exhausted, you won’t suffer from any existential doubts or worries. 

When you are running, you are doing something ancient, something that remains essentially unchanged from what it was in the lives of our most distant ancestors. Here is life in its raw and elemental form. Here life is stripped to the barest: cold and the desire to be warm, fatigue and the desire for respite, pain and the desire for relief, the sensation of movement and the feeling of one’s body as it travels. Human life has accumulated complicated trappings in the millennia of recorded history, but here there is none of that. Here you are faced with the realization that you are no different from a human being of ten thousand years ago. You, too, blister and chafe and sweat until the sweat runs into your eyes and blinds you. Your body has the same limits your forebears’ did – all the technological advancement of ten millennia can do nothing to make your legs move faster than they can move or your lungs breath harder than they can manage. 

The trial of the miles is the weight carried by veteran runners. It is the deep knowledge – of one’s body and of the world and of one’s body in the world – which can only be learned the hard way. It will reward one greatly – with satisfaction and confidence. But it will reward one terribly, too, by banishing one’s fears through exposure to harsh reality. 

One can learn to live with that harsh reality, and live quite well. If one is untroubled by it, if the toil of the miles is not shirked from but accepted and embraced, one can even thrive. The harshness of reality need not perturb us. It is what it is, never more nor less. The trial of distance running isn’t unkind. It is exacting, but it is rewarding, too.

Ben Connelly a writer, runner, and personal trainer based in Virginia. Ben can be found on Twitter and on his Substack, Hardihood Books, where he publishes short fiction and essays.

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Canadian bodybuilder Fouad Abiad once said that whenever he hears lifters blame their inability to stack on muscle, he questions whether or not they are putting in the sufficient amount of work to truly justifying their whining. It comes down to being consistent, of committed daily or weekly repetition of targeting the same muscle fibers, and seeing whatever genetic limitation may then have in store for you. But frustration sets in when we mere see our genetics as just limits, while at the same time understanding our bodies as a kind of enfleshed tablua rasa, an idea which provide grist for the popular, yet somewhat naive, metaphor of the self-sculptor.

Muscular development is neither an unlimited process nor one that is stagnant, but dynamic within our respective biological limitations. No amount of exogenous hormones can create new fibers, they can only expand what has been given to us. Whenever you hear a lifter (including this one) speak of genetics, they are often glumly referring to anticipated failure. Borrowing a Marx-ism, the genetics of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the gains of the living. When viewed from a different angle, genetics can also be seen as an impressive aggregate of our inherited muscularity bequeathed to us by ancestors unknown. Very, very, few lifters ever truly approach their full genetic potential. But what does that actually mean? Working out is not about “building a foundation.” We are not a construction project. Working out better approximates the manner in which we, the living, are able to effectively engage in a conversation with those who came before us, as interlocutors in a dialogue embedded in our cellular structure. The more we stress our muscles, push our cardiovascular system, the more we have to say for ourselves and discover what has been previously done.

If this idea sounds far-fetched, one would do well to consider the earliest and most notable Western theory of knowledge which was echoed in Plato’s Socratic dialogue, Meno. There, Socrates famously tells us that all knowledge is recollection. As he explains, an individual’s knowledge is acquired through the experiences of a singular soul as passes through an unknown chronology of bodies, carrying forward wisdom from one to the next. By way of proving this, the old philosopher calls on a member of Meno’s entourage, a slave boy, whom has no formal education or schooling, and asks him a series of questions on geometry and arithmetic. Upon giving satisfactory answers, Socrates says to Meno that “true thoughts” are “awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him”. All knowledge is therefore recollection.

This theory, however, did not perish under the heady weight of the secular Enlightenment in Europe, or as a someone once called it, the great footnote to Plato and Aristotle. Noam Chomsky, the pioneering linguist and political activist of our day, built an entire career advancing the idea that grammar is something innate to us as people. Citing Plato’s Meno, he calls “Plato’s Paradox” the condition which illustrates how human beings are able to tap into a rich bank of knowledge without ever receiving any real instruction beforehand. As a linguist, Chomsky explores a facet of this when it comes to our innate sense of grammar, or how we understand grammar without actually formally learning it, or even mimicking it. He refers to this unique feature of our species as universal grammar, stating that:

It is the sum total of all the immutable principles that heredity builds into the language organ. These principles cover grammar, speech sounds, and meaning. Put differently, universal grammar is the inherited genetic endowment that makes it possible for us to speak and learn human language.

Plato and Chomsky provide an unbroken chain of insight when it comes to epistemology, or the philosophical discipline of knowledge theory. Primarily the assertion that no one is born as blank slate, but rather comes with a slate dictated by inheritance, whether by virtue of living past lives as articulated by Socrates, or by a more secular rendering of the problem as with Chomsky’s genetic inheritance. Knowledge and grammar are demonstrated by articulating ideas and sentences, and these are properties that are often demonstrated quite immediately. Physical strength is similarly drawn out of us when we’re resisting an opposing force. Yet its full expression is brought to the stage gradually, over longer periods of concerted time and effort.

Dr. Stephen Roth, a kinesiologist at the University of Maryland, writes that “the heritability of skeletal muscle ranges anywhere between 30-85%, whereas muscle strength is 50-80% for lean mass.” With such a wide range of distribution, the onus truly falls on the lifter to decide whether he would fret in disappointment or brim in the excitement of discovery. Put another way, it is to shift the narrative away from the strict confines of one’s individual efforts, to one that places us in communion with our past. Unable to speak audibly, this hidden form of language is best expressed in actively engaging our body to do things our ancestors have done—or what perhaps they could only dream of doing.

Joe Lombardo holds a PhD from the New School for Social Research and is an avid writer and strength enthusiast. He is the Editor of Ultraphysical.

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In a split second, however, I realized things were not as they appeared: the image that had reflected back to me a flattering version of myself was… this woman’s “before” picture. Clicking revealed the “after”life that is the heart of her account: a fifty-something force with sinewy biceps and a ripped eight-pack to match, hoisting herself through pull-ups with a heavy chain wrapped around her slender upper body, which she shows off in cute crop top sets and low-slung jeans. Sheepish that I had seen myself positively reflected in a before photo – a sign I was “letting myself go”? – and embarrassed at the poignancy of that pang – So pathetic I even care about such superficial BS! I well know before-and-after pics only show physical change (and not always accurately), and comparing myself to strangers on the internet never leads anywhere good. My humiliation faded, but the fascination remained. These unlikely transformations both inspired and exhausted me, as each second I lingered on images of this strange sorority added to the endless scroll of similar accounts that whispered, if I just want it badly enough, it isn’t too late to lift, and look, like them.

I have unfollowed and refollowed these accounts several times since, but more important than my emotional reaction is the evocative question they raise: what does it mean to participate in a fitness culture that is ever more inclusive of older people, but also unremittingly obsessed with the aesthetics of eternal youth? 

The inevitability of aging and one’s attendant bodily decline is as old as time, but resisting it at the gym is relatively new. The expectation that regular people — not “health nuts” or elite athletes — should exercise into old age was bequeathed to us by the Boomer generation. For most of American history, the desire to work out regularly made exercisers of any age members of a strange subculture, not compliant with a social imperative, as today. This was especially true for women, as early 20th-century performers like Katie Sandwina were literal freak show attractions, and the few women on mid century Muscle Beach had to convince scandalized observers of their femininity, that “beneath every womanly curve lies a muscle.” But for men too, the idea that exercise decoupled from organized sports was narcissistic, unmasculine, and even lethal, was widespread. 

In the 1960s, the discovery of “aerobics” – or cardio – combined with the fear that excessive leisure was making Americans of all ages dangerously unfit, made exercise more popular than ever before. Books such as How to Keep Slender and Fit After Thirty (1969), however, made clear that the older exerciser was still an anomaly. But Boomers took to jogging, and then aerobics, in the 1970s and 1980s, and when shin splints or hearing loss made these intense activities less accessible, this avid, aging audience drove demand for yoga, indoor cycling, and resistance training. By the 1990s, Jane Fonda was making yoga VHS tapes, and “Silver Sneakers” programs offered targeted programs to people over 50 in health clubs nationwide, still consistently the industry’s fastest growing demographic.

This “graying of the gym,” once considered a space for the young, has persisted for decades, though it rarely comes up in conversations about diversity and fitness culture, which tend to focus more on race, class, gender, and size. Perhaps this silence is because the process has been so seamless, or because it is slightly awkward to acknowledge the integral presence of older people in a realm so consistently fixated on preserving youth. Sometimes it is deliberately obscured; at one health club where I worked, a manager confided that while smooth-skinned twentysomethings graced their billboards and sylph-like models got discounted memberships, it was the 50-plus demographic that kept them in business, paying full freight and buying personal training and massage packages. Quiet as this presence can be, the health objectives of older clients have meaningfully expanded the aims of fitness culture beyond pure aesthetics to include longevity, bone health, flexibility, and community. 

That said, this new ritual of a perpetually active retired life can come at the expense of rest. “You may have imagined a hammock or a reclining chair awaiting you after decades of stress and personal exertion,” the late Barbara Ehrenreich wryly commented in her final book, “But no…you have a new job: going to the gym.” Gen X and elder Millennials are now solidly in their 40s and 50s, and many of us are following in our parents’ sneakered footsteps and continuing to head to the gym. Ironically, we also seem to be resurrecting the aesthetic objectives our parents mostly abandoned at our age – or from which they were excluded. A sign of this new-old chapter was at the 2020 Super Bowl, when the oldest Gen Xers were just hitting 55. Shakira, 43, and Jennifer Lopez, 50, performed at halftime, electrifying the audience with their toned bodies, acrobatic choreography, and apparently indefatigable energy. Viral memes breathlessly compared JLo to Golden Girls star Rue MacLanahan, who was the same age when the sitcom debuted in 1985: one was swinging around a stripper pole, the other playing the fact that she still felt sexual desire for laughs. THE NEW 50!?! messages filled my feeds and chats.

Four years later, this new crop of fifty-something influencers I can’t quit clicking on is encouraging the masses to believe that the J Lo path is available to us, if we just choose it: one reel shows a hunched woman in a bathrobe, glasses, and a bun, clutching her lower back embodying, “what I thought my 50s would look like;” a quick transition and she is squatting under a heavy barbell, glowing muscles popping beneath a shiny spandex set and a swinging ponytail, representing “what your 50s actually look like.” A bootcamp class I like reflects a lower-key version of this dynamic; some of the strongest, most coordinated and conventionally fit-looking participants are clearly at least in their late 40s. They do not seem to be headed for the rocking chair, or a gentler age-segregated program.

If we are carrying on a Boomer tradition in continuing to exercise as we age, doing so with such fierceness and in pursuit of unapologetically aesthetic outcomes seem to be new expectations that we Gen X/Elder Millennials are layering on all on our own. Is this progress? Maybe. Imagining that such an intense level of performance, and yes, eye-popping appearance, might be achievable can feel positively thrilling. As arresting as these women influencers look, their appeal is just as much in their welcome resistance to the idea that (peri)menopause in particular and aging in general must mean fatigue, weight gain, and slowing down. They join a growing conversation that takes seriously older women’s health needs, but shake off both the ominous tone of much of this discourse and the presumption that medical intervention, or aggressive dieting, is required to weather this life stage. Even as they share before-and-after images that center physical change, they are careful to use the language of “self-love,” not to condemn interventions like hormone treatment, and to dismiss the quick-fix spot-training quackery that was our generation’s entry point to exercise. 

All this matters, even if I never lift or look like these formidable women. I think about them and feel less frivolous when I set aside an hour to practice my handstand, a skill I recently decided I wanted to master, for no other reason than I think it’s cool, and challenging, and I could never do it as a child. I summon them when I am served endless ads for armor-like “mom” swimwear in thick fabrics ruched across “problem areas,” though it’s no longer politic to call them that, and instead swipe them away to return to my less restrictive bikinis, even if they don’t fit like they used to. They also give me hope that in ten years they might fit even better, and reassurance it’s not delusional to believe I could choose to make that happen.

And yet. There is something comforting about the elastic hug of those mom suits – I do have a couple – that allows me to exhale with relief that a “bikini body” is a cultural expectation I can finally be free from caring about. I am reminded of octogenarian feminist Gloria Steinem’s reflection on aging; at about sixty, she expressed exhilaration at being “free from the demands of gender” in a way she had not felt since childhood, before the aesthetic expectations of femininity were fully heaped upon her. To that point, when the frothy enthusiasm about the Shakira-JLo Super Bowl spectacle “redefining 50” subsided, some women admitted the performance left them deflated: wasn’t one of the few benefits that aging promised women emancipation from the expectation of looking hot? Now that small consolation was being wrested away by celebrities with teams of trainers, nutritionists, and stylists, and it was supposed to be “inspiring”! I recognize that exact same ennui in my experience of these addictive social media accounts that have sprung up since.

Does their example help us – or even just me – resist dominant ideas about youth and beauty, or just prolong the time frame in which we are beholden to them? I am not sure. In a world when eleven year olds spend their allowances on anti-aging “skincare,” twentysomethings inject themselves with “preventative Botox,” and being mistaken as older is grist for TikTok meltdowns, it is hard not to interpret these phenomena as on a continuum in which ever older women and ever younger girls are expected to invest ever greater energy cultivating their physical appearance and chasing youth. Perhaps the greatest fantasy of all is that social media – rather than ourselves – will liberate us from the most limiting aspects of fitness culture, rather than simply presenting them in enticing new forms.

Natalia Petrzela, PhD is a historian of contemporary American politics and culture, author of FIT NATION and Classroom Wars, she is also co-host of the podcast WELCOME TO YOUR FANTASY.

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Obesity, often dissected in the cold, impersonal light of clinical scrutiny, is, in truth, a tapestry of deeply personal struggle, silent fear and yearning for acceptance. It’s a journey that transcends the simplicity of numbers and charts and delves into the core of identity and self-worth; a tedious journey, overlooked by a world that prefers to gaze at things that are shiny.

In this next chapter of our discourse, we venture beyond the rigid framework of clinical markers to where an actual solution may lie: integrating the transformative potential of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Here, in this fusion of mind and matter, we endeavor not just to treat a condition, but to understand and empower the individual at its heart; to find a sustainable balance between physical health and emotional well-being.

The Historical Context of Obesity and Public Perception

Historically, our public narrative has painted obesity in unforgiving strokes, creating a landscape where judgment overshadowed understanding. Type 2 Diabetes, which I’m old enough to remember was once commonly referred to as “adult-onset diabetes,” underwent a significant rebranding in medical terminology. This shift occurred as an alarming trend emerged in the early 2000s, where an increasing number of children began to develop the condition, previously thought to predominantly affect adults. This rise in pediatric cases of Type 2 Diabetes was closely linked to a surge in childhood obesity rates, which were growing at three times the rate of adult obesity. I believe this played a role in the direction-shift in terms of signaling in public health campaigns, children now taking center stage.

Advertising and the media, those relentless sculptors of public opinion, took to portraying obese people, specifically children and their parents, through a lens colored by shame and reproach. Mercilessly so, at times. These ad campaigns, like funhouse mirrors, not only reflected societal prejudices but also amplified them in the collective psyche. This, though certainly done with good intentions, was not helpful to anyone.

For example, in 2011, the Strong4Life campaign by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta ignited considerable controversy with its approach, which was widely perceived as blunt and shaming towards overweight children. The campaign’s strategy, notably the use of real overweight children in advertisements coupled with stark messages such as “Mom, why am I fat?”, drew deserved criticism for its potential harm to the mental health of the children involved. Critics highlighted the risk of exacerbating feelings of isolation and bullying, common experiences among overweight children.

The campaign was critiqued for its reductive portrayal of the children, merely focusing on their obesity and overlooking the intricate web of psychological, genetic, social, and environmental factors that contribute to the condition they were actively suffering from. This reductionist approach raised significant ethical questions about the use of children in public health messaging, sparking debates and concerns about the possible long-term psychological impacts on these children. The campaign, by concentrating exclusively on the weight of the children, was dehumanizing to them as individuals while oversimplifying a complex health issue.

This campaign was not an isolated example of the thoughtless tactics it employed, either. Lest we forget the helping hand of our federal government, in 2014, The Real Cost campaign by the FDA, ventured into the territory of obesity-related issues like type 2 diabetes in teenagers, garnering a spectrum of reactions. Its graphic depictions of health consequences, designed to seize attention, were understandably met with similar reactions as the Strong4Life campaign before it. It was criticized for potentially stirring fear and anxiety more than fostering any positive change. The campaign’s vivid portrayal of the physical toll of obesity-related diseases was seen as an overreliance on scare tactics. These means reduce individuals to mere embodiments of their health conditions, and bypass the emotional and psychological struggles that we discussed earlier.

The impact of these representations has been profound, not merely in shaping public opinion but in allowing the pendulum to do what it does and swing wildly in the other direction. If campaigns that directly address physical health consequences are harmful, and I think it’s obvious from these examples that they can be and often are, the Luciferian inversion of that approach would be to avoid addressing the consequences altogether. In my view, here enters the HAES movement. On one end of the pendulum’s swing of public health messaging we have the attempts listed above to shame people suffering with obesity into losing weight. More recently, on the other end HAES seems to be used to ignore clinical markers entirely and pretend people suffering with obesity are healthy already (see the previous installment).

It seems to me there is a middle path which public health messaging aimed at obesity misses, altogether.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) offers a critical dimension in the treatment of obesity, focusing on the psychological factors intertwined with physical health. This therapy goes beyond simple behavior modification. It delves into the complex interplay of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that influence one’s relationship with food and body image.

CBT confronts some of the less visible aspects of obesity, such as emotional eating and the struggles of self-awareness, in the context of societal perceptions. It helps individuals in their journey towards understanding and altering their internal narratives. Narratives which profoundly affect their eating habits, as well as how they view themselves. With this sort of therapy, those suffering with obesity can learn to reshape these narratives, fostering a journey that leads to a healthier relationship with food and their own bodies.

The combination of CBT with traditional clinical marker-based approaches in obesity treatment forms an integrated, wholistic strategy. This integration is a thoughtful blend of objective medical data and the subjective human experience. Both of which must be addressed.

In this combined approach, clinical data such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels are considered alongside the insights gained from CBT. This method provides a more comprehensive view, acknowledging that the journey to manage obesity isn’t just about meeting clinical targets but also involves navigating emotional and psychological challenges.

This way the focus is on a balanced treatment path where clinical improvements are seen as part of a broader personal transformation. The reduction in clinical markers becomes a symbol of not just physical, but also psychological progress, marking the overcoming of challenges and the development of a healthier self-image.

In closing, the journey through the landscape of obesity treatment demands a nuanced understanding that neither vilifies nor oversimplifies the condition. We must strive for a compassionate, yet effective approach that acknowledges the complexity of obesity, treating it not as a mere physical anomaly but as a multifaceted human experience. By integrating Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with clinical marker-based approaches, we stand to offer a more empathetic, efficacious road towards health, one that respects both the physical realities and the psychological narratives of those it seeks to aid. This balanced path, illuminated by both science and understanding, is not just about treating a condition but about nurturing the whole person—body, mind, and spirit.

Swede Burns is a devoted husband, father, Christian, and published author and poet. He also created the 5thSet Methodology for training and competition as an elite powerlifting coach with over 25 years of competitive experience.

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But if there is one thing that really makes me dread coming into work, it’s dealing with the driver of the fire engine: Luke. A savvy, mechanically inclined, thrill seeker from a rough part of New York City with a sharp sense for the game of firefighting. I’m intimidated by his knowledge, and he nitpicks everything I do: how I deploy a hose line, throw ladders, handle the stretcher on medical calls, clean toilets, mop the floors, and even chop tomatoes. I can’t deny that he’s under my skin. I want to do well, but coming into work feels like torture.

His expectations are incredibly high, and I feel the crushing pressure at every corner I turn. And after being burnt out from six grueling months in the fire academy, I have no idea how I’ll muster up the energy to survive here without my fellow recruits. All eyes are on me, and me alone.

Although Luke has said he cares about my success, I feel like I’m being suffocated by an overbearing parent. Because anything I do, he told me, becomes a reflection on him, good or bad.  He told me that people would fuck with me a lot this year, but that’s a good thing, because if the crew makes fun of you, that means they like you. But if they are silent around you…they don’t want your ass there. He told me rookie year is where you soak up as much information as possible to become the best you can be. “Be a sponge,” he told me. But god damnit, this is overwhelming. And since I don’t have any firefighting experience nor am I blue collar, I’m a fish out of water getting cooked on a grill. I feel like I can’t do anything right.

But what I’m most anxious about is when am I going to get a fire. I’d like to get this over with because the anticipation is killing me. I’ve been called to so many false alarms in the past month but nothing real. And whenever we’re going to those calls, what I’m really scared of is not being trapped and burnt alive in the rubble of someone’s house; it’s that I won’t perform at the level I should in front of my experienced driver and that he’ll embarrass me. How is that I fear that more than death?

Yet, I can’t escape this ominous sensation that maybe all these false alarms are just getting me ready for the big one.

If the big one was to happen though, I hope it’s today. Why? Luke is on vacation. A matter of fact so is my captain and everyone else on my shift. It feels so relieving, like I can just breathe for a second. Even if I make a mistake, I won’t catch a verbal assault from him like it’s the end of the world. God, I hate dealing with his temper. Thinking about him just fills me with rage. I know I have to play nice to get through this year but what I really want to do is snap his god damn neck.

I know I won’t do that but the reality is I feel so alone. It feels like everyone from every shift at that station is against me.

But the Captain filling the spot today, nicknamed “Boulder”, was anything but nasty. Bald in the middle with a short round stature, he was welcoming and told me “We’re going to take it easy.”  That surprised me. Is this a trick? We’ll see.

We went to a fire alarm and a couple of medical calls, but other than that, we didn’t do much. We rode around in the firetruck with Boulder blasting Linkin Park through the speakers. This guy seems cool. We ended up at a neighboring station in the wealthiest part of town and everyone joked around with one another while I stood and listened. It’s 2 o’clock and I’m starving. Should I say something? I don’t want to take away from these guys’ free time. I’ll suck it up.

I ran into a former crew member of mine, covered in tattoos, who had transferred stations because of how much he hated our regular captain. He fist bumped me and asked how I was doing.

“Oh you know, I’m doing pretty good.”

“Is Luke still riding your ass?”

I know I shouldn’t tell the whole truth, that he rides my ass with a saddle and spur boots and he’ll turn me into glue if I trip up or don’t know how to do something. But I was suffering. I just wanted someone to hear my pain. “Yeah, he does, but it’s ok, I’m learning a lot overall. In the end it’s going to be a lot better for me.”

“Aight. Well, just don’t wear yourself out man.”

It’s now 2:45 pm and we’re finally back at the station. I’m so hungry I can feel my brain switching to battery saver mode; I can barely think. But, at least I’m finally going to eat the left over beans, rice and chicken that I had made two days ago. I give myself a hefty helping in a bowl and heat it in the microwave. That smell wafting through the gaps is making my mouth water.

I sit down at the dinner table, fork in hand and start digging in. I’d rather have food in my stomach just in case we got a call right now. Historically, I’ve never been able to function on an empty stomach; I just shut down. So, luckily, I was almost done with my meal when the dispatch alarms went off. I wonder what it is this time.

“Engine, Medic, response—garden apartment fire.”

Oh shit.

No time to digest; my body is galvanized by adrenaline. I spring out of my seat, bursting through the bay doors to the fire truck with everyone else. Surprisingly, everything feels smooth as I just focus on my breathing. So much pressure is off now that I’m not being watched like a hawk. I throw my hood on, slip on my boots, pull up my trousers and flip my coat on quickly. I just have to remember, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I get in my seat, as the lights and sirens come on and we race down the main road to the incident.

We’re speeding down the highway and clearing traffic like Moses splitting the Red Sea. Although, I don’t know anybody I’m working with, I feel more comfortable than ever.

Boulder is talking to command over the radio while also giving the driver directions to the apartment and locations of nearby hydrants. As much as he’s had to deal with, he was a 30-year veteran of the department, so he’s at home.

He tells us what radio channel we are on and what our assignment is. “Ok, boys, were operating on delta and we’re third due.”

I didn’t know much, but when he said third due, meaning we would be the third hose company on scene, I knew what I was going to do. Pull the 400-foot hose line and go around the back of the structure. I had read that in the garden apartment manual for the department. So that’s what I’m sticking to.

As we make it into the street surrounded by brick garden apartments, grassy knolls and trees, I’m putting my mind at ease even as I see crowds of people on the outskirts watching us roll in. A ladder truck is right in front of us along with a bunch of other units. Now that I think about it, this might be the real thing; the big one. Whether it is or isn’t, I’m pulling that 400-foot line. My heart is racing but I keep the panic isolated to my body and not in my mind.

We hop out as the airbrakes hiss. Boulder buckles the waste strap to his air pack and looks at me.

“Captain, I’m gonna’ grab the—”

“Grab the 400, Danny!” he cuts me off.

“Yes sir!” Great minds think alike? I hop up on the back bumper and grab the nozzle and stack of hose piled on top of it. It lands on my shoulder, and my backseat partner, a chubby paramedic with dirty blonde hair nicknamed Meatloaf, grabs the first “drag load” and then the second. Christ, this hose line is massive. Boulder grabs another 100 feet of hose from a side compartment just in case we came up short.

“Head down there!” Boulder ordered.

I started running, which ended up tugging my partner behind me.

“DON’T RUN! WALK!” Boulder yelled at me.

I slowed down, giving me too much time to see the crowd getting bigger through my peripheral. Maybe this is why Luke’s expectations are so high: he doesn’t want me to screw up in front of the public.

 We weaved through the trees to the grassy courtyard where the apartment was. Another hose company was blasting high pressure water into a third floor balcony that was charred and still smoking. The thud of the water pounding the ceiling was thunderous. The firefighter on the nozzle was grunting in pain from handling the force of the hose for so long. I could see him wincing.

Oh. This is real.

“Hey, I’m all out of line!” Meatloaf yells.

“Danny, get that nozzle off! We gotta extend the line!” Boulder orders.

I drop the last of the 400-foot hose from my shoulder onto the grass. I unscrew the nozzle while a crowd of fifty people stands watching with horror and curiosity. I can feel the pressure coming on. Just focus Danny. Boulder drops the free-standing 100-foot stack of hose off his shoulder, and Meatloaf connects it. As I move closer to the action, evening out my section of hose to prevent kinks, I hear Boulder yelling again.

“Hey! Move that ladder to the balcony!”

I look up at this humongous 35-foot ladder, leaning on the brick by the burnt-away railings. There’s no way I’m dropping this shit in front of all these people. I turn back to Meatloaf who is putting his air mask on.

“Hey! Help me move this! Can you help me move this!”

“Hold on!”

God damnit man, he’s taking forever. I thought experienced firefighters were supposed to be fast at this.

“Come on boys! Get that ladder moved!”

“Shit.” I look back at the 137-pound ladder. Should I roll it over to the balcony? No, not taking that chance. “Let’s get this moved! Let’s do a beam lower!” I yell. I hope he knows what I mean.

Finally, my partner and I pushed this ladder up straight in the midst of the chaos, lowered it down on its side, and moved it to place on the balcony. When it was done, Boulder came back over, fired up.

“Danny, grab the line, were going up!”

“Yes sir!” Alright, here we go. I mask up quickly, taking my first breath through the regulator on a real incident. This is surreal. Everything is moving a mile a minute. Then, I grab the nozzle and sling it over my shoulder.

Boulder bolts up the ladder and I follow behind with the dry hose, the nozzle clanking on my thigh. The firefighter on the ground is still spraying water into the unit. What the fuck. The stream of water is just whizzing by my face like liquid bullets as I hear gasps from the crowd. He’s waving it back and forth, spraying me as I ascend up the slippery rungs. Every muscle in my body is tensing, now clasping onto the rails for dear life thirty feet in the air. Smoke and steam make my vision hazy, and my gear is getting soaked. Two months in and this how I die, by getting knocked off a ladder. Underneath the 80 pounds of weight I carry, my heart is beating out my chest. They didn’t teach us this shit in the academy. Dear god.

Luckily, we make it to the top and hop over the balcony that looks like burnt firewood. How the fuck is this not going to collapse under our weight?! Although wobbly, it s=is stable enough. I take a deep breath, thankful that I’m alive, and start dragging the hose onto the balcony. The sliding glass doors into the living room were shattered from the blistering heat so we have easy access inside. We mov into the dark and smoky living room, and the couches and TV are littered with soot.

“Pull that line in!” Boulder orders again. I yank as much as hose I can into the unit. But now I’m nervous. Should I get on the radio and call for water? Fuck it, I’m standing around doing nothing, I’ll do it. 

“NO!” Boulder yells, “DON’T CHARGE IT!”

Boulder goes to the railing and ties a knot around the hose so the water weight doesn’t drag it back to the ground. “Stand on the line!” he says to me. Then, he gets on the radio and tells the driver to send us water. As the hose fills up, other firefighters come climbing through the balcony and front door with iron hooking tools.

“Danny, go check the bedrooms for extension!”

“Yes sir!” I drag the hose to the back bedrooms only to find light smoke and no fire as the other crews conduct a quick search for anybody still inside.

Boulder looked at my partner, who’s already exhausted.

“Grab a tool Meatloaf! Were going to work!” Everyone inside started poking and tearing down the ceiling tile, exposing charred joists in the cockloft. Lath and plaster debris crashed down onto my helmet, white ashes covering my face piece.

As crews tore the apartment apart, checking for fire in hidden spaces, I did my job and sat there with the hoseline. I scanned my surroundings, realizing that I’m in someone’s home. Its unnerving. I saw family photos by the flat screen TV, prized memories of the families son and daughter in middle school graduation photos. It’s sad, but this is reality. No disaster I’ve seen on the news can compare to being in it.  This family’s home was destroyed. Luckily, they were all alive.

When my partner went onto vibe alert, meaning his airpack notified him that he was low on air, we all had to exit down the ladder. The sun was shining bright after emerging from the darkness, and it felt nice. Despite the tragedy of the incident,  I had never been so thrilled in my life. I really had to hold myself back because my body was rushing with endorphins and all I wanted to scream was FUCK YEAH MOTHERFUCKER, THAT WAS MOST BADASS SHIT EVER! FUCK YEAH! YOU SEE THAT SHIT!? I took my coat off,  completely drenched in sweat.

There must have been sixty firefighters there total and sixty residents. The residents were cheering us on as a couple of women with big smiles screamed, “You are heroes!”

 I saw one of my fellow recruits in the crowd, one of the strongest and most respected in our class. He was surprised.

“Danny!? Oh shit! You were up there?”

“Yeah,” I said catching my breath, “I went line over ladder.”

“Ok, ok, I see you, doing big things out here!”

Another respected lieutenant I worked with my first week out came up to me right afterwards.

“Danny?! Holy shit, I thought that was you.”

“Yup...it’s me alright.”

“Yeah, I got here and all I saw was Wang’ going up the ladder and I was like ‘that motherfucker.’ Outstanding job man. I’ll tell Luke you did a good job.”

I inhaled deeply. I was so relieved.  Maybe this would ease things up at the station a bit. I didn’t know if I would have been able to perform that well if Luke was here. I felt like the universe was looking out for me.

We all had to get checked out by paramedics afterwards to make sure our vital signs were fine. One of the medics looked at the monitor than back at me with concern. “Hey man, looks like you caught a little bit of Carbon Monoxide in there.”

My gut wrenched.

“Oh, that’s not good.”

“Yeah man, you just gotta make sure the seal on your mask is tighter next time, but you’ll be fine.”

“Whoa, that’s not joke—will do.”

Later on, my crew and I were cleaning up and re-racking all the hoses. It took a while but when we finished, Boulder was jumping around with joy. “I got you your first fire! I got you your first fire!” He complimented all of us on a job well done.

I’m lucky I ate that whole bowl of rice and chicken before this, cause I would have been completely dysfunctional. When we got back, I walked past the dinner table. The entire bowl of food was there, completely full. I swore I ate the whole thing. But I only had two bites. I guess I can do more than I think.

Danny Wang is a professional Firefighter/EMT, writer, and an avid practitioner of Brazilian Jiu-Jijtsu.

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By all accounts Ryan Belcher is a big man. Weighing around 350 pounds, a sizable heft put on from years of powerlifting, Belcher has squatted 950 pounds in competition, bench pressed 530, and deadlifted 800. By comparison, a Jeep Cherokee weighs around four tons. Mathematical odds be damned, Belcher enlisted his strength and courage: “I had no other choice” Belcher said, “It was either save a man or not believe in myself. So I just reached in and did what I had to do.” Belcher lifted and managed to push the vehicle several feet until medics were able to arrive at the scene and rescue Tinsley. He later reflected on the incident, saying that “This [was] where I need to be. This is all the power I’ve used, all the training I’ve been through, this is time where it’s really going to pay off in a good way to help somebody.”

The very pedestrian impulse to rubberneck and drive on by is an instinct as utterly human as any other. Ryan Belcher’s act of service immediately conjures up one of the finest examples of Christian charity and citizenship: the Good Samaritan. For Montrell Tinsley, precariously trapped underneath a roadway sign, Belcher’s arrival must have appeared as predestined, a miracle that kept the man alive. But for the powerlifter, there was more than just struggling with the weightiness of moral responsibility to help a car crash victim. Factored into Belcher’s decision to be helpful was also the readiness of his body to accomplish what is considered by all measures of average as nothing short of a super-human feat. For years, he had been physically preparing himself, call it a skillset or talent, one that could tailor itself to fit any task, be it win a powerlifting competition, carry in groceries in one trip from the car—or heft part of a four-ton vehicle to free another man. The distillation of these so-called talents comes down to Belcher understanding his own strength training as an ethical imperative, of seeing the development of his body as more than a personal matter with consequences limited to himself.

One need not be at Belcher’s level of strength, however, to understand that caring for our bodies far exceeds just being helpful for our own health, but potentially for that of others. Helpfulness can be understood as an active expression of kindness and love, but on condition that one is appropriately outfitted to perform the task. To be physically fit lays the foundation for being helpful whether as a brother, husband, citizen or son. It is hard to imagine how being fit is somehow a material disadvantage to society.

Improving the body, even when it cannot provide any real usefulness for others, is still a worthy pursuit in refining one’s sense of meaning. Physical fitness is not the sole provenance of the able-bodied. Socrates, arguably the greatest of philosophers, was a man who suffered from sickness throughout his entire life. Yet he still valued fitness in himself as well as in others, understanding that exercise is an activity of self-discovery, as we will touch upon shortly.

ii.

Of the many linguistic treasures the ancient Greeks have bestowed us moderns, the word idiot ἰδιώτης (idiōtēs) is among the more colorful, if not misunderstood. The term is no doubt a harsh one to be on the receiving end of; most of its Greek subtleties are lost on the English ear. “Idiocy” in ancient Greek denotes a sphere of excessive individuality. An idiot is a person who shows no interest in civil affairs, and often someone not skilled in any particular craft. The Hellenistic quality of the term comes out in a line from The Communist Manifesto, where Karl Marx writes of how the spread of urban capitalism had “rescued” countryside inhabitants from the “idiocy of rural life”; in other words, from their isolation apart from the city.

For the Greeks, an idiot lacks the qualities not only desired, but demanded in order to meaningfully participate in civil society. This amounted to a sense of responsibility in the affairs of the city state, the chief urban configuration of power and culture across the ancient Hellenic world. So important was the city-state that Plato used it to project an ideal political realm in the Republic. It is there in the imaginary city of Kallipolis, in which every individual, by dint of their talent and occupation, establishes a kind of urban metabolism that allows for civilization to take root. For whether they liked it or not, the inhabitants of the city would have to collaborate, taking up a distinct or adjacent trade in order to produce one sort of good or service, and exchange it for another. The Brazilian philosopher, Carolina Araújo, underscores the creative and necessarily collaborative aspect of the Republic in her term, “Cooperative Flourishing.”

Thus, to be called an idiot is not simply a swipe at one’s geographical preference. It harbors a much deeper ethical indictment of one who strictly regards himself as the sole subject of concern. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socrates sets the term in sharper relief when he contrasts the “idiocy” of the body against its opposite: the body of an athlete.

By way of getting at its Socratic usage, I will briefly contrast how two translations contend for the meaning of the label, idiot. In Book 3, Section 12 of Memorabilia as translated by Amy L. Bonnette, Socrates notices that one of his students, Epigenes, appears to be out of shape. “How like a private individual (i.e., an idiot) you maintain your body, Epigenes” states the philosopher. To which a Epigenes responds, “I am a private individual, Socrates.” In the Dover Thrift Edition of the text translated by Henry Graham Dakyns, the dialogue is somewhat less inflammatory, although no less scandalous: “You look as if you need some exercise, Epigenes” to which the pupil responds, “Well, I’m not an athlete, Socrates.” The contrast between these two translations is telling. In the first instance, Socrates’ choice of words in English is rendered literally “like an idiot” whereas the second demonstrates a free translation: “You look out of shape.” One could reasonably assume that in the Dakyns translation, the use of “not an athlete” provides a safer, more straight-forward connotation for the modern English reader. But when the etymology of the word is sacrificed, so is the potency of Socrates’ point: that in his student’s very outward appearance, Epigenes’ body communicates a slovenly disinterest in responsibility, civic or otherwise.

Continuing with Bonnette’s translation, Socrates responds to Epigenes’ provincial retort, stating: “Not anymore in fact than those who are about to compete in the Olympics. Or in your opinion, is the contest for one’s life (“soul”) against the enemy—a contest the Athenians may at any time chance to establish—a small one?” Unlike the Socrates we find in Plato, Xenophon’s Socrates appears somewhat more agitated and blunt. It is perhaps due to the motivation of the author who has taken it upon himself to provide a rigorous and clear apology or defense of Socrates after the philosopher is charged with spreading impiety amongst the youth of Athens. The terms of the discussion have been set. Thus, throughout each book of the Memorabilia Socrates appears to take on a paternalistic tone in his explanations. He is less willing, perhaps, to put up with the youthful intransigence of his students; more willing, perhaps, to get to the point.

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates urges his interlocutors to join him as they work patiently at the olive-press of ideas, grinding down received wisdom until they lose their conceptual firmness. In the Memorabilia, Socrates casts away his usual veneer of faux ignorance and lectures directly to the youth of Athens on what they ought to understand, and moreover, what they ought to do.

In lecturing Epigenes, Socrates lays bare the importance of having a body in good condition, buttressing his argument by way of presenting all the ill consequences of when it is not. Socrates does this by placing the body into a series of hypothetical situations such as war to the demands of manhood, and even as an object of beauty. In doing so, Socrates is not so much body-shaming Epigenes to belittle him, but in his own turgid way, to help enlighten his acolyte of the dire social and personal consequences of not being fit. By Epigenes’ refusal to elevate his own physical condition, Epigenes suffers to remain civically useless. That is, to suffer as an idiot. Beginning with the most basic fight for survival, warfare, Socrates, himself a veteran, states that a healthy body is one that dies less on the battlefield, as well as less prone to “shamefully” be captured by the enemy. The fruit of such a capture is that which belongs solely to the victor—the acquisition of a future slave. To be a slave is to be subjected to the harshest realities of life. Socrates then inverts his example, rhetorically asking Epigenes whether he himself would be able to withstand such trials, and moreover, with ease.

For Socrates, physical fitness is not only preventative in nature (such as being captured in battle due to poor conditioning) but also generative of qualities and characteristics many recognize as desirable and useful. Socrates states:

For those who maintain their bodies well are both healthy and strong. And many due to this are saved in a seemly manner in the contests of war and escape all the terrible things; many bring aid to their friends and do good deeds for their fatherland and due to this are deemed worthy of gratitude, acquire a great reputation, and obtain most noble honors and due to these things live the rest of their life in a more pleasant and more noble manner and leave their children with more noble resources for life.

Socrates also draws reference to the idea of ἀγών (agōn) which bears a more negative connotation in English as it is our root word for agony. But in Greek, agōn meant struggle or contest, to endure a rigorous challenge to come out the wiser, or better. In his discussion of Athen’s lack of mandated physical training for their military, Socrates puts a premium on training on one’s own accord. “For, know well that you will not be worse off in any other contest or in any action from having your body better equipped.”

Beyond ascertaining social and moral accolades, Socrates shifts from the social role being physically fit plays to the more personal benefits, including improved mental acuity and health benefits:

Since, even where, in your opinion, there is least use of the body—in thinking—who does not know that, even here, many greatly falter because their body is not healthy? And forgetfulness, dispiritedness, peevishness, and madness frequently attack the thought of many due to the bad condition of their body, so as to drive out even the sciences.

So far, we have considered Socrates’ understanding of “idiocy” of the body along the lines in the context of what we could otherwise call unathletic or in poor physical shape. By thinking through the social and moral impact that a healthy or unhealthy body would have because of training (or lack thereof), Socrates dismisses the relatively unbothered decision to be out of shape. In doing so, he elevates the importance of one man’s health, the young Epigenes, to a civic rallying cry.

But all of this begs the question: why did the Greeks, so concerned with personal fitness, not spend more time writing more on the importance of the body? In vast corpus of ancient Greek philosophy, care of the body seems to be a relatively muted affair in comparison to its well-known headier ponderings. It is as if these philosophers have relegated the status of the body far below the rich intellectual requirements of Socrates’ famous charge, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

In spite of this dearth, what is evident is that these philosophers did not make fitness a footnote in their everyday lives. Pythagoras was a trained boxer. Socrates was known to have exercised daily. Plato himself was an athlete. In fact, Plato established a school, the Academy, which incorporated physical fitness as part of its curriculum. But physical fitness and sports were not limited to the ancient classroom, to then be later carried into Hellenic adulthood as a sign of a cultivated life. As Heather Reid notes in her book Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World, athleticism became embedded as an idea of virtue, one whose impact underpinned very notion of a Greek aristocracy “as something to be trained.”

And indeed, the Greeks stood out among all other civilizations at the time for their high esteem of training and athletics. Writing on the importance of play and the Olympic games, the American classicist and mythologist, Edith Hamilton states that they “were so important, when one was held, a truce of God was proclaimed so that all Greece might come in safety and without fear.” Further along, she writes,

There ‘glorious-limbed youth’—the phrase is Pindar’s, the athlete’s poet—strove for an honor so coveted as hardly anything else in Greece. An Olympic victor—triumphing generals would give place to him.

The Romans, whose own cultural lineage was closely tied to that of the Greeks, placed less emphasis on the “play” aspect of training, viewing fitness as falling under the strict purview of war preparation. In the Hellenic understanding of athleticism, however, it was the competitive spirit intermingled with the bodily reflection of virtue, that elevated the body as a site worthy of maintaining to the highest levels.

A no better example of the Greek connection between physical fitness, athleticism, and civic duty is bound up in a man simply called Andreas. He is mentioned but once amid the storytelling of late Roman conquests by the historian Procopius in his multivolume work The History of Wars, and reintroduced by the British Classicist, H.A. Harris in Sport in Greece and Rome. Andreas was in the entourage of the great Byzantine general Belisarius during his campaign against the Persians. Known as the Iberian War, the conflict emerged when a small Georgian kingdom decided to leave Persia and join Byzantium. The Persians, feeling their hand forced, invaded the Iberians to bring them back into their fold. In 530 CE, just two years before the end of the war, the Byzantines were defending the city of Dara against a Persian attack with little progress being made on either side. Both armies remained firmly entrenched behind their own lines. Frustrated by the lack of movement, a Persian soldier mounted on horseback and rode up to the Byzantine line, daring the enemy to get up and fight him in battle. None but Andreas answered the call to fight. According to Procopius, Andreas was neither a soldier nor did he have any military experience. He was an athletics trainer who ran a wrestling school in the capital city of Byzantium, who was serving as a bath attendant to the Byzantine calvary commander, Bouzes. Procopius describes Andreas as having struck the brash Persian horseman on the chest with his spear, causing him to fall from his horse, and then killed him with his dagger. The Byzantines cheered him on, while the Persians sent again another one of their men to fight Andreas. The men clashed on horseback, which caused them to be thrown from their horses. By using his skill as a wrestler, Andreas was able to spring up from his fallen position and once more, slew yet another challenger.

One could imagine Socrates smiling from the grave at news of a sixth-century wrestling coach defeating battle-hardened enemy soldiers. For while Andreas may have thrown himself into a fight without any military training, he was certainly no idiot.

Joe Lombardo holds a PhD from the New School for Social Research and is an avid writer and strength enthusiast. He is the Editor of Ultraphysical.

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To anyone who follows sports, the fact that men (i.e. adult human males) run much faster than women (i.e. adult human females) is neither shocking nor controversial. Even a casual observer can see that men are generally taller, more muscular, and just overall larger than women (Roser  2019, Bassett 2020). The advantages in body height, body mass, and muscle mass provide men with inherent athletic advantages in terms of strength, power, and endurance over comparably aged, trained, and talented women (Hilton 2021, Millard-Stafford 2018, Sandbakk 2018). The anatomical and physiological factors that give men athletic advantages over comparably aged, trained, and talented women also include less visibly, but no less importantly, larger hearts and lungs, greater bone mineral density, higher hemoglobin levels, and more. Depending on the sport being compared, men outperform equally aged, talented, and trained women by anywhere from 10% to over 50%.

Now, what causes men to possess these anatomical and physiological advantages over comparably aged, trained, and talented women is a matter of some controversy. There is no question that the increased testosterone concentrations experienced by males at puberty accelerates growth in bone length and size, increases the amount of muscle mass, and overall accentuates the differences between males and females. At puberty females experience increased levels of estrogen which cause increases in the total amount of body fat and the deposition of body fat in the hips and breasts, which is not generally conducive to improved athletic performance (Bassett 2020, Hills 2010). The onset of menstruation in females during puberty, which is an essential part of female maturation, may also be associated with detrimental effects on sports performance (Meignie 2021). But are sex-based differences in blood testosterone concentrations the only factors responsible for men being bigger, faster, and stronger than women? Or might there be some inherent differences between males and females that originate at conception due to differences in sex chromosomes regardless of puberty-based differences in sex hormones? This is a controversy that is being debated not just in sports, but also in society overall.

Brief Overview of Sex Determination and Sex Differentiation

At fertilization sex is determined by the paired sex chromosomes, 46-XX for female and 46-XY for male, which lead the development of germ cells that develop into ovaries in females or testes in males (MacLaughlin 2004). Typically, the Y-encoded SRY gene causes development of male gonads, and without the SRY gene female gonads develop (Goymann 2023, Nassar 2023). Sex differentiation then occurs as the fetus develops along either the male or female pathway. Humans are sexually dimorphic with male anatomy & physiology centered around the production of sperm and female anatomy & physiology centered around the production of ova (Arnold 2019, Bhargava 2021, Goymann 2023). A major purpose of sex-differentiation is the development of male or female reproductive systems, but sex differentiation also results in sex-based differences in fetal growth with males typically being larger than females (Broere-Brown 2016, Kiserud 2017).

Undoubtedly these sex-based difference are a result of differences in gene expression between males and females. Out of 20,000 known human genes, approximately 6,500 are expressed differently in males and females (Gershoni 2017), with sex based differences in gene expression reported in more than 3,000 genes in skeletal muscle alone (Haizlip 2015). Without question some of the differences in gene expression between males and females can be attributed to differences in sex hormone concentrations, but not every difference between male and female cells is caused by differences in sex hormones (Arnold 2019, Institute of Medicine 2001). There are 27 protein-coding genes that are unique to the male specific region of the Y chromosome in humans, with some Y chromosome driven aspects of sex differentiation occurring independent of sex hormones (Skaletsky 2003).

Due to the complexity of fetal development, disorders can occur with the individual then being born with a disorder of sex development (DSD). There are a wide range of DSDs (which are beyond the scope of this paper), however, an extreme example of DSDs are those in which a person is born sexually ambiguous (aka intersex) (Witchel 2018). Fortunately, intersex conditions occur in only 0.018 percent of births (Sax 2002). Some intersex conditions may present as female at birth but have male pattern testosterone secretion due to internal testes, and these intersex conditions are often brought up as examples that human sex is not binary (Goymann 2023). However, this is disingenuous as those who are intersex are still either male or female. As stated by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins “Sex is pretty damn binary” (Dawkins 2023).

Brief Overview of Testosterone Concentrations During Fetal Development through Adolescence

Blood testosterone concentrations in fetal males increase considerably beginning around the seventh week of gestation when the SRY gene first initiates development of the testes. Testosterone concentrations are then elevated in fetal males from weeks 8 to 24 of gestation (Nassar 2023). Testosterone concentrations once again increase in infant males during the first five months of postnatal development in what has been termed “minipuberty” (Nassar 2023, Renault 2020). There are then typically no differences in testosterone concentrations between boys and girls until the onset of male puberty, which occurs between the ages of 9 and 14 years old with an average of 11 ½ years old (Mayo Clinic, NIH Child Health and Development). Typically, by age 14 and then throughout adulthood males will have 10-20 times higher blood testosterone concentrations than females.

The effects of testosterone are very evident during male puberty. Prior to puberty boys have about 10% more lean body mass than comparably aged girls (McManus 2011, Staiano 2012) and after puberty men have about 45% more lean body mass than comparably aged women (Hilton 2021, Millard-Stafford 2018, Sandbakk 2018). Before puberty boys are perhaps ½ cm taller than comparably aged girls (before the onset of female puberty, when girls may become briefly taller than comparably aged boys) and after puberty the average man is 12 cm taller than the average woman (Roser 2019). Of course, the higher testosterone concentrations in male puberty also contribute to the heart, lungs, and other systems of the body growing accordingly. The surge of testosterone during male puberty also causes other secondary sex traits such as deepening of the voice and growth of facial and body hair. However, it is an oversimplification to attribute all of these changes due to increases in testosterone during puberty since there are many genetic and hormonal factors (such as growth hormone) that regulate body height and body composition (Sonksen 2018).

As stated previously, the increased blood testosterone concentrations in males during puberty causes men to have anatomical and physiological attributes that give them inherent athletic advantages compared to similarly aged, talented and trained women. But is that the only time there are sex-based difference in athletic performance?

Sex-Based Differences in Athletic Performance Before Puberty

There has been a limited number of scientific evaluations of sex-based differences in sports performance before puberty. For example, Handelsman evaluated publicly available data on swimming, running, and jumping in children and adolescents and, although his figures clearly show boys aged 10-and-under running faster, swimming faster, and jumping farther than comparably aged girls, in 2017 he published these analyses in a paper titled “Sex differences in athletic performance emerge coinciding with the onset of male puberty. (Handelsman 2017)”. In 2019 Senefeld et al. (Senefeld 2019) used data from USA Swimming and reported that, before age 10, the top 5 girls swam faster than the top 5 boys but there were no differences between the swimming performance of the 10^th-50^th ranked girls and boys. In 2020 Huebner and Perperoglou (Huebner 2019) reported no sex-based differences in competitive weightlifting performance before age 10. To my knowledge these represent the only scholarly studies on competitive performance in children before puberty.

In contrast to the limited scholarly evaluations of children’s competitive sport performance, there are a plethora of scholarly evaluations of school-based physical fitness testing in children as young as six years old. Using tests such as the Presidential Fitness Test, FitnessGram, Eurofit Fitness Test Battery, or some other school-based physical fitness tests, it appears that boys consistently outperform girls of the same age on tests of muscular strength, muscular endurance, running speed, aerobic fitness, ball throwing and kicking distance while girls perform better on tests of flexibility. A small sampling of publications evaluating school-based physical fitness testing include a longitudinal evaluation of 240 boys and girls through ages 9-12 years old (Golle 2015), an evaluation of 85,347 fitness test results in 9-17-year-old boys and girls (Catley 2013), and evaluation of 108,295 8-year-olds (Fuhner 2021), an evaluation of 424,328 boys and girls aged 6-18 years (Tambalis 2016), an evaluation of 1,142,026 performances of a 20 meter shuttle run in 9-17 year old boys and girls from 50 countries (Tomkinson 2017), and an evaluation of 2,779,165 Eurofit performances in 9-17 year old boys and girls from 30 countries (Tomkinson 2018). Particularly interesting is the laboratory based evaluation of 688 Danish 6-7-year-old boys and girls showing that boys have more lean body mass and higher VO₂max than comparable girls, and for the same amount of physical activity the boys attained higher levels of fitness (Eiberg 2005). Collectively, these studies (and many others not listed here) indicate that before puberty boys consistently outperform girls of the same age on tests of muscular strength, muscular endurance, running speed, aerobic fitness, ball throwing and kicking distance while girls perform better on tests of flexibility. While physical fitness tests do not always predict success in competition, physical fitness is often a prerequisite for success in sports.

USA Track and Field (USATF) sanctions youth track & field meets in most states as well as regional and national championship meets. The youngest age groups in USATF are the 8-and-under and the 9-10-year-old age groups, both of which can reasonably be assumed to represent pre-pubertal athletes. If we evaluate the overall youth records for the best performances in running, throwing, and jumping from USATF (USATF 2018), from the USATF National Junior Olympics (USATF 2019), the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Junior Olympics Records (AAU 2023), and the School Sport Australia Track & Field Championships (School Sport Australia 2016) all indicate that boys aged 10-and-under outperform girls of the same age in running distances of 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, and 1500m, and in the shot put, javelin, and long jump by an average of 3.7% in running, 20.4% in throwing events, and 9.9% in long jump. Similarly, the age 10-and-under records from USA Swimming indicate that in 18 out of 22 events the boys’ records are faster than the girls’ by 1.8% (USA Swimming 2023). Collectively, these records of competition performance in children under age 10, who can reasonably be assumed to be pre-pubertal, show that males outperform females with only rare exceptions.

Evaluations of the overall records for best performances are often used by scholars to demonstrate sex-based differences in adult athletic performance (Hilton 2021, Millard-Stafford 2018, Sandbakk 2018). But the sex-based differences in sports performance between pre-pubertal males and females have been dismissed as being too small to be meaningful (Safer 2022, Merten2 2022), which is intriguing given the difference between finishers in swimming and track & field running often come down to hundredths of a second. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that a sex-based three percent difference in running performance between pre-pubertal males and females would indicate a profound advantage for male athletes.

Some colleagues and I have recently presented an evaluation of the sex-based differences in athletic performance before puberty at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine (Brown 2023). Drawing upon a national database of track and field performance (athletic.net) and evaluating the top 10 performances for boys and girls in the 8-and-under and 9-10-year-old age groups over a 5-year period, we observed that the boys consistently (and statistically) ran almost 5% faster, long jumped 6% farther, threw the shot put 20% farther, and threw the javelin 40% farther than girls of the same age. At the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine there was another group of researchers from an entirely different university who used the same database with slightly different evaluation techniques and came to similar conclusions about the existence of male sex-based athletic advantages before puberty (Atkinson 2023).

It is therefore my conclusion that are indeed male sex-based athletic advantages before puberty. I base this conclusion upon large numbers of scholarly evaluations of school-based fitness testing, data from youth track & field records, youth swimming records, my own analysis of the top 10 national track & field performances for boys and girls in 8-and-under and 9-10-year-old age groups over a 5-year period, and a similar conclusion from another group of researchers. Yes, the sex-based differences before puberty are smaller than after puberty, but the differences are there in a pattern that results in a statistically significant difference that favors male athletes. Furthermore, small differences become extremely important in athletics as the difference between a gold medal and no medal can be fractions of a second.  As there are not known to be differences in testosterone between boys and girls between the ages of 6 months old and the onset of male puberty, one can only conclude that these differences in performance are due to lasting effects of testosterone during minipuberty or are somehow linked to the Y chromosome.

What about Puberty Blockers?

Whether there are, or are not, sex-based differences in athletic performance before puberty still leaves questions about how puberty blockers affect athletic performance. And, quite simply, there is not enough information to answer questions about how puberty blockers affect athletic performance. There have not been any published studies evaluating the effects of puberty blockers on school or laboratory-based tests of muscle strength, muscle endurance, running speed, aerobic fitness, throwing or kicking distance in children. Nor have there been any studies on the effects of puberty blockers on competitive sports performance. There have been very few published studies on the effects of puberty blockers on body composition and body height.

Three long term studies on the effects of puberty blockers on body composition and body height show that the sex-based differences in lean body mass (Klaver 2018) and body height (Boogers 2022, Willemsen 2023) are not eliminated by 2 years of puberty blockers which were then followed by another 6 years of so called “gender affirming hormone therapy” (GAHT). Particularly interesting is that males who are given puberty blockers, testosterone suppression, and estrogen do not attain an adult body height that is different than would be expected for males without GAHT (Boogers 2022), and females who are given puberty blockers and testosterone attain only slightly taller adult body height than would be expected for females without GAHT (Willemsen 2023). It is undeniable that advantages in lean body mass and body height translate to athletic advantages in many sports. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that current evidence indicates that puberty blockers and subsequent GAHT are unlikely to eliminate male advantages in athletic performance, even when male testosterone concentrations are suppressed.

Sex-Based Athletic Differences in Adults

As has been well summarized and reviewed adult males typically have 45% more lean body mass and 30% less body fat than comparably aged females (Hilton 2021, Bassett 2020). Because of the greater lean body mass and corresponding muscle mass when compared to similarly aged, talented, and trained females, males have 73% higher overall muscle strength (ranging from 40 to 120% higher depending on the exercise and muscle group being compared) (Nuzzo 2023). Adult males also have a 25% higher maximal oxygen consumption (VO₂max) per unit of body mass than comparable women. There are also differences between adult males and females in respiratory function, cardiac function, tendon stiffness, bone length, and pelvic shape that all provide inherent athletic advantages to males.

In adults, when compared to similarly aged, talented, and trained females, males are 10-13% faster in rowing, running, and swimming. Males outperform similarly aged, talented, and trained females by 16-22% in jumping, downhill mountain biking, and pole vaulting.  Males outperform similarly aged, talented, and trained females by over 30% in weightlifting and baseball pitching speed (Hilton 2021, Millard-Stafford 2018, Sandbakk 2018). The performance differences between adult males and females are much larger than those observed in prepubescent children, with the magnified male advantages unquestionably due primarily, but not exclusively, to the increased blood testosterone concentrations experienced by males during puberty (Handelsman 2017).

While testosterone is the primary androgen, male pubertal growth is not regulated solely by testosterone and not every difference between male and female cells is caused by differences in sex hormones (Arnold 2019, Institute of Medicine 2001). Growth hormone (GH), insulin like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), sex chromosome linked genes, and many other cellular processes work together synergistically to regulate growth and development (Baron 2015, Mauras 1996, Sonksen 2018). While GH is thought to be primarily responsible for growth in children, and particularly growth in the long bones (Brinkman 2023), GH is also necessary for skeletal muscle growth (Mauras 2003). For example, in adults with growth hormone deficiency who were receiving thyroid, adrenal, and gonadal hormone replacement, administration of GH increased lean body mass by 5 kg over the course of 6 months while those who did not receive GH experienced no change in lean body mass (Salomon 1989). It is presently unclear precisely how genetics, testosterone, estrogen, GH, and IGF-1 all work together synergistically to promote growth and maturation during puberty (Gharahdaghi 2021, Sonksen 2018), but it is certainly overly simplistic to presume that male pattern growth can be stimulated solely by administering testosterone or terminated solely by suppressing testosterone.

Testosterone Suppression

There has been speculation that suppressing blood testosterone concentrations in adult males will erase male athletic advantages, thereby allowing transgender identified males (i.e. transwomen) to compete on an even playing field with females in women’s sports. The notion that suppressing testosterone in adult males will erase male athletic advantages was given the appearance of validity by the 2011 NCAA transgender inclusion policy (NCAA 2011), and the 2015 International Olympic Committee (IOC) transgender inclusion policy (IOC 2015) which state that a sufficient duration and magnitude of testosterone suppression will allow transwomen to fairly compete in women’s sports. Although there is considerable debate about whether transwomen can compete fairly in the female sport category, the evidence to date indicates that suppressing testosterone in adult males does not erase male athletic advantages.

One of the major factors contributing to male athletic advantages before and after puberty is the higher lean body mass, with corresponding higher muscle mass, exhibited by males. To date, there are 16 papers demonstrating that 6 months to 14 years of testosterone suppression in transwomen does not reduce lean body mass sufficiently to eliminate male advantages (Alvares 2022, Auer 2016, Auer 2018, Elbers 1999, Gava 2016, Gooren 2004, Haraldsen 2007, Klaver 2017, Klaver 2018, Lapauw 2008, Mueller 2011, Tack 2018, Van Caenegem 2015, Wierckx 2014, Wiik 2020, Yun 2021). Keeping in mind that adult males typically have 45% more lean body mass with a corresponding advantage in muscle mass than comparably aged females (Hilton 2021, Bassett 2020), research presently suggests than testosterone suppression in transwomen causes a 4-5% reduction in lean body mass.

Due primarily to higher lean body mass and the corresponding muscle mass, males typically have higher muscle strength than comparable females. To date, there are 8 papers demonstrating that 6 months to 14 years of testosterone suppression in transwomen does not reduce muscle strength sufficiently to eliminate male advantages (Alvares 2022, Auer 2016, Lapauw 2008, Scharff 2019, Tack 2018, Van Caenegem 2015, Wiik 2020, Yun 2021). Keeping in mind that, depending on which muscle groups are compared, adult males typically have 40-120% higher muscle strength than comparably aged females (Nuzzo 2023), research presently suggests that testosterone suppression in transwomen causes a zero to 9% reduction in muscle strength. Further demonstrating that testosterone is not the only factor responsible for muscle mass and strength in males, it has been demonstrated in males undergoing testosterone suppression for prostate cancer treatment that muscle strength and mass can be maintained, or at least the loss can be diminished, by engaging in strength training (Chen 2019, Kvorning 2006). There is no question that higher muscle strength is desirable in most, if not all, competitive athletes because of the positive relationship between muscle strength and athletic performance. Presently, research indicates that testosterone suppression does not erase male advantages in muscle size and strength.

There have been two very intriguing evaluations of the effects of testosterone suppression combined with estrogen administration in transwomen in the US Air Force (Roberts 2020, Chiccarelli 2022). These evaluations are intriguing because military personnel must meet fitness expectations, so it is reasonable to assume that the subjects engaged in regular exercise so the findings should elucidate the effects of testosterone suppression and estrogen administration in a physically active population. However, the findings are somewhat contradictory regarding whether, and to what extent, physical fitness is impaired due to testosterone suppression and estrogen administration. The first evaluation (Roberts 2020) indicates that prior to gender affirming hormones the transwomen performed 31% more push-ups and 15% more sit-ups in 1 minute and ran 1.5 miles 21% faster than comparably aged female Air Force personnel. After 2-2.5 years of testosterone suppression combined with estrogen administration the differences in sit-up performance had disappeared (indeed, the transwomen completed 2% fewer) but transwomen still completed 6% more push-ups and were 12% faster than females (Roberts 2020.). The second evaluation (Chiccarelli 2022) indicates that prior to gender affirming hormones the transwomen performed 66% more push-ups and 28% more sit-ups in 1 minute and ran 1.5 miles 18% faster than comparably aged female Air Force personnel. After 4 years of testosterone suppression combined with estrogen administration, the transwomen still performed 18% more push-ups and 8% more sit-ups in 1 minute but the difference in time to run 1.5 miles was only 0.2% faster than comparably aged female Air Force personnel (after 3 years the transwomen were still 5% faster). The discrepancy between these two studies regarding whether the differences in push-up and sit-up performance between males and females was erased by testosterone suppression combined with estrogen administration is hard to explain. Both studies (Roberts 2020, Chiccarelli 2022) used US Air Force Personnel and the same fitness testing. It’s important to note that Chiccarelli 2022 experienced considerable loss of subjects from 223 at baseline down to only 15 subjects after 4 years, which impairs the ability to draw firm conclusions from the data. Collectively, however, both of these studies indicate that testosterone suppression and estrogen administration in males will take over three years to erase sex-based differences in 1.5 mile running performance and it is unlikely that male advantages in muscular strength are erased after even 4 years.

The changes in 1.5 mile running performance with testosterone suppression and estrogen administration suggests that testosterone suppression impairs aerobic fitness (Roberts 2020, Chiccarelli 2022). However, to date, there has been only a single laboratory-based assessment of aerobic fitness in those who have undergone testosterone suppression combined with estrogen administration (Alvares 2022.). In a cross-sectional study of transwomen who had undergone an average of 14 years of testosterone suppression combined with estrogen administration, the transwomen had an absolute peak oxygen consumption that was 20% higher, peak oxygen pulse that was 17% higher, and maximal ventilation that was 17% higher than age matched women. Collectively, the data from Roberts, Chiccarelli, and Alvares suggest that testosterone suppression reduces but does not erase male advantages in cardiorespiratory function with the obvious implications for retained male advantages in endurance sports.

Finally, some of the best examples for retained male advantages in spite of testosterone suppression can be found in transwomen competing in women’s sports.  A case study of an NCAA Division 1 swimmer who competed in the men’s category, then underwent two years of testosterone suppression and estrogen administration and then subsequently competed in the women’s category indicates that over 50% of the male advantage  in swimming performance was retained (Senefeld 2023). Overall, for the distances of 100, 200, 500, and 1,650 yards this individual lost 4.0% percent of swimming speed when undergoing testosterone suppression, and the typical difference between men and women is 10%. As a male swimmer this individual was ranked 65^th in the 500-yard freestyle and yet earned a number 1 ranking when swimming as a woman. More telling about the limited reduction in performance due to testosterone suppression is that this individual was ranked 551^st as a man in the 200-yard freestyle but was ranked 3^rd when swimming as a woman. A similar reduction in performance without the erasure of male advantages can be found in Cece Telfer, who was ranked 200-390^th as a man, but won an NCAA Division II 400 m hurdle championship when running as a woman (Brown 2022). Another example can be found in Laurel Hubbard who was unheralded as a male weightlifter, but after identifying as a woman at age 35 and following the IOC guidelines Hubbard qualified for the Tokyo Olympics (Fair Play for Women).  Collectively, evaluating three well known transwomen athletes suggest that testosterone suppression did not eliminate male advantages sufficiently to cause them to be equally ranked in women’s sports as they were in men’s, and instead they were much more successful when competing against women than they were when competing against men.

Overall, the current published peer reviewed research and evidence from a few transwomen athletes indicates that testosterone suppression in adult men for up to 14 years does not eliminate male advantages in lean body mass, muscle mass, or muscle strength. Very limited evidence provides conflicting information on the effects of 4 or more years of testosterone suppression on endurance performance with one study indicating an elimination of the sex-based differences in 1.5 mile running performance after 4 years of testosterone suppression while another study indicating retained male advantages in aerobic fitness and cardiorespiratory function after 14 years of testosterone suppression.

Summary and Conclusion

In summary, males and females differ at conception based on sex-chromosomes and genes. These chromosomal and gene differences then lead to differences in growth and development that are influenced by androgens and estrogens, but are also influenced by growth hormone (and other hormones), and the interactions of genes and hormones. There is no question that testosterone has immense effects on muscle mass, which in turn can affect muscle strength. However, current evidence indicates that it is overly simplistic to think that the use of puberty blockers, testosterone suppression, and estrogen administration will entirely eliminate male advantages in lean body mass and corresponding muscle mass, body height, muscle strength, and cardiorespiratory function sufficiently enough to level the playing field between male and female athletes.

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Gregory Brown, PhD FACSM is a Professor of Exercise Science and Director of the University of Nebraska at Kearney General Studies. This manuscript represents Dr. Brown’s opinions and is not a statement on behalf of the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Most forms of tacit knowledge are either physical or social. There is the intuition a practiced mechanic develops which allows him to understand how a new machine works when he first encounters it, before he has read a manual or been taught by someone else. There is the instinct of a skilled goalie, who knows where the ball is going before she can explain its trajectory. She may never have studied physics, aerodynamics, or kinesiology, but when the opposing forward kicks the ball, she knows where to be to stop it.

Athletes therefore develop an awareness of their body through practice, which allows those who perform at the highest levels to quickly pick up entirely new movements and techniques. They can see an exercise performed by someone else and understand what that person is doing without ever having seen it before. Crucially, they understand how they can do it, too.

Athletes also understand their sport at the so-called a gut level. Sometimes, what appears to be superstition is actually intuition developed through experience. A pitcher may instinctively adapt his strategy to different weather conditions without knowing why. He may not even be consciously aware that he is doing so.

It may surprise some readers, but all exercise requires a high degree of this tacit knowledge. The longer you lift weights and the more you try to learn about the human body, the more you become aware of just how complex human movement is. You realize how little you used to know. Exercises that once seemed simple now feel complicated in ways that you find difficult to convey. You begin to come to terms with the limits of your own knowledge and awareness, and you grasp a hint of just how much more there is to know. Even at this late date, there is much that we do not understand about the body.

There are those who find weight training boring. It appears repetitive, often performed inside buildings without aesthetic interiors, and mindless. But then there are others, including many athletes and sports professionals, who don’t find it mindless. To them, it engages the mind at a very high level. A movement such as the deadlift, for instance, appears simple, but it requires a great degree of coordination between most of the major (and many minor) muscle groups within the body. It is technically and mechanically interesting. If you deadlift very heavy, you can’t let your mind wander. You must be focused on what you are doing. You feel different muscles within your body engage, and you can tell if something fires improperly or if you relax too early.

For an athlete, and especially for a trainer, every workout is an opportunity to gain this type of knowledge. Not only is each workout designed to stimulate key physiological parameters, but it is also an opportunity to practice. That could mean practicing new movements or techniques, or it could mean mastering the same skill one has honed for years. It could mean trying to develop new tweaks and innovations, or it could mean focusing on deepening one’s instinct for physical movement. It is a deliberate form of practice, a deep practice, one that is anything but mindless.

Physical exertion can concentrate the mind very effectively. But surprisingly, the mind doesn’t always concentrate where you might want it to. It takes work to focus on the carriage of the arms, the rhythm of the breathing, the sensation of the footfalls, the cadence of the run. Running is deceptive. It is something “everyone knows how to do,” and yet most people don’t do it nearly as efficiently as they could. There are thousands of little variables that go into it.

Barbell lifts are similar. There are more possible cues than any lifter can keep at the forefront of the mind during any single repetition. This can be intimidating, because a lot can go wrong in a heavy lift. And if something goes wrong, it can go wrong very badly.

Even less-intense lifts contain a surprising amount of information. Take a basic step-up. A deceptively simple exercise. A hip hinge that isolates a single leg. Everyone knows how to step up onto a step. Right? But to perform a step-up properly, an athlete must ensure multiple muscles are firing correctly, and multiple joints are coordinating and moving properly. For anyone wishing to develop tacit knowledge, a simple exercise like this is a perfect opportunity. Concentrate on the action. Ask yourself: what are my hamstrings doing? My glutes? Where do I begin to lose control on the descent? How is the posture in my upper body? Is my pelvis tilting forward? Is there movement in my ankle? Where am I unstable? And so on.  

Experienced powerlifters often retain a large amount of tacit knowledge about the basic lifts they perform. Men and women who have practiced heavy back squats weekly for years will talk about feeling “off.” They come into the gym, warm up, start to do it, and stop. They feel off. Something is wrong. They may not be able to explain exactly what is off that day, or why something is off. Maybe their ankles are too tight, limiting their range of motion and forcing them to compensate elsewhere. Maybe their back is tight from sitting all day, and that tightness is limiting the external rotation in their hips. Maybe their glutes aren’t firing properly. Maybe a combination of all of the above, or perhaps a combination of unrelated factors.

But how exactly is it that athletes know something is “off” in their bodies? And how can someone tell if their hip is hinging properly or if their glute is misfiring?

As children, we were taught that there are five senses. But most athletes and coaches are aware that there are two more: proprioception and interoception. These two senses are what give athletes knowledge of what their body is doing at any given time.

Proprioception is the awareness of one’s body as it moves in space. This includes perception of balance and knowledge of what each limb and joint is doing at any particular moment. The more you exercise, the more you develop this sense. You can feel when you are performing an exercise properly or not, even if you don’t feel any pain or discomfort. It isn’t through touching objects in your surroundings, or listening very carefully, or even looking at yourself in a mirror, that you sense where your foot is, or your arm, or how your knee is moving. It is through proprioception.

Interoception is the awareness of things internal to the body. You don’t taste or smell or touch hunger. You know you are hungry. You don’t touch fatigue, but you feel tired.

A lot of physical tacit knowledge is related to these two senses. Not all of it, to be sure. Certainly, getting a bad feeling about a change in the weather before a big game isn’t related to either of them. But proprioception and interoception are important skills for an athlete to hone, and beyond exhortations to “listen to your body” and “maintain spatial awareness,” there isn’t a whole lot that can be done to coach them. There is even less that can be done to quantify them.

We can describe physical sensations in words, and we can use scales like RPE (rate of perceived exertion) to attempt to capture our level of effort as a number between 0 (no effort) and 10 (maximum effort). But it is difficult for us to truly measure how hungry someone feels, or how much pain they are experiencing. One person’s 10 is another person’s 2, especially if the first person is relatively untrained. Some people will naturally rate anything that causes them to feel the “I can’t do this” pressure in their brain as a 10, whereas others will rate anything that didn’t hospitalize them as less than an 8.

What this means is that one person’s tacit knowledge about his or her own body cannot easily be transmitted to another person to replicate. Moreover, it cannot be touched or understood by smart devices, advanced metrics, complicated models, or machine learning algorithms. No artificial intelligence can comprehend what it is to move one’s body through space, to feel one’s hamstring contract, to follow one’s fist backwards past the side of one’s hip without ever looking down, to know at all times where one’s feet are landing, because an artificially intelligent device cannot experience such things.

Nor can an AI effectively train an athlete, because to do so requires extrapolating one’s own experience and knowledge of one’s own body, to the movement and improvement of another’s. A trainer or a coach needs to have tacit knowledge both of his or her own physical performance, and of the physical performance of others. Moreover, he or she must know how to effectively stimulate the proper physiological variables in the proper configuration at the proper time to elicit the best response in each particular athlete. And while our bodies all respond to the same stimuli, we don’t all respond exactly the same, and therefore each athlete will be a little different.

Which brings us to another area of tacit knowledge required of trainers and coaches: interpersonal communication.

According to some metrics, GPT-4 is able to “say the right thing” to comfort bereaved humans more often than the average human being. But it isn’t doing this because it is able to actually read the bereaved humans and understand what they are feeling and what they need to hear. It is just better at selecting the phrases most likely to comfort most humans. It isn’t even aware that it is comforting a human, because it isn’t aware that it is doing anything. It isn’t aware of anything at all.

Human beings are aware of other people. We may not always be good at reading others’ emotions, and we will always face some difficulty in knowing what is really going on inside another’s mind, but we are born with the ability to learn something about other human beings from their faces.

Trainers and coaches must be good at adapting to the nonverbal feedback our clients and athletes give us. An algorithm may be able to design a training program, and even make adjustments on the fly based on variations in resting heart rate or insulin levels or body composition or other metrics. But a human being can figure out what another human being actually wants and needs, not just what might be determined to be optimal in a particular case.

Not Easily Reproduced

Coaching, personal training, physical therapy, group exercise instruction, and similar professions both require, and provide, opportunities for the development of vast stores of tacit knowledge—about the human body, about physical training, about working with human beings, and more. This tacit knowledge is, like much of the tacit knowledge in the world, particular, local, contextual, and often found only inside the heads of individual human beings.

This makes it very difficult for technology to replace the jobs of the best coaches and trainers and physical therapists. To be sure, many people’s fitness needs can be met by apps and algorithms—just as there have always been many people who could train perfectly fine on their own using workout plans copied out of a book. Some trainers were those people before they became trainers. But (as with professionals in other industries) the fitness professionals who go above and beyond their basic tasks to emphasize the elements of their work which cannot easily be replicated by technology will always have a competitive advantage that keeps them in business.

There is a more important conclusion to consider, too. One that is not original to me, but one that is often ill-understood nonetheless. Because tacit knowledge in a variety of professions can only be learned from experience, and there is always some information that cannot be stored in a computer or externally managed or modeled with statistics or even understood at a basic level once context is stripped away (i.e., at a remove from the particulars of the situation), it is impossible to direct all of the work of those professions at scale from a single hub. Some decisions will always be left to the individuals involved in each particular situation.

All human bodies operate according to certain principles which apply universally, but those bodies are so complex—involving tens of thousands of subtle variables at play at any given time—that there is nearly infinite variation among human bodies. It may prove impossible to ever perfectly model anyone’s body (doing so would likely require reproducing it exactly), meaning that the limit of what statistical models (or algorithms, or artificial intelligence) can tell us about even one single person’s body will always be less that there theoretically is to know. We will never have a computer that can predict exactly what one person’s body is going to do next.

We should be humbled by the recognition of that fact. Perhaps one of the future roles of the fitness professional will be to remind human beings, as Friedrich Hayek wrote, of “how little [we] know about the things [we] imagine [we] can design.”[1]

[1] Hayek, Friedrich. (1988) The Fatal Conceit. University of Chicago Press.

Ben Connelly a writer, runner, and personal trainer based in Virginia. Ben can be found on Twitter and on his Substack, Hardihood Books, where he publishes short fiction and essays.

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It’s four a.m. and dark outside. The desert night is still. The moon is shining through the small window in my hut. I’ve been up for about an hour doing chak tsal, (ཕྱག་འཚལ་). Chak tsal is the Tibetan practice of forward folding, sliding out into a prone position, then reversing out of it back to standing. It’s similar to a Hindu push up or a sun salutation in yoga. I did more than three thousand of them yesterday and I’m guessing I’ll do about the same amount today. My body just remains sore without relief. Inhaling, feel the weight shift in your feet, allow the rebound to come through you to lift your spine and push the head up, arms float up, exhale sinking down touching hands as they take the weight and slide out on the floor. Lying flat I flip my wrists up, forehead touches the ground, inhale, pull hands back to shoulders, use feet to pull body back into a squat, roll up to stand, reaching hands up, arms down. One hundred sixty-eight.

It's been three weeks of this daily routine, before sunup and past sundown, all day for the last four weeks. My Tibetan teacher had recommended this six months ago, and it’s taken six months to gather things and organize this retreat.

The first day I arrived I stared out of the door of my hut, and I was hit with the blindingly bright hot Arizona afternoon. I was gripped with a profound sense of loss. All those months preparing, traveling, and then suddenly everything stopped. This is what I had come for, this isolation, the stillness. At first, it’s jarring. It happens every time I enter a retreat, yet the sudden shock of the stillness is never lost on me. I haven’t seen or talked to anyone since I’ve been here. I’m supposed to be here for just about four months, which will give me plenty of time to finish the practice I’ve been given. Lift arms up, forward bend to the floor, slide hands out until I’m flat, reverse it back up to standing. About an hour in, I lose track of time, sun begins to rise, no thoughts, back down, slide reverse and up. Movement is effortless, I feel like I’m swimming through the air. Later in the day I will feel like a boxer just trying to make it through the rest of the fight, but for now my body is enjoying it.

Being isolated in the desert without anyone to talk to, it feels as though my mind had slowed down weeks ago; almost as still as the desert itself. Even on my breaks between my practice sessions my body and mind are calm. Removed from daily engagements, there is nothing for me to mull over, nothing to worry about, nothing to anticipate. My senses are very clear. All sounds, smells, and colors are vibrant, unobstructed by the normal internal incessant chatter. Still, I am not able to let go to the point where I feel my mind and my body singularly integrated, where they no longer exist in duality. In spite of my relaxed attitude, I can feel my mind and body as distinct entities, separated. Intellectually, I have worked out the meaning of the “non-dual” to some extent. I can grasp that my body is not a solid thing, nor is my mind, but actually exist in such a state is something I have yet to accomplish.

There’s no obvious reward for doing this. No one will celebrate me, or even really notice when I leave. So why would I keep doing this? What is my motivation for putting myself through this? The secret is in the practice; it’s impossible to be taught by reading about it. It’s only through practice that embodied knowledge is discovered. There are many moments that I experience this—just being, feeling my body, my feet on the floor, and falling into the rhythm, losing myself in the movement. In my normal day-to-day existence, my mind is heavy, confused, full of thoughts, but in this retreat my mind is calm. When combined with the practice, I am able to find moments of freedom.

Chak tsal is a very important practice in the Buddhist tradition for other reasons as well. It can lead one to develop a sense of humility, patience, and even perseverance. Chak, means something like “sweeping away.” The practice shows us how to remove distractions, just as you sweep away dust and dirt. Tsal means that we create the conditions to free our mind from the dualistic and distracted thoughts. Our reaction to the practice can be very strong. We will want to quit along the way, at these times we must reevaluate our motivation. Of course, the practice is difficult, both physically and mentally demanding. Therefore, I must be diligent, but also learn to embrace the difficulty. I chose to do this practice because I want to cultivate the mind-body relationship. Even though the practice is difficult I remember my intention and I can shift my attitude. Hands reach up and come down, body, speech, mind are one thing, relax tension to go down slowly, hands touch and slide out, inhale push back, stand up, reach up.

There are many layers to this practice. The physicality is one, but the more profound part is the mental aspect. When I can allow the conceptual mind to just be and not grasp at it, I’m free to embody the action. There is very little complexity to the physical aspect of the practice. The difficulty is in the extraordinarily high number of repetitions; my entire body is moving continuously all day long. The mental part of the practice is a bit more involved. There is a very complex visualization I create in my mind as I move through the practice. It’s not a fixed visualization but one that moves and interacts. The essence of the visualization is a conceptual representation of the nonconceptual experience. How to perceive or conceive the nonconceptual? The conceptual aspect of our mind needs something to occupy it, or it will excitedly run amok. Therefore, it can be useful to use a conceptual symbol that points towards something nonconceptual. For instance, the thought of the sky is a concept, it’s not the actual sky. Whereas directly experiencing the sky is a non-conceptual event. One doesn’t differentiate the sky or the one perceiving the sky, there is simply the experience. Therefore, holding the sky in one’s mind can point one in the direction of the nonconceptual experiential state.

If our mind was simply a construct of conceptual images, then the visualization would be enough to focus on, but the mind is more layered and complex than that. There also exists the internal dialogue that comments on those mental images as well as the external information our other senses are constantly in contact with. Therefore, I must occupy that aspect of my mind as well. The traditional method used for this is mantra. The Sanskrit word mantra is made up of its root, man, meaning “mind,” with the suffix -tra meaning “tool” or “mind tool.” The Tibetans describe mantras as a form of “mind-protection,” a method to protect the mind from distraction. Recited vocally or mentally, in or out of meditation, mantras help our minds to settle and hold our attention.

The visualization helps keep my conceptual mind occupied and the mantra keeps my inner dialogue occupied, these two methods combined with the physical practice allows me to completely absorb and remain in the embodied state. It’s an ingenious method. The people that developed it had an extremely sophisticated understanding of the mind and how it functions. I feel grateful and humbled that I have found this practice.

Second Session

Hours go by and I hardly notice. I don’t have a watch; I can generally tell where I am in the day by the sun. I have nowhere to go and no one needing anything from me. All I have is time. I really don’t have a goal. The practice requires the completion of 111,000 but I’m sure I’ll do more than that. In the evenings I do extra sessions sometimes. It’s a goal-less goal, in that I’m the only one who knows how many I will do. As I see it, the number is more about time, how much time I’ll spend fully immersed in the practice. That’s a high mark. Even a moment of complete embodiment is extraordinary. Up from the ribcage, forget the arms, lengthen from the spine, initiate the movement down from the front of the middle of the spine, the weight shifts faster than normal, grip hard with my toes don’t fall forward, hands hit hard control the slide into a plank before touching down, plank back up, stand with a bit of a hop reach up again. When the practice is going well my mind doesn’t control as much as it inhibits distracting thoughts that break my concentration.

The desert is dead silent. Up, down, I can hear my clothes swoosh and floorboards squeak as my weight shifts. Other than my clothes and feet on the floor I can hear my thoughts as if someone else is in the hut talking to me. I can’t control them, I’ve tried. I tried to ignore them, but they just keep coming like waves on a beach, it’s useless. I’ve figured out that I can choose to place my attention wherever I want and that’s more useful. I can feel my body and focus on that, on my breath, and bodily sensations. While it’s not a fully embodied state it’s still a form of peace, at least time out of thoughts.

Let the body be natural, don’t think about the movement at all, just allow the body to move, be aware of cognitions but don’t engage, slow down, unfocus, allow whatever thoughts to arise to arise, don’t cling, don’t embellish. My current level of understanding is that if I can remain in a relaxed state of listening then anxiety, caused by the endless distracted thoughts will not arise. However, as soon as my mindfulness breaks, my habitual thoughts come rushing back in. Up by way of the mind, body following the mind down, sliding, reversing up stand, stretch, rest. One thousand five hundred and forty-six.

Walk to Lunch

It’s about noon and I conclude my morning practice. Stepping out of my front door I’m immediately hit with the full heat of the desert sun; I slowly begin my walk to the kitchen. It’s about 96 steps along a dirt path through sage brush and some trees. I’m barefoot, my head is shaved, I can simultaneously feel the sun on my head and the rocky hot ground beneath my feet. Feeling my spine upward moving from my tailbone, back widening, jaw relaxing, from my hip sockets my legs go down, pelvis rotates off the impact of my foot on the ground propelling me forward, relaxing my gaze, I see everything. Moments like these I’m able to take leave of my conceptual mind and blend into the movement and the natural surroundings. There is no dirt path, there is no sun, and there is no me, there is just awareness. It’s sublime! I’m reminded why I’m here.

I started studying the Alexander Technique a few months prior to this retreat. It seems to me that Alexander invented another approach to the Chinese internal practices (nei gong). Frederick Matthias Alexander was a late 19^th century Australian stage actor who lost his voice while trying to project his lines to the back of the old theaters before sound systems were invented. He went to a slew of doctors but wasn’t ready to accept their prescription of rest. Convinced the loss of his voice was brought on by something he was doing, he stood in front of a mirror for months and sang observing his every move. Finally, he realized what was causing him to lose his voice. He was pulling down in the front of his body, contracting his neck and shoulder muscles, and this habit was causing him to lose his voice. He realized that knowing about his habit allowed him to stop it. However, stopping his habit was not the same thing as changing it, that was the next piece of his movement puzzle that he had to figure out.

Alexander understood his habit was in his mind and that he had to catch himself before he engaged in the habit and then he was free to engage in new movements or behaviors that would achieve a different result. After months of arduous practice in a retreat setting very much like one, Alexander managed to regain his ability to project his voice, and never again lost it. He then went on to share this new knowledge with other performers, dubbing it the Alexander Technique. He came up with a few basic directions. “Let the neck be free, allow the head to go forward and up, spine lengthens, back and shoulders widen, allow the knees to go forward and away”, that’s it. I’ve been using his technique during my retreat, especially while walking to lunch every day. Back heel lifts, shifting weight forward, allow my neck to be free, spine lengthens, shoulders broaden, toes lift, knee swings forward and away from my hip, set the heel down, shift the weight, roll the foot.

Like his Chinese counter parts, Alexander’s method requires mindfulness and a deep attunement with the body that goes beyond thoughts about anatomy. I can feel my whole body as I move, although I’m walking in slow motion, the fluidity and control are unbelievable. Mentally repeating the directions acts as a mantra. In this way the mind doesn’t control as much as it inhibits distracting thoughts. I just repeat it over and over. The more I do it, the less I think about it and the more I start to “feel” them. This makes sense to me. It takes me about thirty minutes to reach the kitchen.

Third session

Returning to my hut I once again wrap my hands in cloth, so I can slide them on the wooden floorboards. I stand for a bit gathering my mind, regain my motivation and intention. Following lunch, I’m in no mood to resume the practice. It’s hot, I’m tired, I want to rest, even though I just rested. Then I remember why I’m here, in part to break these tiring habits that seem to define who I am and what I do. They continually sneak up on me. Arms up by way of the feet’s connection to the floor, I feel my arches engage, entire body bends forward as my toes grip the floor, hands take the weight, slide forward lay flat, move tailbone back and roll over toes, squat and raise up, lift the arms. It’s never as smooth or connected as I want it to be, too mechanical. When I first start the practice, it’s a bit bumpy and I conceptualize more than I’d like. My inner dialogue is louder than I’d prefer and it’s typically critical. I can’t quite get it through my head that it doesn’t matter what that voice says.

The most difficult part of the practice is when the disorganization of the mind and body set in. I lose the rhythm and just have to grind it out. I’m overwhelmed with a barrage of distracted, unwanted, thoughts that won’t stop. I start debating with my internal dialogue, I’m completely disembodied. This seems to happen after lunch quite frequently. I know my body can be a refuge, an opportunity to lose myself in the experience of the movements, but it doesn’t seem that way a lot of the time. My thoughts override the experience. My awareness is completely entangled in any thought that arises; I can’t sense my body in any real way. I’m feeling stuck, faking my way through the practice.

Every session has a different flavor, it’s not predictable. Whatever comes up, I just have to deal with it. Hands up, bend down, what’s that sensation on the inside of my knee, bend down touch the ground with hands, slide out, be careful on that knee, come up, stand up, lift arms, knee hurts, this can’t be good. What do I do if I get injured out here in this desolate canyon? I guess I’ll limp up and out of here. Mind is racing. The panic and anxiety are real. Arms up, bend down, slide hands, knees down, face down, roll back, stand, arms up, down, rest. That seemed a bit better. Focus more on the mantra, let the noise go, pain subsides, for a bit.

I eventually realize that my knee doesn’t hurt at all, it’s anxiety. My anxiety plays out as bodily sensations quite often. It’s easy to put mental anguish on the body. The body seems solid, real. We can see it, feel it, make some sense of it. If the body is injured, we can diagnose the problem. It’s seductive to experience mental pain as physical pain for this reason. Unlike the body the mind is not a material object, rather it’s experiential, continually changing, which makes it so difficult to work with. I want to develop the level of mindfulness needed to identify anxiety before suffering its adverse effects. Up whole-body awareness, soften mind, down, keep mind soft, allow thoughts to come and go, slide, reverse, stand, reach, rest. One thousand eight hundred and ninety-two.

I can think about the practice all day, but little will be gained, the embodied learning happens inside the practice. The more repetitions I do, the more is revealed. Insights arise all day long, every day. They are not huge things, but many little things arise in my mind, and I continually adjust, taking the advice. In this respect, my practice is continually changing, internally and externally. However, I’m sure there is very little noticeable change that anyone can see, and this is probably why most people will never do this practice, they just can’t see it.

Since the mind and the body are impermanent, they are changing moment to moment. This understanding allows me to not get caught up in any one moment. I know the inner dialogue will continue to arise, change, and dissolve and so there is no need to fight with it. When a habit arises, instead of fighting with it, I just recognize it and due to its impermanent nature, it arises, changes, and dissolves. To be able to recognize these continual fluctuations is one more step of discovery about the mind-body complex. The more I’m able to experience the impermanent changing nature of my mind and body there is less to do. I am gradually able to settle into the experience and stop trying to control this continually unfolding process.

Movement in this state becomes free and spontaneous. I don’t need to direct the body, the body knows what it’s doing, I can feel it all happening like a dream. I need to go beyond the mechanistic conception of my body. The mind and body have always existed in a non-dual state, an impermanently changing process, therefore there is nothing to “fix” or “build,” it’s simply a question of recognition. Up yang (expand), down yin (contract), sliding out yang, pulling back yin, stand up yang, rest in wuji (emptiness) undifferentiated, timeless.

Each session seems to go about three to four hours long. I do four, sometimes five sessions a day. In between sessions, I will take water breaks or go on a short walk. Today I’ll sit just outside my hut. I do my best to rest in the open expanse of my mind’s nature. It’s much easier to do in this isolated desert. The landscape is vast, I stare up and fill my mind with sky.

Fourth Session

By the end of the day my body is sore. I cannot get through the last session with grit alone; I need to let go. In some ways, the last session of the day is my favorite; I like feeling worn out with nothing left to give and then grind through. The way the desert changes as the sun sets is surreal. It’s other worldly and easier to collapse my sense of “I,” losing all sense of time and space. In this state I don’t need grit, I just let go of the struggle.

According to both traditional Tibetan medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine a practice like chak tsal is an ideal way to improve qi and blood circulation. Chak tsal combines the benefits of qigong, taiji, and other gong fu’s. Repeated, mindful physical exercise with regulated breathing enhances our energy which helps dispel symptoms of internal physical imbalances caused by poor qi circulation. It opens the joints or energy gates and invigorates the internal organs through the movement of repetitive bending, kneeling, stretching, and rising. When the conceptual mind dissolves, it stabilizes our emotions, leading to a balanced body and mind free of stress. In this way it is a very effective medicinal practice.

Both Tibetan and Traditional Chinese Medicine are based on a set of intangible "internal" channels or what in the literature is referred to as the meridian-collateral circulation systems. I find viewing the body through this lens is more conducive to embodiment. Thinking of the body as a fluid whole, an energetic process cuts through the materialistic objectification of the body that so often sets me at odds with my body, and even my surroundings. From this view my body and mind are immaterial which frees me up to move unrestrained by habits. Suddenly the soreness is gone and I’m only moving. There’s no objective self that is commanding my body to move, instead it’s just purely experiential. I do hundreds of these without experiencing any soreness or the passing of time. I continue the practice through the sunset, and into the night. Three thousand two hundred and twenty.

I conclude the day sitting in meditation. I make my evening tea and sit some more, gazing out at the night sky. There are so many stars, the desert landscape is completely illuminated. Finishing my tea, I unfold my sleeping mat and lay down on my back gazing up at the night. I fill my mind with the vastness of the night sky as I fall asleep.

Bryson Newell is the host of the Somatic Primer Podcast and the creator of the Somatic Restructuring education program at Vidya Method.

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I took my first few jogging steps gingerly, noticing twinges of discomfort here and there but nothing that screamed “STOP,” so I kept going. When I felt tired, I looked down at my wrist where I’d written in permanent marker two pairs of initials: those of my husband’s best friend who had just died from breast cancer, and those of my grandmother who was back home in New York in hospice care. I had been reluctant to leave her but knew she would have wanted me to finish what I started. I walked, shuffled, and jogged through the winding streets of Old San Juan watching the mile markers go by, sucking back energy gel packets and Dixie cups of Gatorade.

Other than some stinging in the cuts on my legs from where they scraped against the pavement, I felt no pain as I made my way through those 13.1 miles to the end of the race. Until, that is, the moment I crossed the finish line. My lower body stiffened, my quads as taut and rigid as rocks. I moved like the Tin Man before he finds his oil can, joints locked into place, and I could hardly bear weight on my left side. I limped to the medical tent where a volunteer cleaned and covered my cuts. “I think I might have some kind of other injury around my hip,” I told him. The suggestion was to send me to a local hospital, but I was on vacation and not about to waste time sitting in an emergency room, so off I waddled to where my friends were waiting.

Things got worse over the next few days, and by the time I attempted to climb into the back of the SUV waiting to pick me up from the airport, I had to wrap both hands under my left quadricep in order to lift my leg into the vehicle. When I finally made it to a doctor, he sent me for an MRI, although knowing that I had completed a 13.1 mile course after my fall, he didn’t expect to find any significant injury.

A few hours later, he called with the news. “I have the results of your MRI,” he said, in a slow measured tone. “Your hip is cracked in three places. I have no idea how you finished that race.”

“How else was I going to get home?” I joked.

I was half serious, but in the aftermath of the injury and diagnosis, and the months of physical therapy and running on an anti-gravity treadmill, I also wondered how I pulled that off. When I stub my toe or smash my elbow on a doorframe (both of which happen with concerning regularity) there’s a lot of yelped expletives and grunting and sometimes tears. And yet, I caused actual fissures in my bone during that fall and felt no pain while I slammed the connecting bones and tissue into the pavement for two hours. How on earth is that possible?

Does the brain choose when to interpret pain as a challenge, and when to see it as suffering?

How is it that the pain we feel during a physical feat that we’ve willingly submitted to is somehow less than one we’ve stumbled into?

Some of the answer may have to do with purpose and some of it may have to do with fear. When I crashed my bike, I would have felt two strong emotions: fear of having to admit defeat and take a DNF (Did Not Finish) in the race, and an intense pull to finish the race so that my trip there, away from my family, would be worth it.

In the book Extreme Fear, Jeff Wise writes, “When we find ourselves under intense pressure, fear unleashes reserves of energy that normally remain inaccessible.” He goes on to explain that in situations in which our fight-or-flight response is activated, one of the changes the body goes through is the release of pain-deadening chemicals into the brain.

It is also possible that in some scenarios, our purpose for doing something overrides any limits our bodies sense. Perhaps that’s why a professional basketball player remains on the court during a playoff game, despite an obvious injury, or how a strongman athlete literally tears a biceps muscle off the bone before dropping a weight. Or how one of the most memorable Ironman finishes in history played out.

“The legs are there, you just can’t feel them. The eyes see but through a gauzy veil of delirium,” the announcer says, as we watch athlete Sian Welch stumble towards the finish line the 1997 Ironman in Hawaii. She crumples to the ground, her right leg buckling under her like a baby deer. She gets back up. “At this point, Sian Welch is aware of two things: the finish line is so close. And someone is so close behind,” the announcer says.  

Less than 100 feet from the finish line, and with her closest competitor, Wendy Ingraham, quickly gaining on her, Welch falls again. She gets up and takes a few more stumbling steps. Then she falls again. She stands with the aid of a metal barrier, then tumbles to the ground. Ingraham, whose legs look in as much if not more pain as Welch’s, duck-walks her way towards the end, then falls to the ground directly behind Welch. For an agonizing 15 seconds, they both press their hands into the pavement, hoping to rely on the strength of their arms to rise to standing, but their legs won’t hold. Finally, Ingraham begins to crawl and you see just how close they are to the end: a mere few feet. Ingraham crosses the line on all fours, and Welch follows closely behind. Neither can stand up. As we watch race volunteers hoist their limp bodies, the announcer suggests: “Their bodies were obliterated, but the spirit held firm.”

I’m not suggesting we all play through injuries, but the notion that we can choose when to see discomfort as a limiting factor and when to see it as a chance to persevere is captivating. There’s a sense that maybe our perceived limits are just that: our perception. Maybe we have more in the tank, can go further, harder, and faster than we believe. What if the only thing limiting us from what we can achieve is our mental game?

“You can never give up the fight for pain—that is only temporary,” Ingraham told Triathlete Magazine in 2013. “I would not have known how to do the race any differently. It was the day that was given to me; it ended how it was supposed to.”

Alyssa Ages is the author of Secrets of Giants: A Journey to Uncover the True Meaning of Strength (Avery, 9/12/23), a journalist, and a strongwoman athlete.

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A number of years ago, during a period when I was experiencing higher than usual stress, I made the genius decision…no, I didn’t even decide, I blindly backed into countering that life stress not with yoga or diazepam, but with more stress, albeit of a different type. My day job was editing a contemporary art magazine, while most of the rest of my time was spent trying to finish a book. Two deadlines for the book had passed, the current one was, my agent and editor warned me, an edict from god. And I’d taken a substantial (for me) advance, so there was no backing out. Yet, rather than unwind each day after work by vegging out on videos or by writing or drinking at art or literary events, which would have at least advanced my professional life, I began to wind things even tighter—by getting serious about lifting heavy barbells over my head.

When done artfully this activity is sometimes called weightlifting. I say sometimes because weightlifting is an obscure and neglected pursuit, of interest largely to introverts who prefer numbers or books to socializing. A measure of its obscurity and neglect is the fact that it doesn’t even have a commonly accepted name. For the majority of gym-goers, weightlifting refers to almost anything you do with weights, from bodybuilding to powerlifting to just messing around, and so to clear up—or add to—the confusion the sport is often referred to as Olympic lifting, because its two components, the snatch and the clean-and-jerk, comprise the only barbell sport in the Olympic Games. Yet because it demands the production of the most power of any barbell activity, weightlifting is often confused with its more extroverted cousin, powerlifting, which would be a more appropriate moniker were it not already taken.

Initially I took up weightlifting just to get better at CrossFit, which incorporates the lifts, and which I’d begun in order to get as fit as possible. After all, I was rapidly sliding into middle age: staying in the best shape I could seemed a reasonable response. In retrospect, I also wanted to look good—in clothing and out—although at the time I didn’t acknowledge, or even realize, this fact, in part because I didn’t need to. I was biking to the gym six days a week in order to be fit and, I believed, I didn’t care what that looked like, as long as, I told myself, I performed better and better.

But only saints and a few born puritans don’t worry about what they look like, and I am far from either. At my CrossFit box I was known as Eight-pack Dan, because I never met a shirt I didn’t want to rip off. Weightlifting would change all that: as soon as I lost the abs, I kept my torso well hidden under large T-shirts, while being demoted from Eight-pack to Old Dan.

Despite a lifelong aversion to wearing clothes, I do appreciate fashion. Our second skin is a daily expression of who we are or aspire to be: I care about cut and color, feel and fabric, and how those things make me look and what they say about who I am. Unfortunately, I soon found that my new stress intensifier refused to cooperate with my taste in clothes. I have, for instance, always been a skinny jeans guy, in part because I’ve always been relatively thin. Not rocker thin, not a tall Ramone who needs to peg even the narrowest of pants, but a shortish mesomorph with a long torso, stubby limbs, and not much extra fat. It’s a build, I would eventually learn, that is well suited to weightlifting. Weightlifting, however, is not at all suited to fashion. If skinny jeans are the sexy, teen idol of the pants world, weightlifters are the baggy, faded, sky-blue dad jeans of the sporting world. When you practice it, you spend your days squatting (front and back, as well as with the bar overhead, in the snatch), which bulks your quads like yeast causing rolls of dough to expand, and fashion, be it men’s or women’s, famously cowers at thunder thighs. And designers, it seems, loathe a juicy bottom.

After a few years of squatting and pulling heavy weights, I could no longer shove my calves through the leg holes of skinny jeans, and I felt like I needed to rent out an extra room for my quads. My shirts ticked up a size (which is fine if they’re Ts but turns dress shirts and other types into tents). This was a while ago, before the widespread advent of Lycra-infused apparel, but it remains pertinent. For ages I’d been exercising under the delusion that it was all about what my body could do, while delighting in my prominent inguinal crease and the lines I created in clothing. It wasn’t until I’d spent months weightlifting exclusively that I came to see what training for performance, as opposed to health, really means—it means sacrifice.

Performance, of which sport is the most obvious physical expression, deforms—or rather forms—us. The tennis player’s unequal forearm hypertrophy, the gymnast’s upper-body development, the size of a lineman in American football or Japanese sumo. To perform, one must prioritize certain qualities at the expense of others, most notably aspects of health. Which is to say, the aims of performance do not always square up with those of health or fitness: if I focus my training on my results in the snatch and clean-and-jerk, I inevitably neglect aspects of cardio-respiratory fitness, of deadlift strength, and, to some degree, of my overall muscle mass.

And, as I mentioned, I am formed by my practice in a particular way: my quads have grown too large for skinny jeans, while my back is expanding beyond the bounds of what even an imaginative tailor might cut for. Stylish clothing, it will shock no one to say, is designed for a very specific silhouette, one that for men is thin, with long narrow legs, a wispy waist, and rangy shoulders. That is as true today as it was then, although now we also have the great boon of athleisure. Back then, however, I realized that either the squats had to go or my commitment to fashionable clothing, and so I abandoned my trousers and button-downs and sports coats in favor of sweats, shorts, and T shirts.

Physical practices have long changed modes of dress, and in turn these sartorial swings have both reflected and helped foster socio-political shifts. In the late 19^th century, the advent of the bicycle led to the acceptance of trouser-wearing by women, and the two together allowed women far greater independence, of movement but also of general agency. A woman could leave the house to travel far, unchaperoned by a man. A couple of decades of bicycle-riding, trouser-wearing women resulted in American and British women garnering the right to vote. Toward the end of the 20^th century, jogging and aerobics informed feminism and the sexual revolution in producing the sports bra, again providing women with greater freedom of physical self-expression, while at the same time demolishing long-held standards of modesty and formality.

Now, it’s not that I imagine that my sweats somehow delivered me from oppression by some junta of the long and thin. But it does seem interesting to consider how the world has changed in the era of ubiquitous #legproblems.

Observers of culture tend to see athleisure as a sort of extension of the style revolution of the sixties: a rejection of formality in favor youthfulness. It is those things, however I think we can go deeper than that. The replacement (by only a portion of the population, of course) of boxy suits and oversized shirts by sweats or gym tights represents an evolution from draping the body—denying it, hiding it, out of sight and mind—to spotlighting how it looks, broadcasting our shape and contours, as well of course with how it performs. Your dad and granddad’s suits did not allow for crouching and crawling, kicking and running, twisting or leaping. And baggy though they were, those suits, like todays tighter ones, did not allow for legs built by squatting or deadlifting, for big legs, despite what one can do with them, were regarded as ungainly, uncouth, and unaesthetic. The cultural modification of athleisure prioritizes movement and plasticity, the ability to change and do, rather than camouflaging our decay and eventual decrepitude.

Of course, decline is inevitable. The kilos you once added to the bar are now steadily subtracted. Maintaining one’s general fitness as a stay against age makes sense, less so stubbornly trying to compete in weightlifting. Doing so in your forties makes about as much sense as deciding to become a gymnast at that age: you’re suddenly demanding from yourself absurd levels of flexibility, speed, strength, power, and balance. Why train and strive for peak performances at all as we age, especially as those peaks sadly jut with less and less amplitude?

Here the comparison with CrossFit is useful. Like bikers, swimmers, and runners, CrossFitters practice the art of suffering: the more pain you can take the better you do. Weightlifters, by contrast, suffer for art. Despite the fact that they train neither to look good in clothes or out (both of which involve dieting down to body-fat levels that tend to hinder performance in strength sports), weightlifters are in fact quite preoccupied with aesthetics. This may seem like an odd thing to say: there are no style points in weightlifting; it is judged solely on an objective criterion, the combined weight of your best snatch and clean-and-jerk on a given day. And yet those of us who are fans of the sport attend not to the numbers per se but to the beauty of an athlete’s movement. In the vast majority of instances, the weight you see lifted in competition, in training, or on social media are weights you’ve seen made a hundred times. Nobody shows up to a meet to find out what it looks like when a woman snatches 110 kg, as impressive as that is—because we’ve all seen it, and we’ll probably see it several more times that day. Sure, every once in a while someone hoists a truly huge weight, breaking a record, but we don’t spend hour upon hour watching solely in hope of glimpsing the all-time best numbers inching upward. Rather we follow the lifter’s limbs the way an audience gazes on a dancer’s—and in fact the comparison is especially apt. We’re at a weightlifting meet for the ballet the lifter dances with the bar, and thus hers is a performance both in the theatrical, or entertainment, sense as well as the athletic sense. For seasoned viewers, the aesthetics of a lift portends the future, for the prettier the movement the more efficient it is, and efficiency lends itself to heavier lifts. Once you’ve recognized that fact, you come to understand that the weight on the bar is simply a measure of how challenging it is to move well around it.

So challenging, in fact, that I often think those of us who bother with this sport of no name (and a nearly equal number of fans) suffer from a genetic predisposition to futility. Those who spend time on the lifts tend to do so out of what Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult.” When I first saw people flinging up terrific weights with lubricated ease, I knew I had to try it. Who wouldn’t want to take a heavy deadlift, propel it upward just high enough so that you can squeak under it in the hope that you’ll be strong enough in that absurd squatting position to “receive” the bar, which happens to be crashing on you like a refrigerator tipped out a window? What I found is that few things will expose your limitations like the snatch and clean-and-jerk. Even with the lightest of weights, the physical precision required was beyond my capacity; I felt estranged from my body, like it was a puppet jerking around; the flexibility required seemed unreasonable. The accuracy of movement is similar to hitting a tennis ball or a golf ball or pitching a baseball, except it differs in two respects. First, as my coach once said, weightlifting combines a throw—propelling the bar upward with the legs in the snatch, clean, and jerk—followed, in hundredths of a second, by a reversal of the nervous system and structure, an instant drive down into a catch, be it at the bottom of the snatch, the clean, or the jerk. To do this at all is difficult (try it with a broomstick), but to do it with flair, striking with whip-like speed, only to stop as in freeze-frame, fully locked out, with no wobble, with nothing less than perfect control and balance, is, depending on your point of view, either the height of physical art or about as sensible as imitating Wile E. Coyote. Second, instead of a ball that weighs ounces, you are throwing and catching the maximum weight your strength will allow. If all this felt impossible, there was, I recognized, an upside: mastery seemed unlikely. This struggle, to maybe one day move like a dancer around the bar, would likely never go stale.

To the outsider, however, the idea of weightlifting often seems as boringly basic, as repetitive as breathing: you pick something up and put it over your head. And therein lies the great paradox of weightlifting, how something so simple can be impenetrably complex. Every micro-adjustment to your positioning alters the trajectory of the bar, every stray thought that wafts through the mind affects your posture and speed and effort, knocking you off course, and yet only one minutely specific bar-path leads to success.

One day I run into a friend who tells me she is just back from a meditation retreat in Colorado. I approve, saying I think meditation is an excellent thing to do. “Oh, do you meditate?” she asks.

​“No, I get the same thing in other places.”

​“I did too, mostly from really intense exercise, but that can amp you up so much. Seated meditation is more calming.”

​“I get it,” I reply.

And I do. Then I take pity on her, and instead of pinning her to the sidewalk and forcing yet another of my impassioned monologues on her, I change the subject. What I want to say is that shifting weight to the lifter is even more absorbing than breathing is to the meditator, for it is unique in requiring a frictionless back-and-forth between tranquil relaxation and desperate tension. Consider, for example, the tongue of the magnificent Uzbek lifter Ruslan Nurudinov as he sets up in front of a bar loaded with 180kg (that’s 396lbs). He squats, takes a wide grip on the bar, that tongue lolling out as he lifts this weight to and then past his knee, and only as he flings it past his bellybutton, dropping under the weight, does he draw the tongue in briefly before it seeks the air again as he catches this enormous mass in a full squat and stands with it. Imagine being so unconcerned with biting your tongue off that you can receive, dynamically and over your head, some 400lbs, brace for it, yet be so unclenched, so relaxed, that you can stick your tongue out over your teeth for the entire several seconds. That ease is necessary to move fast enough to execute the lift—a taut whip doesn’t strike.

Rather than abolishing stress, replacing it with meditative calm, a weightlifter focuses on properly assigning tension, putting it in its place, as it were, in the back muscles, for instance, while the arms remain limp. That practice of assigning tension, of flowing between maximum tightness and complete relaxation, allows you to employ stress to achieve an end that will leave you at ease, because once you put the barbell overhead, you can drop it and walk away.

Unless, of course, you’re training, in which case you return to the bar again and again like a hapless character stuck in a video loop. Yet if that were all it is, repeated action on a loop, there would not be much of a lure, especially when you’ve trained long enough to know you’re unlikely to match your best results. Indeed, it is this excessive difficulty that causes many, even young lifters with years of personal records ahead of them, to quit weightlifting. In training, however, you are not a hapless character replicating the same movements endlessly, rather you are a protagonist constantly trying to outdo yourself. So, while the pull of training is training itself, the appreciation of attempting to master movements, it is also forms a structure through which we create meaning. The program we follow represents an abstract ideal to which we aspire—I will snatch this number, squat that, do these many sets with a projected amount of effort—while the daily work in the gym is the manifestation of those ideals. Each session produces a new story, as we, the protagonists, seek to embody our ideals each day. The training hall tells the story of our abilities, our limits, the speed of our growth, our injuries, our mental impediments, our fears, our desires, our needs, and our capacity to adapt.

The narrative of training tends to be about hope, the narrative of the platform, of competition, tends toward nerves, frustration, and sadness, punctuated by flickers of expansive joy, or so I’m told. To compete during the consistent-improvement phases of life makes sense: the exhilaration makes up for the pain and ennui of getting to the platform. But what about the rest of us? Given that we see techies of advancing years trying daily to advance through digital pelotons, CEOs rolling in a death grip on jiu-jitsu mats, grandmothers breaking powerlifting records; given that, in other words, whole tranches of previously desk- or home-bound individuals have become masters athletes suggests that my urge to get better at getting worse is not a unique passion. It stems, I think, from the quest for a kind of suppleness.  

As we get older, we are less drawn to difficult, dangerous, anxiety-provoking situations. And so it’s not at all strange that sometimes, usually early in a training cycle when the weights are lighter, I find myself relieved that I don’t have the pressure of going into the gym to hit weights that are 90 percent or higher; relieved that a failure today doesn’t indicate anything about how I will perform in a couple of weeks or days. What is perhaps weird is how reliably I return to competition and the months of stress and anxiety that precede it, and which can make training a fretful, almost feared part of my day. Why put oneself through that, especially once you’ve proven to yourself—and maybe others—that you can prevail over the mental, emotional, and physical obstacles of difficulty? The short answer is doing so makes me feel alive. But what I mean by that sort of aliveness (as opposed to say, the aliveness one feels relaxing on a beach in the sun) is important. Meeting the anxiety of having to perform on a given day, responding to the pressure of the moment, even when the day doesn’t go well, entails adapting to these emotional and mental stressors, becoming a little more efficient and consistent in my movements (even as something within me is trying to render me more complacent and ossified), which itself entails becoming a little less interested, or invested, in the outcome of my attempts and thus emotionally more pliable. In other words, those periods of unpleasantness—and it is important that they come within the context of something I love, training—make me more plastic, more open to change. Change is life; plasticity the ability to adapt to it.

That said, what we mean by life is changing; has changed. Life expectancy hundred years ago would put me now at the very end of mine, instead of being near the middle, with perhaps four more decades ahead of me. Almost another lifetime of anxieties and hassles and traumas inevitably rolling over me like the next set of waves in heavy surf. The weightlifter in me responds in two ways. He strives to lift in the most efficient way possible, thereby maximizing his strength, because dealing with resistance efficiently, training to do so, might make the other forms of resistance life affords a bit more manageable. But wait, the weightlifter doesn’t avoid resistance, he strives to take on more and more. He knows that stress is the engine of life, that without it we cannot adapt, and that when we cease to adapt, we face extinction. He knows that the day will come when the fine line of a tapered pant is no longer his line, but if he can avoid sclerosis, training himself not to look back through the rosy lens of sentimentality, back to the good old days when things seemed to fit comfortably, he can find other ways of cutting a figure, being artful.

Daniel Kunitz is the author of Lift: Fitness Culture from Naked Greeks and Amazons to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he is the editor at large of Ultraphysical as well as editor in chief of Sculpture magazine.

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