A dialogue with our past
I once believed, and perhaps a part of me still does, that strength and physical aesthetics is a matter of inputs and outputs: a given expenditure of effort in the three areas of proper diet, sleep, and training. The cumulative result being that how your body will look and perform is how you envisioned it from the beginning. But anyone who has consistently trained over the years knows that this is not the case. While it is true that we have a significant amount of control in how we direct our bodies in order to look or perform a certain way, at a certain point, we encounter what our genetics is really able to offer us. For many, this discovery that we simply don’t have the desirable amount of lean muscle mass in our calves or forearms—two areas which are arguably the most difficult to stimulate relative to other parts of our bodies—is met with indignation. A smaller minority may take this as a kind of challenge, but I’d surmise that the vast majority of lifters don’t quite hold this view.
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:
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.