Plague of Strength

After spending the last 48 hours acting like Charlie hunting down that slippery fuck Pepe Silvia in an effort to explain the desperately weird roots of the decidedly non-Japanese martial arts family known as karate, I came to the realization that some of my best work has been other-than-wholly intellectual. If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been leaning hard into the edu- side of edutainment recently, for reasons I couldn’t possibly ascertain, but just as with my interest in specific strength sports, my interest in intellectual topics is streakier than the screen of a video booth in a seedy porn shop. Looking back over the years, I’ve gone in definite waves of erudition and vulgar displays of intellectual power, and though I’m currently on the research tip, circumstances dictate that I fire up the fucking hyperdrive and set people straight, because most of you are acting like a pack of small, weak, mentally feeble children with the gym shutdown going on.

The fact that people are spazzing should not come as a shock to me, yet it does. humanity has a knack for having the ability to fail to fulfill even the feeblest fucking faith in the awesomeness of our species, and this week’s nonsense should only surprise optimists like myself who refuse to believe in the reality of humans as a species of trembling yet violent omnivorous herd animals. And as much as you might like to think it’s one, that’s really not an opinion- it’s confirmed by social scientists.

“At heart, human beings are not brave, self-reliant innovators, but careful if savvy conformists. We perform and imitate apparently impractical actions because doing so is the key to learning complex cultural skills, and because rituals create and sustain the cultural identities and solidarity we depend on for survival. Indeed, copying others is a powerful way to establish social rapport. For example, mimicking another’s body language can induce them to like and trust you more” (Wood).

I realize that in these times of tumult, it is natural to seek some kind of solace in routine, but if you ignore the uniqueness of the situation you face, in addition to the newfound freedom to do what you will, you’ll have missed a valuable lesson to be gleaned from this quarantine. You’ll miss your chance to be a proverbial Audie Murphy. Where you could have shone as a legend you instead chose to seek shelter in the middle of the herd. Perhaps if you are content to be simply one of many this won’t bother you, but if you have an interest in perhaps being a person people will remember long after you leave the planet, forging your own path is a necessary, if occasionally painful, evil you must endure.

“I, who wish to be free, cannot do so, because around me are men who do not yet desire freedom, and not desiring it, become, as opposed to me, the instruments of my oppression.”

– Michael Bakunin

Like Bakunin, I find myself invariably fucking constrained by the attitudes around me that scream for compliance to social norms that turns my fucking stomach. If you people want to freak the fuck out and feel that having an Excel spreadsheet laying out sets and reps for fucking pullups will make you a better person, you really should look into whatever method of dispatch is most convenient and expedient for relinquishing your feeble clutches on life. You don’t need a goddamn program for sporadic, daylong exercise any more than you need one for breathing or shitting.

You’re a fucking adult- grab your junk and act like one. Waving your proverbial arms in the air and screeching about your plight on social media makes you look like nothing more than a fucking coward and a weakling. If that’s your bag, dope for you- now fuck off, because if you look at the historical record, you find people who faced far more adversity and came out on top than you will ever face.

• Bruno Sammartino, who was a war refugee foraging for food in the countryside into his tweens;
• Hermann Goerner, who fought in World War One and lost an eye and a bunch of flesh to 200 pieces of shrapnel before becoming a professional strongman, then continued lifting heavy even after spending time in a Nazi concentration camp for his membership in a Workers’ party and a Russian POW camp after the war;
• Monohar Aich, who spent years in a horrible backwater British jail in India after slapping a British officer for insulting India but went on to squat 660 at 154 thereafter.

“With no equipment whatsoever, Aich would practise on his own, sometimes for “12 hours in a day”, pumping iron in his body with sheer determination. Touched, and impressed, by Aich’s perseverance and exemplary conduct, the jail authorities arranged for a special diet enriched with stimulants for him to build his stamina” (Pandya).

If you would care to act like a goddamn adult with dignity and self-respect, I have written at great length about how I trained in jail and how others around the country train in jail, in addition to a multitude of articles about bodyweight training. If you are at a loss for something to do, it’s not that you lack the knowledge necessary to get shit done in quarantine- it’s that you lack the fucking will to get jacked with limited resources.

Here are a few articles that should light a fire under your ass for the next couple of weeks:

I Ain’t Sweet Like That- Dieting and Training in Lockup, Part 1

I Ain’t Sweet Like That- Dieting and Training in Lockup, Part 2

I Ain’t Sweet Like That- Dieting and Training in Lockup, Part 3

You Don’t Have to Train in a Gym to Be a Jacked Badass- Bodyweight Training of the Experts 

It’s Time To Stop Mocking Indians For Their Clubbells #3: Yoga, The Indian Way, Is Actually Fucking Badass

It’s Time To Stop Mocking Indians For Their Clubbells #5- Training Like A Pehlwan

I personally have just been picking a bodypart or movement and then just doing it all day long, be it band curls, pullups, TRX pec flies, TRX arms, free squats, or band overhead presses. The volume has me incessantly pumped and slightly sore, and I am willing to bet I come out of this bigger and as strong as I was when I went in, even if the gym band runs to a month and I do it all weightless. At present, my various workout apparatus amounts to a pullup bar I got on Amazon, a knockoff TRX setup I got on Amazon, some Elite FTS bands of various strengths, and an ab wheel. Though we’re considering going to local junkyards and looking for scrap weights, we’re trying to conserve as much money as possible in the event the quarantine drags on. One thing I am considering adding to the mix is a Gorilla bow and their ultra-heavy resistance band set, which gives 320lbs of resistance. That thing in total would be $230 bucks and looks like it could give anyone a decent workout at that price.

Frankly, this shit would have been far more convenient ten years ago, before the posers decided that it was Eleiko or nothing- you used to be able to get crappy plates for $.30 a pound, and now everything is a buck and more a pound, which is preposterous. Why weak-ass noob dickheads insist on training with machined-to-molecular-exactness plates is a mystery I’ll never solve, but at this point I can’t ascertain the reasoning behind most peoples’ actions beyond sheer stupidity.

If you get nothing more out of this article than one sentence, let it be this- if I can get in good workouts sans weights, anyone can. At present I can generally get a few decent singles with 495 on front squat even without doing legs more than once every ten or fourteen days, and I’d be perfectly fine with or without repping 320 pounds for hours at a time for a few weeks. All of my training weights are on par with that, and I’m gonna be just fine with a bow and some heavy bands, so it stands to reason you lot should as well. In fact, I will likely end up with better legs at the end of a month with the Gorilla bow than I had before the use of the thing, because it’s not like there’s shit else to do but get jacked and clean the fucking house.

Try Mike Tyson’s jail squat workout.

Go running.

Drunkenly lift river rock.

Do a fuckload of pullups and pushups.

Or just do literally anything other than what most of you seem to have been doing, which is bitch endlessly about what you can’t do or things about which you can do absolutely nothing (like whatever other people are busy doing).

Figure out what you can do, then do the holy fuck out of that.

Next thing to drop will be Fustigation Fury: Training To Fight From The Primeval To The Present, Part 5- Everything You “Know” About Karate is Wrong, which is nearing some semblance of completion now.

Sources:

Pandya, Haresh.  Manohar Aich: the father of Indian bodybuilding.  Outlook India.  12 Jun 2016.  Web.  23 Mar 2020.  https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/manohar-aich-the-father-of-indian-bodybuilding/296960

Wood, Connor.  Being copycats might be key to being human.  The Conversation.  14 Jan 2020.  Web.  23 Mar 2020.  https://theconversation.com/being-copycats-might-be-key-to-being-human-121932

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