"I hereby resign from the weight hoisting douchebag society"

[David Boxen]

Even if you don't agree about absolutely everything, that guy always provides an entertaining read.

[Brady]

Haha, I do all the same things but sub martials arts for yoga. Simply because I need some underlying goal to work for.

[Chris Fleming]

Sounds a little douche baggy if you ask me. Why does being able to lift heavy weights equal injury or violence for that matter?

A different perspective:

By Henry Rollins

I believe that the definition of definition is reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself.
Completely.

When I was young I had no sense of myself. All I was, was a product of all the fear and humiliation I suffered. Fear of my parents. The humiliation of teachers calling me "garbage can" and telling me I'd be mowing lawns for a living. And the very real terror of my fellow students. I was threatened and beaten up for the color of my skin and my size. I was skinny and clumsy, and when others would tease me I didn't run home crying, wondering why. I knew all too well. I was there to be antagonized. In sports I was laughed at. A spaz. I was pretty good at boxing but only because the rage that filled my every waking moment made me wild and unpredictable. I fought with some strange fury. The other boys thought I was crazy.

I hated myself all the time. As stupid at it seems now, I wanted to talk like them, dress like them, carry myself with the ease of knowing that I wasn't going to get pounded in the hallway between classes. Years passed and I learned to keep it all inside. I only talked to a few boys in my grade. Other losers. Some of them are to this day the greatest people I have ever known. Hang out with a guy who has had his head flushed down a toilet a few times, treat him with respect, and you'll find a faithful friend forever. But even with friends, school sucked. Teachers gave me hard time. I didn't think much of them either.

Then came Mr. Pepperman, my advisor. He was a powerfully built Vietnam veteran, and he was scary. No one ever talked out of turn in his class.Once one kid did and Mr. P. lifted him off the ground and pinned him to the blackboard. Mr. P. could see that I was in bad shape, and one Friday in October he asked me if I had ever worked out with weights. I told him no. He told me that I was going to take some of the money that I had saved and buy a hundred-pound set of weights at Sears. As I left his office, I started to think of things I would say to him on Monday when he asked about the weights that I was not going to buy. Still, it made me feel special. My father never really got that close to caring. On Saturday I bought the weights, but I couldn't even drag them to my mom's car. An attendant laughed at me as he put them on a dolly.

Monday came and I was called into Mr. P.'s office after school. He said that he was going to show me how to work out. He was going to put me on a program and start hitting me in the solar plexus in the hallway when I wasn't looking. When I could take the punch we would know that we were getting somewhere. At no time was I to look at myself in the mirror or tell anyone at school what I was doing. In the gym he showed me ten basic exercises. I paid more attention than I ever did in any of my classes. I didn't want to blow it. I went home that night and started right in.

Weeks passed, and every once in a while Mr. P. would give me a shot and drop me in the hallway, sending my books flying. The other students didn't know what to think. More weeks passed, and I was steadily adding new weights to the bar. I could sense the power inside my body growing. I could feel it.

Right before Christmas break I was walking to class, and from out of nowhere Mr. Pepperman appeared and gave me a shot in the chest. I laughed and kept going. He said I could look at myself now. I got home and ran to the bathroom and pulled off my shirt. I saw a body, not just the shell that housed my stomach and my heart. My biceps bulged. My chest had definition. I felt strong. It was the first time I can remember having a sense of myself. I had done something and no one could ever take it away. You couldn't say &&*@ to me.

It took me years to fully appreciate the value of the lessons I have
learned from the Iron. I used to think that it was my adversary, that I was trying to lift that which does not want to be lifted. I was
wrong. When the Iron doesn't want to come off the mat, it's the kindest thing it can do for you. If it flew up and went through the ceiling, it wouldn't teach you anything. That's the way the Iron talks to you. It tells you that the material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you.

It wasn't until my late twenties that I learned that by working out I had given myself a great gift. I learned that nothing good comes without work and a certain amount of pain. When I finish a set that leaves me shaking, I know more about myself. When something gets bad, I know it can't be as bad as that workout.

I used to fight the pain, but recently this became clear to me: pain is not my enemy; it is my call to greatness. But when dealing with the Iron, one must be careful to interpret the pain correctly. Most injuries involving the Iron come from ego. I once spent a few weeks lifting weight that my body wasn't ready for and spent a few months not picking up anything heavier than a fork. Try to lift what you're not prepared to and the Iron will teach you a little lesson in restraint and self-control.

I have never met a truly strong person who didn't have self-respect. I think a lot of inwardly and outwardly directed contempt passes itself off as self-respect: the idea of raising yourself by stepping on someone's shoulders instead of doing it yourself. When I see guys working out for cosmetic reasons, I see vanity exposing them in the worst way, as cartoon characters, billboards for imbalance and insecurity. Strength reveals itself through character. It is the difference between bouncers who get off strong-arming people and Mr.Pepperman.

Muscle mass does not always equal strength. Strength is kindness and sensitivity. Strength is understanding that your power is both physical and emotional. That it comes from the body and the mind. And the heart.

Yukio Mishima said that he could not entertain the idea of romance if he was not strong. Romance is such a strong and overwhelming passion, a weakened body cannot sustain it for long. I have some of my most romantic thoughts when I am with the Iron. Once I was in love with a woman. I thought about her the most when the pain from a workout was racing through my body.

Everything in me wanted her. So much so that sex was only a fraction of my total desire. It was the single most intense love I have ever felt, but she lived far away and I didn't see her very often. Working out was a healthy way of dealing with the loneliness. To this day, when I work out I usually listen to ballads.

I prefer to work out alone. It enables me to concentrate on the lessons that the Iron has for me. Learning about what you're made of is always time well spent, and I have found no better teacher. The Iron had taught me how to live. Life is capable of driving you out of your mind. The way it all comes down these days, it's some kind of miracle if you're not insane. People have become separated from their bodies. They are no longer whole.

I see them move from their offices to their cars and on to their suburban homes. They stress out constantly, they lose sleep, they eat badly. And they behave badly. Their egos run wild; they become motivated by that which will eventually give them a massive stroke. They need the Iron Mind.

Through the years, I have combined meditation, action, and the Iron into a single strength. I believe that when the body is strong, the mind thinks strong thoughts. Time spent away from the Iron makes my mind degenerate. I wallow in a thick depression. My body shuts down my mind.

The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found. There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, it's impossible to turn back.

The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you're a god or a total *******. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.
__________________

[cerebus]

Hah hah!! Sounds alot like me (the first post, that is)! I had been doing crazy levels of heavy strength training (like 3 sets of full-hang pullups with an 85 lb. rucksack on my back, for one thing), now I'm just doing yoga, cardio, Tai Chi and standing post practice...

[Dmitri]

3 sets of full-hang pullups with an 85 lb. rucksack on my back

I almost read it as "on my sack"... Now THAT would be truly high-level internal accomplishment.

[Brady]

Sounds a little douche baggy if you ask me. Why does being able to lift heavy weights equal injury or violence for that matter?

I just skimmed the original article, missed that. If lifting weights hurts this guy, then his yoga is not gonna do him much good. I think he needs to learn to rassle haha.

[cerebus]

3 sets of full-hang pullups with an 85 lb. rucksack on my back

I almost read it as "on my sack"... Now THAT would be truly high-level internal accomplishment.

[Formosa Neijia]

Let a hundred mid-life crises bloom!

http://moynihaninstitute.com/

I am also getting to the age where I have to decide what it is that I want to accomplish. Do I want to be the big shot on internet forums, blow out my shoulders and knees all in the name of being consistent or hard core or some such bullshit? When I was participating at Irongarm the rank and file

You read Rant's stuff? That's his handle over at Irongarm.com. He's a hoot. They chide him all the time over there because he reverses himself about every other month. He argues against heavy lifting then goes and does nothing but next month.

Actually if you keep reading his veering this way and that, you'll see that he's really just doing a natural form of periodization but doesn't seem to realize it. He does KBs, etc. and then when his body's had enough, he goes to softer things. It all makes sense.

He's very entertaining.

Dave C.

[GrahamB]

Both Rollins and Moynihan - same thing.

We are all falling from a 10th floor window and we're going to hit the ground, no matter what. We all want something to stop us hitting the ground - mellow yoga, pumping iron - both are the same thing. It's ok, so long as we know that it won't stop us hitting the ground, yet we (the universal we, everyone, not just those two) never do - we think it's going to halt our fall, and we fool ourselves time and time again. My preferred illusion of choice is chi kung and IMA -what's yours?

(Badly paraphrased from ideas expressed by Charlotte Joko Beck in the Fall.)

[Chris Fleming]

If we follow that thinking Graham, then it would be wise to break the illusion and just give up now and stop wasting all that effort and just do something else. I don't buy it. Not the fact that we are going to get old and die at some point, but the notion that training is an illusion that makes us think that we somehow won't die thus really doesn't matter. Sounds like a funny "all-is-relative" philosophy. Now, of course, this guy and Rollins can take whatever training method they want, I was just wondering how it is that weight lifting automatically leads to violence and injury.

Personally, I am training because I want a better quality of health NOW, as well as in the future. If you look at the health problems of those who don't do some kind of training, you'll see (and of course you all know this) that they are in some bad shape LONG before they die. Why spend the last decades of your life dying?

[GrahamB]

What we do as human beings (which is a complete waste of time ) is spend all our time trying to mentally scheme so that we'll never have to suffer through a crisis, such as being seriously ill, for example. We put all our energies into trying to be liked, successful, agreeable, assertive (or non-assertive) depending on what we think will do it for us. Like Rollins did, like Moynihan did. Like I do. Like we all do. We have schemes (like being healthy NOW so we don't spend the last 10 years of our life as an invalid, etc...). Most of our energies go into these schemes as we try to handle our life so that we never hit the bottom. But we're all falling. That's why it's so wonderful to get close to the bottom. That's why people who are seriously ill often wake up. Wake up to what? What do they wake up to?

b.t.w. I'm not saying we should stop doing this - it's what we do. I'm just saying that we should be aware that we are doing it. Life goes on and we never seem to notice.

[Kelley Graham]

If we follow that thinking Graham, then it would be wise to break the illusion and just give up now and stop wasting all that effort and just do something else. I don't buy it. Not the fact that we are going to get old and die at some point, but the notion that training is an illusion that makes us think that we somehow won't die thus really doesn't matter. Sounds like a funny "all-is-relative" philosophy. Now, of course, this guy and Rollins can take whatever training method they want, I was just wondering how it is that weight lifting automatically leads to violence and injury.

Personally, I am training because I want a better quality of health NOW, as well as in the future. If you look at the health problems of those who don't do some kind of training, you'll see (and of course you all know this) that they are in some bad shape LONG before they die. Why spend the last decades of your life dying?

my feeling is that he's trying to move away from the douchebag part. i think it's the douchebag part that leads to violence, injury and poor quality of life.

[cerebus]

What we do as human beings (which is a complete waste of time ) is spend all our time trying to mentally scheme so that we'll never have to suffer through a crisis, such as being seriously ill, for example. We put all our energies into trying to be liked, successful, agreeable, assertive (or non-assertive) depending on what we think will do it for us. Like Rollins did, like Moynihan did. Like I do. Like we all do. We have schemes (like being healthy NOW so we don't spend the last 10 years of our life as an invalid, etc...). Most of our energies go into these schemes as we try to handle our life so that we never hit the bottom. But we're all falling. That's why it's so wonderful to get close to the bottom. That's why people who are seriously ill often wake up. Wake up to what? What do they wake up to?

b.t.w. I'm not saying we should stop doing this - it's what we do. I'm just saying that we should be aware that we are doing it. Life goes on and we never seem to notice.

What I spend my time doing is simply trying my best to enjoy life and hopefully help others to enjoy theirs. I like feeling strong & healthy. I like being free of pain. I like being able to keep someone from beating me up. It's good stuff...

[GrahamB]

Yes, we like doing what makes the self feel good and avoiding what makes the self feel bad.

[chud]

I liked both articles, the original post as well as Henry Rollins' story. The original one seems to be railing against the extreme form of bodybuilding, while Rollins is appreciating the discipline that he learned from working out with weights.
Anyone have a good link to the ten basic exercises that Rollins mentions?
Oh and btw, wtf is "irongarm" (I know it's a discussion forum, but based on what)?