Thanks to Dave Lull for alerting me to a new book about lifting weights that I’m going to have to read.
Now he’s published Stronger, which looks at weight-lifting from several perspectives — historical, sociological, medical, biological, psychological. His message is simple: undergoing a process of lifting increasingly heavy weights — or, as it’s called, progressive resistance — has remarkable physical and mental benefits. For most of history, the consensus was distinctly otherwise.
I had to laugh at the inevitable “studies have shown” part of the review:
Nonetheless, in the wake of DeLorme, scientists have made remarkable discoveries that have confirmed the positive impact of weight training. For example, “the brain’s posterior cingulate cortex, the seat of empathy, grows larger when people do weight-lifting exercise.” Also, “progressive resistance exercise produces a spectrum of benefits that aerobic exercise alone does not provide”; for example, it “can build confidence and reduce anxiety; improve bone density, blood pressure, aerobic fitness, body composition, metabolic health, insulin sensitivity, depression, and sleep; prevent and treat type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease; reduce the risk of several types of cancer; increase resistance to injury; and decrease the likelihood of falls and of osteoporotic fracture.”
Lifting makes your empathy muscle grow? But progressive media has been telling me differently for years!
We’ll just have to hope that the fear of creeping Nazification keeps away the kind of midwits who pride themselves on their overflowing empathy. Let them stick to lifting nothing heavier than the latest literary fiction.
In all seriousness, despite the implicit social science bias that all good things invariably buttress liberal bona fides, what I’ve found is that having worked hard, even suffered, for a goal makes me, if anything, more contemptuous of those who give up easily at the first hint of pain or discomfort. Like all human activities, there’s an inherent status competition built in that we can’t help but be aware of. As my own trainer put it to me in a recent message:
From this positive reinforcement and affirmation, these people eventually fall in love with the grind – the time investment, the fatigue, the pain, the injury, the soreness, the inconvenience – justified by the intermittent and very personal victories earned. The grind requires faith, guts, dedication, determination, and personal sacrifice. The grind is made sweeter by the knowledge that very few people have what it takes to endure and embrace it.
Or as a histrionic philosopher also wrote:
This spiritual and silent haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect knowledge, of the “initiated”, of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect itself against contact with obtrusive and pitying hands and altogether against everything that is not equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates.
On Friday evenings in particular, I’ll often look around the gym and think, These are my people. They could be out clubbing or partying or getting started on a weekend of torpidity. Instead, they’re in here, sweating and straining for a goal that matters only to them. There’s a camaraderie, sure, but within limits. If it’s a Christlike love of mankind you’re after, you should probably be in church instead.
