posted July 30, 2000 02:08 PM            

I was wondering whether or not anyone on the list would like to share some of the - for lack of a better phrase - "moral lessons," lessons in life, the Zen wisdom of iron that they've collected and that they find transfer well to other areas of life. Working out in the gym has impressed several of these lessons on me. I have a clear memory, for example, of a morning when I began lifting seriously over four years ago. I was standing around briefly with a guy who'd just asked me for a spot. He looked out across the gym, scanning the other people at the bench press stations and the weight machines, and said rather abstractedly, "You know, very few of the people you see here will be here a year from now. You're just getting started, so you're about to find out that building muscle is a long-, long-, long-term project. Most people just don't have that kind of discipline. That's why they don't look like us."

He was right. Very few of those folks were still there a year later. And I've never doubted that I was still there, and am still there four plus years later, in part because of the implicit challenge in that first moral lesson that my friend taught me. So, here is the first moral lesson in the Zen of lifting, the Zen of Iron, that has come my way. I'm not trying here to articulate things I've learned that apply only to lifting, but rather things I've learned from lifting that help me understand other areas of my life.

1. Good results take time - and they're worth working for!. As a physiologist/weightlifter friend of mine says, "Hypertrophy? Now there's a bitch to induce!" You can speed the process up with well-planned routines, smart nutrition, supplementation, and certainly with drugs, but those 300-pound steroidal monsters didn't get that way overnight, or without a helluva lot of hard, hard work. I see the same principal at work in my career (I'm an academic researcher): The people who do the best work, publish the most important results, and train the best students are those who operate against long time-horizons. I see the same principal in my private life, too: After a bunch of kids and more than 20 years, my wife and I are more in love than ever, because of all the hard work we've put into our relationship over all these years. So, after a long, long time, you can stand in front of a mirror, or you can look back on your work or examine your relationships and say, Yeah! I couldn't have gotten here quickly, but this has been worth the effort. I don't think anything teaches that more effectively than lifting, especially "natural" lifting, where it might take a year and untold amounts of pain and strain to add a measly fraction of an inch of muscle to a lagging bodypart.

I'll post some other Zen lessons in the weeks ahead. Anybody else with something to teach, please go ahead on!

Bjaarki

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"'Til the weard of the world, stands, unforgotten,
high under Heaven, the hero's name." - Hrolf Krakki's Saga (Iceland)

posted July 30, 2000 04:09 PM            

I agree with you about effort over time. In fact, Iron Zen Lesson #2 is "Consistency is Everything!" I'll post that later. Thanks for the props on Lesson #1.

Bjaarki

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"'Til the weard of the world, stands, unforgotten,
high under Heaven, the hero's name." - Hrolf Krakki's Saga (Iceland)