Virtue

Convict Conditioning-Week One

Posted by scalesonfire on January 11, 2013
Posted in: Product Review/Endorsement, Typical Personal Training is Stupid, Uncategorized, Virtue, Yoga. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

If there’s one thing I hate about “fitness speak” (These are the soft, stupid, undisciplined things that people say about exercise) it’s the phrase ‘I’ve got a love/hate relationship with…’  You don’t have a love/hate relationship with burpees or scones or squats, you simply love indulgence and hate discipline.  While I’m putting people down, I’m undisciplined with calisthenics and I hate my current level.

I can do a great deal of repetitions, enough to look good without weights.  But this isn’t about looking good, or getting to a certain point and stopping.  This is about being super-human, and being a super human.  That’s going to take a level of strength that regular humans, even ones who exercise regularly simply never have the discipline to build.  So one of my goals will be to build it.

Then I found out about this:

Image

I was looking up books on Amazon.com about body weight exercises and supposedly this is one of the better books.  What I found after it arrived is that Paul Wade and I share some core view about fitness.  The fitness industry is out to build dependence on “extras.”  Weights do more harm than good.  Progress is progressive.  But in terms of calisthenics, I thought there would be no way I would have to start at the first steps of the program being that I can do most of the step five exercises.  Then the most basic of exercises brought me back to reality…

The Wall Pushup

You see, each of the core movements in this program: Pushups, Pullups, Leg Raises, Squats, Bridges, and Handstand Pushups have progressions.  The initial progression of pushups are wall pusups: feet arms-length from the wall, three sets of fifty.  The book says to build up to the three sets of fifty and that this number indicates that you can progress to the next level.  One set of fifty made me feel like my arms were on fire, the second set was a lactic acid fiesta, the third was numb, but I made it.  The other step one exercises, Shoulder Stand squats ( upside down air squats in a yoga shoulder stand), Knee tucks (think of bench crunches), Half-Bridges (think “bridge pose’ in yoga), static headstand, were much more terrible and the only easy one was the back exercise, Verical Pulls (think the exact opposite of the wall pushup).

Here’s how that workout looked:

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This workout was far more challenging than I expected and I’m giving myself a week to actually complete it, as some of the exercises are more difficult than others.  It was humbling and made me quite excited about what the future of this program will be.  I’ll be spending this first week perfecting these movements and building toward consistently executing the progression standards here in the above picture.  Doing headstands every day is also going to improve my yoga practice and eliminate my difficulties with inversions.

Transforming

Posted by scalesonfire on December 21, 2012
Posted in: Lists, Motivational, Practice, Race Recap, Virtue, Yoga. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Culture indicates so much about success and failure.  If I could meet my former self and give them one bit of advice:  change the culture of your life.  I could have used that advice fifteen years ago, or five years ago, or last year.  Even when I knew and understood that a culture of discipline is the only type that brings on plentiful, consistent and secure gains, I didn’t live the life I knew I needed to live.

For so long, ScalesonFire.com has been about attacking a fitness industry that preys on the weak and ignorant instead of uplifting them.  Personally, I’ve felt just as weak and ignorant as those people in that time I’ve been writing because I know what to do and my life could be better, and it simply has not been.  Exploring discipline is a long process when you weren’t raised to show it.  Changing who you are based on who you want to be is doubly difficult because the people around you will not understand and respond negatively to these changes.

I’ve had to transform too many times to count, in body, in mind, I’ve changed who I was to be something I thought suited me over and over.  This process has gotten me here, with a strong, lean body, a positive outlook on my own life, and a real vision of how I can help society and not just attack its faults.  There are twelve months in 2013.  Here are the twelve things I will do to change my personal culture and feel some of the greatness I’ve always craved:

 

1.  Get 25 race t-shirts and 6 medals

This means running two or three races a month, running NYRR’s entire 5-Borough series of half-marathons, and one full marathon.  This will also mean qualifying for the 2014 NYC Marathon.

2.  Dramatically increase my strength

This means staying with a more structured, disciplined calisthenic regimen.

3.  Practice yoga daily

This means combining a home practice and studio practice to build a body that is infinitely flexible and a personal tranquility that I’ve never had consistently.

4.  Run 2000 miles

This means a progressive number of miles run and a running practice that is equally as consistent as my yoga practice.  No matter how slowly these miles must be run, they MUST BE RUN.

5.   Build my brand

In order to be the person I need to be, YOU need to know who I am.  I must be more dedicated to writing about fitness and my own training.  I must be more dedicated to self-promotion and the promotion of my beliefs.  I must take more pictures of this body I’m building and what I do to build it.  I must connect with more like-minded individuals.  I must always think in  terms of the safety of the brand.

6.  Become a better planner, preparer and execute more

This means scrupulously attending to my past, current, and upcoming affairs so that I can give myself the opportunity to make the most out of them.

7.  Eat a fuel-only diet

I can not expect to succeed athletically if I make poor food decisions.

8.  Non-stop involvement in sports leagues

Whatever sport is in season, I need to compete in an organized league playing that sport.  This should be a year-round process.

9.  Get faster

In 2013 I will run a sub-7:00min/mile pace during a race, I will also build fast-twitch muscle fiber to display a new quickness and power translating to sprint speed, leaping ability and improved agility.

10.  Attack every day

To see my goals, I need to treat every day as if it has limitless possibilities and use each passing day to get more done.

11.  Get sponsorship

I use a lot of products, and plan to use and try more.  Some I really believe in.  I want to connect with those companies and build lasting partnerships.

12.  Live the world’s most active lifestyle

Because nothing would make me happier than to inspire others to greatness by showing them that discipline makes the impossible, possible.

 

This should be my last year of struggling, scrambling to be better and feel better.  After sitting down to plan out who I really want to be to and for this world, I’ve arrived at these twelve things, and the superathlete that emerges from this change is going to change the way you view fitness, athletics, and discipline.

On a Goal

Posted by scalesonfire on July 8, 2012
Posted in: running, Virtue. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Maybe the real goal is to do it every day and never stop

The worst part of fitness goals that involve daily work (like my current two hundred miles in forty days goal) is missing days, and as if missing days isn’t terrible enough, cramming to make up work is even worse.  The type-A in me lies in bed after days where I’ve failed to get it all done and says “oh, the miles will be run, and I will not fail.”  The type-B in me says “why  does the exercise have to be micro-managed?  Are such small goals so important that I won’t get the the results if every goal isn’t met?”  But type-B has no idea how to be so consistent that nothing needs micro-managing.

As we can see, the type-B voice is the stupid one.  Of course every goal is important or else setting them wouldn’t be so important to us.  My problem is that failure leaves type-A distraught and enraged.  As much as failure can not be an option, acceptance of failure has to be much less of an option.  With that said, goals are time-sensitive, and it is just unrealistic to think that you can buy or make up time that you should have saved by putting your goal first. When type-A takes over the right way is when the goal becomes to change your living habits and you do not need to set small goals.  When this happens consistency is expected, but missed days become smaller deals in the big picture of a lifetime goal.

Goals come first.  When they don’t you find yourself wondering if they should be taken so seriously.  You should hate this person.

Wanting it All, Always.

Posted by scalesonfire on July 8, 2012
Posted in: Motivational, Virtue. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Roger Federer’s consistency, work ethic, and love for his profession are something to admire, especially when these qualities are difficult to generate for yourself.

In life, being elite is about trust.  You must trust yourself and ability.  Others must trust you to perform regularly so that they will always acknowledge you as elite.  In this quest to be an elite athlete, I do trust my ability, I do trust my body, but I don’t see myself as consistent in completing tasks and reaching goals.  Yes, my goals are higher-reaching than most out there, but I’ve got a vision of myself with an unmatched consistency and work ethic.  In short, I dream and have always dreamed of being a “Type-A” personality.

That’s because unfortunately I was raised a Type-C personality; a person who has always dreamed big, showed promise, but handled life incorrectly.  I was passive, ignorant, angry, pleasure-seeking, and lost.  Then I became a Type-B personality, where I had goals, dreams and a focus, I just didn’t understand why being ultra-serious about those things was a way to live.  Now, I want to be elite.  I agree that some are better than others simply because they want certain things more and will die to have them.  When you’ve never admired yourself, and always quietly admired these individuals, there seems to be only one thing to do: Figure out what you love and live for it.

The first step to this is frequency.  In 2012 I’ve been truly burned out, dehydrated, fatigued, or ill because of excessive exercise a few times, and every time I’ve come out of it wondering it I could ever be the sort of individual who does the extremely high volume of exercise I’ve always dreamed of.  I’ve never thought about quitting or slowing down.  Ten years ago I’d have done something else.  Five years ago I’d have blamed something else.  Today I understand fully that I get what I put into this.

Only those who operate under that mentality are trusted in this world.  They trust themselves and everyone trusts them.  The first step to being elite is building a rock-solid consistency that promotes trust from every direction.  Once you gain this resounding trust, goals become realistic and it is difficult to hold yourself back.

Choosing to be More of a Human and Less of a Person

Posted by scalesonfire on June 4, 2012
Posted in: Analogies, Obesity Apocalypse, Virtue. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

People are killing the human race. In fact, do some research on global warming, endangered animals, dying art forms, anything that could be saved with care from more people are all the victims of their negligence. This is because people live in the world, and this world is quite different from the earth we all inherit when we are born. People’s disregard for the earth and full regard for the world is why it is easy for all of us to imagine this population being the last.

Our world is full of people who deal with inhuman conditions all the time.

Humans though, aren’t afraid of extinction. One can’t fear something that they’ve watched their brothers and sisters perpetuate throughout history. People’s fear of death is the same as that of the cockroach: “please don’t kill me, I’m just looking to eat and procreate. My existence is too insignificant to really bother you.” But their existence in strong numbers makes them repulsive to the civilized human. This is because billions existing for the cause of survival makes the cause wholly trivial. This does not mean that the practice of survival is unimportant, it simply means that it is no reason to exist. It is a means of existence. We must do things like eat, find shelter, or excrete waste to survive on earth as humans. The practice of working in the world to afford food and a place to live is not survival. A person who places the emphasis on survival without realizing that their world does not call upon direct survival skills will live a life that is fully dependent on society.

How people raise children.

Life as a person starts early, and far earlier than people want to admit. A person will argue maliciously with anyone who disagrees with their parenting methods or even denies the complete innocence of an infant. Children are reflections of the people who raise them, and without knowing, people raise their children to be people-to build a life of materialism and dependence, to seek out pleasure and comfort and connect these things with basic human needs like food, sex, and shelter, to find value in possessions instead of simply seeing the beauty of things. Children are taught to desire things that it is unnatural for the human body to consume like refined sugars and fats. They are helpless slaves to materialism. They know the brand of sneakers they wear before they can play a sport, which is understandable when they have a mother who demanded in her baby shower registry that she receive a specific brand of stroller. Children in today’s society have little passion for the outdoors. Their sugar-induced ‘tummy aches’ are seen to be preparing the body for more awful foods to come later in life. People think that denying them what will kill them is depriving them.

Our society’s most successful are those who can get people with less wealth to care about their lives more than their own. This does NOT mean they are talented at anything.

It builds an adult who doesn’t know what it means to be human, to crave oxygen and exercise, to respect nature as something that exists for our survival, to feel the pleasure in knowing that a healthy meal will keep you strong and alive. Humans have a connection with the earth that people simply don’t have in their world. In fact, most people have little knowledge of how their world works and any understanding might bring on severe depression. Informing a person that their favorite “reality” television show has writers, that high fructose corn syrup kills or that jump-starting your metabolism with coffee twice a day is a bad thing will get you mean looks, a possible nasty and ignorant argument, or if the person trusts you (people trust doctors with television shows, so yeah..) they may go into a hopeless rant about how “everything can kill you.”

Things are now made to be popular, based on the notion that people (especially young ones) are stupid and will demean art forms for the sake of living in the moment.

I don’t want to be a person. It makes me cringe every time I hear a person say that “real women have curves” or that healthy food isn’t food for “real men.” In my estimation, those who do things without a notion of integrity, eat artificial things, and do artificial things to hide personal flaws that they’ve created, are the realest people out there. To be fake, artificial, to lack integrity in what you do, especially for yourself, yes these things make you fat, unhealthy, lazy, and ignorant. They also though make you a target consumer for any corporation looking to capitalize on stupidity, which is most.

Most humans are trapped amongst people. Every day having their healthy, vibrant spirits broken every day by the stupidity of society.

While people feel that obesity needs a cure, humans agree that if obesity is a disease, it is one brought on by hundreds of thousands of personal transgressions. If life as a person means that one is conditioned from birth to make these transgressions, then life as a human in our time means fully erasing them from our practices.

Fixing the Fitness Problem-Choosing exercise over workouts

Posted by scalesonfire on November 11, 2011
Posted in: fitness Politics, Motivational, Practice, Virtue. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments

There are a lot of reasons that fitness is a broken industry and personal training is a broken profession, but none are bigger than the problems people have with understanding the difference between exercise and workouts.  Since the fitness industry is geared toward workouts, the average person sees the workout as being all of possible exercise and sees fitness as a direct result of workouts.  This approach may be fun, time-consuming (in a positive way), and at times, effective, but it is the absolute wrong way to go about becoming fit.

This mentality is all over the fitness world, but ask an elite athlete what’s more important to their success, drills and workouts or practice that’s specific to their sport, they’ll say the practice.  How could they ever get the most out of drills and workouts had they not honed their skills from a young age with repetition?  Workouts are simply to stress, test, and make already developed skills dynamic, they do not create skill.  This is just as the person attempting to lose weight MUST understand that workouts are for people who are in shape, exercise is for people trying to get into better shape.  Understanding this means gaining the ability to control the fitness process at will, instead of waiting for that set of DVDs or that class to control and stabilize the fitness process for you.

But we’ve overlooked an even bigger problem here: Exercising simply to look better is no valid or noble quest.

That’s right, one of my fundamental beliefs is that the actual premise of working out to lose weight is what prevents people from losing it.  There are many helpful analogies, but that’s like people who work at their jobs simply to make money.  When money is the motivating factor in work, then it’s difficult to be directly fulfilled by the work itself.  Fitness, when approached correctly, is fulfilling within itself, and at a higher magnitude than the fulfillment from the results themselves.

What fuels the clamor for workouts is the notion that working out in more extreme ways will speed up the superficial processes, and even deeper, it fuels entitlement.  It allows a person to desire a balance of hard work and rest, believing that they deserve the rest if they’ve worked hard.  A fit person, or someone who has the correct approach, always moves forward eith daily exercise because when a person exercises, all their body “deserves” is more exercise.

Now, this doesn’t mean that a person shouldn’t take days off.  I agree fully with what the fitness industry says about workouts and rest days, I just think that people are sold the whole “workouts and rest days” speil because it promotes laziness.  But hard workouts are hard on the body and mind, and have their place.  Daily practice like say, working to improve and increase your push-ups every day is a very different thing.  You should NOT take days off from a daily calisthenic routine or a deep yoga practice or a regular running practice.  It should feel like the death of all deaths to miss these things, and that concept is much deeper than superficiality, you’ve chosen to give your body these things daily, and with them, form what your body is.

If you’re using the methods we’re used to, and going through the process of eat-drink-work-fun-relax-exercise, then you’re probably wondering why the aesthetic results aren’t coming consistently.  This is because fitness and seeking it is far more important than all these things.  They are all necessary, as many things are, which is why they should be locked into our lives, done as a sort of second-nature, and never be made into a big deal.  Eating is necessary, and a small deal, fitness is important and should be a big deal until it can be small.  If fitness in our society is sold as a small deal, that doesn’t happen daily, then the goal of the conservative personal trainer is to prove that the opposite yields ideal results.  What has sold to this point has simply not worked.

In this series I’ll be discussing exercise as a practice, something you can build on every day and complement with workouts.  The goal of practice is perfection and comfort with that perfection.  Long before the perfection though, the body adapts aesthetically to meet the daily demands of your practice, and your body will continue this adaptation as long as you practice, so looks won’t be a worry.

The End of Entitlement

Posted by scalesonfire on September 23, 2011
Posted in: explanations, fitness Politics, Motivational, Virtue. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

The problem is that she already thinks it's her right to have ice cream.

The answer was always right there.  What causes overweight bodies and comfort with obesity?  What causes a person to be satisfied with poor food and exercise choices?  What created the negative stigma placed on fitness?  What’s the number one thing that trainers need to push out of a person’s head before they push in all the positivity and understanding?

Entitlement.

Our problem as a society is not simply that we increase the population and therefore increase the umbrella our society forms for that population, it’s that the population is unable to value their lives without the society.  As long as our society provides things, individuals will think that they deserve them.  Just because there is a bus for you to ride, does not mean that you deserve a seat.  Our parents create us and within months try to directly acclimate us to both healthy and unhealthy things in our society, not because they feel that any are particularly necessary to life, but because the American mentality is to condition children early on the idea that they deserve enjoyment.  So everything must provide enjoyment for children-food, television, school.  Everything a child in our society does must be rooted in enjoyment for them to give their full attention.

If the child thinks they are entitled to enjoyment, then the adult, who now abuses the adult privilege of living out entitlements, lives devoid of sensible, prudent, and prosperous practices.  We have always been entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but these terms are created to broadly protect us from tyranny.  They were not given to us to justify what I call immediate freedoms.  We went from being free to pursue happiness long-term without government interference to thinking that this pursuit is a pursuit of over-indulgence.  The ways we feel about the things that drive our emotions, like acceptance, food, family, personal loyalties, and love, do that driving because they are grossly misused by people who think that these things are a right and should not be intruded upon.  But no one deserves these things.  No one simply deserves thousands of Facebook friends, or huge meals, or a loving family, or for their sports team to win, or to find their soul mate.  Still, because so many feel entitled to largely irrelevant things, this is all that concerns us.

There is no notion that important things, like valuing the body, or instilling positive virtue in younger generations are priorities in our society.  We want to have fun, feel good, and never work for anything.  Most treat exercise like something they’d never do if they already looked great.  The problem is that individuals who don’t like lives of entitlement always get more from exercise than the rest because entitlement doesn’t negatively fuel such a positive element of their lives.  Typically, a person says, “I enjoy food, I enjoy laziness, I enjoy enjoyment, and I deserve them all.”  Their deserving overrides focus, dedication, and commitment.  What’s worse is that they never understand that willpower is not simply committing to exercise, but also de-committing to practices that have always hindered the results of exercise.  When a person thinks that these practices are their right, it’s difficult to explain to them that their fitness process will always stall.

We deserve nothing more than the bodies we were given, and building or destroying those bodies is an individual’s prerogative.  What doctors and so-called experts won’t admit to those less enlightened is that most of the things we do with and to our bodies are products of the entitlement mentality and in result, harm our bodies from the day our parent sticks the lollipop in our mouth when we’re crying and we associate soothing with sweet.  Entitlement, whenever and wherever it’s cultivated in the human mind, begins the direct progression to death.  Nothing has created more negative habits than individuals thinking that building negative habits is their right.  Our founding fathers never prepared for a population too ignorant to clearly understand and interpret founding documents so much so that freedom for many generations has been freedom to be fat and do nothing.  Seeing the fitness industry conservatively, I now know why I loathe entitlement so much.  In the most needy areas of our society, positive habits, developed minds, and fit bodies are not the products of mindless resolutions, limited erudition and repetitive jobs, and quick-fix, no work, infomercial exercise or concealing garments.  Positive habits are developed within individuals who are intelligent enough to focus on the important in life.  But, because of entitlement, there are no individuals.  That’s because the thing people most feel they’re entitled to is normality.   If you’ve ever just stopped to take a look at “normal” people, you’d realize that the right to be and think like everyone else is a right that has no value.

Re-solving your problems

Posted by scalesonfire on September 21, 2011
Posted in: Motivational, Virtue. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

Resolve really gets the stains out of your life, but you must read all of the directions.

Customs are killing the English language.  So much so that words have meanings, and then they have particular meanings in our society.  The most underused word and virtue is “resolution.”  This word isn’t simply a reason to reflect on negatives and negligence in your life when the calendar turns to a new year, it’s a window into the ways we should live.  Resolution is a tool we can use to embark on and then complete tasks that are important to us.  The roots of our “new year’s resolutions” come from guilt, comparisons to others, and self-pity.  These resolutions aren’t merely petty excuses to join in with mainstream practices, they’re indicative of all the mental deficiencies we have.

In short, new year’s resolutions don’t work because most people have bigger problems than smoking, swearing, and needing to take the the stairs instead of the elevator.  We struggle so much to meet the expectations we have for ourselves that we’ve got to resolve to do things that should be simple parts of our lives.  What’s worse is that we do so much to disregard these things until the last week of December and we pretend for the first week of January that this resolution will instantly help us prove to ourselves and the world that we now have this unbreakable discipline.

But resolution and resolve aren’t the sorts of nouns we think they are, as if we can use them to directly improve our lives.  Like most of the other things that make our lives better, we build resolutions and we operate with resolve if we want to improve our lives.  Targeting one area of your life for change that’s already drastic considering what you already do might seem like a positive thing, but it’s no different than overeating at Thanksgiving or watching fireworks on the fourth of July simply because you were always told this was the thing to do at that time.

Resolution and resolve have little to do with making resolutions and have everything to do with finishing the things we set out to do.  If what we call resolutions are really ways we’ve decided to improve our lives, and the level of resolve within us is what allows us to complete these tasks, then ideally, we would make these improvements and then make it a goal to operate with resolve so that things happen for us.  I’ve never really heard of a new year’s resolution that did stick and work for a person so well that five and ten years later they say something like “2005 was the year man, that’s when I really changed my life for the new year.”  I have though, heard a person who is so fed up with who they are and the way they live that they say “I’m not only going to do so many things differently, but I’m going to commit to finishing them.”  These are the times when lives change, and they rarely happen because one year is ending and another is starting and they usually happen at a time when making resolutions isn’t fashionable.  This year, this month, and today, operate with resolve, finish what you start, and seek out more things to do that really improve your life.  People with real resolve live the virtue.  Everyone else waits for the new year to make resolutions because it’s fashionable do so without ever teaching themselves how to carry out those meaningless resolutions.