Where's the Infinity Gauntlet?
OR: Someone Get This Man a Dumbbell!
I actively did martial arts for about ten years, from about my early teens to early twenties. Near the end of that run, I trained for a couple of years with a Wushu master, an immigrant from China. After class, my colleagues and I would often ask him about his training when he was young. In one conversation, we asked him about how and when he started training Wushu, which is a form of Kung Fu. It is widely known for its performative features, like explosive spinning jump kicks and even certain basic gymnastic elements, like aerials—handless cartwheels, which I never succeeded at, and I was mediocre at best with everything else. If you think of archetypal movie Kung Fu, as in The Matrix movies, that’s largely in the style of Wushu.
My coach said that he started training in Wushu when he was very young, seven or eight years old, if memory serves. He said that he was plucked off a playground during school recess one day and taken to a different school to study the martial art. This was early 1970s China, and he and other kids were recruited in this manner, which was a trend back then, with physical training as much as academic. Kids were identified early and put on tracks suited to their strengths. The recruiters must have seen some kind of above-average physical prowess in my coach that day because they selected him and put him on a path that would define his life.
As my coach explained it, Wushu and Kung Fu were/are China’s national sports. He was chosen to go to a private, sort of Ivy-League preparatory program for Wushu and physical fitness education, but he said that everyone learned Kung Fu. It was their culture, from national past time down to gym class. It’s common to see people of all ages doing it in parks, much like we wouldn’t give a second thought to a couple of people tossing a baseball or a football.
I got a lot out of my martial arts education. It opened the doors to another culture and history that I wouldn’t have had much opportunity to study. I got to meet many great people who I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Learning the forms developed my mind-body connection in ways that I think will stay with me forever, and going through the workouts and the tests refined my sense of grit, and knowing how to rock and roll and rumble (however well or not) gave me confidence that I could take down other challenges in life. Learning how to meditate and rubbing shoulders with eastern philosophy made me aware of getting a grip on some of my emotions, no small task for such an emotionally tumultuous time for an adolescent male in our culture.
Much like my experience with martial arts, weightlifting has also helped me grow and develop as a person, as much figuratively as literally, cognitively and physically. Like martial arts, it developed my sense of grit, perseverance, and work ethic. Tom Platz has said that being under the squat bar taught him more about life than anything else. It’s an easy metaphor to see. You literally carry a heavy load on your shoulders and back; you set a goal, like a rep number on an exercise that you think you can get to, and you do it or fail trying. You don’t quit. You keep going until you’re forced to stop, maybe longer. The fight is equal parts mental and physical. When it gets difficult physically, you must force yourself to keep at it. That’s where the real change and growth comes from.
If I got my hand into Thanos’ infinity gauntlet, with a snap of my fingers, I’d make lifting weights our national past time. I’d normalize and standardize weightlifting to become the ubiquitous and omnipresent cultural exercise, and we’d all learn the principles of strength and resistance training starting in elementary school—not to mention nutrition and cardiovascular exercise. We’d have Little Leagues, JV and Varsity teams in high school, and we’d have professional teams that’d compete against each other like any other professional sport. Weightlifting’d be America’s analogue to China’s martial arts.
If you have never lifted weights, there’s not much to it, really, unless you intend to do maximally heavy loads with some of the compound lifts—squat, bench press, deadlifts, not to mention some of the traditional Olympic lifts, like snatches and clean and jerks, which are technical at that level and not really for novices. Most movements with weightlifting are simple and straightforward and require little training or skill for execution.
I understand that doing anything for the first time can be intimidating, but walking into a gym is an easy first step. I’ve worked out at scores of gyms from one side of this country to another, and I’ve never seen people react negatively to others. I’ve never seen laughing or snickering, pointing and giggling, even though sometimes those stories appear on social media. (I’m not sure how much some of these stories are real and what’s fabricated, anyway.) And remember, everyone in the gym is there because they want to better themselves. Everyone there on some level is self-conscious about themselves in some way.
You don’t have to literally lift dumbbells and barbells to start if you don’t want to. Those movements are isolated and mimicked on machines, which can be helpful in staving off fatigue because you’re not carrying the load with your body, and most machines come with easy-to-read instructions.
You literally don’t need to know anything about lifting weights to go do it and reap its benefits. Just get to a gym and move some weight. Start with anything and see what feels good.
After a couple of weeks of doing it, you can expect to have significant increases in strength, which is mostly the neuromuscular adaptations first. Your brain starts refining some of those motor pathways, quickening and strengthening the very route to activating and engaging your muscle fibers, like upgrading a network line with the strongest fiber optic cables.
Then, soon, your muscles may get a little bigger. Along with bigger, stronger muscles, your soft connective tissues—joints, ligaments, tendons—will also strengthen. Your bones will respond to the load of the stimulus and become stronger as well. (The change in muscle can be seen pretty quickly, but soft tissue and bones take a bit of time to remodel.)
As you weight train, you essentially train your body to expect to use its muscles. To do that, it needs energy, so your muscles soak up many of the nutrients you eat, fats, sugars and other carbohydrates, which is called non-insulin dependent glucose uptake, and it lessens the demand on the pancreas to create insulin. Yep, you can improve your fasting blood sugar just by lifting weights.
These are just surface benefits: stronger muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and metabolic health. There are also cognitive benefits. The body is the vehicle for the brain. To exercise the body is to exercise the brain.
There’s also the satisfaction of setting a goal and achieving it, even surpassing it, and there are few things in life that can take you to your limits routinely, like pushing or pulling a weight ten times this week when you could only do it eight times last week.
If you’re worried about injuries, these mostly occur in men because we tend to push things more than we should and especially when we should not be. It’s a case of trying to do too much too soon. If anything, it’s a function of our egos, which doesn’t mean we’re necessarily trying to show off. Many of us just have a competitive spirit, and we don’t want to quit when we think we can make it happen.
To illustrate the low-risk of injury in weightlifting, in 2019, a prospective study following injuries across different sports and activities identified the average injury rate per 1,000 hours [1]. For weightlifting, that came in at 1.12 injuries per 1,000 hours, behind tennis’ 1.37 injuries and just more than cycling’s 0.59 injuries. At the top of the list was soccer, with 7.21 injuries, followed by Judo’s 4.82 injuries per 1K hours. Even volleyball nabbed 2.64 injuries. And 1,000 hours is a lot to do anything. Even if you accrued five hours of weightlifting a week, which is a ton, you’d need 200 weeks—almost four years—to hit 1,000 hours.
For myself, as I’ve discussed, my only major injury with weight training was when I was approaching Christian Bale’s look in The Machinist. A body in that condition should not be deadlifting.
Though the benefits to physical, mental, and metabolic health are probably too numerable to even be fully known, there are, obviously, also aesthetic “consequences” to weight training. A strong body is an aesthetic body.
Women sometimes worry about getting “bulky”, an abstract and undefined phantom threat. A ghost. Go to a commercial gym and count how many “bulky” folks you see. I’d be surprised if you saw any. Men often train themselves into stupors to become bulky, and except for a select few, it doesn’t happen, and if it does, it’s after years of deliberate, focused, and consistent work and effort, with bulk as the intended outcome.
It’s probably helpful to define “bulky”. For some, like me, it conjures notes of muscularity, but I think for others, it connotes body fatness. I’ve lifted weights for a long time, and yes, as this Substack is predicated on my own health transformation, lifting weights wasn’t the thing that got me overweight, which is only achieved through a surplus energy intake over a long-enough period. Yup. I ate too much for too long, sometimes a dry cookie to swallow. That’s what it fundamentally comes down to. If anything, lifting weights will literally incorporate—to make into the body—and materialize that energy and those nutrients into stronger muscles, connective tissues, and bones. If we aren’t moving, our muscles atrophy into oblivion, and any surplus energy becomes adipose tissue—we get soft and fat.
So, ladies, don’t let the rare image of a woman bodybuilder from the 1980s or 1990s who was abusing as many steroids as her male counterparts lead you to think that that physique is the inevitable result of recreational weightlifting. If you look at some of the leading women powerlifters today, like Stefi Cohen and Jessica Buettner, women who weigh about 130 lbs. soaking wet and can deadlift in the high 500s, you’ll see how aesthetic they are. They’re crazy strong, but they simply look like fit and athletic women, like women who move regularly. These are world-class powerlifters, and they’re not bulky. If you’re worried about getting bulky, as in muscular, try to do it for three months and see what happens. (It won’t. I promise.)
And don’t think how they or any other muscular individual look during competition or training is how they look 24/7, when they’re hyped and pumped and have manipulated their macronutrients in such a way that it affects their appearance, like bodybuilders on stage, who can only maintain that targeted “look” for a few hours, tops. Unfortunately, the coveted “pump” only lasts for a short time during a training session and maybe an hour or so afterwards.
Remember, also, that many athletes tend to “self-select” for the sports they play. That is, they tend to find that they are naturally good and above average at certain sports, which makes them excel beyond their peers. Much like my Wushu coach was selected for martial arts, though not of his own volition, he showed potential, so we can’t think of the top 1% of the top 1% as being any reasonable model for what we might expect aesthetically or athletically. For myself, I’ve always been partial to bench pressing. Out all my lifts, it’s always been disproportionately ahead. It’s self-reinforcing. I like it because I’m good at it, and being good at it makes me like it more. (To be clear, I’m not “good” at anything. For me and everything I can lift, it is, though, probably my best lift.)
And weightlifting shouldn’t be the province of the young and well. As we get older, the maintenance of these tissues is imperative for the maintenance of healthspan and to be able to perform activities of daily living, to maintain independence. According to the CDC [2], falls are the leading cause of injury among adults older than 65, and these falls often result in major injuries, bone fractures—notably of the hip—as well as brain injuries. About half of these folks are unable to get up on their own if they do fall, and that’s even irrespective of injury. This very situation happened to my grandfather. He slipped in the supermarket one day, fell hard, broke his leg, and that was it. I don’t think he ever walked again. His health declined rapidly, and he died a couple of years later. Lifting weights and resistance training will help us keep our strength so that we can move quickly enough to catch ourselves in the event we do slip. And if we do fall, our strong bones can handle it, and then we can roll to our feet without much ado. There’s no shortage of frightening stats regarding how devastating a single injury can be for older folks [3].
My love for weightlifting is rooted in my teenage years when I first started, but it’s not until the last few years that I’ve really grown to appreciate it for what it does to just about every facet of our health, but this appreciation is not limited to pumping iron. I could easily write the same article on cardio work or another one just on martial arts, another on just reading and writing, and yet another on only nutrition, but if I could only have one of these forever, I’d be sad to have to exclude the other areas, but my answer would be weightlifting.
The great thing is that we don’t have to exclude any of it. We can have it all. Maybe we can’t make things as widespread as we’d like, but we can certainly shape our lives in the ways that we want. We don’t need a Thanos snap to make it happen. We don’t need a multiverse. We don’t need to wish upon a star.
We just have to go do it.
