The afternoon crowd is just starting to mill inside the commercial gym. All-walks are present. High school students congregate near the dumbbells and EZ-curl bars, mainly doing isolation exercises and socializing. Occasionally, the high school crowd will wander over to the bench press, but they are afraid to lose face in front of their friends if they go heavy and do not make the lift. The yuppie crowd is content with running laps, doing cardio on treadmills, playing racket ball, and toying around with machines. Some overweight folks are on bicycle machines at the behest of their personal trainers, huffing and puffing, looking like they’ve descended into a circle of hell reserved for the slovenly. Meanwhile, a dinosaur and a dinosaur-in-training enter the gym. The dinosaurs head straight for the power rack. Curiously, no line exists for the power rack. Like a ghost town, tumbleweeds are blowing around that area of the gym.
The dinosaurs stretch before warming up with light weights on the bar. Then the real fun begins. They start with squats. The seasoned dinosaur loads up the bar first. He engages it, white knuckling it, taking three huge gulps of air. He drives his elbows down, sticks his chest out, and sets his hips. He drives the bar up, takes two steps back (legs shoulder width apart, feet set as naturally as possible), resets his air, resets his hips, spreads his knees and drops into a full squat where his thighs are parallel to the floor. From there he drives upwards with all his might to return to the upright stance, restarting the whole process. He completes twenty reps, and by the twentieth rep, he’s either come to Jesus or gone to meet Him. The high school crowd looks over like they have just seen a car crash. They are not used to seeing dinosaurs grunting and yelling, “Come on with it!” It’s sort of scary.
The dinosaur-in-training, a human toothpick wearing a polo shirt, gym pants, and wrestling shoes, like some old school Romanian power lifter from the 80’s (sans the muscles), loads up his ten rep maximum load on the bar, then goes for twenty reps. (Before even thinking about doing twenty reps of his ten rep max, he has done twenty of fifty-percent of his ten rep max, getting his form smooth, so that he can kill the lift, not have the lift kill him.) He gasps and sputters. By the twentieth rep his teeth hurt from gritting and his lungs feel like they are going to explode. His face is bright red and he has bug eyes. Onlookers gawk. The dinosaurs look like they are leaving after those grueling squats, but wait!
They have just gone to get some water and are now back, busting out twenty reps of pullovers with a light weight (about 35 lb) to stretch out their rib cages. Surely they are done now. Personal trainers and gym employees are looking at them with worried faces. They should just go. They’ve done enough. Think of the potential law suits!
What? Now they are headed over to do fifteen reps of stiff-legged deadlifts and are going HEAVY. They’re going to hurt themselves! This is just uncomfortable for everyone watching. Okay, okay. That should be it. Who in their right mind would keep going? Well, after three sets of twelve rep bench presses and three sets of twelve rep seated behind the neck presses and one set of fifteen rep bent-over rows, the dinosaurs are done. They look like they are either going to grow or die. But due to practicing form, concentration, and knowing their bodies, the dinosaurs will grow stronger. They will prevail. And the next time they come in they are going to add five or ten pounds to the bar for all their lifts! By the way, the workout is after a ten hour shift of grueling work at a manufacturing plant. Oh, the humanity!
To the uninitiated, the aforementioned anecdote sounds crazy. This sort of weightlifting is dangerous and archaic, isn’t it? One has to be a professional athlete with a certain genetic predisposition in order for the body to handle such stress, doesn’t he? People are obviously influenced by genetic and environmental factors and have their individual limitations, yes. The leading proponent of dinosaur training, Brooks Kubik, likens old-time strongman training to a greenhorn lumberjack—he either grows or dies. Likewise, to get big and strong, Kubik advocates a hard and heavy training program, with the caveat of novices following beginners’ programs in his book, Chalk & Sweat, before advancing to advanced programs. But the point remains that complex exercises are the gateway to strength and power.
The human muscles are designed to perform complex movements, and if one keeps adding weight, the muscles, ligaments, and tendons are forced to adapt and strengthen. These are the time-tested principles of overload and progressive resistance. The best, least time-consuming exercises are compound exercises that work entire muscle groups, not isolation exercises that target single muscles. A novice weightlifter has to first master form and concentration before he moves on to heavy weights, yes, but he simply is not going to get big and strong standing in front of a mirror fooling with bunny weights. To avoid blinkered selectivity: follow the advice of your physician and a seasoned weight trainer, of course, for getting bigger and stronger. But it’d be a good bet to put down a cool million that the experts would tell you to 1) be a man, 2) go do some complex exercises, and 3) eat, rest, and grow. Believe it or not, we’ve become so advanced that people have to be convinced of this stuff. However, how did we reach the point where tried-and-true training methods are scoffed at and have been replaced by methods that simply do not work and do not build strength? As manhood suffers in general, manly activities inevitably are not any too well.
There is an attitudinal impasse American men have about hitting the gym hard and heavy. When a dinosaur is in the gym, and he sees other men doing the same exercises as women, he is reminded that, as Julius Evola said, feminism is a by-product of men setting a bad example for women. That’s not as chauvinistic as it sounds. Explaining the historical importance of the Virgin Mary in his The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler argued, women are history, but men make history. Women have always been the core of society, because they are our mothers, our sisters, our wives, our best friends, and so forth. You are reading this right now, in fact, because you were born at the sacrifice of your own mother. The ancients compared a mother giving birth with a warrior going into battle. That is a huge undertaking and responsibility—frankly, a terrible burden. Because of this very simple reality, men have always felt an obligation to reciprocate the sacrifice of all women by being strong and clever. The deal was that responsibilities were compartmentalized, and both men and women broke even, for the most part. Men reneged on their end of the deal. When women saw the handwriting on the wall, they embraced ideologies that were a vehicle for the empowerment of women. Women are ultimately smarter than men, and they always adapt to the situation at hand. When men used to fail their women, the shame and dishonor was unbearable. The Japanese ritual of seppuku was one way men typically dealt with dishonor. (See Yukio Mishima’s film, Yukoku. Interestingly, Mishima was a fitness fanatic and wrote a manifesto, Sun and Steel, extolling the balance of the mind and body.) Since shame and honor are in short supply nowadays, it is no wonder that Iron Youth are not pumping serious iron and hitting the gym hard and heavy in droves. Men passed the buck to women long ago. But the few men who still respect women and what manhood means know the score. If you train today, train to be able to use these other “men” as human lawn darts. Women everywhere will appreciate the public service you are performing, as they are not too happy about the world being topsy-turvy either. That’s all that is.
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