Thoughts From Mark Rippetoe

Unnecessary death is never good. But it is also bad in that the ability to rise to such an occasion has been essentially lost.

McConnell hates the term “wellness” as much as I do. Wellness is what we say when we mean Ineffective Exercise and USDA Dietary Guidelines, both of which are designed to be easy to do and to pay lip service to a concept that most people know is good and right but don’t have the nads to actually follow.“Wellness” means having a salad and a baked potato after your aerobics class. It means enjoying increased longevity—getting to watch more episodes of Oprah! It means making an attempt at doing something slightly harder than sitting at your desk, and that the attempt itself is good enough. Mainly it means that just being “well” is good enough. Well, “well” is not good enough, and we need to quit acting like it is.

Granted, modern Western society could benefit immeasurably from a large-scale movement in the direction of even this watered-down version of optimal human existence. But, the general public being what it is, the tide that floats all the boats is going to have to be a pretty big tide, and “wellness” just hasn’t got that much water.Those of us who actually train should understand why it’s good: that physically—and mentally—difficult tasks are normal and natural to our existence, that they have been since the inception, and that this is the reason they make us healthier. Overcoming the challenges presented by these tasks makes us generally better as humans, and if the task does not rise to the level of a challenge it fails to provide this benefit. It may make you “well,” but it won’t make you anything more. Maintaining our own high training standards will have the long-term effect of raising those of the general public as well, for which favor they will all owe us a beer.

Hard training does all these fabulous things because physical difficulties are always accompanied by mental and emotional effects that those difficulties create. Finishing a very heavy set of twenty squats, or pushing through “Three Bars of Death” as prescribed, or suffering through “Murph” wearing a weight vest, is as much a mental task as it is a physical. The seventeenth rep is done under conditions of accumulating lactic acid, the inability to satisfy an increasingly severe oxygen debt, blurred vision, aching feet, and a sensation that must be vaguely akin to drowning. And then you have to decide whether to do the eighteenth, which isn’t going to feel any better.The nineteenth and twentieth are going to be

worse, and most people who have not experienced this before will quit.The ones who don’t will learn something about their own limits, and about the temporary nature of such adversity. Amazingly enough, the weight is not that heavy—the first rep and the last rep are both “light” compared to the way a heavy single feels—and the challenge is not really the generation of enough force to get back up out of the bottom.The challenge is doing it when you feel like you are about to die, when things other than making the bar go up would logically seem more important. If you have never done a set of twenty with a weight that you previously thought was a 10-rep max, you should try it sometime.

Max sets of twenty are nasty, sinister bastards, very hard to do for more than a few weeks at a time because of the mental aspects of the task. Quite literally, you have about five minutes to enjoy the fact that the set is over before the realization dawns that you have to do it again next week. I have often spent days with an awful sense of dread for weeks at a time while I was doing them until, finally, progress on them slowed to a stop and I could honorably change squat workouts to something else. After this, pretty much everything else seemed easy, at least in the weight room. I learned later that there is significant carryover to things outside the weight room.

The two things that most influence our physical appearance, exercise and diet, have in common the fact that doing them correctly means choosing to do things that involve discomfort.It is unfortunately impossible to sit down to the table and eat all you want every time you eat. Jobs that make this possible—like being a galley slave or a field hand—are not terribly common since the invention of modern labor-saving devices like engines and tractors. Leaving the table before you’re full involves making a decision not to do something you’d rather do.Whether this rises to the level of actual discomfort depends on your personal relationship with your cheeseburger, but hunger is a powerful sensation for most people who don’t suffer from an eating disorder.Try walking into a restaurant sometime and just watching other people eat when you’re hungry yourself. Even younger guys trying to gain weight find that the requirements—eating more than you want to every time you eat—involve some degree of temporary discomfort.

Eating to obtain a positive result as opposed to mindlessly feeding yourself to satiety requires discipline, although not as much as the last three reps of the set of twenty. And if you can’t make yourself stay away from the fourth piece of chicken, you’re never going to do the set of twenty anyway. Supper might be a good place to practice setting easy little goals for yourself that require some discipline to accomplish, so you can get in the habit of being in better control of your behavior.