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I wrote this after I re-watched the documentary American Hardcore and thought (as I often do) about the correlation of underground music and physical sub-culture. Enjoy (or don't).

 

  Time is oppressively cyclical. The mistakes of our forebearers inevitabley become ours. They may take on a different face, but the same strife, the same confusion, misdirection and ignorance are all but unavoidable. The same voices seem to shout from the ages, shrieking ideas and messages that we once took for our own brand new creations, but they continue to go unheard by the vast majority of people. How can we break the cycle?

 

  In the same way that American was in a musical/moral/fashionable state of facism in the late 1970s and early 80s, we are again caught in the vortex of white man’s rule, corporate vacuousness and manufactured cool. Except now music and fashion have become benign, and youthful rebellion has be relegated to a tool of clothing manufacturers, cell phone companies and social networking websites. Our counterculture image has been co-opted by pornographic websites and our self-expression through hair, clothes and nihilistic attitude are rendered similarly ineffectual by the marketing juggernaut.

 

 Fitness is no better: just as we were promised success, happiness and the American Dream in the 80s, we are now promised ripped abs, endless life and physical perfection if we buy into the newest scam. It’s not school, work or polo shirts now, but instead crunches, diet drinks and Under Armor. Just as disco and area rock recycled, exploited and twisted valid culture, fitness now promises new results from old ideas re-packaged.

 

  We are at an impasse and rebellion is the only escape. Fitness has commodified revolution, removed its teeth and erased its own history. We need to jump down the rabbit hole, take the red pill, step through the looking glass. It is time to turn away from the self-destructive funhouse mirror of mainstream fitness, escape the mundanity of the manufactured life and embrace the truth that’s been there all along.

 

*Photo credit goes to Bodytribe, as I just straight up stole it from their website. I'm in it, so it must make it OK on some level.

Huge news! Chip talks about our upcoming documentary on the history of physical culture over at his blog: http://physicalsubculture.com/2009/12/31/the-history-of-fitness-project/

The combat sports community has made great strides in regards to embracing the world of "functional" training, and shedding the ineffective shackles of bodybuilding-style training. In that transition, though, the value of training for strength has become neglected. It is almost as though an aversion to basic, practical weight training has been cultivated in pursuit of ultimate functionality.

Preregistration for the Oct 10th and 11th workshop series with Chip Conrad at Second Nature Fitness is now open. Register for the whole weekend before Monday, October 5th and receive a $10 discount! And don't forget to inquire about group rate discounts - the more people you bring, the greater your discount!

Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for more details and registration forms.

Chip Conrad, strength coach, owner of Bodytribe in Sacramento, CA (www.bodytribe.com) and physical culturist extraordinaire will be coming to Milwaukee to present a series of workshops at Second Nature Fitness this October.

We will explore fitness, movement and program design from top to bottom over 2 exciting days.

Day 1 (Sat) will kick off with a 2-hour program design workshop in which we discuss the philosophy of Physical Culture, the Spectrum of Strength and how to combine these concepts to create exciting, effective and fulfilling fitness programs.

The bulk of Day 1 will be spent exploring barbell exercises - new ways to understand familiar movements, and some new exercises, too! We'll spend 3 hours tearing into core lifts like the squat, bench, deadlift and overhead press. We'll also break down the Olympic lifts (snatch, clean and jerk) and talk about how to successfully incorporate these movements into your workout schedule.

We'll end Day 1 with an hour-long workshop on mobility - the unification of flexibility, stability and strength. A combination of traditional bodyweight exercises, yoga, and pre-habilitation, mobility is an essential part of any exercise program. We'll discuss how to use it to cap off a great workout, increase strength & range of motion and prevent injury.

Day 2 Sun) will begin with a 2-hour kettlebell exclusives workshop: we'll dig into the history of the kettlebell and explore how to use this tool to its fullest capacity. Even if you consider yourself to be a mini Pavel, you'll still learn some new tricks!

Once we've mastered the kettlebell, we'll move on to building combos out of dumbbell and barbell movements: oft considered to be tools of limited use, we will bend, twist and warp your understanding of these chunks of iron until you view them in an entirely new light. This 2-hour workshop will cover some new movements and how to incorporate old & new into crushing combos.

The weekend will conclude with Chip's newest brainchild: Brutal Recess. We'll learn how to combine mobility and bodyweight movements to create killer workouts with only ourselves and our minds. Expect fun, hard work and some outside play time (weather permitting).

Each seminar will be $20 each, or $50 per day. You can attend as few or as many as you like - we, of course, encourage you to join us for the whole weekend party, but it's not mandatory.

Pre-registration will be available beginning Monday September 22nd and an early bird discount will be offered. Also, refer a non-member (Neutral Ground or Second Nature Fitness) for a discount on your admission!

Please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for more information.

Fitness is sorely lacking in a cerebral component. For some reason the physical has become disconnected from the mental – except, perhaps, in the most banal and superficial ways possible (“it’s all in your head” or other such painful clichés). Mass-market fitness focuses entirely on appealing to the visceral, foregoing any pretense of intellectualism and reducing its opinion of the public to a horde of slobbering idiots. Truth be told, you don’t have to be a scholar of any discipline to be fit, but it doesn’t hurt. At times it seems an impossibility to rectify strength and conditioning with intellectual pursuits, but this week we’ll talk about how it might be possible to be both the brains and the brawn.

From Eugen Sandow's Strength and How to Obtain It (1897):

"'And what is physical culture?' is naturally the question which arises to the lips of those to whom the subject is still unfamiliar...it is to the body what culture, in the accepted sense of the word, is to the mind. To constantly and persistently cultivate the whole of the body so that at last it shall be capable of anything that sound organs and perfectly developed muscles can accomplish - that is physical culture...

To undo the evil for which civilization, and all the drawbacks it has brought in its train, have been responsible in making man regard his body lightly - that is the aim of physical culture."

Although Sandow was concerned with the aesthetics of the "perfectly formed" body, his intentions were true - to cultivate the body, to develop fitness, health and ability. Sandow is adamant that strength of the mind comes first, then the body, then the external. One quote I often use is "appearance is a consequence of fitness." If you are fit, your body will reflect that. If you are not of sound mind and body, it will manifest itself aesthetically.

Physical Culture is the pursuit of mastery of the self - not a vain quest to fulfill an external perception. Conquer yourself, master your mind, and seek out those physical activities that bring you joy, enlightenment and success and you've found Physical Culture.

Recently we’ve been talking a lot about WHAT to do and HOW to do it. I thought that this week we’d take a bit of a break and dig a little bit deeper, instead discussing WHY we train and what drives us to succeed, or causes us to fail. Central to this discussion is the question of goals: what are they, how can we use them and why do we need them? It seems much simpler to walk into the gym, perform our movements of choice and leave, foregoing larger structure and pursuing the moment. Many of us train in this fashion – day in and day out, chasing some vaguely defined notion of what we want to achieve, working more on the struggle of getting into the gym, without really even considering what “there” might be. No matter what your poison (BJJ, kickboxing, strength training, running, etcetera), goals are an essential part of training. It is, of course, why they call it training. I cannot over-emphasizing the importance of goal-setting. Without a greater target, we have no motivation to succeed. If you do not have a reason, you will inevitably stray from your course of action.

OK, so let’s say you’ve followed my advice and developed a solid base – that is, you’re inury-free, have decent alignment, motor co-ordination and balance – all the components of a good fitness foundation. You’ve prepared the body through GPP (General Prepared-ness), addressed muscular weaknesses and imbalances, and are for all intents and purposes, physiologically sound. For some, this set of circumstances is a given, due to a history of athletics, structured fitness programming or plain old genetic luck. It’s possible that you may fall into this category, but even more likely that you have over-estimated your foundation and are in need of some corrections (a common mistake of the ego that we’ve addressed in previous columns). I urge all trainees seeking strength and conditioning improvement to meet with a competent, knowledgeable coach in order to have their abilities assessed with a skillful, critical eye.