Now that I’ve click baited you in with a sexually charged title, here’s the scene: Oluwole, of Fit Camp fame–who we all just know as "O"–stands in a squat rack. He’s got some black knee-wraps on over his sweats, headphones in. Earlier he was looking for someone to film this set for him, to which I replied, “I’ll write you an essay on it. That work?” He said that would be acceptable.
Now he’s wrapping his hands around a bar loaded with 425 pounds. Nelson, standing behind him, slaps his back a few times, yells that he’s got it, and O. slings himself under the bar and squats it six times, holding his trademark "O-face": Emotionless, no movement in it aside from remarkably even-keeled breathing. One must hope, puns aside, that that’s not his actual "O-face".
Anyway, he squatted it six times. He’d planned on five but was unsatisfied with the look of the fourth. That kind of guy. The dude then did exactly what anybody would do after squatting a cumulative 2550 pounds: He plopped down on a box and shook the stars out of his eyes.
And I wondered, “Why?” Watching this guy’s earrings jiggle as damn near every muscle from his tibialis anterior to his sternocleidomastoid pulled taut as bridge-suspension, I thought, “What’s this even for?” Because the usual explanations—health, longevity, and looks—are way too simplistic.
I could go through a whole research article on the history of lifting weights in an attempt to derive its motivations from its past, and such a pursuit would do a body good, but the thing is it’s already been done pretty damn well by institutions like History of Physical Culture Library and Chaos and Pain.
And in any case, the history doesn’t tell the whole story. The whole story is that lifting is, pardon my buzzword, a genuinely holistic pursuit that can make just about every aspect of life better if approached from a good angle.
The physical bit’s clear. It’s the most explicit. That lifting is also mental exercise—that’s almost as clear. Directly after O finished his set, we all set into discussing its minutiae: Foot angles and their relation to glute flexion, the vertical illusions of hip-hinge movements—really a bunch of gym jargon that after a few years of lifting amounts, if not to a second bachelor’s degree, at least to a minor in physiology.
Aside even from the direct analysis of lifting mechanics, picking up any serious amount of weight—whatever that means in your context—requires a level of clear-minded focus directly opposed to the thought-scattering, self-rending horcrux-machine that is socially networked modernity.
And there’s the deeper function of lifting. Sure, it’s an utterly absurd activity whose physical and mental functions could be served roughly as well by some other form of exercise, whose functions could be served roughly as well by still another, etc.
Long story short, no particular form of exercise makes any sense: We in the U.S. have basically eradicated the necessity of hard physical labor from most people’s lives, particularly in the middle and upper classes, yet we have decided that to look like you perform regular hard labor is fashionable, so we perform repetitive movements that produce nothing outside themselves/ourselves so that we will look like we work as laborers.
But it’s no more absurd than most of the shit we do. Just another example of what Dr. Theodore Kaczynski calls a surrogate activity.
His idea, roughly, is that because most of the things we do all day only abstractly affect our survival or reproduction—in that, for example, working may provide you with money in order to survive, but you’re not working to directly find food to survive—we have to create purpose for our activities to replace the instinctive purpose that direct work toward survival would have.
Hence most of our activities are surrogates for working toward survival. We’ve got to convince ourselves that we have power over our lives somehow, that we cause enough good either in the world or for ourselves that we can justify the resource-sucking void of our existence. Surrogate activities—like volunteering, academic work, activism, and hobbies—are how we do that.
And this particular surrogate activity can be, for some, a transcendent spiritual experience, something like a deep meditative trance: As I begin a heavy squat, I see nothing. Hear nothing. Taste nothing. All senses but proprioception black-out, there is no memory or future, only the instantaneous developments of a hip-hinge motion: It is a movement from the spatiotemporal spider web that is normal thought into a senseless, patternless full-present, only to return to earth as the bar hits the rack and, to a slowly waning degree over the next hours, to return to it as a present being, as one submerged in the flow of what some call the Dao, others the will of God, others the stream of consciousness.
By the time I came to this thought, O had finished his set and plopped down on that box I talked about earlier. The rest of us had our physiology talk. And someone else got under the bar and took his turn in the lifting-induced trance, breathing evenly as someone asleep, though more deeply.
Ha! O, you thought I was joking about the story, didn’t you?
