River of Deceit

Confusing the floor and the ceiling, and comfortable lies in the fitness industry.

For all the chatter about “what is optimal”, “peak performances”, “science and evidence-based” training, I see very little in the way of experience-based accomplishments.

Dan John’s “Juggernaut Training”, April 2021

I’m not trying to be pretentious, I’ll call out my own limitations plenty in this article. I’m talking about the peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect regarding fitness revivalists. I also won’t dote on anyone’s success, regardless of how you define it.

What I want to do is speak truth-to-power regarding the charlatans and hucksters who are selling you pictures of Mr. Olympia and giving you a 10K-steps-per-day generic prescription for the general population.

This is the classic bait-and-switch that keeps the “fitness industry” profitable. Magazine covers are a poverty aspiration like the lottery. The fervor of a person’s radical breakthrough in health or fitness often leads them to wanting to share the message. Good for them.

What’s not so good is the inability to see beyond what is currently working for you — another rife plague we have to contend with even without assuming malicious intent — and it gets worse when these folks go seeking confirmation bias and actively avoid different perspectives.

We have plenty of people biting on the low-hanging fruit of swapping out LED lightbulbs and drinking from glass instead of plastic bottles, but won’t commit to animal protein every meal or a 12-week training plan.

We need an authentic reality check to confront this identity-expectation-mismatch. We can do so much better than photo-shopped booty-pics selling “scrunch-butt” shorts and 20-year old “coaches” citing a single animal study to sell you a greens powder or the “optimal” number of leg extensions per set.

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The Ante and The Elite:

Unfortunately, the fitness bar has been set extremely low by the acceptance and “normalizing” of a grossly un-fit population. This ends up looking a lot more like a big fish in a small pond than it does coming out of Plato’s Cave.

You don’t get to claim a “red pill” identity like a participation trophy, just for showing up at the gym a few days per week. The language of “elite”, “optimal”, and “peak” abounds yet, by definition those things ought to be quite rare.

Are we defining excellence by the cellar from which we crawled out of, or by the height of which we wish to aspire?

Eating “clean” 5 days per week isn’t a diet, it’s role playing. “Lifting weights” (a dishonestly vague term) 3x per week, doing cardio (just as vague) 2x per week, and sticking to a diet (still unclear) for the next 30 days may make you “unrecognizable”, but it does not make you “superhuman.”

Quite literally, it makes you “just human.” You have achieved the bare minimum for success — the buy-in, the ante. I don’t say this to rain on anyone’s parade. I hope it inspires you to keep striving higher and demanding more of yourself.

Tim Grover reminds us that “showing up is none of the battle.” Before you call this statement cold, recall that Tim isn’t selling you a meal plan; he’s standing on the business of dozens of NBA championship rings.

While showing up is a pre-requisite for winning, if you’re at a place where just showing up feels insurmountable, you certainly won’t be contending as a “winner.”

This isn’t a personal indictment or value judgment. It is the reality of what “elite success” actually costs. Did you think it would be easy? Did you confuse your Instagram progress pic and motivational quote for the actual work?

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Calibration and Faux Humility:

While we’re on the subject of what high performance and “intensity” actually look like, here are some prime examples from various sport disciplines:

Capacity:

In 1999 Lance Armstrong was tested at 450 watts for 38 minutes; which comes out to ~6.3-6.7 watts / Kg — often generalized and cited as 500 watts / 20 minutes. Those numbers are gibberish to most most folks, but you don’t need a PhD to understand that no amount of EPO will get your average gym-bro to those numbers.

In 2023 I attempted a simple 10-minute max calorie workout on an Echo Bike. The total was 158 calories of output which translates to about 316 watts for 10 minutes. I weighed ~80 Kg at the time. This means I held 61% of Lance’s power for 26% of the time — and it leveled me. It was a potent enough lesson that I haven’t had the desire to attempt that session again in almost 3 years.

Strength / Power:

Certainly “longevity” and “functional fitness” experts have commented that lifting heavy “isn’t worth the risk” and that a certain young lady — named Olvia Reeves — will have her back and hips in shambles in 10 years.

However, you know what’s cooler than living to 200? How about winning a world championship before you’re old enough to buy a beer to celebrate… and then winning an Olympic gold medal the next year… and then breaking your own Olympic record the year after that… all well before your car insurance goes down at 25.

Likewise, Lasha Talakhadaze is 6’6” and weighs about 400 lbs. Similar to the experts above, one may be tempted to critique Mr. Lasha’s physique (body fat) or metabolism. In 2021 he set world records for both the snatch (225 Kg / 496 Lbs) and clean-and-jerk (265 Kg / 588 lbs). He’s almost literally throwing you and the horse you rode in on overhead — anabolics or not.

My own Olympic lifts are barely a whimper of what’s mentioned here — 225 Lbs CJ / 135 Lbs Snatch.

Endurance:

I’ve “ran” 20+ miles exactly once in my life and it took 6 hours. Prior to 2023 the world record for consecutive ultra-marathons (31 miles each) was 23 days. Between 2022/23 Candice Burt obliterated that record by running 31 miles each day for 200 consecutive days. In case you’re bad at math, that’s 6,200 miles total — further than it is from Vancouver to Miami.

On one hand there is also the troubling trend of faux humility that benefits no one. This is the performative mask that veils a frail identity; be that rooted in megalomania, lack of experience, or deceitfulness.

Some globo-gyms brand themselves as “judgment free zones” and this is a net detriment. The best gyms I’ve trained in have dusty banners (usually denoting a handful of national or world caliber titles) hanging from the ceiling and grimy chalk boards with accolades, tests, and accomplishments that are actively updated. In other words, judgment.

I’ve never viewed these things as “put downs” or infantalizing “the average person’s capability.” Nor, have I used faux humility as a sophisticated excuse to avoid work. Many people are quick to dismiss achievements, like those above, to drugs, genetics, or some other privilege. But, I see it as an inspiration to strive for as if instead to say, “that’s really cool, let’s get after it!”

Nevertheless, the longevity cult often uses “safety” as a euphemism for stagnation. Anyone who has accomplished anything worth talking about knows that avoidance is a terrible strategy for success.

Trying not to lose gets you beat every time.

The Specialist’s Tax:

Similar to faux humility, there is a lot of appeal to being a “jack of all trades”, or above average in a lot of things. Certainly, this is fun and entertaining, even addictive. “Noob-gains” are exciting, and definitely a real experience. But, it’s important to recognize that no amount of breadth spread across the bottom will make up for the hard work of going deep.

You can be good, even really good, at a lot of things. However, true excellence will always come at the expense of something else. Intuitively we understand this because rarity and exclusivity add value to things. What defines a peak is that it is intrinsically not sustainable — that would be a plateau. When someone accomplishes something we deem “not worth the risk” for ourselves, we can either hide from our own insecurity, or acknowledge that because someone did it anyway is exactly what makes it so spectacular.

The point where “fitness” becomes “effort” is where most people realize they just want to “exercise” and not “train.” “Elite” and “optimal” rhetoric are just ways to make themselves feel better. That’s fine, I truly hope you enjoy the things you do in life — and that fitness is one of them. I also hope that you’re not bench marking a Ferrari against a minivan.

High performance machines, and people, don’t measure themselves against the rest of the pack. They measure themselves against the track. Like all things, this ruthless pursuit isn’t free. How many divorces would you trade for a few of Kobe’s, Jordan’s, or Brady’s championship rings?

For most of us we can pretty quickly and easily conclude that such things “are not worth it.” Cool. It takes all sorts of people to make the world go round. The reality is that many of the achievements and people I’ve listed here aren’t necessarily literal goals or benchmarks, but reminders of the infinite.

Raise the tide, don’t lower your standards. A given feat is only impossible, until somebody does it.

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