Dispatch #31
How to properly modify exercises, why we should all learn to chill-out at the gym, and the puzzling gap between how old we are & how old we feel.
I’ve done it.
After fielding several emails from readers who have encouraged me to do so, I’ve gone ahead and monetized this newsletter. Now if you’d like to support my work with a small monthly or annual donation, you can.
Some Substack publishers offer lavish incentives to their readers as enticement to upgrade to a paid plan. I wonder how much of a difference these offers make. Is anyone really that stoked about the idea of having access to my newsletter archives? If so, please email me directly because I want to know who these super-fans are.
Here’s the offer I am making: anyone who has a paid subscription gets 10% off all my training services. Personal training, online training, nutrition consultations—this offer applies to everything. How’s that for a deal??
If you’re already a subscriber, you can easily upgrade to a paid plan by following these instructions. Free subscribers will still have access to these (semi) weekly dispatches, but you’ll be shorting yourself the immense satisfaction of knowing you’re supporting an independent creator.
Brain & Body
Here is my latest column for The Globe & Mail. As far as I can tell this piece isn’t paywalled, but you do need a G&M account to access the content. Good thing it’s free to make an account! If you’d rather not go through all that rigamarole, copy and paste the link here.
I’ve noticed that the pieces I struggle with the most lead to the greatest reader response. This piece is no exception. I went through three drafts before submitting it to my editor, and I’ve received a whole lot of emails and messages since it was published. Guess I’m not the only one who cringes at the notion of fitness as a form of punishment or penance.
A loyal reader and sometimes-client sent me this piece from The Guardian, noting that it shares a similar message to my latest column. What’s strange is how both pieces were published on the same day. Great minds…
I can’t reiterate this point enough: when it comes to fitness, less is almost always more. Of course your own individual “less” will be different from mine or your training partners. And as your fitness improves, so too will your work capacity. That “less” will grow beyond its original constraints. That’s what we call “progress”, kids.
One of the most common mistakes misguided trainees make is focusing the majority of their efforts on their strongest lifts. I get it—when we’re good at something, we naturally want to showcase that ability. Why struggle through an awkward set of pull-ups when we can crush it on the leg press all day long?
Well, as the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The whole point of intelligent resistance training is to strengthen those shaky bonds; this is why the smartest lifters learn how to modify difficult exercises to suit their abilities.
Heart & Soul
Call me a crazy communist, but it seems clear that the first step towards ruining anything (including this newsletter??) is to turn it into a commodity. Once money becomes involved, people stop mattering. Profits become God. Marketing bullshit becomes gospel. Consumers become cynical and apathy soon set in.
To my eyes nowhere is this cycle more evident than in the fitness world. Here we have an activity that requires next to no financial investment to take part in, and yet the market is valued at $30 billion in the United States alone. What makes these figures so curious is that for all the money people are dumping into gyms and treadmills, our society isn’t getting any healthier. Anyone else smell a scam?
I’m 43 years old...a fact that I’ve only recently begun to accept. Just writing that number (43!) feels strange. I know my life has a history behind it; I can reflect back upon decades worth of memories and experiences, but still the notion that I’m nearly half a century old boggles my mind.
Turns out I’m not alone. According to smarter people than I, we tend to feel 20% younger than our actual age. Why? Read the article and find out.
1987 is my cultural Year Zero. That’s when my eyes were truly opened to the magic of music and movies, to the weirdness of art, the importance of literature. To this day, so much of the music that I consume was released in the five year window from ‘87-‘91.
Realizing this got me thinking: is it possible to establish a Year Zero for rock & roll in general? What’s the exact point in time in music history when everything changed for good? According to author and music historian Andrew Grant Jackson, the answer is 1965.
Social Spotlight
As regular readers of this newsletter may remember, for the last month or so I’ve been using AI art generators to help pretty-up the content I share. That’s right—every image contained on this page was made by an ethereal machine-based artist. An artist I don’t have to pay a cent to (at least not for now anyway…I’m sure soon enough some copyright lawyer will convince a judge that AI has creative rights too).
There are a whole bunch of sites offering this service, and while none are perfect my favourite so far is NightCafe Creator. It’s easy to use and unlike most you don’t need to pay for credits in order to curate a masterpiece.
That’s all for this week. As always, I thank you for spending some time scrolling through the stuff that I find interesting. Hopefully at least one of these articles made you think about life in a slightly different way.
Until next time!
- P