The debate goes like this.
The Weightlifter: Yanking 350 pounds up over my head explosively makes me a badass!
The Powerlifter: 350 is pretty small. Try squatting 800 pounds! That’s a real monster!
The Crossfitter: Yeah, well I can do 1,000 pull-ups in the time it takes you to do that squat.
The MMA fighter: But will any of that prepare you to have your ass kicked by me?
The Triathlete: That’s badass? The pinnacle of our sport is called the Ironman, since it is an entire day of grueling endurance competition.
The Bodybuilder: Well we were the FIRST to have an Ironman competition. It’s the display of many hours in the gym preparing to look as big and strong as possible and being shredded at 270 pounds at 3% body fat. Dude, I’m HUUUGE!
Then everyone laughs at the bodybuilder for having no real skills, and he inevitably brings up the fact that Ronnie Coleman deads 800 for doubles (like that means anything). And we’re back to the beginning of the debate.
Minus the triathlete, this was a summary of a thread on T-Nation that went on for pages and days, revolving around itself and having no ending or even justification for existing. Words like “tough” and “strong” were played like trump cards without any real definition as to what they meant, and they were often erroneously correlated with being “big.”
It may behoove us to diddle the pedantic in all of us (that sounds fun, right?) and open a discussion about definitions and true meanings. Solidifying our own personal philosophies will help us see our goals as not mere vague possibilities but very real paths with defined indicators of progress.
No more of this “I’ll know when I get there” nonsense. A passion is only as strong as the philosophy it is based on, and a philosophy must be defined, outlined, and understood thoroughly. So, if we really have a passion for empowerment through iron, let’s define what “strength” really is.
How Strong Are You?
We cannot obtain what isn’t defined. The vague archetypes that we carry around in our heads will suffer from being fuzzy ideals unless we define to ourselves and the Universe what the heck they really are. Marketing hyperboles weave magic spells around people’s otherwise logical brains, creating a need for pursuing such words as “strong” or “tough” without really self-defining what they are. But what does it mean to be strong?
Although an attempt will be made in the following paragraphs to define strength, let’s determine whether a need to define strength is relevant.
Yes. (It’s my article. Hence, saying ‘no’ would defeat the many paragraphs I’ve already written.)
Men are bombarded with some heavy hitting propaganda defining that to be a Man means ranking high on some scale of badass-ness that exists in some blurry archetypical universe. (I don’t mean to discount the awful hell women have to go through fighting the big media beast that attacks their self-esteem on a regular basis, but I just haven’t walked in their shoes. They are uncomfortable and small.) Hence, the redundant, painful T-Nation thread that was a prime example of how ethereal and undefined our quest is.
During the said thread, many guys chose the word “strength” to sum up the higher echelons of badass-ness, yet no one defined what strength was. The word “toughness” was thrown around with equal etherealness. Fighting prowess seemed to be the bench mark for many guys and even led to a UFC-fighter-versus-street-fighter-versus-bodybuilder debate that, again, due to undefined terms and ideas, led nowhere (although it did appeal to the Batman-versus-Spiderman sort of debates some of us nerds had as kids). Size came up over and over again, as it does in all magazines and advertisements. The quickest, shallowest estimation of badass-ness seems to be sheer mass. Where did that leave me at age 22 weighing 127 pounds? Standing at the sign-up counter at the gym forking over my ducats for the right to lift badass stuff within their badass walls and be among the badass guys.
I’m about 60 pounds heavier now but far from the behemoths on the cover of any bodybuilding magazine, as are 90 percent of most men. My quest for “size for size’s sake” ended when I realized the best ME wasn’t going to waste time in the gym striving for a media-fed ideal that had nothing to do with REAL strength or performance. REAL training, for strength and performance, teaches you to be better at anything, not just looking pretty posing for a magazine cover.
But strength, for many men, still means size. Although the inverse can hold some truth—size very well may mean a stronger muscle—strength, as I will define below, does not always have to mean size.
So what is it to be strong?
First I’ll discuss physical strength, the physiological ideas behind the performance of the body. If we were to conjure up a group image of strength, it may resemble some strong man or woman with bulging biceps hoisting some serious weight. However, individually, we’ve all seen different displays of strength and need to mine those caves of thought for what, beyond the world of media, strength may really be.
Contemplating Strength
This evening my sanctuary is alive. The sun is lowering as I glance around my gym smiling, knowing that what hasn’t yet been picked up, thrown, carried, lifted, pressed, pulled, swung, or squatted soon will be. Don’t worry apparatuses—if you haven’t been played with yet today, you won’t be ignored for much longer. A tribe is defined by its toys and ideas as much as its people, so an un-carried sand bag or lonely barbell that hasn’t felt gravity’s pull from waist, chest, or overhead height probably longs to be an active community participant. For the next two hours or so, the gym population swells, and its members are hungry for strength, letting the equipment know it is needed and loved.
I, with care, caress the 25-pound leverage club before hoisting it around in a hammer throw a few times, and I believe I hear it squeal with delight, as does my local and global spinal musculature, now alive and excited for more movement. But this isn’t my play time; it is the iron recess for my tribe. I am simply to lend them my tiny trainer brain for moments when my humbly acquired sagacity might increase the level of their empowerment.
With the club in my hand, I start to ruminate on all the possible ways this one tool, or any one of the tools within bleeding distance, can increase that formerly nebulous word “strength.” Although we started to define it above, the burden of my passion never ceases to drag that word kicking and screaming into the spotlight until our collective subconscious agrees on a model that will serve as a permanent archetype.
So let’s continue talking about strength and how the little artist in all of us needs to assert the creative virus that resides in our souls. Perhaps covered in cobwebs and candy wrappers, or maybe too busy in other endeavors, our little artist can, with the right lighting and a bit of squinting, view the weight room as a most glorious palate and that physical house of ours as the not-so-blank canvas. Art of Anima Mundi 101, here we go…
If we define strength in the physical world as “force development” and acknowledge all the different degrees of force development, then we have a giant spectrum of strength, from the archetypical absolute maximal force development (the legendary world where grandmothers lift cars off babies and what all “strength” athletes are striving for) to extreme endurance events like century runs, multi-day challenges, and everything in between. It is all force development, from the body generating as much force as possible at once (powerlifting, Olympic lifting, throwing cars off pinned loved ones, etc.) to low-level force development over a long duration (what is called “endurance,” and often treated as something different from “strength.”).
With such a spectrum of possibility, why is it that the average weight trainer works within the very limited prison of 6–10 or 8–12 reps with moderate speed and weight? Training further in both directions will create a more capable, “stronger” human. Thinking beyond “reps,” “sets,” and “weight” is the key to using the entire spectrum. What about speed? Duration? Distance? The weight room isn’t just for the limited ideals of a bodybuilder.
Beyond physical strength, we hear of strength of spirit, strength of character, and strong morale, all of which should have definitions of their own since they are often talked about as vague but determined, admirable traits. Perhaps these are simply ways of overcoming obstacles, showing a “strength” that has little to do with mere physiology or muscle.
How about a small, simple definition for strength? Ability. To be strong is to have ability. In life, in the gym, and in relationships. The ability to overcome the physical, emotional, or subjective obstacles that hinder our progress as human beings. That is strength.
Defeating yourself before even making an attempt—that is weakness. Those who avoid this are “badasses,” “tough,” and “strong.”
Chip Conrad is the owner of Bodytribe Fitness. He is a published fitness writer and coaches strength athletes of all levels, including a powerlifting team. He’s an APA referee and hosts several meets a year. Chip will be releasing his Physical SubCulture DVD in the late summer as well as his book, Lift with Your Head. For more information, visit www.bodytribe.com.
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