375 Reps

Well, it’s been a week. Not only another training week running down to the end, but, I finished my eight week “get jacked” strength training block on Tuesday. It was a grind, three days per week, hard day, easy day, moderate day, racking up 375 reps on the hard day for eight consecutive weeks. Exact programming was my own, but roughly following the Delorme Protocol. Measuring success is necessarily subjective; however, I’ve lost 5 or 6 kilograms, and I am back to climbing at my 2021 level. Given that I’ve spent very little time actually climbing (rock climbing is the ultimate strength to body weight sport) over the last couple of years, that makes the programme a rousing success. Remember, as you get older, maintenance becomes the new personal record. .

There is a certain satisfaction to completing a hard programme similar to what one feels after climbing a remote mountain, getting your first kayak roll, or sending a hard route. Mostly, of course, the secret is dogged persistence and determination. There are other things, however - like adjusting to sacrifices - which are over-looked as essential to success. Most of us have busy full lives and if we committ to something new, in all likelihood something old will have to be put aside, at least for a while. Not accounting for sacrifice is what causes a lot of people to fail. The sacrifice might be giving up junky carbohydrates and eating just meat and vegetables, or it might be passing on your favorite sedentary activity to train instead. I often think stopping doing things is almost as hard as starting to do new things. New things always hold the alluring promise of a glistening fresh reality but old things are our coping strategies for tough times or stressful circumstances. Most of us have grooved decades of patterned behavior deep into our cerebral cortex. Simply stopping is surprisingly hard.

Nutrition is like this. Most dieticians bang on about adding vegetables and fruit to your diet when the most important diet make-over people can employ is taking all manner of stuff out of the diet. Of course, most dieticians are trained not as thinkers but as ideologues and their schooling – I can’t in all honesty call it “education” – consists in learning some rote “facts” that get regurtitated at regular intervals as the answer to all questions.

Which is a good segue into this essay from Dr Vinay Prasad. In the world of medicine, Prasad is a contrarian thinker. Almost always a virtue in my judgement. The article is about “desperation oncology” but it could be about desperation anything and highlights how incremental (as in almost immeasurably small) most advances in medical treatment are in modern times despite the wide-spread belief that medical science is in any measurable way an actual science rather than a collection of facile and simplistic theories which are as quickly disproven as they are imagined.