Jeff Ventura

Remembering Christopher Hitchens

Not breaking news, but still: Christopher Hitchens, one of the authors who really resonated with me and taught me to think for myself, died a week ago. He was a magnificent contrarian bastard, but always enlightening and encouraging us to use our rational minds. As a wannabe-writer myself, I had a personal relationship with his words, how he wrote. On my best day I couldn’t think or write like him, but I try. I’ll always try.

He tried to show us the best of ourselves.  He encouraged us to let go of binding superstition, demagoguery, religion and useless mythos. His words agitated many, and infuriated many more, but that’s to be expected from a man who didn’t care who he rubbed or how. He spoke his mind eloquently, beautifully, rationally.

Here’s Slate’s tribute to him. If you’re at all a fan of Hitch, go read it.

The Flinch

Funny I just found out about Julien Smith’s new e-book, called The Flinch, a few hours ago. Funny because I just got done rambling about attacking your weaknesses as the way to get stronger, both functionally and mentally. I am a huge fan of Julien’s blog, In Over Your Head, and think anyone with a functioning sense of reason should be reading it. Now, giving The Flinch a quick cursory glance over at Amazon, it looks right up my alley:

A book so important we refuse to charge for it.

Julien Smith has delivered a surprise, a confrontation, a book that will push you, scare you and possibly stick with you for years to come.

The idea is simple: your flinch mechanism can save your life. It shortcircuits the conscious mind and allows you to pull back and avoid danger faster than you can even imagine it’s there.

But what if danger is exactly what you need?

What if facing the flinch is the one best way to get what you want?

Here’s a chance to read the book everyone will be talking about, before they do.

What are you afraid of? Here’s how to find out.

Dramatic intros aside, the ideas in this book aren’t for sissies. They’re about leaning into your fear, into your discomfort, to understand what you’re truly capable of. Just like I said about heavy olympic lifting, this scares a ton of people. It’s too much work. It’s painful. It’s not life as we know it.

Hell, most notions of self-imposed discipline scare people.

And for those reasons many of you might not read the text, let alone do the ‘homework’ The Flinch prescribes.

Are you one of those people?

Are you willing to prove you’re not?

You can get The Flinch at Amazon, right now, for free. It might not be the deepest book ever penned on facing your fears with demonstrable action, but it’s likely the first many of you have seen.

Attack Your Weaknesses

You know this story, right?

You find a comfort zone in the gym. You get good at running. You find your groove on the Concept2. You like Bosu balls and woodchoppers. That’s fine, but after a while you begin to do the same movements over and over, perhaps mixed into different days/workouts, without even recognizing what’s happening. You become blind to your own patterns.

What’s happening is the one thing that’s holding you back from becoming a complete athlete. At the very least, it’s what holding you back in your workout performance.

It’s this: we all tend to reinforce our strengths instead of working on our weaknesses.

You don’t need to be a PhD to figure this one out. If you’re terrible at, say, squats, doing them sucks. Your loads will be off. You stand an increased chance of injury. It’s just downright painful. Why do this shit, you ask yourself, when you can do the same thing with one-leg Bosu lunges and seated hamstring curls?

You’re weaknesses are weaknesses because you’re not good at them. They’re not comfortable. You make ridiculous faces when you do them. You haven’t learned proper form, you’re underdeveloped in a certain area, or your ashamed that you can’t do 10 consecutive pull-ups but you can woodchop like a champ with 80 lbs. on the cable.

Whatever your rationale, it’s wrong. The quickest way to break through your training barriers is to start attacking your weakest areas.

When I first began doing CrossFit, I was horrible with the Olympic lifts. People would cringe watching me. I jacked my back more than once with horrible deadlift and squat form. For a long time, I stayed away from these lifts in favor of other movements. Seeing how my goal is to gain lean weight, the realization eventually hit me square in the face: if I was going to get bigger andstronger, I would need to hit the lifts that I hated. Hard.

Four months ago, I began focusing on these movements: clean and jerk, squats, deadlift, front squat, snatch, strict pull-ups. My results changed instantly. I didn’t become proficient in these overnight (I’m still not), but slowly I got stronger, my form better. I swallowed my pride and began really working on my weaknesses, and let me tell you: there’s the closest thing to a magic piece of advice I can give you.

You’re already good at what you’re good at. Why not challenge yourself to become good at what you’ve been avoiding? It’s hard, it sucks, and you have to go back to square one for some movements. You might get injured. You might blow a few box jumps and look like a dipshit.

So what?

You will advance your training goals and become so much more functionally strong in the process.

Think about it.