This Is the Life We’ve Chosen

I don’t often get into the public-figure part of my life on this blog. There’s not much to it, beyond my books and occasional appearances at fitness events. But, because I have a lot of material out there (I’m up to 269,000 hits on Google), I’m occasionally confronted with the unpleasant truth that I really piss some people off.

I’m not talking about people who disagree with me or raise legitimate questions about my work; those debates are invigorating and necessary. They keep me honest.

It’s the crazy shit that throws me off. I don’t get a lot of it — I’m not prominent enough for that — but when I do, it’s unnerving, especially if it involves a review of one of my books.

Take a recent Amazon reader review of Book of Muscle, for example. The reviewer gives it one star, headlines his review “Are You Kidding?”, and then says this:

When referencing select muscle groups like shoulders, this book lists EVERY exercise that effects the muscle group and not the exercises that have a direct impact. For example, for shoulder exercises it lists Bench Press. The primary muscle group for Bench Press is the CHEST with the Shoulders being indirectly affected. The Bench Press should not even be in this category. This happens over and over whne discussing various muscle groups and it can lead a beginning weight lifter to have a strong misunderstaing of strength training.

Now, if you’ve read Book of Muscle, you know the entire point of the exercise sections was to sort movements according to their physiological function. The chapter my critic refers to is called “Muscles That Act on the Shoulder.” Those muscles, I wrote, include the pectorals, the main function of which is “to pull your upper arm across the front of your torso, as in a bench press or dumbbell fly.”

Put another way, what Ian King and I were deliberately and pointedly trying to avoid was classifying exercises according to “body parts.” Lots of workout books have chapters filled with “chest” exercises. Ian and I were trying to change the conversation.

My critic clearly didn’t want the conversation changed, and that would be a fair point, if he’d raised it. Instead, he ripped into the book for doing exactly what it set out to do.

I got a similar slam from a reader of New Rules of Lifting, who headlined his two-star review “Not so hot.” His complaint:

Page 13. of the book, “when I conceived this book I had a brilliant premise: I would take every excersive in the gym and look at it in terms of possible role in human movemement.” Then later goes on on to list the moves they think are important, even debating what should be included. There is no scientific method to this, only apparently two individuals conceiving an idea for a book. I’m sure there strength books are good, but this a “me too” book on core performance.

It would be one thing if this fellow had called me out on my self-absorption or pomposity. But he chose a sentence I wrote in a section in which I was poking fun at myself. Here’s the sentence that precedes the one he quoted:

I’m going to make a horrible confession about my own ignorance.

You know, I think it’s pretty clear I wasn’t going for pomposity there.

There’s nothing you can do about these reviews, other than hope that the positive reviews from people who actually read and understood the book will marginalize the bad ones. And, indeed, it’s worked out that way so far.

But there’s another type of comment that some people in the fitness biz get, a comment that’s highly personal and extraordinarily deranged, that crosses the line from infuriating to funny. Eric Cressey, one of the really bright young guys in the fitness world, got one of those recently, and decided to deconstruct it in his newsletter.

I couldn’t do justice to it by pulling out any particular passage. So if you want a good laugh, click through and read the entire thing.

Rolling the role models

Cassandra Forsythe, a Ph.D. student at the University of Connecticut and one of my coauthors on my next book, has just started blogging, and already has a doozy of a post.

She saw the most recent cover of this magazine, and went off:

This girl looks like she starved herself for weeks before her photo shoot, and has never touched a weight (unless it was pink, and weighed less than five pounds) in her life. To make matters worse, one of the titles on the front of the mag says, “Get hips and thighs like these!” and points to this model.

Give me a break! 99.9 percent of the women in this world couldn’t have hips and thighs like that unless they were still 12 years old or if they stopped eating for a month. Plus, who wants to look like that? I sure don’t, and if there are women out there that do, they need to have their heads checked.

This model is exactly the reason why so many women have distorted views of their body. Women are meant to have hips and thighs, whereas the model here doesn’t. It’s not healthy, or attractive.

If anything, I think Cass took it easy on the magazine. Not only did it promote the model’s unmuscled thighs as something its readers should aspire to, it put a “Trim Your Waist!” coverline next to a midsection that would make a Barbie doll look like a candidate for bariatric surgery. I almost hope the magazine’s art director Photo Shopped the model’s waistline. (I’ve seen cover images before and after they were manipulated; nobody looks as good as a magazine cover.) If that’s her real waist, then Cass is probably right about not eating for a month.

Cass’s righteous fury reminds me of the skinny-fashion-model tangent I went off on a few weeks ago. I don’t want to speak for her, but I think our points dovetail into this thought:

If the fashion industry wants to sell its products with paperweight models, that’s their business. But when those models with that degree of emaciation cross over into our business, we have to push back. Muscles are healthy and look good on women as well as men. To promote a starved, unmuscled physique on the cover of a fitness magazine is an abomination.

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