Marshall Sontag Live!

HIT Me

The time was 7:15. I drank down my 1% Milk/Soy Milk/Whey Protein/Creatine shake and did 20 minutes of yoga. Then I grabbed my water bottle, kissed Brittany goodbye and walked out the door.

The time was 7:50. I walked into L.A. Fitness and gave the receptionist my membership card to scan and he looked at me surprised. "You know we close in 10 minutes, right?"

While I was caught off-guard by his statement, the surprise was fairly ephemeral. "That's OK, " I said confidently, "That's all I need." He smiled, shrugged his shoulders and said "Go right ahead, then."

I walked out of the gym 5 minutes later after having completed my workout. I did one set on the leg extension, one on the leg press, one on the calf raise and one on the ab machine, all in a high-intensity training (HIT) fashion. That was it.

Why so brief? I purchased a copy of Mike Mentzer's newest book, High-Intensity Training the Mike Mentzer Way and spent a large part of the day reading it, and that's one of the three workout routines he advocates for bodybuilders. Three routines, all consisting of performing one set of 4 or 5 exercises, every 4-7 days. This is a huge departure from traditional strength training advice, but then again Mike Mentzer was a huge departure from the traditional bodybuilder or exercise guru.

Mike Mentzer was a hero. He was the first person ever to receive a perfect score in a Mr. Universe contest by training for 45 minutes a day, 4 days a week when the other bodybuilders at the time, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, were training twice a day, for 2 hours each workout, 6 days a week. While Mentzer made huge contributions to the field of bodybuilding, above all else, he stood for rationality, honesty and integrity. Being an Objectivist, Mentzer began all explanations of bodybuilding principles with a sound philosophical foundation composed of logic and reason, and emphasized that strength training was a purely scientific endeavor. As John Little, the co-author, says in this book, Mentzer was something that was "a first for a professional bodybuilder -- an intellectual." I highly recommend you read an online essay by Little, A Question of Character: The Objectivist Versus The Machiavellian to learn more about Mentzer's amazing character, and how it parallels with Schwarzenegger's conniving ways.

He expounded on the law of identity, and its application to exercise science. In fact, Identity is the first principle of exercise he teaches: A is A, man is man and a muscle is a muscle, which has a specific nature and requires specific stimulus, universal to all muscle, in order to produce the desired result. The other fundamental principles are intensity, duration, frequency, specificity, adaptation and progression. If you have any interest in bodybuilding, or giving yourself a harder body, or just want to know more about strength training in general, I highly recommend you get yourself a copy of this book. Unfortunately, Mike Mentzer passed away in 2001 at the young age of 49 from a heart attack while he slept.

I purchased this book because, as some of you may know, I have taken to sculpting my physique as a new hobby. In my sculpting toolkit, I have the South Beach Diet which I've used to burn off nearly 30 pounds of fat, as well as various books on strength-training which I apply to make my muscles larger and more clearly defined. I also started taking creatine today for the additional workout energy, as well as the increased muscle volumization.

I didn't start working out for this purpose, however. I initially began because I had been finding an overwhelming amount of reasons to take it up. First off, I naturally wanted to lose fat and build muscle, just for the purpose having a leaner and more attractive body. I also found that regular exercise improves focus and mental sharpness, as well as staves off brain aging, helps you sleep better, and is just as effective in treating mild depression as antidepressants. In addition to exercise's brain-boosting and mood-enhancing qualities, it also produces a whole slew of health benefits.

After learning all of this, what reason can you possibly have NOT to start an exercise program now? (If you live in the Orlando area and are interested in joining a gym, contact Drew Baye.)

Anger Bad for Objectivity

If you read my last entry, Ignorance Bad for Objectivity (if you haven't, I recommend you do so first), you probably felt one of two ways afterwards:

1. Self-Righteously Infuriated
2. Self-Righteously Infuriated

What I mean is, you were most likely influenced by the angry tone I used, but in different ways depending on whether or not you agreed with me on the matter.

If you already agreed with me, you would have become angry at this Wayne Dunn guy for being such a complete idiot (This can be seen in Chris Krusey's comment on that entry). If you disagreed with me on the subject, you would have become angry at me for being such a complete idiot. Either way, my essay was ineffective.

Why? Anger.

After I had written it, I sent it to the Mudita Forum because it pertained to both Objectivism and Buddhism. However, Joshua Zader, the forum moderator, rejected my post. He said he struggled with approving it and finally decided that the tone wasn't conducive to the benevolent atmosphere that he had cultivated on the forum. After it didn't show up on the forum, I became mad because I had suspected that he wasn't going to approve it (though I suspected he might not from the beginning), but came to my senses before even confirming that he had indeed rejected it (Shameless Self-Praise).

We had a dialogue about it the next day, and I explained that I found an angry tone to be effective in engaging the reader. Joshua's response? Kindness will do that too. I believe he said something along the lines of that it has a way of disarming the reader. I complained that with kindness, I wouldn't have been able to use clever metaphors, like the wolf/straw man one. "Yes, maybe not," he responded.

With these few points made, I considered what I aimed to do with my essay. I certainly think it was entertaining, and it definitely was effective as an exercise in writing -- but these things should have been secondary to the purpose of the writing, which was to persuade. I realized then that anger is an extremely ineffective way of persuading a person.

If a person already agrees with you, it doesn't matter what you say because you're preaching to the choir -- they're only going to be influenced by your angry tone to become angry themselves, which will endow them with and strengthen an attitude of angry self-righteousness. If they don't agree with you, they're certainly not going to even consider the validity of your ideas because now they're angry, and emotions have a very powerful way of inhibiting a persons openness and objectivity. When was the last time you convinced someone of anything in the midst of a heated argument? That was most likely only possible once the two of you had some time to cool off.

Josh then suggested that I write a more effective response detailing what benefits that Buddhism and the Dalai Lama could actually provide to a business. He referred me to a study performed by Richard Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn in which they trained several people in meditation at a medium-sized company named Promega. The results were pretty astounding, and here are the important points from the University of Wisconsin Medical School website:

In the UW study, participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The experimental group, with 25 subjects, received training in mindfulness meditation from one of its most noted adherents, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. (Kabat-Zinn, a popular author of books on stress reduction, developed the mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.) This group attended a weekly class and one seven-hour retreat during the study; they also were assigned home practice for an hour a day, six days a week. The 16 members of the control group did not receive meditation training until after the study was completed.

For each group, in addition to asking the participants to assess how they felt, the research team measured electrical activity in the frontal part of the brain, an area specialized for certain kinds of emotion. Earlier research has shown that, in people who are generally positive and optimistic and during times of positive emotion, the left side of this frontal area becomes more active than the right side does.

The findings confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis: the meditation group showed an increase of activation in the left-side part of the frontal region. This suggests that the meditation itself produced more activity in this region of the brain. This activity is associated with lower anxiety and a more positive emotional state.

The research team also tested whether the meditation group had better immune function than the control group did. All the study participants got a flu vaccine at the end of the 8-week meditation class. Then, at four and eight weeks after vaccine administration, both groups had blood tests to measure the level of antibodies they had produced against the flu vaccine. While both groups (as expected) had developed increased antibodies, the meditation group had a significantly larger increase than the controls, at both four and eight weeks after receiving the vaccine.

What business couldn't benefit from their employees having an increased resilience against stress, a greater orientation towards positive emotions as well as possessing a stronger immune system? (If you'd like you can read more about this mindfulness study.) I probably won't get around to writing another response like Josh suggested because I'll lose interest in the time it would take -- but I think the reference here is adequately informative enough, not only for my loyal readers, but for Wayne Dunn as well. That is, if he ever ends up visting; Who knows -- maybe he'll find my blog during a bout of ego-surfing.

And to Wayne Dunn, I would like to make an apology. I'm sorry for being so vituperative and ripping into you as I did; I just got angry about what -- and especially how -- you had written. I don't mean to sound condescending when I say this, but this may serve as a lesson to you: Anger only cultivates more anger, and that's bad for objectivity.