Optimalist Socrates
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“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Socrates
I would like to begin with some good quotes from an ancient intellectual man, just to remind myself that the important things have often already been said and to remind myself why I started my blog.
For that reason, I have decided to create a collection of Optimalist historical figures who have pushed for a better humanity from a futuristic perspective.
We have to move toward the future but remember our past.
I want to remember them as heroes and guardians of knowledge and courage. If someone wants to contribute to my effort to spread knowledge, they can simply learn how to use a wallet like Metamask and buy their favorite Optimalist Hero of the past. By doing so, they will learn something and be able to obtain my gratitude. I prefer this kind of crowdfunding because I don’t like advertising and have chosen to avoid it.
The Optimalism series:
- Optimalism, Starts with Diet and Discipline
- Optimalism, Strengthen your Body
- Optimalism, the Mind
What are we going to learn in this chapter?
- The Why!
- Strength
- Homegym
- Training program
I believe our culture is in decay, and I want to learn and share the necessary skills to thrive and build a new paradigm based on knowledge and action.
I am writing this piece during my lunch break. Usually, I use this time to weightlift in my home gym and, in the meantime, I like to read or write, as is the case today.
I must confess that this is the least interesting write-up for me. I have trained myself for more than 15 years, and I would prefer to get straight to the point of my last article, which is the mind: the ultimate land to conquer in the battle for sovereignty. I am looking forward to it.
As I explained in the first article (Optimalism, Starts with Diet and Discipline), I started my journey because of many troubles I had in my life when I was young, and I felt like some more physical strength was the solution. In some ways, it was, but as usual, life takes some weird paths, and what I realized is that the body is a means to arrive at the mind.
The deep meaning you can reach by exploring your own mind is well beyond any kind of travel you can do on the other side of the planet. Indeed, any journey, if well-experienced, is actually a journey into your mind in order to reach wisdom.
But I can’t even reach those conclusions if not through my body and the improvement of myself, because at the end of the day, our brain is on top of our body and there are many connections between them. If your mind is a temple, the body is the walls of this temple, and in some ways, the foundation. It is the machine that helps you get the best from your living experience.
The body isn’t just a bastion but also a teacher. The body teaches us the importance of strength, discipline, and perseverance. As a teacher, the body shows you the importance of long-term commitment and the never-ending journey of improving oneself, which are omnipresent digressions during my three-chapter analysis.
As usual, my favorite question is: WHY?
Why train my body? Firstly, because you are a physical entity, and you evolve in a physical environment with physical laws that are usually issued to challenge you! Yes, the meaning of our life is to be challenged and to prove that we are elements worth living.
What do I mean?
I mean that you are what you are going to communicate through your habits. If you tell your body that you have already accomplished the most important life goal and become lazy, your body will start to succumb to entropy.
We are animals, and in a comfortable context, we become lazy because nature doesn’t challenge us anymore.
Therefore, if you look around, you will see tons of middle-aged men out of shape, and that’s not normal! In an environment engineered to be comfortable, challenging your body is your task!
Suggest to your brain the right things. Suggest to it that you are young and strong, that you are a predator and not prey! If you ask for energy, your body will give you energy to fight the entropy of our human condition.
Entropy?
“Civilization, like life, is a Sisyphean flight from chaos. The chaos will prevail in the end, but it is our mission to postpone that day for as long as we can and to push things in the opposite direction….”
The Bottomless Well, Peter Huber, Mark Mils
Frontier? At the border with entropy, where uncertainty is at its highest.
Entropy is the force that fights against order. It’s something that doesn’t allow us to stay in a status quo. It’s an enemy that conquers territory if it isn’t faced by an opponent. It’s something that gains power from an imbalance of energies. An abundance of energy brings chaos. I’ve already talked about the consequences of caloric imbalances in the first chapter of the Optimalism series.
You are looking for comfort and relaxation, and that’s normal. In nature, a condition like that doesn’t exist. Resources will be depleted, and enemies will come to the doors. Do you think that it’s different now? That there are no Vikings to knock on the door of the empire? There are many more Vikings today than in the past, and there is always someone who challenges our status quo and tries to obtain more resources. The very existence of those Vikings, or in other words, competitors, is what pushed our society to evolve.
“It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
The natives of Europe were brave and robust. “
Fig. 1 Destruction (1836), Thomas Cole
Be a Viking.
Balance.
“The heavy is the root of the light.
Dao te ching
The still is the master of unrest.”
We have to maintain a balance between our body and the external environment, but why do it? For sure not to conquer some beautiful girl. This may be the consequence if that’s what you want, but it’s not the “why.” If you need some oxytocin in your life, let’s do it, but think deeply about the meaning of your actions! It’s all about consistency. Find a strong “why”!
A goal can be misleading and maybe unreachable. Instead, “why” is a deep question, and its answer brings you to deploy a system that will never disappoint you because it’s a way of life you reiterate through. Motivation is the igniter, but it’s the constant supply of fuel that brings us where the goal is.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Why?
It may seem trivial, but you have to do it for yourself. It’s not selfishness, but rather stability. If you do it for others, such as a partner in the hope of starting a relationship, you’ll end up feeling demotivated or sacrificing something that goes beyond just appearances. You have to question yourself about your ‘why’ and find a deep motivation. I have found strength in various anchors over time, such as finding a partner, improving my appearance, and intimidating enemies, but as you can see, each of these motivations is rooted in the external world, which means your motivation is volatile and subject to the whims of others.
“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.”
Marcus Aurelius
In other words, the real and inexhaustible force is within yourself. What you are looking for is energy, and this energy will flow from yourself if you work on your body. The body adapts and maintains balance, giving you more energy. As an anti-fragile machine, the body has developed in order to adapt. This process is called homeostasis, which is achieved through continuous, but gradual, eustress.
Stress?
No, eustress.
A healthy and proportional kind of stress which helps your body to scale up.
“Stress is now defined as a state of homeostasis being challenged, including both system stress and local stress.”
“Therefore, an optimal stress level is essential for building biological shields to guarantee normal life processes.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
“Stress functions through the stress system, and it contains three basic types: distress, eustress, and sustress. While distress may impair normal physiological function, eustress plays a critical role in the adaptive process of assessing and disposing of stressors, and endowing the individual to prepare for and survive future challenges [65],”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Okay, we need some stress, but how can we obtain it in a healthy way?
First of all, the goal of this blog is to spread knowledge for free, and as the quote on the homepage says,
“You can recognize truth by his beauty and simplicity”
Richard Feyman
I’ve often heard complaints about how boring it can be to follow a strength routine, but in the end, it’s like cooking. You have the ingredients, and you have to follow your taste. I can give you the ingredients, but the recipe is something personal.
For me, it’s like a meditative experience.
When it comes to training, you don’t need special machinery or complex programs. The most straightforward thing to do is to create an exercise routine based on fundamental exercises and iterate it with consistency and discipline. If this isn’t something you’re already doing with your diet, I suggest reading the first chapter of the series, ‘Optimalism, Starts with Diet and Discipline.’
Save your money and use your financial energy to become a financial fortress.
Remember that most of the equipment or suggestions people sell are meant to enrich themselves and create a highly profitable niche where they can operate. You don’t need to waste your money, and I will explain how to do it.
Keeping things simple frees up mental resources and helps you focus on what counts. Complexity brings confusion and mental burden, which can prevent us from being disciplined. There are a few exercises that help us maintain the fitness we need, and it’s important to stick with them and iterate through a meditative approach.
I’ll start by discussing the most important exercise and what you need to create a functional gym in your house.
Fundamental exercises.
There are three fundamental exercises in the practice of weightlifting, and I also consider running an important task. Multi-joint exercises are known as fundamentals because they are based on a kinetic movement that involves many parts of our body, igniting many metabolic and hormonal processes.
The three fundamental weightlifting exercises are the squat, deadlift, and bench press.
Side note: Squat is an amazing exercise, but in the past, I undervalued the importance of a strong core, and I got a back hernia. Now I avoid it, and I frankly prefer a controlled deadlift. I feel more comfortable, and it is beneficial approximately in the same way. That’s your choice, BUT NEVER, NEVER underestimate the importance of the ABS.
Strength.
What I think is really important is strength. The muscle aesthetic will follow in a natural way if you stick to a strength regime,
My Litmus paper.
Aesthetics is the compass which shows you the way.
I think that aesthetics is not the goal, but sustaining and protecting our body is the goal.
Feeling self-comfortable and equipped with strength and resistance is what we want.
A strength routine is really simple. It could be boring, but over time you can develop a meditative approach through the practice. It permits you to be in touch with your body, perceiving its limits but also its potential.
“In this sense, many people might perform a variety of exercises under the pretence of needing to do so to increase strength and muscle size across each of those exercises. However, the present study suggests that a general strength increase is possible which might provide transference to other exercises and potentially other movements. “
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Core strength and flexibility.
We have already talked about the importance of strength in order to sustain our body. The question we have to ask ourselves is about the most important part of our body in the effort to sustain our corpus. We have to focus on improving our back and, more broadly, our core, which is the central part of our body composed of the lumbar and abs. It’s clear to everyone that when it comes to our core, not only strength is important but also flexibility.
I can’t stress the notion enough.
Over time, I changed my approach and started focusing more on core strength and flexibility. That’s because, as I said, I developed a hernia a long time ago, which I want to keep under control. These things happen when you are young and hormones outcompete your wisdom. Unfortunately, I realized only after many years the importance of flexibility and core. Crunches, planks, and stretching have become my morning routine, and now I have been practicing them for many years.
I implemented them as a regular morning routine coupled with 1 hour of meditation, cold showers, and a good breakfast (a subject which I covered in my first chapter, “Optimalism starts from discipline and diet”). These measures applied with discipline and consistency helped me to recover and feel even better than before my injury. My back, thanks to a strong core, is now rock-solid. I can deadlift without any trouble and always feel comfortable even if I stand for hours or sit for extended periods.
What’s my training routine?
As I mentioned, after years of reading research and listening to the experiences and suggestions of many bodybuilders, I decided that my goal was to be strong. The reason for this was to give my mind an army.
What do I mean by that?
I realized that my mind is nothing without a healthy and strong body to defend my bastion. I want to live longer, full of energy, and be able to protect myself from a hostile environment. It may sound like some motivational nonsense, but the reality is that a strong body can improve your posture, and your posture, in turn, can change your mood and energy levels.
“A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly from that of a lobster winner. This is reflected in their relative posture. Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter.
A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. When a lobster that has just lost a battle is exposed to serotonin, it will stretch itself out, advance even on former victors, and fight longer and harder. “
Jordan Peterson, 13 Rules of life
“Adopting an upright seated posture in the face of stress can maintain self-esteem, reduce negative mood, and increase positive mood compared to a slumped posture. Furthermore, sitting upright increases the rate of speech and reduces self-focus.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
It seems that postures have a bidirectional effect, as do many other physiological dynamics.
“Self-focus refers to an individual’s attention being directed inward, towards their own thoughts and emotions, rather than being directed towards the external environment or task at hand. The quote suggests that sitting upright can help to reduce self-focus and increase positivity by maintaining self-esteem and reducing negative mood. This highlights the power of posture and body language in shaping our mental and emotional states. It’s interesting to think about how different postures can influence our self-perception and our interactions with others. It’s also a reminder that small changes in our behavior can have a big impact on our overall well-being.“
chatGPT
And posture depends on our muscle strength and flexibility, something simple as our posture can change how we perceive ourselves and how people perceive us, winners or losers.
If you don’t believe Peterson, I can tell you that neurotransmitters are not the only chemical involved but the powerful testosterone and growth hormone depends on our exercise habits as well.
“Testosterone plays a pivotal role in maintaining balance within the multi-dimensional psychological network of mood, behaviour, self-perception and perceived quality of life in men of any age.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
This graph underlines that free weights have huge advantages over machinery, enlightening my hypothesis that there is nothing new to invent about weightlifting.
Fig. 2 Free weight and testosterone https://journals.lww.com
Fig. 3 Eugen Shadow 1901 performing a military press, no machinery, no roids, natural and beautiful human strength.
The best way to do it is to keep the routine simple and iterate it with discipline and consistency. Simplicity frees the mind, and having a home gym provides the environment to stick to the purpose, putting in place a resilient system. We also learned that simplicity, such as free weights, improves hormones, which in turn improves our strength.
Having a gym at home helps to focus on the “why” and stick to it. There is no competition with anyone, no feeling of inadequacy, and no need to follow someone else’s “why”.
Home gym
Building a home gym is also a learning process. You start to think about optimizing the space and questioning what is really important (scarcity of space brings efficiency to training and thus, simplicity). I ended up realizing that all you need to get fit is minimal equipment based on the three fundamental exercises I talked about earlier in this article.
Using free weights allows you to stick with fundamental exercises and avoid paying tons of money for unnecessary fancy machinery
Power Rack
The power rack is a simple iron structure that helps you keep the weight at a specific height based on the exercise you want to perform (as seen in the picture of my home gym). The power rack is the core of my gym, serving two purposes. Firstly, it gives me the desired starting point for my exercise and a grip for my pull-ups. Secondly, it acts as an inorganic spotter, allowing me to deploy some safe measures.
Just as I did for nutrition, I will provide you with my workout routine based on my experience.
Morning routine:
Meditation 1h,
Stretching,
Core training (crunch+planks),
Cold shower,
Hot tea + breakfast shaker.
I usually get ONE espresso before my training session and some music.
Strength Training Program A
Benchpress 5×5
Militarypress 4×6
Benchpress close grip 3×8
Lateral rises 3×10
Strength Training Program B
Deadlift 5×5
Pullups 4×6
Rower 3×8
Curl 3×10
I alternate between the two programs on alternate days (A, B, A, B, …) I would suggest adding squats to the routine as they are a great exercise, and you can also include some accessory exercises for the legs.
Experiment on yourself. There are tons of tutorials online which can explain how to perform these exercises. It’s also a good idea to ask someone with experience to watch you during the execution. As you can see in the picture of my home gym, I placed a mirror to check my execution.
When I was young, my goal was to lift tons of weight without paying much attention to my health. Over time, I realized that consistency is more important than intensity. I train every day with less weight and feel stronger and healthier than ever.
I read tons of research and try to apply the findings to myself. The goal is to see if something makes me feel better and support these experiments with research.
Lately, I started experimenting with a beta-oxidative metabolism, also known as fatty acid oxidation. The paleo diet and fasting are two ways to switch the metabolism from glycolysis to fatty acid catabolism. I’m just experimenting, reading research, and trying to implement changes in my habits to optimize myself.
Beta Oxidative pathway is like overclocking human beings.
“We observed a positive impact of a Paleo diet with exercise on all investigated athletic performance.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
I run 10km once a week in a fasting state.
Be careful and consult your doctor before trying this. It’s a high-stress activity in a fasting state.
I suggest trying fasting step-by-step and avoiding physical activity for the whole day.
Beta oxidative catabolism (Fat Acid Oxidation) facts.
“Our findings suggest that FAO is downregulated in multiple tumour types, and activation of this pathway may lower cancer cell proliferation, and is associated with improved outcomes in some cancers.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
“Among adults reporting no aerobic MVPA, any weightlifting was associated with 9–22% lower all-cause mortality.”
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/
Be strong, The Network State needs Vikings.
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