Hypertrophy, Dysmorphia, Relaxation

A recent tweet about American fitness culture having little to do with health has got me thinking. There’s a follow-up in the thread about how many people feel like they’ll lose all of their gains even after just a few days of ceasing exercise. This is a form of dysmorphia: believing that your body is losing its shape in such a short amount of time. You have to have an unrealistic vision of your body in order to believe that this could happen. I think I know people like this - and I also know people who have a similar pattern with respect to their mind: a constant anxious state about the state of their intelligence and memory.

Unironically, these are also some of the smartest people I know - very knowledgeable, very analytical, very curious. It is the dysmorphia and anxiety around the loss of an asset that leads to the very visible and enviable hypertrophy, but also an unfortunate inability to relax. Many people who go to the gym and hit the same muscles to build for visible bulk suffer from flexibility issues. The major exception being guys like Jujimufu who specifically train for flexibility as well as visible strength and shape. I wonder if something like that exists in the mental realm as well - people who keep bulking don’t have as much dynamic range. They are capable of incredibly intense mental tasks such as digesting technical papers but not making light jokes, not being able to turn off the front brain.

The physical/mental analogue continues in other ways - heavy lifts might be great for the musculature, but the skeletal system can take a hit. Learning Python doesn’t help you fix Javascript bugs, and can in fact hurt you because the syntax is similar enough.

Sorry, that was a bad example, but I think the message comes across.

In both cases, I see the real problem as anxiety fuelling the pursuit of greatness. People worried about loss of status, due to falling behind intellectually or physically, are living in a poverty mindset, forever racing to catch up. People freed from this status concern might choose intellectual and physical endeavors which do not provide a direct status return but offer immense internal rewards.

That’s the future I want to build for myself - a pursuit of challenges for mind and body that allow me to explore the full scope of this meat vessel I happen to inhabit without the anxiety that comes from believing that a pause would result in me falling off the treadmill, off the cliff and off the waterfall (a metaphor I treasure from the very aerobic David).