I really like Lawrence Kasdan's 1994 film, Wyatt Earp, which I was watching again recently. In one scene, Earp orients Bat and Ed Masterson to law enforcement in Dodge City, Kansas. He asks them to disarm two drunks walking on the thoroughfare in violation of the city ordinance on carrying firearms. Ed engages them in prolonged conversation before Earp intervenes definitively. He comments:
"You talk too much, Ed."
This wasn't about a mere difference in style. It's revealed moments later that one of the men was reaching for a pocket pistol. In other words, Ed's excessive speech endangered himself and his peers.
Earp's approach might seem aloof or hostile in a logorrheic society. In fact, his comment to Ed Masterson has a strong Biblical foundation. Consider the holy words of King Solomon:
"In an abundance of words, offense will not be lacking, but one who restrains his lips is wise" (Proverbs 10:19).
"One who is sparing with his words knows knowledge, and a man with a spirit of understanding speaks sparingly" (Proverbs 17:27).
"Be not rash with your mouth..." (Ecclesiastes 5:1).
The ArtScroll edition of Proverbs notes regarding the second verse, "The Vilna Gaon understands the verse to refer to a person who values not only his speech but his thoughts, and doesn't waste them on worthless topics."
Excessive, idle talk is all about ego and arrogance--the antithesis of humility prescribed so often in the Torah. As the sage Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi summed up the matter:
"If a word is worth a coin, then silence is worth two."
I grew up listening to classic rock groups like The Kinks and recently heard Terry Gross' interview with the lead singer from the band, Ray Davies. At 31:10, she plays the beginning of Davies' song "Run Away From Time" from his 2006 album, Other People's Lives. Two of the verses are:
And time is the avenger But why should we just surrender to it?
This brings to mind masters powerlifters who maintain amazing levels of strength or grow even stronger. They exemplify King Solomon's holy counsel in Ecclesiastes: "Whatever you are able to do, do with all your might." Consider Brad Gillingham deadlifting a personal record of 881 pounds at 42 years old:
Or Sioux-z Hartwig-Gary winning her 15th national championship this year, setting PRs and world records at 41:
Or 50-year-old David Ricks winning the 198 lb. weight class at this year's Raw Unity Meet with a 716 lb. deadlift:
Or Larry Wallen and Bob Gaynor deadlifting 705 lbs. and 680 lbs. in their 60s:
Or Rick Melear deadlifting 589 lbs. at his first meet in 18 years:
Or former powerlifter Mark Rippetoe doing 18 real chin-ups in his 50s:
If you need added motivation to train, turn off the volume on whichever of those clips you like best, and pause to just before the lift begins. Then watch it while listening to the second verse quoted from "Run Away From Time."
I'm reading Hillel Halkin's book on the 12th century Spanish-Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi, who lived in cities including Córdoba. Halkin remarks on his time there:
In Córdoba he had many old friends and acquaintances. There was Avraham ibn Ezra, a ruefully witty and financially unsuccessful wanderer who once joked in a poem that if he were to go into the candle trade, the sun would never set, and that men would cease to die if he sold shrouds.
This reminded me of the scene in Wall Street where Bud Fox meets Gordon Gekko for the first time, and Gekko says about the CEO of Teldar Paper:
Why the hell is Cromwell giving a lecture tour when he's losing 60 million a quarter? Guess he's giving lectures in how to lose money. If this guy owned a funeral parlor, no one would die!
"It's clear that the equipment for crowd dispersal with which they [Israeli commandos] were issued was insufficient," IDF Chief of General Staff Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi commented after the recent flotilla fiasco. The commander of the soldiers who boarded the flotilla commented, "We did not expect such resistance from the group's activists as we were talking about a humanitarian aid group."
Israel's highest political and military echelons committed serious strategic errors in preparation for, during execution, and in the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon campaign. Together, these errors enabled Hezbollah to persevere against the larger, better-equipped Israeli military and emerge as perhaps an even greater threat.
Israeli historian Benny Morris has noted regarding Egypt and Syria's joint attack on Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War:
The Arabs' success in springing this strategic surprise--a feat that has taken its place in military history alongside Hitler's invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor--owed much to the Israeli perception of the Arab forces as inherently incompetent, weak, and incapable of mounting such a deception. Zvi Zamir, then director of the Mossad, explained: "We simply did not believe that they could do it...We scorned them."
Israel probably has the second or third most sophisticated military in the world; but it has a sickening habit of jeopardizing citizens' lives due to this pattern of arrogance. Or is it as much ineptitude?
I’ve joked to my neighbors that Israel is Americanized in the wrong ways and not Americanized in the right ways. Since making aliya on November 3, I’ve trained in two Israeli gyms, both of which contain a form of negative Americanization.
Guys like to bench press, and Israeli guys are no exception. This isn’t inherently bad, although most guys bench with shoulder-wrecking form and don’t approach the bench as a technical lift to start with. Retired elite powerlifter Dave Tate gives an overview of how much technique the bench press involves:
Furthermore, benching without overhead pressing (standing, of course) and back exercises in equal volume is a recipe for shoulder problems and results in a heinous lack of balanced strength. Yes, heinous, because a healthy guy should be able to stand on his feet and deadlift twice his body weight. He should be able to clean or unrack two-thirds of his body weight and press it overhead. (That’s press, not push-press.)
The press can be especially tough in the most constructive sense. Mark Rippetoe has called the press “the soul of the sport of barbell exercise” and observes in Strong Enough?:
The press is hard. You won’t be able to press what you can bench. You have to support with your whole body what the bench supports when you lay down to press. So you are doing all the work instead of letting the bench do some of it, supporting, balancing, and manhandling the whole load. This is how strength was, and is, built.
Because of its standing nature, the press is immune from an inane—no, infernal—phenomenon: the two-man bench press. Anyone who has spent some time in the free weights area of a gym knows what I’m talking about. A guy starts to strain during a set, and bar speed slows down. Then the spotter starts “conducting the bar” by placing his hands under the bar to help lift the weight. Rip discusses the rudeness of such behavior:
But sometimes the two-man bench press is consensual, which is to say requested. Hell, the other day I saw a guy doing cable crossovers with someone assisting on the final reps. This is depraved stuff, right up there with the ghoulish Wall Street type guys in the end of Requiem for a Dream.
Barbell training is an individual endeavor. Training partners can be great, but we are alone under the bar. When a spotter participates in a lift, he subverts how we develop strength and distorts how we measure strength. As Rip writes in Starting Strength, “No rep counts that is touched by anybody other than the lifter. No spotter touches any bar that is still moving up.”
In Judaism, we are taught that "Derech eretz kadma l'Torah." (Good manners precede Torah observance.) To my new countrymen, I say: Do not be a rude spotter or an accomplice to stupidity. Stop emulating the wrong Americans, and start lifting like Jews.
"The end of a matter is better than its beginning," King Solomon observes in Ecclesiastes. On April 10, my friend Eric Talmant broke through a major barrier after two years of effort.
Eric is a top powerlifter in the 165 lb. weight class and the founder and director of the Raw Unity Meet. ("Raw" powerlifting doesn't use equipment like squat suits and bench press shirts. In the RUM, knee wraps also aren't allowed.) At the first Raw Unity Meet in January 2008, Eric deadlifted 622 pounds for a personal record:
He deadlifted 635 pounds a few months later:
At the second Raw Unity Meet, Eric attempted to deadlift 639 pounds and missed it at his knees. The third Raw Unity Meet this January had huge interest, and Eric accumulated an immense amount of fatigue going into the competition. He pulled 639 past his knees and was approaching lockout when his body shut down:
Missing a deadlift can mess with a lifter's head. Missing the same deadlift twice can really mess with a lifter's head. And passing out during a deadlift can rattle a lifter that much more.
Eric did not get rattled.
On April 10 at the R.A.W. United Beau Moore Classic, Eric set personal records on his squat and bench press before deadlifting. On his second attempt deadlift, 640 pounds went up with amazing speed:
Then Eric did something even more amazing on his third attempt:
Eric totaled 1435 pounds, which is the second highest raw total in the country for the 165s. His 650 lb. deadlift is number one.
Eric is usually reserved on the platform, but after deadlift PRs he often shows justified exhilaration. After he deadlifted 650, what struck me was the look of profound peace, awe, and gratitude toward his Creator.
I am honored to have a role in Eric's latest achievements. In December, Eric and his head coach David Bates brought me aboard as his technique coach. Using Mark Rippetoe's mechanical model along with my own concepts, I identified inefficiencies in Eric's lifts that I felt were blocking PRs. Eric adapted the model and concepts to his style, and the results speak for themselves.
But as I once wrote, after the meet is before the meet. We're already discussing future goals. Old walls have been broken down. Moving on to new ones...
"Meditate, my brother, on the Creator's wisdom in structuring your body," Rabbi Bachya ben Yosef ibn Paquda advises in his classic book, Duties of the Heart. The Rambam likewise observes in his Epistle to Yemen:
"The inner parts of man are the true wonders that reveal the wisdom of the Creator: the nerves extending into the muscles which allow man to move his limbs at will; the attachment of ligaments, how they cling to bone, and the manner in which they grow; the connection of bones and joints; blood vessels that pulsate and those that do not and how they branch out; the placement of man's organs overlapping one another; how every part of the body has its proper composition form, and place."
The fundamental barbell exercises (squat, press, deadlift) are the weighted expression of this Divinely arranged physical structure. Consider the deadlift. On the surface, a deadlift is simply picking up a bar from the floor and standing up with it. (The "simply" part tends to disappear with a maximal weight.)
In fact, a deadlift contains an immense network of musculoskeletal coordination from the upper back down through the legs. Toward the end of my interview on the deadlift with Mark Rippetoe, Rip recounted how he discovered why the shoulder blades need to be aligned with the bar at the start of an efficient deadlift. I'll close this post with his reflections:
"Look at the anatomy of the traps and the rhomboids. Look at the position that the scapulas are in to receive the force transmitted up the spine. It’s right there in front of you. That is the structure that receives the force transmitted across those broad muscles isometrically and then down the arms to the bar...
The trapezius has the broadest muscle origin in the human body. It goes all the way from the base of the skull down to T12. It receives the force that the rigid spine transmits, the force generated by the muscles that open the knees and the hips. That force is then transmitted across the traps and the rhomboids to the scapulas. What hangs from the scapulas? The arms. And then if you’ll look at it, every single time you see somebody pulling a heavy bar off the floor—every single time—it’s the scapula that is plumb to the bar, not the arms. Why would that be? Because the scapula is the thing below which the bar hangs. The tensional force of the weight in the hands is transmitted between the scapulas and the grip by the muscles, ligaments, and tendons that anchor the bones in place isometrically. The traps and rhomboids transfer the force to the scapulas; the triceps, biceps, forearm muscles, grip muscles, and the ligaments and tendons form the chain from which the weight hangs; and the lats act on the humerus to keep the arms at the angle they have to be to place the load directly under the scapulas."
My passions include Judaism and the sport of powerlifting. I have written about these subjects for sites such as Israel National News, Powerlifting Watch, and Elite Fitness Systems.
