How to experience the human sublime by lifting weights (an interview)
In the past year, I've found that lifting weights can be a way to understand yourself, open up to other people, and experience a bit of wonder. So I talked to my friend Zack about it.
I wanted to write something about the magic of weightlifting, but then I realized that half of what I wanted to say was based on conversations I’ve had with one of my oldest friends, Zack Malitz. So instead of just paraphrasing him, I invited him to do a conversation over messenger, which I’ve lightly edited and turned into the conversation that now forms the post below!
Duncan:
I wanted to have this conversation about lifting weights now because I have been strength training for about a year and found it really rewarding, even though I had essentially never lifted a barbell before last spring. When did you get started, and what are the first things you noticed when you began lifting?
Zack:
I started in 2019 totally on a whim. I had a gym in my apartment building at the time and, at a friend’s suggestion, started a simple barbell program. I was pretty immediately hooked. For me, exercise has always been about healing my mind first and foremost.
I just don’t feel ok if I don’t exercise regularly. For a long time, I thought I could only get that from running, which was a problem because I was constantly hurting myself running. I was pretty delighted when I found out I could feel even better lifting weights and that I wasn’t injuring myself.
I really loved having a program, too. There’s something really enjoyable about the simplicity of a sticking to a program. Even if the program is complicated it’s still just a finite, tangible set of instructions. you follow them and you get stronger. I loved that. Still do.
Duncan:
When I’ve done various attempts at meditation in the past, one of the first steps to entering a state of mindfulness is to notice what your body is doing. Being underneath something heavy is a direct path to that: you will find out a lot about what your body is feeling, very quickly. On a big lifting day, I feel like I can trace back the soreness, tiredness of my body to specific places in the past few days, even if I’m not thinking about them otherwise in the moment. It is in that way, a step towards mindfulness.
You also said to me something that I have repeated to a lot of people: “You can’t lie to yourself under the bar.” There is just total honesty about your capacity and ability that you can only get when you’re near your limits. Even if you want to lie to yourself in other ways about your life, I think that moment of total honesty is clarifying, and spills into everything else.
Zack:
Once you get under a heavy bar, you find out exactly how you’re doing. If you’re tired, your tiredness is there with you. If you’re hung over, the drinks you had last night are there with you. If you’re worried, distracted or depressed, it’s right there with you. Personally, I get lost in my head sometimes and really can’t get a handle on how I'm doing. A barbell can be a mirror that reflects you back to yourself. For me, it converts what can often be disorienting and confusing emotional signals into easily readable physical signals. I find that profoundly valuable.
It’s also a mindfulness practice in the sense that it brings you back to the moment, right here right now. I don’t know about you, but if I'm doing a really heavy deadlift the only thing I can think about is that I'm picking up this incredibly heavy thing. My nervous system lights up and, for the duration of that set, there’s nothing else but me and the bar. It’s just too physically and psychologically stressful an activity to coexist with anything else. And I find that that carries over into the rest of my life: I can be more present when I routinely have this experience of being brought into intense contact with the present moment.
Duncan:
So much of anxiety, depression, etc. spells for me are essentially examples of being stuck in looping, intrusive thoughts. Stepping out of it even for a second breaks the cycle. This is also the theory about why ketamine works for severe depression: it's a break in the storm of thoughts.
I think that learning to listen to yourself is an important pathway to being able to listen to other people too. If you don’t really know how you’re doing - or what all this emotional stuff firing around your body means - you don’t have a particularly good platform to figure out how other people are doing either.
Zack:
I think any activity that helps you quiet your mind creates more space in there for other people.
Duncan:
It’s interesting that you mentioned wanting to limit injury earlier, because I think it was you who pointed out to me that actually getting stronger is, in a way, a process of injuring yourself. Basically every time you push yourself on a lift, you’re putting microtears in your muscles that when repaired, are what make you stronger. It’s a very intentional kind of pushing your boundaries, and the actual strengthening comes through rest and recuperation.
Zack:
The difference between work that makes you stronger and a lot of chronic injury is just a matter of degree. And that’s really changed my perspective on rest. I used to see rest and work as opposites. Now I see them as complementary elements in a system. If I want to rest well, I have to work hard. If I want to work hard, I have to rest well. That’s true physically and psychologically.
The biggest impediments to progress in my experience are ego and impatience - both lead you to push yourself too hard too quickly and not to rest enough. It takes humility and awareness of your limits to rest well. And of course the flip side of that is that you’ve got to try to lift even when you don’t feel like it. You can have a good workout or you can have a bad workout, but you’ve got to get under the bar and do the best you can.
Duncan:
I think this is actually where the community element comes in, too. It’s not as solitary as it looks at first, and I think both of us have also found different kinds of community in lifting in the last year or so.
Basically, humility only goes so far, unless you have people who can help fill in the gaps of what you do and don’t know. There is a right and wrong way to lift, and coaching (and being coached) is part of success too. Not to mention spotting - sometimes you literally need someone there next to you for you to get to your limits, and achieve that moment of clarity you were talking about.
I can’t remember if it’s you that said it or someone else, but I have written down in my notes for this conversation ‘spotting is about limiting crisis.’ You have other people there to help catch you before you’ve dropped a barbell on your throat or whatever - which is a lovely metaphor for pretty much all of the meaningful relationships in your life.
Zack:
That wasn’t me, but I love it. I really like that failure is part of lifting, and that a key part of learning to lift is learning to fail safely. It’s true that you can learn a lot from failure, but the world can also be pretty unforgiving: failure, risks, mistakes… they can have pretty profoundly negative consequences. I like that lifting has a plan for failure baked into it.
The community element of it is big. There are some seriously smart people who have dedicated their lives to the science of getting stronger, and while there’s a lot of bro science on the internet, but there’s also a lot of really real science. I think it’s amazing how much expertise exists and also that you have to ultimately balance the expertise of others against what you feel in your body.
Science and expertise can give you a great program, but you ultimately have to call the shots. Sometimes you just know you need to reload, regardless of what your program says, and that balance between expertise and intuition is really cool to me.
I ended up going to a gym and getting a coach because I hit a ceiling. Squats started to hurt in a bad way and I couldn’t get better. I’d kind of avoided going to a gym for a long time because even though I lifted I still had some negative stereotypes about the people who lift. I figured if I went to a gym it’d be a bunch of meathead dude bros who I really didn’t want to be in community with.
But I found this place called Ironside here that is just awesome: it’s very welcoming and invites all kinds of people to train with a barbell. Obviously I'm in Portland, OR, so it may be a bit easier to find that here than elsewhere, but it’s really opened my eyes to the kind of community you can find lifting.
I’ve got a question for you: you wrote a really interesting piece recently about masculinity and the Terminator. It’s good to acknowledge that as wonderful as lifting is, it’s also a big cultural thing for some of the worst elements of the right wing in America, and that’s specifically related to ideas about masculinity and hierarchy. It’s not even new for fascists to be deeply into physical fitness. I’m curious how you think about lifting in that context?
Duncan:
There’s some questionable stuff in the culture out there. I feel similarly blessed to be at a gym that is pointedly inclusive here in Austin, Dane’s Body Shop, and honestly wouldn’t want to be a part of any fitness community that wasn’t explicitly open to women, queer, nonbinary, or femme people. The toxicity (not to mention grunting) of male-dominated fitness spaces has always been deeply alienating for me, for the reasons I wrote about.
I was just talking with a trans friend who also got into lifting recently, and I think there’s so much in it for people who want strength to mean something besides domination. I think if you feel like you have a body that is stigmatized, called-out, or possibly preyed upon, getting stronger can be a way to remember how beautiful and powerful you are in that same body, and get positive reminders of how it is special and useful.
There’s also a very practical edge to it too: I remember in 2016 some people starting group workout classes called ‘get fit for fascism’ and to the degree that we live in a time where there are people who want to use physical violence and intimidation as a political strategy, being strong, confident, and fast can be a way to concretely oppose that kind of politics.
Plus, strength means so many different things, and it’s very silly to assume it confers any particular status. I watched a fascinating YouTube video comparing an Olympic weightlifting medalist, a power lifter, a championship crossfitter, and a bodybuilder in various tasks, and it’s just all so different. All of them are valid and skilled, but all of them were bested in one way or another by people with other expertise.
Zack:
I think one of the key things that distinguishes the right-wing version of fitness from the humanist version is how you think about progress. The knuckle draggers are into lifting because they see it as a way to climb some twisted hierarchy of masculinity: it’s explicitly about domination, the strong trampling the weak. Some extremely online Nazi types even relate it to eugenics: it’s about sorting out the fit from the unfit, which is totally evil.
The humanist version by contrast isn’t about hierarchy, it’s about the open-ended pursuit of excellent. Your point of reference isn’t other people: you measure yourself against yourself, and the unit of measurement may not even be pounds lifted. It might be discipline and commitment, or health and fitness or even just joy.
Duncan:
I actually think this community element is where it makes sense to talk about what we were discussing earlier today, about how lifting is a kind of way to get in touch with the human sublime.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar wrote a great essay about having his NBA scoring record broken by LeBron James, and he talks about how pushing boundaries is an affirmation of universal human potential. I think we get a glimpse of something like this when we lift heavy:
“Whenever a sports record is broken—including mine—it’s a time for celebration. It means someone has pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible to a whole new level. And when one person climbs higher than the last person, we all feel like we are capable of being more.”
Sports can be dumb, but they can also be a way to experience the transcendence and transformation of human potential. Whenever you max, it’s an expression of that, in your own body.
Zack:
That mentality isn’t exclusive to people at the pinnacle of their sport. There’s this great Anthony Bourdain interview where he’s talking about his experience with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and he says: “For me, I don't really have a goal in mind. I'm just looking to suck a little bit less every few weeks." So even for those of us mere mortals who can’t deadlift a thousand pounds, we can still experience that transcendence and celebrate our human potential.
Duncan:
I think in an ideal world, the gym is a reflection of that sense of shared accomplishment that comes whenever any individual crosses some kind of limit. In the good gyms, at least, it seems like everyone knows what accomplishing a new max means, even if they lift much more, and can celebrate it (earnestly) for everyone. I think it's because they all see a bit of the miracle of growth in every big pull. We are not just who we were when we are born, we can make ourselves a little bit every day.
There’s actually a great meme that just takes the phrase “This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like” and puts it over all sorts of images. It started as a way of making fun of Steven Crowder, who really sucks, and the meme is clearly taking the piss out of the hierarchical mindset you were describing above. But I actually think there’s wisdom in the meme, and I kind of think my philosophy on strength training is ‘that meme, but not ironically.’ We can all be examples of peak performance.
Zack:
This might be a good place to acknowledge that not everyone is physically able to do the kind of strength training we’re talking about. But I don’t really think the benefits we’re talking about or the lessons we’ve learned from lifting are in any way exclusive to lifting. There are so many roads that lead to the same place, to the same celebration of human ability.
When I think about my personal experience lifting, it’s not even that I'm stronger now than I used to be that I appreciate the most: it’s knowing that the process required week after week when I picked up the bar three times a week even when I didn’t always want to. That joy in self-discipline and commitment is something people discover in all kinds of different ways.
Everyone’s potential is different, but we all have the same capacity for growth and change - it’s really intrinsic to being a person. That’s part of what’s so disturbing about the right-wing mentality toward fitness generally and lifting in particular: they see it as a way to figure out who to throw away, when really it should be a reminder that every human being is wondrous.
Duncan:
I feel like that may be a good place to wrap it up. If you are reading this, you are wondrous. You can remind yourself of that by lifting some heavy (or not heavy) things. I’m going to try to deadlift PR tomorrow and it should be interesting, based on how my body feels right now. I'm looking forward to it, still.