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On Oliver Sacks and His Obsession with Weightlifting
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jseliger 8y agoI would add that many people who do brainwork that isn't physically demanding feel the urge to engage in something physically strenuous as well; I certainly feel that way. And the history of people interested in developing the body goes back a long ways; the book The Temple of Perfection is okay on this subject: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/bo20174729.html https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/....
- saiya-jin 8y agoThe old truth is (at least how I heard it maybe 20 years ago) - if you work physically, relax by doing some mental work and vice versa.
- rv-de 8y agoI suppose we need a new truth then addressing the 90% of the adult population who neither work physically nor mentally (to any significant degree). How are they supposed to cope?
- DataWorker 8y agoIt’s all about training the nervous system. The mind body connection is the whole thing.
- mattnewport 8y agoIt's not all about that. It's also about building muscle which is about training over time with appropriate rest and diet and can't really be short circuited without steroids.
- DataWorker 8y agoPerhaps I’m misinformed. Can you tell me what part is not tied to mmu?
- scott_s 8y agoIt's all tied to the nervous system. But given a certain muscle mass, there's a limit to how much weight you can move, even with optimal technique and an optimally trained nervous system. Eventually, you'll need to add more muscle in order to move more weight. Of course, more realistically, beginners will add more muscle over the course of normal training. Intermediate and advanced lifters will need to schedule muscle-building blocks into their training to add muscle.
- CalChris 8y agoYep, newbie gains will be almost entirely about the nervous system. You'll get stronger without adding much if any bulk. Then as you continue over time, you need to add rest to your routine. It's counterintuitive to a degree.
- criddell 8y agoGreat article! My only knowledge of Oliver Sacks comes from his appearances on Radio Lab. I've just added On the Move to my wishlist. He seems like an interesting fellow. If somebody wanted to get into weightlifting, where would they even start?
- achompas 8y agoI got very far with Starting Strength: https://www.startingstrength.com https://www.startingstrength.com
- DataWorker 8y agoSounds like Sacks was doing 5x5s coincidentally.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoThat's pretty amazing if he got that far (5x5x500) just with 5x5's every 5 days- really speaks to the power of the KISS approach.
- olivermarks 8y agoMark Riptoe's video CD's for starting strength are excellent, show you the best form for lifting, taking account of your posture etc
- toasterlovin 8y agoFWIW, in my opinion there are better videos for form and technique on Starting Strength’s YouTube channel at this point.
- olivermarks 8y agothanks will look at those
- mattnewport 8y ago
- will_brown 8y agoAncient ideas: “No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training…what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” - Socrates “In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection.” - Plato
- qntty 8y agoI don't mean to be a killjoy but both these quotes are obviously fake for anyone familiar with Plato. (The concept of god was not used like this in Ancient Greece and Socrates didn't talk like that.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Jun8 8y agoGood discussion about the sourcing of that quote: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hcclh/did_socrates_even_lift/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hcclh/did_s..., it's from a Socratic dialogue by Xenophon in his Memorabilia. Here's one relevant quote from the Memorabilia: ὁρῶ γὰρ ὥσπερ τὰ τοῦ σώματος ἔργα τοὺς μὴ τὰ σώματα ἀσκοῦντας οὐ δυναμένους ποιεῖν, οὕτω καὶ τὰ τῆς ψυχῆς ἔργα τοὺς μὴ τὴν ψυχὴν ἀσκοῦντας οὐ δυναμένους. As those who do not train the body cannot perform the functions proper to the body, so those who do not train the soul cannot perform the functions of the soul. (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Memorabilia_(Xenophon) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Memorabilia_(Xenophon))
- kilo_bravo_3 8y agoThey're not fake, just mistranslated/corrupted. Mistranslated/corrupted: "No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training…what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable." Closest quote: "Besides, it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit." - Xen. Mem. 3.12 Mistranslated/corrupted: "In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection." Closest quote: "For these two, then, it seems there are two arts which I would say some god gave to mankind, music and gymnastics for the service of the high-spirited principle and the love of knowledge in them—not for the soul and the body except incidentally, but for the harmonious adjustment of these two principles." - Plat. Rep. 3.411e
- mruts 8y agoThe benefits of weightlidting are very marginal compared to cardio. There’s very little weifhtlifting does anything for your body besides getting stronger. Cardio on the other hand increases cognitive performance, life expectancy, decreases chances of getting dementia and parkinson’s.
- all2 8y agoHave you ever done squats or deadlifts? For reps or volume (overall weight moved)? It gets your heart going. My best 2 mile time (14:11) came after doing a month straight of the Stronglift 5x5 routine. I didn't run once the month before. A good heavy lift is cardio and strength training.
- jamiecurle 8y agoI agree but I think it is worth pointing out the two activities (cardio vs lifting) use different energy pathways (aerobic vs anaerobic). You almost certainly know that, so my comment is aimed at giving other readers some deeper context. I routinely hit 180bpm deadlifting and squatting.
- all2 8y agoAh, I apologize. Good call on adding context. In light of that my above comment is not so useful.
- stormthebeach 8y agoIt's also worth pointing out that no energy pathway acts alone. You're always using all of them in some degree, but a particular activity will use one of them over the others. You will strengthen them in conjunction, though what you focus on will improve the most.
- glangdale 8y agoIt is not. At least the slow lifts are too restrictive on blood flow. Fred Hatfield did claim that Olympic lifting did interesting/good things for ejection fraction (IIRC) but these lifts have very little time under tension so are a different animal. I would suspect you were reasonably fit before, needed some more leg strength to hit your peak speed, and didn't lose too much cardio from not doing it for a month.
- gadders 8y agoI wish they would change the title of the article to powerlifting, not weightlifting. I blame the sub-editor of the website. It's correct in the article text. Anyway, here is a pic of Oliver Sacks squatting 600lbs/272kg: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/0*3-yWU2in-5YvucmG.jpg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/0*3-yWU2in-5YvucmG.... Truly a renaissance man.
- mi100hael 8y agoMan that bar is really bending! Any bar at a competition today would be barely flexing.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y agoDating myself with this one, but "if the bar ain't bending, you're just pretending" :-)
- jamiecurle 8y agoDinner party conversation comment for you all. People who are into lifting are more likely to associate the term Weightlifting with the practice of Olympic Weightlifting. This article is about powerlifting. Olympic lifting focuses on the two dynamic, technique-driven main movements. The clean and jerk, which is a two-part lift and the snatch, which is a single movement lift. Up until 1972, the press was also an olympic movement, but it became too hard to judge and was so removed. There are rigorous criteria in competitions. Powerlifting, as the article goes onto state is centered around three movements, the squat, the deadlift and the bench press. Just like olympic lifting (or weightlifting), powerlifting has strict criteria for competition lifts. The aim of powerlifting though is to move as much weight as possible. For people who do not lift, they typically hear the phrase "weightlifting" and think of the practice of bodybuilding which is concerned with hypertrophy of muscle groups to build a balanced and awe-inducing physique. Context: I like to dabble in weightlifting as a fun pursuit and held a very minor title for a short time period. It was a hollow victory, as due to my only competitor weighing in 0.4kg too light, I ended up as the only person in my age/weight category. I won because I made all my lifts. I was competing against myself.
- dehrmann 8y agoTo make it a little more confusing, olympic weightlifting's lifts are more powerful (think watts--energy over time--explosiveness) than the three power lifts.
- jamiecurle 8y agoI'd never considered it like that. Nice! thankyou.
- plausibilities 8y agoImpulse would be a good technical term to describe this. The impulse from the first 0.5s of my clean & jerk is significantly higher than the first 0.5s of me grinding out a heavy deadlift rep
- pen2l 8y agoI'm a (novice) powerlifter -- the way you just described that makes me want to crossover to weightlifting. But I'm just too afraid of getting injured; chance of injury is so much higher when lifting explosively vs. lifting heavy. :(
- 40acres 8y agoA majority of modern day office workers would really benefit from learning the deadlift. Sitting for hundreds of hours a month, mixed with the standard American diet is really bad for your health. The deadlift is a fantastic compound movement that targets so many areas weakend by sitting, it also incorporates a hip hinge which is a quite natural movement.
- dymk 8y agoI never made progress getting my hands past my toes in a pike (I attribute that to a lot of sitting) until I started strengthening my glutes and hamstrings with the deadlift. The muscle fatigue post-workout paired with stretching finally got my muscles to relax and lengthen. Plus I have an ass now. So many upsides to doing deadlift.
- msla 8y agoIt would cause a lot of serious muscle injuries, that's for sure.
- toasterlovin 8y agoWeightlifting, in general, is a pretty safe sport. It has a way lower injury rate per hour spent than soccer or running. The deadlift, specifically, is a very easy lift to learn how to perform. And if you perform it properly and only add 5lbs to your max from workout to workout, you’d have a pretty difficult time injuring yourself.
- umeshunni 8y agoIt could, but if they started with a low weight (50% of their bodyweight) and learned proper technique, it would work out.
- EpicEng 8y agoNot if you do it correctly. In fact, you'll avoid many injuries later in life by maintaining your strength and bone health.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
- Emma_Goldman 8y agoI'm surprised to see no mention of Sacks' mental state at the time. The gloss seems a little too upbeat. He was clearly unhappy in his late 20s and early 30s. Despondent at Oxford, he spent a summer in Israel working on a Kibbutz. After finishing his medical degree, he travelled across Canada and tried to joint the Canadian Air Force as a pilot. When he began working in San Francisco, he was drawn to obsessive weightlifting. He also began to regularly consume copious amounts of hallucinogenic drugs, and briefly joined Hell's Angels. Sacks says that things only fell into place when he began writing.
- vsef 8y agoAlso not mentioned: He was a gay man, which he never seemingly really came to terms with after coming out to his father at 18 and then being unwillingly outed to his mother who declared him an "abomination", and it clearly fucked him up. He remained celibate for decades and never directly addressed the issue until his memoir written/released when he had terminal cancer. It's hard not to think of his interest in weightlifting as related to his internal conflicts over gayness and masculinity. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/31/the-tragic-story-of-oliver-sackss-celibacy-and-homosexuality/?utm_term=.2258d109e9d8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/3... And not mentioned: He also had some serious lasting physical problems from weightlifting, as did other of his competitive weightlifting friends: https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/oliver-sacks-on-how-our-hobbies-can-kill-us-2342f95c08 https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/oliver-sacks-on-how-... I am an avid weightlifter, I think its really great and overall healthy, but the linked article paints a rosy picture of something more complicated for Sacks.
- rv-de 8y agoOliver Sachs being mentioned always strikes my attention since having a read a couple of books by him. I was not aware though of his troubled past. Makes him more relatable in some way. Also brings this article into perspective. For all the positives that come with lifting weights (of what ever kind) it is obvious that most of the time it is born out of a desire to compensate a perceived shortcoming.
- bondolo 8y agoI had associated Oliver Sacks with swimming based upon this New Yorker article : https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/swimming-with-oliver-sacks https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/swimming-with-ol...