Instagram Fitness: Photoshop, Synthol, Steroids, and Peaking

I recently got an Instagram account (If you have any desire to follow me, you can, but it's mostly pictures of food and my vacations... just search for Joe Berne). There's a lot of interesting content available, including a ton of fitness pictures - lots of very muscular, lean fitness models showing off their abs, arms, etc. It's all free and easy to find, and it's very easy to get inundated with pictures of very, very fit looking people, all kind of in your face on a daily basis.

To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with any of this. I'm simply saying that there is a very specific danger to exposing yourself to this content.

Some people can look at these sort of pictures and have no negative impact. But many people can find these pictures discouraging - especially those of us trying to lose weight or gain muscle or otherwise improve our appearance. It can be easy to fall in to a trap of looking at a fitness model, then looking in the mirror, and feeling like your goals are unattainable, and that it isn't even worth trying.

Now plenty of people avoid this thought process entirely, and get nothing but extra motivation from so-called motivational pictures. And that's great! If you're that sort of person, fantastic.

But if you find yourself getting discouraged by these images, there are a few things to keep in mind.

1. Very few of those models actually look like that year round. They're posting pictures from a photo shoot for which they have 'peaked,' they have extra makeup and stuff on, they have great lighting, etc.
2. Many of those models have advantages over you that have nothing to do with hard work or dedication. For example, they all have great genetics.
3. Many use performance enhancing drugs.
4. Many have had cosmetic surgery. 
5. Many don't have 'regular' lives that interfere with training (kids, full time sedentary jobs, etc.). 
6. That's not to disparage their accomplishments, just to say that comparing yourself to them is a little bit like a race car driver entering his Honda Civic in the Indy 500 and feeling crushed at not being able to qualify.

If you feel demotivated by these images, stop looking at them. There are more-realistic Instagram accounts - look for something with people who post excerpts from their workouts on a near-daily basis (both so you're not seeing a peaking picture and so you get a feel for the way even these people have good and bad days). Or stay away altogether.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to how to stay motivated. There is no good or bad here. Figure out what works for you, and stick to it! 

If Sartre studied karate: An existentialist analysis of the Shodan

A significantly large percentage of martial arts students quit shortly after earning their black belt (including me - I took a 12 year 'break' almost immediately after earning my shodan).

There are potentially many reasons for this, but I think one is a basic misunderstanding of what it means to be a black belt, one that can be nicely contextualized through an existential analysis.

Existentialism is a branch of philosophy that focused on a number of things, only some of which I'll be concerned with in this post. A significant issue that existentialists in general talked about was freedom and reification (reification is just a fancy way of saying you think of yourself as an object). I'm going to explain and simplify, because that is the part of high level philosophy that I was good at.

People tend to think of themselves the way they think of objects, as having fixed qualities. People think things like, "I am a good person," or "I am a bad person," "I am lazy," "I am hardworking," statement either positive or negative that paint a picture of us as fixed objects with fixed qualities that persist through time.

The central understanding of the existentialist philosophers was that these statements are all incorrect. Humans, unlike, for example, chairs, are free. Every moment of your conscious life, you can choose to be lazy, but even if you think things like "I am lazy," you can also choose, at any moment, to do some unlazy things. The same is true of almost any claim one makes - a person can think, "I am a good person," but at any moment, even after years of having that thought, choose to do something bad. That is existential freedom (which is not necessarily a good or comfortable thing - in fact, it is kind of nauseating).

When people imagine earning a black belt, they conflate two senses of the idea of becoming something new. They understand, on some level, that passing a test earns one a title which is acknowledged by a community of people. For example, because in 2011 I was given a belt with three stripes on it by the leaders of my style, a large group of people will now call me 'senpai' whereas before they didn't have to. They let me line up in a certain place, bow to me in a certain way, and so on, acknowledging my rank.

The second sense of black belt, though, is where the problem happens. People imagine that they will be something different once they have passed that test. They imagine that they will become something new - closer to some ideal of what they think a martial arts student IS. More dedicated. More disciplined, perhaps.

The truth (the uncomfortable truth) is that you can NEVER BE more disciplined or harder working or more dedicated. Those are not traits that you own or possess, the way you own or possess your eye color or your height. Instead, those are traits that only describe choices that you make, that you have to make freshly every day, every hour, as you live your life.

No matter how long you've trained you are, fundamentally, free to skip your next workout. You can never BECOME something that necessarily trains. By the same logic, though, no matter how long you've skipped training, you are also always free to go to the next class, to do the next workout, to resume your training.

Every single day you have to choose what you want to be. You can never become that thing (because you can never become anything) - you are not a thing. This is what existentialism is teaching us.

Once you've earned your black belt, you will be the same you that you've always been, freely choosing from hour to hour how you'll live your life. Choosing to train the next day will be no harder or easier than it had been before.

If you want to BE a different sort of person as a black belt, you will have to continually and freely choose to live a different life than you lived before. If you want to make a kind of hokey slogan, you can say that you can't BE a black belt, but you can always choose to make black belt choices.

Earning any advanced rank is meaningful - it's an acknowledgement of the choices you've made in the past, and of the skill you've developed. But it doesn't change the fundamental truth that to live a certain life, you have to continually choose it, every day. You have to re-become a black belt every day.

You might think that once you've got a darker belt around your waist that you'll be a different person - feel differently, have a different character, automatically make the right choices (to go to class, eat right, stretch every day, whatever) where before you used to sometimes falter. Sadly, it's not true (it can never be true). You're not like a chair, which can be painted to have a new color. You're a human, free to make all the choices, and to suffer the consequences of those choices.

The good news (if there is any), is that no matter how unmotivated, lazy, or whatever other negative traits you've expressed in the past, you're free to stop making those sorts of choices. I didn't say it was easy, but it is possible. So if you haven't been living a black belt sort of life, you can start to. Right now. That's freedom.

Osu (but as you read this, please think of me as saying Osu in a French accent, with a beret on my head and a cigarette dangling out of my mouth, to get the proper effect).