Agamemnon Was A Pussy

All Agamemnon did was sacrifice his daughter to win a war.

Then, after his cheating wife’s tawdry taunts, he walked on some purple carpet.

Big deal.

Let me ask you this:

Did he ever watch two seasons of The Dog Whisperer and then go out and buy a purebred puppy thinking all he needed was a collar and a few forceful pulls on a leash to get it to obey.

Well I did. And my hubris was a grander scale than that wimp.

(Note: I in no way, shape, or form, liken my experience with this dog to that of rearing a child. God forbid I fail at this I can always drive my dog to the pound. Parents don’t have that luxury, although school shootings would end tomorrow if we instituted a put down policy on all kids up to the age of 18. Think about it: “Sorry junior, it’s just not working out. You’re Mom and I think we’d do better with a different breed. So we’re going have to put you down).

Meet Mow Mow.

Yes, Mow Mow. She’s beautiful, rambunctious, and very playful. But I can’t help but wonder if our breeder didn’t feel a little like God when she spliced in some old Atari PacMan into the genetic stew of our pup.

She chomps e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.

So we read dog books on positive training, no violence here, to raise young Mow Mow right. They tell you how to teach Sit. It goes something like this:
Wait for your dog to sit. Click and treat. (We’ve chosen to clicker train our dog).
Every time it sits on its own, Click and Treat.
Then start to walk backwards after she sits,

she should follow and sit, expecting a treat.

Click and Treat.
When she does this 80% of the time, add the command “Sit.”
Not bad right? Conditioning at its best.
It works. It elicits feelings of power I’ve never felt before. To shape the behavior of this beautiful being…priceless. I’ll get ten dogs if it’s this rewarding.

Hubris.

She bites everything, as stated earlier.

The book says that whenever she comes in contact with human skin to yelp out “OW!” just like Mom or her brothers and sisters would do in the pack.

This works, kind of.

Anyone walking by our house must think we have Turret's.
When she chews on something she’s not supposed to the book says to offer her an alternative. This works, kind of.

When I say she chews everything, I mean everything, metal, wood, flooring, sticks, rocks, trees, grass, cars, the couches, the coffee table, you name it, she chews it. Offer her an alternative, she chews that until you turn your back.

So we’ve called in reinforcements.

A trainer will be here Saturday morning.

I’ll keep you posted.

Just One Man

I try really hard, but it feels like a crusade. I am just one man. Fitness magazines are the purveyors of myths. It’s the stuff conspiracy theories are made of: They play on fears, I sell only truth. I can get my clients to agree with what I say. They need to believe it.

I do it too. I want what I want and I want it sooner than now. Don’t ask me to wait. God bless you if you come at me extolling the virtues of patience. I admit the hypocrisy inherent in asking it of the people I train.

That said, here’s the deal: Men would be better off cutting the weights they use in half and paying strict attention to form. And women would be better off applying a little meathead logic to their training, in essence, Lift More Weight!

I see it all day long. Men and boys alike, hoisting weights far too heavy, stressing their joints, destroying their ligaments, all so they can answer the question ‘how much can you bench?’ without feeling like a giant pussy.

Contrarily, filling the group exercise studios, are the women. Buying the myth that cardio will burn their fat, and high reps will tone their muscles. Wrong.

I honestly wish I could turn the gym up-side-down, shake it like a snow globe, and have the men settle in the classes, and the women on the free weight floor. Why?

Back in the 80’s I was a meathead, mullet and all. I wore a thick, tight, gold chain, tapered Levis, high top sneakers, and listened to Motley Crue, Dokken, and Great White. I also buried myself under the heaviest weights I could hold. Now I’m paying the price. My back kills. My neck is all fucked up and my knees protest every time I run more than ten feet. I wish I could sit down with 80’s Bry and tell him his life wasn’t any better bigger. As a matter of fact now, almost thirty pounds lighter, life is a million times better.

When I started personal training for a living, I was perplexed about why it was so hard for my women clients to lose weight. I put them on elaborate cardio programs, low carb, high protein diets, and had them perform hundreds of reps with low weights, but none of it worked. At the end of the day they might have been lighter, but their body fat percentage not only stayed the same, in most cases it went up.

Then it hit me. My certification manual didn’t differentiate between the sexes. It didn’t have separate chapters for training women as opposed to men. It dealt with changing human muscle, not gender specific muscle.

Muscle doesn’t tone. It gets smaller, stays the same, or grows. There is no rep range that’ll tone and not build. It’s a myth that women can build bulky, huge muscles. It’s against their physiology, completely contrary to how their bodies work. Estrogen is anti-muscle building, testosterone builds. That’s why we men can usually whip themselves into shape faster than women.

The benefits of weight training have finally caught up to and are now surpassing cardio and range from increasing insulin sensitivity to preventing and reversing osteoporosis. Several exercise journals have reported recently that resistance training is actually better than cardio at burning fat. Who knew? I try to get my clients to understand that exercise isn’t about racing against calories. Calories in vs. calories out doesn’t always work. My clients get an education on metabolism, how it works, why their bodies are in fat storage mode, and how to get their bodies to start spending what it has saved.

And therein lies the problem. With so many periodicals catching people’s attention with, “Loose fifty pounds of fat in ten minutes,” I can’t compete. My plan of retaking control of a metabolism that has slowed takes at least six moths of hard work, determination, and discipline. Shit!

It is all about choices

When Rachel and I started dating I had a head full of therapy. It was unarguably the best therapy I’ve ever engaged in. It forced me to look at and challenge my core beliefs, including many I didn’t know I had. My therapist was versed in the art of Determinism. Determinism is the belief that everything in nature is caused. The definition of Total Determinism is that all someone’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are caused by one or more determinants, and that beliefs, especially those which are emotionally loaded, are powerful determinants of thoughts, feelings and behaviors. “We are what we believe.”

It’s a philosophy like any other, open to debate. Rachel and I spent many a night curled up on either side of our favorite green couch debating Determinism’s boldest statement: Free will doesn’t exist.

To prove its point, determinism uses deductive reasoning: If man is bound by determinants, then any choice he makes is not of free will, he is motivated by unconscious desires to serve his determinants.

Rachel disagrees.

“It’s all about choices,” She stated, point blank, then waited for me to respond.

I was apprehensive. Rachel, like me, loves to play devil’s advocate. It’s one of those qualities about our mates that we only find endearing in hindsight.

“There is no free will if we’re bound by determinants.” I answered, expecting her to accept my airtight case.

“I don’t believe that. Even if you are behaving on an unconscious level, you can still make a choice to do or not do something, it’s all about choices, ” she pulled out some eighties logic on me, quoting from an old Rush song, “Even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

It was the first time I heard her say it, and it won’t be the last. Like all mantras, it’s only powerful if the person saying it truly believes it, and she does.

We revisited it when I pondered leaving my job. "You can choose to stay and see how it goes, or you can choose to take a chance." (I was going to leave out the part where now I work only half the hours and make more money). "See, it's all about choices."

When we thought about moving to escape the fourth most polluting powerplant in the country, I doddled, worried it was a mistake. "We can stay or go. Either way it's a choice." It was her way of of forcing me to recognize the truth...need I say it again?

On Saturday Rachel and I were faced with a dilemma, more mine than hers. We went to BestBuy to buy a camera to take pictures of our new puppy, Mow Mow, (not here until June 12th, stay tuned).

While we were there we picked up an extra memory card for the camera and a zip drive for Rachel to save all her school work.

Rachel scanned the receipt in the parking lot:
Camera $179
Extended Warranty $29.95
4 Gig Memory card $29.95
No zip drive.

“We have to go back.” Rachel said without thinking. But she’s in a relationship with me, a former criminal, and as lazy as a retired donkey.

“But it’s way back there,” I whined. This from a man who jogs three miles, three times a week, to nowhere in particular, “it serves them right.”

Rachel crooked her neck, as if trying to rattle loose the thorn stuck in the logical side of her head, the one that allows her to date an unethical heathen like me. “Seriously?” she asked.

“They’re a big, faceless, conglomerate,” I stopped myself there, knowing my argument, if not contested, could easily mushroom. It would start slow. I’d take more than one lollipop from the bank or sneak nine items through the eight item grocery line, and eventually, I’d be taking down armored cars.

We went back. I let Rachel do the talking since for her it meant another feather in her ivory wings, for me it was one step back from Hell.

In the car she smiled, held my hand, leaned in and kissed me softly on the cheek and said, “See, it’s all about choices.”