In Brief

I’m a skinny science geek who took up weight training many years ago, dabbled in powerlifting and strongman, and then transformed into a grad student in philosophy. My interests now include staying in shape in order to drink beer and eat pizza.

Favorite Beer Style: A toss between an American-style IPA (Armageddon IPA by Epic Beer) and Dark Ale/Porter (Pot Kettle Black by Yeastie Boys).

Connecting

Most interesting things happen for me at Goodreads, where I keep track of my reading, and Untappd, where I keep track of my beer drinking. You can also follow me at the usual spots like Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn although I am less barely active on them.

Thoughts on Training & Nutrition

I’m big on science. I like knowing how things work, whether that’s a microprocessor, a black hole, cellular automata, living cells or your body-as-a-whole. In that sense, I like knowing how dietary and exercise strategies affect our bodies as biological systems.

I’m just as big on wisdom, which is where the philosopher takes over. Science is a wonderful tool which virtually no one (excluding professional scientists) knows how to use properly. While I push science as the basis of any exercise or nutritional program, my style of inquiry doesn’t have anything to do with pulling protocols straight from studies (may your god help you), or sensationalist health journalism.

My science is interdisciplinary. While I’m aware of modern thinking in nutrition and strength training, I find these areas largely uninteresting. The real insights come from other fields: the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and the physiology of stress and immunity, and it doesn’t hurt to throw in a heaping dose of chaos theory, complexity science, and biological systems theory.

Such a style will become increasingly necessary as science moves away from the analytic, reductionist, body-as-a-machine metaphor that has prevailed through much of the last century.

We are storms of chaos and the emergent phenomena they produce. This is an umbrella that captures our bodies, but more than that, it includes our minds, our personal identities, and our relationships with the natural world in which we exist.

To optimize our lives — inclusive of physical fitness, but also mental health and subjective well-being — we must understand this. Fitness is about being informed, and it is about how you use your knowledge. It’s about pragmatism and understanding that some things are more important than raw efficiency, or chasing perfection, or lifting more weight, or being leaner.

My approach to nutrition and training might strike you as deceptively simple, but it does us no good to rely on an ever-larger magnifying glass in hopes of discovering new insights. The details do not predict the outcome.

I focus on the bare minimum of useful, applicable tools that lead to success and try to ignore everything else.

Or, as Franco Columbu once said, “if it works, it works”.

Do you even lift?

Occasionally, though not as much as I once did (in quantity or quality). I’m logging my workouts at Fitocracy if you’d like a look.

Can I hire you for coaching?

Possibly. I do offer coaching services, and I’m happy to chat with anyone about their goals, but my time is limited and I’m selective about who I take on. See my coaching and consultation packages at Impulse Strength for more information.

Communications and Privacy Matters

I consider personal communications to be private, barring a few exceptional circumstances. If you send me hate mail, you’ve implicitly waived your right to privacy and given consent for me to post your message all over this site and anywhere else I see fit.

Subscribers to my RSS feed and those choosing to post comments for discussion are guaranteed privacy. I hate spammers as much as you do.

Where are the comments?

I began this site as an exercise in free speech and open dialogue. Comments were open from day one and, minus spam, just about everything that was posted went up. The intent was to encourage participation, debate, and to generate a healthy dialogue with my readers. Unfortunately, that never seemed to materialize.

With the growth of social networks to handle the heavy lifting of discussion, compounded by what I feel to be some serious flaws in the way fitness communities operate — and, let’s face it, the reality that comments are the low point of any online content — I’ve removed them.

If you want to communicate, feel free to Tweet @Myosynthesis or RT any articles you find interesting. Better yet, write your own articles in reply and let’s have a real conversation instead of the knee-jerk short-form back-and-forths encouraged by comments.