It’s no secret that I’m a verbose writer. I try to keep my articles under a 4000 word cut-off, but that’s still a chunk of text to digest on a computer screen. As much as I love to read, even I don’t have the patience to sit staring at the window for 10-20 minutes to process an article of that length.

Recently I jumped on the Future Train and got myself an Android mini-tablet. This is a handy little device, as I’m sure those of you with iPhones and Android phones will attest, and I’ve found it surprisingly useful for organizing all the reading material that floats around me like the cloud following that dirty kid in the Peanuts cartoons.

For the purpose of organizing the web articles I come across, I’ve found Read It Later indispensable. Find a long-ish piece that looks awesome but you just don’t have time right now? Click “read it later” and it’s stored in your account and synced across platforms. Set it up in your browser and on the mobile device and you’re set.

It’s such a cool idea, and with my long articles likely being more the norm than the exception, I decided to add a button down at the bottom just in case anybody wants to make use of it.

This article began to take shape after reading another well-intended internet complaint about how mock-quote “science” has no relevance to practical get-in-the-gym exercise.

As pro-science as I am, I have to admit there’s a lot of truth to that point of view. You don’t have to look much further than the papers passed around the strength and fitness blogs and Facebook updates to see why. While there’s occasionally interesting stuff turning up, there’s also a lot of crap. By crap I mean papers looking at how Molecular Signal X jiggled in hungover college students when exposed to a lab trial resembling no workout you will ever do.

While I personally find a lot of the biochem research interesting, there’s no shame in admitting that it’s exactly that: a personal interest. I don’t think that material has any relevance at all to doing things at the gym, at least not in the way most folks seem to expect.

Still, there’s something not quite right about the blanket anti-science, anti-intellectual perspective that characterizes some corners of the strength and fitness field. The stereotypical Bro, the musclehead who believes the pseudo-science in supplement ads but turns hostile toward any attempt at debunking it, isn’t our ideal role model. There’s rejecting the irrelevant, on the one hand, and then there’s needless hostility towards intellectual curiosity.

The former I can get behind. The latter, that’s just typical internet posturing — or, at best, an over-reaction to bad science — and in either case an attitude best ignored. The problem is, it’s not always clear which is which, or why there’s a difference at all.
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Now that we’ve officially flipped into another new year, activity at the gym — and in the kitchen — is about to boil over into that first-quarter frenzy of new goals, new resolutions, and the hard determination that only the buzz of the holiday season can kindle. For the starry-eyed masses recently-committed to laying down the cigarettes and twinkies and getting some exercise, the new year is a time of optimism: they have dreams of better health and better bodies.

For the old gym hermits, it’s time to fortify the defenses, shore up the walls, and hunker down until late February. Not because we resent the influx of greenhorns. I’ve waffled on this over the years but in my mellowing-out I’ve had to admit that the January rush makes me happy for what it is. Sure it can be irritating to see all the chuckleheaded tomfoolery going on when you just want to squat, but let’s keep it in perspective: at least they’re trying.

The Serious and Dedicated know that, year after year, the Resolutioner rush inevitably fizzles out by late February, March at the latest, as that post-holiday enthusiasm gives way to the hard truth about reality. It’s hard work. Changes aren’t immediate and to call gratification, such as it is, delayed is an understatement. Those of you with “the bug”, who enjoy lifting and intense cardio for what it is, have to realize that, like coffee, it’s often an acquired taste.

The average Resolutioner doesn’t get that, and without any guidance or mentoring, the odds are stacked heavily against them ever figuring it out. Take a look at all the fresh faces you see on the second week of January, and compare that to how many are still there in August.

It’s easy to snicker and shake your head in judgment. It’s even easier, if you’re like pretty much everyone I’ve ever met in the fitness or strength community, to write these people off as lazy, unmotivated, weak, and other assorted insults continuing on down the spectrum of disdain.

A depressingly large number of people abandon exercise programs, and diets, and plans to quit smoking, and most anything else you can name. Why is this? Are people really just lazy and weak-willed? Are they just stupid and in need of your brilliant workout and diet plan?
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I read a lot. Have I mentioned that? This year I managed to put back more than a few books, and now that we’re winding up 2011 I want to give a nod to those that really stuck out to me (a list which, in the interest of brevity, only covers books published in 2011) as an informal sequel to my recent post about learning new things.

As I say on my Goodreads profile, I only tend to read books that I have a good idea I’m going to like in the first place, and those I approach from an optimistically bright outlook such that I’m probably going to find something interesting, thought-provoking, and just entertaining enough to rate well. The presence of a book on this list does not serve as an endorsement of every statement or argument made within said book. It only means that I found something of value in reading it.

There’s virtually nothing fitness-related here, as I don’t really care for most of those books, although at least some of the nonfiction will be (indirectly) of interest to any exercise buff. I’m also including fiction along with the nonfiction because, well, I just want to.
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I rank Iain M. Banks as one of my favorite authors. Banks’ Culture series was one of my first exposures to so-called “literary science fiction”, which uses the backdrop of science and technology but also focuses on interesting characters and quality prose not always associated with “sci-fi”.

The Culture books deal with the eponymous anarchistic super-civilization, run by intelligent machines (called Minds) and inhabited by mostly care-free citizens. With boredom as an eternal problem in utopia, the Culture eschews the Prime Directive in favor of a more hands-on approach to civilization-building. The books handle all the questions of morality and dramatic hijinks that ensue from said policies.
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A question I’ve been asked a lot, and never really sat down to answer, is how I go about learning new things.

Before going there, I want to tackle the whole “smart” matter. I think that, firstly, “smart” — or “knowing lots of stuff” — has more to do with the amount of time you’re willing to spend grappling with difficult concepts than anything else. If you aren’t almost compulsively interested in knowing about some subject matter, then you aren’t going to know much about it. You’ll spend lots of time on things that do interest you, and therefore know a lot more about them. Pretty easy there.

Intelligence certainly plays a part but I really don’t like that kind of deterministic explanation. Although there’s a measurable component to specific kinds of abstract intelligence, I also think that many people underestimate what they could learn if they just applied themselves. For whatever reasons learning stuff for the sake of learning stuff isn’t a huge priority for people, but that’s all getting into discussions for another time.

The other issue relates to meta-cognition (how you think about how you think) and that’s off in another zone of its own. Let if suffice to say that there needs to be a degree of introspection and self-awareness going into any learning process, because knowledge isn’t about rote memorization and regurgitation of facts. You have to be able to think, and most importantly of all, to step away from the details of the problem to more generalized and universal principles. These are not traits always valued in higher education, thus explaining the “dumb PhD” phenomenon.

The framework of knowledge matters as much as the contents.

All I can tell you is that a. I get a warm glowy feeling of satisfaction when I read topics of science and philosophy and b. that drives me to read a whole lot of things in those subject areas which c. leads to a self-sustaining feedback loop.

The rest of this article outlines the rough steps I go through in learning about things that interest me and give me the warm glowy feeling of satisfaction. I’ll warn you up front, I treat my autodidactery seriously, so if you’ve got a Science^TM allergy or a real smug contempt for Knowing Stuff, you’ll want to skip this one.
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The last few months, during my yearly layoff from hard training (I’d rather spend my free time at the pub during New Zealand’s nice summer weather, and “yearly layoff” sounds nicer than “lazy slug”), I’ve been gravitating towards less demanding, more fun kinds of lifting.

Regular readers will know of my love for autoregulated daily training, but I’ve discovered that I really only care for this during the winter months. For whatever reason, I find myself uninterested during the summer. That reason is beer and sunshine.

Instead, I prefer a more unstructured and unfocused approach, which you might call “screwing around”.

The last few weeks, I’ve been messaging back and forth with JC Deen about good old fashioned Bro-training. You know the stuff: body-part splits. Having an arms day. Pumping the hell out of everything to get that hurt-so-good burn.
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Since I get Pubmed updates every Sunday, I usually find one or two papers that catch my eye. I figure it’s worth having a look at them, what they mean, and why they’re interesting to me.
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Back in early 2007, when I first decided to start a website, I had a mission in mind: to parody, satirize, and criticize the Fitness Industry. For those of you that aren’t aware, even the “Amped Training” brand name was meant as a riff on the hype-filled ad-copy used to sell supplements and diets and workout programs. Long-time readers will undoubtedly notice that the site has taken a different direction since those days when the posts were mostly flames and trollposts, a change coincident with some fundamental shifts in my own belief systems and outlook on the world.

Still, despite the inflammatory postings, Amped was always about science and skepticism, about clear thinking, and penetrating the layers of obfuscation surrounding the niches of strength & conditioning, bodybuilding, nutrition, and general get-in-shape exercise. Even the harshly-worded criticisms were, at heart, about clarity, paring away the unnecessary and deconstructing the ridiculous.

As then, I still believe that scientific thinking and what Hemingway so accurately called a shock-proof bullshit detector are critical, whether you’re a coach, a trainer, or just looking to make the most of your own health and fitness. But with a new direction, without the motivating force of satirical hard-edged criticism, the Amped brand feels past its prime. So I’ve decided to change it.

My original passion, what got me into lifting weights, was bodybuilding, which then morphed into a love of strength via powerlifting — muscle and brawn, the typical motivations for young insecure males. I’ve never been much of a competitor, always hanging around the edges of the sport, more the mechanic and technician than the driver. As such my writings have always fallen into orbit around those topics, with occasional excursions into the worlds of nutrition and exercise for fitness and fat loss.

I think that constraining myself to just strength and just muscle has left a lot of potential on the table. For myriad reasons exercise science and nutrition are mutts as sciences go, with very few first principles of their own when compared to a ‘harder’ science like physics. Insights from other areas of biology and even superficially unrelated fields like psychology can be incredibly powerful when applied to an exercise context, as can more philosophical musings about how to look at science and the human world.

I’ve been writing more of those kinds of posts over the last year, and they’ve proven quite popular compared to more of the same, the usual hackneyed and overdone posts about how to obsess over squat form that you can’t change, or lists of exercises to work whatever muscle, or how to fixate on details in your diet or your training that convey exactly zero benefit. Boring.

So, in addition to my writings on exercise, I’m also writing more about those Interesting facets of neuroscience and cognitive psychology and epigenetics and computer science and whatever else strikes my fancy from Pubmed or ArXiv or Google Scholar. And while I’m at it, I’m going to talk more about daily life — what I’m doing in the gym and in the kitchen, books I’m reading, pretty much whatever I feel like chatting about. I make no promises on that front, as I’ve turned into a bit of an e-recluse the last few years as my posting droughts testify, but it’s on the table.

This is no longer a site about “lifting weights” or “getting big” or “making fun of idiots”. Think of it as my all-purpose Batman utility belt of a site, still encompassing my science-minded views on strength and muscle, but adding a new perspective.

On the technical front, this changeover hasn’t involved switching servers and the DNS records for the myosynthesis.com domain have been resolved for quite some time now, so this should be a relatively straightforward conversion. Likewise you RSS subscribers should have been switched over as well, but if not, here’s the feed address. That should have switched over on the back end but you may have subscribed view the http://url/feed method, so make the change if you haven’t already.

All old URLs should be redirecting, but I’m under no delusions that there will be a completely flawless transfer so don’t be surprised if older links redirect to 404 Hell. So far the redirection has been working smoothly, but if you’re missing an article or a post that you think should be there, let me know.

Also, you’ll have noticed that I did a mild redesign of the layout. I got tired of all the clutter, so I took a minimalist approach to a new template and streamlined everything. Here again, I expect to be some flaws with the display and shaking down bugs for all the new templates, so I don’t mind you letting me know about them — with one exception: if you’re still insistent on using IE, you’re out of luck. I’m trying to code with W3C specs for HTML5 and CSS3 in mind, and to be more honest, I just can’t be bothered trying to make my code reverse-compatible with IE6/7/8. Most things should work, but I make no promises and if something does turn up wacky, I offer no solutions.

If you aren’t using a modern browser, preferably Firefox or a Webkit-based browser by now, well, that’s what the RSS feed is for.

We throw around the words smart and intelligent and genius casually, and I’m not sure that really applies to someone who writes articles about pumping biceps or how to eat Paleo. I don’t think there’s any such thing as genius in strength & conditioning.

When I think genius, I’m thinking names like Isaac Newton, Bernhard Riemann, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Richard Feynman, Douglas Hofstadter.

(If none of these names ring a bell, then you may not understand why my bar for genius is set so high.)

Reading anything written by those names (and plenty of others I’ve left out for brevity) leaves me feeling roughly the intellectual size of an ant scaled against Mt. Everest. At least one valid definition of genius must be that its sheer capability leaves you profoundly aware of your own limitations.
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