Think about why we started to ‘train’…
Men fought battles. We built homes and towns and eventually cities and city-states. No matter our social standing we initially had to be good at fighting.
The king’s would fight at the front, not dictate who fought and where they fought at the back of the pack.
As such, working out was initially invented so that men could become better at war. Athletics were war games, not games or sports.
Vanity is something that can only happen amidst safety. You cannot put vanity before performance if you’re heading off to war, and it shouldn’t be on the spectrum of things you worry about…
…Yet, that’s why many workout, to look better, to slim down, to gain confidence not from performance but from appearance.
This isn’t necessarily the individual’s fault, but it’s up to them to solve.
We live in a weak, soft society that puts vanity before values, virtues, and morals.
And performance, for a man, is a virtue.
Jordan Peterson has an incredible line…
Weak Men Cannot Be Virtuous.
It’s true in that manliness demands utility. We need to be able to serve a purpose, and at the foundation of this service is the ability to act upon our morals and virtues.
Ethics
If you’ve ever read anything by the great thinker and author Nassim Taleb, you’ll know that his idea of ethical behavior goes beyond one’s own behavior.
If you see someone doing something wrong, spreading lies or false information, or acting immorally, it is your duty to call them out, to expose them, to stand up to them, to not look the other way.
As a man, if you see someone mistreating someone, robbing them, hurting them, abusing them, it’s your duty to defend the victim.
You cannot be a bystander, and being vain and weak means that you cannot act on your ethics.
Thus, you cannot be virtuous, ethical, or good, in terms of being a good man because you are not good at being a man.
Strength and Honor
We do not call our men to be strong and honorable like we once did, in fact, much of society is calling on men to become more feminine, to become softer and weaker, deaming those masculine qualities like strength, power, force, and aggression, as toxic.
This is a big problem.
It’s similar to veganism. Asking humans to eat only plants is like asking a lion to stop eating meat. It betrays our genetics. It betrays who we are and what we are.
To ask a man to not be strong, to instead be soft and vain is to ask him to not be who he is, it’s to require him to not be a man.
There is, of course, blowback to this in the forms of site’s like mine and many others that do an even better job…
Men need to be men.
We need to act like men in order to feel like men in order to give society half of what it needs, the masculine, while women give society the feminine.
This invades how we train, too.
You betray your soul, your spirit, who you are and what you are when you’re consumed by looks, you also don’t get enough from your training when you’re focused on curls and not deadlifts.
Vanity rules the marketplace, where abs and a chiseled physique far out-sells even the best strength and performance programs…
…Which is telling and sad.
Men want to look better more than they want to perform better.
Of course, you can have both, and focusing on performing better will help you look even better in the long run, but it won’t sell books or programs, vanity does.
You’re different.
We’re different.
Train like a man. Train because you’re a man. Train to be better at being a man. Get after it.
> > How to Train Like a Warrior, Like a Man
(Gain Strength, Power, Athleticism, Toughness)
Be Legendary,
Chad Howse
