Validation

The frontal assault took the Marines completely by surprise.  They stood dumbfounded, unsure of which one of them should react first.

Striding across the road was my 17-year-old daughter, who with palms up called out, ‘How many dead hang pull ups do I have to do for a T-shirt?’

They had to think fast: A girl?  Dead hangs?.  

This was at a big festival, where the Marines had set up a recruiting booth.  They brought a pull up bar, and their clever enticement to potential recruits was a challenge to their masculinity: do a certain number of reps to win a lanyard, water bottle, or T-shirt - and maybe that would lead to a talk about joining the Corps.  Above their boots and camouflage pants the Marines wore tight black T-shirts to showcase their arms.  The strategy worked; plenty of young, cool dudes took up the gauntlet, many of them quickly running out of horsepower after only a few reps.  This is what made the Marines pretty sure that while this chick had guts, she wasn’t going to do any dead hangs.  

She nailed four, to their immense surprise.  The recruiter in charge tossed her a T-shirt and followed up with a packet of literature on a career in the Marine Corps.  This was the best thing they saw all day.  

We’ve been away at this week-long festival in The Great Lakes, which is why I haven’t been writing.  In truth, I’ve been writing a great deal in preparation for the event, our working vacation and first chance to travel and have fun since the pandemic began.  

It was also our first chance in years to lift in a public gym, which was eye opening.  We’ve always known that we’re doing pretty well in our little garage, but even when progress slows and we’re feeling beaten up, it’s encouraging to see that a solid background in science, technique, and programming really does go a long way.  

Really, what surprised me more is just how many people don’t have that kind of background.  

A number of public officials were in attendance, which called for a protective detail, essentially SWAT-level trained guys with rifles, vests, and dogs, and like the Marines, T-shirts that were tight on their arms and shoulders.  A few of them were at the gym early one morning, where it was clear that their elite level training did not extend to strength work.  Squats were done with a 60-pound dumbbell clutched to the chest goblet style.  Romanian deadlifts were done with a whole 135 pounds.  If anything was amazing, it was that their arms were as respectable looking as they were, considering the pedestrian level curls and pull ups I was seeing.  

I wrote about running into this same Special Operations command years ago, hundreds of miles away at their home base, when one of their big guys was doing deadlifts and I was using the same weight for power cleans.  

A mother and father came in with a ten year old boy who was all long bones and joints, utterly lacking muscle or the merest suggestion of hormones that could provide some.  Still, it was time for strength training, they had decided, and they proceeded to misinform him on every single exercise in the gym.  The bands supporting his pull ups were not strong enough, so despite his brave, albeit jerky, attempts at reps, they urged him to move slowly in each direction.  On the deadlifts, he had to keep his hips down, which only worsened the bend in his back.  They tried goblet squats, box jumps, push ups, and tricep push ups, of all things - done with his hands close together beneath his chest.  His posture collapsed constantly.  

There’s a way to handle this, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut.  The parents meant well, and the Dad was a nice enough guy to say to me, ‘Hey!  Holy Cow, did I see you squatting with three plates on each end of the bar?’  

To take stock of what you’re doing, sometimes you have to see what other people are up to.