Welcome To Deep Squats, Shallow Thoughts

An uncredentialed strength coach's opinion on everything

Feb 06, 2023

I’ve worked in the fitness industry since 2005: First as a commercial gym personal trainer & personal training manager for 6 years, a part time D3 Strength & Conditioning Coach for 3 years, and a strength coach in private practice for over 12 years and counting, currently independent for in-person work and with Barbell Logic for online coaching. I spent about 7 years as an inner circle member of Mark Rippetoe’s seminar staff as coach and lecturer at the Starting Strength Seminar, and while I’ve not been part of that organization for several years now, and don’t agree with every jot and tittle of its positions, it remains a large influence in how I view the field. I compete in powerlifting as a hobby more than as a true competitor, and though my lifts are mediocre at best for the top tier of competition (634 squat, 475 bench press, 705 deadlift, 315 press), they’re respectable enough for my purposes.

Deadlifting 705 in competition, July 2021

My undergrad degree is in Biology, which fits somewhat with my chosen profession, but as an adult have taken special interest in economics, politics and political theory, (corruption of) science as a technocratic tool, and cultural trends.

I always posted primarily about strength and fitness on my public media until 2020. I didn’t shy away from expressing my opinion if asked something directly, but generally held to the old paradigm of not wanting to alienate up to half my potential customer base by speaking out about contentious cultural or political topics. One Current Thing passes onto the next, and what would I gain by opining on it, other than reducing my future income potential?

Then came 2020, Covid, and the Summer of Love.

Departure From Polite Society

Initially in March 2020, I thought the world had collectively lost its mind, but sanity would soon prevail and we’d return to normal. By April it was clear that my initial assessment was completely wrong, and that Covid - rather, the response to Covid - was going to be a long term disaster, entirely of our own making. So I started posting on Facebook, mostly privately, to express my objection to lockdowns & covid policy in general. I was happy to see some friends agreeing with my skepticism, but also noticed how many didn’t, and how accusations of bad faith (“you just don’t care if people die”) would follow immediately when I commented on others’ posts.

In June, after the George Floyd incident, I was shocked to see how many people who had previously been the biggest enforcers of insane covid policy, were the first to either go out and protest themselves in huge, shoulder-to-shoulder groups, or were the most ardent defenders on social media of those massive protests. Separate from the looting, murders, and property devastation - even support for the protests themselves was massively hypocritical, coming from the same people who yesterday had supported not being able to visit dying loved ones in the hospital and not being able to hold a funeral for a dead parent, suddenly full-throatedly supported standing shoulder to shoulder with 10,000 of your closest friends.

I initially supported the rights of the protesters, before they became ~~consistently violent~~ fiery but mostly peaceful, but that wasn’t hypocritical, as I also was against the lockdowns and restrictions from the beginning. However, seeing the agonizing and obviously strained mental gymnastics that otherwise seemingly intelligent and rational people deployed to justify their support for the protests while maintaining support for the covid restrictions, changed my view of society forever. It cemented what I had suspected but wasn’t yet ready to admit in March and April: we live in a post-truth society where the dominant institutions of governance, sense-making, and culture, are captured by progressive ideologues who justify their policies with tortured reasoning, packaged in convenient talking points, which are then repeated unthinkingly by massive swaths of the population.

Maybe it was ever thus and I just hadn’t realized, but it certainly seemed to me that it had never been this bad, this pervasive, with so little escape. We were living in a dystopian clown world of human contact = evil, even if this is how you make a living, even when dealing with the lifecycle events that form the backbone of our emotional (and for many, religious) life, our celebrations and grieving as human beings - unless you were going to smash the windows and loot your local target or foot locker, in which case gatherings were the voice of the unheard.

Meanwhile, the gym I had attended and loved for the past year and a half, went out of business due to the lockdowns.

I didn’t post anything specifically about this socio-political stuff, except one short quip about how “If cases don’t surge nationwide now, we can all agree it’s all been BS, right?” or something to that effect.

But I continued posting about covid, and didn’t post an obligatory black square on my instagram, where I continued to post about my lifting and my dog. I was told to “read the room,” and other similar comments, implying I was a bad person for not supporting the current thing.

Finally in Fall 2020, facing the specter of a new round of lockdowns or return to more restrictions, I started posting about Covid publicly on a regular basis, using instagram as my primary vehicle, since I had nearly 8,000 followers there. Not that many, but also not totally insignificant. I posted data and analysis about lockdowns and masks both not accomplishing their stated goals, while causing harm, with more occasional posts about more esoteric aspects of the pandemic such as the problems with PCR tests and their effect on the case and death counts, and such.

The response was interesting. I received many angry DMs, including some from people I knew personally or had coached, expressing dismay that I was speaking out against lockdowns and masks. They all used the same tired appeals to authority and consensus, unwillingness to engage with me on the substance of my posts, and lacking any curiosity about policies that had ruined the lives of millions, robbed untold numbers of a last chance to see a loved one or to be at their wife’s side at their kid’s birth, or simply to not waste away in lonely isolation. I eventually lost almost 2000 followers from these posts. But interestingly, I received many more DMs of support than anger, telling me I was saying what they thought, but couldn’t say for risk of losing their jobs or alienation from friends and family. This suggested to me that while my position was publicly still very unpopular in Fall 2020, many people privately agreed but were being held hostage to stay silent. Invigorated by the avalanche of supportive DMs, I started posting on my IG stories almost daily, finding more and better sources of data and analysis, along with some of my own, to dismantle the consensus orthodoxy on lockdowns and masking, and all aspects of the Covid Regime.

Although some of those 2000 unfollowed simply because I was going off topic for what had previously been a strength/fitness account, my sense from the sample of comments and DMs I got, was that the vast majority of those 2000 now considered me an evil, far-right, conspiracy peddler who could no longer be countenanced by people in polite society.

Given what I had started to understand about society and The Current Thing, I embraced this new perception wholeheartedly.

I’ve been posting regularly on IG ever since, mostly still about strength and fitness, but also fairly often about Covid & related policy. At the end of 2021, I began posting on my previously dormant twitter account as well, where I venture much more frequently into the socio-political and cultural domains, while also posting some about strength and fitness.

Why Substack?

IG and Twitter are fine for what they are (sort of), but I recognized the need for a place to write longer form pieces than either of those places is good at facilitating. A place to explore ideas and analyze things in greater detail than either the format of IG or the attention span & limitations of Twitter are good at.

Additionally, the “sort of” qualifier above has become increasingly important. Since the Covid era began, both places ramped up censorship big time, and any post against the regime consensus was subject to removal, and even if not removed, resulted in significant shadowbanning, which I have been under for more than 2 years now.

Twitter has improved in both regards since Elon Musk’s takeover, but still has some problems and lacks the attention span for the longer format material that allows us to explore and analyze things in greater detail.

Cool Story Bro. So What Will You Post About, and How Often?

Anything and everything that I want to, this is essentially a Wolf-Miscellany space. But I laid out my primary interests above, and I suspect most of my posts will fall into one of those categories:

Strength, fitness, and related.
Covid and the Covid Regime.
Political theory and ideas - I eschew label these days, but I’m probably closest in view to the excellent Mises Institute and those in its orbit. Day to day partisan politics will sometimes fall into this, but more so as a vehicle to explore ideas than to get enmeshed in the muck of blue vs red all the time.
Culture, including but not limited to TV, music, movies, and sports.
Sense-Making institutions and their problems, including but not limited to universities/academia, the corporate press/media, and the current state of ~~science~~ The Science.
How the institutions and anointed experts of the above are used in an increasingly technocratic society, where appeal to authority, expertise, and consensus are no longer considered logical fallacies, but general rules to be followed for good governance.

Since this is brand new, I don’t have a sense yet of how often I’ll post. I’m sure that will evolve over time as I get a better handle on using Substack, and see who my audience ends up being and what they like.

Welcome to the Party, Pal

So that’s the short version of my story and why I’m starting this newsletter. I hope you’ll join along for the ride, subscribe, like/share/comment, and all that other good stuff. While I generally “do what I want,” and like to cultivate an audience that appreciates that, rather than a polished & focus-group tested brand, I will take reader feedback into account too, in terms of how often and how much I write about various topics.

So with that intro out of the way, we shall begin our journey. Welcome to the party, pal!