- we skeptics like to say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
- God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. Barking mad!
- when you are in the religious bubble everything makes sense and there is no such thing as chance, randomness, and contingencies.
- I call this activist approach to helping people overcome their faith, “Street Epistemology.”
- Let’s be blunt, direct, and honest with ourselves and with others.
- Socrates … said that wisdom is the key to happiness. Socrates was a skeptic about happiness, because we do not possess wisdom—no one he knows has wisdom.
- When pressed, the faithful will offer vague definitions that are merely transparent attempts to evade criticism, or simplistic definitions that intentionally muddy the meaning of “faith.”
- A deepity is a statement that looks profound but is not. Deepities appear true at one level, but on all other levels are meaningless.
- Malleable definitions allow faith to slip away from critique.
- The words we use are important. They can help us see clearly, or they can confuse, cloud, or obscure issues.
- If one had sufficient evidence to warrant belief in a particular claim, then one wouldn’t believe the claim on the basis of faith. “Faith” is the word one uses when one does not have enough evidence to justify holding a belief, but when one just goes ahead and believes anyway.
- “Believing something anyway” is an accurate definition of the term “faith.”
- Not everything that’s a case of pretending to know things you don’t know is a case of faith, but cases of faith are instances of pretending to know something you don’t know.
- As a Street Epistemologist, whenever you hear the word “faith,” just translate this in your head as, “pretending to know things you don’t know.”
- Faith and hope are not synonyms.
- Give me a sentence where one must use the word “faith,” and cannot replace that with “hope,” yet at the same time isn’t an example of pretending to know something one doesn’t know.
- A difference between an atheist and a person of faith is that an atheist is willing to revise their belief (if provided sufficient evidence); the faithful permit no such revision.
- The problem with agnosticism is that in the last 2,400 years of intellectual history, not a single argument for the existence of God has withstood scrutiny. Not one.
- “Agnostic” and “agnosticism” are unnecessary terms.
- Faith Claims Are Knowledge Claims
- Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that focuses on how we come to knowledge, what knowledge is, and what processes of knowing the world are reliable.
- A knowledge claim is an assertion of truth.
- Faith is an epistemology.12 It’s a method and a process people use to understand reality. Faith-based conclusions are knowledge claims.
- Those who make faith claims are professing to know something about the external world.
- Much of the confusion about faith-based claims comes from mistaking objective claims with subjective claims.
- Think of subjective claims as matters of taste or opinion.
- Faith claims are knowledge claims. Faith claims are statements of fact about the world.
- Faith Is an Unreliable Epistemology
- If a belief is based on insufficient evidence, then any further conclusions drawn from the belief will at best be of questionable value.
- The only way to figure out which claims about the world are likely true, and which are likely false, is through reason and evidence. There is no other way.
- “No amount of belief makes something a fact.”
- Believing things on the basis of something other than evidence and reason causes people to misconstrue what’s good for them and what’s good for their communities.
- The emotional satisfaction of religious belief vitally depends upon the beliefs being taken literally; the epistemic defense of such beliefs crucially depends on taking them nonliterally.
- Faith is an epistemology because it is used as an epistemology.
- Absent any desire to know one is either certain or indifferent.
- Socrates said that a man doesn’t want what he doesn’t think he lacks.
- Certainty is an enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth.
- Wonder, curiosity, honest self-reflection, sincerity, and the desire to know are a solid basis for a life worth living.
- The sense of moving your intellectual life forward and feeding the hunger to know are a vital part of the human experience.
- As a Street Epistemologist, one of your primary goals is to help people reclaim the desire to know—a sense of wonder.
- ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.’
- people can and do change their mind in response to reasonable argument.
- Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network.
- There are five reasons why otherwise reasonable people embrace absurd propositions: (1) they have a history of not formulating their beliefs on the basis of evidence; (2) they formulate their beliefs on what they thought was reliable evidence but wasn’t (e.g., the perception of the testament of the Holy Spirit); (3) they have never been exposed to competing epistemologies and beliefs; (4) they yield to social pressures; and (5) they devalue truth or are relativists.
- Belief revision means changing one’s mind about whether a belief is true or false.
- A “filter bubble” describes the phenomena of online portals—like Google and Facebook—predicting and delivering customized information users want based upon algorithms that take preexisting data into account (e.g., previous searches, type of computer one owns, and geographical location).
- Doxastic openness, as I use the term, is a willingness and ability to revise beliefs.6 Doxastic openness occurs the moment one becomes aware of one’s ignorance; it is the instant one realizes one’s beliefs may not be true. Doxastic openness is the beginning of genuine humility
- A pathogenic belief is a belief that directly or indirectly leads to emotional, psychological, or physical pathology; in other words, holding a pathogenic belief is self-sabotaging and leads one away from human well-being.
- Once you expose a belief or an epistemology as fraudulent, you’re likely to hear statements of greater confidence.
- Having a reliable epistemology doesn’t guarantee that one will act accordingly.
- Most people are afraid of feeling anxiety, and they’ll do anything they can to distract themselves from it.
- When people aren’t reasoned into their faith, it is difficult to reason them out of their faith.
- Many people of faith come to their beliefs independent of reason. In order to reason them out of their faith they’ll have to be taught how to reason first, and then instructed in the application of this new tool to their epistemic condition.
- Interventions are not about winning or losing, they’re about helping people see through a delusion and reclaim a sense of wonder.
- Few things are more dangerous than people who think they’re in possession of absolute truth.
- If someone knows something you don’t know, acknowledge that you don’t know.
- People dig themselves into cognitive sinkholes by habituating themselves to not formulate beliefs on the basis of evidence. Hence the beliefs most people hold are not tethered to reality.
- do not bring particular pieces of evidence (facts, data points) into the discussion when attempting to disabuse people of specific faith propositions.
- Remember: the core of the intervention is not changing beliefs, but changing the way people form beliefs—hence the term “epistemologist.
- Nearly all of the faithful suffer from an acute form of confirmation bias: they start with a core belief first and work their way backward to specific beliefs.
- Every religious apologist is epistemically debilitated by an extreme form of confirmation bias.
- Faith holds up the entire structure of belief. Collapse faith and the entire edifice falls.
- God is the conclusion that one arrives at as a result of a faulty reasoning process (and also social and cultural pressures). The faulty reasoning process— the problem—is faith.
- Belief in God(s) is not the problem. Belief without evidence is the problem.
- Early in the intervention, explicitly ask subjects to assign themselves a number on the Dawkins’ Scale. At the end of the intervention ask them to again assign themselves a number. By doing so you can test the effectiveness of your intervention.
- A solid strategy for lowering your conversational partner’s self-placement on the Dawkins’ Scale, and one that I repeatedly advocate throughout this book, is to focus on epistemology and rarely, if ever, allow metaphysics into the discussion.
- In other words, focus on undermining one’s confidence in how one claims to know what one knows (epistemology) as opposed to what one believes exists (metaphysics/God).
- Do not move on to another claim until the subject concedes that the particular claim in question is not sufficient to warrant belief in God.
- Again, it’s always advisable to target faith and avoid targeting God.
- The belief that faith is a virtue and that one should have faith are primary impediments to disabusing people of their faith.
- First, I’ll ask, “How could your belief [in X] be wrong?”14 I don’t make a statement about a subject’s beliefs being incorrect; instead, I ask the subject what conditions would have to be in place for her belief to be false.
- Second, I’ll ask, “How would you differentiate your belief from a delusion?
- Simply causing one to consider that their core beliefs could be delusions may help them recognize the delusions.
- Model the behavior you want to emulate.
- Avoid politics whenever possible.
- Bringing up politics when conducting interventions sidetracks the discussion—which should be about faith.
- Always be mindful that your relationship with the subject will make or break the treatment.
- Trustfulness of reason and willingness to reconsider are two crucial posttreatment attitudes the faithful need in order to make a full recovery.
- System 1 thinking (intuition) is instantaneous, automatic, subconscious, and often has some degree of emotional valence; System 1 thinking is the result of habits and resistance to change. System 2 thinking (reasoning) is much slower, more subject to change, more conscious, and requires more effort.
- Many beliefs are formed on the basis of the System 1 fast-thinking phenomenon.
- Arguing about what constitutes evidence and what are the criteria for evidence usually results in shifting the discussion into ever-receding tangents. Such shifts are common rhetorical tactics of apologists.
- The process of genuinely opening oneself up to competing ideas is vital for one’s intellectual life, because it prevents doxastic closure.
- Knowledge = Justified True Belief.
- Knowledge is not a fuzzy thing that we can decide to have or not.
- Meet people “where they are.”
- if one thinks one has the truth, one stops looking.
- “Often as a consequence of sustained Socratic dialogue, one realizes that one did not know something that one thought one knew.”
- The Socratic method may sound complicated, but essentially it’s asking questions and getting answers.
- The Socratic method has five stages: (1) wonder; (2) hypothesis; (3) elenchus, (4) accepting or revising the hypothesis; (5) acting accordingly
- The Socratic method begins in wonder. Someone wonders something:
- Simply put: from wonder a hypothesis emerges.
- Hypotheses are speculative responses to questions posed in stage 1. They’re tentative answers to the object of wonder.
- The elenchus, or question and answer, is the heart of the Socratic method. In the elenchus, which is essentially a logical refutation, Socrates uses counterexamples to challenge the hypothesis.
- The purpose of the counterexample is to call the hypothesis into question and ultimately show that it’s false.
- A hypothesis is never proven to be true. After a hypothesis survives repeated iterations in the elenchus, this only means that to date it has withstood a process of falsification.
- A single counterexample can kill a hypothesis, yet even millions of confirming instances don’t change the status of the hypothesis. (There’s an asymmetry between confirmation and disconfirmation.)
- The elenchus is a simple yet effective way to undermine a hypothesis by eliciting contradictions and inconsistencies in one’s reasoning, and thus engendering aporia.
- It’s a good idea to ask someone to repeat or restate their claim.
- “I don’t know” is a deceptively powerful statement.
- A pregnant pause is a very useful, nonthreatening technique, typically used in sales, to get the result you want.
- Humor is an incredibly effective and underused dialectical technique, probably underused because there are so many ways it can backfire.
- I never allow people to steer these discussions from faith is true to faith is beneficial (comforting) unless they explicitly acknowledge that faith is not a reliable guide to reality.
- The phrase “open yourself up” and the word “gift” are frequently used to indoctrinate people into faith systems. These terms may also be effective in nudging people toward embracing reason.
- When administering Socratic treatments, make sure to offer as few hypotheses as possible.
- (Asking people to “just pray about it” pushes them into a form of confirmation bias where the very act of prayer means they’ve already bought back into the system they just escaped.)
- Socratic interventions are easy to administer, no-cost treatments that can engender doxastic openness and even separate faith from its host. The main way this happens is by helping expose contradictions and inconsistencies in subjects’ reasoning processes.
- After an intervention, don’t leave the subject hanging. Be prepared to provide names, contact information, and resources that can help.
- Always be prepared to furnish resources at the end of your intervention, and also have that information on hand just in case you run into a subject at a later time.
- Forming new relationships is important because these interactions mitigate the risk of recidivating and falling back into faith communities.
- Sam Harris observed that there are only three defenses offered in response to critiques of religion (Harris, 2007b): (1) Religion is true; (2) Religion is useful; (3) Atheism is somehow corrosive of society or other values.
- The possibility that the universe always existed cannot be ruled out.
- No faith is needed to posit that the universe may have always existed.
- Anyone who says, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” doesn’t understand what the word “atheist” means, or is simply insincere.
- Science is the antithesis of faith. Science is a process that contains multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias. Science has a built-in corrective mechanism—hypothesis testing— that weeds out false claims.
- Science is a method of advancing our understanding. It is a process we can use to bring us closer to the truth and to weed out false claims. Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works.
- Equating an extraordinary claim with a mundane one, and then suggesting they “both require faith,” is disanalogous.
- Conversations about whether or not faith is beneficial should only take place after your interlocutor explicitly states that faith is an unreliable path to truth. Once you ask people to acknowledge this, you’ll almost never enter into a conversation about the benefits of faith.
- The more people who share a faulty process of reasoning the greater the magnification of potential harm.
- “What people believe, and how they act, matter. They particularly matter in a democracy where people have a certain amount of influence over the lives of their fellow citizens.
- A criticism of an idea is not the same as a criticism of a person.
- Ideas don’t deserve dignity; people deserve dignity.
- All faith is blind. All faith is belief on the basis of insufficient evidence.
- The basic idea behind cultural relativism is that because everyone is always judging a culture from their own particular, situated cultural viewpoint, it’s therefore impossible to make reliable judgments about other cultures and cultural practices. This means that cultures and cultural practices cannot be judged.
- The fundamental idea behind multiculturalism is that different cultures can and ought to peacefully coexist.
- When one believes dignity is a property of ideas and not just a property of people, then criticizing an idea becomes akin to criticizing a person.
- Tolerance only works when there’s reciprocity. That is, tolerance doesn’t handle intolerance very well.
- Correcting students’ reasoning processes, and granting faith-based responses no countenance, needs to be the academic, cultural, and pedagogical norm across all academic disciplines.
- Give faithbased justifications no countenance. Do not take faith claims seriously.
- In order to reason well, one needs to be able to rule out competing or irrelevant alternatives. But one cannot do this if one believes that there’s no way to make an objective judgment about those alternatives.
- Generally, praise is underused in advancing dialogue.
- (For better or worse, putting the onus of action on someone usually ends the discourse, as most people won’t act beyond the initial contact.)
- Curriculum Resource Center (http://www.skeptic.com/skepticism-101/): “A comprehensive, free repository of resources for teaching students how to think skeptically.
- Historically, philosophy has focused on truth. Contemporary philosophy instead focuses on meaning.
- Faith is an unclassified cognitive illness disguised as a moral virtue.
- People infected with faith don’t think of it as a malady, but as a gift, even a blessing.
- It matters how we talk about things. It matters what words we use.
- If you’re fortunate enough to engage imams, mullahs, rabbis, pastors, ministers, clerics, swamis, gurus, chaplains, shamans, priests, witch doctors, or any other faith leaders, be blunt and direct when demanding evidence for their claims.
- Atheism is skepticism applied to a specific extraordinary claim, and children should be taught to apply skepticism to claims in general—not just faith and extraordinary metaphysical claims.
- act the way you want others—particularly your children—to act.
20220912
A MANUAL FOR CREATING ATHEISTS by Peter Boghossian, Michael Shermer
REBUILDING MILO by Aaron Horschig, Kevin Sonthana
- To develop strength, you must strike a balance between stress and recovery.
- To progressively develop more and more strength, the demands of your training must not exceed the adaptive capabilities of your body.
- When you train hard and don’t give your body enough time to recover, the stresses of training begin to accumulate.
- There is always a reason for pain. It doesn’t develop out of thin air.
- When a radiologist sees a bulging disc on an MRI scan, they have no way to determine whether it is due to a recent event (a wound) or is 20 years old (a scar).
- Your body is resilient to injury when the power generated at your spine remains low.
- if you want to lift heavy weight (placing load on the spine), it is best not to move your spine and keep it within the neutral zone. Lock it in place and keep it stiff while you move at the hips.
- Every spine has a breaking point, and the quickest way to find it is to load your spine with a ton of compression and perform rep after rep with poor technique.
- If given time to adequately recover after being overloaded during a heavy training cycle, the body can adapt and replace a microfracture with stronger bone.
- While your hip joint is meant to move under load, your spine is not.
- Working every day to improve ankle mobility should be a priority if you wish to return to deep squatting pain-free!
- Learning to stiffen your trunk anytime you move a load (picking up a box off the ground or squatting a barbell) needs to be your first priority.
- Stiff hips affect the role of the joint complex directly above: the low back.
- Poor mobility in either the thoracic spine or the shoulders often causes the low back to move excessively as compensation when the arms are raised overhead, such as when placing a box onto a high shelf, pressing a barbell, or performing a snatch.
- Understanding how your injury presents will help you figure out what you need to do and what you need to avoid in the short term to decrease your symptoms.
- Nearly all back pain can be controlled and altered by changing the way you move.
- While exercises like Russian twists, sit-ups, and back extensions from a GHD machine may be great at increasing strength, they do little to increase core stiffness.
- To enhance the quality of stiffness, you must train the core differently. This comes through the second approach of using isometric exercises built to enhance muscular endurance and coordination.
- The definition of stability is the ability to limit excessive or unwanted motion.
- One key to fixing injured backs is to use exercises that enhance stability but place minimal stress on the spine while the exercises are being performed.
- This group of exercises has become known as “the Big Three”: • Curl-up • Side plank • Bird-dog
- Before you begin core stability training, I recommend addressing mobility restrictions at the hip and/or thoracic spine.
- After addressing mobility restrictions in those areas, Dr. McGill recommends that you perform the cat-camel before the Big Three to reduce low back stiffness and improve motion of the spine. Unlike other stretches for the low back that can place harmful stresses on the spine, this exercise emphasizes mobility in a spine-friendly manner.
- Unlike training for pure strength or power, the endurance component of stability requires the body to perform many repetitions of an exercise to see improvements.
- As this rep scheme becomes easier, increase the number of repetitions rather than the duration of the holds to build endurance without causing muscle cramping.
- The McGill Big Three has been highly effective since I started using it with my patients who come in for low back physical therapy.
- The side plank is a unique exercise because it activates the lateral oblique and QL muscles on only one side of the body, making it an excellent choice for addressing weak links in stability while placing minimal force on the spine.
- Stretching the low back stimulates the stretch receptors deep inside the muscles, giving the perception of pain relief and the feeling of less stiffness.
- Most of the muscle pain and stiffness you feel in your back is a consequence of a chemical reaction called inflammation that occurs from the real injury located deeper in the spine (disc bulge, facet irritation, etc.). 76 This underlying injury is what causes the secondary contraction or spasm of the surrounding muscles.
- Stretching the low back only treats the symptoms and does not address the true cause of the pain.
- No rehabilitation plan or corrective exercise program will truly fix your pain and restore your body in the long term if you are too stubborn to deviate from a training plan that is creating pain.
- One of the most common reasons for developing back pain is an inability to use the hips properly.
- As you work through each exercise, be cautious of how quickly you increase load. An efficient rehab program slowly applies load to the body.
- When attempting to lift heavy weight, I recommend taking a large breath in and then holding that breath throughout the entire repetition. When you combine this breath with a strong bracing of your core, your trunk will instantly become more stable and capable of handling tremendous weight.
- Many athletes who develop back pain when deadlifting do so because they fail to use their legs sufficiently and end up relying too much on their backs.
- The inverted row, performed with a suspension trainer or gymnastic rings, has been shown in research to elicit a high amount of upper and mid-back muscle activation while placing minimal stress on the spine.
- Performing a suitcase carry with the weight in one hand is significantly harder and poses a greater challenge to your core than performing the exercise with weight in both hands.
- The upside-down kettlebell carry is one of the most challenging variations.
- Proper use of a belt involves much more than just wearing it tightly! To use a belt, you must breathe “into the belt.” If you only cinch it tight, you will miss out on the benefits it has to offer. Always think about expanding your stomach into the belt and then bracing against it.
- I highly recommend keeping belt use to a minimum.
- A belt should never be used with the goal of taking away back pain or soreness.
- For those who do not have access to a specialized machine like the reverse hyper, a kettlebell swing is a great late-stage rehabilitation exercise that emphasizes and trains dynamic hip extension in a similar cyclical motion.
- Contrary to the exercise name, I recommend performing back extensions in a very hip-centric manner.
- If you want to see significant changes in flexibility of any muscle or group of muscles, you must be consistent with your stretching.
- Mobility should always be evaluated before flexibility.
- If you want to stretch before a training session or competition, I recommend short-duration stretches (less than 30 seconds), which have been shown to have no harmful effects on muscular performance.
- I’m going to share a little secret with you: most elite athletes have abnormal traits that give them the ability to do things most of us “normal” people cannot.
- The squat is a movement first and an exercise second.
- To squat to full depth with your toes straight forward, you must have adequate ankle and hip mobility and sufficient pelvic/core control. You also must have acceptable coordination and balance.
- Research shows that knee pain associated with barbell training is often due to overuse injuries. 3 These nontraumatic injuries can become nagging and often lead to further issues down the road.
- The most common reason strength athletes develop pain around the kneecap is a lack of ability to control for rotation at the knee (i.e., demonstrating poor knee stability when lifting).
- You need to stop using ice on injuries and sore muscles.
- Ice does not do what you think it does. It does not aid the process of healing from injury; in fact, an overwhelming amount of research shows that it does the opposite! Other than temporarily numbing pain, ice delays healing and recovery.
- There is no denying that ice provides temporary pain relief. Slap an ice pack on an area of your body that hurts, and you’re going to feel better instantly.
- But here’s the deal: Just because the pain is decreased does not mean that you’re fixing the injury. In fact, you’re doing more harm than good.
- inflammation and swelling are normal responses to injury.
- Plain and simple, healing requires inflammation. It isn’t a bad thing at all; it is an essential biological response to injury.
- Placing ice on an injured area essentially puts a roadblock in front of the white blood cells trying to get to the area. You think you’re helping the healing process by placing a bag of ice on your body, but you’re actually delaying its start by preventing your body from doing what it wants and needs to do.
- Swelling is merely the buildup of waste around an injured area that needs to be evacuated via the lymphatic system. It is a natural response to injury that becomes a problem only when the waste-filled fluid is allowed to accumulate.
- Scientific research does not support the use of ice.
- Despite conventional “wisdom” telling us that ice is a good idea, research shows that icing delays muscle repair after injury and gives us direct evidence that icing can lead to increased scarring!
- swelling accumulates around an injured area because you stop moving!
- Exercises performed in a relatively pain-free manner not only accelerate the removal of swelling through muscle contraction but also optimize the healing process without causing further damage.
- While voluntary exercise is undoubtedly the most effective way to preserve muscle mass, reduce swelling, and kick-start the healing process after injury, neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) devices come in a close second.
- NMES devices work by stimulating muscle contraction through electricity.
- Simply put, after injury, we want to promote movement (even if it’s as little as stimulated muscle contractions through the use of an E-stim device) to optimize healing and safely return to the sports we love.
- While you may feel less soreness after icing, you’re not necessarily recovering any faster physiologically.
- Instead of reaching for that ice pack or jumping into a tub filled with ice, I recommend using an active recovery approach.
- If you’re extremely sore the day after an intense workout, I recommended performing a few minutes of soft tissue mobilization.
- Research has shown that a few minutes of rolling on a foam roller or small ball (such as a lacrosse or tennis ball) can significantly reduce delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS).
MYTHOLOGY 101 by Kathleen Sears
- The ancient Greeks and Romans used myths to explain the wonders of the world, including the rise of humanity, the causes of natural phenomena, and the origin of the Earth and the universe.
- A myth, defined simply, is a fictitious story or half-truth, but it goes much deeper than that.
- A myth evolves as it’s told, over and over again.
- Because myths are told and retold, passed from one person to the next, there is often more than one version of the same story.
- The Greek victory over Troy was a defining moment for the Greeks and the catalyst for the foundation of Rome.
- Virgil is best known for the Aeneid. This epic poem, which tells the story of the origins of Rome, follows the Trojan hero Aeneas after the fall of Troy, as he travels and then settles in a new land, where he founds a new race: the Romans.
- Like many modern religions, classical mythology explores the relationship between humanity and a higher power.
- Mount Olympus was more than the dwelling place of the gods and goddesses. It was also their command center, the place where trials were held, laws were created, and important decisions were made.
- As ruler of gods and men, Zeus had the duty of bringing ultimate order to the universe.
- Often considered second in command to Zeus, Poseidon was the powerful god of the sea, a god who garnered more fear than respect. He controlled the seas and could create earthquakes.
- Although the ancients often described Hades as cold, he was never associated with evil. He was simply the ruler of the dead, and he performed his duties efficiently and with an unrelenting sense of responsibility.
- In Greek mythology, the Underworld was divided into different regions. One region was for the most exceptional mortals (such as heroes), another region was for the common folk, and a third was for evildoers.
- When a person died, Hermes came to collect that person’s shade (or soul) and lead him or her to the Underworld. To get to the Underworld required crossing one or more rivers. To cross a river, the shade had to engage the services of Charon, the ferryman of the dead. Charon didn’t work for free; he required a coin as payment. If a would-be passenger could not pay Charon’s fee, that shade was doomed to wander the shoreline for a hundred years before being allowed passage. Even after they’d paid and boarded the boat, the shades had to do most of the work—they rowed, while the ferryman merely steered.
- Elysium (sometimes called the Elysian Fields) was the dwelling place of the exceptional. This island was where heroes (and other extraordinary mortals) were sent after death.
- According to Greek mythology, all shades (souls) traveled to the Underworld, Hades’s realm, after death.
- The hearth was the source of warmth and nourishment because it provided heat for cooking. As a result, to the ancients, the hearth represented the epicenter of the family and one of the most important places in the home.
- Of all the things that mortals might do to offend the gods, blatant violation of something sacred was one of the worst. The sacrilege usually resulted in the offender’s suffering and death.
- The Parthenon is one of the best-known temples of ancient Greece, partially due to the fact that remains of the temple are still standing today.
- The Judges of the Dead decided the destinies of those who dwelled in the Underworld. Although the Judges were symbolically important to the Underworld, they didn’t have much real power. The gods themselves decided whether a person had been wicked enough to send to Tartarus or brave and good enough to spend eternity in Elysium.
- Ancient battlefields were places of confusion, bravery, violence, brutality, and bloodlust.
- The Thracians were skilled, savage warriors who wielded heavy swords and were ferocious in battle.
- To the ancients, the world was inhabited by thousands of deities and spirits that controlled nature and interacted with humans.
- The Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, were the goddesses of music, art, poetry, dance, and the arts in general.
- The Fates: Three goddesses in charge of determining a person’s lifespan.
- Greek mythology was assimilated into Roman mythology to fill in gaps in the latter; eventually, Romans adopted (and adapted) Greek myths on a broad scale.
- While many of the stories are essentially the same in Greek and Roman mythologies, the names are different.
DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME III: HOW TO USE OLD-SCHOOL PROGRESSION METHODS FOR FAST AND STEADY GAINS IN STRENGTH, MUSCLE AND POWER by Brooks D. Kubik
- Strength training used to be called "Progressive Resistance Exercise." That's an excellent term, because it places the emphasis exactly where it belongs – on progression.
- The principle of progressive resistance training is the foundation for all gains in strength and muscle.
- There are seven basic progression methods that build strength, muscle and power: 1. Adding weight to the bar. 2. Performing more reps in each exercise. 3. Performing more work sets of each exercise. 4. Performing each rep in stricter, better, tighter and more precise form, with greater concentration and deeper focus. 5. Performing more difficult and more demanding exercises, or performing your exercises in a more difficult fashion. 6. Performing additional exercises for each body-part. 7. Any combination of 1 – 6.
- It's much better to start light and easy and allow the new trainee to experience steady progress for as long a period as possible.
- Beginners should train three times per week on a total body workout, and follow a basic training program that uses either single progression or double progression.
- Start with 5 reps on upper body exercises and 10 reps on gut work and lower body exercises. Do one set of each exercise. Use 8 to 10 different exercises.
- That's the beauty of progressive strength training. If you follow a sensible progression system, your initial progress comes fast and easily.
- Beginners do NOT need to do a variety of different exercises, and will do much better by training on the same exercises.
- As far as sets and reps go, the 5 x 5 system is perfect for intermediates. It provides the right amount of volume, and allows you to work with heavier weights than you used in your beginner programs.
- For long-term progress and lifelong training, it's a good idea to work up, drop back down, and work back up again. You don't have to stay at the hardest possible program all the time.
- Modern bodybuilding programs typically amount to specialization programs on all of the different muscle groups at the same time. That gets you nowhere, because all you do is over-train. It's much more effective to combine an all-around training program that provides adequate work – but not excessive work – for all of the major muscle groups, together with a period of specialization on one or two muscle groups. Over time, you end up specializing on all of the major muscle groups – but not at the same time.
- Remember, dropping back to the easier program (with one exercise on the days that you do heavy, awkward object training) is NOT a step backwards. It's a way to maximize your recovery and recuperation from hard training, and a way to help recover from any dings and dents that may be bothering you.
- Doug Hepburn believed that no matter what you did, what you ate, or how you trained, there was a limit on how fast you could build strength and muscle.
- The answer, Hepburn believed, was to limit yourself to gains of one rep per workout.
- As your strength increases, your progress will slow down. This happens to everyone, so don't worry about it. When it does, try using double progression rather than single progression.
- Starting light is good because it allows you to concentrate on doing your reps in good form.
- Older trainees should always use some sort of simple cycling system that lets them alternate between harder workouts and easier sessions.
- Slow and steady is ALWAYS the way to go.
DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME II: HOW STRONG ARE YOU? by Brooks D. Kubik
- The ability to put 200 pounds over your head was the mark of strength back in the day.
- In the modern world of drug-free training, we have Stuart McRobert's 300/400/500 standards. The goal for an advanced trainee weighing about 190 pounds at a height of 5'9" would be a 300 pound bench press, 400 pound squat and 500 pound deadlift. These lifts are drug-free and without any lifting gear other than a belt. In other words, they're "raw" lifts.
- Most lifters of the era used a power clean when they did a press.
- The crucifix is a tremendous test of shoulder, arm and upper body strength.
- strength training is one of the most important keys to lifelong strength and health – and as you grow older, it becomes more and more important.
- Many regard the standard deadlift as the best measure of over-all body strength. It's a very effective movement, and one of the best exercises to include in your training program.
- The back hand or reverse curl was one of the exercises in the York Barbell training courses, and it was widely practiced back in the day. It's not used nearly as often today, and that's a shame. It's a very good exercise, and a terrific test of arm, forearm, and wrist strength.
- Pressing exercises build real-world "stand on your feet" strength. They are a very important part of a strongman's training, and should be a regular part of your workouts. And they're a great way to match your strength against the legendary strongmen of the past.
- The alternate dumbbell press is a terrific exercise for the pressing muscles, as well as the abdominals and obliques, and even the lower back muscles. You perform the exercise by cleaning the dumbbells to the shoulders. From there, you press the left arm to the extended position. Now press the right arm up – and as you do so, lower the left arm. Continue until you perform a total of 10 reps – five reps with each hand. Finish with both arms overhead, and hold for a count of two.
- The military press is a tremendous exercise, and one that every trainee should do. It builds the kind of rugged, total body strength that is very rare nowadays.
- The repetition press begins by cleaning the bar to the shoulders. After a two-second pause, the lifter presses the weight for five consecutive reps.
- Of course, if you prefer to do so, you can make the exercise harder and more demanding by performing one clean and one press on every rep.
- The repetition clean and press is a real man-maker.
- However you do it, the snatch is a wonderful exercise.
DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME I: EXERCISES, WORKOUTS AND TRAINING PROGRAMS by Brooks D. Kubik
- devote all or substantially all of your training time to the very best and most effective exercises. The best and most effective exercises are the basic, compound exercises such as squats, presses, bench presses, deadlifts, etc.
- There are no "secret exercises," so don't waste time looking for them. Stick to the basics.
- Of course, the sad reality is that most trainees spend almost all of their training time on isolation exercises, and some "gyms" even prohibit their members from performing some of the most important and most effective compound movements, such as squats, deadlifts, military presses and push presses.
- The basic, compound exercises are best because they allow you to work several muscle groups at the same time, and thus, to work up to substantial amounts of weight in your different exercises.
- Over time, hard work on the basic, compound exercises leads to enormous increases in strength and muscle mass.
- Your best compound exercises are squats, front squats, deadlifts, Trap Bar deadlifts, standing presses with barbells or dumbbells (or a single dumbbell), barbell and dumbbell bent-over rowing, pull-ups, chin-ups, pull-downs, weighted push-ups, bench presses (performed with barbells, dumbbells, or a single dumbbell), incline presses (performed with barbells, dumbbells, or a single dumbbell), shoulder shrugs (performed with a barbell, two dumbbells, one dumbbell or a Trap Bar), deadlifts from the knees (performed with the bar or Trap Bar elevated by resting the plates on sturdy wooden blocks), hand and thigh lifts, and Hise shrugs.
- Grip work, gut work, and neck work are all important.
- Altogether, there are about 20 basic, compound exercises.
- So do this: pick one squatting exercise, one deadlifting movement, one or two upper body pushing movements and one or two upper body pulling movements. That gives you four to six "big" exercises to focus on. Train these exercises hard for six to twelve weeks, and then, if you want some variety, switch to other movements.
- Contrary to what many mistakenly believe, there's no need to change exercises as long as they're working for you and as long as you are motivated to train hard and heavy on them.
- Many very strong and powerful men have performed the same exercises for pretty much their entire training careers.
- Your job is to train hard and heavy on the basics, and that's where the lion's share of your time and effort needs to go.
- The simplest way to train with heavy, awkward objects is to carry them as far as you can, put them down, rest, and then carry them back to where you started.
- The farmer's walk is the simplest and best of the lot, and doubles as a very effective grip builder.
- By building your back muscles and avoiding over-development of the chest muscles, you develop a tall, erect posture.
- Heavy dumbbell training is a lost secret of strength, power and muscular development.
- The two-dumbbell clean and press is an excellent dumbbell exercise.
- Over time, thick bar training will make your entire upper body much more massive and more heavily developed than would ever happen otherwise.
- The only caveat is to be careful when lifting thick-handled dumbbells. Don't hold them over your head or feet, and make sure you get out of the way fast if you drop them.
- Understand that with the right kind of training, you can make incredible gains with nothing other than a barbell.
- Unless you are an advanced trainee who plans to enter a bodybuilding contest, training for "cuts" is a waste of time.
- Instead of training for "cuts," train for strength. Strength is a positive quality. It's something you build.
- A healthy diet is one that promotes recovery from your workouts, builds muscle and keeps you from adding unwanted body-fat.
- Don't get hung up about training for "cuts" or extreme definition. Train for strength instead.
- As your strength increases, so will your muscle mass.
- There are many excellent exercises for the midsection. I've always preferred leg raises to anything else.
- Hanging knees to chest, leg scissors, leg raises, and windshield wipers are all excellent exercises.
- Planks are excellent for mid-section training.
- The gains from workout to workout are extremely small, but over time, they add up to enormous increases in strength and muscular development.
- If you train too much, too hard or too often, you outrun your body's recovery system. It's that simple.
- The biggest challenge for most older trainees is finding the right balance between training hard enough, heavy enough and often enough to build strength and muscle without training too hard, to heavy or too often.
- Abbreviated programs work far better than longer, more complicated, more demanding workouts.
- There's no magic about 5 x 5.
- Always use what works best for you in terms of sets and reps.
- The key to building great strength and muscle mass is to add weight to the bar whenever you can.
- Do gut work to finish the first workout, grip work to finish the next workout, and neck work to finish the first workout of week two.
- I've suggested that you use the 5 x 5 system. Try four progressively heavier warm-up sets and one set with your working weight for the day.
- The squat and deadlift are especially good for building all-around strength and muscle mass.
- Diet and nutrition helps you recover from hard workouts, but there quickly comes a point where diet and nutrition can’t do anything more.
- If you've been paying careful attention, you will have noticed that the primary message of this book is to train hard and heavy on sensible, low-volume training programs that focus on the basic, compound exercises.
- Devote yourself to hard, heavy training on a small number of the very best exercises.
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