On December 26, 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy published a piece for Sports Illustrated titled The Soft American, in which he lauded physical fitness as the backbone of Western civilization and warned against its decline in American society, which first became apparent in the 1950s.
At the time, not only were 50% of young Americans being rejected by Selective Service for being unfit, but studies showed that American youth in general lagged far behind their European counterparts, with 58% of them failing basic tests for muscular strength and flexibility compared to just 8.7% across the Atlantic.
What was most disheartening in the eyes of the former President, however, was the fact that, in the five exams testing strength, almost 36% of American children failed at least one or more of these, while the European rate stood at approximately 1%.
Furthermore, the rate of physical soundness was also dropping rapidly among college students, as the physical fitness tests for incoming freshman at Yale demonstrated that the rate of success had dropped from over 50%, in 1950, to 38%, by 1960.
At the time the essay was published, the United States was in the midst of a Cold War against the Soviet Union, and the incoming President feared that such ‘softness’ on the part of American citizens would ‘strip and destroy the vitality’ of the nation, preventing society from meeting ‘the great and vital challenges’ the future was sure to bring, jeopardizing both national potential and security.
While we did eventually win the ideological battle against the U.S.S.R in the early 1990s, this outcome was achieved despite our nation’s continuing decline in health and physical fitness; and, in the more than 60 years since J.F.K warned against both the mental and physical deterioration that tend to accompany the ‘modern advances and increasing leisure’ of a prosperous society, things have only gotten worse—much worse.
While we no longer track the physical fitness statistics of our youth (the Obama administration eliminated the Presidential Fitness Test in 2012), we do have statistics regarding lifestyle habits, obesity, and diabetes.
Today, American children spend an average of 7.5 hours per day on their tablets, computers, phones, and television screens.1 Conversely, less than 1 in 4 U.S. children achieve 60 minutes of daily physical activity.2
In 2022, childhood obesity hit an all-time high, affecting almost 1 in 4 children between the ages of 2 and 19 (the rate of increase has doubled since 2020, a spike unseen since the CDC started tracking pediatric obesity in 1970).3 Prediabetes in our youth doubled between 1998 and 2018, affecting 1 in 5 American children, a statistic I surmise has only worsened post-pandemic.4
These trends, while alarming and disheartening, sadly pale in comparison to today’s American adults.
Screen-time for U.S. adults, across all devices, is projected to surpass 8 hours per day in 20225 (2 hours of which will be spent on social media6).
Fewer than 1 in 4 American adults meet the federal physical activity guidelines.7 According to data from 2018 (again, pre-pandemic, so probably worse today), over 30% of American adults are overweight, over 40% are obese, and another 9.4% can be classified as severely obese.8
This means that just 1 out of every 5 American citizens maintains a healthy weight. To make matters worse, approximately 50% of U.S. adults are either prediabetic9 or diabetic.10
While President Kennedy was optimistic that our citizenry would never have to meet the challenges of armed conflict faced by that Greatest Generation in World War II, he believed that maintaining our society’s health and fitness was just as crucial during peacetime, because our success in that area determined ‘our freedom in the years to come.’
As a nation, we failed to heed his warning.
And 2020 was our collective moment of reckoning.
It is without question, at this point, to anyone with an objective mind, that the coronavirus pandemic unleashed on our shores was made exponentially worse, first, by our citizenry’s abysmal state of health and fitness; second, by the decline in intellectual curiosity, critical thinking abilities, and courage that tend to accompany a soft and complacent people; and third, by elected officials who, instead of addressing the root cause of the pandemic’s death toll with honesty, education, and true leadership, seized the moment to play on our citizenry’s heightened state of emotion and capitalize on their own power.
According to the CDC’s own statistics, approximately 80% of American citizens hospitalized for Covid-19 were overweight or obese.11 Concurrently, approximately 95% of those who lost their lives to the virus did so with an average of 4 comorbidities, including overweight and obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.12
These insights were evident very early on in the course of the pandemic, though only a few of our scientists, medical experts, and leaders chose to recognize these patterns and (quite courageously) adjust their messaging as a result, doing so in the face of immense societal pressures to remain silent and obedient.13
The last two years offered our country a stark fork in the road:
On one side, a path paved with hard truths and painful, yet necessary, adjustments, leading to a freer, stronger, healthier, more equal and prosperous country.
On the other side, a path guided by comforting lies and quick fixes, leading ultimately to less freedom, worse health outcomes, increased inequality, and the continuing decline of the United States of America.
We chose the latter.
And by doing so, we cemented The Era of the Soft American.
For over a full year, the most prosperous of our citizens—those most likely to be able to maintain a healthy BMI, experience mild Covid reactions, and also afford treatment—locked themselves in their homes while working class Americans—those most likely to be overweight, and thus more susceptible to severe Covid outcomes—went to work to provide essential goods and services.
Then, even after being “double-vaccinated” and “boosted,” those in the top quintile of our economy, still not feeling “safe” or “comfortable” enough, supported the (unconstitutional) firing of millions of Americans from their workplaces simply for exercising their freedom of choice in declining an experimental treatment, making no exceptions for natural immunity14 nor acknowledging the fact that even those “fully vaccinated” could still contract and spread the disease.15
Throughout the last two years, our government spent 4 trillion dollars16 on Covid-19, money our country did not have, and the majority of which went toward supporting and enforcing failed lockdowns.
(John Hopkins researchers conducted a meta-analysis on several lockdown studies and determined that they only reduced Covid deaths by two-tenths of one percent while simultaneously imposing ‘enormous economic and social costs.’ They concluded the study by stating that ‘lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.’)17
Meanwhile, these policies resulted in the largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to elites in United States history, with billionaire class wealth surging by a whopping 58%18 while 200,000 small businesses were forced to close permanently.19
And I have yet to touch upon the subject of our children.
When future generations look back at this moment, and if they are objective and honest, they will conclude that not only were the forced long-term lockdowns a grand malfeasance against humanity, but that what we did to our youth—by far the least susceptible cohort to Covid-1920—was iniquitous.
Not only will every health metric mentioned earlier get worse in the upcoming years, but we now know that children suffered especially from the forced masking and social isolation of the lockdowns, and that it will take many more years to undo the psychological damage inflicted upon them by our soft society.21
Moreover, besides the absolute risk of dying from Covid of 1 in 500,000 for those under 18 (for some perspective, the risk of dying in a car accident is 1 in 10122), many of our leaders are hell-bent on mandating the mRNA shots on our youth, a treatment in which the long-term ramifications still remain uncertain, and of which we can already see immediate negative effects, particularly in boys.23
While most in our country viewed the virus as the ultimate threat to our well-being, I posit, and time will inevitably show, that our response to the disease was far worse—and that, if anything, Covid only sped up the downward spiral our nation already sustained.
We are already dealing with the ramifications of our choices, not just in the exacerbated health outcomes mentioned previously, but also in the soaring inflation rates and supply-chain disruptions around our country and the world.24
Add this to the fact that our nation, already over 30 trillion dollars in debt,25 spends the most out of any country in the world on healthcare;26 much of which is being driven upward by our society’s atrocious state of health.27
Any student of history will tell you that this is the type of environment in which civilizations crumble.
A country in which 4 out of every 5 citizens are overweight or obese, and 1 out of every 2 citizens is prediabetic or diabetic, is on its way to ruin.
A nation that not only fails to address this issue as the national crises it is, but, in fact, does the exact opposite, and embraces poor health as something “beautiful,” something that one should embrace and show pride in, is on its way toward collapse.28
And a society that puts the emotions of its adults over the health and future prosperity of its children may have already breached the point of no return.
I’ve been shocked and appalled to witness how quickly most of us sacrificed our freedoms the last couple of years for safety and convenience—and worse, how we did so (some enthusiastically) while millions around us lost their livelihoods not through any fault of their own, but because government officials determined that they weren’t important enough in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve been horrified by a public school system in this country less concerned with teaching our youth how to think than teaching them what to think.29 30
And I’ve been deeply saddened by a national media and political class that, instead of tackling the major issues of our time, seem determined, no matter the social costs, to cling to their power and sow the seeds of discord among the body politic.
Perhaps the most disheartening part, though, is that I don’t see any of this changing any time soon, if at all.
However, instead of rolling over and accepting this inconvenient truth, I’m proposing a new curriculum to anyone reading this who chooses to recognize the catastrophe we find ourselves in, and, in doing so, decides not to contribute to this system any longer.
It’s time that we embrace C.R.T:
Cooking.
Reading (and Writing).
Training.
While many of our elected officials and media talk endlessly about “rights,” they seldomly promote the other side of the coin: “duties.”
In brief, rights are entitlements and duties are obligations. You cannot have one without the other if you want to live in a free society.
Quite particularly in the time since President Kennedy penned his essay and our current era, our country has experienced a radical shift in favor of rights at the expense of duties.
The resulting effects have put us in the predicament we now find ourselves in, and the only way to climb out of this chasm is to embrace our responsibilities as citizens and lead our lives with more self-reliance.
I believe that a solid foundation in C.R.T is the way to a healthier, stronger, and more intelligent society.
Here’s why.
Cooking
Humans may have been cooking for almost 2 million years.31
Some anthropologists have even proposed that cooking allowed our species to evolve into Homo Sapiens, as the chemical process that takes place when food meets heat changes its composition—making it more readily digestible, thus allowing for greater caloric extraction—which they posit fueled the growth of our large brains.
For most of human history, humans, whether hunter-gathers or farmers, spent between 3 and 4 hours per day procuring, preparing, and cooking food.32
Not only was food preparation an absolute necessity for existence, but it bonded the community together with shared responsibilities and also instilled a deep sense of gratitude within individuals for the sustenance they worked so hard to obtain and enjoy.
Furthermore, for the majority of our history, the human diet was fairly simple: meat, fish, eggs, tubers, fruit, wild vegetation, fungi, herbs, spices, nuts, seeds. Not only have we strayed tremendously from our procurement habits, but we’ve also modified our diets greatly in just the last hundred years.
Today, only 1 in 4 Americans cooks every day; and, according to a Zagat survey conducted in 2018, the average American eats out approximately 6 times per week.33
Over a third of Americans (including children) eat fast-food on any given day; 83% of American families eat fast-food at least once per week; and Americans spend 10% of their income on fast-food each year.34
I’ve mentioned in previous essays, that the main driver of the obesity epidemic seems to be high consumption of refined foods, particularly in the form of processed carbohydrates and seed oils.
Fast-food—from the soda to the fries, the bread to the factory-farmed meat—is comprised predominantly of these substances.
Moreover, even if eating a “healthier” meal from a restaurant up the quality scale, the likelihood of still consuming copious amounts of seed oils remains quite high, as most eateries choose to cook with these refined and highly inflammatory substances (as opposed to natural fats like butter, ghee, coconut and avocado oils, lard, and tallow) because they are cheaper.
Knowing this, is it any coincidence that the percentage of Americans who cook every day (25%) is almost exactly the same as that of Americans who maintain a healthy weight (20%)?
If you find yourself among the 80% of the country who suffer from overweight or obesity, this is the number one factor that you can change in your lifestyle if you wish to transform your health, and that of your family’s, for the better.
Will you have to modify other areas of your life so that you have time for weekly grocery shopping, meal-prepping, and cooking? —of course (maybe start with your device time).
Will this be difficult, at first? —absolutely.
But nothing worth doing—especially something as critical as improving your health—is ever easy.
However, once you’ve established a new routine and start to witness the powerful effects this simple change can have on your life, you’ll question how you ever got along without this habit. You don’t need to spend as much time each day as our ancestors, either; rather, use the advantages of modern society to your benefit while discarding its superfluities, which only lead to laziness and ill-health.
After taking a couple hours each week to shop for groceries, some simple planning and preparation will allow you to spend just an hour or so each day preparing 3 meals.
For example:
Breakfast can be as simple as a whole food smoothie; or a few boiled eggs and piece of fruit (prep times for each approximately ten minutes).
Lunch can be as uncomplicated as a raw vegetable salad and tin of fish; or a sandwich made using sprouted bread, grass-fed roast beef and cheese, sauerkraut, broccoli sprouts, tomatoes, onions, and Dijon mustard (prep times for each approximately ten minutes).
Dinner can be as straightforward as a veggie, bean, and meat sauté over rice; or oven-roasted chicken thighs with vegetables and potatoes (prep times for each approximately 45 minutes).
Use your creativity to experiment with the foods and recipes that best align with your daily routine while keeping in mind that the main goal is to make sure that only 100% whole foods enter your digestive tract.
For those of you with children: there is absolutely no reason why your kids cannot consume the exact same foods that you do; so the excuse that you can’t eat healthily because your children won’t eat what you eat is both wrong and irresponsible.
Be the adult in your household and exercise your parental right and duty to educate your children in healthy and responsible eating habits.
There is no such thing as “kid food.”
There is only real, whole food, and processed food-like substances.
Don’t fall into the trap of feeding your children refined foodstuffs laden with sugar, trans fats, and void of any nutritional value just because it's expedient; by doing so, you are only setting them up for a lifetime of failure in the realm of their nutrition and overall health.
If you find yourself unmotivated in regard to changing your own lifestyle and you have a family, let this be the spark you need to drive the shift in your behavior.
And if you have been led to believe that eating a healthy diet is more expensive than your status quo, I guarantee that your weekly bill of 100% home-cooked and prepped meals will undershoot whatever you currently spend on fast-food, restaurants, meal-delivery services, and coffee shops—not to mention the immense fortune in future “sickcare” costs you potentially stand to save.
Freedom comes with responsibilities.
No matter how much income you earn, if you reach middle age, then spend the next 30 to 40 years of your life adding to the more than 1.7 trillion-dollar cost of the obesity epidemic on our economy, you are failing to live up to your full potential and duties as a citizen of a free society.
Moreover, by failing to teach your children how to procure and cook their own meals, you are setting them up to inevitably suffer in life, as well as contribute to the civilizational decline we are currently witnessing before our very eyes.
Honor yourself, your family, and your community by showing respect and gratitude for the food you consume each day.
The best way to do this is to stop outsourcing the procurement and preparation of your meals—maybe the most fundamental of human activities—to others, so often.
Start by cooking at least one whole food meal every single day, preferably with the whole family.
Your lives and the vitality of our nation depend on it.
Reading (and Writing)
One of the main motivations I had when starting this website was wanting to build a platform that attempted to unite the body with the mind, just like the gymnasiums of antiquity; I wanted to create a digital space where I could write just as passionately about squats and presses as I could about Socrates and Plato.
This is because mind and body are one and the same thing.
Therefore, if you are at all concerned with human excellence, as I am, then striving to challenge your intellectual capacities as much as your physical capabilities is an absolute must.
President Kennedy, just like the ancient Greeks, understood the symbiotic relationship between the two when he wrote that
Intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies… And if our bodies grow soft and inactive, if we fail to encourage physical development and prowess, we will undermine our capacity for thought, for work and for the use of those skills vital to an expanding and complex America.
Along with the pusillanimity demonstrated by the most well-off in our society the last two years, I was also deeply dispirited to observe the complete lack of critical thinking abilities displayed by a large portion of the American people.
I watched politicians lecture and mandate the public on one issue, then do the exact opposite in their own private lives.35 36 37 38
I witnessed the scientific establishment pivot, at the drop of a hat, on their “expert” opinions the moment it became politically expedient to do so.39 40
And then, worst of all, I observed most of our citizenry, spellbound by mainstream media, non-stop day-time streaming, as well as their own ideological blind spots, consistently fail to point out the inconsistencies and continue to march along to the beat of the collective conscience.
In 2022, it is estimated that the average American will watch 45.5 days of television.41
Meanwhile, reading has continued to decline among our population, with Americans reading fewer books in 2021 than any of the past 30 years, with the largest decline sadly among college graduates.42
The reason this is disheartening is because, in our highly specialized economy, where one goes to school and learns a tremendous amount in a very specific niche, the chances of being led astray in other areas of life—whether by someone who intentionally manipulates for personal gain, or genuinely has your best interest at heart but errs in judgment—is quite high.
Furthermore, while modern science is tremendously adept at figuring out how things work and then manipulating both the environment and our bodies as a result, it’s not very useful when it comes to addressing why things work or predicting unintended consequences as a result of our experiments further down the road.
The best way for any individual to make wise decisions for themselves is to read often and broadly, across subjects, domains, and, most importantly, opinions.
As the amount of information within varying fields continues to expand, the more the experts know about less and less.
Therefore, rather than blindly trusting the experts on the hot-button issue of the day, as so many of our politicians urge us to do, critical thinkers should instead listen open-mindedly to the experts—but then compare that information with their own life experience and research, as well as the opinions of other specialists who may have differing stances than those anointed by the government, before making up their own minds.
This is the only way a free society can function.
But sadly, just like our food, a large portion of Americans have become content outsourcing their thinking to government officials and talking heads on television.
Not only have they become satisfied with this method of living, but some even endorse, whether tacitly or explicitly, the censorship by Big Tech, in collaboration with the federal government, of those with whom they disagree.
This was made apparent with Covid-19, where anything outside the established governmental narrative was deemed “mis”- or “disinformation,” and many voices, including physicians, were censored from speaking their minds across social media platforms, simply because they challenged accepted orthodoxy.43
If a symptom of a soft body is that it shuns physical activity at all costs, then the marker of a soft mind is that it evades any and all opinions that challenge its outlook.
And just as a lack of physical activity causes the body to weaken and decay, a lack of intellectual diversity and discourse causes the mind to grow stagnant and inevitably wither.
A society made up of soft minds is the soil in which authoritarian governments flourish.
As Benjamin Franklin once so presciently stated,
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Beside opting for physical safety at the expense of everything else that makes life worth living, many Americans have opted for cognitive safety as well, refusing to listen to, acknowledge, consider, or tolerate any ideas that don’t align with their worldview.
And while this may be a sound strategy for reinforcing ideological biases and creating a temporary bubble in which to feel secure, it’s an extremely poor way of getting to any semblance of truth, the only pursuit worth striving for if the goal is long-term prosperity.
Therefore, I urge the reader to assume the most vital mindset, and perhaps the most lacking today, in the maintenance of a liberal society: that of the informed freethinker.
Start by turning off the television and picking up a book.
The average American reads only 12 of them per year.
Begin with that, if you currently don’t read at all, but know that the goal should be at least double this number for any serious thinker.
Instead of reading books that reinforce your positions, however, as many pseudo intellectuals amongst the chattering classes tend to do, read as widely as you possibly can, making your main goal the pursuit of truth above confirmation bias and identity reinforcement.
Just as lifting heavy weights facilitates the maintenance and growth of a robust musculature, reading of this kind encourages the development of an agile and intellectually rigorous mind, one that thrives on exposure to new ideas and concepts and takes great pleasure in constantly reassessing belief systems, knowing more about the world today than yesterday, and engaging with others who hold opposing views.
As John Stuart Mill stated in On Liberty,
The only way a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired wisdom in any mode but this, nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.
Parents: once again, lead by example; your children will emulate your behaviors, so assume responsibility and make your behavior worthy of emulation.
If they see you more often than not off of your phones and iPads, and instead with a book on your lap, they may just do the same, or at least exhibit some curiosity as to why you’re not like every other adult they observe in their daily lives.
Engage your children on what they have been learning in school.
If they are being taught something in which you yourself are intellectually or morally opposed, don’t just dismiss the subject outright; introduce them to other viewpoints and help them develop the critical thinking abilities necessary to objectively compare ideas and formulate their own unique perspective.
Once having done so, have them write it down.
One of my favorite thinkers alive today, Dr. Jordan Peterson, has repeatedly stated that there is no difference between writing and thinking.44
Writing trains our minds to digest and synthesize complex ideas, allowing us to grasp concepts more proficiently and articulate our positions coherently.
In the words of Dr. Peterson,
If you can think, and speak, and write—you are absolutely deadly.
I agree wholeheartedly.
But in a country in which almost a quarter of adults are illiterate, and more than half of adults have a literacy rate below the 6th grade level, it is beyond apparent that we are failing miserably as a society to create a population of ‘deadly’ freethinkers, and are instead fostering a nation of docile conformists.45
Furthermore, in the age of text messaging and social media, even the majority of those graduating high school and matriculating at university lack the skills necessary for advanced-level writing.46
Knowing these deficits, is it any wonder that most Americans—and especially the college “educated”—hesitate to put an egg yolk (perhaps nature’s perfect food) in their bodies but won’t think twice about injecting themselves two, three, even four times, in less than 1 year, with a novel technology never administered before on humans, and in which the developmental safety standards were drastically reduced or bypassed altogether?47
And is it really a surprise that those same human beings cannot tolerate others who refuse to do the same, even after the technology to which they genuflect has proven ineffective regarding the very goal for which it was initially intended (and promoted as effecting48): halting the spread of the disease?
Certainly not, to me.
Because a society that doesn’t read or write is a society that doesn’t think; and a society that doesn’t think is molded by the wills of those who only think about ways to grow their own power.
This is why you’re second duty as a free citizen is to read comprehensively and write down your thoughts more often.
Consistently challenge yourself (and others) to think outside of society’s boxes.
Don’t accept anything from anyone simply because they hold a position of authority.
And perhaps the hardest task of all, don’t be afraid to change your mind and do so regularly, for contrary to popular opinion, this is not the mark of a dullard but indeed a trait of genius.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson once penned in Self-Reliance,
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
While most of society concerns themselves with shadows, dare to be great.
Read more.
Write better.
Think for yourself.
Training
It is without question that, right now, at this moment in time, America has become the victim of its own success.
According to President Kennedy:
The age of leisure and abundance can destroy vigor and muscle tone as effortlessly as it can gain time… The television set, the movies and the myriad conveniences and distractions of modern life all lure our young people away from the strenuous physical activity that is the basis of fitness in youth and in later life… Of course, modern advances and increasing leisure can add greatly to the comfort and enjoyment of life. But they must not be confused with indolence, with, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, ‘slothful-ease,’ with an increasing deterioration of our physical strength.
Today, the average American spends half of their day sitting, and for the typical office worker it’s closer to two-thirds of their day.49
While our hunter-gather ancestors trekked an average of 8 miles daily (approximately 17,000 steps), the average American today walks just a quarter of that distance.50
We have access to more food than our ancestors could ever have imagined51 and 91% of our homes have air conditioning,52 making it so that we spend around 90% of our time indoors.53
While many may scratch their heads pondering how our society got this indolent, it all makes perfect sense to one with even a slight understanding of human evolutionary biology.
That’s because the great paradox of modern living is the tremendous disconnect that exists between our socially constructed environments and our ancient genes.
For most of human history, our ancestors lived with tremendous caloric scarcity.
While humans had to be physically active in order to procure sustenance, our genes evolved to expend only the energy absolutely necessary to achieve this task—no more, no less.
This ensured that our energy expenditure, over time, balanced out with our caloric intake, allowing our species to survive and therefore reproduce.
In other words, humans are hardwired for laziness (or ‘slothful-ease,’ in the words of Teddy Roosevelt), because, in an environment of scarcity, this evolutionary strategy made sense.
However, in our technologically engineered environment of abundance, our genes, not having changed much in the last 300,000 years, are now working against us.
Therefore, while you can’t blame someone unaware of this inconvenient fact for their ill-health, I believe that, once this has been made clear to an individual, it is not only well within their power to change their trajectory but that it then becomes an absolute necessity and moral responsibility to do so.
If the most effective survival strategy for our ancient ancestors was to seek leisure amidst the physically demanding necessities of their subsistence environment, then the most effective survival strategy for us moderns is to actively seek physical struggle within our leisure-filled society.
This is how you undo softness.
And it is why I refuse to ignore the harmonious relationship that must exist between mind and body if one is determined to thrive in this world.
One of the underlying concepts of Western philosophy, going back to Plato, is that the single characteristic separating humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to reason.
Everything today—from our environment to our food supply—is working against our biology.
While the ability to reason allowed humanity to manipulate the world and in turn produce large-scale convenience and material prosperity; today it is our lack of reason which prevents us from using these advances in moderation, and we’ve allowed our ostensible successes to slowly deteriorate our health and vitality.
In today’s America, the only way to reverse our circumstance is through the rational acceptance of this fact combined with the conscious decision—fueled by nothing more than sheer will and mental fortitude—to actively seek hardship.
Training—specifically strength training—is the best way to do this.
Not just because it’s difficult, but because it is the most efficient way possible to transform the body and reverse the ill-effects of modernity.
However, it should come of no surprise by now that, according to a 2018 study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, less than a third of adults in the U.S. regularly engage in strength training exercises, while 60% of Americans don’t strength train at all.54
I’ve expounded greatly on how to get the ball rolling if you are starting at square one, both on my Four Foundational Habits essay55 as well as on The Fifth Habit: Strength Training.56
Therefore, instead of revisiting those areas, I will address long-term goals for any serious-minded athlete determined to not only take their fitness to the next level but also maintain an elite state of physical conditioning throughout a lifetime, ensuring that their body never yields to the excesses of modern living.
While our government may have given up on strength standards for our citizenry, I haven’t.
But first, a caveat: it’s no use to just be “strong,” as you can still be strong and overweight, and therefore still fall prey to the myriad diseases related to such body composition, especially later in life.
Accordingly, instead of focusing on absolute strength—the maximum amount of force one is able to exert, regardless of body size—the objective should be to achieve and maintain a high level of relative strength: the amount of strength one is capable of producing relative to one’s bodyweight.
The reason why relative strength is so important in terms of health and longevity, is that it ensures an inverse relationship between muscle mass and body fat, which in and of itself has consistently been shown to reduce all-cause mortality in elderly populations.57 58
The recipe for accomplishing this task is fairly simple (though not easy): on one end of the spectrum, fine-tune your dietary habits so that they are conducive to achieving and maintaining low body fat levels; on the other end of the spectrum, engage in two to three weekly bouts of full body weightlifting, focusing on compound movements (which train multiple muscle groups simultaneously) and progressive overload (consistently getting stronger over time).
Now, I make a living helping others both design and execute templates that best fit their current state of fitness and lifestyle limitations, so that’s as much specificity as I will get into at the moment in regard to methodology.
In regard to testing protocols, I’ve borrowed from elite trainer Joe DeFranco59 and decided to use three simple exercises from his “Relative Strength Index” in order to determine physical capacity:
The Pushup
The Chin-up
The Goblet Squat
Not only are these exercises easy to execute, but the combination of these movements test both upper and lower body strength, as well as aerobic capacity, ensuring that high scores across each of them indicate an advanced level of overall physical fitness.
Regardless of your chosen training modality, I recommend testing yourself on these movements 2 to 3 times per year and working toward achieving the elite-level prescriptions for each listed below.
Pushups: full-range repetitions, resting no more than 2 seconds at the top position
(Men)
Elite: 41 or more / Great: 31-40 / Good: 20-30 / Poor: 19 or less
(Women)
Elite: 20 or more / Great: 15-19 / Good: 10-14 / Poor: 9 or less
Chin-ups: full-range repetitions, resting no more than 2 seconds at the bottom position
(Men)
Elite: 15 or more / Great: 10-14 / Good: 6-9 / Poor: 5 or less
(Women)
Elite: 10 or more / Great: 6-9 / Good: 3-5 / Poor: 2 or less
Goblet Squat: holding 50% of bodyweight, full-range repetitions, resting no more than 2 seconds at the top position
(Men)
Elite: 25 or more / Great: 21-24 / Good: 16-20 / Poor: 19 or less
(Women)
Elite: 21 or more / Great: 16-20 / Good: 11-15 / Poor: 10 or less
Now that you have the numbers, I will mention a few points regarding body fat levels.
It will be nearly impossible to ever achieve more than a ‘Poor’ ranking without modifying your eating habits to spur on fat loss.
Men: along with intelligent strength training, getting your body fat down to 15% will give you an excellent chance at achieving a ‘Good’ score on each exercise, with a body fat below 12% necessary to break into the ‘Great’ and ‘Elite’ rankings.
Women: along with intelligent strength training, a body fat of 25% will facilitate improvements within the ‘Good’ ranking, with a body fat below 22% necessary to crack the ‘Great’ and ‘Elite’ categories.
While not impossible, getting into the ‘Great’ and ‘Elite’ rankings will require months (for some) and years (for most) of hard work and discipline. However, I believe that getting into the ‘Good’ category is not only possible, in a relatively short time frame, for most of our citizens, but also a crucial component in regard to reversing the many serious and disillusioning trends I’ve outlined in this essay.
This is why your third duty as a free citizen is to strength train regularly and maintain at least a decent level of physical fitness throughout your life.
I will close this essay by asking the reader to imagine our country today if, in the summer of 2020, our elected officials put the politics aside and told the American people that it was time to stop being afraid, just as our leaders of the past had once done.
What if we were told the truth about the coronavirus: that it didn’t affect everyone equally, and that the single greatest step we could take toward immunological protection was to eat better, get outside more, and challenge ourselves physically?
What if only a fraction of the money spent keeping everyone locked indoors went solely to the most vulnerable in our society—to hospitals and nursing homes, to the elderly and immunocompromised—as well as toward the development of therapeutics and alternative treatments, while the rest of us got back to work and our children went back to school?
What if, for the last two years, a majority of Americans saw their physical and mental health improve instead of deteriorate?
What if an asymptomatic or mild Covid case was something to celebrate instead of something to be ashamed, or scared, of?
What if an upward trend in cases combined with a downward shift in deaths was reported by our media and elected officials as positive news instead of being exploited for ratings and political firepower?
What if, because of all this, we had a rational discussion about the merits and risks of the mRNA shots, and in doing so allowed people to make up their own minds without coercion?
What if we had stared at the fork in the road and, instead of choosing fear, manipulation, and the profit motive—we chose truth, love, and faith in the human spirit?
Unfortunately, we can’t change the past.
However, we can learn from our mistakes and use those lessons to shape a better future.
While I don’t have much trust in our political leaders or institutions at the moment, I do have faith in individuals to assess the world accurately (especially when given access to all the information available), make the best decision for themselves and their families, and respect my right to do the same.
This concept, after all, is what our country was founded on.
Though, quite particularly in recent years, we seem to have lost sight of this.
I believe that C.R.T is a solid foundation for regaining our sense of independence and initiative.
Why?
Because in order to reverse the tailspin our country currently sustains, we need a healthy citizenry of critical thinkers with both the inner strength and outward toughness necessary to rekindle our ideals and safeguard our liberties for future generations:
We are, all of us, as free to direct the activities of our bodies as we are to pursue the objects of our thought. But if we are to retain this freedom, for ourselves and for generations to come, then we must also be willing to work for the physical toughness on which the courage and intelligence and skill of man so largely depend. All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our community. We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.