Gym Rats Quotes

Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

In the front was a man he knew only as “Samson,” a big man that from all appearances was a former juice head gym rat with exquisitely defined muscles, stripped to the waist and carrying a huge nine foot cross hewn from raw timber and held together with nails and twine. Behind him in a rough line were the flagellates: five men also stripped to the waist, holding various chains, heavy corded ropes, and one with what looked like a leather whip from the S&M sex shop. They beat their backs as they slowly walked down the center of the street.

Where's the elevator?" Mike asked, sheathing his weapon. Tallow felt a little better telling Mike there wasn't an elevator and watching his face. But then Mike picked up the dolly, boxes and all, with one hand, took the kit bag from Sophie with the other, and started jogging up the stairs with"Third floor, right?" "There," said Scarly, "goes a man who has names for all his muscles." "I was just thinking that," Tallow said. "Serious gym rat." "No, I mean he's named all his muscles. That's a man who calls one of his muscles Steve.

Ew,” I said quickly, shaking my head and walking forward. “You’re sweatier than two rats fucking in a gym sock.

Doesn’t prove she’s dumped you for a gym rat with the face of Keanu Reeves, the anatomy of King Dong, and the charisma of moi

Sometimes, I’ll craft a scene that’s so poignant; on the last keystroke I’ll raise my hands high overhead and scream “Yes!” at the top of my lungs. I have yet to experience an orgasm so powerful and fulfilling.

came to understand for the first time ever the importance of being healthy, and I don’t mean the universalizing and troubling concept of “diet conscious” our culture currently prefers, but the kind of healthy that encourages and cultivates a knowledge and awareness of your unique body and what it can be reasonably asked to do, and to never feel shame if your body does not operate by the same rules as someone else’s body. I’m talking about a healthy that is rooted in self-determination and individual autonomy, and is thus applicable to a spectrum of bodies, including professional athletes, cancer survivors, gym rats, the doctor-phobic, the poor, joggers, and folks with a limited supply of spoons, a healthy that excludes no one and that is specific and relative to the individual.

Well,” he was clearly thinking out loud, “probably someone who wants to be at practice. I love gym rats, but not just the kind who want to play one-on-one all day. I like the kids who come early and do extra drills. And watch film even when they don't have to.” He paused before adding, “And who kind of hate to lose.” “Sore losers?” Ben shook his head. “No, not at all. I mean, the kind who come to practice wanting to work as hard as they can to avoid losing. Coaching them is easy.

And that's when the doorbell rings. Marcus freezes. As do I. "That must be your friend," I somehow manage to say, even though my throat is trying to close. Marcus is clearly torn between remaining immobile and opening the door. The bell rings again. "Want me to get it?" "No," he says. "No." I stand, not knowing what to do while he slowly springs open the door. Not surprisingly, Marcus's old schoolfriend is a petite and extraordinarily pretty brunette. She steps into the apartment and kisses Marcus full on the lips. "Hello, darling," she says. Marcus recoils slightly and casts a worried glance in my direction which his friend follows. "Hi," I say, extending my hand as I try to force my face into a smile. She takes it. Her hand is cool and delicate, as slender as the rest of her. "I'm Lucy," I continue brightly. "Marcus's girlfriend." Now it's her turn to recoil. "This is my friend, Joanne," Marcus says tightly. I look at my lover. "An old schoolfriend. That's what you said, isn't it?" I turn back to Joanne. "Which school did you go to with Marcus? Primary? Grammar? Or maybe it was the harsh school of life?" His old schoolfriend looks at him blankly. "I don't know quite what's going on here, Marcus," she says. "But I don't think that I want to be a part of it." She turns away from him, spinning on her heel toward the door. "Jo," Marcus pleads as he catches her sleeve. "Don't go." And I think that's my cue to leave. "Oh, Marcus," I say sadly. "Do you have so little respect for me?" "I can explain," he says, and I notice that he's still looking at Jo rather than at me. "You're welcome to stay and listen to it," I say to Jo. "I'll be the one to leave." Marcus does nothing to stop me, so I hitch up my gym bag once more and move toward the door. "It's been nice meeting you," I say to Marcus's new love. "You'll enjoy your dinner. It smells wonderful. It even covers the smell of a rat. The chocolates are great, by the way. I hope you both choke on them.

It’s a perspective on story that may also shed light on why you and I and everyone else spend a couple of hours each day concocting tales that we rarely remember and more rarely share. By day I mean night, and the tales are those we produce during REM sleep. Well over a century since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no consensus on why we dream. I read Freud’s book for a junior-year high school class called Hygiene (yes, that’s really what it was called), a somewhat bizarre requirement taught by the school’s gym teachers and sports coaches that focused on first aid and common standards of cleanliness. Lacking material to fill an entire semester, the class was padded by mandatory student presentations on topics deemed loosely relevant. I chose sleep and dreams and probably took it all too seriously, reading Freud and spending after-school hours combing through research literature. The wow moment for me, and for the class too, was the work of Michel Jouvet, who in the late 1950s explored the dream world of cats.32 By impairing part of the cat brain (the locus coeruleus, if you like that sort of thing), Jouvet removed a neural block that ordinarily prevents dream thoughts from stimulating bodily action, resulting in sleeping cats who crouched and arched and hissed and pawed, presumably reacting to imaginary predators and prey. If you didn’t know the animals were asleep, you might think they were practicing a feline kata. More recently, studies on rats using more refined neurological probes have shown that their brain patterns when dreaming so closely match those recorded when awake and learning a new maze that researchers can track the progress of the dreaming rat mind as it retraces its earlier steps.33 When cats and rats dream it surely seems they’re rehearsing behaviors relevant to survival. Our common ancestor with cats and rodents lived some seventy or eighty million years ago, so extrapolating a speculative conclusion across species separated by tens of thousands of millennia comes with ample warning labels. But one can imagine that our language-infused minds may produce dreams for a similar purpose: to provide cognitive and emotional workouts that enhance knowledge and exercise intuition—nocturnal sessions on the flight simulator of story. Perhaps that is why in a typical life span we each spend a solid seven years with eyes closed, body mostly paralyzed, consuming our self-authored tales.34 Intrinsically, though, storytelling is not a solitary medium. Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance. This offers a related design rationale for coding story into the human behavioral repertoire—for identifying, that is, the adaptive utility of our storytelling instinct.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you this story, since it just rolled into my gourd while I was into that 1950 Lighthouse shot. I never told you about the Legend of the Gigantic Fart, did I?” “Put the beer in a paper bag. Let’s get it on the road.” “No, man, this story became a legend and is still told in the high schools around the county. You see, it was at the junior prom, a very big deal with hoop dresses and everybody drinking sloe gin and R.C. Cola outside in the cars. Now, this is strictly a class occasion if you live in a shitkicker town. Anyway, we’d been slopping down the beer all afternoon and eating pinto-bean salad and these greasy fried fish before we got to the dance. So it was the third number, and I took Betty Hoggenback out on the floor and was doing wonderful, tilting her back like Fred Astaire doing Ginger Rogers. Then I felt this wet fart start to grow inside me. It was like a brown rat trying to get outside. I tried to leak it off one shot at a time and keep dancing away from it, but I must have left a cloud behind that would take the varnish off the gym floor. Then one guy says, ‘Man, I don’t believe it!’ People were walking off the floor, holding their noses and saying, ‘Pew, who cut it?’ Then the saxophone player on the bandstand threw up into the piano. Later, guys were shaking my hand and buying me drinks, and a guy on the varsity came up and said that was the greatest fart he’d ever seen. It destroyed the whole prom. The saxophone player had urp all over his summer tux, and they must have had to burn the smell out of that piano with a blowtorch.” Buddy was laughing so hard at his own story that tears ran down his cheeks. He caught his breath, drank out of the beer glass, then started laughing again. The woman behind the bar was looking at him as though a lunatic had just walked into the normalcy of her life.

Not every Gym Rat will become MVP, but every MVP is a gym rat.

When girls like me, who are relatively smart and pretty, who have something to say, and who have their own points of view, spend every Friday night home alone watching reality TV, this is because all of the guys they might potentially have dated are out with Adventure Barbie. You know who she is—that girl with the perfectly tousled hair, long legs, and no fat anywhere because she doesn’t eat. She wears super-high heels, which she can walk in perfectly, but she also comes equipped with hiking boots. A guy who finds himself an A.B. is pleased to find out that she is equally at home zip-lining and fine dining. She will go with him to his kickboxing gym and impress all the guys there, and then she will go home and change into a little black dress and five-inch heels. A.B. does not exist in nature; she is her own creation. And no regular girl can match her. A regular girl’s face betrays her panic when she is asked to go rock climbing or cliff diving. A regular girl looks like a drowned rat after an afternoon of white-water rafting. But not Adventure Barbie.

plié

A Protein Is Not a Protein Companies are touting protein as a cure-all and for weight loss/muscle gain. They’re selling protein shakes, protein cookies, protein snack bars, even protein coffee. It’s true that protein is neither carbohydrate nor sugar nor fat, and you need it to maintain normal growth. However, your kidneys have a limited capacity to excrete the metabolic by-products of protein metabolism, and overexcretion can cause kidney damage. Therefore, protein quality is as important as protein quantity. For example, eggs and beans both contain protein, but are very different in quality. Dietary protein is made up of twenty separate amino acids strung together in different combinations and amounts. One of those amino acids, tryptophan, is rarer and therefore more important than others, because it’s the precursor of serotonin, an important brain neurotransmitter (see Chapter 19). Eggs, poultry, and fish are the best sources of this amino acid, while beans have very little. On the other hand, additional protein is needed if you’re building muscle, especially branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs; leucine, isoleucine, valine), which are 20 percent of muscle (see Chapter 18). BCAAs are in high concentration in corn products, and are what’s in those tubs of protein powder at the health food store. If you’re a bodybuilder, you need them; if you’re not a gym rat and consume excess BCAAs, your liver will take the amino groups off and turn them into organic acids, which will either be diverted into liver fat (through DNL) or into excess glucose, either of which can generate hyperinsulinemia and drive chronic disease. The goal is to get more tryptophan and less BCAAs in the protein you consume.

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This other colleague invited me to a yoga class. I was not, in any way, shape, or form, a yogi. I was, if anything at that point, a gym rat, and gym rats don’t bend or twist easily. I didn’t want to go, but I did, remembering James’s words that I would “cold-bloodedly” have to go through the motions of being happier in order to actually become so.

People who’ve spent time on high country trails know the heartbreak of a false summit. When all you want is for the incline to stop kicking your ass, it tricks you into thinking you’ve made it, only to reveal that you aren’t even close! But you don’t have to be a trail rat to know that feeling. In life, there are plenty of false summits. Maybe you think you’ve rocked an assignment at work or school, only to have your teacher or supervisor rip it to pieces or tell you to start over again. False summits can come in the gym when you’re doing a hard circuit workout and think you’ve hit the last set, only to hear from your coach or trainer—or from a quick glance at your own notes—that you have to go back through the entire circuit one last time. We all take a punch like that every once in a while, but those who tend to crane their necks looking for the crest of the mountain as they beg for their suffering to end are the ones who get smashed the most by any false summit. We have to learn to stop looking for a sign that the hard time will end. When the distance is unknown, it is even more critical that you stay locked in so the unknown factor doesn’t steal your focus. The end will come when it comes, and anticipation will only distract you from completing the task in front of you to the best of your ability. Remember, the struggle is the whole journey. That’s why you’re out there. It’s why you signed up for this race, or that class, or took the damn job. There is great beauty when you are involved in something that is so hard most people want it to end. When Hell Week ended, most of the guys who survived cheered, wept tears of joy, high-fived, or hugged one another. I got the Hell Week blues because I’d been immersed in the beauty of grinding through it and the personal growth that came with it.

Unlike prostitution or promiscuity, stripping was entirely public. One foot on the state would forever mark me as a disreputable character, the sort respectable people called a sleaze. On the other hand ... I didn't know any respectable people and my workday would be a mere thirty minutes long. And, I had to face it, some quirk of my psychic constitution rendered the strictures of ordinary jobs insufferable to me. Restaurant work felt like a cross between the treadmill at the gym and one of those Japanese game shows on which contestants are abused and humiliated in front of a sadistic audience. Office work was even worse, calling to mind those B movies in which some poor soul--bound and gagged, but eyes wide with terror--is slowly walled up brick-by-brick in the dungeon of some damp, rat-infested Transylvanian castle.

Even if you know nothing about nutrition, consider this protein paradox: some of us consume protein shakes and skinless chicken breasts in order to lose weight, while at the same time bodybuilders and gym rats chug protein shakes and gorge on chicken breasts in order to gain weight.

Is he a gym-rat asshole, or is he a good guy?” “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that maybe Tate is working with Carly?” “Who? Huh? Not sure.” I keep my eyes focused on the woodpile. What is it about talking and thinking about Carly that makes me feel like a sixteen-year-old? Hell, not even a sixteen-year-old because Jack is more mature about all of this than I am! “Dude.” I hang my head with my hands on my hips. “I know.” “Du-u-ude.

Unanticipated rewards in the future, such as a paycheck bonus in two weeks or an athletic trophy you get at the end of a season, will not change neural connections in the same way. Rewards have to be experienced right after we do something in order to build habit associations (context-response) in memory. Given this timing, the most effective habit-building rewards are often intrinsic to a behavior, or a part of the action itself. This could be the feeling of pleasure you get when you read an engaging story to your kids and see their enjoyment; or maybe the warm glow of generosity you experience when doing a good deed, like volunteering at the soup kitchen. You aren’t a rat. If you volunteer, don’t then go and buy yourself a big chocolate bar and expect the habit to start forming. Let the warmth intrinsic to the activity be the reward. Take advantage of your built-in humanity. As you’d expect, those who liked to exercise—who rated it a fun activity that made them feel good—exercised more often and reported that it was more habitual and automatic. They didn’t have to think much before heading out to the track or gym. Most interesting is that students who exercised just as often, but who indicated that they went mostly out of guilt or to please others, failed to form a robust habit.