The Thinker

You've seen "The Thinker" haven't you?

Here is the "real" Thinker:

It is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, it depicts a man in sober meditation, battling with a powerful internal struggle.  I feel that struggle on occasion with my training and diet.

I was taking pictures and I did this, and the pose made me think of the sculpture. I love sculptures and I think it is because they depict the human body the way I like it.

Sculptures catch the human form in a way that no other media can. They show men with muscles that were grown with labor not drugs, women as athletes and life-giving beings and not morphed sex objects. If you have never seen life sized sculptures up close, I cannot urge you enough to go visit a museum to see what the human form is supposed to look like. 

If you live here in the Bay Area, you may not be aware that we are lucky to have one of the largest collections of works by Rodin (outside of Paris), right in our own backyard. It is the Cantor Arts Center located at Stanford University and it's open to the public and free to get in!

If you are in Paris, then museums are everywhere, the largest and most impressive being The Louvre, I would plan more than one day there and not in a row, you need time to absorb it all.

Back to the "internal struggle". I love it when I add more weight, but it comes with fat, there just really isn't a way to add more size without adding some fat. I'm not huge by any means, but this is my struggle, I want to have the added shape and muscle and not the fat.  I just need to get over it and convince myself I actually look healthier, but it is my "internal struggle". I wonder how many others go thorough this? If you do, I would enjoy hearing from you, how do you deal with it?

Tonight I trained with Roy, it was squat day. There is a Crossfit Gym in the same industrial complex as his gym, and we see the folks run past every now and again. Tonight they were doing farmer walks, they all peer in as they go by, they are curious about who could be making so much noise inside. It's just me and Roy.

As I left one of the guys stopped me. "I don't mean to be disrespectful" he started, "My girlfriend has no butt at all, how did you get that?!" as he pointed to my rear end. I threw my head back and laughed out loud. "I turned and pointed at BodyComp Gym and said "He gave it to me!". The guy read the name on the outside, "What is it" he asked. "A gym, we lift weights, that's all we do" I told him.

We talked a bit, he wanted to know what his girlfriend should do. I said she should come train with Roy, but it didn't sound like that was part of the plan. He asked if it always looked like this. I told him, it wasn't bad to start, but we have been working, and working hard at getting it bigger.

I ended by telling him to have her do squats, heavy squats. I just did 5 sets of front squats at 135 (7 to 8 each set), and walking lunges holding a bar (last set was 75 pounds), and I said to add in the Glute Ham Raise. He thanked me and trotted off to the Crossfit Gym.

I laughed again and told Roy, then drove home thinking, thinking, thinking.