Carl-Richard

Here is an insight I've rescued after deconstructing "science-based lifting" and the training style I had since I started training over 14 years ago: When you do a set, the entire set is like one rep. In other words, each rep you do is in a continuous flow with the next, such that your muscles are under a constant tension that builds throughout the set and then peaks when you hit failure and can't do anymore. This is really what I believe is intended with the cue of "controlling the weight". It's not about slowing down, not about limiting intensity, but about maximizing flow. The main pitfall of science-based lifting is the tendency to make divisions, e.g. between eccentric and concentric, and consequentially making prescriptions like "slow the eccentric, explode on the concentric". This limits flow, because in flow, only the body decides what the movement is, and it's one movement. There is no eccentric or concentric, and there are no reps. There is the set - the exercise - and rest. If the goal is truly just "stimulus", then letting the body perform the movement it knows best to reach muscular failure, that is the only job. Techniques like "deep stretch" or "pause at the bottom of the rep" are tools that can come in handy in some situations, but the main exercise, the main part of the workout, is in my opinion to maximize the smoothness of the curve to muscular failure. Whether you prefer fantasies like "2-3 reps in reserve" or taking on endless amounts of volume, the same goal still applies: approaching muscular failure. My claim is simply that maximizing flow is generally the best path towards this end. Why? Because we see this in professional athletes: flow is the best measure for performance. So if you're an athlete of hypertrophy, why would it not be the same? Flow is a synonym for doing something right, as right as possible. If you perform the movement as right as possible, focusing all resources on exactly what you need to perform the movement, then you will be more efficient, you will have more resources to use on exactly that movement, which gives more resources for hypertrophy. We know things like stress, doing cardio instead of resting, impact hypertrophy, because they require resources that could be used for hypertrophy. Flow limits the loss of resources to factors external to hypertrophy. It could be something as simple as flailing your arms a little too much, or indeed not controlling the weight in a way that targets the muscle. Maximizing flow streamlines the targeting of the muscles during the exercise, and it also maximizes rest during rest periods. If you spend your time during rest moving in a less efficient way, there will be less resources for the set. These may seem like inconsequential things that a scientific reductionist who is numb to anything slightly subtle will brush away as indeed inconsequential. But consider that the line between the mediocre and the best, is subtle. And it's rooted in a personal relationship to oneself as the best, which cannot be replaced by a scientific formula written in a book or spoken about in a podcast.

"It's not a drug, it's a natural plant". Level 1 stoner ego defense mechanism.

There is also an underappreciation in "pure bodybuilding" culture of the aesthetics of athletic movement. A sprinter moves, walks and even talks in a specific way that is much more attractive than a bodybuilder who can't walk up a set of stairs without losing their breath or can't reach halfway down to their toes or lift their hip without tearing a muscle. When your steps are light, when your legs are nimble but strong, that just looks much better than if you're a walking brick house.

I'm sorry I couldn't help.

@Ramasta9 I came to this forum to distract myself and seek guidance while dealing with a spiritual emergency. My academia was like your van. It's a way to drive around, explore, karma. Eventually I'll settle.

I think after my awakening, I understood nobody could actually give me advice about anything, because I knew what I wanted, so their misunderstanding doesn't matter. Of course they will misunderstand, they haven't had the same experience. So just getting really firm and connected with the feeling of what you truly want, that will make anybody else's input simply indeed useful suggestions, which do not perturb you existentially.

Why did you actually return to the forum?

The frame is undeniably Neo-Advaita based on context (you do talk about the non-existence of self a lot), but we can reduce it to apophatic theology (speaking about God using negations) if you like, but that assumes you're indeed talking about God or something divine beyond intellectual comprehension. But if you also want to object to even that, then maybe it's just absolute/radical skepticism. Regardless of the particular frame, my frame is challenging the need to stick to just one frame. There are also other forms of Advaita, or Westernized academic forms of idealism; there is cataphatic theology; there is realism, pragmatism, meta-theorism. You can say very similar things with these different frames. Hence also in some cases, disagreements may not be actual disagreements, just disagreements in how to state the same things. And that is very often what I see, where disagreements are simply at level of frame, not at the level of substance, and where there is no desire to connect beyond frame, being open, honest, seeking and generous, instead closing down and defending, asking "questions" performatively, feigning incredulousness, ironically placing so much importance on your exact words, wording, phrasing, choices of framework, when in fact your substantial point, is beyond that.

Performative incredulousness to protect frame.

More "I only use one frame" non-duality preaching and endless argumentation to uphold that frame. Non-duality is not cognitive development.

This is consistent with how administering dopaminergic drugs strengthens the pathways that were active prior to administering. It could be as simple as the fact that when you experience something during the trip, or you have an insight or breakthrough or drastic change in perspective, that is what was active during the trip, and given the lasting changes that such deep experiences can bring, that is what was changed. With dopamine, it reflects experiences of significance, so you will remember such events better and be more likely to think about them in the future (and hence addictions can occur), hence your brain rewires to be more likely to fire those particular neural circuits in the future. The brain and experience (or "mind" more generally, which might involve unconscious, sub-, pre- or periconscious processes) are just mirrors; you will always find a cause explaining one of the coin from the other side of the coin, but the cause is both ways, not just brain to experience (in fact, there is only correlation, but we can speak of causation in a certain sense).

Two of the 9/11 hijackers who flew the planes, when asked why they did not laugh ever, responded "how can you laugh with what is happening in Palestine?". Then they practiced for a year to get pilot licenses. Belief in oneself comes in many shapes and sizes.

@Ramasta9 U tryna spiritually one up me bruh?

See the beauty in depressed people 🙏🙏🕉️☯️🌙🧘🌟

Yeah. Anyway great place to meet chill people. My "chill" is probably largely genetic, because my dad is extremely chill, my mom is decently chill if relaxed, but my stepfather is like almost a different species (there is no such thing as rest). Like I was just helping my stepfather with moving some stuff and fixing some doors and when he became hungry for lunch (I was not) he suggested I could keep going while he went to eat, meanwhile I was like "just resting could be smart, to regain some energy, we know it can be good for productivity", and he was like "I didn't go to that school, but sure, do whatever you want". So I rested like 5 minutes and then I continued while he finished eating just so he didn't have an internal neurotic breakdown watching me just sit and rest 😂

There are reasons for thinking they are invented and reasons for thinking they are discovered. You can heed both of those while also choosing which ever frame you prefer the most for your everyday epistemology.

My house (jk jk jk holy). I was going to say just hang out with chill person(s) and watch them and learn. A yoga retreat is essentially the same thing just more focused and generally more transformative.

What do you want? Integrity, autonomy, self-determination is #1.

Quite ironic that it means "copy", i.e. not original 😂

We first have to distinguish between constructing something from the ground up completely vs using an existing structure and deducing new patterns or connections (synthesis). Here is a map of the complexity of your cognition (each level contains the next): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277962409_Stage_of_development_and_million_dollar_per_year_earning_from_sales 0-6 are virtually always not original, because they concern movements, vocalizations, letters, simple words and sentences, and constructing these from the ground up is very impractical because you tend to learn a language from birth anyway (and much faster than when you're older) and it also takes a lot of work to construct new forms of these things and use them in a way that makes sense (essentially a new language) and all that for probably very little gain. 7-12 are more where "original thinking" can occur for most people. But notice this is no longer purely "ground up", unless you take a lot of care to deconstruct various stories, concepts, systems, words (but that is still not completely ground up either, but reasonably), down to around 4 as far as intellect is concerned. Indeed the thinking is more synthetic and connective, rather than ground up, but the syntheses and connections can be original if nobody has made them before. That said, original thinking at level 12 is actually quite rare, because you have to actually construct a whole new system, and that's not simple (it might look something like this). Original thinking at 13-16 are essentially reserved to hyper-geniuses who construct entire new fields of study or grand theories (e.g. Newton, Einstein). Concepts or systems connecting systems ("meta-systematic", level 13) that are genuinely original are also exceedingly rare. Your best shot at this is probably to construct your own original systems and then see the connections between those systems, but this is of course a lot of work, a bit the same problem as constructing 0-6 from the ground up. The type of original thinking Leo espouses is putatively more ground up (focus on deconstructing existing frames and becoming intellectually sovereign), while the type that maybe a leading scientist or academic philosopher can engage in (moving the existing fields forward by seeing new connections and possibilities) is more synthetic. Leo cannot do something like this for example (talking about merging Markov blankets and other analogous concepts with Integrated Information Theory, sometime in the future), but he talks about other things. So all in all, when it comes to original thinking, you run into a trade-off (in terms of time and resources) between constructing things from the bottom up and seeing new connections between existing structures. Essentially nobody is "truly original", but some can be comparatively more original, and usually at the levels 7-12 (because the higher you climb, and the lower you climb, the more extraordinary you have to be).

@Elliott I think "animal biomass" can be a sort of vegan index for weighing morality because it is sensitive to both large animals with higher forms of sentience (high individual body weight) and it's sensitive to larger masses of smaller animals at the root of eco systems (e.g. earthworms, insects). So you get a number that strongly represents both sentience arguments and ecological arguments. The middle of the distribution like chickens, fish, frogs, are more "we like them because they are unique lifeforms, not as much for what they do".

It was not an argument against veganism, unless you care about comfort, convenience, being 3x less single.

Pollution and pesticides are still ongoing sources of harm, especially for marine life in the vicinity. Even so, you have to think about it in abstract quantitative consumer terms. Without sales, the plantation cannot exist. So you're funding plantations when buying the banana. Your contribution might be in the millionth or billionth percent overall, but so is your contribution to the meat industry by buying a steak (and a steak is not a whole animal either, let's say 0.06% of the meat you get from a whole cow [430kg] you get for a 250g steak). So how many animals (or maybe "animal biomass" is a better quantifier if we care about "lesser" lifeforms as well) does your pack of bananas cost, all factors considered? Is it less than 250 grams?

Omg.