Giving up Envy
...will pump you up!
This weekend, I took my sister, my niece, and my nephew for a bike ride. Getting out into the woods or a park on my bike has done wonders for my mental and physical health, and they have bikes they rarely use, so I helped my sister install a bike rack on her car and led them on a short ride in Brookdale Park. Designed by Edward Olsmtead of Central Park fame, it is a gem of Essex County, New Jersey, with public tennis courts, walking paths, bike lanes, and archery targets, operated by a local club.
We took a short loop around part of the park and watched the archers shoot for a while, and then went to Applegate Farms for ice cream. It was a good weekend. Next, I’ll have to see if they like archery…
I had planned that ride for a week or two. But the same week, Arnold Schwarzenegger—who I’ve admired as a bodybuilder and a movie star since I first watched Conan the Barbarian—helped me along with another activity. He asks for questions on Reddit, so I asked him for a workout using my limited gym equipment. And he responded in his daily newsletter, The Pump!
I’ve recommended his newsletter before because he focuses on positivity and overall wellness, including mental health. He’s encouraged his subscribers to reconnect with old friends; to avoid the apps and news sites that flourish by making us angry; and this week, he wrote about the toxic online culture that rewards us for cutting other people down instead of boosting them up. He issued a challenge: find someone you envy, and boost them up instead of cutting them down.
It’s something I’ve fallen prey to. Initially I blew it off. I’d come to think of that constant negativity—of avoiding people I envy—as normal. So after some hemming and hawing, I took the challenge and reconnected with someone I’ve been avoiding online because I covet their career path—when I have a pretty awesome life—and I boosted their latest accomplishment.
And I felt better. The envy had been poisoning me. It’s like I took out a splinter that’s been festering in my hand. (I use this analogy because only yesterday, I literally cut a splinter out of the heel of my hand with a pointy knife.)
You can’t go back in time and read Arnold’s old newsletters, but Satya Robyn of
wrote a good post about the poison of envy and comparing yourself to others, which I recommend. Thank you to Satya for this good read:
On Tuesday, I performed Arnold’s chest and back workout. It was over twice as many sets as I’d been doing, and included one exercise I’d never done before. But it felt great! I even checked out the 24/7 local gym to see if they had a power rack, so I could get back into doing squats with a bar. One of my heroes, Oliver Sacks, was a multifaceted person who not only excelled at neurological studies and writing, but was also a top-tier powerlifter for his time, known as “Dr. Squat” at Muscle Beach in Venice, California in 1968, a few years before Arnold joined Gold’s Gym. I wonder if they ever crossed paths? Here’s a great photo of Sacks performing a 600 pound squat, roughly 50% more than I’ve ever squatted:
You can read more about Oliver Sacks’s weight training at Mind Over Muscle, or read his excellent memoir On the Move: A Life which gives you a picture of his multitudes. (He was also a motorcycle stud who drove days on end cranked on amphetamines, and could swim for miles well into his seventies; he led a fascinating life.)
I thanked Arnold on Instagram, and of course I set the video to the “Anvil of Crom” theme from Conan!
What’s awesome this week? Two are callbacks to recent posts:
The fossil of a mammal attacking a dinosaur was found, flipping the narrative that our ancestors were shy and fearful creatures who hid away until the saurians were wiped out by that meteorite. And guess what, it looks like an otter. If you remember, otters are the gator-slaying wolves of the river!
And Thomas Dambo created another troll, this one is on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and is named Benny the Beard Fisher:
P.S. If you want to join me and perform Arnold’s chest and back workout for people with a pair of dumbbells and a place to do chin-ups:
Those 5,000 spots went a last faster than we expected and sold out in less than 36 hours! But don’t worry, we plan to give the members referral codes in the next week to share with their friends and family, and then we’ll notify the people on the waitlist. We want to grow slowly, not like these venture capital companies that only care about how many users they have, but we’ll get you in soon. And the founding members have suggested a lot of improvements and found most of the bugs, so you’ll be walking into a better app!
I assume you mean adjustable up to 50 pounds so that you can progress your lifts and do exercises that you use less weight for, like flys. I know you asked for pecs, but as you probably know, I always do chest and back together. Here's a quick workout since you’re waiting to get into the app. I even used our tutorials from the app that include never-before-scene Pumping Iron footage and modern footage of me brutalizing Daniel and Adam.
Superset #1: Dumbbell Bench Press + Chinups
Perform 5 sets of each exercise, alternating between the two moves. Follow the guidelines below for the number of reps on each exercise.
Bench Press: 15 reps, then 12, then 10, then 8, then 6
Chinups: 6-12 reps, slow and controlled
The videos in The Pump are a little different.
For bench press, choose a weight for each set where it is challenging to do the last rep but don’t fail. So your weight is going up every time the reps go down. Don’t rest between the press and the chin-ups, but rest 2 minutes each time you finish both.
Superset #2: Dumbbell Fly + Dumbbell Pullover
Perform 5 sets of each exercise, alternating between the two moves. Follow the guidelines below for the number of reps on each exercise.
Fly: 15 reps
Pullover: 15 reps
Finisher: Pushups + Single-arm dumbbell row
Perform 2 sets of each exercise, alternating between the two moves. Follow the guidelines below for the number of reps on each exercise.
Pushups: Do as many as possible until you fail (don’t worry, the ground isn’t that far).
Single-arm dumbbell row: Do 12-15 reps on each arm
And that's it! You could repeat this workout twice per week.
Remember, if you want access to all my workouts, you can join the waitlist here, and you'll be the first to know when we make more spots available. See you in The Pump soon!
I like that strategy of complimenting someone you envy. It’s like making soup or some similar “do something nice for someone else” when you’re depressed, which never fails to work for me, even if it’s hard to take the first step.
First of all, what beautiful green space *didn’t* Olmsted design? And you finally convinced me -- I signed up for Arnold’s newsletter and I’m pumped about it! 😁