Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not. As humans have developed throughout history, physical strength has become less critical to our daily existence, but no less important to our lives. Our strength, more than any other thing we possess, still determines the quality and the quantity of our time here on earth. Whereas previously our physical strength was integral to our survival, it now merely determines how we function in these new surroundings we have crafted for ourselves as our culture has grown. But we are still animals – our physical existence is, in the final analysis, the only one that matters. A weak individual is at a disadvantage fighting against disease and function, vs if they were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very same people as they get stronger.
As the nature of our culture has changed, our relationship with physical activity has changed along with it. We previously were physically strong as a function of our continued existence in a simple world. We adapted to this existence well, since we had no other choice. Those whose strength was adequate to the task of staying alive continued to do so. Since most of us have been freed from the necessity of personally obtaining our subsistence, physical activity is regarded as optional. In reality, millions of years of adaptation to a rugged physical existence will not go away because desks were invented.
Like it or not, we remain the possessors of potentially strong muscle, and bone.
These hard-won commodities deserve our attention. They were too long in the making to just be ignored, and we do so at our own peril. They are the very components of our existence, the quality of which now depends on our conscious, directed effort at giving them the stimulus they need to stay in the condition that is normal to them. Strength training is that stimulus.
Humans are no longer exposed to meaningful physical effort. Strength training is not a thing we do to fix a problem, it is a thing we MUST do to have meaningful existence, a thing that without which there will always be problems. In other words, strength training is substitute for caveman to farmer activity. It is the thing that we need to make our bodies and minds normal in the 21st century.
