Hello from Austin, TX + a new essay

Embracing Physicality

Hi friends,

Some quick business — if this is your first time receiving a missive from Robbie Rambles, welcome! You were previously a subscriber to (and likely participant of) The Gap Year. If you’re interested in what Robbie, Jenoa, and the Sap clan are up to (along with hearing Robbie’s thoughts about…anything), this is the place to follow. If you don’t want another thing in your inbox, you can unsubscribe below. If you’d like to hear a general life update, I encourage you to check out this post. If you’d like to hear my thoughts about why a life of the mind is not mutually exclusive of a fully embodied life, keep reading!

Much love,

Robbie

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Embracing Physicality

For much of my life I valued knowledge. Perhaps I’d been something of a gnostic. I kept the life of the body at bay. I’m not sure why this was. My parents encouraged physical activity when I was young, and enrolled me in youth sports. The also encouraged my early adolescent interests in skateboarding and surfing. And for a brief season, around ages fourteen to fifteen, I even took my health somewhat seriously, going so far as to attempt to meet the BUD/S admission standards and eliminating soda from my diet. But I was never naturally athletic. So, along with an increased focus on playing music around the age of sixteen, I think my gradual shift toward a “life of the mind” developed as a sort of defense mechanism. If I couldn’t outrun or out-lift or out-throw others, perhaps I could outthink them. But what began as adolescent pettiness eventually ossified into detrimental habits — cigarettes, junk food, and sedentariness.

As I entered adulthood, I half-heartedly tried to mitigate this with occasional forays into lifting, but for the most part I just excused this as part of my biological makeup. I resorted to physiological determinism, if only implicitly. And I bristled at any notion that physical preparedness was a necessity.

I minimized my embodiedness. I was mostly content with a “life of the mind” until two points in my life.

First, when I was 25, my church held something called Men’s Training Camp. For a few weeks, a group of young men gathered at an MMA gym twice a week for a kickboxing class at 5:30am. The class ran for an hour and consisted of conditioning, technique, and sparring. It kicked my ass, but it also helped me improve my fitness, at least for a little bit at the time. But it wasn’t the wake up call it could have been. Once the program ended, I returned to middling and half-hearted attempts at a lifting regimen. There are a number of factors — cost and Orange County traffic being two of them — but southern California was replete with MMA gyms. I easily could have continued my training at a gym nearer me.

It wasn’t until a few years later, well into my career and married life, in January 2021, that I started to take my health seriously again. I was grappling with depression and loneliness wrought by pandemic protocols. At this time a friend introduced me to F3, an experience I’ve written about at length elsewhere. It had reignited a fire in my belly from Men’s Training Camp whose embers still smoldered. Bleak as it sounds, I needed an outlet for the anger and sadness that embedded themselves. In a weirdly masochistic way, I needed physical pain to be the catharsis for psychic pain (I actually think this motivates more people than polite society is willing to admit).

F3 proved to be truly transformative for me physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. But the most significant change it wrought in me was how it helped me to develop a physical sense of self. I began not to just see myself as physically capable, but actually be physically capable. I went from not being able to run a mile to running six. I began doing burpees. I sprinted. I rucked. I carried. I did things that I always considered beyond the scope of my capabilities.

These days, my regimen looks like strength and conditioning on M/W/F with Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program followed by one or two EMOMs to get the heart pounding. I can finish a solid workout in 20-40 minutes depending on how much time I wanna give myself. T/Th mornings are for training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Kickboxing at 10th Planet Austin. I’d like to post to the occasional workout with F3 Austin, but with the way this region is setup there’s nothing that makes sense for me with work and family commitments.

I guess the upshot of all this that I learned that you can radically transform yourself when you let go of limiting beliefs. This doesn’t mean that the challenges and suffering we encounter are somehow immaterial or inconsequential — it does mean that incremental changes can go a long way. I don’t expect most people to give has much time and energy as I do to physical pursuits (though, to be fair, I also know of people who devote more than I do, but they don’t have toddlers). I will say the hardest but most profound change though is when you go from 0 to 1 — it’s remarkable what you can get with just doing 20 minute EMOMs 3-5 times a week.

I often lament that I didn’t pursue such transformation when I was younger, when I could have had my body naturally working more favorably for me, and had more time to give to this. Conversely, I’ve learned learned that it’s never to late to make a positive change. At 30, I was still able to change my physique and sense of self.

That transformed sense of self is really what I was beginning to get at with everything I’ve written so far. This is running long, but it was all preamble to what I really want to say — that embracing one’s physicality may be a critical missing piece in so much of the discourse about the “trouble” with young men today. Is it sufficient? Maybe not, but I would contend that it is a sine qua non of recovering a sense of masculinity that is robust, generative, and virtuous. The angry young man who spends his days doomscrolling and numbing himself may not completely exorcise his demons after 10 rounds of 10 pushups/squats/situps, but he will as a matter of biological fact be altering his neurochemistry in a such a way that the conditions for clear thought will be present.

Men need adversity. The first adversary one needs to face is oneself. To discipline the body and its impulses through physical adversity is a critical step toward mastery of those other things that are under one’s control.

As with many things, this is all easier said than done. And, as with many things, overcomplicating it can be a self-imposed impediment to action. So, if you’ve never exercised before, here are some suggestions:

• Every other day, do 10 sets of 10 pushups, 10 situps, and 10 bodyweight squats. Can’t do a pushup? Do a pushup on your knees. Still too much? Do wall pushups. 10 sets of 10 too many? Do 10 sets of five. Add one rep every week.

• Grab a backpack. Put something heavy in it, about ~20-30lbs. Go for a 20-30 minute walk. Congratulations, you’re rucking.

• Still have questions? Reply to this and ask away. Happy to answer or point you in the right direction.