Physical Subculture

MFD of the day: ME Bench.

Combo Catch of the Day: Powerslave

The FULL CIRCLE
(upon reading older blogs, I realized I wanted to post this one again. This is for anyone who thinks they know it all, because chances are you don’t.)

Dave Tate put the germ of this idea in my noggin, which has since been washed around by the spam and lime jello between my ears into my ‘concept of perpetual learning,’ or, to borrow from my ‘guru terminology kit,’ the Principle of Continuing Education.’

The Full Circle is the difference between learning and knowing. For an easy example of how this works, think back to 5th grade. We could probably list a handful of things you learned in 5th grade that you don’t remember now, that you don’t know. In my case I don’t remember how to properly diagram a sentence (as might be horribly evident), but I could tell you all about a stegosaurus. Why? I came Full Circle with dinosaurs, but English composition took a priority just above having rocks thrown at me and a bit below wondering what Mrs. Green looked like when she stepped out of the shower.

The Full Circle starts with the desire to learn something. This is often where education stops, since a lack of enthusiasm for the knowledge means an aborted quest. But if we want something bad enough, then to know it takes the climb up one side of the circle, where we read and fill our head with the desired information, then we come back down the other side, applying the knowledge, putting it into action.

In the gym, the Full Circle means that memorizing every article on T-Nation doesn’t mean squat… literally, since nothing in your brain will prepare you to squat until you actually SQUAT. Time Under The Bar, as it is known by coaches world wide (Under The Bar is even the name of Dave Tate’s tome of powerlifting motivation), or TUB, as we’ll call it. This is where learning becomes knowledge, where a true iron head understands that all the schooling they’ve been feeding their brains has no place except as reference material for the real action of actual force development. That’s the full circle, and we have to start at the beginning of the circle every time we embark on learning/knowing something new, whether in the gym or out in that scary world beyond the iron.

How did this work with the stegosaurus in the 5th grade? Books and films were fun and all, but getting covered in sand and mud with my models and toys of the giant lizards was more fun, and made more effective by everything I DID read. I was a dinosaur (some say I still am) and I wanted a brain in my butt too (’twas believed that they had a second brain in their rear ends). I KNEW about dinosaurs.

Learn and apply, learn and apply, over and over, for the rest of our lives.