What Donald Trump Taught Me About Myself
It will help me, and can help all of us, weather his second presidency.
Remember my New Year’s edition, and what I wrote about the fitness influencers I turned to for home exercise programming during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic?
One of them died last week. His name was Steve Cotter, and unlike most Instagram coaches and gym rats, Cotter was highly specialized. He was a Brazilian jiujitsu expert (not my thing) and an innovator in kettlebell training.
Most Americans who know anything about kettlebells will be familiar with “hardstyle” kettlebell training. Foundational hardstyle kettlebell movements are the ones you’ll learn in CrossFit gyms, designed to move heavy load quickly through explosive hip extension, such as in the hardstyle snatch.
Cotter practiced a hybrid style of kettlebell training influenced heavily by a Russian sport called girevoy, or, colloquially, “kettlebell sport.” Kettlebell-sport movements require somewhat less power but much more endurance than their hardstyle equivalents. They recruit the same muscles, but propel weight in a more technically complex way, using the body more like a pendulum than a catapult, and propagating weight upward as if it were riding a wave or tied to the end of a rope.
See the differences? They’re most evident in the feet, the bending of the knees, and the positioning of the working arm (free-floating vs affixed to the body).
Hardstyle kettlebell programming tends to look a lot like conventional resistance training. You test your strength, gain a sense for how much weight you can move, then lower that number so that you can complete sets manageably. A few sets of five on the heavier end, or maybe 10 on the lighter end, or as many reps as possible in a minute.
In professional kettlebell sport, you’re expected to perform variations on three foundational movements (inspired by corresponding olympic barbell movements) for 10 continuous minutes. This often sums to well over 100 unbroken repetitions. The unique lever mechanics of the body are part of what makes that possible, but there’s more to it. Strength helps. Gravity helps. So does the fact that these movements have “fixations” where the bell (or bells) stops moving, and you can pause to catch your breath.
Thanks in part to Steve Cotter, I’m a self-taught, amateur girevoy hobbyist—and so this is a statement of gratitude to him. But it’s also thanks to Donald Trump, who can go fuck himself.
LUNG OUT TO DRY
A subset of the punditry thinks its fashionable to be unperturbed. They distinguish themselves through contempt for people who supposedly “overreact” to Trump rather than through contempt for Trump himself. They lament the ways people they once respected have changed, or been broken, by Trump.
My contempt for Trump runs so hot mostly because of how he’s changed other people. How he’s made them meaner, or more cynical, and encouraged them to team up against the defenseless. But the “calm down” pundits are right in my case, even if they have no clue why. Trump really did change me, physically.