CRACKPOTS #49: SAMI REISS

Brace here---This weeks Crackpots is a guest one from my friend Sami Reiss...big guy, also into Hardcore music, we always get Hotpot near Christmas...it's a bit late cause I went to the Blessing of the Animals (which, for whatever reason, had far less exotic animals than usual) and so couldn't post it this morning. But here it is. You can check out his health writing stuff here: https://superhealth.substack.com/ I always think he's gonna cream me if I eat a muffin around him but he seems to be fairly sanguine about everything...what do I know about health anyways...here it is...

Here’s the thing about lifting. One: people who work out all the time are very intelligent and good at pointing out mistakes. And two: there’s no one right way to do things. Lifters are experienced readers, accepting of a wider variety of principles than, say, a political news consumer might—they know, over  time, everything kind of works. The smartest omnivorous lifting media consumer may, at worst, assume whoever they’re reading or watching on YouTube is a grifter, but they’ll hold off judgment until all the details are laid out. Which is kind of what happened when a number of editorialized historical interpretations of the Soviet regime showed up in a weightlifting video posted to YouTube this summer. Shit went too far. 

The video itself—otherwise pretty good—was of a type that gets uploaded every few months, maybe more often: a kind that attempts to explain the stupefying success that came out of the Soviet Union—specifically, how their Olympic weightlifters were both so successful and, to quote the headline, jacked. (Here’s another from a little bit ago; here’s one from July; here’s an excerpt of a discussion about it on Rogan.) The vids are like any other type of lifting video on YouTube, in which the worst and dumbest simply game the viewer, and offer pablum and no real detail, while the best (like this one, maybe) shake out as meticulous, casually addressed and often idiosyncratic pieces of research that cover every nook and cranny of nutrition, working out and every other substrate of health under the sun. 

Generally though, these videos, and just about everything having to do with strength, end up apolitical and stick to specifics regarding the lifts: What athletes eat or wear or how they train, what rep ranges their workouts stick to, where they stand on progressive overload vs. variety, and so on... maybe this is because lifters don’t really agree on politics, though maybe it’s because they don’t care. In any event, it was genuinely shocking to see this one broke the rule. In the video, the narrator, after listing the USSR’s general sports dominance—second in the medal count for Olympics in general, 35 years after its collapse; more wrestling medals, still, than any other country; second in weightlifting—weighs in on Stalin for more than a moment before going over the sport. (For the record: an athlete lifts a barbell from the ground to over their head, in one and then two movements.)  I’ve transcribed the first part of the Soviet critique in full: 

Before we start getting our bellies full from lapping up that red Commie glaze. The creation of the Soviet Union was fueled by a rush to fulfill their collectivist ideals and that involved taking a very large unskilled work force and putting them to work with quantity as the priority over quality. This made soviet synonymous with shoddy. They had a command economy where they could point a finger at a particular industry and flip a switch and suddenly have everybody working to produce on that one thing. While that certainly had some benefits, you’d better hope that the people in charge had an airtight plan and effective communicating skills. They of course didn’t, which means that they went into WWII without sufficient fuel, ammunition or vehicles, and had to rely on horses. In the age of the atom bomb, our allies against Nazi Germany were using horses…

A pretty tight script by YouTube standards; which then goes on to list the Red Terror, the Russian famine, Dekulakization, the 1930 famine, the gulags, the great purge and the Katyn massacre before counting out the Soviet death toll. And while I’m not sure how exact he is on the details here—I’m no student of Soviet history—the diversion comes off as a bit strange. It’s not like his video about prison workouts—also very good—sidelines with high American rates of incarceration. Why would it? There’s no reason to wedge Stalin into a thing about lifting, any more than a piece about Venice Beach bodybuilding should be set up by the bombing of Cambodia, or the Dulles brothers, or whatever else.  

Which is half a shame if you’re coming to this video from the outside, but just as encouraging if you watch videos like this on the regular. Why? Well, there’s always a catch. In this case the uploader’s derangement—passion? patriotism? Belief?—is, to a smart consumer, nothing more than the price of admission. The sort of sidetrack an idiosyncratic YouTuber chooses to place into their video, and which we can truly skip over or ignore. It’s a randomness generator, if it’s anything. Individualism borne out of the platform… better, at least, than a grift. 

To its credit, the video subject itself was an obscure choice here: though there’s an appetite for content on this very specific corner of strength training, it’s not exactly the biggest thing that there is. (A video on an Australian faceless guy has twice as many views.) Still, Olympic weightlifting is patently fascinating. Unlike a number of alleys in strength training—bodybuilding, powerlifting these days—this one is distinctly un-American. Not many people here lift in this way, compared to bodybuilding, and America’s been incompetent, more or less, at the sport on the international level for at least 70 years. 

A deeper look, like the one in the video, may be pyrrhic. But the videos collectively reveal that the sport seems to succeed only on the other side of the iron curtain. Beyond the Soviet medal count, when adjusted for weight classes, a number of weightlifting records are mostly still theirs. The most successful runner-up countries based their systems either along Russian lines or against them. And so while the political question might be: How has this sport succeeded so massively in places of penury? The more personal question of how to make bigger lifts and how to be jacked is unchanged as a corollary.  

Which is what the meat of any good video—like this one— includes. How did this shit actually work? How did the Russians get good? After the short speech, the video kind of goes into the specifics of the Soviet Union’s sport system, mostly correct and reined in, though quite critical, and focused on theory. Sports systems, the video says, were planned economies: details were measured and lifts and training was planned out years in advance. Former Olympic athletes would retire and become sport scientists and would influence training. Compared to America, variety and skill was emphasized in Soviet systems, roughly, over progress and maxing out. The video then goes in deep into the differences between different sport scientists working in the USSR: One guy who kept workouts mostly the same, and then varied them when they “stopped working,” and another whose programs changed up a significant amount, before later concluding that steroids made most of the difference—the USSR doped its way to golds—and that the science that came out of its sports system was sort of not really provable.   

Getting into the proving and disproving of Russian sports science is too granular a point to thread out to a non-lifting audience, so I’ll leave it there. What’s more fascinating though—and what the video leaves out—is that the sports system was set up in a decidedly free market way. Everyone was incentivized; no one was that ideological, everyone was just there to work. Athletes, plucked young from the Caucasus, got a valuable education, decent food (comparatively), and, if they medaled, glory and, more concretely, a lifetime pension. The athletes who didn’t get that high up received real educations, and might  find decent work afterwards as coaches—decent, relatively speaking, of course—owing to the massive size of the system: coaches were needed not just for olympians, but for children, prospects and juniors. Athletes’ families were famously taken care of, and the athletes themselves were given permission to travel internationally, to be sure, with their families as a cudgel so they’d stay. It's not Bolshevism to say Olympian was among the best jobs in the USSR. 

Which is why it’s surprising to see the black wedding band explanation here. Any smart lifting reader knows that conceding some Soviet success doesn’t make you a communist. It really just makes you an American: powerlifting and football strength coaching and jump training (and cross training, and hockey since 2005) are more or less built off the Soviet system’s back. Indeed, they had, in terms of ideas, a more free-market system than ours. Is baseball—only two teams legally allowed in New York—an unregulated free for all, or a legal monopoly? This is without mentioning any professional sport’s draft, which are all all market-defeating rights to an athlete that negate  their true worth. 

Anyways, it’s a pretty good video. All of the videos like this one usually are. Even the deranged ones are worth watching. Whether they match up to the headline, or surpass it, there’s always a kernel of truth in these pieces of shit that’s worth checking out. Honestly?I like most of his videos. Lifters don’t need revolutionary or even competent politics—though if they do, there’s a place for that, either way, there’s no time to discuss this at the gym. There’s too much real work to do there.