Strength training is a gateway to White-Supremacist thought-crime. Who knew?

A bottom-shelf, Progressive "expert" is getting more exposure than she anticipated over an article that she penned about six months ago.

In that article, she identified the desire to be physically fit as a gate-way to White-Supremacist thought-crime and Right-wing Extremism.*

Specifically, she pointed out strength-training, testosterone and defensive arts as the most evil portals to...not being safely dependent on the system.

Rather than mocking the intellectual pygmy who wrote the piece and her insistence that all those scary men should change so she can be more comfortable, I want to write a quick essay about why I think being physically strong and physically fit is important.

Resilience

If you watch a couple of good basketball teams play, and if the officials LET them play. The game is smooth and fluid and very, very fast. Mistakes are made but each player flows as seamless part of the team to fix the mistake.

Every player can dribble.

Every player can rebound.

Every player can make amazing passes and in-bound the ball.

Every player can shoot three-pointers and juke inside and push the ball up.

Every player.

Because it is not possible to know in advance where the ball will go or exactly how it will bounce. A single finger can deflect the ball and change the course of the game.

Magic Johnson, a guard, played center in the 1980 NBA finals when KAJ was not able to play. And he did a very credible job especially when you consider that he was a rookie.

Other major sports are not as seamless. 

Soccer has defensive specialist and corner-kicking specialists and a goal keeper.

American football has separate teams for offense and defense and the play stops after every down.

Baseball is a retelling of David and Goliath; two heroes (pitcher and batter) in a duel with a supporting cast in reserve.

Hockey...much closer to basketball except they still have the guy between the pipes.

Brittle vs Ductile failures

Imagine somebody construct a diving board from a single rod of glass. We intuitively know this is a bad idea because as soon as a flaw develops on the diving board's surface, the beam will break and the diver or a swimmer might get speared by a jagged edge.

Now visualize a diving board but it is an optimized truss where every molecule of steel is stressed to its ultimate tensile strength. Steel is ductile so there should be no problem, right?

In fact there can be a problem. Steel rusts. Divers don't always respect the maximum weight restrictions. Imperfections in fabrication can occur. Because every molecule is already stress to the maximum, there is no "under-worked" material that failing material can shift its load to. "Optimized" structures can fail and they do fail they often fail spectacularly.

For our third mental experiment, visualize a diving board made from a solid, steel plate of a simple, garden variety mild steel. When in bending, the most highly loaded material is at the extreme top-and-bottom of the plate right where it is bricked into the wall. The material gets progressively less loaded as it approaches the center of the plate.

A diving board of this nature does not fail when overloaded. Fail that is, in the sense that it becomes totally incapable of carrying the load. Rather it fails by deforming as the very top-and-bottom layers permanently deform and the slightly deeper layers pick up more load.

The metaphor

If your minds have not raced ahead of my text, let me be clear. Modern society is like the optimized truss because it is hyper-specialized and tasks cannot be (easily) shifted to other resources.

What happens when the Sanitation Department goes on strike and stops picking up the trash? People cannot or are not allowed to seek other ways to dispose of their waste products. That is just one example.

Being physically fit and physically strong is the cornerstone of being able to adapt to chaos and to create work-arounds. 

Getting back to our waste-disposal problem. A person with a couple off five-gallon buckets has a lot more options than a person who does not IF he can carry them down X number of flights of stairs. I will even spot you half-filled buckets because slopping the contents is not a good thing.

You have to have a certain amount of stamina to move your body out of harms way.

Gardening requires flexibility and stamina and the ability to adapt to heat and cold.

And on, and on, and on.

Being physically capable is to choose to not be the deer-in-the-headlights. Being physically capable means you can get off the X and you can move your family off the X.

Maybe that is what scares people like the author of the alarmist piece referenced above. They are afraid of anybody who can vault over the guardrails they want to put around our behaviors.

*I want to be the fly on the wall when she tells Mike Tyson that he is a White-Supremacist.