Variation

 What is a variation? It is an art and a risk. – Anne Dufourmantelle, In Praise of Risk.

Repetition

Facebook and YouTube have both recently fixated on showing me short films of former Mr Olympia Dorian Yates making polemical declarations about what works and what doesn’t in bodybuilding training. In his outlook, Yates follows Mike Mentzer, whose ‘heavy duty’ philosophy was inspired by the evidently beguiling simplicity of Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ (I put this term in scare quotes, because to my mind Rand is more of a moralist and ideologue than a philosopher). One thing is one thing, another thing is another thing; there is right and there is wrong; and so on. Moved into bodybuilding, heavy duty training is right. Any variation from it is wrong.

My algorithm shows me Dorian Yates insisting that you only need to do a handful of core exercises, and you need to do them heavy, to failure and beyond, and you do not need to vary them. You should not vary them. Well, he concedes, you can vary them – if you must – but only if you feel you have to because you are bored of the small handful of compulsory core exercises. So, you might, for instance, replace heavy barbell rows with heavy dumbbell rows. For a while. But you must keep the basic movement the same – the movement of the row is the thing. And you must understand that the perceived ‘need’ for variation only arises because of the weakness of your fickle mind. The muscles only grow as a result of the same kind of overload of the same kind of stimulus – the repetition of the same overload.

And yet… Owing to a training injury, for the latter part of his career, Dorian Yates never did squats. Many would regard these as mandatory, and to be included without excuse or exception in the list of core, necessary and unavoidable exercises. And then, a contrast: Arnold Schwarzenegger insisted that you must regularly shock or surprise your muscles by periodically or unexpectedly radically changing your approach to workouts, otherwise your muscles stop responding. Furthermore, even today’s so-called ‘scientific bodybuilding’ influencers are forced grudgingly to concede that ‘beginners’ (and indeed many other kinds of people) will experience hypertrophy simply by doing anything at all in the gym.

Variation

Repetition of overload is clearly important for physical development. But what about variation? Now, I have almost boundless respect for Dorian Yates. But really: little to no variation? Ever?

I think about my own training. I vary many things, all the time, often without planning or anticipation. I walk into the gym with a particular plan in my head. Then a new idea enters. So, I change the workout. I do something entirely unplanned. Many people in busy gyms must do this all the time: either take whatever equipment is available now or extend the training time for hours because of having to wait for equipment.

Of course, one difference between Dorian Yates and me is that Yates was ‘the original mass monster’ who won the highest title in world bodybuilding multiple times. By contrast, I am a little spod who dabbles like a dilettante in a little lifting, vague attempts to get some good nutrients into my body, and not much more. Also, I am the kind of person who becomes fixated on exploring an idea rather than adhering to a fixed rule.

Or am I? On reflection, my own ‘variations’ away from the fixed repetition of a few core exercises or a few core sets and reps principles always falls within realms. I may think I will vary ‘anything’, but actually these variations always seem to within the bounds set by a vague and highly predictable kind of commonsense, one that I seem to have arrived at via a rather ramshackle autodidactic process.

Reading Arnold as a teenager, I took to heart the idea of ‘shocking’ the muscles, or ‘confusing’ them, as he would sometimes say. Reading about Dorian in my 20s, I took to heart the idea of doing 2 sets of 6-8 reps and taking them to positive and then negative failure. Training at home with kettlebells and clubs during my 40s, I brushed off all suggestions that one should swing bells and clubs for long durations – five minutes, ten minutes, or more – and always counted precise sets and reps, almost never allowing myself to do more than, say, five sets maximum 20 reps, but more often it was – as ever – about three sets of 8-12, of any kettlebell or heavy club exercise. Returning to the gym in my early 50s, I immediately accepted ‘Dr’ [ahem] Mike Israetel’s injunction to avoid ‘junk repetitions’ (although I entirely resisted his related claims that ‘more volume’ might be a good thing). And so on. In my head, three sets of ten seems to remain as the uncontested and incontestable king. Unshakeable. The point being, that while I believe I embrace variation – and not just for reasons of avoiding boredom – there is another force or inertia within me that seems to work hard to keep this variation within certain clear limits, in accordance with certain naturalised or habitual principles of repetition.

Risk

According to psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle, in In Praise of Risk, variation ‘is an art and a risk’. The relationship between repetition and variation is not one of opposition. Variation is not opposed to repetition. Repetition is the precondition of variation:

In music, variations elaborate a whole world around a simple theme. A dazzling world of counterpoint, ascending and descending harmonies, intervals, and polyphonies of which Bach’s fugue is one of the miracles. Variation stretches time to infinity; it appeals to memory (of the theme) while constantly diverging from it. Variation introduces the new under cover of obedience to the old (theme – guardian of the temple); it is a pure improvisation in the guise of respect for ancient rules. It operates in secret, much like neurosis, but in exactly the opposite manner. When you are capable of variation, you escape repetition. For neurotic repetition (in your life) always appears in a new light, but, in reality, obeys a single scenario, indefinitely reprising the same pattern. Repetition in our lives never proclaims itself as such; the combinatory logic that governs the tragic apparatus never lets itself be discovered so easily; beneath the contingencies of the real (many prefer to say ‘life’) there is a prohibition upon inventing variants, escaping the circle.

Are my varying repetitions therefore forms of neurosis? I have asked before whether bodybuilders are living in and through a particular repetition compulsion. In one sense, clearly they are. But is that compulsion caused by the repetition of some negative trauma? Obviously, that depends on the person, but on this general theme, I follow Gabriela Méndez Cota’s reading of Alphonso Lingis, both of whom I will half misread here and crudely reduce to this statement: if bodybuilding involves a repetition compulsion, then what is most repeated is not a negative relationship, but rather the experience of a certain embodied ‘jouissance’, pleasure or enjoyment in one’s own body itself. Not every repetition need be the disguised variation of a problem. Some can be different variations of pleasures.

Drift

Of course, there may be no valid analogy between making beautiful music and building a ‘built body’, even if there may be one between making beautiful music and making a beautiful workout. Many workouts are beautiful (or, at least, Instagrammable). But will they build the desired thing – in Dorian’s case, the professional bodybuilder’s body? The pursuit of beautifully varied workouts may lead to a drift away from the aim we originally told ourselves we intended to repeat. Strength trainers Dan John and Scott Shetler say things like, ‘the goal is to keep the goal the goal’ or ‘the aim is to keep the aim the aim’. That is, if we are to be true to our original intentions, if there ever was a hope or a dream or an outcome or a plan, then we cannot allow variation in our goals. The kinds of workout we do all imply specific outcomes. One cannot run on a treadmill every day for hours at the expense of the barbells and realistically expect to look like a bodybuilder in 12 months’ time.

So, we might read Dorian Yates’s words as being driven by a sensible concern to avoid the risk of drifting away from the original intended aim – which for the bodybuilder is purely and simply hypertrophy. Yates wants lifters to avoid the risks of falling into junk reps, wasting time with ineffective exercises, or indulging in pointless or counterproductive overcomplication.

Yet – to return to this question at the risk of seeming compulsively repetitive – might there still be something ‘neurotic’ in this?

‘Neurosis dislikes variations’, states Dufourmantelle. Now, I am not saying that Dorian Yates is neurotic. But in psychoanalytic terms, repetition compulsion is one of the ways that neurosis perpetuates itself: a person repeatedly enacts an unresolved conflict rather than recognising it. Repetition compulsion is an unconscious tendency to repeat distressing experiences or relationship patterns, even when doing so brings further suffering. The repetition need not reproduce an event literally; a new situation can recreate the emotional structure of an earlier one. in Freud’s words, someone might repeat something that has been repressed ‘not as a memory but as an action’; they repeat structures without knowing that they are repeating them.

To ask again: is the bodybuilder’s compulsion to repeat (sets and reps) symptomatic of some trauma? Not necessarily. This is neither more nor less likely than the repetition any of the things we feel driven to repeat in our daily lives being symptomatic of something. Then why repeat? Why be driven to repeat? According to many, the central puzzle of repetition compulsion is: why do we repeat what hurts us rather than simply avoid it?

Avoidance

Throughout In Praise of Risk, Dufourmantelle reiterates that she is not a fan of pursuit of the question ‘why’. She encourages patients not to pursue the matter of ‘why’. She views the search for an answer to this question as a kind of trap – an obstacle to genuine self-transformation. The matter of ‘why’ is, she proposes, ‘a bluff, a rearview mirror in the blind spot’. When people look for ‘why’ – why do I feel fear, sadness, etc. – they are effectively seeking a comforting, simple, single origin story – a neat ‘key memory’ that promises to explain everything away.

In the context of psychoanalysis, she notes that you only really progress in your analysis when you lose your fixation on ‘the “why”, the imaginary cause of your complaint, of your affection, and of the injustice that accounts for it’. Believing in the existence and operation of a single ‘why’ creates a false certainty that a past event has permanently determined one’s life. As such, asking ‘why’ keeps a person looking backward into past justifications rather than engaging with the unpredictable present. It serves as a defensive manoeuvre – an alibi to avoid making a decision or taking the risk of changing one’s life.

Instead of searching for past causes, Dufourmantelle urged patients to focus on what is happening right now in the moment. She encouraged people to ‘forget about asking why... Begin where you already are’; engage directly with current desires, perceptions, and immediate possibilities for transformation.

Gym-going is not psychoanalysis. Therapy, maybe. Exercise is definitely therapeutic in all manner of ways. On the matter of training for hypertrophy, I don’t really know whose advice to take – Dorian Yates’s or Arnold Schwarzenneger’s. Surely both. At different times. Or maybe – even better – Anne Dufourmantelle’s. As a psychoanalyst and not a bodybuilder, Dufourmantelle was interested in encouraging us to think about whether the life we are living is in some sense true to our desires. To establish this, we need to interrogate the question of our desire, and interrogate how we are living our life, what life we are living. In this context, maybe variation in our practices is one form of practical exploration, of our desire and of our life.

‘Variation is not avoidance’, Dufourmantelle observes, ‘even if there is some resemblance between them’. Rather, variation ‘is a very formal art of chosen, and thus surmounted, repetition’:

Into repetition itself, [variation] introduces an apparatus of supreme invention, I might almost say of diversion. Variation makes us believe that all might be lost just when it gently leads us by the hand back to the principal theme, only to drift away, imperceptibly, once again. In this navigation, instruments aren’t used much for guidance, because the whole point is to try to lose sight of the shore, to get lost altogether, and to find along the path of this loss, the loop of an intact desire.