Executed with the requisite tenacity, intensity and precision, Purposefully Primitive methods can and will favorably alter the compositional makeup of the human body. Primitive tools and simplistic modes are used to power sparse methods. By generating a methodical and sustained physical and psychological effort, the human body is forcibly morphed from what it is into what we want it to become: leaner and more muscular. The human body is not seduced, lured, cajoled, convinced or persuaded to alter itself—it is forced to alter itself. We force the body to favorably reconfigure itself by generating physical and psychological fierceness during training. The intense, protracted physical effort is amplified and enhanced by the studied and sustained use of specific nutritional strategies. Commonsense nutritional strategies and Old School training tactics are synchronized and placed within a periodized timeframe.
The three interrelated Purposefully Primitive disciplines (weight training, cardiovascular training and nutrition) need to be regularly and routinely practiced in a balanced and proportional fashion. Lock down all aspects of the program and within seven days of full implementation tangible results appear; by the end of the first month, body composition (the fat-to-muscle ratio) undergoes a dramatic turnaround; those who commit completely for 90 days undergo a total metamorphosis. Does this mean everyone will end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger on his best day? No, but no matter how deep a physical hole you are currently standing in, 90 days of maniacal discipline and teeth-gritting effort will enable you to utterly and completely change the shape, texture, efficiency and hardness of your body.
Our Purposefully Primitive Methodology is a loose amalgamation of methods and modes absorbed from genuine Masters. This cumulative, combined knowledge is grouped into one of four categories: Iron, Mind, Cardio or Nutrition. These are the four avenues of transformational progress. The Purposefully Primitive amalgamated philosophy is not time intensive, but it is physically intense: total training time for a beginner or intermediate athlete does not need to exceed five cumulative hours per week—not much time at all when one considers the innumerable physical benefits derived. The caveat is that you must generate extreme physical effort during those five hours. Sub-maximal training yields sub-maximal results; we consciously and continually push against the lip of the limit envelope because we understand that extreme physical effort is the transformational precursor.
Disciplined nutrition underpins gut-busting training. Eat plentiful amounts of wholesome, nutritious and delicious tasting foods. Bias food consumption towards nutrients preferentially used to build muscle and accelerate the healing and recovery process. Avoid foods preferentially shuttled into body fat storage. Purposefully Primitive training is self-inflicted physical trauma. We need to supply the battered body with ample amounts of regenerative nutrients. Certain nutrients ingested at specific times will accelerate the physical recovery process. Physical recovery is the precursor to actual muscle growth.
Certain foods accelerate results and other foods undermine hard training. We consume foods that amplify our efforts and jettison foods that subvert and derail the transformational process.
Those disciplined few able to attain and maintain that delicate, elusive balance between resistance training, cardiovascular training and precision nutrition, ignite physiologic synergy. When synergistic critical mass is attained progress compounds at an astoundingly fast rate; results exceed realistic expectations. The transformational total exceeds the logical sum of the deconstructed parts: 2 + 2 + 2 = 10. A fully instituted Purposefully Primitive regimen always transforms the physique. The human body subjected to our peculiar and particular procedures and protocols has no biological choice in the matter: when the human body has been successfully served with certain physiological imperatives the laws of causation must be obeyed. Enact our procedures in the prescribed fashion and muscle must be manufactured; stored body fat must be mobilized and oxidized.
I have provided you with a series of tried-and-tested tactical training templates. I have provided you with nutritional strategies used on a worldwide basis by the athletic elite. Hopefully I have shed the light of truth on a few basic physiological facts-of-life. There are certain laws of science and biology that are profoundly applicable to the process. All fitness-minded individuals need to understand these facts-of-life if they are ever to gain any traction in their own transformational quest.
I have empowered you with classical knowledge gleaned from true Masters. You now know precisely what procedures and protocols will work. By replicating and instituting Purposefully Primitive training and eating strategies, you will be able to engineer your very own physical metamorphosis.
Your search for effective transformational methods is over.
Scientists are concerned about discovering commonalties that can be reduced to theorems and laws—the artist is concerned about peculiarities and particulars that can draw distinctions and differences.
—Vladimir Nabokov
A true Purposeful Primitive is both scientist and artist. We are scientists in that we are guided by the immutable laws of biology. We obey the theorems and laws that govern the scientific guidelines of the transformational process. The Purposeful Primitive is also an artist that uses a skillful blend of creative methods to sculpt and mold the human body. We are aware and concerned with the peculiarities and particulars. Each of us is unique and has individual idiosyncrasies that need to be taken into account.
The Purposefully Primitive approach flies in the hi-tech face of everything you thought you knew about “fitness.” We embrace harsh reality and understand that the transformation process is difficult, arduous and intense; hardly the effortless glide path profiteers would lead you to believe. The athletic elite know from firsthand experience the difficulty of the renovation process; those who have actually traveled the path and engineered their own transformation know what works. They also know that ease, sameness and sub-maximal training deliver negligible results. Those lucky civilians who actually find a sound game plan rarely understand the degree of pure physicality needed to trigger muscular hypertrophy. Nor do they understand the exacting procedural processes necessary to force the body to convert stored body fat into energy to use as fuel. You need more than just an intelligent game plan: you must train exceedingly smart and you must train exceedingly hard.
Physical renovation is a riddle wrapped in an enigma tucked neatly inside a paradox. Taken individually, the various component parts that make up the Purposefully Primitive matrix are quite easy to understand. Someone once said about the poker game, Texas Hold ‘Em, “It takes five minutes to learn and a lifetime to master.” Ditto the Purposefully Primitive approach. Bach’s opening Aria in The Goldberg Variations lasts one minute and fifty three seconds and could (almost) be played with one finger of each hand, yet to play it with soul and conviction takes a lifetime of study and commitment. So it is with our deceptively simplistic approach.
To achieve synergistic critical mass requires extreme exertion in the gym and disciplined eating 24-7. The process is powered by the continual invocation of certain politically-incorrect psychological traits: tenacity, patience, ferocity, discipline and genuine enthusiasm. The process is the reward. Our primitive menu of training and eating is extremely limited yet exceedingly rich in flavor, depth, dimension, detail and texture. Limitless variety can be found within our small exercise and eating menu. Our approach is about doing fewer things better.
Do you want a seat at the transformational table? Then let us put away all the fitness gadgets and toys, all the childish beliefs in magical products. Let us roll up our sleeves and get down to serious business. There is no school like Old School. Whereas most fitness approaches are a mile wide and an inch deep, we are an inch wide and a mile deep. You can power your way out of the dank cocoon that physically envelopes you and emerge with a renovated body. You can undergo a physical metamorphosis and morph from what you are into what you want to be. The transformational trail has been blazed by the true Masters. Now it is time for you to turn words written on the pages of a book into your very own life-changing reality.
People would like to see lions combed and scented like a marchioness’s lapdogs.
— Honoré de Balzac
I recently had a client come visit me for one of my four hour Fitness Day Camps. It was the first trip up for this lady and in many ways she was typical of a certain type that continually seek me out. She was a 51 years old business executive who was quite successful. An empty nest mom with a husband and grown children, her bodyweight had ballooned upward over the past five years, and now, 50 pounds overweight, she was “desperate” to do something about it. On her visit she impressed me: she asked all the right questions, took notes and seemed engaged, sharp and determined.
I thought that by redirecting the drive that had made her successful in business towards fitness she would be able to reverse her physical disintegration. She had neglected herself while raising two kids and working fulltime. Now she had the time, money and desire to rectify her condition. With a minimum of determined effort and using the Purposefully Primitive methodology, I felt quite certain that she could realize a radical reduction in bodyweight within 60 days. She had discovered me when I wrote my weekly column for the Washington Post.com. Totally out of shape, completely ignorant of fitness-related systems or procedures, I had a blank slate, an empty canvas, to work with.
I knew from past experience that when a totally unfit individual suddenly institutes and executes our Purposefully Primitive methodology with the requisite consistency, the out-of-shape participant invariably experiences a quick burst of initial progress. This completely predictable initial burst is both physically exhilarating and psychologically empowering. I’ve supervised innumerable obese individuals as they underwent rapid and radical transformation using our ultra-basic methods. Sound methods need to be cubed with maximal physical effort. Transforming the body isn’t magic: it is straightforward science, cause and effect, i.e., execute this procedure using these specific protocols for a specified period of time and that result must occur.
Changes occur quickly when the out-of-shape overweight person begins power walking. We insist they log cardio session frequency, time, distance, pace and heart rate. Simultaneously we have the obese individual institute our simplistic resistance program: we empower them with strength. Making an obese person stronger is a relatively easy task. The unnoticed upside is when the formerly weak obese person is made stronger they are able to power their bulk around with much greater ease. Climbing steps, getting up out of low chairs, arising from bed or in and out of bathtubs, tasks that were once difficult and demanding, suddenly are made much easier. The acquisition of newfound strength radically improves the overweight individual’s quality of life. The obese weakling is empowered through an infusion of strength. The final piece of the transformation puzzle is nutrition. We insist the overweight clean up their food selections and adopt a dietary game plan.
Within a few weeks clothes start fitting loosely, within a month visible physical change is apparent; within three months total transformation becomes concrete reality. Again, this isn’t magic, this is applied biology.
Anyway, my lady client requested a follow-up visit a few months later and indicated in her e-mail that she wasn’t making any progress. I knew immediately she wasn’t performing the program. I agreed to see her and when she showed up she looked identical. I had given her a three time-a-week weight training program consisting of three exercises: free weight squats, sumo deadlifts using a single kettlebell, and modified pushups. I had instructed her to walk at a local park in her neighborhood. I happened to know this park because I used to live in her neighborhood. It was a spectacular botanical garden with miles of lovely paths crisscrossing manicured grounds dotted with sculpted shrubs and ponds full of Koi carp. Serene and surreal, the park was an ideal spot for someone to fall in love with cardio walking. We’d agreed on her last visit that since she didn’t report to work until 10 am, she would walk the park early every morning. Thrice weekly she would perform her three exercise/three set resistance training regimen. The training template, she agreed, was doable and user-friendly—assuming she actually pulled the trigger.
In fact she never completed a single day of full compliance. Her ingrained habits and slothful, self-indulgent lifestyle apparently had claws equal to those of a grizzly gripping a just-caught salmon. She felt it important to justify her laziness with abstract talk of self esteem and feeling good about herself. In reality she was a fitness poseur with zero pain tolerance and with no real desire to change any of her long-ingrained, exceedingly detrimental habits.
Let me count the ways I sought to accommodate this overconfident under-achiever: she had a sweet tooth so I had found her a sports nutrition bar that she absolutely loved. She agreed to use the substitution principle to wean herself away from sugar. Anytime the sweet tooth Jones hit, she was to eat a sport nutrition bar to satiate the sugar craving. She loved fish and shellfish and could afford all she wanted. I showed her how to make a variety of delicious fish and shrimp dishes, all of which could be prepared inside ten minutes. She had no problem eating salads and fibrous vegetables. When she left the first time she was enthused and fired up and I really thought she was going to succeed.
On her second visit I sat her down and before I could open my mouth she began talking a mile a minute, chockfull of rationalizations and excuses as to why she had fallen off the wagon. I pointed out that factually she had never gotten on the proverbial wagon to begin with. She seemed extremely practiced at excuse-giving. In my mind her problem started and ended with laziness. She told me with straight face that she was “unable” to wake up. She could not get it together to go to the park and walk. “I can’t seem to get up in the morning. I like late night TV and consider it my quality time with my husband. I always feel tired in the morning.” Some quality time. Her bitch list continued. “I can’t seem to make time for the weight training program. It was so exciting when you were watching me and guiding me; at home it all seems so boring. I seem to have a lot of scheduling conflicts.” There was more, much more. “I can’t find time to get to the store and buy food…I don’t like to grocery shop…I can’t seem to get it together to prepare shellfish. They don’t taste as good as when you made them…I made salmon one night and it stunk up my kitchen for days afterwards. I ate all my sport nutrition bars in three days and haven’t gotten around to buying any more.”
To my ears it was all “I can’t, I won’t, I refuse!” After she finished delivering her litany of excuses, I told her that there was nothing more I could do for her. She was baffled by this and explained that she needed another approach: this “primitive stuff” was “not for me.” She wanted me to provide her something different. She suggested I teach her another form of exercise that was more “Pilates-like.” As I unceremoniously escorted her to the door, I told her “I can’t get results for those who can’t implement the program.” I told her that she should resign herself to physically spiraling downward for the rest of her life. She seemed mortally insulted and got a little testy. This bought out the testiness in me. I told her I was all out of “magical fairy dust” and thus, unable to sprinkle it on her, thereby allowing her to skip past all the disciplined effort. “Without magical fairy dust,” I said, “I am unable to transform your fat ass into that svelte vision you envision.” She left in a sanctimonious huff.
How much easier could I have made the process? She only needed to weight train three times a week for less than 20 minutes per session. She only needed to take a daily walk around a lovely public park in a surrealistic setting. She could eat once a day using the Warrior Diet, or she could graze, eating small mini-meals every three hours, using the Parrillo approach. She could eat out, often, if she obeyed our simple rules. To overcome her sweet addiction I introduced her to substitute nutritional supplements that she liked.
Factually, she didn’t crave a new body more than she craved her self-indulgent habits and soft lifestyle. My simplistic approach was not nearly simple enough or easy enough for her.
I had another client who was in dire need of help: he needed a new attitude towards food and eating. He was in his late thirties and had added 35 pounds of pure body fat over the last 24 months. This was due to the metabolic slowdown that happens to men around this age. He had what I called the “cafeteria complex.” He wanted to pick and choose amongst my strategies: he wanted to lose the body fat, but rejected every dietary approach I suggested for a variety of reasons. He didn’t want to try the Warrior Diet because he HAD to eat during the day. He didn’t want to use the Parrillo approach because eating 5 to 7 times a day was “too much hassle.” He liked my weight training and couldn’t get enough of that. He was consistent in his cardio and did it often. He generated excellent training intensity and I told him he had “NFL offensive lineman syndrome.” He asked what I meant. I said, “Real strong, great cardio conditioning—yet still fat as a pregnant hippopotamus.” He too became mortally offended.
What he really wanted was for me to suggest the slightest, mildest of modifications; tiny tweaks that would produce dramatic effects. In actuality the only changes that would net him the radical results he sought were radical changes that he was unwilling to embrace. He wanted to argue so I told him the same thing I had told the change-resistant lady. “Resign yourself to looking and staying the same—or getting fatter.” Like an auctioneer he wanted me to rattle off a list of mild dietary strategies until I stumbled upon one to his liking. The diagnosis for his current condition was as plain as the nose on his chubby face: he was eating way too much of the wrong stuff at the wrong times. He wanted me to rearrange his dietary deck chairs ever so slightly, then pat him on the head, tell him how great he was doing and send him on his way. Then he would magically lose 35 pounds of fat in two weeks by cutting out the second piece of pie and switching to lite beer. He was another example of “I can’t” or perhaps more accurately in his case, “I won’t!” He was far more attached to his current habits and comforts than he was to the idea of building a new body.
In my experience unless the individual positively burns for transformation, unless they can mentally visualize themselves as a final finished physical product and use that vision to tantalize and induce self-motivation, nothing of any significant physical consequence is likely to occur. If a person approaches the transformational process with the approximate same level of motivation and commitment they muster for mowing the lawn or brushing their teeth, the whole effort is doomed to eventual failure. The internal vision must be so strong and so real that it motivates the person to actually drop bad habits. Vision enables a tired trainee to get out of bed when they don’t really feel like it-then train with the savagery necessary to produce gains. Vision enables people to break the chains of bad habit and escape the ceaseless cycle of endless, mindless self-indulgence. Those individuals with strong inner vision are the ones likely to gain traction and eventually succeed in engineering a successful physical transformation.
“County Ron” had vision. When Ron first came to me I was unaware that he had been in a horrific industrial accident a few years prior: his leg and knee had been destroyed when a truck engine fell on him. One shoulder had to be reconstructed and in the accident aftermath the 5’9” 49 year old man had ballooned up to 240 pounds. Had I known he was damaged goods, I likely would have passed on working with him for fear of re-injuring his rebuilt body.
Ron is classical country: stoic, dignified, resolute and steadfast. A man of few words, he was by nature a hard worker with a high pain tolerance. He never murmured a single complaint. His progress was breathtaking: for three straight months he improved in each lift in each session. His walking morphed into power walking, then trotting, then jogging and eventually running. His lovely wife Roxanne mixed up massive amounts of chicken, rice and vegetables that he would graze on throughout the day. He neither smoke nor drank, he never missed a workout despite working two jobs. For three straight months he performed the three powerlifts—and nothing else.
On day one he squatted 95 pounds for a few shaky reps; bench pressed 95 for five, and deadlifted 135 eight times. Fast forward to the AAU World Championships 89 days later: Ron squatted 253 (making 275, called on depth), bench pressed 226 and deadlifted 402. On day one working with me he weighed 241 pounds. Ninety days later at the competition he weighed an official 174 pounds, he had lost a staggering 66 pounds in 90 days. It was even better than that; he had added 10 pounds of muscle in those same 90 days. The 50 year old took third place in his age group and weight division, his first ever athletic competition, the Amateur Athletic Union world powerlifting championships.
Ron is a classical example of country can-do. You can replicate Ron’s results; you too can undergo a radical transformation in a matter of months. Our methods work every single time. The only variable is the degree of application the user is able to generate. Visualize your body in final finished physical form. This vision will help power your ongoing efforts.
Those who burn for transformation now have a proven methodology of metamorphosis: the search is over…time for implementation!
The Band came from nowhere specific and their evocations were indistinct…saloons with cracked windows and leaky ceilings, dancehall girls, hotel rooms with naked light bulbs, highways, deserts, great rivers, mountains, girls glimpsed once or left behind or revisited many times. Saturday afternoon outings, race track bets, traveling over country back roads in fourth-hand cars with a bottle passed hand to hand; truck stops, railroads, three cell jails, eternal dreams of wealth, bad debts, hangovers and movement—always movement—forever that sense of traveling back and forth across the land, trapped by its immensity and engulfed in never ending and infinite change.
—Nik Cohn
There was a time when I thought about calling this book, “Fitness from Big Pink.” I didn’t think many people would understand my abstract correlation so I shelved the idea. In 1967 a record was released called Music from Big Pink and it set off a counterrevolutionary shockwave. Eric Clapton quit his superstar group, The Cream, upon hearing the record. Michael Schumacher wrote in Clapton’s biography,
The Band’s unique song arrangements were deceptive; what appeared to be simple, back-to-the-basics music was in fact a complex, thoughtful layering of sound, devoid of flash.
That’s actually a pretty good description of the Purposefully Primitive philosophy. Clapton was playing in the biggest band in the world and upon hearing Music from Big Pink, he realized…
I felt we {The Cream} were dinosaurs and what we were doing was outdated and boring. Music from Big Pink bowled me over. Nothing was ever the same for me after that record.
At the time, the popular music world resembled the current state of the fitness universe. Sonic overkill infected popular music as mindless pretension and needless nihilism was de rigueur. Music mired in muddled politics was passed off as social sophistication. Lyrical cynicism was melded with increasingly elaborate musical modes and the musical world was awash in Orwell’s “smelly little orthodoxies.” It seemed each new musical offering was louder, harsher, brasher, more derivative and pretentious than its competitive predecessor. Everyone sought the next “breakthrough.”
Nowadays fitness “experts” and “industry leaders” enthrall and bedazzle the gullible public with the unquestioned contention that physical progress is all about what lies around the next corner. The unspoken assumption is that we live in an era of fitness miracles and “the march of progress” trumps into obsoleteness any and all things that came before. This fitness contention is as false and ridiculous as its musical corollary was back in 1967. The Band created music that pointed backwards while everyone else pointed forward. Primordial counterrevolutionaries, they honed their retro message in rural isolation, away from radio, pop culture trends and contemporary influences.
Musical Purposeful Primitives, they displayed deceptive degrees of sophistication and nuance. They strove for simplification while everyone else sought complication. The Band told stories while everyone else surface skimmed. They didn’t confuse emotional immaturity with factual reality. They left space in their music and played with taste and restraint, speaking with clarity and conviction. They told tales that were at once interesting, humorous, profound, profane, emotional, wicked, angelic and always and forever rooted in personal experience.
Oddly, the public took their message to heart. People sensed the truth in their music and they achieved commercial success. When I first conceptualized this book I thought that I would construct a fitness equivalent of Music from Big Pink, “Fitness from Big Pink.” This analogy was entirely appropriate. I too point backwards. While I pay homage to fitness Masters, Big Pink paid homage to ancient blues Masters.
I had the good fortune to have a farsighted publisher and editor, John Du Cane, who insisted my book be something more than the conventional “fitness cookbook.” The cookbook fitness formula is all about making money. The fitness cookbook is a mercenary undertaking that coldly selects a large target demographic then assembles a series of softball exercises and easy-as-pie diet strategies that are then attached to happy-face sound bites used in purposefully deceptive ad campaigns. Bogus pabulum is boldly proclaimed as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘breakthrough.’ Dynamic, attention-grabbing adjectives lure naïve consumers to userfriendly, factually ineffective methods designed to sell units. Cookbooks are financially driven “projects” that play fast and loose with the truth.
John insisted we create something more, something with “eloquent gravitas.” My idea was to champion an unpalatable message: I would reiterate to the public the fitness ultrabasics they likely never learned to begin with. Championing the harsh and unvarnished truth is always a tough sell.
People demand a method or product that will enable them to circumvent the harsh realities of the physical transformation process. Unscrupulous fitness hucksters are only too happy to provide the gullible public with pretend solutions, magical mystery products that provide product owners the fitness equivalent of a “get out of jail free card.” When the sales curve plummets on the current magical mystery product, the product maker retires that particular product and introduces an even better magical mystery product, “Turbo X Cubed! Now with Supercharged Nitrous Mx3!!” The new magical mystery product is trotted out with a brand new ad campaign and the ceaseless cycle rolls ever onward….
I thought this book should be musically analogous to a plaintive Band song, or perhaps a John Coltrane solo or a Thelonious Monk composition. I would not pander to anyone. Like the iconic bebop jazz Masters, I might actually drive away potential audiences with the uncompromising nature of the harsh message. The message would remain true to what I knew to be true. Jazz at the highest level is the polar opposite of the modern Machiavellian corporate rock template where Svengalian puppet masters assemble Scandinavian songwriters to compose funk ditties played by mercenary studio musicians using genius studio wizards to gloss over vocal inadequacies of talent-less pop divas. Skilled choreographers are then assigned to teach rhythm-less spastics how to put on slickster shows for mind-numbed masses paying $150 for a ticket to watch a 50 foot video screen in a football stadium. I wanted to produce the fitness equivalent of a Keith Jarrett solo piano gig on a Friday night at the Village Vanguard circa 1975.
I think it not coincidental that in his previous life as a Cambridge undergraduate, John Du Cane had been a rabid jazz enthusiast and a film and literary critic The book took me the best part of a year to write, yet John never once pressured me. It was a testament to his intense artistic sensibilities. I isolated myself in rural seclusion and used a musician tactic known as “going to the woodshed” to write my data download. I took my artistic cues from a famous urban musical purposeful primitive…
In 1962 tenor saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins stood atop the Jazz universe. Acclaimed by critics and fans, his concerts and club dates were sellouts and his record sales were tops in the jazz industry. Yet Rollins was plagued by artistic self-doubt. He could not shake an intense dissatisfaction with himself and his technique. He felt a spiritual disconnect between himself and his playing. The music that he made was reflective of his life to that point in time, but that musical reflection bored him to tears. What he really wanted was a break from clubs, recording, touring and traveling the world so he could turn inward and recalibrate.
Introspection requires isolation, time and space to think and breathe and above all else, time to forget all that you’ve learned. To come upon something new an artist needs seclusion. So many wanted to see him play his music, so many depended on a working Sonny Rollins for the food for their families’ table. An inactive Rollins would disappoint and deprive those who loved him most. The pressure was strangulating his creativity. Incongruously everyone in his orbit told him he was at the absolute peak of his awesome powers. He felt hemmed in and static, restrained by the constraints of the stylistic path he had blazed. The end came when Rollins repeatedly caught himself plagiarizing himself. He became painfully aware that he was continually and uncontrollably repeating certain ingrained phrase patterns. Tics and habits infected his improvisations and the very air he sucked in to power the horn on exhalation felt stale and lifeless; yet he was at the peak of his powers. He was plagiarizing himself. As Nick Tosches wrote “In the Hand of Dante,”
“Above all I stole from myself. Words and phrases that enamored me, whether I had come upon them or they had come to me from within, were endlessly repeated and recycled: ridden like horses until they were dead. I became a fool, a thief who stole from himself.”
Suddenly and mysteriously Sonny Rollins dropped off the scene. For three years, five nights a week, he took his saxophone and trudged to the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge. He would stand mid-bridge on a catwalk, his back to a pillar, staring out over the river. He’d let his mind go blank and let his fingers mindlessly move over the keys of the horn. He would improvise from midnight until four. Then he would trudge back to his nearby apartment. The Bridge offered him seclusion and the ability to blow as loud and long as he wanted. By thrusting himself into a new and odd environment, he struck off in a new and odd musical direction. His odyssey, without purposeful direction, took his nightly practice sessions to strange new places. He strode boldly down an unmarked artistic trail; he had no idea where it might lead or where it would end or when it ended if it would end in an artistic dead-end, a dry hole.
As the months melted into years, Sonny underwent a musical detoxification. It was not all pleasant. It is difficult and counterintuitive to give up what you know and what made you famous and popular. Some nights deep into his improvisations Rollins would experience artistic vertigo, an odd sensation similar to stepping off the last step of a long staircase in the dark and missing the bottom step. His elaborate “no mind” improvisational flights often could find nowhere to “land” after extended and exhausting passages. Initially his practice sessions were unfocused and somewhat confused. Over the subsequent months and years, his practice sessions became increasingly and incrementally more focused and intense. Late into his third year of seclusion an internal 6th sense signaled to him that this phase had run its course. It was time for Sonny Rollins to renter the “real world.”
Out of the despairing depths of artistic uncertainty a new musical vocabulary slowly revealed itself By purposefully isolating himself and allowing himself time to forget, new phrases and fresh musical ideas emerged, slowly and subtly. Rollins no longer plagiarized himself because he had purposefully forgotten how he used to play. Something strangely different was emerging and it was exhilarating—he was continually amazed at the oddness, the pure strangeness of what leapt from the bowels of his horn—the notes he played were now conceived within the deepest depths of his musical sub-consciousness. His transformation was complete. It became apparent during those explosive nightly practice sessions towards the end of his third and final year that it was time to end the woodshed phase.
It was time for Sonny Rollins to share with the public his musical discoveries: whether or not the public embraced or rejected his new language was irrelevant. His purposeful isolation and introspection had born strange fruit. Rollins had abandoned one musical style, invented another style and in doing so reinvented himself. After his self-imposed sabbatical he reemerged and went straight into the recording studio. He produced a groundbreaking album unlike anything he had done before. He titled his reentry record “The Bridge.”
This book is my version of Music from Big Pink or The Bridge. Strange fruit honed in rural isolation, away from modern influences, the internet, magazines, TV and any and all contemporary fitness trends. I have consciously constructed this book using my own odd blend of personal experience, reflection and intense introspection. I have borrowed the musician’s timeless woodshed template. My approach invokes The Band’s retro message, the iconoclastic jazz musician’s allegiance to artistic purity, and the scientist’s cold recognition of factual reality. My approach stands in stark contrast to the modern fitness template where a rationale is reverse engineered to justify the existence of a (ineffectual) system or product.
Our stark, plaintive Purposefully Primitive method offers a limited menu of choices, but within the reduced selection exist a veritable universe of variations and variables; enough possibilities to keep a diligent man busy for the rest of his natural life. When balanced application of all the individual elements is achieved, synergistic critical mass is attained, causing transformational progress to accelerate dramatically.
Science and method need to be melded with physical and psychological fierceness: methodical consistency is the progress amplifier. Willpower jump starts the process. When enthusiasm takes over for willpower, intense training and disciplined eating become effortless and enjoyable. Tangible physical results continually stoke and refuel the fires of enthusiasm. The pace of progress accelerates in direct proportion to the degree of enthusiastic commitment the trainee is able to generate.
I would like to offer my heartfelt and sincere thanks to all the true Masters I have encountered on my long and circuitous life journey. These men were kind enough to share with me their profound discoveries. As a fitness Prometheus I now pass along to you the transformational fire of these true Masters. Make wise use of this incredible information. I wish you the best of luck in your own transformational efforts.
Marty Gallagher
