What is Strength?

I’ve been dwelling on meaningless definitions of terms we use in our daily life. What is love? What is effort? What is determination? One that hits closer to home than I’d like is; What is Strength? Strength is something that people define themselves by. It is a sought after trait, one that can be easily and often quantified. How much do you bench? How fast can you run “x” distance? How much shit can you take before you crack? All things that people want more of, all things that I thought I wanted more of.

When I started thinking on this topic I immediately was shrouded with cynicism, with the first real correlation being between strength and greed. Remember Gordon Gecko said that greed is good, so strength must be good too. When people ask about getting stronger, they correlate that with a number, “I want to lift “x”, I want to jump “x”, I want to run “x””. It is the desire to attain a quantifiable thing that makes it such a greedy concept.. Digging my heels in deeper to this greed concept, I reflected on strength athletes in preparation and competition. Not that all athletes aren’t just as egocentric, but these ones really take the cake and expect everyone and everything to line up for their delicately balanced performance to show their strength. People will do terrible things to themselves, their bodies, and others to achieve these qualifiable feats of strength.The biggest problem is that there is always more you can do, or rather it seems like there is almost more. When will you be satisfied? In the big picture, there isn’t that much of a difference between a 495 bench and a 505 bench besides that one has crossed an imaginary line into the “500” category. Even defining strength outside of strength sports, when we say someone is a strong runner, we know their strength is referring to their ability to run, not the person themselves. This likely means that this strong runner, can run fast at their given performance distance and this yet again takes us to another easily quantifiable feat of strength albeit in the endurance sport realm, it still seems to have weezled its egocentric focus into there.

Let’s do an experiment, say someone could, at a time, lift a weight that a peer considered strong (because, let’s admit it, qualifiable strength looks very different depending on the individual’s perspective on the matter). Now they can’t perform that feat anymore. They were injured, they stopped that style of training, or even they were physically peaked for performance and are in the lull of training that occurs in the months after a competitive demonstration. Is this person no longer strong? You lost all your money; you are poor. In a very measurable way, quality has been lost. Looking at this person at two individual moments in time, not even knowing about their feat, one might say that this person was weak, since that is how they appear at the given moment. The person in question might even feel an obligation to prove to their group that they are strong, by bragging about past feats or attempting new ones to demonstrate their value. But strength, as we have thus defined it, is temporary. It can only exist at a moment in time and cannot be maintained, at least not forever.

If Strength is not greed, then what is it? I know it, because I’ve felt it. When you are strong you feel invincible. You feel like you can walk through a wall. You feel prepared, prepared to lift more than you’ve ever lifted, or climbing higher than you’ve ever climbed. This is a feeling that extends outside of the gym. In the world of hiring departments, people refer to a prospective hire as a “strong candidate”. It is unlikely they asked this candidate about any other qualifiable physical performances to assess their merit for the job. They are strong because they are confident, educated, and prepared. Fitness is defined by many as the ability to perform a task. If someone is prepared to perform a task, they would likely be able to perform it well or at least better than an unprepared version of themselves. If strength is fitness, then the ability to perform these tasks again and for a duration is taken into account as well. Are all these traits: endurance, speed, strength, etc, all the same? Once we boil them down and strip away all the deep rooted cultural associations with their individual groups, they all start to look like the same human quality, one that we all look to improve, but can’t quite put our finger on. But like a feat of strength, we will know it when we see it and we will feel it when we have it.