A while back everyone was talking about some free speech blowhard named Milo.
Until then, the only Milo I knew was the old powerlifting magazine and its inspiration — Milo of Croton, the mythic Greek strongman:
This is what happens to bodybuilders with their head crammed up their own ass.
The Greek Milo built his legendary strength by lifting and carrying a newborn calf and then repeating the feat every day. So as the calf grew into a cow, Milo grew to be very big and strong.
Of course, even the best training program gets stale and boring, but rather than add back-off sets with a lamb or add chains to a hoof or two, one day Milo went full program hopper and slaughtered the poor cow to eat it.
This earned Milo the distinction of being the first to ever successfully apply progressive overload, but also the ignoble title of the first selfish, head-crammed-too-far-up-his-own-ass bodybuilder. Oh well.
But karma wasn’t kind to Milo. His death came while walking through the forest in a foul mood and encountering a tree that he thought was looking at him all funny-like.
That offence — along with whatever ungodly amount of Greek Anadrol he was running — drove Milo to ram his hands into the split of the tree to rip it in half, thereby teaching it a lesson in arboreal manners.
But the joke was on him: the tree closed upon his hands and, unable to free himself, Milo was ripped apart and devoured by wolves.
Simply dying of exposure or a nasty heart attack would’ve done it, but the Greeks never pass up the opportunity to make a grisly point:
- Don’t change a program that’s working.
- If it’s getting a little stale or feels boring, make subtle tweaks before wholesale changes.
- Getting fancier is okay but never forget the basic work that got you to this point. And never forget where you came from and who helped you get to where you are today. Not eating old training partners is a good start.
- The success you earned comes up with a responsibility to “do some good with it.”
- Don’t go looking for fights, especially if you’re noticeably big and strong. There are much smaller but FAR more capable foes out there looking for a puffed-up tough guy to make an example of.
- Don’t mess with trees. Come on, man.
– Coach Bryan