HOUSEKEEPING
A final call for The Practice Project beginning this Friday (11th).
An admittedly self-serving beginning to the Bestof’s, but one that will better serve you.
I was looking for a recipe online this morning, and if you’ve done the same, you’ll know that when all you want is a list of ingredients or instructions, or whether you need a t or a T, you’re a long way from getting it.
First, you’ve got to wade through page after page of back story and photos and advertising, none of which has anything to do with you putting that dish on the table.
Because while all you want is a quick answer, they are interested in the key SEO metric, ‘time on the page’. It’s not malicious— you can understand that for a blog, SEO is important.
Apparently.
But this is now normal. Normal that you click on a recipe and just start speed scrolling until you are halfway down a long page, at least, before you have to even think about slowing down to find what you’re after.
So it doesn’t serve you. And your behaviour has adapted accordingly, so it doesn’t even serve them.
And this is our world of slop. Of misalignment with everyone and everything
Fitness, as I’ve discussed, is the same. Crowded out by layer after layer. Curtains of crap. Nonsense that may be factually correct, interesting or even useful in another context.
But has NOTHING to do with you getting and staying fit.
Even pulling up the drawbridge here would be fantastic, but we don’t. We instead go on to believe that all this other stuff IS fitness.
Now, I’ve had the same accusation levelled at me. That, I too, take a long time to say a short thing.
And if you are looking for what you think is the recipe, I would agree.
But the fitness recipe I’m offering doesn’t look like that. The fitness recipe I offer IS all that stuff written exactly like that to help highlight the distinctions so you notice the nuance that will free you from this rubbish forever.
To offer a practice that removes all the unnecessary normal.
So you’re left with supernormal.
THE BESTOF’S
BEST IN SHOW
But enough of the frivolities.
There was a lot on offer this month and I had a few options lined up here but they all got bumped when I stumbled on one of my favourite writers, Iain McGilchrist —as referenced in a previous Bestof here— who has made the leap to Substack, offering a more user-friendly introduction to his ideas and work than any of his typically doorstop tomes present.
The other benefit is that we get his insight outside more narrow fields of enquiry, while still enjoying both the scope of his ideas and their elasticity in addressing our macro—global, societal and historical— concerns, while grounding them in our fine-grained, individual experience, and, ultimately, to respective hemispheres of the brain.
His thoughts are as expansive as they are urgent, and in just three articles, you get a masterclass in how we’ve arrived at this domestic and geopolitical juncture, what we might do about it, and what we can look forward to if we don’t.
Exhortations to tolerance were profoundly intolerant in intent; expressions of compassion were selective and sounded good, without necessarily doing good, and sometimes doing actual harm; sentimentality, self-admiration and feeling good has been the key note of politics in recent years, and sentimentality is at its core not kind but cruel. The wolf that show its teeth is less dangerous than the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
With astonishing hubris and abundant pettiness, we sit in judgment on our ancestors, as though we were by definition wiser than they; we measure them against a check-list we have drawn up representing the parochial outlook of the last few decades. That list has no historical antecedent and is in opposition to most wisdom traditions around the world: we imagine we are superior because we are blind to many things that they could see.
We live in an increasingly dangerous world, one where if we are to survive at all, and especially to maintain and defend a free society, we need to regain a truer understanding of our history and values, to regain some self-respect, and promote and rely on only the very best people. Instead we appear to be actively finding ways of doing the opposite.
Okay. With that more than troubling assessment ringing in our ears we’ll go to a Guardian article ostensibly about the geopolitical reality Australia is slowly waking up to, but only serves to illustrate much of what McGilchrist describes above.
International security analyst Alan Behm suggests Australia get on the front foot.
Australia enjoys considerable national power. The constant retreat into the sham comfort of “middle power” (as though we were an southern hemisphere version of the Baltic states) and “punching above our weight” represents a serious failure of confidence, imagination and political leadership. We occupy a continent. Our resource base is practically limitless. Our economy currently ranks 12th, perhaps just in front of Russia in current circumstances. On some calculations, four of our capital cities are in the top hundred in terms of amenity and habitability. On other measures, eight of our universities are in the top hundred global tertiary institutions – a remarkable achievement for a population of 26 million. Even in terms of military spending, Australia ranks 13th in the world – albeit a long way behind the US and China.
Forgetting that the ‘practically limitless’ resource base is, under Net Zero, not exploited to the benefit of Australia and is instead shipped to China where they burn the fossil fuels to make solar panels to sell back to us not that they'll make any difference anyway, the passing reference to defence points to the flaw in that plan: In the absence of any credible defence, these relative riches don’t confer influence so much as make us ripe for the picking.
Behm may find the ‘middle power’ designation frustrating, but Australia's military limitations are real, with naval and air forces insufficient in both numbers and range to independently secure vast maritime approaches, let alone project meaningful force into wider Asia.
The problem is not one of punching— above our weight, or otherwise— but of getting punched.
A strategic naivety that made no sense at all. Until it did.
There are some deep pathologies that constrain Australia’s agency. For all our protestations to the contrary, we are widely seen in Asia and the Pacific as deeply racist, and we are. Again, just contemplate the voice referendum. We are a structurally misogynistic society, with male entitlement continuing to dominate business and the professions. We are insecure, afraid of abandonment and constantly in search of reassurance from a great and powerful protector.
Insofar as nonsense can make sense. A prime example of the partial truths, revisionism and academic ignorance, detailed by McGilchrist.
And while this is not to preface the argument with the tired and obvious disclaimer, Australia has not been racist, misogynist, or whatever other change you might care to admit to, in its past.
Or that accusations of this sort can only be made by comparison to an imagined utopian ideal that — unsurprisingly, given Australia exists in the real world and is made of humans with all their flaws and foibles— is yet to live up to.
What Behm fails to acknowledge is Australia's substantial progress on precisely the issues he identifies. Not to suggest the work is complete, but they demonstrate the capacity of Australian society to acknowledge historical wrongs and work toward addressing them, a capacity enabled by the liberal democratic values that underpin our society. Values both hard-won and defended.
This is a reductive worldview favouring simplistic identity politics over historical and geopolitical complexity but Behm beautifully signals the blindless characteristic of this ideological capture by citing the ‘voice’ referendum as evidence of racism while failing to recognise that exactly this binary —you're either for it or you're racist— framing of the issue, sealed its fate.
But what makes the charges particularly galling here— although helpfully illustrative again of just how wilfully blind you have to be to write such bullshit— is that it's made by direct comparison to what are some of— if not the— least ethnically diverse, racist and misogynistic populations on the planet.
A collection in which, by comparison to friend and foe alike with respect to these issues, Australia is far less a guilty party than the literal guiding light.
All before we get to the giant Panda in the room.
The one now interning the Tibetan and Uyghur populations for reeducation, while supplanting them with "millions of Han Chinese settlers to dilute and assimilate the local ethnic populations, transforming them into weak, isolated minorities, with a degraded identity of ever having been a distinct people."
All despite which, figures like Behm might dismiss these observations as xenophobic or racist. But every mention of China here refers to the CCP, not its people and where democracy serves as a tool of freedom, authoritarianism only tightens its grip. Time has not led to so much as a pause in these aims, much less their abandonment—only to the employ of surveillance technologies to amplify these aims.
Indeed, the first victims here are the Chinese people and culture, subject to the sadly mistaken manifesto of a couple of well-meaning white guys. An idea, nonetheless, that in every instance and all iterations has meant misery on its maximal scale.
Iterations that continue. Even today, none of the communist states claim to have achieved communism in their countries, only to be working towards its establishment. All the horror conveniently explained away only as proof we haven’t quite got it right yet.
The ideology can not be wrong.
But it has never had nearly the means to that end as the CCP does today. And racism isn’t the half of it. From covering up Covid to their belligerence in the South China Sea, from the crackdown in Hong Kong to skirmishes or territorial provocations with most of their neighbours—India, Taiwan, Japan, and across the South China Sea—bar Russia, all just to barely scratch the surface— and with a state-nurtured century of humiliation chip on its shoulder is now, finally, all dressed up to seek redress if not vengeance, and one best managed, if Behm is to be believed, by diplomacy.
But Australia is right to “feel insecure, afraid of abandonment and constantly in search of reassurance from a great and powerful protector,” because its prosperity and security have rested less on diplomacy or economic fundamentals than on the deterrent effect of military power and the anomalous peace the world has enjoyed in the past 80 years has come solely courtesy of America’s military might.
And because there’s every chance we’ll find ourselves in the thoughts and prayers of our US cousins rather than their strategic calculations. China may yet roll the dice, cut straight to the chase and forgo even the pretence of negotiation.
In either case, diplomacy might be useful with respect to our allies, but the threat China presents to all and sundry makes that point largely moot as well.
Diplomacy or otherwise, divided we fall.
But, insofar as diplomacy is useful, it is only undermined by useful idiots proffering this sort of self-flagellation and China's wolf warrior diplomats, muzzled of late, will be off the chain soon enough.
They’ll be licking their chops at this own-goal of political point scoring, all too willing to point out the self-tendered speck in our eye while ignoring the log in theirs.
Showing their typical scant regard for any norm, much less rights or freedoms, they won't be receptive to cuddles. They'll be duly presenting countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, with a menu of 'soft' coercive measures that will all amount to the same thing: get with the program.
A range of soft measures, not because —as people like Behm fancifully believe— that violence never solves anything, but because, if there is a reductive view that reduces the complexities of human history to a single rule of thumb, it's that violence has always solved anything.
You take the soft. Or you get the hard.
Diplomacy in a nutshell. Or, as Colonel Nathan Jessup—paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt— says in A Few Good Men:
Walk softly and carry an armoured tank division, I always say.
But with strategic analysis like this, who needs enemies? As the crux of an essay, ‘National Power, Agency, and a Foreign Policy that Delivers, the only thing Behm serves up here is Australia on a plate.
More of the same but different.
This, then, is what the activist class has been making excuses for. This is what they referred to as ‘resistance’. This is what they called ‘a day of celebration’.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/20/a-savage-rupturing-of-our-civilisation/?
Same but different— Shakespeare: the ready go-to for Nazi’s and the Klan.
Celebrate the Bard for being British and you’ll be accused of nationalism. But celebrate his universal appeal and you’re in the firing line for promoting white supremacy.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/18/now-theyre-decolonising-shakespeare/?
Same but different— Australian universities following the Ivy League lead— mentioned in the November Bestof— and helping to make their students unemployable.
It reflects upon the students who are going out and applying for these jobs. And you’ve got these partners ... who would look at this stuff and think ‘That’s crazy. I don’t want to hire a kid who’s been taught by people like this
Although phones are doing a good job here too— making students unemployable., that is. Frankly, it’s not looking good for students.
Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things.
Different (finally). Ummmm, but also the same: Mimetic desire in the wil— everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch.
Do all hipsters look the same?
Of all fitness myths, this one is perhaps the hardest to kill, and I’ve put this in the nutrition section to underline that exercising to burn calories, aside from being utterly at odds with your physiology and needlessly miserable lens way in which to frame it, is a sure path to fitness frustration.
Out of all the benefits of physical activity, “burning calories” wouldn’t even crack the top ten.
https://physiqonomics.com/out-diet-sedentary-lifestyle/?
Bringing things squarely back into the nutrition department, Dr Rhonda looks at UPF’s (Ultra Processed Foods), and along with all the obvious stuff — a diet high in rubbish means you’ll consume more calories— the more worrying revelation that a diet high in these foods increased liver fat by 63% in just 5 days, before the real kicker:
Just 5 days of a high-calorie diet made the brains of these healthy, normal weight men structurally and functionally similar to people with obesity, and even after cutting the high-calorie foods out of their diet these changes persisted for at least one week.
I don’t have Australian figures but they won’t be a million miles from the standard American diet and the UPFs that account for nearly 60% of the average adult's daily caloric intake, and higher for children.
And that’s not only for five days, but every day.
https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/ultra-processed-foods
David Neill lays out the basics of strength and conditioning and an underlying (athletic) template very close to what we follow at Leftfield.
We apply a stimulus (lifting, running, jumping, etc.) and that stimulus applies stress. When the body encounters enough stress and is given adequate time to recover, it adapts to that stress and changes.
https://simplifaster.com/articles/strength-conditioning-for-non-strength-coaches/
Compared to just adding another plate or using a heavier KB, bodyweight exercises are a bit trickier when it comes to—key fitness principle— progressive overload.
Here’s GMB on the signs to look for that signal progress, and also how you can make the same exercises more difficult. But not too difficult.
Real progress isn’t measured by a number—it’s measured by how capable, confident, and free you feel in your own body.
And if you’re training with intention, that progress never stops.
https://gmb.io/bodyweight-skills-progression/
And a primer on the pushup. An exercise that everyone knows and can do some variation of— i.e. at an appropriate height— but I reckon maybe 1 in 30 would do properly, using the whole body.
So, read how to do them well, and you’ll not only enjoy the far greater benefits, but you won’t get the problems possible from doing them poorly.
When you engage your entire body in this way, you’re learning something essential that will absolutely carry over into every aspect of your life: You’re learning to move your body as a unit, rather than as a collection of parts.
An Outside article about fatigue — the ability to keep, keeping on— proving there is no substitute for strength.
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/fatigue-resistance/
While I dispute the idea that there is any single ‘key’ and cardiovascular fitness in the absence of strength, or, most critically, as we age, lean muscle mass means nothing. Nonetheless, here’s a deep dive into one critical aspect of fitness.
…and how to train smarter without overcomplicating it.
Physiologically Speaking, again, this time with the low-down on Zone 2. It could be in the training section, but Z2 also works perfectly as active recovery.
Also note active recovery is typically FAR better at helping you recover (from training, work, life stress demands) than the non-active variety ie Netflix.
Misty watercolour memories…
MISCELLANEOUS
Recommendations reflect what I’ve been reading/listening to/watching/using recently but, in most instances, and especially where music is concerned, will not have been released in the past month.
MUSIC
BOOKS
TV
No TV this month. Just lots of Jujits.
APP
CLIP
Have a great weekend.
- OLI