The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Your objections to this are actually hilariously off-base. Taking the second first
Thalatta, Thalatta! Xenophon* is on the shortlist for greatest general in classical antiquity**. If you have never read the Anabasis you should, but at least watch The Warriors it's just as good. Xenophon was elected to command of a group of 30,000 Greek mercenaries, trapped in hostile Persia after the side that hired them lost the civil war they were hired to fight in before they could arrive. He lead them in a fighting march across hundreds of miles, facing enemies on all sides, with no home base. He knew warfare about as well as anyone could.
I assume because you said "Game" rather than "sport" you're talking about something in the Vidya or Chess range? Yeah, physical sports just don't work like that. You can't just make the same explosive movement over and over all day. You'd end up with overuse injuries, you'd overtrain and retard physical progress, and you'd fatigue yourself and practice shittier and shittier reps of precision movements. And in a contact sport (phalanx warfare is the ultimate contact sport), you can't train full speed often at all without injuries. We still aren't really sure what Phalanx fighting looked like, but we can look at analogues.*** Taking the Medieval Tournament, a scrimmage in terms of battle, and fatalities were constant whatever the precautions. You simply can't do very much fighting when you're training for fighting, so you have to do other things to build your skills. Professional fighters today spar only a few hours a day, a couple times a week. NFL teams practice full contact only once a week. It's not practical to "grind" away at fighting 12 hours a day.
But, my use of the quote was some rhetorical sleight of hand. It's likely that the "dancing" Xenophon referenced was more like the single-sex group dances common at traditional celebrations. Less Dirty Dancing and more like a college Bhangra competition or a high school colorguard. And Phalanx combat was notoriously more about group coordination than about individual strength or courage or prowess. So almost nothing would train you for that better than practicing high speed complex coordination among pretty much the same guys who would stand in the phalanx next to you because the Polis isn't that big. So Xenophon's/Socrates' point is actually pretty mundane mechanics of the phalanx: Coordination is more important than individual strength or daring.
*I'm skeptical that we can really say much about Socrates, there is the Platonic Socrates and Xenophon's Socrates, in addition to The Clouds Socrates and some likely false but more contemporary than us interpolations. Socrates himself was noted as a hardy and stoic, but not extraordinarily athletic, soldier.
**It's reasonable to discount Xenophon because he was his own best publicist, as was Julius Caesar (Alexander paid his professionals). If we're going by that though, Hannibal is the clear winner. Not only was his history written by his enemies, his entire culture was wiped out before his body was cold. Still gets the rep for GOAT.
***If I were a mad scientist in Mengele mold, I'd force prisoners to attempt some pre-modern fighting methods, for the purpose of simulating how it would have actually gone. Of course, a phalanx on phalanx fight would require minimum 128 prisoners for two 8x8s
More options
Context Copy link