24 June 2010

You Want To Get Toned? How About You Just Go And Get Fucked?

The next time you hear some bitch blabber on about toning (and by bitch I don't mean chick, I mean bitch, as this insidious term seems to have crept into the vernacular of both men and women who have no clue what they're talking about with lifting), you should educate the motherfucker. Now, as much as we'd all like to educate them at the point of a sword, it's instead time to employ your rapier-like intellects rather than tossing them off the nearest tall building. Thus, put aside your hate for a moment and gather round the fire, because I'm going to fill you in on a tidbit that will invariably be ignored, but will at least expand your knowledge base and fuel your hatred for humanity all that much more.

I think I've established fairly concretely the fact that your average human being is rocking an intellect that would embarrass a banana slug. Whether this is innate or learned is a matter for some debate, but the fact remains that the average human is woefully unprepared to embark upon a program of physical fitness, mainly because they have no fucking idea what they're doing, a set of concrete goals, an idea of how to accomplish their goals, or the willpower and intestinal fortitude necessary to complete a workout of any worth. As such, they're less prepared than the idiots who settled Jamestown, but instead of starving to death and dying from drinking brackish water, these idiots will eat their fucking faces off and then bellow loudly about the fact that they're genetically predisposed to resembling some sort of land-dwelling cetacean (interesting sidenote, whales actually descended from land-dwelling mammals and are closely related to ungulates like deer, hippos, and giraffes).

 
 Michelle Levesque.  I'm sure some lazy fatass has told her they don't want to get this lean.

These idiots will regularly blather on that they do not want to look like you, because you're too muscular/lean/awesome/etc, but they just want to get "toned". You can read into this anything you want- to me, it means they're lazy and expect that they lack the requisite willpower to reach a level of physical fitness commensurate with their actual goal, and will thus settle for some sort of ephemeral toning goal. After implicitly admitting their various character faults, they will ask you pointed questions about exercise, and as you all know, they will continue doing whatever dumbass shit it was that they were doing in the first place. At this point, you, like I, most likely want to toss them in the trunk of your car, drive them to the nearest crack den, drive around back, and chokeslam them into a pile of dirty AIDS needles and broken glass for wasting your time. Instead, however, try dropping the following bit of knowledge on them.
 
Would you count this as one or two in your bodycount?    

When people are talking about toning, they're referring to myogenic tone, also known as tonus.  This phenomenon's essentially a state of partial contraction of a muscle, and that includes both smooth and striated muscle(1)- you'll find a shitload of articles on Pubmed referring to the myogenic tone of the the vascular system, for instance.  So basically, once you've achieved tonus, you're constantly flexing a bit, unconsciously.  Tonic innervation, as it's called, is achieved in one of two ways- by improving neural efficiency and by stimulating fast twitch muscle fibers.  You know how you do that?  Of course you fucking do, as you read this blog, and I've done little more than beat you over the fucking head with it- you lift very heavy weights for low reps.  To rehash a bit, however, the former head coach of the Bulgarian Olympic Weightlifting team, Ivan Abadjiev, stated that "Consistent training with high intensity loadings can increase the density of nerve impulse that can be generated by the central nervous system. Over time this allows the athlete to recruit a greater percentage of their higher threshold muscle fibres and hence significantly improve power output. Additionally, there is evidence that Type IIa muscle fibres can actually be converted to the more powerful Type IIb fibre type. Abadjiev states that these adaptations are best achieved when loadings are near maximal."(2)  High reps, conversely, stimulate slow twitch muscle fibers (Type I).  These fibers, being less dense than high twitch fibers, will engorge with blood, giving anyone with a preponderance of them a pumped look when they lift.  They won't maintain that look, however, which is why you'll see guys like Triple H walking around on the street and think he's a biker who plays pickup basketball in his free time, whereas you'd see a powerlifter like Joe Ladnier looking almost exactly the same walking around the mall as he would in the gym.
Ladnier's the guy on the right.
Given the fact that muscle tonus is best increase by lifting heavy weights, it would stand to reason that the idiot who's asking your advice would get their disgusting fatbody off the elliptical, because no, it's not going to help them "ease into the gym".  It'll let them watch tv in a different locale and will justify that bowl of ice cream they're going to eat when they get home to celebrate the fact that they managed to get their fat ass into the gym in the first place. Therefore, in the form of a gentle reminder like a brick off the side of their head, remind these fucking idiots that their high rep, machine based workouts will have them looking almost the same as when they started, in addition to the fact that they'll be criminally weak, have odd strength deficits, and will still be a fat fuck because they went to the gym and sat down on a padded bench, which is nothing more than a change in locale from what they were doing to get fat in the first place.

Go heavy or go fucking kill yourself.
1.  http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/M/Muscles.html - "Even at rest, most of our skeletal muscles are in a state of partial contraction called tonus. Tonus is maintained by the activation of a few motor units at all times even in resting muscle. As one set of motor units relaxes, another set takes over."
2.  Ivan Abadjiev + the Bulgarian Weightlifting System. http://weightliftingexchange.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=438&Itemid=60

27 comments:

  1. Nice post but you've got to start proof reading this shit.

    By the way, that is the best picture of a girl yet. Fucking wow!

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  2. really interesting stuff. i didnt know about the different types of muscles since i havent taken a biology class in the better part of a decade, but this is good to know.

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  3. I too am a huge fan of low rep lifting. It's all I want to do in the gym. But I've got a question for you CnP folks. How to go about training strength-endurance without being a high rep faggot? I must maintain a high level of endurance for my job and higher reps are the only way to achieve this I've found. Thoughts?

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  4. Being in the Air Force I see a lot of those pussies telling me that they want to get tone and usually I just tell them that they are fucked beyond repair! haha I guess now I can explain a bit to them and if their still not coming to the light, well a flying knee will be in order! I must agree that you posted the best pic so far on this one Jamie! haha Usually you make sure that your typing and such is tight as a virgin, were you fucking piss drunk when you put this up? hahaha

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  5. Newbie to the CnP philosophy here.

    So, as an example muscle- biceps. If I want HEUG MUSSELS for my arms, I should lift close to my max or more than my max for only 1-3 reps and lots of sets? Or only a few sets?

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  6. Here in Bandung Indonesia the local gym has a bit of a high school atmosphere to it, with squirrels running around crawling all over the machines screaming at each other SATU LAGI!! (one more!!) I of course am the only large caucasian in the place, and focus on 10 sets of 3, and so forth, as a general rule. When I was leaving today one of the "instructors" asked me in broken english why I do so many sets, so few reps? I grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote the equation for Power = force/time, where force in this case is weight lifted times reps. "So I rest one minute, and 10 sets, and do bench press with 100-140 kg...average 120 kg x 30, 3600, divided by 10 minutes...360 kilograms per minute. Meanwhile the dickhead on the smith's machine over there has been fucking around with his phone for the last 15. MENGERTI? (understand?)" Behold, I am the bringer of enlightenment even in this foreign land.

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  7. Nothing wrong with doing high rep work, just look at some of the elitefts guys.

    Of course, the high rep work should only supplement or be in addition to the low rep, heavy training.

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  8. Ever the voice of reason, Manveet. As a reminder, I still do some high rep work (as you guys can see in all of the programs I've got on here, but it's all ancillary, off-day detail work, like calves and arms. It's pretty much whatever I feel like I want to work without taxing my CNS too much, but it really only comprises about 10% of my total time in the gym.

    And to the guy who mentioned the editing, I just noticed that upon rereading it. I speed read, so I'll miss that sort of thing when I've just written it and am trying to pick up fuckups.

    In re Michelle Levesque, I had my picture taken with her at the Olympia one year and almost fucking passed out- she was in a full-body pvc suit and fucking sweats sex. I'll have to see if I can dig that pic up, haha.

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  9. "you'll see guys like Triple H walking around on the street and think he's a biker who plays pickup basketball in his free time"


    Are you retarded? That BTN press that you failed must have destroyed most of your brain. If we brought your dumb ass to the hospital and gave you a MRI, all it would show is that your brain stem is all that is still functioning but miraculously you still have the ability to type.

    Your blog sucks fucking dick now by the way.

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  10. Hahaha. Thanks, fuckface. Evidently, you've never seen Triple H in public.

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  11. Jamie, I can't get past the picture of Michelle, so get busy and dig out that picture you mentioned!

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  12. I agree with the Triple H fan: This blog sucks fucking dick.

    Every reader of this blog is a fucking flea on my big swinging nuts.

    ChAoS and PAIN is no match for the Moynihan Institute, and if you think otherwise, you're a homosexual cocksucker.

    Every reader of this blog can eat a dick.

    I bet CNP was fat as a kid and everyone made fun of him. So now he projects his self-hatred onto everything that resembles it.

    Every reader of this blog will be dead in 100 years. Dead in the fucking ground with worms eating through your corpse.

    CNP is nothing more than a fantasy of a lonely guy who wishes he had the charisma to start a cult. Too bad his charisma is pseudo-intellectual douche.

    P.S. I wrote that shit about your dad being a cross between Dick Cheney and Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter. Yeah, that's right. What the fuck are you going to do about it? A paleo man would come to the Moynihan Institute and fight me. You'll probably blog about it. Tell me how many paleo men blogged? You're a pathetic piece of shit.

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  13. Rant is now trying so hard that he's become boring.

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  14. Rant you like Jamie's blog. You like to read it. We all know how much you like it.

    You're sneaky rant but we know you like it;)

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  15. Rant just agreed with a Triple H fan. Not much more needs to be said.

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  16. Rant,

    You'll be dead in 30 years, old timer. Just a friendly reminder.

    I have a bottle of jack, a M&P .45, and an empty parking lot waiting for you bud if you want to make that 30 mins, I know things are hard for you.

    Think about it... :)

    Regards.

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  17. Even M&P is too high class for him. How about a hi-point?

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  18. Any and all time spent online is pretty much wasted and hours from your life that you're never going to get back. Since all of us here obviously spend plenty of time online even though we know we will never get that time back there's no point in whining about it. But reading a blog that you hate is about the stupidest thing you can do. Do you watch TV shows that you hate too? Listen to music that you hate? You idiots probably even hate all your friends in real life but hang out with them anyway and then talk shit behind each of their backs.

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  19. "any and all time spent online is pretty much wasted". Are you capable of expressing yourself in writing without sounding like you just got out of grammar school? You are certainly not going to be confused with Mike Mentzer, based on your juvenile thought process. All time is wasted? In your case, that is true.

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  20. It's not my fault you can't read, kid. Maybe your parents didn't beat you hard enough.

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  21. "Any and all time spent online is pretty much wasted"
    Good comeback, Glen. Back to back moronic posts. I'd expect nothing else.

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  22. Yo Rant,

    If u give me the address for the Moynihan Institute, maybe we can box this shit out, you peace of shit h8r.

    Dracoy

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  23. fucking pumped. Gonna lift some heavy shit and make some wussies shit pussies.

    fuck yeah.

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  24. "Gonna lift some heavy shit and make some wussies shit pussies." Hahahaha, classic.

    Is it me, or did Rant just call me out over the internet while simultaneously impugning my manhood? Hahaha.

    And Rant, everyone knew that was you. The reason I've got no interest in fighting you over your comments stems from the fact that your words are as feeble as your body, and my 72 year old dad would fuck you up without breaking a sweat. You're a fucking joke.

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  25. Once again I don't sock puppet. I don't hate you. I just think you're stupid. Who cares if someone wants to get toned or whatever? This was a classic meathead article. You have become a self parody. LOL!

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  26. Rant-

    The issue is that they have neither the ability to clearly articulate their desire, nor the willingness to listen to the voice of reason when they set about attempting to achieve their poorly articluated goals, and then proceed to spend endless hours in front of the television on the elliptical, while they'd be better off at home on the couch.

    To the kid who asked about huge arms, most arm work is taken care of with your heavy compound movements. Direct arm work's really just adding detail. Here's insight into my arm-training philosophy: http://chaosandpain.blogspot.com/2009/10/so-you-want-to-know-my-arm-routine-eh.html. Since then, I reinjured by elbow during a BTN catastrophe where I smashed it into some equipment, so I've been going really light, for really high reps.

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