Droppin' Knowledge Update- Hooking Up The Fuzzy Foreigners

Shit's about to explode with awesomeness!  As I've received a number of emails from people interested in the Big Seminar II I posted about last month, I talked to Spud and set up a PPV on UStream for people who can't make the trip to lovely South Carolina or whose leprechaun has refused their request for $300 and whose money tree is tragically not bearing the fruit is should.  Then, due to the insane amount of bitching I've received at the near VHS-quality of my lifting vids (shit's mad retro, hipsters represent), I've purchased a 1080p cam to ensure we provide viewers with the highest quality audio and video for the seminar.  Additionally, I'm going to set up a throwaway chat client account for the seminar, so anyone who buys the pay per view can ask questions, make comments, talk shit, etc.  The pay per view will be offered at a substantial discount ($100) and will consist of the first day of the seminar, but won't have the second day available.

Jesse the Body emailed me and told me to tell you this seminar will "make you a god damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me."

Do not defy the almighty will of "The Body".  Go here and select whichever option you want- uStream or attendee.  If you're planning on coming down in person and are coming as a group, shoot the web orders guys an email and they'll work out a discounted group rate.  This thing should be pretty pimped, and my presentation will, of course, be awesome.  From what I've seen of the other guys presenting, they're nearly as fucked up as I am, so hilarity should definitely ensue from this seminar.

In my search for a hilarious and sexual pic for the end of this blog, I discovered this priceless bit of what appears to be Christian insanity.

Dude, So and So Got SO Fucking Jacked For That Movie: Henry "Fat Cavill" Cavill

Superman would have been awesome had the Soviets dominated in WWII... except that Shuster and Siegel likely would have been deported and liquidated by Stalin with most of the rest of the Jews in Russia.

I've made no bones about my dislike of DC's most famous character, the squeaky-clean, has-every-fucking-power-in-the-book, unstoppable, relentlessly boring Superman.  As a character, he's uninspiring, but his appearance is banal to the point where he should be a middle manager at a small manufacturing company who owns no pants but dockers and no shirts but short-sleeved, plaid button-downs and drives a wood-paneled, powder blue minivan to work every day, rather than being a newspaper reporter.  While I think Shazaam/Captain Marvel is actually the progenitor of the Dudley Do-Right ethos Superman's championed since the early 1940s, Superman's personality compounds the anti-appeal of his appearance to create what has to be the most genuinely unlikeable character since Archie (who is apparently also getting a feature film soon).

More likable.

Though it should surprise no one, the people who have played Superman on the silver screen were generally bland and remarkably unmuscular that one wonders if the people doing the casting were aware of the generally muscular appearance of superheroes in general.  In chronological order from the 1940s World's Fair onward, behold the physical wrecks who've played the iconic man of steel:

1940: Ray Middleton, rocking a slightly modified 'S' because no one knew who the fuck Superman was in 1940, and entirely bereft of visible musculature.

1948-1950: Kirk Alyn, who would have benefited greatly from the invention of Spanx, had they existed in the 1940s.

1951-1954: George Reeves, who ate a bullet out of shame after seeing his legs in the mirror.

1961: Johnny Rockwell, a man with a physique so pathetic his pilot Superboy tv show never even aired.

1966-1968:  Who better to play a muscular, super-strong alien with every superpower known to man than a 34-year-old, showtune-singing, chubby fuck named Bob Holiday?

1975:  Left with no way to make Superman suck more, David Wilson played a Superman whose musculature was replaced by a mad scientist with a voice that could only be described as a combination of Fergie and Jesus.

1978-87: Christopher Reeve, before he proved he was not "super" anything, other than crippled.

1979: Tayfun Demir in the odious but hilarious Turkish Return of Superman, who seems to have had his arms replaced with pipe cleaners after some horrible industrial accident.

1988-1989:  John Haymes Newton, who at least had the decency to have visible abdominal development as Superboy.

1989-1992- After allowing a person who clearly did semi-regular situps play Superboy, the studio, ashamed of their mistake and searching for answers, recast the role with a pigeon-toed, metrosexual, former soap opera star, Guido named Gerard Christopher to atone for their sins.

1993-1997:  Dean Cain, simultaneously proving it only takes a pro football player 5 years to lose his physique entirely and that Superman can be played by a guy who's clearly one of those "Asianals" Andrew Dice Clay likes to mock.

2001-2011:  Tom Welling, proving once more that no one in Hollywood gives a shit about source material and that the CW is the worst thing to happen to humans who can see and hear.

2006: Brandon Routh, the first Superman to do "rope yoga", whatever the fuck that is.  Those of you to have the misfortune to see this film know Routh's unimpressive swimmer's build was the most impressive thing about the pile of uninspired dogshit that was Superman Returns.

2009: Matt Bohmer as the first gay Superman.  Who knew Superman was a twink?  All joking aside, I find it amusing that a 150 lb Superman looks far more "super" than the fat fucks who played the role from the 1940s to the 70s.

All physical wrecks, until now...

2013: Henry Cavill takes a steaming shit on precedent and actually lifts weights to play the first jacked Superman.

The tide of suck seems to be going out, however, as Zach Snyder appears poised to make Superman cultural relevant and interesting again.  Snyder cast Henry Cavill in the role of Superman based in large part on the fact that Cavill was already fairly jacked for his role in an unpronounceable Russian director's completely unwatchable film, The Immortals. Having not created a suit for the movie yet, Snyder dug up Chris Reeve's corpse, peeled off the Superman suit from his rotting body, and handed it to Cavill for his screentest.  After proving that not even the gooey bits of a quadrapalegic's rotting flesh could keep him from looking like a badass in a 40 year old Superman costume, Cavill got the part.

Seriously, don't bother watching this, even on Netflix instant.  The Immortals is truly godawful.

Though Cavill was cut up like a bag of dope for the Immortals, that wasn't always the case-according to the dudes at Men's Health, Cavill's nickname growing up was"Fat Cavill"(Chang, Superman).  In spite of addictions to Elder Scrolls and Skyrim (I'm not making that up), Cavill managed to not be a disgusting fatass as he grew into adulthood, he wasn't really rocking a physique that belied his standout performances on rugby and field hockey pitches when he auditioned for the Immortals.  In his tenure on the show The Tudors (the show on which he was working when he auditioned), Cavill could only be described as skinny fat, echoing in most regards your average weightlifting message board poster's physique.  After getting the nod for the role in spite of being a pasty white, toothpick armed doughboy, Cavill trained his ass off for the role.

The physique for which most Fittitors strive.

Trained by Mark Twight, progenitor of the 300 workout, 6'1" Cavill lifted six days a week on an extremely restrictive diet with the rest of the cast to build muscle and lose fat.  Cavill eventually dropped 25 lbs for the role and hit an all-time low of 6% bodyfat for the Immortals, for which he credits the fact that he worked out with cast members and  who eventually went on to become a star athlete who excelled at rugby, field hockey and cricket, says training for the role of the Greek warrior Theseus in "Immortals" rivaled the Labors of Hercules in their brutality.  Prior to hitting the weights for the role, Cavill put in five straight months training with martial artist Roger Yuan just to get into shape.  Day in, day out, for that period, Cavill trained for four to five hours a day with a combination of bodyweight movements, cardio, chapala yoga and kung fu before he was able to begin weapons and fight training.  According to Cavill's cast member Luke Evans, with whom Cavill trained, their trainer would  "wake [them] up at seven in the morning and before breakfast we'd run up and down 21 flights of stairs in the hotel three times. Also, you're constantly feeling hungry because you're only eating what your body can burn off - you don't want to store anything. You're just like a processing machine" (Morris).  Having survived the conditioning phase, the cast began training with circuit weights at 4A.M. six days a week for over an hour at a time before moving on to weapons and fight training, skirting the line between eye-bleeding intensity and pants-shitting insanity.  Though there are no details on what the workouts were exactly, they're rumored to be of the variety a certain group of Kool-Aid-drinking "elite athletes" do on a daily basis.  According to Men's Fitness UK, the workouts consisted mostly of high intensity compound movements, with the addition of some rehab work to prevent repetitive stress injuries from fight and stunt training (Hit and Myth).  The only thing that got him the workouts was, surprisingly, the sense of camaraderie he had with his cast mates and extras, all of whom participated in the daily workouts and ate roughly the same diet.

"There was a sense of team and camaraderie," Cavill, 28, recalls. "We all sweated together, we all bled together, we all ate the same highly inefficient food and just kept on going and supported each other."

"Because they were doing it—and if they could do it, so could I. It's not the end of the world that your feet hurt. Push yourself" (Chang, Superman).

Though the majority of their training was free-weight based, all of their workouts ended with a circuit of some kind to burn out the actors.  One such workout was the brainchild of Gym Jone's Mark Twight, while the other was created by the aforementioned Ricky Blanchard.  The purpose of these circuits was two-fold- one, they were intended to condition the actors for 14 hour physical workdays in which they had to look as fresh as the scene required, and two, to get the last bits of bodyfat off of them, so as to appear as the Greek warriors with which we're familiar from Greek art.

You know the Greeks took shit seriously if their statues had abdominal vascularity.

Twight's workout is nothing Earth shattering, though his recovery method, known as the "tailpipe technique" might prove useful to the average trainee.  The tailpipe is a breathing exercise intended to help trainees manage fatigue, which is of primary concern to the special operations trainees and action movie actors Twight typically trains. The method works like this- right after you complete an exercise, take eight calm, controlled breaths through your nose.  Don't fiddlefuck around with your mp3 player, dance in place, or engage in a bit of the ol' jib-jab with your training partner- just breathe.  The second you've completed your last exhalation, move on to the next exercise in the circuit.

The circuit, as I mentioned, is hardly incredibly innovative, but according to Cavill is highly effective.  Grab a 35 lb. kettlebell and do 25 reps of each of the following movements:

Goblet Squat
Kettlebell Swing
Squat Thrusts (clearly, you won't be holding the kettlebell for these)
Jumping Jacks (you won't be holding the kettlebell for these, either)

Blanchard's circuit was a bit more intense and utilized a Tabata protocol to condition Cavill's balls off while building strength at the same time.

Warm-up

5 rounds 1 minute jumping rope, 1 minute rest

Round 1

30 seconds work, 10 seconds

Weight plate halo

T-bar row

Dumbbell clean and press

Mountain climbers on upside down Bosu ball

Gym ball jackknife with hands on Bosu

Side to side pushups on Bosu

Dumbbell swings

Medicine ball wall toss

2 minutes' rest

Round 2

Repeat the circuit from the first round with 40 seconds' work, 10 seconds' rest (Hit and Myth)

Like Tom Hardy in Warrior, Cavill credited the diet equally with the soul-crushing workout regimen for his ripped as a prolapsed anus's sphincter condition.  Cavill's diet was created by one of the trainer fors the cast of The Immortals, Ricky Blanchard, and is surprisingly high in carbohydrates and relatively low in fat and protein.  They did carb cycle, however, so the diet below isn't entirely accurate- Blanchard explained Cavill would spend one to two days on a lower carb diet, then kick up the carbs for a day to replenish his glycogen stores.  Without doing that, Blanchard said, there would have been no way for Cavill to make it though the long daily sessions of weightlifting and fighting.  According to Men's Fitness, here's a general day in the gastronomic life of an Immortals cast member:

Monday 
Breakfast: Oatmeal with dried fruit and almond milk. 1 serving of fruit.
Snack: Natural protein bar. Sports recovery drink
Lunch: Salad of your choice but must include chicken breast, 30g avocado and 90g low-fat cheese. Low-fat dressing.
Snack: 60g nuts.
Dinner: 125ml vegetable  soup. 180g salmon with lemon sauce, asparagus and wild rice.
Snack: 250ml fat-free cottage cheese. 30g nuts.

Tuesday
Breakfast: Protein shake (blend 1 banana, 50g berries, 1 scoop protein powder, 250ml almond milk).
Snack: Hummus with carrots
Lunch: 250ml vegetable soup. Salad with chopped turkey.
Snack: 1 green apple. 2tbsp almond butter.
Dinner: 180g chicken breast with 2tbsp honey chili sauce, quinoa and snap peas.
Snack: 20g casein protein.

Wednesday
Breakfast: Egg white omelet. Handful of strawberries.
Snack: 225g cottage cheese.
Lunch: Tuna salad with greens. 250ml soup.
Snack: 8 almonds. Carrot, apple, celery and ginger juice drink.
Dinner: 225g swordfish with mango and ginger sauce, wild rice and 1 medium artichoke.
Snack: Fresh pineapple with 225g cottage cheese.

Thursday
Breakfast: Muesli with almond milk. 1tbsp protein powder. Carrot, apple, celery and ginger juice drink.
Snack: 240ml low-sodium V8 juice. 2tbsp peanut butter.
Lunch: Stir-fry 170g scallops with 250g Chinese vegetables, garlic, onion and ginger in 2tbsp olive oil.
Snack: Protein shake (blend 1 banana, 250ml carrot juice, 1 scoop protein powder).
Dinner: 225g turkey burger with coleslaw (no bun). 250ml gazpacho.
Snack: 20g casein protein.

Friday
Breakfast: 250g fat-free plain Greek yoghurt. 1 banana.
Snack: 225g unsalted nuts. Carrot, apple, celery and ginger juice drink.
Lunch: Veggie burger with sautée vegetables and salad. 125ml vegetable soup.
Snack: 20 pistachio nuts.
Dinner: Tuna salad with plenty of greens. 250ml chilled cucumber soup.
Snack: 225g cottage cheese. 30g mixed nuts.

Saturday
Breakfast: Scrambled egg white or egg white omelette with mushrooms. Handful of strawberries. 170g cottage cheese.
Snack: 1 tomato. 50g fat-free cheese.
Lunch: Soup and salad of your choice (include 2tsp sesame seeds).
Snack: 50g turkey jerky. 280g almonds.
Dinner: 280g halibut with 4tbsp pesto, wild rice and courgette.
Snack: 20g casein protein.

Sunday
Breakfast: Egg white omelette with spinach. Handful of strawberries.
Snack: Fresh pineapple with 30g cottage cheese. 225g unsalted nuts.
Lunch: 280g steak with salad of your choice (include avocado).
Snack: 1 apple with 2tbsp almond butter.
Dinner: Beef and broccoli stir fry. 250ml miso soup. 1tbsp protein powder.
Snack: 225g cottage cheese. Handful of mixed nuts.

Blanchard, who clearly has some sort of cottage cheese fetish, appears to have put the cast of The Immortals on a starvation diet the likes of which has not been seen outside of a sorority house in years.  According to Cavill, the diet worked wonders but the cast paid the price, getting sick every time a stiff breeze blew past due to the heavy workload and light diet.  As such, Cavill did what any red-blooded man would do and got good and hammered on the weekends to unwind from the brutality of a spartan diet and training regimen that exceeded 6 months in length.  "When you train with guys and you're all eating nothing in order to be lean, there are those weekends," Cavill, 28, recalls. "There's no point in going halfway. You're going to wake up with a terrible hangover and think, 'OK, thank God, I got that out of my system'" (Chang, Henry).  On their once weekly cheat days, Cavill and Evans would hit up a steak restaurant for "a great rib-eye steak, chips and couple of pints"(Morris).  I've no idea precisely what Cavill drank, but should you wish to follow his example you might want to stick to clear liquors and stout beer to keep your carbs low, and to supplement with a multivitamin, ZMA, liver support like Liver Stabil or Liver Armor, a protein shake, and a gallon of water before bed and through the night to minimize your hangover the next day.



Having already gotten ripped for the Immortals, Cavill changed his training and eating strategy considerably for Superman in an effort to gain as much fat free mass as possible for the role.  Retaining the services of Mark Twight, Cavill started putting in long hours at the gym and at the dinner table.  Though the exact details of Cavill's Superman program remain shrouded in secrecy, Cavill did have the follow to say about his programming:

• he trained two and a half hours a day on average, five to six days a week (Man of Steel)
• for the first two months of training, he lifted on his own and tried to gain as much size and strength as possible, using what basically amounted to a powerlifting routine.  He kept the weights as heavy as possible and his reps low in an effort to build a dense physique, focusing on cleans, squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, and bench presses (Dutta; Man of Steel)
• the last four months of training were spent with Twight, trying to gain more mass while leaning out as much as possible (Ibid)

Cavill gave a little insight into the exact programming Twight had him doing in one interview, wherein he stated "Mark Twight, the chap from Gym Jones, has been putting me through the ringer big time. An example of the sort of workouts we’ve been doing recently? A couple of weeks ago it was 100 front squats in body weight. We’ve been quite fond of doing the 100 repetition stuff recently and heavy as well."  In keeping with his previous sentiments about group training, Cavill stated that it helped his progress considerably in his quest for mass as well.  "For example, if Mike Levins, who’s the assistant trainer, Mark Twight, and myself are training, we’ll just do 10 reps of a weight and then someone drops out, they do 10, someone drops out, they do 10. By the time the third person’s finished their set, you come in and do your 10, up to 100. Otherwise, training stuff, I mean, it’s huge amounts of kettle bell workouts" (Man of Steel)

Interestingly, Cavill revealed that he had a special six-week period of training specifically for his shirtless scene, as he insisted there be CGI abs in the movie.  Though he was less forthcoming with the details than the NSA's been about their recent rape of the Constitution, it would seem from his description of that 6 week period that he was training and dieting even harder than usual, as he admitted he was a mean son of a bitch during the training and hungry all the time.  Cavill revealed in an interview for the Immortals that his trick for looking pumped onscreen is that he constantly carries resistance bands with him on set to keep his pump.  It sucks, apparently, because he's exhausted, starving, and usually lifted before they shot each day, but it worked.  For Superman, it appears he added random sets of pullups to his pump up regimen, as I've seen more pics of Cavill doing pullups hanging off of any overhead ledge or bar that happened to be nearby than I have vids of Ashley Blue being throatfucked until she puked (and trust me, that's a lot).  The ultimate payoff, however, was the fact that movie theaters are hiring cum swabbers out of porn shop's "video arcades" to clean the seats after female audience members view the scene, and Zach Snyder hooked him up with a badass meal immediately after the shoot for the shirtless scene wrapped.  "The biggest treat was after a six-week phase when I was getting in shape for shirtless scenes.  After that, Zack Snyder bought me an amazing apple pie and a tub of ice cream. Then I ordered a pizza as well, and didn’t even go home — I just sat in a trailer afterwards and ate it. I passed into a food coma after that" (Shortlist).

Swapping his bulking diet for the cutting diet was the hardest part of the shoot and training, according to Cavill, because until he started cutting he'd been eating 5,000 calories a day in his quest to pack on mass as quickly as possible.  The diet definitely worked, as some sources stated Cavill put on twenty five pounds of rip in his six month training period.  Unlike his pro-ana Immortals diet, Cavll's Superman diet consisted of large quantities of lean meats, eggs, fruits and veggies, with starches comprising the smallest part of his diet.  According to Cavill, "You’ve got to eat protein first, then a little bit of carbs" in order to stoke the furnace and keep your hunger levels high to continue eating (Dutta).  Nothing Earth shattering there- eat more meat, eat less crap and you'll gain muscle faster than before.

As usual, the takeaway from a "So and So" seems to be- eat a ton, train a ton, sleep a ton if you want to look superhuman.  Doing what everyone else is doing isn't going to cut it.  45 minutes of half-assed training a day four times a week isn't going to cut it.  "Cutting out carbs a little" isn't going to cut it. If you want extreme results, you have to apply extreme effort- quit whining about who's taking what, who's got the best genetics, and why you don't have the time or energy to get what you want.   If a dude who's nickname growing up was "Fat Cavill" could do it, so can you.

Don’t listen to the lies, your barriers are breakable- Fat Cavill

Sources:
Chang, Samantha.  Henry Cavill: I worked out at 4 every morning to get my 8-pack abs.  Examiner.  13 Nov 2011. Web.  11 Jun 2013.  http://www.examiner.com/article/henry-cavill-i-worked-out-at-4-every-morning-to-get-my-8-pack-abs-for-immortals

Chang, Samantha.  'Superman' star Henry Cavill sculpted body down to 6% body fat.  Examiner.  16 Oct 2011. Web.  11 Jun 2013.  http://www.examiner.com/article/superman-star-henry-cavill-i-sculpted-my-body-down-to-6-body-fat-for-immortals  

Dutta, Nirmalya.  Man of Steel: How Henry Cavill got in shape with the Superman Workout.  Health.India.com.  13 Jun 2013.  Web.  13 Jun 2013. http://health.india.com/fitness/man-of-steel-how-henry-cavill-got-in-shape-with-the-superman-workout/

Henry Cavill.  Shortlist.  4 Jun 2013.  Web.  13 Jun 2013.  http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/films/henry-cavill

Henry Cavill on his training for the Immortals.  Hurtin Bombs.  9 May 2011.  Web.  11 Jun 2013.  http://hurtinbombs.com/post/5338493075/henry-cavill-on-his-training-for-immortals

Hit and Myth.  Men's Fitness UK.  Apr 2012.  Print.

The Immortal Workout.  Men's Health.  Web.  27 May 2013.  http://www.menshealth.com/celebrity-fitness/immortal-workout

Man of Steel Workout.  Movie Workouts.  11 Jun 2013.  13 Jun 2013.
http://www.movieworkouts.com/man-of-steel-workout

Miller, Chris.  Eat like a star of Immortals.  Men's Fitness.  23 Feb 2012.  Web.    http://www.mensfitness.co.uk/exercises/celebrity-workouts/2020/eat-star-immortals

Morris, Andy.  Diesel celebrates Luke Evans!  GQ.  24 Apr 2011.  13 Jun 2013.  http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2011-04/28/gq-film-diesel-celebrate-luke-evans

Total Film.  Henry Cavill talks Man Of Steel and James Bond. Total Film.  3 Aug 2011.  Web.  27 May 2013.  http://www.totalfilm.com/news/henry-cavill-talks-man-of-steel-and-james-bond

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Why "Your Head Is Fucking Tiny" Is The Greatest Compliment You'll Ever Receive

"If I want to find out how much physical force a man possesses, or is likely to possess in a dormant state, I look at his neck. That never fails to answer my question. In both men and the other male beasts, the neck has always been the true indication of a quality and quantity of his concentrated nerve power. A strong healthy man always has a powerful neck, and he always will have one."  

- George Jowett, The Key to Might and Muscle.

As anyone who's read this blog with any regularity knows, I started lifting weights after failing to bench press 135 lbs for the strength training test for high school football.  Apparently the shame of that sort of weakness has been washed away in a tidal wave of internet white knighting, participation trophies, public displays of weakness in Youtube videos, and rising flood waters of emasculation and estrogen in which the Western world is currently drowing.  When I was in high school, however, it would probably have been less embarrassing to show up at school in drag than it was to stand before the football team as one of the "remedial kids" who couldn't bench a bar with a plate on each side.  I didn't just feel compelled to sit at the kiddie table for meals- it was pretty much akin to being sent to the kiddie table in a pink petticoat while singing "I'm A Little Teapot" in falsetto and my dick tucked between my legs.  As such, I went on a benching and dipping bender that made your modern day bench bro's workout seem positively balanced in comparison.  Throughout high school, I began adding other exercises as I discovered there was other shit to do in the gym besides bench, weighted dips, and calf raises, and I started mixing in neck work on a regular basis.

134 lbs of fury.

By the time I was a junior, people had started to comment on the size of my neck, as my work on the neck harness was compounded by the work it got in wrestling and football.  For those of you who've not participated in one or either sport, the first week of both seasons is pretty much non-stop neck soreness.  Wrestling involved a tremendous amount of your opponent pushing and pulling on your neck, in addition to a top of bridging off the back of your head, and football's basically nonstop weighted neck work from having to carry the weight of your helmet.  By the end of the first week of football two-a-day practice in the summer, your helmet feels like it weighs 40 lbs, and your neck's so sore you can't tell if you have a headache, chest pains, or you're simply experiencing muscular hypertrophy so fast and violent that your head is threatening to pop in a shower of blood and pus like it's the worst zit you've ever had.  My neck, to be honest, wasn't all that objectively big- it was only about 16.5" or 17", but I weighed 140 lbs.  As such, it looked huge.

Over time, I periodically trained neck like a maniac so that it kept pace with my physique.  There is nothing more preposterous, in my opinion, than a big dude with a little neck.  A little dude with a huge neck looks like a scrapper- you can rest assured if you see a guy with a neck bigger than his upper arms, he's a dangerous motherfucker (provided we're not talking a 12" neck and 11" arms).  If that's what you're looking at, betting that he's seen his fare share of fustigation and drunken mosh pits is reasonable.  Conversely, when you see a dude with big ass arms and a pencil neck, you can rest assured, without exception, that he is all show and no go.  If you need further proof of this, you can actually look to a woman- Gina Carano looks tough not only because if she smiled her head would explode into thousands of acid-spitting rape demons with footlong barbed penises, but because that broad's neck is probably bigger than everyone you know.

That is one thick-ass neck on a very hot chick.

Put more eloquently, from The Art Of The Neck:

"Contrary to popular belief

Your manhood is

Defined by the measurement

At your top button

No surprises for anyone

Just exposed flesh for the

Gawking."

Arco.

Before you scoff, consider the fact that a small neck on a muscular man is not only a purely modern phenomenon, but would have been considered offensive to men of a bygone era.  For instance, the diminutive turn-of-the-century bodybuilder Otto Arco had a 17" neck at 135 lbs, while his training partner Stanislaus Zbyszko had a neck that measured over 21".  Early rough-and-tumble fighter/wrestler Sir Atholl Oakely rocked a neck almost two feet around at its biggest, despite the fact that he never once lifted weights- his strength and size came entirely from beating the dogshit out of people.  Legendary lifter and wrestler George Hackenschmidt stretched his collar to 22" inches while only weighing 204 lbs.  Descriptions of "manly" men in turn of the century books and earlier almost never mentioned the size of a man's biceps or chest, but rather the size of his neck, shoulders, and back- those have been the benchmarks of strength and masculinity thoughout until feminists and liberals colluded to strip the modern male of his masculinity.  Now, it's a near certainty you'll see one thousand men with plucked or waxed eyebrows in your gym before you'll see someone throw around weight and then don a shirt with a 20" collar he can't button for fear of choking to death.

Before we move forward, I suppose it would stand to reason we delineate small from large necks.  Thus, I turn to Steve Helmicki, former champion powerlifter and former proud owner of a massive 23" neck at 5'4" (from the vids I've seen of him recently, he seems to have slacked off on his training).  The dude loves neck training so much that he's written poems about necks and makes his dogs train neck, so it's safe to say that he's psychotic enough to make a completely impartial judge of your neck size.  Thus, here is his condemnation of the bit of meat holding up your head:

Steve Helmieki's Neck Size Chart:

14”: Girl

15.5”: Puny

16.5”: Average

17.5”: XL

18.5”: XXL

19”: XXXL (Pre-Massive)

20”: XXXXL (Huge Status)

21”: XXXXL (Enormity)

22”: Awe 

23”: Freak

25": Veroninized (Which I assume refers to powerlifter Jim Veronin)

26": Cartoonish

(I'm aware 24" was skipped.  I've no idea why that is.)

A large, strong neck does more than just look cool, however- a strong neck makes what is a weak link in most lifters' proverbial chains strong.  It will improve your bench by allowing you to press your head harder into the bench, thereby strengthening your arch.  It will improve your deadlift by stabilizing your spine.  It can help your squat if you're failing lifts from being unable to hold your head in a neutral position due to a heavy load on your spine.  It will enable you to give better head, longer, to whomever you're going down on.  It will keep you from dying if you, say, flip your Mazdaspeed 3 end over end while driving at high speeds while not wearing your seatbelt.  It will make you a better fighter, leaving you less susceptible to chokes and less prone to being knocked out.

A thick neck and murderous rage kept Tyson off the canvas for quite some time.

All of the aforementioned lifters' necks, and much of my own neck size, came from the liberal application of isometric neck work and high reps.  This seems, then, to be the one muscle group that responds incredibly well to those two training methods.  Early on in my neck building extravaganza, I relied almost primarily on isometrics for neck work, with the exception of the occasional day of neck-work insanity on my high school's ancient Nautilus 4-way neck machine.  Due to the constant battering my neck got on the football field and in wrestling practice, it grew like John Holmes's cock on the set of an orgy porn starring naught but broads with DD tits and 24" waists.  In grad school I picked up the gauntlet again in an effort to get my neck up to 19", inspired by a combination of boredom and a desire to experiment with localized hypertrophy.  As such, I started doing high-volume, high-rep, high frequency neck training with relatively low weights, and enjoyed a reasonable amount of success.  Training neck for at least three sets of 20 in each direction (four, if you're having trouble with counting today) for 6-7 days in a row, with at least double that volume on Tuesdays and Thursdays brought my neck from 16.5 to just about 18" in 4 months, during which time I leaned out and saw my bodyweight drop from around 175 to around 165.

My neck was literally bigger than that Bulgarian's legs at 170 lbs.

The only thing that held me back from reaching my lofty goal was cramping.  During my neck training rampage I never once got a massage until it was too late, which was a critical mistake.  My dad popped over the lake to visit me and we immediately hopped a train to Salzburg.  At some point I made the grave error of turning my head to the left to look out the window, and promptly passed out face first onto the floor from the immense and immediate pain of the entirety of my neck cramping in unison.  Only the liberal application of professional massage, massive quantities of muscle relaxers, and sleep were able to resolve the issue, and I was markedly less aggressive in my neck training thereafter.  Thus, while daily training of the neck is possible and will result in immediate and rather explosive neck growth, doing so without the proper rehab work may well result in you shitting your pants from taking too many muscle relaxers.

It's much hotter when chicks do it.

Should you wish to embark upon a high rep neck programs, Steve Helmicki makes a recommendation with which I agree- start with neck bridges and gradually work your way upward in volume.  Wrestlers traditionally have some of the biggest necks on Earth, and their preferred method for building them is the wrestler's bridge.  The following is Steve's recommendation for doing so, as my programming recommendation would likely be something along the lines of "just do a fucking neck bridge":

"For trainees just beginning neck work it is recommended the volume be gradual. Start with five reps on the forehead and five reps on the back of the head. Add a repetition or two.  When you achieve twenty reps split into a twice daily routine.

Complete upon rising and prior to going to bed. Stretch post training and throughout the day. We have experienced trainees gaining two inches in six weeks. Stretch thoroughly/ice" (Helmicki, 22).

For those of you who have never done a neck bridge, they're just about the most simple exercise of all time- wrestlers have been doing them for millennia to strengthen their necks and have suffered no injuries, no matter what the idiots on your favorite message boards might have to say otherwise.  Training the bridge is simple, and there are plenty of tutorials online if you need help figuring out how to lay on your back, arch it, and then push yourself up onto the back of your head using leg drive.  I'm not saying you're retarded if you can't figure it out without Youtube tutorials... I'm just saying you should be sterilized and placed into a home for the mentally disabled so the rest of the world doesn't have to deal with your idiocy.  Here's how wrestlers do bridge drills, by and large (from iSport.com)

"Bridge-ups
A great way to improve your neck strength and to practice bridging is to perform bridge-ups. This is a very simple exercise and it’s extremely beneficial for intermediate wrestlers. This is how they are done:

1.  Start lying on your back with the palms of your hands resting on your stomach.

2.  Get into your neck bridge. Make sure your feet are flat on the mat and you are supporting your weight on the back of your head. (Your back should not be touching the mat.)

3.  Use your feet to push off the mat and arch up. As you do this, “roll” on your head so that the very top of your head is touching the mat. Arch up as high as you can — try to touch your forehead or nose to the mat.

4.  As you arch up, extend your arms along the mat next to your head. The backs of your hands should touch the mat when you are fully arched.

5.  Lower your body and return to your original position. Move your arms down towards your legs and rest them on your stomach. Don’t let your back fall to the mat, support yourself!

6.  Repeat this motion for 20-25 repetitions. 

Hot Tip: Bridge Your Partner

If you want a bit more of a challenge when doing bridge-ups, have a partner straddle your midsection while facing you as you perform them. Make sure your partner keeps good posture with his head above his hips so he can keep his balance. This will help you increase your neck and back strength, and it will also simulate the action of bridging an opponent off of you" (Neck Bridge Drills).

Another easy way to get your neck into condition for some hardcore neck training would be to do isometrics, which is how we conditioned our necks in football.  Most of what you see online is nonsense wherein a person is training against their own hands, which is stupid and pointless.  Isometrics should be done with a partner, as you'll get far more resistance and neck training will be come competitive.  For lateral  training, for instance, you will be on all fours, and will push the side of your head against your partner's leg as hard as possible for a twenty count.  At that point, you'll be trying to knock him over with the strength of your neck, and he'll be trying to keep from moving.  Also on all fours, you'll train vertical strength- to train flexion, you'll have your partner make a basket with their fingers into which you'll press, and for extension they'll push the top of your head with their pals, both while standing over you bent at the waist.  This will also become rapidly competitive, with each partner trying to pin the other's chin into their chest from the top, and actually pulling their partner off the ground when training flexion.  Bret Contreras posted some interesting variations on these if you're interested, which you can check out here.

Should you question the efficacy of training that doesn't involve weights, consider this- Corey Taylor of Slipknot/Stone Sour might weigh 150 and has an 18" neck, and Corey Taylor has an 18" neck, and George Fisher of Cannibal Corpse stretches the tape to over 20" around his neck.  Their secret?  Headbanging during shows.  No bullshit:

"In the October 2012 issue of U.K.'s Metal Hammer magazine, vocalist George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher (pictured below) of Florida death metallers CANNIBAL CORPSE was asked to explain his "gigantic neck." "Well, it's just from headbanging and lifting weights when I was younger," he said. "My dad had a business where he did painting, roofing and everything, so I'd work with him all day long. After that, we'd go to fishing spots to catch and eat all these fish. Then I'd jog over to my friend's house, who lived about a mile away, and we'd lift weights. If you compare old pictures from when I was in VILE to now, it's obviously grown and the only thing I've really done since is headbanging, which must be fairly similar to weightlifting."

Asked if he has ever had his neck measured, like if he had to get a tuxedo to go to a wedding or something, Fisher said, "Maybe when I got married in '98, but I don't remember and it's bigger now. If you really look at it, it's bigger than the base of my head or where my ears are. A friend of mine once said, 'You don't have a head, you're a neck with lips.' A lot of security guys will come up to me and complain about working out, but having skinny necks, and ask how I do it. I tell them to listen to [SLAYER's] 'Reign In Blood' and headbang the whole way through after working out."(Blabbermouth)

Up next, more exercises for training your neck, possibly more poetry, and some training routines to turn your toothpick into a tree trunk.

Sources:

Blabbermouth.  Cannibal Corpse Frontman Explains ''Gigantic Neck'.  Blabbermouth.net.  28 Nov 2012.  Web.  12 May 2013.  http://www.blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=182885

Helmicki, Steven.  Art of the Neck.  Vol. 1.  2008.  PDF.

Neck Bridge Drills for Wrestling.  Wrestling.isport.com.  Web.  10 Jun 2013.  http://wrestling.isport.com/wrestling-guides/neck-bridge-drills-for-wrestling  

Jump Muthafucka, Jump

As I've said before, the jump squat is to the competition back squat what liquid Viagra is to porn stars— it enables you to perform at the highest levels without fear that you’re going to go limp in the middle of the competition and make a total ass of yourself.  The jump squat makes getting out of the hole (the bottom of the squat) a simple affair, because you’ve conditioned your body to literally explode out of that position.  The powerlifting back squat is a fundamentally slow affair, and could easily be conducted to the slower parts of a Wagnerian opera in a Viking helmet.  Slowly grinding through the squat sucks, though, and the very worst part is that second at the bottom wherein you pause for a moment to wonder “is it really possible to get the fuck out of here with my life?”

Just as Justin Bieber is often asked the question "why don't you fucking die already?", I am often asked the question "why don't you do pause squats?", in spite of the fact that I've answered this question repeatedly.  To recap, I despise pause squats because they make sitting in the hole an even more protracted affair than it already seems to be.  For me, it ingrains a very bad habit of going slack in the hole, as well as staying there like I'm pausing a bench, in competition.  That, I discovered, is a terrible habit to have, and a hard one to break.  Thus, I abandoned the pause squats I'd been doing for a few months after my first full meet in 2009 and began experimenting with other methods, whereupon I decided jump squats were a far better option.

Though I've mentioned these in the past, I've not really gone into any great detail on how I conduct them.  Frankly, I thought the performance of these would be more or less self-explanatory- put bar on back, squat, jump off ground.  Not that much to it, really.  Since I initially posted on the subject, however, it's come to my attention that people like far more direction than I would in the performance of any given exercise.  As such, I shall provide it.  Due to the fact that you're leaving the ground, low bar squatting is out the window- if you attempt a low bar jump squat, there's a very real option you'll wake up in the hospital with a broken back and small stumps at the shoulders where your arms had previously been.  Rather than ending up a potential freak of nature, you might want to just squat high bar.  Quite frankly, I despise high bar squatting, but using it as a supplement, especially if you're a low bar squatter, gives you much more quad-dominant training, which will ultimately help your low bar squat.  Another thing that will help your regular squat is the varied stances you should be using with the jump squat.  As a general rule of thumb, you will widen your stance with each successive set.  I find that I use more or less the same stance from 135 through 315, then begin spreading my stance from 405 upward.  By the time I hit 505, I'm using my regular squat stance, only with a high bar (which is far harder than it has any right to be).

You'll notice that I go heavier than an Acacia Strain breakdown on jump squats.  Conventional wisdom, a sense of self-preservation, and a modicum of sanity would generally indicate otherwise, but I have been hovering around 80% of my one rep max of late on jump squats.  The only other maniac of whom I've heard who does jump squats as a part of his regular routine is Kolkaev, and even a man who willingly subjects himself to the dangers of a 600 lb no-hands barbell back squat doesn't go over 185 lbs on jump squats.  Frankly, I'm not sure why this is- maybe it's because I drink gallons of Diet Coke in lieu of the sedative-laced drinking water most people consume (Salon), it's the result of psychosis brought on by years of stimulant use, my giant brass balls, my desire to impose my will on the universe, or some fault with the rest of humanity.  Nevertheless, I go considerably heavier on jump squats than do most people, it seems to pay off on the platform, and I'm far more used to exploding out of the hole than a roomful of poorly endowed Japanese at a bukkake porn shoot.

If you're still skeptical, consider the following reasons to employ jump squats in your training:

• explosive training induces more hypertrophy than slow reps (Chapman).
• the utilization of different tempos in a training cycle produced far greater strength gains and hypertrophy than did a single tempo (Verkhoshanskii).  Thus, if you're using jump squats in concert with squats off the pins or regular back squats (or better yet, all three), you'll compound your gains like you're a fund manager named Madoff.
• fast eccentric movements lead to a higher concentration of type IIb than type I muscle fibers and greater strength gains than do slower repetitions (Paddon-Jones).
• consciously attempting to move explosively, regardless of the speed of movement, results in far greater  full-range strength than slower movements (Young).
• old ladies had huge rates of strength development with heavy explosive training, and if they can do it, you people damn well better be able to (Caserotti).
• going heavy on these works wonders- a study pitted  two groups of lifters against each other, one group doing 30%1RM jump squats and the other going with my much more awesomer 80%1RM, and the heavy jump squatters had significantly greater increases in their 1RM and their 1RM/bodyweight ratio (McBridge). 

Ian Middleton did make a good point I'd not really taken into consideration when developing this technique or recommending it to others- the participant's bodyweight.  Frankly, I generally give a person's bodyweight the same type of consideration Mel Gibson gives to good public relations.  Nevertheless, it stands to reason that the heavier a person is, the lower they should load their jump squats.  This is because a jump squat really includes the lifter's bodyweight in the total load lifted, as they're leaving the ground.  Additionally, the heavier a lifter is, the greater eccentric force they generate in their landing, which will affect their recovery rate considerably.  As such, he recommends utilizing a percentage of total system weight (body weight + one rep maximum bar weight) rather than simply utilizing their one rep max.  As this might seem somewhat confusing to those of you with widely spaced eyes, here's his example:

After trying to reverse my loading for the total system weight, I realized that it wouldn't provide any kind of useful example.  I generally use 455 for doubles and 405 for sets of 5, which is 70% of my 1RM and 62% of my 1RM.  If you'd like to convert that for yourself, feel free.  If you'd just like to use common sense, it'd probably be easier than doing the mostly useless arithmetic   If you're fat, use lower percentages.  If you're skinny, use higher percentages if you want.  Problem solved.

Squat as if Arnold was watching you.

In terms of sets and reps, I don’t recommend high reps for these due to the fact that your speed drops precipitously as your reps increase.  As the study I alluded to above stated, that's not necessarily a bad thing, at least until you actually lose the ability to jump off the ground.  Wishing you were moving quickly only goes so far in jump squats.  As such, I'd keep it to 4-10 sets of 1-5 reps.

There you have it- jump squats, in all of their glory.  Go do them.

Sources:
Caserotti P, Aagaard P, Buttrup LJ. and Puggaard L. Explosive heavy-resistance training in old and very old adults: changes in rapid muscle force, strength and power, 2008. Scan J Medicine & Science in Sports, 18: 773–782.

Chapman D, Newton M, Sacco P, Nosaka K.  Greater muscle damage induced by fast versus slow velocity eccentric exercise.  Int J Sports Med. 2006 Aug;27(8):591-8.

Harvey, Matt.  Your tap water is probably laced with antidepressants.  Salon.  41 Mar 2013.  Web. 30 May 2013.  http://www.salon.com/2013/03/14/your_tap_water_is_probably_laced_with_anti_depressants_partner/

McBride JM, Triplett-McBride, Davie A, Newton RU. The effect of heavy-vs. light-load jump squats on the development of strength, power, and speed, 2002. J Strength Cond Res 16:75– 82.

Middleton, Ian.  Jump Squats.  How Much To Load?  Published online.  http://www.dieselcrew.com/articles-pdf/DC-IM-JumpSquats.pdf

Paddon-Jones D, Leveritt M, Lonergan A, Abernethy P. Adaptation to chronic eccentric exercise in humans: the influence of contraction velocity. Eur J Appl Physiol, 2001 Sep;85(5):466-71.

Verkhoshanskii IuV, Biru AA. Patterns in the long-term body adaptation of the athlete to
physical loads. Fiziol Cheloveka. 1987 Sep-Oct; 13(5):811-8. Print.

Young WB,Bilby GE.  The effect of voluntary effort to influence speed of contraction on strength, muscular power, and hypertrophy development. J Str Con, 1993 7(3), 172-178.