*What, Exactly, Is Ideal? Part Deux.

This is what real men look like, in my opinion. This is a pic of a bunch of guys training at Matt Kroczaleski's house, and they look like hard motherfuckers.

You might have a different opinion of what makes up ideal. For my purposes, however, there's nothing better than being able to flip a car nonchalantly, and then rip off your shirt and display your abdominal vascularity to the delight (or horror) of random passers-by.

Certainly, based on your goals, you're going to have different opinions of what's ideal. If you're a bodybuilder who's all show and no go, you might like the looks of a wasp-waisted Frank Zane. The man certainly was ripped, but he also did a hell of a lot of yoga, which is how his penis turned into a overly-large clitoris. Tragic story, really.

No one's fooled by that balled-up pair of socks in your trunks, Frank.

Maybe you're more into the power-bodybuilder look- guys like Jimmy "The Iron Bull" Pellechia, or Branch Warren, the guy from the Animal Pak ads, or Johnnie Jackson. Definitely a cool look, and nice to see that those guys can actually move some weight. Not my deal, however- I get bored doing lots of reps, and I'd rather do shots of bleach than sets of cable crossovers. Nevertheless, respect goes out to those guys, in my eyes, and I try to incorporate a bit of their training into my style.
Since much of my inspiration comes from comic books, however, and I'm practically a midget, I'm gonna have to go fantastical on your asses and say MY personal ideal is:

Not the pussy Hugh Jackman Wolverine, either, but straight up, 5'3", 220 lbs, all traps and forearms Wolvie.

Train how you want to look. Just try not to look like Hugh Jackman.

**To Lift, or Not to Lift. That is the Question.

Dunno if he feels like dogshit, but he certainly looks fucking retarded.

Ever walk into the gym feeling like a bag of hammered dogshit? Your lift becomes a Choose Your Own Adventure story, where you’re constantly debating whether to continue your workout or not. It kind of goes like this:

1) Should you lift? If yes, go to step 2. If not, go to step 6.

2) If you want to lift heavy, go to step 3. If you want to go light, go to step 4.

3) You’ve picked a heavy day! Work up to a heavy set and see how it feels. If it feels good, go to step 5. If not, go to step 1.

4) You’ve picked a light day! Warm up and dick around with some light weights. If you get ants in your pants and decide to go heavy, go to step 3. If not, continue to step 5.

5) If you’re enjoying what you’re doing and want to continue, keep it up until you’ve gotten in a decent workout and head home. If not, try to get some semblance of a workout in and bounce.

6) You’ve chosen not to work out. Go home, and think of yourself as a failure the entire way, even if you’re feeling like you got hit by a truck and worked out for a straight fortnight. Hahaha.

Those are pretty much the steps I go through in the gym. Typically, if I’m having a day in which I feel horrible, I hit the weights hard and heavy as fuck, because most old heads in the gym know that THOSE are the days on which you will hit random, brutal PRs. I have no idea why this is, but it just is.

Or you could just have the hottest bitch you can find spot you on a 585 raw bench.

Another way you can go is the, “holy fuck, I’ve been murdering myself in the gym lately and know I’ll hate myself if I head home, so I just fuck around with some light weights or do arms, and roll out.” I’ll also hit abs, calves and abs on these days, and be pretty psyched about them.

Finally, the last, and in my opinion, the worst, thing you can do is just say fuck it and go home. Typically, I won’t do this unless I have broken myself down to the point where I can do nothing without cramping or hurting badly in some way, and then justify my abandonment of the gym with that. If you’re just saying “fuck it, I don’t feel it”, you can string those days into a month off, or just abandon working out altogether. As such, if you’ve gotten to the gym, you might as well do something to justify your expenditure on gas.

Tis better to try and to fail than to look like a pussy for not doing a goddamned thing at all.

Mr. T pities the fool who skips workouts. And by "pities", I mean "murders".

----------------
Now playing: Carnifex - Love Lies In Ashes
via FoxyTunes

**I Fear No Man… Or Weight.

One of the biggest problems I see in the gym does not stem from physical weakness. Instead, it stems from mental weakness- most notably, fear. This isn’t because people are inherently pussies. I’ve been just as guilty of this as everyone else in the past, and I guarantee you, I’m no fucking pussy. Instead, it’s because that evil little voice that gets in everyone’s head and screams “I CAN’T!” at the top of its tiny little lungs can get pretty fucking loud at times. Thus, you have to find ways to outsmart that evil little motherfucker and pile on the weight. Thus, by the time that you realize what you’re lifting, you can’t be scared of it, since you’ve already done it.

How To Do This:

1) This is my favorite method, which I stole from some shit I read about Arthur Saxon at some point. Saxon, crafty motherfucker that he was, used to challenge townspeople to a variety of lifts that he knew only he could complete. Though the lifts varied across a wide range, they all shared a common feature- they were unevenly loaded. His methods would range from blatantly loading one side heavier than the other to using a hollow bar partly filled with water, so the weight would slosh from side to side, to throw off his opponent’s balance. I’m not suggesting you do anything tremendously drastic, but try this- start using mismatched plates. We’re all guilty of trying to match plate types exactly, especially on bench, and I’ve seen guys go so far as to scour the gym for the best-matching clips before attempting a PR. Instead, use mis-matched weights. You’ll start to realize that it’s not so bar after all. This will get you on the path to owning the weights, rather than letting them own you. Later, you can add an extra 2.5 lbs on one side or the other, and do a couple of sets with that. It’ll feel weird at first, but you’ll come to find that even drastic differences in the weights from side to side are manageable, and even fun, provided you don’t FEAR them.

2) Stop paying attention to the weight on the bar. The best way to do this is to switch from American to Metric, or vice-versa, depending on what you’re used to. Lift the weights before you have time to really calculate them. If you’re pretty good at mental math, try to use 25kg plates, or 100lb plates, to help throw yourself off. You’ll end up using slightly different weights than you’re used to, or possibly surprise yourself by lifting an obscene amount of weight on a particular lift, entirely by accident, simply because you didn’t take the time to calculate the weight first.

3) In a similar vein, start having your lifting partner load the weight for you, based on your performance, and lift it without tallying up what’s on the bar. That's a tidbit I got from a story about Arnold and Franco, where Franco was having a shitty bench day, but was in front of a window, so he was killing himself to look good. Finally, Arnold added 10 lbs to a side when Franco wasn't looking, then when Franco got pinned, told him to lift it or die under a bitch weight in front of everyone outside. Franco finished the lift, saw Arnold changed the weight, and was amused and pissed, but laughed his ass off and proceded to have a good but brutal lifting day.

Give that shit a shot, and you may just end up surprising yourself with a 500 lb+ front squat or something, as I did one day. Once you get a couple of those surprises under your belt, you’ll be fucking fearless in the gym.

Pain, or damage, don’t end the world, or despair, or fucking beatin’s. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you’ve got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back.

----------------
Now playing: Killwhitneydead - You Smell Naughty
via FoxyTunes

**My Secret Diet Food- you'll never guess it, and it fucking rules.

I have tried many, many diets over the years. In college, as a wrestler, I stuck with an ultra-low fat, fairly high carb diet for nearly two years, eating almost nothing but turkey lunch meat, lettuce, and bagels (obviously, I was eating a lot of bagel sandwiches). After waking one night starving to death and craving sausage biscuits like a lunatic, I made a drastic switch to the Atkins diet. Due to the fact that I didn't research it all that well, it didn't quite have the effect I would have liked. I did enjoy my couple of months of eating nothing but sausage patties and hamburgers, at least until I awoke in a massive amount of pain, constipated as all hell, feeling the cumulative effects of two months of eating processed meat with no fiber whatsoever.

Neither of those diets worked particularly well, and in spite of 5 or 6 days a week of lifting and running, and wrestling hard 6 months out of the year, I was not "ripped". Sure, I was muscular (for a guy who wrestled 134 lbs), and fairly lean, I was not the stack of brutally lean and vascular muscle that I am now.

From there, I moved to Tucson, where I started eating steamed chicken and broccoli for three meals a day, doused in the manna of the gods, Sriracha sauce. This meal was accompanied by at least a full cup of white rice, which I usually faced after drowning it in Sriracha, and then followed it up with a couple of protein shakes a day (at the time, I made my own chocolate shakes using unflavored bulk whey concentrate from Supplementdirect.com). Using this diet, I pushed my weight up to around 170, and was pretty lean, but the white rice kept me from getting much leaner. I mixed in the occasional hoagie as well, in addition to chicken soft tacos from Del Taco. MMmmmmmmm. Del Taco fucking rules, fyi, although every single one of their restaurants is a fucking shithole.

The 1970's called, and they want their restaurant back... cleaned, for once.

After trying the Chipotle diet for a few years, which put a few more pounds of muscle on me, and the chicken soup diet (which I'll outline in another post, mostly for the ladies), I discovered Metabolic Typing, found that I'm a meat type, and started doing occasional keto runs (a period of time in which you keep your daily carbs below 5% of your daily intake) in conjunction with carb cycling. The carb cycling, another thing I'll outline in a later post, basically boils down to a couple a days of keto dieting, a couple of days of medium carbs, and a couple of days of high carbing it (typically on the days I have a cheat window).

So, for the secret: drum roll please...

CHICKEN WINGS. This is not a joke. I can attribute the veins on my abs DIRECTLY to my massive consumption of unbreaded chicken wings. Allow me to tell you why.

Wings have the perfect macronutrient ratio for low carbing it.  60% of the calories in wings come from fat, and almost all of the remainder come from protein.  Thus, when you combine a couple (or few) pounds of wings a day with a couple of protein shakes, you end up with a macronutrient breakdown that's split almost exactly down the middle between protein and fat.

Thus, wings pretty much the ideal macronutrient ratio for low-carbing. Most diet gurus suggest a ratio along the lines of 55-70% fat, 5% carbs, and the remainder of your caloric  intake to come from protein, and that's the breakdown with which you'll end up if you allow wings to become the (awesome) cornerstone to your diet.

Clearly, Nothing in This Blog (Except for Disdain) is Directed Towards Women

The aim of this blog is to establish a basis from which I can write a book. Given the fact that I am remarkably profane, I highly doubt that my book will ever be published, but I will enjoy the shit out of writing it and in giving it to my friends and training partners. That stated, nothing of the knowledge or opinions I'm imparting to you, my fuckers, is in any way directed at women. Frankly, I'd be surprised if any women actually read this, but I realized some time ago that I am a shitty trainer of women.

If I owned a gym, I would happily kick this broad right the fuck out, because she would be both a distraction and a constant source of annoyance.

Why?

1. Most women are insane. I cannot relate to them, and I typically am far more likely to piss a woman off than I am to endear her to me in any way. Part of this is because I tell it like it is, and part of it is because I'm an unabashed misogynist and general all-around asshole.
2. Most women lack the intestinal fortitude for hard training. Additionally, they've convinced themselves that cardio is king and weights suck, and I thus have about as much use for them as I do of retarded cripples, cats, babies, and mimes. Fuck me, I hate mimes. This, however, is why you'll see pudgy women dicking around on treadmills and ellipticals and avoiding the weights altogether.
3. Most women do not listen. Perhaps this is because they're too busy talking, or because they suffer from the maladies I've outlined in points 1 and 2.
4. This is the big one- women have to diet in a way that I consider insane, or they do not diet at all.

Let's address this last point, because it is the impetus behind this blog. I am frequently asked by women how to eat to look like so-and-so. Or to lose just the fat on their legs, abs, arms, etc. I used to make an attempt to explain, in the way I would speak to a small child or a housepet, how this could be accomplished. I now simply look at them like they're fucking retarded, laugh at them, and tell them they're totally fucked. If they wanted to look a certain way, they already would.

I would rather train this dog than any woman you could name. At least he's motivated.

Why?

1. Women want one thing- for you to tell them they can continue to eat what they're eating and they can look however they want. They know this is untrue, but this is the ONLY answer they will accept. If you tell them, as I do, that they will have to give up every food near and dear to them, they will stop listening, but pretend that they're hanging on your every word. They will then tell you, to a person, that they are either Irish or Italian, or both (even if they're blacker than Wesley Fucking Snipes) and so they HAVE to eat pasta and potatoes. Preferably covered in cheese, or cream sauce, or cheese and cream sauce.
2. Women are emotionally attached to food. I have no idea how to break this attachment. The attachment perplexes and disconcerts me, and generally makes me want to chokeslam broads into a pile of broken glass and rusty nails. It's fucking retarded.
3. If a woman can actually force herself to diet, she CANNOT cheat. This is foreign to me, and negates a major portion of my dieting plan, since I typically operate in a slight caloric deficit until the days of my cheat meals, at which time I reach caloric excess, to a degree that will allow me to gain muscle while losing fat. It also recharges my metabolism, which is essential when dieting. If women cheat, they fuck their entire diet up, and begin using that cheat meal as an excuse for cheating the next day, or the next hour, or for abandoning their diet altogether, and blaming their failure on their feelings, rather than their lack of willpower.

So, to sum up, I do not address the myriad issues women face because they annoy me, and it's essentially a pointless exercise anyway. Women would benefit from following the diet I do, or from training the way I do, but it takes far too much effort to force them into believing it than I care to expend. I will say, for the record, that women who train in Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, or strongman, and who follow a decent diet, look fucking awesome. Unfortunately, they are in the minority, and their exploits are overlooked because the average chick is terrified of giving up macaroni and cheese long enough to look the way they want.

Kara Bohigian. Hot. Elite powerlifter.

I believe Pitboss 2000 said it best in their song "Fat Pig":
You fucking fatass you make me sick
bubble cunt in spandex, your ass is this big
first you broke the treadmill
then you broke the bike
with jelly rolls a flappin
and a mullet like a dyke

fat pig! get outta my gym

no one needs to see you, so don't leave your house
wait for richard simmons to come and get you out
when breaking down the door to make a wall
is the only way you leave
we'll watch you take your forklift ride live on tv

----------------
Now playing: Killwhitneydead - It Ain't Gonna Suck Itself
via FoxyTunes

*Why HIT IS Total Fucking Horseshit, Part 2

A high-intensity training advocate who apparently lifts in Auschwitz.

So, Mentzer was a fucking whackjob, which we know right off the bat. But how whacked?

He applied Ayn Rand's "Art of Non-Contradictory Identification" (i.e. logic) to weightlifting. This theory hold that contradictions cannot exist in objective reality. Thus, there can only be ONE best system of weight training. Somehow, in Mentzer's drug-fueled ramblings, he failed to notice that the "best" is an entirely subjective determination. He believed, as an extension, that a contradiction is mistaken reasoning, which is amusing, because the fact that he lost to many, many bodybuilders who followed training regimes that were the total obverse of his own should have tipped him off to the fact that his conceptions of proper training and nutrition were retarded.

Mentzer believed:

1. That heavier training through progression took more of a toll on the body as one progressed. (Wisdom of Mike Mentzer p. 50) He apparently failed algebra, as had he done the math, he'd have recognized that 90% of a 1RM is still 90% of a 1RM, even when the RM increases drastically, and that training at that intensity takes the same toll on the body, no matter how low or high the RM (rep max).
2. That the more intense the workout, the shorter it should be. "For every slight increase in intensity, there has to be a disproportionate decrease in volume." (WMM p. 50) At the time, the Bulgarians were drastically increasing the volume of their programs, and began training up to 8 hours a day. Elite athletes found that the stronger they became, the more they needed to train in order to get results, rather than less, as Mentzer believed.
   
3. Mentzer believed that "intensity" was defined as "how hard you train", a completely subjective concept. Everyone else in strength training and physical culture knew (and know) that "intensity" describes the amount of weight used in relation to one's limit lift. Thus, 90% of one's 1RM (one rep max), is a far greater intensity than 60% 1RM.
4. "The full completion of the recovery process may take anywhere from one day to a couple of weeks." (53 WMM) Sport science would disagree, claiming that individuals' training capacities may vary widely, but that most trainees recover in between 6 and 72 hours, depending on the volume and intensity of one's workout. He also thought that "up to 3 months might be required in order to recover from a high intensity workout for the biceps"(54 WMM) in spite of the fact that BROKEN BONES HEAL FASTER THAN THAT.
5. "Anatomically and physiologically, every human being is essentially the same" (33 High Intensity Training), in spite of the fact that he believed in somatotyping, and the fact that it's been widely demonstrated that no two people are "essentially the same", exhibiting widely varying metabolisms, enzymatic processes, organ location and sizes, and muscle fiber compositions.
6. That one should consume massive amounts of carbs, and no more than 100g of protein a day! HAHAHAHAHA.
7. That one needs only to do one set for each bodypart to total failure every week and a half, though he regularly exceeded this volume by an order of magnitude.
   
8. Lastly, Mentzer believed that "the mind can alter any physiological system (200 HIT). This is hilarious, given the fact that he didn't believe that one's recovery EVER adapted to training, hahahahaha.

The verdict? Mentzer was a fucking retard, and I'm glad he's dead. With any luck, his legions of HIT jedi will fade into obscurity (rot in hell Ellington Darden and Stuart McRobert), and we can all train like fucking animals without hearing about "overtraining" and "hardgaining" ever again.

The badass physique of a drug crazed asshole, bold-faced liar, and bonafide retard.

Destroy the weak.

----------------
Now playing: I Declare War - Fuck Your Claim
via FoxyTunes

*What, Exactly, Is Ideal?

A good question, and one that every person should address themselves. I've fought with myself over this issue for years, between aesthetics and performance, and within aesthetics themselves. Traditional bodybuilding sentiment is that the truest ideal of bodybuilding lies somewhere between skinny guys like Frank Zane, the allegedly herculean but actually apollonian Bob Paris and Steve Reeves, and fan-favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger.Much was made about Reeve's classical proportions, wherein one's neck, upper arms, and calves are all supposed to match. Zane was similarly proportioned, while Paris was a bit larger, and Arnold was a mass monster by comparison. For comparative purposes, Reeves was 6'1" and 210 lbs (which is the size of a somewhat impressive guy at any gym in the US these days), while Zane was a paltry 5'9" and 180 lbs (making me considerably more jacked than that yoga-loving retard), Paris weighed in at 220 at a height of 6' (giving him roughly the same proportions as Arnold, though as a gay activist and a terrifically uncompelling personality, no one gives a flying fuck about Bob Paris outside of an AIDS clinic or the greater San Francisco area), and Arnold tipped the scales at around 240 at a height of 6'2". All of the guys looked great for their time, and are revered as some of the best physiques ever.

When I got into the whole bodybuilding thing, it was the mid-90s, the beginning of the mass monster movement. I fucking revered guys like Mike Quinn, Mike Matarazzo, and David Dearth. All three of those guys were fucking lunatics, trained constantly, and were generally pissed off and ready to battle every time they hit the weights. Dearth was quoted once as saying "I'm an extremist, and I hope to be remembered that way: noncompliant and an artist. I do not want to be remembered as a nice guy. I want to be the slayer of Bambi." THAT'S the kind of fucking guy I wanted to model myself after, rather than Reeves and his namby-pamby lifts and his obsession with measuring his bodyparts.

Fuckers all look like they're about to eat a baby, even when smiling.

Anyway, I fought a war with myself over what the ideal should be. This war got even more pronounced when I stopped doing reps, or even considering bodybuilding to be a sport, and I shifted into powerlifting and strongman. I then started revering guys like Ed Coan and Pudz, and getting into the old school guys like Maxick, Hackenschmidt, and Arthur Saxon. All of the last guys I named, modern and classic, are and were consummate showmen, displaying physiques that belie their strength, and may in fact complement their strength as well. That's what I've come to see as the ideal, and have adjusted my sights to be the strongest I can be within the strictures set by my need to lift brutally heavy every time I enter the gym. This seems to be the trend in strength sports lately, as I've noticed a lot more BIG strength athletes rolling into comps with impressive sets of abs.

So, how to accomplish this? Well, check out the next installment of ChAoS&PAIN to find out.


----------------
Now playing: Blood Of Our Enemies - Dead Smiles On Broken Glass
via FoxyTunes