16 November 2017

Do It. Don't Fucking Talk About It.


I've decried the modern era of lifting for a wide variety of things ranging from people treating competitive lifting like a fun run to the idiotic dogmatism people have for certain training methods / disciplines to rampant consumerism, but perhaps no other modern era tendency in lifting is more ubiquitous or fucking annoying than the tendency people have to endlessly talk about lifting on the internet.  Day in and day out people are yammering on about their latest unmemorable workout, their new program, what diet they're on, or asking questions about a mishmash of those things and making vast proclamations about what they intended to do.  This phenomenon has come to make me hate the online community of lifters that I'd lose sleep over the fact that the gym is no longer the bastion of awesome it once was, but is instead filled with people I would literally as soon kill as look at.  The internet has literally ruined lifting, the lifting community, gyms, and has made just about everyone with whom I might have had something in common nothing more than prey and a target for pure hatred. 



Why anyone gives a shit what you did for your daily workout is a mystery to me.  I'm reasonably certain if anyone does, it's a bunch of pasty-faced doughy fucktards jerking their dicks to lifting vids, never having lifted a day in their lives.  The whole thing is so bizarre and narcissistic I have trouble understanding how I'm part of the same species.  And worse than being confusingly conceited (since everyday lifting is pretty drab), it serves absolutely no purpose.  "Didn't feel 100% but posted this stupid bullshit anyway / felt off / my dog was triggered by what a cat said to him so I was distracted / whatever" THEN DON'T FUCKING POST IT.  Journalists don't get to just vomit a bunch of lackluster bullshit onto the news page accompanied by weak-assed excuses and caveats because they desperately required validation.  Chess players aren't posting random lost games online with a litany of saddie commentary about how they weren't feeling up to snuff, BECAUSE EVEN CHESS PLAYERS ARE TOUGHER THAN LIFTERS AT THIS POINT.  Where the fuck is your pride?  Is that your identity?  Your identity is endless excuses and mediocrity?  


Has both a training log and the shitty physique to show for it.

And if you are claiming it's for a training log, I call bullshit.  First, training logs are for the retarded- if you can't remember what you lifted, spend less time fucking around on the internet while you're in the gym and acting like a professional photographer and FUCKING LIFT.  Maybe if you're less distracted with fucking Fitspiration (holy shit you people make me want to smash my laptop with a hammer because you're more annoying than a flock of midgets singing songs from the Wizard of Oz and more pathetic than Louie CK's game with women) and taking selfies while acting like the next George fucking Butler, you could remember what you'd lifted.  Second, if it were part of a training log, you'd either have insanely truncated workouts or you're a fucking liar because you're never going to watch 60+ minutes of training.


Huh.  Weird.  The man said nothing about begging for attention from strangers.

Which in no way brings me to my point, but as I'm gonna digress about 100 more times about how much I hate just about everyone on the planet I'll rein it in.  Rocky Marciano once said (and I think this is an old Italian adage), "Do it.  Don't talk about it."  The man was the only undefeated heavyweight champion ever and was so undersized he'd even be a small cruiserweight today.  In spite of being pocket-sized and not particularly quick or skilled, he out-worked everyone and went on to win 43 fights by knockout.  This beast never talked about being the champ outside of the ring- the neighborhood kids were amazed that he'd come home from fights and toss the football around with them in the street like regular-old Joe Blow.  Did he ever bore them to fucking death with talk of his workouts, or his diet, or any other of the minutia you fucking people endlessly discuss as if it matters in the slightest?  No- he was too busy training, or reading books, or playing football with neighborhood kids, or practicing his Italian.  There's a great big wide world out there, assholes.  Shut the fuck up about training and your diet and learn about it. 


That's what giving 100% effort looks like.  Notice she's not taking a selfie while doing it.

What matters is exactly what you lack: effort.  Execution.  And the reason?  You spend so much energy boring everyone to death with talk of what you're doing or going to do that you siphons energy from what you should be doing- training.  You're an energy leech off yourself and others (not that you care about anyone else, because the internet generation are the most self-serving, self-absorbed, whiny, purportedly disordered, useless sacks of monkey shit the world has ever seen) and you're preventing yourself from being anything than what the hideously vast majority of you are- pathetically average or below average.



While we're at it, STOP TELLING PEOPLE YOUR TRAINING AND PHYSIQUE GOALS.  Holy shit.  Years ago, I thought I had driven this fucking point home harder than Paul Walker drove his into a lamp post, but here's a refresher- if you tell people your goals, you're less likely to achieve them than Paul Walker and Ryan Dunn are to star in the next (and hopeful last) Fast and the Furious.  It's science- you create something called a social reality in which your brain thinks its achieved the goal already, and the social recognition you all crave so much makes you so fucking happy inside that you just throw up your hands and say fuck it.  And then proceed to bore us all with endless posts of spiritless gym drudgery replete with the aforementioned excuses.


When I become Overlord of this dumpster fire we call a planet, this picture represents just the start of what I'm going to do the internet form nazis and their shitpile families.

Finally, the worse form of the talkers are the fuckwits critiquing form online, and they should just die.  Long and slow.  They're a pussy or a cunt, their mom is a whore, their dad is a bitch, and their brothers and sisters should have been aborted.  9/10 of them have never lifted a fucking thing heavier than a jug of milk, and the other 1/10 are insecure pussies who for whatever reason feel the need to diminish the accomplishments of others to pump up their already overinflated egos  It's fucking pathetic, and while they should kill themselves, they won't because they're bitch-made to the point they make Kevin Spacey look like a paragon of masculinity and virtue.  To them I say: I hope you all get mouth cancer and your kids are born deformed.  Weak sauce, bitch made cunts.


The Road Warriors never spoke a word to anyone about their shitty workouts... nor would they have made excuses for one either.  They would have just sacked the fuck up and soldiered on.

To Wrap Things Up...

This is not your sport.  And I don't mean, maybe you're just not all that good and blah, blah, blah.  I mean this is my sport.  It's the sport of the people who trained in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who didn't define themselves by a particular weightlifting discipline- they just lifted and busted their asses and had fun doing it.  People who were perfectly happy to hear your training maxes because they only competed to prove they were the best, rather than get some worthless trophy or medal to validate their existence.  The sport of people who would all show up to a competition if someone in their gym was competing because it meant that person had a legit shot at winning- and even if they didn't we'd descend on a pizza place in a mob and bullshit about just about anything but training afterwards.  This is the sport of the dudes who trained outside at Muscle Beach in the 1960s.  This is the sport of Saxon and Goerner and the dudes who trained in their gyms and trained like fucking lunatics.  If you don't want to be awesome, if you don't want to exhibit the modicum of personal pride that should prevent you from posting lackluster videos on the internet and endlessly discussing training minutae online while skipping workouts or meals, if you need Fitspo to get into the gym or not fall down weeping when someone doesn't tell you how pretty you are in the office one day, then GET THE FUCK OUT.  We don't want you.  We don't need you.  We don't like you.  We fucking hate you.  We want the fucking weight stack to fall on your weepy little head every time we see you in the gym.


Now fucking get out there. I want you to change the world. Don't think it'll change peacefully or you can do it alone. You need to eat the weak. You get out there. You use your hatred and you rip weightrooms apart. You hunt down the armchair internet form critics, the Fitspo cunts on Instagram, the fitness models, the scumbags with GoFundMe pages for competitions, and the loudmouth natty pussies, the unqualified coaches, the people who won't shut up about their fucking macros, the sensitive. Because they're all the same. And you... you rip their fucking guts out. Drape them on your Christmas tree! Make a mountain of their skulls in the foyer of your local gym.  We need a cleanse, people. We need a reboot. We need a new chance for all of us. But I cannot do this work alone. I need you not to suck.  Or I will have to break into your fucking house and eat you.

14 November 2017

Eat Shit That Tastes Good And Get Some Yogurt (Or Probiotics) Down Your Neck Or Pay The Fucking Price

If the choice is eating like this or finding out what a .45 round tastes like hot out of the barrel, hand me that hand cannon and pour some Dave's Insanity Sauce on the bullet before I pull the trigger.  And Mrs. Goddamned Dash?  You've got to be fucking joking.

We've all fallen into the trap of eating to feed the machine- it's been a badge of pride for me throughout the years, and I know it is for many bodybuilders.  Glorying in the asceticism of eating bland, unfulfilling meals with perfect macros and reveling in the superiority of the stoic refusal to eat a slice a pizza while out with your friends on Friday night, or refusing altogether to go out and silently proclaiming your supremacy over the people around you who refused to live like some weird, tan monk in an effort to achieve weight-induced enlightenment.  Some of us have done it.  It's "the life."


Just say no to asceticism.

If you've ever attempted this sort of asceticism, you know that it was pretty much wholly unnecessary.  As I mentioned above, I managed to stay reasonably lean, maintain most of my size, and not get too horrifically fat eating nothing but summer sausage and ramen noodles, and I barely had access to weights.  I discovered then that it was possible to out-train my diet, which was a fact of which I had an inkling when I managed to stay pretty big and lean after a year of literally nothing but vodka, chicken fingers, strip steak, pizza, and tater tots.  Does this mean I was completely wrong to diet so hard for years and years, treating carbohydrates like they were tainted with fallout from a dirty bomb?


There is no reason why anyone should have to live that way.

Nah, but I was onto something.  Taste, texture, and smell all affect digestion, and good digestion is critical to good healthy.  If your gorge is rising in your throat due to the fact that you're spooning canned chicken slathered in a bit of Texas Pete's into your face, your stomach is not prepared to deal with digesting that slightly-better-than-cat-food bullshit... and by the way, Texas Pete's is just about the most disgusting hot sauce on the planet.  Seriously, spend some time on Amazon and find some actually tasty hot sauce if you're just gonna forcefeed yourself the type of bland pap that one would expect in a futuristic prison movie where people are being fed nutrient paste (I'll give you yet another reason why hot sauce is awesome for you later on in the article).



This is a man with depressed dopamine levels.

Why does it fucking matter?  It's simple- your digestive tract doesn't just digest your food and process nutrients- it controls 75% of your dopamine production and thus has a great deal to do with your mood.  Before I get into the details of that fact, your mood has a great deal to do with your dopamine levels- too little dopamine and you're an ice cream eating saddie in stained underwear living in your parents' basement shit-talking the depth of world record squats, and too much makes you so fucking razor focused that you're what the Terminator would jerk off fantasizing about if he has a dick (Perez, Teta).


Notice that the Oak is tucking into an inch and a half steak and not a couple of cans of tuna like some ridiculous perma bachelor with a stained ceiling from his horrific and constant fish, eggs, and oats farts.

In 2012 the awesome podcast Radiolab ran a segment on a guy who had a massive inoperable fissure in his intestines.  Docs said that the only way to fix it was to anesthetize his digestive tract and let it heal itself.  For years he was on liquid diet injected directly into his stomach, but this caused a new problem- he was so goddamned depressed he started acting insane- he literally broke into a guy's backyard to grill for him immediately after failing at suicide and wandering the streets like a deranged, syphilitic hobo.  He'd noticed that his tongue had gone completely smooth, as he'd lost his taste buds, which pissed off his vagus system worse than a hillbilly when you tell him you hate him so much you'd like to send him to country festival in Vegas.  Your vagus nerve runs from the tip of your tongue to your colon, so pissing it off can fuck up pretty much aspect of your life... and that guy nearly died from doing so.



After having another infection that had the doctors thinking he'd die if he stayed on the pump, he reintroduced solid food into his diet slowly, but still had no sense of taste because he wasn't eating foods he loved, so he was still more or less miserable.  This all changed, however, when he went to his favorite diner and got the only meal he ever ordered (which is apparently the greatest breakfast sandwich in history)... and suddenly he could taste.  One of the largest nervous systems in his body responded immediately with a Thai massage parlor happy ending in his mouth because he fed it what it wanted.  As such, it seems like saying that taste is a factor in optimal health is like saying that punching is a factor in a Ray Rice elevator trip, because both of them can cause serious and immediate changes in the health of their surrounding environment.


In case you're unfamiliar with Pol Pot, this is the class picture for University of Phnom Penh in 1969.

It goes further than that though- we can apply this to hoisting heavy shit and looking like Grecian statues.  A study using two groups of mice fed them either lactobacillus-infused broth or regular broth, then dropped them into a bowl of water.  Mice hate water more than Pol Pot hated intellectuals, but they're great swimmers.  So they'd swim all over looking for a way to escape, and at about four minutes the broth-only mice would just give up and do a dead man's float.  The lactobacillus mice, however, went on like tiny fat little Michael Phelpses and the reviewers pulled them out at six minutes while their legs pinwheeled like a dog held over water.  In the first group, there was a 100-fold increase in cortisol that caused them to burn out and shut down.  The Michael Phelps group had a huge change in the receptors for GABA (which keeps you cooler than Jason Statham karate kicking in the middle of a gun fight), and they had half of the cortisol of the other mice.  The reason for this is... the vagus nerve's stimulation with an extra-healthy colon.

To prove that the vagus nerve was the way the lactobacillus-induced changes became tiny little badasses, they conducted a second experiment in which the good swimmers had their vagus nerves cut, were still fed the probiotics, and the mice suddenly became the couch potato saddie bitches their compatriots had been.



If you want a more philosophical reason to eat shit that tastes good and avoid just eating like a half-retarded Nascar fan on a food binge around Talledega weekend, consider the fact that food links you to your heritage and your heritage to you.  Cultures have forever been definied as much by their dress or speech as their food, so if you want to be recognized as a half-retarded bodybuilding asshat who owns nothing more than a gym membership and a microwave, by all means eat like a Men's Health model.  For me, I'd rather embrace the foods of the jacked motherfuckers from history who loved eating, fighting, and fucking.  Ajax from the Trojan War or Honey Boo Boo's mom.  Take your pick.

So, if you're good to your tongue and your colon you're gonna be a fucking god in the gym.  Because science.  Dunno about you guys, but I'm to off try my hand at making triple dipped fried chicken (which I'm using for ultra-spicy chicken sandwiches) because I plan on breaking my ass at the gym tomorrow and science says I'll PR.

Sources:
Bravo JA, Forsythe P, Chew MV, Escaravage E, Savignac HM, Dinan TG, Bienenstock J, Cryan JF.  Ingestion of Lactobacillus strain regulates emotional behavior and central GABA receptor expression in a mouse via the vagus nerve.  Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Sep 20;108(38):16050-5.

Lehrer, Jonah and Carl Zimmer.  Guts.  Season 10, Episode 7.  3 Apr 2012.  Web.  14 Nov 2017.  Radiolab.  http://www.radiolab.org/story/197242-gut-feelings/

Perez SM, Carreno FR, Frazer A, Lodge DJ.  Vagal Nerve Stimulation Reverses Aberrant Dopamine System Function in the Methylazoxymethanol Acetate Rodent Model of Schizophrenia.  J Neurosci. 2014 Jul 9; 34(28): 9261–9267.

Teta, Jade.  Is your brain making you fat?  Metabolic Effect.  21 May 2009.  Web.  14 Nov 2017.  https://www.metaboliceffect.com/is-your-brain-making-you-fat/