385 Bench
And here's my high 645 squat. The 650 was much, much deeper.
670 Deadlift
19 September 2012
Clash For Cash Bench and Deadlift Videos
385 Bench
18 September 2012
I Am Legend- Clash For Cash Results
As you may have already heard, I took part in the most epic powerlifting competition since powerlifting's heydays in the early 1980s. At the 504 Clash For Cash, my flight took the squat record for the 198s, tied the record in 181s, and broke the total records for 181 and 220. Dan Green took the total record at 220, Jesse Kellum broke Tony Fratto's 39 year old record in the squat, and I tied Bob McKee's 650 squat and broke his 1700 total with 1705. Shit just got real. I'll be posting videos later tonight of my third attempts in the squat, bench, and deadlift, but my attempts were:
Squat: 605,
Bench:
Deadlift: 605, 670,
Total: 1705
Apparently, many butts were hurt over my choice of tshirts, as I rocked a "Smile, Satan loves you" shirt for the squat and bench, but I was assured by a random nice guy that Jesus still loves me, which I'm sure you know comes as a relief. Southerners have no sense of humor at all.
How could you not love this shirt?
13 September 2012
Chaos And Bang Your Earballs, The Grunge Appreciation Edition
Paul and I decided to discuss 90s music, some training, gunshot wounds to the chest, the Crocodile Drug and whatever is wrong with the Russian peoples as a whole, and a bunch of other random bullshit for this iteration of CNBYE.
I'll go ahead and upload the Krokodil pics later, as Blogger is being a bastard right now. Rest assured, you're going to vomit up your last protein shake. ... and here they are- Krokodil for the win. For those of you who are curious, here's Wikipeda's take on Krokodil:
"Desomorphine attracted attention in 2010 in Russia due to an increase in clandestine production, presumably due to its relatively simple synthesis from codeine. The drug is easily made from codeine, iodine and red phosphorus, in a process similar to the manufacture of methamphetamine from pseudoephedrine, but desomorphine made this way is highly impure and contaminated with various toxic and corrosive byproducts. The street name in Russia for home-made desomorphine is "krokodil" (крокодил, crocodile), reportedly due to the scale-like appearance of skin of its users and the derivation from chlorocodide. Due to difficulties in procuring heroin combined with easy and cheap access to over-the-counter pharmacy products containing codeine in Russia, use of "krokodil" has been on the increase. Since the home-made mix is routinely injected immediately with little or no further purification, "krokodil" has become notorious for producing severe tissue damage, phlebitis and gangrene, sometimes requiring limb amputation in long-term users. The amount of tissue damage is so high that addicts' life expectancies are said to be as low as two to three years, especially as they are often highly susceptible to infections and gangrene due to widespread HIV infection among injecting drug users in Russia.
Abuse of home-made desomorphine was first reported in middle and eastern Siberia in 2002, but has since spread throughout Russia and the neighboring former Soviet republics. In October 2011, indications of "krokodil" use were found in Germany, with some media outlets claiming several dead users. One death in Poland in December 2011 was also believed to be caused by "krokodil" use, and its use has been confirmed among Russian expatriate communities in a number of other European countries. In September 2012 the drug was reported in use by Norwegian heroin addicts in Tromsø."
No eye cleanse for you! Go eat some well-done ribs cooked over an open fire and be happy you're not fucking Russian.
10 September 2012
It's Time To Stop Mocking Indians For Their Clubbells
As a student of history, I've come to the realization that I shouldn't be surprised by anything I find in historical annals. In spite of that knowledge, I still find myself continually surprised by shit I thought I had locked down, when I in fact didn't know the half of the story. Most recently, I had this realization about India, a place with which I generally only associate stupid wars with Muslims over glaciers no one really wants and "food" at which even the least discerning scat porn actors would turn up their noses. Certainly, when I think about India, about the last thing of which I think are robust physiques and weightlifters. After doing a bit of research, I discovered that India has earned precisely one medal in Olympic Weightlifting, a bronze medal in the women's 69 kg class in the 2000 Olympics. That seems about right to me, because the Indians seem only capable at excelling at badminton and perpetuating horrible diseases generally not found outside their country's borders than they do at strength sports.
But, you might argue, they also excel at driving taxis, owning convenience stores, and making godawful 5 hour movies filled with interminable and inexplicable dance numbers. That's correct, but still fails to explain one thing- how is it possible that a nation of 1.2 billion could possibly produce fewer weightlifting medals in history than the tiny, poverty-stricken, land-locked nation of Moldova produced in the 2012 Olympics? Moldova's economy, as I understand it, is based almost entirely on moving cars from stolen all over Europe. If you think I'm joking, stolen car resale is so extensive in Moldova that the Moldovan Justice Minister was caught driving a stolen car in Austria (AP). Thus, a couple million car thieves managed to produce more medals in weightlifting this year than more than a billion Indians have in their entire history. The craziest part? Indians have a longer and more storied history in weightlifting than any group of people on Earth. That is where this story gets interesting.
Insofar as I know, most of us believe that ancient weightlifting pretty much began and ended with the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans, and was pretty much a dead issue until the 17th Century when traveling strongmen resurrected it. Strength historian David Willoughby chronicled some strongmen who performed in the interregnum, but there appears to have not been any widespread strength training or physical culture in the West until the 18th century, and it didn't really pop off fully until the 19th Century. While that might have been the case in the West, it was not so in the East- Indians held strength training the fuck down the entire time, only quitting when some ill-tempered pasty-faced limeys robbed their country blind and left them so bereft of pride they make modern reality television stars seem downright noble in comparison.
As an aside, I realize it's unfair to paint India with such a broad brush, given the fact that they're so enthnolinguistically diverse they're essentially all of the Americas crammed into the state of Texas, but I like broad generalizations. India's actually a pretty fucking crazy place, even after they chopped it into three countries in 1949. When you think of India, you probably think of mocha-colored people speaking Hindi, rocking twig arms and legs and potbellies, always looking for a cow to worship. You'd not be all that far off, but there's all kinds of crazy shit going on in the fringes, like the Toda people of South India, who live in thatched huts shaped like barrels, are ethnically related to Greek Cypriots and have a sacred Milkman; the people of Kashi, who brawl so fucking hard at Thai-style kickboxing that people in the stands kill each other in fistfights; the Meitei who live on the Burmese border and speak a Sino-Tibetan language, basically treat chicks like men (which is not the case in the rest of India), and whose script is comprised of letters that all correspond with parts of the human body (the first letter means "head", for instance); and the overarching Hindi culture, which has pretty much predominated since the Indo-Aryan invasions began out of Western Siberia around 2500 BC. It's really that culture to which I'll be referring, since it's the one about which there is the most information. Basically, I'll be treating India like most foreigners regard Americans- to them, we're all fat, white, barely literate xenophobes who buy everything from Walmart, are aggressively ignorant of other cultures, and drape ourselves in American flags while hating homos and supporting wars of foreign aggression with no logical reasoning.
According to a number of sources I recently discovered, however, the Indians were the only group of people heavily into strength training in the Middle Ages. Strength training manuals in India have been discovered that date as far back as the 1100s, and recommended that people basically do what you see going on in pictures of third world gyms today- they lifted stone weights and sacks of sand (Sandow). By the 1500s, strength training was so widespread in India that it could be considered to have been what cricket is today- their national pastime. Since then, North Indian wrestlers have been held aloft as some best-conditioned athletes ever, and some authors have made entire careers out of regurgitating ancient Indian strength training "secrets" for a generation of people who think that walking and occasionally jogging a 5k is an impressive physical feat.
My interest in Indian strength training grew out of an article I recently read about former Mr. Universe winner Monohar Aich. Swarthy little dwarf that he is, Aich won the 1952 Mr. Universe after pulling a full-on Charles Atlas transformation. Aich contracted one of India's famously bizarre diseases, black fever, and dragged his own ass from death's door to peak physical condition by doing 100 rep sets of one-legged squats, pushups, crunches, pullups, and leg raises all day long. Monohar got a bit of time off from wrecking shit in the Indian Air Force by getting invited to British prison for mouthing off to the Limeys for being thieving assholes, during which time he trained for twelve hours a day on bodyweight shit. After his release, Aich went on to become the Indian version of the Mighty Atom, repping out 660 lb squats, tearing 1500 page books, in spite of the fact that he was only 4'11'' and didn't weigh more than 150 lbs (Tyrrell). The craziest shit about his story is that although he grew up so poor that George Jefferson's humble beginnings would have been moving way the hell on up for Aich, the dude not only still trains 90 minutes a day, but is still jacked at 100 years old. Not surprisingly, the Rigveda actually states that people should live to be over 100, and Aich isn't the only Indian bodybuilder to live into his triple digits. In a country where our jacked guys' hearts explode at age 55 even with highly advanced medicine and great material wealth (come the fuck on Michael Clarke Duncan. How the fuck do you die of a heart attack at 55?), Indians are pretty much making us look like their punk bitches.
Codified systems of exercise are actually about as old as what we think of India itself, as the Vedas made frequent allusions to systems of exercise, though they didn't detail them outright (Mujumdar 1). For those of you who are unaware, the Vedas have basically been a combination of Wikipedia, the Bible, and the Farmer's Almanac for Indians for the last 200 years. In the Rig Veda, it was suggested that one use digging, fist fighting, swimming, running, and archery to build physical strength (Mujumdar 2). Interestingly, Mariusz Pudzianowski regularly includes the middle three in his training, and Steve Justa mentioned the value of digging in Rock, Iron, Steel. Though digging gets short shrift in comparison to the wood chop so frequently detailed in Men's Health and frequently performed in big box gyms around America, it's a hell of a workout. In the Vedas, the sage Agastya "desired to develop his strength by digging with a hoe (Vide Rigveda 1-179-6" and suggested others do the same (Ibid). Justa mentions that doing shovel lifts, in which he essentially mimicked the movement of shovelling with one of his wacky homemade implements, increased all of his other lifts after skipping other lifts for weighted shovels for two weeks. Frankly, any of you who's shoveled snow for a day know that shovelling kicks your ass inside out, and any of you who have seen an old image of a coal shoveler know they were ripped up in spite of the fact that their diets consisted of sausage and liquor.
In addition to the above, the Rigveda kicked shit off right, by recommending they take a variety of herbs to increase their strength, and to eat a diet heavy in fats. As I've covered before, fat-rich diets improve your hormonal profiles significantly, which will in turn confer greater strength upon you over time.
The Ramanyana followed that with recommendations or stone lifting and throwing, which persists in the Karachi district in India as Gutti, was part of the ancient Greek Olympics, and is still popular in the Scottish Highland games and among the Basques, both of whom are renowned for their physical strength. It also promoted jumping, which is still a popular exercise among East Indian wrestlers (who contributed heavily to modern catch wrestling/mma grappling) (Willoughby 200). Additionally, "swinging" was promoted, which from the accounts I've found seems like a combination of Crossfit's pullup abortions mixed with random Olympic high-bar gymnastics done from tree branches. As anyone with eyeballs and a television knows, gymnasts have always been, and always will be, jacked as fuck. Finally, the last couple books in the Veda basically promote "games" that consisted of hopefully-not-fatal brawling with fists, maces, and any other blunt object they happened to find laying around. One look at the average mma fighter will give you an idea of what that does for the body- all good things. Thus, all of their recommendations in ancient times are better than most of the nonsense you'll read online today- and that shit basically just came from their Bible.
Once they got out of the Biblical age, shit got real in India for weightlifting. Up next- how Indians got to be some of the most jacked motherfuckers on Earth while Europeans were too busy burning each other at the stake and declaring the female orgasm to be the sole produce of sorcery.
Sources:
AP, Associated Press. Moldovan Justice Minister Comes to Austria in Stolen Car. The Associated Press. 8 May 1996. Web. 7 Sep 2012. http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1996/Moldovan-Justice-Minister-Comes-to-Austria-in-Stolen-Car/id-5c33ec2f31e03cdc7e4ac03d48c25f0a
Mujumdar, DC (ed.). Encyclopedia of Indian Physical Culture. 1950.
Sultan, Azhar. Hazara traditions: Big men prove brawn and bravery with balls of stone. Express Tribune. 28 Dec 2010. Web. 10 Sep 2012. http://tribune.com.pk/story/95636/hazara-traditions-big-men-prove-brawn-and-bravery-with-balls-of-stone/
Tyrrell, Ron. Monohar Aich- An Enduring and Endearing Ambassador for Physical Culture. Sandowplus- Indian Physical Culture. Web. 10 Sep 2012. http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/India/Monohar/aich.htm
Harlequin disease or progeria? I honestly cannot decide which is worse, but they're both proof that if there are higher powers, they certainly hate the holy fuck out of India, and they are without question the biggest shitheads ever. The kid on the left is apparently alive but their skin is a hard crust, and the poor fuck on the right is fifteen years old.
But, you might argue, they also excel at driving taxis, owning convenience stores, and making godawful 5 hour movies filled with interminable and inexplicable dance numbers. That's correct, but still fails to explain one thing- how is it possible that a nation of 1.2 billion could possibly produce fewer weightlifting medals in history than the tiny, poverty-stricken, land-locked nation of Moldova produced in the 2012 Olympics? Moldova's economy, as I understand it, is based almost entirely on moving cars from stolen all over Europe. If you think I'm joking, stolen car resale is so extensive in Moldova that the Moldovan Justice Minister was caught driving a stolen car in Austria (AP). Thus, a couple million car thieves managed to produce more medals in weightlifting this year than more than a billion Indians have in their entire history. The craziest part? Indians have a longer and more storied history in weightlifting than any group of people on Earth. That is where this story gets interesting.
Rumba with 10 lb dumbbells? Apparently Crossfit was bestowing elite fitness on ancient Romans, too.
Insofar as I know, most of us believe that ancient weightlifting pretty much began and ended with the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans, and was pretty much a dead issue until the 17th Century when traveling strongmen resurrected it. Strength historian David Willoughby chronicled some strongmen who performed in the interregnum, but there appears to have not been any widespread strength training or physical culture in the West until the 18th century, and it didn't really pop off fully until the 19th Century. While that might have been the case in the West, it was not so in the East- Indians held strength training the fuck down the entire time, only quitting when some ill-tempered pasty-faced limeys robbed their country blind and left them so bereft of pride they make modern reality television stars seem downright noble in comparison.
As an aside, I realize it's unfair to paint India with such a broad brush, given the fact that they're so enthnolinguistically diverse they're essentially all of the Americas crammed into the state of Texas, but I like broad generalizations. India's actually a pretty fucking crazy place, even after they chopped it into three countries in 1949. When you think of India, you probably think of mocha-colored people speaking Hindi, rocking twig arms and legs and potbellies, always looking for a cow to worship. You'd not be all that far off, but there's all kinds of crazy shit going on in the fringes, like the Toda people of South India, who live in thatched huts shaped like barrels, are ethnically related to Greek Cypriots and have a sacred Milkman; the people of Kashi, who brawl so fucking hard at Thai-style kickboxing that people in the stands kill each other in fistfights; the Meitei who live on the Burmese border and speak a Sino-Tibetan language, basically treat chicks like men (which is not the case in the rest of India), and whose script is comprised of letters that all correspond with parts of the human body (the first letter means "head", for instance); and the overarching Hindi culture, which has pretty much predominated since the Indo-Aryan invasions began out of Western Siberia around 2500 BC. It's really that culture to which I'll be referring, since it's the one about which there is the most information. Basically, I'll be treating India like most foreigners regard Americans- to them, we're all fat, white, barely literate xenophobes who buy everything from Walmart, are aggressively ignorant of other cultures, and drape ourselves in American flags while hating homos and supporting wars of foreign aggression with no logical reasoning.
Dude's never even seen a squat rack and has bigass legs. U mad bro?
According to a number of sources I recently discovered, however, the Indians were the only group of people heavily into strength training in the Middle Ages. Strength training manuals in India have been discovered that date as far back as the 1100s, and recommended that people basically do what you see going on in pictures of third world gyms today- they lifted stone weights and sacks of sand (Sandow). By the 1500s, strength training was so widespread in India that it could be considered to have been what cricket is today- their national pastime. Since then, North Indian wrestlers have been held aloft as some best-conditioned athletes ever, and some authors have made entire careers out of regurgitating ancient Indian strength training "secrets" for a generation of people who think that walking and occasionally jogging a 5k is an impressive physical feat.
My interest in Indian strength training grew out of an article I recently read about former Mr. Universe winner Monohar Aich. Swarthy little dwarf that he is, Aich won the 1952 Mr. Universe after pulling a full-on Charles Atlas transformation. Aich contracted one of India's famously bizarre diseases, black fever, and dragged his own ass from death's door to peak physical condition by doing 100 rep sets of one-legged squats, pushups, crunches, pullups, and leg raises all day long. Monohar got a bit of time off from wrecking shit in the Indian Air Force by getting invited to British prison for mouthing off to the Limeys for being thieving assholes, during which time he trained for twelve hours a day on bodyweight shit. After his release, Aich went on to become the Indian version of the Mighty Atom, repping out 660 lb squats, tearing 1500 page books, in spite of the fact that he was only 4'11'' and didn't weigh more than 150 lbs (Tyrrell). The craziest shit about his story is that although he grew up so poor that George Jefferson's humble beginnings would have been moving way the hell on up for Aich, the dude not only still trains 90 minutes a day, but is still jacked at 100 years old. Not surprisingly, the Rigveda actually states that people should live to be over 100, and Aich isn't the only Indian bodybuilder to live into his triple digits. In a country where our jacked guys' hearts explode at age 55 even with highly advanced medicine and great material wealth (come the fuck on Michael Clarke Duncan. How the fuck do you die of a heart attack at 55?), Indians are pretty much making us look like their punk bitches.
Aich, making most people look like soggy dogshit at age 75.
Codified systems of exercise are actually about as old as what we think of India itself, as the Vedas made frequent allusions to systems of exercise, though they didn't detail them outright (Mujumdar 1). For those of you who are unaware, the Vedas have basically been a combination of Wikipedia, the Bible, and the Farmer's Almanac for Indians for the last 200 years. In the Rig Veda, it was suggested that one use digging, fist fighting, swimming, running, and archery to build physical strength (Mujumdar 2). Interestingly, Mariusz Pudzianowski regularly includes the middle three in his training, and Steve Justa mentioned the value of digging in Rock, Iron, Steel. Though digging gets short shrift in comparison to the wood chop so frequently detailed in Men's Health and frequently performed in big box gyms around America, it's a hell of a workout. In the Vedas, the sage Agastya "desired to develop his strength by digging with a hoe (Vide Rigveda 1-179-6" and suggested others do the same (Ibid). Justa mentions that doing shovel lifts, in which he essentially mimicked the movement of shovelling with one of his wacky homemade implements, increased all of his other lifts after skipping other lifts for weighted shovels for two weeks. Frankly, any of you who's shoveled snow for a day know that shovelling kicks your ass inside out, and any of you who have seen an old image of a coal shoveler know they were ripped up in spite of the fact that their diets consisted of sausage and liquor.
In addition to the above, the Rigveda kicked shit off right, by recommending they take a variety of herbs to increase their strength, and to eat a diet heavy in fats. As I've covered before, fat-rich diets improve your hormonal profiles significantly, which will in turn confer greater strength upon you over time.
Indians still take stone lifting seriously- "only men who have been practising and know they can manage, take part because in this age of technology news travels fast. 'There is the insult factor,' said Abbasi. 'If someone takes part in a Karachi competition, and fails, news of it will be discussed in his village [up north] for days.'"(Sultan)
The Ramanyana followed that with recommendations or stone lifting and throwing, which persists in the Karachi district in India as Gutti, was part of the ancient Greek Olympics, and is still popular in the Scottish Highland games and among the Basques, both of whom are renowned for their physical strength. It also promoted jumping, which is still a popular exercise among East Indian wrestlers (who contributed heavily to modern catch wrestling/mma grappling) (Willoughby 200). Additionally, "swinging" was promoted, which from the accounts I've found seems like a combination of Crossfit's pullup abortions mixed with random Olympic high-bar gymnastics done from tree branches. As anyone with eyeballs and a television knows, gymnasts have always been, and always will be, jacked as fuck. Finally, the last couple books in the Veda basically promote "games" that consisted of hopefully-not-fatal brawling with fists, maces, and any other blunt object they happened to find laying around. One look at the average mma fighter will give you an idea of what that does for the body- all good things. Thus, all of their recommendations in ancient times are better than most of the nonsense you'll read online today- and that shit basically just came from their Bible.
Once they got out of the Biblical age, shit got real in India for weightlifting. Up next- how Indians got to be some of the most jacked motherfuckers on Earth while Europeans were too busy burning each other at the stake and declaring the female orgasm to be the sole produce of sorcery.
Also, desi broads can bring the ruckus.
Sources:
AP, Associated Press. Moldovan Justice Minister Comes to Austria in Stolen Car. The Associated Press. 8 May 1996. Web. 7 Sep 2012. http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1996/Moldovan-Justice-Minister-Comes-to-Austria-in-Stolen-Car/id-5c33ec2f31e03cdc7e4ac03d48c25f0a
Mujumdar, DC (ed.). Encyclopedia of Indian Physical Culture. 1950.
Sultan, Azhar. Hazara traditions: Big men prove brawn and bravery with balls of stone. Express Tribune. 28 Dec 2010. Web. 10 Sep 2012. http://tribune.com.pk/story/95636/hazara-traditions-big-men-prove-brawn-and-bravery-with-balls-of-stone/
Tyrrell, Ron. Monohar Aich- An Enduring and Endearing Ambassador for Physical Culture. Sandowplus- Indian Physical Culture. Web. 10 Sep 2012. http://www.sandowplus.co.uk/India/Monohar/aich.htm
05 September 2012
Destroy The Opposition
One of the main criticisms of my approach to training, it seems, is my reticence to program anything. Thus, I have heeded your incessant requests and combined my general training scheme with a bit more of a static approach to give you Destroy The Opposition. Destroy the Opposition is a powerlifting training book that grew out of my series detailing the three powerlifts. Unlike my previous ebook, however, this one isn't simply the blogs rehashed. DTO was built from the ground up to give you guys insight into how I approach the three lifts and training for powerlifting in general, and includes rewritten versions of the powerlifting series blogs and the addition of a bunch of other champion lifters' programs. Champion liftes whose programs I profiled include:
- Doug Young
- Rick Weil
- Jennifer Thompson
- Ted Arcidi
- Jeremy Hoornstra
- Scot Mendelson
- Ken Fantano
- Bev Francis
- Ken Lain
- Jim Williams
- Lamar Gant
- Konstantin Konstantinovs
- Bob Peoples
- Benedikt Magnusson
- Rickey Dale Crain
- John Kuc
- Ed Coan
- Julia Zaugolova
- Idalberto Aranda
- “Mad” Mike Kuhns
- Andrey Belyaev
- Sam Byrd
- Paul Anderson
- Phil “Squatzilla” Harrington
- “Captain” Kirk Karwoski
- Mikhail Koklyaev
Like I stated above, the book includes programs for squat specialists and deadlift specialists and covers training for beginners, intermediate lifters, and advanced lifters. I am no overstating my case when I say this book is the unadulterated shit, and I was literally impressed with myself as I reread it. Additionally, it's been through at least 10 different proofs and edits, so it's pretty airtight from an editing perspective, lest you worry. If any of you purchase this and are subsequently disappointed with the decision, I will literally eat my fucking laptop.
For those of you with a Kindle, I've included a mobi copy in the download, so you'll get a pdf and a mobi when you buy the book.
Thanks for the support!
03 September 2012
Chaos and Bang Your Earballs #15 (Allegedly)
Paul and I finally got around to posting another installment. I've been sort of cloistered in an effort to finally finish the ebook, which should go on sale this evening. In any event, we cover:
- Paul's grave error in failing to see Expendables 2, which will explode your face if you've not already seen it
- A couple of other movies worth seeing, and mini-reviews of the Dictator and the Bourne Legacy
- the latest "doping scandal", in which I'm pretty sure my voice rose to an earsplitting shriek in the midst of my wild-eyed rant
- the oldest and youngest broads we'd realistically fuck
- a tiny bit of training
- upcoming meets
If you liked the song in the intro/outro, it's off the Warriors' first disc, War is Hell. If you didn't like it, eat shit. That song is the tits.
In other news, this cyclist has legs bigger than yours, and is the guy I was looking up when I stopped paying attention to Paul altogether near the end of the podcast: Robert Förstemann is on the German Olympic team for cycling and doubles 572 on the squat at a bodyweight of 200 lbs.
30 August 2012
USPA Nationals After-Action Report And CfC Meet Prep
The new logo's pimped, right?
I realize I haven't posted a motherfucking thng in the last couple of weeks, but it's for good reason- I've been spending ten to thirteen hours a day on a new ebook that grew out of the blog entries on the three powerlifts. It's called Destroy the Opposition, and it's a total rewrite of the blogs plus a ton of new material, and it's clocking in at over 100 pages eve though it's as yet incomplete. I'm working on a print version as well, which will be an expanded version of the ebook. I'm not going to state unequivocally that this is pretty much the seminal work on powerlifting, but if you guys aren't blown the fuck away by it, I will be surprised. Rereading it for edits, the thing even impresses me, and I wrote the fucking thing. Look for Destroy The Opposition to go on sale this weekend. It will be well worth the money you spend on it.
Still exhausted and spacey a day after weighin.
I find it hard to believe I was mistaken for an ice giant, or a giant anything, for that matter.
Karmic Beatdown For Generally Being An Asshole?
I have no idea what cosmic powers I pissed off before this meet, but they handed me an epic beatdown before this meet. I'd not attempted to cross multiple time zones for a meet before, and have never had a problem with jet lag, so doing a meet in San Francisco seemed like no biggie. From Birmingham, I had to fly to Atlanta and then San Francisco, then drive to San Jose. That would have put me into San Francisco just before midnight, so I would have been in bed by 1, letting me get about 6 and a half hours blissful sleep with the AC cranked to "Arctic Circle" before starting my cut at the gym. My flight was delayed three hours in Birmingham, however, and I then had to wait for another hour and a half (at 230 in the morning) for a rental car, so I didn't actually get into bed until 5AM. I then overslept (of course), and frantically searched for a Ballys I never found (driving around a strange town while dehydrated and hungry is about on par with a three-pronged attach into Russia in the winter, as stupid ideas go).
As a general rule, you should always have a backup plan for making weight- having one saved my ass, sort of. The gym to which I went after frantically searching one-way streets for the Ballys I never found was actually my first choice for a gym, but it was further away than the Ballys. As such, I tried the Ballys first, in an effort to spare myself having to drive 20 minutes each way to another gym. I picked a gym with a dry sauna and brought a sauna suit and a towel to drape over my head to hold in heat, which worked well for my last meet. For some reason, this cut was far harder than my previous cuts, and I spent a hell of a lot of time out of the sauna rather than in it because I honestly felt like I was dying. I would venture to guess it was the sleep deprivation- that always fucks with my head and moods. In any event, I put Die Antwoord's "I Fink U Freeky" pretty much on repeat for three hours, which for whatever reason made the misery of being in the sauna and sauna suit tolerable. I then spent 2.5 hours in the suit and the sauna sauna and believed, according to the gym scale, I was underweight. I generally operate under the golden rule of never trusting a gym scale, so I thought being a shade under 181 would float me. It did not. Upon arriving at the venue, I discovered I was three tenths of a pound over. To give you an idea of how dehydrated I was at this point, my piss was cloudy and brown. To say I was pissed was an understatement, but I grabbed a cup for spitting and hit the bathtub. I spat into the cup and soaked in water so hot I could just barely stand to be in the tub for 45 minutes and soaked in a hot bath, which got my weight down to 179. I honestly have no idea how I dropped taht much weight that quickly, but I can tell you that I will be picking a gym with a hot tub if at all possible for my next cut, as that seems like a far more pleasant way to drop weight than the sauna suit/sauna combo. The hot bath seems to do far more than a sauna, or is at least a good follow-up to a sauna.
Lesson: Be really careful about doing meets that require you to cross multiple time zones in places with which you're not familiar and in which you have little or no support structure.
This recomp was a bit haphazard, as I had a college buddy come visit from San Fran I hadn't seen in years. I basically spent the next 6 hours drinking as much liquid as I could and eating pizza, Cinnamon Life, and burgers at hourly intervals, attempting to get as much in the way of carbohydrates, salt, and water into my system as possible. I was too tired to really care that much, however, and was so full the entire time that I really didn't do all that I should have to recomp. I was in bed by 930PM and asleep within minutes, and slept so hard I really didn't continue to rehydrate overnight. As such, I was still really dehydrated in the morning. Additionally, I couldn't find shit for breakfast worth eating and had to travel 30 minutes to Walmart in search of deadlift socks (which I'd forgotten) an hour before the meet. Incidentally, soccer socks work perfectly as deadlifting socks, so if you find yourself without yours, they're cheap as hell and available wherever you can find sporting goods.
Apparently, I am not the only person who thinks Cinnamon Life springs forth from heaven and descends to Earth by sliding down rainbows into gilded pots.
The Meet:
The meet went, by and large, about how I expected. My walkouts all felt shaky (which they were), so I went light on my third to avoid missing an attempt there. I set a PR with my second, but I figured I might as well split the difference on my third and put up an impressive number. The bench was a bit of a debacle, but I made up for it on the deadlift. I was so bored by the deadlift that I really had no interest in lifting. I warmed up with 225, 405, and 545, then pulled my first attempt. In my next meet, I'm hoping that ingesting enough stimulants to kill a small horse will reignite my flagging interest in the meet. When i say I was bored, I mean I left the venue after every flight because being there was driving me slowly insane. I actually missed the medal ceremony (where I was declared the Best lifter) because I was eating Mexican... mostly because I couldn't stand to watch any more lifting.
Lesson: Powerlifting meets are fucking boring. Ritalin would probably be a good idea for the deadlift.
Round-back like a motherfucker, but I got it, and by all accounts it went up easy. My C7 would dispute that, however.
Post-Meet:
Prior to the meet, I thought I had strained a trap, which thought was odd. My upper back was killing me throughout the meet, particularly on and around my C7, which is the vertebra that sticks out the most in your upper back. As it happens, I'd incurred a clay-shoveler's fracture on that vertebra, which means that my traps were ripping chunks of bone off my spine every time I lifted. I laid off shrugging for a few weeks, as that seemed to be the culprit. It seems to be fully healed, and I shrugged 855 for 4x5 and then 1x8 the other day, so I'm stronger than ever. I am, however, amused at myself for putting up PRs with a fractured vertebra. Next time you're thinking about making excuses and pussying out, bear that in mind.
Blurry, but you get the idea. I was going for the Bronson pose in honor of our esteemed trapariffic crackhead.
What I'm Doing To Prepare For The Clash For Cash
Basically, my training over the last year has been a long test to see how much punishment my body can take while determining my best form on the three lifts. It can take a tremendous beating, it seems, provided i don't do the few things that really annoy it. Thus, I have made the following changes to my workouts:
- Use a monkey/suicide grip on the squat. Paul Carter from Lift-Run-Bang tipped me off to the fact taht hooking my thumbs under the bar on the squat was both unnecessary and counter-productive. I was putting way too much pressure on my brachialis to hold the bar in place, as hooking my thumb under the bar transfered a great deal of the weight down my forarms and into my elbows. As the brachialis is what rotates your lower arm at the elbow, that's what was taking all of the strain. Since I rolled out all of the knots and quit that shit, I'm pain free in my upper arms and able to train the squat far more. As such, I've been squatting between 3 and 5 times a week since.
- Get a liftoff for reverse grip benching. In addition to the knotting in my brachialis, I was getting huge, deep, Russiand Nesting Doll-style knots in my biceps. I couldn't figure out what the problem was until I got them out, then tried to unrack 315 myself and felt them knot up immediately. Thus, I've only reverse gripped twice in the last two months, once from the bottom position off the pics, and the other with a spotter. In the latter, I got an easy single with 385 and a couple of very near misses with 405 after a hell of a lot of benching. Additionally, I've been close-grip benching two or three times a week and doing weighted dips once to strengthen my triceps further.
- Training more and heavier. I've come to the realization that the lighter, small workouts that I had been doing were better suited to morning workouts, and have been training twice a day almost every day, doing light shit in the morning and heavy shit in the evening, 6-7 days a week. As such, I'm leaner and stronger than ever. My only issue with this level of frequency is that it's mentally exhausting, but I just force myself through it and keep going. It has, however, caused me to scour the internet for ever more brutal music to get me through my lifts. Die Antwoord being the exception to that rule, obviously.
Since you guys are always asking for my workouts, I'll share what I've done thus far this week. Of late, I'm spending between one and a half and two and a half hours a day in the gym.
Saturday AM
20 minutes of arms, doing sets of 50-100. I was bored.
Saturday PM
Pendlay rows: 15x3x365, 3x2x385
Abs
Sunday AM
Klokov press: 5x10x135, 3x5x185
Sunday PM
Close Grip Bench Press(Paused): 1x3x135, 225, 315. 10x1x365
We did random other shit but I've forgotten what.
Monday AM
15 minutes with 80 lbs of weighted vests ( I wear 2 of them at once) on the treadmill, walking and reading.
15 minutes pullups and dips
Monday PM
Bottom Position Squat, 2" above parallel
1x1x 315, 405, 495, 585, 8x1x675, 1x2x675
Standing Hamstring curls 6 x 8-15
Standing Calf Raise with the stack (~600 lbs) 4x15
Tuesday AM
Same as Monday
Tuesday PM
Shrugs: 1x20x405, 495. 1x10x585, 675, 765. 4x5x855. 1x8x855.
Pullups: 6x5x90lbs. 4x15x unweighted
Pushdowns: 3x25
Abs
Wednesday AM
Weight vest on the treadmill 20 mins
Wednesday PM
An hour and 30 minutes of Klokov presses with 135 for sets of 10, mostly.
20 minutes of standing wrist curls with 135
(I didn't bother counting sets and reps)
Thursday AM
Weighted vests on teadmill 20 mins
Ab Wheel with weighted vests, 3x12
I've not yet decided what I'm doing tonight, but it'll likely be jump squats with 495 for singles.
Hopefully, that will tide you guys over while I finish up the ebook. If that isn't enough, perhaps this will push it over the top:
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