Squatting Like You're The CEO of the Paper Street Soap Company #3- The Chaos And Pain Guide To Brutal Squats

Gracyanne Barbosa.  Sweet jesus christ.

The conclusion to this series has been a long time in coming, but as a greatly expanded version of this series is included in Destroy The Opposition, I didn't think it prudent to post this while the book was still in its infancy.  Given that the majority of the books sold months ago, those of you who bought the book could likely use a refresher, and the rest of you can get the gist of the information contained in the conclusion of the series.

Before I jump into the meat and potatoes of my squatting strategies, I recently heard some interesting tidbits about the guys who set all of the records in the early 1970s and 1980 I thought prudent to pass along.  It seemed odd to me, with the improvements in sports nutrition, alleged improvements in training methods, and the advent of a variety of new pharmacological and ergogenic aids.   As such, I've started to pick the brains of guys who trained in the 70s and 80s to see what, if anything was the primary driver behind the insane success of the lifters in the 70s and the 80s.  You guys might want to run and grab some duct tape and slap that shit on your asses, because what I discovered is pretty much going to blow your butt cheeks directly off your fucking bodies.  For one, they were remarkably inventive in creating new ways to win.  I'm not talking about coming up with crazy training routines or wacky diets- I'm talking about straight up, good, old fashioned cheating.  Had they spent half the time they spent on coming up with ridiculous methods for artificially boosting their numbers in the gym lifting weights, their records would still be unbroken.

If you've not read DTO (buy it on the right!), you likely don't know that powerlifting is a remarkably new sport- it only came into official existence in the early 1970s.  It evolved out of odd lift competitions that had a three or four lift format, but those lifts could be any of 42 offical odd lifts.  During the 1950s and 1960s, these meets actually outstripped Olympic weightlifting in terms of popularity in the US, and typically consisted of the bench press, squat, deadlift and/or strict curl.  Eventually, these morphed into "powerlifting" meets, a name that became popular after it started being used in Muscular Development, which was apparently far more devoted to strength sport sin the past than it is now.  In any event, powerlifting was very much a catch-as-catch-can sort of affair until the mid to late 70s, from the rules to the equipment and even the order of the lifts.  At the outset, the meets used the order of bench-squat-deadlift/curl, and the order in which the attempts were taken was by weight.  As such, the strongest guys had to do some or all of their attempts in a given lift back to back.  Likewise, there was no real standard for equipment, so most of the racks and benches were actually made out of lumber until the 1970s, as the standard gym racks would just fucking collapse under the weights in competition.  Thus, when shit started getting standardized in the 1970s, people seemed confused by the simplicity of the meets and decided to fuck shit up.  Thus, you had guys wearing ultra-tight denim shorts under their singlets as makeshift briefs and using shitloads of ace bandages as knee wraps.  Lest you think that's the least of it, there was apparently some dispute on what constuted legal wrap length, so the British lifters wraps that were at least in one case, 18 feet long.  Shenanigans went even further than that, however, as lifters like former multiple record holder and alleged Mafia hitman Tony Fratto would wrap tennis balls behind his knees to give him more drive out of the hole.  That would explain why his wrapped record stood until the last couple of years, I think.

Tony Fratto.  If that isn't the most godawful looking squat I've ever seen, I've no idea what it, but he was probably hiding a gun in his pants.

Their desire to get their numbers higher at any cost is what led to the death of raw powerlifting, I think, during the 1980s and 1990s.  As I posted previously, Ricky Dale Crain Pretty much summed up the feelings of lifters of that period with this:

"RAW IS A PHENOMA OF THE PAST 5-10 YEARS....IT DID NOT EXIST BEFORE THAT.....
I AM NOT SURE WHAT HAS PROPAGATGED IT OTHER THNA GIVE SOME VERY AVERAGE OR BELOW AVERAGE LIFTERS A CHANCE TO WIN A TROPHY OR BREAK SOME RECORD THAT REALLY MEANS NOTHING.....
MOST LIFTERS THAT LIFTED IN THE 60'S AND 70'S WHO USED WHATEVER THEY COULD DREAM UP TO LIFT IN TO HELP THEIR NUMBERS AS WELL AS A SAFETY FACTOR......LIFTED WAY MORE THAN 99% OF TODAY'S SO CALLED RAW LIFTERS SO WHAT HAVE THEY ACCOMPLISHED??????
I SQUATTED 575 IN A SINGLET IN 1976 AT 147 POUNDS AT AGE 22....
I DARE SAY PROBABLY NO 148'ER TODAY COULD DO THAT......AND WITH IPF JUDGES LOOKING AT IT...BUT I WOULD BE FOOLISH INDEED NOT TO BELIEVE THAT IF I CONTINUED LIFTING IN THAT SINGLET FOR 35 PLUS YEARS I WOULD BE CRIPPLED FROM INJURIES BY THIS TIME..." (PL Watch)

Given what I've learned of late, the above seems pretty spot-on.  It would also explain why raw lifters generally suck- they're using training methods designed for geared lifters, which is an entirely different sport.  As I'm a fucking awesome raw squatter, I'll clue you fuckers in on how to get awesome at the squat so I can get a little competition at a meet sometime before I die.


My Method For Building a Badass Squat
First and foremost, I’m of the opinion that your one rep max on the squat represents the sum total of all of the training you’ve done over your life.  More so than any other lift, it is evidence of your unrelenting dedication to the development of physical strength and your continued efforts thereto.  Thus, there is no quick fix for the squat.  Certainly, tweaks to your form can help get your squat to change quickly, but those changes will be static without continued effort.  Thus, there are three factors that I believe play heavily into building a squat that Milo of Croton would respect: persistence, frequency, and intensity.

Persistence
Unless you are mentally retarded, you should have a pretty clear understanding of what persistence is.  Squatting is not something that comes easily to most, and it is grueling, taxing, and generally a bastard.  As such, you really have to tap into your inner masochist, wrap your brain in a latex gimp suit, and whip your own ass to get it into the gym from time to time.  This is not something to which elite lifters are immune, either— the more you train, the harder it’s going to be to fill yourself with the kind of ferocity you need for a successful workout.  Thus, you’re going to have to accept that some of your squat workouts are just going to be washes— you’re not going to be Billy bad-ass in every workout, and some of your lifts are going to downright suck.  It’s how the game goes.  Your duty, in this case, is to look past it, take it as it comes, and just attack the next one.  If that one sucks, attack the next one.  I have had mental slumps that have last months, and I’ve had nagging injuries that dogged me for over a year.  Around 2000, I attempted to do a one legged squat as a goof and lost my balance, pulling some muscles in my groin as I hopped around one-footed trying not to bust my ass.  A couple of hours later, I squatted heavy, and suffered felt like the ghost of Albert Fish was haunting me by jamming red hot, 12” needles up through my groin and into my lower back for about a year after that every time I squatted or deadlifted.  I continued performing those lifts, however, week in and week out, tweaking my form and my workouts as I went to minimize the discomfort as much as possible.  That’s what I’m referring to when I state that persistence is key.

• If you’re not masochistically enjoying squatting for some reason, tinker with your rep ranges until you find one that’s tolerable.  I personally despise doing more than 5 reps on squat, and would rather simply not squat than do six reps.  Sam Byrd is the polar opposite.
• If squatting hurts your knees, try squatting with a significantly wider stance to reduce the strain.
• If your lower back hurts, try moving your stance in and working high bar Olympic style squats to minimize lower back loading.
• If you’re bored with full rep squats in the same rep range, alter the rep scheme or the exercise itself— there are plenty of alternatives with which to tinker, like front squats, jump squats, box jumps, low box squats, high box squats, Zercher squats… The list goes on and on.  You’re only limited by your imagination here.
• Though it might seem like I’m joking about mentally donning a gimp suit, I’m not.  Squatting is fucking brutal.  Accept it and move on— it’s not a reason to avoid squatting, but rather a reason to attack and conquer squatting.

Frequency and Intensity
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unless you’re Kirk Karwoski, you’re likely not going to possess an elite squat unless you hammer that lift more than once a week.  If you’ve chosen to make the deadlift your specialty, there’s nothing wrong with sticking to one squat day a week to increase the number of days you pull, but frankly you might be better served by adding some light squats on a pulling day than avoiding them.  Pavel Tsatsouline’s theory of “greasing the groove”, also known as the Hebbian Rule, has become rather famous of late, and refers to the phenomenon wherein successful performance of an action will create and strengthen the neural pathways associated with that action (Tsatsouline 17).  The key to harnessing the benefit of Hebbian Theory is the completion of the reps, however, as failed efforts don’t reinforce the neural pathway.  This is why I rarely max out in the gym- I’ll do singles with near-max weights, or triples with my 4 or 5 rep max, but I rarely train to failure.  The “intensity multiplier” techniques of bodybuilders are focused on one thing- failure.  In case you’re unaware, failure rarely leads to victory.  Thus, you train for victory to achieve it.

“Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

– Bill Belichek, head coach of the New England Patriots

Beyond the “greasing the groove” of my sub-max poundages, there’s another biochemical reason you should avoid frequently training to failure- the utilization of intensity multipliers when working out increases one's levels of cortisol significantly, which reduces one's ability to recover for future workouts, protein synthesis, and one’s overall health.  Additionally, training to failure reduces production of IGF-1, which has a negative impact on your ability to grow and retain skeletal muscle reduces your strength and power (Izquierdo et al).  So, essentially, by training to failure, you're creating a metabolic shitshow from which you're not likely to recover prior to your next session.  This means you cannot train as much, which means you’re limiting your subsequent workouts for no reason.

This does not in any way mean you should not push yourself in your workouts, however.  This means you’re going to need to be cognizant of the speed of execution of your lifts and gauge your ability to continue utilizing that.  If a weight is flying up for triples in your first couple sets and it’s a grinder for a single after a few sets, it’s time to move on to something else.  That’s the beauty of high-frequency workouts- you can always make up for a shitty workout in the next.  If you’re limiting your squat workouts to once a week or once every ten days, you lose that ability, and every workout becomes do-or-die.  Fuck all that- I’d rather have the ability to cut a subsequent workout short because I went for broke earlier in the week and dominated than feel like there is an axe hanging over my head every time I enter the gym to do a single lift infrequently.  This does not necessarily mean, however, that you need to drag your ass into the gym twice a day and lift near-maximal weights until your eyes pop out and you shit blood. As much fun as that might sound, it's time to temper your enthusiasm with a modicum of sense- if you're fucking dead, your squat's not likely to increase much, is it? Thus, don't get stuck on stupid- approach this as you would a growling wild dog.  That wild dog might tear a new hole in your ass, or it might wander up and lick your fingers, depending on how you approach it.  Ju
st as you would that dog, move slowly, keep calm, and don’t do anything painfully stupid.

Probably best not to approach wild dogs.  Or if you live in Pittsburgh, maybe don't throw them into the African Wild Dog enclosure at the zoo.

If you’re wondering how frequently you should train the squat, there is unfortunately no easy answer to this question- strength training demigod Vladimir Zatsiorsky himself states at the beginning of his seminal work that "it is absolutely unclear which criteria one should use for selecting proper intervals between consecutive workouts" (Zatsiorsky 13).  As I've stated before, training capacity is a wildly shifting target, due to the massive number of individual factors, both biological and environmental, that play into its determination. For this reason, you're going to have to feel this one out like a blind man at an orgy. The most common frequency for squat training appears to be twice a week.  I personally vacillate between two and four squat sessions a week, as a general rule, and I vary the rep scheme and exercise at every session.  Thus, I rotate between full squats, weighted jump squats, front squats, partial back and front squats at a variety of ranges, and zercher squats at a variety of ranges of motion.

I made a poopie.

If You Don’t Know Squat,You Need These Routines
Running the Ladder
Like I stated in the deadlifting blogs, I did this program a great deal in my early years after picking it up from an Iron Man magazine and used it for both the squat and the deadlift.  I never used this routine more than once a week for either lift, though I did use it for both lifts in the same week.  For instance, I might use this set/rep scheme for the squat on Tuesday and the deadlift on Friday.  This was due more to the fact that at the time I’d not considered using a full-body routine, and my lifts suffered as I adhered to a bodypart routine.  I spread back and legs as far from one another as I could, however, to maximize recovery from one to another and ensure that my deadlift and squat didn’t adversely affect each other.  Yeah, I labored under the misapprehension that I had the recovery ability of a burn victim with cancer and AIDS for years as well.  Assuming a 405 max, this is what running the ladder would look like.
1 x 10 x 135
1 x 8 x 225
1 x 6 x 275
1 x 4 x 315
1 x 2 x 355
1 x 2 x 365-375
1 x 4 x 315
1 x 6 x 285
1 x 8 x 265
1 x 10 x 225

The key in this routine is to make sure that your second half of the ladder is noticeably heavier than the first half.  It’s great for breaking plateaus and ruts, and also for getting your comfortable with your form on the deadlift.

Might As Well Jump
This program grew out of a short writeup in Muscular Development magazine that stated that the use of an explosive movement prior to a grinding strength movement would lead to greater strength and hypertrophy gains.  I was never able to hunt down the article on which that was based, but I’ve used it pretty much continuously since I started competing two years ago to keep my IT bands loose (dropping into the hole of a very deep squat acts as an explosive stretch for me), and it seems to have kept my squat numbers on the rise.
Weighted Jump Squats (Assuming my current max jump squat of 500)
1 x 3 x 135, 225, 315, 405
6-10 x 2 x 455

Partial Back or Front Squat (I vary between just above bottom-position, half, and quarter squats)
Work up to 3RM
6-10 x 3 x 3RM (This is one of the few exercises on which I go to failure, and I extend my rest periods to allow me to keep getting 2-3 reps.  Hold each rep for 10 seconds at the top)

Squat Variants You Should Be Doing
It’s not enough to simply back squat, quite frankly, if you want to be an awesome squatter.  I don’t mean that you should head for the nearest hack squat machine and start slamming out some super sweet reps on that utterly fantastic machine (this is called sarcasm, in case you’re confused), but rather that there is more to the squat than meets the eye.  Thus, allow me to introduce you to a couple of the best friends a squatter could have:

The Jump Squat.  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?”  For this reason, I despise pause squats, because it makes sitting in the hole an even more protracted affair.  If you regularly include jump squats in your program and go heavy on them, that moment of indecision will be lost in a thoughtless explosion of muscular force the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since JFK first got Marilyn Monroe naked in the White House.  Additionally, a long term study in Russia in the 1980s showed that the utilization of different tempos in a training cycle produced far greater strength gains and hypertrophy than did a single tempo (Verkhoshanskii).  Thus, it makes sense to include these regularly in your workouts.

Suggested Set and Rep Scheme: I don’t recommend high reps for these due to the fact that your speed drops precipitously as your reps increase.  Thus, 4-10 x 1-5 would be best.

Form Tips:  Vary your stance on these.  You will have to keep the bar higher on your shoulders to prevent it from slipping, but you can still change your stance to alter the loading on your quadriceps and hips.

The Front Squat
No matter your sport, the front squat can have a profound positive effect on your lower body strength.  The front squat places the primary emphasis on the quads, so it’s a great companion exercise if you’re a low bar, wide stance squatter, as wide stance squatting focuses the bulk of the load on your hips.

Suggested Set and Rep Scheme: 4-10 x 1-5, once again.  There’s really no point in doing higher rep sets if you’re interested in improving your competition squat, as taming the beast that is fear and getting used to a heavy, uncomfortable weight driving you downward is key to mastering the squat.

Form Tips:  You have three options in terms of the way you grip the bar on the front squat.  No matter which you choose, however, the bar will essentially rest on your neck, as it’s your front delts that hold the bar in place.  As such, you can squat hands-free if you wish, because your hands are more or less redundant.  If you cannot take your hands off the bar without it slipping off your delts, the bar is in the wrong position.  As for where to put your hands, you can either hold the bar in an Olympic-style clean catch position, cross your arms like a bodybuilder and hold the bar in place with your thumb and forefinger, or you can hook your straps around the bar and hold onto those.  If you choose the form I do (bodybuilder style) I would recommend against hooking your thumb all the way around the bar, as it generally hurt and can pinch nerves and reduce circulation to your thumbs.  Regardless, vary your stance as in the jump squat.

The Partial Squat (for advanced lifters only)
The partial squat is one of my favorite movements, although I wouldn’t really recommend it for neophytes, as they really need to get the basics down before messing with the formula too much.  Thus, if you’ve not lifted for at least three years, stick to the back squat, the front squat, and the jump squat.  Tony Fratto was a really big fan of doing these as I do them- from the pins a couple of inches above parallel.  He managed a set of three with 750 at a bodyweight of 198 when he wasn't whacking people out for the Mafia, so you should probably throw some fucking weight on that bar and get after it if you're not some pasty-faced noob (Seno).  If you are a noob, just stick to the basics until you're strong enough to wear your big boy underpants and move decent weight in the gym.

Suggested Set and Rep Scheme: 6-10 x 1-3, with the inclusion of the occasional death set.  This movement is really about moving heavy-ass weight, not getting in a ton of work.  Frankly, this is something you can do a lot of if you’re not doing bottom-position squats every time.

Form Tips:  My favorite method for performing these is at or just above the bottom position of your squat.  It’s godawful the first time you try it, but if you work it hard, it is the easiest way to get your squat up quickly- the more weight you can move from a dead stop at the bottom of your squat, the more weight you can squat in general.  I use this as an indicator of what my competition squat is going to be- if I can bottom position squat 600, for instance, I am 100% certain I am good for 635, and have a pretty good shot at 660.  On the other end of the spectrum you have lockouts and top half squats, which are useful for feeling out weight and strengthening your abs and lower back.  If you’re doing the former, there’s no real reason to hold the weight at the top of the movement, but if you’re doing the latter, a 5 to 10 second hold makes the most of the movement.  At the end of an ultra-heavy festival of half squats, you will literally feel like a human bulldozer- not terribly agile, but fucking unstoppable.

Basic Tips on the Squat Itself
This will probably be a fairly unpopular opinion, but I believe there’s not that much to the squat, other than training it.  Clearly, I’ve done a lot of tweaking with my form over the years to arrive at what works for me, but the sum total of my knowledge there will help exactly one person on Earth squat better- me.  With that in mind, here are a couple of things that I believe are pretty much universal.

• Show me your tits.  When I show chicks in particular how to squat, I tell them to show me how a slut stands.  They always stick their tits and ass way out, which is basically the position in which you should be in when you squat.  A less interesting way to say it would be “chest full, head up, ass back” which is what you should be repeating to yourself every time you get into the squat rack.  Eyes looking straight ahead at the top of your head if you’re looking in the mirror, chest as full as you can back it, and reaching your ass as far back as you possibly can as you descend.  One fascinating trend on the internet currently is a preoccupation with “butt wink”.  For those of you living in blissful ignorance, “butt wink” occurs when you tuck your ass at the bottom of a squat.  If you do it, you’re squatting incorrectly.  When you squat, you should be reaching your ass back like you’re trying to find a chair you know is somewhere behind you in a dark room.  Rather than bust your ass on the ground, you force it behind you like it’s a spear you’re using to fend off a particularly ugly stalker at a really cool bar.  You know, the kind of bar that allows you to bring in a spear.  If you’re reaching your ass that far back, tucking it is a physical impossibility.
• Do not deload to the bar, EVER.  Even the weakest asshole on Earth can squat more than 45 lbs, and using nothing but the bar does not give you an accurate picture of what your squat looks like.  In order to determine how to squat, you’ll need to have some weight on the bar to ensure your leverages are correct.  
• If your squat is stuck, have someone look at it from the front or back, rather than the side.  Nearly every time I’ve seen someone with a squat that is truly stuck, it’s the result of one thing- their weight is improperly distributed between their legs.  You can see this from the front because their ass will gravitate toward one side or the other.  There’s a very simple way to fix this- make a conscious effort to force your ass to the other side as you squat.  It will feel incredibly unnatural at first, but if you feel like you’re forcing your ass so far to the other side that you’re in danger of falling over like a drunk chick at the aforementioned spear bar, your ass is probably dead center.  Keep working that for a couple of weeks and then have someone recheck it.  Within a month, your squat will be up and you won’t have to worry about your weight distribution again.  This is usually a problem with new trainees and people who’ve had a lower back or lower body injury.
• Fear makes you strong.  If you’re not afraid of a weight you’re using for your top weight sets, you’re definitely not going heavy enough.  You should be so piss-scared of the weight you use for doubles that you consider skipping the gym altogether.  If you’re not, you’re definitely stronger than you think, and need to raise the weight.  We’re talking Manchurian peasant fear of the Japanese Army circa 1940 kind of fright- this is not a mild discomfort sort of fear, but a fill-your-pants-with-liquid-shit-because-100,000-armed-Mongols-are-bearing-down-on-you sort of fear.  Master it and you’ll master the squat.  Succumb to it and your squat will forever suck.

In my opinion, the squat gives you the exact measure of a man or woman.  If you’re a great squatter, you’re damn near fearless and possibly indestructible.  If you’re a shit squatter, you have no work ethic and you’re likely to piss yourself at the sight of a dwarf clown holding a bouquet of posies.   No matter whether or not you choose to become a squat specialist, you need to make the squat a cornerstone of your workout.  Failure to do so will invariably lead to mockery from friends and family and dismal showings at meets, and will prevent you from becoming as awesome as you know you can be.

Sources:
Izquierdo M, Ibañez J, González-Badillo JJ, Häkkinen K, Ratamess NA, Kraemer WJ, French DN, Eslava J, Altadill A, Asiain X, Gorostiaga EM. Differential effects of strength training leading to failure versus not to failure on hormonal responses, strength, and muscle power gains. J Appl Physiol (2006)100: 1647-1656.
Leistner, Ken.  History of Powerlifting, Weightlifting and Strength Training - Part Twelve.  Titan.  Web.  18 Nov 2012.  http://www.titanstrengthandpower.com/history_of_powerlifting_part_12.html
Seno, Bill.  Pushing for Power Part Three.  THE TIGHT TAN SLACKS OF DEZSO BAN.  Nov 2008.  Web.  18 Nov 2012.  http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2008/11/pushing-for-power-part-three-bill-seno.html
Tsatsouline, Pavel. Power To The People. St. Paul: Advanced Training Solutions, 1999.
Zatsiorsky, Vladimir and William J. Kraemer. Science and Practice of Strength Training. 2nd ed. Champaign: Human Kinetics, 1995.
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.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love the Zercher, #2

As a forewarning, I've only been doing Zerchers for a couple of months, so I hardly consider myself a pro at them. I am, however, completely sold on them as an exercise, and have made them a mainstay of my workouts since perhaps the middle of January.  Thus, for anyone who feels it necessary to decry my weight choices in the following vid, suck it- they're coming along.

Triple H has my back.

Zerchers, insofar as I understand it, are more of a class of exercises than one specific lift.  The "official" Zercher lift, however, is a very specific exercise outlined by the USAWA in their rule book.  Ed Zercher, the progenitor of this badass exercise, was one of the earliest competitors in the USAWA, where he competed well into his 80s... a hard motherfucker indeed.  According to the USAWA and Ed Zercher, this lift is correctly done this way:

"The bar starts on the platform and at the lifter’s discretion the bar is deadlifted to a position where it may be supported on the knees or thighs. Feet placement is optional, but the feet must be in line with the torso. The lifter will then bend down, with the bar resting on the legs, to a position in which the lifter is able to secure the bar in the crooks of the elbows. The lifter will then stand erect with the arms bent and the bar fixed at the articulation of the upper
and lower arms. The lifter’s arms may be inside or outside of the legs. The hands may be locked together. Once the bar is motionless, the legs straight, the body erect with shoulders upright, an official will give a command to lower the bar. The bar must be returned to the platform under control for the lift to be complete. It is acceptable to drop the bar once it is below the level of the knees provided that the hands follow the bar to the platform."(USAWA Rule Book, p. 54)

Bill Clark, founder of the USAWA, doing a full Zercher with 405.

I gave that lift a shot in the video at the end of this post, and it was actually a hell of a lot of fun.  I intended to modify the lift, for the purpose of emulating (as best one can with a barbell) a stone lift, by using the deadlift form of Bob Peoples, the first 181lber to deadlift 700+.  Bob had perhaps the most unique deadlifting style ever, for which "round-backed" is a description that undersells the true state of affairs about as much as calling Gabourey Sidibe a horrible, disgusting landbeast only marginally smaller than a rhinoceros.  In other words, Bob Peoples specifically and pointedly utilized form so offensive to the denizens of Bodyspace that were they to witness it they'd pass out from a sudden rise in blood pressure resulting from trying to scream "fake plates", "he'll die a cripple", "STEROIDS!", and a mountain of other poorly written defenses for their pathetic PRs while simultaneously masturbating furiously.  For those of you who don't know, Peoples lifted with empty lungs and with a round back- he'd exhale fully, round his back and raise his hips, look down, and then pull.(Dezdo Ban)

Though I kept this form in mind, the beginning of my Zercher lift really amounted to more of a contemptuous snatching of the weight from the ground.  Once I hit 365, this became less contemptuous, but I did the full lift only after an hour and a half of rack work, so my arms were pretty worn out.  That was actually the first time I'd tried it, but it's definitely well worth the price of admission.


Other Zercher lifts:
Zercher Squats:  These are typically done out of the rack with the bar at a bit over waist height.  You unrack it, drop like a fucking stone into a full squat (until your elbows hit your legs), and then rerack.  For those form Nazis out there, there's no "perfect" depth on these, because this is a partial version of the full lift.  Thus, anyone who has shit to say about your depth can suck it.  Refer them to the pic above.

Bottom Position Zercher Squats: Frankly, these are more like deadlifts than squats.  Set the pins so you're starting at the bottom of the lift and stand up with the weight.  These are my favorite way to do the lift.

Partial Zercher Squats:  Another favorite, these will whoop your ass like you are Rampage Jackson and the lift is Pride-era Wanderlei Silva.  You'll leave the rack bloodied and broken, but unbowed.  I'll be sorer than Annabelle Chong after setting a world record for days after doing these, but I fucking love the shit out of them.

Zercher Deadlifts:  I've seen a variety of knuckleads do these online, but have no interest in trying them.  They're a ridiculous version of the full zercher lift and require you to have the flexibility of a young Jean Claude Van Damme.  It's not 1990, and I've no interest in wearing pegged acid wash jeans with the waist pulled up to the bottom of my ribcage.

If you look around online, you'll see that there are a hell of a lot more Zercher lifts out there.  People have concocted shit like the Zercher yoke walk (which is a nice analog to Conan's Wheel), Zercher farmer's walks, Zercher good mornings, and a variety of other crazy shit.  No matter which of them you do, you'll definitely be getting a full body workout, and your biceps and upper back in particular will get the shit kicked out of them.  As you can see in the vids

Is it stone lifting?  Nope.  It is, however, one of the manlier lifts you can do, a damn good stunt double for the stone lift, and a hell of a good way to waste a Saturday afternoon in the gym... and yet another pair of cargo shorts.


Sources:
Todd, Terry.  Bob Peoples and the Roundback.  THE TIGHT TAN SLACKS OF DEZSO BAN.   http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2008/03/bob-peoples-terry-todd.html


USAWA Rule Book.  http://www.usawa.com/rule-book/

Find A Way Forward 2

In the previous installment of this series, I elucidated the ways in which one might find one's self mired in a virtual bog like they're a modern day brontosaur with bad directional sense.  The shit happens to the best of us, and the worst of us never recover.  Many of the useful are somehow lured down various well-traveled paths in the gym to bask in the glow of mediocrity that only cookie-cutter programs can bring, while others experiment until the find shit that works.

Better 1... or better 2?

Having a scientific backing to your theory is certainly helpful, but not necessarily essential- Western science is pretty slow on the uptake with sports science and physiology.  The average gym goer's "common sense" approach is even further behind- I still overhear baseball players babbling on about not wanting to become "muscle bound" and incapable of playing well.  I guess they've never heard of Canseco, Bonds, or McGuire.  In any event, it's easy to get fucked up, as the gym is at the best of times an intellectual minefield... though most gyms simply settle for being an intellectual wasteland.

Nary an IQ above room temperature will be found here.

When I find myself mired in the aforementioned metaphorical bog, I generally crack open my lifting books and see what I can dig up.  It's at this point that I'll generally give old school lifts like Zercher Squats or  unilateral Olympic lifts a shot, or I'll try a different programming technique.  Having looked at both Siff and Zatsiorsky, I noticed that both authors recommended doing dynamic/strength lifts prior to static or semi-static/power lifts.  This suggestion was echoed in a recent US study as well, so I decided to give this theory a shot for squats.  As the only dynamic permutation of this of which I could think was jump squats, I started doing those prior to either front or back squat partials.  I saved the Zercher squats for a separate day or days, and am now back to 4 days of squatting a week, alternating the two microprograms.  Thus, a typical leg workout in which I'd do jump squats and partials looked something like this:

Jump Squats
1-3 x 3-5 x 135
1-3 x 3-5 x 225
1 x 3 x 275
1 x 1 x 365, 375, 385, 395... and now 405.  I'd keep doing my top end weight for a couple of singles.

Partial Squats/Front Squats
3 or so progressively heavier sets to my top end weight, which I generally did for 3-6 sets of 4-6 reps.  I varied the height of the pins between bottom-ed parallel reps and quarter squats.

** A thoroughly renowned strength coach recently mentioned to me that a nice alternative to the weighted jump squat is the back squat to overhead press (like a behind the neck thruster).  I love that exercise, as it's the exercise that got me into full-body programming, and recommend you give that a shot on days wherein you don't want to go all that heavy.

Apparently, Google thinks that this is a representation of thrusters.  I'd posit that this is simply a preface to a hell of a lot of thrusting, but I suppose Google and I will have to agree to disagree.

One thing you'll notice during these days is that the knurling is going to rip the skin off your traps.  Wearing a sleeved shirt's generally a good idea on these days... and wearing 2 of them is an even better idea.  Another thing you'll notice is that you're not going to get much air as you get heavier.  That's not the point- the point is to generate enough power to leave the ground.  This is due to the fact that maximal force and maximal velocity are generally inversely related- as Zatsiorsky writes "gravity is a motherfucker."(Science and Practice, 21) I generally focus much more on getting height on my early warmups, and on occasion won't even go heavy, but will just focus on exploding off the ground with 225 and getting way into the hole.  Like everything I do, this shit's very touch-and-go.

For those of you who are curious, I've no fucking clue what this has done for my back squat.  In fact, I don't intend to even do a maximal effort back squat until I get on the platform again, which I think will be a fairly decent test.  Until then, here's a better visual representation of what my jump squat workout looks like.

Is this the holy grail of squatting programs?  I highly doubt it.  It's worth a fucking shot, however, and at the very least it's something to throw in the mix.  Of note- the attempt at 405 in that vid was my first, and it was really just a matter of sacking the fuck up and doing it.  I guarantee that the lot of you can jump off the ground with a hell of a lot more weight than you think.

Give it hell.

The Lemmy Of Strength Sports- Inside The World Of The USAWA

Of all of the bands in metal, one stands out as forever existing in the conversation, though you'd be fucked if you had to find a die-hard fan of the band- Motörhead.  Formed in the mid-1970's, Motörhead's been hailed as one of the seminal heavy metal bands, and are credited with being the progenitors of thrash metal.  In spite of the fact that metal fanboys will namedrop Motörhead for any reason or none at all, you would be hard pressed to find a person who can name a single Motörhead song beyond The Ace Of Spades, and only then because the hard rock anthem was in three Rock Band releases.

The singer of Motörhead, Lemmy, is the only human whose appearance could be compared with that Chinese Hairless that won World's Ugliest Dog a few years back.  Known affectionately by his fans as "The Warted One", Lemmy is to rock star good looks what a gelatin tuna salad mold (yeah, people ate that shit in the 1960s, apparently) is to delicious comfort foods, and his face is to Ben Affleck's what krokodil is to Adderall.  Beyond that, the man drank at least a bottle of Jack Daniels a day for 37 years, and essentially lived off LSD and speed for the entirety of his career, which might not account for his face but should earn him a trip to a medical think tank to determine what sorcery gave his heart and liver better longevity than a naked mole rat.

Looks more like the kind of guy who's fucked a handful of chicks in the dumpster behind fast food joints, and might occasionally land the diner waitress with some hard miles on her face, a speed habit, and a bunch of C-section scars than the white Wilt Chamberlain.

In spite of the fact that his music is generally unmemorable, he's uglier than a can of smashed assholes, and he consumed massive amounts of every substance commonly believed to make your dick limper than Philip Seymour Hoffman's wrists, Lemmy's banged over 1200 women.  While many of them were likely of the brown snaggletooth, massively bespectacled, infamously ugly 1970's British variety, that's still quite a feat.  Oh, and did I mention the man credited with inventing speed and thrash metal has stated in numerous interviews that he fucking hates the genres of music with which he's credited?  If Jesus had only managed to convert colonies of syphilitic hermaphrodites and subsequently decided that Mithraism was far cooler than modern Christianity, it still wouldn't do justice to Lemmy's quizzical actions.

If I entered one of their meets, I am betting I would be struck my lightning as I tried to enter the venue.

Like Lemmy and Motörhead, all round lifting and USAWA/IAWA (United States All-Round Weightlifting Association / International All-Round Weightlifting Association) don't play nicely with the strength sports to which their traditions gave birth.  Instead, all round lifters seem to inhabit their own niche miles distant from powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, and strongman- instead of raving about massive numbers and brutal training regimes, the USAWA guys are handing out courage and sportsmanship awards (no shit- it's as if their organization is run by a kindergarten teacher who lives next to a trophy shop) and discussing the weirdly massive age ranges of their competitors.  Nowhere on the USAWA website will you find anything with a BR00TAL or extreme theme- everything is tidy and polite, nodding respectfully to the drunken lunatic strongmen of the past as if they'd actually hang out with them if, say, Saxon were to stumble into one of their gyms demanding a barrel of beer for himself and another for the people in the gym, and then lifting random shit until everyone else collapsed from exhaustion, they'd be super psyched he'd vomited all over their platform.

Grimek busting out an exercise of which I've never heard- the Kelly snatch.

Weirder still, one sees very little crossover of athletes from USAWA into the other three disciplines, or vice versa.  Despite the apparent likeness of the two sports, it's not been widely publicized if a strongman ever made a crossover into USAWA.  Instead, the sport is content to garner the occasional mention in Milo... which is a far cry from its roots as the beginning of organized strength sports competition in the Western Hemisphere.

Though its roots are in the late 19th and early 20th Century, all-round weightlifting as an organized sport began in the US in 1985, when groups of odd lifts aficionados from the US battled lifters from the UK.  Lifting competitions at the turn of the century were formal affairs often contested for decent sums of money, but they had no set format.  Instead, the contestants, usually two, agreed upon a number of lifts, then determined the winner when one lifter defeated the other in more events.  In that way, it was much the same as how strongman events are contested now.  With the resurrection of the Olympics, weightlifting became a bit more organized, as the focus shifted to one and two hand versions of the snatch and clean (and for one Olympics, the swing).  Perhaps due to the fact that fun and the Olympic lifts are more akin to matter and anti-matter than anything else, informal lifting competitions persisted locally as "odd lift" competitions, which also included a physique round to determine the overall winner (Salado).

Only a people as awesome as the Germans would turn the deadlift into a drinking game.

Though the competitions were a far cry from those of the Bavarian beer gardens half a century and an ocean away, lacking both the standout lifters and large crowds, odd lift competitions flourished in the US in the 1940s and 1950s (Ibid).  With no set program of lifts, the participants themselves chose the events, which ranged widely between power lifts, Olympic lifts, and bodybuilding movements, the points from which were then added to the evening physique competitions to determine a winner (Salado).  Now, before you channel your inner Leslie Chow and shout "HA! GAAAAAYYYY!" at the screen, bear in mind that these competitions, while small and local, were incredibly popular.  So much so, in fact, that the godfather of Olympic weightlifting and evil authoritarian overlord of strength sports, Bob Hoffman, decided to destroy them.

Terry Todd busting out the world's first 700 lb competition squat.

Awed by the lifting feats of Terry Todd, who at the time was the strongest man in America not named Paul Anderson, Grimek had taken a shine to what were then being called the "power lifts", as the bench press, deadlift, and squat started to pull away from the odd lift contests (Fair 212, Sutphin 413).  Seeing powerlifting as the best method by which Hoffman could counter Weider's growing legion of oily man magazines, Hoffman founded Muscular Development as a powerlifters' training and diet resource (Fair 215).  He had, however, an even more nefarious goal- to destroy the sport of odd lifting, which he saw as a threat to his beloved Olympic weightlifting.  According to Hoffman, "there were not enough Olympic lifters in America and that physique and odd-lift contests were 'killing our chances of victory' in international competition (Fair 216).  To that end, he advocated upright rowing and behind the neck pressing for "power-lift" programs and sponsored the first two national powerlifting meets in 1964 and 1965 in an effort to force lifters' hands into choosing a side (Ibid).   If that seems to be counter-intuitive to you, as it would seem that powerlifting would simply steal great lifters from Olympic lifting, you're not the only one.  This would be like a Christian pastor decrying the loss of straight men in a bar to a club for bisexuals and deciding to sponsor a homosexual-only bathhouse and promote the gay lifestyle as a stop-loss.

Hoffman celebrating the death of odd lifting in the US.

Predictably, odd lifting was all but dead by the 1970s (History).  Like the martial arts masters of China going into hiding in the mountains when the Qing took power to refine their arts while living in caves, odd lifting aficionados retreated to the dusty corners of forgotten gyms and practiced their art in secret, awaiting a day when they could again pit themselves against other lifting Renaissance men.  One of these men was Ed Zercher, the guy for whom the zercher lift is named.  Ed was well known in Missouri for helping any young lifter in the area, and they all trained in Ed's dungeon basement.  For those of you who know what a zercher lift is, it will come as no surprise that Ed's gym lacked a squat rack, so it stood to reason that he and his lifters would begin to keep track of the weird shit they did, just so they had a metric against which to measure themselves.  It was this small group that eventually formed the basis for the USAWA, training in a tiny gym in a backwoods town, doing lifts of their own invention, those they'd heard about in passing (like the zercher lift, which Ed heard of being referred to as an elbow squat and started using), and those they had read about in the books of turn of the century strongmen (Van Vleck 99-100).

An ancient and wizened Zercher- like a leg pressing Yoda in a singlet.

For some reason, these pasty subterraneans eventually came into contact with other groups of like-minded, anachronistic, Morlocks.  Over the first few years of the 1980s they had enough of a cohesive structure that groups of odd lifters from both the US and the UK made contact, and by 1987 the first international odd lifting competition took place.  For whatever reason, the sport's gained very little traction in the interim, but like Lemmy and Motörhead, the mere fact they seem anachronistic isn't necessarily a reason to ignore them altogether.

Ever the egalitarian, Lemmy on women: "Women, they’re the same as me, with tits. If they want to be crazy, well, that’s all right, because I’m a little crazy myself sometimes."

Here's where it gets tricky, though, because the number of lifts that can possibly be contested in the IAWA borders on ridiculous.  A rival organization, the Odd Lift Strength Association, had a much shorter list of contested lifts, but appears to have been dead for the last few years.  Their competition lifts numbered only 25, and none of them seem esoteric enough to deserve a mention in a Dennis Miller monologue.  By contrast, the IAWA's website lists no fewer than 170 movements, many of which are likely only known to a few people on the planet.  That is not going to stop us from finding out just what the fuck it is these guys are up to, however.  So, next time, we are going to delve into the lifts of the odd lift movement and see if we can figure out why that entire sport is consigned to a possibly interconnected, Viet Cong-style series of basements in the Midwest.

Sources:
Fair, John D. Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell.  University Park:  Pennsylvania State Press, 1999.

History of I.A.W.A. (UK).  IAWA.  Web.  29 Aug 2014.  http://www.iawa.org.uk/HISTORY.html

Salado, Julio.  From Odd-lifts to Power-lifting: Boston’s weight lifting pioneer Archie Burgess.  Fitness Foundry.  10 Aug 2013.  Web.  29 Aug 2014.  http://fitnessfoundry.net/2013/08/from-odd-lifts-to-power-lifting-bostons-weight-lifting-pioneer-archie-burgess/

Sutphin, Paul.  Powerlifting: The Total Package.  Bloomington: Authorhouse, 2014.

Van Vleck, Thom.  Do You Zercher?  Milo.  2009 Sep;17(2):98-103.

Of Stones and Strength Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Zercher

For those of you unfamiliar with this pamphlet-sized book, I can hardly recommend it enough:

Of Stones and Strength, By Steve Jeck and Peter Martin.  It's not really a training manual, and it's barely long enough to be considered a proper book.  What it is, however, is a reminder that all of the gym lifting in the world isn't going to provide enough awesome to counter-balance the pathetic waste that most of us call our modern lives.  Why?  Because we're not busy with picking up any random heavy shit we might see in the course of a day of plowing a field, because there's no right of passage into manhood in Western civilization, and because we're decidedly, sadly, in and incontrovertibly not Basques.

It gets no more metal than this.  Someone's definitely wailing on a fucking guitar in the background.

Stay with me, fuckers,  I shall elucidate my points.  First, a bit about the book.  It is essentially a display of the world's manhood stones, in particular those of Scotland.  Steve Jeck, the co-author of the book, discovered these stones while competing as a pro Highland Games athlete in Scotland, and went on a quest to lift them all.  He brought along with him a guy named Peter Martin, a historian of Scottish manhood stones and one of the main reasons I found the book so inspiring.  Why, might you ask, was this historian the catalyst for my inspiration?  Because the book is chock-full of pics of a 61 year old back in slacks and dress shoes picking up 300+ lb stones in a muddy field with a back so rounded it looks like he's trying to form the perfect arch with his back.  Frankly, when you see a bunch of pictures of an old man picking up rocks the size of your torso, it makes you rethink every decision you've made in your life, and you realize that you've been fucking up if you cannot be out there outlifting that fucker like it's your job.  Back to that bit in a second.

The book outlines a number of stones throughout the world that men lifted to show other men that they were indeed big swinging dicks.  Stones like the Dinnie Stones, so named because a strongman named Donald Dinnie picked up them both (one weighs 435 and the other 340) and walked across a bridge and back with one in each hand.  Back in the day, if you wanted to be a part of a crew of warriors, no matter where you lived in the world, there would have been a stone lifting test involved- these are the kinds of stones Jeck and Martin lift throughout that book, and the kind of stones you'd probably like to lift as a matter of course.

Which, oddly, brings me to my third point- we're not Basques.  This sucks for a wide variety of reasons ranging from their awesome, alien-inspired and possibly only related to that of the Ainu halfway around the world language, the fact that they're all nobility in Spain because their land was just about the only place in Spain not conquered by the Moors, and the fact that they have constant festivals wherein they compete against one another in wrestling, wood chopping, stone lifting, and a variety of other awesome shit.  Their stone-lifting competitions, however, are in my opinion the coolest bit in the book.  Jeck describes a legendary competition between a stone mason and an accountant, both weighing between 200 and 220 lbs, in which they competed to shoulder a rectangular stone for reps, taking turns in 7 minute rounds.  The stones, by the way, weighed over 300 lbs apiece, and the mason won with 22 reps in 21 minutes... which is fucking insane.  This is what the Basques do on the weekend, though, which makes them far more awesome than we are.

So, having contemplated what I'd just read early on a Saturday morning, it occurred to me that not only do I lack access to stones for lifting, I lack the ability to store a stone if I had one made or simply found one and took it home.  I have the misfortune to currently live in a filing cabinet for the not-poor, and thus lack the necessary personal storage space in which I'd have to store such an object, and my gym is currently unfriendly to the idea of storing a big rock for me.  Thus, I was faced with a bit of a quandary.

There is no reason for this pic, other than all of the awesome contained therein.

Then, however, I recalled an exercise that would offer a not-horrible substitute for stone lifting, get me out of my comfort zone in the gym, and possibly offer me an opportunity to discover a new favorite exercise...

and this is how I learned to stop worrying about how much it sucks and just love the fuck out of Zercher lifts.  Amusingly, Zerchers aren't mentioned in Of Stones and Strength.  In fact, few exercises are mentioned, the workout program's ridiculously basic, and that page and a half of the book is pretty much the least interesting portion of it.  Nevertheless, it occurred to me that that "cradle" one uses for the bar is not too unlike that you use in stone lifting.  Given that I've no access to stone for the time being, the Zercher lift would be a good way to approximate stone lifting in the gym, so maybe when I find myself hanging out with a badass Scottish sextogenarian I don't find myself embarrassed by my inability to emulate his random overdressed feats of strength.

For those of you with little to no background in what a Zercher is, it can take many disparate forms.  The original Zercher lift was invented by a strongman named Ed Zercher, who while well-known in the strength community is tremendously hard to research online.  In any event, the guy was an old-school Steve Justa, except strong, and lifted in what has been described more than once as a junkyard in his basement.  He was a big fan of doing barbell leg presses, and due to his lack of a squat rack (though why he couldn't fashion one out of junk I'll never know) would deadlift the barbell, place it on top of his thighs, and then scoop his arms underneath the bar and continue the lift until he was at full lockout.  Horrible as that sounds, it's pretty analogous to stone lifting, especially when one uses Bob Peoples' deadlifting technique.

Peoples pulled 728 at 178 with a double overheand grip and a completely rounded back in 1946.

With the next blog in this series, I'll throw up a couple of vids showing you some Zercher permutations, explain Bob Peoples' deadlifting technique, and hook you guys up with more titties.  The chick, by the way, is ultra hot Pole Eva Wywal.

Go pick up something heavy.  She'll be lifting her tits.

Hail To The King #2- First You Wanna Kill Me, Now You Wanna Kiss Me. Blow.

The Background
In the aftermath of last year's foray into powerlifting, I found myself more or less crippled.  My IT band in my right leg was insanely painful, I was burned out, and I was sick of training and researching.  As such, I started doing a bunch of useless bullshit in the gym, tried 5x5, and let my diet slip into what was for me complete shit.  In late December, however, I switched to a new gym and found myself reinvigorated if for no other reason than the fact that I was embarrassed to wear a sleeveless shirt in the gym.  I started doing the jump squats of which I've grown so fond to work on hip flexibility, started mixing it up more, and gradually ramped up my training frequency.

By April I was in full swing, but was still not taking my diet all that seriously.  I tightened it down gradually, and started dieting in earnest by June.  To give you some idea of what not taking my diet seriously was, I was eating 6 meals a day of no less than 40g of protein and medium carbs with medium fat.  In spite of the loose diet, I was still having two cheat meals a week.   I kept locking it down, switching first to a four day keto run, a medium carb Friday capped with a cheat meal, and a medium to high carb weekend, and then cutting out the carbs on the weekend.  Once or twice I had two cheat meals in a week, and I kept tinkering with what would become the Apex Predator Diet (which I'll finish detailing soon).  At this point, I was doing little more than squatting and overhead pressing.

The Workout
Monday
AM
Fuck about in the gym for 15 minutes doing whatever struck my fancy.  Often, I did some one arm deadlifts (strapless) with 155 for sets of 5.
PM
Zercher Squats 10-20 x 1-3 (working up to a couple of ME singles).  For whatever reason I love starting the week with Zerchers.  Did them both off the pins for a lockout and out of the rack for a "full" rep.
Military Press 5-8 x 5-1
Any auxiliary shit I felt like doing

Tuesday
AM
Same as Monday or not at all.
PM
Jump Squats 5-10 x 3-1 (working up to a couple of ME singles)
Partial squats from various heights ranging from bottom position to 1/4 squat lockouts.  Did them until I got bored.
Whatever else I felt like doing, including Pendlay rows for triples.  Usually 335x3 with straps, and a couple of times 365x1-2.
Light overhead pressing, often in the form of Viking presses, 3 plates on a side for sets of 5-8.

Wednesday
AM Only
Fucked about with arms for 20-30 mins.  Usually did some one arm deadlifts with 155 for sets of 5 as well.

Thursday
More squatting of some kind.  Occasionally Squat to press.  More often front squat partials or more zerchers.
More OH pressing of some kind.  Usually heavy on this day, BTNPPs or push press from the front.
Sometimes did Incline reverse grips on this day for triples, doubles, and singles.

Friday
AM only
Benching happened on this day or not at all.  Usually triples, sometimes singles, occasionally did a death set or two.
Usually some light arm work consisting mostly or entirely of cables, and sometimes a shitload of Curl and Press.

Saturday
Longest workout of the week.  Occasionally did two a days.  Trained everything of which I could think for 2-3 hours, and usually shrugged for an hour on this day.  I like rack pulling from my knees to shrug height, and usually worked up to 8-9 plates per side for 3-5 reps.  My last shrug workout I did 5 sets of 3 with 9 plates per side.
Usually did Incline reverse grips on this day for triples, doubles, and singles.

Sunday
Off or something fairly light.

To all of this I added a lot of wrist curls, occasional cable crossovers, the occasional few 30 rep sets of pullups, some curl and presses, some machine squats, and the occasional high pull workout.  I didn't deadlift once, nor did I do a single set of dips.  The reason behind the deads is a combination of "I didn't feel like it" and the fact that I discussed it with Glenn Pendlay and we thought it'd be an amusing experiment.  It was.

What I learned, training-wise...

• take everything everyone says with a grain of salt.  There's very little training advice I've gotten over the years that's worth a shit.  Had I not abandoned the deadlift altogether, I might not have realized I've no fucking need of it at all in my training.  I need to squat heavy and often and avoid getting caught up in what other people tell me I "should" do.  Likewise for the shrug- on any forum anywhere, mediocre lifters will decry the shrug as a worthless vanity lift.  They can all eat shit.
• Squat lockouts are fucking amazing... if they're done in combination with full-range or extra-full range versions of the same lift.  That was my problem last year, and I full rectified it by learning from my previous mistakes.  That's an often overlooked and essential part of training- adapt and overcome.  If you do the same shit day in and day out like a mindless drone, you'll suck like every other Jersey Shore watching dickbag with an OK magazine on his coffeetable.
• Zercher squats are the shit.  I credit those, in combination with Pendlay rows and shrugs for my deadlift.

Setbacks Encountered

The reason I mention these is because I get a shitload of emails about a variety of minor injuries.  People are constantly asking me what to do when training with them, and my answer is always the same- train around them.  That's what I do, and that's what any person with a scintilla of balls would do.  Sitting home on your ass will just turn you into one of the sorry motherfuckers on that godawful show Mike and Molly, and for anyone who's seen the commercials, Wilford Brimley's on his way to their house with a pair of six-guns loaded with mayonnaise bullets while riding a horse name Diabetus.

The moral of this section is that you should TRAIN AROUND INJURIES, goddamnit.  Quit yer bitchin' and man the fuck up.  To wit, here's an incomplete list of the setbacks I had from July 1st onward.

• Exploding car shenanigans.  In early July I flipped my car while I was not wearing a setbelt.  It caught fire, and I had to punch out my driver's side window to get out.  In the process, I incurred a massive concussion, a shitload of cuts and scrapes, a ridiculously deep bruise on my left calf, and a huge high ankle sprain.  That killed a week of training for me, as it's really hard to lift while concussed (though I was back in the gym Monday, and I flipped the car Saturday), and forced me to cut out jump squats for the better part of 6 weeks because I was physically unable to perform them.  Also, this is the reason I didn't finish the blog on stone lifting, as Of Stones and Strength was in the car and was thus burned to a crisp.  To combat the lack of jump squats, I used machine squats while concussed, and then switched to top half partials and worked my way down as my range of motion improved
• Constant pec/shoulder issues.  The reason behind my attempt at stretching was because I constantly had pec/shoulder knotting in my left pec.  That region always felt like a tear was imminent, so I did a lot of stretching and massage on the area, and then started using the TENS unit I got on my birthday.  The latter seemed to have the best effect, and I've been using it religiously all over my body for minor strains and sprains.
• Minor tweak of my sartorius in my left leg.  This only affected me in the last two weeks of training.  It's slightly painful, but just kept me from getting super crazy in the two weeks leading up to the meet.
• Strained lower abs.  I'm not even certain how I did this, but once you strain an ab, it takes forever to fully heal.  It still acts like a bitch from time to time.
• Strained right bicep.  After a horrible day at work and a variety of other personal bullshit, I went into the gym and decided to go bananas on Pendlay rows.  I made them my punk bitch for the better part of 70 minutes, but once I threw on 405 for a singe my bicep loudly (audibly) told me to go fuck myself.  I iced and babied it for a a couple of weeks and it manned the fuck up.  By babied it, I mean I didn't do 120 lb hammer curls and 365 lb Pendlay rows for a while.  Instead, I did a hell of a lot more zerchers and really, really light curls to stretch it and get blood into the region so it healed faster.
• Horribly strained right trap.  I honestly thought they were indestructible, but I managed to strain my right trap my doing shrug-and-holds with 9 plates on a side.  By this, I mean I did a triple with the weight and then held it as long as I could.  After three sets, my trap knotted up so badly I nearly passed out, and I couldn't turn my head for two days.  To fix it, I used a TENS unit, the Theracane, an ART massage, and ice.  I was shrugging again the following week, but I had a hell of a time doing anything trap related for about 8 days.  What finally fixed it was squat lockouts with 10 plates on a side- I literally crushed the knots out, and it felt fucking awesome.

Breaks Taken
Though this might come as a shock to you, there were two weeks between July and November wherein I didn't train more than 4 times in a week.  Of those, one of those weeks was a week wherein I did three days of light arm workouts and one day on which I did an hour of heavy front squatting followed by a BodyPump class.  BodyPump, incidentally, nearly killed me.  I'm no longer suited to high repetition anything.  The second of those two consisted of two days of zerchers, one light and one heavy, one day of incline reverse grip bench press and one day of fucking about on a variety of machines.  During those two weeks I relaxed my diet considerably, eating carbs every days and going out drinking a couple of times.

I found those two weeks to be a nice break, and while they weren't necessarily a deload, they were a nice slowdown.  Afterwards, I found my resolve strengthened both on dieting and exercise, and I was a fucking maniac in the gym.  Additionally. it allowed niggling injuries to heal a bit, which also helped get back at it harder.

In case you're curious, neither of these were planned as slowdowns, but happened as part of the natural course of life- I went on a couple of staycations and found that I wanted to do other things than lift the entire time, like sleep and fuck.

Had this been my staycation, it would have been more like "found that I wanted to do other things than lift the entire time, like fuck and fuck.  

In the final installment of this series, I'll detail the week of the meet, including my weight cut, which fucking sucked, what I did in the gym that week, and the meet itself.  If you guys want the final installment of the Predator Diet series first, let me know in the comments.