Month: December 2017

Weird Lifts : The Bottoms Up Press

Frankly this qualifies completely under the category of gym play, as it was not planned and solely happened out of boredom and the fact my hang cleans were going very shitty today.

I knew I’d hit reps with 50lbs before, and in between sets of seriousness (hang cleans and cheat form shrugs) I’d do some random bottoms up pressing.

(I count 5 reps in the above video.)

I started with the 50lber, 3 reps easy. Ok, cool. 55lber next, huh can’t find it. Wait 24kg is what 53lbs, so another triple with the 24kg bell.

I walk across the gym to shrug and on my way there “Why look a pair of bigger looking kettlebells in the wrong place, I wonder which trainer and client pair forgot to put them away, silly trainers and clients.”

I found a 55lber and a 60lber.

  • 55lb x fail, as I was not focusing well at all.
  • 55lb x 2 fail 3, I still wasn’t staying tight up the chain
  • 60lb x 3 no to very little shaking as I made sure to stay tight. (Bottoms up pressings greatest lesson, to stay rigid/tight.)

Ok, lets skip 65 (the gym actually didn’t have it, I didn’t know this at the time), and go to 70 or 75 whichever they have.

I didn’t find a 75lber, so 70 it was.

Delete the first vid, I lost it on the negative after a successful press.

Vid result?

(I opt not to try to get a perfect rep on camera, notice the shake shake shake at the top.)

The entire time I was doing shrugs here and there. After the vid, I rep the 35lber for 10 with my left hand, and then got something like 2 with a 35lber in each hand (like a cowboy, dual wield style).

One hand I can hit 70 with the right, two hands I could maybe go 35 left + 45 or 50 should I focus well and be ok with going uneven. I’m not sure my left one hand max.

Really its the weird shit that is best for your grip. Just yesterday I was finally able to do the bumper plate flips again 9 weeks later, and this time I made a solid 6 or 8 catches, still not with the right hand though. (Update 12/31/17: I’ve since done it with the right hand.)

As I’m now getting off the initial subject of bottoms up presses I shall conclude, and likely do a more comprehensive wrist post in the next few days.

-J

P.S. The next stage seems to be some combination of higher reps, two handed, and double up bells (one sitting atop the bottom up one).

Food : Quality VS Quantity

I once saw the point made about the quality vs quantity of food made in an anecdote describing deer.

Which is going to be the more robust of the two bucks? The one living on the edge of suburbia on starvation levels of natural food, or the one eating copious amounts of soy beans and corn from a hunter’s feeder? (Factor out the fact the feeder fed one may be getting fucked come next fall, and the suburban one will likely starve or get hit by a minivan.)

Think about it, then apply it to humans.

Picture the fitness type shopping at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s eating their perfect organic paleo macros and spending easily $200+ a week on food and then picture the guy eating whatever he can get his hands on in bulk.

Which one is going to be big? Which one is going to be stronger?

Sure It’d be nice to eat $10+/lb tuna steaks and shit, but really is that yuppie going to be physically more robust than the guy eating on under $10/day with cheap chicken, ground beef, milk, ramen, etc and getting in far more calories even if they are not of the highest quality sources?

I wouldn’t put my money on the yuppie.

Food for thought.

-J

Explosive Effort PR Music

It dawn’s on me that my first time cleaning 275 and broad jumping 8ft+ were both done with the same song in my headphones.

Lil Wyte’s “I Sho Will”.

Something about this wannabe gangsta ass anthem talking of a code wherein “if he actin like a bitch” one properly “treat him like a bitch” aids me considerably in explosive efforts.

Listening to this song results in instantaneous improvement of hip power, likely as you’re implanting in your brain the idea that you “sho will” “ beat him on the floor of the club“, and be willing to “jack him even if he dumb” cause “if he actin like a bitch” you are obliged by unwritten code to “treat him like a bitch“.

Fight mode.

Bum bum bum bum dah, bum bum bum bum dah! (I was going for typing out part of the beat.)

-J

P.S. And yesterday I broad jumped 8’9” or 9′ (estimate) very clearly getting over the rogue crash pad/mat/obstacle. 8′ pad + gap of roughly a shoe length.

Bum bum bum bum dah, bum bum bum bum dah!

 

Broad Jump Progress

I once read a performance metric saying an 8 foot broad jump is decent, not shitty, starting to get good, or whatever. I think it was something Jim Wendler wrote. I figured it’d be cool to do at 245+lbs.

Now my gym has a Rogue crash pad, red, 6′ wide by 8′ long.

A perfect measurement tool!

And a link to the product page should you doubt that it is 6’x8′.

Every so often I’d jump the width basically just playing around. Eventually that got easy, so easy in fact I’d do it for high reps, jump, turn around, jump, ad nauseum with my hands in the small of my back taking away the arm momentum.

At this point I was good for over 6′ but under 8′. I’d guess I was hitting 6’6″ or 6’9″ consistently on good jumps.

I kept playing with it. Sometimes fresh, sometime fatigued, sometimes warming up at the short distance, sometimes not.

Occasionally I’d hit warmups with an olympic lift, and start mixing in the broad jumps once I was warmed up and adding weight to the bar.

For around 6 or 8 weeks I’d been landing very close to clearing the 8′ pad. First on good jumps I’d get the toes over, then it was consistent at this mark of roughly 7’9″. This is already a gain of a foot in only a month or two of goofing around with this.

About a month ago I hit a string of squat PRs, then a week of two later hurt my knee, not injured it. (Note that this was not gym related.)

I decided to not make it worse, as doing stuff on it was making it worse, so I modified the PT leg stuff, and cut all lower body gym work. (I’d kept doing PT and olympic lifts on it + some bleacher runs and wrestling for a week or so and it was getting worse, it started swelling on top of the cuts and bruises behind the knee that had been there. I realized I had to stop to keep it from crossing out of hurt and into injury territory.)

I gave it 10 or 14 days and let it heal.

A few days ago I went back to normal PT.

2 days ago I did some light stiff leg and straight leg power cleans (slpc) + press.

Yesterday I did a full olympic session (all 3 pre-1972 lifts) of:

  • SLPC (both types) + Military Press
  • Snatch
  • PC+Jerk
  • Front Squat

Nearing the end of the presses I started doing broad jumps in between sets. 2 reps at 6′ then BOOM! I got it at 8′, a mild arm pumping celebration, and went back to weightlifting.

I ended up doing it twice or thrice more during the weightlifting breaks. No misses.

After the front squats I decided to try for filming it.

No celebration as I’d celebrated after the first time hitting the milestone, and this was the 4th or 5th time. Not liking the angle above, I moved the mat around, and did one more. I ended up deleting that video as the angle was no better and the clip lacked the humanity of a badly positioned holding up of 8 fingers to signify the number of feet I’d just jumped.

Now how did I make the gains on broad jumps?

  • practice-in all matter of circumstances
  • no real change in weightlifting ability
  • a possible loss of 5lbs bodyweight (I’m unsure as I have forgot about the scale only checking today to see how heavy I was while jumping clear over the mat.)
  • a month with little leg work, a week or so with only PT, and a few days with modified PT that was basically none (Modified PT was holding warrior pose for some longish counts and seated calf raises instead of standing, so basically none).

I guess I’ve admitted I messed up the hindu squats and calf raises daily thing, although I modified it around the hurt which was getting close to injured, recovered and reaped the rewards of recovery both intended and unintended. Mentally I am not counting that as a miss, it was a necessary modification.

Train hard and play,

-J

Update: 12/14 8’9″-9′ Roughly shoe length past clear over mat. Also the stiff leg power cleans likely come into play, it dawned on me later.

The 80s Seen During The 2010s

As a high school underclassman I walked to school.

For more than a year I’d see him, he was like clockwork. I could base the time off his position.

I had a few metrics based on him to judge the time, when did I spot him?

Did I look over my shoulder as I passed that tree?

Did I see him a few houses in front of me?

That tree metric was almost perfect, if I was to check my watch the sighting had an accuracy to within 2 seconds every day.

Who am I talking about?

I’m talking about this guy that would bike by every morning on that same route, but unlike most on bikes it was at a blistering, breakneck speed.

Not quite 100% all out sprint, but close to it.

The pace had to have required serious lungs. The guy had huge anaerobic endurance.

How fast he went and how long he sustained it for (I never saw him slow down) was very impressive.

Hands down it was the most impressive biking cardio I’ve ever observed, and this includes seeing packs of regular training cyclists and triathletes.

The best part?

He was an 80s trailer trash throwback. A reverse time machine.

  • Long brown mullet? Check.
  • Couple day scruff? Check.
  • Cigarette hanging out  (always the right side) of his mouth? Check.
  • Stained wife beater, seemingly the same one daily? Check.
  • Very short cut off jean shorts, seemingly the same pair daily?  Check.
  • Highish socks? Check.
  • Work boots? Check.
  • Old regular bicycle? Check.

Every morning this 80s guy would blaze by on his near decrepit bike puffing that cigarette hanging out the right side of his mouth dressed in the same attire as I said above practically to the second.

I remember some of my first thoughts as I saw him being “holy shit, for a smoker he has cardio”, and “why is he sprinting while smoking, isn’t that contradictory?”

Funny shit.

Haven’t seen him biking in years.

-J

A Bench Method I’ve Used

Despite being theoretically built for benching (I have short ass arms) it seems to take me longer to make gains on it when compared to squats (also built for them, they respond well to frequency, which needs my mind to be right) or deadlifts (all mental as I am the opposite of built for them).

I did this last night, and it’s the method I used to first get to a 275 bench when I was 19 or 20.

Now what I did was this:

I’d unrack 275 myself and start to lower it. However this wasn’t negatives. I lowered the bar to a point that I felt if I went any farther down I’d pin the bar to my chest, stopped there, held it for a short count which would progress to a long count, and then at another bench session I’d go a bit lower, next to progress by time of the hold, so on and so forth until arms were at around 90° the bar now not too far off my chest, at which point the long hold allowed the full rep.

Call it a blending of negative, isometric hold, and partial reps. Now I was doing this without spots. While doing this it’s a better idea to have a spotter even though they may be aghast at you for your “ego” lifting that you wanted them to spot. The safest way though is in a rack with the safety bars set at a height should something go wrong the bar isn’t bouncing off your ribs or face. Set them high.

Just like with negative protocols its best to use a number that is near future conceivable. A 10% jump past your 1rm is a good guideline here. Last night I doubled 315 (very grinder 2nd rep, sat still a moment in the middle yet had a fast lockout, I’ve had a gear shift in my hard benching lately), and did 3 -5 sets of 2-3 partials with 335 (my lifetime PR which fatigue wouldn’t have allowed at that time).

This likely flys in the face of “scientific” training. The Westside aficionados would scoff at this from their banded/chained floor or board presses, yet for me it’s simpler, I like it, and it works.

Try it, or don’t. I’m still throwing it out there. Progressive distance training is what this is, it’s simply my spin on the protocol and it’s one that I like.

-J

 

 

Me And My Terrible Form + Weightlifting Thoughts + Competing

Bruce Wilhelm Power Clean Jerk Ugly Terrible Perfect Form Strong As Shit Hell Heave
Inspiration: Bruce Wilhem Performing A 210kg/462lb Power Clean And Jerk With “Terrible” AKA Perfect Form.

In Jim Schmitz’s article Jumping The Feet To Wide (where the photo was ripped from) he describes the above lift as : “It was an ugly lift, but it was strong and impressive.”

Weeks later reading Bill Starr’s article They Don’t Award Form Points In Olympic Weightlifting I had an epiphany.

I don’t care at all about the cleanliness,properness, and picture perfectness of my olympic lifting/weightlifting form at all.

Like the stress in the linked Bill Starr article I’d rather simply get stronger, have my numbers improve, and let form work itself out.

My experience says looking to form/technique as a goal does nothing but hamstring me. My power clean really took off when I stopped giving a fuck about triple extension and just ripped the bar.

Past the knee, jump + shrug, get under it. The jerk is a given.

Weightlifting Thoughts

In early olympic weightlifting they didn’t perform the lifts we do today. Through 1972 there was a third lift…the clean and press, and in the 1800s and early 1900s weightlifting competition was a grab bag of one handed and two handed floor to overhead lifts.

Not 2 or 3 but closer to 8.

Form?

I’d prefer continentals and press outs to be legal.

I prefer the brute force and heave old time version of weightlifting to the perceived trickery that is the perfect technique of today.

That’s not to say weightlifters are weak. In fact (watch the bloody vaginas come out of the woodwork here) that if international caliber weightlifters were to compete in powerlifting we’d see some records shattered.

The jerk carries over to the bench.

All the pulling carries over to the deadlift.

The back squat? They already train it, walk it out (no monolift trickery), have big #s raw, and aren’t far behind the records if at all.

I’m sure if you were to comb the entire internet for video you’d find weightlifters hitting the largest unofficial world record squats, not powerlifters.

Competing

Like Jimmy “The Bull” Pellechia says in the one tnation article online interviewing him, “why make it official”.

I care not whether it’s been done in front of officials in competition or in a gym or not. Strong is strong.

Powerlifting has this weird hive mind like thought of “it only counts in competition”.

LIFTING IS AN INDIVIDUAL SPORT!

Outside of owning a world record, why are you in a meet? That shit can be simulated at a gym (lots of york barbell guys did meets every saturday either somewhere else or simulated at the gym, some even branched out from weightlifting into powerlifting without training for it, just entering meets).

Video (or even witnesses) is more than enough as proof of a lift. Fuck having officials, do you really need their approval?  You could even try being your own approval.

If it’s not a world record, near it, or even elite why are you “competing”, like chaosandpain says lifting is not a fun run.

500lbs is still 500lbs be it in a meet or a backyard.

I’m not clogging up a meet, or paying to enter one without the planned total being something actually good.

-J

Your Best Set

Your PRs VS Your Best Set

Your best numbers and your best sets may or may not be the same sets.

I view a 405×20 squat as something I will hit. Mentally no issue. I’ve taken 5rm’s to 20 reps before.

I’ve hit 315×20.

Yet the more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that none of my current lifetime PR squat sets are actually my best set.

They are not the ones I’m most proud of, or the ones where I put in the most effort to get it done ie where I dug deep to get it done.

So best set would be defined as what you retain pride from due to the effort involved.

Squatting? I’d say my best set was 6½-7 years ago, nowhere near recent.

It was the first time I hit 225×20.

At the time this was around bodyweight. I considered BWx20 to be a landmark.

I wanted to quit early in the set. My hands went numb. I went into that mental place where “if I don’t finish these reps I’ll regret it for life”, and continued dispite all the discomfort.

Where I legitimately laid down for a solid 20 minutes before stripping the plates, grabbing my bag, and leaving still unsure of my ability to drive home safely.

Your best numbers aren’t always your best from a mental intensity standpoint.

Food for thought.

-J

No Camera Lifting Which Turns Into A Gym Culture Rant

No Camera Lifting

In our age of “pic or it didn’t happen”, and “it doesn’t count if it isn’t on video” sometimes it’s all for the better to simply leave your phone/camera in the locker and not take it out regardless that day.

Imagine a world where a PR was a PR whether you did it in front of witnesses, alone, in a meet, or on video? Where it counted under any circumstance as you were your own 3 white light givers?

I get filming occasionally for checking your form. I get filming some cool shit that happens for putting online (YouTube is fun for me, I assume all the people on Instagram enjoy it to some degree). But when every rep by powerlifters is form check videoed, and every exercise is filmed ass angle from plain faced fitness types it’s gone too far. Bodybuilding and the gym would have been better off staying some fringe thing thought to be overly narcissistic and gay, fitness being derived for the masses by labor jobs no longer worked, walks no longer taken, basic calisthenics that are no longer performed, and tables being occasionally stood up from.

Leave your camera in the locker for once. Not every PR or PR attempt needs to be on camera, just like often your headphones just get in the way.

It Turns Rant

I miss the days of the high school weightroom. Alone, no camera, silence or a cd popped into the player, and just fucking bringing it. Squats, dips, db rows, then doing some (often giant setted) full body volume not tripping over anyone as I was the only one there.

I once stated “I am the anti-thesis of who would go to a bodybuilding show.”  One overhearing this misheard, laughed, and repeated “I am the antichrist to bodybuilding”, well with the culture the way it is, it’s accurate enough.

  • I don’t care about the perfect split, or perfect diet.
  • I refuse to make my numbers official just because. “MEET!!??!?!??!?!”
  • My views on injury, and the talking about it have been written clearly multiple times, as have my thoughts about overtraining. HARDEN THE FUCK UP!
  • I have a personal gripe about the push to turn females into little males via lifting be it turning them overly muscular, overly lean, or via the complete loss of tits. I’m not against a female lifting in theory, but a lot of what I’m seeing in practice is wrong. (To stay attractive a certain amount of softness ie femininity is needed. You’d be best doing lots of ass, some lats, some shoulders, some cardio, and little else. I’m not against female health, nor completely against them lifting.)
  • Related to the last: There should be male only lifting spaces. Our society has very very few male environments.
  • You don’t need your own music every fucking session.
  • You don’t need to film every fucking thing.

End of today’s rant.

-J