Month: February 2020

Out of shape and just starting out?

I want you to start an unbreakable regime of daily PT.

No equipment, and therefore no excuses.

•Pushups
•Bodyweight squats

You could do wall sit instead of squats, and optionally some abs.

I’ve given an acquaintance the advice of pushups, bodyweight squats, and crunches daily to get into the habit of exercising.

You needn’t start with many. Progression on reps and volume will come naturally. 10 reps a day of your standbys is plenty to begin.

This is excuse proof advice. I’ve given it to more than one freely, but it only works when they use it.

Use it.
Do your squats.
Do your pushups.
Daily.

Persistence & Tenacity

From The Archive : 10/15/15

Fitness can be play
It can be as regimented or free form as you want
It can require a gym or require nothing but your ingenuity
It can be as short or long as you want
Take back the true definition of bodybuilding
Express yourself with your build,and abilities
Your fitness
There is no one true fitness plan
The correct one is one you like,the one you’ll do, and the one you can.
In a perfect world your regime hits all of the above 3 categories
Sometimes life forces you to drop the one you like the most
Or forces you to train for things you don’t like
Either way train hard or you may as well be in a graveyard
It’s life, live it.
Do some sprints, hit the deck for pushups
Get it
Persistence and Tenacity J Out!

Super super high levels of protein are unnecessary.

Probably 100g a day is enough, making the usda 60g a day recommendation closer to accurate than not. I don’t see a gram per pound as being necessary. 1.5-2g/lb or more? Damn!

Protein has a fat burning thermic effect. Yes, it is the building block of muscle, but it’s not what creates the anabolic environment.

Think of protein like brick sitting on a construction site. It ain’t building itself. Workmen are needed.

Saturated fat is the best macro for creating the necessary environment.

Just like with carbs you can take in a lot of calories via saturated fat.

Heavy cream, butter.

Carbs are really an energy source.

Protein in a primal sense is firstly going to be had with very high quantities of saturated fat, and isn’t going to be just smorgasborded down by itself or in huge quantities.

A 250lb guy trying to get 500g protein each and every day isn’t going to pull that off in the wild sans an occasional feast.

Farming allows the masses. Both in number of humans and in the size of each.

Hunting and even ranching just aren’t going to create the necessary calories worldwide for upteenth billion people.

You want mixed macros. The primal fat and protein diet is the better of the two extremes (between it and essentially carb only veganism), and you want to skew towards that end in general manner of eating, but you’re doing yourself a disservice not having carbs in addition.

Use everything available to you.

Between protein powder and meat always take the meat. Red meat, fatty chicken, a fatty meat, as for protein to be anabolic one must eat the fat with it.

You don’t need protein supplements. You’d be better off eating a bowl of ice cream, or drinking some heavy cream.

If you have 5000 calories coming in daily, and it’s roughly an energy balance, you’re gonna be a monster. And on the high end, only 800-1000 of those calories will come from protein. The rest saturated fat and carbs.

Naturally I’m a high energy person, without a high energy expenditure daily, I essentially cannibalize myself becoming unable to sleep, cocooning indoors (staying home is a sickness), and having my stomach be all tucked up.

This is why I PT daily, and the energy expenditure from labor is a blessing to me.

I have to earn my sleep, I’ve always preferred training daily, and days I don’t work I’m still in the gym for a few hours to get that daily calorie burn.

I’m doing just stupid high volume. Days off of work I’m putting in a half shift at the gym, days at work it can end up being half the day physical.

I’ve found volume doesn’t wear me down one iota. I can work labor, and do massive rep volume on top of it and just grow bigger and stronger.

I started doing a purposeful run of training biceps, mostly on the seated preacher curl.

A month of this has thickened my arm, and I find chin ups to be easier.

It’s 30+ chins most days, and sometimes I’ll be going back and forth between chins and a curl, just pushing the volume into the stratosphere.

I do mantra pushups everyday, at least three times through the set of 23 (15 mantras + 4 mantras done twice through, for a while it was sets of 19, then I started repeating the last 4) mantras.

The other PT constant is three minutes of a leg static. Lately I’ve been doing the wall sit.

The high horse stance definitely made my legs stronger. I’ve noticed wall sit to noticably improve my explosiveness in the past, and at present it sets my metabolism on fire, making me feel mildly feverish when I push it. And 2/24/20 at ~403-406pm I hit a 3:05 wall sit, probably the second time in my life I’ve broke three minutes. A fairly old fit dude gave me props for this. Unlike in May 2018 I hadn’t intended to get a 3:00 set, with each fraction of the total I just felt good and kept going.

I do most of my PT at the gym now. So a gym session is a bunch of curls and/or chins, random other stuff, then pushups, and wall sit.

3:00 is that daily minimum time held, and I add a second to the total requirement each “set” it takes to get there. For example 3×1:00 ends up being held til a total of 3:03 has been held before I check it off for the day.

I feel phenomenal.

Some crispy bacon is the best energy bar you can get.

Years ago I read this suggestion on a defunct blog “apocalypse barbell” written by former marine Colin Webster, the son of NFL hall of famer Mike Webster.

He said how his father would eat a small amount of bacon before training camp two a days, and how he had good results doing the same on the mornings of PT tests, and when he knew there would be long runs.

On that PT test note, he wrote how the best “recovery” method he found being a big heavy guy for quickly being good to go after long 5k+ runs was to immediately drop into a deep atg squat for a minute or so. This works very well for me, working labor, at the gym, in life in general. “Third world squat”.

Bacon? A few oz gives me great energy, and contrary to how bad it supposedly is…I stomach this before physical activity better than anything else I’ve tried.

Expensive to buy precooked, I think I’ll have to just cook pounds at a time in the oven.

And waste not want not, save that bacon grease to pour into ramen at dinner. That’s what I do. Dinner is often meat thrown over ramen, and I just pour the drippings into the noodles.

Animal saturated fat is the most anabolic dietary thing. Use it!

A funny story ; a buddy of mine for years ate the same breakfast every morning, 7 egg whites plus 1 whole egg. Those 7 yolks either went down the drain or into the ground.

One morning at his house I go “dude, I’m hungry too, don’t toss those yolks, set them aside, I’ll fry them up after you’ve fried up your whites”, and did so, a few times at his house actually.

Many toss out perfectly good anabolic calories, yolks, drippings, etc.

Me? I’ll use the saturated fat. I’ll drink heavy cream. I’ve never tossed an egg yolk. I pour my meat drippings onto other things.

This was the way in an older more physically robust time.

From beginner to those making money in the fitness industry everyone is overcomplicating how to be in good shape.

It’s a mentality I don’t get, I see the bodypart splits, and simply don’t get it.

You work, full body, and do so more often than not.

Train hard, eat well, don’t obsess over needing “recovery”.

Full body most days, push yourself, you’ll find that you’re capable of far more than the fitness industry proclaims.

It helps to have wrestled or worked labor.

It’s not complicated.

Work → results. That’s it!

Being built, healthy, and strong is natural, it’s instinctive.

And instinctive is simple!

Simple training! Simple eating!
1000x better results.

Fancy is fucked. Simple & Instinctive.

Get it!

Persistence & Tenacity

High reps will make you strong.

High volume will have you grow like you wouldn’t believe.

It boggles my mind that I’m getting bigger while working labor, but then I realize all I do is high reps and high volume at pf outside of work. And it’s not like I eat like a bird.

I saw a comment online one time that high reps, high volume may not be the best/most efficient way, but in certain circumstances it can be the only way.

High rep, high volume pushups really gave me all the pressing strength I have, and thus far on weighted pushups my 5rm was 115, an entire petite chick standing on my upper back.

An older guy gave me props for the weight being on my upper back, acknowledging that’s worse leverage than it spread out.

In a prison setting big ass homeboy sitting on you will make you wicked strong. Training partner as weight for squats and pushups…harder than the barbell lifts.

Machines? There’s nothing wrong with machines.

The biggest dude I’ve met did machines and high reps.

Mental focus adds to the effectiveness of an exercise.

Work? That’s brainless carrying, but my pf machine workouts? That my friend is mentally focused on the musculature.

Of course I’m growing.

Running yourself into the ground is a worthwhile experience. You’ve gotta push to feel alive. As long as you’re doing so with anabolic, not catabolic activities ridiculous volume is not only fine, but highly beneficial.

I view my physical abilities as something of a strange case. My most recent “best” set on chins was 7 reps having already done ~300 back reps. My rep outs may not be high, but my work capacity is. I can do reps until the cows come home. If we just do rep after rep until one of us can’t go any more…you’ll tap. I can do into the hundreds just one after another after another.

I remember benching 225 for a lot of reps on a few occasions. 1000 pushup workouts. Yep.

Work capacity is the ability to just keep doing work.

Sarcoplasmic hypertrophy? It doesn’t matter, you don’t need to worry about shit like that.

When you get bigger you get stronger. It’s not a perfect correlation, but strength will come along with the size.

This is why I’m amped up training volume at pf. I’m getting bigger. Therefore…you know it, I’m getting stronger.

Just make the mental decision that you’ll be big and strong and you will. Simple.

I patiently await touching a barbell again… because I’m far far stronger.

As long as you’re not obsessing over minutia, pf works very very well.

A length of time away from the barbell makes you hungry.

Small hole in the wall places with limited equipment can be the best.
Any place can really. Your training progress is up to you.

Train hard. Eat well. Disregard minutia. 100% of the equation right there.

Taking days off is garbage.

Persistence & Tenacity

If you have to ask, or even research if _ will work, or if _ is okay, you’re not trusting yourself, willing to experiment, and are still seeking external validation.

It can be downright comical reading forums threads on training and diet.

If you’re the type prone to overanalyzing…a type oddly common in the lifting world, basically everyone who touched weights for the first time outside of a high school football weight room (myself included), you are best served just training and eating however you feel like without any external validation, ie no science, no forum approval, no googling, so on and so forth.

Just training how you want.

Don’t ask! Observe, think, and play (experiment).

You’ll figure it out.

Just because 5’8″ ~145lb is small to our standards, does not mean they would be anything but superhuman physically compared to the current average american.

The civil war soldier lived a life 1000x more physical than one in the modern era.

I’ve seen plenty of laborers (and wrestlers) around that size that’d blow your mind, not only having endurance, but considerable strength.

The average civil war soldier lived rough. A good deal of miles marching daily was par for the course. Hell, life at the time involved way more walking.

Before soldiering it was manual labor whether they came from the city or a rural area. And manual labor makes you strong.

We think him small, but he wasn’t weak.

This dream was like a low budget high testosterone 80s action martial arts cop movie.

Handstand pushups and hand walking qualify it under the “gym dream” umbrella.

Lakeside to show off (I’d say the crowd was mostly chicks I’ve met in real life) I sat in lotust position, pressed off the ground to an L-sit like position, then slowly levered up into the handstand.

I’d do a few reps then hand balance walk around. Not just flat ground, but up and down steps, even onto a picnic table where at the edge I did something ridiculous like 75 full range of motion to the chest reps.

And right now you’re thinking, “how does this qualify as a high testosterone low budget 80s action flick”.

You see I was dreaming a cheesy cop movie. It must’ve been 80s due to the blaring Metallica and lack of cellphones.

My partner and I would not only spar each other gloved kickboxing regularly at the cop shop, we’d allow people to resist arrest with the promise that if they ko us we’d not serve the warrant (we alternated who fought and kept it 1v1). The dream had a bunch of mostly civil bare knuckle boxing matches, but a few warrants (a giant 7′ 400lb redneck at a bar against my partner) devolved into wwe chokeslams and power bombs (after getting powerbombed my partner caught the giant with a lucky haymaker right on the button).

In a moment possibly against the Chuck Norris rule I chokeslammed
a 5’8″ 130lb junky onto the sidewalk when he drew a switchblade on I think it was my partner..

You know maybe this was a cheapo 90s high testosterone martial arts flick.

I was a white brawling bodybuilder, and my partner a black brawling bodybuilder with facial features like nba player David Robinson.

My girlfriend was a tall thick sexily proportioned mullato girl with a small light brown afro (I’ve walked by this one in real life), and she was not the only sex scene in the movie. At one point I walked in on my partner with a very petite mullato girl (this role played by a chick I knew out west) we’d pulled over for speeding at 100mph+ near the local community college, and I was actively cheating on my girlfriend with a tall thin blonde (played by someone I’ve known for most of my life).

Weirdly every female in the dream, which I’d say was lucid, it felt like having my conscious and ability to make decisions while knowing I was in a movie, was someone I either know or at the very least have seen in real life.

The dream ended with a fire fight in a warehouse. For whatever reason my partner was without his gun, and was rushing the perps with a billy club as I provided cover fire. I’d say he beat one perp to death with that stick, I’d wounded both with the department issued 9mm, and with the second perp I went over kill palmsmashing his head into the concrete after he was already dead, having emotionally lost it, him having played dead after taking shots to a hidden bulletproof vest and by doing so almost getting my partner. The two perps had almost got both of us. They were both dead and we had piddly graze wounds. It had been two minutes of sprinting, ducking, screaming tactical info, and I woke up heart booming, panting as if I’d truly lived it, weirded out to be in my room, even checking my left arm for the graze wound I expected to be there.

Fun dream. As a 9-12 year old I had dreams like this set in warzones pretty commonly. It was a blast to have a cop movie lucid dream.

There was a vision quest theme overlayed throughout, and on at least three separate occasions during it, I was visited ghost of Obi Wan style by the spirit of my grandpa standing before me during early morning hours.