Month: May 2020

When you desire something honestly, truly, without inhibition, the universe has the ability to present it to you, nay, even has to make it so.

I sit outside.

Year after year, mosquitos bite, while no one else would be getting bitten, I’d be their feast.

I love the fresh air, so I sit outside.

“The mosquitos won’t come near me”, I think, think isn’t exactly what I’m describing, it’s a pure honest energy from in to out.

I’m getting bitten at most a tenth of the frequency I’d get bitten in the past.

A few fly near, I just “think” – “go away” as I physically brush them aside. They take the hint. Off they go.

A bee or something flew at my head, I start to walk away, two paces later I stop, “I’m not getting stung”, it flies off.

Our brains have an amazing power, all you must do is not stifle it.

It’s your energy that the world around you shapes itself to.

Link :

The lockdown has forced me to do what I can. I rotate through the prioritized exercises on generally a couple week to month basis.

Instinctively I started doing more cardio.

It was just time.

Over a month of jumping jacks, burpees here and there, and now fairly regular bike rides.

Everyday I think about running.

Cardio is only going to be catabolic if it’s too much and of the type that doesn’t activate the musculature.

Basically every cardio I do results in a muscle pump somewhere, so I’m good to go.

•Burpees – everywhere.
•Jumping Jacks – calves, upper back
•Biking – quads, upper body pull, calves

I actually get lat pumps walking, and the bike riding I’ve been doing has the feeling of an isometric effect over a few different upper pull muscles.

If I’m going to be this heavy I need more wind. The cardio will either do this, or get me to lose the unnecessary weight slowing me down. Either/or is acceptable to me.

I no longer care about the scale. It’s been around a month since I last was on one. Performance, how you feel, and health are what matter.

It’s now sunny, and cardio is easily done without a shirt. This makes it multiuse ; a muscle pump, wind, and vitamin d + tan.

I bike shirtless more and more often. The amount of staring is great. I’d forgotten that just because looking in the mirror I see a muscular man everyday, doesn’t mean it’s a normal sight for everyone else.

Now starting to bike more regularly, which caused me to start leaning out a bit, the next step was to add in ab work.

For about a week now I’ve been doing situps and either flutter kicks or a 6″ hold daily. Upper and lower abs.

Despite carrying a higher amount of bodyfat I look better from this. My stomach is more flat. My entire upper body shape is better.

Years back at the commercial gym an old timer made a point of giving me some rather simple advice. His advice boiled down to “cardio, always do cardio, as you age always do cardio”.

If you do some strength training, always do cardio, and train abs, it’s impossible to not be in good shape.

On the ab note ; moving “sexily”, and belly dancing…experiment with it. It’s something that could be considered lost knowledge. The practice is a healthful thing. Who cares what it looks like, that’s what privacy is for.

I can slightly do that yoga side to side ab roll, ab control thing.

I’ve been making a point to breath more with my nose since watching this clip last month :

“These guys in their teens and twenties are so scared of overtraining that they think if they do one more rep they’ll instantaneously age to 70 or 80 something, with a snap of the fingers just like that.” – Me 5/14/20 on the phone with my uncle

The principle at play here is why beginners should be steered towards high rep, high volume, and that every guy should have both held a labor job at some point and played challenging sports growing up.

Gym perspective on physical possibilities are often pretty limited.

Good things happen to those who make themselves capable of lots of physicality.

Persistence & Tenacity

Consistency!

If there is one lesson people training need to internalize as part of their being this is it.

Whatever programming you do, if you have perfect consistency you’re going to get good results at some point.

Who cares about ideal!
Fuck ideal!

If it was to have been ideal my father would’ve gotten into bodybuilding out in SoCal before I was born, there would have been a squat rack on our concrete patio…in SoCal! We’d have never left!

Reality is that my father never lifted weights, he’s been hostile to the idea of my doing so, and we’re not in Cali!

I put to words a lot of my training philosophy speaking with my uncle.

The reason I made myself so obsessive with pushups is that they’ll never be taken away.

Pushups will never be taken away.

I’ll always have them.
Doing them is always under my control. No one can stop me. My doing them daily is a daily act of self ownership.

Since I started lifting I’ve had weights banned from the house, been locked out of the school weightroom often, been kicked out of a commercial gym, had a gym I frequented for years close down, been so broke I couldn’t go to one, moved coast to coast a couple times, so it’s really only rational that I stick to PT.

And now with this lockdown, you can never take this away from me!

I’m starting to make gains again. My appearance is at a threshold.

And I’m not doing much past 10 minutes of daily PT, a couple bike rides weekly, and the occasional lifting of an empty barbell outside.

(The empty barbell 50s could be the perfect program much searched for.)

How?

Consistency. The other day I hit 4 years of daily pushups. 4 years without a miss.

Do you have that consistency? Do you train everyday?

You go high frequency for long enough, you’ll effectively have the best genetics.

No equipment lack will ever hold you back.

I’m used to losing gym access. When that happens, I always move forward.

People want the fast gains, they search for the perfect diet. As far as I can tell you’ve just gotta struggle for years. Those who got it easily eventually quit.

Just be physical on a daily basis for some years. Everyone else has NFL Sunday fandom, video games, and shit. You become through action essentially superhuman.

A buddy wants to train with me when pf reopens. I told him to start burpees right when he got home.

You. Train. Everyday.

I started at 14. Younger is always better to start than now, but now is now, and to start tommorow is bad.
Now is the perfect time!

Lockdown : pushups in the kitchen, and some various additions, presently enjoying the quad pump from long bike rides.

When you’re used to some stimulus you can do a lot more when you set your mind to it, and check this out ;

Repeated exposure to a simple, easy stimuli, over years will make that same simple, easy stimuli far more effective than what common knowledge claims, and how it was at the gate.

I’ve done pushups for so long that doing them feels like I’m cheating at life. It’s just too easy, and I haven’t even milked them for their worth yet, not even close.

Whatever I was at 14, I’m an easy gainer now.

It took about a decade, and the last couple years have just been silly.

I’ll find something that works and just go do a bunch of it for awhile and my body starts to change right quick.

And now, possibly for the first time in my life, I just have a sense of strength, something I feel, just living.

10 years. Train for 10 years. Have a minimal fallback that you do religiously. Don’t quit. Give it a decade.

Persistence & Tenacity

May 14, 2020 at 207am i did 65 mantra pushups. This means I’ve now done pushups everyday for four years without a single day off.

Hitting 4 years makes this my definite unbroken record. My last missed day was 5/13/16. Every day I’m extending this personal record.

From starting in 2012 into 2016 was a month or two shy of 4 years unbroken. Assuming I actually missed that day.

(I just couldn’t confirm it.)

In 2012 I didn’t note the day I started, I hadn’t expected to get more than maybe two years without missing, but I ended up getting nearly four years. Now I just don’t miss. Period.

The 2012-2016 streak was started running the daily pushup challenge alongside my friend thst I’d suggested do it as a way to have a win every day in the world. Day 11 I revealed to him that I’d been doing it alongside him since day 1. It was a good time to do so, the way I did it meant something. It would’ve been hypocritical not to do them. He started to drop, it was near the end of the day, he had barely remembered in time, and I surprised him by dropping with him.

Last August my streak on Duolingo errored out on me while on an otr delivery. Once back and thinking about the streak I literally sat down, wrote out each day’s start and stop locations, and made sure I could recall where I was for at least one set of pushups each and every day. Reps were done at rest stops, while pumping diesel, in hotels, and on the unload day (the day I was worried about) a few minutes past midnight into the day in the hotel room because I wasn’t sure when I’d have the opportunity after starting the shift at 7am, and didn’t want to have to do them when getting ready for work.
The streak alive.

I’ve written before I’ll make 5 years without a day off of pushups.

I’m at the 4 year mark! 5 years is a guarantee.

Miss my pushups? I’d rather die.
That shift was 18 hours, I got them in right before truck time.

I’ve done them dropping one forearm onto a pillow at 15, as I’d hurt my hand and it was before I could do one arms to keep the streak alive.

I had a wicked bad fever in April 2018 (ironic given the month, and considering that I’ve been healthy as a horse through the
corona pandemic of 2020), that I delusionally sweat out, and on the worst day did 3 pushups in the kitchen at my peak strength of the day because that’s how serious I take the streak. Delusionally feverish still requires I do pushups.

I’ve done so many pushups over the years.

Starting in 2nd grade Sensei made me. Sensei, thank you.

My parents and uncle had a phase (ending by early middle school) where they’d make me drop as corporal punishment for talking back, swearing, taking the Lord’s name in vain, etc.
Mom, Dad, Uncle, thank you.

In 6th grade I thought I had tied for the win out of all three gym classes with 50 reps. I gave it my all. The gym teacher counting said only 48 were up to standard.

As a freshman in high school I did around 50 reps backpack on in science class to prove a point.
“Your turn asshole”, as I brushed off my hands.

I’ve no joke dropped for punishment reps in a community college bathroom before. (Summer camp, cadet thing.) At the same location I did the backpack on reps again. If we’re gonna go standing to on our faces repeatedly why bother taking off the pack? I had asphalt embed itself in my palm from doing pushups in that parking lot.

However, that bathroom is probably my weirdest location.

I’ve done pushups next to the water, doing a set, getting in, repeat, Pool, ocean, that doesn’t matter.

It strikes me that pushups and swimming would build the ideal upper body.

I’ve been doing them practically daily for just about a dozen years.
I’ve not nearly milked them for all they’re worth.

I’ve done them in probably 30+ states.

It was 1000+ a week in 2015.

With the gym still covid closed I often do extra sets of pushups thinking about how this is building the base to explode off of when I’m able to do 50+ rep sets on the machine preacher curl, my weighted pushups, and weighted pullups again.

I keep having this brain thought “get weighted pushups with 90lb on my back to feel like it’s just bodyweight. No difference in effort, able to just rep out”, that’d give 405lb bench strength.

This is 1461 days of pushups.
1500 pushups on day 1500 sounds good to go.

Being used to doing some means you can do something significant when you mentally get into it.
I’ve had people freak about the pushup volume I’ve done, a 1-20-1 pyramid recently, but I’m used to volume. 100s of pushups, even a 1000 isn’t a mental sweat to me any.

The streak is alive.

Pushups everyday for four years.

Persistence & Tenacity

Archives :
5/16/19

I’ve run into this guy off and on for years, nearly every gym I’ve stepped foot in in New England, the grocery store, etc.

High level bodybuilder, never got the pro card though.

Hilariously he’s working at pf.
The opposite of what is expected based on commercials.

(He even told me he hadn’t expected to get the call for the interview.)

About 6’3″ I’ve seen him at as high as something like a lean 330lbs. Big ass French-Canadian.

At pf he’d reminisce to me about what he’d done, as some injuries in the last few years have been hard on him.

•750 deadlift
•750 squat (narrow footing, fairly high bar)
•600 for reps squat (wide stance)
•315x~42 bench to looks of “what the hell”
•Incline 455×7 by his own admission being stronger on incline than flat
•DB row 5×300 each side strict
•Power Curl 4×225 to mess with a guy

Generally worked as a contractor of some sort. He’d told me at one point under 30 he was a roofing laborer at about 300lbs. The roofing at his size impresses me, it’s quite comical to picture, as even I’m comical as a mover at 6′ 255lbs.

(It’s like this : you’ve got a bunch of humans on crew, then the gorilla steps out of the work truck to the astonishment of the customer.

Like the scene in the 70s longest yard when burt goes “what is that” as a big guard steps out of the vehicle.)

However I think most of his time in the trades was spent doing tile floors.

Honest opinion?

High level bodybuilders show far more impressive #s than powerlifters on the whole. Same can be said of weightlifters.

I’ve noticed heavy lifting makes it wicked easy to grow. Heavy demands calories. High reps can go very heavy once you’re big, strong, and feel like pushing.

-J

Amongst other things I dreamt of having built a wooden frame in the yard, where I regularly did deep Anderson style overhead squats.

Clean and press, and clean and jerk for sets that lasted all day long, then end with the power movement described above.

I wasn’t training heavy, but in the dream I was clean and jerking 1c+1j repeat style sets of 20+ at 205, sets of 10 in the same style of clean and press having leaned down to a bodyweight of 225.

The overhead squat was just silly, like 405lbs starting from the bottom silly.

My press was well over bodyweight from all the jerk volume.

I kept thinking to myself, “I can probably dunk a basketball…from a standstill”.

Though a dream, following it would definitely lead to the results dreamt.