During my practicing today I was getting more comfortable in the arched position.
On a really solid handstand I lowered, touched my nose to the floor, and came back up about a quarter of the way/to the point I dropped from yesterday.
Boo yaa!
Getting a solid handstand takes less and less kickups, happens more often, and now I’ve become able to lower in an arched handstand nose to floor under control.
I’ll be doing so soon.
On one long balance with my knees bent to 45° while in the arch I had two things pop into mind :
•hop (in this position)
•calypso tumblers (you/I can build your/my own performing act)
During my practicing I got a few solid 10 second handstands today.
I did try the freestanding handstand pushup negative, getting my chin down to about 2″-4″ from the floor (with the arched hspu form) before finding myself unable to lower that last bit under control, dropping through them, then losing the balance, and falling back into the bottom of a pushup position.
Nearly being capable of a controlled negative is another step towards the goal.
I’m outside doing choked up holds and choked up levers with the sledgehammer.
First thing wrist work & breath work – I’m enjoying the cool morning air as the sky brightens and the birds start to stir.
A few days ago I realized that repeatedly bending forward and standing straight gets you breathing deep.
I’ve read this practice before in an old book.
It’s things like this that prove health is so simply achieved.
Wim Hof is repopularising what old time strongman wrote before him, what many cultures knew before that.
Northern Europeans sauna and cold themselves.
Yogis have their way. Tibetan Buddhists have theirs.
Combine the bends with bodyweight squats.
I’m getting deep breathes, and a light pump in the cold.
It’s free man. I’m doing it, so can you.
As I do a brief pyramid I envision first back bends, then handsprings, and flips.
The cool air, it feels phenomenal.
This pyramid could really be milked in the future.
•1 bend
•1 squat
•2 bends
•2 squats
•etc
1-10-1 is sure to wake you up. Do it outside. Do it! It’s your life!
This type of routine morning exercises keeps all young who would do them.
It’s ancient knowledge – lost in the modern hurried slurping of cereal, and car commute to somewhere you’d rather not be.
The other day I was asked “do/did you watch the news”.
I looked back at him honestly answering “I don’t even have cable tv”.
This was so far out of his wheelhouse that he went dumb for a moment.
Shock! Then silence, eventually a stammer, a stutter or two. He eventually got out “I just can’t believe ___”.
I reassured him of how it will be ok.
At this very moment as I type I’d place money on him scaring the heck out of himself by watching the “news”, a negative habit he’s committed to.
Sometimes the healthiest thing is to do is to stop taking in more information.
Why would I turn on a flashing screen of negativity, the content of which I can’t control, when instead I can exercise, and then create positive material with a different electronic device?
It like so many health and fitness related things these go to me without asking.
I take it as a given, otherwise I’d be doing what most do…a negative to themselves.
Rid thyself of self harm.
Then do some simple health builders.
December 2020 – The Worst Excuse I’ve Ever Heard In The Gym :
This is the topper, the worst gym related excuse I’ve ever heard. It’s gonna be hard to beat…
And I quote verbatim ; “I don’t know how to grocery shop”.
Bwahahahahahaha!
(The above is the exact # of ha’s I want you the reader to hear aloud.)
College aged, he’s living at home, his mom doesn’t buy enough groceries so he eats out twice a day to supplement what’s at home.
Saying he wants to bulk and struggles to afford eating, he’s eating out to the tune of solidly half his paycheck!
What he needs to do is instead of buying a burger out, AND something else daily is go into the grocery store pick up 5lbs of ground beef for the same cost as the burger alone!
Then he can bank the second meal’s money, finding himself suddenly able to afford eating the way he needs to while saving some cash.
Kid has a fast metabolism and good muscle insertions.
20lbs to 40lbs heavier he’d look like a monster.
Those 20lbs would come jet pack quick if he stopped making the excuse of not knowing how to cook, not knowing “how to grocery shop”, and actually entered a grocery store.
The place is a cornucopia of affordable, good food in abundance!
I tell him homemade cheeseburgers, egg shakes, and to buy a crockpot.
About a year later he’s still playing around at ballpark the same bodyweight, constantly hungry, and constantly spending dollars he shouldn’t be on going out to eat.
It blows my mind.
I ate on $35 weekly at his age.
I remember in high school that I started cooking fried eggs with tuna regularly as I was ravenous after getting home from the school weight room.
I wanted something quick, nutritious, and easy since I had to make it myself unless I was going to wait a good deal longer for whatever my mom would make for dinner.
(I’d then eat that dinner too.)
Fried eggs fit the bill, and to them I’d add a can or two of tuna (I love the stuff), and/or pepperoni (usually end cuts) that were bought on sale.
I guess he doesn’t cook/hasn’t cooked at home…ever.
In his situation I’d eat 4 meals a day, probably half his mom’s cooking, half his own.
Grocery costs are never high for the young adults who have their parent’s shopping available in addition to their own.
I’d be downing stew over ramen, and drinking lots of milk – my dinner.
Whatever as a mother provided dinner.
Dinner one and dinner two you know. This has been a running joke between my mother and I since I was around 16 :
Mom : “Is this dinner 1 tonight?”
Me : “No Mom, I had 5 eggs, two cans of tuna, and ¼lb of pepperoni fried up with cheese while you were out.”
Mom : “Okay good, I was wondering what was wrong since I thought you only had one dinner tonight.”
Like this, but with dinners.
Lunch? A few sandwiches and either a quart+ of milk or a similarly sized egg shake. It could be a cold cheeseburger made the night before kept in a lunchbox.
You already have the lunchbox for the nutritious liquids, put a cold burger in there as well.
Breakfast? An egg shake and a few slices of toast with the butter slathered on thick.
I wouldn’t be eating out, spending $30/day, to get not enough calories to bulk.
Especially not on that paycheck.
I’d be eating ground beef in homemade burgers, pork/chicken stew, ramen, some type of dessert, and drinking eggs and milk at home for $15 a day tops while getting the necessary calories.
At his age I was eating well on about $5/day, mostly chicken stew with potatoes, ramen/rice, and milk.
You can give good advice, it’s not necessarily going to be implemented.
Sometimes you see the potential in others, and see them blowing it with the worst of excuses.
Heck, he could just buy frozen food with some nutrition to microwave, and bulk more effectively than he is now, but (as I laugh/snort/guffaw)…he doesn’t “know how to grocery shop”!
It’s really not expensive to eat well on even the most restrictive of budgets.
It’s one of america’s strong suits.
Every third week or so pasta is on sale for under $1/lb. I figure each pound, with fixings is 3 or 4 dinners. Just buy 4 or 6 packages every sale, it’s about $5.
Now pasta is a carb, dry beans I count as a protein, and they too are often $1/lb, garbanzo beans being the only one I pay more for at about $1.35/lb.
(And the garbanzo beans are worth that extra cost.)
A pound of dry beans once cooked is enough for a week’s worth of dinners.
Veggies? 2 bags of mixed vegetables is $2-3 weekly added to the total.
In all honesty though I’d probably skip the veggies and buy another pound of beans, and a pound chicken thigh instead.
With the veggies you’re at 7 dinners for about $7 here, nutritious enough, but lacking the animal.
Adding in the animal, this is where the cost is racked up.
2lbs ground beef – the fatty one – $6
2lbs kielbasa – $7
3lbs chicken thigh – <$5
The pasta, bean, veggie base, with a pound of meat each day – $25/weekly for all the dinners.
Intermittent fasting, and you’re good.
But you want more calories, okay,
½ gallon of milk daily.
Round up to 4 gallons a week, it’s under $12 anywhere in the country.
Shit, I’ve seen it for less than $6.
That one walmart was selling gallons for $1.47, groceries were ridiculously affordable there.
25+12 = $37 weekly for a good dinner every night, including a pound of meat and ½ gallon of milk.
$13 minimally left on a $50 a week budget, eggs come next.
Say 4 dozen eggs, probably $6.
Ice cream is anabolic – 1 tub, $3.
$4 remaining.
brick of cheese – $2
generic poptarts – $1
Put the extra $1, though probably closer to $5 as I rounded up every time, back into the future “I’m frickin hungry” fund.
Buy sticks of butter with it.
This did bring you to ~4000 nutritious calories a day, completely on $50/week, a food stamp budget.
I’m going to let you in on the training secret. Ready? Come closer, what with only 10 YouTube subscribers and low website traffic this is only a whisper…
Here it is…
As your mental default choose to be physically robust.
Fine. Done.
Long Version :
The mind is far more powerful than anyone believes.
I’ve stayed injury free, rarely getting hurt, and not feeling physical fatigue nor soreness to much if any degree like most seem to.
I mentally was a physical workhorse from the start. Add in disgust at my own perceived weakness, a few sports, and thousands of hours training, mostly alone. It forged an unbreakable physicality.
I gave myself the best genetics.
I had tits at 13. I’m now the largest athletic guy around just about everywhere I go.
My uncle made an interesting statement to me ~4-5 months back. “You scare them because you are the strongest one there who hasn’t used anything. Just like you know they’ve used, they know you haven’t, and the gap is far closer than they’d like it to be considering.”
The truth of that recently really hit me.
From Cali through present my body has been crazy high responsive to any and all stimuli.
Why? Isolate the cause.
Because just like how I made myself impossible to injure mentally (I refused to even acknowledge or consider the possibility of such nonsense), I evolved a new part of my mindset towards physicality…
“I’m physically robust naturally.”
(IE to be physically robust is default, and my mental belief.)
Friend, when you heed my words, it’ll give you the athletic body of your wildest dreams.
You will do well…however, whatever, any which way.
The gym won’t matter.
Equipment will be inconsequential.
Diet? Inconsequential as well.
Training frequency, more, less, tons, some, any, none? All good.
I don’t expect you to believe me. I suggest that you see for yourself.
Belief is the most powerful thing we as humans can access and control.
No matter what I do I am physically robust.
I’m the strongest I’ve ever been.
My pants keep getting looser.
I don’t go to a gym, and I haven’t done any weights heavier than an empty bar in over two weeks.
My standard for a while has been roughly 30 pushups every evening, and balancing for a bit eyes closed on each leg. Of course as I’m doing my reverse curl challenge I average 50-65 reps of the empty bar daily for the time being.
I most often do 2 or 3 pullups daily, and occasionally hit a set of neck harness, wall sits, gripper, or hand opening.
Shoveling (hey, it’s winter) is my largest overall source of physical stimuli at present.
I’m looking and feeling more naturally athletic than meathead, though I doubt bodyweight has changed much, if any.
The problem many take to the gym with them is a belief in their own weakness, and thinking they can’t or would have to struggle to change it.
It’s a cruel facade. While reality is that there nothing more natural than to be robust, vigorous, strong, enduring, and full of vitality.
Everyone who thinks a 300lb weight set isn’t enough weight aren’t being very creative.
They’re thinking inside the powerlifting box, and not with vision of the wide world of strength sports.
Firstly if you aren’t hitting a 900lb pre-1972 style three lift weightlifting total (press/snatch/jerk), and a 300lb York combo you don’t get to talk.
May as well use strict early 1900s feet together to end the lift rules too.
Secondly going back to the same period in weightlifting you have one arm variations.
It’s possible that no one has snatched past 225lbs on a one arm barbell snatch since Charles Rigoulot set his 253lb world record with his specially made globe barbell in 1928 (edit : twice – Alekseyev with 231lbs pictured below, and Koklyaev more recently with 242).
I want 225lbs!
Clearly you have a ways to go with a 300lb weight set.
And you’ve got one arm pressing in many variants :
Strict/military, push, side, bent –
315lbs for 20 on a back squat is something of an intermediate goal, one I’ve hit…
Now imagine 300 as a 20 rep overhead squat max!
High rep overhead squats are damn near limitless thinking in sets of 50+ with 300lbs to top out at.
One can get a 300lb weight set, put it anywhere (outdoors being preferable), and get very very strong with it – with no other equipment.
Walking back from the pool I hear “damn bro, I need to get my ass to whatever gym it is you go to”.
I laugh, “haven’t been to a gym in six months”.
“How the”
“Pushups, lots of pushups”.
“Damn! That’s natural?”
Almost midnight on a friday or saturday night, a late 20s hispanic, about 6’1″ and a slightly chubby 280, was wandering back from the parking lot drunk past the pool to his apartment door.
I got a laugh out of the honesty of the drunk and childlike outburst.
At that pool complex I did so many pushups, rope skips, and deadlift isometrics.
In the sun during the day you’d burn your feet and hands on the concrete surface surrounding the pool.
That’s Las Vegas for you.
Because of this I had taken to working out in the dark once it had cooled off enough from the lack of sunlight.
That isn’t the only time I’ve had a hispanic male have roughly that interaction with me.
Anecdote 2 :
I had another a few years later (in New England), this time with a very short, skinny, tatted up junkie type inside of a gas station.
It’s likely on the site already, but a quick recap :
“Damn bro, you bodybuild.”
“I haven’t been to a gym in months.”
“That’s natural! You don’t lift?”
“I do a bunch of pushups.”
“That’s natural! That’s crazy! Some viking shit. I gotta start doing me some pushups.”
Anecdote 3 :
And recently at planet fitness I was asked if I lift weights by a retiree who was prior service because of how large I am and his surprise to only see me doing calisthenics.
Notes :
I get a kick out of how many will view not lifting weights as “natural” development, and how much being a big guy doing calisthenics blows people’s minds since in their eyes you should be lifting weights.
Years ago the movie Limitless struck me. At the end where the main character learned how to retain his abilities while having weaned himself off the drugs got me to thinking….
Oddly the kids movie Matilda gave me the same thoughts while I was pre-pubescent.
What is the mind capable of? Truly capable of?
What realms of esoteric knowledge does science say is impossible but truly is?
Have you ever with your whole being said something was going to happen that day, and it did?
It may have been seemingly small, but has it happened?
Yes it has.
Have you ever felt like you communicated telepathically?
Talked to a deceased ancestor recently, AND felt their presence?
Wanted to levitate up a flight of stairs?
Who’s to say what is true, what is real, and what isn’t?
You can opt in, or out of ANY belief. You create your reality, why take soceities word at where you have to stop?
Hasn’t society opted to be broke, bothered, beat up?
Hasn’t the average person, the so called sheep opted for thier slop in life?
Why listen to that?
Listen to the 7 year old inside of you! The inner child just knowing to explore and doing it naturally. The part of you thats innocent to bullshit, and doesn’t need external validation. The part that pushes it to the limit because that’s what life is!
Give yourself permission!
Do You 100%, Fully You 100%
Build the iron willpower and watch the magic happen.
I remember eating breakfast platters, I would’ve been around 4 years old, I wanted the one with the most sausage links and strips of bacon.
You get four. I remember thinking my father and the server the coolest people ever for letting me have two of each instead of one or the other.
I loved sausage links, but this was the only place I’d have bacon.
Two of each, once they even got me three and one.
The problem was the four pieces of fatty meat would be gone one french toast slice or so in.
Four pieces of meat per bread unit always sounded correct. I said so as a little kid.
“Excuse me, this platter needs eight sausage links and four strips of bacon.”
First the meat was gone.
Then the eggs.
Followed by the “main course” of french toast or pancakes smothered in butter, and doused in maple syrup.
Lastly I’d be scarfing down the toast with at least one jelly of every flavor, some butters, and peanut butter packets if they too were available.
As a kid given the opportunity it’s fatty meat first, working your way down to sugar and grain, attempting to fill yourself with that since the adults for some reason thought proper eating was in the opposite direction of nutrients, and you were still hungry.
You don’t know the science behind this as a kid, yet as a kid I clearly intuited it.
I did the same a few years older often opting out of dinner at grandma’s house friday night (a massive salad “rewarded” with some rice, hopefully white rice as brown rice hurt my stomach, and the tiniest bit of lean chicken or otherwise fish, the fish I liked and forced my way through the preceding course to), knowing I’d get some milk with breakfast, and hoping we’d go out, do something, then eat out, where a pizza or burger gave me what I craved.
You’re born intuiting this.
Children get it.
Adults often forget it, then opt into the opposite. They then have health problems.
Lunacy.
Trust your gut.
Trust your instincts.
It’ll never lead you astray.
Saturated fat is the most important, though you’ll fill yourself with carbs when you must, and even then fruit sugar is preferred.
And you prefer smothering grain in fruit sugar, and saturated fat, instead of having it plain whenever possible.
