March 2021 - Persistence and Tenacity

March 2021 Volume Flow :

I’ve had a realization :

Volume is the answer.

People are not big and strong, as a rule, because they do not have enough workout volume.

People are all sorts of dysfunctional BECAUSE THEY DON’T GET ENOUGH WORKOUT VOLUME.

Even people I train with look at me like I’m crazy, but they can’t argue with the results.

Volume works.

When I don’t get in volume my strength will hold yes, however the majority of my progress has come from volume.

Throw out your ideas about only three or four sets, throw out your ideas about never going past 15 reps a set.

In general you need movement.
In the gym you need more sets and reps.

You know what works, always has, always will?

Effort.

If you committed 30 minutes a day to density training you’d be a god among men.

The bar is so low. You actually have to search out true potential and hold it in mind to keep upping your own limits.

Not getting stronger?
Nine times out of ten you’ll solve it by throwing more volume at it.

You should be doing as much volume as your joint health allows for.

Time? lol, you’ve got time.

Never watch tv again.
There’s plenty of time.

Everyone has it in them to be a sidewalk crackin motherfucker.

They get there with volume.

If 10×10 done as heavy as possible was the standard protocol there’d be a whole lot more muscular beast on every gym floor.

•Do more work.
•Up the intensity.
•Up the volume.

Be big, strong, & in shape.

It’s not rocket science, it’s only effort.

Do more volume.

I’ll write about this at some point, lss, I’ve started helping my fat ass buddy get in shape.

I’ve got him started real light on machines, building him up, with reps, my idea to get him doing either 5×20, 3×30-35, or 10×10 full body as a way to awaken dormant too much video game and zero gym time muscles I know must be there by virtue of having locomotion at damn near 400lbs.

Beginners need lots of volume, as volume is what builds work capacity.

I’m getting him doing volume a couple times a week, and I keep upping mine.

10×10 benching has been real fun, plus I do extra credit heavier sets.

I’ve never done 10×10 pullups, I’ll train for it soon.

Yeah I’m using a smith machine, and benching more than bodyweight in it for 10×10 superset with the pullups will be badass.

I believe in human potential, and I believe in frequency and volume.

Man needs high physicality.

-J

March 2021 Flow – Higher Gravity & Strength Training :

I never watched dragon ball z.

From what I know of it maybe it would’ve inspired seven year old me to train more.

I don’t think I had the channel, and watched something else in the same early weekend morning time slot while at my grandparents.

At my grandparents where in their guest bedroom I’d use my grandpa’s total gym with a fury needing to be stronger as sensei was always having me wrestle kids three to five years older than me, or on one noteworthy saturday three kids at once.

“Pin them all…at the same time.” – Sensei

Man that’s a story!

However I have read some science fiction.

A common enough trope is the noting of the differences in gravity between planets, and how this affects humans from world to world.

A human raised in low gs is weak in high gs.

A human raised in high gs can be effectively superhuman in low gs.

Has science created a gravity chamber where one could train?

It’s often depicted as a room around a spinning centrifuge whether it’s built on a planet or part of a space ship.

Again never having watched dragon ball z, calisthenics in a high g room sounds pretty sweet to me.

At 3gs a pushup is equivalent to a roughly a double bodyweight bench at normal gravity.

Imagine walking in at 1g doing fifty pushups, and daily increasing it a tiny percentage, over 300-365 days having yourself doing the same at 3gs?

I doubt you’d notice a 1% increase, in what is effectively bodyweight, from day to day.

Linear progression and microloading! lol

It seems to me that if this was to exist it would be the best, not to mention an extremely cool way, to get extremely strong.

looks like a rip snortin good time – same timeslot

Do a bunch of bw squats and pushups!

-J

3/28/21 Gym Philosophy Flow :

You don’t need any particular program.

You need to be physical. That’s it.

•Get in the gym daily.
•Put in work.

Those are the biggest things.

You’ll muscle up.

Write your own program.
Disregard science, disregard forum posts, and disregard normal training programs.

Make yourself the program that mentally you buy into, and run it.

Run with it!

Too many don’t run their program, and hence have lackluster results.

My program is literally:

•do pushups today
•get to gym often and apply effort

I don’t think whether I’m tired or hungry.

My programming is by instinct, and I barely consider whether I have soreness or not.

I definitely don’t act like soreness matters, and it definitely doesn’t stop me.

I’ve found as a general rule that I perform better physically while fasted.

Psychologically, if not physically, 90% of the time I need “high frequency”.

I believe humans as designed are meant to be highly physical.

So a focus on days off and recovery is just a way to slack off.

Making decisions is healthier than constantly overthinking.

Don’t hide behind some excuse. Choose to train, or own your choice to take a day off aka to not train.

For instance, I often choose to eat in a way that “you don’t want to know how I eat”.

Instead of eating like a bodybuilder I choose to self regulate diet mostly by cravings which for me ends up alternating between fasting, and what I consider gluttony.

One day on an exercise bike cutting weight for high school wrestling I decided “I’d rather exercise more and be able to eat more”, and have been doing some version of outtraining diet since.

My first summer as a mover I was eating dirtier and dirtier trying to keep weight on.

Out training a “bad diet” isn’t some impossible thing.

America needs to match it’s activity levels to it’s calorie levels – this alone could change the health landscape of the nation. Outside the box baby!

Maybe I’ll go full bodybuilder. Maybe I won’t.

Right now I’m laughing expecting to see abs soon, and I’m getting to this higher level with the least mental activity involved.

I don’t care much, and I’m flying.
Soaring high by having embraced the sea floor.

I stopped caring. I just do.

Not touching a barbell, and here I am getting better and better.

Going to planet fitness, lol the place is so bad, at least that what the internet would have you believe.

I don’t care. I just go.

Effort. Where I am. With what I’ve got. No thinking. Brainless. Yet no one can help you with your training like I can.

After long enough in the gym you can make anyone muscle up.

You can lean people out.

You pick up the knowledge of dieticians, physical therapists, masseuses, etc as par for the course.

Even an idiot savant becomes a genius trainer.

Even trying not to think, taking your brain out of the gym as much as possible when applied to self, doing your best draft horse with blinders (straight forward nothing can stop me – budweiser horse philosophy as an article – note to self) impersonation you get the ability to teach.

You do.

It’s a natural evolution.

Since I’m not thinking about how I train, just going straight forward, my brain being naturally at 100mph always has to do something, so it’s active, me looking around figuring how to fix someone’s form, what they should be doing instead, figuring out how to get your training partner to double his reps, etc, etc, etc.

Be a draft horse with blinders – straight on forward, the freight train on rails – can’t stop me!

To Arnold’s Conan I ask “What. Is. Good. In life!”

“To train with effort daily!”

There’s weights to lift!

Bad Dreams About Participating In Electronic Vices :

I keep my cellphone far from the bedroom overnight as having bad dreams that I’d watched porn were a regular enough occurrence.

With the phone outside the room, there’s no doubt in my eyes that I didn’t watch.

The dreams would be so realistic I’d expect to see my phone within arms reach upon waking, the place it would’ve been set down after watching porn. However with the phone outside the room I couldn’t possibly have watched.

Last night I had the same type of dream, not about porn, but about video games, or more specifically a computer game.

I dreamt that I was modding the files getting ready to play rome total war, setting up for a campaign on ridiculously easy mode.

Unit recruitment times, cost, and maintenance cost down to zero.
Maybe putting some powerful units like berserkers or elephants into the armies of different nations, and turning location based recruitment restrictions off.

A campaign on ridiculously easy mode.

It was a game I rather enjoyed growing up, having purchased it upon enjoying greek and roman history in class, with 11 year old logic figuring “if I like the time period in history class, I’d like playing a video game in the same”.

It’s probably the last game I played, in 2019 at the latest, as I quit video games cold turkey, before doing so with the television in all it’s forms.

I have bad dreams about participating in electronic vices.

To me these dreams are signs that sitting in front of flashing screens for entertainment truly are vices, which serve no purpose, and therefore have no part in my life.

You can exist in the digital, or, and this is what I choose – I choose to live in real life fully.

With none of that passive life slipping away screen time!

March 2021 Flow – Food Quality, Commercial Agriculture, & Eating Without Worry :

“Oh my goodness! Heavens to mergatroid!”

I went just over 24 hours without meat.

I had an interesting conversation about eating, and agriculture recently.

I recalled my aunt was cooking some fish with soybean oil.

The smell in the air was off.

Trusting my sense of smell (an instinct) I concluded that soybean oil is unhealthy, poison even.

Trust your instincts.
My nose wasn’t hitting on the fish.
Fish is fine, they are food.

no way this happens in the ocean – fish are food

You could eat like your grandparents or great grandparents did, and be healthy as a horse.

Interesting to note they were using bacon grease, butter, lard, and suet, olive oil the only vegetable oil.

That’s the way to go with fats.

Animal fats have human history saying they are healthy.

Vegetable oil has advertising and propaganda saying they are healthy in the face of 50+ years of experience saying otherwise.

We spoke of cholesterol, organic foods, and meat substitutes.

I had made fun of my cousin for purchasing the not a burger from burger king.

I laughed at him for buying not meat at a place which sells meat.

The guy I was talking to pointed out “what is going on with it to make not meat, look, smell, and taste like meat”.

It is my opinion that cholesterol is only worth ignoring completely.

I’ve witnessed adults who stress it, dodging the animal products, and still having it be a “problem”.

Likewise those who disregard it generally are healthier in my eyes.

Testosterone is tied to cholesterol.

I don’t stress, nor will I ever stress dietary cholesterol (again).

I’m not a middle school kid unhealthy per doctor’s orders.

Dietician, what a farce – I lost 38lbs at 14 on my own accord.

I was unhealthy living on grains and low fat.

I became healthy partaking in all the delicious animal fats.

And the best the doctor and dietician could come up with was “cut out grape juice”, not tell me “eat real food and exercise”.

At age 6 being given 2% milk, having been given soymilk to “prevent developing lactose intolerance”, I felt as if I had discovered the nectar of the gods.

I felt this again at 16 switching from 2% to whole milk, and likely will again should I ever drink raw milk.

Raw milk is actually fairly available.
There are directory websites for finding some near you.

However at present I’m not going and paying quadruple or more (I don’t know raw milk’s average cost) for the truest milk, and view homogenized whole milk as good enough at about $2.50 per gallon.

This is including having seen with my own eyes rather disgusting conditions road side at what I took to be a commercial dairy farm as I drove coast to coast.

I figure in this case, under large scale commercial agriculture conditions, that the heating is a good idea.

Raw from healthy naturally raised cows is better, speaking from what I’ve read and intuited, but commercial production in america is pretty good for what it needs to accomplish.

Commercial agriculture provides far beyond ample calories.

You as the consumer get to choose what you eat.

I personally base my diet on dairy, meat, and some grain.

You can’t go wrong with meat and potatoes, even if that’s inexpensive meat which while living was corn and soy fed.

Organic makes the most sense with meat as the fat is where all the bad stuff is held in the product.

I laugh when people buy organic fruit for instance.

With what a healthyish vegetarian eats they don’t really need to purchase organic as organic makes a difference with red meat and milk the most.

As I type I have a bowl of chicken and potatoes, stretched with a box of mac and cheese, while drinking milk.

I’m thankful for commerical agriculture. It feeds me well.

It’d be healthier to eat only organic meats, free range eggs, and raw milk, but that’s not where I’m at this moment financially, so I make do with commercial agriculture knowing I choose robustness and vigorousness as I eat.

I don’t worry about a thing eating how I eat.

Worry is low testosterone. It’s catabolic.

I ain’t worried. This serves me well. Others can choose to worry about how they eat.

As you eat choose robustness and vigorousness.

There’s plenty for you to choose from and partake in.

March 2021 Flow – “Body Transformation Gone Dumb” :

500+ dips on the day.

I spoke with a buddy about 2019’s “dip odyssey”, and leverages allowing you to really rack up the volume on certain movements, milking them for all they’re worth.

Likening the process to a “body transformation gone dumb”.

A body transformation gone dumb – for me this tends to be doing dips, dipping some more, after that dipping even more, and then thinking I’m done doing more dips.

I’m not doing a 2021 “dip odyssey” at present.

I’m using dips as a way to get more volume in, and because of 2019 know the effects and what I can get from them.

Instead of daily it’s more like every other day.

(500+ happened because dips are a way to go light, do meaningful volume, and get meaningful stimulation all at the same time.)

I spoke with a fat boy failing his PT test. I’ll probably do an article more specifically on this soon.

I offered to do burpees with him.
He needs it.

Fat boy didn’t want to do burpees…
He needs to!

I’ve never had a fat boy take up my advice or offers when it comes to burpees.

Burpees would stop fat boy from being a fat boy.

Burpees – an Rx for fat boys on the macro and micro levels, which keeps the fat boy from participating in said status of being a fat boy.

To really make this fat loss, I’d superset dips with some leg calisthenic.

Bodyweight squats most likely, though lunges too would work.

PT is the way to go.

Military, felons, and smart civilians agree on it.

Thinking on this note I want you to view diet as irrelevant.

Like Wes says in the video above ; “fuck the motherfucking food”.

During 2019’s “dip odyssey” I was doing the dips on top of moving labor, living on pizza, subs, kielbasa, whoopie pies, gatorade, ginger ale, and milk.

It wasn’t clean eating. I was getting leaner through high activity at work, and sheer volume with dips.

Body transformation gone dumb.

You can do this with a commitment to volume calisthenics.

Dip or chin ups for the “odyssey” portion, one or the other depending on whether you have arms more closely resembling a tyrannosaurus rex’s or an orangutan’s.

Then sometimes, or if you’re choosing to emulate the “Iron Wolf” channel, all the time – you smoke yourself with burpees.

100 1 pumps in 20:00 or less daily is maintainable physically.

You work on jogging up longer and longer portions, all set to an interval timer.

So you’re looking at :

•massive volume dips or chins
•some of the other and pullups
•100+ pushups as daily standby
•bw legs
•burpees – smokin

(Since I’m at pf I supplement with machines and dumbbell c&p, since they’re available.)

Physical Transformation Gone Dumb

This has near zero attention to eating right now, that’s the next step for going all in.

And in all honesty at a barbell gym I’d be running this with ~225lb deadlifts for the volume (like the dips), power cleans (& press?) and power snatches, the olys in 50/20 protocol mostly, and weighting bent rows all across the board as the heavy work, and as an alternative volume lift.

Persistence & Tenacity

How To Have An In-N-Out Workout/Feel Good Session 101:

For an in-n-out workout you don’t want to be spending much time on the gym floor.

You go in.
You have about 20 minutes.
You leave.

This is “Feel Good Session 101”.

You’re there to catch a full body pump.

This makes you feel great.

You’re not going to do many sets per exercise, so pick movements you can go all out on from the gate.

•Upper Push
•Upper Pull
•Lower Body

One high rep set per exercise is ideal, but you have a bit of leeway here.

You could do a few sets for one of the three, or you could split lower body into push/pull as well making four exercises in the session.

At planet fitness this ends up for me being a rep out on dips, either a pullup variant or the machine preacher curl, and the “bad girl” machine.

This type of session gives you a massive full body pump, it’s feel good to a tee.

At a “hardcore” gym this would be a one movement session, but the pf style is all about the pump, and can be done anywhere.

You could use a bit of stationary bike or the stair climber, and you could superset.

My in-n-out style however is three sets :

•Rep Dips
•Rep Pullups
•Rep The “Bad Girl” Machine

I’ve been training like this often lately.

100+ dips, 20+ pullups here I come.
The glute rep count is already going higher and higher into the stratosphere!

Persistence & Tenacity

The Dietary Opposite Of The Donuts & Massive Volume Of PT Weekend – Cans Of Tuna & Sprints :

What would be the dietary opposite of the PT and donut weekend?

We’re still looking for fast physical transformation here, so the volume PT is still a given.

The dietary opposite is :

Cans of tuna or eating chicken breast, no carbs, no fats.

Being fat loss focused the PT is
massive sprint repeats or burpee volume for a weekend.

(or for a few consecutive weekends)

This is an idea for a quick way to lose a bunch of fat while holding onto your muscle.

Sprints and burpees both are some natural HGH!

It’s a protein sparing modified fast.

This is what I meant in 2018 – the tuna and sprints thing being something I read around 2013 on a now defunct website.

Imagine doing this for four weekends in a row, each Monday your coworkers bugging out seeing a visible change since each Friday.

-J

3/22/21 – Gym Dream, Training Pullups/Dips/Leg Press In-N-Out Style, & Dips On Deck :

Gym Dream :

I was going back to school with the intention of playing football, doing school right by being in the sports I should be in.

Within the last couple days I’d read a couple college sport walk on stories, so it was on my mind.

I knew the running at practice would lean me out, I realized it’s actually easier to condition in practice than by oneself in the off season, so I was going berserk in the weight room with only “minimal” sprinting outside.

I still sprinted, and I still would run extra after lifting. Lifting was the focus.

The dream took place in summer, I was lean and mean, 6′ 235 in crazy condition.

Bodybuilder lean but extremely athletic and strong – doing it right took the purpose of training for a specific goal.

Brief sprinting session every morning, and mostly upper body – going heavy and high rep every evening in this ramshackle improvised gym in what seemed to be a community center basement in the late afternoon.

Instead of repping a 225 bench, the football PT test, regularly – I was doing a pullover and skull crusher variant.

A short length of pipe with five 45lb plates slid on the center, my hands on opposite sides of the plates.

Getting it in position was quite the process. On that ramshackle homemade bench I’d roll it from the floor in front of me onto the end of the bench, then heave it up to at arm’s length above my stomach/chest, then from there lower it behind my head most of the way to the floor, before using pure brute strength to french press it with a bit of pullover back to lockout, the pipe with weights, looking like a roided up devil’s ab wheel, ending each rep where you’d normally hold a bar at the top for benching.

Serious reps, I’m talking quickly getting to sets of 50, day to day I was seeing my arms get bigger – day. to. day. I. saw. the. growth!

Each day I saw less and less fat.
Each day I saw my abs show more and more, nearing the season I was 235 covered in veins, sprinting crazy fast, and running good miles from some running the track and bleachers postworkout.

Athleticism running in the summer sun.

A couple hours of weights daily.

Bleachers or a mile run after the weights.

Six meals a day, bodybuilder style eating, fatty meat with vegetables – it was kielbasa or steak on rotation with green beans, broccoli, and cauliflower on rotation.

I saw a lot from this dream.

Gym Training :

Now with a dream like the above, I couldn’t not go to the gym.

•15 pullups
•50 dips
•5×10 leg press

An “In N Out Workout” (post idea here), with a recent pullup PR tie (even if the last two reps used a bit of hip power), and a recent dip PR.

Leg press, because full body, and you can never do enough legs (especially in the land of “Captain Upper Body Man™ that is pf).

20 minutes in the weight room is all you ever need.

Dips On Deck :

I’ll be training pullups with sets of 5-8, and should throw some weighted reps in.

I’ve hit 15 on a couple occasions now, can do a set of 10 most days, so 20 is close.

Dips? I can taste 100+.

And I have the idea to do reps with weight again. I barely notice bw+45.

A dip goal would be 50-100 x bw+90lb.

You’d get some triceps from hitting that.

From 2019’s “dip odyssey” I know how much I get out of dips.

I’m not committing to dips every day right now, but I’m training them again.

50-100 x bw+90lbs

50 x bw+anything is ridiculously close.

+90? That’s the equivalent of me in the mid 300s REPPING DIPS.

Persistence & Tenacity

Ridding Yourself Of The Mental Glitch That Is A Focus On “Recovery” :

There is to much focus on recovery.

I’ve seen adult males enter powerlifting meets to “officially” have ~~hilariously~~ not so funnily bad numbers.

Shameful levels of ~~strength~~ weakness in grown male bodies.

Now I did not make the most of my 300lb weight set and rickety stands and bench as a teenager.

I admit this.

The downfall was too much reading into powerlifting and starting strength* on internet forums.

It would’ve been better to have never heard of recovery, which I didn’t think of during the survival mode that is your first wrestling season, but did “balancing” the running of JROTC’s PT with starting strength’s squats precedingly in the fall that year.

“I’m the PT stud, but this running and squatting within a day or each other is so difficult, like my legs are fatigued.” – paraphrased thoughts of weakness (cause you were already “tougher” than the rest of the cadet corps- a bullshit excuse!)

Yet within five minutes of an uncle’s dare I’d squatted 8×300 shortly PRECEDING attempts at programming and having read the internet when the school year started.

Stronger goofing around at squats in the summer than trying to use a popular program in the fall!

I was pound for pound stronger, and had better numbers without the training “knowledge”.

A mind bug on “recovery” set me back.

This principle plays for many inside of gyms. They’re thinking with a focus on limits, instead of expecting greatness as a given.

Thinking → Limits
Thoughtless 100% Action → True Potential

Fuck recovery! Find out what you CAN DO!

Hopefully you wrestled in your youth.

I pray, for your sake, you’ve held a labor job at some point.

Go and be strong. Just go and be strong. You have permission to do so.

Go clean & press more than you weigh.

Go do sets of over 20 pullups.

Go run a ≤6:00 mile.

Go bang out a few hundred burpees, squat 20+x405+, shoulder big rocks.

Pull 30 reps with “reasonable” 8rm weight. Human forklift status!

Go be great.
It’s not difficult.
It’s natural.

Greatness IS a given.

Persistence & Tenacity

*by all means read starting strength to learn form, don’t wed yourself to the programming especially for life, don’t accept 95lbs as a press reset poundage – it’s my way to do more and more volume and frequency, find your abilities, don’t accept limitations typed up on forums by those weaker than you. Rippetoe is right having you squat thrice weekly to start, then when you’ve learned the form…go bonkers. And always play sports. I’m okay with starting strength if there’s volume calisthenics and sports play daily. It’s fine to introduce you to the weight room.