From the archive :
~Late 2018/Early 2019
I’m gonna tell a story, I’ll go back almost 3 years, my buddy and I were driving into the gym, talking training as per usual.
Though I’ve seen Pavel write about not needing warm ups, other than myself, I’ve never seen it in the gym in real life. Everyone has falsely bought into the warm up myth.
Somehow a minute or two from the parking lot he made a statement along the lines of “you can’t hit a good percentage of your max cold”.
I took it as a challenge, we’d been talking of how I’ll never be injured in the weight room, cause I simply don’t believe in the possibility, and I told him I’d hit 90%+ 1rm on the three powerlifts no warm ups back to back to back.
What I Hit Cold/1rm
Squat : 405/455
Bench : 285-295? axle/315
Deadlift : 495/495-515
The squat was outside the rack.
The bench was axle, I’m hazy on the weight. The pull was 5 plates, I remember having made my point going “what day is it again”, “shoulders”, and joining him.
My warm up is taking a shit, no joke. Life has me good to go, and truly I don’t believe in the possibility of getting hurt in the weight room.
1 :
Don’t suck. If you don’t mentally suck your self talk will keep you safe. Don’t consider injury as a possibility. Don’t be a mental weakling who falls into belief in overtraining, shit recovery, possessing a religious belief in being injury prone.
2 :
Don’t be stupid. I liken the body’s warning as a red alert siren going off on my head. When I see/hear the alarm I STOP. I’ve quit some deadlifts over the years due to this, some that even looked good to observers. In the end your health is on you, don’t be stupid.
3 :
A story I tell so people can mentally write me off as having freakish genetics, because people really need this as an excuse :
On my grandma’s 64th birthday my father asked her if she can still do splits…
She looked at him went “one minute, let me see”, did that stretch where you grab the foot behind you, right, left, boom, bam, held onto either a chair or the table, down she went into front-back splits. “Yeah, I can still do the splits”.
From question to physical proof to standing, under 15 seconds.
(Related : An older cousin? of her’s who I’d assume was Army Airborne in WW2 taught my grandma and her siblings how to safely jump off of progressively higher parts of the house as well. While this may sound crazy my grandpa (her eventual husband) and great uncle would go into the woods with an axe and treat trees as their personal carnival ride, one climbing, the other hacking, taking turns riding the chopped tree down. So maybe the risky height stuff in youth was normal for the time period. Only once did my great uncle freak out thinking my grandfather dead, who awoke confused as to why his older brother was pacing and ranting.)
I simply don’t believe in the possibility of injury. It’s the superior mindset to bring to the table. I guess a childhood of sports, having a laborer father, and an apparent PT stud Grandma (plus death defying Grandpa) seeped it into my brain.
Someday I’ll be able to hit Bulgarian again, and the progress will be insane…ly good.
I don’t have a gym right now. I’m barely training. Half of my meals are technically vegetarian.
I’m still writing here, and still doing my pushups. Fuck the gym industry, I’m not dead yet.
Persistence & Tenacity