Category: Mindset

The key to the gym, as in life, is to show up.

I see these couples, 50+, that go for walks daily, probably an hour a day…and they’re far healthier than the majority society wide.

Normal health.

Normal health isn’t hard to achieve, plus it’s the simplest thing to maintain.

Just do the work.
Do the work.

That’s it!

You can be jacked on calisthenics and walking.

There are no excuses.

The equipment you need, all of it, to be healthy, strong…and happy – is inside you.

Simply spend an hour or two each day committed to your health.

Spend half the time doing calisthenics, the other half walking.

Easy peasy.

Simple.

Just do it.

Persistence & Tenacity

One buddy, a training partner, sometimes he’ll wear a weight vest, ankle, and wrist weights for hours.

He was saying that this will make him stronger and faster, but then with a change in tone of voice added “theoretically”.

I said to him, “you just lost it there bro, you believed in it – therefore it works, then you negated all that with doubt.”

You can train however you want.

There is no goofy program.
There is no perfect program…in the way most think.

However there IS a perfect program for everyone.

It has two ingredients, simple, and readily available :

1. You’ll do it consistently.
2. You believe it works.

That’s it.

Train only your right glute, left pec, left calf, and right pinky finger if that’s what fits the mandatory criteria for you.

The hell with what others think about your programming, it’s your’s, not their’s.

They have their’s. You have your’s.

Programming is the simplest of things.

•Consistency.
•Belief.

Persistence & Tenacity

It’s like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

Work, gym, eat, sleep – the day is mostly filled.

I’m not doing enough.
I admit this.
I’m changing it.

And I can’t see myself ever turning on a television.

There’s much that needs to be done.

There’s much not getting done.

There is zero available time to waste on my ass watching what?
It’s all garbage – this says a lot about people’s self respect and pride being television is their second full time job.

Work. Make a living.

Train.

Actually do meal prep.
Don’t just eat frozen pizzas.
The time is there, we all have the same 24 hours a day.

Find your way to working for yourself!

There is no time to sit wasting away in front of a tv!

There isn’t!

I have a life to live.
There’s life to experience.

May you choose the same.

Persistence & Tenacity

On Friday May 13, 2016 I missed my daily pushups, something I had been doing without miss since around the 4th of July, 2012 – a daily habit to create a daily win in life so as to not be hypocritical having advised the practice to my best friend.

Going back further, I had initially started the daily pushups in the summer of 2008, stopping for a decent amount of my senior year in high school preceding the restart in summer 2012.

2012-2021 I had one missed day of pushups.

Assuming I didn’t do them, I didn’t give benefit of the doubt.

Today I hit the five year mark without missing one.

With Certainty.

Of the last 13 years I’ve done them daily for more than 12 – you could average this out to maybe two days off a month throughout the whole period.

With what I know now I’d never have stopped for the maybe semester of school, and I’d have missed zero days, not the maybe – I’m not exaggerating – maybe 12 days in 12 years.

(The first three and change run was around 8-12 misses, a few missed a year.)

It’d be 13 years unbroken.

Daily pushups over time became a practice of high value.

At 14 I was doing them to make sense of the world in which my grandpa had just died.

Telling myself that “if I don’t put in my true 100% here and now on these two sets it could be death for myself or for those I care about in the future”.

A survival mode lense on daily PT opted in, self chosen at 14 years old.

My arms were shaking on those sets.

The small glass of water from my grandma’s fridge following the nightly 2&2 sets tasted real good.

(I’d never before, or for the most part since went that far to true 100%. It was two sets of pushups and two sets of situps at that point, the only two exercises I knew, from having taken karate.)

As a fat 14 year old I had taken my first step in self betterment.

I’d stopped part of my senior year of high school.

Stopping a positive is always a negative. Just as starting a negative is always a negative.

I started back up Summer 2012, a lost “adult”, a young Man struggling to see a way in a messed up world.

Where I was at mentally, my friend was worse!

The ssris and shit prescribed by the medical establishment, supported/enforced by his own mother were smothering his soul!

The suburban ennui, his hot blonde neighbor (our age, biker dad) was doing meth!

As we walked those Cali hills talking, I stopped him, and suggested the practice as a way to win every day in the world.

I remember the exact spot. The beat up car, bush, the trimmed shrub, the sidewalk…

I haven’t heard from him in years. I pray he’s doing well.

I hope he’s 28, doing well, not 6′ under.

I get more than the physical out of my pushups, they too to me are metaphysical – I’m pushing up against the negatives of the world.

Up down up down, an action in positivity.

The world can’t keep me down!
Up down up down – I stand up!

My ritual.

It’s getting done regardless.
A win every day.

I’ll never stop.

I near 5 years of pushups done daily…unbroken.

13 weeks, boot camp length (I never went to) daily trombone coming up on a similar date.

Both roughly two weeks away. I had done neither for the day, yesterday. Dinner time, get it done.

• Play trombone.
• Intersperse pushups throughout.

The wind requirement is higher this way, same as in any physical superset. Don’t say playing an instrument isn’t somewhere on the spectrum of physicality, I play standing, sheet music taped to a doorway, you breath deep, and expend air with the brass band instrument.

I ponder to myself whether I :

• Naturally had a booming voice
• Built a booming voice via trombone in my youth
• Both fed into each other, option C – all of the above

I go with C. I could always be loud, but playing brass built the ability too.

Sometimes I sing as well during “music time”. The old time lifting obsession with the rib box, exercise and an instrument is a way to do this.

I may have naturally had a robust rib box. I expanded it with a million pushups, from forcibly with youth karate, to willingly at age 14 with my daily PT.

I believe the trombone built into that base. Don’t underestimate the wind a fat kid playing trombone will show once he’s dropped the fat upon finding high school sports.

Highlander status.

I didn’t figure out the Rader chest pull until an “aha” moment while in Cali, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, 2018.

Rib box came from trombone, pushups, sucking wind as a fat kid going all out during mile runs, then through weight room means. I’ve done 20 rep squats, 50/20 density power cleans. The dip odyssey of summer 2019.

Da Vinci was said to be inhumanly strong, a robust build, with freakish hand & grip strength – in addition to being possibly the smartest ever to have lived…a renaissance man.

I see him mixing tinkering, with pondering, with study, and with physical training. Very free form.

One must mix the intellectual with the physical. Playing an instrument with calisthenics interspersed throughout is a way to do this.

They feed into each other. They heighten each other. Be a smart jock, a robust intellectual.

And most importantly a Man of Action.

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!

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.

The purpose of the gym rightly is not physical.

It is not in looks.
It is not in physical strength.

The purpose of the gym rightly is metaphysical.

It is in the striving.
It IS the ever purposeful striving.

The truth of the gym is in the mental of the self betterment.

It is not in the physical of the self betterment.

You could work your body.

There is 1,000 times more value in working your soul.

As a Man it’s not about looking pretty, or being physically strong.

It is in the mental of self improvement – the opportunity to slack off and training with passion anyway, the passing on of knowledge gained through sweat equity, the defiance in your eyes at society, swearing to never be just a television watching physical and mental trainwreck, in getting on the floor day after day and doing your pushups because…

YOU KNOW you have value as a Man…

To Yours. To Self. To God.
You a Man.

The gym?
It is physical, yes.

That’s the lower plane, the unenlightened place…

The gym participated in rightly is a journey of the Soul.

…..

Continue reading “We’re Human…Amazing As We Choose”

Humanity has proven itself resilient over the years, not a bunch of survivors, but a bunch of thrivers.

The other night I slept with just the blanket AND sheet, skull cap on, no long sleeve shirt, no socks, and felt somewhat chilly…indoors.

Ignoring the feeling, I slept, dreamt vivid dreams, and when I awoke to urinate a thought was strongly in my head :

“We’re cold indoors not as layered up as would be comfortable, while soldiers in the civil war were sleeping back propped up against a tree under the stars in snow storms with one government issue blanket over them, no skull cap either. Then upon rising, and having some weak coffee, they were either in for a long march, or went to battle that day.”

Humanity is coddled. Humanity doesn’t need to be. It’s the most resilient, adaptable animal on earth.

You don’t need all the stuff you have.

Your wardrobe more than keeps you warm.

Your fridge more than keeps you fed. Within five minutes and for under five dollars you can eat what many drool over. Don’t eat too much!

A little hardship makes you better.
You’re so blessed, that you choose to go without!

It’s “hardship” by choice, not by force of circumstance –
that’s amazing abundance.