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When I was at barbell gyms I’d learned that stomping before unracking a heavy squat gives some more “oomph” to the rep, it primes the nervous system allowing for a little more power output.

I was working on handstand pushups, doing sets of ten partial reps as I’d failed to do a head to floor rep on the first attempt.

I’ll talk about this principle another time, but I decided to put on a show as there was a chick with an awesome ass near me…girl powered, and the day before did better on sets smashing my palm into the floor two to three times before kicking over, the same practice as stomping before a squat.

That palm smashing allowed a good rep, head to floor.

Little tricks that allow for better performance.

1/18/20
I’m talking with a new coworker, a tall middleweight, he’s also into the gym, and also used to wrestle. We’re talking about physical strength as we empty out a bedroom.

At work there’s a pair of brothers. 29yo and 25yo, their frames/bone structure are very similar, but there’s a 40lb difference, 150-155lbs vs about 195lbs at ~5’8″.

Both have freakish strength at work. The build difference is in that the older brother has been going to the gym alongside labor all along. The younger brother at 150/155 is the strongest dude you will ever find at picking up and carrying weird shit.

See both brothers have been movers since being wee lads. Moving labor is basically walking with the upper body, the back/biceps/forearms, being in some state of isometric contraction.

Long enough shifts, and long enough hours and you’re hitting 1000x more time under tension than any gym lifting.

It builds freakish strength. It’s isometrics. Isometrics build freakish strength.

Talking with the new coworker I was saying how certain shifts have me wishing that I’d done this work before I wrestled. Certain positions, sustained, will build killer mat strength.

You can just feel the right items carried translating over to the pudgy ref warning you not to injure your opponent with violent snapdowns.

Gym training for me hadn’t carried over to the mat so much, nor does it carry over to the job much aside from the big ass items (pianos, gunsafes, safes) which equate more closely to gym style max lifts, at least in the strongman sense since we still have that isometric hold, then carry component.

Big dudes won’t move as quickly with small items. Small dudes may not be able to pick the giant items.

The dude hadn’t known the term isometrics by name, but you saw the light bulb turn on over his head after I’d defined it some, and said “isometrics are where you build freakish strength, that doesn’t necessarily show” (on the build).

A plastic tote I carried to the truck, with my left t-rex arm barely grasping the far end pumped my back analogous to how it felt when attempting a snapdown on my resisting practice partner who saw it coming. Wrestling daily with someone, we both knew what the other would do. Other schools? Nah, they didn’t see what other coaches thought was primarily a judoka or greco guy coming.

Do a bunch of isometrics. The real world strength it builds gets you to a freakish level.

Simulating a deadlift with isometrics was the most effective training I ever did.

My total went up without any lifting.

And work as a mover has only done good things physically.

The majority of gains is mental.

Therefore a good deal of gains is a lack of bad mental stress, just as positive thoughts play huge roles.

The mind is key, so much so that it’s nearly unbelievable.

Your mental space, what you tell yourself, and what you hold to be true are far more anabolic than any diet scheme, training program, or even anabolic steroid.

Stressing a lack of gains causes a negative feedback loop where you don’t make gains. That’s the problem for 99% online and at gyms identifying as lifters. They’re stressing shit that they don’t need to be stressing. Book knowledge will tell them to, reality is they don’t need to be one bit.

Take gains for a given. In the opposite way, positive feedback loop, and it’s so.

You can think your way to every helpful, healthy, positive chemical release…from a dopamine dump to testosterone production into overdrive.

Don’t underestimate thinking well!

You’ll get this concept when you get it. Work takes as long as it takes, your preparation period is/was as long as it need be.

Feed yourself thoughts of what you can do, where you are, with what you have.

I’m strong as fuck, and as far as equipment I don’t need nothing.

I don’t need a barbell, I’ve got a dip bar, and a piece of wall to kick over against. And I don’t need even that.

Zero equipment, I’ll make more gains than everyone.

Any equipment more than zero is just extra credit opportunity.

The gains lay in your head. It’s never been any different.

Think well.
Gains are ripe for the taking.

Persistence & Tenacity

I’ve been having a lot of these lately.

In the dream I had just gotten a job at a grocery store which seemed to be staffed fully with girls I either knew from high school or recognize from the gym…me obviously as an exception to this.

(It was both horrible and awesome to be the only man on staff.)

It was near the end of shift, near closing, and in boredom and to piss off the “manager” (a chick I was friendly with 6-9th grade, a softball player) I started doing pullups, knees bent, off the overhang where they keep the broccoli and shit that inexplicably is watered though already picked and therefore dead, without the need of watering.

10 in “huh, I didn’t expect this”
20 in “is this reality”, scratch the realization that this may be a lucid dream, and I go wide grip to…
30 in I’m getting screamed at for being in the way of a customer (and for doing pullups off the overhang) I hand walk down the overhang to the cheese section. Getting out of the way, but disregarding being told to get down (lucid dream, I have control at this point). 30-40 I go super narrow grip, hands touching.
40 in, out of the kindness of my heart I hand walk out of the way of the cheese for a little old lady buying the exact cheese I stuff into the center of my burgers…a purchase I approve of. I go 40-50 wide grip. I drop at 50 dumbfounded that I’d just done 50 pullups, in the dream seeming to know I’m in a dream, and thinking “50 pullups it can be achieved”.

“You’ve finally stopped exercising, go take out the trash (a giant drum of meat scraps and liquid fat)”

I’d already done this. The shift was ended having a three way with some tattooed gym chick and some chick I recognize but can’t place.
After I’d gotten off, I got off.

(As I was in a lucid dream I wrote the three way in out of nowhere. It surprises me that it was with 6.5s, not 8s.)

Not mentioned are the parts of the dream where I was stabbed at a swimming pool while carrying a kayak (in the following fight the dude was clearly in a psychotic break, and seemingly would not die), riding a recommissioned school bus through rural Ohio driven by the guy in that viral sinkhole video, possibly being the deer being hunted through a marsh…a marsh with vampires, moving into the cheapest apartment in Memphis TN projects, and all the other weirdness that entailed that dream (more accurately the night’s dreams, as some were before and some after waking up to piss) other than the workout part.

The cashier views me as a regular, I go often enough, and comments on my purchase.

“Right now I’m living on almost naught but red meat and grape juice.”

I’ve eaten a decent amount of ground beef and drank a whole lot of grape juice these past few months.

Animal fats and fruit sugar :

At 21 visiting family who had collected about 300lbs of apples from their yard, while feeding myself on chicken leg quarter, milk, tuna, and ramen they told me apples were fair game.

Meal one was tuna and ramen with milk, generally around 8am.

Meal two was chicken leg quarter and ramen with milk generally between 4pm and 9pm.

Around lunch time I’d eat a 2 or 3 apples, maybe a glass of milk, and possibly a protein bar in a flavor my uncle had bought in bulk, gotten sick of, and given the last dozen or so of to me.

Maybe 2 dinners a week I ate with my aunt and uncle, and rarely I’d spend a few bucks to throw some deli meat on the cheapest bread available while out.

I realized during this period that I functioned really well with fatty cuts of meat as the base with simple sugar from fruit as an energy source, eating grain in more of a supplementary capacity/in addition to role.

Years later I’m on the same principle with ground beef, grape juice, chicken thigh, and dairy.

I don’t think keto is how we are supposed to eat, nor do I think vegetarianism is, I’m not suggesting eating the standard american diet either.

I like approach eating with a more masculine lense than the gym, and clearly was strongly influenced by the biblical outlook on eating.

“Land of milk and honey” is clearly implying an abundance of good things.

I take this to be clean eating. I don’t vilify any natural foods.

My opinion is that God wants his children to participate in, and take advantage of the cornucopia he has made available.

Restrictive ways can have use, but healthiest and most sustainable is to have a mixed diet.

I have realized such things as grain being the food of slaves, cowards, women, and the womanly.

That’s not to say it’s without use.

You will grow larger eating grain in supplement to your meat. Heavy on meat and dairy, grain supplementary.

Media fear mongering on fat, cholesterol, meat is intended to keep you weak and unhealthy.

Anything pushed by the media I know is sickness, and therefore I go the opposite way.

I’ll eat as much meat, eggs, and full fat dairy as my body craves.

Likewise sugar implied to be unhealthy for you, I disregard.
I find that natural sugar from fruit, maple syrup, and honey is fine for the body, it’s the combination of processed man made vegetable “fats” and processed sugar that’s bad.

Natural fat?
Natural sugar?

Healthy sources, part of a mixed diet.

High fructose corn syrup? Vegetable oil? Not really.

Red meat and fruit sugar are both quite unprocessed. It doesn’t get better than that.

Persistence & Tenacity

I’d hangglided into what seemed like a costco or a walmart, probably walmart, an open roof garden section.

Rogue (well an unspecified analgulous company) was hosting an event in a front room, and the parking lot.

Events, open to the public, it was team entrys. The event being held over a few weekends.

I got there late. I entered by myself, not eligible for team prizes, but having just witnessed a clusterfuck of a team doing terribly on a push/pull/sled drag for laps event with what looked like an oversize red metallic fireman’s battering ram I went in anyway.

They told me I was ineligible for prizes, but any event records I set would stand.

Working as a mover, having moved pianos with less effort and with less guys than the clusterfuck performance I’d just witnessed I do that event…and solo smash the record of laps. The team members had been getting in each others way acting as brakes to the guys on the opposite side of the implement.

1 record to me.

Next log press, with this weird felt like soft material. A new equipment breakthrough! Bumper plates…but more like a beanbag. Only one per team could step up for this, and most barely got, or failed the opener which was about 120…lbs not kg.

I smoked it, weird balanced 135-150 stepping forward around lockout, got a good lift call anyway, then loaded it with all the plates they’d brought.

They called it 200 or 205. I cleaned it and smoked it perfectly strict, so fast it looked like a jerk.

The events host company big wig was angry at this. He stressed that the event is a 1rm event so that’s the record.

Trash talking him back I told him “what is this a mail order 165lb weight set, I could rep this all day, 1 rep event my ass”.

(I hadn’t even used a continental or a jerk, have maxed their equipment super strict.)

I recleaned it, and preceded to rep it overhead all day. 10 reps making eye contact with that big wig, debating whether to start cleaning in addition to the presses (1c+many p vs c+p+c+p indefinitely). I stayed pressing, then started the show, like a York exhibition, or the time a weightlifter stork posed his medal winning jerk.

I balance on each leg one at a time for a rep, hit an overhead squat, then an overhead left leg pistol squat. I go for a stroll pressing each step, stop at the other side of the area and started repping again.

Soon an insane dude that thought he was an orangutan was singing a song and I joined him in it (I’d have written the lyrics if I still recalled them, it was a Robin Hood like folk ballad mocking the bigwigs weakness), then offering him the bar to press for a few reps, which he did also going off the record scale, then I started pressing again.

The big wig in the booth was dumbfounded, his event was very different than he’d anticipated.

Amusing dream. A lot of pizza was eaten throughout it. It’s possible I was a teenage mutant ninja turtle without realizing it.

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.

I have the best genetics.

Persistence & Tenacity

Muscular bulk isn’t hard to come by.

A long period of force feeding and consistent training will take an ectomorph to endomorph and then from there to mesomorph.

If bodyweight was hard to gain there wouldn’t be so much blubber in sight every time you go to a damn walmart.

Where somatotyping is wrong is the general thought that type can’t change via stimuli or lifestyle. It can, and hybrid types do exist.

The difference between 300lbs of fat fuck and 275lbs of lineman/linebacker hybrid is training, protein intake, and actual nutrition in the calories.

It’s not hard to be big. You get to eat copious quantities of foods you crave, then down some dirty sugar calories to keep the caloric intake high.

Fat fucks manage to weigh scale = fatass. You’re telling me with training and eating big with actual nutritious calories you can’t get to similar poundages?

Look to sumo.
Look to sumo.
Look to sumo.

I say this all the time. Two giant feedings a day, some muscular usage…you’ll be big and strong.

To the so called “hardgainer” ; get out of your head and just do the work. Do the work, the required consistency is a process of years. Train for 5 years, big calories, lots of volume you’re gonna carry loads of muscle on your frame. Train for 10 years, big calories, even more so.

16 year old me wouldn’t believe it, the process isn’t truly difficult.

Persistence & Tenacity

It took me a few hours upon waking to realize this hadn’t happened, it felt real.

I was at the gym, and a couple people didn’t believe I could do handstand pushups.

Standing around was this dude into calisthenics, and a few chicks. Someone I don’t know had to have made the “he can’t ___” comment.

I walked over to the wall kicked over and hit it.

1,2,3,4,5 “I’m at a PR, this is easy I’m hitting 10”

…10,11,12 I realize I’ve got a lot more in me.

20…25 in, I’m almost not believing this myself. “From 4 to 25 like that? The hell?”

Between 25 and 35 I almost lost balance nearly falling seeing the look of disbelief on this tall blonde watching with her looking upside down (as I’m inverted).

I start to get nauseous tasting acid burps of what I’d guess was pepperoni pizza as I’m still upside down.

36-38 my range of motion is a little shy.

I hit 50 basically doing singles from 35 onward. There’s peanut gallery about a few “no rep” reps.

The peanut gallery is still squawking. That tall blonde is still upside down which I find hilarious looking up at my own crotch and the funny look on her upside down face in the same line of sight.

I mentally decide to go ham, fuck range of motion, and get to 75, 80 real quick. I continue repping.

Soon I get bored, drop down, stand up, brush off my hands, make eye contact and nod saying “What’s up! How’d you like that for range of motion”.

I walk away giggling inwardly to myself about the show I’d just put on, and wondering what the hell I’d done that allowed me to not only do good handstand pushups, but good handstand pushups for around triple digit reps, with easily 75+ being done strict.

In that dream universe I’m scary ass strong. Thing is though, every gym dream I’ve had is within the realm of possibility. They’re often not nightmare, but darker, and tend to hype me up.

Triple digit calisthenic reps in a set are possible. Not only have I done it with pushups, but I’ve done it with dips as well.

Persistence & Tenacity

The other day I went to the gym without headphones…purposefully.

You know what?

I preferred it.

It’s one less thing to charge, keep track of, no sweat pool around my ears, but these aren’t the real benefit.

It had been awhile since I’ve done this. I decided I wasn’t going to be bothered by the pop radio, and wasn’t. Mostly I didn’t even notice it missing. A few times my ears peaked up, and I found myself enjoying “california girls” reminiscing. Almost in disbelief that I was enjoying working out in planet fitness to Katy Perry.

My neighbor was in disbelief that I go to pf. A buddy had thought I was pulling his leg, only to months later see my card and realize that I had been serious.

I left my phone in the locker, just as I’d done at the SoCal bodybuilding gym. The gym is better this way.

Without the phones watch functions I don’t know exactly how long my wrestler’s bridge holds were. It’s freeing in a way, to not have exacts in your workouts. To lose count and just go.

Our society is very lonesome, aside from cashiers/front desk/etc people don’t interact much in public, it’s depressing really – as opposed to what my grandfather and my impression of his generation did. Everywhere I went with him he always would have friendly conversations with those around him.

I did notice a lot of surprised looks, I figured these to be surprise at my being without headphones…the only one without headphones.

Naturally I was a bit more outgoing as I had no artificial barrier over my ears taking my attention away from the world in which I’m living.

I’m not even going to frame going to the gym without headphones as a challenge. Going without headphones is natural, you don’t pop out of the womb with earbuds in. I’m going to go this for awhile. It’s better to live in the world without distraction.

Persistence & Tenacity