Why Work Out

Henry and I at the Highland Games in Tampa... Or what I've been doing instead of blogging lately

 

"I already have a hot body.  I don't need to work out." 

 

"I know you work out to relieve stress but..."

 

"Man, you can seriously fucking move!"

It's intriguing to me to listen to others in my life ruminate over why I am so serious and diligent about making sure that a day doesn't pass by without some sort of physical training.  Particularly interesting are the people who show marginal interest in working out offer the theories that I find most amusing.  I've heard those three lines from three different people and by far, the third one was the most satisfying and conclusive answer as to why train in the first place.

While a good strength training session can be cathartic and I don't mind looking good in a tight fitting shirt, both explanations are just outside of the ten-ring as to why I enjoy working out so much.  The mini-me in the sunglasses provides the best answer:  because movement is fun!   Modern adults hopelessly miss the mark when they think that comfort and not-moving is the way to be happy.  This trend must have started up a century ago when we started looking for ways to eradicate manual labor from our lives.  It made sense back then since we had spent the last couple of Milena literally working ourselves to death.  Viewed from that fact, taking to desk jobs must have seemed like a form of salvation. 

Our kids tell us a different story.   Confine a child to a chair and watch how pissy they become. They can't stand sitting.  It must be why I use sitting in a corner as punishment with kids for over a decade with remarkable results.   Note how they effortlessly squat as though they had been taught by _____ (insert your favorite fitness guru).   Did they learn that from someone?  Or, is it instinct that we suppressed through years of sitting down way too much?    They're happier squatting ass-to-grass. 

They don't do this just to relieve stress; they do it just because they're happier moving.   Their fresh, new bodies aren't yet degenerated by institutionalised laziness and they don't look at lots of movement as excessive or try to avoid it.  They need it.  Little do we realize that so do we as adults. 

Movement isn't simply cathartic.  It can also be sexy.  People far smarter with me with larger budgets of other people's money to waste figured out that most men are attracted to a certain ratio of hips-to-waist-to-shoulder measurements in women.  What they couldn't understand was why the ratio was exaggerate past perfect why men found it more attractive.  It should have been too much to have such a small waist with big hips... until they realized it wasn't how they looked.  It was how they looked when they moved that turned on men so much. 



You knew something like this was coming...

On a much simpler note, too many of us guys have bedded that seriously hot woman only to find out that they figured that since they were so damn smoking, they didn't have to do anything other than lay there and get screwed.  Or, think about the stripper with no dance moves.   On the less raunchy side of things, I've seen ugly ass men down in South America pick up hot women simply because they could dance so well.  It isn't simply enough to be good looking.  Humans are attracted to how a body moves.


Of course it happened at Bodytribe...This is a seriously cool (and hot) move!

So, we need to be move to be happy and life is happier overall when we move better.  It still doesn't explain why and where some sort of regimen of strength training ties into this need.  That's an easy answer though:  it helps us move better, especially as we get older... or at least it should.  That institutionalized laziness that pervades too much of Western Civilization renders many human bodies a complete wreck by the time age 30 rolls around (maybe that's why, without my knowledge, 30 became old by the time I hit that age).   There's no excuse for it either.  The fact that I move better now at 32 than I did at 27 might be a small accomplishment but still one that I hold some good regard.  I attribute this to the fact that know more about getting strong now than I did 5 years ago as well as being better at doing it.  That's why I find that third statement so satisfying

Whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, we judge a lot of our being regarding our ability to move.  Ultimately, the better we move, the better our lives are.  Anything that accentuates that is good and worth pursuing. 

Because I can't always use gun fire at what irritates me: Shooting My Mouth Off III

So, the kid's asleep, the wife went shopping, and I've decided to end my month-long blog drought by crawiling out from underneath the rock that I've been hiding underneath...and do another of my bitch-and moan entries...

-Stop with the biceps pics!  For over 40 years we've been subjected to zombie-like hoards of meatheads trying desperately trying to get Arnold's biceps and documenting every step of the way with pics. The trend has only gotten worse with the advent of cell phones with cameras. Now, every bathroom with a mirror has turned into a posing stage for men desperately trying to out-douchebag the ultimate douchebag  . Didn't we used to use bathooms to take a shit?

So true...

-ESPN 99 must have run clean out re-runs of World's Strongest Man, World Series of Poker and dogdeball tournaments. So, they Show the Crossfit Games. My exposure to Crossfit was marginal up until I saw it at a bar in Massachusetts and now I think I get it. Crossfit is what you when you do a lot of really good exercises with extremely shitty form as fast as possible... and pay too much money per month to someone to "teach" you how to do this.


There really isn't much to farmers walking to screw up and yet CF finds a way...
 

-Can we replace "functional" with practical?

-Which exercise releases growth hormone naturally? Please don't bombard me with answers. I won't believe them anyway, even if you have a scientific study from the University of Bangledesh that says you're right. If HGH is something that helps you recover from intense exercise, keeps you young, and repairs your cells, then I'd bet HUGE money that the answer is actually... SLEEP!

-If you think women with muscle definition look like men, then you probably don't look much like a man yourself.

-This shit's getting out of hand! If you're posting pics of yourself working out, wear a pair of pants that don't show off your package! 

-Why is it so incomprehensibly hard for some fools to pick out workout music?   Why do you need to ask for suggestions from everyone else?  This is about as difficult as masturbation material on the internet:  find something that arouses you and get to work!   It doesn't matter if it's death metal, classical music, movie soundtracks or gay nightclub fare.  It it accentuates your desire to move with intensity, then it's good workout music!

Okay, now that I've got that off my chest, I'll get back to writing something memorable.  In the meantime, feel free to spout off about the things in our sub-culture that really annoy you too!

This guy never gets old!

60 Is the Magic Number

If I were running one of those dating services, I'd make a fortune hooking up weight training men with those numerology-obsessed women.  We're all keenly aware of how obsessed our fellow Iron Mongers are with percentages of max lift number,  sets ,reps, percent activation, minutes and hours spent training, number of seconds of rest...do I need to go on still?  They might live happily ever after with a cat-hoarding harpy who looks at living the good life as a specific set of numbers away from perfection. 

I can't speak for my readers but when I see a pile of numbers associated with lifting on my computer screen, seemingly popping out at me in 3D they're so numerous,  my mind goes blank almost as fast as it becomes uninterested.  It's the pinncale of paralysis by analysis.

While I have a general tendancy to shun specific sets, reps, rest periods, % of max, I have found a number in my training that has succeeded in standing out after all of these years that I've grabbed onto a rigid, overhead object for reasons related to pulling up:  60...or more. 

I've found through my own pile of sweat and pain that doing 60 pull-ups per day is a one way ticket to being more awesome in life.  I came across this wonderous discovery well over 12 years ago when I was working a night shift, 6 pm to 6 am.  Back then I could just barely manage to do 15 pull-up in a row.  So, I'd do a set every hour, just to keep myself awake on an unusually strong bathroom stall to keep myself awake.  Of course, being a 147 lbs puke, I'd barely be able to do even a few by the 9th hour but over the course of those dreadful evenings that I was onto something. 

That something is the simple fact that has been hammered home on my latest job of brooming, shoveling, sweeping and lugging around heavy and harsh sucton hoses that the upper back muscles can take a brutal amount of labor and not yeild in agonizing cramps and soreness.  The Lattisimus Dorsi muscle is a glorious piece of meat that begs for work.  No matter how much you try to beat it up, it just keeps taking it and getting more awesome in the process. 

Over the years, when I decided to train with pull-ups, a workout doesn't seem complete without at least 60 pull-ups, regardless of sets.  Do 4 sets of 15 or 10 set of 6.  Ladders or pyramids, it doesn't matter.  Just get to, or over, this number.  It's really that simple. 

Do more if you can.  Get exotic if you'd like.  Fat bars, weighted, on suspension rigs, L-sits, gripping towels.  Whatever.  Don't get wrapped up in too many details.  Just make sure that you throw lots of volume at your Lats.  They'll thank you for it and it won't take you too long to appreciate what they're doing for you. 

Learning Alone in the Internet Jungle

I recall several years ago when I used to post pretty regularly on Rosstraining.com's forum, I got challenged by a guy named Andy Patterson (aka:  The Fucker) to a conditioning challenge called Demolition Day.  That particular year's challenge was called the Magic 200.  It was pretty simple:  Take Ross Enemait's Magic 50 workout and multiply it by four.  Not one to back down from a challenge from a guy who sports the goofiest chrome dome that I've ever seen on all internets, I took him up on it. 

There was just one problem:  I had never done a one-armed snatch.  I didn't know how. 

A quick internet search led me to another, fellow blogger acquaintance, Sally Moss.  She had a great description of how to do this movement.  It's still there, along with a bunch of other good tutorials. 

I'll be the first to admit it:  learning movements off the internet sucks.  It's not easy to find people who know what they're doing and can show it to you it ways that you can understand.  Just try looking up how to bent press.  That's a fucking nightmare right there...and certainly don't go to the abominable Bodybuilding.com (WARNING:  dont' click that link!) to find out.  That move is the epitome of the problem we face when we isolated garage gorillas try to get back to the gold old days of strength training. 

It can be done though.  I paid close attention, practiced and completed the challenge.  Even when I had the opportunity to go to an EXTREME HARDCORE gym where my one-arm snatch was critiqued by someone who knows more than I do about it than I do, I was surprised that there was so little to clean up in the first place. 

Once again, I'm not claiming to be an expert and anyone who dares call me that will be subject to flogging upon my meeting them but I do have my guidelines that I'm about to impart on you on what has helped me learn some of the more loopy and obscure strength stuff out there when I have marginal-to-non-existent contact with the larger gym universe. 

This is the video I most credit for helping me learn how to bent press, BTW

1.  Find Good Material To Learn From
The best teachers are those who can break down movements to the fewest, important directions to get the exercise done right.  Without anyone to be there to critique what you're doing, the fewer things you have to keep in mind the better you'll learn.  Good learning material also has good, if odd, cues to get the move right.  My friend Chip gave one of the most bizarre set of cues for doing a deadlift right not too long ago:  Crush your armpit trolls and squeeze your sphincter.  Strange, but it works.  I'm not kidding...look it up!  I've also noticed that well-known, good teachers who record seminars are often training gold.  I would imagine if you're going to teach a group of people effectively and quickly, you need to be able to refine your directions down to the most basic elements. 

2.  For God's Sake, TAKE IT EASY!
I hope this one is far more obvious than the first tip.  Don't go for the biggest chunk of weight or the hardest variation on the move right from the get-go.  Take things easy.  Very easy.  Take long breaks between attempts.  Shelve the workout musice for now.  Put the movement you're trying to learn at the beginning of your work out, treat it like practice, and don't try to get some of that muscle soreness that we all crave from our work outs.  I started bent pressing with a 35 lbs kettlebell back in Summer, 2010.  I can now bent press a 111 lbs kettlebell.  Patience pays off.  It's not a coincidence that impatience alliterates with injury.  We need to accept the fact that learning alone usually takes longer.  It's the drawback to being a loner. 

3.  Pay Close Attention to Where You're failing
One thing that I try to do when move a bit past the point of practice and more towards working out is I try to pay attention to what my form is when I start and where it is when I finish.  Something's going to be worse than when I started.  Whatever that something is will tell me where I'm weak.  Figuring this out also gives me feedback as to what I need to improve with execution or what I need to strengthen.  

Certainly don't ever miss an opportunity to get "professional" help.  After all, every major book and video that you can dig up on the topic at hand will warn you ahead of time that that what you're about do something that could kill you to death if you're being an idiot so you should find someone way smarter (with lots of acronyms after their name) than you to show you how to do it.   It's still a good idea though.  So, never turn that up.  Otherwise, you're left to your own intelligence, patience and observation powers to learn how to move in strong ways.  It's entirely doable though. 

So, if you have no choice, go and do it.

For The Love of Bent Press III: Two-Hands Anyhow my Bodyweight

 

 

 

A little over a year ago, I started expanding my Ironmaster set by picking up a second handle. The first thing I tried with two kettlebells was doing a two hands anyhow with a 65 lbs and a 55 lbs KB. It was the start of a "lift" that I fell in love with ever since and beginning on that modest incursion into two hands anyhow lifting, the goal that floated around in the back of my mind was to be able to do my bodyweight (175 lbs, or 180, depending on how much ice cream I eat) in this lift.

It's been a slow climb but I can now confidently do 176 lbs (111 lbs on one KB, 65 lbs on the other). Calling this pile of movements a lift is a misnomer since it's actually three or four lifts into one. They all have the same basic core move: bent pressing one weight heavier than the other. What kinds of weights lifted, how the first weight gets to the starting position, how the second weight is lifted, and if how the weights get put down can change. My Two Hands Anyhow looked like this:

1. Clean the 111 lbs 'bell.
2. Bent Press it, grab the second 'bell.
3. Curl it up to a racked position.
4. Press it overhead.
5. Bringing the 65 lb'er down to the ground via partial windmill.
6. Carefully lower the big guy with two hands to the ground.

While I have a natural attraction to the odd when it comes to working out, I learned a lot from this whole excursion into Two Hands Anyhow excellence.

First and foremost, the bent press got rid of any lingering doubt of dropping the first weight. Looking at the bottom of a pack of iron that weighs as much as a petite woman will either force most to get over it or get your skull stoved in. I did. It'll also make you bilk every ounce of strength you have on that side of your body.  I enjoy these kind of do-or-die challenges in my training.   

My right-hand bent press isn't as pretty in video

Second thing that I absolutely had to get better at if I was going to bent press any kettlebell over 85 lbs was cleaning and racking the KB properly. I got into the habit of having a wide stance when I was using a sandbag to bent press. That wide stance played hell with heavier KB's. I just couldn't pop that bitch up enough to get it into a good rack position with my feet so wide. My poor wrist and elbows paid the price. Good, focused practice made permanent and I got that under control.

Not the most fun part of the lift

The biggest carry-over benefit I got from this 15 month journey came from pressing the second weight overhead. When you've already got a skull-crushing quantity of metal in an overhead position, you can only press another 65 lbs one way: THE RIGHT WAY! No leaning forward, backward or to the sides. Otherwise, you risk dropping the first weight. Not fun.

I feel like Arthur Saxon already!

Most people I've seen bent press don't bother to put down the weights. They simply drop them. I opted to partially windmill the second, lighter weight. Windmilling when the bottom hand has a weight actually makes the exercise easier. So, it was good practice to getting the quantity of iron I can windmill up. When I traveling by car, I usually brought only one kettlebell. So, a common practice on those trips was to substitute a bent press/windmill for my Two Hands Anyhow work. I don't think this would have been possible had I not thrown in the windmill move into my Two Hands Anyhow.

So, there's been some practicality to doing this for so long but really, this is just a fun way to lift weights. As long as I've had the equipment, I've done this lift twice a week since pretty regularly since that first stab at the two hands anyhow back in late-January, 2011. It's easily my favorite lift and now that I've maxed out the capacity of my Ironmaster Kettlebells on the bent press, I'm looking forward to trying out bent pressing on a barbell.   

 

Letters to Myself

A while ago, Jim Wendler (as always) wrote a very good article for T-Nation:  A Letter To My Younger Self.   It got me thinking about what I'd love to tell myself, relative to training, when I was a teenager.  If you look down the livespill comments, someone asked him what he'd tell his future, old bastard self.  That was kind of interesting too.  So, I figured I'd follow suit, writing two letters to my former and future self...

Dear Young Justin,

First of all, you need to stop being such a procrastinator with your homework, especially the English and literature essays.  Write them on time and stop doing the all-nighter papers.  There's no reason that you need to fail this class three years in a row, GODDAMMIT!  Don't wait 15 years for it to sink in that you write pretty damn good and you might have blown some opportunities just because you were being a lazy, little shit who didn't want to do work in a class you should have fucking aced! 

How do I know this?  Well, because I'm you, 17 years later.  I'm going to tell you a few things that you should be doing to make life a bit easier, more enjoyable, and certainly more fulfilling. 

I know you're looking in a mirror, all 5'8" and 130 lbs of you wondering when you're going to get dad's massive bulk and freakish strength.  I've got some bad news for you:  it's not going to come as naturally to you as it did him.  If you want to look like you should be taken seriously and be strong enough to pound the shit out of someone when they don't, you need to take things into your own hands. 

First, start eating.  A LOT!  Eat a pile of steak, eggs, and nuts to compliment all of that milk you're drinking.  You know that protein powder you're eating instead?  Stop bothering with that.  It's all shit that would have been thrown away had someone not thought to put a steroid junkie on the cover of a container filled with it in the first place. 

In a short time, Mom and Dad are going to get a membership to that fitness club so you can go.  You're going to start doing the machines and running a lot.  Don't bother with either.  They won't help you as much as you want to be helped.  You're going to see a bunch of kids from school you don't like doing stuff with barbells and dumbbells that you're going to want to dismiss because you're such an independent-minded loner.  This time, that's a mistake.  Figure out how to do what they're doing. 

That would be a better start to working out but don't do just this.  You already goof off and do some push-ups and pull-ups.  Keep doing them.  As strong as you get and as many exercises as you try, you'll never regret any of the work you do with these two movements. 

Next, don't stop doing sports just because you got a job.  Keep doing lacrosse.  You have time to work later.  You won't have time for lacrosse when you're an adult.  Also, there's an obscure little school in Burlington teaching this martial art called Brazilian Jui Jitsu.  Start taking classes in that IMMEDIATELY!  Trust me, this will be a life-changing moment for you when you go. 

Also, stop being so awkward with girls.  You might be a skinny fuck but you're still not bad looking and there's actually a few girls that like you that you think you don't have a chance with.  Don't bother With Chandra.  She's nothing but a tease that's using you.  Besides, someday you're going to be even better looking than you could possibly imagine (if you eat big and train hard) and she's going to look like a bloated beach ball. 

I do have to give you some credit:  you don't drink, smoke or do drugs.  Bravo!  Keep it up.  you're going to thank yourself for that later.  You'll also thank yourself for not blowing your money too. 

Above all, don't forget this:  There will a girl you meet online.  Above all, DON'T FALL IN LOVE WITH HER!    Yes, she's got big boobs and she's great in bed but just remember the 4 F's of dating:  find her, feel her, fuck her, and forget her. 

This is where she ends up after you're done with her...

Now, to my future self...

Dear Older Justin,

Hi!  Remember me?  I'm you at nearly 32 years old.  You know what made us so awesome?  Right around the time most of our peers were turning 30 the had expended most of their youth on pointless shit, and were bitching and moaning because they were getting old.  Well, they were getting old and they weren't doing a fucking thing about it except doing all the same, stupid shit that they did when they were young and they just accepted that they were going continue getting fat, grey, wrinkly, weak and broken down.

Well, you didn't.  Actually, you cleaned things up even more and got serious about getting more awesome as you got older.  You'd train even after the hardest work days.  You'd insist on finding healthy food no matter how much of a pain in the ass you made of yourself.   You were also curious enough and demanded to know the truth about what the right way to live clean and strong. 

What I'm most concerned with is if you kept all of this up?  Is your fire still lit?  I hope you've remained as stubborn as ever about eating healthy food.  I hope you still have the energy to train hard and effectively as often as possible.  I hope you learned from my mistakes about not getting enough good rest a few years back. 

Most of all, I hope you passed that on to Henry (and any other children you have now).  For all I know, 20 years old is considered middle age now.  Lord knows, that whole notion of 30 being old was ridiculous enough.   I hope you're not pretending you're healthy by taking god-only-knows what kind of hideous drugs they've come up with at this point.  Don't give up like everyone else did, and don't let your kids see you giving up either. 

He didn't.  Don't you either!

Best of luck to both of you,

Justin_P, 31.75 years old. 

Below the Bar? What a Shitty Title!

If you're reading this page, I'm guessing that your thoughts about the modern industrial fitness complex are somewhat similar to mine:  they vary between nausea and pyromania.   They have a pile of bizarre ideas that don't do much in the way of getting strong or healthy.  The only thing that they do well is drain your wallet.  Just in case you forgot how stupid they can be and you needed a reminder, The New York Times just recently provided one for you:  Why Women Can't Do Pull-ups.

Somehow managed.  Great Blog, BTW!

 

We have to state the obvious:  women generally aren't as strong as men.  Men have more muscle, shorter connective tissue, and better levers for doing most things strength-related.  So, the article got that part right.  I do recall something from my couple of months of reading (and re-reading) books on anatomy (pre-baby days, when I had time to read and re-read stuff):  levers are designed to be either powerful or precise.  So, if a body doesn't have the inherent, raw power to pull itself up to the bar, then it's capable of more precise, coordinated manner to generate the force needed. 

 

In other words, if women, weak men, or tall-big men with poor leverage want to do pull-ups, they need to PRACTICE!   It's completely unknown to me what modified pull-ups, back and biceps exercises that they did in this story to produce the positively lackluster results but I'd venture to guess it wasn't nearly enough pull-up practice and progressions.  I'm certainly at a loss as to what a bunch of muscle-wasting cardio is going to help with. 

 

Genetic Freak?  Or just persistently smart  about the way she does things?  Either way, a nice and fun person!

 

Maybe that's what so many good trainers are getting at when they refer to focusing on movements and not muscles.  While most of us think about how great the pull-up is for the lats and the biceps, the fact is that's involving a whole lot more than just two types of human meat to successfully pull off the movement.  Were we to try to construct a routine based on strengthening every muscle doing some work to get over the bar we'd be left with an unwieldy-long workout that wouldn't produce the same results if we had just stuck to doing pull-up progressions. 

 

I could keep going on and on about how bad this article sucks, provoking ourselves to the point of projectile vomiting and firebombing but let's leave it at this:  it is entirely possible for all us, men and women alike, to do pull-ups with some proficiency.  We just have to stop treating this movement like a muscle-specific strengthener and spend some more time getting to know it better.  We're all going to vary on how fast we accomplish that goal but it's still doable.    

 





On the other hand, 6'3", 275 lbs with long arms=disadvantage??