Is unilateral good? Is this unilateral? Two Ropes One Climb and some Cossack Squatting...

Being disconnected from the industrial gym complex has numerous perks. I don't know what's going on there, sure. Then again, I'm not burdened by people telling me that what I'm doing is wrong, even when it probably isn't. Take "unilateral" training. I never knew that there was any debate on it's usefulness. Apparently, it's not all it's cracked up to be, for reasons that I couldn't quite grasp. Explanations left me with a typical, intuitive yet highly intelligent response: SO WHAT?

Okay, a lot of the stuff I'm going to mention isn't strict unilateral work. I know this. I call it that because the load isn't spread evenly on both limbs. I don't want to confuse things further by coming up with yet another term.

I like unilateral srength work. In the bare-bones world of broke, traveling and/or otherwise cramped for space/stuff strength training, working out out one side/limb/whatever disproportionately at a time works out nicely. It lessens the demand for more stuff. Take my friend Fred's Facebook page profile pic. He's doing (I think) a 100 lbs Cossack squat. That's bad ass! When I saw that, I slapped myself for not thinking of it sooner. Squatting 100 lbs with my sandbag is getting pretty easy for me, even in Zercher format. So that was a nice way to use the same amount of weight to make for 20-30 seconds of "OH SHIT THAT'S HARD!" muscular tension. Hey, I'm not training for a competitive lifting sport so what difference does it make if it doesn't help out any competitive lifting? I just want to get that special feeling that I love so much!

That was the weighted side of things...

So, yeah, I escaped from California, and rain and snow and cold and work, for a couple of weeks down in Peru. On the downside, I had to leave all my big-ass ropes, along with my work equipment, in Sacramento to pick up later. All I had for rope back home was my old 1 1/4" rope (25' long) thate I don't use a whole lot anymore. Too thin, but I had an idea. Cut and eye spliced it into two pieces and dragged it to Peru (for reasons you'll read about later, in another blog entry). It was just blind luck that I found out that the beach house my in-laws and I rented had a spot to hang these ropes for climbing. So, hung them both up and started climbing them.

It's important to give credit where it's due. I know Ross Enemait didn't invent this idea but I got it from him so kudos anyway, Ross! It was in his awesome book, "Never Gymless." This is an idea that doesn't get used a lot, or enough as far as I'm concerned. Each side of the body has to work a lot more than if they were grabbing onto the same one rope. It's a lot more unstable and it really hits the biceps hard! Finding that out was really a case of making lemonade out of lemons since I started realizing that my biceps seem to be my weak point for rope climbing work.

Eventually, all my ropes will make their way back from California and I'll get back on track for the 3" rope climb. I made it halfway up not too long ago. In the meantime, I can make happy time with two ropes after finding out how hard this really can be. If you've been getting into ropes as much as I have lately and you've left behind a smaller-diameter rope in favor of the big stuff, this is a good way to squeeze some more life out of those old ropes.

Some Strength Trainers That Move me

I'm one of those crazies that actually likes American airports. Yes, they're glorified cattle stockyards with overpriced, bad food and worse coffee but they offer endless opportunities to people watch. For avid people watchers, there's just no shortage of highly interesting individuals in an airport. It can, and has, kept me occupied for hours.

The same can be said about our little subculture. There are some unique characters in the culture of the perpetually strength-starved persons. So, in no particular order, I decided to throw out there some of the guys in the history (and present) of physical culture that I find as interesting as they are motivating.

John Grimek
There are but a few people out there who pick up stuff to get strong and no matter what they pick up, they excel at it. It's almost as though they have a limitless control over their body. It's natural to think that they're genetically blessed. They may well be but that can't explain how they seem to do really well at everything that they try strength related. What kind of drive and ambition they must harbor in their mind is equally amazing and mind-boggling to me. John Grimek seemed to be just that kind of man. It almost seemed like he could do anything!

Even back in Grimek's day, there was already some very distinct separation between the weightlifters and the bodybuilders. You were either good at one or the other. I'm sure it helped just a tad that Bob Hoffman controlled a lot of the events that Grimek competed in. Sure,it's possible a man can control judging, he can't control the awe that someone like Grimek inspires.

He could build the big shapely awe-inspiring muscles that could win Olympic lifting contests. He could bulk up to 250 lbs and drop back down to 195 lbs if he pleased. He could eat 2 lbs Hersheys chocolate bars without getting fat. He squatted 400 lbs for 20 reps well into his sunset years. He pressed the 270 lbs "Cyr" Dumbbell in his younger years.
Maybe this man had limits to what he could do. It sure didn't seem so. It seems like if Grimek wanted to do it, he eventually did!

Steve Justa
My buddy Chip Conrad said it best in his book, "Lift with your Head": strength training is pretty funny, if you think about it. There we all are, lifting big heavy stuff, only to put it down and pick it up again while wearing dumpy-looking clothes, making contorted faces in a puddle of our own sweat. All the while, we're throwing around words like jerk, snatch and rack.


YOU SAID... RACK!

When it's not funny, it's downright crazy. Our primal minds are designed to avoid stress, pain and fatigue. It thinks that these are cues of imminent death. Instead of heeding the call to stop doing them, or not even doing them in the first place, we push onward anyway. Most of the time, this stuff could hurt or kill us, if we're not careful. Still we do it anyway. It's part of the process of getting strong.

Put in that light, it shouldn't be a surprise that people like Steve Justa exist. Silly and crazy aren't strong enough descriptions for this guy. Look at his Youtube channel! You'd swear that he must have walked out of a Rob Zombie movie and came to life (credit to Wild Gorillaman for that line). He might be a Grade a whack-job but, for our purposes, who fucking cares! He's every bit as strong as he his eccentric! Get past his bizarre music videos and you'll see him doing some equally crazy lifts! Embrace the bizarre when you're training, because the whole process is nuts, in it's own cute way. Few embody and prove that better than Steve Justa.


Vince Gironda
Given how I've evolved in a non-bodybuilding direction with strength training, away from barbells and machines, and in a somewhat-free form manner, I find it kind of odd that I'm caught up in the post-mortem fanfare that surrounds Vince Gironda. Still, I find him pretty interesting and highly motivational.

I have to say that some of the best information that I found about how to eat to gain mass was stuff that I gleaned here and there that he either wrote or said. I still think he's among the best source about how to eat to get big out there. He hated steroids and by the standards of today, he didn't use a lot of supplements (although that whole dessicated liver fetish of his was kind of gross).

It doesn't take much reading about the man to figure out that he had a major attitude and no tolerance for things not being done the right way. Which, incidentally, he would say is his way. In spite of being that hard-nosed about how to train, I find his raw pugnacious drive extremely motivating. That highly driven approach can move mountains and make up for possible and/or perceived lack of genetic perfection.

Plus, he pulled off what I consider to be the most insanely bad-ass chin-up feat I've ever heard of: a single-arm chin-up while holding a 45 lbs dumbbell! Somewhat off the topic, but ever notice how unique their footware is too? In our present day, too many people suffer under the illusion that we've got to wear some sort of highly specialized shoe in order to get in shape. Here I've collected some of the luminaries of the iron-tugging world and there isn't a swoosh to be seen on any of their feet! I like it!

Hang Yourself... and get some Abs!

Misleading title. Yes, the elusive ab definition isn't made in the gym so much as it's made in the kitchen. What we're talking about is getting strong abs. It used to be that if we tried to strengthen our abs, we'd lay on the floor. Most of us know that if you're laying on the floor, you're probably not a strong ab muscle (In case you don't know, the six-pack Abs are actually one muscle). Kettlebell-ISM could probably take a large amount of credit for getting us off the floor. While ab-training off the floor is a very good idea, I think that there's a strong possibility that the best way to get your abs strong is to reach up... and hang off something!
NO, NOT THAT WAY!

I mean your pull-up bar, or whatever you use for pull & chin work. Some of the highest ab activation exercises are actually the one's where you're hanging. As we've discussed in the past: properly done, the pull-up is an awesome ab exercise. You can make it even better by doing them with your legs in an L-sit.

For more direct ab work on the bar, then we could turn to the hanging leg raises (HLR). Most of us are familiar with this one...My reception to ab slings is kind of cold. Yeah, if you don't have the grip and arm strength to execute these then I understand. If you can do pull-ups without an issue, then you should have no issue grabbing the bar directly to do HLR. You'll save some money too because these things, like most strength training equipment, are ridiculously overpriced.

When I do HLR's, my preference is to touch my feet, or even my knees, to the bar. The important part of doing HLR's like this is descent: do so slowly, and under control. This isn't a speed-demon exercise. Control the movement! Besides, most of the good ab work is on the descent anyway. Rushing this risks hurting the lower back.

While you're up there, there's another ab exercise you could do called the windshield wiper. This one generally starts at the top of the hanging leg raise movement. From there, you move the legs in a semi-circle... like windshield wipers! The level of difficulty can be adjusted two ways: smaller circles or bent legs. Both make the movement easier. This is a nice and easy, controlled exercise too. Remember what I said about fighting gravity a while back? Well, gravity wants to pull your legs down. RESIST!

Then, there's always the possibility of combing hanging leg raises with windshield wipers. Start from a hanging position. Then, pick your knees up to the bar but don't lower yourself just yet. Now, do a windshield wiper. Bring your feet back to the middle and lower yourself.

You could throw this in after doing one, or more, pull-ups too. Start by doing the pull-up(s), then bring your feet up to the bar and then do a windshield wiper set, then slowly come back down. This combination is pure hell on your grip and your abs! Even 5 "reps" of this can be very brutal! It's kind of like burpees but for the bar.

Those of us who follow BW training know this guy, HIT Richards. While his insanely bad-ass training videos are well known, I wish that even more people saw what he's capable of. There'd be a whole lot less doubt about the legitimacy of BW training left to argue about. Much of his work revolves around pull-up bar work. Between his obvious power and his carved physique, he proves pretty decisively how well hanging exercises work the mid-section of the body. Even Pavel Tsatouline commented on the how well pull-up and chin-up work the abs: find a guy good at either with a weak rectus abdominis. It just goes to show how valuable this very simple set-up can be.

Eat this/Not that... after a workout

A little bit of personal background for my readers: I was born to teenage parents. I didn't have any cousins at all until I turned 11. Most of my cousins are quite a bit younger than I am. So, I have more of an uncle-niece/nephew relationship with them. One such case is my 16 year old cousin Guy, who's still under a grand delusion that he can, someday soon, kick my ass in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He's big into the MMA and boxing and like everyone else who takes up either (or both), he's realizing the importance of strength training and conditioning.

Keep Dreaming, punk!

I have a sneaking suspicion that he (and a couple of his friends who train with him) might be hitting this site more regularly. He was curious about what he could eat to help recover from his workouts, which are leaving him feeling a bit worn-down. Hey, even adding a little muscle would be a nice bonus! He got in touch with me and I realized that it would be a very good topic for blog entry.

Post-workout, there are two things that the body needs, and pretty damn quick: protein and some high glycemic carbs. A hard session of training is going to leave the body with a lot of "torn down" muscles and not much glycogen (sugar that the muscles use to move) left. The protein part is easy to understand: that's what you make muscle out of. The high glycemic carbs need an explanation (this is very simplified, BTW).

Glucose is what you really want here. Glucose is the fastest-absorbing, insuling-spiking sugar. After a workout, the muscles love a good insulin spike! Glycemic index (GI)is the measure of how fast a carb will trigger the release of insulin.

So, what's high on the GI that we can take to trigger that insulin release? Well, read enough muscle-comic magazines and they'll tell you things like white bread, white rice, oreo cookies and even chocolate milk. Highly processed foods drive up insulin levels fast, sure but they're still junk food. There are better ways to do this.

Although, I have experimented with chocolate milk and the results can be
okay, with a few conditions. You really have to be jonesing for some sugar
by the time you're done your workout to make the most of Chocolate
milk. Second, you need to be really fussy about which
chocolate milk you use. Some brands, no matter how much your brain and
muscles are screaming, crying and begging for sugar, they simply have too
much. Moral here: be as careful as you are picky!

My two favorite candidates are ripe bananas and dates. The bananas have to be ripe, or even over-ripe. Bananas have a lot of starch that convert to sugar as they ripen. So, a barely ripe banana comes in around the mid-40s, which is kind of low. Let them get some brown on them and they sky-rocket up into the mid-to-high 70's, which is pretty high. Dates are REALLY HIGH on the GI, usually coming in the high-90's. Just two or three will do the trick here. Another major plus that I like about both of these is that they're both very high in potassium. Since you've probably sweat like a bulldog in the desert, some electrolytes could be very, very helpful to avoid muscle cramps!

So, we get done the workout, threw down either a mushy banana or 2-3 dates. Now, for the protein part. Most readers will know that I'm not a huge fan of any supplements, including protein powders. I don't consider whey a food. It's a food extract that comes from milk. So, why not just drink the damn milk? It's cheaper and it tastes a whole lot better! Besides, do you really know what's in your protein supplement? Do a quick search! A lot of these snot-mixers have been caught with conaminants from heavy metals to some "fairy dusting" of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED's).

There's always cattle blood too! This Surma kid is on his way to being a bad-ass stick fighter! Hey, Jack Lalanne drank a lot of this in his earlier years...

How much of either to consume after a workout varies. If weight gain is the goal, drink and eat more. After a workout during my bulking days, I would drink a quart of milk and eat two bananas. If simple muscle recovery is in the order, consume less.

There are a few other things that can help out for muscle pains. Earlier I mentioned potassium consumption to avoid muscle cramps. Coconut water is gaining popularity as a natural, low sugar-calorie sports drink, partly because it's loaded with potassium. It's expensive but you don't need to drink much to get a lot of electrolyte out of it. 8 ounces will do. Another fruit that's good to consume after a workout, if they're available, is cherries. Studies have found that they have a natural muscle-relaxing chemical in them, which makes them a good dessert before bedtime.

Of course, this is all second to making sure that you don't push it too hard during the workout and that you're getting enough sleep! These two are paramount to making strong, happy and healthy muscles.

Does Strength Training Need a Church?

Paul Anderson is a bit of an anomaly in the strength training world. No, it's not just because equipment manufacturers couldn't make barbell sets heavy enough to give him a challenge. It's also because he was one of the few truly elite lifters in physical culture history that was also extremely religious. A very devout christian, after his he retired from competition, he founded a very successful home for troubled youth.

Historically, that kind of devotion to a religion hasn't been immensely popular in Western Physical Culture. We can all speculate as to why that is but I think that the answer is simple and much the same reason many others shun religion: they don't like to be told that what they're doing might be wrong. For example, Sandow could, and pretty much did, nail every available (and married) woman that attended his encore, look AND touch private show that he wanted. Depending on who you chose to believe, that list might have included a few men here and there too. The last thing he or any other good-looking muscular guy wants to hear is some bible-thumping holy man preaching the evils of promiscuous sex and adultery to them.

Anyway, strength trainers have a tendancy to be self-indulgent and self-absorbed. So, they avoid the divine wagging finger (for now?). Oddly enough, they kind of do have a religion and a church. Regardless of how they decide to tug on iron and to what end they hope to accomplish by doing it, I think that the case could be made that training has been turned into a religion.

Think about it for a moment. It doesn't take much of a stretch. They have their very narrow beliefs (their strength training protocol) that revolve around certain rituals and rites of passage (their competitions). They have their sacraments and/or magic potions that guarantee them divinity and enlightenment(supplements and PED's). They have their sacred relics (the iron and the machines they work out on). They also are very rigid in their whole outlook on things and will bitterly argue and deride any other differing views(Functional Strength Training vs. Oly vs. Bodybuilding vs Crossfit vs Powerlifting vs Bodyweight vs Strongman vs whateverthefuck) other than their own.

Above all, the salvation of strength must come from a gym. While they'd prefer it to come from their gym, they all agree that it has to come from working out in a gym. Otherwise, it's not possible to get strong. You don't have the relics, after all! That's the one that I challenge the most. Being told that I couldn't get strong without weights or a gym by my wife's ex-trainer lit a fire under my ass that burns pretty bright to this day, long after I accomplished what set out to do.

Although I'm known as a Bodyweight guy, I'm truly non-denominational. I've never had anything against weights, just that they cost money and they're not quite as easy to travel with. I look at the Earth as my gym. All I have to do is look at it with some imagination and I see my strength training relics. For example, take a look at this pic I just snapped at work on my phone...

What do you see?

A set of stairs, some railing and a doorway?

Geeze, you're boring! It's an exercise station where I can do the following stuff:

1. Pull-ups
2. Chin-ups
3. Hanging Leg Raises
4. Hanging Windshield wipers
5. L-Sits
6. Dips
7. Feet-elevated Push-ups
8. Plyometric stair jumping

I'm guessing that you could easily make up two workouts based on this short list of exercises!

Wait just a minute...How can you get strong from that? How can you possibly make that work with a 5/3/1 or a 5x5 or an 8x6x7x5x3x0x9 routine? How could that help my bench? None of this is functional! Really? How horrid!

While I choose not to comment the need of a religion and/or a church for the spirit at the moment, I will say that I don't think one is needed for the body. Like religion for the spirit, I do think that it would suit people to take a step back and realize that they don't need to be so rigid and unforgiving in their strength belief systems. Why not focus on what they all have in common and in reality, what they have in common is more important than the differences. Those are lots of minor things that don't really amount to much. We all agree that doing really difficult movements with lots of intensity and/or speed will make us really strong. Why do we need to bicker about specific means to the end?


A quick walk around most religions also yields a conclusion that most of them aren't big on idolatry. It seems to have fallen out of style everywhere except strength training religions. Strength isn't dependent on having stuff. It's how you use what you have on hand (within reason) that makes the difference. Hell, I've spent the past three years talking about how I get strong with no implements at all (most of the time)!

Closed minds never solve anything. Not in the matters of the soul or the body. Strength is plastic. Malleable. So, the ways it's developed are much the same. So, the place that it's built isn't that important. The end does justify the means in this case. Get it however and where-ever you can.

What's Reps Got to Do With it?

There's a lot of small details that people get way too caught up in when they decide to induce muscle hypertropy. One of them are reps, specifically how many to for muscle growth. Generally, you'll hear people toss out things like 3-5 for strength, 8-12 for muscle growth, and anything beyond that is just endurance.

I'd love to know where that all came from. If anyone knows, please drop me a line. Or, is this a case that proves the point, "success has many parents and failure is an orphan?"

For as long as I've trained, I've never bought into that. Back in 2007, i grew my upper back and arms (in addition to my entire body) by doing pull-ups and chin-ups in 15-20 rep ranges. How did that happen? I discussed this a while back, in this post.

I don't see the point in regurgitating old posts yet again. Besides, like any other form of regurgitation, people don't generally have positive reaction to it. I do have something to add to it, to further get the mind off of the strict importance of rep ranges.

Lately, I've been doing quite a few exercises that render it impossible to fit into the normal, pretty category of one rep. When we think of an exercise, we're kind of accustomed to a movement that has a definitive concentric (muscle shortens) movement followed by an eccentric (muscle lengthens) movement... or sometimes the other way around. Either way, put them together, and you've got A REP!

What about rope climbing? Going up is nothing but concentric movement. Going down is nothing but eccentric movement. What do you consider one rep on that? What's the rep range for building size and strength on that one? I can certainly vouch that it can! Or, what about any kind of carrying or farmers walk work? Does it even have concentric and eccentric movement? Better still, how about pushing a car? Most people that do car pushing do a lot more than just 20 "pushes" in the scheme of doing so. Is that just endurance? Try it and get back to me...and don't be a smart ass and use a SmartCar!

Definitely Strength-Endurance!

What's also very interesting about these three is that if you ask anyone who has done them with any kind of frequency, they'll tell you that you can, and will, get brutally strong with them.

Hey! There's a workout for you: Rope climb, truck push, and farmers walks. PhunSHUNcTal too!

This kind of brings up another angle to muscle confusion. By destroying the typical eccentric+concentric=one rep movement that makes up most exercises, we have another angle to building some awesome strength. Let's level with each other: after a while, if we get tired enough, our body instinctively finds ways to make the rep easier, usually by dropping out the controlled, eccentric movement. You can't do that when you're hanging 12' off the ground anymore (unless you love sore elbows, or the the sensation of hitting the ground from the top of the rope).

That's why I'd rather think in terms of amount of time under contraction rather than reps. I will say that for a beginner, giving rep ranges have their place. They make for a good starting point. Besides, a lot of the exercises (maybe the concept of scrambling concentric+eccentric=rep isn't for beginners anyway) I described aren't exactly beginner's movements. It just goes to show that there isn't this carved-in-stone rulebook to getting big, buff, powerful and sexy.

Jack Lalanne... and what his death is saying about us

You don't see this picture very often in my very humble basement gym but it's my favorite picture that I've hung up. Several years ago, my wife wrote to and called Jack Lalanne, asking for an autograph (and possibly a phone call) for me. His agent arranged the former. I was so thrilled that I had it professionally laminated so it would, hopefully, last as long as the man himself did. Now we know how long it has to last to live up to the man himself: 96 years.

I was positively crushed when George "HIT" Richards reported on his Facebook profile on Sunday night that Jack Lalanne passed away. I have no illusions that he was going to live forever. We all owe a death at some point. It hurts to lose such great people though. There's a real shortage of them left in this world. Having him for as long as we did was a unique gift: he might have been the last of the original "Muscle Beach" crowd. He was part of the second wave of physical culturists who formed strength training world as we now know it.
His posse of iron men and women established California as a mecca for health and fitness that it is to this day. They made gyms and health spas popular in the USA. They brought fitness to the new media. It wasn't just Jack Lalanne's TV show. These guys trained most of the actors and stuntmen in Hollywood. Everything that we do now can be traced back to Jack and his friends. He was the bridge between the early Sandow years and the modern world of strength training as we know it.

In my opinion, this was also the greatest generation of strength trainers. We could go on about his physical feats, his Television show, and his juice machine but that really misses the real greatness of Jack Lalanne. This man can lay a solid claim to being the greatest example of how to nurture a body for the purpose of serving a greater purpose...EVER. Inner light can't shine through dirty windows and showed us, by example, how to let that light through. It's hard to put that kind of inspiration into words. It's something that anyone who has ever turned themselves from physically weak to physically strong can understand.

that transformation must be unpopular these days because I'm very underwhelmed, and frankly pretty pissed, at some of the coverage of his death. I detected a grain of mockery coming from people I hear on the news regarding his death. I've heard more references to his drunk driving arrest back in 1991 than I ever heard about Ted Kennedy's drinking binges when he died. I heard quips about his strict anti-sugar, quasi-vegetarian diet..."and he still died!" Or, about how he preached health and fitness as America got more and more unhealthy?

This evening turned into one of those, "what has America become?" moments. We lost someone who was an outrageously productive human being who we could trust to be an honest and good example to our children and we find reasons to point out how he wasn't perfect? Are we only happy if we see trashy excuses of human life shoved into our eyeballs on the tube?
Seriously though, what have we become? Can't we hold virtuous life with high regard? Why do we think it's okay to glorify how mediocre and internally filthy we've become? Is it funny that most of us eat about 160 lbs of refined sugar a year that we know is going to slowly kills us? Who is really insane here: most of us for doing this or Jack Lalanne for telling us for the past 60 years that this is suicidal?

What do you think? Enough sugar for a medium-sized American Town?
I think it comes down to judgement. Simply put: nobody wants to be told that what they're doing just plain sucks, even when it's so lately fucking stupid that it shouldn't even be a debate. Another mark of a great man is that they'll tell you the truth, no matter how badly it hurts. Jack told it to us straight, right up to the very end.

His example of lifelong clean, health, and strong living was the best idea for a goal that he gave his audience. We all love to set goals for ourselves. It's a tangible way of seeing progress. Those are all groovy things, don't get me wrong, but keeping ourselves healthy and strong for a lifetime could be the best goal to make. A healthy life makes all time spent training, regardless of how fun or how obligatory, a step in the right direction to fulfilling. Jack Lalanne said it best:

"People don’t die of old age, they die of inactivity."

"Better to wear out than rust out"

With that as a goal, every ounce of activity becomes meaningful; a middle finger given to the notion of a diseased life and dampened spirit. I thank you, Jack Lalanne, for that. We all do.