It Never Stops Coming! Bullshit III!

Shouldn't certain things be obvious? Maybe I haven't been subjected to enough brainwashing going on in our modURN society to have most of my objectivity removed. As I glanced at Wild Gorillaman's Facebook page, one such example popped into my mind.
I pretty sure that he posted this pic of Marilyn Monroe because she's hot. I hope it wasn't for her brain. I've never really understood the amount of respect that she gets. Let's add up a few things that are definitely, or probably true, about her. First, she got famous for shucking her clothes for Playboy. She was married and divorced three times. She did JFK, and then possibly his brother when she wasn't doing mobsters or miscellaneous other married celebrities.

In other words, SHE WAS A SLUT!

People look at me funny when I say this to them. Now, why can't more people put two-and-two together on this one? What does this have to do with exercise? I don't know. Here, let me throw this picture up and it might be more on topic...
Okay, the point of the rant-n'-ramble above is to point out that there is BULLSHIT! that should be pretty self evident if all of the facts were laid out there and a conclusion was drawn based on the facts. You can make up your own reason why this doesn't happen. I've got two examples in mind of this. So, here two BULLSHIT! ideas that I think ought to be more evident than they are.

Anyone else seen this one on Facebook too?We know where this one is coming from too, just like the kipping pull-up phenomenon. To start off with some common ground, I fully admit that there are people whose fat-making arsenal is equipped with too much bread. To go to this extreme, declaring that bread is the death of the human body, well, doesn't this fly in the face of roughly 30,000 years of human history?

Bread's been eaten that long, long-since declared, "the staff of life". Wheat farming is one of the crops that allowed humans to make the jump to living in a civil-organized society. Along the way, people managed to figure out that certain (but not all) bitter almonds, fly agaric mushrooms, and horse shoe crabs were deadly poisonous to eat yet somehow bread slipped by for all of these years.

Special thanks to Art De Vaney and Loren Cordain for showing humankind the error of its ways?

Okay, bread 30,000 years ago is probably much different than bread today. It would be a major improvement if we didn't eat so much of it in pre-digested, white form. We'd probably do ourselves a great service by eating more vegetable and less wheat. Still, I'm not about to abandon my grilled cheese sandwiches in fear of being slowly choked of life from something that civil societies have thrived on eating for millennium.

Here's a chunk of BULLSHIT! That's creeped into mainstream western society with increased speed lately...

This is one we as fellow fitness fanatics can all agree on. The whole fat-is-beautiful has got to be a classic case of mob rule. With 60% (or more) of the population sandwiched between Mexico and Canada waddling around life with a surplus of white andipose tissue, it was only a matter of time before they tried to convince the everyone that being "fluffy" was a mark of beauty.

I mentioned this in a previous blog: Is the end result of gluttonous eating and slothful living become something that we should be emulate? Is bad, over-the-top living sexy? Is promoting fat as something good really something that we want to teach our children? Or are these people hiding from these questions by changing the concept of beauty to cover their collectively humongous asses?

Besides, are many of these fat beauty queens pretty because they're fat or pretty in spite of being fat? Furthermore, why is fat being held as something sexy for women? If we're being fair then perhaps CK should start a ad campaign for their undies featuring fat guys!

Both of these BULLSHIT! have in common that they're bad ideas spread around by minority divisions of our greater culture. It's shitty group-think, devoid of analysis. We can come up with more rants about how cultish Paleo dieters and fat activists have become another time but for now I think that we can end this rant against BULLSHIT! by agreeing that it's a good idea to be a critical thinker and to be careful about who we tune into for our ideas and opinions.

Grip Crazy!

Generally speaking, lifting straps make as much sense to me as thumbless pull-ups: they don't. Yeah, I'm aware that there are beginners with weak hands or trainees compromised hands out there. I've been one of those on a rare occasion when I forgot that my thumbs go forwards only and not backwards. Sometimes, there's a need to make things easy on the hands.

Then we see people who we know could use their full grip- but don't. I don't get deprioritization of the grip. Maybe it's a part of the gaps in strength training. There's a gap that exists between the look of being strong and actually being strong. There's another gap where strength is defined by game and strength to finish real work. Two gaps, like the holes in the middle of whatever you're grabbing without your damn thumb! Strength, perceived and demonstrated, comes from the hard shit that we grab and how well we manipulate it when it's in our hands.

Maybe that standpoint has something to do with my heritage. Living in Northern Vermont and having a healthy dose of French-Canadian descent, I've got a great deal of respect for the old-time strongmen of the turn of the 20th century. Quebec was quite the hotbed of that time, producing some very notable strongmen.
The most obvious, big-daddy of all Quebec Strongmen: Louis Cyr!

It kind of makes sense if you live in the area. If you hang out on the east side of Vermont, you'll see logs constantly heading south from Quebec. If you enter Quebec from North-Western Vermont, you'll note that most of the old houses are made out of field stones. Those stones didn't move themselves any more than the trees cut themselves down 130 years ago. It was a harsh land of hard work that made powerful men.

The kind of work that you don't get done with half of a grip!
Were I to pick a favorite French-Canadian strongman of yore, I'd have to go with Arthur Dandurand. If forearm power is your thing, how could you not be impressed with a guy who had 15.5" forearms on a 5'8", 180 lbs frame? Apparently, the guy put them to good use by pushing a wheel borrow with 4300 pounds 23 feet. That's got to be one of the most uniquely insane feats of strength I've ever heard of!

So, this all means that I'm beginning to morph into something of a grip strength junkie. I consider it an affront to both my reputation as a strong man and my strongmen-laden ancestry to not be. With few exceptions, I look at nearly everything I do and wonder if I can use it to enhance my grip.

Grip training is really the only thing that I do that comes close to isolation exercising. I started using CoC grippers early April, barely able to close a Number 1. Now, I'm within striking distance of closing the Number 2. Getting closer...

I don't consider doing pull-ups unless they are hell on my grip. Thick bars, towels, lifting straps, uneven "ladders", and most especially using my 3" thick rope.
Yes, I haven't forgotten or disregarded my 3" climbing rope.

It's not too uncommon to see lifting straps used for deadlifts. Not only do I not own them, I look for deadlift variations that require more grip work than usual. My latest favorite has been the Steve Reeves style deadlift. More on that later.FYI, I do use my thumb on these.


I'm sure that a few of my readers are new to my blog, finding out about me from Paul Wade's newest book, "Convict Conditioning 2." I still use fingertip push-ups on a regular basis. A week doesn't go by without me adding some 5 finger (one hand, 5 finger) and handstand-fingertip push-ups. To add insult to injury, they're usually super-setted with either rope climbing or pull-ups!
This is where one of the pics in CC2 came from!

Maybe the grip is a limiting factor in doing a lot of moves that we do. Maybe I could deadlift more weight and do more pull-ups if I could try to use less grip. Well, I'm not a powerlifter and there's no pull-up rep count contests. As a freelancer strength trainer, I can do whatever I want to do and I choose to make my hands as close to vices as I possibly can.

Mermaids or Whales?

The damnest things bounce around Facebook with amazing speed. I swear, I've seen this show up on at least seven friends' status updates. I had advanced warning before this latest round of basura hit my ocular rods and cones. The cookiemonster Christine posted her barrage against this latest piece of fluff that too many are falling for. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm going to subject you to the same piece of unfortunate, incoherent piece of writing that I did. Unlike Christine, I was nice enough to include the picture of the naked french girl that went along with the "story":

A while back, at the entrance of a gym, there was a picture of a very thin and beautiful woman. The caption was "This summer, do you want to be a mermaid or a whale?"

The story goes, a woman (of clothing size unknown) answered the following way:

"Dear people, whales are always surrounded by friends (dolphins, seals, curious humans), they are sexually active and raise their children with great tenderness.
They entertain like crazy with dolphins and eat lots of prawns. They swim all day and travel to fantastic places like Patagonia, the Barents Sea or the coral reefs of Polynesia.
They sing incredibly well and sometimes even are on cds. They are impressive and dearly loved animals, which everyone defend and admires.

Mermaids do not exist.

But if they existed, they would line up to see a psychologist because of a problem of split personality: woman or fish?
They would have no sex life and could not bear children.
Yes, they would be lovely, but lonely and sad.
And, who wants a girl that smells like fish by his side?

Without a doubt, I'd rather be a whale.

At a time when the media tells us that only thin is beautiful, I prefer to eat ice cream with my kids, to have dinner with my husband, to eat and drink and have fun with my friends.

We women, we gain weight because we accumulate so much wisdom and knowledge that there isn't enough space in our heads, and it spreads all over our bodies.
We are not fat, we are greatly cultivated.
Every time I see my curves in the mirror, I tell myself: "How amazing am I ?! "

(The girl on the picture is French model Tara Lynn)

Now, you're up to speed.

This chunk of words struck me as bizarre but it did make me think. Most specifically, it made me think about how poor to non-existent the the amount of thought that goes into body image amongst human beings. Maybe that's a lot to ask on something that most people react emotionally to rather than thinking about. Maybe that's part of the problem.

Maybe it's just coincidental that mermaids were brought up in a gym setting but it is fitting in one respect: mermaids don't exist any more than fitness models exist, or at least as we see them in the pictures. What we see is a tribute to someone's ability to pose, light, airbrush, and photoshop an image for people to chase after.
This isn't here just to show off muscle gals. I'll get to why in a minute...

It seems sadly fitting that many of those people seduced into believing that they can look like those models are running on machinery but going nowhere since they're chasing something that they'll never get. Most of us would agree that the whole senario is a poor and cruel way to shame people into a gym to work out.
Pauline, same woman as above, in real life. I have to hand it to her: she's honest!

As bad as that imagery is, the rest of the story is worse. I came across a fancy term in a book that I read earlier this year that seems to adequately describe that: cognitive dissonance. I'm sure that since you're reading this blog that you agree with me that being fat isn't any good and no amount of fantasizing that your wisdom will accumulate on your hips will ever change that. It's just an elaborate excuse.

Rather than coming up with some bullshit story/excuse, wouldn't the person writing this have better served her readers by challenging them to think about how healthy their bodies are and how well they perform? Now that I have a kid, I think about things differently. It's fun to eat ice cream with kids. It's far more fun to be able to play with them and not be worn out by trying to keep up with them. Playing with my nephew, as much as he wants. Henry's dad is good to go!

Another, very important consideration for me is being a good example. Muffin tops and beer guts aren't made of wisdom. They're made out of gluttony and sloth. Neither of these are good traits to pass onto children as normal or okay.
Oh, and while that model is a good looking, bigger woman, let's not kid ourselves. For every Tara Lynn out there, there's at least 50 Rosie O'Donnells and Kathy Bates. Fat rarely looks that good!

Maybe I'm taking this viral garbage too seriously. It really is a pretty stupid glob of words. It would have been too easy to dismiss had it not shown up over and over again on my wall. It's unfortunate when agreements can be made on problems but the solutions to them are so far apart. In the end, there's no good justification for obesity.

What Charmed Times!

Ranting dominates lots of blogs. I try fake originality to the best of my ability and so I generally don't try to turn my blog entries into masses of angry words that give people the impression that Pantera enters my earholes too many times a day. Last time I checked, I'm a human living in a bizarre society that I understand but just don't get. I get mad, and I guess rants are inevitable.

We do live in some charmed times. Our consumption habits and our ideas behind their justification are just too rich. They're as overwhelming in the sheer volume of silliness as their justifications are flat-out stupid. My pressure-cooker of a mind needs a release, right about now...

We stopped lots of smoking (tobacco)because it causes cancer. That was a good step... but now we have smoking (marijuana)that HELPS with cancer. To your health?

Somewhere in a natural market near me...and possibly you... you can find cookies and brownies that are good for you, so long as they're vegan and organic. No, wait, they can be good for you if they're gluten free and organic too.

Hey, wait a minute... if we come up with a cookie that's gluten free AND vegan (plus organic), would that mean that we invented a SUPERFOOD? Yeah, like that $5.00 juice in the produce section that's supposed to convince us that drinking juice is the same as eating fruit. Yes, that's the key to being healthy!

That might be a topic of discussion on the next episode of Dr Oz. You know, the guy that said that the top three best foods to have on a deserted island are broccoli, walnuts... AND BEER!

Oh, and exercise may not be good for that whole fat-loss thing. After all, doctors have been telling people to exercise for 50 years (while doctors 50 years before that told our ancestors that exercise would bind up their joints and use up their heartbeats) and we just get fatter and fatter. Besides, exercise makes us hungry, and therefore we eat more. Remember this gem of an article (and my reflection on it)?

Of course, it's not because some expURTS told people in rag-mag's that eating cookies was a good post-recovery snack... Hey, just make sure you get the cookies from one of those "Healthy Vending Machines" full of candies and cookies that must be healthy because they're ORGANIC!

As the steam finishes rolling out of my ears and my fingers begin to stop violently smashing the keyboard, I'm left wondering how we could live in a time where so much information is more available to us than at any other time in human history and we still seem as dumb as ever. It's as though we decided to use our leaps in technology, our discoveries about health, our revelations about diet cherry-picked the data that would give us the best ammunition to excuse our obviously bad consumption habits.

Organic methods of food production are groovy. Vegan is leaps and bounds better than the common Western diet. Gluten-free helps a lot of people regain their health. They all have their limits though and if it what you're eating would be considered junk food before getting the organic-vegan-deglutenated treatment, then chances are it's STILL junk food afterwards.

I really think that after you read this fine piece of writing, you should devote 20-30 minutes of research into the liver. Next to the brain, it's probably the most impressive organ in your body. Yes, some alcoholic beverages have some health benefits but most of them are heavily washed out by the damage that they do to this, most special organ.

If you have any doubt about how healthy alcohol, or any other food item that you eat is really good for you or not, I have the perfect way to find out. First, consume the item in question. Next, wait one or two hours. Then, pick your favorite above-average level of difficulty workout. If you feel like shit midway through, you shouldn't have ate the questionable food-like item to begin with. Training is the ultimate form of figuring out what does and doesn't belong in your body.

Finally, could we please, PLEASE...PLEASE!!!!!... start showing even an inkling of good sense about recreational drug use? Most of the Western World has been locked in a 130 year cycle of dumb-ass when it comes to them. It all began when a young Sigmund Freud thought he could cure his ailing friend, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, of his chronic pain and crippling morphine addiction with a new and safe drug: Cocaine. Care to guess how that turn out?Ever since then, the same history has repeated itself. We find a drug, abuse it, find a new drug that's considered safe (even declare it healthy) and we find out that it's just as bad (or worse) than the last popular drug that the previous generation ditched.

Seen in this light, doesn't the whole, "tobacco smoking is bad but marijuana smoking is good," look repetitively stupid?

Let's not confuse me as a 1000.1625% clean-living-all-the-time guy here. I like cigars, wine, whiskey, ice cream, etc and lots of other stuff that's not good for me. I'm just not here trying to explain away the fact that they are bad for me with the latest health and fitness buzz words and concepts. These are REALLY good though!

I know that the more of them I consume, the worse my health will get. I'm just tired of this film of willful ignorance that our culture keeps stretching over all of this stuff. I'm tired of the pretending and the sooner it stops, the less my blood pressure will spike for such foolish reasoning.

Tendon Strength II: the pull ups

Every faction of strength training has a blacklist of exercises that you shouldn't do. They're labeled everything from pointless and useless to dangerous. Often times, the reasoning trends towards dangerous. They're bad for the joints. They cause tendonitis, or something along these lines. I just knew that when I posted this entry about tendon strength I'd get someone bringing up the pull up.

I'm a little surprised that the pull up doesn't get blacklisted more often. If there is any chance that what is said on the internet happens in real life, I'd be lead to believe that pull ups are responsible for a lot of elbow tendinitis out there.

I read a very good description of the state of pull ups on T-Nation: they're like vegetables. Just like we know we should be eating more vegetables but we don't, we all know we should be doing more pull ups... and we're not. Well, maybe some people got the memo. Maybe they're just like that 'roided out gorilla that I upstaged on Miami Beach years ago by more than doubling the number of pull ups that he could do on the bars set up around Ocean Drive. In other words, they sucked at pull ups, realized how much more awesome they could be if they started eschewing the lat machine in favor of the pull up bar, and got to work pull themselves up.

And screwed up their elbow(s) in the process.

Well, what's going on here?

Before I go further, I need to liberate myself from the responsibilities of being considered an expert again. I'm not going to claim to be anything resembling one so confuse me with one of those. I'm just a few steps above a keyboard kumanndo with a blog here. At the end of the day, you've always been the one who determines whether I'm writing anything worth reading. If something in your mind is telling you that I'm full of shit, then feel free to leave....

Pull-ups are a closed kinetic chain exercise. That is, the hands don't move. We all know that closed chain also applies to the feet, right? Well, the feet differ from the hands in many ways, namely that they're set up to handle our BW for most, if not all of the day. Our hands, on the other hand, struggle to maintain it for much more than 30-60 seconds at a time. In the outright beast category, Konstantinovs managed to do do pull-ups for nearly a minute and a half. Still, It's easy to see that the feet, and the knees, are designed more for hard use and shock than the hands and elbows ever were.

What difference does that make?

Form and Execution. I'm not here to be a form-nazi. I never will be either. When it comes to the form you do the movement with and how you move your body, I've always felt that both serve two purposes. First, to get the most out of the exercise. The second is to keep the body safe during execution. The first allows some flexibility in how you do things. The second doesn't. Frankly, I've ID'ed just about everyone who has asked me about elbow pain with pull-ups by asking if the control the rate that they descend down from the bar. Most of the time, they don't. I've said it several times before: Speed-Control=injury!

Another recent phenomenon, and most of us know where this comes from, is adding momentum to pull-ups from the beginning of the set, trying to drive the body upwards toward the bar. This is something else that generally find strange and avoid. I'm from the old school and as far as I'm concerned, kipping pull-ups are something that you do when you can't do normal pull-ups anymore. More specifically, you do that when you're failing and you can't do anymore without a boost.

I think that both bouncing up to the bar and falling down from it both come from the drive to increase pull-up rep count for no other reason than for the sake of having a high rep count. Let me remind my readers of one basic fact: THERE ARE NO PULL-UP COMPETITIONS TO SEE HOW MANY YOU CAN DO! Since no formal contests exist, then the strength that you gain from doing pull-ups should be the focus. There's no game to validate pumping up your rep count with cut corners.

This is the closest thing to a pull-up contest I know of. Marine Recruiters give you a T-shirt if you can do more than 20 pull-ups or chin-ups

Besides, since we've established that the upper extremities aren't made to take a beating quite like the lower ones, why subject them to all kinds of bouncing and shock? Lots of momentum with pull-ups really are more of an advanced movement. That's probably why you didn't use to see kipping pull-ups frequently taught to beginners.

I'm glad I got this one. My son puked on the shirt I was wearing at the time!

Still, when it really comes down to strength AND health, I'm much more of a fan of doing pull-ups the old school way. All of the biceps, grip, and lat strength don't amount to shit if the elbows are riddled with pain. I regard them best used for max strength and strength endurance work and used for explosive strength more sparingly. Above all, CONTROL THE MOVEMENT, DON'T LET THE MOVEMENT CONTROL YOU!

My collection, proof my tendons are awesome!

Most Gyms Suck...And My Son is AWESOME!

Multi-tasking perfected. The genesis of what I'm about to write about occurred when I was eating breakfast, rocking my son to sleep, and reading a web site about a gym that just opened up nearby. I was kind of struck with the juxtaposition. My intuition tells me that Henry's a future athlete. He's top 98% percentile in height...wait... length and weight, he's extremely strong, and he doesn't stop moving when awake ( he's furiously fighting sleep by bicycling legs right now, giving a fine demonstration of explosive leg strength). He's so amazingly alive and brimming with this amazing vitality. It's just great.

This new gym, on the other hand, is neither. It seems dead. Then again, the be dead, it would have had to be alive at some point. It doesn't even look like that ever happened it's so sterile. Unfortunately, this is par for the course in the world of recreational fitness.

I always thought that fitness is about life. It's about how much life do you have and for how long you have it. We strive to get fit so we can have higher quantities of quality life. So, the (rhetorical) question that pops into my mind is why on earth do people go to such an inert place looking for ways to make them feel more alive?

It brings up interesting questions about how much does the environment that you choose to move for fitness in contributes to how well you succeed at getting fit. I've typically been critical of having a hyper-specific focus about the right workout location, or what most simply say: "I need a gym to work out at." I'll still stick by that. I think that being married to a gym stifles creativity to a degree and creates a groove for the practitioner to get stuck in. "I didn't work out because I couldn't get to the gym"... or something like that. When we look at the world as our gym, then we never have an excuse for not working out.

Still, I'll admit that there's some requirements of a space for a decent chance of succeeding at making working out regularly and getting into some sort of version of good shape.

I mentioned creativity. Clearly, a room full of machines dedicated to making you move in one, very specific manner after another doesn't inspire an open minded approach to working out. Maybe my strange mind is getting the better of me but I think that some of these bizarre objects passing off as training equipment are starting to look like medieval torture devices. Maybe that's partly because they're mimicking them by putting the user in one position, allowing only a predesigned movement, and breaking a body to pieces in the process.

Another thing that I've always appreciated about a decent area to work out is that it is a little imperfect, even a tad dirty. Life, at it's best, is often messy and dirty. Are our best memories of growing up the ones where we were freshly-showered and in our dress clothes? Isn't part of having some fun the ability to cut loose a little? What difference does everything being clean amount to when I'm working out? I'm just getting sweaty anyway. Perhaps that compulsive obsessively cleaned look of too many Mchealth clubs reeks of lack of focus on what's important: the moves! It's not necessary for the place to look like the place was bleached white with an atomic bomb to be a good workout location!

As far as I'm concerned, it's downright counter-productive. It would be hard to deduce that from many of the chosen places of sweat and strength, including the above-mentioned health club.

Then again, whenever I step into our society's idea of a health club, I feel like an alien getting off of a space ship. I've barely ever worked out in them in comparision to how long I've been doing this stuff regularly. So, perhaps my strange looks as I examine the places like this new gym are nothing more than a feeling of awkwardness. I'm simply out of place.

Something tells me that I'm not though. People herd, and get herded, into these places all of the time, thinking that they're going to get in shape. It happens all too rarely. Something needs to change, and the way that we arrange the surroundings just might be a sort of catalyst. So, I'm just going to leave you with some adorable pics of my new bundle of joy and I along these thoughts to ponder.

Really hard stuff to do with embarassingly little weight

So, now that I've got a barbell set, and presumably the keys to the ultimate in strength training so I can finally look like a strong guy, I can pile on some massive weight and get to work, right?

By now, you've got to know that I don't work like that. Even as I collect more stuff, I still keep my minimalistic mindset about things (even if it's not needed anymore) and ask myself how I can do more with less stuff? I do this for two reasons. First, It's always easier to work with more than less. That mentality has served me well over the years as I've moved to places that put restrictions on training. Second, I find some very interesting stuff stuff to do.

Disclaimer time: once again, I didn't come up with any of this stuff. I'm just passing along information. again.

Besides, in a subculture so constantly obsessed with how much iron they can make defy gravity, it's kind of fun to take a bitchy amount of weight and struggle like it was 500 lbs. I find that it's a good reminder not to rely on one method of progression...as my face winces in pain.

Saxon Bend
This one doesn't use the bar, only a plate. It's pretty simple to explain: put the weight overhead and bend at the spine. The trick is to keep thyself from shortening the movement... REALLY BEND TO THE SIDE. I do this with a 22.5 plate from my Ironmaster KB or a 25 lbs olympic plate. Either way, that long lever really makes that measly, little piece of iron really hurt muscle and ego alike. A nice combination with the Saxon bend is to squat with that plate arms-straight length away from the body, followed by a Saxon bend in each direction. You'll never be so happy to drop a single plate!

One Arm Barbell Curl(OABBC)
I would have never conceived that I would ever enjoy doing what is probably the most vain exercise in existence. I just wasn't trying the right variation. Lots of people do barbell curls with two hands. I got the idea from T-nation to try it with only one. All single-arm barbell stuff is kind of funky and this one is no exception. What's humbling about OABBC that the bar alone is plenty hard!

What makes this so nasty is the same thing that makes a lot of unilateral work suck so hard: everything's got to be tight. There's a lot of muscles that work with your arm in order to curl a weight, namely your Traps, upper-rear shoulder muscles, abs and glutes. Cheating is simply a way of moving the body so you don't have to use these supports as they fatigue.

You can kiss that goodbye on this one. You can't cheat it nearly as much as the two handed version. If you do, chances are good one end of the bar will hit the floor. At the very least, it will torque the shit out of the grip. Either option should be avoided. Stay tight and curl. Oh, and do I need to mention that this variant is hell on your forearms? Also, chalk is very, VERY helpful with this one!

Squatting Press
I saw this one a while ago, back when I started bent pressing. Anthony DiLuglio from Art of Strength put out the best tutorial (<---That's a hint, BTW) on how to do that lift that I've seen on Youtube. In that video, he showed how to do the squatting press too. It's a weird-ass thing to try. Start out with the bar at your chest and squat underneath it until your arms are straight. From that point, you've got two options: stand up with the weight overhead or keep the weight stationary while standing back up.

Have you been using the mirror to admire all of the muscles that attach to bottom of your scapula, obsessing over how to make them sexier so you can get girls? Well, if you haven't, and you try this one out, you're definitely going to regret that decision. While I can do more weight with this one than I can the other two, bitch-making movements, this one makes me feel like a complete loser. It's just really, fucking hard! I don't even dare to embarrass myself by putting out a picture of myself doing it with shitty form and such a small amount of weight I squat press with! This is along the lines of exercising in the nude: best kept to yourself until you look really good! Even then, it's not a great idea anyway.

So, if you've been walking around, flexing in front of mirrors excessively, thinking about how awesome you are because you can do 20 crossfit pull-ups and can bench press...whatever... lbs of iron then I've got news for you: YOU'RE NOT AWESOME! In fact, you probably downright suck!

What you need to do is cleanse the douchbag out of yourself and give one, or all, of these lifts a try!