Yesterday I told you to enjoy your holiday break, but to reflect on 2013’s training. Now I want to hear what it is you accomplished. Though PR Fridays have been less frequent, they historically provide a venue to talk about your own weekly improvement or personal records. Let’s face it, sometimes your wife (husband?) or co-workers just don’t give a shit or understand what it’s like to get a 10 lb deadlift PR, so sharing it with other lifters nets an appropriate response.
Look back over 2013 and think about what you accomplished. Did elevate your training to the next level? Did you compete? Did you experience any injuries? Let us know how it went. Training is intimately related with what else is going on in your life, so recap the non-training part of your life. Did you get married (I did), graduate, or get a new job? All of these things effect your training but also count as leveling up in life.
Lifting isn’t just something we do because we love it; we need to do it. It’s the great leveler, the thing that brings you back to reality or reminds you how progress requires blood and sweat. The lessons under the bar have direct application in life’s success; let us know how training has influenced your life in 2013.
‘Tis the season of hanging out, drinking coffee out of a mug with a bear’s face on it, wearing a flannel robe, and watching the final season of Breaking Bad. Christmas holidays usually give us a chance to slow down and breathe before the new year. And that’s perfectly fine; you’ve earned it (or at least pretended to). Use this time to hydrate, sleep a lot, and eat a lot of meat; rest and digest, homie. I’d also recommend getting outside to explore, build a fire, and shoot things, but in the biz we call that a digression.
But as you sit there taking a dump and reading “How To Survive in the Woods”, take a few seconds to reflect on the past year’s training. Every January 70’s Big puts out a post called “Letter of Intent Day” that asks you to figure out what you want to accomplish in the coming year. Did you accomplish what you wanted to this year? What could you have done better? What physical attributes need work? By getting your shit together now, you’ll have prepped for January’s Letter of Intent.
Do yourself the favor of taking your vitamins, eating your protein, and resting nine hours a night while you have time off. It’ll at least help your hangover, but it’ll prep you for next year’s training. Happy Holidays, but get your shit together.
I remember doing about 12 to 15 maximal reps between snatch, clean and jerk, and front squat a few years ago, and I was tired halfway into it. After the initial warm-ups, I would amp myself up for the maximal sets using imagery and cue words; purely psychological. I’ve increased my heart rate 50 beats per minute doing this while sitting in a chair using these methods (the pulse was obtained with a pulse oximeter).
It’s easy to intuitively know that “getting amped” can tire you out, but what is physiologically going on? Why is it tiring to do a lot of high intensity lifting? Or even high intensity conditioning workouts (as in CrossFit)? We can start by understanding epinephrine and norepinephrine (aka adrenaline and noradrenaline).
Chris uses epinephrine because it tastes good
Typically epinephrine and norepinephrine are secreted by the adrenal medulla, a part of the adrenal gland that sits on the kidney, but norepinephrine is also a neurotransmitter released by neurons in the sympathetic nervous system. There are lots of smart words here, but the sympathetic nervous system is summed up as the “fight or flight” response while the parasympathetic takes care of “rest and digest”. Both are necessary for sex, or at least good sex, but I digress.
These hormones are amino acid based, which means they are water soluble and therefore not fat soluble. If you can remember back to your basic biology days, cellular walls are made out of a phospholipid bilayer. In other words, cell walls are made out of fats and cholesterol — which is a mega huge raging reason you need to eat quality fats in your diet, but that’s another digression.
Anyway, epinephrine is not fat soluble, so it can’t just pass through cell walls. Instead, it attaches on receptors on the cellular membrane and creates a chain of reactions inside that cell; a process called a cascade. This cascade can change a lot of stuff going on in a given cell from just a little bit of epinephrine, and that’s why it’s effective; lots of change from just a little amount.
The primary effects of dumping epinephrine and norepinephrine into your body are increased heart rate and blood pressure (via vasoconstriction, or narrowing of specific blood vessels), increasing respiratory rate (via bronchodilation, or making lung airways bigger), increasing blood flow to muscles (via vasodilation), increasing blood sugar levels by breaking down stored glycogen in the liver, and lastly, increasing nearly every cell’s metabolism and burning glucose and breaking down proteins and fats.
Well fuck, there’s a lot going on there. Basically it preps the body for some sort of intense event, like uppercutting a predator or running from prison rape (but you can’t escape; it’s prison!). The part we are more concerned with is cellular metabolism. Burning glucose and breaking down proteins and fats means getting substrates ready for lots of action, but it isn’t sustainable. These macronutrients are stored in special ways, but they need to be broken back down to be used, which uses energy. After the event, you have consumed lots of energy and don’t have stores left, so you feel tired.
Imagine doing this every single workout multiple times a week until further notice; it’s metabolic madness. Do you understand now why doing CrossFit six days a week or lifting with a high frequency and intensity isn’t sustainable without performance enhancement drugs?
Furthermore, imagine if this cascade happened routinely from psychological and emotional stress. It’s easy to see why people use the term “adrenal fatigue”. Call it whatever you want, but getting stressed physically or emotionally is the same and it messes with your body. Understanding one little cog called epinephrine in the giant metabolic machine can show us how too much exposure can be debilitating. Or at the very least you know why you’re so damn tired after amping up in training or competition.
Four years ago one of the founding principles of 70’s Big was to reset the idea of body image in society. At the time, CrossFit was fairly “anti-strength training” — evidenced by HQ’s proclamation that focused strength training wasn’t necessary AND rejecting an article I wrote detailing how the “CrossFit Wichita Falls Program” (a program I wrote while at Rippetoe’s WFAC; I refer to it as “The S&C Program” now) made all of my trainees very much stronger while increasing their CrossFit performance. I was told it didn’t contain “measurable, repeatable data”, which it did, but that is neither here nor there.
It was thought that the “workout of the day” was enough to increase performance and that structured programming was unnecessary and less effective. Let’s ignore these stupid fucking points and focus on the result: it was more popular to only do met-cons, and most CrossFit guys were lean and small. 70’s Big was a kind of “fuck that” to CrossFit and bodybuilding and focused on the “big because you’re strong” look. Long story short, I give less of a shit about how people train, so long as they do it intelligently and efficiently…which almost always means they should strength train.
The 70’s Big mentality is focused on strength, muscularity, healthiness, and being jacked because of it. When I hear bullshit about women thinking they need to lose weight in order to have “the gap” (which Mike and I talked about it in 70’s Big Radio Episode 15), or how young girls think they need to weigh a certain amount to “fit in” with their friends, it drives me fucking crazy.
As long as civilized society exists, people will be concerned with conforming to it. I have no god damn idea why it’s so important, but to some people it is. I’ve spent most of my life trying to do the opposite, and hopefully I can help others think the same way. It seems to me that one of the barriers in doing what you want to do instead of what others want you to do is self-confidence. Lifting weights, getting bigger, faster, and stronger can develop confidence. I’ve seen it in kids, teenagers, young adults, and older folks. Society is fucking weak. Most people get comfortable with something and stick with it. Then they feel chained to it because they think they can’t do anything else. They lack the confidence in themselves to make it happen.
Yet lifting weights can give people a little kick in the B-hole. They work their ass off to achieve a goal, and they realize that they can do something that previously seemed impossible. One thing is to avoid lifting with good prep. And to take good care of your nails, you may check out essentials for acrylic nail art here.
When Chris was deadlifting mid 400s for reps, and he said, “I want to deadlift 600×5,” I thought it was kind of far-fetched. But the mother fucker trained his dick off every. god. damn. week. And you know what? He eventually did it (watch the vid and read about the journey; learn about the program to the right).
I’d like to think that people who lift have a different understanding and expectation of what is sexy and healthy, just like this ideal remote vibrator. I’d like to think that a woman who lifts doesn’t give a shit about “the gap”, which I don’t even understand. Why would a guy think a space between skin is sexy? How did a bunch of weirdo-neck-beards on the internet popularize this? Some piece of shit in his cubicle at work has power over a young girl’s mind — this is truly the future. Furthermore, why do girls think they need to be skinny to have “the gap”? You take most chicks, including those with muscular legs from squatting and deadlifting, bend her over, and she’s probably going to have a gap (Note: only try this if you have female compliance). It’s called the subpubic angle, and women have a wider pelvic opening because they need to be able to drop a watermelon-sized child out of their pelvis. This is of course a BIG fucking digression since a space between thighs is not fucking sexy anyway; it’s probably the fact that there is a vagina sitting right above it. Let’s call a spade a spade; dudes like seeing lady parts and the gap has nothing to do with it.
The internet is a mob, and the mob has power. I’m here to be the sniper on the clock tower picking off the mob’s leaders. The gap is a shit-head development from the mob. Instead, aesthetically confused girls (or boys) should focus on strength training and health with the byproduct of sexiness. I’ve discovered something incredibly important. Since I have that aforementioned narcissism self-confidence, I named it after myself.
This information was garnered from a series of observations in repeated experiments in which the result is always the same. Of course there are other variables that are important, like conditioning (i.e. cardiovascular and respiratory training), other lifts or exercises that can fit into the “strength” equation, or other variables that define health like hydration or supplementation, but this is a simplified look at the law. It states that if you put these variables together, the result is sexiness.
Not to insult your intelligence, but notice there isn’t anything in there about “losing weight” or even “gaining weight”. There isn’t anything about “being able to see through someone’s legs while their feet are together”. There isn’t anything about seeing beads of oil accumulating on rippled abs. There isn’t even an opportunity to leave your sexiness up for interpretation, even to yourself. Most importantly, there is nothing in this equation that indicates someone outside of you has any control over your sexiness.
This is a monumental point; a fucking fat weirdo fapping onto his keyboard does not define what your sexiness is. Your friends do not provide a comparison to derive your hotness. People in your demographic group (i.e. gender and age) do not define your attractiveness. I’m not even giving you false hope in saying that your mindset determines your sexiness! There are fat people out there who think they are da bomb, but we all know they aren’t, so I’m not going to bullshit you into thinking you can look however you want yet feel like sexual god. I’m giving you an absolute, measurable way to determine your sexiness. How strong are you? How consistent is your training? How well do you eat (learn more to the right)? How well do you sleep? This is all quantifiable and can be recorded with any effort or OCD. If you’re gonna have a complex about your aesthetics, let it be a healthy one. Frisbee your weight scale out the window and tell the people that try to influence your body, clothes, or style to go fuck themselves. You’ll be free; you’ll be in control. Implement Lascek’s Law, because, like me, it’s never fucking wrong.
I’ve been super fucking busy, so the podcast is the only real content this week. That being said, this is the best podcast I’ve ever recorded. I suggest giving it a listen for five or ten minutes. Let me know if uploading them to YouTube would be more accessible. Enjoy. Please donate to the Movember team!
Intro and Rant
14:00 – Peanut butter sandwiches
18:00 – Melanichev, the man
19:30 – Books you should read
– How to improve “upper back rounding” when squatting
31:00 – Nihilism; it’s exhausting
33:20 – Can you ever show off too much quad?
34:50 – Zombie Apocalypse, would the 70’s Big crew survive? What skills do they have?
40:20 – Outer pec injury rehab
45:40 – Five Guys or In-N-Out?
50:00 – Close grip benching in a linear progression?
52:00 – Kalle Beck loves himself.
53:50 – Elbow pain while low bar squatting…
58:50 – Knee wrap protocol?
61:05 – Mobility for squat sessions
– Paleo for Lifters question; lose fat, keep muscle
Search “70′s Big” on iTunes or listen/download HERE. Subscribe with your RSS app HERE.
