Australian Story
I meet all kinds of people through this website. I hesitate to accept lots of Facebook friend requests (it’s getting harder to tell a creeper from his profile picture), but I’m glad I accepted Tom’s. Tom is an Australian, ginger version of Brent Kim. Except Tom is taller. And is nothing like Brent except for his internet trolling ability.

In any case, he told a compelling story on his Facebook status the other day. I deemed it good enough to share. Behold…

February 10 at 2:00am:
I got to the gym today and as I was walking to the door I saw a hawk fly across my path. I walked over to where he’d been and saw what was left of the rooster that used to reside in a pen next to the gym (R.I.P. Blacky). I walked in to the gym and started warming up.

February 10 at 2:03am:
Later on, I went to put some water in my shaker for my PWO Shake (2 scoops waxy maize, 1.5 scoops WPC) and noticed there was a little frog in the sink drain. I undid the u-bend and Australia’s strongest powerlifter took him from me and placed him in the little garden beside the entry. I went back in to finish my chins.

February 10 at 2:04am:
Finally, as I was getting ready to leave I was notified by another mate that a goanna had arrived and decided that Blacky’s remains looked to be a delicious meal. We all stood around for 5-10 minutes and watched a goanna eat his dinner. After this, I went and collected my gear and drove home.

The tone of this story makes me think of this video. Later in the comments, some guy (presumably Australian) said that it sounded like a Pokemon episode. Australia sounds interesting, no?

St. Patrick’s Day Sale
The 70’s Big Store is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by offering a 17% discount on orders $35 or more. Make sure to use the coupon codes:



Additionally, the “original logo” is now available on a green shirt so that you can look excessively manly while you get excessively drunk on March 17th. Win-win. Australians also celebrate St. Patty’s Day.

Question of the Day
Do you have any sweet lifting stories from a country not in north America?

I’m working on those “other projects”, and this post seemed extremely relevant. Courtney is 5’2″, 125 lbs, is from Reston, VA, and can deadlifted 332lbs. As they say around the interwebz, that’s “mega hawt”. Her goals for this year are to deadlift 350 and squat 275.

Here’s a video of her doing a 290 pound sled drag. She had 135 lbs. in bumpers on there, but it wasn’t heavy enough so her friend jumped on to make it 290. No big deal.



What we have here is a cute girl who deadlifts over 300 pounds, and wants to deadlift and squat more. Courtney said in her e-mail,

I hope you will share this on your site as I work to show women just how much fun strength training can be! Hopefully I will be making those lift goals in no time :)

Yes it’s true; stronger women are the best.

What have I got to say to those of you who aren’t significantly stronger than this girl? Step up your game, son.

I bet you perverts thought the title of this post was going to refer to something else. Typical.

You’re squatting your last set of five on your linear progression. You find yourself getting bent over a bit at the bottom of each rep; it happens regularly with hard or heavy sets. You hit rep number three and something tinkers in your back. Instantly the muscles seize around your lumbar spine and you dump the weight (on the pins, not your friend). What. The. Fuck. Happened?

I’ll tell you what happened; The Final Stroke.

If you’re like me, you wear flannel (Editor’s Note: If you’re like me, you pick your girlfriend up wearing flannel.). Flannel is perfect for cold weather, and it’s even more perfect for chopping wood. Chopping wood requires a tree that isn’t attached to the ground. The man-method of removing a tree from the ground is by chopping it. If you’ve read “Where the Red Fern Grows”, you can imagine what happens next: you chop the base of the tree with an axe until it falls. If you’re smart, you’ll get a good rhythm going; most of your strokes will be pretty equal to one another. The base of the tree will be chopped away, and eventually one of your even tempered strokes will fell the tree. It may take a thousand strokes, but it’s the final stroke — a stroke that isn’t any more significant than the other 999 — that brings the tree down.

This is the same thing that happens to your grandmother’s hip. She gets osteoporosis because she doesn’t regularly apply force to her bones, thus they don’t adapt to being stronger (ask Jack LaLanne if he ever fucking got osteoporosis). Grandma gets achy and has brittle bones. Eventually, she’ll step off the curb walking in the super market parking lot and will break her fucking hip. It’s not like stepping off the curb was a significantly higher stress than anything else she experiences on a regular basis. It’s that her bone was getting chopped at because it was so brittle, and the 1000th stroke finally landed. The Final Stroke is hardly ever more significant than the 999 before it, yet it’s the one that causes the biggest trauma.

To understand The Final Stroke, you need to look at the hundreds that occurred before. The Final Stroke is a regular event made irregular by inadequate preparation or by doing the wrong thing. The dude in the first paragraph didn’t screw up his third rep on his last set; he’s had some weird little form fault — in this case the “leaning over” thing — that has chopped away at some structures until finally, the structures gave away. This happens all the time. All the fucking time. Most training related injuries or mishaps occur because something wrong has been occurring for weeks, even months. The debilitating effects of a little form fault may not be felt until The Final Stroke.

Take notice of your knees coming in on the squat or shoving your head through when you lockout a press. Take notice of how you jerk the deadlift off the floor or how your pelvis shifts to the left in the squat descent. You don’t have to go out and McCarthy every exercise (half of you are now thinking, “Jesus Christ, is my pelvis even when I squat?”). I’m just saying, address those little form faults before increasing the weight. If you keep hacking away at them, you might have to eventually deal with The Final Stroke.

Atlanta Workshop – March 5th

The first 70’s Big Workshop of 2011 is scheduled for March 5th in Alphaertta, GA just north of Atlanta. This will mark version 3.0 of the workshop, and I’m busily working on improving the lectures, presentation, and material. The workshop consists of various lectures on strength training, yet will focus on programming for both strength and conditioning. We’ll have a laid back training session followed by a hearty dinner at a local restaurant (I’ll be drinking beer, too). If you are interested, then e-mail me at Justin@70sBig.com for sign up information. More details will be provided via the site and the Facebook Fan Page.

Debate

There was a debate raging yesterday on Facebook on whether pull-ups or chin-ups were superior. My stance has been that they are both equally important for shoulder strength and health because of the difference in the angle of the humerus. The chin-up (done with a supinated forearm) has the humerus pointed forward while the pull-up (done with pronated forearm) has the angle of the humerus anywhere from 45 degrees in front of the direction the torso is facing to perpendicular to the direction the torso is facing. The subtle difference will stress the various shoulder extensors differently, and thus both are equally important to maintaining and strengthening a healthy shoulder.

The debate raged with arguments of which had more musculature involved and which had more biceps involved. One party even repeatedly claimed chin-ups were “gay”. This study was even cited as research proof that biceps involvement isn’t all that different between a pull-up or chin-up (we’ll find why this study is very fucking irrelevant below). For your entertainment, I have provided my comments on the issue. I’ve left out the debate and mentioning the other participants on purpose so that they don’t have to deal with all of you stalking them like I do.

Comment 1:
1. Chin-ups aren’t gay.
2. Someone needs to make a compelling argument with a stellar mechanical analysis to point out that the lats are NOT extending the shoulders as well during the chin-up.
3. Neither chin-ups nor pull-ups are better th…an the other. They just are.
4. Both movements train the shoulder musculature differently because of the angle of the humerus when doing the movements.
5. Thus, they are both important

Comment 2:
Regarding that study, I have to pick it apart like I did in the writing assignment of my GRE:

1. Machines were used in the study, which has an irrelevant representation of a body weight controlled movement.
2. Machines also make the study ga…y.
3. The average weight of the MALES was 78.25kg (~172 lbs.). The average height was about 6′ tall. These “males” are pussies, and that makes the study gay.
4. Each “maximal voluntary contraction” test done with electrodes on the skin were three seconds of isometric contraction against an immovable object. Not only is this fucking irrelevant to real world training, but isometrics are gay.
5. They then used two reps of ten second isometric contraction at the completion of the movement for each exercise (exercises were wide grip pull down, reverse grip pull down, and two variations of the seated row). Again, the machines are irrelevant, but so are these measures. Gay.
6. Most importantly, there were only 12 subjects in this study. That can hardly be generalized to any population other than weak, pussy males, much less to everyone. Furthermore, the exercises that were used in the study are irrelevant to significant and effective training, so the point is moot anyway.
7. The majority of the people working on this study were from the undergraduate program, so the study and results aren’t that compelling anyway.

Comment 3:
I’m not mocking [the dude who posted the study] for citing the source, I’m mocking the fucking ineptitude in the Exercise Science community in studying irrelevant bullshit topics. Why even ask this as a research question? If you know anatomy, and do a mechanical analysis of how structures effect a movement — given the change in those structures relative to the joints and relative positioning to one another — then you can come to a pretty compelling conclusion without all this rhetorical bullshit. Furthermore, this line of study is so weak, nobody is gonna give a fuck to repeat the study, much less with varying populations. Even if we HAD seen a change in biceps involvement, or any other muscle involvement, we already know what does or doesn’t make a strong shoulder girdle. And even if we didn’t, it’s logical to work it from many different angles to ensure that the structures are as strong as they can be so that they can withstand the forces of other movements, whether they be lifting or otherwise.

But I guess you all are really focused on this topic because you don’t have fantastic biceps like me.

PR Friday

Post your training PR’s or updates to the comments. I am probably going to the beach this weekend, so you northerners can imagine me in a speedo as you tread through snow.

Donate
I started this site in September of 2009 and have aimed to entertain and educate readers. The site has existed completely for free during that span, and I hope you’ve gotten something out of it. Things are a little tight financially right now, so if you are willing to donate a few dollars via the PayPal button below, it would be very appreciated.
No donation is too small, and again, I appreciate it very much.

Projects
I’m working on some projects to further your education and entertainment. One version is a short podcast of interviews with various people, whether coaches or trainees. Another project is a writing project that will help at least 75% of you in how you program and train. New t-shirt designs will also be released today (I’ll update in this post) and completely new t-shirts will also be on the way. There’s a lot to be excited about if you’re a fan of 70’s Big.

In the mean time, amuse yourself with this video of Bjorn from Sweden:

Reality Shoveling & Cleans from Björn Uddenfeldt on Vimeo.

Question of the Day
What’s better: fried chicken or barbecued chicken?

New Shirts
There are two new shirts available on the 70’s Big Store. The first is a new version of the brown Throwback shirt, now reprinted in navy. It looks sexy.

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The second places the Reckless shirt on a red shirt — the color of blood and rage.

Both shirts, as well as all of the others, are available in standard heavyweight and American Apparel shirts. Be sure to check both pages on the STORE for all of the shirts.