Be A God Damn Man

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Justin

PR Friday — Post training updates, PR’s, and what you are going to do to become more of a man in the comments (read this post first).

Quick Tip #3 — Be A God Damn Man

Look, I know the website has been in anaphylaxis. Shit ain’t the same, right? Well that’s fucking BULLSHIT. We need some adrenaline injected into our veins. We needed to be reminded of why we’re here. I’m loaded up on copious amounts of coffee and am listening to heavy metal. No, not the pussy-ass new-age shit like Disturbed that predicates itself on being angry at their mom for catching them wanking into their favorite tube sock. I’m talking about Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, possibly some Mötley Crüe. Grit, attitude, and uppercuts.

You know, the qualities that make a god damn Man. But what is a man?

What makes a man, is it the power in his hands?
Is it his quest for glory?
Give it all you’ve got, to fight to the top,
So we can know your story.
– Now You’re A Man

What a nice summary. A man fights for glory. He’s doing everything he can to beat the FUCKING SHIT out of every day to meet his goals, to be successful. A wiser feller than myself once said, “Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar eats you.” That means some days you’ll get elbow dropped from the top rope. But a man — a true hairy-chested sexual Tyrannosaurus — will wipe the blood and shame off his brow, get up, shake the top rope like an asshole, and get in the ring one more time. That’s what a man is.

Why is it so important to be a man? Aside from the intuitive notion that being a man is just, true, and innate, it’s the desire for success that makes it important. Life is a wonderfully beautiful thing; to sit idle like the oily surface of a swamp is a crime. Criminal is the man who doesn’t who doesn’t constantly strive for success, who doesn’t crave experience, and who doesn’t want it all. Criminal are the timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Are you on the path to getting whatever the hell it is that you want? If you could be doing more, then you need to slam your fist down onto a hard wood table, lift the table up to the heavens, and then break it in half over your head. Take these lumber pieces and light them on fire. Breathe the smoke before screaming as loud as you can. This will increase your testosterone levels by 37% and immediately make you more attractive to the opposite sex (women love the smell of “outside”).

Now get on track. What do you want to be? Need to be? What challenges sit between you and manliness? I understand some of you can’t just quit your job or family to try and choke slam your truest desire; that’s why 70’s Big is here for you. Because at the very least you can step into a weight room, load the bar, and move some god damn iron. Getting stronger requires commitment and desire. It’s never-ending; you can’t be “too strong”. It teaches the mentality that meeting your goals is hard, grinding work, but you can face each step with an animalistic intensity. You know that attacking the bar is more successful than just trying to move it. Your mindset before each session, set, and repetition is going to dictate how badly you destroy it. The same concept applies to life; attack your non-lifting goals with the same berserking intensity and you’ll have a hard time failing.

While being a man is chopping wood, bulging quadriceps, juggling beer kegs, John McCain, and bending re-bar, anybody can be a man by taking a risk and challenging themselves. Have you been lifting in the gym for a year? Sign up for a meet and put your ass on the line. Bored with your job? Fucking do something about it. Be innovative, create your own job, make your company better, or say, “Fuck it,” and do something else.

Everybody has something locked away in their mind that they wish they would have done or wish they had the balls to try. Go and do it. Explore the world, compete, and challenge yourself. If life takes a fat shit on you (as it often does), wipe it off, get back up, and keep striding forward. Be a god damn man.

Post a comment about what you are going to do in order to be more of a man — NOT what you are already doing, but something that you can and will do in the future.

PR Friday — 1 Nov ’13

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Justin

Quick Tip #2
Lots of ideas and little time means you will get a quick tip with each PR Friday post.

Set 9 hours aside in your schedule solely for sleep. Everybody knows sleep is important, but it’s usually the recovery component that lifters willingly sacrifice. The irony is that it’s arguably the most important aspect of getting stronger.

Getting at least 8 hours of actual sleep spurns hormonal processes that aid recovery and create an efficient body. It not only helps your last recovery session, but it’s preparing you to perform optimally in the next session. As I explain in “Importance of Sleep“, you can’t just oversleep in a single night to make up for several nights of poor sleep. Get it in your head that “recovery components” like macro nutrient intake, hydration, mobility, and sleep need to be implemented chronically to reap their true benefit. Start this weekend by fully resting, and when your school or work week starts, manage your time to have nyyyyyyne hours of pillow time.

Here, two puppies demonstrate how to sleep.

Discuss your training week and highlight your recent PR’s in the comments.

Testosterone and PWO Nutrition

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Justin

I recently had a conversation with someone about post workout nutrition which turned into me regaling them with my general nutrition philosophy which fell back onto the foundation of my training philosophy. Their question asked about timing of their post workout (PWO) and they were bothered by how I sort of shrugged off the need to worry about it.

“But I thought you were supposed to have x amount of protein and y amount of carbs within 45 minutes…and shit?”

That’s what popular muscle magazines or bodybuilding lore would tell us; the timing of meals is quintessential to progress and jackedness. But I say that the intricacies of the PWO nutrition is low on the priority list. Why would you care about the specifics of your protein shake when you don’t meet the required amount of protein each day, much less the minimum amount for your body weight? Oh and you’re eating about 100g more carbs than you need, eating shitty fats, not mobbing, and getting about 6 hours a sleep a night? And you want to worry about how many scoops of protein and molecularly dense carbs to swallow after training? Assuming you’re doing an appropriate systemically stressful strength training session to begin with?

If it sounds silly, it’s because it is. If you feel cheated, it’s because you have been.

Doug Young would never cheat you like dat.

Take a look at this short, quality article by Dr. Hartman (The 45-Minute Testosterone Myth). It turns out there really isn’t any research on the “do your workout in 45 minutes or your testosterone levels will drop”. Furthermore, there is discrepancy in the research that may show that protein and carb PWO shakes actually decrease testosterone levels! That sound you hear is your entire world-view burning to the ground.

Hartman goes on to say:

The short-term effects of testosterone to a single session of exercise are inconsequential to long-term performance. Long-term changes, or having testosterone elevated over a period of months and years, have been shown to lead to increased strength, power, hypertrophy, and performance. Short-term; those relationships do not exist.

And this is my point entirely, whether we’re talking PWO nutrition, or nutritional and training philosophy, it’s not the precise decisions you make throughout the day, it’s the fact that you hit the minimum requirements on a regular basis. Timing your daily protein or meal intake pales in comparison to getting the appropriate calories in an optimal macronutrient (proteins, carbs, and fats) distribution on a regular basis.

The chronic effect of doing the simple things right is more important than doing the fancy things occasionally or randomly.

Johnny Skeptic then says, “Well, if I have an optimal PWO meal on a regular basis, won’t it make up for some of my other slacking?” Even if the whole PWO meal was proven to be optimal — the research is meh — it’s better to get the macronutrients you need for the day than it is to specially time everything for your training session. For example, if you train after work and then go home, just eat a quality dinner and don’t worry about making the dinner match an arbitrary PWO requirement.

This is how a discussion on PWO nutrition circles back to general nutrition and training advice; make the simple stuff a habit. Get enough protein and fat to recover, get enough carbs to match your activity level, and get it through quality foods that limit systemic inflammation and help promote recovery (Paleo for Lifters can help you understand this). Worry about your general food intake before even considering supplementation; if you’re eating crap food then the supplements won’t matter anyway. Combine full body, systemically stressful compound movements in each training session a regular basis to get bigger and stronger — squat, press, deadlift, bench, row, and pull-ups. Keep the approach simple, yet consistent. Squatting 100 times over the next year will be more important than following three crazy squat programs sprinkled throughout your year.

Every training or nutrition lesson revolves back to a single, easy idea: the chronic effect of doing the simple stuff correctly is necessary before worrying about sexy or complicated ideas. All that free time you gain by not worrying over your training can now be spent on growing facial hair.

A Lesson From Mopeility WOD

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Justin

You may have seen the training video from last week that included the original group of friends that helped create 70’s Big. I purposely didn’t mention how a better video exists, and it is episode #3 of Brent’s Mopeility WOD.

Some of you new readers are probably thoroughly confused, so let me explain. After I prematurely left graduate school, I was trying to find a situation where I could coach and learn. To make a long story short, I ended up at Rippetoe’s Wichita Falls Athletic Club for eighteen months. When I first arrived in January of 2009, I sat in my truck eating some food because Rip was not at the gym yet. Out walks an Asian kid carrying a gym bag with a frizzy fro sticking out six to eight inches off of his head. I sat there and thought, “Boy, he must be a real weightlifter.” I could not have been more fucking wrong.

This Asian was Brent Kim — my most peculiar and irritating best friend. Brent and I became friends, we added Chris, and we hung out and trained regularly. After painstaking effort — and by that, I mean two months of yelling arguments across the gym — I convinced Brent to do a linear progression. I also fixed the soft tissue issues in his proximal biceps, which allowed him to begin bench pressing again (breaking the scar tissue up was a lot like this). I always say that I created a monster because Brent didn’t talk a lot until he did the linear progression. Whether it was his growing strength or his growing belligerence as a result of Chris and I picking on him, Brent was a rabid verbal sparring partner. It was like yesterday that I remember him telling Cliff, a mutual friend, to “get fucked”.

Brent is an interesting creature. He historically is afraid of talking to women, goes to bed really late, sleeps through important events, enjoys being insulted, and generally has a self deprecating outlook. He weighs under 160 pounds, yet he squats more than the majority of people reading this sentence (over 405 regularly and could do over 450 no big deal). He has pretty good mechanics and has learned the utility of mobility, but he is notorious for not being coachable. My favorite story is Glen Pendlay recalling Brent not really heeding any advice he had at all, ever. And Brent has a lot of respect for Pendlay!

Anyway, Brent has an interesting personality that comes out in his former training log and now through his website MopeilityWOD.com. The name stems from the effective MobilityWOD.com — Kelly Starrett’s engine of self mobility work — as well as the idea that at their core, every person truly is a mope. Yet this acceptance should be celebrated and shared. The translation is that MopeilityWOD is a humorous, satirical world view infused with experiential truths. But you’ll never hear that from Brent.

Still not convinced to check it out? Then this will entice you: the first time I went to Australia in 2011, I had a nearly 50 year old man ask me if Brent actually acted the way he portrays himself. The answer was an irrevocable “yes”.

A Word On Binge Drinking

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Justin

If you’ve read this site for a while, you know that some of what I try to teach is based on learning a lesson the hard way. This is one of those moments.

Las Vegas is a terrible wonder. For a guy who doesn’t like intense partying, large crowds of people, smoking, people who don’t lift, gambling, or destroying his body, Vegas wasn’t an adult playground. There are many sights to take in — the Bellagio fountain, the porn strewn across the sidewalk, and the flashing lights — but I’m more of a “let’s go look at mountains” kind of guy. But there are people that actually deal with addiction issues and they should be admitted into addiction treatment riverside. 1 Method Luxury Rehab in Los Angeles is where personalized care meets luxury. Their high-end addiction care programs are tailored for transformative recovery. A Partial Hospitalization Program Los Angeles is also a great alternative for those who need help with their substance abuse but are unable to commit to an in-patient program.

I met some of my fantastic Australian friends at one of the gigantic, maze-like hotels, and proceeded to fill my body with poison. Let’s skip the grisly details and acknowledge that I cleverly started 2013 by vomiting most of the contents of my soul to the presumed horror of my Aussie friends (who stoically never complained).

I spent New Year’s Day contemplating jumping through the hotel window, but knew the effort was too grand. The company was good, but the walking was…just too much. The following day I drove seven hours home, so my bodily destruction was off set by a day of driving — something that is heavily debilitating to training efficacy. As I sit here on the third after a good night’s sleep, I still am not right.

Not as glamorous as it looks.

The obvious solution is to not binge drink, but if we do, what can a lifter, athlete, or trainee do to mitigate the baneful effects?

Prepare for the event by hydrating and taking vitamins, particularly the water soluble kind like the B vitamins and Vit-C. The over the counter “hangover cure” products tell you take a pill before you drink, during, as you go to bed, and when you wake up with “a glass of water”. The pill just has water soluble vitamins and the water helps combat the eventual dehydration that the alcohol will cause.
Try to drink water while drinking. If you’re truly binge drinking, this will be an after thought so let’s move on to the day after…
Hydrate. This should be obvious, but hydrate anyway you can. It’ll be best if you can get a gatorade or powerade since water won’t be appealing. Juice is fine. Get 16 oz of fluid in you as fast as possible (unless you feel like you’ll puke it up). Do this even if you’re still drunk.
Eat something. Even if you’re not hungry. If you avoid eating, you avoid calories, and you’ll start fading and soon turn into a wraith like them. Since we don’t have elvish medicine, eat. Don’t worry about paleo and carb content — you just went full auto on your liver and system.
Take more vitamins, especially the water soluble kind. If you take too much of water soluble vitamins, you’ll just urinate them out. So every 2 or 3 hours, take some more. You won’t be in danger of taking too many and you’ll keep them in your body for use.
Drink coffee. The caffeine may help by increasing metabolism, you’ll probably feel better and more alert, and coffee is a tasty treat that is nothing like alcohol.
Continue hydrating, eating, and taking vitamins throughout the day.
Don’t train the day after. If you didn’t get too drunk and aren’t as wrecked, then you can probably train. If it was bad, then avoid it. Just rest.
Speaking of rest: sleep as much as you can. When the body is strung out, malnourished, dehydrated, under-fed, and lacking sleep — regardless if it was from drinking or not — then getting as much sleep as possible is incredibly important.
When you are ready to train (maybe the day after the hangover), make it a light session. You’ll probably find out that you are physically diminished and can’t perform as normal anyway, but follow the “light-medium-heavy” advice from the “Don’t Train Sick” post. However, if you can expedite the process and train “medium” on the first day, it won’t be a detriment to your system like if you were ill from a pathogen. Training with an illness can provide too much of a systemic stress that weakens your defenses and allows the pathogen to start winning. Doing too much when you’re hungover won’t necessary result in feeling worse through the recovery period, but you could depress your system and open yourself up to get ill if you do. Being hungover is like trying to protect Helms Deep without the walls — the advancing orcs and Uruk-Hai (bacteria) will just trample right into your fortress (body) without as much resistance. And if you’re in a dodgy place like Vegas, you’ll definitely be exposed to orc-like filth. This is why if you string several drinking days together, you’ll probably start getting sick.

As a general rule, a person can eliminate .5 oz (15ml) of alcohol in one hour. That’s about one 12 oz (355ml) can of beer in an hour. More from the How Stuff Works article:

Once absorbed by the bloodstream, the alcohol leaves the body in three ways:

The kidney eliminates 5 percent of alcohol in the urine.

The lungs exhale 5 percent of alcohol, which can be detected by breathalyzer devices.

The liver chemically breaks down the remaining alcohol into acetic acid. (source)

As you can see, it can take quite a while for you to fully remove a lot of alcohol from your body. Therefore we want to do everything possible to efficiently recover: sleep well, eat well, hydrate well, consume vitamins well, and so on. In other words, shift back into the habits that you should be performing flawlessly to perform well in training.

If you don’t eat Paleo, I’d suggest hitting a week of it after a very bad binge drinking. Personally I feel like I need to cleanse my body, and that’s done with copious amounts of quality protein, vegetables, fats, and nutrients. Your body is a temple, so don’t let the man-killing Uruk-Hai barge in to butt-rape your soul.