I don’t know what the hell you’re doing looking at a website on Thanksgiving, but I’ll provide you a beard of the day. Otherwise, simply comment your weight gains. And enjoy the holiday (and four days in a row of football).
Socrates was the original troll
Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday. It is a convoluted, weird interpretation of something that didn’t really happen in American history. It’s clear what has actually happened, and I will recount the sequence of events here.
70’s Big is an idea that started in early 2009 and developed into a website by September of the same year. Currently the site easily averages over 3,000 visitors a day. Instead of being concerned with number of readers, 70’s Big is more concerned with establishing a paradigm. Burly men and strong women go forth and take on risks and difficult challenges with fervor in their hearts. They learn this ability through the grueling battles with steel, iron, and gravity. Guts and courage are built through toil; they don’t simply appear at birth.
Alas! Food becomes an important part of this journey of self realization. It is fuel for the body so that the mind can push through each lesson. A man requires a hearty bounty, not egg whites and squash. And thus Thanksgiving was born.
“Bah! Thanksgiving hath endured for centuries; how hath 70’s Big birthed the Great Giving of Thanks?” A valid question, yet the reality is that Thanksgiving has not always existed. There was a time in an alternate universe in which Thanksgiving did not exist while all other things remained constant. The idea of 70’s Big was infectious upon the world as it grew into a dominant way of thinking. Society no longer bitched about being offended and the fame of celebrities waned to that of my big toe. It was a wonderful society that lived through the ages. Several millenia from now, the governing body decided to honor the inception of its way of thinking. Their solution: travel back in time and establish a holiday in which eating a hearty, complete meal was emphasized and glorified. The governing body sent their agents back in time to manipulate such a holiday. In a vain attempt to cloak their true identity, the time travelers showed up in black pilgrim costumes while others showed up as bare skinned Indians. The ruse worked to perfection because the public ate it up, and the Thanksgiving Feast was born.
70’s Big has been preceded by decades of proper eating, a testament to proper planning by the Time Travelers to ensure that skinny people have experienced good eating habits before starting their quest to 70’s Big. “Hard gainers” no longer have shitty excuses as to why they can’t gain weight, because they have done it correctly on at least one day of every year of their lives! Manliness is a choice, and Thanksgiving is as good a place as any to start.
The Thanksgiving Eating Challenge
Now that we have the origin of Thanksgiving out of the way, we can focus on the readers who have chosen Manliness over helplessness; Boldness over cowardliness; and strong over weak. I challenge all of you to an eating contest. We can’t really argue over subjective interpretations of how much you “actually ate”, so instead we’ll measure it by weight gained. You will need to weigh yourself before your feast, and then again after your feast (if you feast throughout the day, then weigh yourself at the end). You will also need to wear the same clothes throughout the day (i.e. wear the same stuff in your pre/post weighing). This would be a proper time to wear your 70’s Big shirt, since it’s our national holiday. Whoever gains the most weight will win a t-shirt. We are probably going to need video or picture evidence of your weigh-ins. This will cut back on cheating, even though it can still happen — don’t be a jackass. On Thanksgiving Day we’ll post our results to the comments.
Good luck to you all, and don’t forget to give thanks to the Time Travelers.
Today is Veteran’s Day, Remembrance Day, or Armistice Day depending on where you live in the world. I’m sure you’ll see events on television or experience moments of silence. I’ll ask two things of the American readers:
1. Remember the the cost of creating our country. While this is a stereotypical sentiment, consider the individual sacrifices it took to have a country of our own. Freedom from tyranny was worth dying for and it was worth the struggle to create a republic with individual rights and opportunity.
2. Consider the individual sacrifice it took all those years ago in a rebellious fight for freedom. Now look at the image above and think about every single battle that has been fought since to preserve that freedom, that way of life. Wars and battles occur for a multitude of reasons, but the men and women who lead this country chose war and violence in order to protect and preserve our freedom (even if that reason only made up a small part of that decision). The sacrifice doesn’t lie with the country, but the individual and his family. You can read the book 1776 by David McCullough to read about the sacrifices of George Washington and his band of starving farmers. You can read Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose to read the story of how Dick Winters and Easy Company fought and survived through World War II. Nowadays you can go to any base or post throughout the country and see the personnel who continue the, for lack of a better term, tradition of upholding our freedom. These are Americans who have chosen to not only risk their lives, but ironically give up their own freedom to a country that aims to preserve liberty. The real hero in America is the mother who holds steady with two children while her husband deploys halfway around the world. The real hero is the husband who kisses his daughters one last time as he he leaves for his year long PCS in Korea. The Americans serving in the military and their families bear the individual sacrifice of preserving freedom so that you don’t have to think about it. And that’s what makes them heroes.
Today think of the past and think of the present. Place your politics aside and be thankful that these people exist, and they always will.
My Halloween was low key with beer and football, but there were some folks that dressed up for the occasion. Here are some amusing photos.
70's Big Day at 423 S&C
Pumpkin: A+, Face: F
Edit: Today is PR Friday too. Weight lifted, body weight gained, food eaten, etc. Post a PR to the comments.
Yesterday I mentioned a program that is a nice combination of barbell training and conditioning (there was not an emphasis on explaining the conditioning, but I digress). Today I want to highlight a very basic novice program that will not only help a novice to increase their strength, but their performance in the Olympic lifts as well. It looks like this:
Monday — Clean and jerk (heavy), Snatch (light)
Tuesday — Squat, Press, Chin-ups
Wednesday — OFF
Thursday — Snatch (heavy), Clean and Jerk (light)
Friday — Squat, Bench Press, Deadlift
The basic idea is that the Olympic lifts are done before the strength workouts so that there is not fatigue for the Olympic lifts. I like to put clean and jerks at the beginning of the week because after having the weekend to rest, the novice lifter should be able to consistently drive the weight up on this lift. The deadlift is done at the very end of the week because I do not want it to interfere with any of the Olympic lifting done earlier in the week.
The key here is that this is a novice program. It will not work for someone who has a more advanced state of adaptation because the days start to interfere with each other (for example, the pressing done on Tuesday will interfere with Thursday’s snatch workout). This set up works well with trainees who are learning the Olympic lifts as well as younger athletes who are still able to adapt to stress on a daily basis. If you guys remember the video of Bryan squatting 495x5x3 (and he has since done 505x5x3), he is on this particular program along with having two minor league practice sessions a week. A trainee will not be able to handle this workout for very long because eventually the stress will become to high to recover from.
Keep that in mind, because this will only work with certain people. We have been tinkering with it at the WFAC for about five months, and this should allow the novice to learn the lifts, and increase everything on a weekly basis. Certain days will require one of the Olympic lifts to be done light, and this should be taken seriously. Ten singles in the clean and jerk done every two minutes or 15 singles in the snatch done every minute would work well for the light workout. The key is to consistently practice good technique and the weight lifted is totally irrelevant. The slow lifts can be increased in a similar manner to the linear progression. Again, this is all dependent on the individual, so use your brain, or hopefully your coach uses his.
Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. If some of this post does not make sense, it is because I have been playing pool and drinking for a few hours in my mom’s basement. Sue me.
———-
And here is an impromptu Merry Christmas from a few of us fellows at the WFAC dicking around:
Notice AC’s laugh at the end.