Zach Update

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Justin

The internet is such a goofy place. I have a friend here at the gym who has gained 78 pounds in the time that he has been here. He walked in one night at 164 pounds and said he wanted to get bigger and stronger. Usually you don’t know if a guy like that is serious or not, yet I taught him the lifts and gave him the low down on eating. He has gained lots of weight and a decent amount of strength, yet there are people on the internet who refuse to believe this. I don’t know, maybe they think Rippetoe is lying, as if fabricating a fake story about a guy gaining a lot of weight is something that he is into.

In any case, here is the data. Rip, an experienced bodyfat caliper user (he has owned a gym for 30+ years), did a 7 site pinch test on Zach to measure his bodyfat. Here is the data (you can find Rip’s post about it here):
Note: The following is a comparison of the progress Zach has made in the last 15 weeks. He has been lifting here for about six months.

Zach Evetts
March 1, 2010
Bodyweight: 242
Bodyfat % measured at 7 skinfold sites (equation detailed below): 20.95%
LBM: 191.29 lbs.
Bodyweight increase in 15.4 weeks: 25 lbs
191.29 – 177.07 = 14.22 lbs. LBM increase
14.22/25 = 56.8% of gain as LBM, .92 lb./week

Equation: 1.112 – .00043499(x) + .00000056(x^2) – .0028826(age) = body density

(4.57/body density – 4.142)100 = Bodyfat %
Skinfold total: 162mm, 7 sites measured and marked

Equipment used: Lange Skinfold Caliper (Cambridge Scientific)

Here are some pictures of him at his current body weight.

Zach has gained almost 80 pounds, and right under 60% of that is muscle. If he wanted to, he could lose the bodyfat that he currently holds, but the last I heard, he was pushing towards 275. The conversation went like this a few months ago,
“So what are your goals?” I asked.
“Other than getting stronger, I dunno. I guess I’ll weigh 275.”
“Cool.”

Zach is not unhealthy right now. Sure, the larger he gets, the harder it will be to complete endurance efforts, but endurance efforts are not a measure of health. Eating to grow for x amount of time is not going to negatively affect long-term health. Furthermore, eating in a manner that skinny people consider “un-clean” when you are training hard will not produce health complications in a normal person.

But a very important point is that the first time Zach ever benched 225 or squatted 300, he did it for a set of five. And that is what matters to him.

How Did You Start?

Posted on March 3, 2010 by Justin

“Ah, a boy. I don’t work with the males, because I used to be one.”

Everybody has a point in which they started lifting weights or training (keep in mind that lifting weights does not necessarily mean that you are training). Back when I was a wee lad, I had the inspiration of wanting to have larger muscles after watching wrestling on TV. I look back now and consider it a bit weird that my mom was okay with my brother and I watching a show where men ran around oiled up in their underwear hugging each other — but hey, I turned out all right.

In any case, that was my original inspiration — to be big like the guys on TV. I started messing around with a dumbbell in 6th or 7th grade, mainly doing copious amounts of curls. I had stopped playing baseball at around ten years old and primarily played basketball…badly. I was pretty good at boxing people out, and that is about it. In eighth grade I was more or less recruited to play football, and we would go lift at the high school a few times a week, and this is where I knew I belonged. In my years of high school I loved getting stronger, and I always did. Every time we would max out I would put at least 30 or 40 pounds on my squat (high bar) and increase my favorite lift, the power clean– it was a glorious feeling.

And this is how I got into learning how to lift and learning how to teach people to lift. By the time I was a junior, I was teaching my teammates and continued to help out others in the weight room. I would go on to play a year of football at a very, very small college, and then after I quit that I had a few years of feeling lost in the gym. For a while I worked out in the same way I did in high school, then it shifted into more of a bodybuilding approach (with squatting — I never stopped squatting). After getting very bored and very annoyed with this, I messed around with CrossFit for half a year and got good at that…meaning I was just faster than other people at exercising.

I bought Rip’s books and combed through them multiple times and immediately started implementing it and teaching it to friends (I was a personal trainer, and then co-owned a small CrossFit). Then, in January of 2009, I ended up here in Wichita Falls and started training more seriously. I went through a linear progression, got into intermediate programming, and then took a likening to the Olympic lifts.

Blah, blah, blah, that is how I got into training properly and effectively. Other than intramurals I didn’t have any competitive events in my life, and none that my training revolved around. It is better this way for reasons that we have previously discussed. Whether you are old or young, new or experienced, why don’t you share how you got into training?

This is a picture of AC and I about two years ago. He is probably 180 and I am 195...

Here is another picture of me before I started seriously training.

Tunes

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Justin

“Hello. How ’bout that ride in? I guess that’s why they call it Sin City.”

There is a lot of useless research done on how music affects performance. More importantly, most of us probably train to some kind of music. More than likely we will think that what someone else listens to is pretty terrible (and you can read this as “I probably don’t like whatever you are listening to”). In any case, it might be interesting to see what everyone likes to listen to as they train. Thus the social observation begins, go ahead and post your favorite stuff to listen to as you train to the comments.

I myself like to listen to Chicago, especially the first and second album. I like Led Zeppelin and Queen too. I’ve listened to the Black Keys recently. When I was still doing an intensity day for squat on the Texas Method (as well as the later stages of my linear progression) my favorite songs to squat to were

Chicago – I’m A Man
Led Zeppelin – When the Levee Breaks
Led Zeppelin – Achilles Last Stand

Here is a video I posted a while back that has some of those songs (this was from the beginning of September):

But now I just let the album play out. I don’t need music to get my adrenaline up since I can get it extremely high mentally, but good music can help get you going when feeling lethargic.

———

A nice hearty breakfast.

Steroids: Part I

Posted on December 23, 2009 by Gant

Anabolic steroids.

If you train with and around people that lift heavy weights, you know at least three people that are on steroids. If you don’t, then you are either naïve to that fact or you’re not really training heavy.

This is the first installment in what will be a multi-part discussion on the hows, whys, and what-fors of steroid use. If you’ve been in the iron game for awhile, you’re not going to learn anything new. If you’re reading this stuff for the first time, you’re not going to learn as much as you would from a good site on anabolics. The point of this article is to get the geared up elephant out of the room and clear up one unfortunate misconception.

I’m going to give away the ending so the 70’s Big detractors can quit reading. Yes, Doug Young, Anatoly Pisarenko, and company took steroids. Damn right. Back in the day, they stacked their stacks. Breakfast was meat, eggs, black coffee, and DBol. Lunch was a cigarette and 200mg of Cyp. They had more test than a boy band. But to say that this is the only reason they were champions is short-sighted and ignorant.

Roger Estep could have passed CrossFit's drug test but not WADA's

For the record, 70’s Big advocates hard, clean training. The guys that are shown lifting on this site—Justin, AC, and Chris—are all natural. I know this because I’ve seen them train and I’ve seen their logs, but mostly because I’ve seen them in person. They are strong as hell and densely muscled, but they don’t have the look (we will talk about the look later).

I want to address a Rip quote that has been taken out of context numerous times. A guy asked Rip about taking steroids while doing linear progression and got this response:

“There are no shortcuts. The fact that a shortcut is important to you means that you are a pussy. Let me be clear here: if you”d rather take steroids than do your squats heavy and drink enough milk, then you are a fucking Pussy. I have no time or patience for fucking Pussies. Please tell everyone you know that I said this.”

Most people cite this for the proposition that steroids are a shortcut and bad in all instances. This is wrong, and it is not what Rip meant.

The linear progression program in Starting Strength works. If you work your ass off in the gym and in the kitchen, you will get stronger every week and add muscle. Thousands of people have figured this out. There is no point in short-cutting a process that gets more weight on the bar every time you lift. Rip took issue with the fact that the guy was looking to avoid time in the gym.

Our co-captains were in a different situation. At the elite levels of sport, there are no shortcuts. At that level, progression is limited by the ability to recover. The Piz didn’t juice so he could miss workouts. He used so he could work more, work longer, and work harder. That is a key distinction.

There are no shortcuts to a 733# deadlift at 220 while wearing short shorts.

The bottom line is that you can and should squat, deadlift, and eat your way to male adulthood (over 200 pounds) and beyond. No alternatives should be considered until you are well into intermediate programming (if ever). We’ll talk about what some people do next in a future issue.

Next: Chemistry, Benefits, Side Effects, and Misconceptions