Life Defined By Training

Posted on February 27, 2014 by A.C.

I left my job, long time girlfriend, family, and friends to live in poverty and train with the best lifters and coaches in the country. Is that strange?
–Sean

This was a response to Mike on FB when he asked “What was the strangest thing you’ve done to pursue your strength goals?” Mike felt compelled to find out more about Sean. Sean was kind enough to respond with his story. It’s heartfelt and motivating.

In late 2010, I was a college dropout English major, rugby player, and on the verge of tumbling into full blown alcoholism but thanks to outpatient rehab Indianapolis who retrieved my life back. I was able to function rather well considering and I didn’t drop out of school because I was doing poorly. In fact between a full load of courses, rugby practice, and two part time jobs I suppose I was a high functioning alcoholic. I dropped out half for monetary reasons and half for lack of purpose. Drinking had always helped writing and it’s an institution within rugby culture, but without any purpose in my life I began to allow it to take over more than anyone should. Fortunately, this did not last very long and I don’t intend to fool you into thinking I’m a sob story who overcame substance abuse or some bullshit like that.

What’s remarkable about stories like Sean’s isn’t just the survival—it’s the spark that leads someone to choose something better. Recovery doesn’t always begin with a dramatic rock bottom; sometimes it starts with a quiet, internal nudge that says, there’s got to be more than this. For many, including those seeking out men’s addiction treatment, the answer isn’t just found in therapy rooms but in the wild, unpredictable clarity of nature. That’s where adventure therapy steps in—not as a cure-all, but as a powerful catalyst.

Adventure therapy doesn’t sugarcoat the hard stuff. It meets you where you are—physically exhausted, emotionally raw—and says, “Let’s move through this, together.” Whether it’s the steady burn of a mountain hike or the adrenaline of crossing rapids with a team, these moments challenge the very parts of you that addiction numbed. They rebuild discipline, trust, and self-belief, one experience at a time. For someone like Sean, who was always chasing strength through sport and identity, this kind of recovery feels authentic—hard-earned, active, and rooted in something real.

What changed is that I found training. With only rugby left in life I decided to improve my strength and conditioning. I wanted to play at higher levels and one of the things that separated me from the next level was a lack of an off the field training program. A friend referred me to three things that were instrumental in setting me on the path.

I developed my lifting career and philosophy through these three components:
1.) CrossFit, the burgeoning fitness craze.
2.) Starting Strength, Rippetoe and Kilgore’s famous book on basic barbell training.
3.) A blog called 70s Big.

I started by trying out CrossFit workouts. I’ve always been a bigger guy, but I was athletic in my youth. Ten years of hockey taught me nothing about training except to skate more, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Football taught me how bench shitty, squat shitty, and power clean shitty. I did not stay there long because I honestly found the game to be incredibly boring from a positional standpoint. My ADD despises running. Aside from being generally silly, running is in no way cerebrally stimulating. So CrossFit’s general lack of running, attention sustaining intensity, and endless possibility of movements was at least interesting. That was great for dropping a few pounds and keeping the lungs strong, but rugby requires an immense amount of power and physical strength. Let me tell you, you don’t want to be a soft corpse on the other side of a full stride Samoan.

This need led me to Starting Strength. I decided I should put as much effort into getting as strong as I could as fast with rugby season quickly approaching. The lungs would come back with some hours on the field. The instructions from the book were all right there. I didn’t worry about shin angles, varus vs. valgus, or am I producing torque. I showed up to the gym three days a week. I put my ass to ankles in the squat, I benched and pressed in a full range of motion, and picked shit up off the ground until I was completely erect (Get your mind out of the gutter). I drank 1-2 quarts of milk per training day. I ate meat and vegetables. I gained a significant amount of lean mass. In three months I squatted 500lbs. That’s not particularly impressive, but I do think it is a tribute to simplicity and consistency.

During this period of training, the third object of influence started to take full effect on my life. I followed and read 70s Big regularly. I found Justin’s writing entertaining, informative, and comforting (all the homo). There were so many articles I found interesting and useful and it’s been so long since I’ve read them that is hard to remember them all. The one thing that stuck with me and really changed my life was Justin’s encouragement of his readers to educate themselves. I followed suit and sought out as much knowledge as I could. I absorbed anything I could get my hands on: Zatsiorsky, Verkhoshanksy, Siff, Kilgore, Medvedyev, Roman, Yessis, Bondarchuk, Stone, Garhammer, Poliquin. Even some stuff from Simmons, Wendler, Boyle, and Cressey. Soviet Sport Manuals were my favorite and still remain a dominant part of my library.

I could take concepts I was learning and apply them to my training or that of my peers. It was something concrete, applicable, practical, a physical experience of science expressed. Training and sport science taught me to give a shit about cellular biology and physics, elements of my short lived education spent studying literature that I had happily ignored. I watched countless hours of film of lifters, gymnasts, and sprinters. For the first time in my life as a young adult I had an inkling of an idea about what I actually wanted to do with my life. I acquired many certifications. CrossFit started me on my path so I decided to get my L1. I eagerly awaited the knowledge bombs I’m told all seminar instructors possessed. Surely they had some secrets I couldn’t find in a book. While I still value practical experience over book knowledge, it quickly became evident to me that I was more educated on exercise science and had more time under the bar than most of my instructors. Even a certain famous figure in the early days of CrossFit who had university level experience and was renowned for his experience in Olympic Weightlifting was very much unable to answer my questions about snatch technique. This was an eye opening and I found it to be a reflection of the fitness industry as a whole.

Following this I got involved with a group of people who wanted to open an affiliate. Coaches were still few and far between then, especially in the market where the gym opened. I should not have been allowed, in my opinion, to coach then, though it did allow me to gain the practical experience I now have and I did simultaneously undergo an internship with a Sports Performance Coach. In my effort to become a better coach I went to acquire my USAW Level 1. Justin had posted articles about discussions with someone named Glenn Pendlay who happened to be instructing a course 5 hours away from me at a gym called California Strength. That man completely ruined my life and made me fall in love with Weightlifting. Glenn was, and continues to be, a very knowledgeable and easy person to speak to. This was the first time that I personally was able to kinesthetically understand the snatch and the revelation was life altering. Since that moment I began chasing kilos.

I made subsequent visits to California Strength, usually in week long increments to observe the lifting in person and discuss with both Coach and the lifters training ideology. In the Weightlifting community I had stumbled upon, perhaps, the most humble and hard working resource of training knowledge in all of Exercise Science. Aside from my visits to Coach, certifications, clinics, and internship I continued to be a largely self-educated coach and self-coached weightlifter. I stopped coaching at a CrossFit affiliate and after an unsuccessful attempt to open my gym I took up work coaching at a Velocity Sport Performance. This was rewarding in some aspects, and good experience with diverse populations but my heart was never really there. The one thing that stayed consistent in my life was training. As the famous Henry Rollins quote goes, “The Iron never lies to you.” I kept showing up and so did the barbell. Through knee surgery and other injuries, I kept showing up having good days and bad days. The barbell taught me consistency, diligence, and confidence. I carried myself with respect and applied the stubbornness and resourcefulness the barbell had taught me to all aspects of my life.

At the beginning of 2013 I decided to go back to school and here I am a little over a year later still going with a 4.0 so far. In early spring MuscleDriver USA announced that they were holding a tryout. They had done something similar the previous year and I decided against going as I did not think the odds were good for me to make it and there were too many elements of life which were uncertain. I regretted that decision every day thereafter. I was not going to repeat that mistake. Due to a few injuries my lifting had not progressed much from the previous year, but I began training with a distinct purpose. I was going to show up, lift weights I had never lifted before, and go 6/6. Looking back, the ferocity of my training at the time was maddening. After multiple flight delays and a mix-up with my long term car rentals Melbourne reservation, I made it to the tryout. Having a reliable car rental made navigating the city much easier despite the hiccups. I PRed in Snatch, Clean and Jerk, and Total, going 6/6. If I wasn’t going to make the cut, I still wanted to go out knowing I had done everything I was capable of. After flying home, I received a call while at work the following Monday from a phone with a Texas area code. The voice on the other end was Coach Pendlay, inviting me to join Team MDUSA. ‘I think you’ve got potential.’ It’s one of the two nicest things he’s ever said to me, I think.

I packed up my car, left my long-time girlfriend, my family, my friends, my athletes, and job to drive across country into the unknown and live in poverty. I have never felt so full of purpose. Everyday I am coached and educated by two of the best coaches in American Weightlifting. My training partners and friends include National Champions and legitimate Olympic Hopefuls. I am afforded the opportunity to show up 9x a week and push my body to it’s limits and learn further lessons from the barbell. Though I have goals for certain levels of achievement in my sport, at this point it’s less about hardware and more about the journey. I am still forever chasing kilos.

You can follow me on instagram @seanmrigsby and check out heavymetalsc.com to stay up to date on projects and my perspective on Team MDUSA.

Sean tells an amazing story. I suggest you take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror, this time not hitting a front double-bi, and decide how you want to approach your life. Whether it be training, work, or a project.

QB’s Can’t Gain Weight? Bullshit.

Posted on February 21, 2014 by Justin

Adam Schefter works for ESPN and is an NFL reporter who gets all the “insider” information. The above tweet is talking about the top three quarterbacks that will be going into the NFL draft this year. These stats are gleaned from the NFL Combine, which allows the NFL personnel to evaluate the talent coming from collegiate sports to the NFL. It’s a lot of mental and physical testing to try and project how well these athletes will do in professional football, yet it is often incomplete because physical stature and prowess do not always make the best football player, though it helps.

I was listening to Mike and Mike on ESPN radio this morning, and they were talking with various experts on the size of these quarterbacks, particularly Manziel and Bridgewater. The important stats for quarterbacks, from an anthropometry perspective, are height, weight, and hand size. The hand thing is apparently a good projector of success (i.e. it’s easier to hold onto a football in adverse weather), but let’s ignore that. Height is also very important — seeing over the large lineman to throw a pass is important — but we’ll ignore that too. How much a guy weighs and fills out his frame is important because football is a rough, collision-based sport, and frail guys will not have durability. Especially when there are mastodons who weigh anywhere from 250 to 350 pounds wanting to crush your soul.

The experts point out that two of the above quarterbacks weigh 207 and 214. As a “lifting and athletic population”, we know that these guys aren’t heavy. Yet we also know that it’s actually kind of simple to add mass on to a guy, especially when their frame has room to fill out (as both of those quarterbacks do).

What I find baffling is how difficult the experts think gaining weight is. And I’m not even just talking about gaining weight for the sake of gaining it, like in Starting Strength-style linear progression. I’m talking about putting a focus on retaining athleticism, agility, and speed yet increasing lean body mass. Most rookie mini-camps don’t start until the end of May. Training camp starts in July. The season actually starts in September. How long was your linear progression? I got some pretty solid fucking progress in 8 weeks by moving my three-sets-of-five from 325 to 445 while increasing my body weight from 195 to 215 (in 2009).

If the experts think it’s difficult to put five, ten, or even fifteen pounds on a guy in three to six months, then either the strength and conditioning is really shitty, there’s no athlete compliance, or they don’t even try. I’m no expert in the realm of NFL strength and conditioning, and maybe we should get John Welbourn’s thoughts, but it sounds pretty stupid to see a 21 year old’s body and think that it can’t be improved. I’ve done it over and over with athletes, so why can’t they?

Shameless plug, but this diet style would help an athlete build quality mass and aid recovery.

Edit: I forgot to mention what I would do for a guy that needed to retain athleticism but increase size. I’d have him lift three days a week in conjunction with his agility, speed, and/or skill sessions. He’d squat, press, row, and do pulling movements that wouldn’t interfere much with his other training (i.e. stuff like power cleans, RDL’s, and lighter deadlifts instead of trying to push his deadlift up). A quarterback would be doing weighted pull-ups and chin-ups, possibly some barbell pullovers. I’d throw a Paleo for Lifters diet at him, which would be a quality, clean diet of meat, potatoes, fruits, veggies, and good fats with a little bit of protein powder in quantities that would help him grow. It wouldn’t be all that hard for kids that are described as “not very thick” or having a “slight build”.

How do I reach these keeds?

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Justin

I overheard some young guys — around 20 to 23 years old — talking about training. They were very enthusiastic and were seemingly sharing “insider knowledge”. One of them talked about a specific type of protein he bought from GNC, how it was good for “building”, and how he would transition into another kind in order to “maintain”. The other referenced his “older brother” and how “he said” that another product was very good, and that he only uses that brand. Then he talked about his older brother went and talked with people at GNC and Gold’s Gym for, “like, half an hour” to learn about working out and stuff. “He’s insane,” he said.

Most of you saw the words “GNC”, guffawed, and knew where this was going. The truth is, we were all there at one point. I remember carrying around a couple issues of Muscle and Fitness for reference (I was 17). One in particular was an barbell-only program. It was actually pretty useful at the time, because it was a poor, haggard man’s strength program that used barbells. Weird, huh?

There are thousands, possibly millions of guys like this. They are young, alarmingly skinny or small, yet enthusiastic. Those “conventional fitness” resources that they read may help them get a bit more muscular, but they’ll be horribly inefficient. A strength program with compound, systemically stressful movements with appropriate rest and caloric intake will work much faster. If they wanted to squat, bench, press, and row for sets of 8 to 12 reps, they will be able to use more weight if they were stronger. Getting stronger will result in bigger muscles. It’s a pretty simple formula that isn’t really preached by the alleged “experts”.

I wanted to intervene in the conversation. I wanted to say, “Look, do three sessions a week of a squat, a press, and a pull, eat over a pound of meat a day, and get a good night’s rest. That’ll be exponentially more beneficial than buying shitty protein powders and talking to weirdos with sea shell necklaces and shaved chests.”

But I didn’t. They never listen to a stranger. Before I started 70’s Big, I remember telling some high school football players in a Gold’s Gym, “Stop playing with these dumbbells and go over there and squat every time you come in here.” They didn’t squat that day. Fuck me, right?

I hate when people write critiques of training programs, methodologies, or how stupid people are without some sort of solution to the problem. For example, I talk about how much I hate hipsters, or vegetarians, or society’s notion that females should be starving and men should be shorn waifs, so my Revolution articles end with proposed action.

In this case, young and dumb kids may not listen to what you have to say, but maybe we should try? Maybe you can help them in one small way by suggesting they squat more often, eat meat instead of powders, or stop worrying about “body parts” and get stronger. But, your words will mean much more if you are a big, jacked, strong guy instead of merely being decently strong and kind of fat.

Eat clean food, jack fucking steel around, and don’t be as douchey as the roiding tanned weirdo who smashes sets of incline bench to pre-exaust his pecs and you might have a chance at reaching these kids. But it starts with you and your success.

When Eggs Grow Stale

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Justin

I’ve noticed some guys complaining about how bland their eggs are. Our own Arin Canecchio and Chris Riley go through spurts when they find it difficult to wolf down six eggs in the morning. I’ve eaten at least three or four eggs every day for almost ten years. Since 2009 I’ve eaten at least five, and usually more than six with peaks of eight or nine. Eggs are a blank canvas, ready to take on bold flavors and different textures, making them an ideal ingredient for experimentation.

The beauty of a good food testing kit isn’t just in testing eggs—it’s about the whole kitchen experience. Whether you’re cooking with vegetables, fruits, or grains, knowing exactly what you’re working with makes a world of difference. For instance, when you’re getting your produce from a local farmer’s market or even the grocery store, you’re often left to trust that what’s labeled as “organic” or “non-GMO” actually holds up. That’s where an Agricultural Product Testing kit comes into play, giving you the tools to verify that the quality of your ingredients is as advertised.

When it comes to cooking, you want to work with the freshest, highest-quality products possible, and testing kits make sure you’re not getting anything less. With a simple test, you can measure the nutrient levels in your fruits and vegetables—check for pesticide residue, or verify that your grains haven’t been tampered with. This ensures that everything you’re adding to your dish contributes to both flavor and health. After all, fresh, clean ingredients are the real MVPs in any meal.

To the complaining gentlemen, I say, “You are a fool.” Dress your eggs up and they won’t let you down. Here’s how.

USE BACON

How could you forget? Nowadays I hate to talk about how great bacon is because all of the hipster pieces of shit tasted it after several months of anorexia nervosa and realized they were fucking missing something. Naturally they rallied together — the most ironic hipster-piece-of-shit thing to do since they allegedly want to lead an independent lifestyle — to make a bunch of shitty t-shirts and memes and never shut the fuck up about it. Yeah, we get it, bacon is fucking awesome; WELCOME TO 1776 AND 1861 WHERE BEARDED AMERICANS ATE BACON WAY BEFORE YOU FORGOT HOW MUCH YOU HATED YOUR PARENTS WHEN YOU TASTED IT ON YOUR FIRST DAY OF LIBERAL ARTS SCHOOL.

Let’s move on. If you clicked the Civil War link above, you would have seen that bacon grease was used to fry beef and corn meal. Confederate and Union soldiers didn’t carry around chickens or delicate eggs, but we’re going to use the same principle.

Hipsters weren’t the first to eat bacon.

SELECTING YOUR BACON

Do you like skinny hipsters? Ptsh, then why would you want skinny bacon? I know of over 900 studies about why thick bacon is better, and they are all single day case studies where I cooked it, ate it, and pat myself on the back for such a solid decision. Thick bacon will cook better, have a better consistency, and yield an appropriate amount of grease (discussed later). I shouldn’t have to say this, but the bacon I’m referring to is the United States variety; Canadian and Australian styles are good, but standard Second Amendment loving Americans will call that “ham”.

BACON TO EGG RATIO

You read that title and thought, “Holy SHIT, I’ve never even thought about this,” didn’t you? I’m here to show you the way. After over 900 studies, I’ve found that two pieces of thick bacon for every two or three eggs is optimal. If you’re bitching about how it’s not enough, then you don’t understand scrambled egg cuisine and can kindly leave. If you’re bitching about how it’s “too much”, then you’re probably a) a terrorist or b) one of the aforementioned hipsters who googled “bacon” looking for a sweet meme to send to your hipster friends so you can ironically fit in with a social crowd instead of doing some squats and curls before bed.

CUT DEM BACONS

No, don’t cut your bacon like a young Ray Lewis; take your pieces of stacked thick bacon and cut it in two to three centimeter segments (for you neanderthals, that’s about an inch). The layers of the bacon pieces will separate when you cook it in the pan.

Bacon thickness as well as cut segment length.

FRY THE BACON

Not too hot, mind you. If the temperature is too high, then you’ll just sear the outside too quickly and potentially ruin the consistency. On a stove where “10” is “High”, I’ll go to 7.5 at the highest. If you want the satisfying sizzle when you put the bacon in the pan, then warm the pan, but it’s not organic to this operation.

WHIP YOUR EGGS

While your bacon is frying, you can prepare your coffee (I prefer a press pot) and eggs. Crack your eggs into a bowl, and whip that shit with a fork. If you use a whisk, then you’re like my 5’3″ mom. If you have a pair of testicles, use a nice, heavy fork. I take a lot of pride in my egg whipping ability; I’m the best on both sides of the Mississippi. On New Year’s Day, I whipped two dozen eggs. Proof below, fuckers.

The technique is a circular wrist motion. You want to think about pulling the eggs off of the surface, break that surface tension, and then push them towards the bottom of the bowl without hitting your fork on the bottom. The business end of the fork has an elliptical motion and the key is pulling the egg off the surface. If you do this quick enough, it looks like you’re separating the layers of the egg and results in much fluffier scrambled eggs without using any cream or milk (which are traditionally used to fluff them up).

ASSESS BACON GREASE SITUATION

Notice what’s happening here; you’re frying the cut bacon in a pan prior to cooking eggs. That’s because you’re going to put your scrambled eggs into the pan with your bacon. This how you’ll change your retardedly bland breakfast into a heavenly romp through taste and time.

You want your bacon to be cooked, but you don’t want it to be charred or overly crispy. Ideally, if you’re a sensible human, you’d want your bacon to have a slight chewy texture instead of crunchy. You wouldn’t cook a steak like a giant buffalo chip (i.e. piece of cow shit), would you? That’s almost as bad as not eating steak.

This bacon is almost ready.

Aside from the bacon “doneness” is the grease situation. Too much grease will result in sweaty eggs; their texture will be oily and you’ll feel like you’re eating the stool of someone with cholecystitis. As crazy as this sounds, too little bacon grease is better than too much. Get a jar and pour your excess bacon grease into it (you can use that grease on your baked vegetables later that evening). Knowing how much grease you need for a given amount of eggs is a learned skill, but if you tip your pan at a 45 degree angle (as if you were going to pour grease into the jar), you wouldn’t want your pieces of bacon submerged. The grease does serve a purpose, so don’t pour it all out; it coats your pan to prevent the eggs from sticking, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. The picture below shows the grease pouring technique and the amount of grease before and after pouring.

POUR IN AND COOK THE EGGS

I’m quite surprised at how some people manage to fuck this part of the process up because it’s very easy. Your pan will be hot enough to make any amount of eggs within a couple of minutes. Pour the eggs over the bacon, make sure your bacon pieces are evenly distributed throughout, and continue to use your spatula to move the eggs off the bottom and sides of the pan.

Letting the eggs sit in the pan, as if you were making an omelette, results in an overcooked eggsterior (I couldn’t resist). If your eggs have a slight browning, that means you’re doing it wrong. If you like that, refer to the charred steak comment above. There’s probably some validity to an argument that would claim you’re denaturing some of the protein by overcooking it, but we’ll save that for another day. Just remember: move the eggs around and off of the pan by flipping the eggs constantly until they are light and fluffy. The fluffiness will be highly dependent on your whipping ability. I also like to use the edge of the spatula to break up the eggs so they aren’t in big clumps. This will improve the texture.

CONSUME AND ENJOY

This next part can make or break your egg eating experience. Some of you will be amazed at how much the bacon will improve your eggs, but if you’ve eaten them like this before you may need something more. I prefer condiments on my eggs, namely ketchup (without high fructose corn syrup in compliance with Paleo for Lifters). Ketchup works really well with white potato hash browns, which you can buy pre-cut up or make from scratch in grass-fed butter or coconut oil. I also like Chipotle Tabasco sauce, but that’s more so for fried eggs or scrambled eggs eaten with my Sweet Potato Hash recipe.

A dozen eggs yields enough for two.

And there you have it. If you’re hating your egg eating experience, you need to cook them with your bacon. Food doesn’t have to be bland, so stop doing all this hipster-like complaining and dress your eggs up.

Steroids And CrossFit?

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Justin

There’s a fascinating article written by performance enhancement drugs (PEDs) gurus John Romano and Anthony Roberts titled, “Steroids, CrossFit, and The CrossFit Games: Who & How“. The TL;DR is a) these guys are experts on PEDs, b) drug tests are very easy to beat, c) testing agencies are mediocre at best, purposely negligent at worse, d) every major sport (including the Olympics) has steroid users, e) given some formulas (that are backed by research) that look at musculature on a man’s frame, CrossFit competitors fit the mold of steroid use. I suggest reading the article as it expands on each of these points significantly.

I’ve written various steroid articles in the past, but as much as I’ve studied anatomy, physiology (including endocrinology), I still don’t understand the mechanism of PEDs well. The most recent article I wrote on it is, “Lance Armstrong, PEDs, and Naivety” (a very good article to compliment Romano and Robert’s above). I’ve accepted this statement as fact: “Most athletes in high level sports are using PEDs. The ones who aren’t are probably losing or are the minority.” The Romano/Roberts article above even points to studies that show specific time periods of increased performance in a given sport and how it correlated precisely with a new PED on the market. To think of this as merely a correlation without causation is, as I say in my own article above, naive.

Why would CrossFit be any different? The winner of the CrossFit Games wins at least a quarter million dollars, and that doesn’t even include follow-up endorsement deals or CrossFitters throwing money at them to attend shitty seminars and “learn their secrets”. I’m not saying they bullshit their way into victory with PEDs, but pointing out that CrossFit fame has significant rewards. (I’m also saying that successful CrossFit competitors are typically bad coaches, but that’s neither here nor there).

My personal opinion of PED use is that it’s none of my fucking business. I believe that the swift movement towards social liberalism will lead to the legality of PED use in the same way that marijuana is legal in some states. This poses a variety of additional questions, like the government inevitably wanting to regulate them (they can’t and won’t), and how it could increase the overall safety of PED use among lay-people. (Remember that scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise gets a back-alley-abortion-style eye surgery because it was illegal?)

To continue my opinion, if most athletes are using PEDs and the tests suck, then what’s the point? In case of alcohol addiction people refer IOP program NYC to get rid off it.But what do in this case ? To be in detail when I wrote the Lance Armstrong article above, my friend Eva Twardokens, a two-time winter Olympian, called me immediately expressing her displeasure. She has a disdain for cheaters in sport, and I completely understand the argument, especially from the perspective of a non-using competitor. Unfortunately for non-using competitors, the rest of everyone else will be using. And they’ll probably be the winners. Those seeking discreet and medically supervised addiction treatment can look into mdhomedetox for personalized detox services. Each recovery plan is designed to provide comprehensive care while respecting the patient’s privacy.

Eva at least made me think about my stance. She lambasted Armstrong while I called him a hero in the article (for other things in life like fundraising). I’ve seen my friends lose in national competitions to guys who were quite clearly using. But I also have friends who save lives or kill the enemy while use testable or non-testable PEDs to increase their performance at work. I see both sides, and I’m not sure I really care. What matters is the ability to connect and share experiences, much like how Digital Business Cards facilitate networking and relationship-building in various professions.

Fairness is an illusion anyway. Forget all of the tangible elements that make a person who they are and look at intangibles. For example, not everyone has the same will to succeed, so why treat them all like they do and make futile attempts at putting them on the same level? That question has more than one meaning.

The truth is…life ain’t fair. No matter what regulation you put on it, folks will not follow it. I’m not making a case for anarchy, no rules, and no government, but I’m making a case against the naive mindset that sport preparation is, or should be, fair. The internetz have talked for years about PED use in CrossFit. It’s likely some of those guys were or are using. And I don’t blame them.

Let’s go back to the Romano/Roberts article. I thought that the linked study was really neat. It basically looked at non-using bodybuilders from the pre-steroid era and compared them to PED-using bodybuilders in the early steroid era and applied a formula based on their lean body mass and height to gauge whether they were likely using steroids or not. (Something like this should be used instead of the bullshit BMI). It found that at least half of the top ten male finishers at the CrossFit Games would fit a classification of PED use. After all, the non-using bodybuilders from the linked study were the most muscular men in the world.

The FFMI formula for reference, taken directly from the Romano/Roberts article.

I thought this was interesting, so I plugged my own information into it. The cutoff, according to the study, was anything over a 25 was flagged for steroid use. They increased the cutoff to 26 for the sake of an argument that benefits the CrossFitters (read their article if you don’t know what I’m talking about). In any case, I estimated my body fat at a conservative 10% (it’s usually more like 9%) and used a 210 lbs (this is my lowest). So that puts me at 85.905kg for lean mass (note that I converted to kilos) and my height is 1.8288m (6 ft tall), and my value was 25.69. Without adjusting for a 1.8m man (which I am close to), and according to the study, I am flagged for potential PED use, and I have never used.

Aside from feeling really cool about having a comparable muscle-to-frame ratio as former Mr. Americas, I found this is interesting. I am much more conditioned than a normal lifter, but I am not nearly as conditioned or adapted to high volumes as the guys finishing in the CrossFit games. However, most of the top ten finishers from the CF Games have a higher value than I do (Jason Khalipa has a whopping 28.5).

Romano and Roberts did not directly suggest that these guys were using PEDs; their goal was to point out that the conditions exist where it is likely they are, whether you’re talking about widespread drug use in sports or the fact these guys fit the mold for PEDs users.

All I’m saying is that it’s naive to not make the assumption.