DIDN'T FEEL LIKE WRITING: HERE ARE BULLET POINTS!

* During my most recently asked “if you could only pick 2 movements” desert island sorta question, I settled on log viper press and prowler push, and I’m REALLY happy with that answer.  If you found an athlete that ONLY did those 2 movements, you’d find a dangerous athlete.  And in that regard, this works well for the “if you only had 20 minutes to train” question too.  

It doesn't get more anabolic than this

* I may make this a bigger post one day, but I finally “get” why beginners are advised to stick with compounds and avoid isolation exercises: they’re too WEAK to DO isolation exercises. And you think that’s crazy, because isolations are lighter than compounds, but they are necessarily that way because ONE muscle is much weaker than several.  And that’s the point of an isolation exercise: to ISOLATE.  I use the example that I’ve pressed 266lbs overhead before, and I use 20lbs for lateral raises, and even then, those are HEAVY lateral raises.  This is assuming I actually want to ISOLATE my middle delts.  Yeah, I could move more weight…by recruiting more muscles, which isn’t the point.  And so, when you have a beginner trying to isolate, they end up making the compounds anyway, at which point they may as well do some actual compounds and get stronger.    To say nothing of the fact that beginners tend to not even be able to FLEX the required muscle in the first place…

* I’ve had protein shakes since I was 15.  They’ve been such a staple of my lifting.  And these days, they don’t even make sense to me.  I keep them up pretty much out of habit, but I go through so little protein powder compared to what I did when I was a kid…and my results are SO much better.  Real food will always win: supplements for emergencies.  And people get that all backwards: using all their brainpower to figure out which supplement is best and then just buying whatever groceries are cheap.

* Still on the topic of nutrition, I really dove into Deep Water with some Mountain Dog influence in my 6 month gaining phase, and it had the interesting effect wherein I simply don’t crave junk anymore.  Emotionally I do, I’ll see a commercial for pizza or a burger or poptarts or something and THINK to myself “oh that looks SO good”…but when it comes time to actually EAT something, I have no interest in it.  All I want is more meat.  Folks have theories about this, gut biome being connected to the brain and other things, but even without understanding the WHY behind it, it’s still worth appreciating.  And it’s pretty cool to have my mind and body working together to self-perpetuatlize success.

* I really like weighted dips…and I feel like they don’t make anything else I do any better.  

But sometimes a thing in and of itself is enough justification

* But on the above, even if weighted dips worked for Pat Casey and don’t work for me, something from Pat that DOES work universally: meatloaf sandwiches.  Seriously: make yourself one.

* Its mind blowing to me how many times I’ve had to explain “how to work in”.  We learned sharing in kindergarten people.

* Ok people: macro ratios are silly.  I don’t even count macros and I think they’re silly.  It forces you to change THREE variables when you only need to change one.  Say I’m noticing some hormone issues because my dietary fat is too low, so I decide to add some to my diet.  Well, if I’m forcing myself to abide by ratios, I need to increase EVERY macro to account for that ONE macro increasing.  What sense does that make?  I wanna pull carbs out of the diet to cut some weight?  Nope: apparently I’m pulling PROTEIN out of my diet too.  Don’t I want to keep that protein HIGH when I’m losing fat? 

* Let’s keep going with the above.  It’s a bizarre combination of over AND under thinking.  We believe there’s something magical about a certain ratio of macros, but then we don’t tend to care about the SOURCE of these macros.  “Gotta up my fats because I upped my carbs”: ok cool, guess I’ll add an extra 20 grams of trans fats to my diet.  Man: why do I look, feel and perform like crap right now?  It I’m going to focus so much on ratios, why not think about things like omega 3 and 6 ratio, saturated vs poly vs mono vs trans fats, EFAs, EAAs, etc etc?  When it comes time to REALLY break out the big brain, suddenly we don’t wanna play anymore…

* Part of the reason it took me so long to release a rough cut of my e-book is that I keep coming up with bad ideas, and here’s my most recent one.  20 seconds of alternating DB snatches/10 seconds of goblet squats with the same dumbbell.  Make sure to actually move explosively on the DB snatches.  This will blow you out in 8 rounds.  Those goblet squats are where the magic lives.

* Someone took the time to upload all the issues of Mark Bell’s “Power” magazine.  It was honestly a great publication, had some fantastic articles, very cringe inducing at times, but I think the most entertaining part is looking through the old supplement ads.  SO many things promising to be the “next big thing” that you can’t even FIND on the market anymore.  A valuable lesson for anyone getting hoodwinked by the current Mr Wonderful: the secret is always the hard work and consistency, the supplements are simply subsidizing the dream.

When's the last time you saw this on the shelf?

* As long as there are nuts, nut butters and avocados, I’ll have no sympathy for someone that can’t gain weight.  You have allergies?  Go for sunbutter.

* Beginners wanting to bulk or cut from the get go is just insanity to me.  If you’ve NEVER trained before, you don’t need to manipulate your nutrition to see DRASTIC improvements in physique and strength.  Focus on eating for HEALTH with something that is sustainable and realistic for you.  Learn how to cook (because you most likely don’t know how to).  Train for 6 months and just eat WELL during that time and you’ll see some crazy improvements.  From THERE, figure out if you’re too fat or too scrawny.

* Somewhere along the line people felt like my theory on nutrition was to eat to support training.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I eat to support RECOVERY from training: no to support the training itself.  Eating to support training means pounding carbs before a training session to make sure you can crush the session: I’m the dude that slams some eggs and beef 10 minutes before a 0300 session because I’m already eating to RECOVER from that session.  No matter what, I’ll push as hard as I can, but, in turn, I don’t need to eat so that I can push harder: I eat so I can recover from how hard I pushed.  This is a big part of understanding nuance, which has absolutely been lost.  People try to employ heuristics and avoid thinking, and it just dooms their ability to understand.

* When in doubt, pick something up off the floor and put it over year head.  This holds true for getting bigger, getting stronger, and getting better conditioning.  The final one is big, because people ALWAYS say they don’t know what to for conditioning.  No joke: find SOMETHING, pick it up off the floor, get it over your head, get it back down to the floor and repeat.

* Fat loss for the non-calorie counter: put less stuff in/on stuff.  It’s really that simple: manipulating portion sizes.  I’ve kept the same amount of meals and even the same TYPE of meals these past 6 weeks: all I’ve done is have less stuff at the meals.  I went from slathering Nuts n More/sunbutter on celery to using a very thin smear.  I went from a 1/3 cup of cottage cheese to 1/4.  From 2 whole eggs and 1 egg white to just 2 whole eggs.  Etc etc.  My mind can’t tell the difference: I’m still sitting down at the same time and having “the same meal”, but my body is reflecting the impact of having less food.  This stuff really isn’t complicated.

* Yet another competition I signed up for reduced the weight of one of the events.  F**k’s sake: isn’t this sport called STRONGman?

* I’ve gotten a rash of people asking me if I’m on steroids or TRT recently.  That’s weird in a lot of ways.  I grew up where it was taboo to ask the steroids question in general, but along with that, lumping TRT in with steroids is weird to me.  It would be like saying “Hey man, you’re pretty lean: are you using insulin or do you have diabetes?”  

* People get legitimately angry with me when I say how much (or perhaps that is to say, how little) I sleep.  I can’t tell if they’d prefer I lie when asked the question or what.  

* “Sleep is the most important thing for growth!”  Funny: I slept a TON as a teenager and was pretty tiny.  I sleep less now, eat and train more…and I’m bigger.  Perhaps there’s more to it…

* Throwing in an unloaded “crucifix hold” at the end of my lateral raise sets has been a fun experiment.  If you struggle with pain tolerance/lactic threshold stuff, that’s such a simple way to get some training in.  I’m sure it’s bound to tear up the delts some too.

* Gains are honestly pretty hardy: you can’t kill them.  Think about it: we’re evolutionarily DRAWN to large muscularity because it confers a message of hardiness.  The idea that you could kill your gains with a little bit of extra cardio or a few missed meals/workouts is comical.  It’s not a soufflé people.