JUST TAKE THE THING OFF THE FLOOR AND PUT IT OVER YOUR HEAD

I am a sucker for all-encompassing/all-in-one information sources.  I don’t think I have a particularly short attention span and, in fact, believe I have obsessive tendencies (as evidenced by a blog that I’ve written a weekly post in for nearly a decade on the subject of getting bigger and stronger), but just the novelty of having A book or A lecture that contains ALL the information you “need” in order to progress is just so satisfying to me.  It’s why I like “Powerlifitng Basics Texas Style”, as Paul took the time to include some nutrition/cooking sections in with the lifting: same with Marty Gallagher’s “Purposeful Primitive”, John Berardi’s “Scrawny to Brawny”, John McCallum’s “Complete Keys to Progress”, “Super Squats”, etc.  And, in turn, I recognize the limitations inherent in having an all-in-one approach, my like how a swiss army knife has a bunch of OK tools instead of 1 really good one, but, in turn, I’ve often been VERY happy to have a swiss army knife on me vs a REALLY good corkscrew.  All of this said, allow me to provide my own all-in-one answer to all things transformation related: take the thing off the floor and put it over your head

Colossus is here trying to get The Thing into position

                                                    

This just answers ALL the questions about training.  How do I train conditioning?  Just take the thing off the floor and put it over your head.  I plan on writing a longer post on “how to conditioning” later, just because people really seem to struggle with the HOW behind it, but if you want an “all-in-one” answer, you’d be hard pressed to beat this answer.  Taking things off the floor and putting them over your head is one of the most effective means of building whole body conditioning out there.  And there are SO many ways to make it work.  Do it all in one motion like a snatch, break it down into two parts like a clean and jerk, or start using permutations of all of this.  Just think: there are power snatches, muscle snatches, hang snatches, clean grip snatches, power cleans, muscle cleans, hang cleans, and then we can get into thrusters, clusters, one motions, etc.  And this is just using a barbell: if you have a log you can viper, you can continental an axle (or a barbell if you’re weird).  And you can do a lot of this crazy nonsense with dumbbells, kettlebells, sandbags, kegs, stones (natural or atlas): pretty much ANYTHING can be picked up and put over your head.  And since we’re doing it for conditioning, we just do it until our heart feels like it’s going to explode.  “What if the weight is too light?”  Move it faster, or do more reps with it.  Set a timer and do as many reps as you can in that time.  “What if it’s too heavy?”  Going Every Minute on the Minute, so you can recover in time and keep your heart rate up.  Snatch it until you can’t, then push press it until you can’t, then strict press it until you can’t, then just clean it until you can’t.  You will be gassed.

How do I get big and strong?  Would you believe the answer is “just pick the thing off the floor and put it over your head?”  Oh my goodness how AMAZING that approach is for that goal.  And pair this with my most recent post about bad form making big muscles and you’re REALLY onto something special.  If you wanna hit a beautiful, flawless looking clean and then split jerk the weight overhead in an instant, that’s groovy dude and it looks REALLY pretty, but if you wanna build some gnarly, ugly, brutal musculature, take something that DOESN’T want to be picked up, like an axle, keg, sandbag, fire hydrant, etc, pick it up and get it over your head.  It’s going to look TERRIBLE, and it’s going to call into play a bunch of muscles you didn’t even know you had, and, in turn, it’s going to make you TREMENDOUSLY big and strong.

I kept it dark to hide my shame

“But what about my legs/pecs/triceps/serratus/pineal gland/metacarpals?”  Oh my god I’m tired of those questions.  Do you know how often I get asked if Building the Monolith has enough chest work?  Do you know how often I ask those dudes if they’re dong the full 200 dips and the answer is “…no”?   Taking something off the floor that doesn’t want to be lifted and lifting it over your head is going to make your WHOLE BODY grow.  You are gonna need some strong legs to get the damn thing off the ground in the first place along with some strong biceps, a strong back to balance the load, that back musculature is going to extend all the way up to the base of your skull as you’ll need strong traps to get the weight to your chest and strong rear delts when you’re pressing to keep it stabilized, and then the shoulders and triceps are obvious in the press, BUT the chest comes into play as well because you’re going to be pressing at an angle, since the object will be big and bulky and NOT going in a straight line.  And then, of course, your abs will light up as your core balances everything into place.  Talking from personal experience, I saw the most significant whole body growth in my life when I tried to bring up my keg press from 200lbs to 275lbs in 12 weeks.  

Could a more specialized approach get different results?  Absolutely, but remember: this is a simple all-in-one solution, and in that regard it works FANTASTICALLY well.  You’d be well on your way to the kind of musculature that was popular among Greek statues, because hey: guess how those dudes built their bodies?  They picked the thing up and put it over their heads.

Sorry if you consider this NSFW, but it's art...and that dude is JACKED

“But how many reps?  How many sets?!  How long do I rest?”  Ya know what, I could outsource this and say go check out Dan John’s “One Lift a Day” program.  Or go Jamie Lewis “Chaos and Pain” style insanity and just see how many times you can press the weight overhead in a fixed amount of time, and then either break that record or go for more time next time.  You could run 5/3/1 for just the one lift, or go Bulgarian on it and just hit multiple workouts with it in one day.  I’ve taken to running Crossfit WODs with implements: axle, keg and log for Grace and Fran.  Hey, isn’t that conditioning?  It all comes full circle: you’re not gonna lift something and NOT build some muscle from it.  If your implement is a fixed weight, do lots of reps if it’s light and few reps if it’s heavy.  If it’s light, take every rep off the floor: if it’s heavy, take only the first rep or first rep reps off the floor and press out the rest.

And folks: this is instinct.  This is what your mind WANTS to do when it sees a heavy imposing weight.  It’s why it’s a show of physical dominance in professional wrestling to lift another man overhead and slam him down.  Almost any child, when given a weight, will immediately try to press it overhead.  They don’t lay down and floor press it, they don’t put it on their back and squat it, they MAY deadlift it if it’s just too heavy to press, but otherwise, we KNOW, on some sort of biological level, that the secret to physical transformation is to just take the thing off the floor and put it over our heads.     

Boy I hope this uploads as a .gif...

So if in doubt, just take the thing off the floor and put it over your head.  And use bad form when you do it to build big muscles.  And figure out your sets and reps by rolling a 20 sided die.  You’re onto something.