STUPID WORDS AND PHRASES

Yup: gonna be one of these...

Alright, I’ve played the language game enough in my posts.  It’s time for me to just come out, embrace my grumpy old man side and ridicule the stupid things we say and show how it’s impacting us.

- “Unofficial World Record”.  What the Hell is that?  Who is keeping an unofficial record book?  How do you have a world record if it’s not official?  “Dude, it means that they didn’t set it under world record conditions, but it’s still the most anyone has ever lifted.”  How do we KNOW that’s true if it’s UNOFFICIAL dingus?!  Isn’t that the point of it being unofficial?  What proof do we have that someone ELSE hasn’t ALSO lifted that much, if not more, and just simply hasn’t’ recorded it?  That’s the stupidity we get into when we start keeping two separate sets of records.  The word you’re looking for is “personal record”, and hey, if your personal record is greater than the current world record, that’s awesome: now you just need to make it official.

Because let's not pretend there aren't a million more special people just like this who may have even BIGGER arms...

- “Lean muscle mass”.  What, as opposed to the other kind?  Like, fat, sloppy muscle mass?  No you idiot: the only kind of muscle mass IS lean mass.  If you put on non-lean mass, that’s not muscle: it’s fat.  What you’ve done is combined “lean mass” with “muscle mass” and made a stupidly redundant phrase.  What you’ve ALSO done is now confused the piss out of a bunch of inexperienced readers who CAN’T see through your buffoonery, and now they’re going to hear about people adding 30lbs of lean mass in X amount of time, think that means an absurd 30lbs of MUSCLE mass in that amount of time, and immediately jump to the conclusion of steroids.  People want to rally against “fake-nattys” creating false hope among natural trainees, but that stupidity is FAR less damaging than what you do when you convince people that water weight is the same thing as muscle weight.

I think I FINALLY found that second kind of muscle mass

- “Functional strength”.  I’ve done a whole post on this one, but to summarize: as opposed to that other kind of strength?  ALL strength is functional: it’s merely a question of if you’re using it for the correct function.  Being able to bench 700lbs isn’t very functional if you’re a marathon runner, but it sure as hell is functional if you’re a powerlifter.  What’s more, people inevitably confuse “strength” with muscle when they discuss this, because they’ll go “well huge biceps don’t matter in fighting”.  No, you’re right: but strong arms are certainly useful AND functional.

Mariusz, seen here, being totally unfunctional.  Rolles, seen here, having his memory wiped.

-“Newbie gains”.  Just stop.  Your body does NOT possess a countdown doom’s day timer that starts the instant you pick up a weight and rapidly expires.  You cannot “waste” your newbie gains, nor do you need to “milk” them.  That just sounds gross.  All this refers to is your ability to rapidly adapt to new stress, which is something you’ve been experiencing ALL your life and just never took the time to notice.  When you learned a new sport, how to play an instrument, how to play a goddamn video game, etc etc, you adapted RAPIDLY when you started because you started at such a poor untrained state that ALL progress was exponential.  It was after that initial wave of exponential growth that things slowed down.  That’s all a newbie gain is.

-“Train like a BLANK”.  Fill in strongman, powerlifter, bodybuilder, etc etc.  There are thousands, if not MILLIONS of these athletes out there, and they all train differently.  Yeah, there are TRENDS in the training (like powerlifters will TRADITIONALLY employ the Big 3, strongmen train events, etc), but unique competitors train in unique ways to better suit them.  The only thing that makes a powerlifter a powerlifter is that they compete IN powerlifting.  When I competed in my first powerlifting meet, I was running DoggCrapp up to it: was I training like a bodybuilder or a powerlifter?  Neither: I was simply training.  It’s only the people that DON’T compete in these things that say “I train like an X”. 

One of the world's greatest powerlifters and strongmen AND a pro-wrestler, seen here, training like a bodybuilder...

 -“Permabulk.”  Specifically, when employed in the past tense.  “Back when I was a permabulker…”.  Do you and I have different understandings of what the word “permanent” means?  Really, let me just strike out on all stupid portmanteau at this point.  “Powerbuilding”?  Boy, I can’t wait to hear about your powerbuilding meet!  Do you mean “getting bigger and stronger”?  Like what ALL good training does?  “Strongfat”.  For Christ sakes, if “and” is too hard for you to write, try an ampersand. 

-“Dirty/clean bulking”.  In its current form at least.  This USED to make sense.  If you were bulking while eating dirty food, you were dirty bulking.  If you were bulking while you were eating clean food, you were clean bulking.  And this is primarily because we used to be ADULTS and knew that Frootie Pebbles weren’t clean food and chicken breast was.  But somewhere along the line we decided to go full on “If It Fits Your Macros” stupid and say all calories were the same and that there was no such thing as “dirty” food, and this meant that ALL bulking was good.  So then we decided to say that a dirty bulk meant you got fat and a clean bulk meant you stayed lean.  No: know what we called it when you stayed lean when you bulked?  LEAN bulking.  Shocking idea, I know.  People got fat when they dirty bulked BECAUSE dirty food tends to not have a lot of protein associated with it, so you’d way overshoot your calories trying to get in the appropriate amount of protein to grow.  It was a side effect of the approach: not the approach itself.  Consequently, “clean” food tends to be clean because it is purely its source of macronutrients.  By that I mean a chicken breast is clean because it’s pretty much pure protein: very trace amounts of fat and carbs.  Rice is clean because it’s almost pure carbs.  Coconut oil is clean because it’s almost pure fat.  When using these food sources with a macronutrient based approach, it’s incredibly easy to hit your goals without exceeding macros or calories: you just dial in the dosage of the food.  When you try accomplishing this with a plate of nachos, things can get…dirty.

The IIFYM crowd going "It's got Salsa, that's vegetables.  And guacamole comes from avocados.  That's clean!"

-“Going to war”.  Let’s be real: it’s just lifting weights.