Here I am attempting a 365 lb. pause squat attempt. I gave myself a 1 just because I kind of got it up a couple inches and it was a very controlled lift. I maintained form on the way down and in the hole, so I gave myself a 1 to help me stay motivated.
Afterwards, I banged out this 335 lb. pause squat. By about midrange of the lift it turned into a good morning but at least I got it up there.
Here's me doing a chest fly with 45's. Notice how I don't go that low for fear of tearing something. Some people would consider that a full and complete lift because I got the dumbbells parallel to the ground, but to me that's a halfway lift. I want to go until my arms can't go down any further while still maintaining correct form and keeping the dumbbells under control without my arms swinging out of position.
As a final note, I used to do tricep extensions every workout but the tendonitis in my elbows was flaring up so bad that the pain was starting to bleed over into my chest press and shoulder press so I resolved myself into doing tricep extensions just one day a week. I'm hoping the shoulder press will adequately stimulate my tricep muscles but that remains to be seen until I do tricep extensions again.
First off I'd like to say I'm not a sports nutritionist or a dietician.
This is just me speaking what I know from experience.
All the protein intake guidelines you read are pretty much arbitrary numbers. Somebody can do a study and then trot around some magical number of grams of protein like it's the end all be all protein number just because they put a subject on that protein number and he made a strength gain.
The problem I have with the protein Nazis is most of the time your actual protein needs are always higher or lower than their guidelines dictate.
What are you going to do if your body is hungry and it's craving animal protein but you can't eat because you're strictly adhering to some made up protein intake number? Are you just going to ignore your body's wants for beef? Are you going to stifle your muscle growth and deny your body the ability to repair its muscles just because some researcher in a lab setting did a study on rats and assigned some arbitrary protein number?
On the flip side, what if it's this scenario? You're between training sessions on your rest day and you're feeling stomach discomfort from eating a big steak and eggs breakfast. Lunchtime rolls around and you know if you eat anymore protein you're going to expel it in the toilet. Do you say to yourself well the magical protein intake fairies told me to consume 1 gram of protein per 1 pound of bodyweight so I guess I gotta go suck down a sirloin steak for lunch. Two hours later you're shooting it out your backside watching your expensive steak flush down the drain.
Then you have the body listeners of which I'm a member. They're connected to their inner aura or some other new age nonsense and they're just letting their bodies tell them how much protein to ingest. The problem with that is the protein you intake may be far greater or less than you actually need.
So what's the answer? There is no cut and dry answer. I heard Michael Phelps was taking in six hundred grams of protein per day when he was training for the Olympics. During the coldest days of January I could easily digest 450 grams of protein in a day. Now that it's summer I'm barely hitting two hundred grams.
Incidentally some of my biggest strength gains came from me eating far more than my protein requirements of 1 gram per 1 pound of body weight. Of course I spent the last of my resting time the day before and up until my workout on the toilet watching all my protein flush down the drain which is disgusting and time consuming and expensive. Beef and chicken are not cheap.
The only guideline I can think of is try to hit the 1 gram per 1 pound of body weight the first 36 hours after you workout and track your protein intake using myfitnesspal.com. If you feel like the protein is not going to digest properly and be used for muscle repair, back off the protein for the whole day. Maybe eat some yogurt or some bread or a banana for the rest of the day. Let your body reset itself. Try not to upset your stomach with a lot of fiber. And then hopefully on the next day for breakfast you can gorge yourself on meat and then start the strength gains again.
These are records of my one rep max's. I rate them on a five point
scale. 5 means I completed the lift with perfect form. 4 is a completed
lift with noticeable shakiness. 3 is completing the lift 3/4 of the way
up. 2 is half way up. 1 is a couple inches up. 0 is no noticeable
separation between the weight and whatever the weight was resting on.
Before I get into my rant, I want to give a little history on myself.
I first started lifting when I was around fourteen years old. My mom bought me a bench press station and a 110 lb weight set with a standard bar and dumbbell handles. For some reason the bar didn't have clips to hold the plates on the bar. Instead it used threaded clips which I had to screw onto the bar to keep the plates locked down. This really made setup time seem to take forever because each and every time I had to change the weight I had to spend a minute or two unscrewing the clips from the bar.
My first injury happened when I was sixteen. I was banging out a mean set of sixty five pound barbell rows, and then CRACK I slipped a vertebra disc in my lower spine and was bedridden for a couple days. I didn't know about holding your breath in to stabilize your lower back.
Incidentally my worst workout accident happened when I had the full 110 lbs of weight on the bar and it was resting on the uprights of the bench station. I stupidly unloaded all the plates from one side of the bar. This made the bar unbalanced and all the weight on the other side of the bar pulled the unweighted side off the uprights and the bar cartwheeled end over end into my bedroom window and shattered the glass.
Up until the age of thirty seven years old, I was seriously misinformed about a lot of things in strength training. I thought three sets of ten was the only way to get strong. I thought breathing in on the concentric part of the lift and breathing out on the eccentric part was how you breathe. I didn't know crap about maintaining tightness in the lift. I believed if you held your breath while lifting you would burst a blood vessel in your brain and die. I had no idea that animal protein consumption was the most important key to build muscle. And I thought all the freaks in those muscle building magazines at the supermarket magazine rack were completely natural and were totally being honest about how they got strong and muscular. And I also believed that they were being honest about the supplements they were taking and all the flashy ads where some big muscle freak is holding a bottle of some expensive supplement was actually the only thing he was taking to get strong.
You see, in many respects this blog is a revolt against those ways of thinking. I'm not very fond of the supplement industry. They're basically misrepresenting the ingredients on their labels a lot of times and for all I know there might just be anabolic steroids in the protein powder I consume. The supplement industry is basically unregulated and the only way they get investigated by the federal government is if not one person dies but three to five people actually die from taking their poison. For almost twenty years I was being duped by the quacks and snake oil salesmen.
One of the first quack books I bought was A Practical Approach to Strength Training. The author basically recommends using time under tension strategies to build strength. But of course this couldn't be any more wrong as you know if you've been reading this blog any length of time.
Then I stumbled upon Supertraining. It was the first book to formally introduce me to single rep sets. I read about fifty percent of the book. Of that I could only understand about seventy five percent. Most of the book is filled with incomprehensible graphs and esoteric strength training language. A lot of the book covers plyometrics which is mostly useless to strength training. It also discusses the concepts of speed strength and periodization which I also consider to be pseudoscience. But still I generously borrow a lot of strength training ideas from that book and you should be aware of that.
Where I branch off into my own research are the two basic building blocks of any successful strength training program. The first is the concept of translative exercises. This is where you use two or more complementary lifts to exercise and strengthen the same muscle group. SUPERTRAINING devotes a couple pages to this topic but it only talks about the strength building aspect of translative lifting. It doesn't talk about the fact that translative exercises are necessary for injury prevention as well.
The second thing of mine is the concept of using missed lifts to strengthen muscles. I generously utilize missed lifts in my training programming. I consider the missed lift in a single rep set to be the single most important key to busting plateaus and sticking points. And I can completely without a doubt claim that no strength trainer in the world uses the concept of rating one's missed lifts to assess strength progression. I count that as my own proprietary original idea.
Now for the rant.
I write this blog for many reasons. The first is that I'm actively trying to undermine all the quacks and the supplement industry. I consider them thieves.
The first set of thieves is the guys on YouTube. They're usually hawking some crap pre-workout powder or protein powder. They're saying that you absolutely have to take their specific brand of powder.
To date, I've only taken one kind of pre-workout and that was caffeine pills. I stopped though because they only last for thirty minutes and the rest of the workout my body crashed and I felt weak.
In fact, anybody who is trying to sell you their protein powder as a replacement for animal protein is trying to feed you a line of crap and you should be very suspect of their intentions.
The body acts on cycles. Sleep at night. Awake during the day. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. These are some basic cycles I can think offhand.
Strength training relies on cycles too. Lift heavy. Afterwards eat beef. Get strong. Another obvious cycle. So how does this relate to anything useful so you can get strong?
See, science hasn't figured out all the cycles necessary to get strong. I haven't figured out all the cycles to get strong. Maybe someday somebody reading this will go to college and apply a detailed analysis in a lab setting to figure out all the biomechanics and chemical reactions that go into making strength gains.
This blog is far from the end all be all of strength training. This blog is about as unrefined and crude as strength training principles can get. If any further research is to be done in strength training it would have to be in refining the strength training process. Protein intake and how it converts into muscle growth. Rest periods. Training session duration. Night time vs. daytime training. Fast twitch muscle fiber analysis after training are just a few of the areas I can think of that deserve much needed research.
So now for the latest kick that I'm on: winter vs summer strength gains. I don't know what type of environment you live in, but here in Chicago during the last winter I had to survive through subzero temperatures multiple days from January to March. And yes it is survival especially when if you stand out in subzero temperatures for more than fifteen minutes you can basically die.
My theory is that it's easier to get stronger in the winter than it is in the summer. Why? Calorie intake. On some days in January I could pound into my gut easily four or five thousand calories in a day, and yes I could definitely feel myself getting strong quickly. I was also getting fat quickly as well, and I had no problems digesting the massive amounts of protein I was taking in.
Now that it's summer my body is in fat burning mode. I'm having problems digesting protein. It seems like the only time I can fully utilize massive amounts of beef protein are after I workout. Even then I'm having to wait sometimes three or four hours after training to make sure my body goes into an almost catabolic phase and doesn't crap out all the expensive protein I had to shell out my hard earned dollars for.
My strength gains seem to be slower, but since it's the start of summer I don't have any hard data to back up my claim. It's just something I'm feeling.
The problem with going with the cycle theory and the whole hippie dippie "Oh I'm just listening to my body man" is that most of the time you're either undershooting or overshooting. For example, my protein intake for the summer is about ten ounces of beef and a couple eggs one time a day. The rest of the day I'm going very little protein and focusing on carbohydrates and fats. Yogurt. Fruits. Pizza. Basically anything to subside my appetite Sometimes thirty minutes later I'll have to go eat some beef because I can feel myself getting weak. But then my appetite is greater than what my body can actually digest and utilize to build muscle and I'll have to sit on the toilet and watch my expensive protein go down the drain.
Anyways here's my numbers.
What the numbers mean:
These are records of my one rep max's. I rate them on a five point
scale. 5 means I completed the lift with perfect form. 4 is a completed
lift with noticeable shakiness. 3 is completing the lift 3/4 of the way
up. 2 is half way up. 1 is a couple inches up. 0 is no noticeable
separation between the weight and whatever the weight was resting on.
When I do cable machine tricep extensions with a rope attachment, from now on I'm hitting it from behind like this guy. It's supposed to activate the long head of the tricep muscle. It also dropped my tricep extension lift by forty pounds. But the good thing about doing it this way is the tendonitis in my elbows has subsided because I'm not trying to move as much weight as I would be if I'd been doing tricep pushdowns. However, my triceps feel more fatigued and exercised when compared to the tricep pushdown. I can feel the lactic acid buildup soreness extending the full length of the tricep and extending back into my rear deltoids. To me exercising the triceps like the guy below seems far more effective than the tricep pushdown.
Before I was doing it like this guy.
Here's what happens when you experiment with good mornings and you don't know what you're doing. I scraped the skin off my back letting the bar chafe up and down where that red mark is.
