This week I was asked more stupid fucking questions than ever in my life, and so many in one day I actually had an eye twitch by the end of it.  If you can easily google something, WHY WASTE MY TIME ASKING FOR THE ANSWER?  If you suck at googling, kill yourself.  Moreover, if you ask my opinion on something, don’t argue my fucking answer.  Don’t claim you’re a special snowflake, assert your unique situation, or deny the fact that you have no interest in actually being a useful human being.  That’s not to say I won’t field stupid questions.  I will.  I’ll just beat you half to death with the answer.  To wit, here was the most annoying question I received, in summary form from the hour of my time this asshole wasted on a day so annoying my eye was actually twitching by the end:

Not the asshole time waster, but similarly fat.

“Yesterday morning 101.3kg [222.86 lbs] at 190cm [6’2″] tall. Its around 99-101kg [~220lbs] usually and the scale weight says 23% fat but I don’t trust it cos it once said 19.5%, then I lost 10kg and it said 19%.”  Yadda yadda yadda I don’t actually want to cut and would love to waste an hour of your time but blah blah want 15% bodyfat for my set point and OH YEAH DID I MENTION I AM TERRIFIED OF LOSING ALL OF MY “STRENGTH” BUT HAVE A 400kg [880 lbs] TOTAL AND WILL FIGHT YOU AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY IF YOU SUGGEST THAT I AM A SAD SACK OF FAT SHIT WHO SHOULD CUT WEIGHT AND HAVE NO STRENGTH TO LOSE?

Before I realize what a shitbird, timewasting, dickless, worthless, cocksucking asshole this kid was, I was actually pretty nice to him.  I caluclated his lean body mass, which at 23% bodyfat (which is horrifyingly, inexcusably high for a male) was 171 lbs.  I then multiplied that by 1.1 to figure out what he’d be with the same amount of lean mass and 10% bodyfat, and suggested that he cut to 198 lbs/90 kg, stay at that weight for six months, and then start lean bulking.  The purpose of this exercise would be to overshoot his goal bodyfat set point to lower it further than need be and give him some metabolic wiggle room while he bulked.

He, however, insisted he could not cut that much weight because his “gains” would “stall”.  If you’re an adult male totaling under 1000, you have no gains to stall or lose.  Though I tried to impress this upon him, he fought me tooth and nail, insisting that his lack of gains was more special to him than other peoples’.  He then told me that he had insufficient funds to actually diet, and continued to assert that he should not have to drop weight in an effort to change his body fat set point.

Google “danish men” and all of the pictures basically look like this.  I could conquer that country single-handedly, hungover on a Sunday afternoon, armed with nothing but two drink coasters and a ham sandwich. 

I cannot assert enough how stupid this line of thinking is.  In fact, my sense of humor fails me when thinking about it to the point that I briefly considered buying a plane ticket to Denmark to beat this asshole into a coma for wasting multiple hours of my time (this was not the first time he did this, and even once had the audacity to literally demand that I respond to his bizarre request to Skype with me).  Were I to do so, I might become the only person in history to commit mass murder using a corpse as a weapon, because I would quite like to beat the entire population of that apparently useless country to death with this kids corpse, so greatly has he annoyed me.  Just grab him by the ankles and smash other people to a pulp with his bloody, lifeless body.  It’d certainly be GPP, at the very least.

Back to the point, however- there is absolutely no reason why an adult male should be over 15% body fat.  If your body fat is over 15%, it’s because you want to be. There’s no utility for the excess weight, no excuse for its existence, and whatever arguments you might proffer to the contrary are as feeble and twisted as an old woman.  This genius told me that he had wide hips, so low levels of bodyfat would make him look weird.  Uh huh.  He also failed to kill himself when I informed him that there were multiple American women under 130 lbs who could out total him, and that he would not even be competitive against women unless he cut to the 165 lb class, so neither pride nor common sense seemed to hold much value to him.

Duckface, fauxhawk, AND nipple piercings.  I pulled a hat trick of douchbaggery in a single pic… but was front squatting 200kg while weighing 77 kg or so, without even the benefit of ephedrine.

In summary, weakness may be a crime, but so is fatness.  Being both should be a capital fucking crime.  In my opinion, getting lean first makes the most sense, because strength gains will not come quickly enough to overshadow the fact that a person is fat.  Moreoever, it is possible to gain muscle and strength while losing fat.  I’ve done it.  And before the puppet show in the comment chimes in with allegations of steroid use, the first time I ever got significantly stronger while cutting was in Europe, and I didn’t have access to any of the supplements, legal or otherwise, one might suggest are the only way to make that happen.  I just ate a ton of chicken breast and lifted like a fucking lunatic twice a day, six days a week.  Therefore, he could attain human form AND get stronger simultaneously by eating correctly (which I swear I have written about extensively) and lifting his fucking ass off.  It’s not as though he could get any weaker, so there’s no reason not to cut.  Given that cutting weight is apparently out of the question, he should probably head over to my newest guilty masturbation reddit for some tips on how to cut effectively, because bleeding to death is pretty much the only way this kid could drain enough shame from his body to avoid creating some sort of singularity of suck in the grand old Kingdom of Denmark… hilariously, the former land of the Vikings and now simply home to Cheetos-eating saddies.

Booty cleanse.
Though one day last week was so filled with insipid, lazy questions, not all of the questions I get asked give e the beginnings of a cluster headache and force me to bed at 5 PM so I can train early and then drink myself into sweet oblivion.  Instead, most of them are generally interesting, and might benefit people who have the number of chromosomes a healthy individual should.  Here are a couple of those.

How would you best structure workouts to progess in the pullup?  I fucking suck at them.

Pullups and dips have been a bit of an obsession of mine since high school.  One of the school records was in “The Circuit” which was dips, pullups, and pushups done in rounds.  As soon as a round could not be completed, you were credited with the last completed round.  In each round, you would do reps for that round number in each exercise with no more than 30 seconds between each exercise.  Thus, round 1 was 1 rep of each, round 2 was 2 reps of each, and so on.  Before I became obsessed with it, the record was 15 or 16.  At graduation, I had it up to 21, and a couple of years later I pulled off an ugly and exhausting 27.  I’ve not really bothered with it since, but I’ve gotten so good at pullups that even after bicep surgery and abject terror of retearing my bicep kept me from doing pullups for 10 weeks, I was still able to do multiple sets of 15 with no problem.

Rather than being some sort of Spider-Man, I developed a lot of different ways to get good at pullups, and they all seem to work universally.  Pullups are, as it happens, one of those things you can’t not be good at if you do them enough.  As such, if you want to be good at them, doing some daily is not a terrible idea- pullups actually make for a pretty awesome upper body warmup, so doing them at the beginning of every workout can benefit you greatly.

The method I have found for getting good at pullups quickly is to set a goal total for reps and then hitting that goal any way you can.  For a number of years my rep goal for pullups and dips was 100 and 300, respectively, but that got very easy, very quickly, so I bumped it to 200 and 600 and then basically quit doing them regularly because it was too time intensive and generally boring.  Doing dips and pullups together lets you actively rest in between sets of each, though I’d really on rest long enough to get a drink of water every fourth or fifth set.  Thus, you can condense a lot of work into a short period of time.

Structuring your rep scheme seems tricky for some people.  My buddy, the guy who asked the question, can hit maybe ten on a single set of pullups but is then basically trashed, and but can do sets of 5 with no problem.  That made it easy for me- I always stop about 2 or 3 reps before real fatigue starts setting in for multiple sets.  I don’t have a ton of repetition strength, so I can do maybe 3 sets of 20 before my reps are reduced to 8, and then 6.  Sets of 15 I can do for a bit longer, so I generally do sets of 12, which I can do endlessly.  For my buddy, I recommended he set a rep goal of 50 and do as many sets of 5 as he could, but keep going until he hit his goal.  Once he was able to get all of his reps in sets of 5, he could do a workout with no goal reps, but just do sets of 5 until he couldn’t, and that would be his new goal.  Then, he could do sets of 7.  That method’s worked great for me over the years, and has worked for all of my training consultation clients as well.

If that strikes you as too mathematical, there’s a simpler way- get a doorframe pullup bar and put it into a room into which you go regularly.  Then, every time you enter or exit that room, do some pullups.  If you can’t do a single pullup, jump to the top and lower yourself slowly for five negatives.  The negatives trick is one I picked up from an NFL trainer, and it’s how they get 300 lb linemen who’ve never done a pullup to be able to do multiples in a couple of weeks.  Every girlfriend I’ve ever had who sucked at pullups used it to get good at pullups, as well.  Pullups, as it happens, are easier for most people to get good at than they would apparently think.

What is your grocery bill like per week/month/however you shop? The reason I ask is two fold. 1) we’re both the same height, 2) how much food does it take to sustain a 200+ lb, 5.5 foot guy? I’m 150lb’s and feel like I couldn’t down the calories it would take to get close to the 175lb range much less into the 200lb range.

I generally shop daily, because I kind of enjoy grocery shopping and it’s become an unbreakable habit.  I’m assuming that this question is regarding my eating habits on the Apex Predator Diet, which everyone seems to think is a recipe for financial ruin.  In spite of my degrees, I’ve never had a particularly well-paying job (at least insofar as what I was taught to expect after obtaining an MBA), and I’ve still managed to use this diet since around 2007.

My diet on the APD varies a bit, so I will use a variety of foods to give you a weekly bill.
9 lbs pork ribs: $36
9 lbs beef ribs: $22.5
1.5 lbs Bone in Ribeye: $10
5 lbs Vitamin Shoppe Whey: $50
Large Pizza: $12
Lunch at Chipotle: $10
Bag of Baked Lays: $3
20 piece McNuggets: $5
Movie popcorn: $6
Total: $154.5/week, so $618 a month, including my “entertainment” meal.

That’s a rough estimate because I rotate my foods somewhat, but I would say that it is between $15 and $30 a day.  As for you bodyweight and caloric needs, it really doesn’t take that much in the way of calories to get to 175. I went from 150 to 175 in a few years eating chicken, rice, and broccoli three times a day, or Chipotle bowls of double chicken and rice, plus a couple of protein shakes. That probably wasn’t too much over 2000 calories a day, and I steadily gained weight from 135 to 175 over the course of a few years.  Then I played with macros until I leaned out and got bigger at the same weight, then kept leaning out and getting bigger.

Oh Chipotle, how I love thee.

Though it doesn’t really pertain to the question above, which was apparently just an effort to get an idea of what he needed to budget for food, I continue to find it fascinating the degree to which the new breed of lifter endlessly compares themselves to their peers.  We’re talking everything from height to arm length to weight to the amount of sleep they get, all with the dubious goal of excusing poor performance.  I’m not going to trot out the old adage about excuses- instead, I will say without equivocation that if you’re doing this you are definitely an asshole, and not of the awesome Jamie Lewis variety, and that if you’re that preoccupied with proffering to nameless strangers on the internets a list of reasons why you suck compared to your peers, just fucking kill yourself.  You’re not shit, never going to amount to shit, and you’d definitely be better off underneath the ground than above it.

Want to know how much muscular weight you can reasonably expect to gain in a week?  HOW ABOUT YOU EAT A SHITLOAD OF FOOD AND TRAIN YOUR FUCKING ASS OFF IN AN EFFORT TO DISCOVER THE ANSWER FOR YOURSELF?  Jesus tittyfucking christ I hate people.  Motherfuckers are so busy putting arbitrary limits on themselves they never actually test their limits, then use their lack of progress stemming from a lack of effort to justify their pathetic mindset and spread it to everyone else.  Fuck that shit.  Push it to the fucking limit and then brag about your baddassery, not the other way around.

What are your five all time favorite Hardcore/Metalcore albums, and what bands/songs do you generally have in your lifting playlist?

Five All Time Favorite Hardcore/Metalcore Albums
Killwhitneydead– Inhaling the Breath of a Bullet
Hatebreed– Satisfaction is the Death of Desire
Hoods– Pray for Death
Throwdown– Haymaker
Candiria– Beyond Reasonable Doubt

I’d say those are unquestionably the albums to which I’ve listened the most over the years.  Early on, it was pretty much just Earth Crisis, Snapcase, Strife, Converge, and Hatebreed, but I dropped most of those bands over the years and moved onto other shit.  I love the fuck out of a lot of the newer bands, but it’s hard to say if they’ll remain in rotation once the shiny wears off.  I’d imagine Infant Annihilator will make it into a top ten at some point, but most of that is filled out by KWD’s second and third album- I don’t think I’ve listened to a single band more than KWD, frankly, and continue to do so in spite of the Homerian tragedy unfolding with their power metal shitshow of a new album.  For those of you who like power metal: Fuck you and your crew.

Ten Most Commonly Found Bands on My Lifting Playlist

  1. 25 ta Life: Entire Friendship, Loyalty Commitment Ep and most of Strength Through Unity 
  2. Hatebreed: all of Satisfaction, Doomsayer, A Call For Blood, Under the Knife
  3. Hoods: most of Pray for Death, most of King is Dead, Ghettoblaster, Pit Beast
  4. World of Pain: entire s/t 
  5. Throwdown: most of Haymaker, Vendetta, This is Where it Ends, most of Beyond Repair
  6. Annotations of an Autopsy: Stagebreaker, Buried in a Bad Rap, Bone Crown, Born Dead, In Snakes I Bathe
  7. Jerome: entire Ep
  8. Nasty: Generation Fuck, Look at Me and Fuck You, My Brain Went Terribly Wrong, Slaves To The Rich
  9. Shattered Realm: All Will Suffer, Showdown, This World is Mine, Kings Cannot Fall
  10. Built Upon Frustration: Immaculate Rejection, Rest of the World, Personal Game for Personal Gain, Nothing, Resurrecting, Turn My Back
Honorable Mention: Sworn Vengeance, Sworn Enemy, Full Blown Chaos, TRC, Recognize, and How It Ends are all bands I’ve had on my mp3 since mp3 players became a thing, and all of whom have been making it onto my lifting mix cds since the late 90s.  
This was, frankly, harder to compile than I expected it to be, mostly because I’ve got a couple of random songs, like “Posi Holocaust” by No Zodiac that never come off my mp3 player, yet most of the rest of their stuff sucks.  Another couple of songs that never get removed are “Where Will You Go?” by unknown, yet awesome Tucson band Gatrot, “Battle Lines” by E-Town Concrete, “Suckerpunch” by Get The Ammo, “Boom Snap Clap” by Irish Front, “Dreaming in Dog Years” by the Red Chord (whose singer has curiously become a cop), and “Not Dead Yet” by Hed PE.  The only reason I mention those is that I’m constantly asked to suggest obscure shit, and to most of you I think it’d be considered, while hardcore kids from my generation are probably going “fuck yes” and smirking to themselves with that list.  
As you might notice, all of my carefully laid plans on ordering the release of blogs fell apart once more, because my writing is driven entirely by my interest in a given subject.  Thus, the exercise fads series is being delayed because the research that goes into it is frankly exhausting, I’m continuing my procrastination on my Raw Unity writeup prep/injury rehab writeup because that topic bores me beyond belief, and the Hormone and paleotard blogs were just plain forgotten about.  All of those are in various stages of completion, and will come out whenever they interest me again.  What does interest me is training for the apocalypse, since sports-specific training questions annoy me and it’s a kind of ridiculous premise that will shed some light on how to train specifically for a given sport without making me want to suicide, so that will be the next blog, out later this week.  The apocalypses I plan to cover are robopacalypse, slow apocalypse, nuclear apocalypse, and of course, zombie apocalypse, and I assure you it will be fucking epic.  Until then, tits.

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