Plague of Strength

Though I steadfastly refused to do another one of these a couple of years ago, it seems like it is necessary given my utter hatred for writing about myself, and the incessant questions I receive thereto. As with anyone useful, my methods, opinions, and approach to just about everything changes over time, though my unrelenting quest to improve myself on a daily basis continues unabated (though it seems to have become somewhat all-consuming). Thus, expect to see new takes on old positions and an explanation for the genesis of these changes, should you find yourself in a position to reevaluate your own methods.

To that end, I’ve thrown on my favorite of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series (the much maligned third installment) for ambiance, washed down some stashed OG-formula Cannibal Genius with a Reign and a Bronk-Aid, and fired up some bangin’ sativa to ensure that this installment of the series will be just as vitriolic and acerbic as Deadpool with rabies, lest some old heads accuse me of having gone soft amidst my polished prose.

Q: How do you structure your progression? I don’t understand your methods.

Somehow, the internet has forgotten that there are more ways to progress than simply adding weight onto the bar, and that has led some of you to take horrendously long rest periods in an effort to keep adding miniscule weights to a barbell rather than just switching tactics altogether, or find new programs, scour the internet for answers, and eventually land on Youtube writing badly edited and composed screeds against strength in any form you happen to find it online.

Making progress in the gym isn’t simply limited to adding weight to three lifts simple enough for a person with the mental acuity of a potato to perform- there is a lot more to it. Progress can be visibly measured in bodyweight, bodyweight, appearance of your physique, overall health, cardiovascular fitness, and weight on various lifts (or all lifts), but there are much more subtle ways to progress that give you far many more options for success (which are the things for which all of you should be searching, rather than just filming every lackluster set you perform in an effort to achieve the absolutely laughable “accountability” I keep hearing about.

Accountability means a willingness to take responsibility for your actions-video evidence of you waddling around the gym bereft of energy is in no way, shape or form, a method of providing yourself accountability. And to whom are you accountable? The internet? That makes no fucking sense, as they have no ability or willingness to hold you accountable for your failures- if they were, you wouldn’t be filming yourself benching unimpressive weights followed by a six-paragraph litany of excuses for not going heavier.

Making progress is not just about weight on the bar- it is about consistency, fulfillment, imagination, excitement, and dedication. “Grinding” is for idiots who dislike lifting and shouldn’t even be in the gym in the firm fucking place- save your fucking sob stories for people who give a fuck. I know that guys like Hippolyte Triat managed to be bigger and stronger than most of you in spite of the fact he was eating half-rotted French food, covered in lice, bedbugs, and all manner of parasites, and with only the most rudimentary implements (though they improved as he invented them). You have literally none of those fucking excuses, and no one on Earth gives two shits about your kids, job, or any of the rest- from a historical perspective you live a life of absolute leisure and ease. If you suck at lifting, being jacked, or any of the rest, it isn’t because you’re a hardgainer- it’s because you might be the least successful person, historically, in your entire family lineage. In a time when literally EVERYTHING is easy, if you still suck, you can rank yourself among the shittiest people in your genetic line.

If you’d rather not suck, there are plenty of ways to increase the intensity of your workout without increasing your bar weights, as increasing your bar weight is not always possible. Here are the prime movers:

• More weight. This should be obvious- even if you just add weight on your last set, your total workload for the workout will be higher than the previous week. Frankly, I frontload my sets and drop reps rather than weight, and everyone has their own method. To wit:
  • For overhead pressing I really like doing doubles and triples. Say, for instance, your strict press max is 225, and nothing you seem to do will budge it (though you need to work on tricep strength for locking out, likely), I will put 205 on the bar and attempt triples but will settle into doubles and perhaps singles over the course of about 30 minutes of banging away with 60-90 second rests between sets. I don’t drop weight, and if I fail to get a rep I stop and move on to something else. Pretty simple. Once I can get sets of 3 for all of the 30 mins, I add 5lbs to each side and restart the progression.
• More reps with same weight. I don’t limit my reps on a set, though I usually leave one in the tank so I don’t drop the bar in my mouth, as I never ever train with a partner or a spotter. I don’t recommend that either, for legal reasons, and don’t do it because I think I’m cool for being a loner but because people move too fucking slowly and talk too fucking much. Please remember I fucking detest black metal, so if you like it, know your and my motivations are likely opposite and you genuinely do not understand the workings of my mind. At some point I will flesh that out but there is a reason I dislike black metal and its fans, and it is philosophical and ethical rather than simply because black metal is shit music by shit people intended to “scare the normies” because black metallers are fucking terrified of everything but shooting up a high school or movie theater.

• Higher intensity (Intensity multipliers). This doesn’t mean trying harder. For most of you, this means bands and chains, but for fuck’s sake quit it will that shit- no one is impressed by your nebulous poundages no one can really understand, and you look like a fat kid trying to hide your man titties with a heavy sweater (we can all see the lame ass bar weight, just like those pointy titties under the sweater). Yes, chains and bands are an intensity multiplier, but they’re also crutches and training wheels for eternal beginners in the gym. Plus, it’s a pretty rad sign that someone is a tryhard, because you don’t need that shit until (potentially) you’re already strong and most people use it incorrectly and overly much.
  • My favorite is an isometric contraction at the end of each set of presses, which has been known at least since the OG Westside Barbell club to confer huge strength advantages that science has since confirmed.
  • I also love tempo changes, like doing skullcrushers with a four-second descent, a one second pause on the forehead, and a one second ascent. Or 4-0-4-0, going slow and steady through the entire movement.
  • Drop sets are another good option, and a reason I really like lifting on hammer strength shit, as doing triple drops is easy, fast, and risk-free for injury even without a spotter.
  • There are plenty of other methods, and you can feel free to google them. I think at this point we’ve established that spending money on equipment is absolutely not how you get strong- it’s literally not been the method any single lifter about whom I ever wrote utilized.
• Same weight in shorter time. Call it escalating density training or time under tension, it’s all the same thing- if you move the same weight you moved previously in a faster time, you worked more intensely and thus harder. Progress! You can use the extra time to add in more work, even, to make more progress. This is why a lot of lifters in the past used jump sets and supersets, so that they could fit more lifting into less time, and thus lift more overall.

Now, depending on how you’re lifting, your strengths and weaknesses, and the amount of time and energy you have, it is unlikely that you’ll always pick the same opinion for progression unless you’re just a lazy and unimaginative person, in which case you’re going to fail anyway. There is no “right” answer for how to progress beyond what works and what doesn’t, and anything into which you put your all will necessarily yield results (though if your methods are fucked, the results might not be what you really want).

Q: What is your current diet like? Do you still use the APD (Apex Predator Diet), or have you moved onto something else?

Before any of you ask, I’ve never read a single fucking thing about the IIFYM diet because the entire idea of that diet is fucking stupid. It is the brainchild of fat people, designed for fat people so they can continue their mediocre existence without having stretched themselves in any way. It is a diet for the undisciplined idiot and the indolent house spouse- a meal plan for the mentally feeble and the dignity bankrupt, and not one to be followed or really even discussed by any useful individual. Know how I know? Because I have a fucking brain in my head, and I know that in no way, shape, or form are all calories equal under the watchful eye of the baby Jesus. In fact, all calories are pretty fucking different, due to a variety of biochemical reasons including, but not limited to:

• whether it is protein, fat, or carbohydrate.
  • The thermic effect of protein is much higher than either fat or carbs, which really matters due to the generally inaccurate state of caloric tracking- if you are going to fuck up eating too much of anything, make it protein rather than fat or carbs. The reason for this is “Metabolic rate not only rises to a greater extent with an increased caloric intake but there is a 6–8% increase in energy expenditure with carbohydrate meals, 3% increase with fat, and 25–40% with protein based meals” (Scott). That means that when you eat protein, you burn between 25% and 40% of the calories contained in that protein simply digesting it, which is 20-30% more than you would with carbs or fat.
  • “A higher protein intake actually increases levels of the satiety (appetite-reducing) hormones GLP-1, peptide YY and cholecystokinin, while reducing your levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin” (Healthline). Fat also has a significant effect on making your feel more full and less hungry, but carbs barely make an hour-long dent in either.
• whether it’s a solid or liquid meal.
  • In one study on the effect of a protein shake vs a protein bar on diet-induced thermogenesis and metabolic rate, “shakes produced a greater DIT (absolute and relative) than the solid meal in the resistance-trained group. In the sedentary group relative DIT from shakes was significantly lower than from bars. It seems a bit confusing, but if you regularly lift weights, liquid protein apparently is more thermogenic than solid protein. Yet the opposite occurs if you are a couch potato” (Antonio).
• the type of carbohydrate
  • High fructose corn syrup, for instance, is basically metabolic poison while sucrose spikes your blood sugar and insulin, fructose is stored in your liver or converted to fat if it isn’t burned immediately.
• meal composition
  • The total composition of each meal has effects on your satiety, hormone levels, and metabolic rate independent of your daily caloric macros
• the timing of your carbs
  • Consuming sucrose during workouts blunts your lipolysis during your lift- in other words, if you have a Starbucks Frappuccino before you lift, you’d not burning a single gram of fat while you lift.

Given that protein is literally the bricks we use to build the bastion of strength that is your body, it should necessarily be the backbone of your diet. That said, I went a couple of years without consuming a single protein shake because frankly I was sick of drinking them, sick of trying to prove myself to a bunch of people I will never meet, sick of lifting as a “job” (which it had sorta become in my mind in my efforts to make Chaos and Pain supplements a success all while trying to break my own record in powerlifting), and was busy doing a passable effort at trying to drink myself to death for a couple of years. During that time I was smaller, fatter, and generally less awesome than I have been before or since, so when I decided to stop being a morose shitbag and resolved to make Jamie 2.0 better in every single subjective and objective way than I’ve ever been, I began drinking at least two protein shakes a day, no matter what.

That is not because protein shakes are the panacea for which you’ve been waiting- it’s because when you’re in a pit like that, you have to climb out rung by rung and bit by bit. And drinking two protein shakes every day no matter how little you want them is a means to physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual betterment for a wide range of reasons, especially when you feel like shit about your appearance relative to what it typically has been throughout your life.

If you are in a spot like that or have been: stop planning to do some shit to fix yourself and FUCKING DO SOMETHING. Drink a protein shake. Go to the gym. Get a subscription to Curiosity Stream and watch every documentary on that motherfucker or something. Make positive changes in your life rather than discussing them. Don’t tell people your bullshit “plans,” don’t dither and ask people for their opinion for how you should better yourself- make a fucking decision on the spot to be better and begin being better. You keep doing things like that, especially when you don’t feel like it- throw a homeless guy a few dollar menu burgers even when you’re low on cash, become your pets’ (or kids, if you’re a “breeder” as a guy I know likes calling you) best friend and really spend time interacting with them and getting to know them, take care of random plants and shit, and you will build a little mountain of success on which you can sit. All of those little pebbles of good will eventually form a big ass mountain, and standing atop it feels pretty motherfucking good, though you’ll forever wonder what caused you to have your little episode (which, as I’m finding, most interesting people seem to have going from the musical of life’s first act to it’s second).

As to my calories or my macros, I never really count them, though i am very conscious of what I have eaten throughout the day and use that to guide my choices goin forward. If I am low on calories for the day (some days it is a bitch to force myself to eat), I will often eat less clean later in the day to bring them up, though I try to keep my calories more or less isocaloric with a 40% protein, 30% fat, and 30% carbs style diet. I eat a hell of a lot of tacos, as they’re portable, delicious, and easy to modify without making large expenditures of time or effort. They’re the easiest fucking thing on earth to make, and when i am in a hurry I just use off-the-shelf taco seasoning, hard or soft shells, and 85% lean beef drained and occasionally rinsed, then doused with hot sauce. For al pastor tacos i do include the cilantro and onion before the hot sauce, but usually it’s just taco shell hot sauce and meat- a delicious method of conveyance for protein into the depths of my stomach.

And I know your retort will be something about how you don’t like / can’t drink / can’t digest protein shakes- the awesome part about that is I genuinely don’t give a fuck. If you’re a pussy, stop being one- it’s that simple.

I don’t feel like doing shit because I’ve worked 70 hour weeks for months on end? NO ONE CARES. I drink shakes all day even if I don’t feel like eating a fucking thing. After my fifth or sixth shake I’ll usually eat regular food because I’ve got enough protein in me to give me at least the life support-level mental and physical energy to cook and eat. Other days I’ll be starving and will eat ten thousand calories of crispy, breaded chicken wings and pizza, but I will start and end every day with a protein shake just because it fucking works.

Indolence is hardly an excuse to avoid a protein shake, as are forgetfulness, love of a languorous Saturday afternoon naked in bed with people you enjoy fucking, broken legs, comas, or any other shit- where there is a will there is a way, and if you lack the will to drink a protein shake you lack the will to be big, strong, and lean. Period.

And when I say it works, it works. There is no diet beyond eating around 50g of protein (40g minimum) every 2-3 hours I am awake– that’s right, no counting shit other than the hours on the clock. Up for 48 hours straight working on powerlines? That means that at the very least you should have consumed 800 grams of protein of the course of your lengthy workday in the form of 16 protein shakes, if you couldn’t get time to order solid food.

For me, some of them are whole milk and Allmax protein. Some are water and Allmax. Some are Fairlife protein and Allmax. Some are Fairlife and Shamrock Farms RTDs. This isn’t really all that much different from the Apex Predator Diet, for those of you who remember it, but I took off the training wheels because eating is so intuitive for me now I don’t need to be so restrictive. If I feel crazy hungry all day, sometimes I make sure to stop at McD’s or Burger King here and there for a few double burgers that I eat leisurely as I go about my business. usually, my home-cooked meals are healthy as fuck, because that’s how I’ve trained myself to eat, and I love the hell out of Kodiak protein pancakes, which I make fairly regularly.

Bear in mind my bodyfat set point has been in the single digits since my twenties, so a couple of years of sporadic inactivity, suicidally heavy drinking, and occasional jail food could only fuck up my metabolism so much. I also have a very keen sense of when my body needs food after being in jail for my DUIs and starving through a month of quarantine each time.

If you’re fat, don’t try this. If you’re not someone who listens to their body, don’t do this. If you like a lot of directions, don’t do this. Frankly, very few of you should do more than put this in your back pocket, because most of you don’t diet hard enough and those of us who do usually either never stop or quit altogether and get fat, and if you’re doing a program someone else wrote your volume is too low to see decent results anyway. There is an easy middle ground to find, and I knew it was there because after reading about guys like Sergio Oliva and a variety of other 70s bbers, I knew that being lean enough to win a 70s bodybuilding contest didn’t require you to diet (and frankly, 70s bodybuilding lean is plenty lean to get you laid literally anywhere). And if that’s true, then we all must be missing the fucking point, which we are- eating is very intuitive if you just train your fucking ass off and listen to what your body says it needs.

That said, I can’t teach you people intuition, so for now just know that if you want to eat like a normal human being at some point, it’s absolutely possible to eat half an XL sausage and pepperoni pizza a couple of times a week for dinner and still remain lean without the use of clen, tren, or any of the other dumbass bullshit Youtubers like to claim they know a fucking thing about (I was even crashed off what was already a fairly low dose of test through a couple of months of this diet with no ill effects).

Q: Have you changed your stance on cardio? Are you recommending that we do it now? I seem to recall you mentioning you walk as cardio.

No, I haven’t, as I’ve never considered walking to be cardio, and I’ve been walking all over hell and gone since 1998, when I lived in Beijing and used my feet to travel the city. Unsurprisingly, I was lean there even on a diet of oil-drenched Chinese food and deliciously greasy fried chicken… because I was drinking Met-Rx shakes and eating protein bars as the backbone of my diet even then. It took years for me to realize that the combination of not being a fat, lazy American and a protein-shake based un-clean diet seems to unlock my ultimate potential (in China I hit a then-lifetime high bodyweight of 167lbs [I’d wrestled 134 the year prior] with abs before contracting dysentary and losing 15 lbs without ever having even used prohormones like androstenediol, nevermind steroids).

As a general rule I walk to anywhere I’m going if it’s a half hour or less one-way, and I’ve been walking to the gym for years. According to the Ancestry DNA app on my phone, which tracks my steps (previously unbeknownst to me), even on a very lazy day on the couch I walk a mile (because I’ll always walk to the bodega just to get out of the house and stretch my legs), but on most non-work (security at NJ Weedman’s Joint) days I walk 2-3 miles, and on work days it can be more than 5, and I do it without noticing it.

In short, I don’t recommend you do cardio, especially not inside on a treadmill. I recommend you not be such a shiftless, loafing, inactive piece of shit, and find something active to do every day that you enjoy and burns calories without you even thinking about it as exercise (because walking is not exercise- it is a basic activity any animal with legs engages in). Rowing worked wonders for every ancient civilization, and in jail I even used that as my “walk” when I went to the hole, just doing horizontal rows off the top bunk for hours on end. Chopping wood is rad for cardio as well. Hell, mowing the fucking lawn counts- just get off the couch and move your ass. Stop making excuses- even those fatass fucking hobbits walked for three hours at a time in those movies. If they can do it, so can you.

Sources:

Antonio, Jose.  Liquid protein more thermogenic than solid protein?  Ironman Magazine.  26 Jun 2012.  Web.  1 Jul 2021.  https://www.ironmanmagazine.com/liquid-protein-more-thermogenic-than-solid-protein/

De Glisezinski I, Harant I, Crampes F, Trudeau F, Felez A, Cottet-Emard JM, Garrigues M, Riviere D. Effect of carbohydrate ingestion on adipose tissue lipolysis during long-lasting exercise in trained men.  J Appl Physiol (1985). 1998 May;84(5):1627-32.

Scott CB, Fernandez J, Lehman MOnset of the Thermic Effect of Feeding (TEF): a randomized cross-over trial.  J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2007; 4: 24.

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