Before you ask, I have only weighed myself twice in the last year. I was 226 maybe six months ago and am now between 197 and 205, depending on the day. I can run a 7 minute mile, strict pressed 275 out of the rack without having touched a barbell press in months the other day, and am in Xl and XXL shirts with a smaller waist than I had when I was competing in powerlifting, though I can front squat 500 to depth beltless pretty much on a whim. And I racked 600 without even looking at the bar weight high as shit a couple of weeks ago as soon as I walked into the gym, because I was going to curl in the squat rack and the bar was in my way. There are all of the metrics I can provide.

I turned 44 two weeks ago, and in spite of the middle part of the last decade being a dumpster fire in my life, I look good. Real good. And I will finally have a respectable bench in 2021, after discovering that all of my muscle was packed under eternally locked muscle knots radiating out from under my solar plexus was the reason I could never arch. As in, I could not physically arch, which no one ever believed. Well, that weird problem pulled my torso totally upright and sheathed everything from my abs through my forearms in rad little knots that kept shit from tearing because it was so out of place (too bad I didn’t discover this before tearing my bicep).

I am happy to report I can now arch and lay back in a standing press, and once I pulled apart my shoulders and arms I discovers my shoulders are so rad they look nearly tumorous. And my arms aren’t half bad either, even with the torn one on display. As to the knotting issue, I am not a licensed massage therapist and don’t recommend any of you do trigger point therapy on yourselves for six months- you might want to see a professional for that- but I will eventually cover it in a later installment, because I even discovered an extra two abs in all of that.

That smirk is some fake it till you make it shit, because I’ve been so embarrassed of the state of my right arm since I started unknotting myself that half the time I wanted to wear a burka. It went from just looking like a slab off off-color arm with no vascularity or definition into a puffy red monstrosity, then a bruised and sickly looking mess, then progressively less gross. This was maybe two weeks ago, and you can see I had none of the definition I have now.

I didn’t document it because frankly I still don’t think anyone will believe this shit- until last week I’d been off gear for a month (didn’t appear I needed it, really, and I was broke as fuck) and before that I was only running 200mg a week of test (again, broke as fuck), but even at my biggest doses I never really ran much more than a gram or a gram. Anyway, it was fucking ugly the entire time and I really didn’t want pics of my looking that horrible- most of the time my abs and arms looked like I was a leper who’d been hit by a car or two. Hell, this is just a couple of weeks ago, and you can see how swollen and gnarly my arm looks mid-release (and that release has taken at least 90 days).

What looks like weird vascularity is actually the skin pulling in weird directions all over that bicep. The tricep didn’t suffer as much, but you can see it’s fused to my brachialis and over my brachialis to my bicep. Like I said, it was fucking weird. Well, it is either that or I am just willing myself into being a super-saiyan using chaos magic.

Anyway, the point of this brief snapshot of my life is half to brag and half to remind you that although you might not see it in the mirror today, you’re banking gains every time you hit the gym.

YOU ARE, AND ALWAYS WILL BE, A WORK IN PROGRESS.

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