Plague of Strength

Personally, watching my writing evolve over the last twelve years has been pretty fucking interesting. When I began, I was an academic author with no real idea how to write to a regular audience, because I’d never had a reason to do it. As I’ve mentioned in the past, Plague of Strength and Chaos and Pain began just out of a request from friends to start writing the shit I knew about training and diet down, so they could access the information more easily. I decided to have some fun with it, and somehow it grew, though I am still completely unaware of how it did so as I never tried to advertise it once.

In any event, my writing certainly improved over the years, as did my lifts. Writing became as much an outlet for my artistic spirit as lifting was, and as my interests waxed and waned in various subjects, so the tenor and appearance of the site changed, One thing, however, remained static in spite of the fact that people have told me to my face that my manner of training “wasn’t Chaos and Pain,” in spite of the fact I’m me and I’ve said from the beginning that there is no one perfect way to attain superhuman strength, superlative intellect, and an apparently assailable but ultimately impregnable character.

In the Feb 2018 article Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted, I outlined evolution of my training methodology from my beginnings in my high school’s “shitty” old weight room. I’ve tried everything from D-1 wrestling program’s strength and conditioning routines to Bruce Lee’s “run three miles a day and then lift everything, all the time” methodology to old T-Nation programming ideas to bodypart routines to the totally instinctive shit at which I eventually arrived.

As I’ve mentioned previously, between 1992 and 2015 I didn’t take more than three days off from training in a week once, and by the end of that period I managed to be lean enough to have abs on my veins even while living on vodka, strip steak, and tater tots for months at a time. I slow bulked from about 130 pounds to about 210 in that time, squatted 675 for a double at least once in the gym without a belt on, push pressed 405 from my back at a bodyweight of about 190, and was capable of between 20 and 40 dead-hang pullups from junior year of high school onward. It’s safe to say that I’ve tried just about everything worth trying in strength sports, and have rarely noticed anything to be completely useless, in spite of the fact that I’ve occasionally made statements to the contrary.

At some point I’ll build some of these out if you guys want, but for now I am just going to give a quick update to my previous opinion. Know that unless I explain my logic, it all just boils down to no one wants to control everyone else’s other move. Not only is it impossible, it’s impractical and would lead to nothing good. If people who lifelessly went through the motions of life ended up successful, some dipshit would be able to do something halfway useful with a mass-produced program.

There is a place for people who quibble about the tiniest minutiae that is only tenuously related to lifting, but treated as the end all-be all for strength and size, and that’s Reddit. If you’re too scared of a little estrogen to get your dick/ladydick wet and move some weight, you should probably go follow Logan Paul and abandon the gym for mukbang and all of that stupid Youtube bullshit where people resort to watching other boring people do slightly interesting versions of horrifically boring shit. Weed enhances my life beyond lifting (though it seems to improve that as well) so a bit of raised estrogen alongside better sex, better friendships, a generally better life, and a vicious relentlessness in the gym is a trade I’ll make easily.

While I am at it, there is more than one mindset with which to approach lifting. I’m not an anthropologist and barely notice the regular people in the gym, so before you get excited that I’ll name your faction, I’ve no idea why most people lift, but I know it isn’t why I lift. At hear, I am an artist, and the written word, pen and ink, and my own body are my favorite canvases to use. The science crowd is nothing of the sort- they’re naught but fundamentalist carpenters, seeing in themselves a hole they can fill with a structure that doesn’t really reflect their interests or their mentality, but it allows them to adopt the illusion they both enjoy lifting and that they are part of the lifter culture. I genuinely look forward to their departure from the scene, because they’re contributing nothing positive to it and bringing endless bullshit, negativity, and bullshit mindsets into an activity that is supposed to be fucking fun.

Weed is Good. Real Good.

If you have forgotten, I was straightedge until I was 27, and even then only really drank and did a little blow every couple of years until I decided to go on gear in my mid-thirties (because no one believed I wasn’t on anyway). I’d tried weed, and I enjoy the company of hippies, but I didn’t like smoking and never really enjoyed the high off weed. Then, when I started getting a bunch of questions about my opinion on it I gave them, having no real dog in the fight. At this point I wouldn’t say that I am a weed evangelist, but I am much bigger, stronger, and happier overall with my life since I started smoking weed. My verbal fluidity is off the charts, and I have none of the wild-eyed rage issues that consumed my day because people are so unerringly, so violently, and so aggressively uneducated. Well, far fewer of them, anyway.

I also have the added benefit of getting hypersensitive to knotting when I’m high, so I aggressively seek out and destroy knotting, which is leading to a lot of huge lifts, which get extra huge due to my “who gives a fuck, just add weight” approach and the fact that weights no longer have the same intimidation factor they occasionally did- I now just load the weight and fucking lift it. When my shoulder was knotted over every inch of it self, deep into the joint, I just smoked a bunch of weed and attacked it. On the lockdown I did shitloads of dips my shoulder seems not to have likely, and in spite of the pain I benched 365 for a double my first time on the bench in over a year (I’d been doing machine and inclines exclusively, but I’m certain now that I’ve got the power of weed I’ll be moving big weight on a lift I’ve never been particularly good at- seems I had some long-standing knotting issues holding me back.

On top of that, I’ve dropped all of the little bullshit hangups that were generally holding me back, because in spite of not really caring what other people thought of me, I always cared a little before- no more of that exists. I’d have admitted to enjoying Trolls: World Tour before, but I likely wouldn’t have raved about it and watched the first immediately after that (the movie is happy as shit), wouldn’t have rocked a carnation pink sleeveless shirt to the gym with a cartoon death on it riding a cartoon unicorn, or even written this article, because no matter how easy it is for me to admit I am wrong (I fucking despise claiming I can do things I cannot, so I will rarely deny being wrong when I am) I am not a person who likes to give people a backstage tour of the goings-on in my mind. So, it’s lucky you (if you’re enjoying this) that I smoke weed at this point, or this article would be nothing more than an angry rejoinder reminding you not to take yourself so fucking seriously.

In case you’re concerned about your test levels, don’t be- my initial experiences with pissing and fucking better (stims were really making taking a decent piss a bitch for a bit) have been borne out in recent years through science- regular weed smokers have higher testosterone levels than do non-smokers, and they can do way more fucking without the concomitant apocalypse nine months later, because men’s sperm counts are lower when they smoke weed.

“Marijuana smokers had higher levels of testosterone within the same range as cigarette smokers.” (Gundersen).

If you’re curious how high that boost is, buckle up, because smoking raises the fuck out of your test levels, and weed has an almost identical effect.

“Smoking men had significantly higher levels of total and free testosterone compared with men who never smoked (p < 0.001 and <0.01 respectively). Both total and free testosterone levels increased significantly with increasing number of cigarettes smoked daily (p < 0.001). Smoking men had 15% higher total and 13% higher free testosterone levels compared with men who never smoked.  Thus, smoking seems to be an important confounding factor when evaluating testosterone levels, and could possibly mask borderline hypogonadism” (Svartberg). 

In short, smoking weed gives you a 15% boost to your test levels and we needed this fucking information 15 years ago. That said, in addition to the fact that we will all be doing more fucking if we’re getting blazed, we also have the lowered cortisol levels due to fewer fears of spawning unwanted progeny, and the myriad benefits of cbd that come it. 

Am I telling you to smoke weed? No. I am simply saying that there is a site for people who quibble about endless minutiae and their likely negligible effect on one’s training, and that site is called Reddit. This isn’t Reddit, so I withdraw my previous (admittedly weak) reasoning.

And off topic, there are some seriously rad movies out there you can watch with kids and not fucking despise to your core. I’ve no kids, but the Trolls movies are definitely enjoyable and good for kids to watch, the Ralph movies are rad adult-oriented films made to be watched with kids but are likely more fun to watch in a house blissfully barren of womb goofs, and the list goes on (the Angry Birds movies also get a pretty strong recommendation, as does Scoob!). High as shit, I noticed that anything that requires stage acting now seems to be either a tv show or scifi, as the realism in most movies doesn’t really allow for slapstick in the 2020s, and it seems cgi movies are the home of all things 3 Stooges-esque

In any event, if you’re feeling a little Chicken Little-y about the world, just give one of those movies a watch and you’ll see we’re actually on the brink of pulling off a pretty rad coup in terms of cultural and technological sophistication, rather than being on the edge of oblivion.

Leg Extensions

If the IMs and emails I get are any indication, there seems to be quite a lot of emotional upheaval and consternation at my contradiction of past articles like “Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Leg Extensions.”  At various times I’ve lampooned, lambasted, and libeled such exercises as lateral raises, Hercules curls, leg extensions, and a wide variety of other exercises, and I’ve managed to decondition myself to these standpoints in a lot of instances.  I still maintain that Hercules curls are about as useful as a plastic pussy at a gay male orgy, but I’ve come to see that there is a lot of utility in lateral raises (for both strengthening the shoulder girdle and improving range of motion for some people) and in leg extensions in particular. 

For those who are unaware, I was pretty much drunk for the entirety of 2015 and significant chunks of 2016 and 2017. I was training while drinking like a 19th century Russian aristocrat, and that required me to make several alterations to my workouts, because shit like heavy drunken squatting rivals nude bareknuckle bear fighting in stupidity and lethality.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the manner in which I was conducting my leg extensions is precisely the style in which the Chinese Olympic weightlifting team does them- namely, explosive concentric movement with a static hold at full extension– and that method is pretty fucking effective in at least maintaining quad size while taking some time off from the movement itself.

In spite of the fact that tr00 powerlifting bros on the internet eschew such menial exercises as leg extensions, the Chinese team and the lifter pictured at the beginning of this heading, Mohamed Ihab (a 77-81kg Egyptian weightlifter with a 173kg/381lb snatch who can do an easy triple with 462 in the front squat) swear by isometric holds on that exercise.  For my part, I can attest to the fact that they do seem to bring up leg strength, definition, and size quickly- my earlier reticence to do them was in opposition to a growing trend in bodybuilding to discard squats altogether in favor of easier exercises.  Ihab apparently didn’t need to arrive at the conclusion it was alright to do extensions as a supplement to squats in a middle-aged epiphany, and does them for three sets of 20 second holds with 90kg, which is a not insubstantial weight for a 77kg lifter.  I tend to do them with ten second holds for reps, doing more sets and less weight.  I will sit up in my seat to reduce the shearing stress on my knees at the starting point, then explode to full extension, hold for ten seconds, and lower the weight in about four seconds.  I follow a similar pattern with my leg curls as well, as hamstring strength plays a major role in both pulling and low bar squatting.

Finally, if you’re worried that the shit is going to fuck up your knees, you just need to change the pad positions.

“Using a Cybex II, eight healthy male subjects performed isokinetic knee extensions at two different speeds (30 and 180 deg/sec) and two different positions of the resistance pad (proximal and distal). A sagittal plane, biomechanical model was used for calculating the magnitude of the tibiofemoral joint compressive and shear forces. The magnitude of isokinetic knee extending moments was found to be significantly lower with the resistance pad placed proximally on the leg instead of distally. The tibiofemoral compressive force was of the same magnitude as the patellar tendon force, with a maximum of 6300 N or close to 9 times body weight (BW). The tibiofemoral shear force changed direction from being negative (tibia tends to move posteriorly in relation to femur) to a positive magnitude of about 700 N or close to 1 BW, indicating that high forces arise in the ACL when the knee is extended more than 60 degrees. The anteriorly directed shear force was lowered considerably by locating the resistance pad to a proximal position on the leg. This model may be used when it is desirable to control stress on the ACL, e.g., in the rehabilitative period after ACL repairs or reconstructions” (Nisell).

Though I Looked a Tit at First, This Site Was Never Intended to Even Tolerate The Manosphere Crowd

Frankly, I only just discovered what the manosphere crowd really was in the last couple of years with the incel bullshit, which made the fact that one of my biggest referring sites in the Chaos and Pain years was Viva La Manosphere or some shit, which I figured was a bunch of harmless goofs who couldn’t make the shit in The Game work. Turns out that’s partially true, but they’re horrible people to boot. In any event, I couldn’t for the fucking life of me figure out why they’d follow my shit because my interests intersect with theirs in the same way a duck’s interests align with a rubber boot’s. Genuinely, the only use I could find for one of those evil little dickless nothings would be to use their corpses as weapons for bludgeoning the other whiny eunuchs in their crew to death.

As it stuck in my craw, I resolved to get to the bottom of it at some point, which I did when I was editing the original couple of Issuance of Insanities. As I was busy removing the word “retard” (which as I’ve mentioned unintentionally insults people with Down’s Syndrome because they’re working flat out to keep up with society, while most people simply fill their heads with nothing and use it for some kind of lazy evil. I said a number of times at the outset that this site wasn’t for women, which looked at over ten years later looks like shit. My point was that we were neck deep in the Bodyspace years (if you remember it)- everything was Bosu Balls and kettlebells and no chalk and no platforms. It was about as different from the modern era as you could think, due to a huge push by the industry to soften lifting culture so women would be comfortable in the gym. Understandable for the industry, but shit for the core of the industry.

That push grew the fitness, gym, and supplement industries drastically, but that meant that the scene was also flooded with the fucking posers I’ve been screaming about since the outset. And it was that against which I was railing, not chicks, chicks in lifting, or anything of the sort. I realize I’ve not had a lot of chicks profiled on the site, mostly because I write about people who were bonafide maniacs, and elite female athletes are often so driven they avoid the shenanigans the male athletes are allowed to and expected to participate. That basically makes it impossible for me to find truly interesting chicks to profile, but I’m working on fixing that if for no other reason that chicks have had that added layer of ridiculous resistance to their participation in sports, which makes a lot of them (like Ella Hattan) badass fucking rebels and heretics on top of their sporting achievements.

This Just In: We’re Not Devolving

A lot of what I write is intentionally hyperbolic, because hyperbole is often a good motivator. You tell someone they have to defend their homes or they will have to pay taxes to a different government and they likely won’t give two shits- you tell them (exaggerating heavily) that the literal fate of the future lies in killing all of the people living in the adjoining polity, in addition to all of the “internal enemies” people seem to love to identify from either side, be they the actually dangerous Christian fundamentalist militias or the semimythical winners of the WorldStar Hiphop beat em up game, Antifa.

The truth is, we seem to be coming to a locus point in our species’ history in which our natural lifespan in the man-made world is double what our genetics say it could be, and some of us have developed our minds to the same degree of physical excellence that the ancients’ developed theirs at the peak of all of the major civilizations. We can match and exceed even the mythical lifts of the ancient greats. Humans have the ability to be so much better than they’ve ever been, and we stand basically at the culmination of the efforts to bring human physical potential to its greatest ever heights due to a combination of physical and mental effort. And because we can communicate our achievements around the world, instantly, the bar for the upper limit of physical excellence can continue moving upward.

For some of us, that is. There’s a reason there are no full-blood Denisovans or Neanderthals among us- nature and nurture bred for specific attributes that led to modern humans, and it can easily do so again. Lazy, stupid people will raise lazy, stupid children, who will raise more of the same. Hyperintelligent, hyperstrong, cultured, and erudite people will also comingle, and will raise the same. Our society is moving towards at least a nominal parity in living quality across continents (yeah, we have a long way to go, but you’ve never seen what Africa or South America looked like in the late 1970s), so people will likely begin selecting mates along the lines of shared interests and sex appeal. Provided people keep participating in strength sports and encouraging genuine, enthusiastic participation rather than just the lamer-than-skate-powers bullshit with which we’re currently inundated.

PRO TIP: The “we’re being overrun!” panicky nonsense has to fucking stop. The world is not a static entity, and if it was it’d be boring as shit- be glad for our state of constant flux. Stop being a basic piece of shit and learn to enjoy the crazy cool shit the world has to offer. The world doesn’t begin and end in whatever podunk town you live near that thinks the fucking world is ending. Short of an asteroid hitting the Earth, the next twenty years will be just fine (and hopefully we figure out the environment before a bunch of people die).

The FDA is Doing Just Fine- It’s Just Not Designed for Lifters

When I realized the government is not out to get anyone (it is a massive, ad hoc, cobbled-together structure designed for an agrarian society that stopped existing within three decades of its existence), it dawned upon me that the FDA is not the issue- people’s use of it is. As a guideline for the average person it’s pretty ok, because the study on which it was based was just for the minimum requirements one needs. Not the optimal, nor the average- simply the minimum. People distorted the minimum to mean “all you need” rather than “all you need to maintain basic human function.” That wasn’t the government’s fault, nor is the fact that people in the US treat governmental edicts like gospel from the fucking holy mount.

Our understanding of the world is literally in a constant revolution since the dawn of the internet. Our ability to access the information of everything from ancient civilizations to backwoods societies, yet no one actually takes the time to do so- reactions are knee-jerk and based on either no information, bad information, or opinions based on other people’s opinions, because learning the history behind the subject being so vehemently debated is far too exhausting for a bunch of uppity fucks on social media. In any event, the government was never intended to be the sole source of anyone’s fucking information, and we all need to stop blaming them for everything that happens. Fuck me running, the right blames covid on everything from the Chinese to liberals, because they’re clearly out of their fucking minds in assigning blame to a natural disaster and the world’s difficulty in adequately responding, and the left shits all over the right for not acting fast enough to stop Covid- they’re fucking people, not Nostradamus mixed with Einstein and Ben Franklin.

If you’re an athlete and you’re looking to the government for guidance, you’re a fucking idiot. They’ve got plenty of real governmental shit to worry about without people begging them for fucking diet tips.

TLDR: The government is an entity we’ve built to keep shit moving forward. It’s neither infallible nor monolithic, and we’re ridiculous to think otherwise. Just be an educated person and use your fucking head about choosing a plausible source for advice on anything lifting related, and remind yourself that you’re really not any sort of special person because you move weight- Instagram just makes you think you are.

Running. Hooray.

As I mentioned in the running articles, I am not anti-running- I’m anti-stupid fucking pop culture books by the granola crowd that paint humanity to be some weird, tiny, scampering prey animal. We’re none of those things. If you want to run, go ahead- I couldn’t possibly care less. I ran three miles a day for about fifteen years and can honestly say it didn’t improve my life in any way beyond the marginal bragging rights to a 18 min 5k.

If you want information on that, I’d advise you to ask people who do that sort of thing, like Alex Viada. Ask me, running is so fucking simple if you need someone to draw you a fucking map regarding how to go about it you should eat that map and drown yourself in a puddle of piss on the floor of a particularly dirty public rest stop on the highway. It’s fucking running- it literally could not be any simpler than putting your fucking feet in front of each other in an alternating fashion.

Plenty of people lift and run. It’s not only possible, but it’s shown to be beneficial for gains. Why this is something anyone needs to be told is a mystery I cannot solve. The Chinese Oly team runs a mile or two a day before training. The mass monster of the 1940s, Maurice Jones, did 11 mile runs multiple times a week in addition to crazy-long lifts and heavy weighted rucks up a mountain. Every lifter in the 60s and 70s did, as did a lot of big lifters through the nineties. I genuinely have no idea why the fuck this even needs to be typed out, because it is general knowledge that can be easily obtained by opening your ocular cavities and using your goddamned eyeballs to view the great big wide world around you.

There’ll be more of this shit later, as I’ve yet to tell you all about my love of Hammer Strength, among other things. Till then, remember there is no one best way to do any of this, and anyone who remains set in their mind for twenty years about just about anything likely hasn’t thought about the issue in the first fucking place. Use your brain- that’s why it’s there.

Sources:

Gundersen TD, Jørgensen N, Andersson AM, Bang AK, Nordkap L, Skakkebæk NE, Priskorn L, Juul A, Jensen TK.  Association Between Use of Marijuana and Male Reproductive Hormones and Semen Quality: A Study Among 1,215 Healthy Young Men.  Am J Epidemiol. 2015 Sep 15;182(6):473-81.

Nisell R, Ericson MO, Németh G, Ekholm J. Tibiofemoral joint forces during isokinetic knee extension. Am J Sports Med. 1989 Jan-Feb;17(1):49-54

Svartberg J, Jorde R.  Endogenous Testosterone Levels and Smoking in Men. The Fifth Tromsø Study.  Int J Androl. 2007 Jun;30(3):137-43. 

Winter, Gregor. Isometric leg holds. All Things Gym. 7 Dec 2013. Web. 23 Mar 2020. https://www.allthingsgym.com/isometric-leg-extension-holds/

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