I apologize for the tardiness of this article, but it is frankly so fucking difficult for me to write about myself at this point that it turns a simple task into John Wick’s “impossible task” in short order. If I could explain why I would, but it likely is involved with the self-promotion gene I appear to entirely lack. In any event, if you feel like I phoned this in after reading it, please know that this article took at least four times longer than it would have if it were written about anyone else simply because I cannot fathom why my person training methods would be in any way valuable to anyone. That said, here you go.

If you missed the first two installments of this series, in which I explain the logic and reasoning behind my shifting opinions over the last dozen years on all things training, you can click these and whisk yourself away to the magical yesteryear of July, which feels like two years ago for some reason:

• Falling on My Sword: I’ll Admit It- I Have Written Some Shit With Which I Disagree, Part 1: Weed, Badass<>”Masculine”, Running, Leg Extensions, the FDA, and Devolution
• Falling on My Sword: I’ll Admit It- I Have Written Some Shit With Which I Disagree, Part 2: Everything’s Not for Everybody, Perioditization, and Vegetarianism/Veganism

I realize that the concept of this series is as uncommon in the strength world as elite vegan athletes or microclits in powerlifting*, but given the fact that those pussies over at Jailhouse Fuckery keep stealing every fucking article I write and rewording them for anti-intellectuals so they can make a buck, I’d expect either they or my dickriders at TNation will suddenly have an epiphany and “come correct” with some “truth” lifted directly from this site any day now in a wild-eyed and radical departure from their usual staid line-toeing, party line nonsense.

(if anyone is interested in forcing their favorite chick buddy through an hour of forced orgasms that end in her speaking in tongues, passing out, or crying/laughing uncontrollably, the topical application of high-test DHT gel to the clit one to three times a day is a great way to encourage clit hypertrophy, which in turn makes the thing more sensitive. In my experience, a chick on var and using DHT gel will definitely cum just from walking around the house in compression pants. Oral in that state is borderline punishment after the first orgasm, but it’s the best kind of punishment to inflict).

In any event, no one person gets everything right all the time, and I’ve definitely shit on some methods I later found to be either somewhat useful or not entirely useless.

The Rise of the Machines

If you will recall, the lifting world of ten years ago is hardly what it is today… and ten years prior to that, it was different (and from a gym perspective mostly worse) still. Lifting, as with any subculture, will occasionally find itself overrun by the sub-subculture du jure, as the film Trolls World Tour aptly illustrated with the successive efforts of pop and metal to destroy all other music. The same shit has happened with lifting- at the outset it was a hardcore, backroom, dungeon-and-basement activity for serious freaks and weirdos- literal circus folk. As love of strength feats spread, so did attempts by the general populace to achieve great strength, or some semblance thereof. From that, we had the physical culture period- the years of Sandow, Saxon, and Hackenschmidt. Lifters practiced hadbalancing and a wide array of barbell and dumbell exercises as the first lifting machines began to be designed. That was followed by the rise of Olympic lifting and the creation of odd lifting contests and bodybuilding contests, both of which broke off of Olympic weightlifting meets. That said, it was still the sole purview of freaks and geeks, maniacs and whatever burly non-lumberjacks happened to be looking to get their sweat on- it was about as far from the mainstream as prolapse porn is from a typical Pornhub search, and it was viewed with about as much derision and disgust by the general populace.

The first “modern” gym was only built in 1947, and gyms didn’t really welcome females until the 1960s and 1970s, when the Nautilus machine-workout craze swept over the nation like a fucking Tiktok dance. And from the 1960s to 2000s, gyms slowly moved further from their pig iron, chalk, and sweat roots to the chrome, towels, and no-chalk standard that was locked into place in the early 2000s. We’re talking about a time when raw powerlifting had only just begun again, equipped powerlifting was done as far from the rest of humanity as humanly possible, and a decent gym became hard to find. Those that remained for strongman, powerlifting, and hardcore bodybuilding were few and far between, with big-box gyms like Gold’s and Bally Total Fitness dominating the scene- gyms that at best had a single squat rack, no platforms, no bumper plates, and allowed no chalk.

At that point, the people not using machines were Starting Strength acolytes and Crossfitters, and neither was strong. It was insane for me to see, as I’d grown up chugging Jolt Cola while blasting thrash metal and having rock fights with my firends. We were a generation obsessed with doing everything better, harder, more extreme, faster, and way fucking louder than everyone else, and the video game Narc pretty much summed up my generation in a nutshell- we were all about being awesome as shit at everything and in everyone’s face about it. Not just winning, but fucking embarrassing your opponents and rubbing it in their salty-ass, tear-streaked faces. In the pre-911 zeitgeist, that was patriotism- being obnoxiously loud about being insanely awesome at every motherfucking thing you did, and it fucking ruled. At least, that was the case everywhere but in the gym, as every gym was slowly finding itself nerfed into uselessness.

That was the environment in which I began lifting, and through which I’d come to arrive in the beginnings of the CrossFit years with the outset of Chaos and Pain/Plague of Strength. At that point I’d spent my entire life training either in dungeon gyms or chrome-filled, blindingly bright places that are hard to describe using modern equipment as a guide. If a gym had a squat rack, it was rickety as fuck, usually chrome, and never rated as heavy as a rack should be (I think most were generously rated at a thousand pounds, if they even had ratings. They were seriously fucking rickety.

So that was the environment in which I began writing this site- an environment in which people didn’t train with free weights, and even on machines they barely trained hard. It drove me fucking crazy, so I began proselytizing the wonders of barbell training. I fucking loved it, and I got into all sorts of odd lifts as a result because I’d been doing the same 20 or so exercises nonstop for a decade. As it stands, I’ve been lifting for 28 years, and I can definitively say I’ve never trained the same way from one five year block to the next- hell, you’re not even the same person as you were five years ago, nevermind ten. If you are, you’re definitely living life incorrectly, because you’ve not learned shit.

Lately, I’ve been training with a combination of machines and free weights- typical powerbuilding, which is what I’ve done for the vast majority of my almost 30 years of lifting. I have no prescribed days for training and don’t even acknowledge the week as a guide for training. At present, I’d say I train legs between one and two times out of every ten or so days, which is plenty to keep my front squat between 400 and 500. beyond that, I can’t say I give two shits about legs at all- I’m good enough at them they don’t need much attention to be fantastic and I’d rather train upper body these days, if for no other reason than to piss off all of the fucking posers who think they know how best I should train. The rest of the days are split up basically by bodypart and just trained whenever I want. If I do a barbell exercise, it’ll be done first and generally heavy. Having almost gotten my shoulders and biceps reconfigured and actually in the right places, pretty much everything feels both easier and very weird (And I know people are waiting for me to write about that whole thing, but I genuinely have no idea how to write about it- I’ve no interest in researching it, as I’ve already figured it out for myself, but at some point I’ll do a powerlifting meet just to prove how handicapped I actually was when I broke the total record in 2012).

And that is the sum total of my standardization for training. I will do anything from a pullups-only sort of day to doing two-and-a-half hours doing Hammer Strength shoulder presses to pushing the sled for a half hour before doing a kettlebell-only workout for arms to literally anything of which I could think. If I feel like doing a lift, I do it. If I don’t I don’t. If I feel like taking a day off, I do. If I feel like my world will implode if I don’t go to the gym I take that day off from literally anything physical, because that dumbass compulsive behavior isn’t applicable to something you love, and will eventually make you hate it. If I don’t train much one week I’ll train extra hard and for longer the next, then settle back into a range of hard to super fucking hard training sessions until I have another slow lifting week.

Regardless of what I am training, however, I’d say at least half of my work is done on machines and cables, if not more. They’re fast and easy to set up and break down, require little room, and there’s no chubby weakling in my line of sight mincing around in “hardcore” training gear and filming every dumbass rep of their ultimately pointless ministrations for a posterity that certainly won’t give a fuck about their third set of good mornings during this week’s alleged “comeback.” As I have about as much use for “real lifters” as I do for the “tactical,” the “woke,” the “allies,” and the “patriots”- all of that poser shit needs to stay way the fuck away from me, especially in the current climate. So, I hang out in my Hammer Strength and avoid the fake cop who now carries a gun into the gym because I once politely told him to watch his fucking mouth while he was screaming nonsense in the gym and clearly upsetting the two hottest women within 20 miles of that fucking place. That Air Force MP actually thanked me for my advice, then talked mad shit about how he was gonna clap me thereafter, and that’s the kind of person who steadfastly avoids machines- the terminally and suicidally stupid and weak… and unfucked.

If you need any further reasoning, just remember that former bench press world record holder and world’s greatest bodybuilder Bill Seno stated that the reason the big dudes of his era mostly avoided machines wasn’t because they were tough guys- it’s because most of the machines of the day fucking sucked.

If You’ve Already Been “Big,” Reps Will Get You Back There Faster Than Heavy Weight

Coming up, I’d never understood why the big dudes always relied on high rep work- I have never been a big fan of the 10-12 rep range for anything but pullups, and that rep scheme yielded me nothing at all when I first started lifting. Nor am I alone- even Jesse Ventura was surprised when he got to the set of Predator, seeing Arnold and his body doubles banging out high rep set after high rep set with crazy short rest periods. Jesse had expected to walk in there and see 500 pound bench presses on the regular, but was instead pulled aside by Arnold and reminded that you just need a pump to get bigger once you’ve put the work in.

So bear that in mind- whatever your biggest weight is, you can regain that size with or without gear (for the most part) simply training for a serious pump like a fucking maniac. We all tend to forget lifting is cumulative. No workout is a waste unless you skip it for no good reason. If you’re coming back from a layoff, I recommend going hard on machines and bodyweight stuff for a couple of months and eating your goddamned face off the entire time before you even bother touching a free weight, lest you find yourself discouraged or tempted to film something completely uninteresting.

Steve Justa Summer Job Method

Over the course of my life, I can say that most of Steve Justa’s stuff in his seminal work on weird junkyard lifting, Rock, Iron, Steel, has been borne out in my own experience. Frankly, much of it is the sort of “back pocket” type information that you end up sitting on for years, thinking it’s a silly gimmick for a lifter to have, until you find yourself in a position to either independently arrive at the same conclusions or utilize that book to address a situation like the Coronavirus gym shutdown.

That said, I started working a side gig at Amazon to make some extra cash earlier this year, and in doing so got lean without trying just by virtue of the fact I’d inadvertently followed Steve Justa’s advice to burn fat insanely quickly by doing a temporary job that is incredibly physical, like working on a farm. I don’t recall if that was his exact advice, but he seemed to take jobs when he was growing up that were physical specifically to improve his physique and performance. Frankly, the man’s results were mixed, but I would perhaps generously state he did the best he possibly could with his natural gifts, limited as they were. He’s not a great writer, never had a fantastic physique, is weirder than all hell (and in ways I find generally unpleasant somehow), and is not terrifically bright, but using my own personal experience and viewing my life in retrospect, the dude knows his shit when it comes to developing some serious physicality.

Anyway, my job was no farm job and wasn’t even intended to be all that physical, but me being the spazz I am I ended up wherever they needed someone to work faster and harder than everyone on the planet because I treated that work just like wrestling practice, and I fucking loved wrestling practice. A person working a ten hour shift four days a week isn’t going to run hard, but a jacked former college wrestler who just realized he’s getting paid to do cardio will hustle his fucking ass to flex on 20 year olds, snag numbers from the girls they’ve been spitting to, and get lean all while learning random shit through Audible and various podcasts. Though my tasks varied, they were all variations of stacking plastic bins that weighed perhaps five pounds apiece eleven high and then pushing the stacks 50 yards to load them onto pallets or carts. Along that 50 yard stretch there are maybe ten stations on the right and another 10 on the left, eight of those in total for the four lines of the department I was in. My job was to stack and clear those bins, which constantly accumulated at each station.

Most people used big wheeled carts to move the bins, so they let the bins pile up and loaded them (lazily) en masse. It created all sorts of logjams, was lazy, and left a lot of time for standing the fuck around, which I am not into, so I would just clear two to four lines rather than just my personal line, as quickly as possible. When I was feeling sort of lazy I would push between six and eight of those stacks at a time, which was a stupid and slow slog most of the goofy 20 somethings with whom I worked liked to do in an effort to demonstrate their great might or something. I instead pushed three or four stacks at a time, which couldn’t have been much more than 200 pounds. I’d line them up and then run them at a steady pace, so that my pace pushing didn’t cause me to strain and matched the pace I walked unloaded. Doing that, fat fell off me so quickly it was scary, especially since I was eating pizza maybe three time a week and had run out of gear and money for gear a month prior.

Since then, I’ve kept fat off by pushing a light sled for 20 minutes at a go a couple of times a week. I push the sled down, then walk back to the start and to the sled and push back. I keep that pace steady with no breaks for 20 minutes, then fuck off to do something else. If you want to load the sled up because you’re feeling froggy one day, have at it- I am not one to stand in the way of someone testing their might. I think you’ll find the extra effort yields no greater rewards than the regular sled though, beyond extra ab work (and if the sled is phenomenal for anything totally unexpected, it’s the six pack that comes pretty much immediately).

Another nice thing about starting the sled light is that if you gradually increase that light weight with 10 lb increments, say once a week, you’ll increase your total volume over time without even noticing it. Alternatively, you can increase the pace at which you move, or reduce the amount of time you spend unweighted. I personally despise doing things according to a clock, schedule, or timer, so I have no suggestions for you if that’s what you’re doing- my aim is to enjoy myself and get in work, not scrutinize shit and waste a lot of effort in pointless analysis of daily results.

The crossover to your gym lifts, should you properly get the fuck after it, should be pretty profound. First, the movement will make you more athletic, which is positive as most lifters allow themselves to get hilariously stiff. I am no exception, and I regret allowing myself to get to the point I was getting up off the ground slowly. If you’re not embarrassed by the fact you grunt getting the fuck up off the ground, you should be- standing up is a natural human motion. While we’re at it, seeing your abs really shouldn’t be a part-time activity either, and if you have a seriously protruding belly but visible abs (as I did for a while) you have a shitload of fat under your abs, which is no beuno unless you’re looking forward to your first heart attack. I didn’t even realize that was my problem until I dropped two pant sizes in three weeks without increasing my ab definition one iota, so if you’ve been eating a lot of processed foods, you might want to think about changing up your diet and adding in a fuckton of sled for a while, as a kind of “don’t die” strategy.

That said, I am not longevity advocate and I don’t really give a fuck what anyone does anymore, because it’s almost certainly going to be stupid, selfish, and profoundly annoying to me. Steve Justa, however, suggests you do some intense strength endurance work because it will translate to better gym lifts. This should be obvious to anyone with a brain, but since that charlatan Greg Nuckols put it in everyone’s heads that science knows anything at all about training when it in fact has proven that exercise “scientists” are the most anti-scientific motherfuckers on Earth, the people with brains have forgotten how to use them. Strength endurance training will obviously increase both overall strength and endurance- as shown by the rowers of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome along with the Germanic tribes that followed them, as demonstrated by Milo of Croton and his bull, and proven by literally every one of the early 20th century strongmen, who all had backgrounds in handbalancing, wrestling, and gymnastics and who practiced them alongside their lifting.

Justa was a huge fan of the sled, starting his book with a treatise on how “dragging or pushing weight is an excellent way to build tremendous power in the body and tremendous endurance” (Justa 20). The sumo, he explained, are massive proponents of dragging and pushing weight for total body strength, and they are some of the most massively muscular people on the planet (even moreso than most professional bodybuilders), which I previously explained here. Those dump truck-sized motherfuckers build slabs of beef just from doing uphill tire drags with a harness and another sumo riding atop the tire alongside wrestling and some other traditional isometric stuff, which is a serious feather in the cap for any proponent of sled work. Likewise, traditional Indian wrestling gyms have harnesses wrestlers use to drag large logs or heavy pieces of timber to build strength (Alter 112), and Justa mentioned a story in which an old-timey wrestler trained by dragging a one-bottom plow through a field with a harness to build strength- that unnamed wrestler ended up undefeated (Justa 21).

Whether or not you use a sled is up to you- pushing it hits your core like a motherfucker, plus it gives you a nice ass and calves and gives you some extra chest, shoulder, and tricep work. Pulling it hits your entire posterior chain, and as Justa mentions, you can drag the shit sideways and do all sorts of other nonsense if you feel like getting creative. However you do it, though, the shit will work.

Strength, Fitness, and Rip are Cumulative, Not Just Temporal

This isn’t so much a topic on which i was wrong in the past as one I’d never really considered. When I lift, I essentially think of my physique as the result of the last ten or twelve weeks. Not because I’d planned to train a certain way, or because I made a choice to go hard, but because I always think that I slacked in the past. Nevermind the fact that I know definitively that I almost never slack in training (as a general rule, if I don’t want to train on any given day, I don’t)- it’s just as a general rule I look back at all of my training as sessions when I left something on the table (you have to, or you’ll die). I think most people tend to think their physique is the direct result of their recent efforts, when it is in fact more of a reflection of the total work you’ve done over the course of your life.

That is something to bear in mind when you look in the mirror- if you’re not where you’d like to be, you don’t just have recent events to blame- you have the totality of your life. If you want to compare yourself against someone else, that is a set of factors you need to examine long before you launch into a discussion about drugs or genetics, yet almost no one discusses it. I am talking about whether or not you were an active kid- the sports you played growing up, and then the lifting history you have had. Before you start bitching that such-and-thus doesn’t work, maybe examine exactly how little you’ve done over the course of your life before denigrating yourself, your efforts, or whatever program you happen to be following.

On the other side of the coin, if you’ve gotten there once, you can do so again with far less effort. And the longer you maintain a given level of strength or muscularity, the more normal it becomes for your body. Thus, if you want staying lean to be easy in the future, make it so by intentionally staying lean for a decade. That said, most people quit lifting inside a year, so encouraging noobs with promises of untold muscular riches when they’re old doesn’t really work- just know they’re waiting for you on the other side of fifty if you can manage not to be lazy as fuck to that point.

At this point, this shit is so fucking easy it’s almost unfair, so buck up little campers- on a long enough timeline you’ll have lean, cold 18″ arms without even eating specifically to push the tape, and you’ll routinely lift weights with ease other people think are impossible.

And remember,

“Life’s too short to be small.”

Sources:

Alter, Joseph S. The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Justa, Steve. Rock, Iron, Steel. Nevada City: Ironmind Enterprises, 1998.

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