Plague of Strength

I am high as fuck and said in the comments of the last article I’d give a stream of consciousness about my training methods because it finally dawned on me what a compliment it was that people wanted me to interrupt a stream of historical baddassery and training methods to insert my own. So to everyone who has made that request, my apologies for being dismissive and my apologies for the wordiness of this response- if you just want to see the last few workouts I can recall, just scroll until you see the heading “My Last Day of Training” (it was intended to be multiple days, but I ran out of steam) While wordy, this is entirely apolitical and ahistorical. It is just about the weirdness that is me.

It seems that no matter how many times I tell people that I have no specific training methodology, they do not believe me. I genuinely don’t- the story of my life is a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and most people tend towards the Paint-By-Number shit. Everyone wants a prescription for everything, and… it only just occurred to me what a compliment it is that anyone would even ask me how I trained. I might have asked someone about specific bodypart training, but I don’t think I ever cared at all to find out anyone’s training philosophy because almost everyone lacks one.

Frankly, I find that reprehensible, but I am a weird guy. If I were going to go into competitive fighting, for instance, I wouldn’t pick my favorite sport or the one I’d done the most- I would choose the one for which I am personally suited. Most people pick martial arts in the same dumb fucking way they pick clothes- they pick what looks good in theory instead of what actually suits their physical appearance. Instead of picking what would work for them, they go with what is in fashion, and that’s a mistake.

This might seems like an obvious suggestion but very few people seem to do it. I think people who had friend groups growing up tend to instinctively go with what’s popular, and that often leads them to choose shit that doesn’t suit them- like obese people in skinny jeans or every chubby goof with a thousand dollars in powerlifting or me in a finishing school [obviously, I never went to finishing school, but were I a southern chick I’d still test out, having had to memorize most of Emily Post as a child]. In any event, my method likely won’t work for most people because I realize with every passing day how unlike most people I am.

It is only even possible that you will enjoy training like I do if:

• you are capable of reading the fifth book out of a series of six, enjoying it immensely, and never reading another in the series;
• you read magazines back to front (for a good reason rather than just because you want to be a contrarian);
• you train alone
• you are known in every gym in which you have ever trained for noticeably out-training everyone around you
• you are either viewed as asocial in general or asocial in the gym, but you love to show off while you lift on occasion.
  • Trust me when I say that you will quickly become disgusted with other people if you train this way and are in any kind of gym social group, save for maybe KC Barbell, because I can’t imagine Ashman and Hall allow any of the dumbass cliques I see in most gyms. Everyone has always thought me to be hostile in the gym, but I just do my own thing and stay in my own little world- I have almost no interaction with anyone else and I am as disinterested with other lifters’ various ministrations as a human being could possibly be. That said, I move huge fucking weights when I can put on a show, which is why I like to lift in public gyms (in addition to the fact I like to move a lot).

Independent people are often viewed as asocial. We’re not the weirdos skulking in the shadows in ratty tshirts with wolf tshirts or making hair dolls and sitting outside of people’s houses- the independent people are the creative weirdos you often see all the time but dismiss as ridiculous.

I am one of those ridiculous people, and until this year I was mostly unaware of how ridiculous I am to the people around me. Luckily for me, I am so highly educated and strong I’ve always looked at the scorn I’ve received as ridiculous because I am so genuinely unaware of the existence of most people that unless you’ve been unnecessarily impolite to me I would almost certainly not recognize you in person (unless you’re a member of my family) or you’ve met me at least ten times, and that goes for men or women. Almost no one makes an impression on me as a significant human being, and even if they do I won’t remember their face even at the point of a gun. [Except Jenna Jameson, because she was as sunny and intelligent and charming as she looked like one of the nurses serving the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills, and her emaciated body with fake tits and a fake face seemed really memorable against the backdrop of a chick who’d be super rad to befriend. I don’t remember shit about that USPA wrapped meet I easily won in sleeves, but I remember talking about books and horror movies with Jenna looking like a grey wearing the body of a Real Girl Doll].

Again, that kind of makes me sound sociopathic, but I’m altruistic in my apparent apathy and charitable even as I could not care less about you as a human being, because it makes me happy to make other people happy. Weird, but as I said, I am a strange guy.

Choose Your Own Adventure

If you have never heard of this book series or any like it (the genre is called gamebooks and includes shit like CYOA/Secret Path Books) click these words for a rundown on why the thing you should do after reading that Wiki is to buy a gun and two bullets for your parents, for they failed you utterly. I have neither the time nor the inclination to turn this into a choose your own adventure book, although I once envisioned doing one. In any event, in gamebooks, you go to another section of the book based on the decisions you make- they’re if-then propositions that determine how the book ends for you.

My daily workouts are set up in much the same way. If I were an organized person who did everything consciously, I’d make a checklist of shit like the following to determine my course of action upon entering the gym (because it is rare I have any idea what I am going to train before I get to the gym, and I almost always just lift in what I am wearing (including jeans now that they’re all jeggings, replete with my ever present wallet chain even while squatting). I rarely change my shoes to lift, haven’t even owned a belt in years, and haven’t owned wrist wraps in two years. And that’s not because I slump my way through my workouts- it’s because I like to be always pretty much at peak and ready to go regardless of specific preparation for a given thing.

That is not because I like competing- I just like being my personal fucking best. It’s not a life goal or a mantra or any hollow bullshit- I just don’t see any reason not to be 90+% of my personal physical, mental, and whatever else ideal at all times. I learn obsessively because it is fun and seems like an obvious way to pass the time, and lifting is the same. If I am not being a better cat whisperer with the raddest, most friendly, and best behaved clutter, if my birds aren’t happier and more vibrant than ever, every single day, I am fucking up. That’s how I look at my life, and I’ve absolutely no conception of how other people think- it’s never mattered to me any more than it would matter to me why you chose Olympic lifting despite never having played a sport or even been marginally athletic in your life.

In any event, I would ask myself questions like this:

• What is my training environment?
  • Is it hot as fuck/cold as fuck/indoor/outdoor/whatever?
  • Do I have machines?
  • Do I have free weights?
• Do I feel like training?
• Is my desire to train physiological or psychological?
  • If it’s a compulsion rather than a desire, I take a day off altogether.
  • If I just want to move around but not train, maybe I’ll do pullups or something.
  • If I am just apathetic to the idea of training, I train… as a general rule, unless Tara wants me to take a day off to hang out and be lazy. In which case I sometimes do that by “letting her bribe me” with Sonic or something.
  • And sometimes I feel like I need to train because I slacked earlier in the week or took time off or just haven’t trained legs once in three weeks, so I will train.
• Do I plan on competing? If so, I do the following exercises weekly (otherwise I avoid that shit like the fucking plague. I despise powerlifting so much that I don’t even really do my prep exercises for it beyond Pendlays unless I’m competing):
  • Rack Pull -> Shrug
  • Pendlay Rows for 1-3 reps
  • Stiff Legged High Pull
  • Jump Squat
  • Bottom Position Back Squat
  • Bench Press (which I’ll probably do twice a week in prep)
• Am I sore/injured/training around something?
  • I am currently finishing up at least the right arm part of my knotting issue, so I just reintroduced incline bench for the first time this week, after weeks of tons of cable crossovers and pec dec to get all of my pec fibers in the right spots- my shit was all out of whack and stuck together, so benching hurt the fuck out of my shoulders. As it turns out, I couldn’t rotate my elbows under because of the weird knotting, so I was benching super flat backed (I couldn’t physically arch, either).
  • And the ab knotting issue that alerted me to all the rest is still fucking with me on overhead press, so I mostly avoid standing barbell press for hammer strength for that reason. And people might say a belt would help, but if I wore a fucking belt I wouldn’t have realized I’d been competing as a fucking cripple wrapped in knots and weird ass short insertions that are
• How much time do I have and how much time do I want to spend training?
  • Those two questions are rarely the same thing. If you’re in a rut and absolutely have no interest in training, do three arm and shoulder workouts a week for 45 minutes apiece, supersetting everything and taking as little break as possible. That way, at the very least, you look good in a sleeveless shirt and will have a half decent bench and overhead press when you get back in the gym. Having a couple of showcase bodyparts in down times can really keep your morale up even when it’s trash.
    • On that I really speak from experience. I might have looked great after a year of drinking, fucking, fighting, fried chicken, vodka, and some lifting, but after a bunch of time in jail for being a dumbass and drinking and driving, I felt like shit about my appearance. Then I wallowed in my own misery for a couple of years, having my interest in lifting collapse like hot little person’s cervix (should I ever get the opportunity to fuck one) every five weeks. The one thing that carried me through was the fact that even when I wasn’t lifting I’d still do arms at home with bands. That kept me (barely) in sleeveless shirts, which was enough to keep me going to the gym even when I genuinely hated every second of it.

My Last Workout, Insofar as I Can Recall

With that in mind, I think you would still be shocked at how little attention I pay to my workouts- I just go hard as fuck while I am in the gym and give it no more thought when I am not in the gym. I don’t anticipate the gym, as a general rule. I occasionally look forward to training a certain thing or really have a wild hair up my ass about it, but for me lifting is like fucking- you do it because you’re alive and celebrating the fuck out of that fact. And you do it a lot, because you fucking can. That said, it becomes commonplace pretty fucking quickly. Commonplace, but not drudgery, because I don nothing repetitive.

Hopefully this makes sense to some of you. In any event, this is how you end up with workouts like yesterday’s:

I knew I should train but had no interest in it. I went down to maybe do back, but left my straps in my jacket and just did these three exercises for roughly 20 minutes apiece.

Unilateral cable rows- 8-10 x 5-20 (by the end I was doing sets of 5)

Unilateral cable pulldowns- 8-10 x 15-20 (for whatever reason I was working on squeezing my reps with a lighter weight to carve in more definition)

Unilateral high cable rows- 8-10 x 8-20 (I did these standing in a squat from the pulldowns. Tara started doing them a couple of years ago and I figured I’d give them a shot. Not bad)

• I don’t talk to anyone in the gym, so I take really short rests. Nothing is timed and nothing is counted. When I m bored with something I move on, doing maybe 10 sets of each.

Then I realized that I would not be training today, so I did about 45 minutes of cable crossovers to further stretch out my pec, shoulder, and bicep, 15 minutes of rear laterals and machine crunches supersetted, and I bounced.

And I walk a half hour to and from the gym, which gives me all of the low-intensity cardio I could need, as I do that five times a week, plus walking to the store and bodega. I walk a shitload, and that keeps me lean without me even having to think about it.

Jump to Part 2 by clicking these words

I am one man fighting an entire universe of sloth and stupidity, and I’m not above asking for a bit of help. This is DIY as fuck, so if you can throw me some loot to aid in my efforts, I’ll definitely put it to vitriolic good use.

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