GTFOH With That Nonsense (A Rant)

Occasionally, you may find yourself reading some funny articles about fitness. One of the most popular topics for those funny articles is "most annoying people at the gym". I don't even have to link to any of those; just type the words "most annoying people in the gym" into Google, and you'll get a whole slew of listicles showing exactly that.

One that almost always makes the list is Unsolicited Gym Advice Guy.

For me, that guy has always been at the top of my list. You're at the gym, minding your own fucking business, when some asshole decides he wants to come up to you and critique you on your form, comment on the ineffectiveness of whatever exercise you're doing, and otherwise try to tear you down. They're often annoying as fuck because you know they have no idea what they're talking about. On the rare occasions they do, you don't recall making an appointment with them to have as a personal trainer. You want that fucker to mind his own goddamn business.

I consider workouts like I consider masturbation. It's preferred to be done by yourself, cool if you brought someone along, but under no circumstances, do you want some stranger to stop on by and offer to help.

And that was back before I started lifting heavy. Back then, it didn't anger me so much as it did annoy me.

The past week my Unsolicited Gym Advice Guys weren't at the gym. They were at my workplace.

The first time, a co-worker wondered why I was lugging around a giant bag of protein. I explained that I eat protein shakes as a part of my diet. He decided to go into a big lecture on how they're high in calories, blah, blah, blah.

The second time was when somebody decided to bring in a couple dozen donuts for our crew to thank us for helping them out a few days ago when they were in distress. My boss (Boss 1) wondered why I wasn't taking one and I explained that I'm on a diet. I explain that I'm on a carb cycle because I'm trying to cut my body fat without losing muscle. He was with my other boss (Boss 2).

Boss 2: Have you tried cardio?
Me: No.
Boss 2: You should really do cardio. It's great for fat loss.
Me: (Stares motherfuckerly)
Boss 1: You picked a bad time to decide to go on a diet! It's almost Christmas!
Me: No argument here.

Boss 1 really gets no argument from me. I really did pick a bad time to start cutting. I might write another entry about doing that during the holidays.

But Boss 2 and the guy from scenario one have both confided in me a few months ago that they've never been able to bench press more than 200 pounds. In fact, both have said that they struggle to do more than 185.

Yeah, when I can bench press 80 pounds more than you, here's what you can do with your opinion:

What I wanted to say to both of them was, "Motherfucker, I can deadlift 315 pounds. Can you deadlift 315 pounds?" I already know the answer because they've told me. It's NO. I didn't say that, because I'm at work, and I also don't feel like being the dick that brings down their self confidence.

I'm aware of how arrogant this sounds. I don't give a shit. You've been reading this blog long enough to know that there are times when I'm having bad days at the gym, where I'm frustrated as hell at my lack of progress, and have flat out had epic fails in my fitness journey. I still have a long way to go to reach my goals, and I'm far from perfect. I've shared all my failings with you in the past and I'll definitely be doing it in the future. I'm no fitness god. But if some barely-lifting asshole decides to give me a bunch of advice that obviously didn't work for them, you can consider me fucking Globo Gym. Call me an asshole. I don't care.

Do Over/I Almost Quit

Throughout my journey to get to the thousand pound club, I've been meaning to write at least once a week to measure my progress; however, I didn't have time to write last week. Hell, I didn't even have enough time to finish my workouts last week.

Last week was a total bust. I got halfway through the week when my work schedule gave me the excuse to get lackadaisical and not finish. So this week is week one of my new workout cycle. This is my do over week.

I almost quit altogether on Friday. Friday wasn't even a hard day for lifting. The plan was to do 4x8 of 215 pound squats, with 2x8 of 230 pound deadlifts. A workout so easy for me, I could do it on three hours of sleep if I had to.

There were two things that killed my motivation that day. The first was seeing the latest Alan Thrall video where he showed one of his trainees attempt to run a mile in under eight minutes. Here's the video:

In the video, he says his best squat is 507 pounds (wtf?), his bench press is 400 pounds, his deadlift is 620 pounds.

I usually watch Alan Thrall's videos for inspiration, but this video killed my motivation to workout.

Sweet Christmas, I'm busting my ass to reach the thousand pound club, and this kid is already in the fifteen hundred pound club!

I felt weak as fuck just hearing that. I watched the rest of the video with a nagging feeling at my subconscious that what I'm doing is pointless. I can bust my ass all I want, but this kid will always be able to outlift me. Sure, Alan Thrall can outlift me, but he's Alan Fucking Thrall! This is some rando kid that makes me look like a schlub.

And then there was the timing of my workout. Like I said in my last entry, part of the reason why I didn't progress as much as I had hoped in the first cycle was that my workout times were sporadic throughout the day. One day I'd be working out at home in the morning, the next I'd be working out just after midnight at the gym. So I made it a point to workout in the morning at home as much as possible. I have to get up at 7:30 a.m. during the week so I can get my oldest kid ready for school in the morning, so working out at midnight at the gym was becoming an option I could ill afford.

The problem is, I like working out in the morning as much as I like having a boot to the face.

I think this goes back to the days when I did karate. Most martial arts classes are done in the evening, and since that's when I trained, my body is just wired to work out at night.

So when I started loading up weights to do this workout, I was less than motivated. That's an understatement. I was disgusted with this workout. I was tired. I was pissed off that I even had to do this workout. I wanted to quit. What's the fucking point when some rando ass kid is kicking your ass up and down the block no matter how hard you work?

My mind went through all the typical defense/motivation mechanisms that I have built up to get me to train, and none of them worked. People are coming to hurt you, no one is coming to help you, and you will be punished for defending yourself. Fight anyway, I repeated to myself in my head. Well, why in the fuck do I have to keep fighting? I'm 36 years old already! Why do I have to keep training to fight some enemy that will come after me? Why should I have to keep training? IT'S NOT FAIR!

I summoned Beast in my mind, but he had nothing to say for the first time. He just shrugged.

Every mental exercise I had in my brain to overcome lack of motivation was every bit as exhausted as I was physically. I was within a hair's breath of just quitting and going back on the couch and watching videos on the internet.

My mind finally said, "You're a warrior."

That was it. No big speech. No rationalizing of why I need to train. Nothing that made any sense. Just three words that gave me the motivation to continue with my training.

It doesn't make any sense to me at all why those three words overcame all of my objections to continue on this path. I'd like to write an entire blog post about why those words motivated me, but the simple truth is that I have no idea why they worked. They just did.

I finished my workout, and predictably, smoked it like a cheap cigar.

After the workout, I took inventory of my physical prowess and did a very real, rational level of reasoning.

Yeah, some rando kid on the internet can outlift me. Yet I had to be honest and ask myself if I have ever seen anyone in the real world that lifts more than I do.

I've seen a handful of people that can outlift me in the many gyms that I've worked out in in my entire lifetime. I can count on one hand the number of people that I've seen bench press more than two hundred pounds. The same goes with the squat and deadlift. I've rarely seen a man that can do more than three hundred pounds on either.

Yeah, that rando kid can outlift me. But he's the outlier. He's the rarity.

I'm not the strongest. That's a fact. But I'm stronger than most.

I'm writing this because I have some Facebook friends that read this blog and tell me that I'm an inspiration to them. I could omit this entire post and pretend that my journey to greatness is easy and without struggle. The truth is that it isn't. We're going to have bad days. It doesn't matter how we decided to choose our journey to greatness, there's always going to be those days when we want to quit.

But, as that Five for Fighting song says, even we superheroes have the right to bleed.

We have the right to admit our weaknesses. We're also strong enough to keep training, anyway.

My Lack of Discipline Brought Me Here

Today I wrapped up week five of the Candito Intermediate Plan, which wraps up cycle one of phase two of my plan.

I just had three days to workout this week, and on each one I went for a new PR on the squat, bench and deadlift.

On Monday, I managed to squat 295 for two reps. On Wednesday, I did 240 pounds on the bench press for four reps. And today I did a 315 pound deadlift for two reps.

On each of these lifts, you're supposed to do between one and four reps. I only pulled off four reps on my bench press.

My calculated one rep max on my bench press went up from 245 pounds to 265 pounds. That's awesome. Yet my squat only went from 300 pounds to 310 pounds, and my deadlift stayed roughly the same, near 330 pounds.

I crunched the numbers, and my combined calculated max weight on all three exercises comes out to 905 pounds. Just 95 pounds short of my goal, but not nearly as close as I should have been.

I'd like to say that this is just because I'm hitting a plateau, but I'd be lying to myself if I did.

The truth is that I've failed in three areas, and they're all from a lack of discipline.

1. I'm still drinking too much booze. Not only does alcohol cause you to lower your body's rate of testosterone output (which you need to build muscle), but it would also cause problems with number 2.

2. My workout times are inconsistent. I started out on this plan doing my workouts in my home gym, shortly after I woke up. But because I would drink after coming home from work at around midnight, my workout times varied. If I didn't drink, I'd workout in the morning hours the day after. If I did, I'd workout after I got out of work, because I'd be too hungover to workout in the morning. The inconsistency of my hours made it difficult for me to do my lifts consistently this week.

3. Lack of food discipline. This is my biggest failure by far. There have been times when I would meal prep my meals for the week, but not eat them. Sometimes I wouldn't be very hungry, so I'd grab a bag of chips at the vending machine at work instead of eating my protein packed healthy meal, or I'd just hit up the Wendy's near my work instead when I was hungry but tired of eating the food I cooked. Either way, there were times where I wasn't eating enough, or I was eating too much food that was dense in fat and empty calories. Neither of these are good.

So on this next cycle, I have to lay off the alcohol, make sure that I consistently workout in the morning, and make sure that I stick to my meal plan. I'm lifting too heavy now to half ass this thing.

And just to be on the safe side, in case this really is a plateau for my lower body, I'm adding pin squats to my optional lifts. I might as well be used to lifting heavy until the end of my next cycle. If that doesn't work, Johnny Candito has some advanced plateau busting workouts for the squat and bench press. I'll use that if all else fails.

Either way, just 95 pounds more to go, and over a year to do it. I WILL reach my goal.

Size Doesn't Matter/A Little Unconfident

I'm trying to crank out at least one post a week related to fitness to track my progress as I make my journey into the thousand pound club. I missed last week because of life and stuff, so you're getting last week's and this week's progress reports today.

Last week I wrapped up week three on the Candito program, which has me doing the "Linear Max OT Phase", which basically means, "just a tad more than what you were lifting doing the Starting Strength thing". Real easy stuff compared to the previous week. I wrapped it up with no issues.

At the end of that week, I was noticing that I have packed on some crazy muscle mass over the past month. I keep telling myself that I don't do this to look buff, and that size doesn't matter. But when I look at my body and I can see massive amounts of gain in lean muscle mass, I can't help but to feel good about it. It's hard to not let that go to your head, and it can also lead to thinking some bad thoughts.

I don't want to be the guy that thinks, "Hey, I should do this exercise, because it'll make my (fill in body part here) look massive!" I am not a bodybuilder. I don't do this for looks. Yet there were a few times where I was tempted to do all of my accessory exercises around what would help make me look good. Those are bad thoughts. "We don't train for looks", I have to remind myself. "We train for battle."

So that wraps up last week's thoughts. This week deals with my disturbing lack of confidence.

This week is the "Heavy Weight Acclimation" phase. Heavy lifts with low reps, getting me ready for next week when I prepare to smash previous personal records. And with every session, I find myself questioning whether or not I'm strong enough to do my sets.

Let's get this out of the way: I am strong enough to finish these sets. I knock them out of the park every time. Hell, I could easily do a couple extra reps each time. Yet I keep entering my workout with a sense of insecurity.

I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because I'm really, for the first time in my life, pushing myself past the point that I ever thought I was capable. Maybe it's because I was struggling toward the end of Phase One of my training, and even though struggling was in the plan, it just has my confidence shot. Or maybe it's because I'm doing all of this shit with a cold and just feel under the weather. I don't know.

What I do know is, I shouldn't be so insecure about this shit. I'm more than strong enough. The Candito plan works. I'm stronger now than I've ever been in my life. I'm stronger than most people. I need to trust in the process, and trust in myself. I am a warrior. I need to be confident that I can do this. Because I can do this. I am strong enough. Not just strong enough, but stronger.

I guess I need to attach a photo or video so this will get someone's attention when I post this on Facebook, so here's a song I heard recently that reminds me of my wife and me. Love ya, babe!

None of Us are Without Sin

I've been trying to write this piece for weeks, and it's been really hard to do.

It was originally going to be titled, "#IBelieveYou, Because I was an Asshole". In the wake of the sexual harassment scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, I wanted to step up and tell women, "Yeah, I believe your #MeToo stories, because I used to be the prick that you're talking about."

How do you go about writing that you used to be a misogynistic piece of shit that sexually harassed women? Hell, with the left's desire to make anyone who has ever done it in their life persona non grata, should I even make that kind of a confession? How many friends would I lose by admitting the horrible things I've done? Would they even want to know why I did them?

Yet the story of Al Franken groping a woman over a decade ago came up, and the ability to write this all fell into place, because these sins aren't just my sins. They're the sins of every man. There is no one righteous, not even one, and there's a reason for that.

We're living in a new age of civil rights, and with that society is teaching new rules on how to treat women. We're being taught things about consent that we literally have never been taught before.

I didn't know about the concept of affirmative consent until long after I got married. And it's not a concept that has been taught well until recently, as this Cracked article can tell you. The article was written in 2015 by a guy that wasn't taught the concept of affirmative consent. He committed rape because instead of his victim saying no, the woman froze in fear. He didn't know that he committed rape until the next day.

Some reading this might want to stand up and say, "Surely you were taught -"

No, we weren't. Seriously, we weren't. We were taught that no means no, but anything less than that is consent.

And there's not going to be a guy with a sexual history of a number of partners that reads that Cracked article without feeling mortified and wondering if he might have been that guy. Every time I see that story I go through my entire history of sexual partners and wonder what if. Because while I may have never forced myself on a woman who said no, I often interpreted body language to mean yes. I'm confident that they all did want to have sex, but what if I'm wrong? I've always been a giant. I really hope I'm not wrong, because it disgusts me to think of the alternative.

That's an extreme example. Let's look at a few others.

George Takei was recently accused of groping a man back in the early 1980s. Not rape, but touching another man's genitals without his consent. You want to see what consent looked like in the 1980s?

I present, the "love scene" of Blade Runner:

Fast forward to around the 3:25 mark.

I've only seen that movie twice in my life. Once when I was thirteen, and earlier last year when I wanted to be caught up to see the sequel. When I was thirteen, I didn't think much of the scene. When I saw it in 2016, I was like, "Um...dude, that's fucking rape. What the fuck."

That was the "love scene" of the movie. That was what society taught was consent in 1982.

A year later, this catchy little tune started playing on radio stations across the country:

The Police's "Every Breath You Take". A song about a guy that's so fixated on a woman that he's literally watching her with every breath...well, it's in the title.

It wasn't until the late aughts that people on the internet began to point out that Sting's lyrics sound less like a love song and more like the rantings of a deranged stalker. I don't need to post the lyrics. We all know the lyrics (even the kids know the lyrics, thanks to Stranger Things).

One of the top love songs of the 1980s was literally a song about stalking someone. Back then, stalking wasn't even a crime. California passed the first anti-stalking law in 1990, nearly a decade after a song came out glorifying it.

Combine all that with the shitty idea that still persists in society's mind-that men ALWAYS want sex and couldn't possibly say no-and I'd be more surprised if a closeted gay celebrity in the extremely homophobic 1980s didn't grab another gay man's genitals in his apartment without affirmed consent. Ideas on consent in the 1980s were extremely fucked up.

That brings me to my own sins.

In my early 20s, I was lonely and angry at the world. I learned from my friends in the military and the internet that the secret to not being lonely anymore was to be an asshole to women. So I was. Like, all the time. A complete and total asshole.

I can share numerous horror stories about how I was a major prick to the women that shot me down. You know all those stories you read now about the women who saved their conversations on Facebook messenger about the guy that flipped out once the woman said she wasn't interested? That was me. Except it was 2003 and I was on Yahoo and AOL Instant Messenger. I sexually harassed many of the female soldiers I worked with in the military. When one female soldier reported a male soldier for sexual harassment, I joined with the male soldiers in freezing her out. She learned her lesson. Can't say the same for the guy she reported. Even when I didn't think I was being sexist, I was subconsciously being condescending as fuck to all of the women I knew. There's times that my wife will mention how I talked to her while we were dating and I wonder why she didn't just dump my ass. I was a jerk, even to her. I've smacked more than a couple of women on the ass despite barely even knowing them. And all the time I did it with the belief that women liked being treated this way.

I don't have any excuses for my actions. I was young, dumb, angry, and wrong. And I'm sorry.

And before anyone says I'm trying to make all of what we did okay, I'm not.

All of this isn't made to excuse any of the actions that we men did when we were young and stupid. What we did was wrong. The thing is that we weren't taught that any of this was wrong. We live in a new age of feminist ideas on consent and equality, and that's a good thing. We men need to change. We need to be better.

There are most definitely exceptions to what we were taught, though. Harvey Weinstein forced women by threat of ruining their careers to have sex with him. He whipped his dick out and jerked off to female reporters. Even if you could pull the "other time" defense here (you really can't), after the first lawsuit got settled he should have known then what he was doing was most definitely not okay. It was criminal, and he knew it.

Donald Trump walked in on teenagers changing during beauty pageants. He may have even raped a thirteen year old girl. Fuck that piece of shit.

Same thing with Roy Moore. That shitbag tried to have sex with teenagers. There's been so many women that have come out accusing him, and even men that have said that they knew what he was doing at the time, that I can't even link to every story. Fuck that fucking fuck child molesting piece of shit.

And just as a side note, I'm getting tired of hearing talk about, "Well, why are they coming out NOW?" Look at how they're being treated now and you have your answer. They're being treated like this NOW, when they're finally in a position to talk about this without having society completely destroy them for coming out. Imagine how fucked their lives would have been if they reported this stuff THEN, when Harrison Ford could rape Sean Penn on screen and it was considered romantic.

So yeah, there are some men that were so fucking horrible, that there isn't a defense. We know not to go messing with teenage girls. We know not to use our job to force women to have sex with us. Those guys have no excuse. Fuckem.

And yet that doesn't change the fact that there is no man without sin. No one. Not even a senator with a proven record of fighting for the rights of women like Al Franken. We men have all done bad things to women. For my female readers, this includes your husbands, your brothers, and your adult sons. It includes the men that were joining you in solidarity at the march back in January. We have all sinned, and fallen short of society's new rules and expectations.

So if every man that has ever done something inappropriate toward women (or in George Takei's case, to men) is going to become persona non grata, every man is going to get tossed into the wilderness eventually. That includes we men that have learned from our mistakes and are now trying to be good allies and create a better world. We were born in a worse age and are living in the new one, and we're hoping to leave the world better than when we joined it. I'm not saying that nothing should be done to make us pay for our actions, yet there has to be a way to make things right without completely ruining people that are now better men. If not, the only men that will come out on the other side are going to be those that were very, very good at hiding their actions, and those that want to turn us backward on the rights of women. Guys like Trump and Moore.

And to the men, we now live in this new age. We have no excuse now. We know what's right and wrong. It's up to us to tell women #IBelieveYou when they say #MeToo, because we all did something inappropriate to women at some point. We know women who tried to report sexual harassment and were punished. We now know about affirmative consent. We know now that there's going to be times when a woman will be too scared to say no, and that's why we need to be sure that they want sex just as much as we do. We know not to go grabbing on random women, and to just suck it up and try your luck with another woman if you get shot down, and to not even try when it's a woman you work with. We live in a new age with new rules, and we don't get to plead ignorance from here on out. We know we need to be better, so let's be better.

Because if you don't want to be better, you will get tossed into the wilderness. Society is moving forward whether you want it to or not. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.

Not the Strongest, but Stronger Than Most

This was going to be a Facebook rant, but I decided it was best to put it here on my blog instead.

I'm on week two of the Candito Intermediate Program. Week two is the hardest week, as it's the hypertrophy week. For those that don't know, hypertrophy is when you work your muscles out until you have no gas left in your tank, yet you push yourself beyond that point. You've pushed, you've benched, you've squatted and deadlifted until you're basically just a giant mess of yourself left in the fetal position, and even then you push on.

Week two makes sense when you're pushing yourself to new limits. It's required if you want to reach new limits. You handle yourself at a weight just lower than what you're accustomed to, with a rep max far more than what you thought you were capable of.

In week two, I have two sessions of an upper body workout that have me doing a 200 pound bench press for eight reps. After tonight, I just smoked both of those workouts like a cheap cigar. I could easily do ten reps at that weight if my workout plan required it. Bench pressing two hundred pounds is nothing to me. It's easy!

It wasn't always easy for me. When I was in my early 20s, I couldn't do a set of a bench press past 185 pounds. I always hit my limit at that point.

At my job (where I work in private security, a profession that requires us to have great physical strength), most of the people I work with can't break that 185 bench press. They told me so. They struggle to break that 200 pound barrier.

And yet I've now reached the point where I can not only bench press more than 200 pounds, but it ain't shit. Bench pressing 200 pounds is easy. It's 250 pounds that's hard. And it's only hard now. In six months, it might be my warmup weight.

I'm fairly certain that for most men, breaking that 185 pound barrier is something that eludes them. They won't get past it, because they aren't willing to work hard enough. They're that "casual gym member" that I spoke about in the past. The type that joins a gym in January but quits that same gym in March. That's most men. I am not most men. I have worked very hard to get where I am now. I've reached the point where I can bench press far more than 185 pounds. I'm much stronger than most men, and far stronger than I have ever been.

There's a lot of men that can bench press more than me. But not many. They are but the few, greater gods than I,

I'm not the strongest, but I am stronger than most. And that is enough for now.

Starting Phase Two

Like I said a few posts ago, I started a new goal of reaching the Thousand Pound Club. The Thousand Pound Club is when your combined one rep max of your deadlift, bench press, and squat exceed one thousand pounds.

And unlike a lot of my fitness goals, I gave myself a very reasonable time frame to reach it. Fifteen months to add forty pounds to each of my maximum lifts. Nothing I can't handle.

Last week, I ended phase one of my plan. That plan was simple enough. Use the Starting Strength routine until I've reached my limit on it.

The good news is that I reached my limit slightly further than I expected on two of my lifts. I did a set of five reps of squats at 260 pounds (I was planning on maxing out at 255), and did the same at 215 pounds on my bench press.

The bad news is that my deadlift has waned somewhat (I lifted 305x4 on my best day) at 285x5. I'm also still angry that my squat hasn't reached 300 pounds yet. Sweet Jesus, what is the holdup?! I feel like Happy Gilmore screaming at the golf ball.

THAT'S YOUR GOAL! ARE YOU TOO GOOD FOR YOUR GOAL!? ANSWER ME!

Sigh...anyway...

I was planning on maxing out on phase one after I had three failed lift attempts at one of those three lifts. I didn't do that. It was after I failed on two squat attempts and one deadlift attempt that I decided to call it quits. It was because when I didn't finish the squats on day two of this week's plan, I told myself:

Look, other, much more motivated voice in my head-you gotta face reality. I don't care if you deadlifted 305x4 on your best day, you gotta accept that if you keep on this path, you're gonna end up injured. Yeah, you deadlifted more than 300 pounds that day, but you just squatted 260 pounds, deadlifted 285, and you feel like you're about to die. Face fucking reality!

Yep, I faced reality at 36 years old. I might be stronger than ever, but I gotta face the truth that my goal had a long date set for a reason. I gotta train smarter, not harder. I might be stronger than I ever was, but it also takes me a lot longer to heal from injuries.

So here I am, at the end of Day 1 of Phase two of my goal.

Phase two has me using the Candito Intermediate Program.

As I told you at the link above, the program is great. My day one workout had me squatting 240 pounds for 4x6, and deadlifting 260 pounds 2x6.

But I had also been struggling with my deadlifts lately. After trying constantly and failing to meet that one day where I deadlifted 305 pounds, my confidence had waned.

After doing my easy sets of 240 squats, I set up to deadlift the easy weight of 260 pounds, and I couldn't lift it off the ground.

I rested for two minutes after that, and did everything I could to psych myself up to lift it.

Look, other less motivated voice in my head. You once lifted 305 pounds on this exercise. You just lifted 285x5 on Wednesday. You have this. You want some music in your head to motivate you? How about some Fall Out Boy? She's an American Beauty YOU'RE AN AMERICAN PSYCHO! I'M AN AMERICAN! I'M AN AMERICAN! I'M AN AMERICAN PSYCHO!

YOU ARE A SUPERHERO! YOU ARE THE GRASSHOPPER! NOW LIFT, GODDAMN IT! LIFT!

My confidence on doing the deadlift had been shot after failing for the past few days, and that's why I couldn't lift the weight at first. But I psyched myself up enough to finish that first set. The last two reps had me screaming, doing a battle cry that I'm sure everyone in my house heard as I wrapped it up.

The second set was easy. I had my confidence back. Deadlifting 260 pounds ain't shit.

So wraps up day one of phase two.

I will get stronger.

Achieving Greatness (on a Budget)

Since I've started this blog, I have friends on Facebook asking me for fitness advice. What to do if I'm a beginner, which exercise is best for weight loss, etc. I also have friends that tell me that they want to be stronger, faster, and better than they were before, but they have either financial issues, or time constraints that cause them to be unable to join a gym. This post is for you guys.

It's harder to have fitness goals when you don't have a lot of money. Even if you can scrape together a few dollars on a gym membership every month, life and work commitments can make it hard to get to that gym. So this is my post on how to improve yourself physically at home without spending a shit ton of money that you don't have. I've broken this down into three parts: The people that are really flat-ass broke, the people that are pretty broke but have a little bit of cash, and cheap nutritious food. Here we go!

1. For the people that are flat-ass broke.

You're flat ass broke. You don't have enough money to join a gym, but you want to be more physically fit. That's where calisthenics come in.

The literal, dictionary definition of calisthenics is, "gymnastic exercises to achieve bodily fitness and grace of movement". In layman's terms, it means body weight exercises.

Thankfully, the internet (and for all intents and purposes, I'm assuming that you have enough money for an internet connection, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) has a shitload of body weight workouts that you can find just by hitting the Google and typing in "body weight workout".

You'll find a whole slew of images, articles, and such showing you how you can do strength training without leaving your home.

But let's say that you've done those. You're no longer a beginner, but you're still flat ass broke and needing a challenge.

This is where HIIT comes in.

HIIT is High Intensity Interval Training, and it's the fucking Beast Mode of body weight exercise training.

If I had to sum up HIIT in a sentence, it would be, "Do fifty pushups; take a break for ten seconds, then do fifty more."

Fortunately, the internet gods have blessed us in 2017 with YouTube videos. YouTube has an INSANE amount of HIIT workout plans that you can do in the comfort of your living room. Just as an example, the following video is the first one of many that I found just by going to YouTube, and typing "HIIT workout" into the search engine. I didn't view this video, but it's the first of 1,700,000 results:

The pros of HIIT training:

It greatly improves your "mental toughness". In the military, they called mental toughness "muscular strength endurance". It's the ability to drive on even when you're completely maxed both mentally and physically. When we know that we've been several days awake on limited rations and water, but still have to charge a machine gun. For my Facebook friends that read this (you know who you are), it's the ability to stand at the ready against a fascist when you're armed with nothing more than a baseball bat even when some white supremacist shitbag tries to do harm to you and your child. Doing HIIT training makes you mentally tough enough to clock that son of a bitch and still have enough breath in your lungs to fuck up any of his friends that show up.

The cons of HIIT training:

Body weight exercises, no matter how hard trained, have their limits. While you will gain muscular strength endurance, you need actual weights to increase your strength in the long run.

That brings me to the importance of parks.

There's some parks out there that have exercise stations. There's a trail around my township hall that does that. You go to one station, do the exercise that their sign says to do at that station, then run your ass off to the next one until you reach the end. Even if your nearby park doesn't have that, they probably have some pull up bars. Pull ups and chin ups are the be all, end all, of upper back exercises.

If you're like me and still have yet to be able to do a single chin up, do what's called a "reverse chin up".

A reverse chin up is where you go to a pull-up bar and grip it underhand, jump up so that you're at the end of a chin up position, and lower yourself down slowly. It's the best exercise for the upper back that you can do when you're flat ass broke and can't do a chin up. Eventually, you should be able to become strong enough to do chin ups, and after that, pull ups. When you can get to where you can do a bunch of pull ups, it's safe to say that your upper back and bicep muscles are in full-on beast mode. No other equipment for that muscle group is needed.

2. For the people that are pretty broke but have a little bit of cash

So you're pretty broke. You want to improve on your fitness, but you work a lot of hours and have responsibilities with the family that keep you from being able to join a gym. You have a little bit of cash to spare, but not much.

For you, you need to build a home gym so you can work out on your off time. You also need to do this cheaply.

You might need some new home workout equipment. If that's the case, it's important to know which brands you can buy on the cheap, as opposed to the brands that are insanely expensive.

I'm not kidding when I say this. Plenty of home gym equipment is the same, but the brand of said equipment can be the difference between spending a couple of hundred dollars on equipment, and spending nearly a thousand on building your home gym. For example, Weider makes great home gym machines for a few hundred dollars, while Marcy sells similar equipment for more than double or triple the price.

But if you're pretty broke but have a few dollars to spare AND you've been following my blog for any decent amount of time, you don't want one of those fancy machines that they call "home gyms". You want to start off with a weight set.

Weider is great for new weights, but so is CAP.

My first olympic weight set was a CAP 300 pound set. I bought it when I was 20 years old, having no other gym equipment. One 45 pound barbell, a set of 45s, 35s, 25s, 10s, 2 pairs of-5s, and 2.5s, I bought it at a local Dunhams for $200.

I still use it to this day, sixteen years later. They have more than showed that they can go the distance. These weights are built to last. The best part is, the price on those brand of weights hasn't changed much. A CAP barbell and weight set are still $200 retail price.

But maybe you're still pretty broke and need to buy a bench or some other equipment on the cheap. For this, Craigslist and the Facebook marketplace are your best friends.

Weight equipment, regardless of the brand, is really built to last. That's why second hand gear is the best way to build your home gym slowly on the cheap.

To paraphrase Henry Rollins, prices come and go, but 400 pounds is 400 pounds.

I spent years building my workout room on the cheap. I started out by buying my CAP barbell set. I bought a heavyweight bag on Craigslist so I could practice karate on it. I bought my bench on overstock.com. I bought my squat rack on WalMart's website. My mom (god bless her) bought my extra weights secondhand on the Facebook marketplace.

Yeah, prices may come and go, but 400 pounds is 400 pounds.

The pros of developing your home gym on the cheap:

You have plenty of time to lift.
You save a shitload of money on gym memberships.

The cons:
It takes a very long time to build your gym cheaply.
You probably won't have enough space for any cardio machines.

3. FOOD!

Regardless of whether you're flat ass broke, or kinda broke but can afford a few extra dollars towards fitness, you need food to fuel the machine that is your fitness craving body, and you need to do it for as little dollars as possible at the grocery store. For this section, I've broken it down into two sections: Protein and carbs. I won't discuss fats here (as much as they are needed in any diet), because it's inevitable that you're going to eat fat one war or another.

For protein, chicken breast is the champion food of broke people. At one of the stores in my hometown, boneless skinless chicken breast runs at $1.99 per pound. You can buy it in the tens of pounds for dirt cheap prices.

But maybe you're not a fan of eating meat. Maybe you're a vegetarian or vegan. For that, I offer lentils. They're pound for pound, cheaper than chicken breast and one of the best protein sources for those that don't eat meat. As a meat eater, I don't know of all the recipes you can create with lentils, but I'm sure that you do, and you can use them to build muscle while not having to eat anything that has a face.

For cheap but healthy carbs, rice and noodles are the way to go. One of my favorite meal prep recipes uses both chicken breast and rice. There's also a meal prep recipe that uses really lean hamburger and spaghetti noodles. Go nuts with it if you're tired of eating chicken breasts. Those are just two examples of how you can meal prep cheaply, but keep your diet healthy at the same time. There's multitudes more than this. You just gotta use your good friend, the Google.

So that's all my advice for achieving fitness greatness on a budget. I still have to provide some sort of image here so I can post this on my Facebook feed and attract attention, so here you go:

I'm Not Cut Out For This

Well, after a few political posts, we're going back to fitness. I've been wanting to write this one for a while, but I've been busy with work, taking care of the kids, and life in general.

I also have a few other posts in my head ready to get typed up. Hopefully I'll have them up in a few days. Stay tuned for them, because they're some good ones. :)

A few months ago, I decided to take up distance running again to help to cut weight. I knocked the dust off of the old Hal Higdon Novice 1 Half Marathon plan and set a goal to work myself up to running ten miles. The plan was to literally run my ass off until I dropped about twenty pounds or so.

All was going fine until I ran seven miles. For a week after that, I felt a sharp pain in my hip.

I know I'm getting old, but I am not so old as to be getting hip injuries. That's just some bullshit.

The pain was so bad that I was walking bow legged and limping all over the place. Running was out of the question. I could barely even walk.

While I was injured, I remembered back to when I was training to run a half marathon and I got injured right around the same time. Right around when I worked my way towards mile eight. That was a nasty sprain to my lower abdominal muscle that kept me out of running for two weeks. I still managed to run the half marathon in Detroit a few months later, but the injury really hurt my progress. Instead of running confidently across the finish line, I was dragging ass and praying for a merciful death.

I'm just not cut out for distance running. It sucks to admit that, but that's just the way it is. My body type just isn't made for that.

I was never much of a runner. In the Army, my best run time for a two mile run was 14:57. While that's fast by civilian standards, in the Army, it's less than one minute above passing time.

But in between the half marathon and now, I took up powerlifting, and that's where the new phase of my fitness journey comes in.

I have never injured myself lifting weights. I've never injured myself at all during any type of strength training. Ever. That's my body type. That's what I'm cut out for, and it's where I set my new fitness goal.

There's this thing called the Thousand Pound Club. For those of you that don't want to click the link, it's where your combined lifting weights of the squat, bench press, and deadlift all exceed one thousand pounds.

I crunched the numbers into this fitness calculator of each of those lifts that I have used at peak strength to determine my one rep max. At my absolute best so far, my squat is 295 pounds. My bench press is 240 pounds. My deadlift is 340 pounds.

When you add them all together, my combined peak strength is 875 pounds.

I only need to add 125 pounds to each of those three lifts to join that prestige club.  That's only about forty pounds per lift and some change!

This is very much attainable. It's very much attainable given the time frame that I'm setting for myself.

I will obtain this goal by the end of next year. December 31st, 2018. I have 14 months to achieve it. And I will!

I have to add a photo at this point for my Facebook friends (as they are the majority of the readers of this blog) so here you go:

The Best and Worst Advice I got as a Child

I wrote in past posts about this story, but in light of current events, it bares repeating.

I am a warrior, and not by choice.

When I was seven, I started getting bullied by older kids. Being that I was tall for my age, bullies saw me as a soft target. They would beat me up and call me names.

I didn't fight back because I was told through teachers, numerous PSA commercials, and a whole slew of school materials that fighting was wrong, and I should always avoid it. I was told to tell a teacher, or an adult, about a bully so that they could deal with the bully themselves.

Boy, was I naïve.

There were a few times I didn't listen to all of the adults, because they had refused to control the bullies. Of all those times, I can tell you about a bully named Dan. He was my babysitter's kid.

Dan would beat me up all the time because he knew I wouldn't fight back. His parents knew about it, but they didn't do anything to him. He would call me names and I'd tell on him, only to be told, "Don't be a tattle tale". Yet if he told his parents on me for saying something back, I'd be scolded. Dan was probably aware that the double standard existed, because before long, words turned into physical violence.

Dan beat me up all the time, and his parents did nothing. I would constantly be crying over the abuse he gave me and they didn't say anything. So finally, I had enough.

One day, I got into an argument with Dan and I knew he was going to come at me, like he always does. Except this time, I wasn't going to let him beat me. I was ready.

Sure enough, after the argument got heated, he came charging at me, ready for battle. I put my right foot back, and hit him in the face with a hard right fist in the mouth.

That son of a bitch dropped like a sack of potatoes. One fucking punch to the face, and he was screaming, crying to his mom.

I chipped the shitbag's tooth, or so his mom told me.

The mom, who had long allowed for her kid to bully me, went apeshit on me. It didn't matter that for well over a year, he had bullied me. He beat me into dust. She did nothing then. Now, she was yelling and spanking (yes, spanking) me.

If I had known then what I know now as an adult, I would have called her out on her bullshit and hypocrisy. I would have told her that she deserved an ass beating too, and I was ready to deliver. Yet as an eight year old child, all I knew was that I was in trouble.

I stood up to my bully, and I was paying the price.

In my subconscious mind, I learned that you will be punished for defending yourself. People are coming to hurt you, nobody is going to help you, and you will be punished for defending yourself. That was just one of many bullies that I had similar experiences with until I was twelve.

Another one was with a different Dan. That Dan would beat me up after school in the sixth grade routinely. After I finally took enough abuse from him, I went to the assistant principal.

I told her the whole story about how Dan would bully me as soon as I got off the bus. That he would hit me. That he would hurt me and knock the wind out of my stomach for no reason. When I asked her what she would do about it, she very pointedly told me that she would do nothing.

Why? Because Dan worked in the school office. He was the "teacher's pet". Aside from whooping my ass on a daily basis, he was a model student. Because of that, the assistant principal didn't give a shit that he was a bully. He had a free license to beat me up, and there was nothing that the authority figures would do about it.

In those years, I had many bullies. Adults did nothing to defend me from them, but they always told me the same lie: If you fight the bully, you're just as bad as they are.

I was stupid enough to believe it.

"Don't fight the bully, or you're as bad as he is", is the worst fucking piece of advice I had ever received as a child.

Then seventh grade happened.

I was in an office meeting with my school counselor for the third time, dealing with bullies. I don't remember the name of my counselor, but he was a good man. The past two times, he pulled the bullies into his office and scared them enough to not physically bully me anymore (emotionally, he had no control over). But by the third time, he was exasperated.

It was at that moment, he gave me the best advice I had ever received from an adult:

"You're going to get in trouble for it, but you have to HIT BACK."

That was his advice. I might get in trouble for it. The adults won't protect me from the bullies when they try to beat me, but I have to fight, and be ready for the punishment that comes from defending myself.

As an adult now, I really, really wish that it hadn't taken me his permission to do so, but as a kid, it was all it took to truly wake my ass up. He put a real truth in my brain that has always been in my mind since:

People are coming to hurt you. Nobody is going to help you, and you will be punished for defending yourself. Fight anyway.

I had a strange confidence after that. If anyone had decided to talk shit to me, I'd tell them to fight me. Most refused because I was a giant. No longer a gentle, pacifist giant. A giant ready to tear their limbs off.

Eighth grade was another story. I spent half of my time in In School Suspension because I was taking shit from nobody. Bullies didn't touch me because I was ready to fight. Most of my time in In School Suspension was because some bully decided to verbally abuse me, and I responded by knocking his head off.

In high school, I started doing karate. I was no longer just the guy you didn't want to fuck with, but I was protecting other bullied kids. Sure, there were some bullies that tried to mess with me emotionally, but once I said, "YOU WANT TO SING IT, OR BRING IT?!", they would back down real quick. Real fucking quick.

To this day, I remember the worst advice that was given to me by adults: Don't fight the bullies, or you're as bad as they are.

I always keep in the back of my mind the best advice that I got from my seventh grade counselor:

People are coming to hurt you. Nobody is going to help you, and you'll be punished for defending yourself. Fight anyway.

Yeah, I became a warrior. Not by choice, but because my options were either to fight, or be crushed.

I kept that advice from the counselor in the back of my mind long after high school, when I joined the Army as a result of another group of bullies attacking us on 9/11.

That bring us to today.

Last week, there were bullies gathered by the hundreds that marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Those disgusting bullies, that screamed evil things like, "Jews will not replace us", "Blood and soil", and eventually rammed a car into a crowd of people that were protesting such bullying.

As it was in my childhood, the "authority figure" that was supposed to denounce such bullying instead blamed "many sides", except there isn't many sides. There's only three sides; the bullies, those that they're bulling, and those that aren't bullied but fight on behalf of the bullied. I've been on the both of the latter parts. The "adult" that's supposed to condemn the bullies instead enabled them.

He gave the same bullshit speech that I heard many times in my youth. That speech is a lie.

"If you fight the bully, you're as bad as he is."

"If you fight the Nazi, you're the real Nazi."

Yeah, I've heard that speech before. That same, lying speech that adults told me to keep me from defending myself as a kid is now being spewed forth by the supposed president of the United States. The same bullshit that I was told by adults when I was defending my friends from bullies.

If politics is like high school, our "president" is the new assistant principal. The one that won't attack the real bullies because they're the teacher's pet. They're the ones that got him elected. He doesn't want to punish them.

"If you fight the bully, you're as bad as he is" is a lie. Bullies don't respond to kind pleas for you to stop hurting them. They don't respond to reason. They don't respond to acts of kindness. They only will stop bullying you when punch them into the face so hard that they have a chipped tooth and go crying to their mom. And then, and only then, they'll stop when you tell their mom, "WHAT?! YOU WANT SOME OF THIS? COME AT ME! I'LL BREAK YOUR TOOTH, TOO!"

So as it went then, so it goes now. The fascists are coming to hurt America, nobody is coming to protect us, and we will be punished for defending ourselves. Fight anyway.

The Death Threats Made Me Laugh

I was going to call this, "Absurdism in Dangerous Times", but the title above is a bit more catchy.

It's been over three months since I've written anything, and it's not without reason. I've been working constantly, and when I've been home I've been helping to raise my kids. It's given me very little time for writing, but I've been wanting to write this story for a while.

A few months ago, a very outspoken friend of mine on Facebook was being targeted by some Neo-Nazis. She found that a Facebook page called, "You Can't Run or Hide Antifa Scum" had put up a picture of her after she, in no uncertain terms, told some white supremacists to go fuck themselves.

The page was created with the supposed intention of exposing anyone that's a part of the Antifas movement in the hopes of getting them to be too scared to do a little Nazi punching. In reality, they were posting a lot of pictures of elderly women, dads holding their kids, and other people that aren't connected to the Antifas movement in any way, but were also outspoken against white supremacists online.

My friend isn't a part of the Antifas movement, nor am I. It's not that we're not sympathetic to the cause; both of us believe that white supremacists need nothing short of a good ass kicking. It's just that we're both parents with full time jobs, so beating the shit from skinheads and klansmen isn't something we can fit into our busy schedules. We may tell some racist shitbags off online from time to time, but actually finding the time to beat the shit from one is a luxury that neither of us have. But she told some white supremacist somewhere online to go drink bleach or whatever, and that was enough to get their attention.

So when that Facebook page attempted to dox her, I very calmly said to myself, "This cannot stand. These people must be dealt with. It's time for to unleash some trollfuckery."

Maybe it's the new anti-anxiety meds that I'm on (more on that in another post), but despite having a history of internet stalkers that drove my political blogging ass into anonymity, I decided to hit them up on Facebook using my real name and identity.

The plan was very simple and was meant to be run with precision. The first part of my plan involved me taking a selfie of myself wearing my "Fuck Racism Punch Nazis" t-shirt, and post it on Facebook under the line: This Machine Trolls Fascists. That went off without a hitch.

The second part got a little more complicated, as I'll tell below. The second part was to go on their page, spew just enough trollery to get noticed, and let my photo get shared on their page.

After it got published, I was going to respond with a whole shit-ton of laughs, and this video:

I called it, Operation: Trolling Phonebook. The purpose of it was twofold:

1. Show that they weren't really exposing anyone in the Antifas movement, and
2. Let them know that nobody was afraid of them. After all, if I, a man not a part of the movement with a full time job and kids was willing to troll them, they really aren't that scary.

It was meant to be a two-fold operation that discredited the page.

So after posting my photo, I went on their page, and spewed just enough shit to get their attention. But the day I did that, I noticed that posting on their page ground to a halt. No new names were being published. All the activity was being done in their comment section by strangers.

I realized that I had been too late to the party.

Some real, online members of the Antifas movement had been on to the owner of the page for quite a while and managed to get him banned from Facebook the day I began my operation. Those magnificent BASTARDS managed to disrupt a perfectly planned plan!

A few days later, the page was shut down, but not before some other white supremacists saw my work on the page.

And that, as John Mulaney said in his bit about the Salt and Pepper Diner, did things go from good to great!

Remember how I told you about my public photo of the T-shirt that says "Fuck Racism Punch Nazis"? Well, holy shit. Did they respond! I literally said "This Machine Trolls Fascists" to tell them why I posted it, and they took the trollbait, anyway.

They responded with trolling. They responded with threats to be me. They responded with death threats. And I just laughed.

Like this guy, Mr. Rich Hickman (find him on Facebook if you want):




"I'll talk to you very very soon". Bwahahahaha!

It's been well over two months, and despite his promises, Mr. Hickman has yet to buy a plane ticket to Detroit International Airport  Neither did the dozen or so white supremacist shitbags that trolled my Facebook photo in the months since.

I told you earlier that I was planning on titling this "Absurdism in Dangerous Times". Well that's for a reason.

I posted a long time ago that it was, of all things, a cartoon show that showed me the philosophy of absurdism. After that, I started reading about it a lot. I delved into the works of Alfred Camus.

Absurdism is the idea that life is meaningless. You accept that. You don't try to find some meaning in the meaningless, but instead enjoy that it has no meaning. You are Sisyphus rolling that stone on the hill. The only way to rebel against the gods is to smile at the meaningless of doing so. To take joy in it. You smile as you know that your existence is without meaning or purpose.

It was at the moment that I saw my friend's photo posted on that page that I accepted it as a part of political activism. I used to be afraid to show myself online or in person because of cyberstalkers of years' past. I was afraid of what they could do to me if I allowed myself to be exposed. But at that moment, I took the advice of Morty to full heart:

Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch T.V.

That's why I had the courage to allow strangers on the internet to try to find me. It's why I laughed as they threatened me. I accepted that my life has no meaning, so fuck any white supremacist that would dare come at me.

For the first time in what felt like forever, I was living without fear. Without that fear, I was having the time of my life fighting fascist idiots online. I found what those in addict counseling call, "your higher power". That cause that is bigger than myself.

I recently read the book "The Power of Habit", and it discussed the role that religion has in helping addicts deal with their addiction. In the twelve step programs, it was shown that believing in a faith helped those deal with addiction not necessarily because of the supposed powers of their newfound deity, but because that faith had helped them believe in a cause bigger than themselves. I found mine in fighting fascists on the internet. It was through that that I discovered how absurdity can make one fearless.

We do live in very dangerous times. Like I wrote in my widely (at least as far as this little blog is concerned) shared post, we are now under the presidency of a man who thinks that nukes should be used as conventional weapons. That should scare anyone of sound mind. Yet many of us aren't because of faith or discovery of the pointlessness of life. That includes me.

But like I learned defending my friend, we should embrace absurdism so we remember that the fun is in the fight.

Even though I found joy in the meaningless of life, it doesn't mean that I lack empathy. I still feel great anger when a cop shoots a black man that was legally armed just as I was when I got pulled over by a cop and the cop laughed as I pulled my gun from my glove box into my cup holder. I still feel great anger at the idea that millions of people could lose their health insurance if Obamacare is repealed. I still feel great anger at racism, sexism, and the threat of war hanging over our heads. I'm angry that I have to work six days a week and miss out on free time that I need to spend with my kids and my own mental welfare.

Yes, my empathy causes me to feel great anger at the injustices of this world, but it's remembering the philosophy of absurdism that gives me the courage to fight. It's the knowledge that life is meaningless that makes the fight fun. Our lives might be meaningless, but goddamn it, is it fun to fight evil assholes.

Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Go punch a Nazi. Or troll them online. Or write your congressman. Whatever works for you.

If You Want to do Something Right...

It didn't take long for me to get back to my peak strength levels on the Starting Strength program. I even exceeded my previous bests on my squat (235x5 reps). After doing that, I decided that I need to work on becoming faster and have better endurance as well.

Some time last year, I heard about a book called Hybrid Training, which is one of the few books that is dedicated to making someone an all-around superior athlete. Their workouts look great, but they're suited for someone who is in moderately good shape in all areas. My speed and my endurance are lacking.

With that in mind, I decided to start a bodybuilding routine to keep my current strength levels, and be able to run until I can run three miles in under 30 minutes.

I decided to pick the Buff Dudes 12 Week Plan, Third Edition. For those that don't know, Buff Dudes are two fitness models that have their own YouTube channel. There's a thousand different weightlifting channels on YouTube, but their videos are by far the most entertaining.

Here's a playlist of the videos from that plan.

As far as bodybuilding plans go, it's great. If your primary goal is to get a great looking body, I highly recommend it.

And the first phase of the workout was good, too. There were only two days when you worked your legs (and this is only because Buff Dudes are under the mistaken impression that the deadlift is a back exercise and not a leg exercise), so I was able to run on the other days I worked out.

Unfortunately, by the time phase two hit, I was working my legs three times a week. Two actual leg days, and one back day where you're doing deadlifts. I couldn't run with a shit on phase two.

Watching their videos, one of the brothers said that he wasn't even doing cardio anymore because the weight training was too exhausting. And all they do for cardio is fast walking!

Walking is fine if all you want to do is gain cardiovascular endurance. But I feel the need, the need for...

You 80s kids know the rest.

"Well, fuck it", I told myself. "If you want to do something right, you're going to have to do it yourself."

So, I created my own workout plan, mixing all of what I know about lifting and running, and doing a goal assessment.

My long term goals are:
1. A squat and deadlift of 450 pounds
2. A bench press of 300 pounds
3. Be able to do pullups
4. Run a sub 8:00 mile

My short term goals are:
1. At least maintain my current strength levels, if not increase them
2. Run three miles under 30:00
3. Decrease body fat so I can run faster
4. Do this in as short as workout as possible (I still got kids at home!)

The short term goals are harder than they sound. I've found since having bariatric surgery that the following is true:

1. Gaining strength is easy
2. Losing body fat is easy
3. Doing both is extremely, extremely hard

So this plan isn't intended to gain strength. It's just meant to keep what I have. If my strength increases, great, but it's not necessary.

I'm combining bodybuilding with megsquats' program to get you to do your first pullup, and Higdon's novice 5k plan.

The first exercise is the primary exercise, done in four sets of 10/8/6/4. The exception is back day, where my primary exercise is the reverse pullup from the megsquats routine. The primary exercise is meant to make you worn completely down by the time it's over. The weight you lift is based on your one rep max. There's plenty of apps to download to your phone (and this website) to help calculate your one rep max. Based on that, you figure out how much weight to lift on each set.

For example, if you know that you can lift 205 pounds for five reps, your calculated one rep max would be 236 pounds. Based on that, you would do a set routine of 180x10, 190x8, 205x6, and 215x4. You're rounding up to the nearest five on every one.

By the time you're done with the first exercise, the muscles you worked should be officially done for the day. That's where the rest of the workout comes in.

You have to do at least one more isolation exercise for that muscle group for 3 sets of 10, and then on most days, you'll be doing two accessory exercises for the arms for 3 sets of 10.

The idea is that you work your body past its breaking point. It builds endurance, and you get to spend the rest of the week recovering, so you don't have to worry about muscle strain, either.

So here's the first week of my six week plan to get me ready for Hybrid Training:

Sunday (Chest and Biceps):
1.5 mile run
Reverse Pullups
Bench Press: 10/8/6/4
Cable Crossovers: 3x10
Bicep Curl: 3x10
Zottman Curl: 3x10

Tuesday (Back):
1.5 mile run
Reverse Pullups
T-Bar Row: 3x10
Pull downs: 3x10

Thursday (Shoulders and Triceps):
1.5 mile run
Reverse Pullups
Overhead Dumbbell Press: 12/10/8
Barbell Upright Row: 3x10
Overhead Tricep Extension: 3x10
Overhand Cable Push-Downs: 3x10

Friday:
Squats: 10/8/6/4
Deadlifts: 1x5
30 minute incline walk on treadmill

The running routine falls in line with the Higdon program. The next week would be a 1.75 mile run on the first and third run days, 1.5 miles on the second, and 35 minutes of incline walking on leg day.

There's a lot of people that like to save the cardio for after the weight lifting. When it comes to running, I like to do it first, just because running is always harder for me than lifting.

As the weeks pass, if I find that I'm not able to break my muscles down into mush after the first exercise no matter how much I lift, I'll add another compound exercise (for example, an Incline Bench Press on chest day). The goal is to leave the gym feeling like I've got my ass kicked. The workout is broken down enough to avoid injury, short enough to have a life outside of the gym, and can meet my short term fitness goals.

So far, the workout has been great. I've noticed that my strength is increasing slightly, and even though this isn't my goal, I'm seeing a lot of added muscle on my body. While I can say that it's not my goal to look strong, it feels pretty damn good to see that in the mirror. :)

If you decide to give this routine a go yourself, remember to see a doctor before beginning any new exercise program. That's my legal disclaimer so you can't sue me. Enjoy!

Time

I don't have enough time.

Time for what? Everything.

I'm constantly working. I was promised more money at my new job. I get paid more by the hour, but I also work a lot less hours than I did than at my previous job. This means I'm making less money.

So I beg for overtime. I get what I can, but my new job picks overtime on a seniority based scale. My old job had an overtime policy of, "Just give it to The Grasshopper. He'll take it." That was much more preferable to my current situation.

What little time I have when I'm not working, I either spend at the gym or watching my kids.

I make this complaint because after I posted about my return as a political blogger and activist, I literally have no time to do either.

If you don't write about politics everyday, good luck keeping up with the clusterfuck that our latest presidency has become. Another day, another new heaping pile of bullshit. As of today, Trump is accusing Obama of having tapped his phones during the 2016 campaign, and is doing so because he read an article on a right-wing blog.

Trump has access to literally everything that our government can get its hands on, and he's relying on morning news shows and conspiracy-theory websites instead of our intelligence agencies for information. It's beyond mind-boggling stupid.

And yet tomorrow, there will be some other clusterfuck coming from this administration. What will he do next that will boggle the mind? Start a dog fighting ring? Make a sex tape? Start a war based on his viewing of Killer Clowns from Outer Space? We don't fucking know. We just know that he'll be a bigger idiot than he was the day before, and it'll be equal parts entertaining and horrifying. We'll keep worrying about how low our country has sunk while being mesmerized by the spectacle all at the same time.

I don't have the time to keep up with all of this dumbfuckery. How do you occasionally blog about politics when Trump's dumbfuckery comes at you at a 1,000 miles an hour?

I wanted to be more politically active in the real world as well. I was hoping to attend political meetings, attend some rallies and protests, and otherwise do my part to make some change.

That's hard to do when you have two kids at home, and work 48-56 hours a week.

Every time I see some rally or meetup on Facebook, I look at the day. It's always on a day that I'm working. I tell myself, "Well, maybe I can do it before work...oh, wait. I've got kids. Nevermind."

A few months ago, I watched an incredibly cathartic video of the white supremacist shitbag known as Richard Spencer get punched in the face by an Anarchist.

There's been hundreds of videos, but this one is my personal favorite

I started reading up on Anarchism after that, because I knew that they didn't believe in the concept of a government, but didn't know much else about them. It turns out they don't like any groups at all. No governments, no corporations, nothing. Just all men on their own.

I don't agree with that philosophy, but it is damn nice to see them punching Nazis. I can disagree with their philosophy all I want; if there comes a time for punching Nazis, I'm calling them. You can't count on liberals for that shit.

One of the things I did read on them mentioned that most Anarchists are active either in a) Early adulthood, or b) The years after they turn fifty.

The author explained (sorry for no link, I can't find it right now), that this is because like just about every other activist, they get married, have kids, and have to work to provide and pay bills. Raising a family takes priority over setting the world on fire.

So it's going to be up to the college kids and the grandparents to save the world. Again. As per usual.

I still hope to do what I can when there's time. My wife will stop teaching in the summer, so hopefully I can do something other than call my representatives until they get sick of hearing from me (that's about all I can do right now).

In the meantime, I still wear this around town while I run my errands:

Come at me, wingnuts. Y'all ain't shit

Stronglifts and Starting Strength Suck

You might be looking at the title and thinking, "What the fuck? The Grasshopper has been singing praises of these workouts for the better part of a year. Why is he telling us not to do them?"

Look, despite my many posts talking about how great they are, I was completely wrong. Sure, it made me lift heavier weights than I ever had in my life, but they just aren't going to do the same for you.

I could give you all sorts of reasons for it, but all I can say is that you have to trust me on this one.

It has nothing to do with the fact that every time I've hit the gym as of late, no matter what time of day or night it is, I find that there are lines for the squat racks at my gym.

Nope, nothing to do with that at all.

It has nothing to do with that fact that I go to the gym after work at midnight, MIDNIGHT FOR CRISSAKES, and find that the gym's TWO (not ONE, but TWO) squat racks are already being used!

It has nothing to do with the fact that I see the guy in front of me doing sets of five, and I know he's doing the exact same fucking workout that I'm about to do, and I have to patiently wait as he gets done with all his sets before I can jump in and claim that squat rack as my own.

It has nothing to do with the fact that when I go into the gym I turn into Samuel Jackson, and all I can think is, "I'VE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERFUCKING GUYS ON MY MOTHERFUCKING SQUAT RACK!"

What kind of lunatic goes to the gym at midnight, anyway? Except me, of course.

There was a time when I could go into the gym late at night, and there'd be one other guy there running on a treadmill like a hamster on a wheel. Not anymore!

Look, if you want strong legs, there's a leg extension machine with your name on it. Go ahead, give that a whirl.

Squats and deadlifts are just bad for you. Don't worry about all of the scientific data that directly contradicts me on that, just go with me on this one guys!

Pretty please?

The Grasshopper Returns!

Ten years ago, I was one of the top political bloggers in the state.

That and a dollar will get me on a bus. It would have done the same ten years ago.

In the years between 2006 and 2009, the liberal "netroots" had reached its peak, and there was no stronger a state to find it than in Michigan. While every state had its own network of bloggers, in the netroots community, Michigan was known as "the Juggernaut". At our peak we had over 80 blogs discussing politics in our state. We were the largest collection of bloggers in the country, and we were damn proud of it.

I had my own blogger handle that was picked out for me when I was young.

In the 90s, back in the days of usenet groups and dial-up modems, I was given my name when I was 15 years old.

I got it because I had just started doing karate in those days, and every time I advanced to the next belt, I wrote about it on those usenet groups to my online friends to boast of my accomplishments. Those friends named me:

The Young Grasshopper

Like any 90s kid that does martial arts, I was a fan of the show Kung Fu, and loved it. I owned that name. I made email addresses out of it. It was my name on every internet related thing I had to sign up for (back in the days before you could simply sign into something by giving your Facebook profile).

So when I started political blogging in the mid-aughts, that was my name. DJ The Young Grasshopper, usually as the acronym that had all the first letters in that name. I blogged because during the beginning of those times, I was in Iraq, and netroots activism was all I was able to do to do my part to fight against the Bush Jr. administration. In 2004 I was mad that the war in Iraq (before I deployed) had already gone to shit, and wanted to do my part to get the war to end. By the time I deployed, I was writing.

I became one of the top bloggers in Michigan for that very reason. Blogging when you're serving in Iraq (and even after I came home) gives you a ton of street cred, and also makes you a powerful weapon against chickenhawk assholes that would dare call anyone against the war traitors. I would remind any trolls that we came across that I did my time in the sandbox, so where the fuck where they? I didn't serve with them. They were at home preaching about the need for this needless war, while I was over there, wondering if I would see tomorrow.

The years passed, and I made a name for myself in the Michigan juggernaut by having both an extremely sharp wit and equal parts cynicism and self-righteousness that made my posts as entertaining as they were biting. I would attack both Republicans and Democrats alike (but mostly Republicans) when they were involved in any kind of state or national fuckery.

While my name carried zero recognition in 99.9% of the state, politicians in Lansing knew me quite well, and many were scared of me. I was told by another liberal blogger that the state GOP had files on all of us. We were scary enough to them that they did opposition research on us. I gave zero fucks on that, because they had nothing on me. What are they going to say, that I'm an angry Iraq war veteran? Shit, at that time in the war, if you were going to go after an angry veteran that had become disillusioned by the war, you'd have to take a number. Three quarters of us were against the war at the time.

But, things changed.

Because of a situation that I can't discuss much about because it ended in a lawsuit settlement (I can tell you that I ended up being on the better end of it), I stopped blogging. I really can't discuss that lawsuit, but what I can tell you is that the actions that happened before that lawsuit scared the hell out of me. I feared for my life for a very long time because of actions taken by a certain person.

Back then, before the neo-nazis and the mens right activists fucked it all up, even trolls had rules. You kept the shit online and impersonal. That person broke them. That's all I'll say on that.

By the time the dust settled on that situation, blogging had become archaic. I was fine with that, because I was too scared to do any political blogging again. It was easier just to post news stories on Facebook.

After I had kids, I had very little desire for any type of political activism, even the type that you do online. Hell, it's one of the bigger reasons why I wish that Clinton had won the election.

I still debate politics online under names that aren't remotely related to my blogger archetype. After the election, I told right-wingers that they didn't realize what they had done. We old(ish) activists were tired. I was hoping that Clinton would win for many reasons, but a big one was that I was just too damn tired to be an activist anymore. Yeah great, Clinton wins. She already knew that she wasn't going to get any cooperation from the GOP in Congress, so she'd carve her own path. Great, it means that I don't have to get in the dirt anymore. I can just do my day job, raise my kids, continue to kick ass at the gym, and be done with the whole damn thing. Her victory would have been the best thing to happen to the right, because we on the left were just too goddamn tired of fighting, and her victory would be enough to take a long rest while the right would continue to do battle.

But here we are.

Yep, here we fucking are.

The right didn't realize that Trump's win would do more than energize us. It made us lose our fucking minds! I'm now hearing conversations from the left about arming ourselves and getting concealed weapon permits (I already have guns and permits, but thanks for joining me guys). That's a sharp turn from just a few months ago. We didn't just get motivated, we got fucking militant. We saw a guy become president by not just losing the majority of the voters, but one that was actively helped by white supremacist groups. One that was helped by Russian interference into our democratic process. A man that has no goddamn business having access to the nuclear codes.

The left isn't tired anymore, and we're a fuck-ton more motivated than we were in 2005. We're ready to do one thing, and one thing only. Destroying Nazis.

We want our scalps.

Before this election, I would listen to "Fight to Live" by The Bouncing Souls, and scream about how, "the fight to live is the only fight, I got left in me". After the election, I got a lot more fight left in me. Enough to last four years.

I started this blog with the intention of logging my weight loss and fitness journey after I had bariatric surgery. I found that this wasn't enough, as parenting and mental illness were just as much as part of my fitness journey as hitting the gym and watching what I ate.

I never intended to start writing about politics on here, and did my best to avoid doing so, but I can no longer pretend that politics isn't a big part of my life and interconnected to my health and well being. Politics is a major part of what happens in all our lives, whether we want it to or not. I can no longer talk about fitness, health, and mental illness and leave discussions of the fate of the Affordable Care Act out of it. I can't blog about my mental illness without discussing the fear of our country being ran by an insecure, narcissistic idiot that is both Russia's puppet and has the ability to get us all blown to hell in a nuclear holocaust at worst and will lead us into another recession where I'm scared about money problems at best. I can't blog about raising two wonderful girls to be strong, independent, and healthy without talking about feminism. I also can't refuse to talk about racism, implicit bias, and prejudice and call myself a decent person.

Hell, at this point, net neutrality is being threatened, and I may not be able to blog at all without that!

I can't separate the political and the apolitical on here anymore. They're both connected, and I'm done with pretending that they aren't.

The Grasshopper is back from retirement. I'm too old to be The Young Grasshopper anymore. Just call me The Grasshopper, or Grasshopper for short.

And should any trolls try to come after me, keep in mind what happened to the last guy. The local trolls can tell you all about him, and it's why they fear my name. I could always use another settlement check.

Just sayin'

I'm also armed, carrying, and I train while you sleep.