Yesterday, I loaded up my barbell with 225 pounds to do a warmup set of squats. I could tell there was something wrong because those squats felt less like a warmup and more like a new personal record. Nonetheless, I ignored the pain and did a set of three reps at 275 pounds. Then, I loaded the barbell up with 280 pounds. After one rep, I quit. The pain in my lower back was too much.
The past two weeks I've been ignoring the strain that I've felt in my lower back when I do squats. As the gap between my max squat and max deadlift started to shrink, I would feel some strain in my lower back when I would do my squats, and struggled to keep my form straight. At least one rep in any one of my sets would have me leaning forward too far, and I was doing a "good morning squat".
So, I'm injured. Nothing too serious, but I'm not doing any max lifts anytime soon.
Conventional wisdom says that you should rest when you have an injury, but sometimes conventional wisdom is just stupid. I'm taking the advice of Alan Thrall's trainer on this one.
Today, instead of just being immobile, I did a few sets of barbell squats with no weight added, and tossed in a set of good mornings (real good mornings, not squats with shitty form). I'll gradually increase my weight over the next few days.
Next week, instead of continuing on the Candito program, I'm going to spend a week working on increasing my higher rep maxes. This will help me work on my squat form while using a lower weight.
As if YouTube had been reading my mind, another Alan Thrall video discussing squat form popped up in my feed, and gave some good advice to unfuck my form. I'll be making sure to take that advice. Here's the video:
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
