Strength and Deconditioning 10: Oh God my freaking leg...

Okay, last night I got injured in a fairly embarrassing way. As I was walking out to the gym to do my squat workout--which was gonna be big and huge and epic, like, you know, around 455 at the end! maybe 475!--I slipped on a wet patch of grass and went arse over heels. My left leg was thrown out and hyper-extended pretty awfully. I heard a kind of a ripping noise, and found myself unable to pull myself to my feet for a few moments.

Hoping that it was just a little twinge, or something, I hobbled to the gym, after I had gotten to my feet, and tried to squat my warm-up, to see if I could handle it. Only 225, basically little baby weight. I mean, ladies and gents, I do my high rep rows with 225. It was so heavy, as I was going down, that I couldn't imagine all the forces of gravity pulling on me any harder. I rolled the weight over my head and dumped it. After managing to put my glasses back together, and to somehow dead lift the 225 one handed and one legged back onto my rack, I crawled to the house and collapsed. Not the most pleasant night, you understand.

So, now, for a couple of weeks it looks like I'm going to be a 'bench press only' athlete. As my hamstring, which I think is torn a little bit, heals, I'll work dead lifts and, eventually, squats back into my programming. Hopefully it won't take too long... I hate sitting still!

Strength and deconditioning 9: To gear or not to gear

Something that I have wondered about for a few months now is the place of gear in power lifting competition. I began by thinking that the use of gear--any gear!--was cheating and that no lift accomplished with the aid of anything more supportive than a particularly tight pair of gym shorts should count for towards your personal record. These opinions were held before I started doing any serious max work, this summer. The first time I squatted 525, benched 405 and pulled 455 on the same day... I felt all my joints just crinkle up, like off brand french fries, and my central nervous system sizzle like a cheap steak. I had to go home and lie for basically three days to recover. I was suffering from a great level of deep muscle fatigue and nervous exhaustion. I can only imagine how awful it is for men who are attempting to pull, push or squat twice that amount. If that was attempted without some supportive gear, even just wraps, I can imagine that exhaustion and missing the lift would be a best case scenario; total joint failure and a loud ripping noise seems more likely.

I am still not a fan of the more elaborate set ups. One does not seem to need a suit of armor made out of vulcanized rubber for squatting and dead lifting, and one certainly doesn't need an extra layer or two of pectoral muscle for bench pressing. This is sort of sneaky and gives an unfair advantage over lifters who don't use that kind of equipment; there are many power lifting federations which don't even allow double-ply equipment. I am a strong believer in taking care of your joints, however, and may even buy a Z-suit, elbow wraps and knee wraps in the future, to make sure that I don't suffer any injury to body parts where I am prone to it.

Strength and deconditioning 7: Getting strong

I have coached a few people, in the weight room, when I have worked out in public places. This is one of the hazards of working out while very strong. People see you loading four or more plates onto any given bar, and they just sort of assume you have a duty to the public to help them work out. Maybe you do... I don't know. I do know that I don't mind helping somebody out when that person is dedicated and serious about weight training, about getting stronger. One of the best students I ever had, in the weight room, was a tall, thin young man whose leverages were absolutely and utterly wrong for lifting weights. He was able to do a lot of running and to hop around like a tree frog on crack, doing P90X, but wasn't able to bench press, squat or dead lift more than 135. His bench might have been 145; I forget. The point was that he wasn't very strong, in absolute terms, and the program he was doing of four sixes wasn't doing him any favors. I put him on a program of alternating 3x3 and 5x2 workouts (I chose against adding in a cycle of 8-12 singles, due to the fact that I couldn't watch him closely and do my own workouts) and, within a few weeks, his max bench press had leaped to 165! This is a pretty impressive step forward and I was incredibly proud of him. He also made progress on bench press and squat, which are excellent indicators of overall strength.

This is one of the reasons that it confuses me, then, when someone comes up to me in the weight room and says, "I want you to help me, but I don't want to get strong/I don't care about getting strong. Can you help me?" I have to say, after looking at them confused, for a moment, "No, no I don't think I can help you, at all, and furthermore I can't understand you." It's not that I don't get where they're coming from, you know... I understand them intellectually, I guess, I comprehend the words that they're saying, and all, but I just don't get what they want to get if not, you know, stronger. If you don't want to get stronger, then what do you want, to get weaker? Do you want to be weak? Really? Really? If so, then, why? I've had people tell me everything from that they want to get "bigger" to that they want to "lose fat." Well, buckaroo, you can't get big, you can't get really big, without getting strong. You can get a blood pump happening in your muscles, you can develop a certain amount of liquid hypertrophy, but a few hours out of the gym will bring you down to earth, leaving those little swollen guns, of which you were so proud a little while ago, posing in front of the mirror, will be deflated like balloons. If you want to lose fat, well, then, you need to pack on some muscle, which can be accomplished by getting stronger. You might weigh more--muscle ways more than fat, after all--but each pound of muscle will burn four times the amount of calories that a pound of fat will. Your body will literally revolt against fat as you get stronger, stripping it away. Besides, when a person is truly down and out, you don't hear "I want to get buff," or "I want six pack abs." When a man or woman can't walk, or work, or get out of bed, he or she says, "I want to get stronger." That person is at their lowest, back to basics, and that's where the deep work, which feels like it's being done at the cellular level, gets done. Get back there and start building. Get strong. All the other stuff you want will come.

Strength and deconditioning : The importance of a rest day

The most important thing you can do, if you're trying to get bigger, get strong, lose weight, whatever, is to exercise with great intensity every time you step into the gym or onto the track. By the time you finish you ought to be staggering, dripping and gasping, but not hurting... endorphins will keep you from hurting, and if you're truly hurting, you're doing it wrong.

Anyway, that's the most important thing: working out hard. The second most important thing is to take a rest day, when you need it. When one lifts weights, one causes micro-tears in the muscles affected by the movement you engage. If you never allow these tears to heal, then they'll continue to get bigger, making you weak and eventually causing an injury. If you give them a day or two to heal, however, they muscle fibers will knit together, a little bigger and tougher than before, and produce a world class physique! That feeling of soreness, common to beginners and those just returning the Iron Game, is called Direct Muscle Soreness. Serious strength athletes, like power lifters, face a more insidious problem called Deep Muscle Fatigue. DMF is a leaden feeling that pervades the body, emanating in waves from the core and making it impossible to move the limbs. When the symptoms of DMF are ignored, and you keep punishing your body, you'll end up blowing a lift and hurting yourself, or find yourself simply unable to get out of bed in the morning, since advanced DMF feels like a mild form of paralysis. I can remember one of my biggest limit squats, taken earlier this summer... I had been working out hard for two weeks with little rest, and knew that a limit squat was a bad plan. I was all hyped up, though, and there were a couple of cute girls over on the cardio machines watching, and that can make a man foolish. After barely beating my old PR, I staggered two steps back, got light headed, and fainted into my two spotters arms. I was just glad that I didn't get a nose bleed. I have seen that, during a max on squat or dead lift, and worse. For the next three days, I moved through life like something out of a zombie movie, sluggish and moaning for food. It was the worst!

I say all of this because today is a good day for rest, like Dr. Seuss used to talk about a great day for up. I've been exercising hard for a full week, and just need to rest. There are bruises all over my body... my neck is bruised from back squats, my chest from bench press, and there are huge, ugly, purple blotches on my shoulders from cross-grip front squats. The ever present scuff marks on my shins, from dead lifting, are raw and ready to bleed, and I have a huge, ugly abrasion on my stomach from a clean that I almost lost at the top without racking it completely. I look like I just lost a fight with a small, angry bear, and to prevent something bad from happening I took today off and am mostly sitting still, aggravating as that is to me. Resting can be as hard as working out, but it's just as important!

Strength and deconditioning 5: Epic chest

Normally, I really cannot stand upper body training. Squats are my best workout. My legs and posterior chain are incredibly powerful, allowing me to pick up a massive, ego boosting amount on that lift. As long as I have gloves on or my hands wrapped, dead-lifts are the same way. The hand protection keeps me from ripping the calluses on my hands open and I can drag a fairly enormous amount of weight off the ground. This keeps me big, tight and fit, and makes me fairly popular with friends and family who need furniture moved! You can't just do lower body exercises, though, even if the squat is the most important movement in the world and the dead lift a close second. One must, at some point, work the upper body. I do not like working the upper body nearly as much as I do my legs and back. For one thing, my shoulders are a federally declared disaster area. I had to have my left one repaired and rebuilt after a disastrous wrestling match when I was sixteen (I was a fairly good light heavyweight... but my opponent was, unfortunately, a fairly good super heavyweight) and am constantly afraid that it's going to just fall apart of its own volition. The closest it has come, interestingly enough, didn't come from lifting some of the enormous weights that I pick up but from picking up a box of plastic containers when I did bakery work. Go figure. I also have, I'm almost certain, some undiagnosed football damage in the right shoulder, and so I am as careful as I can be with any pressing movements.

I do, however, work my upper body at least twice a weak, sticking to big, compound movements. Avoiding isolation exercises forces my muscles to work in concert with each other, engages my central nervous system and keeps me from putting too much pressure on any single joint that might be weak. The first exercise that I like to do is the bench press. Although I cover it in much more detail in "Strength and Deconditioning 1: Bench pressing in theory and practice," I can summarize here by saying that the golden rules for benching effectively are to maintain a tight arch in the back, squeeze the traps together and hold the bar like you'll die if you let go... after all, you might! Pull the bar to your chest in a controlled descent, hold it for a second at the bottom of your ribcage and then, with a jolt coming from the legs, drive it back up hard. Here is a very large man doing an even larger bench press.

The second exercise I do at every upper body session is the incline bench press. I set the bench at about a sixty degree angle and do sets of 6 with 205, 225, 245, 265 and 285. I lower the bar in a slow, controlled manner--this is especially important on incline bench since the bar is lowered so close to the throat, and you really don't want to drop it on your throat--pause for a second on my chest and then drive it up hard, fast and smooth. Always come from a dead stop. Bouncing the weight off your chest in any pressing movement scrambles the central nervous system and can actually make you weaker, but coming from a dead stop forces the muscles to work hard and grow. Ken Fantano, the legendary power lifter and owner of the Muscle Factory, did six sets of six dumbbell incline presses with a 220 pound dumbbell in either hand, which is ridiculously enormous. Here is the same man incline pressing 405 strictly and very impressively.

Although there are many exercises which can work the upper body--including the fly and the decline press--I always find myself coming back to these two and have had excellent success with both of them.

Strength and deconditioning 4: Squat workout heaven

I think I had the most perfect squat workout in history, yesterday. Instead of my usual 5 sets of 3, which leads to a pretty decent fifteen reps at giant weight, I chose to do 4 sets of 6 on back squat and 4 sets of 6 on cross arm front squat. All the back squats were done with Olympic protocol: high bar, narrow stance, straight drop from the knees and a super deep bottom, ass to grass, as they say. This is what Marty Gallagher calls the "perfect squat." The front squats were done with the bar high on my front deltoids and clavicle, almost high enough to choke me but not quite, and I paused at the bottom for one second before coming up. Back squats were 315, 355, 405 and 425. Front squats were 205, 255, 275 and 315. I honestly felt like my thighs were going to fail on the last set of each one, especially the front squats, which are a monstrous strain on the quadriceps anyway.

Although some people don't seem to like them--my last weightlifting coach, who was a great coach by the way, among them--squats are absolutely my favorite exercise. I can move a massive amount of weight, and nothing stimulates strength and muscular growth like pushing huge weight. Stimulation of the quadriceps and posterior chain also promote the release of testosterone, and this causes all of your other exercises, from bench press to clean and jerk, to be more effective. By doing squats (and dead lifts) along with other big, full body and multiple joint movements, you can't help but get big, thick and strong! Yet another reason to avoid those lat pull downs and cheat curls that the kid in the Ed Hardy shirt and backwards cap is doing... over there in my thrice damned squat rack, of course. For one thing, he's not getting the most bang out of his buck by stimulating the most muscle fibers--even if he was doing squats, which he's not--and secondly, he looks like an absolute, total and complete tool shed, and you really don't want to be anything like him, right? Even if he does score with rather skanky blond bartenders by pretending to be an MMA warrior that fights in a cage because of a vaguely homoerotic weekend he and his "brosephs" once had. There's an old Russian proverb, which I read first through Pavel Tsatsouline, which goes, "Feed the wolf!" Your legs are the wolf. Feed them and the whole body will grow.

Strength and Deconditioning 3: Back up

What's the major problem with most young men in the gym today? Well, other than the fact that most of them are unrepentant douche-bags. And the fact that they have a love affair with Nautilus machines matched in passion only by the Brownings. And the fact that they do biceps curls in the squat rack. And the fact that they pick up girls by leaning (usually against a squat rack I want to use or a tree with weights on it that I need) into them and murmuring, deeply and soulfully I assume, "Yeah, brah, doo, yah, I'm, like, a cage fighter, brah, do, yah, brah..." The girl usually eats it up and they sleep together that afternoon, touching off a torrid two year affair which ends with her crying and him still saying, "Yeah, brah, doo, yah, brah, doo, fun, just fun, no strings, yah, doo..."

Actually, come to think of it, there are a lot of problems with young men in the gym today. Is it any wonder that I built my own gym to work out in? Anyway, the thing that I'm thinking, the major problem, is that young men don't pay any attention to the development of their backs! The level of attention which these guys pay to their chests, and especially their abdominal muscles, leads to a dreadfully unbalanced physique. No one wants to see a six pack on a cadaver (well, with the advent of Twilight who knows...), after all. The men who have been most dominant at Mr. Olympia in the past thirty years have been men like Sergio Olivia, Lee Haney, Ronnie Coleman and--most of all--the great Dorian Yates have all dominated the field with their broad, overpowering backs. Power lifters and Olympic lifters build their entire base of strength, for clean and jerk, snatch, dead lift, squat and even bench press off of enormous traps and lats. Although most "fitness professionals," who usually look like someone grafted the Miz's head onto Edward Cullen's body, advocate isolation exercises for the back, the fact that they look like they have the Miz's head grafted onto Edward Cullen's body should suggest, perhaps, that their advice probably won't make you a whole lot stronger. Disregard it and stick to big, sweeping, compound exercises that work the back as a whole. The body's muscles are all interrelated anyway, and so torturing them one at a time doesn't really do anything other than waste a lot of time. With compound exercises, you can torture all these muscles together, save a lot of time and actually get some results!

I work my back once or twice a week, depending on what else I'm doing, and use one of two protocols. Sets are always done with heavy weights and low reps, either three sets of three reps or five sets of two reps, and each rep is done with a strict pull and full muscular contraction at the top.

One protocol that I use is made up of dead lifts and power cleans. The dead lift is an excellent full body exercise, and develops the lower back, lats, glutes and thighs like nothing other than the squat. The proper dead lift is done with the bar close to the shins--you will get scuffs on your shins doing this right, it's the mark of a power lifter!--and the thrust should come from your thighs and posterior chain forcing your back to straighten, driving your heels through the floor. Observe this video, cribbed off of youtube, of Andy Bolton's world record 1008 pound dead lift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5groVHlMkRE Do not pull with your arms. If the weight is at all an honest weight for your dead lift, pulling with the arms will result in failure at best and a torn biceps at worst. A torn biceps isn't pretty... it leaps off the bone and rolls up your arm like a slug wincing away from salt. You do not want to experience it!

The second exercise on this protocol is the power clean. This lift, popular with football teams all over the country and closely related to the Olympic full clean, is a pulling movement that works the upper and lower trapezius and medial and anterior deltoids. The bar is pulled from the floor the the waist, and then scooped under the the thighs with a double knee bend. At this point, pull explosively from the traps and shoulders--keeping the arms straight to avoid injury--and flex the quadriceps. This movement should be follow by a jump off the floor. As counter intuitive as it sounds to jump while holding a barbell in your hands, this allows you to fling the weight high enough for you to pull your body under it and catch it, in a quarter squat position (as opposed to the Olympic clean's full squat) in a rack across your collarbones. Recover, stand straight, and replace the weight on the floor. For an example, watch this video of a gigantic, 400 pound power clean from youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LyV7fwr7ik.

Although there are many other exercises to work your back--including the Romanian dead lift, row, high pull and--my favorite of these--the Kroc row, the above exercises helped me to reach a 500 pound dead lift. I hope that they help anyone else who comes across them just as much.

Strength and Deconditioning 2: Bench pressing in theory and in practice

In addition to being one of the competitive lifts in power lifting, the bench press is one of the most effective exercises for developing the entire upper body. The whole apparatus gets into the act while bench pressing... the pectoralis major and anterior deltoid drive the bar off the sternum, the traps dig into the bench and provide a base for pressing big weight, the lats allow the bar to be lowered to the sternum in a controlled fashion and the triceps allow for a big, powerful lock out. In addition to being so darned healthy for the whole upper body, the bench press is also a really important 'ego' lift. Although the dead lift, squat and power clean are probably better indicators of overall total body strength, when someone wants to know how strong you are, he or she asks, 'What do you bench press?' When I was in high school I used to have to lower my lashes and mumble, "Eh, 275 or 285." This was awful! A bench below 300 pounds can make you feel like less of a man, especially if you weigh over two hundred, or at least it always did me This maybe isn't a fair or good thing, but one can't help one's body image or obsessive compulsive issues with gender construction, right? Now, however, since I've learned how to bench press correctly, I've shot up to a reasonably respectable 435 pounds and the sky is the limit!

The first thing to do, when preparing the proper bench press is to find good position on the bench. One should scrunch up into a tight arch with the upper trapezius and buttocks digging deeply into the bench. The legs are clasped tightly to the bench, coiled under the body like a spring, and the lumbar region forms a tight arch, tight enough to be uncomfortable. This may seem counter-intuitive--who wants to be uncomfortable while working out, right?--but this set up provides a strong base for pressing up big weights. Like so many of us learned in our world humanities (or art history or world history) courses, the arch is the strongest, most stable structure in the world. The arch must be tight, too, because when one looks at Roman and Greek arches, notice that they're made out of stone, not gelatin. Heavy weights can only be supported on a tight, hard arch, and the human body is no exception! Don't worry about the discomfort... you're only going to be doing this for a couple of seconds per rep, right?

After the perfect arch has been achieved, grip the bar about one hand's width outside of the smooth area at the center. This will provide a good area of support and will spread the weight evenly out over all your pressing areas, the pectorals, triceps and deltoids. Grip the bar tightly, like you're trying to strangle it, trying to murder it, and get your game face on. This is the time to take a few deep breaths, pull your abdominal wall tight, and maybe count to five or six, to really fire yourself up. When the desired state of mental agitation is achieved, lift the bar out of the rack and bring it over your lower chest, arms straight, body so tight that you feel like your back's about to break.

This is where bench pressing starts to get slightly complicated and very cool. When the bar is right over your sternum, right at the end of your bone before it becomes the soft flesh of the belly, begin to pull it downward using your lats and triceps, tucking the elbows into the side as you go. Do not allow gravity to lower the weight for you or the battle will be lost. If the weight is is the control of the situation, you're going to get crushed; hunt the tiger, don't let the tiger hunt you. When the weight is resting on the end of your sternum let it pause for a second. Don't allow it to descend any further into you, or you won't be able to drive it back up, but let the barbell come to a dead stop to prevent any bouncing off the body. This is where most people get messed up bench pressing. The bar will bounce off the chest violently, leaving bruises and robbing the muscles of the 'set' they need to recover and push the weight, or they'll lower the bar too high on the chest, even near the throat, once again not allowing the body to derive the correct leverages for driving the weight.

Now that the weight is set on the chest, we can finally push it back up and complete the lift! Start by flexing the quadriceps and caves, thrusting into the floor from the balls of the feet to the heels of the shoes. This will transfer energy up through the hips and create a jolt that makes the bar explode off the chest. Do this in tandem with pressing through the shoulders and chest as hard as possible, almost as if you were trying to drive yourself through the bottom of the bench and into the floor instead of pushing the weight off your chest, and expanding the abdomen violently. This provide momentum and helps to force the weight up. Gravity is your enemy, here, and you need as many allies against it as you can have, right? According to Mary Gallagher's book, The Purposeful Primitive, the great bench press champion Ken Fantano performed this feat so violently that he blew all the rivets off a specially made, four inch weight lifting belt. Fantano did this while pressing 645, without a shirt no less, so you probably won't destroy any weight lifting belts while you're making it happen, but this is pretty impressive nonetheless!

Now that the leg drive and chest are engaged and the weight is moving up, the triceps get into the act and finish the job. Flare the elbows as you press up and let your triceps lock, giving the weight no choice but to jump upwards instead of flattening you. Push in a straight line, not in the exaggerated 'J' curve that some weight lifting coaches--who apparently have never lifted a weight that wasn't somehow attached to a Nautilus machine--recommend. The straight push engages all the muscles and provides much less opportunity for disaster than the J curve, which seems like it could only lead to tragedy after dropping the weight on your throat and cutting your head off. A lot of people have weak triceps, making the lock-out hard, but exercises like the pin press, board press, close grip bench press and floor press (all to be covered in a future essay) can develop them into the big, powerful weapons you need to finish the bench. After locking the barbell out, take a deep breath and either rack the weight or begin the next rep. You are now a bench pressing machine!

Strength and Deconditioning 1: Who I am and what I do here.

As a neophyte to intermediate power lifter, I spend way more time than any normal human being should thinking about how to pick up big, heavy pieces of metal. I say "normal" human being because, well, let's face it... an elite power lifter who can jack 650 pounds off his chest raw and squat 950 raw isn't normal in any way, shape or form... sometimes you begin to wonder if he's even a human being! My 435 on bench is nothing to sneeze at, though, and it's not the kind of thing you get by pissing around in the gym, talking about the great set of curls you just did in the squat rack (all while the huge, bearded, tattooed biker got behind you got angrier and angrier...). Although I'm relatively weak compared to really big power lifters, my raw bench and raw squat have been bigger than most I've encountered in commercial gyms and university gyms, or at least the university gyms which didn't cater to a nationally ranked Division I football program (where I can still at least hold my own, thank goodness).

What does this all add up to? Hopefully it puts me in a pretty good position to help other normal people, who maybe have good leverages but aren't complete genetic freaks yet, to build up their bench press and squat. I might not help you win any world records--hell, I haven't won any yet--and I can't help you to develop sexy six-pack vampire abs (who needs em!?!?) but I can promise that you'll grow bigger, thicker, somewhat leaner and a hell of a lot stronger if you follow my advice. I've seen a guy's bench press max jump twenty-five pounds in two and a half weeks using my protocols, protocols liberally cribbed from such enormous raw bench masters as Hugh Cassidy (who used back of sets to keep blood in the muscle) and Kenny Fantano, master of pressing from a dead stop to torment the CNS into responding. Now, the guy who I was coaching is a total beginner, and that means a lot for quick gains in strength, but that much growth in less than three weeks is pretty darned impressive.

So, as this little blog goes along, I'll put up my theories on lifting and training, eating (here's a hint... do a lot of it). I'll also review comic books (I'm a big ol' comic book nerd), and ramble about professional wrestling--mostly stuff like Shimmer Women Athletes but some other stuff. I hope anyone who comes across this enjoys, learns something, has her his life changed... any of that good stuff.