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A little summer acrobalancing
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Tiev and I doing our Acro stuff after a two year hiatus.
Random Rants
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It's been too long since I've updated this blog, and unfortunately in two months time, www.allaroundstrength.com will be up for grabs. I'm scrapping everything and starting all over with a new site, an new look, and new stuff, trust me it's for the better. I figured I'd rant about a few things just to give people an idea of the weird barage of crap I get here daily. Currently I'm working 2 jobs, one at a gym, the other at a grocery store. This combination allows me to see people in a realistic and vulnerable light, and observe their habits and behaviors. Lets start with people who buy bottled water. Bottled water is an evident way companies make money by preying off your ignorance. Check the bottle before you buy it, it might just say municipal water. Same stuff as your faucet, if you're really afraid get an in home filtration system. Besides you can buy a water bottle and spend a fraction of the amount filling it daily. People are weird to me. People who shop for the sale stuff are those who actually don't care about their health, if they did what would be the purpose of buying 10 Ben and Jerry's ice cream cups just to save 2 dollars. When someone can explain the logic I'll actually pretend to care. The food on sales is rarely ever real food, in fact it's what I call crap food, things like white bread and pastas, powerade zeros, soda, luncheables, and cheap cheese. Doesn't make sense to me but they will go out of their way to eat crap food to save a little bit of money, and clip out a million coupons to hold up the line so they can save five bucks. I feel rather embarassed working there. My favorite topic which may end up becoming a guest article on straight to the bar is about yogurt. I will say this in a nutshell, yogurt isn't supposed to taste like Boston Creme Pie, Cherry Cobler, Key Lime Pie, or Chocololate Mousse. Something is fucked up about yogurt tasting like something other than yogurt, sort of like a steak tasing like cheerios, WTF is that about, it's yogurt not candy. People are lazy weak morons.
Ok onto the flipside, I got those Vibram Five Fingers shoes, and absolutely love them! Nothing but great things to say, they strengthen your feet and proprioreceptors, lightweight, form fitting, draw attention and are guaranteed to start a conversation. Training partners can make the difference between a good workout, and one you can barely finish. I just found a new tranining partner, at least for a weeks and it has made me work harder just to keep face. I'm curently using Chad Waterbury's Huge in a Hurry Program with my own exercises instead of the ones in there. I'm following a push/pull routine with total body pushes, and total body pulls. I feel stronger, my bodyfat has dropped between 8 and 9, and for someone pushing 165 lbs. I can do lunges with almost 200 lbs right now. The TRX is a worthwhile investment, and so are the Val Slides, apparently this months Mens Health thought so too. Other than that this summer will produce a whole new era of all around strength, the jack of most trades, and master of none.
In the meantime train hard, train harder than what you think is acceptable, step out of your comfort zone, be prepared to fail, and never ever feel sorry for yourself for training so hard.
Ok onto the flipside, I got those Vibram Five Fingers shoes, and absolutely love them! Nothing but great things to say, they strengthen your feet and proprioreceptors, lightweight, form fitting, draw attention and are guaranteed to start a conversation. Training partners can make the difference between a good workout, and one you can barely finish. I just found a new tranining partner, at least for a weeks and it has made me work harder just to keep face. I'm curently using Chad Waterbury's Huge in a Hurry Program with my own exercises instead of the ones in there. I'm following a push/pull routine with total body pushes, and total body pulls. I feel stronger, my bodyfat has dropped between 8 and 9, and for someone pushing 165 lbs. I can do lunges with almost 200 lbs right now. The TRX is a worthwhile investment, and so are the Val Slides, apparently this months Mens Health thought so too. Other than that this summer will produce a whole new era of all around strength, the jack of most trades, and master of none.
In the meantime train hard, train harder than what you think is acceptable, step out of your comfort zone, be prepared to fail, and never ever feel sorry for yourself for training so hard.
Less Volume More Work
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In the past week I've discovered that cutting my workouts in half and shooting for a half hour or less is super tough. Apart from being always out of breath, if I limit my number of exercises and try to go all out in five exercises or less, I get pretty sore. Hopefully this also means I'm growing too. I've been working at pistols again, really shooting to see how much weight I can add to each rep. I'm capped out at just over a 45 lb. plate, my forward lean is so much that any more and I'll probably burst a seam. Besides that I've been gathering up more and more books to put into my mega file, where I keep all the cool exercises I might forget.
Don't be a sucker
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If the 2009 fitness trend of working out at home remains true, and sales of fitness tapes, dvd's and the Wii stay high then the personal trainer industry will take a heavy hit. After spending about 15 minutes on netflix browsing through the 43 pages of fitness dvd's I noticed a pattern of what sells. First off what sells is a bunch of bullshit, pure and utter bullshit, and those who buy said bullshit are sheep begging to be eaten by the wolf. I have never seen so much bullshit put on dvd collection in one place before. I found a whipping 7 out of several hundred dvd's potentially worth watching, and 2 of them I had already owned. Why do people insist on really inventing the wheel, as is hip hop, latin dance, pilates, yoga, crunch, core class, and step aerobics weren't lame enough. They have done a great job integrating these classes into fooling you to believe they work, for instance you have pilates booty ballet, and ultimate cardio kick box core blaser. Fuckin please, seriously like Carlos Mencia said F.T.P. (or fuck those putos). Gutless money chasers waisting bandwidth trying to put their stupid worthless name on a big big map. I have to say that the fitness industry tries to cater to everyone and in doing so, has dropped it's standards below the Army's these days. It almost seems as if the industry is putting all more crap just to keep people ignorant and weak. Not that I'm terribly biased to just weightlifting, but come on how many fucking curl variations with 4 pound dumbells can you do in a 60 minute dvd? Those people should be hit for putting their stupid mugs on a cover trying to sell sugar coated nonsense and tom-foolery. Good thing this is just a blog and not a real article because I do feel a bit better now. If you are a home gym sort of person and you think you're going to save money by actually buying one of these crap videos, save your money and buy a brick to hit yourself with. It will accomplish the same thing, but you'll have some cool scars with an interesting story. If you want to buy something worth while head over to www.rosstraining.com and pick up his books, they're a great start in the right direction, chalk full of goodies, and you would be supporting an honest person who doesn't sell anything stupid like yoga pilates gyrotonics for better strip tease poll dancing workouts for gay men.
Abductors Firing?
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Are your abductors firing correctly? I used to think mine were, seeing as my hips are huge compared to the rest of my body. My right knee was popping and cracking, and hurting, and swelling, and I couldn't get it to stop. Finally a chiropractor who's name I'll leave off for now, noticed that it wouldn't hurt for me to try to flex my abductors before doing my squats. I now can do them close without too much forward lean, and the popping has stopped. The swelling in my knee has gone down too. Interesting... so now I've been using my versa cuff to warm up my abductors and make sure they're working before I do anything other exercises. Its pretty easy to do and works for me. I've also spent a lot more time stretching out my right glute and piriformis and that's helped too. Funny how one side can be as flexible as spaghetti and the other, a door know. To make sure your abductors engage while doing any lower body training that is not machine based; plant your feet solid, and try to pull them away from each other. If they're planted or you have some weight on you, they shouldn't move but you may notice that your knees to shift slightly outwards. In my case it works, I haven't spend too much time on corrective exercises, with all the hundreds of tests to see whats tight and what to fix. I sort of look at the big picture, and leave the fancy stuff to the professionals.
Bigger Faster Stronger
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I just finished watching Bigger Faster Stronger, by Chris Bell, and I have to say that the movie was actually very insightful. I particularly enjoyed the fact that it was not all pointing bad to steroid use, it gives you both sides of the debate and allows you to come to your own conclusions. I did think that of all the people interviewed the mother and father said the best things when showing their stance on steroid usage. It doesn't go into too much technical details of steroids but more of the societal implications as well as historic use. Ironically enough the general conclusion is that growing up in America is sort of the competitive reason why people pick up steroids in the first place. I should also note that my stance is very much against the use of anabolics, and growth hormones. Always has; personally I enjoy working hard and training several hours a day, and not being huge by any measure. To me strength is not defined by how large your muscles are or how strong you appear to be. Strength is being able to move some form of resistance, but to take it a step further I think strength is how much weight you can move, how much speed you can generate, how much control do you have over your total body, and how long can you continously move something before fatigue takes over all together. I think that the concept of taking supplements to boost performance, when you are not really exercising for athletic performance is sort of a waste of money. Do you really need to be that big and muscular? Are you gonna bag the girl, or guy of your dreams if you look that muscular? Is your whole life going to be what you want it to be? Probably not, although there are always exceptions. Point of the matter is, if you enjoy working hard and you like to challenge yourself physically, in order to become stronger both physically and mentally, then this is good. If you feel compelled through peer pressure, or justified in taking steroids because everyone else is doing it, you have fallen into a trap, that may have some long term rammifications that you may not be able to forsee. Sort of like drinking diet soda, or consuming too much MSG. Taking steroids chronically is catering to an addictive personality, and the risk to benefit ratio can come into the equation pretty heavily. That's all I have to say on this subject, and while I do think that it is in human nature to outdo your competition by almost any means possible, taking steroids is a choice that becomes just another risk to your daily life.
T-Nation
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Charles Polliquin's question of strength newsletter is out, and it's a great little read. I like his stance on Cross Fit, and his excerpt on how to tell how athletic someone is.
http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_training_performance/question_of_strength_vol_47
http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_training_performance/question_of_strength_vol_47
TRX News
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I'm a little pissed that someone stole my TRX suspension trainer from behind my trainer desk at work today. Whoever that S.O.B. is I hope they hurt themselves so severely that they'll return it back to me just so they don't break their neck. I am planning on migrating allaroundstrength back over to wordpress because my site traffic is so ridiculously low right now, that it might be a good idea to find a better server. If anyone finds a TRX trainer and wants to give it to me for free I'd be more than willing to take it off your hands.
Human Bench Press
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T-Nation put up an article about crazy bells as if it's some new radical thing, it's not, and I'll do you one better, try benching a person without gym clothes...
Olympic Lifting Seminar this Sunday
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If anyone in the Phoenix AZ area wants to come into LA Fitness for a 2 hour+ seminar on the clean and jerk taught by yours truly, then feel free to drop on by at the LA Fitness on Tatum and Shea at noon on sunday. We will go over the fundamentals preparatory movements and finish with the clean and jerk. You will need to bring some sort of mock bar such as a broom, stick, dowel, pvc pipe, or barbell, you can even bring small dumbbells, just remember light is right this time around. We will perform the deadlift, the hang clean, the squat clean, the push press, push jerk, and split jerk. Look forward to seeing lots of familiar and unfamiliar faces.
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