Life’s a Bitch and It’s Back in Heat

                Your beliefs are holding you back. Back before anyone had ever heard of a 500lb bench, people thought it was impossible, now there are high school kids benching this weight. That’s right you’re getting out benched by a kid and the hilarious part is it’s because you’re afraid. You may in your conscious mind have a hollow sense of bravado thinking, “no way man, I’m hardcore, I’d love a shit heavy bench” but underneath your childish macho bravado; your subconscious mind is cowering in a corner wetting itself.

                I’m sure that most of you, at some point in your lives, have known some kind of freak, a mutant, someone who didn’t react to hardship like the “rest of us”. Someone who could handle workout stress or job stress or relationship stress with ease and seemed to prosper despite extreme fan hitting shit. A lot of the guru’s and science types will be inclined to heap tribute upon the golden calf of genetics but what no one seems to realize, although they will admit to portions of this, is that your genes are activated and deactivated by your body’s chemistry. Who controls your body’s chemistry? You fucking do and don’t give me some shit that you don’t, who feeds it? Who bathes it? Who stuffs it full of shit take out and processed fuckery? You. Your bench sucks because you do and your life sucks because you do, it’s not your genetics fault and it’s not your parent’s fault. Your suckitude is because of your choice.

                As should be obvious to even the most dimwitted of readers, your hormones have a huge effect on your body chemistry. Who controls your hormones? Wait for it… YOU! How do you do it? Get this: change your perception of the world. To illustrate what I mean let’s do a thought experiment: let’s say you’ve gotten into a fight at a bar with some guy who turned out to be a Russian and now you’re dead and they’re rushing into the ER to resuscitate you. After like twenty minutes they finally manage to bring you back to life but you’re brain dead. Your body is alive but you have no ability to perceive anything because a Russian caved your dome in, now the only time you’ll have a cortisol response is when there is a physical stressor such as dehydration or cold. While putting your doctor’s kids through college your zombie corpse will experience no testosterone elevating feelings of sexual accomplishment or social dominance. More or less, your brain dead body will have virtually no changes in hormonal state and will maintain a fairly consistent body chemistry, assuming that all other exogenous factors required for homeostasis are stable, which they will be because YOU AREN’T CONTROLLING THEM!

These are the kind of Russians I want to run into in a bar.

Unless they’re with this guy…

                Well what the hell does this mean, I hear you ask? Well, because you are able to perceive, unlike the vegetable, you can directly control your hormonal and biochemical state to a large degree just by changing how you feel/think about your situation. If you tank on a set of squats and feel defeated, your T levels drop. On the other hand if you destroy the set, and you feel dominant and powerful and your T levels will elevate. “You can’t always kick ass” you rebut, to which I respond with, “who can’t?”. You can’t because you just told me you can’t, you just told me that your belief is limiting your performance and that your belief is more important to you than changing into a stronger person. But even beyond that, who decides how you react to tanking or to dominating? Again (this is getting repetitive) the answer is you! This is getting me a little worked up because it’s so f’ing simple, did you know that during a study, I don’t remember exactly which one, subjects who were told they were on steroids made almost the same gains as a group that was taking steroids? How many ways do I need to say this? You are in control if you take control!! Enough ranting, let’s get to some training.

How to Kick Ass and Chew Bubble Gum

If you don’t get this reference go immediately to your bedroom and hang yourself.

                The training mentioned in the last section will not be of the physical type, you’re going to be training your behaviors to control your hormones>biochemistry>”genes”. First of all, you all are going to have to accept that no matter how badass you think you are: you suck, you’re mortal, you suck at guitar, your girlfriend isn’t a machine gun wielding Russian superfox and you aren’t Rowdy Roddy. This isn’t bad, it’s just true. Everyone sucks hard at some things. In fact it’s good. Now you get to accept the challenge of training, of becoming a stronger and more dynamic personality, of being a real person instead of a fake, ego cushioning illusion of one. Secondly, with the firm knowledge that we suck in one hand we must in the other hand carry confidence that we can move beyond sucking. Look at Ronnie Coleman in the gym, he’s yelling shit like “Light Weight!” and “Ain’t nothing but a peanut”. Look at this symbolically, he wouldn’t say (let alone yell) anything about the weight if he wasn’t in some capacity threatened by it so he is admitting that he is fallible, but he is at the same time saying, “I can overcome (this peanut)”. Use that, it allows you to use your fear instead of just pretending it’s not there, why do you think humans even feel fear? For no reason? Fuck no, it’s there because it’s supposed to help you but you manage to fuck it all up. Let your fear help you tighten up your muscles, let it help you pay attention to what you’re doing instead of fucking around with goddamn text messages (you f’ing narcissistic prick, what makes you think you’re important enough to need to be contacted at any time?) and if you’re not doing anything in your life that makes you afraid, why are you on this site? Why do you lift weights? What the fuck kind of subhuman CHUD motherfucker are you? Why do you even live?

                Anyway, let’s move on to a less esoteric application (?). The Russians (yes the fucking Russians again) used a wacky Shaolin technique with their elite athletes and special operators involving relaxation, to put the brain in a relaxed, receptive brain wave state; and then used careful and disciplined visualization to program new beliefs into the subconscious mind thus releasing subconscious blocks to progress. Pavel writes that “you are already strong enough to lift a car” or something like that because mothers have lifted cars off their infants without specific training to do so, basically the idea is that you have so much strength that your brain is afraid of using it so it bases your strength levels off of what you believe is possible (no I’m not ignoring feedback loops but they can be overridden if ordered to do so!), or in other words, your perception of your reality. So because your subconscious mind is massively powerful and regulates all of your body’s systems, including strength levels, you need to learn to talk to it and it’s doesn’t understand English, it only knows symbols and images. So here’s the gist of the combined Russian/Shaolin technique:

Relax:

-          Lay down or sit comfortably and close your eyes

-          Place your attention on your feet, feel all of the tension draining out of them until there is none, “turn them off” and move to the next bodypart in sequence, the calves, and repeat the same “relax and turn off” procedure

-          Continue in this fashion until you have relaxed your whole body

-          When you are totally relaxed you are ready for visualization

Visualize:

-          See yourself in the situation you are going to work on

-          Try to be accurate, if you are imagining yourself at the gym, add in all the sounds, smells and textures (and dummies pissing you off)

-          Imagine yourself overcoming the problem but don’t diminish the difficulty of the problem, if you’re benching a shit ton it has to hurt, be heavy and be hard as fuck to do

-          Visualize how you’ll overcome the specific issues you are encountering, like if you’re stalling somewhere in a lift: tightening your guts, gripping the fuck out of the bar and flexing the appropriate muscle group, feel what it’s like to do that

-          All in all you are really just practicing the situation in your mind, with positive results, so you can show your subconscious mind what you want it to do/let you do
 

Yes, that Shaolin.

To Sum This Whole Fucker Up

            You suck like a Chinese prostitute, hard (and for a good price). You have the raw power to change yourself. You just need the confidence, the balls, to accept challenge into your life; and to embrace what fear will teach you. To triumph over yourself. Admit your weakness, use your fear of life to power your dominance and ultimately overcome it. Also you can use Soviet Shaolin.

References:

-          Your fucking mom. Seriously.

-          Do some fucking experimentation for once instead of blindly accepting something as fact because it has a fucking reference, science, contrary to popular perception is BASED ON EXPERIMENTATION, DO SOME, make up your own fucking mind about something and stop being such a goddamn slave!