Wednesday 30 May 2012

Getcha Row On

Heavy High Rep Dead Stop Dumbbell Rows

This guy has the right idea: shit heavy. Way to go guy.

How to perform:

- Set gigantic dumbbell (at least 1/2 your body weight) on the floor next to a bench, stool or some similar such upright.

- Bend down (buch dich), grasp dumbell firmly and, staying in the bent over position, rip dumbbell off floor with vehemence until bell contacts body. Return bell to floor and repeat.

Notes:

These are one of the hardest core exercises that anyone can do. I use a thick handled dumbbell and these are a great  grip workout. That's not to say they aren't anything else, these are the dopest back and forearm exercise there is due to some peculiarities: you can rest briefly between reps while the bell is parked on the floor, so you can crank out shit high reps as though you were doing breathing squats. This rest/pause technique allows one to use a huge amount of weight for high reps (15-35ish). Also pulling the weight from a dead stop increases total muscular tension during the acceleration phase of the lift this means more strength gain and more muscle gain.

I, like Kroc recommends for his rows which are very similar, recommend that if you do these more than once a week then use straps for one of the sessions, this will change the recruitment pattern of the lift enough to a) keep your nervous system from getting pissy, b) allow more stress to be placed on the back without being limited by grip strength and, c) allowing the grip, which can be slow to recover from a shit kicking, to catch up recovery wise and come back stronger next session.

A note on hand position: your hand/dumbell should be at about a forty five degree angle to your torso.

You may find that your regular sized dumbbell handles are too diminutive to pile the Herculean weights required by this exercise onto. Don't fret: use a barbell : ) Or make your own dumbbell handle. Or check out Ironmind, they sell a pair that honk.

Don't fuck around out there.

Wednesday 23 May 2012

Cheating

Contravention of the law, a crash course in lawform

 

There exist many forms of law in our modern world. You may think of them as the layers in a pyramid, with the lowest form of law being the most widely believed in by man at large and the most commonly enforced. This most common form of law is called "Statute Law". It is literally the policy of the company you work for, example: "Canada". Statute law is the law of politics (policy) and is set up to make money for the company, example "United States", through fines and penalties. You are only subject to this type of law if you subject yourself to it. It is voluntary and without merit of it's own. This form is public policy.

The next layer of the pyramid is the law of contract, or "Admiralty Law". This is merchant law and is very, very ancient with recorded examples dating back to the Phoenicians, the great seafaring merchants. Basically in this form of law anything a person allows you to do to them (without putting the person under duress of any kind) is admissible because they have accepted (usually tacitly) your offer to contract. To clarify: if a person makes you an offer and you do or say nothing then you will have agreed to it, this is tacit acceptance. To clarify even further: there is no right or wrong in Admiralty, which lawform do you think makes wars legal? You can do anything you want as long as you get the other parties agreement. This type of law is used to enforce "Statute Law" and is how things like torture and indefinite detention without charge and all kinds of other seemingly "immoral" laws are created and enforced legally. This form of law is private policy and both of the preceding forms of law are the law of man.

What is a man? The Merriam-Webster online dictionaries third and fourth meaning for the word man are as follows:
3
a : a feudal tenant : vassal b : an adult male servant c plural : the working force as distinguished from the employer and usually the management
4
a : one of the distinctive objects moved by each player in various board games b : one of the players on a team 
Keep these definitions in mind the next time you hear the phrase "be a man" or "man up" or some similar such machismo. All you're doing is being a good slave. Slaves are who the first two lawforms apply to.

The final form in law is "Natural Law" or the law of equity. This form is tricky for many because we live in such an insanely inequitable world (slave world) and thusly have virtually no concept of it. I'm going to use an example: a man plants a field of crops, tends to them and harvests them. The field is "owned" by another man. Who's crops are they? They belong to the man who actually paid for their existence with only thing that has any value, the time of his life. The land "owned by another" has actually become the "property" of the man who cared for it. Why? Because he is the only one to have contributed anything of value. He has "equitable title" so to speak. 

There is much, much more to this. In non-linear dynamics, which is the mathematical study of super-complex systems, there is the idea of the attractor field. This idea posits that if you do something for a what we would call a "good" reason, than you will attract more "power" than if you do something for a "bad" reason. To take this beyond the reach of such pitiful human concepts of good and bad we will use a physical example. If one were to have a number of differently sized magnets and randomly cast them into a system (a vibrating box for example) the small (weakest) magnets will align their orientation to the orientation of the largest (most powerful) magnetic system. Magnetism is powered by the subtle underlying energy interactions that make up physical space, thus a high powered magnet is the most in line with what the underlying make up of nature has deemed to be the "best" for achieving magnetic force. Humans didn't make this assertion, nature did and it is intrinsic to physical reality. We can act in ways that are the most in line with what the underlying nature of our environment dictates and when we do, our "power attractor" will be higher than weaker systems who are trying to "fight" the underlying nature.
The nature of the man who grew the crops is that he grew them, who else can claim they did if they didn't? King Solomon, when confronted with two women who each claimed to be the mother of an infant, said "cut the child in two and each one may have half", one women was okay with this and the other withdrew and said that she would rather see the child with the other woman than cut in half; King Solomon granted custody of the infant to the woman who withdrew because even if she was not the mother she was equitably the infants mother. Love, it seems, is the driving force in equity and thusly in nature. This can actually be proven scientifically but I digress, as, if you don't understand this and require proof then I am not talking to you.

Contravention of Morality, or, know thyself


Merriam-Webster's online dictionary definition of "moral":

1
a : of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior : ethical ;moral judgments; b : expressing or teaching a conception of right behavior moral poem; c : conforming to a standard of right behavior d : sanctioned by or operative on one's conscience or ethical judgment moral obligation; e : capable of right and wrong action moral agent;
2
: probable though not proved : virtual moral certainty
3
: perceptual or psychological rather than tangible or practical in nature or effect moral victory> <moral support&

Tangible morality, or practical morality is simply trying to do what one believes is right based on a testable "right" or "wrong". I use this idea (tangible morality) only avoid the limiting pitfall of definition three. "Right", "wrong", "good" and "bad" are merely terms we use to describe power attractors. This is why hate is "wrong" (weak attractor) or why love is "good" (strong attractor). We are merely referencing power attractor fields in a super complex system (reality). There is no real opinion about it or interpretation left to the individual. We can, using certain types of electrical sensors, establish quickly if a given situation is "right" or "wrong" by measuring certain aspects of it's harmonic exclusivity or ability to phase conjugate. This simply means that systems which are limiting to growth and expansion are "bad" and systems which are inclusive to growth and encourage complex expression are "good" and that this is measurable. We ourselves actually posses the equipment to measure these effects ourselves, as part of our physiology. Unfortunately all of our "hu-men" can only think with one hemisphere of their brain and so practical demonstrations of math and electromagnetism are required to get it into their sadly malfunctioning heads. Again, I am not talking to those people, I'm elucidating the inextricable interconnectedness between perception, action, the natural world and the world of man.

So morality, in essence,  is natural law. Which means that practical morality as I have defined it is the highest form of law and power in nature.

Cheating...

doesn't exist. Either you do something which is "right" and beneficial to supercomplexity or you do something bad and limiting to supercomplexity.

This cat is cheating.... somehow.
An example: man A is not really much of a thinker but he is good at football and likes to play it, his teammates are using anabolic steroids, he is concerned about his ability to perform at the level required of him and so uses anabolic steroids to continue his career. Wrong? Probably not, it is in line with his goals and required (unofficially) by his sport.


Man B is intelligent and health conscious, he eats well and exercises and likes to look the part. He does not compete at any sport and likes to learn about physiology as it pertains to his hobby of weight training. For him to take steroids can be either right or wrong, let's see how:


- he uses steroids in a practical, no nonsense way, to boost his immune function and increase his returns in the gym, he manages his use and side effects with intelligence and a judicious application of the physiology he has learned and learns a good deal about how the body works, sounds good right? Maybe not, what if:


- instead of taking steroids, he pursues his intellectual interest in physiology and researches how the body makes, distributes and mitigates the natural steroid hormones used for it's correct and natural function. Through his research he finds and connects an interesting and unusual series of facts that lead him to be able to produce a supplement that is cheaper and easier to use than steroids that boosts the bodies natural hormones instead of replacing them and mitigates the effects of hormonal side effects by increasing the efficiency and sensory capacity of the bodies natural systems, leading to a revolution in the way hormonal problems are treated. Thusly he is able to expand his love of health and his intellectual pursuits to help other enthusiasts. This is perhaps the closest to "right", given the "practical morality" idea.


None of these examples are right or wrong. The right or wrong of a situation has to do with what we primitively call "love". Man A loves football, if steroids help him love football, then it is good, a net gain in systemic love. If on the other hand he feels like a "mega douchebag cheater" then it's bad, a net decrease in systemic love. Remember that, in this case, "love" is a systemically positive electromagnetic function of interfering waveforms.


Where is this all going? You can do anything you want as long as you love it enough, and, if you do then the universe will help you achieve it. Why do you think it made you? Why do you think that the universe spent billions of years of it's own time and resources putting you together? Given the fact that the only way the universe can exist as a super complex, self mediating system is with love, it made you because it loves you. For you to exist in nature as a supercomplex, self mediating system is to love yourself.

Make yourself into a fractal of the total system and you will create a "free" energy machine.

Perhaps most importantly, you will not need the energies others try to sell to you and you be able to power your own person.


Tuesday 8 May 2012

TFDub

Too Fucking Weak

I was on Kettlebell Systema Universities facebook page when I saw this:

I was entertained by the meme-y-ness of it all.


In the comments section for this image there were people actually defending the image on the right which is apparently from a workout video called Kettleworx.

People said: "the guy on the left is an athlete and who would want to look like that anyway?" And "kettleworx is a good cardio workout".

There are many sides to the insidious weakness that pervades this type type of thinking. Let's start with cardio. If you need a good cardio workout and you aren't an athlete, why would you ever even consider using kettlebells in the first place? Kettlebells are the implement of Kettlebell Sport, called Girevoy Sport in Russia. If you can't lift the kettlebell for your weight class perhaps you should consider GETTING IN SHAPE FIRST. If you need a five pound KB, YOU ARE TOO WEAK TO LIFT WEIGHTS, PERIOD. If you need a good cardio workout and you are this weak, THE LAST THING YOU NEED TO WORRY ABOUT IS CARDIO!!

Jesus titty fucking christ people! How fucking stupid is it possible to be? How do you brush your teeth or tie your shoes? If you're going to start lifting weights, in any capacity, you need to be strong enough to do it! You should have a reasonable grip on the BASICS: push ups, squats and lunges, throwing, jumping, running, the simple things your body is BUILT TO DO. Try and tell me you can't get a good strength and conditioning workout with just your bodies own weight. Try it, I dare you.

One commenter sad that the GS athlete was intimidating. Wow, YOU AREN'T A CANDIDATE FOR KB LIFTING YOU WEAK STINKING SHIT. You should be taking care of babies somewhere, oh wait, babies weigh more than five pounds so I guess that means you should be dead in a hole or perhaps writing Big Bang Theory episodes, you scum.

Why is fitness an industry? I can see how athletics is an industry, I am involved in it. But fitness? GO FOR A WALK, RIDE A BIKE, DO THE 5BX ROUTINE I POSTED, CHALLENGE YOURSELF. And, should you be so stupid as to not know how to get "fit" then it means you aren't "fit" and probably belong in aforementioned hole.

But you can use kettlebells for other things than just Girevoy Sport, I hear as a rebuttal. Well, you can use a turkey baster as a fucking dildo if you want but it works better as turkey baster. Why spend money on something you don't need? Why do you have to admit, which you do with your purchase of this crap, that you are so mindless that you can't go outside and move around? You do not deserve to be called a human being. Calling you an animal is an insult to animals. You are a consumer. You take and give nothing. You are a vacuous black hole. Recycling your bodies carbon into charcoal would serve the earth better than you will.

Simply put, people need to lay a base of basic athleticism and movement capacity before taking on any specialized training. Weight training in any form is specialized. You must be able to: do a push up, do a chin up, do some jumping squats with good form, do some lunge switches with good form and be able to both jog and sprint a reasonable amount with decent running kinematics. This is not hard, it is instinct. Ninety five percent of people will do just fine with only these exercises. Why has this insanely basic information been lost?

Weak Soul

These five pound kettlebell types are weak souls, they are weak inside. At least if you're only weak outside, there's training for that and your strong constitution will help you pass through it. Soul weakness is much harder to deal with, there is training for it but usually the trainee is too weak to undertake it as they are filled with superficial and base desires and can't really grasp the benefit.

If you have a weak soul and desire to cheat yourself with gimmicks, buy a TRX, at least then you can hang yourself with it.



Sunday 6 May 2012

Why You Aren't Lean


Blood Sugar

I once had an argument with a medical student. She proclaimed that the Atkins would kill you because the human body will expire if not given carbohydrates. She outweighed me by probably forty pounds. I lifted my shirt, pointed to my (lean and muscular) midsection and said “If Atkins killed me then I must be in heaven”.



Most people do not understand that diet is what shapes your physique. You will not exercise your way to leanness, we all have known the fat chick who works out religiously for ninety minutes a day who never gets any thinner.  In fact, for the very overweight, most forms of exercise are usually quite detrimental to weight loss.

Greece, today, is the shortest nation in the EU. It wasn’t always this way. We can see in the fossil record that before agriculture was introduced to the region the average height of males was a smidge over six feet. Once agriculture was introduced and the average height plummeted to about five feet from which it has been ever so slowly recovering to today’s average height of about five and a half feet. The funny thing is that it would seem on the surface that this switch to an agrarian society was just due laziness on the part of the hunter gatherer tribes. In fact this switch to an inferior food source was actually more labour intensive than hunting and gathering. So why did people do it?

The human brain uses some very interesting mechanisms for rewarding certain types of behavior. The Ventral Tegmental “Reward” System uses neurotransmitters so chemically similar to opiates that when opiates are consumed they trigger the receptors meant to be activated by the endogenous “reward” neurotransmitters. What this means is that when you do something that pleases your brain it releases endorphins which for all practical purposes are morphine, you become addicted to brain morphine and then repeat the behavior to get more, like a crack head stealing cars for crack money.



Starch is very calorically dense and easy to digest so the metabolic cost of digestion is very low, your brain likes this. As well, the brain can run on only a few things: glucose (sugar), glutamine (an amino acid) and ketone bodies (converted fat). The gut competes for glutamine and the manufacture of ketones requires a large metabolic cost so the brain prefers glucose as its primary fuel source and rewards you with brain morphine for getting it.

So why did the Greeks switch to agriculture even though it was clearly bad for them and more work to do? They were, and are (like the rest of you), addicted to brain morphine. Carbohydrates are, in essence, drugging you.



Others have known this for a long, long, long time. In fact the use of processed carbohydrates is woven into the very essence of statecraft. You’ll notice that the Ceasar’s were pictured as wearing crowns of wheat. Wheat was, and still is, used as a means to keep the populous at large docile, estrogenic and disinterested. Why do you think that most beer is made with wheat (like it was in ancient Egypt) and advertised to be synonymous with large public sporting (gladiatorial) events? This topic is much larger than I am interested in delving into at this juncture, so let’s get back to body composition.

Plant lignans as of late have been promoted widely as a type of cancer reducing estrogen blocker, functioning much like the drug clomiphene citrate. This only shows just how far doctors have their heads wedged up their asses. The reason people have estrogen aggravated cancers is because their endogenous estrogens are out of balance resulting in high estradiol levels because of unmitigated aromatization. So why are the naturally produced estrogens out of whack? Progesterone deficiency.

Hormones
Progesterone is the key to unlocking the body’s hormone puzzle. Estrogen is a progesterone antagonist which means if you have high estrogen levels you will have a low progesterone levels. This would normally be okay but as with everything there is much more to this than is readily apparent. You see by consuming phyto (plant) estrogens and through exposure to xeno (petrochemical) estrogens, your total estrogen load is grossly out of whack. Compounding this issue is the fact that xeno estrogens don’t really biodegrade, so their levels just keep building up and up and up. Sensing the elevated estrogen levels your pituitary gland shuts down progesterone production wrongly.

Progesterone is critical to the proper functioning of your hormonal system. When progesterone levels are low the body produces two enzymes to convert hormones into super potent but damaging versions of themselves. The first is aromatase, this enzyme converts testosterone into estradiol, a super estrogen implicated in estrogen aggravated cancer and the growth of breast tissue in men (gynocemastia, by aggravating prolactin). The second enzyme is 5-alpha-reductase which converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, a super testosterone that causes all of the masculine traits associated with high testosterone levels such as male pattern baldness, body hair growth, deep voice, acne and muscle density.

This story keeps getting better. Testosterone is made from progesterone and progesterone competes with the adrenal glands for pregnenalone. So this means: proper progesterone production = reduction in stress hormones via competition for pregnenalone = higher testosterone levels = balanced estrogen levels through mitigation of aromatase = lowered negative hormonal side effects = suppression of prolactin. Progesterone also increases thyroid function and helps heal a wide range of gallbladder issues.

It should be noted that plant foods also contain phytic acid or phytate (salt form) which interferes with the absorbtion of zinc, magnesium, calcium and iron. Zinc is a powerful aromatase inhibitor and magnesium is critical to the liver in the detoxification of estrogen. A deficiency in either of these metals is enough to switch the hormones into an estrogen dominant state and suppress progesterone. As well the World Health Organization has stated that Zinc and Magnesium deficiency is the most widespread nutritional deficiency in the world.
 
What does all this have to do with weight loss? Your hormones control your body, they control how much fat is stored and where. Eating too much plant derived carbohydrates destroys the proper functioning of the hormonal system and results in a plethora of problems not the least of which is weight gain.



There are variations on this theme, certain populations are more able to tolerate plant foods. People who’s genetic lineage is more equatorial can handle more plant foods but still nowhere close to the amounts they consume. The long and short of it is this: humans, to be optimally healthy, need to eat meat. A lot of meat. If you’re white or native American, most of your total caloric intake should be in the form of meat and fat. Do Atkins, or if you’re an athlete, the Anabolic Diet and stop eating wheat entirely.   Many people will lose a pound a day for the first ten days after dropping wheat. As well you could check out ProgestroPro because, as I have stated, you probably have a progesterone deficiency.

This article could keep going on and on. The issues covered in here are at the crux of our modern health dilemma. There are many types of treatment modalities, nutrition tips and so much more to be said on all of the topics covered here but I hope this very brief introduction will help you into a place where you can deal with your malfunctioning brain, terribly poisonous diet and whacked out hormonal system in a calm and efficient manner being assured that you have a grasp on what exactly is happening and approximately why.

I just couldn't resist this one.


Wednesday 2 May 2012

Meatheads

Code for: "mentally retarded"

 

Some people think that being a meathead is cool. I think meat is something that comes from something slower and dumber than I.


Why does it seem that the majority of powerlifters are the most intensely stupid, ignorant and emotionally unstable rejects imaginable? A very simple reason is "daddy issues". Another is the "I'm dumb and I know it so I have to excel at something that just requires lots of effort" complex. Perhaps one leads to the other but one thing is for sure: when you have people who abuse drugs , their bodies, their emotional selves, their families and anything else they can get away with for the sake of proving something, there is a problem.

The way in which we use the word exercise literally comes from the dark ages when people were into exercising their demons. Nothing has really changed, in a recent elitefts.com article, the author mentions that because his emotional life is so fucked, doing anything in the gym seems easy and normalizing. His case is not unique. This seems to be the norm for powerlifting. Hate and fear permeate the bizarre subculture that has formed around it.

In the causal chain, fear precedes hate. Why do you think many powerlifters have to get bigger and lift bigger in a constant drive to prove themselves? To become stronger and more intimidating than that which they fear. This is fundamentally the same as the sexually abused girl who grows up to be a whale because she is trying to insulate herself from the fear she feels from male sexual aggression. It's great that people can find an outlet for this and I have no real problem with that but, as I said earlier, I do have a problem when the outlet becomes an excuse to further the abuse.

Psychology has no real answers to this, you can tell because psychologists frequently are as fucked up as the people they treat. Another indication is the ineffective drug and therapy protocols employed by the psychological establishment that just keep having to get more and more intense. I have yet to meet anyone who has actually been cured by these quacks. It has been proven in declassified documents by people who you pay to "keep you safe" that the human mind is laughably pliable and there exist a plethora of modalities to entrain the individual to any desired response.

Despite the macabre tone of these spooks total derision of the human individual, these techniques are no more deleterious than the commonly accepted ones. The only reason you aren't able to access them in the mainstream is because curing people isn't very profitable as evidenced by the amount of totally unnecessary and detrimental surgeries being performed everyday in every hospital in the world.

I'm not bashing powerlifting as a sport or powerlifters for that matter. I am bashing peoples total and wanton mishandling of their situation to the point where they look in the mirror and and hate what they see looking back at them. See elitefts.com article.

Your demons are your choice. You feed them and take care of them and keep them around.
Peep the minions: they choose to stay, as their chains are loose and easily removed.



Wake the fuck up and help yourself.