I know the updates have been a little, well, nonexistent lately, but there’s actually a good reason for it this time. I’ve started up my own training/consulting business, in real life even, and that’s been taking up a good chunk of my time recently. I figured I’d go ahead and make the announcement now that it’s officially sorted and I’m getting settled in.
I’m working out of a pretty nice gym I found, which is run by a really good group of people and has a heavy strength & conditioning emphasis – right up my alley, in other words. I’m hoping for good things over the next 6-12 months.
All you faithful readers, don’t worry. Amped isn’t going anywhere, as I still plan for this site to be my online presence for (semi-)regular updates, articles, and whatnot. Impulse is going to be more focused on my real-life training ventures, including the squat-and-bench clinics I want to start putting on at some stage.
Yeah. I mean, that’s not news I guess, because let’s be honest, that’s never gonna change.
There’s just so much to hate, from incompetent personal trainers to lame Internet marketing.
Case in point, apparently there really are Type III muscle fibers now, because some guy wants to make a buck. This is considered edgy and revolutionary marketing, and not the horrible abuse of authority that it is, because capitalism is good and he’s just trying to get paid, brah.
Squats are dead, too. I didn’t get the memo, but apparently squatting is useless because…well, honestly I have no idea why, it’s always worked well enough for me. Though I guess if you squat like an idiot, and thus don’t actually get stronger while dramatically increasing your chances of hurting your knees and back, you’d consider squatting outdated too.
This must be why most personal trainers don’t know what a squat is – let alone your average yokel at the gym. I mean they teach something they call a squat, which generally involves loading up a barbell with too much weight and a sissy pad, but then they have their client do a pansy little knee bend instead of an actual squat. I don’t understand what this is supposed to achieve, and I certainly don’t understand why they call it a squat.
This is a squat:
It doesn’t always have to be that low, but dammit you should at least try. If you can’t squat that low, then figure out why. You might have a weak core, you might have flexibility issues in your hips or ankles or both, but if you can’t do it, something’s wrong and you need to fix it. As for the rest of you, just quit being pansies and squat.
Also any of you physiotherapists out there that think squatting through a full ROM is dangerous, you’ve got a challenge: provide me peer-reviewed evidence backing up this claim. If you can’t, then stop telling everyone it’s dangerous.
In some good news, our friend Alan Aragon, lover of chocolate milk, has put a blog up, and it’s already been trolled by those Internet miscreants that feed us all with laughs. Alan’s a good bro and he talks a lot of good sense, so it’s worth adding to your RSS feed. Check out his AARR too, it’s chock full of researchy goodness.
So it’s Friday again, at least here. Just to keep myself up to snuff I’m trying to make myself update on every Friday even if there’s nothing I really feel like talking about.
What’s interesting this week:
Skyler Tanner wrote up a review of Maximum Muscle on his blog. It’s nice to see a positive review on it, since to be completely honest I was (and still am) worried that the subject matter would be off-putting to a lot of my target audience.
I’m standing by my decision to release it as a CC ebook, however. I do find it interesting at the amount of – not quite backlash, but “WTF” and crypto-anger that I’ve seen in response to that decision, as if I almost did something wrong by stepping outside the bounds like that. Whatever. I’ve made it clear from day one that I’m not in this to hustle for cash.
Alan Aragon wrote up a brilliant rebuttal to some recent T-Marketing (TM) shenanigans over on the Unapologetic Hustling site, which is a guest blog on Lyle’s Body Recomposition blog.
I’ve been putting up some spreadsheets on the forum. So far these are still in a preliminary testing phase, as I want to spend a little time with them before really endorsing them, but what I’m trying to do here is create some templates based on Prilepin’s Table as a framework, while incorporating some of the strategies that Mike Tuchscherer outlines in his Reactive Training System.
I’ve been doing some research into the Dunning-Kruger Effect for reasons that might be somewhat obvious. There’s a good and relatively recent review available for free on Pubmed. This is something deserving of a longer article in its own right, as it obviously ties in to much of my theme regarding critical thinking and the lack thereof. It’s kinda nice to see “stupid people are stupid” quantified in science-terms, in any event.
So it’s Friday and I’m sitting here with not a lot to talk about, but I haven’t updated in awhile so I figured I might as well put something up. I’m usually not one on for the quick-update bullet-point type posts, but maybe they’re a good filler in the absence of anything long and boring to talk about.
Firstly, it’s been a little over a month since I put Maximum Muscle up on the P2P nets and let the whole world have at it. Say what you want about my motives; anybody that wants a copy can get one, and that was my number one goal.
I’ve noticed that people seem to be a bit confused by the concept of nonlinear or undulating periodization, so I added a new workout article to cover it.
