Over the last say five, six years, I’ve pretty well managed to wall myself off from gym culture. I do lift in a commercial gym, though I have very little contact with the people there – unless you count staring in slack-jawed amazement at some of the antics and stupidity as contact. I don’t, personally.
Most of the people I talk to in person are real lifters of some sort or another, guys that like powerlifting and strongman and Highland games. The manly kind of sports that you can drink beer with. We don’t always agree 100% on the details, but we also know that the details don’t matter and that in every way that matters, we’re on the same page.
“When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”
Sometimes there’s deep truth in simple statements.
In Buddhism, particularly the famous Zen school, they’re fond of using koans like this to deliver powerful meaning. Koans are short stories, usually no more than a few short sentences, that always confuse Westerners because we’re brought up to be very literal-minded. You can’t look at a koan and try to interpret it literally. At least not if you expect to take any meaning from it.
There’s nothing exceptional here, besides the usual T-Men being T-Men, and the T-Moderators locking the T-Thread because somebody said something that might lead to real discussion.
Here we have a prime example of someone that doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. And yet, due to the magic of Internet media, he’s given a voice.
The only good news here is that even the YouTubers largely realize this is bad gumbo, given the one-star rating and judging by the comments.
The other week a blog was linked on a board I read, and it was a discussion loosely titled as “explosive movements don’t make you explosive”. This is a recurring theme amongst some elements of the strength & conditioning field, most notably the more rapid later-comers of the HIT and SuperSlow schools of thought.
I added a few comments to the discussion, because I felt the gentleman in question was mistaken on a few assumptions. Firstly, I linked to several studies that showed the addition of elastic bands to regular strength-training to be more effective at developing both strength and power when compared to regular weights (PMID: 16686552, PMID: 18550975).
This sparked a tangential discussion – namely, what does variable resistance training (the fancy name for adding bands or chains or anything that changes the normal resistance curve) have to do with training explosively?
So T-Mag finally released their Ultimate Super Mega Peri-Workout Protocol based on the ANACONDA!!!!! supplement they’ve been hyping since about 2006.
When you’re talking about ANACONDA!!! you have to preserve a few rules. Firstly, YOU HAVE TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS AND USE THE BIGGEST BOLD-FACE FONT YOU HAVE AVAILABLE!!!! EVERY SENTENCE MUST END WITH EXCESSIVE PUNCTUATION!!!!
To be a bit more serious, if you actually sit down and read the labels on all the overpriced crap they’re hocking, you find (or at least deduce) a few interesting things.
It’s started already. Every year, The Holiday Season seems to creep back earlier and earlier. When I left the US, you could see Christmas ads starting in October. Halloween be damned! Thanksgiving gets some kind of individual respect, though you can tell that it too is being assimilated into this vague “holiday season” that seems to last about four months.
I don’t mind the holiday spirit. I do hate how it’s become so commercialized that the entirety of Q4 is given over to a continuous spree of BUY! messages. Halloween seems to kick it off, and it doesn’t really quit until New Year’s Day. Then everybody wakes up on January 1st with a hangover and a new stack of credit card bills.
I’ve always hated the Good Morning. It gets a lot of attention from a lot of really strong guys, and because of that advice I’ve tried to give it a fair shake over the years. No matter how much I tried, I was never able to find a way to make this an enjoyable exercise.
Usually I consider not liking an exercise to be a good thing, since that pretty much means you suck at it and will benefit from getting it stronger. That’s not what I mean here. Yeah, it’s awkward if you don’t do them regularly, but it’s not just that. The mechanics of the lift are just weird.
I think that part of the problem was trying to follow what Westside was doing a few years back when they were really pushing them as Max Effort exercises. They seem to have backed off that somewhat lately, although it’s still pretty common to see maxed-out GMs floating around.
In virtually every textbook and manual about strength training that I’ve ever read, the suggestion for “hypertrophy” workouts is always something like 3-5 sets of 10-12 reps at around 70-75% of your 1RM. This tends to double up as a suggestion for beginners, as well – the rationale being that they need to use lighter weights and build a foundation before moving into heavier weights.
Of course there are some differences of opinion there; Bill Starr suggested sets of five, and this has been continued by Glenn Pendlay and Mark Rippetoe with their ongoing use of the now-classical “5×5″ workouts.
In reality it seems that it just doesn’t matter much what beginners do. They’ll grow and get stronger regardless of the program as long as they’re showing up and trying to get stronger. And in Maximum Muscle, I questioned the idea of the “hypertrophy protocol” to begin with. This entire notion is based on these beginner gains, firstly, and secondly, on the notion that the hormonal response elicited by this kind of training actually correlates with muscle and/or strength gains.
I mean, it just goes without saying at this point, but this guy is spectacular.
For those of you not aware, I’m talking about Latvian powerlifter Konstantin Konstantinovs. Why is he awesome, you ask?
That’s 954 lbs for a triple, in a belt only. Yeah the plates are on 6-inch boxes. That shouldn’t matter, but you’re not a believer. OK:
That’s 837 lbs for 4 reps and 939 lbs for a single, both raw – and I mean real 100% raw, because he doesn’t even have a belt on. Holy shit. I just about passed out from that much badass in one spot. I love his videos for all the Latvian yelling, which reminds me of Rocky IV, only this time you want the Russian to win.
The best part? He’s a 275er, and at only 30 years old, I’d bet money that he’s going to break the 1000 lb barrier before he’s done. That’s no mean feat, considering that only two men alive have come remotely close to that, Gary Frank and Andy Bolton, and they’re both SHWs.
Konstantinovs is no one-lift pony, either. He’s benched 551 lbs and squatted 727 lbs, both lifts also completely raw (although to be fair, he did at least put on a belt and medical knee-wraps for the squat). He’s just spectacular any way you look at it.
The other thing about the K-man (that’s my clever Internet name, which sounds pretty lame now that I think about it) is his unique form in the deadlift. If you’ll notice, he pulls with a hunchback. His lower back is fairly neutral, as all the experts say it should be, but his upper back is rounding like hell.
This has set a fire under all manner of Internet form nazis, because we all know it’s not Real StrengthTM unless it’s done with absolutely 100% textbook form. Just imagine all the poor physiotherapists and Certified Personal Trainers that are in tears right now because of this round-backing. He really needs to back off to a more reasonable weight, around 135 lbs, and iron out these form errors so he can really be strong one day.
Now that the form-wankers are appeased, I have to admit that I’ve been playing around with this style the last two months during preparation for our upcoming meet. And to be blunt about it, I’m sold. When the weight gets heavy enough, I tend to default to high-hips stiff-leg pulling anyway, along with inevitable lower-back rounding. I could get all worked up over it, but my thought process over the years has been that my body wants to be in that position for a max deadlift, so why fight it?
What I’ve noticed with the hunch-backing method is that it tends to exploit this high-hip starting position and slightly reduces the ROM of the lift – the result is that I can bring more glutes and hamstrings into the lift. I’ve noticed that my starting position is a lot stronger; the bar has more snap off the floor, versus my original style which resembles a clean-style deadlift. I’m convinced that I was wasting a lot of movement by being in a sub-optimal position. In any case, I’m going to pull with this approach in this meet to confirm my suspicions, and then go from there. Who knows, maybe it will help me finally break that 600 lb goal of mine.
