The heavy 10 x 3 period begins!!!!

After a short break for Easter, I started the 10x3, the final stretch of the 12 weeks programme.
In weeks 9-12 the volume is in fact higher (32 reps per set in the 4x8 period, down to 25 in the 5x5 period, now up to 30 in the 10 x 3).

I was hesitant and I have to say also a bit afraid that I would get hurt here, especially because of the short break, which was rather sedentary too. It might have been just what I needed, in fact, or maybe it played no part at all.

I just know that over 3 reps and 10 sets I am able to ramp my way up to a couple of heavy triples, usually sets 6-8, and the final sets 9 and 10 feel good for the burn even if I take off 10 or 20% of the weight.

It is a bit time consuming, and not easy in a commercial gym with queues that go on forever for the bench press and power rack, but it is definitely worth it.

The poundage is going up in very small and prudent increments. I am making 2.2 kg / 5 lbs jumps every week top allow for proper form and avoid injuries, as I know my other "pillars" are not so stable. I mean recovery (sleep and de-stress) and nutrition. I also do not do enough stretching and prehab (all the preventive massaging etc...) and have no spotter, so I reckon that I need to take it a bit easier.

So far week 9 (which is really already week 13 at least, with all the delays, breaks etc...) is going well, with a good 86kg x 3 deadlift and a good 76 kg x 3 bench press, with some gas still left in the tank.

Squats tomorrow, which should be manageable, and Overhead press Saturday, which will be a serious "moment of truth" as the OHP is my slowest progressing lift, since I am basically stuck at 30 kg since I can remember....(I am talking years of plateauing there)

Wish me luck!

M. 

Phase 1 done, from 4*8 to 5*5. Pain ahead!

The first phase is supposed to last just 4 weeks, out of 12 total. It is the phase when all your 4 prime movers get a 4x8 volume. You are supposed to build some muscle mass here, and some muscular endurance before the actual strength work begins. I made it in 7 weeks, with a few interruptions, a few "just conditioning" workouts, and definitely one extra week of "let me try again that overhead press top set....one last time" to see with what numbers I would have to enter phase 2.

Too much, and I set myself up for failure and injury. Too little, and I am wasting time and not growing. A fine balance!

Anyway, phase 1 was tough but rewarding, although there is nothing like strongman training for a beginner to make you feel worthless, from time to time. You just cannot help but think, on the tough days when the barbell does not want to move, about all the years spent doing body-building type of work, without a real target or goal in mind, just "stay in shape". Sure you do look better, and you get a bit stronger, but the day of reckoning is only postponed, until you pick up some real barbell training. Then all your weaknesses are brutally exposed, and your brain spontaneously withdraws to the crocodile area and fires up thought like

"if this was a beam trapping a family member, could I lift it just ONCE?"

"if I was pinned down by a tiger, could I press her away?"

"if I was to carry a mate to safety, could I bear that weight on my shoulders?"

"if I had to throw something heavy as far as I can, how good would I be?"

and then you realize that you are just a weak city slicker, who runs out of gas way sooner than your body was designed for.

and then you power through, crappy workout after crappy workout, until things do get better.

Now I am a bit worried, because the 4x8 volume was intense, and now it is time to go 5x5. The progression is that if I hit "100" in my last and best top set for week 4 (week 7 for me) x 8, then I SHOULD be able to hit 115 x 5 in the second phase. That, for me, is scary. The last top sets were at the very cusp of what I could reasonably move without a spotter or a coach or ...anything really. We will see how it goes, I am looking forward to epic pain and hopefully some gains.

What I am sure I will take home is a ton of humility (never hurts) and a ton of mental fortitude (also not too bad) for which I have to thank both Brian Alsrhue and Alan Thrall! 

Poundage up, pain is floating, progress welcome

Not a Haiku, but a reflection. i went through a week of basically core hell and then 2 weeks of just dull and repetitive conditioning, in the shape of classic linear progression sets (4x10, 3x 8 , 3x12 etc).

It gave me a bit of a base to re-build on, as the back pain was ebbing away. No dead-lifts, light squats, it sucked but I stuck with it.

The I managed to move to the antagonistic training. On squat, bench, dead-lift, overhead press and upper back days, working up to a heavy set of 3s, immediately followed by a comparable weight in the antagonizing muscle group, to get rid of the imbalances. It allows for SO much more variation, effort, and satisfaction, and it mitigates imbalances. So, for example, bench-press followed by bent-over rows, or strict overhead press followed by weighted pull ups, right away, 3 of one, 30-60 seconds of core (planks, for example) and then 3 of the other. Strict technique, no cheating. Do this 3 times (so 3x3). Then a heavy set of five in a neighboring group (say, dumbbell incline x5 , 30-60 core, then one arm rows x5). Do this 5 times (so, 5x5), and then 3-5 minutes of assistance for shits and giggles. Curls, extensions, lat raises etc....

It felt great but it was starting to be a bit taxing so I lightened up a bit. Last 2 - 3 weeks have been much much better. It is Alan Thrall's mix of intensity Vs volume. You start explosive (say, clapping push-ups 3x3), then you go to your main movement (bench day, squat day or dead-lift day) and go 5x5. Then you super-set for assistance and do all other parts. Say, on bench day, barbell overhead press S/S with weighed pull-ups 4x10. Then you are done, but if you have still gas in the tank you can throw in some more assistance for "aesthetic" reasons (lat  raises, dips, curls, extensions).

At the end of the session, if you did every set to failure, you are beat and it is time to go home!

Yesterday I upped the dead-lift a bit, the last 5 reps were with 40 kg per side, so 80 kg total. The barbell must have been lighter than the usual ones, but it still felt heavy overall. The very last rep of the last set I felt something tighten at the very bottom of my lower back, but other than being stiff as hell this morning, which makes me thing I exaggerated a bit, I seem to be fine. I worked through all the cues in my head, and that helped.

1- Grip it tight
2- Squeeze it and "bend it" against your shins
3- Brace with a big belly breath
4- Hips down
5- Pull the slack out of the bar
6- Open knee and hip angles at the same time
7- When the slack is out, accelerate!
8- Drive through and lock out.
9- BOOOOM!

Bottom line, classic bodybuilding for muscle mass in itself is now so boring that I cannot go back to it!

M. 

First set-back, back to bro-splits before I could even begin strongman work

Today begins with a set-back. The come back to the gym was a few days too soon, that is, I could not wait until the end of this heat wave that will last until next Friday. It is late September, and to work-out in 30-32 degrees in a BERLIN gym is just not acceptable. I should have stuck with running for a few more days, conditioning, pull-ups/pushups.

The intention was to follow Brian Alsrhue EXCELLENT and free (wow, just wow) strength program. It is featured here, as a guest-vlog on Alan Thrall's untamed strength channel

Incorporating strongman work

Do watch it, and then subscribe to Brian's channel. he is both very strong and very knowledgeable, athletic, and practices what he preaches. A rare combo.

Well, in that insane heat, even with the warm up, and a gradual increase in weight, I simply could not do more than 1-2 dead-lifts with 60kg (total. a laughable load). To top it off my lower back is now contracted into a tight knot. Hopefully it will go away soon, but bending forward is painful.

I also pin it on a long hiatus, poor rest, and lack of concentration and focus (which led to improper form), but the heat in the gym still takes the biscuit for the main factor. My bad for still trying it out of guilt, rather than out of single-minded determination.

With a bit of luck I can still do exercise until I am healed. Sadly, I have to wait for the proper strength work, and be content with the bro-splits that should really be assistance work at this point (like curls of all kind, isolation work etc...)

Then some movement, gentle, very gentle, in the hurt area. Like Brian says: blood heals. Gotta get the blood to go to the damaged area, and fix it quick.

More on that later.

M.

Brian Alsruhe's channel

This is Brian

New blog series

It's been tough to find a focus for this blog. It started as a place for rants, witty rants, livid with rage rants etc...

Then it became a general repository for impressions, some book reviews, thoughts without a place-holder of any kind.

It is still the blog of a moody bastard, but I realized that I cannot just rant about whatever ticks me off. It is a digital foot-print that might be counter-productive later, or it simply changes my brain chemistry, leading to negative spirals. Cannot have that.

Politics, religion, but also management, personal development, fatigue at this and that, are all things I need to figure out by myself.

BUT

There is fitness. I can write about exercises, fitness, and the personal development challenges. Matching life, work, friends, with social pressure, peer pressure, judgement spoken and unspoken, expectations, confidence (physical, mental) and the staples of this endeavor, as rare as they are simple

• REST
• NUTRITION
• EXERCISE
• FOCUS

They are not quite in order of importance, but mostly yeah, they are. Broad categories, of course, but you get the idea. They might eventually stand for other, bigger things. Convenient screens for other things I might want to say.

It will be a journey, and there will be rants, but I will also try to share lessons. Rants will be 99% about the idealized, totally disconnected from reality messages coming off the damned internet. The true petri-dish of all things good and evil. The image crafting, idea spewing volcano which mostly only manages to frustrate us all with unattainable standards of clock-work precision in scheduling one's life, with the touch of "sprezzatura". The art of being naturally and effortlessly being good st doing stuff without so much as breaking a sweat, all delivered by polished characters who are essentially there for the money, and live and thrive in social context so unique that their "recipes" "tips & tricks" and whatever else they foist on the poor internet surfer is pretty damn far from useful.

Universal truths that require so much customization as to be basically rubbish "for girls" or "for dudes" crap. I might want to set some ground rules for myself and for you if you visit and comment.

Let's start with one: here we do not talk about "girls" or "dudes" or any of that horse-shit. Here we talk about humans. Get this straight, or leave.

But I digress, because ranting is addictive. Let's start with some-one who pretty much got it right instead. Meet my 2 of my favorite fitness people. There are more (Scooby, Jeff Cavaliere etc...) but they'll pop up in the next weeks. So, follow the links and take notes!

• Molly Galbraith at Girls Gone Strong  
• Alan Thrall, at Untamed Strength and his video channel on Youtube: Train Untamed!)

Read their stuff, listen to some of what they say, we reconvene next week. Fresh(er) than today (I slept like ass, and also not that much) and ready to get better. 

A quick pit-stop, on an Indian summer day

This is not my best blog post. It is just a little blurb to keep the blog alive. It is a page where I would love to write more, but lack the confidence (and often the time) to do so.

I am writing from a room where the temperature is well above 25 Celsius (77 F), while outside Berlin is blessed by a gorgeous day of sun, a cool breeze, and the flaming colours of the fall.

It is the end of a long week, with meetings and work pretty much back to back from 8 am to 10 pm. Wednesday to Sunday, spent between coffee in unhealthy amounts, sweets and other treats, stress, and very little movement, mostly because I am sharing a room with 350 people, and some 50 laptops and mixers (they give off heat too). It's like I am asking to get sick, but so far so good.

I am writing mostly to commit this to memory. The annual membership meeting 2014 is almost over. It was interesting, but as usual fraught with lengthy conversation taking place inside my head, amongst the various facets of my personality. On the one hand, the huge motivator which was to watch and listen to the former Commissioner of the New York DOI (Department of Investigations). A true anti-corruption champion. Efficient, effective, prepared, competent, experienced, to the point. On the other hand there is the wish to do more of my own, to manage, to direct, to craft, to shape. I am witnessing a lot, but it is hard to convince myself that I am influencing anything. I could influence myself, but by training and education, my preferred venues are a bit far from what is within reach now. A gym, perhaps. A book. But other key items are missing. Time, mostly, but also the mental discipline to set my day in a way that protect the space I need to devote to personal growth.

There will be a closing dinner tonight, and the next two weekends are pretty much taken already, so that will be my time frame to set the plan in motion, to go at it again, and try to become, every day, the better version of myself, and not just a bystander observing life zooming past.

M.

The Dragon in the Sea

I think I am reviewing books with the subconscious urge to compare them to G.R.R. Martin´s "A song of Ice and Fire". There is just so much that an author could to to make the story come to life without writing 9000 pages, but I suppose everyone has to make a buck. Anyway, here goes.

The Dragon in the Sea (Under Pressure) is a damn good book. It is a new Frank Herbert, away from his familiar landscape, the Arrakis/Dune which is now a quite well known setting (starting with David Lynch's adaptation, and on with videogames, spinoffs and telefilms). 

Herbert shows remarkable competence at narrating an adventure entirely set inside a small sub marine, a Hell Diver. The author shows the tricks of a good narrator, by giving us a high dosage of technical language, which even if you have never been in the navy, definitely gives to the "feel" to be there. He is accurate in his description of the sub-tug, and by the time we are through with the book, it feels like we have lived ourselves in those claustrophobic quarters. Its bulkheads, control panels, dials and gauges, levers, rudders. It sets a stage, with quick brush strokes, without killing it with too much detail. 

<< Oil. The war demanded the pure substance born in the sediment of rising continent. Vegetable oil wouldn't do. War was no vegetarian. War was a carnivore. >>

The plot is simple: in the near future (VERY near, for us, about the late 2030s) the USA is quite oil-starved. The crews of the hell-divers, 4 men units, risk their lives to, literally, steal oil from underwater continental shelves of the EP (Eastern Powers), dragging a "slug", a 1 mile long tank. The waters are infested with wolf-packs, submarines patrolling the enemy seas, but there is more. "Sleepers" in the US Navy have consistently sabotaged the last 20 missions, resulting in the loss of 20 crews. The journey is nerve-racking, and the submarine has to endure the strain of ordinary warfare, coupled with acts of sabotage. The task of the protagonist: to find out what is it that drives men insane during those missions, but also find a way to stop the sleepers. 

What is truly remarkable, is Herbert's ability to characterize. Thoughts in italics provide a commentary to the author's suggestions on where the truth might lie, and on where a man's sanity might be hiding, on the backdrop of the function of religious belief in a high-tech future. The titular Dragon in the Sea, is in fact the Leviathan: "In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea". It haunts the crew, and especially the deeply religious captain Sparrow. Instead of droning on for 7 volumes, Herbert gives us access to the security files of the characters, with the voice of the protagonist. Of Sparrow we know that he is <<"forty-one. Picture of a tall, thin man with balding sandy hair, a face of sharp planes, stooped shoulders. He looks like a small-town college professor, thought Ramsey. How much of that is conditioned on his early desire to teach mathematics? Does he resent the fact that his hardcrust Navy family forced him to follow in the old man's footsteps?" >>

The same man will pull the most insane feats of leadership and seamanship. Better still, the profile of Leslie Bonnet: <<"Held from advancement to his own command by imperfect adjustment to deep-seated insecurity feelings." The Unwanted, he thought. Bonnett probably doesn't want advancement. This way, his commander supplies the father authority lacking in his youth.>>

There is more than psychology. Some Anthropology which is right up my alley. Ramsey is called by second name until he faces combat, after which they all switch to a friendlier first name:

<< Johnny! thought Ramsey. He called me Johnny! And then he remembered: We've met the enemy. The old magic is dead. Enter the new magic. >>

There is a sense of completion, at the end of the journey: 

<<"Take her in, Les," said Sparrow. "You've earned the right."

Bonnett reached up, adjusted the range-response dial. His shoulders seemed to take on a new, more positive set. Ramsey realized abruptly that Bonnett had come of age on this voyage, that he was ready to cut his own cord. The thought gave Ramsey a tug of possessive fondness for Bonnett, an emotion touched by nostalgia at the thought of separation.

Truly like brothers, he thought.>> 

I am a navy person at heart, so I melted a little when I read that. The final note, to come full circle, is on miracles (and many happen during the mission). <<"There's such a thing as being on God's side. Being right with the world. That's really the thing behind miracles. It's quite simple. You get in . . . well, phase. That's the mechanical way of saying it. You ride the wave instead of bucking it." >>

So, read this book if you like navy stories (especially submarine stories). Read this book if you like war stories (especially cold war). Read this book if you want to see some real character analysis elegantly laid out in less than 200 pages.