Chaos and Pain

Anyone who's read Issuance of Insanity 2 has likely read this, but I'm slammed getting the company together and finishing my diet book, so I figured I might as well use this as an excuse to post pics of one of the hottest women ever to walk the Earth- Dana Linn Bailey. Every chick in powerlifting under 130 lbs should thank every god in every heaven that Dana Linn Bailey sticks to physique competitions, because this broad is beyond brutal under the weights. If you doubt me, consider this- she benches 90 lb dumbbells for reps, knows the words to Blood for Blood's song "Maldito" (which is fucking awesome if you've not heard it), has the most insane set of abs on Earth, benches half her bodyweight for 128 reps, 220 for a triple at 128, front squats 135 for 7, back squats 135 for multiple sets of 20, and is so hot that if you looked right at her you'd go blind and insane. Making matters worse is the fact that she and her punk rock star / DJ / artist / jacked motherfucker husband both seem cool as shit, so we're all pretty well fucked if anyone ever draws a direct comparison. That aside, she trains with her husband and more like a guy than what you'd typically see in a female lifter, and busts her ass in the gym.

For those naysayers who feel like that's not enough of a baddest motherfuckers resume, consider the following:

she only started lifting 7 years ago, and is hitting numbers that half of the guys on Reddit can't at considerably less bodyweight.
she won her first figure competition with less than a year of training under her belt.
she's the first IFBB pro physique competitor ever.
she's so goddamned hot she's been credited with killing more penguins with global warming than Styrofoam and Freon combined.
she and her husband hold a Guinness Book Of World Records record for most duck and snarly faces by a couple, ever.
she once trained with Tim Lambesis and escaped without a death warrant.
all she does is work, hustle, and kill.

... and you thought I was kidding about the duck and snarly faces.

Her workouts are long as all hell, apparently so she doesn't have to do cardio to stay ridiculously lean. All upper body exercises are done for 4 sets of 6-15 reps and all lower body are done for 4 sets of 10-15 or 15-20 reps, as her legs are already pretty big and awesome from playing soccer through college (she played for West Chester University).

Monday
Incline Bench
Dumbbell Flat Bench
Pec Deck supersetted with Pushups
Incline Cable Flies
Decline Cable Flies

Tuesday
Wide Grip Pullups
T-Bar Row
Behind The Neck Lat Pulldowns
Seated Row
Pullups or Pulldowns
High Row supersetted with Straight Arm Pulldowns

Wednesday
Squats
Hack Squats (close stance)
Leg Extensions
Step Ups
Calf Raises

Thursday
Off

Friday
Seated Dumbbell Overhead Press
Lateral Raises supersetted with Reverse Dumbbell Flies
Front Raises supersetted with Overhead Press
Cable Lateral Raises
Rear Delt Spreader (on seated cable row)

Saturday
Sumo Squats supersetted with Adductor Machine
Lying Leg Curls
Dumbbell Stiff Leg Deads supersetted with Standing Leg Curls
Calf Raise

Sunday
Weighted Dips
Close Grip Bench Press
Straight Bar Curls
Reverse Cable Extensions
Cable Curls

As to how she stays lean, it's pretty much a combination of brutal training and more genetic gifts than half of the X-Men combined. As I mentioned, DLB despises doing cardio and figures it's a complete waste of time that would be better spent lifting, and on top of that barely even seems to diet:

"I am not a very strict dieter. I do not count carbs, I do not weigh anything, I do not record anything…I just eat! I try to eat somewhat-clean for the most part. My sources of protein come mostly from egg whites, turkey, fish, steak, and some chicken. Most of my carbohydrates generally come from oatmeal, rice and sweet potatoes. But I do not like bland boring meals, I like eating like a normal person. I just make healthier choices for the ingredients. Example, if I’m hungry for spaghetti, I make nice wheat pasta and load it with tons of lean ground turkey instead of beef. Simple things like that keep me happy" (Cut and Jacked)

For those of you out there not planning on auditioning for the Averngers sequel with the selling point of having enough superpowers to get by without CGI, I can tell you from experience that this sort of a regime does not work for everyone. That sort of a diet kept my abs in hiding like their name was Timur Bekmambetov for the majority of my training life, but the shit is definitely working for DLB. If nothing else, you might want to take away from DLB's routine that if you break your ass in the gym for 9 hours a week, you can one day be as strong as a 128 lb chick. If you're a chick and a powerlifter, pray this broad never jumps the line into our sport, or even the unstoppable juggernaut Jennifer Thompson is in serious fucking trouble.

Sources:

Cut and Jacked Interview: Dana Linn Bailey. Cut And Jacked. 17 Feb 2011. http://www.cutandjacked.com/Interview/with-Dana-Linn-Bailey

Dana Linn Bailey Routine. Cut and Jacked. PDF. http://www.cutandjacked.com/Interview/with-Dana-Linn-Bailey

Japanese Lolita look + drunk sluts = shut the fuck up, the goddamn song is catchy and I hope you get AIDS.

Alcohol consumption has, at least in the United States, been a contentious issue. At the risk of beating the balls off a long dead horse, I will again ascribe responsibility for this issue to Christians, as they are solely responsible for the development of a teetotal movement in the United States that's never really existed anywhere else (save for India, which shares a hatred of awesome with Christian fundamentalists). The humorous aspect of that is, to me, that Jesus liked to party, so I'm not really clear on where Christians developed the idea that Jesus was straightedge. Irrespective of how or why the Prohibitionists in the US developed that notion, however, they disregarded both the words of their own holy book, evidence from thousands of years of human history, and the fact that primates have apparently consumed alcohol for the duration of our family's existence to arrive at the conclusion that alcohol is "the debbil". Even tree shrews, which have a higher brain mass to body mass ratio than humans, drink their fucking faces off all the live long day in the wild.

You'd never know that little fucker could drink you under the table.

Though not precisely primates, they're prosimians, and are often used as an alternative to primates in scientific studies. According to scientists, "The pentailed treeshrew is considered a living model for extinct mammals representing the stock from which all extinct and living treeshrews and primates radiated. Therefore, we hypothesize that moderate to high alcohol intake was present early on in the evolution of these closely related lineages" (Wiens). In fact, scientists believe humanity's love for boozing is actually an "evolutionary hangover" from our fruit-eating primate ancestors,many of whom seem to have had a tasted for fermented fruit. That's right- for those of you out there who are eating a strict paleo diet, alcohol is definitively paleo. Moreover, as brewing has occurred for at least the last 9,000 years, humans have certainly adapted to alcohol consumption well enough to obviate the arguments of teetotalers who contend that alcohol impairs athletic performance, especially given the fact that some of the largest and most prolific warriors in history are well known for consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol on a regular basis. For instance, Tacitus has this to say about the only race of people to defeat the Romans completely on the field of battle and resist their imperial aims- the Germanic tribes:

"To pass an entire day and night in drinking disgraces no one. Their quarrels, as might be expected with intoxicated people, are seldom fought out with mere abuse, but commonly with wounds and bloodshed. Yet it is at their feasts that they generally consult on the reconciliation of enemies, on the forming of matrimonial alliances, on the choice of chiefs, finally even on peace and war, for they think that at no time is the mind more open to simplicity of purpose or more warmed to noble aspirations" (Viking Answer Lady).

Contrary to what one would think after perusing any discussion about drinking and hypertrophy on an American internet message board, the Germans were hardly sickly fuckers- in fact, they were renown in the ancient world for being the biggest, strongest, scariest motherfuckers on Earth. According to Tacitus, " All have fierce blue eyes, red hair, huge frames, fit only for a sudden exertion" (Medieval Sourcebook). the same goes for the cultural successors to the Germanic tribes, the Vikings, who drank beer, ale and mead with alcohol concentrations of 9-10% and 8-18%, respectively very regularly, and had at least three instances of multi-day binge drinking per year associated with festivals. Likewise, the Scythians were well known for their use of cannabis and alcohol, the Mongols drank (and still drink) kumis as a nearly exclusive source of hydration, the Chinese have been drinking alcohol since 7000 BC and have dominated East Asia for the duration, Indian warriors began consuming an alcoholic beverage known as sura 5,000 years ago and have dominated South Asia the entire time, and Maya and Incan warriors consumed vast quantities of alcohol during the span of their empires' reigns over Mesoamerica.

Straight up and on the rocks

My liver's hella shot

Fuck all the bros and jocks

Tonight I'm rollin' with the cops

This ain't no A and E
Won't see me on intervention

Straight A student, honor rollin',
Sneaking vodka in detention

Rigert's gainz look surprisingly intact.

That's all well and good, you might be saying, but those motherfuckers are dead, probably of liver failure, and according to Bodybuilding.com's genius posters, catabolism and low testosterone levels (bet those fuckers fucked chicks and jerked off too! Suckers! Killed their gainz and their empires simultanously.) Let us, then, examine some more modern examples of epic lifters who were also epic drinkers:

Arthur Saxon. Though he lifted for two to three hours in the morning and often performed twice a night, this legendary lifter drank his fucking face off daily. Claiming to have been "weaned on beer", Saxon drank a "health drink consisting of a stout beer and a shot of gin with eggs and sugar added, and once drank 50 beers prior to a performance in Britain and still failed to miss a lift (Inch).
Vasily Alekseyev. "When they were in the training hall sizing each other up Vasily was always gone only to return after hours. The other competitors slept in their beds like giant babes while "Uncle Vasily" ran up and down the halls drinking beer from the case held under his arm while thowing bottles and firecrackers in the other sleeping giant's rooms" (Sorin).
David Rigert. Like Alekseyev, Rigert was a Russian Olympic weightlifting phenomenon who was legendary for his vodka consumption and chain smoking habits.
Bulgarian Olympic weightlifters. Anyone who has ever trained with these guys comes back with a six week hangover, as the Bulgarians apparently think water and vodka are interchangeable for hydration.
Hermann Goerner and the early 20th Century Germans. "Many German gyms were not only places where you went to improve strength, health and muscularity. They were also social centers, places where friends met, where you took your wife or girlfriend. They were, at the turn of the century and well into the 1920’s attached to a beer garden or close to one.... Around the four walls of the gym were benches, and above them the shelves where you kept your personal beer stein" (Smith).
Norbert Schemansky. The angriest man ever to compete and win at anything at all, Mike Tyson included, credited his success with a diet consisting of "hamburgers, pizza, beer" and once stated that he drank so much Budweiser would be his sole sponsor if he was lifting today (Green).

When asked why he drank so much beer, Schemansky had this to say, "Because fuck you, that's why."

I could go on at some length, because I've frankly never met an elite lifter who didn't like to drink. there's actually a reason for this- elite competitors are much more inclined to indulge in risk-taking behaviors than the average person (Jacobs). Additionally, exercise and drinking are very positively correlated. the more you drink, the more you exercise, and vice-versa. Though scientists have no idea why this is, they do know that exercise mitigates the damage done to the brain in binge drinking, and that

"'drinking is associated with a 10.1 percentage point increase in the probability of exercising vigorously,' the authors write. More specifically, 'heavy drinkers exercise about 10 more minutes per week than current moderate drinkers and about 20 more minutes per week than current abstainers.' Meanwhile, the authors continue, 'an extra episode of binge drinking increases the number of minutes of total and vigorous physical activity per week for both women and men'" (Reynolds).

See what happens when you people bitch about DLB? Millionaires, that's fucking what happens.

While that might seem counter-intuitive to most people, it falls in line with what statistics show- the countries with the highest per capita consumption of alcohol seem, almost invariably, to be the countries that produce the best lifters. Here are the top twenty six nations in the world for per capita alcohol consumption and some of their strength sport (I've included the Olympic sports in which strength plays a profound role) feats:

Moldova-2 bronzes in weightlifting, 2 in boxing, 1 in wrestling, which isn't bad for a country known solely for car theft and corruption. Additionally, it's only been a country since 1994, and boasts a population of only 3.5M. In spite of those facts, the US was barely able to pick up as many medals in weightlifting in the same time frame.
Czech Republic- 1 silver in boxing. Only a country since 1993 and pop of 10M. As a part of Czechoslovakia, however, they pulled down 15 medals in wrestling, 8 in weightlifting, and 6 in boxing out of a country with a population of 13-15 million.
Hungary- 20 medals each in boxing and weightlifting, and 54 in weightlifting though they only have a population of 10M people. Clearly, drinking one's face off and boasting the genetic line of Attila helps on the lifting platform.
Russia- 48 medals in wrestling, 26 in boxing, 26 in weightlifting as Russia (since 1992), and 116 in wrestling, 62 in weightlifting, and 51 in boxing as the Soviet Union. Additionally, Russians hold roughly half of the world records in powerlifting and are capable of more evil per pound of bodyweight than any other group of people in history, especially if homos are nearby. Vodka for the win.
Ukraine- 14 each in boxing and wrestling and 8 in weightlifting since 1992 and home of World's Strongest Man winner Vasyl Virastuk.
Estonia- 11 wrestling, 7 weightlifting, and 1 boxing medal in the Olympics, though it's only been a country since 1991 and has a population of 1.2M.
Andorra- Not even a country, really. Not sure how the hell it made this list, as I've taken shits larger and more interesting than Andorra.
Romania- 32 wrestling, 13 weightlifting, and 25 boxing medals, in spite of the fact they have about 11 dollars between all of the people within that nation's borders and their country is filled to the brim with destitute vampires.
Slovenia- 3 medals in Judo since 1992 pulled down by a country that fits comfortably in my parents' backyard. Yugoslavia, however, which consisted of Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovnia, and Croatia had 16 wrestling and 11 boxing medals in 70 years of competition out of a population of 23M.
Belarus- 10 weightlifting, 8 wrestling, and 2 boxing medals since 1992, plus they boast badass chick powerlifter Irena Pietrovich in one of the few countries still run by a psychotic despot.
Croatia- 2 boxing medals, one very fucking badass Mirko Crocop, and the aforementioned Great Antonio (in the last stew-roids blog).
Lithuania- Home of WSM badasses Žydrūnas Savickas and Vytautas Lalas. Also 5 weightlifting, 7 boxing, and 6 wrestling medals at the Olympics in under ten years.
South Korea- 20 boxing medals, 35 in wrestling, and 11 in weightlifting, all in spite of the fact that the country's only been around for 60 years and has a fifth of the US's population.
Portugal- Portugal sucks at everything but drinking, apparently. When some of the people in that country used to actually have jobs, though, they did help "discover" the New World.
Ireland- 16 boxing medals in the Olympics, and birthplace of the most ridiculous martial art of all time, shin-kicking, in which drunken Irishmen kick each other in the shins wearing steel toed boots until one quits.
France- 19 boxing, 17 wrestling, and 15 weightlifting medals, though they seem to have peaked quite early and have done virtually nothing of note in decades.
United Kingdom- Home of WSM winners Jamie Reeves, Geoff "I have very butthurt fans" Capes, and Gary Taylor. They've also boasted their fare share of good powerlifters, and 53 boxing, 17 wrestling, and 7 weightlifting medals in the Olympics.
Denmark- 12 boxing, 8 wrestling, and 3 weightlifting medals, plus the home and birthplace of one of the few people to fuck Grace Jones and live to tell the tale, Sven Ole Thorson..
Slovakia- 3 boxing, 5 wrestling, and one weightlifting medal as an independent nation, but also contributed to the badassery displayed in the former Czechoslovakia.
Poland- Home of Marius Pudzianowki, Sebastian Wenta, and Krzysztof Radzikowski, in addition to 43 boxing, 25 wrestling, and 32 weightlifting medals, plus a partridge in a pear tree.
Austria- Two wrestling and 9 Olympic weightlifting medals to their credit, in addition to being the birthplace of Arnold Schwartzennegger, Roland Kickinger, and Manfred Hoerberl.
Luxembourg- Barely a country and boasts a population of ten rich people and their manservants, but they still have a silver in weightlifting and legendary strongman John Marx Grunn.
Germany- 22 boxing, 24 wrestling, 20 weightlifting medals, and currently boasts badass Olympic lifters Matthias Steiner (the dude who dropped several hundred pounds on his head at the last Olympics) and weightlifting goddess Julia Rohde, who would have been worshipped as a diety in 1940s Germany.
Finland- Birthplace of some of the most legendary deadlifters in history, WSM winners Janne Virtanen and Jouku Ahola, and WSM runners-up Riku Kiri, Marko Varalahti, and Ilkka Nummisto.
Latvia- Home of Konstantin Konstantinovs and WSM competitor Raimonds Bergmannis. 'Nuff said.
Bulgaria- 18 boxing, 68 wrestling, and 36 weightlifting medals, in a country with three million fewer people in it than New York City and roughly the same GDP as the state of Virginia. That, my friends, is called drinking your way to weightlifting excellence.

Not sure if that's a man or a woman, but the moral of the story told in this picture is "Don't be Bangladeshi".

By contrast, the countries with the lowest alcohol consumption have very few or no Olympic medals, no good powerlifters, and no decent strongmen, in spite of the fact that many of them having comparatively massive populations- I'm looking at you, Bangladesh. Does this mean drinking confers great strength? Certainly not, but it does point to a very interesting correlation. While we're on the subject, though,

post workout consumption of 70-80g of alcohol had no effect on testosterone, leutinizing hormone, cortisol, or any other endocrinological indicator of recovery or hypertrophy (Koziris)
post workout consumption of 60-90g of alcohol had no effect on strength (Poulsen) or recovery (Clarkson)
alcoholics have better body composition than non-drinkers (Addolorato)

So, where does this put us? Squarely in the "tell the 16 year olds on the internet to spend more time lifting and less time debating pointless minutiae" section of the library. If you're going to be a Billy Badass, you're likely going to be a badass drinker as well. The two seem to go together like peanut butter and ladies, Chinese food and chocolate pudding, and cocaine and waffles- while you can have one without the other, you're not bloody likely to. Thus, it might be time to grab yourselves some Devotion vodka (it's got 2 grams of casein protein per shot) and head down to the gym for a bit of the old "anything you can do I can do better drunk as a fucking lord", because there's nothing like a drunken, impromptu strongman competition to get the ol' blood flowing. Just bear in mind there's a reasonable chance you might die, and try not to (that's my legal disclaimer for when you parents try to sue me over your corpse).

LIKE ME ON FACEBOOK OR I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL!

Sources:
Addolorato G, Capristo E, Marini M, Santini P, Scognamiglio U, Attilia ML, Messineo D, Sasso GF, Gasbarrini G, Ceccanti M. Body composition changes induced by chronic ethanol abuse: evaluation by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry. Am J Gastroenterol. 2000 Sep;95(9):2323-7.
Alcoholic Beverages and Drinking Customs of the Viking Age. Viking Answer Lady. Web. 4 Sep 2013. http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/drink.shtml
Clarkson PM, Reichsman F. The effect of ethanol on exercise-induced muscle damage. J Stud Alcohol. 1990 Jan;51(1):19-23.
Green, Jerry. Norbert Schemansky- With little money or home recognition, Olympian dominated. Natural Strength. 19 Sep 2011. Web. 4 Sep 2013. http://www.naturalstrength.com/2011/09/norbert-schemansky-with-little-money-or.html
Inch, Thomas. My Friendship With Arthur Saxon. The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban. 7 Jan 2009. Web. 4 Sep 2013. http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2009/01/my-friendship-with-arthur-saxon-thomas.html
Jacobs, Farrin. Risk is relative: Elite athletes take the biggest risks. Psychology Today. 1 Mar 2002. http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200203/risk-is-relative-elite-athletes-take-biggest-risks
Koziris LP, Kraemer WJ, Gordon SE, Incledon T, Knuttgen HG. Effect of acute postexercise ethanol intoxication on the neuroendocrine response to resistance exercise. J Appl Physiol. 2000 Jan;88(1):165-72.
Medieval Sourcebook: Tacitus: Germania. Web. 4 Sep 2013. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/tacitus1.htm

Poulsen MB, Jakobsen J, Aagaard NK, Andersen H. Motor performance during and following acute alcohol intoxication in healthy non-alcoholic subjects. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2007 Nov;101(4):513-23. Epub 2007 Aug 24.

Reynolds, Gretchen. Phys Ed: Does Exercising Make You Drink More Alcohol? New york Times. 5 Jan 2011. Web. 4 Sep 2013. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/does-exercising-make-you-drink-more-alcohol/?src=me&ref=health&_r=0

Smith, Charles A. Hermann Goerner. The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban. 12 Oct 2009. Web. 4 Sep 2013. http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2009/10/hermann-goerner-charles-smith.html

Sorin, Richard. A brief history of sport's most recognized man. Sorinex.com. Web. Link broken.

Wiens F, Zitzmann A, Lachance M, Yegles M, Pragst F, Wurst FM, Von Holst D, Guan SL, Spanagel R. Chronic intake of fermented floral nectar by wild treeshrews. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2008 Jul 29;105(30):10426-31.

Just finished "Nutritional Psycho", the Chaos and Pain Guide to nutrition. It contains heavily revised versions of all of my nutritional stuff, a couple of completely new entries (including the conclusion to the Metabolic Typing Series, ananalysis of a variety of proteins and a price per gram of protein analysis thereof, a guide to supplement ingredients for fat burners and pre-workouts, and some other random shit. Weighs in at over 250 pages, has 13 single-spaced pages of citations, is filled with American Psycho quotes, is printed in the font Bateman goes berserk over, and is generally the fucking balls.

Buy it now at chaosandpain.merchanttribestores.com. And when you do, click the fucking download button. It's right there.

Peep the Table of Contents:

No titties in this vid, so I'll help you out with that and hook them up here. We pretty much ran the gamut on this show, so I'm not going to bother trying to give you all of the topics. We pretty much threw our plan out of the window in the first thirty seconds of the show.

I've been catching shit from a variety of you about the lack of thick chicks on the blog, so feel free to voice your opinion about whether or not we need more thickness on the blog. Frankly, I could stand to have a bit more thickness, but I know you guys love trannies and skinny broads, so let me know what you prefer.

REASON WILL PREVAIL!

Every now and again, one is struck by a preternatural genius the likes of which the world rarely sees. In the ashes of what ended up being a half decent yet not Scanners-style head explodingly awesome bench workout, Talia suggested we take this shit back to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and do a Master Blaster Strict Press. For those of you who've never seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, here's a picture:

It's exactly what it looks like- a tiny baby man riding atop a giant retarded man. Given that we had neither tiny baby men or giant retards, Talia and I subbed ourselves and busted off some strict presses with 65 lbs and 95 lbs. It was, frankly, far more acrobatic than you'd think, and given that I barely have enough athletic ability to stand on one foot, proved to be rather challenging. In short, he's a badass exercise you'll likely never do but you might want to just because it's completely pants-shittingly insane. For the redditors and bodyspacers amongst you, it works:

neck, back, and hips for the bottom. Riverdancing proved to be decent cardio, as well.
lats, traps and tris for the top. There was excellent delt activation in the initial part of the lift, and abductors to squeeze the holy fuck out of my head.

Thus, without further adieu, the dumbest and most awesome thing any two people have ever done in a weight room and lived to tell the tale:

Big ups to Stacy at Crossfit Music City for letting us train there free and basically allowing us to turn his gym into a fucking amusement park. If you guys are ever in Nashville- hit him up. www.crossfitmusiccity.com

"A CrossFit facility with a dedicated lifting emphasis. Lifter friendly and one of the largest CrossFit facilities in the country. Coaching staff includes Bryn Herrin, Stacey Greenway, Opal Hammer and Alex Brigham."

Contacts: Bryn Herrin (bryn@crossfitmusiccity.com) or Stacey Greenway (stacey@crossfitmusiccity.com)

Recorded about a month ago and lost in a mass of shit I had to do, the Talia episode finally sees the light of day For those of you who who have a need for an actual podcast, I've title linked this thing but my filesize exceeds the limit for Feedburner and I'm running on an hour of sleep, so I find myself not giving a fuck so much about getting this shit on iTunes. In any event, you can download the mp3 on Mega here or just check it out on the Youtubes and hopefully not too many jimmies will be rustled.

As I recall, this was pretty fucking hilarious, so enjoy. If you find yourself not giving a shit about podcasts, here's booty.

Coming up in the next couple of weeks, I've got a hilarious BME on the Ultimate Warrior, a piece on the workouts of armwrestlers, and a nod to my form critics entitled "Perfect Is The Enemy Of Good". Additionally, I'm still plodding through the first installment of my as yet unseen "This is my War" series, in which I'll detail Navy Seal training and diet, and I'll be updating you guys at random from the Olympia this weekend here and on Facebook. Get over there and like that shit, already.

Goddamn, I am glad the consensus was for thick, because this shit is too nice. Before you ask- this chick doesn't actually exist- it's a shopped pic of a Mexican stripper named Yurizan Beltran.

It should come as no surprise that my friends think very much like I do. Though one would not guess it looking at her, the angriest, most caustic and sarcastic, and generally irascible of my friends is not a hulking behemoth but rather a tiny Asian powerlifter I nicknamed "Nuprin" when I first met her because I was hammered and couldn't remember her name. Being awesome, she took that right in stride and continued to talk to me where most chicks would have sprayed me with lighter fluid and flicked lit matches at me until I finally exploded in the glory of their firey, estrogen-inspired retribution. The following is the gist of a conversation I had with Nuprin earlier today:

So, slightly racist, I suppose, but a flattering nickname nonetheless.

Nuprin: I don't get how there are so many fat people

Me: Right there with you

Nuprin: You cant possibly wake up. See yourself in the mirror and be like "yeah, I'm good."

Me: When you can't see your junk without straddling a mirror you've laid on the floor and employing some strategically placed krieg lights, you'd think it'd be a wake up call

Nuprin:
Go to doctor. Be told you're obese and gonna die. Then make mad dash for nearest treadmill
And curse the heavens and genetics for making you a lazy asshole who makes shitty decisions!!
Oh why why wont society accept me for being a lazy slob??
I have a full time job! It's too much!!!
I need someone to work out for me!!
/snorts
I hate society

Me:
Doesn't everyone? Have you seen the haes stuff?
Health at any size?
Retarded
Utter nonsense

Nuprin:
Haven't heard of it
I just hate people
This society is so fucked
it's ok to be morbidly obese people will feel bad for you and call it a disease, something you can't help
but it's wrong to be gay
the fuck?
one is sucking up more of our natural resources than necessary the other causes no one any harm
but right... gay is wrong. fat is right.

If that's right, I am happy to be wrong. I have no idea if that's a woman or a man, honestly.

These are my friends- cold, calculating, brutal motherfuckers... and that's just the chicks. She does bring up an interesting point, though, in that our society finds it far more acceptable to be fat than gay. Given that gluttony is a deadly sin, it's nothing more that bald-faced hypocrisy for the denizens of middle America to stuff their fat faces all the live long day while voting for neo-fascist Christian conservatives with agendas so evil they'd have given Ivan the Terrible ideas about how to be an even bigger asshole. Beyond that, these fat fucks think nothing of the fact that they're inconveniencing those around them, crippling the EMTs who have to load their disgusting, bloated carcasses into ambulances on hyper-expensive super-reinforced gurneys, increasing the cost of healthcare, oozing over the armrests on airplanes, and generally being disgusting to regard in person. Wheezing, hacking, lumbering herds of elephants hell bent on eating themselves to death as they inconvenience real humans with every moment of their existence, and they somehow believe themselves to be better than the guy who likes to get in a workout 6 days a week and then suck some cock.

Once again, Russians manage not to help at all in proving my point, but at least he's not about to stroke out or fall into a diabetic coma because he failed to eat his hundredth doughnut of the day.

I will confess that I thought of Holley Mangold as one of these useless land beasts for some time. Though she managed to make it to the Olympics for weightlifting in spite of the USAWA's best efforts to keep us from ever competing in strength sports again, a complete lack of funding and truly horrifying obesity, Mangold was so fat when she competed that it was hard as hell to accurately describe her as an athlete. She was so fat that she disrupted the Earth's Schumann resonances to the point that she causes lightning storms on the other side of the Earth when she heaved her ponderous bulk out of bed. She was so fat that her muscle to fat ratio could only be explained in complex irrational numbers. She was so fucking fat that if the moon exploded the Earth would only have a tidal bulge on the side she was standing on. She was so fucking fat she'd give those sparkly twinks on Twilight the beetus if they tried to suck her blood. At 5'8" and 360 lbs, Mangold manages to outweigh me at my heaviest by 150 lbs, in spite of the fact that she's only three inches taller than me and is hilariously no stronger. We're talking about a person California openly courted for relocation because she'd serve as a natural habitat for condors. She was literally carrying around a full grown person made of fat atop whatever muscle she managed to retain while eating sheet cakes and narrowly dodging type 2 diabetes. For those of you who are unaware, the superheavyweight class in women's Olympic weightlifting is 165 lbs and up. That means she was almost 123 lbs heavier than the 2nd place competitor in her class, 156 lbs more than the 3rd place finisher and still only managed to come in 10th fucking place. Meanwhile, her aggregate total in Olympic weightlifting is a paltry 562.2 lbs. That, my friends, is piss fucking poor- if you're so fat that (srs) you have to wear two fucking singlets because you're continually bursting them at the seams, you're too motherfucking fat.

Apparently, Mangold finally came to that realization. As the only broad to ever play a non-kicker position in college football (she was an offensive lineman), she apparently doesn't lack the strength chops to hang with some strong motherfuckers, but having a 50" waist is going to ruin your bar path and whatever other considerations American Olympic lifters sit in the corner stressing about while fiddling with PVC pipe and not actually lifting weight. Recently, it hit the news that Mangold was going to be the second US Olympian to grace television screens as a member of the television show The Biggest Loser. Though I despised the move by alleged wrestler but actual stalling world champion, fat, waterheaded, Jesus freak Rulon Gardner, I applaud Mangold for the move, because she actually seems semi-intelligent and merely lacks the requisite willpower to avoid stuffing her mouth with cake every 43 seconds. I realize that anyone watching you read this just witnessed the most epic jaw drop of all time, so I'll explain my reasoning:

She finally looked in the mirror and decided she wanted to see what her vagina looked like.
She realized that maintaining a weight that put her within minutes of a heart attack if she elevated her heart rate enough to cross a street on foot was not the path to great strength.
Mangold realized that there is no other way for her to get paid to train for the Olympics in the United States, never mind finding a way to get access to clean food prepared by licensed nutritionists, obtaining trainers who will fucking tase her and toss her fat ass off a building if she doesn't lose some fucking weight, and possibly finding a way to pay for the next two years of training and dieting if she wins the competition.

About to be pwned?

In case you're unaware, Olympic weightlifters in countries with good Oly teams are fucking rockstars. Their monthly stipends are considerably higher than the average wage, they get to go to paid training camps with excellent food (not unlike NFL training camps), and their well treated. By contrast, our athletes are constantly hounded by the unathletic, noncompetitive, nerdy, dickless, worthless, honorless, brainless assholes at the USADA every moment of their life, ignored by the press, given no support by the government, and are generally treated like second class citizens. To wit:

"[A] Member of the Russian national team has 4 main competitions per year. That includes Cup of Russia, European Championship, Russian Championship and World Championship. Prior to each competition, there is a training camp. Overall, athletes spend 8 months per year in training camps.

Training camps are being held for top 3 athletes of the nationals as well as for young talented prospects. Quiet often training camps are being held in the Academy of Olympic Weightlifting in Taganrog. There is an excellent food there, great diversity of dishes and some athletes gain up to 10 kilos over a camp. Most athletes have personal plans and the head coach only give sthem advice and sometimes corrects athletes personally.

National team member gets a stipend of 15,000 roubles ($ 500) per month and every year each athlete has to earn this stipend by finishing in top 3 @ the Europeans or top 6 @ the worlds.

There are bonuses like for the duration of a year, Russian championship winner receives 45,000 roubles ($900) per month, European champion gets 60,000 roubles ($2,000) per month, World champion gets 90,000 roubles ($3,000) per months and for gold medal @ the Olympics 150,000 roubles ($5,000) per month.

To put that into context, the average Russian income (as of 2009) was $8874 US per year per person" All Things Gym).

Chinese Olympic weightlifters fare even better than the Russians in terms of quality of life compared to their countrymen:

"For their years of service, the lifters receive a state salary. Even for Olympic champions, the annual amount rarely breaks $10,000, and any money from endorsements is shared with the national federation. The athletes I speak to profess no resentment. “Our food, housing, clothing, tuition—it’s all paid for,” says Liu, who receives around $9,700 a year from provincial and national-level sports bureaus—10 times the average rural Chinese income"(Beech).

She might even end up kind of hot.

In essence, Mangold is finally going to get the same support, sans drugs, given to nearly every other Olympic weightlifter in the world, and in the end will actually be regarded as an athlete, not in the least because she'll actually resemble one for once. In fact, if all goes as planned, Mangold might just end up looking fucking jacked- even if she was 40% bodyfat at 350 lbs, she's still carry enough lean muscle to hit the platform at 235 lbs at a ripped 12% bodyfat. That means she'd make Klokov look like a bitch by comparison, which is something I personally think would be awesome to see. In short, I applaud Hollry Mangold- she finally realized she was a disgusting piece of shit, and decided not only to do something about it, but to actually try and get awesome for once rather than relying on sheet cake and genetics to be a tad above mediocre. Middle America, take note- you just might be able to rise above the level of land beast and actually do something useful with your lives before I become overlord and send the lot of you to the camps for manual labor on starvation rations and eventual liquidation.

This is usually where I'd post a pic of Auschwitz with the caption "Biggest Loser circa 1945", but I've grown past that, so here's a thick chick I'd smash the fucking granny out of.

Ah, fuck it. I've not grown up at all. Biggest Loser Sachsenhousen winner circa 1945!

Sources:
Beech, Hannah. China's Gold Standard. Time. 19 Jul 2012. Web. 3 Oct 2013. http://olympics.time.com/2012/07/19/chinas-olympic-weight-lifting-and-diving/
Chidlovski, Arthur. Russian weightlifting demands and paychecks. All Things Gym. 29 March 2012. Web. 3 Oct 2013. http://www.allthingsgym.com/russian-weightlifting-demands-paychecks/

LIKE THIS SHIT ON FACEBOOK OR I WILL RIP OUT YOUR HEART AND FEED IT TO LENNOX LEWIS.

Looking back on past BMEs, I find it odd that I've got yet another professional wrestler in a list of badass lifters given the fact I've never been much of a fan of pro wrestling. When one considers that there's less money in lifting than there is sucking cock behind dumpsters in any American ghetto, however, it makes a little more sense. Furthermore, lifters are by and large boring motherfuckers. They go to the gym, train people, and go the fuck home, never once stopping to rip an entire 8 ball of a line off the dashboard of a moving car and then leap out at the nearest passerby screaming unintelligible words and throw them through a plate glass window as their best imitation of a practical joke.

THE FAMILY THAT I LIVE FOR ONLY BREATHES THE AIR THAT SMELLS OF COMBAT!

This is why I find it necessary to profile the only pro wrestler outside of Goldberg I have ever found myself compelled enough to watch on a regular basis, and my only choice when playing WWE video games in the arcade back in the day- The Ultimate Warrior. Ultimate Warrior was sane in the same way Oprah is thin and the Kardashians are actually people- his promos were unintelligible to the point where you wondered if he was simply such a genius that you lacked the requisite intellect to comprehend him. He was one of the most physically violent and remarkably unskilled pro wrestler of the modern era, relying on drug-fueled rage, brute strength, and so much pants-shitting insanity that the Insanity Wolf seems rather tame by comparison to win his matches. Like his eventual coke and dbol-fortified tag team partners, the Mad Max-inspired, freakishly coiffed, angriest tag team on Earth the Legion of Doom, Warrior's go to move was the gorilla press slam, which requires less athleticism than one would get out of Stephen Hawking but more brute strength than you'd get out of ten meatheads at your local rusty-iron bar garage gym to complete. It is for these reasons, then, that the Ultimate Warrior is joining the esteemed pantheon of Valhalla-bound hardasses that comprises my Baddest Motherfuckers Ever list.

Ultimate Warrior Vital Stats
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 280 lbs.
Gorilla Press: 303 lbs (Hulk Hogan)
Bench Press: 550 lbs (reportedly)
Sanity: Nonexistent
Awesomeness: Incalculable

Perhaps you're thinking that the above list of strength accolades doesn't warrant a place among guys like Arthur Saxon, because he's never been a competitive lifter. You're thinking wrong. The Warrior hails from a bygone era in which bodybuilders actually lifted heavy. When Warrior hit the mat for the first time, he was part of a generation of bodybuilders like Eddie Robinson (610 bench press in competition at under 200 lbs.), Tim Belknap (renown for being a flaming asshole and ruining every barbell in the gyms where he trained for using insane poundages on partials), and Benny Podda (a nutjob I've detailed at length). Bodybuilders in that era were so strong that they either had competed in and dominated powerlifting, or were simply content to compete with one another and heave around enough weight to smash a heard of mastodons flat. Not only that, but the Warrior eventually became tag team partners and ostensibly trained with the Legion of Doom, which would mean that he was both psychotic and incredibly strong. LOD were well known for moving massive weights, hitting bench presses of over 600 lbs (even with broken ribs) and shrugging over a thousand just because it was Tuesday and no more weight would fit on the bar. Not only that, but the LOD were also famous for being shitty wrestlers, and pretty much relied solely on massive physical trauma and press slams to stop their opponents, both of which were the mainstays of the Warrior's wrestling repertoire.

Though true wrestling aficionados then bag on them like they're Clinique counter girls at Macy's talking shit on Amy Weinhouse's crack whore makeup motif (only likely in a far more effeminate manner, as I've yet to meet a true wrestling mark who doesn't live in his parents basement and appear to spend the bulk of his time stealing and sniffing his mother's shoes), all of the most entertaining wrestlers of the past seem to have been the least technically proficient- Goldberg, Big Poppa Pump, the Legion of Doom, Hulk Hogan, and Andre The Giant are living (and dead in the case of half of LOD and the Giant) proof. Speaking of Andre, the Ultimate Warrior might not have displayed his lifting prowess on the platform, but he sure as shit hefted that tubby acromegalic fuck off the ground for a body slam when Andre was tipping the scales at 545 lbs. For those of you who think that's not all that impressive, feel free to try to hoist a saddie in a scooter at your local Walmart and dump them on their ass. Whether or not you succeed, you'll be a fucking legend for trying and will gain valuable insight into what it feels like to heft about 600 lbs of uncooked cookie dough , flip it upside down, and smash it on the ground.

His ass is his proudest accomplishment.

Though many of the baddest motherfuckers have interesting starts to their careers, Warrior's is perhaps the most ridiculous- he wanted an ass.

"On the lecture circuit, Warrior is fond of telling the story of how a skinny little kid befriended a rusty old workout machine and the machine gave that kid an ass. Seriously, that was his proudest accomplishment. Not the biceps, triceps, delts, or lats. Ass. Not even “glutes.” Ass. He was very clear about that. Ass" (Simon).

To that end, the Warrior signed on with an all-male review called “PowerTeam USA”, which included a mime and two other random, jacked and tan, ambiguously gay in a 1990's sort of pink spandex sort of way. At the same time, Warrior got into competitive bodybuilding, placing decently at regional shows until he met up with a couple of other bodybuilders who decided to make the transition into professional wrestling. Warrior debuted in a shitty little Texan federation I recall seeing on UHF stations on Saturday mornings as a kid, and to my recollection the ring was octagonal, prefacing the UFC's cage shape by 10 years. I realize that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand, but I recall thinking that was a stupid fucking gimmick even as a little kid. By the time he hit the mat for the WWE, the Warrior had established himself as a bonafide maniac capable of few legitimate wrestling moves, but also as the single greatest promo cutter in the history of wrestling. Not event the Rock could touch the Warrior's stilted, guttural, incoherent rants, so rife with insanity that you couldn't help but pay attention. I'm honestly not even sure his rants were a work, given that everything he's done since is equally nonsensical and insane. Bear witness as he exercises his exorcism:

Having witnessed his insanity,it will likely come as a shock to you that his workouts were not all that exciting. He's admitted a great many times that he has no idea how many years steroid abuse took off his life, so those of you chomping at the bit to scream "STEROIDS" can look smug and pat yourselves on your back. Then, punch yourselves in the fucking face, because steroid use is so fucking common in commercial gyms that even in BELGIUM, a country that has literally never produced a lifter of note, 25% of of recreational lifters use gear. Thus, steroids were not the magical panacea for muscle building and strength you might have thought they were. Instead, insanity seems to be the primary factor in the Warrior's lifting and career success, just as it was for Tookie Williams.

Were you to watch the Warrior's training, you would look directly into the face of a man who's managed to channel enough insanity to fill 100 horror movie loony bins with gibbering maniacs, self mutilators, and compulsively masturbating cannibalistic evangelic Christians. I've been around multiple Special Olympians in my day, and I have never before seen a human being perform exercises with that much grimacing and slobbering. That moaning chick at every commercial gym who sounds like she's working her way through a 50 man gangbang while lifting makes less of a scene than the Warrior does while warming up. Nick Manning makes less of a spectacle of himself dropping loads on bitches' faces. A roomful of naked, shit-covered midgets with Tourette's would draw less attention than the Warrior in your local Gold's Gym. It's like the Warrior is trying to get his face as jacked as his body by making the most dramatic rictuses he possibly can in the least amount of time possible. It's almost as if he's using time under tension for his face, and somehow it radiates out to the rest of his body. Whether it's intensity or insanity, however, the shit is clearly working- he looks better at 54 years old than most people look at 24.

50 years old and still looking thick, tight, and solid.

In case you're curious, the Warrior does a "bodybuilding type of workout", and is preternaturally excited about the fact that he trains calves. For the vast majority of his training, Warrior does 10-15 reps for each set with warmups in the 30 rep range. Ture to his completely nonsensical form, the Warrior believes this works the muscles from "the inside out". We could spend the next hundred years with linguists, scientists, and psychologists trying to parse exactly what the fuck working a muscle from the inside out means and would likely be no closer to the answer than we are now. Nevertheless, it seems to work for the Warrior, who is jacked to fucking bits at 50 and angrier than ever. Just ask the band Asking Alexandria if his methods work- in a pilot for a television show that sadly never saw air, the Warrior spent the better part of an hour berating the skinny jean clad metallers from that band for disrespecting him and interrupting himself with a great deal of psychotic pseudo-intellectualism without ever really putting them through a workout. In spite of the fact that they learned nothing more than what psychotics smell like up close, I bet each one of those skinny fucks put on 5 lbs just from being in the same room as the living embodiment of every fear feminists have of machismo that is the Ultimate Warrior.

I am not exaggerating when I say that the Warrior appears to make up for terrible programming with full-blown lunacy, skull splitting intensity, and what appears to be a dogmatic adherence to a lifelong strict diet and training routine. If nothing else, this should prove to one and all that your program doesn't matter nearly as much as the effort and persistence you put into them. The Warrior's routine literally could not be objectively less interesting or less likely to make someone strong enough to help a neighbor move a couch, much less lift a 600 lb man off the ground and slam him, or strict press a wiggling 300 lb man overhead. Who needs good programming when you have maniacal training intensity? One of the Warrior's workout videos literally shows him spending 20 seconds grabbing random benches and throwing them around the gym in a manner I previously only believed befit eternally spandex-clad and Otomix shod douchebag bodybuilder Branch Warren.

251 lbs locked out overhead and taking it for a stroll.

Warrior's workouts typically take 45 minutes to an hour and consist, hilariously stereotypical of 1990s bodybuilders, of one to two sets of three to four exercises to hit each muscle group from a variety of angles. From what I could glean from the videos I saw online, here's what he does:

Chest: Flat Dumbbell Bench Press, Incline DB Bench Press, Flat Bench Flies

Back: Pulldowns (behind the neck with so much crunching it looks like he's trying to suck his own dick), Pulldowns to the front, Pulldowns alternating back to front

Shoulders: Stiff Legged Clean to Behind the Neck Strict Press, Dumbbell Laterals, Dumbbell Shrugs

Arms: Preacher Curls, Straight Bar Curls, Dumbbell Curls, Tricep Pushdowns (variety of angles), Dumbbell French Press

Legs: Leg Extensions, Leg Curls, Close Stance Squat, Calf Raise

Dem quads.

And now, to flog the same cold, dead horse I beat every time I do a baddest motherfuckers entry- there is no one ideal program, and no program is useless if you apply enough pants shitting insanity to it. Just look at this motherfucker- is there anything at all in his program that would indicate that he's capable of moving prodigious weights? Nope. Will a pack of useless shitbirds content themselves with simply screaming "STEROIDS!!!!!!!" in spite of the fact that nearly everyone in your gym is on shit and none of them can do what the Warrior can do at age 54? Yup. In spite of the fact that everyone knows that excuses are like assholes, people just don't want to admit that's just what they are, because the only thing the lot of us should really be injecting is a truly terrifying dose of insanity- that's where the fucking gains come from.

GO HARD OR GO FUCKING KILL YOURSELF.

Get this insane and you will succeed on the platform. Or be committed.

Sources:

Simon, Harry. Clustershmazz. The Wrestling Fan. Web. 22 Sep 2013.

MIKE TYSON SAYS "LIKE THIS SHIT ON FACEBOOK OR I WILL FUCK YOU TIL YOU LOVE ME."

I think this is the part of USAPL Nationals that happens right in between the rules meeting and the Pledge of Allegiance not sure what time nap time is, but they only give you water crackers anyway, since Nilla Wafers might enhance your performance.

All of my information about the USAPL comes second hand, as I only compete in pro meets and they're still chasing their ridiculous pipe dream of getting yet another sport about which no one cares into the Olympics. I have, however, never heard a single good thing about their meets. I've seen videos of them, and they appear to have all of the frivolity and pomp of a Russian Orthodox funeral, only without the heavy drinking. In fact, I believe the consumption of alcohol is prohibited in the USAPL, along with:

being strong
lifting with training partners who compete untested
yelling
smiling
telling off-color jokes
cheering while other lifters are lifting
treating the sport like it's not a gold tournament held in a giant church
being strong
using profanity
drinking too much coffee
competing in other (i.e. better) federations
and, of course, being strong (the two obvious exceptions being JT and Jesse Norris- unbunch your panties, motherfuckers.)

From what I've seen, you could have more fun getting tested for AIDS with dirty needles at a clinic in Bangkok than you would at a USAPL meet. You'd have more credibility as a lifter if you spent most of your time on a Bosu ball than you would flashing your USAPL membership card. Their meets might also be the only place where people dress even more conservatively and 1980s dad nerdy than a southern frat party. There is literally no redeeming quality to the federation insofar as I've seen, and I'm not sure why it exists except to give weak people a showcase and excuse for their unimpressive strength. I'm quite certain simply reading this blog would earn you an automatic ban from the fed, but on the off chance I am wrong, here are a list of things so awesome they'll get you a lifetime ban from the "U Suck At Powerlifting" federation without even unzipping your fly.

Music

As always, support these bands- they need that $5 on bandcamp more than you, and there's no reason to steal shit that's that cheap. Don't be a cheap, thieving pigfucker if you like their music.

Stray From The Path- Anonymous
As anyone who knows me is aware, I love the mid-90s "Blech" more than I could love a human baby. Stray From the Path's vocalist sprinkles that shit liberally over this album like Emeril is behind him egging him on screaming "Again!" and "BAM!" every time he hears a Rick Ta Life Style puking noise. Basically, this shit is 90s Jersey rapcore (yeah, I know they're from Long Island, but I always think of NJ Bloodline when I think of rapcore) channels their 90's style hardcore and slaps it in the face with a heavy dose of old RATM harmonics like they're a prankster beating his best friend unconscious with a 10 lb trout. If you've heard old SFTP, you'll not be disappointed with this album, and if you've never heard them, this is pretty much the best intro you could get.

Hacktivist- S/T
Most or all of you will disagree that this album's awesome, but I don't care- I like djent, and I like rapcore, and this shit is both. Grimy London Dizzee Rascal style rap (but political) mash up with Structures-style djent makes for a good fucking listen. If nothing else, it's about the most original fucking thing I've heard, and since Dizzee hasn't gone Necro style and gotten Jamey Hatebreed to collaborate on a song with him, I'm gonna stick with Hacktivist on my mp3 player.

Sworn In- The Death Card
Sworn In has been on my mp3 player ever since I randomly stumbled across a tiny Baltimore hardcore blog that mentioned them in passing. I've no idea why these guys aren't better known than they are- they're the perfect mix of djent, sludgewave, a tiny bit of rapcore, some of the most scathing, angry, bile-spitting lyrics of all time, and 43,000 pounds of breakdowns, most of which sonically punch a hole through your soul. This band literally has something for everyone who likes heavy shit. If you do not like this band, you are a bad person. Worse than me, even.

Amazon

Breakdown to end all breakdowns at 4:15.

Genocide District- Revolutions
I gave up on bands that utilized solos in their songs in or around 1994. Quite frankly, I never really gave a shit about them, was much more prone to playing air drums than air guitar, and never really liked Van Halen. Thus, the endless conversations about who was the best lead guitarist always bored the tits off me, and I'd try to turn the conversation to something useful, like "would you rather be chased by a T-Rex or an M1 Abrams tank?" That, I felt, was a far better use of everyone's time. In spite of all that, I find myself liking Genocide District, in large part likely due to their name, but they're so fucking brutal i can forgive them their stupid fucking guitar solos, which likely include gratuitous use of rope as well. Mash together Black Tongue and Thy Art Is Murder with the guitarist and his stupid fucking rope and you get Genocide District. Can't hate on that shit.

Bandcamp

Unit 731- Res Ipsa Loquitor

Picking up pretty much exactly where Shattered Realm and Built Upon Frustration left off years ago, we have Unit 371. Their breakdown construction is slightly more refined, but this band is about little more than starting a break with a brutal line and then inspiring people to beat each others' guts onto the floor at shows. If you're curious about the name of the album, it seems to be a catch all for the theme of the album, which is that people in Western society deserve the shitty treatment they get by the moneyed/landed elite because they're all bleating sheep who accept their fate without a fight. I doubt, however, that any of you find yourselves giving a shit. Like me, I'd imagine you guys are not looking for complexity of topic and song structure in the gym- you're on the hunt for brutality, and these motherfuckers live up to their moniker.

Bandcamp

Vow Of Hatred

VOH is a pretty much entirely unknown band, but I love the balls off this song- toughguy hardcore with a cross between Shattered Realm's original vocals and the Hoods' former vocalist Benny, plus digital bass booms and lyrics that consist of almost nothing but threats. They're working on a new album, so check this shit out and if you like it get over to their Facebook and like their shit so they actually cut a full fucking album rather than releasing yet another 4 song EP.

Facebook

Path To Misery- Disarmament

Path to Misery should suit those of you who love old Earth Crisis, like Trash Talk, and need something fucking hard in your life. they definitely bring the brutality, and given that the band's members read like a resume of every badass bad to ever come out of Pittsburgh it's no fucking wonder. Put aside your skepticism that vegetarians can come correct- every now and again one can emerge from the much and bring it fucking hard. These guys take that hardness ten steps further with an EP that makes you consider renting a backhoe for the bodies this thing might inspire you to create.

Bandcamp

Sworn Vengeance- ...And With This Hammer Of Vengeance
I think I've related the story more than once, but I have been a fan of Sworn Vengeance since I discovered them in a tiny record shop in San Diego in 2001. Unfortunately, the band folded shortly after I discovered them, leaving me sadly bereft of music from a band that consistently goes harder than a foot fetishist's dick in the shoe section of Charlotte Rousse. Then, out of nowhere, the guitarist of the band emailed me that he was a fan, and the dude actually rocked a CnP shirt in promo pics for the band's new album. In any event, you shouldn't just support this bad because their music would provide a nice soundtrack to a Mad Max style apocalypse or because they're CnP fans- you should support them because if you don't I might find out where you live and then I come to your house, see? And I beat down your door with a fucking baseball bat! And, then I make a bonfire with the furniture, maybe roast that Golden Retriever, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, then eat it! And then I'm coming upstairs, fuckface, and I'm gonna grab you by your Spiderman pjs, and then I'm gonna take your dumbass iPad and cram it up your tight ass before I fuck your girlfriend into a coma if you do not. Do we have an understanding?

Bandcamp
Best Band Shirt Ever

Music On The Lighter Side...

Dangerkids- Collapse
I realize that some of you are likely about to toss your laptop in the trash at this recommendation, but I give exactly zero fucks. Some of us actually get laid and want to split the difference between the shit you hear on Octane (it's a satellite radio station, foreigners) and music more our style. Dangerkids should fit that bill- a little dancy, very reminiscent of Linkin Park's old stuff (which was actually good, you crotchety, unwashed, metalhead elitists). Not a bad album to have in your back pocket in just in case- it'd certainly bet better than listening to Mumford and Sons, may they burn for all eternity.

Bookiwooks

Angeldust Apocalypse by Jeremy Robert Johnson
One of my favorite methods of conveying an idea in prose is the short sotyr. Done well, the author always leaves you wanting more, and your mind spirals off into alternate universes at random points throughout your day as you revisit a good short story over and over. Provided that alternate universe is the Hell universe featured in the film Event Horizon, that's exactly what happens in Angeldust Apocalypse. Tight out of the gate, Johnson's writing is dripping with the kind on intense insanity you'd only find in the darkest bowels of an insane asylum, but it's overlaid with such a feeling of normalcy that you honestly wonder if you, not he, is the fucked up on the reader/author relationship. Though they're not all gems, his reasoning behind writing what he has is almost as interesting as the stories themselves, and a couple of those stories will stick with you indefinitely. Definitely worth the price of admission.

The Blue Blazes By Chuck Wendig
I honestly cannot think of a person to whom this book would not appeal- it's equal parts mob wars, pulp noir, HP Lovecraft, and Larry Correia's Monster Hunters series. I've no idea if this guy plans to make this into a series, but he fucking better. This book is the balls.

Suffer the Flesh by Monica J. O'Rourke
Don't let the description on Amazon fool you- fans of the Your Fat Is Your Fault series will love this. Abducted off the streets after nominally accepting admission to a fat camp, a chubby broad is raped and tortured until she is skinny. It's unfortunately not much more kinky than my average Saturday night, but it's still a fun read and might give you your own ideas for shenanigans. Imagine 50 Shades Of Grey, only with actual BDSM, a chubby broad, and none of the lovey-dovey bullshit.

Mega Moobie Muffins

American Mary
It's hard to know exactly how to describe this movie. It's dark, and it's gory, but I wouldn't precisely call it a horror film- irt's really more of a thriller, I think. In any event, this is a wildly original movie about a chick who, broke and having been taken advantage of by her professors, so she starts moonlighting in torture for a titty bar owner who for some reason has a need for a personal torturer. From there, she becomes a surgeon for people who want extreme body modifications, and the entire thing is as bizarre as it is hot. If you like it, you might want to check out Dead Hooker in a Trunk, which is the directors' first film and was also pretty surreal and awesome.

Frankenstein's Army
I can't say I was disappointed with this movie- I was just wholly unprepared for how unrelentingly bleak, dark, and gross this movie was. It was perhaps more disturbing than House of 1000 Corpses when I first saw taht, given that I was expecting something a bit lighter. The entire reason I saw this film was because I've been pumped for years to see Worst Case Scenario, a movie that died in development hell only to resurrected as Frankenstein's army. You'll note, looking at the trailer for WCS, that the constumes are exactly the same, and I'm sure much of whatever the original moive was to be is the same. If I had to guess, I'd imagine that bringing his baby into the light of day was such a shitty, laborious, painful process that Raaphorst just dropped the fun aspects of the original and set out to show how truly horrible humanity can actually be (and his conception of horrible and mine are apparently MILES apart). In any event, it's a cool fucking movie, if bleaker than Paris Hilton's future life after 50.

Booty might be banned by the USAPL for raising test levels unnaturally.

The rant blog is almost done, and will be followed by an article on managing women's hormones for lifting, the crazybells article (finally), and the story of my exploding bicep at the Olympia. New site launches this weekend at www.chaosandpain.com for all of your supplement and merch needs!!!! the blog will remain, lest you guys fly into a panic. They'll be two separate ventures.

LIKE THIS SHIT ON FACEBOOK OR I'M PUTTIN' PEOPLE IN BODY BAGS!

After nearly a year of testing, groundwork, begging for money, getting fucked over by overzealous Christian printing companies, and fighting with every private label supplement manufacturer on the planet about dosing and ingredients, the products have finally see the light of day. For those of you who've wanted to check out the blog at work and couldn't, I'll be reposting my shit, PG-13 style, on that site, and we'll have contributions from other authors as well. Alex Viada (the guy who eviscerated Kiefer), Sin Leung, Talia Vandoren, Wayne Banks (my business partner), and Grimmtano (a buddy of mine who's pretty fucking funny) will all be posting shit there for your reading pleasure, and we'll be adding authors as we grow. Right now, we've got our fat burner Cannibal Inferno on sale, plus all new shirt designs. Cannibal Ferox, our brutal new preworkout, drops in two weeks.

Click the images to check that shit out!

"Crazier than that?" you say? Ok, maybe not crazier than that, but still pretty fucking crazy.

Some months ago I realized that my bench press should be, though did not seem to be, the easiest of my lifts to improve in a hurry. For the life of me, I could not figure out why I sucked at the bench- just that I did. Part of my problem, it seemed, was the fact that I despise benching, and when I do multiple heavy sessions of bench every week the tendinitis in my elbows flares up and anything I do pressing-wise sucks for a while. Additionally, it seemed that every single failure on bench press occurred in the bottom quarter of the lift, as is the case with most raw lifters. It's rare you see a person fail at the lockout of the bench press, unless that person has pointedly neglected training their arms. If that's the case, the prescription for fixing their bench should be handing someone nearby a tack hammer and having them beat the shitty bench with it about the face, neck, and head until they cease respiration, because they're too stupid to deserve to live.

An aside: There seems to be a never-ending spate of people decrying "vanity" lifts as useless. THIS JUST IN: Almost any time you lift a weight, it's useful. The guys who focus on vanity lifts definitely out bench the pussies talking shit in the corner while "skwatting ATG, bro" with 135 lbs. like they're some sort of mythical gods of the weight room. I'm not suggesting you should start squatting on a bosu ball, but for fuck's sake think before you start preaching bullshit on the internet like you're a modern day weightlifting Socrates. I'm looking at you, endless stream of pussies decrying people curling in the squat rack in spite of the fact that half of you would fold up like wet origami under the bar if you tried to squat the weight being curled.

As I'm doing this wildly uncommon bit of introspection, one thing stood out at me- I needed to bench more. Because I hate benching so much, however, and invariably end up doing naught but singles without a spotter, which simply exacerbates my elbow tendinitis and makes overhead pressing painful, I decided reps were the answer. "But", I thought to myself, "I fucking despise doing reps. Like, more than Hitler hated the Jews. More than Pol Pot hated people who could read. More than Stalin hated people without mustaches. More than the Westboro Baptist church hates logic, dignity, and self-respect." That left me in a bit of a pickle- either I was going to have to do something I hated with the passion of Lindsay Lohan's infested, fiery crotch, or I was going to have to find a different route.

Then, it occurred to me- I should do the dumbest fucking thing of which I could think for the bench. Something so incomprehensible and inexplicable that I couldn't help being amused by it. I started doing neutral grip barbell floor presses with chains. Those were great, and helped with my explosion from around my sticking point, but I felt like I could get crazier. I looked over at the bench and thought, what about a fat bar with chains? I tried that, and enjoyed it- the fat bar kept my bar path perfect, because if you get your bar path wrong with a fat bar, that shit is going to roll out of your hands and either crush your pelvis or smash your face into a bloody pulp. That got me driving the bar hard up in a straight line, rather than back toward the rack as I usually did. Chains, however, are a tool for geared lifters with bulletproof bench shirts and less muscle than you'd see on your average twink. They're not useful for raw lifters other than a monotony breaker, or in the event they feel like emulating Branch Warren and using them for dips (which I think is about as fucking retarded as the sound of deaf people arguing, but to each their own).

Thus, I looked for something else, and what I came up with was something I didn't know had been done before, but as it happens, there really is nothing new under the sun. In an effort to make the bench press as absurd as possible and put the maximum amount of stress of my weak point (which is most raw lifters' weak point), I hung kettlebells off of the fat bar with resistance bands. Frankly, I thought it was hilarious enough to continue doing, and then was informed that this idiocy actually has a name- Crazybells.

When I came to that realization, it occurred to me that this method of training was pure fucking genius. Physiologically, bands adjust the force curve to make the lift much harder than it would normally be, plus they stress the dogshit out of your ligaments, tendons, and the entire cast of supporting muscles. Basically, it'd be as if Mike Tyson had decided to take up Crossfit at the peak of his career and had his entire entourage take up MMA, forced overeating, steroids, and powerlifting, all in an effort to roll up a whole nation's army in a street fight. The ability to handle much greater loads with far greater stability when you're using crazybells occurs because the load is increased to Oprah-in-winter-bulking-phase levels in the bottom position (where you leverages are the poorest), and decreased where you leverages are the best because of the rebound of the bands and bells from your drive skyward, even though the instability of the lift is vastly increased at the top so you end up looking like someone with Parkinson's trying to balance a clay pot on your hands in the middle of a hurricane. In the end, your muscular activation is greatly increased throughout the lift (Kohler), but the potential for injury is reduced because the load is most unstable at your strongest point.

Adding to all of that massive goodness is my inclusion of the fat bar, which adds a lot of muscular tension in addition to training you to use the most efficient bar path. The muscular tension addition occurs because of something Pavel Tsatsouline refers to as "irradiation":

"It seems preposterous to a bodybuilder that clenching your cheeks and bracing your abs will strengthen your grip, but that's the way your body works. What I teach is just the opposite of isolation. Isolation is impossible anyway. There is something called irradiation.

Whenever you intelligently contract other muscles — your glutes, your abs, your diaphragm, and if you're working the upper body, your grip — you automatically increase the intensity of the contraction of the target muscles" (Shugart)

The Exercise Itself
This isn't fucking brain surgery, people. You loop the band through the kettle bell handle (and you can sub 25 lb plates if you don't have kettlebells), slide that fucker on the inside of the bar, and then put your plate weights on the outside if you're not suffering from brain damage or some mental disorder that causes you to spend an inordinate amount of time doing shit that's not lifting while they're in the gym. Loading and unloading the bands every time you want to change plate weight is stupid. From there, it's touch and go bench. Do not pause. If you pause, you obviate the entire point of the movement because you're not taking advantage of the extra weight provided by the stretch at the bottom. Here's a video showing you Talia's first attempt at crazybells (which she now loves) and a couple of my heavier sets. I think I ended up with about 325 in bar and kettlebell weight for three, which is maybe 25 lbs less than I could do at that point with a dead weight bar, to give you an idea of the loading protocols.

The way I structure my benching using these is thusly- I have one ultra-heavy day and one goofy day.

Ultra Heavy Day
Work up to a weight I can double for at least 5 sets, then carry on with singles until I have to dump the weight in the catches. This means I'm benching for about an hour with 30-90 second rests.

Goofy Day
5-10 sets of 3-5 reps with as much weight as I can handle for 3-5 reps. I stick with 30-90 second rests and just go until I can't. Afterwards, I do a bunch of face pulls and rope pushdowns.

The key, as you can see in the video, is to fucking EXPLODE out of the bottom. This is going to get rid of that nasty stall nearly everyone has at the bottom of their heavy benches. Stick with these and they will bear fruit like no assistance work you've ever seen, ridiculous-looking or otherwise. I would imagine it bears saying, as I know that some of you are going to bemoan your lack of a fat bar, that you can get Fat Gripz. You won't have the benefit of using a non-rotating dead bar, but you will get the irradiation effect. Thus, they're worth the $35.

Now, quit your' bitching about your shitty bench and start benching like a goofball to get that shit poppin'.

Did someone order the thickness entree?

Source:
Kohler JM, Flanagan SP, Whiting WC. Muscle activation patterns while lifting stable and unstable loads on stable and unstable surfaces. J Strength Cond Res. 2010 Feb;24(2):313-21.

Shugart, Chris. The Evil Russian Speaks: Part 1. An Interview with Pavel Tsatsouline. T-Nation. 5 Apr 2001. Web. 22 Oct 2013. http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/sports_body_training_performance_interviews/the_evil_russian_speaks_part_1

Clearly, no one who's familiar with this blog could possibly be unfamiliar with the ketogenic diet, about which I've written extensively. Though I've detailed it in all of its myriad forms and outlined my personal methods for its use in the Apex Predator Diet series, I've neither tried nor considered doing a traditional ketogenic diet. My reasons for this are mostly logical and partly just a concession to the fact that eating nothing but meat gets fucking boring after a while, but in the end I'd never found enough evidence compelling enough to get me to consider trying a TKD any moreso than I would start taking TKD lessons at the local karate dojo in an effort to learn "self-defense". That is, until now. Meet Jamie Caporosso, a psychotic who gave up pizza for an entire year just because fuck pizza. I'd been waiting for his follow up reply to post this badboy, but I'm awaiting input from a collaborator on another blog series and so I figured I'd just ppost this bitch so we can debate the shit amongst ourselves.

While I know a little about you from checking out your website, would you mind filling in my readers on who you are, critical stats, favorite porn star, and whatever else you think is pertinent?

My name is Jamie Caporosso, I have been a competitive Drug Free powerlifter for over 20 years. I have lifted both equipped and RAW. I have ranked pretty high equipped back in the day when Powerlifting USA used to post the top 100. I have also dabbled in some strongman competitions and recently started adding in CrossFit for conditioning. I have a BS in Clinical Laboratory Science, minor in biology from the University of Michigan. I run the blog Paleo for Power with my training partner Darilyn Doddy. Porn Star? I used to really like Chasey Lane back in the day. No real favorites now.

I had only heard of Chasey Lain from the Bloodhound Gang song "Ballad of Chasey Lain", but I'll go ahead and approve this message. So, from what I gather from your site, you're at least somewhat affiliated with Crossfit, and one would assume from the name of your site you at least started out as a paleo diet advocate. Upon closer inspection, it looks like you're a powerlifter who keto diets. Did you start out going one way and switch midstream?

Yeah, As a matter of fact I am opening a Crossfit gym, PFPCrossfit, with my training partner Darilyn Doddy. I used to make fun of it. Then I tried it. I loved it. I found a bunch of new ways to push my self... not just get stronger. Now I had speed, flexibility, endurance, coordination, agility etc.

I started out with just standard paleo. Now I practice what I call keto-paleo, (book coming next year). I was actually very anti-paleo in the beginning as I was programmed by some very good marketing as well as being misinformed. I’ll try and Cliff's Notes this for you as to how I got started with paleo. It was around the time my daughter was born (She’ll be 6 Oct 26th, 2013). I was taking a long hard look at my mortality. I wanted to be strong and healthy. In a yearly physical with my doctor, he looked at me and said you know there is a direct correlation between belly fat and heart disease. I was like "what?" He knew I was a big strong powerlifter. Why would he say that? I was really close to 250 lbs at 5'11". Well, I made a decision to drop some weight. I started looking at bodybuilder diets. It made sense to me. That’s what they do. Lose fat. Why not utilize their knowledge?

They seem to know a thing or two about being lean.

In a conversation with a friend of mine he said that it sounded like my real goal was not only weight loss but more interested in optimal health. Yeah, OK, I am. If you want to perform at your best you should be as healthy as you can possibly be. Turned me on to a book called Neanderthin. As far as I know the first published book on the idea of a paleo diet or as I like to say now, “A Natural Human Diet” After that I read and read and read. Until one day I decided to lean into it. Weight continued to drop off but more importantly the healthy kicked in. My asthma went away, my arthritis went away, my blood work turned completely around and I got stronger.

Now for switching to keto was a byproduct of researching and realizing the biology these bodybuilders were doing to get lean. Didn’t make sense that they eat a huge ass sweet potato/or oats with a huge glycemic load (not glycemic index, they are different things) then spend two hours on a step mill to burn through the sugar to get to the fat burning. Then a post workout carb load??? With a slow digesting Carbohydrate? Why not a fasted one? So you can get your sugar and get your insulin back down instead of dragging it out for hours.

It just made more sense to go into nutritional ketosis, then use paleo criteria to avoid all the anti-nutrients, especially with the performance increase I read about in Phinney's book. I have a few posts on this on my blog. I could type all damn day on the subject. One of our most popular posts is “Stop Carb Loading! There's a better way!” I recommend that to everyone interested in nutritional ketosis.

I'm assuming Pauline Nordin has read Neanderthin. Maybe not. Thong.

You and I are pretty much the only two people on the planet who have actually read Neanderthin. As I understand it, it's been out of print forever, but I would contend that it is pretty much THE seminal paleo book. If you combine that with Cordain's academic work, every bit of information you need to know about why paleo dieting is the balls is right at your fingertips. Unfortunately, most people (ATTENTION REDDITORS) either make up their own version of a paleo diet or read the watered down, for housewives only version. It's not the original paleo book, by the way- a much shittier book preceded it, though the name escapes me at the moment. Back to paleo, what would you say are the two or three must have paleo books? Down to the meat, sans potatoes- you've been in ketosis for half a year, correct? Take us through why you decided to try this, and why you're doing a traditional ketogenic diet in lieu of a cyclical ketogenic diet or a targeted ketogenic diet.

I read a book by Dr. Stephen Phinney and Jeff Volek called. The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance. The book made a lot of sense to me. He mostly worked with endurance athlete but the biology seemed to be very applicable for strength training. He research has shown that unless you get a full 4-6 weeks of nutritional ketosis you truly don’t get keto adapted. You won’t reach the full benefit. He says it’s like kinda going to Hawaii but stopping partway- you end up drowning in the Pacific.

Not pictured: an "athlete" with the same dietary requirements I have.

Seems like a bit more of a ketogenic dieting book than a paleo diet book, but that works. I've posted four or five useful paleo books in the past, so that's just another to drop on top of the "to read" pile. I didn't realize Phinney had written a book- I think every decent keto study I've ever cited had him as an author though. I'll have to snag it when I grab this ridiculous Strength of Samson book I've been meaning to review. Back to your comments, though, there are quite a few authors (all of them, I think) that contend that once one's adapted to a ketogenic diet, they enter ketosis far more quickly than 4-6 weeks. This is why they always recommend an initial two weeks to a month of keto dieting and then keto runs of about a week. I'm assuming Phinney's basing his recommendation on his work with testing cyclists on a ketogenic diet, but that seems to be too small a sample size to really base an entire dietary theory upon. In any event, what does your typical macro breakdown look like? I've seen the macros of your partner and they seem very low on protein and very high on fats.

Lots of fat, moderate protein, and low carbohydrates. I’m usually around 165 grams of protein, 275g from fat, 20g from carbs.

If this fucking guy needs 35% protein, I damn sure do.

Jesus fuck, your macros in no way resemble my own. 165 g of protein? Why so little? Expand on how you arrived at this nutrient profile, if you would. If you're curious about my horror at this, the basic way I structure my diet is double my bodyweight in grams of protein, then halve that for fat and keep my carbs under 30g a day. That ends up not matching my total caloric intake exactly, but that's how I do it as a general rule. In practice, I generally am 220-300g fat, 374-434 protein, and 20g of carbs or less which puts me at around 55% fat, 40% protein, and 5% fat. You're rocking more like 20% protein, 75% fat, and 5% carbs with what appears to be tragically low levels of calories. [Ed- he didn't respond to this, so I'll just fill you in on my thoughts here]. I'm not terribly clear on why this would be, because the highest fat diets in the paleo world are those of the Inuit, and even they eat at least 35% protein. As such, that seems quizzically low.

Nevertheless, I personally have not experimented with a traditional ketogenic diet much, save for a couple of months in college. Instead, I've been following a cyclical ketogenic diet for the majority of the last 5 years, with brief breaks for sanity's sake. How in the hell are you managing the tedium of a traditional ketogenic diet? Aren't you bored fucking stiff with it? Additionally, I find that if I stay ketogenic too long that either my appetite disappears or it becomes unmanageable. Have you encountered that at all?

Eh, once you get over the fact that food is fuel and not entertainment it’s pretty easy. As soon as I hit that 6 week mark I feel like Superman. Energy high, recovery is fast, and I lean out quickly. Basically, I look and feel like an action figure. When I hit that 6 month mark, all of my enzymes are supposed to be in full force and that’s when I noticed a big difference. I do plan on going off it in October as it's my birthday and we are taking a family trip to Disney. From now on though, I really think I’ll stay in ketosis from Jan 1st-Oct 31st just for the health and performance reasons. Halloween is my birthday and I'll probably just stay standard paleo until the holidays are over for convenience's sake.

So, there you have it- it is possible to keto diet for insanely long stretches without dying or losing all of your gainz. In July, Jamie hit a PR bench at age forty, 25 weeks into his ketogenic experiment, and seemed to thrive off the diet. I have my issues with the structure of his diet, but if nothing else this shows that there is more than one way to skin every cat. If you want to get into contact with Jamie Caporosso, grab some keto/paleo recipes, or get step by step instructions on how to build shit like plyoboxes, check out his site Paleo for Power.

See, kids, she might not look like she's plotting your death... but she might have already poisoned your Diet Coke and the coquettish look is hiding her irritation that you're still drawing breath.

Wimminz be crazy. Everyone knows this, from the guys who date/marry them to the women themselves, who will freely admit to anyone they're not fucking that four out of seven days of the week they're crazier than a bag full of wet cats and within seconds of tearing their own face off and burning down the building in which you're having dinner simply because the evil little estrogen-filled bedbugs in their brains told them so. I have come to realize over the years, however, that this is not simply a byproduct of having a luscious set of tits and a welcoming vagina- it's actually due to the fact that estrogen is, for all intents and purposes, crazy juice so potent Timothy Leery wouldn't even have touched it in his most acid-filled state. Let me repeat that- estrogen is the reason that one guy I know has literally had his house burned down, his credit card stolen and used to buy bomb parts, been stabbed repeatedly in the dead of night while sleeping, and gotten the clap. Well, maybe the last one was the fault of testosterone, but now we're quibbling. Oh, and my buddy? Those were three different women. Our experiences thus led us to institute a policy as roommates that if one of us yelled "I LOVE IT!" at the top of our lungs, the other was to kick the fucking bedroom door in and bash the broad with a ball bat if anything appeared life threatening. We had to replace both door frames and doors when we moved out.

Casey Jones embodies the spirit of James quite well.

Worse yet- estrogen seems to be the cause behind a lot of bad workouts for women in the gym and a lot of shitty experiences at meets. Lots of research has gone into the subject in an attempt to determine what exactly is at the root of women's periodic issues on the platform, and the results of those studies are as interesting as they are contradictory... much like the best kind of women.

The good news is, however, that this condition is, in fact, manageable through diet, training, herbal regimens, and exogenous testosterone.

[Because I lack a vagina and might just be talking out of my ass after reading a bunch of science, I enlisted the help of Nuprin to give a female perspective. Thus, she'll be interjecting periodically.]

Nuprin: In my experience, swinging wildly between suicidal and super happy is no picnic. But consistent lifting and regular eating has managed to not only quell my mood swings, but also regulate my cycle (cool, huh?).

The bad news is that I probably pissed off so many women with the first paragraph of this article that the news may never get all that far past my fingertips.

Ladies, if you're still with us and have not ragequit the article to whip up a batch of anthrax to send my way, allow me to explain: there are three ways in which estrogen seems to fuck with female lifters- estrogen/testosterone imbalances, estrogen-cocktail birth control, and menstruation. I'm not going to tell you guys that have all of the answers, but as this shit is rarely, if ever, discussed, it seems it bears some discussion here, both because it will keep more of my friends from getting stabbed and because I'm fairly certain chicks are sick to death for being dominated by their endocrine systems.

It would be far too simple to state that estrogen is "the Debbil" and that women should just all start jacking test to solve all of life's problems. While exogenous testosterone has been and continues to be used to treat everything from depression to low libido/sexual dysfunction to impaired cognitive function to impaired cardiovascular function to poor body composition (Davis, Davis), I'm not going to suggest that women start popping Anavar like Tic-Tacs every time they catch a case of the nutties (though I know of more than one chick who does to fairly good result). Maintaining higher test levels is essential to dominating on the platform and the bedroom, and we'll address how to do so in a bit, but the bigger issue fucking up females when they hit the gym isn't so much testosterone deficiency as "estrogen dominance".

Femdom does not count as "estrogen dominance".

Though it's something of a hotly contested condition, doctors who have identified issues of estrogen dominance have found a massive imbalance in estrogen versus progesterone and testosterone. When such an imbalance occurs, it leads to a massive range of unfun bullshit with which chicks are familiar, ranging from "an increase in PMS symptoms, uterine fibroids, and endometriosis, as well as symptoms including allergies, decreased libido, fatigue, fibrocystic breasts, headaches, infertility, irritability, to fat gain around the abdomen and on the top of the thighs" (Lucille).

While I've never had the grave misfortune to experience the Santa Claus-sized bag of hellish nonsense that is menstruation, estrogen dominance seems to provide year-round enjoyment of PMS without any of the wild-eyed horniness, bleeding, or eventual relief of a period. As we all know, if a man is going to dance with a demon, he should end up with his red wings at some point, and estrogen dominance seems to spit squarely in the eye of that concept and simply turn everyone's life into a non-stop Shark Week with no reprieve.

Luckily, there is a way to treat this issue- simply raise your test levels like you're a member of the Esoteric Order of Dagon trying to raise Cthulu from the depths of the ocean. There are a variety of ways to do this and they have varying levels of success. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to train your ass off and eat a meat and fat-rich diet, as cholesterol is a precursor to testosterone. That, however, probably has the mildest effect. Next up, you could try taking a variety of vitamins/minerals and prohormones aimed at raising testosterone levels and balancing estrogen and progesterone levels. For this, I would recommend a combination of DHEA, ZMA, and vitamin C every day in the following dosages:

DHEA- 50mg-100mg (this dosage has been shown to dramatically raise test levels in women and alleviate or eliminate depression)
ZMA- something with at least 30mg of zinc. ZMA is a great sleep aid, and zinc in particular raises libido and test in women (Poliquin). Magnesium has also been shown to raise the testosterone levels of athletes (Cinar), and B6 seems to work synergistically with the aforementioned two (Simpson).
Vitamin C- 1.5g Vitamin C helps reduce the enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen in women, which is crucial if you're going to kill the estrogenic demon residing in your endocrine system (Simpson).

Another route, of course, is the "prohormone" (read: designer steroid) route, or just straight up steroids. I've know a number of chicks who have done this with courses of action ranging from insane recklessness to ridiculous overcautiousness and have yet to see them anything but happier as a result, with none of the masculinizing side effects. That's not to say I am recommending it, but Anavar or Winstrol would not be the worst course of action to take, either. For those of you who think I am insane/irresponsible/an asshole (I concede to that), doctors have been prescribing anything from oral to topical to injectible testosterone to women to treat hypoactive libido and depression since the late 1930s (Abdallah, Dyett).

20 mg of var a day will not turn you into this, honestly.

The next bit of Downton Abbey-style estrogen-induced horror is the effect of birth control on strength in women. This is honestly something I had never considered, because being a remarkably self-centered man, I just thought it was something women did to avoid making sex about as much fun as showering with your socks on by including a hazmat suit for my cock. When the issue was raised, however, it seemed to make a great deal of sense- no lifter is jacking estrogen to get their squat PR up. As it happens, birth control does appear to have a profoundly negative effect on muscular strength. This does not appear to be necessarily due to the fact that they're supplemental estrogen, however, but because most birth control pills contain antiandrogens to suppress test levels as the estrogen rises. This creates a situation much like what I described above, and one study showed that the inclusion of the antiandrogens (most notably cyproterone-acetate) was roughly as useful for gaining fat free mass and strength as a diet of naught but mayonnaise while doing yoga twice a week (Ruzić).

I blame this shitfest of a show completely on estrogen. This show is so boring I wanted to drown myself in a dive bar urinal in the 10 seconds it took me to find this picture. It's so boring that it actually makes me reconsider my stance on the Golden Girls. It's so boring that I... fuck. The show's too fucking boring to joke about. Someone firebomb the BBC.

Other studies have shown that irrespective of the inclusion of antiandrogens, birth control doubles the recovery time women must endure between heavy weight training sessions (Savage), though it has no effect on recovery from endurance training (Thompson). As if that were not enough, here is the coup de grace for worthwhile vaginal sex with serious lifters- birth control, no matter it's formulation, decreases free testosterone levels in women taking it by an average of 61%. That means you're 61% worse at assimilating protein, creating fat-free mass, staying lean, and being an aggressive, world dominating, bad ass motherfucker. Not only that, but as birth control reduces women's libidos and impairs their ability to orgasm, they're not even getting the testosterone boost or the dopamine and serotonin dump that comes with orgasm, they're even more likely to be frazzled, pissed off, and unready to train (Women's Health).

Hot until you realize that's your blood because you told her to "get her fucking head in the game" after she missed a lift.

Thus, not only does birth control virtually guarantee that chicks who take it are going to spend an extra 15 minutes a day picking out their workout attire because everything makes them look fat, but when they finally drag their asses into the gym they'll have less energy, and their pre-PR psyche-up will blow dogshit, no matter how hard their lifting partners try to pump them the fuck up, because they lack the necessary testosterone to harness the beautiful, white hot aggression that comes with high levels of testosterone.

The great irony here is that vaginas are basically humongous vacuum-style testosterone receptors, and having a guy hose down their cervix with cum actually raises their testosterone levels significantly, which is part of the reason doing so is so pleasant for everyone involved. Tragically, the only thing worse for your gainz are babies, so you really have to weigh your options before hopping on the good foot to do the bad thing.

Nuprin: A stack of B12 and Iron has almost always gotten me OK enough to train, along with plenty of water.

Now that we've covered all that, all we have left is the dreaded shark week, which is pretty much a horrible time for everyone involved and for broads in particular. Nuprin and I will make sure we arm you will of the knowledge we can in regards to managing and mastering training during shark week and why one should never, ever compete during shark week, if for no other reason than to keep you from resigning yourself or your girl to the red tent.

Sources:
Abdallah RT, Simon JA. Testosterone therapy in women: its role in the management of hypoactive sexual desire disorder. Int J Impot Res. 2007 Sep-Oct;19(5):458-63. Epub 2007 Jun 21.

Barnhart KT, Freeman E, Grisso JA, Rader DJ, Sammel M, Kapoor S, Nestler JE. The effect of dehydroepiandrosterone supplementation to symptomatic perimenopausal women on serum endocrine profiles, lipid parameters, and health-related quality of life. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 1999 Nov;84(11):3896-902.

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DISCLAIMER: You demanded it, so you're getting it. Behold a heavily edited version of my original rant against strength coaches. I doubt this will make sense to anyone, but worst case you'll laugh your ass off because I am obviously mentally unbalanced.

In spite of displaying more conceit than you'd likely see out of college sorority girl who's spent more money on plastic surgery in a year than most people spend on their first home, I required a small amount of external motivation to achieve the proper mindset to pull 606 and 672 easily as hell. That motivation didn't come from a person or a chemical, but rather in the form of the song containing the lyrics I've got in the first image in this article. That song, which has facilitated every PR since RUM, it is the hardest, angriest, most hateful, bile-spitting, life-destroying, soul-crushing, death-defying, fetus-aborting, friendship-ruining, life-affirming fucking song in the history of written music.

Beethoven would have wept at the brutal simplicity of this song, and at the cutting edge of its message. This song, Posi Holocaust, is my life's anthem... it defines me in ways I could not with my own words. As ridiculous as this might sound, this song resonates so hard with me I will not listen to it unless I am attempting a max single because it fills me with so much rage and bile I can't be around the Normies who populate the everyday world.

Onto the subject at hand- the thing that's been burning a fucking hole in my gut like I swallowed a mouthful of magma with the belief I could channel the power of a volcano if I did so. I've not, as I realize I needn't injest toxic and fatally hot magma to erupt like Mt. Vesuvius and lay waste to everything in my path. What lies in my path, then, are strength coaches. Yes, strength coaches- innocuous, banal, seemingly irrelevant people of whom there is such a surfeit on the internet that naming them hardly seems necessary and would take more time than makes sense. Lest you wonder, I hardly consider myself a coach. I'm more of a consultant. I identify problems, provide solutions, give a lifters a direction and shove him that way. Just as I do not fancy myself a coach, I do not believe I am responsible for the results gained from the programs I provide or the fixes I relate, any more than a mechanic takes credit for the fact that a nearly new AMG Merc smokes a BMW M3 off the line. I simply facilitate, and take no responsibility for the results- the results lie solely in the hands of the people for whom I provide guidance.

Your average "strength coach" in build and utility.

Of late, I've seen any number of coaches taking credit for the actions of the lifters in their stable. I'm not talking about guys like Glenn Pendlay, who've earned the right but would sooner take credit for the invention of the internet than Tom Sroka's overhead press numbers, but guys few people know about and whom the world ultimately would not care if they immediately ceased to be. They like to claim responsibility for the feats of the lifters "under" them, in spite of the fact that the lifter is the person who did all the fucking work. This, I feel, is part of a greater phenomena whereby people believe that if they talk about something enough, they have done it. That mentality, however pervasive, insidious, disgusting, pathetic, worthless, shameful, and ignoble as it may be, needs to be rectified with nothing less than a hefty dose of cyanide and probably better with a neutron bomb.

You picked the weights for a lifter who broke a world record? Congratulations. You're a good fucking guesser. You did NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL. Not only are you so fucking worthless your parents likely weep themselves to sleep at night with the knowledge they produced a pompous dipshit who'd be better off beating himself to death with a claw hammer than offering other people advice, but you're detracting from the efforts of a lifter far better than you. FAR. BETTER. THAN. YOU.

I live alone. I train alone. I'll win the title alone.

If you don't recognize that quote, it doesn't surprise me at all. It's Clubber Lang from Rocky III declaring he needs no one. No matter how much you think to the fucking contrary, your lifters need you that much. The best you can do is point out shit they're doing wrong- you're not responsible for their success. Fuck me running, you're more responsible for the stranger's cum running down the inside of your girl's thigh than you are for your "lifters" success. That's right- if you're so delusional you're taking credit for the lifts of your "lifters", I've likely cum on her cervix while you were in the bathroom at a meet. If I didn't, someone else did, because we can smell weakness and you smell fucking weak. We're not talking about my "share and share alike" ,mentality with my girls, either- we're talking about a chick who fucks the nearest male the second you turn your back because you're a shit-talking pussy who deserves to lose his girl to a better man.

If you are a coach and you're going to absurdly claim responsibility for your lifters' success, guess what, fuckface? YOU'RE ALSO RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR FAILURES. They didn't listen? Fuck you, you should have yelled louder. They had a bad day? Fuck you, you're there to make it better. They missed weight? Fuck you, you're a dogshit coach and should down yourself in a seedy porn shop's toilet. And sweet Jesus, if you are a coach who either hamstrings your lifters' progress by instilling them with the idea that they're less than they are, or YOU SUGGEST THEY SKIP AN ATTEMPT IN A MEET AND THEY'RE NOT GRAVELY INJURED, do us all a fucking favor and jump in front of a bus. A bus covered with AIDS. And cholera. Preferably one with a spiked cowcatcher on the front just to insure that you'll be maimed badly and die a slow fucking death in a shitty third world hospital or something. The next bitch who tells me that they skipped a fucking attempt at a meet and wasn't crippled with injury or illness is going to swallow a mouthful of his fucking teeth. If you're going to be that weak, dickless, spineless, and pathetic, keep that shit the fuck out of my corner- I don't need any fucking has been's or never-gonna-be's fucking with my mojo.

Witches be crazy.

This is a sport of people who are so insecure, and so bitch-made, they can't take responsibility for a fucking thing themselves. If they lose, they claim it was witchcraft, the other guy's gear, their coach's falult, their parents didn't love them, they are a compulsive masturbator because their parents didn't love them enough/too much/too helicoptery. As such, I can't really blame the coaches too fucking much because they're really just a symptom of a greater problem.

"Force and might makes right. Perhaps things shouldn’t be that way but that's the way they are. I learned to look with suspicion and hatred on everybody. As the years went on that idea persisted in my mind above all others. I figured that if I was strong enough and clever enough to impose my will on others, I was right. I still believe that to this day."
- Carl Panzram

It's not just coaches who spew their vile weakness all over the fucking internet and the platform. Practically every Facebook status update I read is a paean to being a pathetic bitch. Feel like airing your dirty laundry and your emotions on the fucking internet? DON'T. No one gives a flying fuck. If anyone did care, you'd likely be able to And for those of you who will claim they do, you're the bitch-made pussies spouting that passive aggressive bullshit in the first fucking place. Oh, and don't even get me started on the clever little not-so-cryptic, look-at-me-and-feel-sorry bullshit, weak sauce status updates begging for attention and a faux-Mongol horde of white knights to roll in and gently stroke your inner child's engorged clitorises when you post something like:

"Ever have one of those day where everything bothers you from the minute you awake? Today's one of those days."
"I'm done tired of the fights n the bs of u keepin secrets I dont wanna hurt n e more I hope you find happiness Ima stay bein single u can go do u n ima do me its betta dis way 4 both of us u kno its tru" [Sic. To the whole fucking thing and I hope they see me making fun of them and open up some veins. Remember, it's down the road, not across the street, you fucking waterhead.]
"It's so easy to make me happy and yet it's not... ponder that one for a moment."

I read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day when I was a little kid too, and you know what the moral of the fucking book is? SUCK IT THE FUCK UP, BITCH.

Unmerciful. Callous. Relentless.

It's mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.

Our entire fucking sport, and the internet at large, is crowded with pompous bitches who think their opinion is worth hearing, in spite of the fact that they're too stupid to clearly articulate their thoughts, it's highly likely that their parents don't even fucking like them, they've never had an original idea in their lives, and they're too poorly educated to provide a logical basis for the bullshit they smear all over the internet like a four year old retard fingerpainting on the wall with their own feces. Special snowflake syndrome is so fucking out of hand at this point that everyone thinks they deserve some sort of award for showing up, even when they've participated half-assedly in a sport they should have never even recognized as such. Who the fuck wants to sit through 45 minutes of handing out an goddamn trophy to every participant? Fuck- I usually skip those things and head to the bar. I'll pick up my cash later and you can keep the dumbass trophy. Oh, forgive me- I'm being disrespectful to the sport again. I might slam a bar like a fucking boss and upset someone's inner infant.

LIKE. A. BOSS.

I am the best, and I live alone, I train alone, and I will continue to win titles, alone. I need no one and require no help from anyone. When I first started competing, I didn't even wear a belt, just to prove I literally needed nothing to dominate my competition. No handlers, no advice, no support structure, no belt, nothing. All I need is me, and to be fucking consistent and fucking brutal. I'm not fucking magical. No sorcerers were involved in the production of my program. Not because I have the best training scheme ever invented- but because I do what I want, when I want, and don't fucking listen to nonsense to the contrary. Nor am I alone in this. Most people need a coach like they need a hole in the head, and they need a "program" like they need an asshole on their elbow. Instead, what they need is to nut the fuck up, quit bitching on Facebook, and lift some heavy goddamn weights until they shit blood and weep five times distilled vodka, sweat 500 mg/cc testosterone and piss growth hormone.

All those I rely on: NO ONE

Those things I depend on: NOTHING

My survival lies in my own strength

It’s power through control

Control through strength

Strength through hate

Hate through fear

Fear through displays of power

Nut the fuck up. Or don't. I honestly don't give a shit. I will just continue to sit up on high and cast down my judgements like thunderbolts from the heavens. If you're going to pretend to halfway give a shit, try to be as awesome as the picture above.

When I was wrapping up the end of the last blog in this series, I knew I had left a bunch of shit out that I really wanted to get in, but figured I'd hold off a bit before hammering you guys with more of this stuff. Alas, I can wait no longer, so here we go. First of, I figured I'd fill you guys in on what is going on with Chaos and Pain LLC. As most of you should already know, Cannibal Ferox and Inferno are both available for purchase over at www.chaosandpain.com. We had innumerable problems with the Ferox, however, and so we've found an alternate vendor for production. As such, we'r going to be launching two new products next month"

Cannibal Genius. Genius is a nootropic blend combining 40mg of noopept with a variety of other, complementary traditional nootropics and acacia rigidula for a bit of pep in your step. Time to ditch your amphetamines, because I've got that shit chumped with this fomula.
Cannibal Swole. Swole is a no-stim pump product designed to be used along or in concert with Cannibal Ferox. Frankly, I hate pump products, but I can guarantee this shit will give you a pump like you've never had before. Go here and vote for which flavor you want us to make first!

With all of that corporate shit out of the way, here are a bunch of bands, books, and movies that are guaranteed to scare off any Jehovah's Witnesses that might come calling this holiday season.

Music

Suicide Silence- The Black Crown
Though I liked their EP and one of Suicide Silence's songs off their first album (and I think everyone can agree that you really can't not dislike No Pity For A Coward), I found them to generally be somewhat uninspiring on the whole. To make matters worse, their second album blew, and they supported it by touring Not so with their third album, which I just discovered simply because I wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was with replacing their original singer. When MetalSucks gets excited enough to post a four second clip of the band jamming with their new singer, there has to be something to the band. The Black Crown is that something. Suicide Silence was, in my opinion, basically nu-metal repackaged as deathcore, but on this album they basically appear to have listened to Hatebreeed's Satisfaction is the Death of Desire, taken the hardcore sentiments therein, and slapped a thick, brutal layer of deathcore on top. What you end up with is some of the best fucking lifting music I've found since Annotations of an Autopsy's last EP. Not only that, but the album's diverse enough to suit whichever mood you might have when you're in the gym, be it the "fuck yeah I'm gonna lift some weights and fuck some sluts because I rule" or "I'm gonna smash every weight on Earth and burn this motherfucker to the ground when I'm done". It makes about as much sense as Robin Thicke's continued existence to attempt to draw a comparison between Suicide Silence and Bulldoze, but SS is pretty much a repackaged Bulldoze for the new century- sometimes they bring the Beatdown and sometimes they remind you to Remember Who's Strong. For the metal snobs among you, give it this song at least 25 seconds, and bear in mind (Crom help us) that it has a fucking guitar solo in it.

Last Ten Seconds Of Life- Know Your Exits and Invivo[Exvivo]
At some point in 2008 or 2009, I was the sole white person living in a ghetto as fuck apartment complex I moved into sight unseen. Around that time, I picked up Last Ten Seconds Of Life, and that album blasting out of my apartment and the occasional shirtless foray into the parking lot brandishing two sets of knucks and one or two bashed out car windows were the only thing that kept the fucking crack-dealing shitbirds from "gaffling" each other in front of my fucking window. As such, I practically shit my pants when I stumbled on their newest full length and EP, as they're both better than a K9 cop for getting gangbangers to scatter like roaches and make for an awesome soundtrack to a particularly hate-filled training session. I don't think I need to sell this band any more that. Beatdown deathcore so brutal it makes gangbangers pull up their fucking pants and pretend to read books.

Nails- Abandon All Life
Like most people (I assume, as I don't know all that many people), I go through very distinct phases with my music. I'll go through a deathcore phase, a beatdown phase, a dubstep phase, and on occasion, a grindcore/powerviolence/old school hardcore phase. You might find the latter category a bit odd, as few people would lump those three genres together, but it's my contention that what is now either characterized as grindcore or powerviolence is nothing more than the natural evolution of old school hardcore. We're not talking early 90s hardcore- we're talking Bad Brains/Minor Threat/SS Decontrol style hardcore. the kin of shit that was fast, angry, and technically proficient without being noodly. All Nails did was add better distortion and make the shit way, way, way fucking meaner. The result? Fucking stab-your-mother-in-law-with-a-rusty-screwdriver-at-Christmas-dinner-for-her-awful-reindeer-sweater amazing.

Kublai Khan- Youth War
This is for those of you who appreciate my more unhoned tastes. Kublai Khan's not a glass of red at the end of a long working day- it's a quadrupal shot of bum liquor at lunch you can't shake off. It's the chick you fucked but didn't really think was hot who keeps coming back to ruin your other romantic entanglements because she's just that much of a dirty bitch and you can't keep your dick out of her. In other words, Kublia Khan is all that is good in life, with none of the guilt. If you like Thy Art Is Murder, you're going to love Kublai Khan more than chubby, pasty, middle aged white guys with mustaches like the feeling of the inside of a young boy's anus.

Madchild- Lawnmower Man
What? Rap? Why? Well, I'll fucking tell you why. Madchild is a former member of the group Swollen Members, he combines nerdcore and horrorcore rap, and his beats are fucking sick. If you don't like either of those genres, you're likely a card carrying communist who only listens to patriotic marching music and old Propagandhi records... on vinyl, of course. When you've got lyrics like this, you can only go wrong if you only take lefts when everywhere you have to go is on the right.

"Cocaine and steroids, I don't get paranoid

You are not a gangster, you're a fuckin errand boy

Werewolf, warlord, poet and a warrior

Mad Child king, Vancouver and Victoria

These kids forfeit against war orphans

I kill often, I fill coffins

Life's still awful, I will profit

Mad shine bright like light in a socket"

Books Of Which Baphomet Would Approve

Hogg by Samuel Delany
Though I highly doubt any of you will ever read this, I thought I'd put it on your radar only because this book was so fucked up it literally took me three years to finish it. The protagonist, Hogg, is a contract rapist (yeah, people pay him and his gang to rape broads and dudes) who drags a 12 year old semi-sex-slave boy with him to participate in the festivities while he crosses the countryside raping, maiming, and killing a variety of people. If nothing else, it's worth reading just because you can say you did afterwards.

Vampires Overhead by Alan Hyder
I admit it- I generally loathe vampire books. Anne Rice, Twilight, etc, are all garbage in my book. To wit, the idea of a ravenous, blood thirsty semi-cannibal as a sexy creature of the night is simply a ridiculous subject for a book and generally ludicrous idea overall. This novel, however, written by a guy who's basically an unknown pulp writer from the 30's and takes vampires in an entirely different direction. The vampires in this book are sort of alien fire bats descend upon an unsuspecting Earth in hordes, draining every drop of moisture from people while setting everything ablaze. As such, Vampires Overhead is really more post-apocalypse than vampire novel as the vampires are totally alien creatures. If you're looking for weak soft-core porn involving pasty faced Victorian-era Eastern Europeans, look elsewhere, but if you want a great account of a fanciful apocalypse, definitely give this a read.

Invasion by Eric L. Harry
It's been a few years since I've read any of Eric L. Harry, but back in the day this guy was the king of the intelligent World War III novel. This was perhaps the best of the bunch, in which China invades the US by sea and we have to fight back to push those fuckers into the ocean. the tech in the book is believable if not currently extant, and the characters keep the story flowing. If you, like me, like a good WW3 yearn, this one will sate your appetite, as they're not really getting written much anymore.

Coming soon, more of the hormone series and a bit on how I have been training since my injury. Keep it classy, motherfuckers.

Sun Tzu, a long dead Chinaman with a penchant for murdering hookers and writing books to which still yuppies jack off, had a portion of his seminal work The Art of War in which he addressed the proper response to three basic situations in which one might find themselves:

"In difficult ground, press on; On hemmed-in ground, use subterfuge; In death ground, fight."

Though this might seem a bit cryptic, if yuppies can apply this to business, than those of us with the "meathead condition" certainly can apply it to our own lives. Should you find yourself unable to do so, you're likely to be capable of counting only to potato. In spite of that fact, I shall elucidate the meaning of my metaphor- one will find themselves encountering a number of setbacks in training, dieting, and competition, and all of those require slightly different responses. Though it's easy to forget the value of setbacks and injuries, they are actually one of the few things that will keep you progressing forward rather than lapsing into complacency and whatever other training malaise with which you might find yourself afflicted. Yes, that's correct- it is actually a good thing to plateau and get injured, all of the plaintive missives of the whiny bitches populating the interwebz notwithstanding. If one never encounters setbacks, they will never find a way to overcome them. Hilariously, the first impulse of most people is to consult with others to find a solution to their problem, as they're too fucking lazy and stupid to do it themselves.

This might be you.

It might surprise the assembled internet warriors that I never had a significant training injury until I broke a bone in my right hand and tore my left bicep in the Olympia last month. That's right- I broke a bone in my right hand because I drove the bar so hard into the ground after pulling the easiest 606 in history and then tore my bicep on my second attempt with 675. As to the former injury, there were parties at the Olympia to which I was trying to prove a point, and as I am not really a fan of the deadlift anyway, proved the efficacy of my ridiculous non-deadlifting training techniques by slamming the bar to the ground and walking away from it contemptuously. What sucked about the injuries, however, moreso than the injuries themselves, was the fact that they crippled my upper body training for about a month and left me flailing about trying to determine just what in the fuck I should be doing to keep moving forward, as I'd had my sights set on a ~1800 total at RUM and was damned if I'd see that dream go entirely up in smoke just because I participated in a meet I shouldn't have. This brought on a rather uncommon bit of introspection, and that led to the following missive on the incredible value of training setbacks. In keeping with Sun Tzu, I've divided training setbacks into three distinct categories and will outline the strategies I've used to circumvent them.

Given that Chun Li is Chinese, one would think there'd be cosplay porn with a Chinese broad it in, but it's naught but Japanese and Americans. That's almost as weird as the amount of 'shopping done to this pic.

Mountain forests, Or simply "forests", rugged steppes, marshes and fens—all country that is hard to traverse: this is difficult ground.

Everyone has the occasional training setback. It could be due to a chronic, nagging pain that you can't shake, weirdness in your personal life, midnight rape by closet golems, on any other of a thousand reasons. These are without question the easiest of the three "fuck My Life" categories I've enumerated above to resolve, as it simply requires that you identify the culprit and destroy it. Closet golems fucking up your colon nightly? Burn your house down. Significant other acting like an asshole all the time and stressing you out? Kick that motherfucker off the top of a tall building. Have a niggling "injury" hampering your training? Get deep tissue massage. If I had a nickel for every time someone came to me with an "injury" that was either immediately or almost immediately resolved by Rolfing, I'd have a bunch of nickels.

Goddamned closet golems.

I first stumbled upon this realization when I was trying to diagnose what I thought was a rotator cuff injury. After a corstisone injection had the same effect on my pain that Kevin Smith has on the average female's vaginal humidity, I started poking around in my armpit to see if I could feel an issue. What I discovered was a whole fucking pile of issues in the form of nested knots in my bicep, all of which proved extremely painful and difficult to root out, but were definitively the source of my pain. Likewise, I discovered that my knee pain was caused by tight IT bands and/or weak hamstrings, and massage again came to the rescue for that.

If the owner of this crap squats over 315 I will eat my fucking laptop.

If there is nothing in your non-training life apparently fucking with your training, you either need to try something new in the gym or try harder. The former bit would hopefully occur to most of you, but the latter bit is a concept completely lost on people under the age of 25. It seems like everyone under 25 has grown up in an environment wherein just showing up means they get some kind of award, and whereas it was the high school kids who were the go-hards, back in the day, it's the old heads running circles around the kids with abacuses and notepads and Elite EFS gear and rumble rollers and PVC pipes and bands and bells and straps and every other retarded training accouterments one might wish for. Half of these kids seem to think the key to a big bench is carrying 75 lbs of random lifting detritus into the gym in a bag bigger than they are. Oh, and per-workout nutrition. Instead, they just might want to look at the old guys and lift like they do- fucking HARD.

Ground which is reached through narrow gorges, and from which we can only retire by tortuous paths, so that a small number of the enemy would suffice to crush a large body of our men: this is hemmed in ground.

When you're hemmed in, you're basically either suffering from moderate training injuries or long plateaus. The former can be trained around, to an extent. For instance, I tried to roll through an ankle bar years ago and managed to get myself an avulsion fracture of my right ankle in the process. Docs gave me a low cast, and I promptly hobbled my ass into the gym and started squatting on it the following week. This was not a walking cast- this was a regular, rounded cast. I was going to be damned if I was going to see my squat drop simply because my ankle decided to fail me, and I continued lifting as usual. Similar injuries would be broken fingers/toes, or pulled muscles in your extremities. All of that can be trained and/or trained around. What you want to avoid is making the injury worse with your training, which seems to be one of the only two options I see assholes on Facebook taking... either they continue training in the exact same manner that got them the injury and fuck themselves up worse of they just stop training. One's stupid and the other is stupid and weak. Try not to be either.

BUT THE INTERNET TOLD ME THE LENIN-BREZHNEV 5/3/1 HYBRID WOULD PUT 48.23 OUNCES ON MY SQUAT EVERY DAY IF I INCREASED THE WEIGHT BY 12.936% WHEN THE MOON WAS FULL!!!!

Instead of doing the same old shit or nothing whatsoever, forcibly drag yourself out of whatever box-named-after-a-dead-Russian you're in and fucking do different shit. Look around your gym- there are thousands of pound of equipment at your disposal, and you can use ALL of it. Stop being a pompous ass who thinks that his/her MASSIVE 315 squat affords you the right to talk shit about the bodybuilders hammering away on machines all day long. I've seen those cats enter powerlifting meets, and the results are hilarious. In a meet a couple of years ago I saw a 200 lb kid pull 700 in a meet, and it was the second time he'd done the fucking lift. He was just really used to lifting really heavy shit at a variety of angles, and happened to have a some sort of superhuman monkey grip. The second you lock yourself into a mindset is the second you consign yourself to failure.

No, dude, I'm telling you, bodybuilders are weak because there's no carryover... oh, fuck.

Same goes for a long plateau- you're doing the wrong shit. Even the most perfectly designed program can fail miserably if you hate it, don't have the mindset to do it with the proper amount of vim and vigor, or you have to cut corners to make it work for you. Time and time again I've seen lifters beat their faces on the wall like psychotic retards in an attempt to force a themselves to succeed on a program for which they're unsuited. that's not you failing on a program, that's the fucking program failing you, because it wasn't designed for you. The sooner everyone gets this fucking message the better, because the topic is literally going to give me a fucking ulcer at some point. Cookie cutter programs are for cookie cutter people- leave them to the gingerbread men and women of the world and use your fucking brain to determine what's best for you. And before the beginners of the world chime in with bullshit about how they're incapable of thinking for themselves, SHUT THE FUCK UP. No one wants to hear that bitch made drivel, because it's fucking stupid. There are Special Olympians who outlift you, and it's not like they've thought their way into beast mode- they just see a fucking weight and pick it up, put it down, and repeat. This shit could not be more simple.

Still at a loss? Frankly, I think getting past plateaus couldn't be more intuitive, but I am also a genius who's been training for more years than most of the people reading this have not been not not shitting their pants. While you try to figure out that triple negative, I will related what Mel Siff suggests for ramping right the fuck over a plateau like you're a soccer mom in a Hummer texting about some inane television show while she's plowing down mailboxes on the way to pick up little Suzie from ballet practice.

Attempt to increase the number of repetitions with near maximal loads. This is one of my favorite methods, in fact, and I use it pretty much constantly. To do this, you essentially focus on making your rep max for a certain rep max higher in reps, i.e. taking a 2 rep max to a 3 rep max. That generally works wonders, and once you've increased by two reps, you can usually move 10-20 lbs more on your previous rep max.
Increase loads by unfamiliar increments. According to Siff, "sticking points often relate to the numerical value of the load that associates with one’s current 1RM. For example, if you are trying to increase your 1RM of 100kg via succession of sets of 80-90-95-100kg, the sequence could be changed to sets of 80-92.5-97.5-102.5kg." In my experience, that sort of a sticking point is usually about as mental as it is physical, so either tricking yourself into lifting just above or just below the weight with kilos or pounds, depending on what's unfamiliar to you, having your lifting partner change the training weights on you without you noticing (a la Arnold with Franco back in the day), or just jumping right over your sticking point weight by five lbs and having a spotter handy to help you out if it ends up a catastrophe.
Add minimal weights increments near your attempts with your 1RM. Siff says, "Very light weights (0.5-1.0kg) will be virtually unnoticeable. You should simply continue to train as if the small increment was not there." That's all well and good, but I've never found that microplates help for shit. Maybe it's my impatience, and maybe it's just my desire to impose my will on the world, but I don't think involving microplates in your program does much more than indicate the possibility of a micropenis.
Alter or improve technique in problematic exercises. Master trainer Siff thinks that plateaus are occasionally due to imperfect technique, and that the use of a coach or a self-conducted (read NOT A FUCKING FORM CHECK VIDEO) can lend itself to a solution. Again, I've benefited not at all from the suggestions of other people when it comes to determining whether or not my form can be improved, because there are precious few people on the planet with the requisite experience and knowledge to provide such an analysis. Most of the people who are happy to contribute form advice are either pompous beyond any reasonable understanding of how self-confidence is formed, or too stupid to understand they're talking our of their asses. Either way, you're better off looking for weak spots on your own if you cannot find a competent coach.

My approach to plateaus has been somewhat different. Instead of using microplates or sitting down with a bowl of popcorn to watch the fascinating evolution of my squat, I (surprise, surprise) black glass that plateau like it's a xenomorph-infested planet by doing the following:

Alter the exercise. If I am stalled on the bench press, for instance, I will either alter the manner in which I conduct it altogether for a time, or I'll change the second day exercise altogether and change the rep range on the first. I always do major lifts twice a week at a minimum, so I will either change my primary lift from a full back squat to a bottom position back squat, for instance, or change my supplementary second day from something like a front squat to a jump squat, then monkey with the rep range on the heavy first day slightly. I'm not talking about going from singles to tens, I'm talking about going from singles to triples, or from triples to fives.
Alter the arrangement of your exercises. This could be within a day or within a week. Either way, you want to shift your priority to the very beginning of your training week to ensure you're at your freshest when you attempt it.
Replace the stalled exercise with a similar exercise. I've done this with both the bench and the squat to get them moving again. In the former case I replaced it with reverse grip incline bench press, and with the latter I replaced it with the front squat, but kept all other parameters (loading, reps, etc) the same.

Yeah, it really is that simple. Up next, we'll have the death ground bit- what to do when the universe up and fucks you to bits and you have to train through injury and illness. To all those of you who are going to ask me about hernias, please do me a favor and kill yourselves.

Sources:

Siff, Mel. Supertraining (6th Ed.). Denver: Supertraining Institute, 2003

Given the fact that the holidays are now upon us, it seems only right that I should rehash the benefits of alcohol consumption on the strength athlete, since everyone's going to be fucked-in-half drunk for the bulk of the next month. As I posited previously, it's going to happen whether or not you believe it will have a positive impact on your gains, as extreme risk takers are prone to bouts of binge drinking. Beyond that though, there are plenty of reasons why drinking's not the enemy to gainz in the way Jeff Foxworthy is an enemy to comedy you might still think it is.

Good strength athletes are, by and large, risk-taking attention seekers who live in a world where maintenance of the status quo is as unthinkable as running a 24 hour brothel and meth lab out of their parents' basement . Compounding this is the all-American work-yourself-around-the-fucking-clock ethic, to which people who are extremely competitive are even more susceptible to driving themselves to the brink (or in my case, far enough past it I might start bottling my own urine soon) of insanity. Psychologists have an explanation for why, then, people of our ilk like to get fucked-in-half drunk or high as shit on a semi-regular basis:

"[The elite] are expected to work hard year round. Even play is work – camp is for honing athletic skills, losing weight, learning to write or make movies – that is, almost anything but just plain fun. So no wonder that by the time they get to college, adolescents are anxious, depressed and stressed out. How do they deal with these feelings? They work hard at what they see as relaxation – like binge drinking. Ask any of these youngsters, and they will tell you they are trying to get drunk because it’s the best way they know to have fun. They are working at playing the way they have learned to work at living" (Barth).

Given that analysis, it stands to reason that people who kills the fucking weights 6 days a week, sometimes multiple times a day, might need the occasional evening of watching tentacle rape hentai with their underwear on their head while fucked up on vicodin and vodka. It's not as though people who are constantly killing themselves at self-improvement would ratchet down the intensity whatsoever when they're trying to relax- it's not possible. Being brutal is wired into the self-conscious just as not masturbating and white knighting chicks on internet message boards is wired into the psyched of every dude under the age of 27 who's at a bodyweight of 150 lbs or less.

Having established that it's natural, one might wonder what effect it might have on their gainz. As I covered in the last installment, the effect on training, if training is the only factor at issue is likely negligible. That's not to say it has no effect or a negative effect on the rest of you, however. Studies have shown that "moderate drinkers have a more favorable self-perception of their health status than either abstainers or heavy drinkers"(Brodsky), "more experienced drinkers were more specifically focused on enhanced sexual and aggressive arousal"(Ibid), and that drinkers of vodka in particular become far more sociable (Darkes, Goldman). If you're not getting how that translates to lifting, it means you're going to be more aggressive, happier, and leaner because you're getting laid, like yourself more, and generally be more awesome than you were before. If you can't muddle through how that might help your lifting, you might just want to stop reading and throw yourself down a well.

Quad growth might suffer.

Ah, but you might have caught on that the greatest benefits of drinking come when you're a "moderate" drinker. A cursory search of psychological journals puts "moderate" drinking at 2.5 to 5 drinks per day, depending on the source, which means you get between 17 and 35 drinks a week to remain moderate. That's a hell of a lot of shots, in my book, and is the perfect segue to the crux of this post- getting fucked up post workout brings the gainz. Scientists recently discovered, and I am not making this up, that consuming a drink containing grain alcohol (like Tucker Max's "Tucker Death Mix") raised both free and total testosterone for five hours post workout, whereas those who did not consume the frat boy rapist punch had their test levels fall below baseline. Happily, the alcohol had no effect on cortisol or estradiol levels, so the dudes in the study were just floating in a sea of dying brain cells and testosterone-fueled awesomeness (Vingren).

How much is enough to get the nearly 100% boost in testosterone postworkout science has recorded? It depends on your bodyweight. For matters of convenience and exigency, I decided to make a little chart for you guys to give you the proper dosage to spike your test levels properly using the study's 1.09mg/kg bodyweight ratio organized by weight class, as this is after all an article aimed at serious lifters. For the Oly guys and IPF/USAPL (/sadfaceissad) among you, these are the weight classes that existed before the IOC decided that you guys couldn't hang with the old school lifters.

How the fucking guys in the study made it home is a mystery- they sure as hell didn't drive, and if they did, they didn't live, because they slammed that shit in 10 minutes. I can drink with the best of them, but I've never faced half a liter of vodka in ten minutes- that's some Decline of Western Civilization style drinking, and I'm not sure I can hang with the likes of 1980s hair metal bands.

Bring tha gainz.

In other words, here is your plan for the holidays- whenever you're planning to party, smash the fuck out of some weights, slam a shake, and then drink yourself into a coma. According to science, you'll awaken with a steel hardon (and who doesn't get horny as fuck when hungover?), muscle gain, fat loss, and an appreciation for what Peter The Great's life must have been like before he died of a gangrenous bladder.

Dude literally made people take a shot every 15 minutes at his parties and would punch them in the face if they remained sober.

Sources:
Alcohol equivalence. Wikipedia. Web. 29 Nov 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_equivalence

Barth, FD. Can’t Relax? Science Explains—and Helps Solve the Problem. Psychology Today. 13 Jul 2013. Web. 26 Nov 2013. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-couch/201307/can-t-relax-science-explains-and-helps-solve-the-problem

Brodsky, Archie. S. Peele & M. Grant (Eds.). Alcohol’s Role in a Broader Conception of Health and Well-being. Alcohol and pleasure: A health perspective, Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel, pp. 187-207.

Darkes, J., & Goldman, M.S. (1993). Expectancy challenge and drinking reduction: Experimental evidence for a mediational process. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 61, 344-53.

Drinking booze after workouts boosts testosterone. Muscular Development. Dec 2013. 198.

Goldman, M.S., Brown, S.A., & Christiansen, B.A. (1987). Expectancy theory: Thinking about drinking. In H.T. Blane & K.E. Leonard (Eds.), Psychological theories of drinking and alcoholism (pp. 181-226). New York: Guilford.

Ultimate Post-Workout Testosterone Booze: Hard Liquor Increases Late PWO Testosterone Levels by Almost 100%. SuppVersity. 11 Mar 2013. Web. 29 Nov 2013. http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2013/03/ultimate-post-workout-testosterone.html

Vingren JL, Hill DW, Buddhadev H, Duplanty A. Post-Resistance Exercise Ethanol Ingestion and Acute Testosterone Bioavailability. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2013 Mar 6.

Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is death ground. In death ground, fight.

"Suppose an army invading hostile territory without the aid of local guides:—it falls into a fatal snare and is at the enemy's mercy. A ravine on the left, a mountain on the right, a pathway so perilous that the horses have to be roped together and the chariots carried in slings, no passage open in front, retreat cut off behind, no choice but to proceed in single file. Then, before there is time to range our soldiers in order of battle, the enemy is overwhelming strength suddenly appears on the scene. Advancing, we can nowhere take a breathing-space; retreating, we have no haven of refuge. We seek a pitched battle, but in vain; yet standing on the defensive, none of us has a moment's respite. If we simply maintain our ground, whole days and months will crawl by; the moment we make a move, we have to sustain the enemy's attacks on front and rear. The country is wild, destitute of water and plants; the army is lacking in the necessaries of life, the horses are jaded and the men worn-out, all the resources of strength and skill unavailing, the pass so narrow that a single man defending it can check the onset of ten thousand; all means of offense in the hands of the enemy, all points of vantage already forfeited by ourselves:—in this terrible plight, even though we had the most valiant soldiers and the keenest of weapons, how could they be employed with the slightest effect?"

You know what you do in this case? Fucking ATTACK. We've all been in this position in the gym- broken/torn whatevers/horrible illness/etc. Something that not only cripples you physically but cripples you psychologically. I've had it happen twice in the last year, first with walking pneumonia and then with the broken hand/torn bicep combo. In both cases, it wasn't just the fact that I couldn't train the way I liked, but the fact that I'd been proven mortal by the universe at large. Though that might seem preposterous to most people, if you think of yourself as mortal and consider your own mortality, you will never transcend mediocrity, never rise out of the muck, never crawl over the assembled, teeming,unwashed, blind, stinking masses to grab the brass ring. Thus, a catastrophic setback initially freaks me the fuck out and throws me into whatever my best impression of "depressed" is. I, however, have never allowed myself to get sad for all that long- like they said in the original Red Dawn, I "let it turn into something else". Instead of getting sad, I get mad at myself for being a Fucking Awesome Guy and get insanely, ripshit angry. I get angry at everything- the sun, the fact that a book I love has a shitty cover, the fact that my dog pointedly ignores certain command, pants (because fuck pants), my crippled body, everyone driving a car, EVERYTHING. Then, I channel that energy into creativity.

Yes, creativity. It might come as a great shock to everyone under 25 who's reading this, but the gym is the perfect place for you to express your creativity. If you're not creative, you're going to be a shitty lifter, plain and simple. Allow me to explain- in order to be a great lifter, you have got to get creative to overcome hurdles, train around injuries, get lean, fix weaknesses, and sculpt your body however you want it to look. If you just do what you're told, you're going to suck- it's just that simple. Lifting is not a science- it's an art. For those of you who are going to expose your utter blindness to the truth and irrefutable ignorance, consider that just as science influences and supports art (the creation of colors and mediums, explaining why certain art appeals to the majority, etc), science also influences and supports lifting... but lifting cannot, will not, and never could be made into a science because there are too many independent variables involved in programming, exercise selection, and loading for anyone to accurately utilize science or math in their calculation.

Skeptical? I have taken advice from people on a number of occasion, and it has always ended in disaster. One time I didn't cum for almost a year because getting off would "hurt my gainz". No only did my gainz suffer, but my dick developed schizophrenia and would not respond to normal commands when called into battle. If I could have found the old fuck who gave me that advice, I'd have sent everyone in his family a fucking nailbomb. Likewise for when my squat stalled and someone suggested that since Bill Kazmeier only did 10-12 reps in the off-season, I should too. My squat literally dropped 50 lbs over three months and it took the better part of a year to make a five pound PR over my previous plateau weight. People, as it turns out, know precisely fuck all about what will make you strong.

I'ma dig a ditch, bitch, and throw your ass in.

Speaking of knowing exactly fuckall, there is one major caveat to what I am suggesting- if you're under the age of 27 at this moment and happen to ever find yourself injured, you might as well quit lifting and eat a fucking bullet. Not since Al Qaeda conquered the assembled unwashed and uneducated dirt merchants of Afghanistan has there been a less well-educated or more pompous, self-aggrandizing, entitled pack of dogmatic, uninteresting, dickless, brainless fucktards than the under-27 crowd of "powerlifters" fucking up any decent discourse on the subject of lifting on whatever public forum they currently choose. So wedded to the idea that they have to adhere to a "program" lest they fail to achieve the baseline mediocrity for which they so desperately wish in order to impress the other saddie bitches yammering on about the program du jour, they're completely incapable of enacting a damage control system of "improvise, adapt, and overcome" to train around an injury. Frankly, I've no idea how these assholes manage to get out of bed and get their fucking shoes on ("Thanks for tying them, mom! I'll get it before I turn 30! I promise!"), but that set of actions certainly stretches the limits of their autonomy to the breaking point. They'd be more likely to transmogrify themselves into a rape monster in the form of winged bag of pulsating ectoplasm covered with turgid 10" cocks than they would be capable of determining a course by which they could train around an injury.

Hate those motherfuckers about this much.

If that offended you, good. Anyone who defends that generation of lifters will join them in the fucking camps. Lest you worry, we know your work capacity isn't going to allow for much slave labor, as your CNS allegedly has less balls than a geriatric AIDS patient covered in cancerous goiters. Nope, we're just going to lead you fucking lemmings to the edge of a deep pit (dug with bulldozers, because again, you fuckers would fall down dead of exhaustion from digging a potted plant out of the ground) and shove you in, where you can lament the fact you never did a fucking pullup with all of the other assholes in your generation as you starve to death.

I always had the desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost.

-Albert Fish

For the rest of you, what's important is that you get creative and tried new shit. That is the only thing you can do when you get injured, because when you're facing a serious injury, improvisation is all you have. Consider my latest clusterfuck- confronted with the issue of a torn bicep and broken bone in my right hand which still hurts like a fuck), I was reduced to unilateral pulls that did not involve my palm with my right hand, nothing with my left, and machine leg training. As such, I simply started training legs as much as possible, alternating between machine squats and leg extensions/leg curls. Then, on alternating days, I did explosive unilateral pulldowns, curls, one arm pullups, and triceps pressdowns. Once I had surgery, I added in two non-unilateral movements that I basically invented myself- band crossovers with the bands on my biceps rather than in my hands (to remove the load from my bicep) and band rows with the bands over my triceps. You might be thinking to yourself, "that's not gonna do shit", but you know what? It's more than the average person does, and I was trying to keep my back as conditioned as humanly possible.

For anyone who wants a new goal, how about a triple bodyweight one arm dead? Pete Cortese: 370 lbs. at 116 lbs.

As my arm healed, I started doing one arm deadlifts with the other arm to keep moving heavy weight, and at 5 weeks cautiously started squatting again, working up to a double with 585 in my first squat session in 7 weeks just fucking because. That week I also started benching again, working with a wide grip to refrain from compressing my bicep too much, adding in a bunch of machine bench presses just to get my volume up. I also added overhead presses, starting light and not going to lockout just to keep the strain and stretch off my bicep, and gradually (over a week and a half) worked to full lockout. At the same time, I remained cognizant of the strain holding a bar at lockout on my bicep, so I simply put the bar as for over head as possible without retearing my bicep and dumped it. Clearly, none of this should be Earth-shattering- it's just a combination of a bit of creativity and not being a fucking bitch. Pursuant to the latter bit, I've perhaps taken nine days off in the last two months (I had surgery exactly two months ago)... so it seems your body and your CNS is capable of handling both recovery from surgery and heavy, frequent training without giving you cancer of the IDS provided you feed it plenty of food and remember to avoid being a bitch.

To most of you, that strikes you as a waste of time. Leg extensions? Band crossovers? WHAT'S THE CARRYOVER, BRO? The carryover is you're a fucking retard and your parents fucking hate you, bro. Every time I'm asked what the carryover is from one exercise to another I want to burn the world and fuck on the ashes just a little bit more. I want spray random passers-by with acid. I want to grab a small child by the feet and beat an entire college campus to death with its corpse. I want to breathe smoke. You know why? BECAUSE THE CARRYOVER IS THAT ANY TIME YOU MAKE YOURSELF STRONGER, YOU'RE FUCKING STRONGER. Te aforementioned question is a tacit admission that 1) the questioner does not like lifting weights, and 2) knows precisely fuckall about strength training, 3) that person is beneath your contempt and should be treated as thought they just crawled bare-ass naked out of a public porta-potty with their mouth wide open and a baby doll stuffed up their ass.

If you think I am alone in acting in that manner, I am not. The progenitor of the modern bodybuilding competition and basically the person you have to blame for the popularity of physical culture in the US, Bernarr MacFadden, was a harder motherfucker than you will probably ever be at age 12. Having grown up in an environment wherein he was constantly being reminded that his death from tuberculosis was eminent and wherein his mom dropped dead of the same disease and his dad peace out when he was a baby, Bernarr decided to get hard. Essentially an orphan and had no money to join a gym, so he did what he could- too poor to join a gym at age 12, he bought a set of dumbbells he used religiously every morning until he couldn't lift them, replacing them with heavier dumbbells when he needed a bigger challenge. As if that weren't enough, he took nothing but physically demanding jobs, with the thought that desk jobs would lead him to his death... and he was still a tween.

Harder Than You Crew circa 190.

That's right, a twelve year old kid out-harded you. He idolized the badass motherfuckers he saw coming out of mines and loathed the bitches he saw in banks, so he started carrying a lead ingot everywhere he went at age 15 so he wouldn't go soft as he worked for the company that eventually became Dunn and Bradstreet. As he grew older and got more wealthy, his penchant for experimentation expanded, and he became a renowned wrestler and strongman weighting only about 150 lbs due to a fanatical, round the clock lifting program and in spite of a near vegetarian diet. MacFadden wasn't busy worrying about carryover, his CNS, loading protocols for the squat versus the bench, what particular minute adjustment to his bench form he could agonize over, or any of the other stupid shit with which "lifters" find themselves preoccupied these days. He made himself stronger so that he would be stronger, in spite of whatever bullshit life happened to throw in his way, be it poverty or pneumonia.

In summary, this shit couldn't be any easier. You're backed into a corner by life, so you fight your way the fuck out and leave nothing alive. Pretty fucking simple, frankly. Everyone who's been worth a shit in the past has done it, and so will we, if we aspire to even being mere shadows of our much tougher forbears. Time to stop making excuses and harden the fuck up people.

Don't forget- we've got forums now, in case you assholes want to bitch about how I just touched your inner child in its no no place.

Sources:
Adams, Mark. Mr. America. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.
Gentle, David. Some Amazing Feats of Grip Strength. Bob Whelan. Web. 7 Dec 2013. http://www.bobwhelan.com/history/gripstrength.html
Sun Tzu's Art of War. Web. 3 Nov 2013. http://suntzusaid.com/book/11

You ever get so pissed off at a cow that you spend a couple of years in the woods beating inanimate objects to undeath, seething with rage that the fact that cows are just, you know, sitting there, chewing and pooping and mooing, living their lives without the slightest flicker of intelligence behind their big, wet, cow eyes, and then descend from the mountains and tear a swath trough the bovine community, knocking out ungulates like they raped your mom in a 7-11 while smiling at the security camera?

No?

Me neither, but Mas Oyama did.

Well, at least, that's how the story goes. In reality, Oyama just chopped the horn off a single pet ox one time after beating the confused animal for some time and the Japanophile press decided that Oyama was to become a fearless killer of horned, male ruminants. Irrespective of how meaty-delicious animals Sosai Masutatsu Oyama killed barehanded in the name of his beloved karate, no one in their right mind will debate the fact that Mas Oyama was one bad motherfucker.

Born in Japanese-occupied Korea, which was an avowedly shitty place, Oyama was forced to move as a child to an even shittier place- what can only be described as hell on Earth, Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Bear in mind that at this point Japanese soldiers raped anything that would hold still long enough to get their cocks into it in Manchuria during world war two, and the Japanese had a team of "doctors" in the same vein of medicine that the dude from Human Centipede was a "doctor" roaming the countryside in search of people on whom they could test theories that basically amounted to seeing how long it would take you to die if they sewed a dog's head into your groin in place of your cock. After learning the rudiments of kempo from an itinerant worker who ostensibly hoped this would help a small boy retain the structural integrity of his anal sphincter, Oyama adopted the name "Oyama Masutatsu", which was a transliteration of an ancient Korean kingdom Oyama would knew would piss off the Japanese, and moved to Japan to piss off the Japanese even more. From there, Oyama embarked upon what could only be described as a hate-fueled journey through Japan with only one goal- to shed as much Japanese blood as humanly possible with his bare hands.

So Nei Chu knew a thing or to about bringin' dat swole.

In Japan, Oyama started collecting black belts in every style of martial arts he could that no Knockout-obsessed gangbanger in the world would find himself with saggy pants if Oyama could help it. After pulling down multiple-dan black belts in Okinawan and Shotokan karate, Oyama did the same in judo, studied boxing, and then happened upon another Korean ex-pat martial arts badass in the form of So Nei Chu. A goju-ryu master, So Nei Chu was also a bit of a meathead, and began adding a great deal of strength training to the already stocky Oyama's training routine. Under So Nei Chu, Oyama started focusing heavily on hojo undo, which are traditional Japanese kareteka strengthening exercises that include the use of barbells and more cinderblock lifting than you could possibly find in Marky Mark's Good Vibrations video. Since I've already covered this and have not only never seen the implements but have never used them, check this shit out if you want a primer on hojo undo.

The really great man can only be produced through continuous heavy training.

-So Nei Chu

Yo! It's about that time to bring forth the rhythm and the rhyme!

Discontented with his training and the fact that the people who fucked his people in the ear were now being fucked in the ear by gaijin, Oyama did what any sensible person would do and fled to the mountains. There, he built a shack and proceded to train for 14 months in an effort to hone himself into the most brutal killing machine the world had ever seen, at least until the martial arts epic Gymkata was released. After climbing the mountain on which the great unwashed asshole swordsman Mushashi penned The Book Of Five Rings, Oyama proceded to build a shack in which he'd live for six months with one of his students and then another six months alone after his student peaced the fuck out (understandably) from stir-craziness. Having spent a great deal of time building up his conditioning under So Nei Chu (who was also the financial backer for Oyama's homage to the Unibomber), Oyama spent twelve hours a day using trees as makiwara, riping the bark off trees with his fingers (a trick he learned from So Nei Chu, who learned it from the dude who invented their style), punching rocks, meditating under freezing waterfalls, channeling his inner Dean Karnazes for a shitload of trail running, and doing more stone and tree trunk lifting than a drunken Scot in the months before a Highland Games festival. Thus, when Oyama's funding ran out, he descended from the mountains a man with whom no part of nature wanted to fuck and handily destroyed the competition in an all-Japan karate competition. Feeling like that simply wasn't enough awesome and filled with so much hatred for modern society that he even made Julius Evola wonder what the fuck had gotten up his ass, Oyama returned to the mountains for another 18 months of 12 hour a day training with no days off, because overtraining is fuck pussies and Oyama apparently gave less than zero fucks about Mark Rippetoe's eventual opinion on the matter.

Back in civilization, Oyama went back to doing what he did best- beating the brakes off everyone he could. Before he founded his own school, Oyama was the assistant instructor at the home of goju-ryu with none other than Masahiko Kimura, legendary judoka who's one of the godfathers of modern mma. Kimura and Oyama trained together constantly, and Oyama's physique was that much the better for it. Kimura had by this point developed a pants-shittingly awesome practice we could all stand to adopt called "San-bai no Do-ryoku (Triple Effort)." This method consisted of him just tripling the effort of his competition to ensure that he would never lose. Having heard his opponents were training three hours a day, Kimura started training nine. This, he believed, would turn him into a real life Ultron- he'd me insanely confident and virtually indestructible, as his mind and body would exist to do nothing other than to propel him onto victory. Thus, this brutal lunatic would awake in the middle of the night to train, and lacking a hair shirt and a knotted whip, decided that as penance for a lackluster performance (after winning his first championship) he had to do 500 pushups, one kilometer of bunny hops and 500 karate strikes before hitting the hay. At 5'6", 185 lbs, Kimura was pretty much unstoppable- he honed his throwing strength by practicing it on trees (ripping them out of the ground) and dragged Oyama through workouts like this:

Dem pecs.

Pushups or Hindu Push-ups- 1,000
Bunny Hop- 1 km
Headstand- 3 x 3 Minutes
Judo Practice- 100 Throws
One-Arm Barbell Clean and Press- 15 Reps each side OR Bench Press- 3 Sets: 3, 2, and 1 Reps
Situps off Partner's Back or Decline Situps- 200
Squats with Partner/Log/Barbell/Sandbag (150-200lbs)- 200
Judo Practice- 100 Submissions
Shuto (Knife-hand Strikes)- 500
Judo Practice- 100 Entries
Judo Randori- "X" x 3 Minute Rounds
Practice Throws (particularly Uchi-mata) Against a Tree- 1 Hour
Additional Judo Practice- 1 Hour

According to a couple of sources, another influence on Oyama at this time was Japanese strongman Takemaru Wakaki. Though I could not find much in the way of information on Wakaki, you can see he was a middleweight strongman and bridged the gap between the truly old schoolers (Saxon, Strongfort, Hackenschmidt, etc) and the Grimek era. As such, the name of the game was volume, and Oyama's routines definitely reflected that. Though he was about as reluctant to give a definitive program as the team for Half Life 2: Episode 3, here's what Oyama himself said he did on a daily basis in his seminal work, My Karate:

Running- 4km per day
Rope-skipping- 20 minutes per day
Dumbell shoulder press- 200 reps
Dips- 100 reps
Pushups (on knuckles)- 300 reps
Inclined push ups- 100 reps
Jumping side kick over 4 foot vaulting horse
Incline dumbell bench press- 200 reps
Bench Press (175 pounds)- 500 reps

Exercises requiring a partner:
Hitting bag with upper elbow and side of elbow- 200 times each
Practicing jumping kick with bag
Exercises for neck (with partner)
Leg exercise (squat with partner on back)
Back and Abdomen exercises with partner

Think it couldn't work? Think again. Oyama used this conditioning routine to found one of the first truly hybrid styles of the Far East, Kyokushinkaikan, a style in which you have to fight 100 guys in a row, bare knuckles, to achieve the highest belt status. Oyama was the first to do so, and since then only 13 other people have managed to pull it off (and all of them went directly to the hospital, from what I understand). Oyama is also alleged to have defeated over 270 opponents, and his one punch slaughter technique earned Oyama the nickname "The Godhand."

If he hit you, you broke. If you blocked a rib punch, your arm was broken or dislocated. If you didn't block, your rib was broken.

I honestly don't know who was more excited in this pic, but I can tell you I am fully erect.

Thus, when it's not giving its best fighters rhabdo, Oyama's baby has given the world Bloodsport (Oyama invented the kumite), Street Fighters Ken and Ryu, Tekken's Jim Kazama, knockdown karate, K-1, Marius Pudzianowski (he's a European kyokushin champ), Dolph Lundgren (who was also a European kyokushin champ), just about every useful karate style ever, mixed martial arts (Oyama taught Kimura striking, and Kimura went on to beat Helio Gracie's ass in one of the first mma fights), and threw some big brass balls on the universe as a whole. Thus, the next time you think you've done enough in training- think a-fucking again and find some way to do more.

Or imagine she will fuck you if you hit a 3.5x bodyweight raw squat.

Sources:

Keaveney, Liam. Mas Oyama. Original link dead, but taken from British Karate Kyokushinkai
Magazine. Excerpt from http://www.kyokushin4life.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6971&highlight=wakaki+takemaru&page=2

Kimura, Masahiko. My Judo. JudoInfo. Web. 16 Dec 2013. http://judoinfo.com/kimura2.htm

Mas Oyama. Web. 17 Dec 2013. http://www.mutekikyokushin.com/content_bio_masoyama.html

The Mas Oyama Workout. Pierced Visions. 7 Jan 2010. Web. 16 Dec 2013.
http://piercedvisions.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/the-mas-oyama-workout/

Ross, Steven. Masahiko Kimura's Training. Real Anime Training. 2 Apr 2013. Web. 16 Dec 2013. http://real-anime-training.blogspot.com/2013/04/judo-in-anime-and-manga-masahiko.html

Tsui, Dom. Masahiko Kimua Training. 26 May 2011. Web. 16 Dec 2013. http://www.livestrong.com/article/455237-masahiko-kimura-training/

Young, Robert. How Kyokushin Karate Master Kenji Yamaki Endured the 100-Man Kumite. Black Belt. 25 Nov2013. Web. 17 Dec 2013. http://www.blackbeltmag.com/daily/traditional-martial-arts-training/kyokushin/how-kyukoshin-karate-master-kenji-yamaki-endured-the-100-man-kumite/

Maybe a year ago there was a commercial I witnessed on Youtube while waiting to check out some metal video that literally took my breath away with the horror it represented. The commercial, which I cannot find now, was a Dell commercial in which some vapid label whore was watching a rave on her laptop, happy as a pig in shit that she didn't have to brave the dangers of the big wide world to enjoy some shitty electronic music and perhaps actually interact with another human being. The tagline, however, said it all- "Being There, Redefined", a phrase representing a mindset so prevalent, and yet so incredibly repellent to me that it took over a year for me to actually bring myself to write on the subject.

About this legit as a lifter.

What follows is not simply an outgrowth of that commercial and the concomitant reinforcement of that mentality on a daily basis on the internet, wherein people talk incessantly about a subject until it appears they believe they have actually performed the activity about which they are discussing, but also a series of discussions I've had with friends in regards to the myriad, and trust me they are legion, problems with the modern sport of powerlifting.

Clearly, getting fucking SWOLE.

To kick this motherfucker off, I might as well address the elephant in the room, which will come off as rather hypocritical given my internet fame, but the internet is fucking ruining powerlifting. Gone are the days when a kid would just decide he wanted to be big and strong and start lifting, with no conception of what might be the best method of doing so and generally no more knowledge about the lifts he should perform than a person might glean from looking at the side of a machine to see what muscles are worked. That guy, the go-getter, just rolled out of bed one day and said, "fuck it, it's time to get fucking brutal", threw on some shorts and a tshirt and headed into the fucking gym. After a few weeks of aping the biggest guys in the gym with the idea that they know what they're doing (and they often do), the kid would start doing a little research in bodybuilding magazines and the like for a bit more information. He might pick the brain of a lifter or two, and he might discuss lifting with his friends a bit. All in all, that kid might spend a grand total of 5% of his "lifting" time talking, and the other 95% of it ACTUALLY LIFTING WEIGHTS. Not foam rolling, not prehabbing and rehabbing injuries that only exist in the empty mind of the Chucks and Elite FTS clad morons waltzing around the gym like they know what the fuck is up, but actually lifting weights.

Those are the shins of a br00tal strength athlete.

Now, we're inundated with assholes all over the internet, meticulously researching and picking apart various lifting styles, debating the legality of techniques, gear, steroids, and sundry other issues about which they're not, and likely will never, earn the right to have a fucking opinion about, shopping for exactly the right shoes, shorts, wraps, and other assorted accouterments of lifters, foam rolling, stretching, researching programs, debating programs, researching exercises, debating those exercises, and possibly eventually getting around to embarrassing the fuck out of themselves in the gym because in spite of all of their gear, they're piss fucking weak. TALKING ABOUT LIFTING DOES NOT MAKE YOU A LIFTER. INTERNET MESSAGE BOARDS ARE NOT A FUCKING PROXY FOR GOING TO THE GYM. REDDIT IS NOT "BEING THERE, REDEFINED." If you're a male and don't bench considerably more than body weight, squat double body weight, and deadlift the same, you should not even have it in your head you're a fucking lifter, much less defining yourself as such with your fucking clothing. Anyone who does is a fucking poser- they're a posturing bitch with no respect for the sport they're besmirching by claiming to be a part of it and are thus beneath contempt, in addition to being huge pain in the ass to work around while real lifters are actually getting shit fucking done in the gym. Kill yourselves and save the real human people the trouble of having to wash your tainted, stomach-churningly weak blood off our calloused hands.

And holy fucking shit, could you phaggots stop with the gym etiquitte posts? Anyone who is reading them already knows about them, and anyone who is not reading them is not going to fucking care anyway. Holy fuck, what a pompous bunch of brainless fucktards... posting rules for your fellow gymgoers. NO ONE CARES WHAT YOU THINK, AND YOUR INCESSANT WHINING ABOUT CURLS IN THE SQUAT RACK MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE THE DICKLESS BITCH YOU ARE.

Feel free to tel Jay Cutler to cut that shit out. I'll be the one laughing at your closed-casket funeral.

Holy fucking christ- if someone wants to do curls in the squat rack, they might as well- at least they're using the fucking thing. Squat racks are generally used to hang laundry and preserve space for people to do lunges with preloaded barbells in most gyms, and half the people whining about curling in the squat rack have squat numbers so pathetic they shouldn't even be discussing lifting in public anyway. Your invective to the contrary notwithstanding, the shit is going to continue. Shut the fuck up already, you whiny, inconsequential, useless, self important dickbags. Real people are busy waiting to lift in those racks, not posting passive aggressive phaggotry on the internet. Goddamn, people suck.

That brings us to our next issue- the incredible disparity between the elite in the sport and everyone else. As I've mentioned before, I simply started competing in this sport to prove a point. I had no interest in making it my life, nor did I have any interest in becoming a powerlifter. I simply wanted to prove the efficacy of my methods. As it turns out, this sport is ridiculously easy to be competitive in. RIDICULOUSLY. We're talking about a guy who barely benched for ten years because he sucked shit at it, never squatted to depth, and basically made shit up as he went along triumphing over legions of people who devoted their existence to the performance of three simple lifts.

I'm this good at lifting weights.

Not only am I better at the vast majority of the people at my bodyweight at those three lifts, but I'm better at just about any lift at which you can throw at me, because I train to be brutally fucking Viking strong. That's what Chaos and Pain is all about- being so fucking strong that the only time you find yourself incapable of wrecking shit is when you're sleeping. Fuck consigning yourself to a single strength sport, especially when barely anyone could give a fuck about strength sports and even the people who do spend the vast majority of their time talking shit about other competitors rather than actually lifting weights.

CnP's not about training to be a powerlifter. It's not to satisfy some stupid fucking goal set by some 150 lb. bitches as the ultimate mark of manhood. While we're at it, 300-400-500 is a 1200 lb total. SWEET JESUS CHRIST ON HIGH THAT'S PATHETIC. Are a 120 IQ and a 15% bodyfat percentage on your shopping lists as well? Mediocre much? Moreover, what's the point of perfecting your technique if that just means that you perform perfect lifts with paper weights? They don't give out medals for perfect form, and no one gives a fuck if you fully engage your transverse abdominus when you're pulling. Managing lordosis while lifting should not be a goal- lifting the fucking weight should be. Motherfuckers are busy being stuck on stupid and weak because they lack the will do get awesome, and it's fucking pathetic.

Dude's a sub-200 lb physique competitor and apparently benches 500. Yeah, bodybuilding doesn't work. Tell me another, geniuses.

While we're on the subject of lifting more, powerlifters and olympic weightlifters might want to take note of the fact that the strongest people in the world BODYBUILD. Dear god in heaven, you'd think that getting fucking jacked would not be the anathema to the saddies populating message boards, but the suggestion that they might want to do an exercise that might involve a machine makes most of those tards break out into fucking hives. Suggest to someone that a few sets of cable crossovers might help them bench more than the paltry 185 with which they're struggling and they act as though you suggested they masturbate with 600-grit sandpaper and then rub rock salt onto the remaining bloody nub. They act that way because they're fucking retarded, of course. The biggest and strongest people in the world ALL use bodybuilding exercises as accessory movements because, surprise, THEY LIKE LIFTING WEIGHTS AND LOOKING GOOD. Additionally, getting stronger really helps you get stronger! How that could come as a shock to someone is a mystery I will never resolve. Before the word "carryover" bubbles forth from your slack, drool-covered lips, consider the following, courtesy of Olympic weightlifting coach Coach Dan Bell:

"When the Bulgarian training craze swept the sport of weightlifting some years ago, it became dogma almost overnight that you only need to train six exercises to be a successful weightlifter: snatch, clean & jerk, back squat, front squat, power snatch and power clean. The idea was that constant practice of the competitive lifts makes you strong in the lifts, with squats giving you the leg drive for big weights. The idea that areas of the body other than the legs should be targeted for strength gains got lost in the race to emulate the latest breakout foreign program. But even the vaunted Bulgarians of the eighties and nineties did foundational bodybuilding as juniors. Zlaten Vanev did a lot of curls to protect his elbow after blowing it out on a jerk. There is a lesson there for the rest of us.

The Chinese believed that being Asian they started behind other nations in upper body strength, an essential quality for success in a strength sport, they properly reasoned. So they busted their asses at rows, presses, pullups, handstand pushups and even benching. Judging by the stunningly muscular specimens they put on the podium year after year, it’s paying off.

A strong upper body is vital in widening the overhead “groove” for the snatch and jerk. The stronger the lifter’s upper body, the more room for error–front to back displacement of the bar from the ideal doesn't necessarily mean a missed lift."

Without the help of the miraculous textiles, you would be looking at the smashed corpse of a reasonably attractive chick.

And holy fucking hell, as if the race to utter public disgrace wasn't going fast enough, we've got the fracture of the sport into 987,329,873,498,734 federations, which are then separated into weight classes, age classes, gear classes, and fuck, we've even split raw into two fucking classes. What better way to ensure that the saddest pack of self important bitches on Earth all get trophies than a system in which there are barely ever three people competing in the same fucking class? What makes it even more fun is the incessant shit talking, which now even extends to the manner in which people perform the fucking lifts WITHIN THE STRICTURES OF THE RULES. The next motherfucker I hear whining about sumo gets stabbed. Same goes for low bar squatting and hard aches in the bench. Bitch less and lift more, for fuck's sake.

The only song on this idiot's phone ought to be Razorblader by Myndflame.

I suppose it doesn't really fucking matter if the sport's fractured, though, as it seems most of the people involved in it are simply doing it because they're attention whores . Is it even possible for people to enter a gym without a fucking camera at this point? Holy fucking hell. Three years ago that was the sole purview of 140 lb dudes in board shorts doing thrusters with 110 lbs., and the primary driver behind Crossfit mockery. Now, every asshole on the planet's filming themselves doing nothing of any interest to anyone except for other attention whores, all in the apparent search for bragging rights over the most Facebook "friends" and Youtube views. Gone are the days, apparently, when people just fucking lifted weights because they liked lifting weights. Now, it's just a pack of sloppy assholes taking fucking pictures of themselves all goddamned day and filming every lackluster set they happen to perform in the gym. You deadlifted 405 at 180 lbs? WHO THE FUCK CARES? Narcisissism should be reserved for pople who actually have something to fucking brag about, goddamnit? Where are these inflated egos coming from? Certainly not their physiques or their fucking lifts. Jesus fuck.

Okay, that's justified narcissism.

Hey! If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I'd like any one of these assholes, an one of the dipshits ruining our sport, right here tonight. I want them brought from his happy holiday slumber and I want them brought right here, with a big ribbon on their head, and I want to look them straight in the eye and I want to tell them what a useless, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol? Frankly, I don't give a fuck what you people do, but if you people want the sport of powerlifting to persist beyond the next couple of years, you might want to do something about it. Get stronger, quit your fucking bitching, and let's start investing in razor wire and fencing so we can start sending these assholes to the camps and get back to the business of picking up heavy shit.

Cleanse.

Source:

Bell, Dan. Bodybuilding in Weightlifting. Coach Dan Bell. 13 Dec. 2013. Web. 2 Jan 2013. http://coachdanbell.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/bodybuilding-in-weightlifting/

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