Monday, February 9, 2009

**Uncle! Training Style

For years, bodybuilders and strength athletes have wondered what, if any, set/rep/rest scheme was ideal for the purposes of maximal strength and/or hypertrophy. Coaches and laypersons alike seem to believe that the 5x5 system is ideal, apparently due to its endorsement by the likes of eat lead and shit bullets-style brutal hardasses like Ed Coan, Captain Kirk Karwoski, and Bill Kazmeyer, all of whom used that system religiously.

That system might have worked fine for them. It might work fine for you. I do know this, however- Kaz benched 350 THE FIRST FUCKING TIME HE EVER LAID DOWN ON A BENCH AND ATTEMPTED THE LIFT. We could have spent all of his time doing pushups and eating Pez and would have rocked a 400 lb bench.

I personally never got a goddamned thing out of 5x5 training, and would be happy to explain at great length to Mr. Mark Rippetoe how shitty I think his 5x5 system is. Instead, I do a shitload of ultra-heavy singles, doubles, and triples, and I manage to gain size, strength, and cuts, simultaneously.

“How the fuck did you do that?” “That’s impossible!” Well, no, actually, and go fuck yourself for thinking that. My training style incorporates a ton of different methods, but I’ll address the Uncle style first and foremost.



The Uncle! System

This arose out of nothing more than competition, and a tidbit I recalled from Arnold’s Encyclopedia of bodybuilding. He used to do something called handoffs, where he and Sergio would load up a barbell with some weight and take turns doing singles with it, handing it off at the completion of each rep. I did this in high school, and while it appeared to do nothing whatsoever for my biceps, it was fun as hell. Thus, when trying to decide what to do in the gym one day, I challenged my lifting partner to a game of Uncle, in which we’d keep doing singles of power clean and press until one of us quit. Knowing I could edge him on that, he countered with fat bar c&p’s with 200 lbs, knowing my little hands would kill me on that. Having resolved that we would then tie, we chose a stone load with a 200 lb stone as the tie breaker. The competition went pretty much as we envisioned it- I won the regular c&p, and he smoked my ass in the fat bar. By the time we got to the stone, we were dropping it on ourselves and collapsing on the ground after each attempt. After we both failed, we declared it a tie, having looked at the clock and realized that we DID NONSTOP SINGLES ON C&P FOR TWO HOURS with about 85% of our one rep max in the two barbell exercises. I shit you not, gentle readers. Our Uncle workouts, which we did as GPP, hahahaha, became a staple that made us legendary nutcases in Iron Sport Gym, and is the exact thing that spawned the moniker Chaos & Pain for our workouts- they were totally unplanned, and they always ended in horrifying amounts of pain.

As Matt demonstrates, Uncle can be done with snatches, too, or with any full body, balls out exercise.



When I departed the fair city of Philly, I found that I had to modify my training accordingly, and did not want to abandon Uncle simply because my lifting partner, in all of his selfishness, failed to follow me hither and thither around the country. Thus, I began conducting one man Uncles against the clock- I would pick a weight between 85% and 95% of my 1RM and lift it as many times as I could in a set period of time, which usually ended up being 30 minutes. This is a fucking man-maker.



Why, you might ask, should you do this? Because I fucking told you so. Other than that, it incorporates a variety of training methodologies into one, and give you a great benchmark for your personal strength endurance. Lastly, it increases your capacity for performing brutal, volume heavy workouts, and generally transforms you from a slack-jawed faggot into a goddamned sexual Tyrannosaurus.

Roux-Lange, the oft-quoted turn-of-the-century exercise physiologist, laid out the following in his Funktionelle Anpassung Usw:

Only when muscle performs with greatest resistance in a unit of time than before, will its functional cross section need to increase... hypertrophy is seen only in muscles that must perform a great amount of work in a unit of time.

This is the philosophy on which John Little built his Power Factor training, and the ideology on which Charles Staley created EDT. Both systems are essentially the same idea. Power Factor Training measures workouts by pounds lifted per minute, so it uses the formula weight x sets x reps / time = Power Factor. Staley uses a slightly different measurement, calling the result of the same formula average force per rep, but the idea is essentially the same (though he would dispute this claim, I'm sure). Staley's system uses 15 minute blocks of 2 exercise supersets. Both systems, however, caution their followers against using ultra-taxing full-body exercises, as they carry too much risk. Any student of economics knows that one can only see maximal returns with maximal risk, and that low risk funds and stocks invariably produce low yields. I'm not about low yields, and I'm not about low risks. Nothing risked, nothing gained, right? Thus, the principle tenet of Chaos and PAIN is this:



MODERATION IS MEDIOCRITY

EXTREMITY IS EXCELLENCE



The Bulgarians are proof that ever-increasing training loads with full-body, high risk shit is the way to go. Additionally, the European Journal of Exercise Physiology published an article by Andy Fry in 2002 that stated that "heavy intensities must be used to result in a maximal growth response as measured on a cellular level. You can't get the best possible results without using the heaviest weights possible." As such, it behooves one to use the heaviest weight possible, as many times as possible, over the shortest period of time, as it achieves all three of the types of ways to achieve maximum muscle tension: lifting a maximal load, lifting a non-maximal load to failure (as you can repeat it after a short rest), and the repeated effort method. Thus, utilizing this technique, you can simultaneously achieve four goals:

  1. Increase muscle cross sections
  2. Increase ME strength
  3. Increase muscular endurance
  4. Look like a total fucking badass
This, combined with the fact that it makes you into a metabolic inferno, makes Uncle the cornerstone of the ChAoS and PAIN training style, and something any bonafide badass should incorporate into their training, stat.



Go forth and conquer, fuckers.







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Now playing: Dr. Acula - Why I'm Afraid Of Bees

via FoxyTunes

Love the critters.

They are back.

Love pins

The 'Love' sets are finally back in stock. I am updating the listings.

I have had these pin sets in my shop for a LONG time, and I am constantly thinking about discontinuing them. I think "People must be sick of seeing these things!" But then as soon as I sell out I get people asking and asking for them. So instead of discontinuing I might even expand.

I made a ton of them up. I wanted to shoot new photos of them but it was cloudy yesterday and its cloudy today. This is the kind of thing that needs natural light to really show is bright colours. So I will hold off on the new photos...

Now off to sketch some new 'love' set ideas...

Friday, February 6, 2009

*It Ain't Skinny Bitch Day, Is It?

"It ain't Skinny White Bitch Day, is it?"
"Naw man, it ain't skinny white bitch day"

Few things are quite as irritating as know-it-all sorostitutes who pontificate at length about subjects so far beyond their capability to comprehend that they can't even articulate intelligently what they DON'T know about a subject. Well, my friends, you're about to be treated to a publication written by those very same vapid, Cosmo-sipping, bulimic whores, packaged so that any woman who's ever enjoyed Sex In The City will stop surfing trendy clothing websites for shit they can't afford faster than an 18 year old slut drops to her knees for a bout of cock slobbing at a Donald Trump party.

Feast your eyes on this horseshit: Yep. Two of these silly whores decided to impart a spectacular combination of bad science and idiocy to an entire generation of women too stupid and lazy to actually exercise.

Though this book has already been bashed all to be damned and is roundly thought to be a steaming pile of horseshit by anyone who knows anything about nutrition, the book still manages to find an audience amongst women too stupid to know better, too lazy to actually research nutrition themselves, and too enamored of the consumerism-laden, superficial claptrap of failed models like those on Sex In The City to know better.

Though I'm sure those soulless and conscienceless whores are too busy counting the ill-gotten receipts from their book sales to care, allow me to pick apart their inanity for the amusement of my gentle readers.

The basis of Skinny Bitch apparently comes from two books: Fit For Life and Eat to Live. Fit is a semi-religious nutrition text by Harvey Diamond that claims that the gods have ordained that we eat "live"(raw) foods. He suggests we eat fruit (which he lists as nature's most perfect food) until noon each day. His reasoning? God must have wanted us to eat it constantly, because it tastes good. I am not making that up. He apparently doesn't know how fruit bearing plants spread their seeds. Additionally, we should eat raw fruits and vegetables, because they're filled with "energy". Wild dogs and cats are never fat, he posits, because they only eat raw foods! Certainly not because they run around all day killing shit and EATING FUCKING MEAT. Douche. Eat is similarly shitty, though without the odd new wave religious bent that makes Diamond's shit creepier than a naked old guy on a kindergarten playground. Joel Fuhrman, the author of Eat, asserts that people should focus on eating "nutrient dense" (i.e. plant) foods. He fails to understand, however, that organ meats are far more nutrient dense than are plants, so his entire book is essentially a null set.

On page 5, the Skinny Bitches assert that food is indeed "the most perfect food in existence", as it "barely requires any work to be digested" and "because it is made mostly of water, fruit hydrates the body and aids in cleansing, detoxifying, and eliminating." Woe betide the person who eats even a spear of broccoli with their fruit, however, as combining fruit which is usually "so quickly and easily digested", causes it to "rot and ferment in our stomachs." Fascinating. So, what they're saying, is that the most perfect possible food is transformed into a virtual poison whenever it is eaten with any other food. Odd. Also odd that they don't know that the body NATURALLY FERMENTS CARBOHYDRATES IN THE DIGESTIVE TRACT TO AID IN DIGESTION. Later in the book, the Skinny Bitches treat us to a diatribe against meat, which I'll address later, but they assert that humans are the only animals who "have food rotting, decomposing, and fermenting in our intestinal tracts and colons." That's odd, because the Cornell Sun states that "Within the rumen, there are many different types of bacteria that aid the cow in digesting plant fiber, like the pulp in citrus fruit, which humans and other non-herbivores cannot easily digest." Guess what happens in the rumen? FERMENTATION. Whee! Apparently the Skinny Bitches lack Google in their lives.

These silly fucking whores continue their war on common sense, firmly established science, good grammar (the entire book is rife with sentence fragments), and anthropological evidence by warning their idiot readers against the consumption of "refined sugars" (page 29, if you're following along). That's all well and good, as well all know that refined sugar sucks for a multitude of reasons. They, however, continue to say that ALL "simple sugars" are the devil, apparently forgetting the FRUCTOSE IS A FUCKING SIMPLE SUGAR.

Holy fucking hell, that book should have been called Stupid Whore, not Skinny Bitch.

Much of this shitbox book is a diatribe against meat eating, which is a neverending source of amusement. People don't need meat in their diets, apparently, to perform at their best. Bill Pearl and Andreas Cahling are held aloft as two bodybuilders who ate no animal protein and yet suceeded at their sport. These two men, however, ate a fucking boatload of animal protein at every meal. They might not have been sitting down to a steak that'd choke John Candy's fat ass to death, but Pearl ate a couple of dozen eggs a day and drank fucking GALLONS of milk a day, while Cahling ate nothing but open faced goat cheese sandwiches.(peep it) Mind you, Cahling was a shitty bodybuilder, but that's beside the point. Tony Gonzalez abandoned veganism after a month of sucking, and Prince Fielder became a vegan after reading SB promptly (only to be blasted in the press as his batting average dropped lower than his daily protein consumption). Dairy's out too, since it comes from animals, and because these vacuous sluts think that the dairy industry has been lying to us for years, as they assert that milk is made of fat, and can thus not be made low fat or fat free. Are they that fucking stupid? They've never heard of Little Miss Muffett, with her curds and whey. Along came a spider and sat down beside her and said "Hey! What's in the bowl bitch?" Never heard of that? Hmmmm. Methinks they must be idiots.

My thoughts are confirmed when they assert that adult humans need no more than 18-60g of protein per day, and NO ONE IN HISTORY HAS EVER HAD A PROTEIN DEFICIENCY. Sweet jesus. That'll be a post for another day, because that's wrong in way's I cannot articulate without volumes of writing. In addition to making the above specious claims about protein, they follow up with the idea that high protein has been linked to "obesity, heart disease, and cancer" citing either Diamond or Fuhrman for that gem. Nothing of the sort has been shown in any clinical trial of which I am aware, and I'm far better acquainted with Pubmed than are the Starvation Twins.

I'll skip over a bunch of other points that are simple to cherry pick to end on this bombshell:
"Look at what we evolved from. We looked like friggin' apes and had massive heads, strong jaws, and brute strength. maybe back then we were supposed to eat meat. But last time I checked, we aren't cavemen any more."
Wow. Not only did they jam several million years of evolution and a wide array of different hominid types into one short description of the prototypical caveman, but they failed to notice that the Robust types (like Paranthropus Robustus and Australopiticus Bosei) had the big heads, sagittal crests, and strong jaws to MASTICATE FIBER DENSE VEGETATION.

May those stupid whores burn for eternity for foisting their stupidity on an even dumber American female readership.

A Look at Longevity of Carnivorous Diet Advocates vs. Vegan/Strict Vegetarian Diets:
Carnivores
William Banting (1797 – 16 March 1878) 81 years- Initially popularized the low-carb diet. He was a mortician who lost 60 lbs following a diet comprised of nothing but meat, veggies, and dry wine.
James Henry Salisbury, M.D. (12 January 182323 September 1905) 82 years- Salisbury was the inventor of the Salisbury steak, and a proponent of a diet consisting of two parts meat, one part veggies.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson (November 3, 1879 – August 26, 1962) 83 years- He advocated the diet of the Eskimos, which consists of nothing but meat. After returning from the Arctic in good health on this diet, he participated in a year-long study at a NY hospital proving the efficacy of his diet.
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) 87 years- Most well known for his invention of the geodesic dome, Fuller applied his energy theories to diet as well, following and espousing a meat and veggies diet of a Paleo Diet sort throughout his life.

Vegetarians/Vegans
Sylvester Graham (July 5, 1794 – September 11, 1851) 57 years- This asshole advocated a nearly vegan diet consisting of whole grains, fruits, and veggies, and preached abstinance from both sex and masturbation throughout his life. While he did invent Graham crackers, this was the only positive thing the Presbyterian minister did in his short, shitty, sexless life. According to Wikipedia, "Grahamism was influential in the vegan movement. Sylvester Graham focused on meat and milk, which he believed to be the cause of sexual urges. In fact, he claimed animal byproducts produced lust; Grahamism thus rejected meat, animal byproducts, and alcohol in order to develop a purer mind and body." May he rot in hell.
John Harvey Kellogg (February 26, 1852 – December 14, 1943) 90 years- If possible, this asshole actually outlived Graham, whose foundation paid Kellogg's way through medical school. Kellogg followed in Graham's footsteps, echoing the same diet and anti-sex, anti-masturbation nonsense. When not prescribing daily yogurt enemas, Kellogg was busy NEVER FUCKING HIS WIFE OF 40 YEARS, giving circumcisions sans anesthetic to teenage boys to curb "unnatural urges" or sewing their foreskins closed, and for the love of fuck, applying pure carbolic acid [phenol] to the clitoris as a means of allaying "abnormal excitement" in broads. He's got a special place in hell, I'm sure.
Reverend William Cowherd (1763–1816) 53 years- Founder of the Vegetarian Society in England, known for being the first modern society to advocate abstension from meat products.

Notice anything funny? Perhaps it's the fact that the MEAT EATERS LIVED FAR LONGER. Additionally, they do a lot more fucking, since vegetarianism has been associated with being a fucking eunuch since the dawn of the shitbox idea.

A piss poor showing by the vegetarians, all the way around. As if it wasn't bad enough that they ignore the fact that anthropologists attribute the evolution of early hominids into modern humanity to the hearty consumption of meat, and the spate of evidence showing the dietary efficacy and importance of meat, the Skinny Bitches and their followers shall remain woefully ingorant.

Thankfully, we can rest assured knowing that these poor fucks will put up no fight when we start eating them, if we run out of livestock, as they'll be weak as kittens. Additionally, evidence from Fiji shows that people actually taste really good (the Fijian word for human flesh translates to 'the long pig'- yes, they have a word for human flesh as food, haha), so these silly fucks will at least serve a purpose in their timely deaths.
If only that were one of the authors of SB, ready for roasting over an open flame. A bit of salt and pepper, and a nice rubdown with garlic, and we'd have a meal.







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