Rasta Fitness Blog

There is this one guy I know, an Italian guy, very Italian, as in Sicilian, as in his parents speak very little English and he himself grew up speaking Italian in the home. He owns a pizza shop.  Nice guy.  Ends his telephone conversations with “Ciao.”  It sounds natural coming from him, not some affected nuance of speech designed to propagate an image of a cosmopolitan Continental.  Mo and I coach our sons’ soccer team.  Mo is the uptight disciplinarian who makes 7-year olds run laps for missing open goals while I am the nurturer.  Go figga.
 

There is this other guy I know, a skinny non-working out, non-athletic white guy with a receding hairline, over-sized Adam’s apple, narrow shoulders and pants pulled up too high.  He is overly nice and waaaay too vulnerable and self-effacing.  He is soft.  His sons are my soccer team as well.  He calls me sometimes to see what time our games are scheduled and this last time he ended the brief telephone conversation with “Ciao.”
 

Really?  Seriously?  Ciao?
 

OK Team Awesome, I thought this was obvious but some moron out there has made it abundantly clear that Your Life Coach has to get on his soap box and announce what we all already know inside but may not have implemented successfully in our day to day life:  Do not, ever, ever, affect a style of speech unnatural to your own disposition because someone else does it and it sounded cool to you.  I’ve heard a 32-year old Jew sitting next to me in an Ann Arbor deli call an 18 year old waitress “Darlin’” like he was some 50 year old cowboy in a Denver or Dallas diner.  He sounded like a complete and utter tool and he was roundly and raucously ridiculed in a most public fashion for no less than 45 minutes. 
 

So Tool, if you are out there listening, stop.  If I ever, ever hear you end another telephone conversation with “Ciao!” because you talked to Coach Mo on the phone and heard that Sicilian end his conversation in his native tongue and decided to end your conversations the same way, so help me God your sons will play goalie for the rest of the season. 
 

Life coach to Life Coaches out.

WOHA.  Not to be confused with the Wife Induced Headache, the Work Out Headache.  Or, as the mildly educated call it, the Work Out Induced Headache.  Or Exercise Induced Headache.  Unlike Wife Induced Headache which begins at the base of the spine the minute her tone changes to the “We’ve had this conversation before” tone, the WOHA starts, plays and ends right on the temples.  By whatever name you want to call it, I call it AFFIRMATION.
 

It started when I was training with Won Huh, Mr. Korea 1982, on deadlift days.  After the fourth set or so, I would start to get a pounding headache.  By the end of the sixth set, my head was pounding and throbbing (That’s what she said!) and I had to sit down.  I asked him if that was normal and he said that’s how you know you are working hard, that he gets a headache every time he works out and that’s why he was Mr. Korea and I wasn’t.  I told him I’m not Korean and was only 11 when he won his title that’s the only reason he has a Cardillo weight belt that has “Mr. Korea 1982” stitched on it and I don’t.
 

But, privately I will admit that he would’ve won that title even I was there competing against his smug, arrogant ass, so I will also go on to admit that he is on to something, and in the roughly 60 days that have passed since I have embraced the Uncle Phil Protocol (i.e., no rest between sets, one minute of Level 8 cardio between all sets, all heavy sets with 8-10 reps per, 15-18 sets per body part, total about 36 minutes a day, heart rate stays around 158-165 the whole time), the headaches have been a constant reminder that I am doing something right.  Squats with a minute of jumping rope in between are a headache waiting to happen.  Deadlifts with a minute on the elliptithingy in between is an engraved invitation for a migraine.  And sets of pull-ups with a minute of back extensions in between each is like a strained marriage in a bottle.  I’m told.
 

Feel my pain Team Awesome.  Juggle it in your palm, and blow on it if you would.  Thanks. 
 

Your money is in an envelope on the night stand.

Can one be a hedonistic pig and still love Jesus?  Can one be a practicing felon and still love Jesus?  Can one reconcile a rock star lifestyle with a love of all that is Matthew Mark Luke John Acts and the Letters from Paul?  The question came up as I watched my boy Booshnoogs sign off from this site with the suggestion that he could not reconcile his Christianity with an online flirtatious presence on Bodyspace.  Too many hotties, too many thongs, too much time lusting after them.  And then I thought about all the professional body builders whose interviews I read (yes you Peter Putnam and Chris Cook and Flex Wheeler) who profess their love of Christ and his Word, but no mention of the illegal drugs they are injecting (or used to inject in Flex’s case) in an effort to give them an illegal and technically cheating advantage over their competition.  Hypocrisy abounds – or does it?
 

I am thinking Jesus has been around, and I am betting there is very little we can do that surprises him.  I read an autobiography last week where the guy confessed to drilling a hole in a loaf of wonder bread, pouring in a bit of water and commencing to re-drilling the loaf with his organic drill bit.  The Apostle Paul sent a couple stern letters to the Corinthians as well, and the sh*t they were doing to each other and each other’s wives was twisted enough to make a Roman Empire – trotting Apostle take a break from being beaten and jailed and spreading the Gospel to other pagan wife swapping heathens and write a couple letters that were stern enough and well crafted enough to make publishing history.  Literally.  As a matter of fact, since the Holy Trinity is not limited in their experience of human depravity to the New Testament, as the Father and Holy Spirit were around before the Son, we can impute their Knowledge to the Son and he can be charged with at least constructive knowledge of all human depravity, from those wild and crazy Sodomites to the really nutso Assyrians to the just as nutso Macabees and the Hellenist Buttf*ckers themselves.  No offense.
 

Does Jesus really care if Pete and Flex are juicing?  Does he care if the Corinthians were wife swapping?  Paul did, but does Jesus?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Maybe Paul and his Romanizing of the Christian movement, coupled with a few historical accidents, turned the Jesus of Matthew Mark and Luke, the Love is My Religion Jesus, into the fire-breathing My Way or the Lake of Fire Jesus we see starting in John and continuing through Paul’s Letters and the Book of Revelations.  I am thinking Jesus was fine with wife swapping Corinthians as long as all were consenting adults, no one was getting hurt and when they got home from their big wife swapping parties they were loving the people who weren’t getting enough love – the poor, the sick, the jailed, the stupid, and showing their love for the unloved with acts of comfort and love (the non-sexual kind I think).  That’s what the Sermon on the Mount is about, not who or what you can stick your pecker in, or what you can inject in your body.
 

Then again, maybe it’s just me.  I’ve been wrong before and still gotten paid for it, so who knows.  Regardless, I bet Jesus loves me whether I am right or wrong and that I don’t get tossed in a Lake of Fire even though I am technically a Rasta Buddhist, not a born again Christian. 
 

Although, if I lose that will suck.

Taking my own advice is tough.  It’s easy to say to myself at night when my elbows are burning and aching, that I will no longer to any biceps or triceps work until they heal, that if it hurts, don’t do it.  All very good advice.  But then you get to the gym, you’re at a point in your split where you did chest, shoulders and traps and whatever else you did recently that did not hurt your elbows and now you stuck in no man’s land between too soon for more chest work but biceps and triceps work friggin’ hurts but it’s either that or only cardio and that’s just not an option so you do stuff that hurts your elbow instead of what you should really be doing which is taking this opportunity to bring up some lagging body parts, crush some weaknesses, squeeze the last remnants of your old life right out of your body.
 

So this past month I finally did something about it:  no arm work at all until my elbows heal.  Chest day does not hurt them as long as I am not locking out at the top which I would never do as I have a total “constant tension” fetish.  Seriously:  I am so into Constant Tension.   Constant is so hot and fine and I have been cheating on my wife with her for about two years, smashing it like an Idaho potato, but my wife could care less for some reason.  So, me and Constant are all over each other on chest day and shoulder day as long as I don’t do front raises which kill my elbows – pulsating constant tension standing BB or DB overhead presses are cool too as long as that fine ho CT is rockin you.
 

And most importantly, I am calf raising, squatting, deadlifting and shrugging like a beast.  All totally chill on the elbows, all designed to make the butt bigger and rounder and the back thicker and nastier and the wheels sicker.  I decided I need me some quad veins to go with my lower ab veins (baby ab veins but veins nonetheless).  I am in love with my lower ab veins.  My wife thinks they are nasty but what else is new?  I need me some quad veins and some calf veins and some sicker cross delt veins and I am taking this arm hiatus to do just that.
 

When my elbows are healed, in like a year I think, I will be thicker for it.  So thick that I will have to call in thick to work:  “Umm, yeah, I feel really thick today, I don’t think I can make it in.”
 

I am getting Down with the Thickness
 

Can I get a thickness?
 

I will be a thertified perthonal thickness trainer.
 

OK I am done. 

I love to be DOMinated.  Seriously.  And not in a Maddi the MILF Huntress way, although I am sure that is pretty hot.  I love DOMS.  I love the 48 hour delayed crushing debilitating stiffness and soreness associated with pull-ups and deadlifts.  I love the pain of stretching out the pecs after chest day by grabbing the Iron Gym pull-up bar and twisting my torso away from the bar.  That really smarts.  And the agony stretching out the hammies and calves in a hot yoga class the day after Wheel Work: friggin’ awesome.

I am not a masochist.  I am not into hot wax, bondage or leather paddles.  Not into dentists or marriage.  Tattoos I will tolerate but only because the reward is so high, just like Wheel Work, deadlifts and pull-ups:  the pain is awesome because that is the reward.  The reward is the pain of growing and the tactile response is physical affirmation of the sweat expended 48 hours before.  So keep your glutamine and HMB.  I will take total DOMination any day.

Hi Maddi.

As we all know by now, protein powder sucks.  But I love protein shakes at night before I go to bed, so I now mix up and crush the following: Milk, Egg Beaters, fat free cottage cheese, Splenda, vanilla extract, and some frozen fruit, either blueberries or strawberries, sometimes peaches.  And raw wheat germ.

This one was free, but soon I am going to start pimping myself on this site and charging for non-college knowledge by the gram.  Rasta.

F*ck protein powder.  Yes, I said it.  The hell with protein powder as a supplement and as a meal replacement.  As anyone who has ever dieted for a contest will tell you, protein shakes are not conducive to a shredded midsection.  You need dietary protein, even right after a work out.  Dietary protein is absorbed and feeds your muscles much more effectively than whatever crap comes in a plastic tub and scoops.  Bodybuilders who do this for a living eat the highest end organic proteins bought fresh every day.  It’s their job.  They will also hold the plastic tub with the scoop inside and smile for the camera because that’s their job too.  But there are only four situations where protein powder is acceptable, and I will list them for you here. 
 

1.                 Maddi the MILF Huntress has a leather bag over your head and is straddling your back forcing it through the zipper into your subservient mouth as she smacks your ass with a riding crop.
2.                 You are on “Survivor” and you bid on the covered tray and win and it turns out to be a protein shake.
3.                 You are a child and your mother will not let you eat fresh broccoli and spinach and wild blueberries unless you drink a protein shake first even though that hypothetical situation should qualify for a visit from Child Services. 
4.                 You are total tool of the supplement industry and don’t care who knows it.

5.                 Seriously, if you are at an airport and in between flights and about to miss a meal and get on a plane and be starving and forced to eat roasted nuts, pretzels or worse, and you happen to be at an awesome enough airport that has a GNC, go git you some protein shake.  Hurry. Your plane is boarding.  Get a bottled water to mix it with.  Worse comes to worse you can mix it in a cocktail glass.  You just have to do it in several batches.  Like seventeen of them.  Use a spoon if the stewardess will give you one, otherwise use a coffee stirrer, and grab a lot of napkins.  The person next to you will say something but ignore him or her.  They don’t know what it’s like to be you.

My

My wife hasn’t said anything about it, but she’s silently acknowledged the fact through several silent gestures, like folding the shirt in question and putting it with MY clean folded clothes.  So she knows I stole her shirt, but it is now my favorite workout shirt and she is not getting it back.  She has stolen so many of my clothes over the years that she would be a complete hypocrite if she tried to enforce one of society’s many double standards against me.  She can’t Double Standard me; I invented the double standard.  I have been living the double standard for so many years that I can recite the pledge from memory:  “I will clock hizzos and hizzos will be chaste except in my presence.” 
 

These two guys I knew, Kumar and some other guy who is not me and no one I know personally, had an importing business for a little while.  They would import commodities from low-cost suppliers in places like South Texas, Arizona and California.  However, the down side to trafficking in commodities is that the authorities take a dim view of such activities and take every opportunity to downsize the commodities business.  To avoid the unfortunate results of downsizing, i.e., incarceration, they came up with the double suitcase trick.  They purchased identical yet distinctive suitcases.  They would both travel to the exotic off-site acquisition location, one of them travelling under his real name, the other under an assumed name.  This was easier in 1990 because the twin towers were still standing; no picture ID was required to get on an airplane back then.  Crazy.  So anyway, on the return trip, the person travelling under the assumed name would pack his suitcase chock full of vacuum - sealed commodities, the person travelling under the real name would pack his suitcase with clothes.  Real clothes, not hemp.  Then, at the return airport baggage claim, the person travelling under their real name would pick up the “wrong” bag, the one with the commodities.  That way, if the coppers closed in, the person “holding the bag” could say:  “Hey! This is not my bag!  I grabbed the wrong bag!”  And the story would check out when they went back to baggage claim to see an identical yet distinctive suitcase with the person’s real name on it full of that person’s clothes.
 

Clever?  I don’t know:  They never had to try it out, but this one time as the one who is not me and no one I know personally was leaving the baggage claim, an unmarked van came skidding up to the curbside and about nine S.W.A.T. guys jumped out and ran right toward him . . . and then right past him into the terminal.  If you’ve never held a suitcase full of commodities with a S.W.A.T. team running at you, you haven’t lived.  I’m told. 
 

Kumar was a fun guy to hang with.  Very funny.  He went to college for three semesters, all non-consecutive and none at the same college.  He and the guy who is not me and no one I know personally apparently enjoyed the commodities business together.  They never really made any money but definitely crushed their own supply and liked to hang around elementary schools peddling their wares and met some cool sixth graders who liked to party . . .
 

Ok, that’s not funny.  But after a while they both realized that while the commodities business was raw capitalism and a very good learning experience, it was not a long term career choice.  Kumar sold got a job selling accounting software for a while, started his own technology company, sold it, bought and sold a bunch of other stuff, all legal and measured in acres, and is now the chief executive officer at a publicly traded company with about a hundred employees.  I don’t know what happened to the guy who is not me and no one I know personally.  He’s probably clogged his brain so full of bong resin that he babbles incessantly about things no one cares about.  Probably.
 

There is a lesson for children somewhere in this story.  I am not sure what it is, but it is definitely helpful I am sure.

As I’ve stated before, and will be stating over and over again to no one in particular at the Shady Pines Retirement Home in the not too distant future, no one has spent more time staring down into a toilet bowl than me.  Whether it was time spent puking up the six-pack beer bong or staring down as I urinated out a small portion of the gallon of water I drink every friggin day, the time adds up.  And as I will be mumbling to my future imaginary friends at Shady Pines, I notice things about urinating and toilet bowls that other people, who spend more of their leisure time doing other things like eating and sleeping, do not.  And like my imaginary future friends at Shady Pines, you get to hear about them in random outbursts designed to entertain . . . me.  So here we go.
 

1.              There are some very angry toilet bowls who do not like being toilet bowls and are resentful, and exist in a very un-Buddhist-like discontented state at being shat and peed upon.  This is what they do:  if you lift their lid to pee, being the considerate non-toilet seat peer that you are, the seat will not stay at the top in a state of stasis; rather, it does not go past vertical and at some point in the midst of your urination episode will drop suddenly, crossing the stream at a rate of speed sufficient to splash your legs from mid-thigh to shin with your own high water content urine.  Special.  If this happens remember that it is an inanimate object and can’t feel pain.  Go home and kick your dog or yell at your wife.
 

2.              Mankind has mastered its environment like no other living organism in the history of this solar system.  Mankind has decoded the genome, produced staggering pornography and increased the living standard of a few privileged classes of people beyond anything Caligula could have imagined.  Mankind is an impressive organism, indeed. Yet, in spite of this overwhelming capacity to do good things and create value, mankind has not built a urinal that you can pee in with shorts on without splashing your bare legs.  I imagine the problem exists when wearing pants but since I don’t feel it, it does not bother me as much.
 

3.               How awesome is it to walk into a bathroom and see a bathroom attendant?  Especially when it is someone old and a minority!  That is awesome.  Nothing to pour on The White Guilt like having an elderly minority bathroom attendant.  Of course, back when I was white I used to feel guilty about being white because so many of my black brothers don’t get to be white for even a minute and don’t get the free stuff white people always give each other.  But bathroom attendants made it that much more uncomfortable being white and well-dressed. 
 

4.               I really love ballpark or stadium trough urinals.  I wish there was a pill I could take to make my urine bright red, so when I started peeing and it came out red like blood I would start screaming “It burns it burns!”   That would freak the white folks out, almost as much as the size of the python spewing the blood all over the trough and the floor next to it.  Size 13 shoes do not lie.
 

Let me know if there is a pill for the red pee.  Some of you losers reading this went to med school; help me out.