Rasta Fitness Blog

As my wife and I were driving home from the airport last Friday evening I relayed the “Ciao” story from last month’s blog and how if that tool ever ended another conversation with “Ciao” I was going to bench his kids.  And my wife, true to form, did not agree with me.  As a matter of fact, she was surprised that it annoyed me.  She said that the tool should be commended for taking an interest in his image and it was no different than hearing a saying or “zinger” and using it yourself.
 

I was all. “No way, Bré! First, if someone gets you with a good zinger you are like, “Hey can I use that?’ but he is copying a persona, and trying to blah blah blah . . .”  I go off on tangents to hear myself talk because no one likes me like I like me and I really love how right I am sometimes, so I went on for a while and it jut annoyed my wife to the point that eventually she was like:  “You are a tool.”
 

She’s right, of course.  I am a total tool, and to show her that she is right, and that I am even more of a tool than the tool I was ridiculing for ending his conversation in “Ciao,” I am going to affect my own copycat way to sign off my telephone conversations, and accordingly, as my object of emulation, I have chosen evolution’s masterpiece:  the male soap opera star.
 

I watch General Hospital with my wife on those occasions when I think doing so will somehow end up with me and her in a naked pile, and I have always dug how soap guys never say “good bye” or “later” or even “see ya” when they hang up.  They don’t say anything.  They end the conversation and hang up.
 

“OK, that’s fine.  I’ll talk to Roger.”  Click.  Or,
 

“No that’s not possible.  Right.  Well, let me know.”  Click.
 

That’s hot.  I’ve been doing it for a week now and my wife called me back after one such “click” and was all like “I know you didn’t just hang up on me.”  I explained what I was doing, copying soap stars because they are hot and I want to be hot too, and she was like, “click.”
 

Story of my life people.

Arnold is a fabulous governor if you ask me, which you didn’t.  Governor Schwarzenegger supports smart policies regardless of whether they are produced by the right or left.  In that he is rather like the rest of us, the smart people, that is: each of us is right or left on myriads of issues, and only most pedantic of us is solidly blue or red on all issues.  We are all varying shades of violet, some prettier than others.  The ultraviolet Governor Schwarzenegger is also to be commended for his creativity and willingness to listen to any and all suggestions designed to alleviate California’s budget woes and resulting student riots in Berkley and Santa Cruz (those havens of social injustice).  However, and this is a massive “However,” I recently read yet another quote from Governor Schwarzenegger as it relates to one of the social causes near and dear to my own heart, which is of course, the gallon-sized water jug we fitness celebrities carry around with us at all times.
 

If you can possibly believe this, The Oak is fond of ridiculing us shiny happy fitness hotties as we carry around our gallon jugs of water everywhere we go.  The Oak likes to tease us, laugh at our purported hyper-paranoia regarding dehydration, that we inconvenience ourselves with a gallon-sized water jug for fear of being without water for a single second.  He laughs that our irrational and incomprehensible fear of dehydration is ludicrous, that we are only a few steps away from drinking water at all times. 
 

F*ck the Oak.  Yeah I said it:  Cry two tears in a bucket f*ck it; let’s take it to the stage.
 

I am not afraid of dehydration, Wile E. Governor Suuuuuper Genius:  I am afraid of the unsanitary and contaminated water that is only a few steps away.  Call me crazy, but I’ll take my hydration reverse osmosis cross micro-filtered por favor.  And until the Soviet Socialist Republic of California puts reverse osmosis filtration systems on all public drinking fountains, Governor Super Genius should concentrate on full legalization of marijuana so he can save the poor disenfranchised UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs from 32% tuition hikes.
 

Life Coach to Governors and Other Public Policy Makers Out.  Have a Happy TG Team Awesome.

I have a friend we call him Water.  We call him Water because no matter what you do or build to keep him out, he will always find a way in.  He can sneak into any football stadium on any occasion.  He’s snuck into 6 straight super Bowls, including the Steelers v. Seahawks at Ford Field in Detroit, the acknowledged Fort Knox of sports arenas in terms of difficulty to sneak into.  When we were kids, we would sneak into Michigan Stadium each football Saturday and collect ten-cent deposit cans that littered the ground and watch parts of the game if they were playing anyone we cared about.  One Saturday when we were in fifth grade we were walking around with garbage bags of cans slung over our shoulders and collecting all the free money lying on the ground, I mentioned that I was hungry and he agreed that he was hungry as well and since all of our net worth was tied up in recyclable aluminum cans, a rather illiquid investment at that moment, we decided to try to steal hot dogs.  So we walked through the concession line and grabbed two dogs and a cup of pop and then just kept walking and then breaking into a run at the cashier’s station, stuffing hot dogs into our mouths as we ran.  Good times.

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.