miked512’s BodyBlog

You know, this is like … a crazy feature that the bodyspace people dreamed up and unfortunately, it messed up my regularly scheduled programming.  Instead of going to work out early like I said I would and writing up that post to complement dnsigma’s on online personal training, I ended up spending about a 1.5+ hours coming up with 3 people that inspired me.  And of course, the long diatribe that went with them.  Yes, the limit is 10 and unfortunately, there are just so many its UNFAIR to list 10.  Unfortunately this threw my schedule all off, I ended up going to the gym at 10 and well, there wasn’t enough time for me to ring in my 30th birthday with a nice bottle of wine.  You know, for the resveratrol.

My tolerance is a subject for another day.  DaFunkdocta02, damann75, and DarkMuscle all know that miked512 can’t hold his resveratrol despite the fact he drinks it so enthusiastically.  At any rate, back to the inspiration.

Its almost like in the end, people are going to start removing and adding inspirational people weekly because one friend has pissed them off and they want to see some other person be in the top 6 and so on and so forth.  You get what I mean.  It might just defeat the purpose of it.  Inspire is such a strong base word (in my head) that I couldn’t just come up with 10 profiles off the drop of a hat.  I’m sorry that I use Webster definition 1b for the word inspire "to exert an animating, enlivening, or exalting influence on."  Damn, upon reading that definition I might just have to rethink the 3 people I put up there … geez.

True there are some people here (ok, a lot) that just have these bodies that make you say "Damn, I’m about to go train right now.  Thats the motivation I needed".  Sure motivate and inspire are just about the same thing, inspire has such a strong connotation (there goes the suppressed poet in me) that I couldn’t just choose those temporary motivators because, in the deep of it all, they aren’t the ones that make me say that I have no excuse for being lazy, slacking, or being too busy to do this.  Inspire reminds me of my 7th grade math teacher who I think had the sole purpose of moving me to actually believe my dreams of the future were actually quite possible, no matter how technically far-fetched they were (and still are) at the time.  So in the end, the people on my list won’t be the motivators but more like the ones that don’t allow me to come up with excuses.  Here’s a hint.  If your crazy ass ever trains in the rain and/or attempts to run home and beat the storm before it gets there, you’ll probably inspire me.  If you bench press 500+ lbs, can front squat 315+, are genetically gifted, have been an athlete your whole life and stuff like that, you are probably just a motivator.  Unless of course, you’re cool enough to attempt to outrun the rain.  Then I’ll be inspired and jealous at the same time.  You might get listed out of SPITE!  Who knows?  I have to dumb down my feelings towards the word in order to do this in the first place.  If you get listed, you’ll know I have a reason and it’ll be listed.

That was a long paragraph.

So I’m still building my list because I need 10 people but it probably isn’t going to change much even though the ability is there.  And no, my list won’t be filled with people that have disorders and other ailments because if it were, it would be due to complete dishonesty and thats because I have issues.  In all honesty, sometimes that doesn’t really move me the way it does some other people.  Maybe its because a special olympics team trains at my old gym.  Or because having been schooled with a few "special" people (thats another story there) that its so commonplace to me that its just not all that inspirational sometimes.  I know that they don’t want to be treated like they’re special though but treated like they’re normal.  Although in some cases that is hard to do, its not really.  Yeah, I’m the ******* that never gives his friends in a wheelchair a push or holds the door open for them unless they ask.  Damn, I just realized I’m such a butt that I don’t even help them onto non-handicap accessible environments unless they ask.  Maybe because I’ve been cursed out too often.

;-)

I got off the true purpose of this, but eh, you all inspire me to get off my lazy butt and go workout, to not take shortcuts with eating, and the like.  We all inspire each other and in the process are moved to accomplish bigger and better things with our physique.  I’m still working on my next 7.  I act like this is a huge event or something.

“Mike, what are you trying to do?” “What are your goals?” “What are you after?” “Why do you do this?”  Those are all questions I get asked.  It isn’t all that frequent, but when I hear it, it catches me off guard and I usually give them an answer.  If it’s in a life context, if I feel you’re worthy I’ll give you the grand vision of what all I’m trying to accomplish in this life and what I plan on giving to humanity.  If you’re just a norm or I feel you aren’t worthy, I will probably tell you “My main goal in life is to help people solve complex problems efficiently through the use of technology while having lots of fun in the process.”  Most of the time, I get stares of ‘You’re frackin’ crazy”, get called a dreamer, or what have you.  It doesn’t matter which category you fall in to.  The non-worthy goal listing actually applies a lot to the worthy one but this is not the subject of this blog.  This blog, however, is about the training context of the question.  You can delve further into my head and life some other time.
I get asked the question often and my default answer is usually it’s “just a hobby”.  Some people have NEVER asked me the question and that has kept me quite comfortable on the issue.  However, my part-time training partner , mrlongisland1, asked me the question a few weeks ago and I said, “You asked me that before.  It’s just a hobby.”  I thought to myself “This dude asked me that question like my answer has changed.  What the heck?  He just didn’t like my answer.”  Then I got the idea to write a long blog posting about it because what I’m trying to accomplish is a bit more complicated than it needs to be.  And well, no one in their right mind really trains two-three times a day, manipulates their diet to be all healthy, not eat “normal” food,  and  buys boatloads of supplements on the whim of “this is just a hobby”.  Anyone that takes a hobby that seriously has got to be lying and hiding something.

And that is the point of this blog, to reveal what it is I’m hiding.  With this, we must delve into a bit of history for a little bit.

Along time ago, I was a very skinny guy.  This is pretty much all through high school and the beginning of college.  However, I wasn’t like most skinny guys who are at least ripped with abs.  Nope, I was skinny fat.  I possessed the traditional marathon runner build but truth to be told, I really sucked at running.  I still do and at this point I don’t care because … well, that’s a joke that won’t be told here.  I didn’t like being this skinny at all because in all honesty, who wants to look malnourished.  Ha ha, this is what lead me originally to start training in the first place.  It wasn’t because of girls because luckily I never had a problem with them.  It wasn’t because of being bullied/afraid of being beat up because your confidence grows by leaps and bounds when a would be bully ends up with a concussion or a gang of riffraff end up knocked out cold.  Intelligence is so awesome.
So although I started training, I didn’t really take it all that seriously and my nutrition was completely awful.  I grew and it was actually decent minimal fat growth until, as I wrote about on my profile, I got the autoimmune disorder Myasthenia Gravis.  I don’t know if MG has a dietary cause or not but I know I mistakenly came down with it during my college diet of Papa John’s and Mr. Pibb/Coke.  I went through all of the treatments, got it into remission, and happen to still be that way.  However, over time I’ve noticed that cleaning up my diet and training seem to have minimized the number of symptoms of the condition I deal with, leaves me better able to deal with stress and all in all, just feel great.

I guess this means the original goals were:

1) To stop being skinny
2) To get healthy thanks in part to the wreck that Myasthenia Gravis and all of its treatments caused me
3) To lose predenisone fat i.e. get it to acceptable levels

Those were the original goals and since then up until recently, I really haven’t had any and have just been playing around with it.  Oh, I had listed the lofty goal of getting to be 230 lbs and 5% bodyfat but I didn’t really take it seriously.  It was just something of if I got there I wouldn’t be upset.  If I didn’t, I won’t be upset and that’s about it.  I even made up 100 handstand pushups without the wall assist.  In my head, I just trained to train and would have liked to have been strong, huge, and ripped with the ability to move and function like an athlete.  In short, be an athlete that looked damned good.  However, I wasn’t really serious about this and just went through phases and cycles making progress here and there, losing ground here and there, and the like.
I felt fine, was healthy, and was just enjoying life, looking at new ways of training, seeing that this was cool, this wasn’t, and well, it really was just a hobby that relieved stress.  Until of course, late last year after I stopped training seriously to work on a project and gave my athlete power ring to mdrane, I began to notice a problem with myself and my then current training partner at the time.  He never wanted to do more weight, go to failure, or do anything that pushed him beyond his abilities too much.  It was stagnation and complacency despite the fact we both lied to ourselves and I decided, “Enough is enough.”  However, what did I want?  Was I really after 230 at 5% bodyfat now?  Am I really going to cut, pursue strength, or more muscle.  Then of course, on t-nation I read an article about an interview with the great Paul Chek and began thinking, “Why don’t we make this training thing a spiritual pursuit?  You can’t just compartmentalize it.  It’s something that is a part of you?  You’re smart and have a spiritual/religious component  about yourself?  Why do you treat your body as just an afterthought?”  This led me to being to take my body and training through the same thing the “soul” goes through.  

I ended up researching Buddhism a bit and found the six realms of samsara.  These are the phases a soul goes through in order to reach enlightenment.  This was going to be what my training went through in order for me to enlighten my training, make it a part of me and in the end come to either enlightenment or to reach an epiphany and give me something else to struggle with.  This caused me to start at the bottom.  To take my training and body through the worst type of training I could come up with and thus began the twice a day training and the brutal punishment I’ve been putting myself through recently.  I’ve loved it thus far and more details of the actual workout and the like will be posted later.  Just know that in the process, at my midway point, I have somewhat come to a goal with an endpoint, and intermediary steps.

Let’s just say that the being superstrong superathlete is the ultimate goal and will be worked on, but first I have to see what I look like at 230 lbs at an extremely low bodyfat percentage.    Which one am I working on now?  You’ll have to ask me but in the end the true reason that I train is the same reason that shaolin monks do kung-fu.

That probably doesn’t answer your question, but I’m about to go train now because its late, I wrote this all night, and its about that time.

I’m glad you guys enjoy these things.  I’m going to write some more.

First off, I should apologize to everyone for being almost 4 months late with this one.  I’ve been annoyingly busy, preoccupied, and the like.  However, considering the delay in writing this one, I will have to say that thanks to note taking skills and fish oil (you know, for enhancing memory) not much of a beat was missing.  Another thing is, I haven’t done too many of these since this one since I hadn’t written stop number 3, it would be unfair to everyone I had ever stopped to work out with that was supposed to be featured so I also kind of held off.  Not that I was free to do any of this stuff anyway.

So with the previous state tour stops in mind (reference http://blog.bodybuilding.com/miked512/2008/05/12/bodyspace-state-tour-stop-1-snlewis25/ and http://blog.bodybuilding.com/miked512/2009/01/31/bodyspace-state-tour-stop-2-january-17-2009-
glovee3834/ for more details), the third stop was to visit blacksuperman.  

Blacksuperman has been a member on this site since before the bodyspace implementation of it began and it was all forums.  I even remember having a few PM convos with him but eh, I’m not really a big fan of forums so you’ll probably never get to see me having too much dialogue in any of them.  So of course, I go on commenting, scheduling, working things out, and we agree on a date and time.  Unfortunately we scheduled on a Friday afternoon, traffic was horrible and I found out he trained at the LA Fitness in Buford, which well, although I’m a lot closer to Buford then I used to be, we had to move it to Saturday morning.  That was fine but then I start to think about something.  “This dude hasn’t posted any progress pics up since October 2007.  I know I’m not one for putting up progress pics, but it’s like the dude just got silent and disappeared.”  Of course, I let my imagination get the best of me and I’m thinking one of two things.  Either he’s quieted down this little obsession of ours or he’s been training like a mad man and is keeping things secret until he does a contest and just ends up on a magazine or something out of nowhere.  
Either way, I knew he was going to either look the same, be smaller/fat, or just crazy huger than the pics.  So on Saturday morning, I wake up, get a bite to eat, take some preworkout supps, and head on over to Buford, GA.  A few things I didn’t expect on this trip were to see cows this close to the city and for the highway to go from four lanes to two lanes.  There weren’t too many interesting sites off the exit that lead me to the Buford LA Fitness.  I just didn’t expect I’d have to go through a patch of the country between Fulton and Forsyth counties to get there.
I arrive, get there, get ready, and wait a bit before he gets there to meet the guy audacious enough to call himself blacksuperman.  I see him and I think to myself, “Alright, something is up.  He still trains but he looks like he might be about 200-210.  I don’t feel like I’m going to have the floor completely wiped with me.”  We introduce ourselves, talk for a bit and I find out the guy hasn’t been updating because his priorities got reshifted after his son was born.  Being super huge isn’t the only thing on his mind (If that’s the only thing on someone’s mind, what a shallow life we lead) so instead of working out everyday ( 5 times a week)  he’s toned it down to a few workouts per week.  Has he been just child rearing though?  Nope, he’s been working on a couple of rocketry projects as he really is a Rocket Scientist.  Then again, all polymaths end up being called rocket scientists so who am I to argue.

So its time to start the workout.  The paraphrased dialogue went something a little like this:

“I hope you weren’t expecting a really serious workout.  Were you?”
“But of course.  When I do these things, I usually go through the person’s workout. “
“Alright.  Hhhmmm, let me think.  Chest and Back?”
“Sure, that’s fine.”

Before I start, I would say that dealing with this guy made me think I was dealing with an anatomically efficient, more disciplined, much more grounded version of myself.  My head is in the damned clouds a bit too much but I really am a dreamer.  And whats up with the two chest and back workouts on these stops in a row?  People trying to get me to do antagonistic training.  Fine, I guess I’m game.
So of course we start with the Bench Press.  We’ll do four sets of these with a number in mind.  Of course, this workout was made up as we went so bear with me.  This is where I picked up the handy tip of “Stop warming up with those light weights on the work up to 225.  You’ll end up tiring yourself before you get up there and then never get a chance to rep the weights above it.”  That’s a paraphrase by the way.  In truth, he told me about how he used to do the same thing until one day he said he’d just start with the 225 and that got him up to 275 faster that way.   I’ve slightly incorporated this into my own training a bit since then.  Slightly …

Then we proceed on to cable crossovers.  We’re conversing about training, life, jobs, and just about everything under the sun.  At the cable crossovers, he tells me this is about the most serious he’s trained in a while.  I’m actually honored by that statement and of course don’t know how to respond aside from the raised eyebrows, scratching my head statement of “Thanks.  I’m definitely enjoying it” while thinking to myself “Why is all this weight on here?”.  This goes on for four good sets and then over to the dumbbell bench press.

After the dumbbell bench press, it’s time for the back part of the workout so we do bent over rows for 4 sets.  Remember that statement I made about anatomically efficient earlier?  Well, this guy does his bent over rows with his back flat.  There’s an arch but it’s perfectly flat.  If here weren’t contracting a tennis ball would just sit there.  I’m looking at him like, “Wow, why is that just so perfect?  Most people have an arch and it’s not like their bodies form right angles when doing these things.  That’s a right triangle there?”

In the process of doing them, I learn that while he was in school, they put so much emphasis on proper alignment of everything when lifting that he just does that because it’s the safest way to do it.  This was a pretty interesting look at bent over rows and I always felt that since I learned how to do them from the great John Coffee of Coffee’s gym, there was no possible improvement on the form.   That was then followed by a set of deadlifts.  Then some lat pulldowns and the workout was over.

Ha ha, I’m thinking to myself I wouldn’t mind doing this again and this dude would be a great training partner.  Would have been perfect in my initial starting days but alas, time is time.  At the end of that we talk about his relationship with the gym staff and the craziness that goes on at that particular LA Fitness and other random craziness.  It was a good one.  He thanks me for a good workout that he seriously trained through, I thank him for a wonderful one and well, did the usual keep in touch things because of course I will.

Closing Notes:  This workout actually made me value the reasons we do this.  Some people just want to be huge.  Others want to compete.  Others want to be healthy and the list of reasons varies from place to place.  It really is just a hobby to me but it’s become a bit more than that recently which I guess I’ll touch on in another blog.  Its actually pretty amazing why people constantly train day in and out while others can get just enough training they need a few times a week.  And of course ,I’m still interested in what kind of crazy rocketry this dude has up his sleeves because he is a rocket scientist and I really am just a nerd like that.  Also note, that all dialog is a paraphrase.

Blogs are always slow on sunday, I wonder why that is.  I might be about to catch up on some late postings.

Decisions, decisions.

1)  I haven’t posted in a while.

2)  Sometimes people ask me what to eat, how to eat, and other diet related questions.

Before we start, I will say I have no credentials whatsoever that states I’m qualified by some organized group of people that makes it ok for you to listen to me.  Digest this information and lets hope that you will do what you consider sensible and well, we can agree to disagree even though I might just agree with you.

Oh, and no this is not a joke, but Happy April Fool’s day.
At any rate, this post will center on the concept of quality food.  Ever since I started on this ‘bodybuilding’ journey, there has been one constantly changing thing that is ever so subtle that most of the time its not recognizable.  My diet has gone through several phases.  Some of the most notable are:

1.  College Student - My diet consisted mostly of papa john’s pepperoni pizza and Mr. Pibb.  Other pieces for variety were chicken wings, lasagna, spaghetti, chicken parmigiana (the tour of milan at city cafe for all you GT students is the best AND worst bulking meal).  The occasional mcdonalds or burger king was cool too.  Of course there was coke, an occasional powerade, and hard liquor.  Sorry guys, I didn’t start drinking beer until AFTER college.

2.  Sick Bastard - Well, this is the time I was on prednisone.  I also happened to be lifting then so there were a few gross protein shakes here and there (twinlab vege fuel and GNC brand whey) but my diet consisted mainly of pizza, fruit drinks, and kentucky fried chicken.  However, with prednisone, you’re always hungry so you have to adjust the portion sizes.  Yes, at one sitting I could eat a whole pizza or a whole bucket of fried chicken with the family sized sides.  You might think this is good for bulking but when you’re ingesting something that is notorious for stripping away muscle, imagine what your bulk will be. 

Being 240 sounds cool, doesn’t it?
3.  Normal City Life eating - Fast food is a normal part of life at this time.  Of course, there’s chinese food. Cooking?  Yeah, zapped microwave meals.  This lean cuisine crap looks pretty damned healthy.  Microwaveable meals are awesome.  Pop-tarts and cereal for breakfast.  Unless of course you’re going to IHop or Waffle House.  Restaurant eating is at an all time high as well. This is about the same time I discovered chanko, a wonderful bulking food combination.  Tuna, corn, and rice.  Its not all that bad for putting on some good size either.  Now that I look back at it, a flicker of hope for the healthy eating of quality food.

Of course, there’s more but I’m about to go workout so enjoy.

No, I haven’t read Nate Green’s book.  Not yet but it seems like an interesting read.  Maybe after my next supp order.  Who knows?

At any rate, this post is about one of the most annoying side effects of being in shape, lifting weights, and being bigger than a lot of people.  Its not having people move around you, treat you like they’re intimidated/afraid of you, the soreness, or having to squeeze a lot to get through tight spaces.  Its being asked to help people move.  I now have a rule where if no one asks me directly, I’m not going to volunteer.  I’m going to let you know I don’t want to do it but I’ll do it because I’m "your friend".  I won’t even ask others to help me move.  Why?  Its annoying first of all.  Second of all, using people as props because they’re not strong enough to move their piece of the furniture but they can hold a piece of furniture that just happens to be too big (but not too heavy) for you to wield by yourself.  So you’re moving them around like a rag doll.  Not only is this annoying, but its also humiliating to your human prop and thats just sad.

Is that the only real function of all this muscle we train so hard to get?

No, its also useful for pushing vehicles out of the road on your way home from work.  I’ve always considered pushing/pulling vehicles for distance an effective form of GPP or high intensity cardio for those of us too lazy to do real cardio.  Unfortunately (or fortunately), today on my way home I see a truck in front of a line of motorists waiting or swerving past this truck with the one human attempting to push a truck out of the road.  I decide to pull over, and help this poor human move his truck out of the road before he gets killed or worse, the dumb atlanta motorists all pile up in a line and start honking their horns.  I see him, the truck moves back and then starts to roll back toward him.  I completely surprise him by making my debut and pushing the truck on to the side of the road.

First thought in my head "Wow, I need to start doing this for GPP again.  And get bigger vehicles too.  Damn, I’m a sick psycho."

LOL, so we have us a long, lengthy discussion about marriage, selfish motorists, and how he forgot to get gas and managed to run out, and the like as we drove around to a gas station to fix his truck and the like.  It was an interesting 10 minutes of my life, he thanked me, and well, went on our merry ways.  Oh well, as I was typing this I realized, I’m really glad I DON’T have to use this muscle everyday for life or death situations other than training.  Geez, and I thank the men and women of past and present for making this type of life possible.  You know who you are?  Too numerous to name.

Ha ha, so why don’t you all tell me about your "function" stories?

You ever have too much work to do yet wonder why you aren’t working on it all?

Alright, I actually made a stop 2 finally.  This wasn’t a one stop deal.  It was more of a scheduling/timing conflict resolution issue.  The first one happened over 6 months ago and can be referenced at the link below just so you know what I’m talking about.

http://blog.bodybuilding.com/miked512/2008/05/12/bodyspace-state-tour-stop-1-snlewis25/

Well, there were also issues of scheduling, time coordination, who to train with, and just how outclassed am I going to be even though, I always think of myself as training master.  I just never know what to expect, how I’m going to react to it, and there’s always the dreaded possibility of "Wow, you work out with my max weight.  This is going to be really interesting."  Which is relatively easy to do on a chest day for some people as I don’t bench that much.  I’m an awful bencher.  At any rate, the initial idea was to restrict myself to doing this just on trips outside of the city.

However, it dawned on me that there are a whole slew of Georgian’s right here within 50 miles and I know they’re not all training the same.  Lets see what they’ve got.  So due to recent developments, I’ve got some extra time on my hands, lets do this a bit more often.

So the second workout, first workout of the year was with GLovee3834.

I hop on the train downtown as he trains at the Gold’s right next to Hard Rock Cafe.  I meet some random weirdos and laugh at the chick whose amazed that at the bottom of the Hyatt there’s a mini-mall there with tons of food.  She was with a ton of friends, was cute, and was looking for sushi.  I was HUNGRY but couldn’t wait around telling her "You’ve got to go around the corner outside for good sushi", continue the opener, and find myself on some mini-date with a woman from California and her friends, in an effort to separate her from them and.  LMAO, I am not going to brag about my pick-up skills on bodyspace, but suffice to say, I hate missed appointments and I’d have hated to tell the man, "Uuummm, I need to reschedule.  I found this broad and *insert lame excuse here*".

So I eat the awfulness I find, drink a preworkout shake, and go outside of the gold’s gym to look stupid, be cold and wait for GLovee3834 to arrive.  If you look at his profile, you’ll see that this dude is huge, looks tall, and has a angry Quinton Rampage Jackson face on him in all of his pics.  He gets there and I’m squinting like "Why is this guy smiling?  He’s shorter than I was expecting.  Heck, he looks like he’s only my size.  What the hell is up with picture perspectives?"  So we go in, I introduce myself, pay guest fees ( I smell bullshit ), get dressed, joke about:

"Man, what all you got in that big assed bag?"

"My life."  which really translates to "I’ve got a camera in here I’m supposed to take pictures with but can’t thanks to someone leaving the memory stick at home!!!"

So now its time for the workout.

Did I mention that after we got dressed, I see why he looks so huge.  Dude’s a monster.  I have to be honest here.  This dude is, drats, his age isn’t on his profile so I won’t tell that but I’ll just say he was an adult before I was.    How’s that?  At any rate, he’s technically the oldest person I ever worked out with so I just knew there were two possibilities.

1)  This man mops the floor with me and I’m tired and ready to die after some set.

2)  He’s weak as all crap, uses the pink dumbbells, and thinks walking up stairs is a workout.

I was leaning more towards 1 because well, in plain clothes he may not look it but he’s bigger than I am.  To be honest though, it wasn’t 1 or 2.  Then again, he did say he was feeling kinda lazy that day so either I got off good or I don’t suck at training nearly as much as I give myself credit for.  I’m going to go with the former.

Apparently every other weekend, GLovee3834 uses a split of antagonistic bodypart training.  Normal training of his follows a split and on weekends, he’d usually just finish up the week.  I happened to get there on antagonistic bodypart training day.  Oh, how much fun?  Am I going to be sore in two places at once.  Yup, this week was back and chest.

So we warm-up with 3 sets of pull-ups to failure or until we get a burn.  Why does he train like that?  We have no idea, he just does it that way so there is no rep counting.  Just go …, rest, repeat until all sets are done.  Sounds like a winner to me.

So then we proceed on to the start of it all, Incline Barbell Bench Press and Bent Over Barbell Rows.  After the first set I’m thinking, "Ok, its not so bad."  Second set, "This is cool. I’m going to make it."  Third set, "Why do I think this guy is holding back?"

Throughout the conversation thats going on, we talk about injury prevention and he mentions that he doesn’t do too much of that heavy lifting just because it causes injuries and would probably keep him out of the gym longer than he’d want to be.  Note, this is a paraphrase of the actual convo.  I can appreciate that as well, I’m about to be this guy’s age soon so I might want to start looking into that.  Not that I train that heavy anyway.

So then we proceed to do Flat Barbell Bench Press and One Arm Dumbbell Rows.  This goes on smoother than expected for three sets.  I make mention of cruddy gym music and why do they all sound the exact same.  Then he lets me know there’s only one more set of exercises left?

"Seriously?"

Wow, this went on smoothly but I’m thinking to myself "Thank goodness for *insert shameless product plug here.  If you ask me whats in the bottle, I’ll tell you*, one more exercise group, and improving my gym stamina with these 2-a-days because if there were more I’d be shot."

Then we go on to Seated Cable Rows and Flyes.  I’m thinking to myself, "Ha ha, yes.  Finally a group of exercises where I’m not dropping the weight.  WOO HOO!!!!!"  LMAO, so we finish those three sets and the workout is over in 50 minutes.

Phew, I’m alive and not totally exhausted.  Man, I could do this again, next week or something though.

Closing notes:  The gold’s gym in downtown atlanta is just as I remembered it the few times I braved down there for one.  The equipment is even the same.  GLovee3834 also used to be 270 lbs as well.  It was hard to believe seeing him at his lean weight of 228.  "Yeah, I just ate meat and vegetables and it all flew off of me in 6 months."  At one point I even accused him of a gastric bypass but was like "There’s too much muscle though.  You’re not another Jared.  I don’t even know anybody your age or older with abs like yours in real life.  WTF?!?!?!"  Ha ha, so this has shown me the following:

1)  Consistent training keeps you young enough to have 29 year olds wondering just what the heck is he going to throw at me.

2)  Even with upsets in life that allow you to balloon, strict dieting can change that.  Don’t go overboard though with the slackerishness though.  The guy wasn’t a fat, sloppy 270 he says.

3)  You don’t have to do anything crazy to consistently make progress, unless you’re just nuts.

Dude tried to convince me to give the sauna a try for recovery for 30 minutes, but after thinking about it, that 50 minute workout actually gave me a second to go check out that chick at the hotel.  So in usual Mike fashion, I bid my adieus, ran out, did a few routines, and enjoyed the rest of my day.    LOL, and gave the sauna a try at a later day and added that its a damned good idea.

Ha ha, I’m definitely going to have to do that sauna thing a bit more though.  Who knows what kind of sickness this dude is going to add to his workout for next time.

For those of you that have actually listened to me on other mediums ( I don’t talk about it much here ), you know that I’m a strong believer in the idea that high insulin resistance and low insulin sensitivity are why LOTS of people are fat.  You guys also probably know I’m a big time caffeine addict.  I think I’ve been perpetually buzzed from caffeine since I was about 8 years old and found out if I could drink sweet tea/coffee/mountain dew, I could stay up longer playing video games.  Oh yeah, its been madness.  I have periods where I quit, get back on, quit, get back on.  It doesn’t help that I’m following a career path where this type of behavior is encouraged.  Ha ha, caffeine is my insulin resistance increasing agent.  Oh yeah, the one I just can’t let go of.
So for the past two weeks I’ve been off the addiction known as coffee (and black tea).  The only caffeine you might see in my life is in the preworkout shake and the cup of green tea.  I’m back at work and my coffee cup that knows me oh so well and hasn’t seen or felt me in two weeks is excited with glee, turns around and says, "Hey Mike.  How you doing?  I KNOW you want to fill me up and drink from me.  Lets go down to the machine and get one of those black seattle roasts you know you love.  NO SUGAR!!!!!"

I’m at odds here.

Oh the life of a mad man that lives in a world of "anthropomorphism" from time to time.  Time for some … green tea.