miked512’s BodyBlog

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.

I’m being a copycat, but my content is completely original.

2008 was a year of discovery.  I learned a lot and actually made quite a few accomplishments despite the fact that sometimes I think I’ve gone backwards in some respects.  I also harnessed the use of "intuitive guidance" a bit more than usual and its gotten me out of some sticky spots.  Here are a few of the great aspects of 2008.

1)  2008 was the year I learned to "Shut the door and hear whats on the other side".  Thats an oblique strategy used to help give you a perspective that you never considered.  This also goes into the idea that things aren’t always as they seem.  This has helped me with various friendship, relationship, housing arrangements, supplement choice, supplement purchasing and various other issues I found myself encountering over the past year.

2)  The human body really SUCKS at multi-tasking.  I thought I learned this in college, but to be honest, 2008 seems to be the year I became really in tune with my body.  No matter what number of activities you think you can juggle and focus on wholeheartedly, you can’t.  With multiple outside of work projects going on and trying to put my all into lifting, doing all of that really messed up and spilled over into other things.  In college, I would have just done it all and trim corners around sleep and recovery.  This time, I just dropped it all off on a plate and said I’d get to it when I could.  Ha ha, if you work a 9-to-5 and consider lifting one of the important things in your life that you have to do 6 days a week, then don’t vow to keep all of your gigs going strong.

3)  "Pushing past a plateau" is a misnomer.  That term implies doing a bunch of work to get over a hump.  So you either change your exercises, moving from 5 sets of 5 to german volume training to P/RR/S or something similar, or taking a break.  The better term would be "Finding a workaround to get you past the plateau.  It seems drastically reducing my frequency of training and doing something silly like full body workouts in a half hour 2-3 times a week.  You don’t have to beat yourself up to past a plateau.  You really just need to find a ride on an animal going across it.  I think I’m going to keep this up until well, I get more crap off of my plate.

4)  I read a crapload of books and am all the better for it.  Speaking of books, I finished my first book of the year right before I wrote this posting.  Man, now what am I going to do?  Read another one and make sure to keep track of everything.

5)   Always remember to keep the beginner’s mind.  Knowing everything sucks because eventually all of that stuff becomes old and needs to be changed and updated.  Somtimes there are just better ways of doing things than you already know how.  My how bodybuilding parallels life.  Of course, you learn this as you grow older but sometimes you need a refresher.

6)  Online friendships are just as valuable as in-face ones, even if you’ve never seen the person on the other end in real life.  There are real flesh and blood people out there on the other end and they can motivate and/or demotivate you just like the neighbor next door can.  However, the thing about online is its persistent.  You can’t just forget it, its real, honest, and saved somewhere.  Ha ha, the only difference about the online versus in-face is the demotivators that are online generally tend to disappear from your area of interest.  They aren’t interested in it, so why waste their time on the internet bothering those that are.  This leaves you with nothing but people contributing positively to you accomplishing your goals.  Those in-face people, well, they’re there spreading their evil or goodness, intentionally or otherwise, with support and what not directly around you.  Ha ha, thank you bodyspace people (you may or may not know who you are) for waking me up to that.

So 2008 was a great your of intuitive guidance and introspective discovery.  I could say I’m even closer to enlightenment than I was.  Ha ha, but at any rate, enjoy your new year.