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.

This has to be postponed.

I’m done with the workout and I can barely move my arms comfortably enough to type a review.  I did something retarded.  This should speak volumes for M5 and NO working very well synergistically together.  However, this is Day 2 and I only had two days worth of the stuff to combo it so use that knowledge in your comparison.  That is also workout selection induced.

I must say wow though.  Cellucor has a GREAT NO product that stacks well with the M5 and the D4.  I kinda want some more as this pump is ridiculous but aaahhh, I can’t type anymore.  I’ll give a real review later.

Today was golden.  I drank the M5 with the D4, wrote my post, and then went to the gym.  Well, of course there was a 30 minute stop at the gas station as well, thanks to the cold and I am Mr. Meticulous when it comes to insuring my tires are properly inflated so the cold doesn’t have that much of an impact on them.  So I get to the gym and still burning to get through everything.  Before I left, I said today is going to be a "Pit Bull" day.  Lets just say "Pit Bull" is a code name for what I want to feel like I got beat up by in the morning.
At any rate, I’m there and I plan on doing Pit Bull.  I breeze through everything.  I’m thinking to myself "I really must not have given that stuff much time to go through my system?"  At any rate, I breeze through the pit bull and I’m thinking, "OK, this doesn’t feel right.  You know what to do when a workout is too easy."  This is what I call the "sasquatch" addition to my workouts.  It requires me to get whatever the magic number of the weeks number of total reps on squats or deadlifts in a workout.  For example, lets say I did a workout that included Deadlifts, Chins, and Dips for 4 sets of 8-15.  If that was too easy and I wanted to invite sasquatch, then that would involve me adding 4 more sets of some type of deadlift or squat to the workout.  Theoretically, that means I could do deads twice.  It all depends on what’s in the workout book.

So I added the front squats and laughed at them.  It could be because I used a different grip then normal that made them easy.  I don’t know.

I am loving M5 though at the moment. 

By the way, to those of you reading this, I don’t buy NO shotgun as I think the only time I’d ever take it is on a weekend due to the crackhead feeling.  M5, well, I could go to sleep right now if I wanted to.  This seems like I could buy it sometime soon.

Saturday, I received a gift from mdrane.  A number of supps to sample from Cellucorp.  Man, thanks again.

At any rate, so like he said I mixed up some M5 with a teaspoon of leucine and and took it with a D4 prior to  my workout.  And although, I’m not aware of the stuff having any focus implements within it, it seems to have had that.  Within 5 minutes of the first swallow.  Of course I said, this is going to be good.  Muscles were pumped and ready for movement.  "Wow, I have to wait 30 minutes.  Geez … this is going to be torture."  This stuff also tastes ridiculously good.  Its one of the better tasting preworkout supplements I’ve ever had.  I didn’t have to mix it with anything else the way I do with NO shotgun.
During that wait time, I prepared the rest of my workout gear.  My intraworkout shake of leucine, my secret supplement that you’ll have to ask me about (Its the best supplement in existence and I don’t usually say that about anything), and gatorade and went on about my day.  In the gym, I honestly didn’t drink nearly as much of my intraworkout shake as I normally would have.  Did I make any PRs while on it?  No, I wasn’t trying to make any.  My weights were good for the day with the exercises I did and considering I did drop lunges, the weight I did was more than substantial.  The increased focus and attention to detail probably kept me from falling on my ass.

Things to note:

1)  Unlike other preworkout supplements, the one serving of this didn’t have me freaking out, bouncing all over the wall, tripping or anything of that nature from the caffeine overdose.  No shaking.  Just pure clean energy with a nice pump.  In relation to that, for NO-Xplode in order for me to get the pump I have to load up on the dosage and feel like a "dysfunctional treasure troll".  NO Shotgun usually has me feeling like I’m on adderall, caffeine, and is probably how crystal meth addicts feel but STRONG and pumped at the same time.  Since NO Shotgun is my favorite preworkout supp and a muscletech supplement is my least favorite ( I know I’m supposed to stack it with something else but WHY!!!!), M5 so far has to go right up there with NO Shotgun or slightly below it.  Sorry, I didn’t feel like picking up trucks, and seeing my enemies driven before me and hearing the lamentation of their women.  I felt like I had already conquered the world and was just going off the high.
2)  I’m surprised that stacked with D4 I didn’t feel all caffeined out.  I’m surprised I can actually even think straight and not think "gym, gym,gym" or other activities not related to bodybuilding.

So I like it and think people should give it a try.  I just took my dose for the day and am about to go lift some weights for the day.  I’m feeling GREAT and well, like I just conquered a day so lets go conquer one or two more things and give it a go.  I’ll write a review about Day 2 in a bit.  I’m pumped though …

OOOOOHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

I’m writing this in response to dnsigma’s post here:  http://blog.bodybuilding.com/dnsigma/2008/12/01/authoring-your-life-part-2/

Check it out and write your own.  Not my turn.
This story has to be filled with humor because I try to be a funny guy, so you can either laugh or wonder just how twisted I am.

As a kid, I was skinny as all hell.  LMAO, and I always wanted to not be so skinny.  However, to add insult to injury my dad wanted to make an athlete out of me and I wanted to read and do nerd stuff, so his forcing athletics down my throat and me not wanting to do it kinda presented a bit of a conflict.  Suffice to say, I won that battle and the only athletic thing I did was some judo here and there.  So at 12 or 13, I decided to use this brain of mine to get myself into shape and unskinny by reading.  I even took a weightlifting class at 14 but thanks in part to my cruddy school system, that didn’t work out and after that I realized I had a nerdy image to uphold.  I stopped the whole wanting to not be skinny thing and decided to do it in college.  College got me some gains as all of my previous reading seemed to help a lot.  Then well, I got myasthenia gravis and that really threw me for a loop.  I kept training though despite the fact seeing took considerable effort.  I gained some good weight and all until well, my doctor finally figured out it was myasthenia gravis.  Then came prednisone and this is my history:

skinny as sticks -> graduate high school at whopping 125 lbs -> lift and eat like a college student for a few years and grow to a whopping 165 lbs -> get myasthenia gravis,  take prednisone, eat like a college student, balloon to 240 lbs

WOW, so at any rate, through the MG treatment (I even got a pretty scar!!), the elimination of the prednisone, and my road to not being a fat ass to the current condition I’m in now, I’ve learned a great deal.  So of course, since I’ve learned a great deal, I’ve begun to live, breathe, eat, and crap out this stuff.  Of course I try to spread the knowledge around to others and it hits them even though its slightly different from what they’ve heard.  They may listen and they may not, but I know the best way to get them to listen is for me to look the part and unfortunately, I don’t think I look the part (even though I’m a lot closer than I have been).

Well, isn’t that sad?

So how do I get there?  By looking at all of you bastards in better condition than I am and getting angry about my slackfulness.  By looking at bastards behind me that are gaining on me and improving their condition at a rate better than me.  I’ve got to outpace you all.  By reading all of this information and wanting to try all of it. By remembering my past condition and realizing I’m past it and knowing that I have to keep at it to keep all of that long behind me.  To make sure I can be young forever and of course, I’m vain.  I have to look completely awesome all the time.
Sure, I have my battle with wanting to put aside going to the gym to do development work and make some extra income.  I have issues with sticking to diets and planning out meals.  I get overwhelmed with projects for work and my personal life and I know one day, a doctoral program is going to snag me in its clutches (as one has dnsigma) and try to insure that I never have time to keep this workout thing going strong.  However, in the end, I know health is the most important asset I’ve got and one I need to keep going strong.  I’m not getting any younger … or am I??

Besides, what the hell else am I going to do?  Go to work, come home, watch TV and eat twinkies all day, and play lottery every week in hopes that I can win, retire, and just change that to stay home, watch TV, and eat twinkies all day??  There’s a life out there to create and continually update it.  Take it by the horns and wrestle it to the ground.

The third exercise I’m listing in the travesty section is the Zero-G Barbell Curl.  I first encountered this, hell some of everywhere.  I’ve been seeing it for years, even on youtube.  At any rate, the description is as follows.

Zero-G Barbell Curl

Exercise Data
Main Muscle Worked: Biceps
Other Muscles Worked: None
Equipment: Barbell
Mechanics Type: Isolation

Execution: With your hands shoulder-width apart, grip a barbell with an underhand grip. Stand straight up with your shoulders squared and with your feet shoulder-width apart. Let the bar hang down at arm’s length in front of you, with your arms, shoulders and hands in a straight line. Leaning back as far as you can and with all the momentum you can muster, swing the weight and curl the bar up toward your chest in an arc. If you mustered up enough momentum, the barbell should be weightless as you curl the bar towards your body.  Move your elbows as much as necessary and bring the weight up as high as you can and squeeze the biceps at the top. If you hit yourself in the face with the bar, good job.  Lower the weight quickly, with no resistance on the way down until your arms are nearly straight.