Facing Death & Fighting the Good Fight

          When Nordic people believed in their pantheon of gods (Odin, Thor, etc.), they believed that if you fell heroically in battle, you would go to the great shield hall in the sky where you would party and drink mead with the All-Father until Ragnarok. During Ragnarok (the end of all things), the demons would escape their hellish prison and besiege the great shield hall where all of the gods (and those lucky enough to be with them) would fight to the death… and they lose. Strangely, they know they are going to lose before the battle even begins but they fight the battle anyway because it is not about winning and losing. It is about putting forth that noble and heroic effort.

           I rarely talk about this but when things were really bad for me, I just hated myself. After I would eat, I would need to stretch out by lying on my stomach to alleviate pain. I was winded from minor physical exertion. I rarely took pictures. I never took selfies. I have very few pictures of me and my kids to pass on to them. I just didn’t like who I had become.  So I started my process to turn things around. I want you all to keep that in mind.

           I just finished watching GENERATION IRON, which is a 2013 documentary about the Mr. Olympia competition. The movie focuses on some of the biggest bodybuilding champions of this era; names like Phil Heath and Kai Greene. If you Google Image search these guys, you see the top of their class.

           But even I look at it say, “Man, that is too much.” I am not alone in this opinion. The greatest bodybuilder of all time, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has commented on how now the sport revolves around how big you can be and we are losing the aesthetics of someone like Reg Park or Frank Zane. You want to see a beautiful man? Google Image Search Frank Zane and you will see what I am talking about. My ideal goal is to have something similar to Chris Evans as Captain America. Or Vin Diesel in Riddick. That is who I named my program after and what I am pushing towards.

          In the documentary, these pro bodybuilders talk about how they have to crush their competition, even if it means playing head games and such. (And, yes, I know. Arnold did that too.) In order to achieve their dream, they have to crush everyone else’s. I know I am never going to be a bodybuilding champion because I do not have that mindset and I do not want to compete against other people.

          I am not an athlete. I will tell you that straight up. Even in my 9-to-5 job, our product is so good that we are not competing with other agencies. There is more than enough business to go around. So we are not trying to be better than this company or that company. We are just trying to be the best company we can be. And I have embraced that philosophy completely. I am infinitely happier for having done so.

           For me, they gym is the same way. Maybe this is why I have stuck to my program for as long as I have, because I am not competing against other people. When I walk into the gym, my opponents are me from yesterday, complacency, laziness, fat… and – my greatest enemy of all – death. I hit the gym because I am fighting to ward off death. Like so many Nordic warriors, I know I will not defeat him. In the long run, he is always going to win. What matters is that I put up the biggest fight to stave that defeat off for as long as possible.

          See, with physical fitness, there is enough success to go around. My success does not hamper anyone else’s and vice versa. There are more than enough seats at the table. And if people see what I am doing and that inspires them or gives them new ideas for their own training, I treat that as a win-win. A rising tide lifts all ships.

           Back several years ago, when things were really bad for me, I don’t want to say that I was suicidal but if Death would have shown up on my door, I wouldn’t have gone kicking and screaming. I would have pulled a Newman and asked, “What took you so long?” Today, I have turned my life around. I have a great job. I have a little money. I try to be the best father I can be. And I am trying to shape myself into something healthy and strong. Furyan Strength has brought me confidence and I feel better about myself.

           I have no delusions. I know I still have a long way to go. I do not have six pack abs or veins showing in my legs. I see myself and I see that I am not where I want to be. But I think about where I could potentially be if I would NOT have started down this road. What if I was still shame eating and stress eating? I had a hard day. Why don’t I deserve that Little Debbie? It’s the only thing that brings me joy now! And that just fed the shame spiral… and that is difficult to reverse course on.

          I may not be where I want to be… but where would I be if I hadn’t started this journey at all? And that is what keeps me going. But somedays… somedays, people, it is very damn hard…

Blog Version 3.0

          Admittedly, I have been away from the blog for a while now but that doesn’t mean I have been away from the gym. I am still at it five days a week and in that time, I have been doing a lot of research, experimenting, and such. I am hoping that all this trialing will help elevate me to a new level and while I am still doing “clinical tests” before posting my results, the effects have been very positive and I am close to being ready to share with the myriad of Furyan Strength followers – hi, both of you! – all that I have learned.

          But before I do that… a few stories.

          First, I feel that the philosophies laid down in the previously published pages are pretty rock solid and will not end up changing as the months (and years) roll on. Resistance training. Antagonistic sets. Limited rests. Protein, fats; limit sugar and carbs. Those building blocks are not going to change and I feel like I have explained them to the best of my limited ability. So with that said, the focus of the blog is now going to shift to that “This is what I am up to” style that I hope you can learn from and adapt into your own program.

          This month, I will officially celebrate my 2 year anniversary of my starting my fitness journey. It has been a long road. I am still learning new things every week. And I am starting to understand and appreciate how much hard work and dedication goes in to getting to that upper echelon. If you want veins to display in your biceps, it is freaking hard work to get to that level. It is not something you can do two days a week and expect results. And I am still learning after two years. It is not a sprint. It is a marathon. So don’t let doubt discourage you. Just keep dialing in to find that perfect routine that is right for you.  

          Third, and finally, I was confronted the other day when someone asked me, “Why are you working so hard? Who are you trying to impress?” And there was this moment, where I wanted to turn and present what some would affectionately call “the stink eye.” I don’t know if you are familiar with the new tag team duo Enzo Amore and Colin Cassidy in the WWE, but I immediately went into my Jersey mode. While this was done through text message (where accents are hard to enunciate), I immediately went to that place. “Well lookie what we have here. A cuppa haters… A cuppa haters…” If you don’t speak Guido or are my father, that translates to “a couple of people who do not approve of what you are doing.”

          Now, in fairness, this texter was female. And the long running joke is that “Men and women go to the gym for the exact same reason. To obtain the perfect female body.” Women go because they want to look like that famous pop star or movie actress. And men go because they feel that they cannot attract the attractive with a pony keg. They need a six-pack to do so.

          Then, of course, is the fear. If a spouse sees their significant other going to the gym and getting in shape, there is the fear that they are doing it to look good for someone new or because they are about to be single again and want to attract the opposite sex. Now clichés are clichés for a reason. They exploit those tropes in sit-coms all the time.

          Time and again on here I have commented that you have to find your why. And this is what I have learned. I have openly said that I am in the gym because I want to cut an impressive figure in my tuxedo a decade from now when I walk my little girl down the aisle. So in that regard, I am not doing it for someone else. I am doing this for me but that mental image motivates me.

          I feel there is a difference between using mental images to motivate you and doing it for someone else. If you tell me, “Ryan, I want to go to the gym because I want my wife to be attracted to me physically.” Boom, good motivation! If you tell me, “Ryan, I think my wife is going to leave me and I want a six pack so she will be attracted to me and not leave.” Sorry, dude. You got bigger problems than the gym can fix.

          I have also said often that you do need the correct motivation to go to the gym and this is one of those instance where I feel it is okay to be selfish. I think if you are doing it for someone else – and by that I mean doing it so some girl will like you – then you will find yourself making excuses not to go. Instead, hit those weights for you. Gain pride in your own appearance and the rest will all just fall into place naturally.

          Keep up the good work. I hope you find the blog useful and learn a thing or two. For me, Year 2 is just right around the corner. What does that mean? It means it’s time to start the hard stuff…

 

The Regiment v. The Routine

           We hear all the time about the “same old routine.” By its very definition, a routine is just the same old same old. It is boring. It is mundane. I thank goodness that I do not have a routine but what I do have is a regiment. My boss at work (who luckily is also one my best friends) chastises me over the fact that you can pretty much set your watch by my schedule. He believes you have to take different routes to work and arrive at different times to be able to throw off the assassins. You don’t want to make their job easy for them. And yet, I leave the house at almost the same time every day.
           I eat the same breakfast. I eat my morning snack at the same time. I eat my lunch at the same time. I eat my afternoon snack at the same time. I am in bed at the same time. I wake at the same time (pretty much). While I know this sounds routine but let me tell you what this also gets me. 
           I get necessary sleep for recovery. I am never hungover headed into work. I cannot remember the last time I was sick. I am not out until all hours of the night. And while this sounds like a boring life, I can also tell you that my bills are paid on time, every time. 
           I told you from the beginning that this journey is about improvement of body, mind, and spirit. It is an odd thing. Once you start seeing results – and I mean real results – it becomes this wonderfully addictive drug but it is a drug of self-improvement.
           You start out saying, “I am going to lift some weights but I am not going to be supplement guy.” Then the results start and you want more. So now you are doing the research. You see how whey protein and Vitamin B and C can help you. Then that starts snowballing.
           The Little Debbie snack cakes start to fade away. To make sure you have a good healthy meal for lunch, you start planning ahead and cooking pounds of chicken in the crockpot the night before. You start investing in Tupperware. You are buying flats of green beans and planning snacks rather than just eating whatever is easily at hand. You start seeing beer for what it really is – liquid bread. And then you start making choices. Do you really want another beer knowing how time it is going to take on the treadmill to get rid of it?
           Now, I don’t want you to take this wrong way. I am not against having a few social drinks with some friends every now and again. There are days where a nice cold beer after a hard day’s work or after excessive time out mowing the lawn is perfectly acceptable. But as your training continues, you begin to cut out things that are going to jeopardize the next day’s training.
           A drink is fine. Falling down blackout drunk is not acceptable. At my age, it would take me days to recover from such nonsense. And for what? A momentary escape from reality? I like my life. What do I need to escape from? In the words of that once popular internet meme, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”  
           I am not telling anyone how to live their life here. I am not so vain as to believe I can shake a moral finger at you and tell you what to do. As always, this blog has been about what works for me. But over the last year, I have seen dramatic improvements in my life. I feel better. I feel healthier. My mind has become more studious as I have been doing research on how to make improvements. This process has taught me patience. It has taught me that hard work put in daily through small increments pays off tremendously in the long run.
           It is not just about lifting the weights. It is about packing the gym bag the night before to make sure you have everything. It is about smart planning at the grocery store. You find that striving to be the best you can be in the gym starts bleeding over and improving other aspects of your life as well. And that, my friends, is pretty darn awesome…

Band Training

           I have been doing this program for some 89 weeks and during this whole time, I had never used those elastic bands with the handles in my workouts. I just assumed they were wimpy resistance training with little old ladies with artificial hips. And then I read an article regarding the science behind them.

           Now, I am not saying that you should train exclusively with bands. There is no way a band is ever going to replace good old fashioned dumbbell work. But let’s looks at some science here. I want you to imagine performing a Barbell Bench Press with chains hanging off the ends of the bar. This is not just a length of dangling chain. It is a length of chain that is piled on the floor. At the bottom of the lift, there is more chain making contact with the floor (therefore less weight) and as the bar is lifted high, there is more chain being suspended in the air. This way, the higher up you lift the weight the heavier it becomes.

           Bands are the exact same way. The farther you stretch them the more resistance is created. Typically, with Dumbbell Curls, the hardest part of the curl is the start of the lift. If failure is going to occur, it is going to happen between the start of the lift and halfway up. Typically, if you can get that weight past that “point of no return,” you should be able to complete the rest of the lift because you have made it past the crux of the lift. Everything else is “downhill” so to speak. Another way to classify the rest of that lift is with the term “garbage time.”

           Band training offers you the exact opposite. The further up you get with a curl using the bands, the harder it is going to be to complete. This allows you to achieve maximum contraction and you will feel the difference in the morning.

           Obviously bands are not something to build a workout around but, holy cow, what a way to finish a workout. You can achieve multiple lifts very quickly which is going to fire those fast-twitch muscle fibers. 

           Remember what I have stressed from the beginning: attacking from multiple angles. This is an entirely different muscle attack because the resistance is unlike what you can get through dumbbell or barbell lifts. It is very easy to rip out as many reps as possible, going to failure, and really exhausting those muscles with a technique that cannot be achieved through dumbbells.

           Now, it is tough to feel manly working with bands. Again, it feels like the same tool that little old lady with hip replacement uses but if used correctly to finish off your workout, they are phenomenal.

Furyan Reviews: Branch Chain Amino Acids

           I have mentioned in the past about how supplements can improve your bodybuilding experience. Just like yesterday’s article, if you are coming in late, here is a simple breakdown. Think of your nutrition as a castle wall. The nutrients from food are the big blocks of granite that form the wall. Supplements are the mortar that holds everything together. It fills in the gaps between the stones, binds everything together, and keeps that wall upright when those rousey mongorians come to tear down your chitty wall. Supplements on their own do little but when mixed together, they make that wall strong.

           My list of supplements is pretty small. I take Vitamin B, E & fish oil for my metabolism and my heart, Vitamin C for my immune system, and CLAs and Green Tea Extract to help me burn fat. While I got away from it recently, I have returned to having a whey protein shake when I get home after my workout, and I do a casein protein shake before bed.

           Now, the Whey Protein shake is fortified with BCAAs but I only use one scoop, so I am not getting the full recommended dosage that the company recommends which is three scoops. The human body can only absorb about 30 grams of protein in a sitting so to me, that is just protein overkill to get their full dosage of BCAAs.

           So why not just take BCAAs? So a few weeks ago, that is what I started.

           Amino Acids are very important to bodybuilding because they provide two essential things that we are looking for. Muscle retention and fat loss. Back in the day, professional bodybuilder Frank Zane was known as “The Chemist” because he was a big believer in amino acids and other supplementation. And let’s face facts. Google Image Search “Frank Zane.” The man’s physique is darn near perfect and his contest weight was usually around 185 pounds. It would be amazing to shrink down to that size and have his muscle definition. So if it works for Zane, I thought I would give it a try.

           I opted for the BPI Sports brand of Best Aminos which you blend into water. Most people acquire the necessary amino acids through food. In order for this to occur, you have to eat the food, it has to get processed by your body, and then pumped into your blood stream. The benefit of adding Amino Acids through supplement is that the fuel gets absorbed directly into your blood stream. Your body then utilizes them as fuel while you are working out to stimulate your muscle growth. They offer a fruit punch blend that if you mix with the right amount of water is pretty tasty.

           There is a series of debates as far as when you should consume these. I take mine about 10 minutes before I hit the gym. (My commute time is very short.) On average, I would say that my workouts last approximately 75 to 90 minutes. If I was going in for a four hour session, taking the amino acids the middle of your workout would be very beneficial. But I don’t have that kind of stamina and the last thing that I want to do is stop in the middle of my workout, mix up a batch of the stuff, swig it, and keep going. Taking it to start is just a more viable option for me. 

           Now, there are a lot of supplements that claim they will make you stronger. This is not the case. You don’t just take them and instantly become stronger. You take them, you gain energy and fuel, and you get 10 reps where you normally might have only mustered 9. Those extra reps and that ability to go harder is what make you stronger.

           I started my week with trying some new chest routines which I thought would have left me pretty sore. That was on Monday. I did a second chest day on Wednesday. And on Friday I added several sets of Incline Push-Ups with my arm routines. My soreness afterwards feels considerably less that it should be. I like to believe that is because of the amino acids.

           So I feel that BCAAs are definitely something I will continue to add to my supplements. I can tell you what oligopeptides do. I have not researched that far ahead yet. But I like them. Do your research and they might help you out too.

 

Maximum Effort

           As I have discussed already, my goal with the majority of my workouts is to achieve hypertrophy.  Hypertrophy is the best of both worlds between strength training and endurance training where you will see an improvement in both strength and size.

            For a quick recap if you have come to the blog late, powerlifters have rep ranges of 3 to 5 reps lifting practically their 1 Rep Max with every set and there are long rest sessions in between to dump that lactic acid out of your muscles. People looking to burn more fat should be performing rep ranges of around 15 to 20 with most exercises because the muscles are under tension for longer time and that results in more calories burned. (This is really the rep range that I should be doing because I want to strip that layer of fat and not necessarily get bigger.) But if you want the best of both worlds, your target rep range is between 8 and 10. I have said that you want to perform those first eight reps slowly and with surgical precision. Then if you have to cheat to get Reps 9 and 10, that is perfectly fine. However, if you can achieve 12 reps (while still maintaining good form), it is time to increase the weight by 5 pounds.

           But now let’s talk about those reps. I think there are times where we get too mentally conditioned by counting. I often wish I could have a partner that would just watch me do exercises and count my reps for me. Imagine just focusing on going to muscle failure, lifting as much as you can as many times as you can, and then turning to your partner and asking, “Okay, how many was that?” Then if they say 12, you increase the weight.

           Many times we give up at 10 because that is the prescribed number of reps when really you might have three more in the tank. But mentally, you know the goal is 10 and you stop at the 10 count. It is like the scene in the book Jurassic Park where they had the computer set to account for many raptors they thought they had, never thinking that there could be more raptors on the island than just the ones they created. You count to 10 when really you can get 12 but you stop because you have reached the mental limit instead of the true physical limit.

           This is where you really have to learn to listen to your body and be willing to push beyond the pain. With some exercises this is considerably easier to do. With things like Dumbbell Curls, it is rather easy to go until you just cannot physically lift that weight anymore. Exercises like Barbell Squats or Barbell Bench Presses are much more intimidating because what if you drop the weight down and you cannot push it back up? That is usually what a spotter is for but what if you are like me and you work out by yourself? That is one of the major disadvantages.

           Now, some will tell you – and I agree with this – to leave one rep in the tank. If I am performing my first set of Barbell Bench Presses, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to compromise my second and third sets by going overboard on that first set. If ever there is a time to push beyond those limits, I try to reserve for that final set before switching to that next exercise.

           However, if you want true hypertrophy, you cannot just slap on any weight, perform 8 to 10 reps, and expect to achieve it. You want to perform those 8 to 10 reps with a heavy enough weight that you cannot perform 15 reps. If you can perform a weight for 15 reps before achieving muscle failure but you are only doing 10 reps, you are not working as hard as possible. That is going through the motions. That is being lazy. And that is the antithesis of Furyan Strength. Remember, you are working to the maximum of your ability. I don’t care if the guy beside you is doing 100 pounds and you are only doing 50. If 50 pounds is the maximum of your ability, be darn proud that you are pushing yourself to the edge of the envelope. That is how you become the hardest worker in the room. That’s how you achieve Furyan Strength.

Motivation Monday