MUSCLE CHURCH: Our Father, the Iron

It's easy to get bogged down in the goal-setting, poundages and blood, sweat and tears on a blog about working out but funny things happen too. Maybe some of us old school blood and guts trainers don't always want to admit it but there is a lot of nonsense that goes on in the gym, and this is one such tale. For those that don't know me well, you will come to learn that I find myself in weird situations-often of my own doing! When I worked night shift I came to fall in love with overnight workouts. For about 4 solid years I was working a shift of something like 5pm-5am and on those rare nights off, I spent a few hours training. I am not a before-work trainer and sometimes after work on night shift was just too much for my brain to handle, so I always took advantage of my nights off to get a good long one in. My old gym, East Shore Athletic Club in Charleston, SC, had a 24 hour facility and it became my second home. I'd mop and take the trash out and clean up some n...

The old saying "failing to plan, is planning to fail" is true in every situation. Like most things in the iron game, the simplest things are the most effective and planning your routine, program, week-hell, even planning your day can lead to greatness. We get too interested in the outcome that we ignore the work to get there, and once we ignore the need to plan-we wind up settling for much less than what we set out for. Whether it's a strongman contest or a bodybuilding show, setting accurate expectations for yourself is the way to achieve anything. But how much time do you sit down thinking not about the endgame, but about the steps along the way? How much time do you devote to benchmarking or setting a time frame for certain things? Probably not much. I'll pull the curtain back and talk about some successful programming I had once. My goal was to deadlift 700 pounds from the floor. I only knew that had about 3 months before competition and I was healthy, so why ...

Often we get in a routine where it becomes easy to just say, ‘fuck it, I’m out.’ In society these days we have so much of everything that many things we truly want and value don’t seem to be worth too much. Going to a movie doesn’t mean anything if I can just stream it at home. Buying an album is just clicking a button. So much of what we do and say in life becomes meaningless because it’s so interchangeable. When you enter the arena of the gym things have a finite value. At your job things might be that way too; whether it’s fixing a car or filing reports, some things are concrete. However, we tend to think of being goal-oriented as the non-stop journey toward something, instead of the way we get there. It’s not always about the end result, it’s about the process. If you want abs. If you want a promotion. Hell, if you want to live another day-it doesn’t come automatically and you don’t earn it by accident. Whatever you want in life, has to come at a price and you pay that pri...

Here's a little something for you all to think about as you get ready to do whatever it is that you do. Every single day, you make a choice. Think about that statement. I'll even repeat it for you... Every single day, you make a choice. You wake up. Go to work. Eat your little sorry lunch. Grab an unhealthy ass snack because you didn't meal prep on the weekend. Drag yourself to the gym. Cut corners with your program. Sulk on home and get on Facebook and like a meme that says, "being an adult means you're tired all the time." That's the daily routine for a lot of you out there because at no point in the cycle did you say, "wait a minute, this shit ain't working and I have the power to change it." You see every single day you're blessed enough to wake up, regardless of your circumstances, you make the choice to live you best life. You either decide to do well or at least do better, or you just let the inertia of life take you wh...

Lately online there has been some serious back and forth about the deadlift. There is a pretty vocal contingent in the powerlifting community that balks at the sumo deadlift while over in the strongman world the sumo deadlift is regularly frowned upon. Which made me think, when is a deadlift NOT a deadlift? In the powerlifting world the bench press is one of the three main lifts, and in gyms across the world on Mondays between 4 and 10pm the flat bench is king. However, so is the incline bench, the decline bench and for many, so is the close grip bench. No one ever complains that one or the other is NOT a bench press, just a variation of it. Though the squat is not as widely practiced by the gym-goers of the world, no one ever looked at World Record Powerlifter Ray Williams and said “that bar is too high.” Conversely, no one has ever gone to multiple time World’s Strongest Man Brian Shaw and given him grief for bar placement either. Yet, there is rarely confusion over high o...

It's that time of year, you guys all know it. The gym is crowded like a club on half price drink night and you're lucky if you get to bench at all during the week. The masses are adorned with the brightest of yoga-like material and the smell of fresh New Balance trainers and discount Amazon "fitness hoodie" is like a low-hanging cloud over the gym. Those of us who visit the gym 12 months out of the year know that January is impossible, February is complex and March is usually the end of the line for the Resolutioners, but I'd like to submit that there is something we can all learn from them. It's easy to get wrapped up your own bullshit. Even if you're a successful lifter or competitor, it gets very easy to start believing your own hype. I like to think I stay pretty grounded but this New Year I had to take a step back and it was good for me. Why do people make resolutions and why do they fail? This isn't news at all, but it's so simple the less...

So only about, what, 9 months between posts. Not bad, right? Well here I am, back again to underwhelm and disappoint with my tales of woe and injury.  At least, that's what the testosterone fueled, excitable and immature young adult version of myself would say. The mature, injured and somewhat refined man that sits here typing on this ergonomic keyboard feels very different. The truth is that I am injured, pretty badly. I have a minimum of two hernias, at least as of my last MRI/X-Ray which went down about 16 months ago. I also have diastasis, which is essentially a tear in my abdominal wall that probably won't go away. Aside from that, I still battle with problems in my surgically repaired left knee which has very little cartilage left, arthritis in both hands and a little tear in my left Achilles tendon that flares up once I put in too much cardio. Fortunately, the worst of my problems, my stiff, nearly straight neck with precious little space between discs, is the least ...