MUSCLE CHURCH: Our Father, the Iron

Mariusz Pudzianowski 5x World's Strongest Man Everyone jokes about carrying all the grocery bags in these days and yeah, a lot of people take it too seriously. Think of it a different way though...not trying to get a laugh, or be goofy or anything like that. You train all the time. You lift weights. You do cardio. You load up with protein and caffeine so you have fuel to perform as best you can. You stretch. You rehab. In short, you do everything you can to perform your absolute best! WHY DO YOU LEAVE IT ALL IN THE GYM??? Maybe carrying the groceries in isn't the greatest reason to train, but how often do you shirk away from exertion outside the gym? Flip the switch on that way of thinking right now. Do more. Carry stuff. Pick up awkward heavy things. Take the stairs. Park further away from the building. The gym is great but it's only a few hours a week, life happens 24/7 and the less you choose to do, the less prepared you'll be. Challenge yourself to perfor...

Turn the Page...what a track, Bob Seger or Metallica???? Well, that's not what the blog is about today. Today I'm talking a bit about New Year's Resolutions and how it can crowd up our gyms, but that's not a bad thing! Enjoy and drop a comment below. This week and every week in January, February and at least the first two in March will see our precious gyms overrun with dreaded newcomers! How dare they come to MY gym and take over the squat racks for their barbell curls and use the good flat bench to do planks on, don’t they know I was here first??? Seriously, how many times have you heard that every…single…year? How many times have you been guilty of feeling that way yourself? I was for years until I realized that the only difference between me and these misguided souls was that I was in the gym in December, toiling away, frying my system and stressing myself out while they were eating cake and psyching themselves up to hit the weights after the holidays. Really,...

The answer is yes. Yes. Yes, you need a goal. You have to have a goal otherwise all this is for nothing, right? If you don't have a specific goal and hit the right percentage of the right poundages from the calculator you got from the website you subscribe to and then forget to post it on Instagram then what's the point? That was me in late 2014...then again in late 2015...and maybe for a smidge in early 2016. I got wrapped up in the question of, "why am I doing this?" Though I was never honest enough to get an answer from myself. From a relatively young ago I always trained for the purpose of sport and later competition so to train for...myself...seemed odd to me and I couldn't wrap my head around it. As result of that I subjected myself to a lot of self-loathing that I could've spared and spent a ton of energy on being negative and most likely set myself back a few years. So what does this mean for you? Well, it really depends on what you want, and her...

Short shorts and tall socks, my favorite gym outfit! What's yours?

A lot of experienced competitors, OG Iron Addicts or folks otherwise well-versed in the iron game might look at my sorry, cheap lycra wrist wraps and shout, "dude, seriously?!" And they'd be right! These things are terrible. They never really get clean, they warp the first time you use them and they were ripped coming out of the package. There's no defending them. At all. However, I've had these wraps for a decade...at least. When Harbinger made these motherfuckers they broke the mold and at least two or three times a week I unroll these sad things to go back into the iron jungle and do that the fuck I do. Now when I got serious about competing a few years ago I went and got some nice, fancy, STURDY wrist wraps that cost about thirty bucks and those are good too, but they aren't MINE. But maybe, just maybe...there is some dreaded OVERTHINKING going on! As long as I've been in this game I've noticed that when something works, you do it...

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 ...

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...