MUSCLE CHURCH: Our Father, the Iron

Even if you aren't as big of a Spider-Man fan as I am, you've heard it a million times and seen a million different memes for it. However, for the benefit of those who haven't... "With great power, comes great responsibility." -Benjamin Franklin Parker, AKA Uncle Ben It's a pivotal scene in every iteration of Spider-Man as Uncle Ben, shortly before dying, passes on this tremendous line to the young Peter Parker as he embarks on his career as a superhero. It's something that resonates with a lot of people and I'm no exception. I think about this line a great deal, especially as I get older and wiser with my years and ask myself  "why?" quite a bit more than I used to. I have always been strong barring anything catastrophic occurring, I always will be. If I am blessed enough to be an old man, I will surely be like the Odd Haugen or Danny Hodge type and trying to wow someone with the vestiges of my once proud physique and eager to impart ...

I think back to the "good old days" quite a bit now. At 36 with a knee that is mostly good half of the time, a heart that gets out of rhythm quite often and the ever-looming threat of cellulitis-it's easy to think my best days are behind me. Quite often when I'm visualizing the evening's workout or planning for the week ahead, I will harken back to the old days when I hit the gym any time I wanted, worked out any way that I wanted and the results were, well, basically the same as they are now. Until you get well north of 30 you don't really get how your body changes and how little, yes how little, training actually matters. As a youth, if you are training consistently at all, you will get in better overall shape. If you do train consistently AND you eat right and rehab, you will get in great shape in the manner you choose. If you do those things AND have a good training plan, well, you will be in heaven. Most of us don't have the discipline to do that as...

Not ashamed to be the worst and most infrequent blogger of all time. Life happens. My biggest problem is that deep down inside I don't like to brag or boast about things. My little accomplishments or things that I do well, eh, I tend to like to keep them to myself. People that know me would laugh at that because they see how much I like to make people laugh and how I'll puff my chest up and antagonize people. Guilty, guilty and guilty again. If I'm guilty of anything, it's that I like to make people laugh or I like to make them think. If I can ramble on about something and that makes someone think about their problem a bit differently, and it helps them, well that's time well spent. Otherwise, I don't care to talk much about myself-of at all, if I can help it. But, when there's an audience...oh man it there's a microphone...I just can't help myself! It's the ultimate dichotomy; I'm an introvert and an entertainer. I live and dream about b...

Movement is...what? I like to say things are always in motion and either falling apart or coming together. Sometimes it's hard to tell which one, but it's always easy to tell when it's happening too fast. At least, I think so. Lately I've been worried that things can move so fast for so long that you either just used to the craziness and consider it normal or you acknowledge the craziness and give up. Movement...is really the opposite of giving up. Moving indicates that you are either in control or attempting to be and that really how you avoid falling down the drain in life most of the time. I live by the saying "you don't lose until you quit and failing is not quitting" and sometimes that's a hard pill for people to swallow because it's so easy to feel powerless in modern society, but once you decide to take control, it's hard to stop! Lately I've been really considering what are goals in life and what do they truly mean, in an object...

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...

I think that over time we attach meaning to things but don't often ask why something means a lot, we just know that it does. Over the course of my life I'm guilty of not letting myself get attached to things that I should because I've lived by the code that "everything is for sale." However, there are some things that have managed to get into my very exclusive "not for sale" category. I regret that there is a belt out there that was mine for many, many years and I let a friend hold it and he lost it in a move. I can't be too mad-I should've never let him borrow something so sacred anyway. However, one man's sacred is another man's optional-never forget that. What matters the most to you, might not mean anything to someone else and that's okay. We all have our loves and likes and there are times when we have to accept that something is just valuable to you and that's it. Which brings me to the subject of this post. You see this...

Did you make it or did you give up? Blogs and self-help gurus abound with talk of defining your own success and what that means, and most of it is good advice. We should be looking inward, not outward, to determine what success is and what it means to us, individually, to consider ourselves a success. Sometimes I worry though, that defining your own success can easily just become a way of moving the goal posts to make it easier for you to stop pushing. Consider the person who wants to lose 50 pounds. They map out their plan, the do the work and they stay honest about all of it, but when the last two or three pounds don’t come off, suddenly the fervor to lose 50 pounds turns into the complacency of losing 47. The rationalization begins with, “well, close enough, right?” Then you start to dismantle why you wanted to lose 50 to begin with. This monolithic number, suddenly becomes just a silly little round number that doesn’t mean anything because you lost a ...

I won’t ever try to pass myself off as an expert in anything other than myself, but I want to share some of the wisdom I’ve learned along the way and hopefully from my lifetime of failing some of you can glean something useful. I don’t mind saying that I am a person who has failed in life repeatedly and will continue to do so, because so much more is learned from failure than from success. At all levels, in any industry, failure is the driving force behind evolution and refinement but in our society we still demonize failing and my belief is that the constant barrage of “perfect” people on social media further eats away at those who are just trying to do a little bit better. There is a cost for success, but not every failure is a true setback-I contend that most are not. Let us take a trip back in the time machine to me in the ninth grade. I was then a doughy 260-270 pounds without an ounce of knowledge about training or nutrition, but I was in weight lifting class because I...