MUSCLE CHURCH: Our Father, the Iron

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

Big Loz just practicing for carrying the groceries in! Oh look at you! Big strong man! Strongest man in Europe? Oh you mean The Mountain??? WRONG! Ha ha! Europe's Strongest Man came and went and while Eddie Hall's amazing world record deadlift stole the show, the real winner of the weekend was Laurence Shahlaei who came in spectacular fashion to win the contest and set a new record in the Car Carry. Laurence, or Big Loz, as he's known, is a hell of an athlete with quite a story. Just a few years ago he was sidelined with a host of injuries that took him out of the World's Strongest Man. He was seen famously laying on the doctor's table with ice packs on both torn biceps saying, "I think it's over for real now." Only to come back from that and tear his quad, in the process losing lots of size and sponsorships. Loz maintains a crazy positive attitude and through all of it he kept posting encouraging messages on social media and cheering on othe...

So I’m on the final lap of contest prep and I’m feeling the strain. In my head I can hear Colin Bryce yelling “take the strain” as he is so famous for doing at World’s Strongest Man. If he was here I could assure him that the strain has been taken, and soon it will be over for a time and I cannot wait. For all intents and purposes, the hard work is done now. With two weeks before contest time, trying to move the needle any further along will probably be counter-productive or cause injury. So there’s a part of me that gets to hit the brakes a bit and look back on the last 12 or so weeks of training and seeing how far I’ve come. I could train all I want in the next two weeks but I’m not going to make myself more ready for this contest. Sure I’m going to have some good workouts and maybe up the cardio a bit, but the time for progression has passed and now it’s time to reap the rewards of my labors. Oh have there been some labors. I present to you the face of fatigue and prog...

Thor's shirt really makes a statement! Hey everyone I’m back with two updates today, both featuring 2 time Europe’s Strongest Man, Hafthor Julius Bjornsson AKA The Mountain. What a lucky guy to get such a cool nickname…and the paycheck that surely comes along with being on one of TV’s hottest shows! Well, while he is strolling around collecting paychecks and challenging for World’s Strongest Man later this year, I am trudging along in my gym getting ready for my next contest in under 4 weeks! I’m not a huge fan of publishing my training journals because the pounds you lift in the gym don’t always correlate to what you can do at a contest. Oh let’s say a 700 pound squat in the gym when you're fresh and rested might only equate to 600 at a contest held outside in the summer and after a truck pull! I’d like to start sharing some more of my specific training theories though, but after this first contest when I can really sit down and analyze how my preparation related to m...

There has never been something so simple and so correct! To those of you who train at a high level, whether you compete of not, you already know how to see yourself achieving your lifts. You practice this type of mental preparation regularly and at times you find yourself getting lost in it. I know I do. However a lot of you out there don’t practice this and I believe it’s because a lot of you don’t understand the importance of it. I wrote once about how important the leg press is for strongman prep because it allows you to feel a lot of weight crushing down on you, so that way when you’re harnessed up to a massive truck or tugging away on a heavy implement, you can recall what that felt like in training. Mentally, it’s just as important to see yourself crushing the lifts you need, because when you get to those few, cherished “champion” sets near the end of your workouts, your muscles will be lacking but your mind can be a source of fuel for them. It’s important to store...

The Man from Coldwater, Michigan...that line just reads like a crazy action flick! Dan "The Beast" Severn...yeah, he's kinda good When someone mentions the name Dan Severn, my ears perk up. Not that Dan would ever need me to defend him, but I’d take anyone to task for not agreeing with me that he’s one of the hardest, toughest, meanest fighters of all time and certainly among the most underrated wrestlers in American history. He’s also kind of a teddy bear and I once ate nachos with him while he was in his underwear. Let that last line sink in for a minute, ha ha ha! Back in the early 1990s MMA didn’t really exist and the UFC was a very small entity that had promoted a few shows and gained a dedicated but small following. Dan Severn had emerged as a very blue-collar, no-nonsense kind of man which fit the rough and tumble image that the UFC had during that time. His trademark grey shirt, handlebar mustache and grimace as he walked to the octagon became...

My first strongman contest was a learning experience every step of the way. I guess you want, or at the very least need, your first time doing something to be educational as much as you want it (or need it, remember that word) to be rewarding. I thought I had done everything I could to prepare for what was to face me on that cool West by God Virginia morning, but I forgot to bring one thing…my A game. I had studied the events and knew where my weaknesses laid and what my strengths were. I knew that the overhead press would be good and I tied for second, just like I knew the Atlas Stone could be disastrous and I failed to even lift it. I wound up coming in last place, by only a few points but still, LAST PLACE. Normally that would infuriate me and I’d write journal entries about how motivated I was to come back stronger and blah, blah, blah but in reality I took my picture with Phil Pfister (truly a large and silly man) and went to Ruby Tuesday and ate a little steak and some d...

I’ve tried several times to sit down and pen something genuine about a man who really touched my life in a number of ways, perhaps too many to count if I’m being honest. I never hid the fact that I cut my hair and beard to look like Ferg. I could routinely be seen in and around any gym I trained in singing his praises and mimicking his soft-spoken, yet often profane, verbal tirades when given the chance. He was my guy. Everybody has their fighter or their team and mine was Kimbo Slice. Kevin Ferguson AKA Kimbo Slice 2/8/1974-6/6/2016 By all rights I shouldn’t ever have been a fan of his. See I’m an old school MMA nerd and I make no bones about how I think the sport has had a steady decline of testosterone (ironically, despite the many failed drug tests) and a rise in paper champions.  Even during the UFC’s rise to global prominence in the mid-2000s, which coincided with Kimbo’s rise to internet stardom, the MMA world slowly began to get a little too “fancy” for my taste. ...

Sometimes talking about strength gets to be a little too self-serving for my taste and well, sometimes it gets to be a bit much. I'm not one to boast or brag because there is always someone bigger, stronger or faster but every now and then you find yourself in a situation where you just need to do something silly to get the job done. I present to you Exhibit A, "the stack!" I'm a big fan of using cables for assistance work, namely working my triceps and biceps. On my bench day I typically do one cable exercise for my triceps Today I was doing pressdowns with the V bar which I love but there's never enough weight on the stack. However, I found this tiny chain...(which I promptly forgot at the gym, but I digress...) And suddenly this stack that only goes up to 250lbs, became a much better stack that I went up to 295lbs on. However, not everyone understands that this stack doesn't fit my needs and next thing I know I got two of the so-called "trainer...

  John Skyler's Store at Pro Wrestling Tees  RAW AUDIO Episode 1... John Skyler AKA "The Southern Savior" has been red hot on the independent wrestling scene and is fresh off an appearance on WWE TV. He is a regular fixtures in WWE's developmental promotion NXT and have competed for various wrestling promotions all around the globe. I've known John since before he first entered the squared circle and we've spent countless hours dissecting the wrestling business but this is the first time we've recorded it! And this is as RAW as it gets, featuring some cogent discussion about the future of independent wrestling, his hectic schedule and a visit from a surly and unprofessional parking attendant! The Official John Skyler Twitter Feed! RAW AUDIO Episode 1 John Skyler...Click Here!

...something else! I had good speed squats and deadlifts (keep in mind me week begins on Saturday) around 405 and 500 respectively. Poundages moving up like I plan so I'm well pleased. My goal is to pull 650-ish at the contest in July as its a single rep event and the squat portion will be for reps so I'm not the least bit worried about that, I think the weight is about 450. Maybe the other guys should be worried... Got my harness in from the fine folks at www.prowriststraps.com who have the BEST customer service in the world, so there will be lots of truck pull practice coming along! Planned to post more this week but I got busy and then tonight I was going to add one or two posts but I started watching the Eddie Hall documentary (available on Vimeo) and it brought me to tears. I'm definitely a big supporter of his but now having seen his life a little more intimately...well, it got to me. Some of his struggles really hit home. Instead of being sad, I'm gon...