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...

--> Some thoughts on setting yourself up for success and avoiding some major markers for failure. There are much more complex and complicated things at play these days compared to the dingy weight room of my rural high school in 1997. Social media is awesome, but so many people, myself included, don’t seem to figure out the negative effects of it until it’s too late. Aside from the constant desire to remain connected and the endless battles with trolls, we get exposed to so many messages and that alone can skew our perception of what we want and who we are. Instagram is the de facto social network for fitness and training, but it’s easy to forget that most of the major players in that realm do that for work, because their job is to be models and spokespersons for products. I’m sure that many of them would love for you to achieve your goals, but at the end of the day they need followers and engagement in order to make a buck. These perfect bodies performing incred...

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...

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...

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 ...

Today could be called an 'assistance day' or to some 'chest day.' I'm not really into that mode of thinking. I like doing one bench press and some bicep and tricep work all together. My chest is so big now I don't like to do too much for it because it's just too big and I gotta live in this world! My biceps are growing too and following this workout I legit popped a seam in the sleeve of my Hulk shirt! What can I say? As C.T Fletcher so famously said, I commanded them to grow!  Poundages were about 60-75% of where "I am," for those that keep track of that. I train instinctively unless there's a contest on the horizon so the pounds kinda just are what they are. Certainly nowhere close to maxing out on anything.  Enjoy! Always start with some real good stretching for about 10 minutes! Elliptical, steady for 20 mins Ab Crunches 50 x2 Side Bends w 35lb plate 20 x2 Incline Bench 135/15 x2, 225/12, 235/10, 240/10 Close Grip I...

I can't put it into words most of the time. Sometimes when people give me that look that says, 'why do you put yourself through all that' I just don't have an answer. I just smile back and say 'it is what it is' and the conversation falls away. I even had the idea that I'd create a website to try to tell the world why I do it but the truth is I really couldn't tell you. There are moments that stick out. I can remember workouts from years ago like they were yesterday and I remember how I felt and the moments when I broke through a barrier or in some cases, and perhaps even more rewarding, helping others break barriers. I guess in a way I look back at my lifetime in the gym thus far and I feel like it's a career of sorts and there are times when I realize that my life has been more defined by my time under the weights than anything. I remember the first time I loaded six plates on the military press and how it was so easy and looked so impressive! ...

Well I guess funny things happen all the time right? So, as you may know from following me, I'm kind of on a half-rehab, half-diet thing now and I'm not doing any heavy training. Cardio. Stretching. Heavy bag. More cardio. Annnnnd the most dreaded two words in the world...light weights. I know, I know heavy training burns more calories yadda, yadda but you guys don't wake up with my knees and ankles everyday, a break is past due. Indeed. Time to take a step away from the heavy training... ...okay it's been 3 weeks, that's enough right? I can't put into words how miserable I feel right now. I've posted on here a lot about how the concept of 'muscle church' is something that transcends lifting weights or competing, it's something so close to my core that I haven't always been able to separate the workouts from the man. My identity is wrapped up in the iron and anytime I have to step back, even just a little bit, it's literally t...

So since around April of this year I have been training hard for some contests this year. I had the Minuteman Muscle Challenge in West Virginia in July, South Carolina's Strongest Man in September and in the preliminary stages of planning to toss my hat in the ring at the Lee Haney Classic in Atlanta in October. And then... Well I don't care for going to the doctor, like most guys. Doctors usually suck, they don't care for patients that know their bodies well and few understand the stress that training and competing take on the body. I trust my chiropractor and that's about it. So I visited him and he gave me the usual 'yeah you're falling apart but I can try to help you' and then I asked about this odd protrusion in my belly...well, long story short I spoke with him and then saw the doctor affiliated with him and they were of the opinion that I probably had a hernia and needed to pump the brakes on everything. Needless to say I was concerned and then refe...

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...