Back on the iron again and a great article

November 17th, 2009

Finally I can get back to lifting! Man have I been busy but hopefully things will remain this way so I can get back into competition again.

I’m down to 200lbs….man do I feel small & weak.

On a different note. elitefts.com sends out a weekly newsletter which I enjoy reading. In it was an article that I have been waiting years for. It’s about sacroiliac joint pain. I’m here to tell ya it sucks donkey ballz when it kicks in. About 10 or 12 years ago I was following a routine in milo magazine that Gary Taylor of the world strongest man was using. In he was doing step ups. I mean high, knee height, and heavy step ups, 250kg! I got to the point of doing them with 365 at just below knee height. On this particular day I remember feeling a bit “off”. Things just weren’t clicking but I was a stickler for making sure I got my workout’s in as scheduled. I was a few sets in when I stepped up with my right leg and I felt something “wierd” down along the right side of my butt crack. It didn’t hurt  just didn’t feel right. Like something slipped. But I continued with the workout anyway. As time went on I noticed muscles in my lower back, glutes, ab’s & hip flexor tightening up in different ways at different times. Creating lots of pain in all kinds of funky spots. I did lots of stretching to try and alleviate the pain but it never truly went away. One thing I noticed is that I couldn’t really do the fun stuff as far as lifitng goes; famers walks, stones. Basically moving around with heavy stuff. I basically had to switch over to powerlifting & olympic lifting because I wasn’t moving around. That and I found that the briefs & squat suit really helped support my hips. I also noticed a bg decrease in my glute strength which the suit helps with.

Over the years I’ve tried seeing many doctors about it but they can never find anything. X-rays, MRI’s never show why it hurts. They just tell me take some ibuprophione…. Gee thanks!

There are days when it feels fine and there have been weeks where I could barely walk & everything in between. For the most part there is a constant pain or discomfort of some sort going on in some area around my lower back/pelvis and it sucks. But I still trained and got half way decent, 1765 total in the aapf 242’s while training at detroit barbell.

I can’t wait to see the second part of the series & would like to thank the guys over at elitefts for finding that site! Hopefully I can become pain free and much stronger that my best total again.

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Great after workout drink

April 20th, 2009

Right after a workout I make sure and get a protein dirnk sucked down. The one I use when I’m trying to pt on weight is a bit different than you’ll see anywhere else.

Here is what you need

  • 2 – 4 scoops protein powder depending on how I feel
  • 10 grams glutamine
  • 2 – 3 tablespoons of peanut butter
  • 1 -2 tablespoons of honey
  • 2 packets of hot chocolate mix
  • milk, usually whole milk
  • 1 cup hot water
  • ice chips

Alright put the hot water into your container then add the peanut butter and the honey. Stir until dissolved. I use a drink mixer or hand lender (Makes it much easier!). Once the peanut butter is dissolved I add a spoon or 2 of ice chips to cool it down and pour in a little bit of milk. Then I add everything else 1 scoop at a time making sure that it’s dissolved before adding more. If  I need to I add milk to thin it out a bit.

I love this drink. It tastes great! (covers up the taste of the protein power & glutamine completely) It covers all the bases as far as getting carbs and protein into your system fast as well as keeping it sustained with the addition of the fat/oil from the peanut butter and the whole milk. Personally I don’t buy into the whole “your body can only absorb 50 grams of protein at a time line”. That might be true if you weight 150 pounds but that number can’t be right if you weight 300+. Everyone has a different physiology and dietary requirements. So test things out and see what works best for you.

Hope you enjoy.

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Weak point identification

April 20th, 2009

It’s amazing how quickly an area can fall behind when you get into a training  groove. I’ve really been enjoyng doing the odd lifts lately, tire flippin’, log clean & jerk, stone training, one handed stuff and things like that. Today just for some variety I decided to do some raw power squats just to see what was going on with them. I wasn’t even using a belt.

So i warmed up with 135 nice & easy. Tossed on another plate and did some pause squats just to see how I was in the bottom, which was nice & quick. Then I went up to 315 for some more pause squats and quickly realized my hips had gotten very weak and slow. I was coming out of the bottom at a snails pace. That is not good!

So I’ll do a cycle of below parallel box squats alternating weekly with deep pause squats. I did box squats for 3 sets of 5 with 225 just to start this thing off today. I’ll make jumps as my speed increases. I’ll beat the snot our of my hammies as well with band GHR’s. Working my way up to the blue or green band for sets of 5 -8 reps. That’ll make the hammies scream. I’ll probably start the reverse hypers up as well, though i have found those to do more for my deadlift than my squat. But things change and I need to bring my hips up to speed if I want to get back to a decent squat.

When it comes to weak points you really need to look for them if you want to make consistent progress. Identifying weaknesses is something that all the top guys are great at. They can tell when an area or muscle group isn’t up to snuff. They also know what exercises work the best for them to correct that weakness. Matt Kroc is a great example. If you look him up on youtube there are a bunch of interviews with him and in many of them he talks about how he noticed that certain things went down when he stopped doing them. Or how he does certain exercises when he notices that a particular area is weak.

The only way to get good at identifying weaknesses is keeping a good training journal and paying attention to all the areas of a lift, from start to finish.

Here’s an example in the bench press. If  I find that coming off my chest  is the hardest part then it’s my pecs and lats that are weak. If I slow down in the middle it’s my front delts that are weak, and if I’m having a problem locking out the bar, it’s my triceps that need work. Now of course some of this could be technique as well. Like not coming off my chest fast enough in the case of slowing down in the middle. It took a while but after testing things out I finally figured out what muscles controlled what parts of the bench for me. Again trial and error is really the only way to find this stuff out. The thing is you have to be able to look back at you training journal to see what exercises made a difference either good or bad.

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Some of my equipment

April 13th, 2009

When I had to start training in my garage I needed to figure out what the best equipment I could get was. After much deliberation I decided to get one of those all in one smith machine racks.(see pic’s below)

The first reason is that I wanted to get the biggest bang for my buck. For the most part it does that. It has 2 high pulleys coming out at the front corners. I use them on occasion but the main thing I use them for is reverse band bench presses. They’re perfectly positioned to hang the bands from. I’ll put up a video of that soon. It has a low pulley so I can do pull-throughs, low cable rows and some other stuff which keeps things fresh and interesting. It also has a “pec-dec” in the back which I dont use but my wife seems to like it.

The second reason is I wanted something that allowed for lots of variety and my wife would be comfortable using as well. See prefers to do more machine work but loves to bench as well. Hopefully she’ll be competing with me soon!!

The third reason is it needed to be fairly compact. I have a 2 1/2 car garage but I did’nt want to take up the whole thing with lots of different machines.

The fourth reason is that it has built in plate storage on the sides. That really helps keep things organized.

Fifth the space between the supports is nice and wide so I can take a wide grip on the bar when I bench or squat.

Now as you’ll see in the pics below I removed the smith machine. Cut the slide rails & pulled it right out! I have no use for a bar that is stuck in one groove not to mention the fact that it got in the way when i tried to squat. Nothing more irritating than whacking your head on a bar when you’re trying to get under one!!

You can also see that I have 2 handles dangling from the center top support. I use that for push up. Talk about developing your stabilizers!! I also use it to wrap bands around for tricep, abs and upper back work.

Under the rack i built a platform out of 2×4’s, 3/4 inch plywood and rubber mats. On the ends of it I took some 4×4 blocks and drilled 1 1/2 inch holes through them so I could slide a bar through and tie bands off on for band squats, bench presses and deadlifts. It’s also nice because the 4×4 blocks a re spread out far enough that I deadlift between them without killing the cement floor.

The rack with an adjustable bench, bar & weights and the rubber mats I got off of craigslist pretty cheap. I always recommend looking on craigslist for good workout equipment for a really good price. Some people just have no idea what they have & what it’s worth or they don’t care and want it gone quick.

Here are a couple pics. one of my modified rack and one of the end of the platform I built.

My weightlifting equipment

My weightlifting equipment

The edn of my lifting platform

The edn of my lifting platform

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training april 11th

April 12th, 2009

Today i took it kinda easy and made it more of a tire day with some triceps thrown in at the end and beat on the heavy bag for a while.

using my modified stone lift trainer. I worked up to a triple with 3 ten pound plates, a 25 pound plate and a 5 pounder on it. Then I flipped my tire till basically failure. After about 10 minutes recoup time I did flaired arm extensions for my triceps. working up to 3 sets 0f 10 with the 55 dumbells. I’ll do a demo video for the flaired arm extensions soon to demonstrate.

After all of that I beat on the heavy bag for about 30 minutes for some vaiety and called it a day.

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The start of GuerrillaGarageTraining.com

April 6th, 2009

A long, long time ago in a life far away I used to have time to go to the gym. But after getting married, starting a business and all kinds of other joys that is no longer the case. For many of us that enjoy training without much time the garage becomes our only choice.

The biggest question I had was how? What is the safest, cheapest, most effective way to do it alone and still make great gains? I dug around all over the internet trying to find as much good info as possible and soon figured out that for the most part people just don’t care about the growing numbers of us. You can find bit’s and pieces here and there but no good sources that have everything you need to train alone effectively. Especially if you want to get back into the competitive arena again like I do.

So I started this blog detailing everything I have learned in the hopes that it will help those fellow lifters that struggle alone in their garages like I do.

One thing I plan on doing here is keeping a training journal to show what I’m doing and for the most part how. If you have any specific questions about my reasoning behind something please post a comment and I’ll respond why I’m doing one thing or another.

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