This summer I have been moving slowly with my squatting.  I have been slowly building up how much weight I am using.  I have held back on trying to progress quickly.  I am doing 5 sets of 5 repetitions for my main squat work, if I feel good I do some heavier singles after this work.  Every time I do squats I have just been adding 5 pounds to the bar for my main sets.  Each workout progresses just 5 pounds, even though it’s been easy.  I’ve thought this is making me stronger.  The other day I tested the plan.

I started feeling a little wild the other day so I decided to test my squat a little bit.  I tossed on some weight and squatted, I lifted fairly heavy so I was pleased with the load I lifted.  My squat was much heavier than my main work sets.  In fact it was twice as much as my submaximal training weight.  I felt really good after going heavy, 4 days later I deadlifted rather heavy too, there was not a lot of fatigue.  The plan had worked.

The plan was the simplest plan ever for lifting weights.  I started light and have just been adding the lowest amount of weight possible every time I workout.  I resisted the urge to do deviate from the plan.  I trusted the plan.

For plans to work, they need to be trusted.  They need to be followed to some degree as well.  A plan must also be put to the test now and then. 

I have failed at really testing plans in the past.

I stuck with things way too long, thinking that in the end they would work.

I also have avoiding testing metrics that matter.  I like lifting weights in this regard.  When I test my lifting, I either got stronger or I didn’t.  Nothing else really matters.  In other parts of life, I know I’ve avoided testing the right metrics. 

Testing the plan correctly, that is where the magic lies.  Test frequent enough, and with the right metrics and growth can be constant.  If the test fails, then an adjustment is needed or a new plan.

In either event it’s good to know.  When we know the truth we avoid wasting time on a bad plan.  I’ve been there, and I don’t want to go back to trusting that bad plan, so now I test…

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

This is a really awesome guide on hook gripping, can be used for deadlifts as well as Olympic lifting.  https://chineseweightlifting.com/hook-grip/

What shoes should you squat in.  The answer is here.  Or at least a good place to start if not the answer for you.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJIBtAhVRPk

This article has a bunch of ways to get more work done in the gym in the same amount of time.  https://joshstrength.com/2021/09/increase-training-volume-decrease-training-time/

A strong case for using safety squat bars.  https://tonygentilcore.com/2021/09/the-bar-every-gym-should-have-safety-squat-bar/

I strained my chest earlier this summer doing a bench press.  Things felt weird, I called it quits.  A few weeks later I started to hurt more from whatever I did to myself.  There was no bruising or any pain when I strained whatever I did.  I’ve dug around in my pec with my fingers, it feels like everything is still attached.  The tendon is still there, so I am pretty chill about the current state of things.

It has been a few weeks since I have been able to train my upper body with any intensity.  I have a long list of things that ache in my right shoulder and arm.  My guess is that I have a case of tendonitis.  That means to me that rest is the remedy.  Sooner or later things will calm down in my arm and things will be back to normal.  I am mildly annoyed at the situation, but yeah my tendons are still attached everywhere they should be.

Working out hard right now might endanger one of those tendons and blow something off the bone.  So for now I am perfectly content to allow my body to mend.  I hang out in this state a lot more these days. 

My strength remains.  I am not getting that much weaker by just hanging out and resting. 

Strength is a resilient thing.  I know my strength is still there.  Strength needs not be displayed to exist.

I take a longer view of things than I used to.  I know my workouts are going to go up and down.  It doesn’t bother me much.  The strength is still there. 

I see younger guys testing their max lifts every week in the gym.  Every single workout they test and display their max strength.  They are young and will likely suffer no ill effects of this behavior.  They think for strength to exist, it needs to be displayed often.

I have grown past this kind of thinking.  It’s something everyone should grow past at some point.

Often I tell myself, if I need the strength it will be there. 

Sometimes I test that strength.  Sometimes I do some real stupid stuff and load up the bar.  I try to mitigate that urge to be stupid though.  I don’t do these things often. 

I have confidence my strength remains.  With this confidence I can be so much wiser.

I can take time off when I need to, as I am doing now.

I can take time away from heavy lifting to fix weaknesses.

I can take time away from a problem exercise to fix mobility and come back to it using much better body positioning in the future.

I am confident I will remain strong through these kind of things. 

Once you grow confident you will unlock these things too.

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

Chris Duffin bringing a lot of deadlift knowledge in this video.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg4Y-f7rH_Y

This article gave some nice ways to make the bottom of lifts harder.  Really good to try if you get stuck in the bottom of movements.  http://bonvecstrength.com/2021/08/03/make-the-bottom-of-the-lift-harder/

A nice introduction to the Spoto Press.  https://tonygentilcore.com/2021/08/exercises-you-should-be-doing-spoto-press/

Mindset

This article got me thinking about fast decisions and overthinking.  https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/how-to-decide-quickly/

A week ago I took an exam.  This exam was to become certified as a personal trainer.  I passed and can now say I am a personal trainer.  I did this for a long list of reasons.  One of the biggest reason is that because when it comes to lifting weights… “I know about these things.”

For over 20 years I have been obsessed with exercise and all sorts of gym stuff.  In my free time I read about working out, and watch Youtube videos about it.  I also have only once since around the age of 13, taken any time away from the gym other than for injury reasons.  Between my general nerdiness about lifting, and my practical experience, I know a thing or two.

Despite knowing a thing or two about lifting, I really never put it to any good use.  Through struggles with unemployment and career woes, I couldn’t use this knowledge and experience base I had.  The thing I knew the most about was sitting there but I couldn’t use it.

Without a certification, it would be hard to get insurance, a job, or have any credibility to use this workout knowledge I had.  However if you asked me what in this world did I know more about than anything else, it would be lifting weights. 

This summer I did something about that though.  I spent the whole summer studying to become a certified trainer.  Now I can get liability insurance, now I can entice clients, now I can do all the things it takes to be a trainer.  This really isn’t that big of a deal.  A lot of people do this.  What the big deal to me is, I took my biggest career asset off the shelf and got to a place where I could use it. 

I don’t know where this training thing will take me.  I may not help any clients, I may not get any jobs.  I have mobilized my greatest base of experience though.  Instead of sitting on a potential goldmine I am now mining.  Too often we sit on good things and don’t mobilize them.

I sat on this fitness knowledge for years.  I have now though fully mobilized this knowledge.  I wasted time but am not wasting it anymore.  I think we should all ask ourselves what goldmines we’re sitting on.  What resources are we not mobilizing?  Are we even using our BIGGEST asset?  For me the answer was no. but not anymore.

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

Pullup tips and ideas for larger folks.  Not everyone is 5’6” and 145 pounds, this article is for people that got some mass and height.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/pull-ups-for-big-guys

A good article with some mobility exercises that are easy for people who don’t like doing mobility stuff.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/best-mobility-exercises-for-lifters/

Some good ideas around the concept of “bad exercises” and which ones might be bad, and when.  https://www.nfpt.com/blog/are-there-bad-exercises

Mental Fitness

I listened to this podcast about peak performance while on a good long walk.  It had a lot of interesting ideas for setting up flow in it.  https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/podcast-672-how-to-do-the-impossible-this-year/

I am a Purdue basketball fan.  That means I have watched the Purdue snatch defeat from the jaws of victory more times than seems reasonable.  The story feels the same, even if it is different each time.  My beloved Purdue Boilermakers get a big lead in a basketball game, and then at the end of the game blow the lead.  Everything seems to be going well for the team, and then in an instant it seems that it is not.  Being an inquisitive guy, I of course look for a pattern.  The pattern to me seems to be that the basketball team quits doing the things that got them the huge lead in the first place, and then they quit scoring points.

When you look at it that way, it makes it sound as though basketball teams and coaches are morons.  Purdue is not the only team I have seen suffer from this phenomena.  I have seen high school teams, college team, and NBA teams all do the same thing.  The game is going great for them, and then they start doing something different.  They change pace, offenses, quit letting the right players shoot and a host of other changes.  Then things get bad fast, like a tidal wave the opposite team charges back.  I have watched this happen a lot.  I always end up asking why didn’t the team just keep doing what was working for them?

I have no definitive reasons why sports teams quit doing things that made them successful.  Coaches like to look smart, so sometimes they just outsmart themselves.  People at times also just like to make changes, for no apparent reason.  Whatever the underlying cause of this behavior, changing things that are working is often a trap.

It’s a trap on the basketball court and it’s a trap everywhere else in life.  This past year I have wrote almost 80 posts expressing my gratitude for the abundance and wonderful things in my life.  These writings have helped me focus on the wonderful things in my life and not the negative things.  Writing these posts is easy, and it has proven to have all sorts of benefits to me.  I’m in a much more peaceful place internally when I write these things.  My brain keeps telling me to stop though and do something different.  I think this is my brain just trying to trap me.  In my life it has been hard to find things that really work well, and here I am talking to myself about stopping something that is working.  This might make me an idiot or just human, but the trap remains.

I do my best to avoid this kind of trap.  I have kept writing some of these writings.  I would rather not ever go away from this practice completely.  The frequency of these writings can scale up or down depending on my life at the moment, but I see no reason to get rid of things that are working.  This is just a case of avoiding the whole grass is greener phenomena.

Life is full of traps and tricks we play on ourselves, and this kind of thinking is just one more of them.  Knowing the trap is the first step in defeating it.  I watch for this kind of thinking because I am finding more and more you should ride things out that are working well.  There will be other chances in life to try other things.  Otherwise I feel like I’m just succumbing to some sort of Lifestyle ADD.  Now if I could only get my beloved Purdue Basketball team to do the same thing…

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength And Conditioning

An article on using flexing and posing to increase components of fitness.  I like the concept of using this because it is lower risk and can be done anywhere without equipment.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/flex-your-way-to-a-harder-body

This was a good interview with Stefi Cohen, world record powerlifter and doctor of physical therapy.  It covered a lot of interesting topics.  https://tim.blog/2021/01/06/stefi-cohen/

Life

A great article on dealing with pain.  A mindset that can translate to all sorts of pain.  https://www.elitefts.com/education/be-willing-to-feel-pain/

An interesting article I read about profanity being performative.  Makes me wonder what else I am doing that is mostly performative in nature. https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/sunday-firesides-profanity-is-performative/

Lately I have been thinking about the book The 4-Hour Workweek.  Like countless million people out there I bought the book and implemented things from it.  I never found the mythical workweek I looked for, but I picked up a few good tricks and ideas from the book.  A lasting thought from that book is to think more experimentally about life.

This book helped me see that life could be run as a series of experiments and structured in all sorts of ways. 

Lately I have been trying to get more experimental.

I have started doing some graphic work for fun.  What I will create remains to be seen.  I like that it is training a different part of my brain than I usually use.

I am attempting to expose myself to more sources of perspective.  I’ve been listening to some random top podcasts.  So far all I have learned from that is that young people with podcasts are weird.  They have a lot of drama too.  They also seem to have no real skills or abilities.  Also they all make more money than I do, so what do I know?  This experiment is partly to try and stay on top of some pop culture, I’m not sure there is value to that particular goal.  I might just be getting old though.

I have a whole spreadsheet of things I want to play with.  Experiments feel a whole lot like playing.

I am looking for more experiments.  I am looking for co-conspirators on some of these.  I am interested in podcasts and YouTube videos.  I have no interest in doing these alone.  Having partners and a team is an experiment itself.  I usually do a lot of things in my life alone.  I’m not sure that is really the best.

Experiments seem to also be an excuse to be wacky.  I like having an excuse to do that. 

Experiments breed possibilities too.  So things are about to get a lot wackier and interesting around here.

So did I get anything I wanted from The 4-Hour Workweek?  Nope I didn’t get the riches and freedom I wanted.  I did get the idea of being more experimental.  My mind keeps coming back to this idea over the years.  This might be the sign of a good book.  Even when we don’t get what we expect from a book, we can still get some nuggets of value.  Which makes reading books sound a lot like an experiment to me.

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

Some things to consider when training around pain.  https://tonygentilcore.com/2021/01/factors-to-consider-when-training-around-pain/

Good video on common mistakes made when doing glute ham raises.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fprB_1sWb6s

This is a really good video that goes over the principles of using exercise variations to help manage fatigue.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-owlwBw4AyU

Today I had a long list of everything I reasonably could want from the day.  It was a simple list, but full of things I did not think was likely to happen.  Then I got everything I thought I was wanting from the day.  I then proceeded to toss away the things I had been given.

What did I want from the day?  I wanted peace and quiet.  I wanted the mental space to work on projects.  I wanted to finish this newsletter for the week and publish it.  I got all this.  Everyone had left the house for the whole day and given me a perfect work environment to tackle the things I wanted to tackle.  I then proceeded to waste all this quality time I had been gifted.

The hours of the day melted away and I didn’t even really try to get anything done.  I had spent an hour this morning thinking about what I wanted to do to.  I had gone for a long walk and thought of all the things I would be doing if I just had peace and quiet.  Then I was given that peace and quiet.  What did throwing away all this time today even mean?

I have been telling myself for a while now that lack of peace and quiet is a huge hurdle to my workflow.  Working from home is distracting, and I thought it was a reason I wasn’t doing enough work.  Today I got that good work environment I dreamed of and nothing happened.  Perhaps the obstacles to my progress are not entirely what I perceive them to be.   They may be something else entirely.

I can’t say that I will find any profound lessons from wasting my day today.  This newsletter is still getting published.  Today has proven I’m not as smart as I think I am.

I’m not smart enough to know all the roadblocks to my productivity.  I thought I had but one roadblock, and that was proven untrue.  

I am not smart enough to keep this thing from happening again and again.  I have wasted time in similar circumstances so many times. 

I am not smart enough to capitalize when I’m given everything I want and say that I need.  How many other times have I been given all the tools and resources and done nothing with them in my life?

I am not smart enough to come to any conclusions for this newsletter.

If only I had time to come to some conclusions then I would have some good conclusions.  If only I had a few hours of peace and quiet I could get something good written down to conclude this newsletter.  We now know that is a lie.  When I say “If only…” I am just tricking myself.  When I say “If only…” there are likely a lot of problems in the way.  Thinking there is one when there are many, that is a mind trap for all us to avoid.

There is the conclusion, that only came about because I had no conclusions.

My Favorite Things

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

A good article on things going differently than planned.  https://www.elitefts.com/education/it-wasnt-what-i-thought-it-would-be/

A good article on using variation in training.  https://www.strongfirst.com/introducing-the-strongfirst-wod/

Mental Fitness

I found this a good article to remind me about mental programming and choosing how I view things.  https://joshstrength.com/2021/01/10-ways-to-program-your-mind-for-success-genetic-engineering/

It is the holiday season, we just had Christmas and New Year’s Eve is tomorrow.  That means a lot of people are setting some goals for the next year.  I set a few goals for 2021 myself.  There were a lot of goals I almost set.

I almost set the goal to become really good at chess.  With the goal of even playing tournaments and trying to get a “Master” rating and title.

Writing and publishing a blogpost every single day of the year sounded like a productive and fun thing.

Regaining my computer coding ability that I have lost always sounds good.

I tossed out all these ideas.  There was too much weight to these goals.  I can do things with some weigh to them.  Right now, these are too heavy for me.

My brain for whatever reason likes “do something every day for a whole year” type of goals.  To pull off the above goals, I would have to work almost daily at any of them to pull it off.  Doing something daily takes a lot of effort and work, it also means you rearrange life to get it done.  Daily requires a level of obsession I’m just not ready for at the moment.

I almost slipped into setting goals like this anyways.  I didn’t think about the weight of what those goals really meant.  I started off 2020 writing and publishing blogposts for something like the first 60 days of the year.  It started to become the only thing on my mind and an obsession.  This habit was starting to rule my life.  I finally broke my streak, and it was like a weight was lifted.

As I get a little smarter, I try to think about the weight of things.  I have set some weighty goals for 2021.  If I pull them off there should be some good benefits.  Weighty goals for things like hobbies though, I’m not going down that path again.

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

A nice article on fixing weak points in the squat with minimal equipment.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/the-squat-one-barbell-no-weak-points

This hack was so simple I had to include it in the newsletter.  https://dieselsc.com/upgrade-your-back-training/

I found this to be a good straightforward article on improving the bar path in the bench press.  This is something a lot of people have trouble doing right, and it’s easy to fix in a lot of cases.  https://www.strongfirst.com/bench-press-more-by-optimizing-your-bar-path/

Ideas are powerful things.  The right idea at the right time is what genius is made of.  Miss out on an idea or opportunity, suddenly you are a moron.  We can keep using the same ideas over and over.  This works for a lot of people.  We can also come up with new ideas.  I try to be smart and come up with new ideas to add to my old trusted ideas.  I also try to steal ideas from other people.  Stealing is fun and I want to steal everyone’s ideas, let’s face it sometimes its fun to be bad!

Coming up with new ideas is hard work.  It can be really taxing on mental energy to think of new stuff.  Then to figure out if an idea is a good idea, that is a lot of work.  I like to avoid doing work when I can, and idea generation is no different.  Lucky for us, other people have ideas and we can steal them! 

We all do this all the time too.  If you read a book you’re pretty much stealing ideas, especially if you read a book from the library that you didn’t even pay for.  Maybe accepting is a better word than stealing when it comes to ideas.  People do share ideas freely all the time, we only have to accept them to make them our own.  We’re not borrowing ideas, we don’t have to give them back.  We get to keep the ideas, use them however we want, morph them, and combine them.  The question of the day is how to find new ideas to accept?

The people we talk to, the content we consume, the places we go will all give us ideas.  We should readily accept these ideas.  There can be a problem however that at some point we quit getting ideas that are all that new.  We start to get the same ideas over and over, maybe in different flavors but they are the same ideas.  I think from time to time how do I get ideas that are outside the normal kind of ideas I usually get?

My mind naturally wants to dive into a few subjects.  There are likely 5 or 6 subjects that would draw 99% of my attention.  This is not a good base for coming up with new ideas.  I recognize that good ideas can come from anywhere.  I never thought I would write a book.  I got an idea from somewhere, and then I wrote a book and enjoyed it.  Ideas from outside our spheres of interest can really impact us in positive ways. 

This is why I proactively seek exposure to new ideas.  I will watch a random show on tv.  I have started listening to random podcast episodes from the iTunes popular suggestions.  This newsletter is one way I try to get new ideas.  At the end of every newsletter, I have links of the interesting and useful things I read this week.  This forces me to read a lot more stuff than I usually would.  Forcing new ideas into mind is always a good thing. 

I am always on the search for new ideas and perspective.  It is fun never knowing where the ideas will take me.  Wherever the idea road leads, I know it will be interesting.

How are you exposing yourself to better ideas?  Do you have an interesting trick or system set up?  I would love to hear about it if you have some ideas how to get ideas that I could steal.

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

Good article with some leg exercises I might toss into the rotation in my home workouts.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/big-quads-no-squat-rack

Philosophy

An article I wrote about how chess is making me think about my life decisions lately.  https://nehemiah.co/ramblings/move-quality-in-chess-and-life/

I spent some time this week writing an operations manual for myself.  It will be called an operations manual because that is better than some of the other titles I thought of for it.  For a long time the working titles was “The Book of Nehemiah.”  Upon further reflection that sounded a bit pompous and even cultish.  I have no desire to appoint myself as a deity.  Really the whole point of this manual I wrote was to have some guidelines and remember things.  These were all notes to myself and I wanted to put them into one place.

It is good to have a plan in life, and this manual is where I am keeping this plan. 

It has a list of some lifetime goals.

It has a list of standards I will hold myself to.

It has a list of super powers I will build.

By super powers I am just talking about skills and knowledge bases that I will build over time.  When I say over time, I mean over the next 10 years or longer.  I believe when you do things for a long time, they start to become a super power.  At Purdue in my classes they would have called these competitive advantages, but I think super powers sound more fun. 

My plan is to just read over this during times like weekly planning sessions.  I have done this before and gotten benefits.  This whole project was just about taking all my systems, and putting them in one place.  I think having concrete written lists and plans can be very helpful.  They provide clarity of purpose and action.  It is my hope that in years this manual does it’s job and keeps me on the path I want to be on.

This all makes me question what other kinds of manuals and guidelines should I be making for myself?

I wonder if other people do this kind of thing.  So if you do this kind of thing reach out, I want to know what kind of operations manuals you have built for yourself.

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength and Conditioning

Really good dive into conjugate training with Mark Bell and Jess Burdick.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgUb8ZHGkJk

Some really good things to think about regarding strength training.  https://bretcontreras.com/3-tips-faster-strength-gains/

Nutrition

A good article with some nice details about the fat loss process.  https://www.elitefts.com/education/why-your-diet-isnt-working/

I have been thinking about games a lot the last couple weeks.  It is the start of another Purdue Basketball season so I am naturally excited about that.  I have also been dabbling in the world of chess.  Mistakes in a game can make you lose really fast.  These kinds of mistakes are easy to catch.  In sports you don’t pass the ball to the other team.  In chess you want to protect your king.  There is also another kind of mistake that like wolves on an elk, takes you down slowly.

My beloved Purdue Basketball team made such a mistake last night.  They played well and got a 20 point lead over Miami.  They then proceeded to squander that lead and lose.  There are a lot of reasons for this, and I’m not a basketball mind so I’ll stick to the one mistake I noticed.  They allowed Miami to take initiative and control the style of the game.  Styles matter, and if you play the style that suits your opponent you’re in a lot of trouble.  Their mistake was allowing the style to change, and it took half the game to catch up to them.

Games are simple, so they are a good way to learn some basic strategies to take back to life.  We can see what works and what doesn’t work in a vacuum.  In life it’s a bit harder to see which moves are smart and which are blunders.  In chess I make certain kinds of mistakes.  I can’t help but wonder if I make those kinds of mistakes in life.  I also do some really cool stuff on the chess board.  Things that win me some games in a fun fashion.  If I can make those moves on a chess board, can I make them in life?

These are the kinds of things I have been thinking about lately on my long meditative walks.  I’ll try some of the strategies from the chess board out in real life.  That is a little bit of game theory that I can get behind.

Every week I spend a lot of time reading and looking for new ways to get stronger, healthier and more awesome.  Here are some of the best things I have found this week.

Strength And Conditioning

What you think is a mobility problem could actually be a stability problem.  https://www.elitefts.com/education/does-mobility-or-stability-come-first/

Another option for training the lower body with bands, because lockdown.  These are something I definitely need to work into the rotation.  https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-a-band-built-butt-is-a-superior-butt

Career and Mentality

An article on creativity with some ideas I enjoyed.  https://markmanson.net/boring-ways-to-become-more-creative