I only get more freckled if I am in the sun. Check your privilege.

hsilman says:

check your privilege checking privilege

I just want to say that I’m a fan of this trend.

Hey guys, Brent here.

Any caffeine addicts here? My first exposure to caffeine was when Mike and I were craving McCafe mochafrappucinos at the WFAC. I liked chocolate and wanted some sugar pre-workout to maintain my glucose-dependent metabolism. I developed a headache a little bit after and had a shitty training session, and vowed to never intake caffeine again. At the time, the idea that a sugar overload/crash combined with inadequate hydration might also be a legitimate cause of headache didn’t occur to me.

Fast forward a few years when I was a chubby 180lbs Asian “powerlifter” who couldn’t deadlift over 455lbs or bench 300lbs. I thought that I was “building mass” doing 10 rep deads at 375lbs. I thought that benching 3×5 was sufficient for my upper body development, and that no delt or tricep accessory work was needed. After one subtle fat joke too many, I decided that it was time to stop living in denial and to lose weight until my belly didn’t touch my upper thighs when I was sitting in my car. This is also known as fat-shaming. Had I known about the fat acceptance movement, or perhaps a devoted member of Starting Strength, I would have said that my body was not overweight and that everyone’s body image was anorexic. Then I would have eaten 75g of rice and consumed 50g of protein through Korean barbecue on a non-training day and thought those were reasonable macros for a person pretending to compete in an ATP/CP cycle-dependent activity.

Instead I realized that looking in the mirror after I showered was a painful endeavor and that it was time to face the music, that “building my strength” was not an excuse to be pre-diabetic, wake up at 3am every night nearly vomiting stomach acid from GERD, and pretend that when girls smile at me it’s because my yoke was getting bigger and not because I looked like a derpy, non-threatening, fat Asian guy who liked boba tea.

As part of this project, I started carb-cycling while using a calorie deficit, which included having high-carb days for volume squat, no-carb rest days, low-to-moderate carb training days the rest of the week, and the introduction of coffee into my pre-workout stack, both to help with my energy levels on the low-carb training days and also to aid in mobilization of fat stores. The problem with this is at this time, the only “coffee” drinks I enjoyed were either iced mochas or frappucinos, which are actually not coffee and are in fact milk shakes with 2oz of coffee in them. There are fat-shaming subreddits which call this “fat-logic.”

Despite this jelly-dicked introduction to coffee, I was successful in dropping 20lbs, and am now blessed with a mild caffeine addiction that manifests in barely-there headaches on my non-training days, since this is the only time I reward myself with an iced coffee. “Reward myself with an iced coffee,” at least I don’t sound like a fat person. This also gives me the opportunity to have awkward interactions with Starbucks personnel, and stories of these failures will return shortly.

The sad part about this is that at this point, the caffeine doesn’t actually provide any stimulation as a pre-workout, I’m only drinking it because it’s now part of my routine before going to the gym and I like the taste of coffee with a little half-and-half.

Today’s MopeWOD: Be a slave to a bullshit substance addiction that isn’t even a real addiction. I’m sure many of you are laughing at “One coffee? Per TRAINING DAY? Nigga pls that’s not a caffeine addiction.” Honestly, you’re perfectly fine without the substance you’re addicted to, but the fact that it’s part of your routine means you’d rather not do without it, especially pre-workout. It should be noted that anxiety or distress from deviating from a set pattern is a sign of autism. Just something to think about.

Thanks for the coffee thread guys, very informative would read again/10.

* * *

21s4gunz writes:

If we’re going to get real….

The “70sbig ethos” was never what drew people to the site. It was always Justin. The videos and images of him looking strong, thick, solid. That was the dream. We could always delude ourselves into believing that we did what we did because we wanted to become better lifters, or be more manly. But deep down, in places we don’t talk about at parties, it was always about being like Justin.

That was why Brent provided such a delicious juxtaposition in the 70sbig world. Justin was the dream, what we could be. Brent is the reality, what we are.

The content of 70sbig hasn’t changed all that much since Justin left, but we lost the dream. Now it’s harder to avoid the cold reality. We train, we compete, but we’re still fat, still weak, still unaesthetic, reaching goals and milestones that have no meaning in the wider world. We will never be Justin. There was never a chance that we would be.

This was fucking amazing. 21s4gunz is the industry’s top analyst, the rest of you dickheads would do well to take notes.

JB writes:

When you reference soffes are you saying the performance shorts with the 4 inch inseam or the ranger panties? I’m slightly over six foot so the ranger panties are basically like wearing your underwear out of the house. I prefer the 4 inch inseam, and I think my neighborhood does too.

The Ranger panties. FYI, they also ride up, becumming even shorter than they actually are. I also don’t recommend wearing them to the pool, because while they do have built-in support briefs into the short, they adhere to your genitals when you get out of the pool.

yup says:

Don’t wear Ranger panties unless you have a tab.

todmann67 says:

Or if you’re a Recon Marine.

Is this a legit? Does the Ranger community frown upon non-Rangers wearing Ranger panties?

todmann67 says:

Tren,

Lots of 70s Big bashing. Are you and Justin still friends? Is Justin aware that his site has turned into same thing it initially wanted to combat? Does he care? Since he became Jim Jones to a bunch of mopers-in-denial, he has vanished. Establishing his own lifting compound in the Utah wilderness perhaps?

I wasn’t bashing 70s Big, it is fact that the site pushes soffes and tank tops, and it is fact that it appeals to a bygone era. Neither of those are necessarily negative, despite what some of you Tommy Tough Guys may believe about wearing embarrassingly short shorts.

Many of you are like me. By that I mean, you never really go outside and are pale as fuck. On the few occasions that you do go shirtless, people mock you for being so white, as though you were an inmate at Auschwitz or perhaps an albino. Much like having small calves, it is a blow to your already non-existent ego, but your lack of overall dignity protects you from feeling true humiliation. That emotion began background noise probably when you were 15 or 16.

Then 70s Big happened. I suddenly had the confidence to wear soffes and tank tops despite the derisive attention it attracted.

“It’s a thing,” I could explain. “This website, about being big and muscular and wearing short shorts.”

“So you’re a faggot?”

“I – ”

Texas makes it easy to dress light. When it’s summer, you’re kind of forced to in order to survive and potentially save on energy bills. If you drive about half an hour every day, to, say the gym, it makes catching about 30 minutes of sunlight through your driver’s side window pretty easy. So you get a nice, asymmetric tan.

This is what the CIA does. You find a resistance movement – do you share common goals? 70s Big pushes the idea of soffe shorts and a tank. I wanted a tan. I took up the resistance movement of soffes and a tank, ostensibly because it was “70s Big,” but in truth, I just wanted to get a tan, a cosmetic desire that ran completely against everything that 70s Big stood for. Then, when it was convenient for me, I started my own blog, now carrying the same banner of soffes and tank, but because you deliberately wanted to look like a piece of shit, not because you were a big muscle bear bringing back the meaningless values of a bygone era.

In a shocking display of functioning humanity, I left my apartment in soffes to read by the pool this Sunday, hoping to absorb some valuable vitamin D and perhaps catch a tan. My future, already unsuccessful career as a fitness magazine model depends on things like this. I am currently reading World War Z and Ghost Wars, both are pretty good books. Anyways, I spent probably about an hour out at the pool. By the time I came back in and took a shower, my entire upper body revealed a mild sunburn. My subtle farmer’s tan and legs remained unharmed and even darker by a shade or two. My legs, accustomed to being mostly bare – the longest shorts I wear being soccer shorts which still stop several inches above the knee – were already used to small amounts of UV ray exposure on my total 30 minute commute from my apartment, to Starbucks, and finally to the gym.

Then I cleaned and front squat on Monday and the bar rubbed on my sunburn. Same with the lacrosse ball and PVC pipe while I mobbed.

My life is a fucking joke.

* * *

Mesomorph writes:

Do you think he qualified for the Nationals because he, you know, actually competes and stuff? And probably doesn’t try to bench and Sn/C&J heavy at the same time and wonder why none of them have moved in forever?

Mm thanks for the insightful wisdom.

Apalachiswola writes:

So Brancy has set the expiration date on this little corner of the interweb. It has been … interesting. Really, I was out when the gay erotica took over. I guess it’s back to the Misc with us …
Ask a brah who just pissed in his protein shake anything (reps til im out)

Real talk: I have a confession. I don’t hate myself. Or my life. I don’t even hate Brent, if that’s a thing.

Hey guys, I was just joking about quitting the blog. It’s been fun, and fills the empty void of my life with an equally empty space holder. The Mopeility project will continue.

Today I felt great benching. I hit up my medial scapular border with a lacrosse ball pre-workout so my shoulder extension and internal rotation were in pretty good shape. I warmed up with 135 –> 185 –> 220 –> 245, and 245 felt ez enough that I figured that this would be the day that I benched 270lbs x 3 for the first time in a while. I completed 265 x 3 a few weeks ago, but since then have been stagnant and have either barely managed 255lbs or failed 260lbs. Today I took down 270lbs x 2, which is leaps and bounds better than I have been doing in the past few bench sessions. I asked a trainer at the gym for a spot for this set, and it took me a solid 4-5 seconds to grind out the second rep. He was unimpressed. Part of me hoped that he didn’t think I was asking for a spot because I thought he would be impressed with the dickhead Asian “benching a lot for his bodyweight.”

He went back to training his client, and I dropped down to my back-off set at 260, figuring that if worse came to worst, I could just terminate the set once it felt like I was going to failure. A 14 year old girl was waiting on her mom to finish her workout, texting on her phone – this will have relevance at the end of the story.

I took 260 out of the rack, benched it for two reps, the second was slow but I didn’t think I stalled too hard, so I took a breath and took the bar back down for my third. I got it off my chest, took it to the sticking point, but instead of grinding through, it stopped, and began to come back down. I didn’t panic – having failed many, many reps before, I thought I was adept at dumping weights and looking like a dickhead.

Not today.

I tilted the bar, but the well-made competition-style bench was too wide, and I couldn’t tilt my torso or drop my shoulder enough to dump one side of the bar. I dipped left, then right, and all I got was the plates on one side to slide a little. The bar was crushing my diaphragm. If it had cantilevered towards my neck, I wouldn’t be typing this. I couldn’t breathe and was basically suffocating. The trainer saw me about fifteen to twenty seconds later and saved me from what should have been my death. I said thanks and began to unload the bar.

“What do you want on here?” he asked.

“I’m done,” I said, and he grinned in response, because he thought I was an idiot. Justifiably so. “Good idea, right?”

“Right.”

The 14 year old girl was standing 20 feet away while all this happened, and she didn’t move from her spot. This is not a criticism of her. She – rightfully – didn’t give a fuck if I was going to die or not.

Today’s MopeWOD: come close to your sweet release from this mortal coil. Live with the shame of having someone save you from your self-imposed doom.

* * *

Krutzed writes:

i def agree with the tragic family shit and people just hiding there feels. w/e. ive been thru some tough shit BRB best friend shooting himself in front of whole platoon and i BRB shitty deployments with mutitlated/ dead people/marines. but honestly who the fuck am i? some ass that went thru for like a year of my life what a third world kid grew up in and will die in. im not special that’s why literally i don’t talk about it. not to my wife or the few people I see or am forced to see (with the exception of drunkin nights w buddies that went thru it AND mope WOD).

that’s why fat people who think they are entitled make me fucking sick. or just most people in general make me sick. who the fuck do you think you are? your nothing. your not special and your life means absolutely nothing. Then I go off on a rant and remind myself that I’m acting like Walter off of big Lebowski.

well said.

emancipatedfreak writes:

blogging about suicide and killing cashiers and harpooning fat people. If you have your finger in a dam, are you brave enough to take it out???

I am not going to keep my finger in this clenching butt hole forever.

beonick writes:

Brent i swear if you stop blogging i will find you and mob your right vastus medialis so hard that i’ll put you in a wheelchair for 10 months. That’s the precise amount of time where you hope and even look forward to recupperating. but when the last week comes around you’ve no desire to start all of the pain and torment of lifting all over again. You will live out the rest of your days as a fucking cripple eating 600g of refined carbs and watching Yu Yu Hakusho until you die, sad and alone at the age of 34.

Check your blogging privilege.

Dub or sub? Subbed Yu Yu Hakusho would be fucking badass.

shido5everalone writes:

Everyone tells me that I should be happy and frankly it gets fucking annoying. Its not like I can turn on some kind of happy switch and be happy. The only person who hasn’t told me to be happy is the girl I like and shes now going out with her ex boyfriend.

Fill your life with emptiness. Like a powerlifting “career.”

21s4gunz writes:

How do you feel about the fact that there is another Olympic-weightlifting Asian who is named Brent, except he qualified for Nationals in his first year of lifting and cleaned 300 lbs yesterday?

By the time chad Vaughn was 26, he’d already been to the Olympics. I’m 27 and I write for a floundering blog with unfulfilled potential.

My fat body is the constant companion that helps me do every single thing that I do every second of every day and it deserves respect and admiration.

If you are incapable of appreciating my body and treating it with respect and admiration that is your deficiency not mine; work on it or not, but I do not care. Nor am I interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter so, if you want to be around me, you are 100% responsible for doing whatever it takes to keep those thoughts to yourself. If you are incapable of doing that I will stop spending time with you – I spend my time with people who can treat me appropriately.

I will wield my beautiful fat body like a weapon. I will love it, I will care for it, I will move it, I will show it in public, I will viciously defend my body against anyone who seeks to classify it as anything but amazing. You’ve been warned – back the fuck off.

Knowing that she wouldn’t approve my comment, I went ahead and asked her a question that, in normal humans, would create a need for at least a moment’s reflection:

Dear Ragen,

This is not fat acceptance. It is one thing to not want to be ridiculed and criticized. You are demanding to be put on a pedestal. Please check your privilege.

Sincerely,
A loyal fan.

Honestly? Demanding respect and admiration? For dancing in your living room for 30 minutes a day? For bullshit pilates poses that don’t require much more than a functioning brain stem? Not entitled at all. Fat acceptance has nothing to do with acceptance and everything to do with entitlement. “I’m entitled to be respected, I’m entitled to be adored.”

Well this is America, goddamn it. The only thing you’re entitled to is marrying someone of the same sex and then shooting yourself in the fucking face – with your very own gun – for the life you’ve wasted pursuing some illusion of happiness, whether that’s in a meaningless job, a family that’s falling apart, or lifting jelly dicked weights at rinky dink meets where there are only two people in your weight class.

* * *

So I was at Starbucks the other day, and I ordered my usual bullshit iced coffee with hazelnut sweetener and a splash of breve, and when the barista brought my drink out, she said, “Have a nice day.”

“Have a nice day.”

The last time I had a nice day was before I lifted. I was wearing a black JROTC t-shirt inside out, because even in high school I was ashamed to be a part of that program. I had also recently purchased running shorts from Target, not aware that running shorts are notoriously small, and I felt self-conscious running in them in my neighborhood. I completed what couldn’t have been more than a 2 mile run, the weather was hot and humid (for Texas), and I felt like my abs were finally cumming through. It was early evening and the weather was great. Then I did some bullshit stretching routine that I had completely made up, ate a Korean stew with less than 20g protein per serving, and played StarCraft until 6am with my friends over a 56.6k modem.

Every day since then has been one missed rep after another.

We are struck by reminders of how much we hate our lives on a regular basis.

I check-out at a grocery store, with the same eggs, spinach, onion, butter, and whatever beef is on sale that day that I buy twice weekly. “How’s your day been?” the cashier asks me.

People have no idea how triggering questions like these are. My day’s been horrible. I’m spending hundreds of dollars a month (on food) – I am still NO CLOSER to completing my mission (of benching 300lbs). I cleaned 300lbs and 305lbs as if they were warm-ups and still missed the jerk. I have to mob 30 minutes every day before I can even do a back squat to depth. That’s how my day’s been.

“Paper or plastic?” the cashier says.

“Check your serotonin privilege,” I said.

People don’t realize the ubiquity of serotonin privilege. The assumption is that everyone, under the surface, is capable of being happy. This quite frankly isn’t true. Reminding them of this fact shames serotonin-inhibited people and only further alienates them from serotonin-privileged society. It’s cruel to say “have a nice day” when you never have nice days.

Today’s MopeWOD: spread awareness of serotonin privilege. If someone tells you “have fun,” you tell them to fuck off.

* * *

There’s 106 comments on yesterday’s post and I am not going to bother going back to respond to them for a Q&A. Glad that most of you guys liked it. I’m not surprised that some of you didn’t – this blog is a fucking prison right? When is Berenstein going to talk about something interesting, like swollen meat rods and how much of a boner peri-scapular soft-tissue release gives him?

I’m fucking over this website, can’t wait for the subscription to run out.

As an aside, she claims to be able to develop Type II muscle fibers “very easily.” I clean 305lbs at less than 160lbs bw, and I know for a fact that I don’t develop Type II muscle fibers period, because I’ve been doing this for like fucking seven years and I’m still shoveling shit. Since she doesn’t participate in sprint-effort activities, she couldn’t even confirm this through a roundabout personal observation. I left a comment on her blog asking how she came to this conclusion and if she’s had a muscle biopsy done, which is truly the only valid method of determining whether someone is “Type II” dominant. It’s still awaiting moderation, and she’s not going to answer it, because despite pretending that she is a scientific individual, waving around studies that prove that diets don’t work (in powerlifting and weightlifting we see people move up and down in weight classes on a regular basis but fuck them, right?), she will not face challenges to her positions and instead chooses to pretend that they don’t exist. All versions of the DSM will call this behavior “delusional.”

As another aside, if you read her 5k post, one of the highlights of that day for her was acting like an entitled piece of shit over not getting a 4XL t-shirt for a 5k that she did not truly participate in. I just want to point out that many people walk 3.2 miles to the bus stop every morning, and they don’t get a fucking t-shirt either. I also want to point out that when they walk to that bus stop, it doesn’t take them 1:09 to get there, because then they’d be late for work, and they’d lose their job. I ALSO want to point out that I don’t buy meet t-shirts, ESPECIALLY at national-level meets, because I don’t want people to point it out and say, “Oh hey you went to Raw Nationals? How’d you do?” and then for me to answer that I benched less than 300lbs. Do you want to know why? Because I’d feel like a fucking farce having to answer that. But this is apparently not something that an “athletic privileged” person worries about.

This brings us back to “athletic privilege.” First of all, unless you’re making a living doing your sport, you are guaranteed to not have athletic privilege. It means you’re not talented enough to make it in a professional sport, or you are competing in something that isn’t actually a sport, and therefore not athletic. Walking a 5k in 1:09 guarantees beyond all doubt that you do not enjoy athletic privilege.

If we follow Ragen’s definition of “athletic,” which apparently is simply showing up at an event, demanding a t-shirt in 4XL, and then proceeding to do what foot-traffic commuters do on a daily basis, only better, then let’s talk about what “athletic privilege” to the average person truly means.

Athletic privilege means you get classified as a “junkie.” If you like to a run, you’re a cardio junkie. If you like to lift weights, and are halfway decent at it, the average layperson will probably accuse you of steroids – whey protein and creatine are steroids, after all.

Athletic privilege means that your intelligence is denigrated because you choose to do something physical. This is especially true if you lift weights. You bench press 315lbs? Get a load of this dickhead.

Athletic privilege means that your body image is now up for criticism to the general public. “For someone who runs so much, she’s not that skinny.” “For someone who lifts weights a lot, he’s not that buff.”

Athletic privilege means that your doctor will now tell you the dangers of whatever sport you choose to do. “You need to stop squatting, you will injure your back sooner or later.” “Running is great, but really only in moderation. All you need is 20 minutes of moderate cardio a day.”

Athletic privilege means that any injury you accrue is because of your sport. Back hurts? Stop deadlifting. Feet hurt? Stop running. It doesn’t matter that sedentary individuals also face injury, and if they do get injured, it’s from doing Mickey Mouse bullshit that an actual human would be able to walk away from and never think about again.

Athletic privilege is being criticized for even trying hard to be athletic, “because all that muscle will turn to fat once you stop.”

Of all the privileges, “athletic privilege” in the context of the average person is the fucking dumbest. Also, if you are 300lbs+ and don’t bench that equivalent on a barbell, I have a lot of trouble believing that anyone is going to treat you with it.

Thank you I’m Brunch Khar.

So I cleaned 300lbs today and squat 420 x 3. This is the highest my squat has been in a while. The last time I got this far, the next week I attempted 425lbs x 3 or 430lbs x 3 or something and the first rep stapled me. Then I never squat that heavy ever again. Can’t wait. I can’t remember if I’ve done 425lbs x 3 or not high bar.

While I’ve never progressed beyond these weights, I’ve been here like, quite a few times. It’s just that every time I got to this point, something set me back. Shoulder strain, SI joint issues, sudden and traumatic weight loss (BRB going from 163lbs to 149lbs in 7 days for no reason). So while I would fucking love to go above and beyond this point, it probably won’t happen. I can only imagine what kind of bullshit is going to stop me this time.

Today’s MopeWOD: you’re good enough to get better. You really are. It’s just not going to happen. You’ve got a job. You’ve got kids. You have responsibilities which don’t allow you to eat 100g of protein within 2 hours post-workout, and constraints which don’t allow you to eat a decent meal pre-workout. You have a life – however unwanted – outside of the gym. Enjoy your fading opportunities at achieving the lofty lifting goals in your life.

But I guess this won’t stop you from funneling a disproportionate amount of your time and resources into this bullshit, unsatisfying, and intensely damaging neurotic behavior you call a hobby.

Purchase a 14oz steak. You wish there were a bigger steak or perhaps a wider selection, but this is the price you pay for doing your grocery shopping just before midnight. Also don’t forget to grab some spinach, an onion, and baby portobella mushrooms.

Dump some butter into a pan. Turn the heat on medium-high. Realize that it would be better to sear the steaks on the highest heat setting on the stove top, but also don’t feel like it’d be worth opening every window, leaving the vent on for half an hour, and then still being forced to run the air conditioning unit’s fan to blow the smell of seared meat out of your less than 700 sq. foot one bedroom apartment. You also don’t feel like turning on the broiler to finish a single 14oz steak.

Season the steak with generic, store-bought montreal steak seasoning. Consider that you could make a pretty decent crust using freshly-crushed garlic, sea salt, and pepper. Oh well.

Cook the steak to desired doneness.

As the steak is cooking, chop up half the onion, the baby portobella, and grab two cups of spinach. When the steak is done cooking, dump the vegetables into the steak juices. Stir until the onions are brown and translucent and the spinach is wilted, like the expectations and zeal you once had for life. Realize that this is more vegetable than you are willing to eat in one sitting. Decide to save half of it for breakfast tomorrow, when you will make an 8-egg scramble. For one.

The steak should have ample time to sit while you cook the vegetables. While you are waiting for the vegetables to be done cooking, wash your cutting board, chopping knife, and the single dish you have in the sink. You consider using the dishwasher, but it doesn’t seem worth it because you only ever use one utensil and one plate.

When the vegetables are done, dump some onto the plate with the steak. Save the rest. Rinse the pan out.

Sit at your computer. Browse /r/contagiouslaughter. Laugh alone in your bedroom eating a steak dinner at midnight.

You probably haven’t met your macros. Your training session is going to suck tomorrow. You probably won’t PR your snatch or your clean or jerk, and you will probably miss a few reps in your squat work sets. Do you care?

Bits of steak grease have inadvertently dripped into your lap. Whether that means it is on your jeans, boxer briefs, or your genitals is up to how much you choose to wear the cloak of decency in your private life. When you are done eating, wash your remaining dishes first, then your person.

Ensure that you drink at least 16oz of water from a plastic water bottle with extra BPA.

Watch a few episodes of the RadBrad’s play through of God of War 3: Ascension.

You get good at doing manly stuff by doing manly stuff, the two movers probably do manly stuff all the time. Go dig some holes or something.

So basically you want me to go shovel shit, right, got it.

I was wearing an American Top Team shirt at the gym today. It’s one of my favorite shirts to wear because it’s red and in addition to being extra medium, has shrunk after a few cycles in the dryer and now makes my traps look bigger than they actually are. There was a friendly couple there who took note of me doing snatches and cleans and they asked where I usually trained. I wanted to get done with my workout so I wasn’t rude, but I was pretty good at not making eye contact and perhaps giving the impression that I was developmentally disabled.

When I was done I decided that I’d had enough social ostracization in my life so I decided to go over and introduce myself.

“So you went to American Top Team?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

I was the equivalent of a guy wearing a TapOuT shirt, but not having actually done anything in mma other than watch the first season of The Ultimate Fighter.

To be fair, I did go to a bjj/mma gym for about six months total in college. I had low self-esteem, hated my life, and thought the girl I loved would notice me if I did something interesting. She didn’t notice me and I got beat up by a 17 year old who had been boxing for like four years.

I have discovered that my problem with snatching recently may be related to my knee flexion. Haven’t been rolling my gastrocs, calves, or working on my suprapatellar pouch, and my distal quads were starting to feel tight and inhibited at the bottom of my squats. More knee flexion allowed me to squat with a more upright torso, especially at the bottom, and it seems to have let me snatch 235lbs twice in the past week and 240 once. It’s also allowed me to clean 295+ on a pretty consistent basis.

My calves have been pretty sore after helping Chris move, my right more than my left, it’s fine, not like asymmetric development loses points, I don’t work out to have a good physique anyways, I just lift to not qualify for international meets. I PVC rolled them and it felt like a tendon on my right side was inflamed, at least it won’t detach and require me to get it surgically reattached.

* * *

newgetelqueso writes:

Brinner, you clearly need to do more calf raises and hammer curls.

I have noticed that hammer curls actually don’t do much for my forearm development and that focusing on supination and a slow negative with a regular dumbbell curl does a lot more for my biceps than hammer curls have ever done. So I now just do regular dumbbell curls.

Stu writes:

Hey Brant. Every time I read your blog I feel a little better about myself. Thank you for being my inspiration.

I missed the final deadlift because I forgot to talc my thighs. I’m still going to count it as a PR. Also, I won my weight class. I was the only lifter in my weight class.

Nice lifting, looking thick solid tight keep us updated with your pics and vids wanna see how freakin thick and solid you get.

“You should make that a MopeWOD,” Ellee told me, “‘Think you’re a badass? Well this Mexican mover can probably smoke your fucking shit.’”

And it was true. Chris and I only moved boxes and smaller piece of furniture, but by the end of the day we were pretty fucked. My calves are real fucking sore from climbing up and down stairs all day, and my grip has gotten a better workout moving bullshit household items than I ever have from heavy deadlifts, snatch or clean pulls, 300lbs+ cleans, weighted pull ups, and bent over rows. Can’t wait to see how this helps my lifting Monday, I’m sure I’ll never clean 300lbs again.

The Mexican guys asked Chris “if he was into that Power Man stuff, lifting balls and shit,” and Chris said yeah. They didn’t ask if I lifted. In fact, as I staggered up the stairs carrying a pretty light book shelf or some bullshit, one of them asked me, “You need help?” implying that he didn’t think I was going to make it, even though I was wearing an extra medium t-shirt that accentuated my underdeveloped bis.

Oh yeah, those are also sore, my biceps tendons, hopefully one of them completely ruptures in the middle of a snatch tomorrow. Can’t wait.

Today’s MopeWOD:

Train for an “Olympic” sport. Mob your fucking dick off. Sliding surfaces in great shape? Anterior hip is pretty open? Well-managed scapular mobility and positioning without upper trap dominance and well-activated lower traps? Get your shit fucking rocked by regular life activities. At least you’re supposed to better prepared than a sedentary HAES fuck.

* * *

Andrew writes:

What did you envision this “community” being when you started this blog? How has it deviated from that original vision?

nobodystopsdblob writes:

Yes, tell us how much we have disappointed you.

beonick writes:

And tell us how many people visit it a day. Is it actually popular, or is it pretty obvious that all the posters are the same person?

I was hoping it’d be mostly people like me, who enjoyed self-deprecating humor, and normal people who enjoyed self-deprecating humor. Now it’s full of burgeoning erotica authors, sociopaths, and a lot of gay men.

I get 400-500 unique visitors a day, with 1200-1400 hits, which means that some of you fucks are obsessively clicking refresh. Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy.

shido5everalone writes:

Went to get pick up some dinner with this girl who is basically like my sister. Picking up order she asked me what was the time because she needed to go pick up her boy friend from bart (its like rail system in the bay area). I didn’t have my phone so I didn’t know. Why dont you have your phone? Because I have no friends to text or call. On that basis she asked me why I have been depressed lately because she felt like she can’t do anything.
“Its okay, no one can.”

Pretty sweet.

Pete writes:

“Someday, someday my dream will come?” One night you’ll wake up and you’ll discover it never happened. It’s all turned around on you, and it never will. Suddenly you are old. It didn’t happen, and it never will because you were never going to do it anyway. You’ll push it into memory, then zone out in your barcalounger, being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life. Don’t you talk to me about murder. All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln Town Car, and that girl… you can’t even call that girl. What the fuck are you still doing driving a cab?

Out of curiosity, did anybody else catch the Collateral reference? I used to worship Vincent when I first watched that movie and thought Collateral was good. Now the only part I like is when Vincent wastes those two dudes in the alley, but everything else is just rambling, masturbatory bullshit from the man who once made the best police shoot-out scene ever in Heat.

The only reason this bothers me is I hate cumming off as a pretentious dickhead. Hissing apparently is thought to be a narcissistic effort to draw attention to oneself. I can’t even remember why I started doing it. Does hissing even count as an effective use of valsalva?

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From this article:

If you care about fat people’s health, then you care about their mental health, their emotional health, and their access to the exact same level of health care that thin people enjoy. If you don’t, then you don’t care about fat people.

I just want to point out that as someone in health care, I actually don’t care about fat people. I also don’t care about former meth-head addicts seeking narcotics, or the hysterical upper-middle class mom pretending that she can live in a $500k house without driving herself into ridiculous amounts of debt wanting us to give “something stronger” than motrin or tylenol for the pain her 8 year old child’s ear ache is causing. I don’t care about the mid-20s Caucasian male who refuses to believe that he’s tested positive for IgG antibodies of Herpes Simplex type II, and I don’t care about the Caucasian 50 year old guy who checks-in complaining of a cold, then states that the only reason he’s here is for a 30-day supply of Cialis.

Newsflash: your doctor probably hates you. So does your waiter. Your girlfriend’s parents, your best friend’s friend, your professor, most of the people you knew from high school, your neighbor’s dog. They all fucking hate you. If you’re lucky, your spouse will hate you, and divorce you – the alternative is that they feel sorry for you, and stay with you out of pity and just not giving enough of a shit to make a change. This is true whether you are fat, skinny, Asian, or an otherkin.

We don’t live in a happy, caring world. I read about this guy who gets on the MTA in LA, dies. Six hours he’s riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around the city, people on and off sitting next to him. Nobody notices.

Where did the idea that “I deserve to be treated well” come from? The first thing I expect out of everyone I meet is for them to not give a fucking shit about me. If they learn my name, I feel like a fucking winner, even if it’s just because they say, “Braushert, if you go to the gym so often why aren’t you buffer” so much. And this is cumming from a cis-gendered male.

Maybe some of these social justice folks didn’t get the memo, but life fucking sucks.

Something I am trying to get a doctor to tell patients who say, “Alright, you’re giving me antibiotics for my strep throat, but what about my pain?” or “So I need to ice and rest my NOT fractured and BARELY sprained wrist, but what about my pain?” (and I want him to do this whether the patient is skinny or fat):

“You know, look, sometimes in life, you hurt.” And then proceed to give them a patronizing speech about why sometimes life can be a challenge, and why they are just going to have to drink some water and wait a few days for their supposedly “10/10 on the pain scale” throat to feel better.

From the title of the article: “Doctors Aren’t Mean to Fat Patients, They’re Just Nicer to Thin Ones.”

“Life isn’t fair because we’re not put on a pedestal.”

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I was talking to my girlfriend about the unusual community surrounding this blog, and asked her if I should feel bad about what it’s become.

She responded, “I don’t see what your problem with the community is when you sound like a sociopath. They’re a milder version of you.”

Honestly I don’t think the community is bad. I think that we are painfully self-aware, and that we take the idea of “self-deprecating humor with a little too much honesty” and turn it into an excessive razor blade fiasco, but it’s fine. I also think that most of us are unmotivated, suffer from at least mild anhedonia, and have no real goals because nothing is worth doing, and imo there’s nothing wrong with that.

I would rather have this community than an obnoxiously positive and happy one.

Again, should I see a therapist?

A lot of you guys are also talented writers. I’m mostly talking about the erotica. You guys really take it to the next level. At least we use our talent on a blog which glorifies failing as individuals and humans as opposed to doing something successful with it, like writing the next Shades of Gray.