The Real Benefits of Weight Training
The real benefits of weight training have nothing to do with reducing bodyfat or a having nice build. The real benefits have everything to do with relieving stress, getting out aggression, building confidence, giving you a positive mental attitude, giving you pride, developing discipline, and giving you a rush like narcotics would do.
In an emasculated world there are precious few outlets for Men to get out aggression. Weight lifting is one of the best ways to relieve aggression. Therapy is an excuse to never actually do anything for yourself and a convenient way to blame others. Iron therapy makes you as mentally strong as it does physically strong. If you’re full of pent up aggression you go to the gym, pick up 135 lbs, and put it overhead as many times as you can. You turn on some music that lights a fire under your ass. You walk out the door and see how far you can run before you can’t breathe anymore. You don’t go talk to an emasculated psychiatrist who thinks ‘open communication’ is the key to getting out aggression. Put 200 lbs on his back and make him squat ’til he can’t move and see if he still wants to talk about his feelings. In our world we can’t go hunting woolly mammoths, but we can do the next best thing. Lift some weights and eat some steaks.
It’s impossible to feel stress after an hour of solid training. No matter how stressed you were when you got to the gym ,as long as you give it your all that stress will go away and be replaced by a testosterone fueled feeling of euphoria. The best rush in the world and all the narcotics in the world can’t give you that natural high.
There’s a confidence gained in the gym that people who never train cannot understand. When a guy first starts out and can barely bench 45 lbs and ups that to 225 lbs with steady, solid training the feeling of accomplishment is immense. When a guy starts out deadlifting 95 lbs and ups that to 405 lbs that’s a huge boost to the ego. That’s something you can be proud of. Even if no one else in the worlds understands where you came from it doesn’t matter, you have accomplished what you once thought impossible and no one can take that away from you.
Discipline comes along for the ride. If you never had any before, you will after you start training. Weight training requires you eat right. You won’t even want to eat junk food anymore, your body will crave the good foods and you’ll want to eat those good foods. Heavy weight training requires you get good sleep, and you will. Weight training requires you get up off the couch and go to the gym and accomplish something. If you can manage that you will see what all the hype was about.
How Prisoners Get So Muscular
Authors Note: Having never been to prison, the following article is pure speculation. Enjoy.
We’ve all seen pictures or videos of prisoners and marveled at their excellent physical development. While no one is jealous of their predicament, many of them have bodies that make most regular men envious. One question often posed is “How do prisoners get so big?” Afterall, they eat a terrible, nutrition deprived diet, they probably don’t take any supplements, some of them don’t have weights to lift, they exercise seemingly non-stop. In fact, everything they do in regards to weight training goes against the conventional advice of eat at least 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, don’t lift more than 3 or 4 days per week, drink water non-stop, take supplements, rest when you’re outside of the gym, bodyweight exercises don’t add muscle, exercise one muscle per session only once per week, and don’t exercise for more than 45 minutes a day.
This is another example of why *conventional* advice is always wrong.
Prisoners follow none of the conventional magazine advice an have the bodies to show for it. This is how they do it:
1) They have to get big and strong. When they go in they will no doubt be one of the weakest, smallest guys around. In an ocean of sharks they are the seals. They HAVE to get bigger, it’s not an option. They set their mind to it and they do it with a single minded determination. Weaklings get picked on, the strong ones don’t. What the mind can believe, the body can achieve.
2) They have high testosterone. Guys who go to prison normally have higher testosterone than average, then they are placed in an environment drowning in testosterone and their own testosterone count shoots through the roof. You’ve got to have high T just to survive, to be on the lookout everyday, willing to fight or kill at the drop of a dime. Testosterone is the building block of muscle and these guys are loaded with it.
3) They workout routinely. Prisoners always take about routine and how important it is to them. Everything is on a schedule for them and they no doubt wait and look forward to the time they can lift. Routine is how anyone gets muscular, inside prison or out. Even the most normal of men who follow a strict lifting program over a period of years will get very, very muscular and strong. How many free men are able to dedicate themselves to the gym for a period of 10 years or more?
San Quentin. Even in 1947 prisoners were getting jacked.
4) They lift heavy. With a yard full of monsters watching you, you not only have to appear strong you have to BE strong, so these guys lift heavy, heavy, heavy. Progressive heavier lifting over a routine period of years will get anyone strong, muscular, and jacked.
5) They use conditioning exercises to get strong and ripped. Stuck in their cells they’ve got nothing but time for burpees and other bodyweight exercises that get the heart pumping and the fat melting. Endless pushups, hand-stand pushups, sit-ups, dips, and pull-ups will create big, broad shoulders, huge chest, thick arms, 6 pack abs, wide back, and a v-taper that the most dedicated of gym rats would be jealous of.
‘Armed and Dangerous’
6) They get enough sleep. They go to sleep and wake up at the same time every single day. Regular sleep is when the muscles recover and rebuild.
7) They eat at the same time every day. Their bodies know when to expect it’s flow of nutrients. Regular eating is extremely important for building and maintaining a world class physique. Even though these guys eat terribly nutrient void food, the body knows what to expect and can utilize what it is given. In addition to the free meals they receive everyday, which can total over 3,000 calories per day, they can buy foods like tuna and protein powder from the commissary giving them extra protein and nutrients.
8) They have low stress. They don’t have the testosterone sapping stress of paying bills, working jobs, nagging wife, unemployment, child support, and other minutia. The kind of stress they do have, surviving, increases their testosterone.
9) Steroids - Prisons are notorious drug hotspots and that certainly includes steroids. Many criminals are in jail on drug charges, meaning they are no strangers to drugs. People who already use drugs are a whole lot more likely to use steroids than any regular Joe.
Prisoners are able to dedicate themselves, not just for a few months but for years, to getting jacked. They are provided all the food and sleep that they need. They lift to get strong as well as big. They exercise for a couple of hours everyday. They have no stress that we in the outside world have.
If any free man was able to dedicate himself the way prisoners are dedicated he would be able to turn himself into a muscular monster, just like these guys.
Unconventional Advice for Young Men
As a young man you have the whole world and an entire lifetime in front of you. Now is the time to take advantage. Of all the regrets you may have later in life, wasted time will be the most heartbreaking of them all. Do not follow the path that has been laid out for you, do not do as everyone else you know. Unless you are average. During your schooling you have been led to believe that you must follow this order: go to college, get a job to pay back your student loans, get married, consume as much as possible, save for retirement at which point you can live life, and then die having accomplished nothing other than being a good boy and doing what you were told. Everything you have been sold in high school is a complete lie. If you find this unbelievable just ask anyone in their late twenties to mid thirties who followed this path and see how happy they truly are. They may lie with their words but their soul-less eyes cannot tell a lie.
Looking back on how I used to live my life I see a lot of wasted time that could have been used to build something magnificent. I didn’t wake up until after my mid twenties. If I could go back and slap some sense into my 15 year old self this is what I would advise:
1) Lift Weights - I definitely would have convinced my teenaged self to start hitting the weights with a fury. I look back on all those wasted years and think of how I could be so much stronger if I had started hitting the weights at around 14 or 15 years old. Lifting gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment that a skinny person or a fat person will never know or understand. As a teen you are in the primetime for developing some serious strength and a great physique. You have all that natural testosterone pulsing through your bodies. The ladies melt for a guy with a great physique too.
2) Play a sport, especially wrestling - I used to laugh at all the “dumb preppy jocks” in my school. What I didn’t know is how competitive sports like wrestling developed strength, courage, discipline, and pride - things that I very sorely lacked until much later and things that are lacking in all the youngsters I see who don’t compete, spending all their time on the computer or other useless time-wasters.
3) Don’t bother going to college - This may be the hardest pill to swallow but college is a colossal waste of time and money. I could have saved myself endless boredom had I chosen a different path. As it was, I didn’t even know other paths existed. I learned absolutely nothing useful in college and what I did learn was downright detrimental and that is because nothing is actually taught in college. You don’t go there to learn, you go there to further your indoctrination and emasculate you even more. Anyone and everyone go to college now and because of this colleges and universities are filled with monumentally stupid people who have no earthly business at an institute of higher learning. As you will learn later a college degree means absolutely nothing when you go your own way and do not follow the path that everyone else will follow. A college degree does not guarantee a “good” job. A “good” job does not guarantee safety. The only safety guaranteed is what you do for yourself. There is no safety relying on other people.
If you must go to college you should go later in life. I hear people say “Oh, I’ll travel in a few years when I have time. Oh, I’ll start my business in a few years when I have time”. If you must go to college, go after a few years of real education in the real world. If you go, you had better get a technical degree (engineering etc..), something you can’t learn on your own. Arts, psychology or anything ending in “studies” degrees are completely useless in the job market. Not that you should want to get a job.
FYI - You do not have to go to college to get drunk, party and hook up. That can be done anywhere at anytime.
4) Travel often - I would have told myself to skip college and instead immediately start traveling abroad, backpacking Asia, or Europe, or South America. Get a part time job while in High School and save your money. When you graduate high school you should head abroad for an eye-opening experience you will never forget or regret. I would have learned more in a year of traveling than I learned in 7 years of college (or 4, or however long it was). Hell, I lived in Texas for 10 years and I never even went to Mexico. I would have slapped that little bastard (me) in the mouth and told him to travel often and everywhere.
5) Turn off the TV - You can’t pick a bigger waste of time than TV watching. Same for video games and other mindless internet usage.
6) Don’t work full time - I used to manage a blockbuster video while going to school full time. What a waste of a young mans life. I would have convinced myself to not work at all and work instead on an entrepreneurial venture. I always had the desire but I never had the courage to just dive right in until several years later. You should be of the mindset of never having a real job or wanting a real job. The only way you will ever get rich is to build a business yourself. The only way you will have security is to build a business yourself. The only way you will have freedom is to build a business yourself. Do you really want to go 50 years asking permission from a lowly middle management executive for a one week vacation per year? The only job you should ever have is one that provides you only with the bare necessities and leaves you hungry for more, one that gives you time to pursue other ventures. When you have a full time job that pays you enough to buy all the stupid worthless shit you see on TV you will get lazy and you will NEVER DO ANYTHING WORTHWHILE UNTIL YOU QUIT. Don’t fall into that trap. Live as cheaply as you possibly can.
7) Do not go into debt for any reason - Do not acquire school loans, do not use credit cards, do not get auto loans. That’s how they entrap young people into debt slavery. “Oh, I can’t go travel I’m in school debt up to my eyeballs“. You go into debt for your “education” and then you pay for it the rest of your life. This is a waste of your prime years. If you can’t pay cash for it, don’t buy it.
8) Don’t listen to anybody - Advice given to you will be, without question, terrible. It will be the same thing over and over “Go to school, get a good job. You can do all that other stuff later.” You can respond “Oh, really? Is that what you did? Went to school, got a job and then fulfilled your dreams later?” and see the look of regret in their eyes. People who fell for the joke want you to fall for the same joke, it’s a part of human nature for people not to want others to succeed where they failed. Conventional advice is to be ignored, always. You are better off doing the opposite.
As a young man you think you have all the time in the world. You don’t. You have only a brief time on this Earth. Use that to your advantage. Never for one second think “I can do all that fun stuff later” because you can’t and you won’t. Now is the time. You are in your prime and if you don’t take advantage you will waste away like all the people you see who are dead inside. The same people who are waiting for retirement, pretending they are going to go and do the things you will do right now.
Go forth young man and live your life. Real education is not in a classroom. It’s in the world around you.
Is It Worth It?
Is your stuffy job worth it? Working 50 hours a week with people you hate just so you can make someone else rich?
Are your two cars and the two car payments and the two insurance premiums worth it?
Is your 30 year mortgage worth it? Are your yearly property taxes worth it?
Is your 50 inch flat screen tv with 500 channels of indoctrination worth it?
Is your useless 4 year degree with your insurmountable student loans worth it?
Is it worth going into massive credit card debt just to get the new iphone?
Is it worth saving for your far-off retirement so you can finally live like you should now?
Is constantly buying useless shit worth the sacrifice you make to work at a shitty job?
Places like this exist. It takes less money to get there than the amount you spend every month.
Is it worth it?
Strongmen: Then and Now
Then:
Now:
The Strong Silent Type
If you say you are going to do something you had better follow through with it. When you do not follow through, the people whom you told of your plans will think “that’s what I thought. He could never accomplish that.”
How many times have you heard a motormouth talk about all the things he was going to do and he never did any of it?
When you don’t tell anyone anything and then you accomplish something those same people will look at you with a sense of awe and respect. And jealousy.
When you speak of your plans, your brain feels like you have already accomplished your goal and you have less drive to finish what you start. When you don’t speak of your plans to a single soul then your brain has no reason to think it has been accomplished. You will still have that fire and passion for success.
Lesson: Don’t say nothing to no one!
Stop talking and start doing.
Explanations are for the weak. Actions are for the strong.
Happy Fathers Day
I remember reading Larry Bird’s auto-biography a while back and I have always remembered a quote from that book. It is something I will never forget and I will pass on to my family when the time comes.
Forgive if the quote is inaccurate, it is from memory:
“My Dad said that if anyone was ever picking on one of my brothers and I didn’t step in to defend them I better not ever come home.”
A lot of places will say things like “Happy Fathers Day to all the REAL fathers” but BOLD & DETERMINED won’t. We know the truth.
We know fathers love their kids more than anything.
Happy Fathers Day.
Why Diets Don’t Work
Diets don’t work.
In other recent news: We Landed on the Moon.
That diets don’t work should be so stupidly obvious I feel like a moron even typing this, however, most people still really do believe that to lose weight you have to go on a diet and eat “diet food”. That typical “diet food” actually makes people fat, even obese, in the first place won’t enter into may peoples minds.
There are 3 basic premises of diets and they are all wrong and completely misguided.
1) To lose weight you have to go on a diet. After you lose the weight you can go off the diet.
“I lost the weight but as soon as I got off the diet I gained it all back!”
What? No! As soon as you started eating the foods that made you fat in the first place you got fat again? Incredulous!
2) You have to eat low calorie foods to lose weight.
This premise is so simple yet so incredibly wrong. If you eat calorie foods you have to eat A LOT to get full. You need to be full to stop eating. If you aren’t full you will keep eating. Low calorie foods will never leave you satisfied, instead you will feel ravenous and fall off the diet within a matter of weeks or days or hours.
Instead, you need HIGH CALORIE, NUTRITIONALLY DENSE, WHOLE FOODS. High calorie whole foods keep you satiated with less food so you do not need to snack or to keep constantly eating. Simple, right?
3) You have to eat diet foods to lose weight.
Diet sodas, low fat yogurt, fat free cookies, “heart healthy” cereals etc.. These types of foods are the biggest cause of obesity in the world which is why you see carts full of these types of foods belonging to obese people. Simple math right? 2+2=a fatter you. Why the link hasn’t been connected by people everywhere is a mystery . These foods aren’t foods. They were foods once, then they were chemically processed and stripped of ALL nutritional value so they could be stored indefinitely and not go bad, then some nutrients were added back in and sold to a bigger, fatter you.
How to Lose Weight and Keep it off:
Stop eating junk food. If it doesn’t go bad it isn’t food. No exceptions.
Eat nutritionally dense whole foods: steaks, pork, chicken, eggs, potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, butter, raw milk (if it hasn’t been criminalized in your area by the FDA - think of the FDA as your new step-mommy that hates your guts and wants you out of the picture. Their ‘advice’ is not supposed to make you healthy and is to be avoided at all costs). Think about the types of foods your grandparents and great-grandparents would eat and eat those foods.
Don’t eat more than 3 times per day. Two is even better.
Eat this way for the rest of your life and exercise vigorously.
That’s it. That’s the no-nonsense way to not be fat. There is no “secret” celebrity method to losing 80 lbs in 3 minutes. To not be a fatass you have to stop eating like a fatass.
Top 3 Rules for Getting into Shape
1) Lifting is King
Lifting weights is King when it comes to getting in shape. If you doubt this, walk into any local gym and check what the most fit people in the gym are doing. They aren’t walking on a treadmill staring at a TV, they are in the weight room lifting away. Lifting increases your heart rate. Lifting builds muscle, muscle burns fat, muscle ups your metabolism.
“But I don’t want to get huge” - Relax. Every huge monster you see in the gym is on anabolic steroids with no exception. Even on steroids getting huge requires almost constant eating, lifting 6 days per week, and the desire to get huge. Don’t inject, don’t eat 5,000 calories a day, don’t want to get huge and it won’t happen. Ever.
“But I just want to ‘tone’ up” - Lifting is how you tone up. Cardio, like jogging and eliptical machines, do not tone you up. They may help you lose weight but you will just be skinny-fat if you don’t lift. Muscle is what gives you the “toned” look.
2) Nutrition is queen
Nutrition is almost as important as lifting. You cannot get into shape eating twinkies, soda’s, and McDonalds all day. Every fitness magazine and every bodybuilder will tell you to eat high carb, high protein, and low fat. It works for them. What they will never tell you is that they are on anabolic steroids and therefore do not need to eat any fat. Fat is essential for building testosterone, testosterone is essential for building muscle. When a bodybuilder or athlete injects synthetic testosterone daily they have no need to build it naturally. For a natural trainee high fat, high-medium protein, and low carb is the best route.
“But eating fat makes you fat!” - No, eating fat does not make you fat unless you are eating man-made, chemically altered fats likes trans-fats and vegetable oils. Stick to real foods that contain saturated animal fat. Fatty meat, butter, eggs, fish, whole milk (raw, I can’t recommend pasteurized) etc.. are excellent foods for the natural trainer.
“What about all that cholesterol?”- You have been lied to by the media and what you believe to be science. Eating cholesterol does not increase your cholesterol. Cholesterol is essential to eat.
Carbohydrate sources:
The best carbohydrate sources are starchy tubers like sweet potatoes, yams, and regular potatoes. White rice is an ok source. The benefits of fruits and vegetables have been greatly exaggerated. Much of modern fruit is sugar in a prettier package. Most, if not all, the vitamins and minerals a human needs can be found in a rare steak. There is a reason your grandfather and great-grandfather had much more testosterone than today’s men. They ate natural foods high in fat - beef, pork, milk, eggs. They weren’t eating “health” foods like soy and wheat.
To lose weight - To lose weight you must eat less food. You will hear advice sating that you need to eat MORE to lose weight. Worse, some people actually believe this. Saying that eating 6 times per day will increase your metabolism or some other nonsense and help you lose weight. In a dream world this might work. 1 or 2 big meals per day is perfect for losing weight. 2 meals of steak and eggs will give you much steady energy and you will not have the need to snack or eat more often. 1 giant meal is harder to start doing, but the benefits are just as good. You can eat not quite perfect and still lose weight at a comfortable rate.
If you’re excessively fat or obese it is because you cannot tolerate carbohydrates. You should severely limit or completely cut off carbohydrate intake. Only re-introduce them very slowly (if at all) after you have lost a good deal of weight.
To gain weight - To gain weight you must eat more food. Smaller, more frequent meals are ideal for gaining weight. Anywhere between 4-6 meals per day is perfect. It’s very hard to gain weight eating fewer meals, this is the reason every bodybuilder eats 6 meals per day. You have to eat to grow. Start eating. When you feel like you can’t eat anymore, eat some more.
3) Cardio is Prince
Some cardio is ok. Endless jogging or other cardio machine usage in a steady rhythm is downright counter-productive. If this sounds unbelievable, go to the gym again and watch all the people that flock to the cardio machines. 95% of them will be completely out of shape. Cardio is not the healthy route. A much better route than traditional cardio is “conditioning”. Conditioning workouts will utilize periods of intense physical exertion with periods of rest. Things like sprints are an excellent way to get into phenomenal shape. As a general rule - to get into great shape train like an athlete would train. Don’t train like the slobs on the treadmill train.
Jogger vs. Sprinter
Start Monday with a BANG!
Monday is the best day of the week because Monday sets the tone and pace for your entire week.
Start Monday with a whimper and you can bet you will end the week with a whimper.
Start Monday with a BANG! and you can end your week as an ass-kicker.
People with no ambition wait and pray for the weekends. People with heart and ambition wait and pray for Mondays. Today is Monday. Time to get shit done.
Nick
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