Real Men of Genius : Chaos and Pain

This article is intended to review a fellow blogger who goes by the handle of Chaos and Pain. Here's his information/blog profile that he has posted.

Jamie Lewis is an MBA from the University of South Carolina and is obsessed with picking up completely unnecessarily heavy shit and making it look easy. His training style is extremely unconventional, engaging in what most would consider to be a massive amount of overtraining, yet managing to be exceedingly strong and maintaining a bodyfat percentage low enough for his six pack to be visible through his child's large t-shirts. He's also an NSCA and ACE certified personal trainer who's worked at Iron Sport Gym in Philly, in addition to a variety of shitty commercial gyms (ahem, Bally's, ahem), and has worked as a BodyPump and BodyCombat instructor. Additionally, he is the all-time world record holder at 181 with a 1705 total and has tied the world record for raw, wrapless squat at 650.

As you can see, this guy practices what he preaches, and that is being a very strong dude. If you want unfiltered powerlifting gold, look no further than his blog. 

The long and short of it is, I think his blog is awesome. I recommend it for pretty much anybody who wants to get jacked to shit and not end up being a fat bastard in the process. He has dieting advice (The Apex Predator Diet), how to get swole without him mollycoddling you, why you shouldn't be a pussy, how you should become a feral badass in the gym, and why overtraining is bullshit.

His articles on overtraining really caused me to reconsider how I stood on the subject. As he quoted in his articles, the Eastern stance on overtraining is a concept known as "staleness". Since the human body can take an unbelievable amount of punishment, what causes overtraining is actually mental exhaustion from throwing around heavy weights. 

This is not a mainstream understanding of overtraining and does require some reflection, but I can see his point. There were times when I was doing heavy manual labor where I thought I'd drop dead from exhaustion, but I kept plugging along, farmer's-carrying five or six tons of rock by hand or racing up ladders with two bales of shingles in heat that would probably kill old people. I'd do this maybe five or six days a week depending on the conditions, with an insane work volume, but all I did was drink gallons of water, eat everything, and get my eight hours of sleep a night and was good to go. 

Many people have done amazing feats of strength and endurance strictly because they had the balls-out willpower to fight staleness. Once they unleashed their inner potential these men had no mental blocks telling them they couldn't do it. Some examples of this are the "One Year, One Million Pushups", where a marine named Sargent Enrique Trevino is doing roughly three thousand pushups daily for the Wounded Warrior charity, almost everything Jack LaLane ever did, and Taoist monks who do one-finger handstands. A lot of gym work is really just a mind game, figuring out how to kill your inner bitch that sends negative feedback in your head and says you can't do something. 

His other articles on becoming a feral badass really changed my outlook as well, and it helped me reconsider a lot about how I view the modern way of living. 

If you're looking for very specific advice on how to get big in the gym, this is the wrong place to go, since he acknowledges that everybody has a different way of doing things and believes that we should all find our own path to greatness in the gym. He'll also probably belittle you publicly on the blog.

Profiles in Strength : John Gill

A lot of people have issues making lifestyle changes. Myself, for example. If you would have seen a picture of me from a year ago compared to today, you'd probably not recognize me. Though I still have a long way to go until I'm like this guy, I've made some pretty solid gains.

You can emulate what John Gill did without a huge investment in time (though effort is another story). Here's a really short bio and picture from Wikipedia.

John Gill (born 1937) is an American mathematicianwho has achieved recognition for his rock-climbing. He is considered the Father of Modern Boulderingby many climbers.^[1]

This is partially why I'm not very patient with people who give excuses about why they don't make an effort to get into shape. Gill not only was a world-class athlete (performing a one-armed front lever is still thought by some to be nearly impossible), but he was a top-notch mathematician, doing work with linear fractional transformations, something that's well beyond my grasp (I did see a presentation about this at a scientific conference, which provided no illumination).  He achieved gymnastic greatness despite being 6' 2" tall and 180 pounds. You don't generally see tall gymnasts.

Gill basically was a hardcore mathematician with a side-hobby that happened to be physically very demanding. He built a sort of practice arena in his garage to try out new rock-climbing maneuvers. That's a good way of looking at things, rather than fitness being a chore, you can choose to practice a sport (either by yourself or with friends) so it's enjoyable. After a hard day at work, you can crack open a beer, put on some tunes, and start doing something fun almost immediately.

So to the point, how to apply this to yourself. Pavel suggests that whenever you leave the house or enter it, you set up a pullup bar at the door and crank out one or two chinups, every time. Over a period of a day, that could be as many as twenty chinups. Skipping every Sunday is not a problem.

After a few months of consistent effort, you might be uncommonly surprised at your new maximum number of chinups. It's an easy way to get something done without having to set aside a lot of time to do it. It just has to become second nature.