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.