[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
Nothing in the weight room will mimic a real world survival situation, period.
[/quote]
Not unless this guy puts some real weight on the bar without a rack or a spotter.
So if I eat a ton of fish and do a lot of swimming can I hold my breath for ten minutes like a dolphin?
Seriously, keep giving updates.
[quote]jjackkrash wrote:
[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
Nothing in the weight room will mimic a real world survival situation, period.
[/quote]
Not unless this guy puts some real weight on the bar without a rack or a spotter. [/quote]
Agreed, but again I try to get as close as I can. I try to mentally prepare myself for the set as if the outcome could be grave. Towards the end there is a bit of an adrenaline rush and I try to exacerbate it as much as possible. I try to convince myself that if I don’t exhaust myself I’ll be failing myself, my family, people interested in my research… The last 10 reps are f***ing rough.
As much as I try though I acknowledge it it was for survival I could do at least one more rep. I use that to pump out extra but I still know it’s not everything, but I don’t want to injure myself either. When I’m done my legs shake, lungs burn, I start cramping up…
Any advice on mentality, preparation, or thoughts that could better help?
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
[quote]SkyzykS wrote:
For the sake of accuracy, shouldn’t you do an intense bout of exercise followed immediately by gorging?[/quote]
Yes. There will be a short delay to finish workouts and get home to eat, but my gym is only a couple minutes from my house. It would be better if one exercise could produce total body exhaustion to adequate levels so the break would be even smaller, but that doesn’t really exist.
[quote]SkyzykS wrote:
Also, since I’m a Discovery channel junkie- most lions do have a warm up. They do a low prowling which turns into a trot as they stalk prey, then as they attack from multiple angles it breaks out into a full speed chase followed by close melee to kill the prey.
So maybe some slow prowler work, a nice short jog, an intense sprint then an mma match- followed by something to eat only if you win.[/quote]
Point taken, but I’d have to question how much actual warm up the low prowling does. I could military crawl for a while I guess… I’ll definitely have to consider it, but I think that a typical pyramid scheme warm-up is still well above the low-prowling equivalent.
[/quote]
Well, for the sake of numbers- lets say 100 yds. of low crawling, a 400 yd. trot, and maybe 200 yd. sprint, consecutively- followed by a fight- eat only if you win.
[quote]xboxwarrior wrote:
So if I eat a ton of fish and do a lot of swimming can I hold my breath for ten minutes like a dolphin?[/quote]
The diet would work, but you’d have to train like a dolphin… And yes humans can train themselves to hold their breathe that long.
If you haven’t watched the TED Talks on how David Blaine trained himself for breaking the under water breath holding record it’s a must. I was never fond of his “magic” but damn I was impressed with him after that.
As a side topic, I love discussing breath holding because it questions the efficacy of typical cardiovascular exercise. David Blaine was able to reduce his resting heart rate to 38 bpm which is below many Olympic athletes. I believe that reduction in heart rate for athletes is two fold: 1) increased utilization of oxygen; 2) increase of caloric availability. The heart burns through a tremendous amount of ATP refreshing it’s stores every 6 - 8 times a minute.
If less could be utilized that be beneficial in a person with high ATP demands. If resting heart rate is a marker for cardiovascular fitness I’d propose that training holding your breath is a pertinent method of cardiovascular exercise. In both running and breath holding part of the adaptation is to handle a reduction in oxygen availability.
You people are so fucking boring. Hurrr durr u wud get bettar result if u just did 5/3/1
Yeah maybe, but this is so much more fucking AWESOME! Predator Program!!!
Fuck the normal omnivorous neolithic humans, OP, be a predator! And you better get a 405 50 rep breathing squat by the end of this or you aren’t putting true predatory hunting power into this. I’ll be watching this thread for sure!
The thing about animal mindset is that they have no doubt, no little voice saying… what if you CAN’T get another rep??? They live 100% in the action with no stepping-outside-of-themselves and judging what they’re doing, telling themselves whether or not they can get another “rep.” So don’t think about reps, don’t think about numbers, don’t think about exercise, don’t “think” at all, get 100% sensory and instinctual. Just GO. All out. You ARE the movement and you will keep moving for as long as you want and however you want in order to get your prey.
Not sure how sarcastic the rest of it was, but either way I still loved it. Heh… This part is actually very pertinent.
Animals instinctively do call it quits though. If they can’t catch a particular prey they don’t just go on a relentless pursuit. I believe this is an instinctual knowledge they’ll burn to much energy and jeopardize getting a prey they can catch. Perhaps it’s instinctual to avoid injury too.
Now for prey avoiding a predator different story… There are no second chances it’s do or die. A scene in “Jack Reacher” resembles the failure of people to adapt this mentality. A guy is going to get shot if he cannot chew off his own finger, and he can’t do it. There are real world examples of this failure, but successful stories too. Many people are familiar with the story about the hiker who had to cut off his own arm to escape death.
I guess the ultimate question to this workout is, how far are we capable of pushing ourselves in a single set? There was actually a T-Nation story quite some time ago about this. I forget who it was, but his “spotter” grabbed him by the weight belt to stop him from racking the weight. In the demonstration he learned the lesson of what we’re all capable of…
Dan John wrote once about how many dips he did in front of a group of girls that far exceeded his normal training (maybe same article). At any rate, it’s about pushing ourselves beyond what our mind tells us we can do and I think we have really limited ourselves to try to “hold back” for that next set or next rep.
EDIT: Further controversy. If we view obesity as a predator is this not a great way to draw the similarity between people’s lack to adapt this mentality? People are falling prey to obesity and not willing to take the efforts necessary to avoid death. Unfortunate stat - obesity rates start declining in the 50’s because the rate of people becoming obese is superseded by the increased rate of death.
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
I actually end up doing 50 reps in under 3 minutes. Usually it’s a 5 - 10 second breathing break along the lines of 15,5,3,3,3,3,3,2,2,1,1,1,1,1,1 when I’m using 185 lbs for 50+ reps. For 225 lbs I usually start off around 9 and I’m at doubles by 20 reps, but it’s still close to 15 “chunks”. I’ll have to time it next time to verify…[/quote]
I wrote the above because your training method seems to be this-
“All breathing sets will be done to the point that I cannot complete a single repetition with a 10 â?? 15 second breathing break.”
But that seems more like an endurance thing than a power/strength thing. Who cares if you can do a 50 reps in like 5 minutes, for example? No predatory animal is going to be expending strength for 5 minutes straight; it’s inefficient and if the prey is that much faster then the predator will just give up and conserve energy as you stated elsewhere.
But if you wrote something like “I’ll do X reps within Y time and it will be incredibly ball-busting”, then sure. But, honestly, I don’t think animals ever go that balls out. It makes no sense.
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
I don’t think we can say with any certainty. This is an assumption based on what we presume to be true, but seeing how many people (like myself) that struggle to make progress compared to others expending far less effort I’d have to say there’s more to the picture.[/quote]
How much progress have you made?
And ever heard of YMMV? Just because it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean that a program of a training concept is flawed.
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
I feel we’ve essentially pigeon holed exercise science to what we know works for a particular subset of people. I think a great example is how there is a smaller subset of body builders that have utilized high volume routines. High volume and typical hypertrophy techniques are fairly different, and I guess my overall question is what other methodologies have we not discovered that will work for other subsets?
It’s really a search for what I may respond best to and the only way to know for sure it to experiment with different theories.
[/quote]
Best of luck to you.
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
EDIT: Further controversy. If we view obesity as a predator is this not a great way to draw the similarity between people’s lack to adapt this mentality? People are falling prey to obesity and not willing to take the efforts necessary to avoid death. Unfortunate stat - obesity rates start declining in the 50’s because the rate of people becoming obese is superseded by the increased rate of death. [/quote]
Obesity levels go up because people are eating more but not moving. It’s a result of an abundant amount of food and virtually no effort required to get to the food.
Dogs and cats get obese all the damned time if their owners allow them to just eat food whenever they want.
[quote]magick wrote:
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
I actually end up doing 50 reps in under 3 minutes. Usually it’s a 5 - 10 second breathing break along the lines of 15,5,3,3,3,3,3,2,2,1,1,1,1,1,1 when I’m using 185 lbs for 50+ reps. For 225 lbs I usually start off around 9 and I’m at doubles by 20 reps, but it’s still close to 15 “chunks”. I’ll have to time it next time to verify…[/quote]
I wrote the above because your training method seems to be this-
“All breathing sets will be done to the point that I cannot complete a single repetition with a 10 Ã?¢?? 15 second breathing break.” [/quote]
Yes, breathing breaks in the beginning are shorter and in the end are longer. That is my condition I have set to end the set.
[quote]magick wrote:
But that seems more like an endurance thing than a power/strength thing. Who cares if you can do a 50 reps in like 5 minutes, for example? No predatory animal is going to be expending strength for 5 minutes straight; it’s inefficient and if the prey is that much faster then the predator will just give up and conserve energy as you stated elsewhere.
But if you wrote something like “I’ll do X reps within Y time and it will be incredibly ball-busting”, then sure. But, honestly, I don’t think animals ever go that balls out. It makes no sense.[/quote]
A predator who is going to starve if they don’t get a kill or a prey that is going to get it’s side opened up isn’t going to go balls to the wall? It makes perfect sense to me…
[quote]magick wrote:
Just because it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean that a program of a training concept is flawed.[/quote]
I’m not saying that any existing concept is or isn’t flawed. The existing principles of modern methodologies revolve around several key concepts. As I pointed out typical hypertrophy routines work for some people but not all. For body building (at a high level) it’s usually standard hypertrophy based or high volume/high frequency. My question is what other subsets have we yet to discover? Maybe why it hasn’t been the best for me is that there is another undiscovered subset. My theory is this training could be it so I’m putting it to the test. I’m not in any way trying to discredit any other methodology.
[quote]magick wrote:
Obesity levels go up because people are eating more but not moving. It’s a result of an abundant amount of food and virtually no effort required to get to the food.[/quote]
Part of the reasons behind that is a lack of acceptance for the actions necessary like giving up soda, not eating fast food, preparing their own meals, not holding onto the treadmill rails a.k.a. a failure to push themselves hard enough to avoid premature death.
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
…but seeing how many people (like myself) that struggle to make progress compared to others expending far less effort…
[/quote]
Saw this coming from the start.
Armchair zoology is perhaps one of the most entertaining armchair sports of all time.
[quote]dt79 wrote:
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
…but seeing how many people (like myself) that struggle to make progress compared to others expending far less effort…
[/quote]
Saw this coming from the start.[/quote]
Yeah I threw up a little when I wrote it. It’s way too common for people to have crappy diets and a lack of effort and say this I know. So regarding the two parts, diet and training, there is no way you can say I don’t have an optimal diet for building muscle. I eat ultra clean, tons of protein, around 4,500+ calories plus a day… Training is much more open to discussion though but I hope I can alleviate those thoughts when I start posting some vids of my workouts. As objective as I can be I put in more effort into lifting than many people bigger than me.
I’m not trying to say it isn’t my fault, because if I wanted it more I would spend more time in the gym. I’m an ectomorph, a computer programmer, and a father of three… For those three things I’m a freakin beast. Heh… I don’t make excuses, but I want to search for a methodology that can potentially produce better results. I’ve tried HST, EDT, GVT, Westside, and other methodologies. My brain started kicking and hence the program…
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
[quote]dt79 wrote:
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
…but seeing how many people (like myself) that struggle to make progress compared to others expending far less effort…
[/quote]
Saw this coming from the start.[/quote]
Yeah I threw up a little when I wrote it. It’s way too common for people to have crappy diets and a lack of effort and say this I know. So regarding the two parts, diet and training, there is no way you can say I don’t have an optimal diet for building muscle. I eat ultra clean, tons of protein, around 4,500+ calories plus a day… Training is much more open to discussion though but I hope I can alleviate those thoughts when I start posting some vids of my workouts. As objective as I can be I put in more effort into lifting than many people bigger than me.
I’m not trying to say it isn’t my fault, because if I wanted it more I would spend more time in the gym. I’m an ectomorph, a computer programmer, and a father of three… For those three things I’m a freakin beast. Heh… I don’t make excuses, but I want to search for a methodology that can potentially produce better results. I’ve tried HST, EDT, GVT, Westside, and other methodologies. My brain started kicking and hence the program…
[/quote]
And I assure you that you will have an ample target market.
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
… there is no way you can say I don’t have an optimal diet for building muscle. I eat ultra clean, tons of protein, around 4,500+ calories plus a day… Training is much more open to discussion though but I hope I can alleviate those thoughts when I start posting some vids of my workouts. As objective as I can be I put in more effort into lifting than many people bigger than me.[/quote]
Not to be out of line, and I’m obviously not clear on what you’ve been up to the last few years, but I suggest you do step back and take an objective look at your progress history.
If you have an “optimal diet for building muscle” and your training effort is where you say it is, how have you not yet regained the bodyweight or strength levels you had 5 or 6 years ago.
As I said in my first post here, I’m all for experimenting. Your body and your goals are all you. And if you’re doing what you’re doing as a new side business or a hobby or whatever, that’s one thing. But I’m wondering if you’ve slipped into experimenting instead of improving, rather than experimenting in order to improve.
quoted for emphasis.
OP lets hear some stats besides your 180pounds at a self estimated 16% bodyfat. height? bench? squat? dead? heaviest antelope carcass you’ve hauled up a tree for a 1 rep max? heaviest rock you’ve lobbed at marsh rabbits? 40 yard dash time while escaping from charging hippo? anything…
[quote]Goldie4545 wrote:
[quote]PureNsanity wrote:
My ultimate body composition goal is 190 lbs at single digit body fat. My 1RM lifting goals are 300/400/500 bench/squat/deadlift.
[/quote]
people have achieved these goals with much more pedestrian methods.[/quote]
God bless Chris Colucci.
[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
If you have an “optimal diet for building muscle” and your training effort is where you say it is, how have you not yet regained the bodyweight or strength levels you had 5 or 6 years ago.[/quote]
Previously I had a heavy usage of testosterone boosters, creatine, etc. And while I may dispute their effectiveness towards overall gains they do greatly enhance performance. My strength curves were a lot different, but I’d beg to differ that I’m not still at that level. When I was 205 lbs I was training Westside heavy focusing on maximal lifts. I was single and spending a lot of time in the gym. I would often do two-a-days and active recovery. I spent at least 10 hours a week in the gym (compared to my 2 right now).
While I had my max squat as 385 since the 5 years since that post I realized I had some significant issues with squat depth and form. I’ve been working mostly on my squat lately but know I can get back to my PR if I start training ME deadlifts again.
I know that if I simply returned to my old methods I would see some substantial improvements, but I don’t have the time to invest in the gym like I did. Part of my search is for a routine that is less time but more intense producing results above the time investment.
I’d also propose that my body favors anti-angiogenesis. It’s a scientifically credible theory that essentially validates the potential for a person to have trouble putting on mass even with great training and diet. Signs of anti-angiogenesis: I lose weight quickly, bruises take a long time to heal, I never get sick, my BMR has been measured up to 3,000 calories.
Now for back fill… Angiogenesis is the formation of blood vessels and it required for growth of all cells to include fat and muscle. Signs of a body favoring angiogenesis: propensity to gain weight, heals quickly, gets sick often, increased rates of cancer, enlarged organs, increased rates of cardiovascular disease.
Meat and animal proteins tend to be angiogenic. Vegetation has the tendency to be anti-angiogenic. This is part of the reason there exists correlations between meat intake, CVD, and cancer. This is part of the reason why animal proteins are superior for muscle growth. This is part of the reason why vegetation based diets (very very different from vegan) have associations with reduced rates of cancer and reversing cardiovascular disease. This is a reason why tendency exists for vegan males to be less than 160 lbs.
In the last two years, even with all my cutting from crazy low calorie health experiments to include a one week fast, I’ve gained about 9 lbs of lean mass (measured via DXA but my weight fluctuates between 150 and 190 lbs depending on my current experiments). So 9 lbs of lean mass I’d say is a decent gain so it’s not like I’m doing nothing. My low DXA measurement on 5/24/12 was 145 lbs at 8.4% body fat and my high DXA measurement was 187 lbs at 5/10/13 at 15.2% body fat. I could spin my gains in a lot of different ways, but I’m trying to present a non-water weight, non-glycogen, pure mass assessment of what I’ve done.
EDIT: Forgot my closing point… If my body favors anti-angiogenesis I believe I can tilt the scales if I convince my body it needs to for survival hence The Predator Program.
I feel as though your results do not mirror the amount of effort you have put into developing them.