[quote]DoveofWar08 wrote:
Damned impressive lifting dude. I’ll be following along, and best of luck with shieko. [/quote]
Thank you, Glad to have you along!
You sir, were born to pull and your bench strength with such long arms at your bodyweight is awesome, especially contending with injury, I will be following.
I may be a touch (40lbs ) heavier than you but I would happily try to race you to a 7 raw deadlift if you haven’t already demolished that mark.
Your work capacity is seriously impressive. Not many people add so much extra work to CMS/MS Sheiko routines! How did you build up to this point?
[quote]BEAR BORN wrote:
You sir, were born to pull and your bench strength with such long arms at your bodyweight is awesome, especially contending with injury, I will be following.
I may be a touch (40lbs ) heavier than you but I would happily try to race you to a 7 raw deadlift if you haven’t already demolished that mark. [/quote]
Appreciate that! the 700 race would be fun! I can always use the extra push! In all reality I should have pulled it by now I have done plenty of rep work in the 600 range (tripled 645 and barely missed the 4th) but I have never had a good shot at 700 I do plan on pulling at least 705 at my meet October 15th so I guess you have till then to beat me 
haha should be fun!
Looks like I found someone to steal info off.
I’ve been more powerlifting focused this year and love it.
[quote]Charles8675 wrote:
Ben, thanks for your thoughts man. It means a lot that you’re taking the time to respond to a younger guy’s inquiries.
Westside For Skinny Bastards was designed mostly for athletes who were looking to gain strength while retaining explosive speed. While I’m mostly interested in improvement of the big four (+ overhead press), I feel like the variety in rep ranges on WS4SB as well as the volume will do a good job for me in terms of accomplishing my goal of a powerful physique coupled with strong lifts (although I only get to perform two “big” compounds a week, which I’m concerned will be detrimental to my progress).
I know, I know, I want to have my cake and eat it as well, but I just thought talking shop with a more experienced guy would clarify things for me a little. Do you think I should follow Westside til a 300 pound squat, then transition over to Wendler’s 5/3/1? I love the look of it but I’d like to think I have a way’s to go in terms of linear progression before I have to drop the progression to 5 pounds a month. (that looks SUPER advanced to me)
Furthermore, for diet, I’m getting in 3500 calories a day, over 200 grams in protein and over 300 in carbs at a body weight of 168 pounds and a height of 6’0. Do you think this is sufficient for muscle growth without turning me into the Pilsbury Doughboy?
Thanks again man[/quote]
I just read up on the program, I think it sounds better for beginners than I initially thought so I would say go ahead and stick with it for awhile. and once you kind of get past the “beginners” gains that come with a commitment to one of these programs it would probably be prudent to find another program that you can run that includes 2 lower body days a week as opposed to one so that you can hit your deads and squats with the full attention they both deserve Remember big RAW totals are made in the squat rack and on the dead platform your bench will never be capable of being higher than those two lifts as long as they are trained properly. This is my full power meet philosophy, I work my upper body lifts to bring it up because it’s my weakness but if I have to prioritize to bring up one of my lifts I would bring up one with a higher weight capacity. make sense?
As for Wendler’s 5/3/1 I’m a fan of the program and I believe that you can run it whenever you would like I’ve seen beginners do great on it and my training partner Ben Seath hit a 1950 RAW total drug free, using that program at 308 20 years old with a 800 lb squat, 480 bench and 670 dead. it’s simple enough for beginners and for upper level guys.
Diet looks solid to me if you’re above 6’ and under 170 I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt that you have a naturally high metabolism and you won’t be having any fingers poking your belly to make you giggle any time soon (Pillsbury reference, not a good one but I tried). I’m not tracking my macros right now, but last time I was I was taking in about 5,500 a day and didn’t get doughy because I was being clean with it.
Overall my base advice is to commit to whatever program you choose, train hard, eat harder, and rest hardest, and be patient harderest
bad ass man… will be following for sure. im also working on my cleans and focusing on dropping under the weight. ill be following for some tips
I think tomorrow on my “off day” im going to try out some of this active recovery! Any tips on what lifts to use, the sets and reps?
[quote]165StateChamp wrote:
Your work capacity is seriously impressive. Not many people add so much extra work to CMS/MS Sheiko routines! How did you build up to this point?[/quote]
Thanks brother, I have always been a fan of high volume work and have a tendency to add extra sets to workouts. It probably helps that I don’t believe in the concept of over-training, just under resting. I feel like it’s more mental than physical, if you can overcome the pain of the adjustment period your body has two options, it will either adapt to whatever you subject it to, or it will break… So far I haven’t broken and so I have kept up with my method of pushing it hard in the gym and resting even harder outside of the gym
[quote]Teledin wrote:
Looks like I found someone to steal info off.
I’ve been more powerlifting focused this year and love it.[/quote]
Haha steal away, I keep no secrets with my training. Feel free to ask questions too, it’s one of my favorite topics of conversation
[quote]gregron wrote:
bad ass man… will be following for sure. im also working on my cleans and focusing on dropping under the weight. ill be following for some tips[/quote]
Glad to have you along for the ride, Yeah I’m way worse at form cleans than I am at just muscling them up haha My “non” form clean max is about 315 compared to 275 with the drop under because my front squat is so under developed here’s an old video of my old clean form where I hit 315 I’ve hit 315 a few other times but switched over to doing it the “right” way so that I have a higher increase potential
[quote]pbclax1 wrote:
I think tomorrow on my “off day” im going to try out some of this active recovery! Any tips on what lifts to use, the sets and reps?[/quote]
When I actually lift on active recovery days I am pretty careful with what I choose to do. First of all I make sure to do a very extensive full body warm up because getting hurt on an off day would really suck haha next I choose exercises that are more dynamic in nature and that I wouldn’t have much of a chance to grind through. Generally olympic lifts for me because I’m relatively bad at them and so I don’t use an incredibly taxing load of weight. also Body weight exercises are good to get some muscle activation and blood flow without overworking the fibers themselves. I also use my active recovery workouts to catch up on any cardio and mobility work that I need to catch up with. The important things that I keep in mind are that I don’t want to ever go to muscular failure on any recovery day, never want to be grinding reps out and taxing my CNS, or causing things to tighten up by not stretching and warming up enough before hand. I also use these days to try out new things that are more for fun than difficulty here is an exercise super set that I made up last summer on an active recovery day for fun that I ended up adding to some other workouts because i liked it so much. Ben Rice 225 crazy clean shrug superset 7-24-10 - YouTube
I’m curious as usual and I don’t think you mentioned it before, so I wanted to ask what your starting lifts were and what was the first program you ever used.
[quote]BigBen198 wrote:
[quote]pbclax1 wrote:
I think tomorrow on my “off day” im going to try out some of this active recovery! Any tips on what lifts to use, the sets and reps?[/quote]
When I actually lift on active recovery days I am pretty careful with what I choose to do. First of all I make sure to do a very extensive full body warm up because getting hurt on an off day would really suck haha next I choose exercises that are more dynamic in nature and that I wouldn’t have much of a chance to grind through. Generally olympic lifts for me because I’m relatively bad at them and so I don’t use an incredibly taxing load of weight. also Body weight exercises are good to get some muscle activation and blood flow without overworking the fibers themselves. I also use my active recovery workouts to catch up on any cardio and mobility work that I need to catch up with. The important things that I keep in mind are that I don’t want to ever go to muscular failure on any recovery day, never want to be grinding reps out and taxing my CNS, or causing things to tighten up by not stretching and warming up enough before hand. I also use these days to try out new things that are more for fun than difficulty here is an exercise super set that I made up last summer on an active recovery day for fun that I ended up adding to some other workouts because i liked it so much. Ben Rice 225 crazy clean shrug superset 7-24-10 - YouTube
Thats legit, haha. CWU huh? I’m at WSU right now.
[quote]
Thats legit, haha. CWU huh? I’m at WSU right now.[/quote]
Yup I’m a wildcat all the way, I’m a vocal performance music major and I RA in the dorms I have some friends who are at WSU they seem to like it, what are you majoring in?
[quote]spar4tee wrote:
I’m curious as usual and I don’t think you mentioned it before, so I wanted to ask what your starting lifts were and what was the first program you ever used.[/quote]
haha Well I have to think back to 7th grade for this info… hmmmm some time ago I wrote a detailed history of how I got started and why I do things the way that I do. Hope you’re feeling really curious because here comes the history of me…
Roots… what got us to do what we do? Had this thought today, as I was doing a lot of heavy thinking. I find myself thinking back to junior high, the first time I was in Mr. Stanfieldâ??s P.E. class when he took us up to the high school weight room and made as work form on barbell squats, bench press, power cleans and barbell incline with just a bar until you could do it perfectly for 10 reps and then you could add a 5 lb plate… I remember looking up at the school record boards prominently posted on the weight room wall… thinking “man those are some big numbers,” and "huh, I wonder what a deadlift isâ??.
Fast forward to my freshman year finally being able to take weights as an everyday class and not a once a week field trip… Squats were my favorite and I hated bench cause I sucked at it… I remember all the kids who were just naturally strong throwing up “huge” numbers like 115 and even a 135 bench. I did my first ever 225 squat. It was super deep and really slow but I finished it out and felt like a champ right up until another kid squatted 235. It was only by 10 lbs, but the idea that someone had been able to beat me by hardly trying got to me… In junior high I was a cross country runner so I was pretty skinny, but I didn’t want to be any more. I started coming in every day after school when everyone else was off doing… whatever kids do after school that isn’t weightlifting. Some of the other guys would tell me I should stick to running and not everyone is cut out to be a weightlifter… At first I wanted to be a bodybuilder so they could just look at me and know how strong I was. I found Bodybuilding.com and AnimalPak.com (before it had the FORVM) and started taking my first Animal Pak vitamins.
I got up every morning at 5:30 to workout with dumbbells and bodyweight movements before making myself scrambled eggs and reading Arnolds Body Building Encyclopedia. I was a sponge of information. Every free minute I had was devoted to reading and learning about weightlifting. Within a year I had gotten up to the top of the class as far as strength went. There were still a few of those naturally strong guys that had me beat, but I was determined that if I kept busting my butt every day I could catch them. Our school had a powerlifting team - best in the state actually. It was a â??pay to playâ?? club with no tryouts so I jumped in and had my first meet. I took 7th out of 10. It was disappointing, but my dad reminded me that the guys I was looking up to didn’t generally win their first shows either. That’s more or less when I decided I’d rather be a powerlifter because I wanted to be stronger than I looked. I kept training through the summer and the next year whenever I had any spare time I played sports: football, wrestled, and played soccer, but my heart always belonged to the iron.
I competed again my sophomore year and won my first competition where I totaled 1000 lbs RAW in the 181 class weighing 170.5… I squatted 370, benched 205, and deadlifted 425. Now granted this meet was missing some pretty strong competitors, but if I hadn’t already been hooked yet, at that point I was in for life. I managed to take 3rd at the state championships still lifting raw even though everyone else had at least a squat suit and wraps, if not a bench shirt to match… That third place finish marked the last time I would place anything less than 1st in any powerlifting competition since then. Junior year I went undefeated and took my first state championship, and senior year I totaled 1490 at 181 winning by over 300 lbs. I’ve consistently grown and developed in the sport from that point and there have been many more stories that shaped and formed me: My first deadlift only meet in Olympia Washington when I started chasing records; my first full power meet after high school; my first and second trips to Worlds in Vegas and Reno respectively. But those first few years are what made me fall in love with this sport… Going from a 130lb cross country runner who hoped to someday learn what a deadlift was, to a 200 lb deadlifting specialist with 3 world records under his belt looking to make it four and break into the uncharted territory of 750 and beyond is a fun thing to look back on. (I recently pulled 733 at 203 in a meet)
But the numbers, fun as they may be, aren’t what made me fall in love with the sport… What made me fall in love with the sport is what it turned me into… Not physically, or intellectually… No, but how it forced me to become better than I was, how it forced me to learn how to set small goals, put all of your effort into reaching them so they could add up to your bigger goals… It forced me to look at every aspect of my life and assess how all my actions were affecting one another. It forced me to see what happens to the potential that natural talent grants when it is taken for granted… This sport shaped me into a strong person spiritually, emotionally and finally physically. It taught me how to look at the limits that others place on what you are and aren’t capable of and blow through them. People always want to tell you that you can’t do something because they can’t… and because that’s the case, I guess that I do what I do… because so many thought I couldn’t…
[quote]BigBen198 wrote:
[quote]spar4tee wrote:
I’m curious as usual and I don’t think you mentioned it before, so I wanted to ask what your starting lifts were and what was the first program you ever used.[/quote]
haha Well I have to think back to 7th grade for this info… hmmmm some time ago I wrote a detailed history of how I got started and why I do things the way that I do. Hope you’re feeling really curious because here comes the history of me…
Roots… what got us to do what we do? Had this thought today, as I was doing a lot of heavy thinking. I find myself thinking back to junior high, the first time I was in Mr. StanfieldÃ?¢??s P.E. class when he took us up to the high school weight room and made as work form on barbell squats, bench press, power cleans and barbell incline with just a bar until you could do it perfectly for 10 reps and then you could add a 5 lb plate… I remember looking up at the school record boards prominently posted on the weight room wall… thinking “man those are some big numbers,” and "huh, I wonder what a deadlift isÃ?¢??.
Fast forward to my freshman year finally being able to take weights as an everyday class and not a once a week field trip… Squats were my favorite and I hated bench cause I sucked at it… I remember all the kids who were just naturally strong throwing up “huge” numbers like 115 and even a 135 bench. I did my first ever 225 squat. It was super deep and really slow but I finished it out and felt like a champ right up until another kid squatted 235. It was only by 10 lbs, but the idea that someone had been able to beat me by hardly trying got to me… In junior high I was a cross country runner so I was pretty skinny, but I didn’t want to be any more. I started coming in every day after school when everyone else was off doing… whatever kids do after school that isn’t weightlifting. Some of the other guys would tell me I should stick to running and not everyone is cut out to be a weightlifter… At first I wanted to be a bodybuilder so they could just look at me and know how strong I was. I found Bodybuilding.com and AnimalPak.com (before it had the FORVM) and started taking my first Animal Pak vitamins.
I got up every morning at 5:30 to workout with dumbbells and bodyweight movements before making myself scrambled eggs and reading Arnolds Body Building Encyclopedia. I was a sponge of information. Every free minute I had was devoted to reading and learning about weightlifting. Within a year I had gotten up to the top of the class as far as strength went. There were still a few of those naturally strong guys that had me beat, but I was determined that if I kept busting my butt every day I could catch them. Our school had a powerlifting team - best in the state actually. It was a Ã?¢??pay to playÃ?¢?? club with no tryouts so I jumped in and had my first meet. I took 7th out of 10. It was disappointing, but my dad reminded me that the guys I was looking up to didn’t generally win their first shows either. That’s more or less when I decided I’d rather be a powerlifter because I wanted to be stronger than I looked. I kept training through the summer and the next year whenever I had any spare time I played sports: football, wrestled, and played soccer, but my heart always belonged to the iron.
I competed again my sophomore year and won my first competition where I totaled 1000 lbs RAW in the 181 class weighing 170.5… I squatted 370, benched 205, and deadlifted 425. Now granted this meet was missing some pretty strong competitors, but if I hadn’t already been hooked yet, at that point I was in for life. I managed to take 3rd at the state championships still lifting raw even though everyone else had at least a squat suit and wraps, if not a bench shirt to match… That third place finish marked the last time I would place anything less than 1st in any powerlifting competition since then. Junior year I went undefeated and took my first state championship, and senior year I totaled 1490 at 181 winning by over 300 lbs. I’ve consistently grown and developed in the sport from that point and there have been many more stories that shaped and formed me: My first deadlift only meet in Olympia Washington when I started chasing records; my first full power meet after high school; my first and second trips to Worlds in Vegas and Reno respectively. But those first few years are what made me fall in love with this sport… Going from a 130lb cross country runner who hoped to someday learn what a deadlift was, to a 200 lb deadlifting specialist with 3 world records under his belt looking to make it four and break into the uncharted territory of 750 and beyond is a fun thing to look back on. (I recently pulled 733 at 203 in a meet)
But the numbers, fun as they may be, aren’t what made me fall in love with the sport… What made me fall in love with the sport is what it turned me into… Not physically, or intellectually… No, but how it forced me to become better than I was, how it forced me to learn how to set small goals, put all of your effort into reaching them so they could add up to your bigger goals… It forced me to look at every aspect of my life and assess how all my actions were affecting one another. It forced me to see what happens to the potential that natural talent grants when it is taken for granted… This sport shaped me into a strong person spiritually, emotionally and finally physically. It taught me how to look at the limits that others place on what you are and aren’t capable of and blow through them. People always want to tell you that you can’t do something because they can’t… and because that’s the case, I guess that I do what I do… because so many thought I couldn’t…
[/quote]
Cool story bro lol. Sounds epic and little bit like me. Do you ever have feelings of self doubt? Nothing like a fear or depression but brief moments where you feel like you can’t do something.
Yeah me neither
[quote]spar4tee wrote:
Yeah me neither[/quote]
haha well actually I do, it’s all a matter of ignoring the feeling and using the doubt as motivation and a constant opponent that I can focus on beating… lol sorry I get in epic moods sometimes and everything sounds all dramatic haha
Sheiko Master of sport Prep #2 W2/D3 BW:203 CGBP & Deads
wasn’t feeling great today, didn’t get much to eat in the morning because I had to go to the Dr. to get some immunizations before our Europe trip. I have had an irrational phobia of needles ever since I got a spinal tap as a kid and so the stress of the impending injections killed my appetite and I didn’t get enough to eat before hitting the gym.
Needless to say I survived but it was harder than it should have been. I was having issues focusing and was just tired.
Close grip bench
45x5
135x5
160x5
190x4
225x4x2
235x3x2
255x2x3
235x3x2
225x4
205x5
190x6
175x7
160x8
Deads (forgot to do flys, sorry Boris I’ll make 'em up next time)
225x3
355x4
425x4
495x3x2 (did the second set conventional with no belt and a double overhand hook grip to prove to Robbie that I could)
565x2x5
565x8 (really should of had 9 or 10 but I was just dragging tonight)
bottom up squats (Olympic style, close stance and high bar)
135x5
225x5
315x5
405x2 (misgrooved)
225x5x2
Core
10x4 toes to bar
Posing practice
15 minutes
Mad respect to the Bodybuilders who do this on a regular basis
had a good time hanging with the guys tonight and they made their presence known in the background of the video for sure. My erector on the right side of my lower back was getting pretty tight tonight but some good food, rest, and foam rolling ought to clear that up. gonna be spending tomorrow in recovery mode to recharge for Friday’s squat session. It is going to be a tough one and I need to be better fueled than I was today to get through in one piece.
