Joe's Gym
Outlaw friendly gym GM/UAW Wellness Center Warren, MI
Sunday, January 19, 2014
19Jan14. Many Thanks
I am not sure what impression I had on you all, but based on the gift it is much different than I imagined. On the flipside, everyone has made a great impression on me in a multitude of ways. Keep in touch. Email, text, phone calls.
Thanks for the great send off.
Short post, but busy day and I need to get ready for my first day tomorrow.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
09Jan13. I haven't left yet..... (MER. Read this. Shoulder stuff)
Not sure if i'll just keep posting interesting articles for MER to read......
4 days in GMNA
Getting Fat.
Haven't 'trained' in many days.
![2014-01-06-Press1.jpg](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vW2M7xo6NBOF0ELBrf6nzFb1B1EJF3CzeTXu4tCjh8qI_itZi9i_hYgBlb88mtr6UTatTQw6g7s81x1y2B98zI5ybc-4Nfn0VTRCBhLWeaFkhY7bNpZ7vXtw=s0-d)
Photo by Thomas Campitelli, copyright 2012 The Aasgaard Company
3. What You Know About Rotator Cuff Muscles May Be Wrong: Physical therapists like to isolate the function of a muscle to rehab it when it's injured. The isolated function of the muscles that lie on the shoulder blade is "external rotation" of the upper arm. This motion occurs when you lay your arms down against your ribs, bend your elbows and rotate your forearms out so that your palms face forward. Your humerus rotates "externally" along its axis when you do this, and the rotator cuff muscles make this happen in isolation.
![2014-01-06-Press3.jpg](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tBcfIixW3_akVVXRUIeIOLZU4TOndJb_k40slJPxsY_ekVCE02RmEPdYMsLsVckjxRWslFNJ5-K_-6i__7yVY8Sgh77G7vj1xOM5gXAZCpVOj68dRP6rYBRg=s0-d)
Graphic by Jason Kelly, copyright 2012 The Aasgaard Company
4 days in GMNA
Getting Fat.
Haven't 'trained' in many days.
The Best Exercise for Strengthening Your Shoulders
Posted: 01/06/2014 4:29 pm
Read more
Pressing a barbell overhead has somehow acquired the reputation as a dangerous exercise for the shoulders. Doctors and physical therapists routinely advise against the exercise weightlifters refer to as simply The Press on the false assumption that an injury known as "shoulder impingement" is the inevitable result. Not only is the press perfectly safe for the shoulders -- as evidenced by the fact that shoulder injuries are the least-common injuries for Olympic weightlifters who use the barbell overhead -- but the correctly performed press is the best exercise for keeping shoulders strong. Here's why.
1. Shoulder Impingement Is Misunderstood: Shoulder impingement occurs when the rotator cuff tendons get "pinched" between the head of the humerus and the AC joint, formed by the end of the collarbone and the bony knobs at the end of the shoulder blade.Impingement means an entrapment of soft tissue between two bones in the area of a joint. You can safely experience this entrapment feeling for yourself: sit or stand up straight and raise your arms from your sides to a position parallel to the floor, with the palms of your hands facing the floor and your elbows bent at 90 degrees. Now, raise them just a little more. The pressure you feel in your shoulders is the impingement of your cuff tendons against the AC.
Now, rotate your hands up so your palms face forward, elbows still at 90 degrees, and raise your hands up over your head. Then shrug your shoulders up at the top, like you're trying to reach the ceiling with your hands and shoulders. Pressure's gone, right? This is the lockout position of the press, and notice that at no time in this process did your shoulders feel impinged. This because the shrugging of the shoulders at the top pulls the AC knobs away from the head of the humerus, so that impingement is anatomically impossible in the correct press lockout position. The press simply cannot impinge your shoulders.
In fact, shoulder impingement injuries are common only in athletes that use their arms overhead without a shrug. Swimmers, volleyball players, and the racquet sports report most of the shoulder impingement injuries. They'd be far better off if they trained the press as a part of their sports preparation.
2. Why The Press Is the Best Exercise for Shoulder Strength: Since a correct press is done in a standing position, the exercise works all the muscles in the body. Everything between the bar in the hands and the feet balancing against the floor participates in the exercise. Legs, abs, and back muscles, as well as the obvious shoulder and arm muscles, all work together in a correctly performed press. Sixty years ago, the press was the primary weight room exercise for the upper body. For men who trained with weights, a bodyweight-on-the-bar press was considered a good starting point.
And back then, shoulder injuries were essentially unheard of because the press made the shoulders strong -- the whole shoulder, not just the front of the shoulder like the bench press does. The takeover of upper-body training by the bench press was an unfortunate development. The bench allows the use of heavier weights, but at the expense of the involvement of more of the body, and more balanced shoulder strength, front-to-back. As a general rule, more muscle mass working at the same time all over the body is much better for strength training than isolation exercises. The coordinated use of all the muscles while standing on the floor with a barbell in your hands produces the most useful strength adaptation -- one that actually applies to all natural human movements.
3. What You Know About Rotator Cuff Muscles May Be Wrong: Physical therapists like to isolate the function of a muscle to rehab it when it's injured. The isolated function of the muscles that lie on the shoulder blade is "external rotation" of the upper arm. This motion occurs when you lay your arms down against your ribs, bend your elbows and rotate your forearms out so that your palms face forward. Your humerus rotates "externally" along its axis when you do this, and the rotator cuff muscles make this happen in isolation.
The question is: what is the normal daily role of a rotator cuff muscle? Does it make your shoulder externally rotate, and that's all? Or does it primarily function as a muscle group that stabilizes the head of the humerus in its socket, the "glenoid fossa"? Think about it another way: who named it "external rotator"? God? Or physical therapists? Maybe a better name for it would be the keeps-the-arm-in-the-shoulder-ator, and it also just happens to externally rotate the arm. When you're not in physical therapy, the rotator cuff muscles are just another muscle group that helps hold the shoulder together.
4. There Is No Single Muscle Group in the Entire Human Body That Works in Isolation as Its Normal Function: Not even your tongue. It therefore makes no sense to train muscles in a way in which they do not function. Physical therapists may be able to isolate your rotator cuff muscles, but you may have noticed that this motion is not a normal part of your day.
If the cuff muscles work during a press (they do), and if they are aided in their function by all the other muscles in the shoulder (they are), then as the progressively heavier press makes the shoulder stronger, it makes the rotator cuff muscles stronger too. It is much better to strengthen the cuff muscles while their shoulder-muscle friends help lock out a press, than when they are made to work all alone, all by their skinny little selves in the PT office.
So, if you start pressing with a light weight and grow stronger by adding a little weight each time you train, all the muscles you use in the press get stronger. From your hands to your feet, and even your rotator cuff muscles, your whole body benefits from this perfectly safe and very important exercise. Once you're able to handle heavy weights correctly overhead, you'll know that strong shoulders are healthy shoulders, and the best way to make them strong is to use them correctly, by pressing the barbell overhead.
Monday, January 6, 2014
07Jan13: Squat Train
The movers come today to start packing.....
This is if you want to get back on the squat train...
I plan to after getting established back into it in Brazil.
This is if you want to get back on the squat train...
I plan to after getting established back into it in Brazil.
FS/BS Template and PR Highlightsby spencergarnold |
For those of you who made it all the way through the FS/BS program you likely never want to see the numbers 7/13 EVER again but holy cow did it produce some results. I think the results leaned a little more toward the Front Squat but we saw some massive PR's in both. Here's a quick highlight video of those who emailed me their lifts. If you're not on here and did email me then likely the format wouldn't work or you gave it to me in Coach's Eye which doesn't import to my computer from my email.
Many of you have asked for the entire template for the FS/BS program. Before I give it away for you to abuse your gym members, fellow training partners, and friends with you need a little history for how this program came about.
The influence of this program has its roots in three different places. Firstly, we have all likely heard of or completed the Hatch Squat cycle. This program has the lifter performing both Back Squats and Front Squats in the same session. I love that cycle and my legs respond extremely well to performing both squats back to back. I was always playing with ways to make that happen in different ways. The second influence came from one of my coaches,Richard Flemming, has always loved making his athletes perform front squats followed by back squats at specific times during his program. So his influence was HUGE. The last influence came from the love/hate relationship I have with 20 rep back squat programs. I love the size they develop in my legs but hate the process. However, I loved the 20 rep idea. Hence 7+13=20 reps.
Enjoy the program. Below is the link to an actual spreadsheet you can use or copy. The percentages are already calculated in that spreadsheet.
If for some reason that doesn't work or you want the actual percentages here is that spreadsheet with the percentages written in.
Week # | Session # | Sets | Reps | Weight |
1 | 1 | 4 | 7--13 | 65% |
1 | 2 | 4 | 7--13 | 94% of Day 1 |
1 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
2 | 1 | 4 | 7--13 | 70% |
2 | 2 | 4 | 7--13 | 94% of Day 1 |
2 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
3 | 1 | 5 | 4--8 | 75% |
3 | 2 | 5 | 4--8 | 94% of Day 1 |
3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
4 | 1 | 5 | 4--8 | 80% |
4 | 2 | 5 | 4--8 | 94% of Day 1 |
4 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
5 | 1 | 6 | 3--6 | 85% |
5 | 2 | 6 | 3--6 | 94% of Day 1 |
5 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
6 | 1 | 6 | 3--6 | 90% |
6 | 2 | 6 | 3--6 | 94% of Day 1 |
6 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
7 | 1 | 6 | 2--4 | 95% |
7 | 2 | 6 | 2--4 | 94% of Day 1 |
7 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
8 | 1 | 6 | 2--4 | 100% |
8 | 2 | 6 | 2--4 | 94% of Day 1 |
8 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
9 | 1 | 4 | 2--4 | 70% |
9 | 2 | 4 | 2--4 | 70% |
9 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
10 | 1 | 1 | 1 | MAX |
10 | 2 | 1 | 1 | MAX |
10 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 60% |
Sunday, January 5, 2014
06Jan14: I'm not buying or selling, just telling.
Just thought this was interesting. 7 Days and counting.
A Century On, There Are Uncomfortable Parallels With The Era That Led To The First World War
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/parallels-with-the-era-that-led-to-the-first-world-war-2013-12#ixzz2pIoBkAuz
A Century On, There Are Uncomfortable Parallels With The Era That Led To The First World War
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/parallels-with-the-era-that-led-to-the-first-world-war-2013-12#ixzz2pIoBkAuz
AS NEW YEAR approached a century ago, most people in the West looked forward to 1914 with optimism. The hundred years since the Battle of Waterloo had not been entirely free of disaster--there had been a horrific civil war in America, some regional scraps in Asia, the Franco-Prussian war and the occasional colonial calamity. But continental peace had prevailed. Globalisation and new technology--the telephone, the steamship, the train--had knitted the world together. John Maynard Keynes has a wonderful image of a Londoner of the time, "sipping his morning tea in bed" and ordering "the various products of the whole earth" to his door, much as he might today from Amazon--and regarding this state of affairs as "normal, certain and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement". The Londoner might well have had by his bedside table a copy of Norman Angell's "The Great Illusion", which laid out the argument that Europe's economies were so integrated that war was futile.
Yet within a year, the world was embroiled in a most horrific war. It cost 9m lives--and many times that number if you take in the various geopolitical tragedies it left in its wake, from the creation of Soviet Russia to the too-casual redrawing of Middle Eastern borders and the rise of Hitler. From being a friend of freedom, technology became an agent of brutality, slaughtering and enslaving people on a terrifying scale. Barriers shot up around the world, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The globalisation that Keynes's Londoner enjoyed only really began again in 1945--or, some would argue, in the 1990s, when eastern Europe was set free and Deng Xiaoping's reforms began bearing fruit in China.
The driving force behind the catastrophe that befell the world a century ago was Germany, which was looking for an excuse for a war that would allow it to dominate Europe. Yet complacency was also to blame. Too many people, in London, Paris and elsewhere, believed that because Britain and Germany were each other's biggest trading partners after America and there was therefore no economic logic behind the conflict, war would not happen. As Keynes put it, "The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of [the Londoner's]...daily newspaper."
Playing your role
Humanity can learn from its mistakes, as shown by the response to the economic crisis, which was shaped by a determination to avoid the mistakes that led to the Depression. The memory of the horrors unleashed a century ago makes leaders less likely to stumble into war today. So does the explosive power of a modern conflagration: the threat of a nuclear holocaust is a powerful brake on the reckless escalation that dispatched a generation of young men into the trenches.
Yet the parallels remain troubling. The United States is Britain, the superpower on the wane, unable to guarantee global security. Its main trading partner, China, plays the part of Germany, a new economic power bristling with nationalist indignation and building up its armed forces rapidly. Modern Japan is France, an ally of the retreating hegemon and a declining regional power. The parallels are not exact--China lacks the Kaiser's territorial ambitions and America's defence budget is far more impressive than imperial Britain's--but they are close enough for the world to be on its guard.
Which, by and large, it is not. The most troubling similarity between 1914 and now is complacency. Businesspeople today are like businesspeople then: too busy making money to notice the serpents flickering at the bottom of their trading screens. Politicians are playing with nationalism just as they did 100 years ago. China's leaders whip up Japanophobia, using it as cover for economic reforms, while Shinzo Abe stirs Japanese nationalism for similar reasons. India may next year elect Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who refuses to atone for a pogrom against Muslims in the state he runs and who would have his finger on the button of a potential nuclear conflict with his Muslim neighbours in Pakistan. Vladimir Putin has been content to watch Syria rip itself apart. And the European Union, which came together in reaction to the bloodshed of the 20th century, is looking more fractious and riven by incipient nationalism than at any point since its formation.
I have drunk and seen the spider
Two precautions would help prevent any of these flashpoints sparking a conflagration. One is a system for minimising the threat from potential dangers. Nobody is quite clear what will happen when North Korea implodes, but America and China need to plan ahead if they are to safeguard its nuclear programme without antagonising each other. China is playing an elaborately dangerous game of "chicken" around its littoral with its neighbours. Eventually, somebody is bound to crash into somebody else--and there is as yet no system for dealing with it. A code of maritime conduct for the area is needed.
The second precaution that would make the world safer is a more active American foreign policy. Despite forging an interim nuclear agreement with Iran, Barack Obama has pulled back in the Middle East--witness his unwillingness to use force in Syria. He has also done little to bring the new emerging giants--India, Indonesia, Brazil and, above all, China--into the global system. This betrays both a lack of ambition and an ignorance of history. Thanks to its military, economic and soft power, America is still indispensable, particularly in dealing with threats like climate change and terror, which cross borders. But unless America behaves as a leader and the guarantor of the world order, it will be inviting regional powers to test their strength by bullying neighbouring countries.
The chances are that none of the world's present dangers will lead to anything that compares to the horrors of 1914. Madness, whether motivated by race, religion or tribe, usually gives ground to rational self-interest. But when it triumphs, it leads to carnage, so to assume that reason will prevail is to be culpably complacent. That is the lesson of a century ago.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/parallels-with-the-era-that-led-to-the-first-world-war-2013-12#ixzz2pIo1SpZz
Saturday, January 4, 2014
05jan14: No guarantees you'll be smarter. But you will have read a bunch of books
Isn’t it strange that we have the term “well-read” but absolutely no one can come close to defining it? And isn’t also strange that other art forms don’t have equivalent terms for a vague sense of someone’s total experience of that form (well-seen for movies? well-heard for music? Absurd).
Thinking about this recently sucked me into a little thought-experiment: say someone had never read any literature and wanted to be well-read. What should they read? And how many books would it take them to get close?
This hypothetical forces any given answerer to do two things: provide their personal definition of well-read and then give a list of books that might satisfy that definition. The first hurdle to clear is cultural position: who is this person? As I can only provide a reasonable list of books from my own cultural position, I have to assume that this person is like me, at least in a very basic way: an alive American who can read English.
“Well-read” for this person then has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.
The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.
As for the number of 100: in addition to being a nice, round number, it is also a number that, at a one-book-every-two-week pace this hypothetical reader could accomplish in just about four years–the standard length of an undergraduate program.
So here’s the list, in alphabetical order:
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Beowulf
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
- Call of the Wild by Jack London
- Candide by Voltaire
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
- The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
- The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
- The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- Faust by Goethe
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
- The Golden Bowl by Henry James
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- The Gospels
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
- House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
- Howl by Allen Ginsberg
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
- The Iliad by Homer
- Inferno by Dante
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Oedipus the King by Sophocles
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- The Pentateuch
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- The Stand by Stephen King
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
- Their Eyes Were Watching by Zora Neale Hurston
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
- Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
- Watchmen by Alan Moore
- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
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