starting strength gym
Page 100 of 187 FirstFirst ... 50909899100101102110150 ... LastLast
Results 991 to 1,000 of 1870

Thread: Stuffed Superdud: Bumpy road to respectable lifting

  1. #991
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    • starting strength seminar april 2024
    • starting strength seminar jume 2024
    • starting strength seminar august 2024
    Quote Originally Posted by George Christiansen View Post
    Certainly, in this day and age, there must be some sort of sweat catheter? Some sort of liner you wear under your suit. Spong on the side that touches your skin drains to an ankle bag?
    It's possible to rig up such a thing, sort of. It's also pretty disgusting to do so: In grad school, I worked in both a hematology/oncology lab and a mechanical/electrical engineering lab, because biomedical engineering means you know a little about everything (and you're not an expert at anything...bleh...). One guy whose work skewed much more towards traditional electrical engineering one day said he needed human plasma to validate one of his devices. I told him I'd fill out the necessary paperwork down at the blood center and he'd have a sample in a few days. Well, he grew impatient, and, with no biological background, he figured sweat and plasma wasn't all that different, so that night, he taped together a sauna suit out of a few garbage bags, and then put on a headband and wrist and ankle straps with little conical vials mounted on them; the straps would wick sweat into the vials for collection. He also put on terrycloth underpants and shoe insoles, which he intended to wring out and/or centrifuge later. He then went jogging through the neighborhood into the middle of a dank sweaty evening in August. Between the heat, the sauna suit, and his poor physical condition (he was like 6' 250lbs, 30+% bodyfat), the setup proved highly effective, and he collected a surprising amount of sweat, which he later concentrated into an eye-watering cocktail via evaporation. He also didn't know how to use the microbial filters so God only knows what sort of horrific ecosystem he was forming in that stuff.

    He later forgot about the sample and left it in an unlabeled container in the fume hood, which a curious undergrad later discovered. She ended up dry-heaving in the hallway.

    On a lighter note, I have a current co-worker, a recent Tennessee transplant, who showed up on a very warm Friday yesterday dressed like an absolute boss in a three-piece seersucker suit, hat, and big red bow tie, just to remind us that he wasn't from these parts. He spent the afternoon telling us all about how in the backwoods shithole he was from, everyone is still butthurt about the War of Northern Aggression. Later, CG met up with him and me for beers, during which he told her all about the war (she doesn't really know the details). Her answer? "So a bunch of Americans shot a bunch of other Americans? Sounds like business as usual for you guys." Hey-yo!

  2. #992
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    Scheduling is tight due to my planning out various logistics for my impending move, but it looks like things will be easier than expected: since I basically live out of a suitcase, I can just put my stuff into boxes and FexEx it to my new address. Whew! Life hack: for those of you with a bit more stuff, you can actually get Amtrak to ship things for you as long as you have a way to get your things to and from the stations. Learn something new every day.

    Minimal training at a bro gym:
    Squat:
    45lb x10
    135x5
    225x5
    315x3
    335x1
    I felt kinda bad during warmups and my upper back and right calf are still a smidge irritated, but I put up 365 anyway and did:
    365x5x3

    Set 1 was a joke, but set 2 rep 4 and set 3 rep 4 were both ugly grinders for some reasons. Whew...

    I'll probably take it light the next day or three, i.e. FS, and upper body work, until the kinks in my back and calf clear out. Fun fact: Last time, I stopped LP at 365 and went to TM. On TM volume day, I never got beyond 365x5x5 before quitting, so if I do 370x5x3, that'll actually be a rep PR for that weight. Interesting..................... Of course my saying this just now will probably just jinx it.


    Ralph Lauren is a marketing genius. Case in point:



    The video is a ridiculous near-parody of a fantastic New England WASPiness that has never actually happened in real life. As in, never in the history of humanity have 20 hyperattractive white / light brown people ever congregated in a Massachusetts field to watch/play (can't tell) polo and then transition into what looks like a wedding reception, sans bride and bridegroom. Also, NO ONE PLAYS FUCKING POLO except for a few guys in the monthly Windsor vs. Wales Classic. NB: I actually once watched a polo match from beginning to end. That shit is FUCKING BORING. Just to rub it in, the OneRepublic song is lame in general and has absolutely nothing to do with the leisure activities of a bunch of Dartmouth students who don't squat. Hell, even as far as parties go, this one seems awfully boring: the characters in the video don't do much outside of swaggering across the camera, sitting at a clothed table with a popped collar, awkwardly caressing another model, and generally being too young to be paying for this shit with their own hard work and sound investing.

    BUT therein lies the magic. Somehow, out of all this pile of entitled vomit, Ralph is saying, "You! Aspirational 30-year-old making $65,000-$99,000 before taxes! Yes you! You too can be happy as a 19-year-old Avon Old Farms alum whose great-great-great-great-great-grandfather served as aide-de-camp to General Washington! Cost of entry?? Only one gaudy overpriced Made in Vietnam polo shirt! Join us!"

    The best part is, Ralph Lipschitz was born a working-class Jew and never actually lived any of the fantasies he creates (this, the rugged Western stuff that guys like Rip do, the trips to the South of France, etc etc etc), which is yet another testament to his brilliance. Contrast that to, say, Brooks Brothers, an actual heritage company that has outfitted everyone from whole movie casts to nearly every fucking American president since 1818 (Abe Lincoln was wearing a badass black BB suit and topcoat when he was assassinated), yet continues to play second fiddle to some dude who dressed our entire Olympic team in his Made in China junk. Again, genius.

  3. #993
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    Feeling kind of beat up from yesterday's work + poor sleep and nutrition today....eh...

    Press:
    45x10
    135x5 felt heavy
    155x5 very heavy!
    165x2 + 3 more push press.....
    135x5
    145x4
    155x4
    and quit. The problem was coming from my upper back, which remains somewhat irritated from a set of squats last week, and my right elbow, which was sore from just holding the bar in the bottom of the press position. WTF? Time to see if more pressing will eventually reset it, I guess....?

    Jack is losing his grip on his sanity and today confided in me, "This whole company is a big pile of Peter's Principle in action. I've been totally faking it for a year. I know how to do experiments and supervise new grad students. Iono what the fuck I am doing as 'Director of Research.' Fucking hell." This is where your pharmaceuticals come from, ladies and gents. BTW we've been working with representatives from places such as the FDA, both the local bureaucrats as well as bigwigs flying out from Silver Spring, and they're all just as clueless. Your tax dollars at work, guys and gals.

  4. #994
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    Ugh goddammit Gilchrest. Related: As I've probably mentioned before, I grew up poor, and found out about what the 1% did for fun mostly through expository scenes of spy thriller villains. Well, the other day, I finally decided to find out what exactly these mysterious country club thingers were..... I figured I'd have to drive to, you know, the countryside, to go to one, but to my delight, Google revealed to me that there were several within a 5 mile radius of me, in the middle of the city. WTF??? Then, one of CG's scruffier friends revealed that he was actually a member of one of them, which immediately destroyed most of the aura of these places for me. Come Sunday, he drove us there and got me a tour...where I found out that it's basically a glorified gym membership??? Only with a golf course attached? And a ridiculous initiation fee? Talk about blue balls. He left to go jerk off at the driving range while a guy in a white polo gave me a walkthrough. Told him I didn't care about golf, so I was offered a possible discounted "social membership" (bleh)... The dude showed me their excuse of a gym, which included very nice mahogany lockers and multiple saunas, but no barbells. There was also a restaurant where members seemed to eat and drink for free, up to a certain point, which I guess was cool but not really. I even toured the pool hoping to catch a glimpse of some gold digger poon, but only found a few old people sitting around awaiting their deaths. Yea...no thanks. Seriously, between this, the horseback-related activities, boating, and most of the Winter Olympics, I'm left to conclude that rich people have the worst hobbies.

    Training:
    Hello snatch pulls my old friend:
    60kgx4x2 Very high pulls
    80x4
    90x4
    100x4
    110x4
    120x4 These were no longer high pulls; more like a snatch DL with a shrug
    130x4 These were barely shrugged because I am weak

    Snatch deadlift:
    150x5 Very heavy and ugly FML.
    I could feel the lingering strength difference in my legs, and was definitely favoring the right side. Ehh...


    Mission impossible:
    CG dropped something $800 or something preposterous like that on a pair of Louboutins the other day. Or rather, her personal shopper liked them and bought a pair and now she's too mesmerized to return them. Same diff. Hey it's her family fortune (I'm pretty sure her dad and all her uncles are in the Panama Papers btw) but I still blanched at the thought of dropping nearly a grand on a shitty hunk of painful rubber made by a bunch of guido fucks in Naples. When she saw my reaction, she went, "Dude it sucks! There are no good women's shoes. You either get stinky plastic things from DSW or you go to Neimans for this. There's no in-between." I chalked this up to her affluenza and told her I'd find her something tasteful and moderately priced, but then took a look around* and found that:

    1. The women's shoes market is a total clusterfuck. Men need, at most, a pair each of: black captoe oxford, brown brogue, dress boot, loafer, and then whatever sport-specific shoes you need, and even that's probably overkill. Women need, at bare minimum, a billion pairs of painful bullshit in all sorts of highly outfit-specific shapes and colors, only to wear the same nasty pair of Tom's every day. The majority of their "dress shoes" have heels 4" or higher, i.e. chiropractors are creaming their pants, and women filter out guys my height on match.com...yea fuck you, Jimmy Choo.

    2. The pricing is indeed a hot mess. Men's shoes are tiered very logically:
    $50-$200 = you have all styles available with glued soles and lower quality leather
    $200-$500 = again all styles available, with stitched soles, nicer leather, made in a 1st World country
    $500-$1000 = ....I'm actually not sure what separates this tier from the previous one....except, I guess, aside from the good things, this seems to be where the nastier spear-toed Italian items end up, no thanks
    $1000+ you're talking bespoke shoes that normal people don't buy

    Women's shoes:
    $0-$5000: I can't even make sense of this. Shit is completely random. It SEEMS like certain names occupy certain regions of the spectrum, but all are pretty broadly distributed, and most are ugly as shit and made by Asian child laborers. I quit for now. If anyone knows where reasonably price lady shoes come from let me know...

    *I started at some outlet malls but then finally caved and went to South Coast Plaza, California's obscene celebration of conspicuous consumption and dollar-worship, and schlepped through tons of women's depts, stopping to observe 1. the shoes, and 2. the types of people shopping. Pretty sure not even KOTJ has examined so many pairs of ladyfeet in so little time.
    Last edited by stuffedsuperdud; 04-12-2016 at 03:19 AM.

  5. #995
    Join Date
    Apr 2015
    Location
    Boston, MA
    Posts
    1,041

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    1. The women's shoes market is a total clusterfuck. Men need, at most, a pair each of: black captoe oxford, brown brogue, dress boot, loafer, and then whatever sport-specific shoes you need, and even that's probably overkill.
    It is somewhat shocking to me the number of men who, when a topic like this comes up, ask "why would you need more than one pair of shoes?" I even understand owning 2 - 3 pairs (sneakers, boots, something a little dressier) but the thought of putting on the exact same pair of sweaty shoes every single day and wearing them for every activity is kind of gross. I think a lot of these guys don't have social or athletic activities so that probably explains a lot of it.

  6. #996
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by brkriete View Post
    It is somewhat shocking to me the number of men who, when a topic like this comes up, ask "why would you need more than one pair of shoes?" I even understand owning 2 - 3 pairs (sneakers, boots, something a little dressier) but the thought of putting on the exact same pair of sweaty shoes every single day and wearing them for every activity is kind of gross. I think a lot of these guys don't have social or athletic activities so that probably explains a lot of it.
    This was actually me for all of grad school. I trained immediately after leaving the lab every evening, so I wore the same nasty pair of sneakers every single day, along with the rest of my gym clothes. Finally, one day, my labmates had an intervention where they nominated some hapless undergrad as the group spokesman and had him tell me to at least wear non-smelly gym clothes, if at all. As you probably guessed, I owned exactly one pair of real shoes, a black old-man type shoe that I bought at Ross my second year of college, the morning before I was due to receive a minor award at a banquet. I moved a few months ago and most of my stuff ended up in storage in Jack's garage; the only shoes I had was the pair of rotting Asics sneakers I was wearing that day. Well I was too lazy to dig through my boxes, so I wore those things everywhere, with everything, until CG finally went, "Dude what's with the whole Dad-mode-engaged thing? You knock someone up?" BRB gotta get the matching Dockers ultra-relaxed pleated khakis.

    Today.....Tired and hungry all day, shuffling from masturbatory meeting to meeting. Went to the gym and did:

    Front squat:
    135x5
    225x4
    275x3
    295x2,2,2,1
    225x5

    Ugh......FS is probably my least favorite lift that doesn't begin with snatch and end with clean & jerk, partly because the bad left knee gives me trouble, but mosttly because of hte shitty front rack that also plagues my jerks. For all the 295s, I wanted to do triples, but the rack would fall apart at the bottom of rep 2 and it'd be exhausting muscling the out-of-position barbell up. The last set was actually kind of scary, as my hand slipped out after a rep and the bar, loaded with iron plates inside the squat rack, started choking me out; I barely got it back onto the safeties. Time to keep working on it, I guess. Also, the DOMS in my upper back just will not go away, which is at least a bit indicative of how weak it is. More pulls probably will not hurt.

    Some of you fools watch the The Americans, right? CG and I just caught up on last week's episode, and.......no spoilers, but holy shit, we just stared at the TV after it ended for several minutes, until she looked at me and went, "..........DUDE WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!" The next few minutes/hours were all a blur to me, but the next thing I remember was standing in her parking lot staring at a dumpster and pondering the meaninglessness of everything.

  7. #997
    Join Date
    Jul 2014
    Location
    Vista, CA
    Posts
    1,937

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    ... wear non-smelly gym clothes, if at all.
    I first read this as "if anything" and thought "my my, that's quite the permissive laboratory safety environment you've got there...

    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    Today.....Tired and hungry all day, shuffling from masturbatory meeting to meeting.
    Standing by for KOTJ's over-the-top response...

  8. #998
    Join Date
    Nov 2012
    Posts
    3,952

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    Ugh goddammit Gilchrest. Related: As I've probably mentioned before, I grew up poor, and found out about what the 1% did for fun mostly through expository scenes of spy thriller villains. Well, the other day, I finally decided to find out what exactly these mysterious country club thingers were..... I figured I'd have to drive to, you know, the countryside, to go to one, but to my delight, Google revealed to me that there were several within a 5 mile radius of me, in the middle of the city. WTF??? Then, one of CG's scruffier friends revealed that he was actually a member of one of them, which immediately destroyed most of the aura of these places for me. Come Sunday, he drove us there and got me a tour...where I found out that it's basically a glorified gym membership??? Only with a golf course attached? And a ridiculous initiation fee? Talk about blue balls. He left to go jerk off at the driving range while a guy in a white polo gave me a walkthrough. Told him I didn't care about golf, so I was offered a possible discounted "social membership" (bleh)... The dude showed me their excuse of a gym, which included very nice mahogany lockers and multiple saunas, but no barbells. There was also a restaurant where members seemed to eat and drink for free, up to a certain point, which I guess was cool but not really. I even toured the pool hoping to catch a glimpse of some gold digger poon, but only found a few old people sitting around awaiting their deaths. Yea...no thanks. Seriously, between this, the horseback-related activities, boating, and most of the Winter Olympics, I'm left to conclude that rich people have the worst hobbies.

    Training:
    Hello snatch pulls my old friend:
    60kgx4x2 Very high pulls
    80x4
    90x4
    100x4
    110x4
    120x4 These were no longer high pulls; more like a snatch DL with a shrug
    130x4 These were barely shrugged because I am weak

    Snatch deadlift:
    150x5 Very heavy and ugly FML.
    I could feel the lingering strength difference in my legs, and was definitely favoring the right side. Ehh...


    Mission impossible:
    CG dropped something $800 or something preposterous like that on a pair of Louboutins the other day. Or rather, her personal shopper liked them and bought a pair and now she's too mesmerized to return them. Same diff. Hey it's her family fortune (I'm pretty sure her dad and all her uncles are in the Panama Papers btw) but I still blanched at the thought of dropping nearly a grand on a shitty hunk of painful rubber made by a bunch of guido fucks in Naples. When she saw my reaction, she went, "Dude it sucks! There are no good women's shoes. You either get stinky plastic things from DSW or you go to Neimans for this. There's no in-between." I chalked this up to her affluenza and told her I'd find her something tasteful and moderately priced, but then took a look around* and found that:

    1. The women's shoes market is a total clusterfuck. Men need, at most, a pair each of: black captoe oxford, brown brogue, dress boot, loafer, and then whatever sport-specific shoes you need, and even that's probably overkill. Women need, at bare minimum, a billion pairs of painful bullshit in all sorts of highly outfit-specific shapes and colors, only to wear the same nasty pair of Tom's every day. The majority of their "dress shoes" have heels 4" or higher, i.e. chiropractors are creaming their pants, and women filter out guys my height on match.com...yea fuck you, Jimmy Choo.

    2. The pricing is indeed a hot mess. Men's shoes are tiered very logically:
    $50-$200 = you have all styles available with glued soles and lower quality leather
    $200-$500 = again all styles available, with stitched soles, nicer leather, made in a 1st World country
    $500-$1000 = ....I'm actually not sure what separates this tier from the previous one....except, I guess, aside from the good things, this seems to be where the nastier spear-toed Italian items end up, no thanks
    $1000+ you're talking bespoke shoes that normal people don't buy

    Women's shoes:
    $0-$5000: I can't even make sense of this. Shit is completely random. It SEEMS like certain names occupy certain regions of the spectrum, but all are pretty broadly distributed, and most are ugly as shit and made by Asian child laborers. I quit for now. If anyone knows where reasonably price lady shoes come from let me know...

    *I started at some outlet malls but then finally caved and went to South Coast Plaza, California's obscene celebration of conspicuous consumption and dollar-worship, and schlepped through tons of women's depts, stopping to observe 1. the shoes, and 2. the types of people shopping. Pretty sure not even KOTJ has examined so many pairs of ladyfeet in so little time.
    Winter sports win bro.

    I may be biased.

  9. #999
    Join Date
    Nov 2012
    Posts
    3,952

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    Ugh goddammit Gilchrest. Related: As I've probably mentioned before, I grew up poor, and found out about what the 1% did for fun mostly through expository scenes of spy thriller villains. Well, the other day, I finally decided to find out what exactly these mysterious country club thingers were..... I figured I'd have to drive to, you know, the countryside, to go to one, but to my delight, Google revealed to me that there were several within a 5 mile radius of me, in the middle of the city. WTF??? Then, one of CG's scruffier friends revealed that he was actually a member of one of them, which immediately destroyed most of the aura of these places for me. Come Sunday, he drove us there and got me a tour...where I found out that it's basically a glorified gym membership??? Only with a golf course attached? And a ridiculous initiation fee? Talk about blue balls. He left to go jerk off at the driving range while a guy in a white polo gave me a walkthrough. Told him I didn't care about golf, so I was offered a possible discounted "social membership" (bleh)... The dude showed me their excuse of a gym, which included very nice mahogany lockers and multiple saunas, but no barbells. There was also a restaurant where members seemed to eat and drink for free, up to a certain point, which I guess was cool but not really. I even toured the pool hoping to catch a glimpse of some gold digger poon, but only found a few old people sitting around awaiting their deaths. Yea...no thanks. Seriously, between this, the horseback-related activities, boating, and most of the Winter Olympics, I'm left to conclude that rich people have the worst hobbies.

    Training:
    Hello snatch pulls my old friend:
    60kgx4x2 Very high pulls
    80x4
    90x4
    100x4
    110x4
    120x4 These were no longer high pulls; more like a snatch DL with a shrug
    130x4 These were barely shrugged because I am weak

    Snatch deadlift:
    150x5 Very heavy and ugly FML.
    I could feel the lingering strength difference in my legs, and was definitely favoring the right side. Ehh...


    Mission impossible:
    CG dropped something $800 or something preposterous like that on a pair of Louboutins the other day. Or rather, her personal shopper liked them and bought a pair and now she's too mesmerized to return them. Same diff. Hey it's her family fortune (I'm pretty sure her dad and all her uncles are in the Panama Papers btw) but I still blanched at the thought of dropping nearly a grand on a shitty hunk of painful rubber made by a bunch of guido fucks in Naples. When she saw my reaction, she went, "Dude it sucks! There are no good women's shoes. You either get stinky plastic things from DSW or you go to Neimans for this. There's no in-between." I chalked this up to her affluenza and told her I'd find her something tasteful and moderately priced, but then took a look around* and found that:

    1. The women's shoes market is a total clusterfuck. Men need, at most, a pair each of: black captoe oxford, brown brogue, dress boot, loafer, and then whatever sport-specific shoes you need, and even that's probably overkill. Women need, at bare minimum, a billion pairs of painful bullshit in all sorts of highly outfit-specific shapes and colors, only to wear the same nasty pair of Tom's every day. The majority of their "dress shoes" have heels 4" or higher, i.e. chiropractors are creaming their pants, and women filter out guys my height on match.com...yea fuck you, Jimmy Choo.

    2. The pricing is indeed a hot mess. Men's shoes are tiered very logically:
    $50-$200 = you have all styles available with glued soles and lower quality leather
    $200-$500 = again all styles available, with stitched soles, nicer leather, made in a 1st World country
    $500-$1000 = ....I'm actually not sure what separates this tier from the previous one....except, I guess, aside from the good things, this seems to be where the nastier spear-toed Italian items end up, no thanks
    $1000+ you're talking bespoke shoes that normal people don't buy

    Women's shoes:
    $0-$5000: I can't even make sense of this. Shit is completely random. It SEEMS like certain names occupy certain regions of the spectrum, but all are pretty broadly distributed, and most are ugly as shit and made by Asian child laborers. I quit for now. If anyone knows where reasonably price lady shoes come from let me know...

    *I started at some outlet malls but then finally caved and went to South Coast Plaza, California's obscene celebration of conspicuous consumption and dollar-worship, and schlepped through tons of women's depts, stopping to observe 1. the shoes, and 2. the types of people shopping. Pretty sure not even KOTJ has examined so many pairs of ladyfeet in so little time.
    Oxford not brogue

  10. #1000
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    starting strength coach development program
    Kingsman was not at all what I expected, but I ended up liking it quite a bit. It's one of CG's favorite movies of all time for some reason, so I've seen it about 10x and it doesn't get old.

    Mandatory:


    ^This happened, and now Roxy 'Lancelot' Morton is who I compare all real-life women against.

    Brogues are interesting in they were originally considered rustic, as the holes were designed to drain water during a hike like a modern jungle boot. They were thus not appropriate for city use in general and definitely not okay for pairing with suits, but now we've flipped it around and associated the patterns with increased formality. It was kind of fun to hear the Kingsmen turn things back around and remind everyone that if you're going to kick ass in downtown London, wear black captoes. I also found it interesting that my penchant for combining brown shoes with suits would label me a bumpkin in parts of the UK. Sorry Mom, guess you'll never make a gentleman out of me.

    That said, the literal term "oxfords not brogues" is kind of wonky in that the two are not mutually exclusive, as oxford refers to the lacing while brogues refers to the patterns, and it's entirely possible to have a brogued oxford. (A-E Strands being a most common example). Here, this says it better than I can:




    Sorry Viola etc., Harlequin Lite erotica has been on standby because I don't feel sexy at the moment.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •