starting strength gym
Page 103 of 187 FirstFirst ... 35393101102103104105113153 ... LastLast
Results 1,021 to 1,030 of 1870

Thread: Stuffed Superdud: Bumpy road to respectable lifting

  1. #1021
    Join Date
    Nov 2012
    Posts
    3,952

    Default

    • starting strength seminar april 2024
    • starting strength seminar jume 2024
    • starting strength seminar august 2024
    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    Do it! Strictly functionally, human shoulders are naturally a load-bearing structure, and suspenders are thus the most intuitive way to hold up pants. Belts work by increasing friction between your pants and your torso, and (thanks to Lagrangians and such that I don't remember how to derive) actually accelerate pants droppage, for those of us who have been GOMADing unnecessarily. They really only came into fashion when the vest that covered them more or less went (temporarily) extinct, which coincided with a whole bunch of guys coming back from WW1 having discovered the belt as part of their military uniforms.

    I've had friends who treated suspenders like coming out of the closet, wearing them for only a few hours a day under a sportcoat, gingerly exposing them for a few seconds at a time, etc etc. Totally unnecessary; just make sure your first pair is a neutral blue/grey/burgundy affair that matches everything, since the obsolete "rule" for suspenders is that they're supposed to be the vest and thus are an undergarment; that's obviously no longer true, but maybe save the fashion statement (Trafalgar Ltd Editions, a la Niles Crane) for your 3rd pair. Technically, now that suspenders are to be seen, the leather loops are supposed to match your shoes, but only goobers care about that and they're too busy being fedora neckbeard m'lady weirdos for their opinions to matter.



    Everyone giggled and pulled on mine on Day 1. They were boxcloth though and not stretchy except for the back piece, and I am still feeling the long-term effects of that day's wedgies.



    Remember guys, it pays to be about 10% spiffier than your peers, and well-tailored suits make everyone look better. I've recently expanded this idea to casual, and have been having a lot of fun at it. What I mean by that is, suits are awesome, but they don't always scale down as hard as you need. For example, for offsite meetings at the bar or on weekends, there's not a lot you can do to dress down a suit besides losing the tie and adding a louder shirt. The fabrics also tend to be more delicate, which gives you an extra thing to worry about if you're walking around Disneyland or something. What does scale across a wider range, I've found, is a well-tailored blazer/sportcoat in a cloth/pattern slightly less formal than your standard navy or gray worsted suit jacket. I usually use a cheapo navy cotton one from J. Crew Factory that pairs with everything from khakis and a polo for the weekend to gray dress pants, white shirt, and tie for when a suit is just a haaaaaiiir too formal, e.g. at an academic get-together, except in the rare case where I'm one of the speakers. Since it's cotton, it's much lower maintenance and runs cooler during the summer. That said, given our proclivity for barbells, I get the feeling guys on this forum lean more towards the classics, so you can't go wrong with a standard blue blazer with gold buttons. That thing's basically a suit jacket, except perhaps cut a bit shorter and with patch pockets. Looks great with everything except you miiiiight start running into trouble with jeans.

    Related: The other day, I walked in on Vic and his son putting an awesome camel-colored 100% cashmere sportcoat with brown plaid and blue overcheck onto an older guy. Looked something like this:



    This is a great example of why this whole smart-casual thing has really grown on me. The pattern is pretty loud, too loud for me to wear as a suit (though guys with bigger balls might pull it off), but for a sport coat paired with quiet light-colored pants, it's a great way to add a bunch of color and depth that can pair with any number of pants, ties, and shirts, all the while looking super casual and relaxed, as opposed to classic blazers, which again are very useful but can bring to mind the image of a rich asshole....when I'm actually a poor asshole.

    BTW Idlehands in particular, check out THIS guy, easily the best dressed IT guy on Earth:
    https://kingofdhaka.com/


    ^Standard ops.

    I could do without the bedroom eyes, but everything else about this guy is on point.
    I'm 75% sure I have the identical shirt. Wife used to train a guy that had a restaurant in Manhattan. And when he retired he gave me a handful of his tailored shirts since they fit me
    Pretty decent. They are amazing and my favorite shirts in my wardrobe.

  2. #1022
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Simon Rest View Post
    1- Sydney is essentially sub tropical. Wearing suits puts a huge strain on my dry cleaning budget
    The short answer for this is, fuck England. Assholes traveled all over the world and foisted onto us stuff that really only works on their perpetually dreary island, the wool suit being the most obvious example. Ever own a Mackintosh, btw? It's a heavy crunchy raincoat they made from rubberized cotton, with zero breathability. Great for a wet 50F day in London, very uncomfortable for a warm California rain, and probably a heat stroke risk in a tropical situation. We're kind of in the same boat: Southern California is not subtropical but it is basically summer seven months a year, plus I sweat way more than most people.

    A couple of simple ideas that have worked for me:
    1. Try materials other than wool, e.g. cotton or linen. Those fabrics rumple easily, and a 100% linen suit will make you look like a Miami drug kingpin, but you can get them with some wool blended in for a nicer structure.
    1a. They also have super lightweight "tropical wools" made from fabrics with thin yarns and very open weaves, the kind you can almost see through. There's one ultra high end bespoke tailoring house in the south of France whose name I can't remember that specializes in this.....because many of their clients are North African billionaires of poor repute.
    2. Ditch the smooth lining in the jacket, or at least make sure it's not made from stuffy polyester: the lining is there for the jacket to slide cleanly over your back with snagging/bunching against your shirt, but you only need that around the shoulders and arms, not the whole torso.
    3. Eschew the traditional navy/grey for lighter colors like light gray or tan. Less radiative heating plus it ties in more smoothly with your non-office job.

    Quote Originally Posted by Simon Rest View Post
    2- I'm a consultant to the building industry. A good portion of my job involves being on site. The steel capped safety boots take the edge off the suit
    Oooh we're kind of in the same boat here. Half the time I'm at a desk, but the other half I'm in a lab coat, safety goggles, gloves, etc., which is why I've relaxed away from suits slightly. For those days, most of us wear the dorky company logo polo with dress pants or khakis, which I guess means no suspenders, but that's fine. But you can still throw a blazer on top of that whenever it's time for lunch or a meeting. For that, IMHO the safety boots are almost a feature, not a problem; it reminds everyone that you mean business and are not just some dandy/safety liability. But you know your industry better than I do.

    Quote Originally Posted by Simon Rest View Post
    3- I essentially work for myself so I don't need to "dress for the job I want"
    Yea, I'm actually not a huge fan of "dress for the job you want" myself, esp. since all this is extra, and it's silly to pretend like it's more than a sort-of-functional hobby, same as barbells; at the end of the day, performance is what matters. But it's fun to look sharp, right? Deion Sanders (a guy who played a blasphemous game we have up here called American Football; think rugby's mutated love child) used to say something like, "When you look good you play good." So it's probably all just mental, but that's fine with me; it only takes an extra few minutes in the mornings, after all.

    Also, if it were up to me, we'd all be running around naked all the time, but alas, the garden of eden is closed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Simon Rest View Post
    Can you wear suspenders with jeans?
    In rare cases, yes:


    But odds are you'll lean more towards this sack of shit:


    So probably not.....though I'd be intrigued to see you make a go at the former.


    Quote Originally Posted by idlehands View Post
    I'm 75% sure I have the identical shirt. Wife used to train a guy that had a restaurant in Manhattan. And when he retired he gave me a handful of his tailored shirts since they fit me
    Pretty decent. They are amazing and my favorite shirts in my wardrobe.
    Ha! Jack did the same thing when he got his current job, only instead of a cool restauranteur, it was a surgeon up in Manhattan Beach whose home LAN Jack set up, and whose douchey teenager kids Jack tutored back in grad school. The doc died somewhat unexpectedly and it so happened that he and Jack were the same size, so the widow gave it all to him. Now he always looks like he's about to go sailing. Good times.

  3. #1023
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    Total disclosure: I missed training yesterday because CG wanted to go watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. The original is probably her favorite movie of all time; she's not Greek, but that movie seems to resonate with everyone from small countries with long histories and surrounded by lots of other small overly proud countries, the whole, "There are two kinds of people: Ruritanians and those who wish they were Ruritanian" thing. Anyhoo, the movie was entertaining the same way Episode 7 was, i.e. a safe rehash of everything people liked about the first one. Ehhhh. I was kinda cringing throughout but CG had a big fat grin the whole time and cried a little at the end. To each their own, I guess.

    Today:
    Squat:
    45x5
    135x5
    225x4
    315x3
    335x1
    365x1
    385x1 overprime
    370x5x3 PR sort of

    When I was running TM two summers ago, I got as far as 365x5x5 on volume day. 370 I did for two sets of 5 on intensity day, IIRC, so it was nice get a 3rd set in there.

    Just saw that latest Olympic lifting thread upstairs. Ugh.....just lift, guys. There are no first, second, third, fourth, and fifth pulls, double knee rebends, jump-n-shugs, s-curves, hip bangs, cock thrusts, none of that. Just pull on the bar as hard as you can, and go under... i.e. just lift. Remember, this is a sport of dumbasses; no lifter has ever come close to winning a Nobel Prize.

  4. #1024
    Join Date
    Nov 2012
    Posts
    3,952

    Default

    So when you getting you 200kg squat ?!

  5. #1025
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by mgilchrest View Post
    You don't think the USSR back in the golden era of the Communist Bloc didn't analyze the ever living fuck out of those mechanics? And that the Chinese aren't trying to do similar?
    In terms of modeling and analysis, I think the level of detail was similar to the threads that show up here, i.e. I don't think they went anywhere near as far as what Savs is proposing, or at least not in any of the publications Bud Charniga found and translated. As for whether or not anything too useful came out of the work though:

    Quote Originally Posted by mgilchrest View Post
    Regardless, I think they look at results more than anything else. As long as the form is fluid and the weight is heavy, all else is pedantry.
    This is key, IMHO: at the applied level, which is where all of us except maybe Mark Rippetoe the Author are, we really don't need to have these megathreads as far as I care, since we can see all the academia being applied before our eyes: the Soviets and Chinese post regular training videos and invite us to their camps, there are five Russian seminars going on every weekend, and at my gym alone we have two coaches who trained under the Soviet system and coach us in it for basically free. All of it boils down to pulling on the bar as hard as you can in as straight a line as possible, and then after that just getting strong. Everything else is great to masturbate to if you're shooting for tenure, but otherwise, it doesn't help you get to where you want to go as a coach or lifter.

  6. #1026
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Posts
    305

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    Everything else is great to masturbate to if you're shooting for tenure, but otherwise, it doesn't help you get to where you want to go as a coach or lifter.
    I've been debating for days whether to post something to that effect in the two current threads. They just seem... pointless from applied standpoint and unsatisfying from the nerd-sniping standpoint. Thirty pages in and the problem of "optimal bar path" is no better defined.

  7. #1027
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Posts
    305

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by mgilchrest View Post

    -A simple model for complex motion is only an approximation
    I thought straight path was bad....
    -There are lots of variables that will determine the actual path

    -Since most folks have a fairly unique anthropometry, bar paths will have some amount of inherent uniqueness
    Precisely. And neither of those were identified in those 30 pages.
    The problem is the dithering about in these discussions. Also the appeal to authority and dogmatic approach taken at times. That's tiring.
    Hey, it wouldn't be e&p otherwise...

    Also with everyone having a phone that takes videos and, apparently, way too much free time, why not take and analyze several dozen of your own videos, with different setups if possible...

  8. #1028
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    Boston
    Posts
    1,814

    Cool

    Quote Originally Posted by mgilchrest View Post
    The problem is the dithering about in these discussions. Also the appeal to authority and dogmatic approach taken at times. That's tiring.
    Just replace bar path with cancer and you've pretty accurately described why I became so disgusted with academia towards the end of grad school and vowed never to return to the ivory tower. Between the endless dicking around with minor details not expected to amount to anything, the egoistic squabbling, the passive aggressive back-and-forths, the drawing of generous conclusions from tenuous data, and the shameless self-promotion, it was all I could do to keep from sodomizing every obnoxious keynote speaker with a poster tube, right then and there on the podium.

    Sayre said it best: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. That is why academic politics are so bitter."


    Quote Originally Posted by trick_ster View Post
    Also with everyone having a phone that takes videos and, apparently, way too much free time, why not take and analyze several dozen of your own videos, with different setups if possible...
    Probably because off the top of my head there are fewer than ten people on this whole site who actually snatches, cleans, and jerks. (amateurs: me, MBasic, IPB and pros: Josiah Moye, Tom DiStasio, Jordan Feigenwhatever, Steven the German English guy, Mary Peck). BTW for those who are curious, under the Polish coach's tutelage, I've slowly moved into what is more or less the SS position, though we don't use any of the SS cues. So the Soviet dinosaurs, the Russians lifting/coaching/seminaring today, and the SSCs are in agreement. Go figure.



    Training:
    Terrible sleep last night due to a fire alarm malfunction, and then had a five hour long meeting today. The AC broke and flooded the building a few days ago, so now to finish the drying process, the air pressure has been kept low enough that it's a struggle to open the front door...and to stay awake in general, meeting or no meeting. I also should have known that the day after a squat pseudo-PR would not go too well. I did:

    Snatch pulls:
    Very high:
    60kg x5
    90x5x2

    High:
    100x5x2
    110x5x2

    Not high:
    130x5x2

    Snatch DL
    140x2

    My back and left hammie was tightening up throughout, so I dropped the ego and shut it down before anything bad could happen.

    Wish I had better stories but this is it for today, I guess. Time to sit in the corner and get wasted to the sounds of OneRepublic. Or was it OneDirection? Bah, Enrique Iglesias and Lady Antebellum it is.

  9. #1029
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Posts
    305

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    Probably because off the top of my head there are fewer than ten people on this whole site who actually snatches, cleans, and jerks. (amateurs: me, MBasic, IPB and pros: Josiah Moye, Tom DiStasio, Jordan Feigenwhatever, Steven the German English guy, Mary Peck). BTW for those who are curious, under the Polish coach's tutelage, I've slowly moved into what is more or less the SS position, though we don't use any of the SS cues. So the Soviet dinosaurs, the Russians lifting/coaching/seminaring today, and the SSCs are in agreement. Go figure.
    <dwight>Wrong.</dwight> There's also this guy and this guy.

    But yeah, slim pickings, esp compared to the amount of arguments it generates. I've been debating whether I should do it for years. Guess it means I should just do it. But I still want to low bar, deadlift, bench, and press. Doesn't leave a lot of time for much else. Oh yeah, and I'm terrible at the above anyways.

    But yeah, from everything I've read and seen from Eastern Europeans and Chinese, no one agonizes over bar path as much as 'muricans. Hell, even here in Canukistan it's just jump or push off with your legs. Mind you, I haven't actually got any coaching, but I train around several people who compete and nobody cares about bar path and starting position.

  10. #1030
    Join Date
    Jul 2014
    Location
    Land of Shadows...
    Posts
    4,987

    Default

    starting strength coach development program
    Quote Originally Posted by stuffedsuperdud View Post
    Just replace bar path with cancer and you've pretty accurately described why I became so disgusted with academia towards the end of grad school and vowed never to return to the ivory tower. Between the endless dicking around with minor details not expected to amount to anything, the egoistic squabbling, the passive aggressive back-and-forths, the drawing of generous conclusions from tenuous data, and the shameless self-promotion, it was all I could do to keep from sodomizing every obnoxious keynote speaker with a poster tube, right then and there on the podium.

    Probably because off the top of my head there are fewer than ten people on this whole site who actually snatches, cleans, and jerks. (amateurs: me, MBasic, IPB and pros: Josiah Moye, Tom DiStasio, Jordan Feigenwhatever, Steven the German English guy, Mary Peck). BTW for those who are curious, under the Polish coach's tutelage, I've slowly moved into what is more or less the SS position, though we don't use any of the SS cues. So the Soviet dinosaurs, the Russians lifting/coaching/seminaring today, and the SSCs are in agreement. Go figure.
    I totally get why you stay out of 'it' SSD. I wish I could somehow control myself as stay out as well.
    To clear, my issue is with the SS midfoot start: 1" in front of shins before reaching down to grab the bar.
    That's way too close, it winds up dictating the rest of the lifters anatomical angles, some/most of which might not be good.
    I agree to a higher hip start, and a static start.
    BUT I believe the bar should be over roughly the ball of the foot, and this is what is described in most Russian literature as far as I know (Roman, etc).
    The midfoot thing as described in SSBBT3 is fucking with alot lifters.
    This is where we disagree. about 3" to 4" or where the bar should start. Seem petty or anal but its a big deal.

    Rip and the SSCs have also created some kind of universal-stawman-USAW/Int'l-Coach the epouses several terrible ideas about lifting:
    -Start with bar OUT PAST THE TOES (past the shoes?)
    -Strength isn't important
    -Shoulders BEHIND bar at the start
    -(about three or four other things)
    I've yet to find this 'guy', or his teachings/writings.

    Re: Russians, IDK about what you said there . . . Alot of those guys start with their hips real low; sort dynamic start; with the bar forward at the start no doubt . . . .not SS model.

Posting Permissions

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