Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

Sounds awesome! Feel free to post pics or vids!

2 premium gyms but they're 17 minute drives away. I know that sounds like normal to all of you but I'm used to walking to my gyms. bodybuilding dungeon gym is about a 5 minute cab ride and I could walk/bicycle, but its just so lonely and hot in there. This premium gym is the only one I've been to in China that has elite air conditioning and feels perfect inside. About 60 usd/mo too ouch.

Legs
Hip thrust: 3ppsx12, 2ppsx21, 14
lying ham curl: 3 sets to failure kinda forgot
paused toes elevated on a 25kjg bumper sldl: 100kgx12, 9
Leg press: 3ppsx21, 15, 11
leg extenions: 4 sets failure

I realize there is nothing novel about these photos to most of you. But Central Chengdu... holy ****... we barely ever have clear skies, even in the summer. And I split my time between BKK and Central Chengdu most of the year, both fo which have pretty bad traffic and pollution. I guess the last time I saw sky like this was the Jomtien/PAttaya Bodybuilding Pilgrimage.

And greenery/mountains/trees like this are completely absent from anywhere I've lived in the past 3 years, though we had this in Suzhou. Suzhou had nice greenery but was still fairly crowded (not nearly as bad as Chengdu) and although the pollution wasn't terrible, it rains around 240 days every year and is cloudy/overcast often.

On a partially related note, I have a lot of nostalgic and warm feelings about Suzhou. One of the girls i was dating joked that I can introduce myself as 苏州人 as if its where I was born and grew up and reminisce about the place incessantly. But what she and many others don't realize is that as a foreigner who comes here young and integrates into the language culture, moving to China is literally a second childhood. You have to rediscover the world and how everything works, you have to relearn how to understand the things people are saying just as a child would, you relearn how to express your thoughts and feelings, and you even re-forge a new compartmentalized identity that has a new name in a new language and a new "mode" for your brain to have an inner dialogue in. It's a new language that your dreams can take place in. People even tell me that my voice when speaking English sounds like a different person than the one I speak Chinese with, which is a much softer, gentler, kinder, more feminine sounding voice.

At times it almost does feel like there's a duality and coexistance of separate identities, but maybe that's all abnormal and just my own neuroticism and the analysis really ends at just "bro moving to another country and learning a language is a second childhood".

With that "second childhood" stretching over 6 years in Suzhou, there's a lot of memories in that place and a lot of growth and milestones to be traced back. It feels far more like my "hometown" than my actual hometown.

There was a girl from 2016... she was the first monolingual Chinese girl I'd ever dated. We met on some dating app where she feigned being able to speak English using a translator app. At that time we communicated in Chinese but my vocabulary was probably no more than 250 words. It was passionate and things happened so fast... I think we french kissed within like 2 hours of first meeting. She showed me around a western (directionally, not westernized) part of the city called Mudu where there were real mountains you could hike and a beautiful outdoor mall with a starbucks (they were rare in 2016). Eventually we both agreed that with my ultra limited language abilities we couldn't maintain a real relationship and mutually parted ways on good terms. I reached out to her about 8 months ago and she was blown away that I was even still in the country and even more blown away by my level of fluency 8 years later. She was sooo pretty... but didn't look Chinese at all, looked Blasian or SEA. Very dark skin, much darker than mine, no more than 155cm, and big boobs. Yes I will find and post pics...

The last two are more recent from around 2021. She doesn't post much on social media. Whitening filter+makeup, she's basically black irl. She had an interesting family of origin with a father that died when she was 5 years old. Her mother was best friends wtih an "OG" foreigner, a Chinese speaking American woman who had lived in China since the early 90s. This trend of forming relationships with women who had deceased fathers would continue into the future, unbeknownest to me at the time. They ended up being weirdly overrepresented among my girlfriends/girls I date and I still can't figure out. Girls with deadbeat dads are drawn to certain types of men, girls with fathers who had been divorced are drawn to certain types of men, girls with alcoholic fathers have a type, girls with abusive fathers have a type, and girls who's fathers died when they were young were drawn to me... or perhaps it was I who was drawn to them? I don't know, actually...

A few days before I left Suzhou to move to Chengdu I went back to those Mudu mountains and that outdoor mall by myself to eat Taiwanese fried chicken and to hike in the mountains. For some reason I assumed every city in China would have a natural outdoor place like this just a 60 minute subway journey away for people to escape the hustle and bustle and be in nature for a while to let their minds decompress from the stresses of extreme population density... and Suzhou's density was not even that bad, especially where I lived in the final 3 years.

Leaving Suzhou for Chengdu was easily the biggest mistake I've made in the past 5 years. I regressed a lot as a person from 2021 to 2023 because of it, and it wasn't just because of covid. Even in the times we were free, I became less of the type of person i wanted to be and lost many of the things I considered great about myself and I think it was largely due to my environment. Even my physique regressed significantly despite still going hard in the gym. But programming was dipshit powerbuilding and my outside of the gym habits were dogshit. But that's getting into emo territory, let's keep it positive this iteration.

Maybe I'll make some more Suzhou memories posts. If war tensions suddenly de-escalate I'd absolutely love to go back there, but there's only 1 school with a salarry worth considering that actually looks good on my CV for jobs outside of China.

The place has a lot of meaning for me... I need to carve out a month or so to return even if I never return permanently. I hope where I am now will forge similar meaning, but this is an unreasonable expectation... that was a unique and special time... I was a 26 year old FOB in a brand new country figuring out who I was. Now I've largely established my identity (identities).

Damn I just looked up and this stream of consciousness disorganized word jumble about the past just materialized on my screen as if by magic. I guess being in a new environment with a fresh start and hope for the future is bringing out all the nostalgia about the past to give some perspective about just how far I've come and how much things have changed since then.

I remember it was summer vacation of 2016 and she brought me to this outdoor cafe in Mudu just a 30 minute walk from a mountain with a temple at the top. It was very late, maybe 3:30 am before we finally headed back home. .We drank sugary frozen milk tea slushie type beverages and cuddle on this wooden "hammock sofa" thing. There were a ton of mosquitos and I was getting bit all over and itching really badly everywhere across my body. I drove her home on my new second hand electric motorcycle and then went home myself. My mosquito bites morphed into severe red hives and I was in intense pain and discomfort. At that time I was too stupid to know how to use delivery apps to get simple medicines, so I just stayed up for another 3.5 hours before walking to a pharmacy to get help and the pharmacist just looked at me like "BRO WTF YOU SHOULDA GONE TO THE HOSPITAL ASAP" and shoved some medicine down my throat and applied some cream to my body. I sat there in the pharmacy recovering and he didn't even remember to charge me before kicking me out of his shop and sending me home

LOL... great times. I felt her boobs, it was worth it.

These are the posts that I enjoy the most! Thanks for sharing. From the pics, it definitely doesn't look crowded and lots of green. One thing I like about living in Minnesota (compared to Orange County, where I lived for a few years) is that it's so green during the Spring/Summer/Fall. It's just nice everywhere.

I'm originally from Oakland where it is green but, still, I barely remember ever going to parks as a kid because I assume they are just kind of inconvenient. Here in Minneapolis there are parks every several blocks. Literally ~10 parks here within biking distance with my 8 year old (and maybe even 5 year old since she's been going further than I thought she could recently).

Can't see boobs in the pics but she is really cure (ldo). Did the brief relationship with her (despite the language barrier) feel more authentic than some of your other ones since then?

It kind of seems like you have relatively brief relationships in China and don't get too attached but I really don't know, maybe you keep everything super casual and date a ton (although that doesn't seem to really be your vibe afaict).

At some point will you want to stop moving and just enjoy one area for a loooong time?

You got a video of the tik tok row? Also, we are going to need to come up with a better name for it

Evo don't trust China, China is asshoe

I know you're just memeing, but yeah sorta.

Seeing what's happening geopolitically makes me think that maybe the neocons were right. Hillary got beat by trump and now we've got all these ww3 flashpoints popping up from countries like the one I live in getting uppity. Maybe if America had a brutal violent warmonger bully like her in the oval office during those years, none of this would be happening right now.

tik tok influencer "pulldown" as opposed to high row. Just imagine dragging the cable height down a few pegs to turn it from a pulldown to a high angled row and youve got the idea. Starts around 3 minutes.

I had one gf for 3.5 years who eventually got into powerlifting about halfway through our relationships. we broke up b/c she wanted to live in the UK and I didn't want to go with. Still on okay terms.

Then a series of short relationships/flings.

Then I had another gf for 1.5 years off and on and was seriously wanting to marry. But that relationship was considerably more volatile and complex. Her dad died at 3. She was an aspiring cosmetic surgeon and I met her just months before she was finishing medical school and starting residency for cosmetic surgery... but then she never started. Instead she went rogue and started doing black market surgeries as a non fully qualified surgeon and making tons of bank travelling around doing this. Distance, her travelling for work, and covid made this relationship very hard and volatile. She had a temper... I'd already seen it first hand... she was constantly on the phone shouting at her various family members, hanging up, redialing, getting mad, cursing and shouting, hanging up again etc. Very rude and angry to service staff anywhere we went. When I went to meet her family for the first time, her younger half-sister from a different father who the mom had remarried after husband died pulled me aside and said "watch out for my sister's temper... she's got some anger issues" as if I didn't already know.

At the bottom of the market she wanted me to dump all my crypto (stupid magic internet money crashed, you better get out before it goes to zero) to help her pay for rennovations on a property she bought with the proceeds from black market surgery. I said no and tried to explain why this is the worst possible time to sell, but she didn't give a **** obviously. Well... look what happened... crypto recovered and BTC hit new ATHs, meanwhile chinese housing, including her city, is in free fall with the worst yet to come. So I was definitely vindicated there... It was dumb as hell because the property was in an area that was still being built around and it would have been impossible to find a tenent. Even if we had found a tenet, it would have been spending like 220k rmb on rennovations to get 2500rmb monthly rental income. I stuck to my guns and didn't cuck out. She didn't break up with me over it, but did use it as justification to start cheating on me by sugar babying to a man about 20 years her senior who even happened to live in my city at the time. I broke up with her largely because of distance/not getting any time together. Turns out she actually was in my city several weekends seeing another man. I didn't even find out about it until her bestie who I was mutual friends snitched on her complete with proof. It made me feel so conflicted and ambivalent... the old man had never been introduced to her family like I was and she was probably still planning on us marrying and having a life together, but her drive to have more money, properties, wealth, and material possessions was just so consuimg. She valued things and money over people almost universally. It all sounds super negative but she had a lot of good qualities too... extremely intelligent, very romantic and passionate in the times she wasn't a little rage ball, and obviously very attractive (to me anyway, a lot of people including BGP said she looks like she's in her 40s when she was 28)

I still think about her a lot. I know I dodged a bullet, but I've never had better chemistry or more sexual attraction or better sex with any other human being and it seems improbable I ever will. And honestly who would you rather marry? Somebody who you are only 5/10 compatible with and you argue in a potentially relationship ending way 3-5 times per year but have mindblowing and very frequent sex with? Something like 12-20 times per week in the honeymoney phase and then 3-7 times per week in the hubby phase. Or somebody you are 10/10 compatiable with that you are only banging 2x/wk in the first 2 years and it gradually falls to every other month when you're 5 years deep... I'm picking the first all day long.

She blocked me for over a year and then unblocked me back last year in October. If she randomly contacted me wanting to meet or get back together, I would be unable to say no. I was a little rageball at 27-28 too and calmed down considerably after 30. Even with my social media blocked, she'd always answer if I called on the phone. For a while she was unwilling to say she wanted to get back together but was willing to meet if I fly out to her. She probably would have been willing to after some persuasion and if I ceded basically all power in the relationship to her. And for a while that's what I thought I wanted after breaking up with 3rd girl I mention below. But I came to my senses, listened to shitty zyzz motivational compilations, and started my fat loss phase in November and decided "nah, **** that. Let's get shredded instead. GEtting p*ssy is g4y". Even despite saying that, if she called me and just said directly she wants to get back together, I'm sure I'd dump whoever I was with almost instantly to go back and try again because I am stupid.

The third girlfriend was actually very recent and only ended october last year. With the other 2 srs relationships, I can't unilaterally assign blame to my ex-partner and I absolutely made mistakes or had faults or did things wrong. But with this third one? Nope... it was all her. Muslim girl with fake boobs from xinjiang who was just a horrible person on multiple levels. I dislike her enought o repost her pics here and recount the story, but I don't think i actually will because it makes me kind of angry to type it out. I learned that there are ways a woman can mistreat you that are far worse than her just cheating on you. The domineering ones are far worse than the ones who stray. Maybe you guys will get lucky one day and I'll write it out with pics. She's "hot" but only in pictures when she's actually trying to be hot, on a daily basis when we went out on dates she paid almost no attention to fashion, grooming, or even basic hygiene. Wore makeup when going out with me literally only once.

Trying a Thai out now. She's 2 years older than me, divorced, works as an airport long distance cab driver, and has a 13 year old son. That's actually the real reason I didn't compete, she came to visit me in China last month and this month and I didn't want to be in clen withdrawal mode while she was here. It's off to a bumpy start just because I'm so unused to Thai habits and dating culture. Distance isn't a huge issue as she makes her own schedule driving a taxi in BKK, my income is around 6x hers, and a round trip flight to bkk is actually closer and cheaper than me flying to Shanghai or most other popular Chinese cities. Thais can enter China visa free now. That's also what derailed my prep diet those 5 days I spent in BKK with her in the middle of the diet where I ate like an idiot. IDK why but it feels good to admit that's what happened. I don't regret it at all, totally worth the memories. I'm not a bodybuilding robot and I still need other human experiences like the exciting beginning of a relationship dating phase.

Hell, even Chinese dating culture there's still a lot I don't know. When you start dating monolingual Chinese who aren't westernized, their treatment toward and expectations of you are identical to Chinese men and it's very difficult to figure out even if you speak the language and have been here for years. So for a Thai its even harder as I don't know jack **** about Thai culture or language.

Alright boyos, I'm sorry to say that's probably all the personal blogging you're going to get until I win a pro card.

back to dry bodybuilding rants/logs.

Marry someone you like spending time with, who is a good person and with whom you are mainly aligned on world view and ‘big’ things. And who is happy. Even then it doesn’t always work out but you give it the best chance. (But what do I know…I’m getting divorced still!)

The sex will slow the **** down whoever you marry

Came for pics of big boobs and talk of anal creamies. Disappointed. Back to N1's log.

China looks like a shiethole. I rather deliver pizzas to yugoslavian or KC and go run around some lake.

First two important. Bolded... I'm not sure if it's actually that important tbh. I algined so much on world view with the muslim girl, like 90%. But she just treated me incredibly poorly and was very cruel and manipulative.

But honestly? The best advice to a person like me is probably "don't get married". Too much neuroticism, too many options, too much baggage, too prone to overthinking things. Marriage laws might be more fair in China than the USA which alleviates a lot of problems, but still marriage is not going to be the best path for some outlier individuals and there's strong evidence to suggest I'm in that group. That doesn't mean go all weird and misogynistic and foresake relationships entirely or anything, however. Some of the aging divorced or never married expats in Thailand I met seemed like some of the happiest people I'd ever met. It's maybe uncomfortable to admit that a large % of the male population might actually be better off and happier running through a series of 20 somethings in purely transactional relationships into old age and that there's nothing particularly special about the monogamous bonds we exalt in our societies.

I had a lot of anxiety about this in my 20s, but as the years go on I feel more at peace that I'll probably choose whatever path makes me happiest in the end. Maybe I don't always consciously know what I want and what's going to be best for my happiness, but I tend to subconsciously gravitate in that direction so it's best not to think about it too hard.

Sorry for no pics, loco. None of these girls speak english or spend any time on the English speaking internet except the first one so there's no fear of trainwrecking in the way that happened to n1h, but I just feel like posting pictures of exes on a public forum is sorta petty. Although the muslim girl does deserve some petty vindictiveness, perhaps.

god damn I turned my log into emo g4y **** again. Let's get alphalpha positive energy up in this b1tch

Feels good to help a young man find his path. I didn't have anyone to help me with things like this when I was 16-18 and suffered as a result.

Lotta emo blogging.

I agree that bigger worldview issues are important. I'd prob gg if Mrs Thremp went on a long rant about Dutch protocoling troon kids was "following the science". Probably the overarching stupidity and self-delusion or maybe being married to an idiot would do it. Hard to really know. Reminds me of when someone called a group of people Nazis and I asked if they meant "neo-Nazi". This clarification went back and forth, and apparently she thought these folks were Third Reich wanna conquer the Soviet Union Nazis, which is just... wow. Probably didn't even read Generalplan Ost.

Then again if you like MGTOW but just need a warm hole to dump it in, "dating" a bunch of 20smths is fine but ultimately not much different than buying whores, which is also fine. Kinda gotta figure out what works for you and what you wanna get out of life. This kinda precludes having a family tho which a lot of bros want.

The powerlifter girl was something close to a Nazi/nationalist/fascist/anti-semite. The cosmetic surgeon was a feminist, but she walked the walk (feminists who don't really walk the walk I don't have much respect for). The Muslim was not particularly extreme and sorta right leaning and had a world view that closely overlapped with mine overall.

As a sorta center left bro none of these bothered me and I barely paused to consider it to be honest.

But cross-cultural dating might be very different from dating somebody from your own country in this respect. OBviously I'm not going to have passionate political stances on issues considered important in China and they won't have stances on issues considered important in America.

However, if we were raising prospective children and trying to instill senses of ethics in them, I can see why this might create conflicts.

I'm still figuring it out. The beauty of being male is you have much more time to decide, although still far from unlimited.

Pull workout

My cousing introduced me to a young BBC (British Born chinese, you sicko!) who just came back to China in May and is getting into working out. 23 years old, totally scatterbrained and trying to do pl, oly, bb, boxing, and general power all at once. Physique is trash. Fat. Cut. Focused on the minutae while neglecting some very big suboptimalities. I'll coach him if he can pair down to a singular goal. I'd love to get a 23 year old kid with too much time on his hands and get him on a 6x/wk ppl split, testosterone, clenbuterol, and have him do a 16-20 week turboshred and then ideally try to control his rebound and not have him binge out afterword. Probably not gonna happen. If I'd had the perfect bbing coach approach me with the perfect plan when I was my scatterbrained ****** 23 year old self I woulda said no too.

Underhand pulldowns: 59kgx15, 11, 52kgx13 all with a pause at the bottom
Tik tok unilateral rows: ???x20, 13, 11
Horizontal plate loaded row machine: 1.5ppsx15, 12, 10
Chest supported tbar row: 1px16, 13, 12
ez curl: 20kgx27, 3 more sets myo rep matching

Everything paused always.

Gym is amazing. Alite equipment except nonstandard plates you can't dl on. If I feel like dling I can just dl at my school gym a 200m walk from my teacher dorm. Once my bicep tendon heals I'll give the DBs first one more go and if I re-aggravate my pec/bicep tie-in one more time I'm finished and going to do either machines only or machines with dbs as third and final pressing motion. Not going to do any flying motions as I'm not sure if that, the mobs, or the presses were ****ing it up. I suspect is was most likely the mobs, but next push workout will be db incline, flat machine press, incline machine press, shoulders, triceps, go home.

Barbell rows are I think definitely out for a while; there are too many good horizontal pulling machines at this gym and i'm gonna be doing hip thrust+sldl every single leg workout anyway so my lower bakc and pchain don't need the extra loading on pull days.

Wait. Your name isn't Ken? Say what you want about your own worldview but mine is completely shattered. Not sure about coming back from this.

Also, there is such thing as PM/DM for those pics, my man. But, yeah, you should really only share what you're comfortable with.

I thought everyone knew my name was Isaac... it's a very distinctly black name.

It is no where close to the Darnell/Tyrone/Leroy tier.

Let's be blunt.

Yeah it's like a 2.5/10 black name. Has a lot of Jews too.

I unironically like the name Tyrone. In the very unlikely event I have a son, I would name him Tyrone. He will probably be white passing asian/black/wh87.ite/latin mixed and people will be baffled when they see him.

Slight incline db: 35kgx17, 12, 8 took all that time off training and "only" lost 2 reps on top set, victory
machine incline: ???x3 sets failure
NG flat press: ???x3 sets failure
rizzing up the 43 year old milf who I thought was 22-30 even though I am ostensibly paired: 1 setx success. Gotta keep the blade sharp even when you're not at war.
db prone raies: 5 sets failure
pushdowns: 5 sets failure no myo reps b/c first day back to training push

If I end up being unable to do free weight chest presses first this gym has more that enough equipment to do a routine where they are done last or I just do machines only for chest.

I tried to name my dog one of those. My wife refused. If there ever a reason to MGTOW, this is it.

Jamal always struck me as trashy for conventionally black male names. Trayvon used to be good until you know what happened, then its ruined.

There’s surely not a white guy in the word named Dontrell

I played rugby with a white guy called Donte though, so everything is possible

Lots of Pacific Islanders called Isaac too

pull

chins: bwx16, 10, 8 shorter rests than normal
underhand rows: 70kgx10, 8
t-bar chest supported rows: 1.5px15, 10, 13
Tiktok rows: 3 sets failure
ez curls: 20kgx30, 2 more set myo rep matching

cardio 35 minutes biking home

steps around 11k today

Surprised I gained 3 reps on chins after not doing chins for long. I guess all the various machine work might carryover to chins better than I thought.