Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

67 weeks out

AM Smashwerx internal rotation mobs day 2, 30 minutes fasted cardio

PM Legs
Seated ham curls: 60kgx21, 11, 9
Lying hamstring curls: 20kgx11, 25kgx11, 9
HIGH BAR MFin BACK SQUAT: 140kgx9, 120kgx15
Hip thrust machine: wtfx2 sets

I was not expecting squats to feel so light and so unstable at the same time. I guess that happens when you build a **** ton of leg strength while losing a **** ton of squat specific stabilizer muscle strength.

I was looking for a squat pattern that was more glute dominant than a hack squat or smith squat and I also kinda wanted to try again because the balance of my leg muscles has radically changed since the last time I did a squat. It must have been over a year since my last squat. After all the **** talk about barbell lifting and being a specialized bodybuilder addressing weak points, I've actually find a decent quad move that is heavily glute focused for me. I think I literally would have been pinned by a smith squat at this same weight with how shitty externally stabilized squat patterns have felt for me.

I originally planned a 3rd set but my lower back was too pumped so I bitched out. My lungs were also far less limiting than before.. because my cardiovascular endurance has also massively increased since the last time I did squats.

I already know if I try to squat every 7 days it'll just lead to knee soreness, burnout, and stagnation. So instead let me try either every 3rd leg workout or even every 4th one and i think I might actually allow the tendons and skeletal tissue to recover in time for the next squat sesh.

So I'll try my next squat workout at 140kgx12, 120kgx20+

I think exercise science research related to bbing is very limited, but a handful of studies show similar glute growth from squats as from hip thrusts despite basically everyone also reporting feeling it in glutes more in the hip thrust and getting more glute pump in the hip thrust. That's another very surprising reserach finding... pump is not associated with muscle growth very well. IDK if i believe it for real high level bbers but maybe.

Generally I think I need to be cycling through different movements more often and repeating workouts a bit less. Back I can seem to get away with it more but it's gotten me into a lot of overuse injury with pressing motions and leg training.

Tomorrow will not do the smashwerx internal rotation but I have an hour with a physical therapy guy so that counts.

I think your balance on topics is pretty good as is. Just keep doing what you're doing.

Agree.

TK_myotherapy sesh went swimmingly. More massage/tissue work than mobility so I'll probably return for mobility later. He said I was the first guy who was even able to self-diagnose and use the word "internal rotation" correctly and more or less offered me an internship. He's booked up and is looking to hire but having trouble with the locals being too ******ed and untrainable. Japanese guy in Thailand. i sent him the contact of Jackie from a few pages ago who just finished PT school. Jackie's parents might be furious that he interns with a self-employed Japanese guy in Thailand who mostly works on bb/pl athletes, but once they see how much money he's earning they might stfu.

No training today.

Smashwerx internal rotation mobs: completed 2 rounds instead of just 1. Felt good. Current bicep tendon pain subsiding. IDK if that's just time or if the mobbing is healing me.

Missed smashwerx mobs. Lady was here for the past few days so didn't lift. Homie from UK who also lives in China was here with a Chinese lady he barely knows and the 4 of us been out doing tourist stuff. Funnily, despite the fact that my partner is Thai, she doesn't know BKK at all so it was fun and novel for all of us. We even got drunk at a bar and we stayed out until 3am. I haven't done that since maybe last summer when I was in the early courtship phase with the muslim girl.

Still did a half-assed pull workout where I barely counted reps at the end of yesterday

NG chins: bwx14, 11, 9
underhand rows: 70kgx17, 12 was very surprised to make prs here
Mag pulldowns: 3 sets
hammer rows: 3 sets
EZ curls: 20kgx32, 3 more sets failure no myo reps

She had to go back to do some stuff with her son and she wants me to spend my days in Pattaya rather than BKK b/c she lives near there and wants to be able to pick her son up from school and spend the evenings with him. So I guess i will which kinda sucks b/c I am just not a fan of Pattaya but it's aight Elite Gym is good air conditioning and only a 10 minute drive from the liveable non-party area of Pattaya I like (Pratamnak).

Emo sorta. But tbh not really more just insight on how I should live my life:

I realize that I am completely dependent on my job. I don't mean from a financial perspective; I mean to say if I became a multimillionaire (and I guess if things don't work out with this woman and I end up single, I might end up a millionare) and had all the money I would never want or need, I would go to total **** mentally if I didn't have this job. I start to realize this almost every vacation and then forget as the school year begins. It just adds so much structure and community/socialization to my life. These things are crucial for human mental health... the feelings of acceptance/roles/hierearchy/group membership and being able to interact with people in whom there is mutual investment face to face on a frequent basis as well as having a sort of routine and structure to your days. But in a way it's kind of liberating to not have any anxiety about what you want to do with your life or making a change in the future. An excess of choice is often a source of unhappiness.

Depressed people often have poor community/belgoning/general social life, which inevitably ends up being tied to your work for the vast majority of people, and often have chaotic unstructured days. That's why I think therapy is so useless... you just pay to talk to somebody ad nauseaum about your problems but they don't give you an itemized list of solutions (I mean I guess I had one who did but the majority just kinda herp derp). When people say 'church is more useful than therapy", they probably mean just because it gets you outside socializing and connecting with other human beings, not literally the god part.

It's looking more and more like my coaching business is going to launch successfully. 2 of my guys started paying me without me asking or requesting them to. I've got another guy in the pipeline, the same british guy I mentioned above who is quitting natty PL and ready to start the enhanced bb journey. He's 27 and fat but lots of tissue underneath so it should be really fun to work with him. I write the above about being dependent on my teaching job because i think it's unrealistic for me to quit teaching and coach full time even if I could make more money doing so. I'd be very happy just having 20 clients each one paying around 1500rmb/mo and just continuing my normal job and aspirations toward eventually becoming a principal. Very nice extra chunk of change to supplement my income doing work that I really enjoy but doesn't quite cover all of the "mental health requirements" a person like me has.

I'm not trying to be didactic or suggest that this lifestyle couldn't work for some people. Somebody from an intact 2 parent household and a more normal upbrining might be just fine with this, especially if they maintained a good relationship with family and are already married/have young kids at home. It's just to say that I'd go crazy if my workday was waking up, walking over to the computer, answering client checkins for 2 hours while eating breakfast, going to do cardio, coming back, client checkins for 2 hours, go to the gym, come back, client checkins for 1 hour, "**** off and do whatever for a while" , go home, go to sleep, repeat. It's way too much freedom and way too much isolation for somebody like me to handle.

https://www.youtube.com/@ChineseHistoria...

This is quickly becoming my favorite channel on youtube. This guy is a psychotic turbo-tradcon but he just speaks with so much conviction and actually walks the walk for the completely unrealistic way he wants society to function. But ultimately even if I think his ideas about a solution are wrong/stupid/completely unrealistic, his diagnosis of the problem is 100% spot on. He's also just accidentally humorous in body language/speech patterns/delivery/facial expressions. He's coming back to China in a few months and I'd love to meet him in person, but he'd probably find me completely horrifying and "degenerate".

Right about the Church thing. Gotta find something that works for ya.

This is pretty much me and I was not happy, at all, working from home during the pandemic. Coaching solo seems worse.

i played poker professionally and hated it

left that for a career where i worked 60+ hours every week but loved it

couldn't get enough time off for travel so i left because i could do dfs full time

been working solo since 2016, my own boss and was able to travel the world which i took advantage of

yet now that i'm no longer traveling, i look back fondly at my old career, was far happier back in my days of having a daily routine of commuting into an office and working with others and now that i'm not taking advantage of the flexibility it offers its just a pit

NotThremp: Even Thremp needs connection with human beings to be happy, and he's peak misanthrope.
Soulman and Rickroll: Glad I'm not the only one. Tons of money and pussy isn't always what will make a man happy. We need connection/community/direction/structure too.

Therapy is to deep social connection what prostitution is to romantic relationships.

Occasionally real romantic relationships do emerge from what started as transactional and physical relationships. It does develop into authentic love here and there. (I mean actual prostitution, not creepy AF parasocial internet stuff) And sometimes while it remains transactional, there's still obvious mutual romantic feelings.

Occasionally therapists do establish real care and platonic "love" for their patients. It's their job, but they maybe still authentically care about a patient and they are similar to close friends or even family. But when you've got a 43 year old hyperlib white upper middle class woman from a 2 parent intact household who's been bathing in social status and a feeling of being wanted/desired/loved her entire life and a 23 year old apolotical low status male, she almost by definition can't provide effective treatment to him. She's playing bejewled on her phone trying to advise somebody on a no hit Sekiro challenge run. Especiallybecause she's also existed in an educational ideological environemnt where woman good man bad.

But both are ultimately transactional simulacrum of unmet human needs.

In that light I probably should be less harsh toward therapy, but it worked so poorly for me and I hear so many reports from various young men in my situation from when I was younger for whom it also worked poorly. They committed the "sin" of being unattractive and unathletic and this resulted in both low social status and poor romantic prospects, often confounded with the neuroticism coming from broken single motherhood led homes making whatever response they have to their circumstances amplified. Even if they have the docility and IQ required to do well in school (me) this won't necessarily earn them the social status and romantic success they are craving until later in life, and they have no way of knowing this when they are 22. And then this gets pathologized by a "professional" therapist that slaps them with a mental illness label and possibly neurologically damaging chemicals. I'm sure some therapists who aren't as ideologically captured do give them an authentic care relationship with more privacy and allow them to talk through things they wouldn't want to speak about with parents/peers, but ultimately it just seems like an egregious misdiagnosis of the problem and has the capacity to make the person much worse off if they lack the insight to asses their own provider and what they are saying.

It's just so god damn soyjacked by ideologues and people who refuse to understand differences in male and female nature. I think if it were a bit more 'self aware' about what its own goals were and less trigger happy on labelling people with mental illnesses and medication, it would be really effective. A big problem is that this would require acknowledging some very uncomfortable and unflattering truths about human nature that we collectively in the anglosphere don't want to accept.

I've been emo about all this stuff lately because DBDR who's youtube channel I posted a few months back removed his channel from youtube. His later videos started to get a bit too dark as he was facing homelessness. Frankly I was triggered and stopped listening to them because it was getting far more depressing and less entertaining. He had an enormous and highly engaged fanbase he could have monetized and just done twitch streaming and for a while it looked like he might go to trade school on his father's dime, but he had some falling out with both parents and was about to be living in his car. I think he might be right now. Yet another example of an unattractive man who ended up with low social status, felt like very bad as a normal rational response to this, was gaslit by mental health professionals into thinking he had a mental illness, and ended up wasting a whole lot of time and not making any real improvements. If we're going to live in this brave new world where single mother headed households are more and more normalized and kids aren't socialized properly, you better have a safety net rather than the cucked out version we have now.

Here's a good summary of DBDR's entire catalogue if anyone is interested for context.

The part where his mom pulls him out of group therapy just when he starts actually enjoying it (but for the wrong reasons) and gets upset with him for not being willing to take SSRIs.. pure ragefuel. Starts around 11:00

So anyway I'll prob make more posts about therapy in the future. It's an interesting and nuanced topic and despite the negative tone of the above, I've probably been too harsh about it. I think its ****ing absurd that the dating app bumble included "therapy" as an interest you can select to screen for partners... This is profound social decay.

oh yeah I did a push workout with my homie Jake LOL.

smith ohp: 1px15, 12, 10
tried a few chest exercises, not happening
db prone delt raises: 4 sets
cable side laterals: 3 sets
tricep pushdowns: 65kgx27, 3 more sets myo rep matching

20 minutes teaching Jakey how to do classic mandatories.

I'm debating when to start the cut. I feel like just starting right when I get back for the simple reason that I can't really train offseason push and actually get stronger because of my bicep tendon issue. I figure if I cut for 16 weeks and don't gain much strength/lose strength my pec tendon will stay healthier and I can use those months to rehab the internal rotation so that it is not a problem when I finally go into a "real" offseason. As I've said before, the stimming and sense of life urgency/scarcity of free time tends to greatly increase my working efficiency. But we have a 1 week holiday first week of october and I still do want to make progress on glutes+hams+lats in a surplus so I could just keep going until first week of october and then start.

f'kn lol at whites who think of China as being "backward" for not having a developed mental health system. People are less neurotic because few of them grow up in broken fragmented families, they have a far greater sense of group cohesion, healthier attitudes toward hierarchy, and don't blame the people at the bottom of status hierarchies for being at the bottom and use this to justify tormenting them or gaslighting them. They acknowledge the people at the bottom are more unfortunates than losers. Genes and circumstances outside of their control are often what put them there.

A much smaller % of their population is as maladjusted as the USA, so they don't need an enormous mental health apparatus (which by the way isn't doing a great job in the aggregate...). But that's quickly changing as the same social changes that afflicted America have been afflicting China....

i think one of the absolute worst things about western culture is acceptance of who you are - not healthy and realistic stuff like "it's ok if you don't win olympic gold or become a billionaire" but things like "i'm a fatass and that's ok" or "i don't need to strive in life because welfare will take care of me almost as well as working an entry level job full time"

we have 345 million americans

40 million are on food stamps - that's more than 10% of the general population which is insane

we also have 42% of americans who are obese - this does not include all the casually overweight people

it excuses away laziness and drives complacency where we've warped our culture to the point where it's wrong to factually describe someone as fat and one of the cruelest things you can do in our society is to call people on welfare lazy

there's 8.2 million jobs available right now in america, it's mostly things in the service industry - but basically every restaurant in america is actively hiring right now but people would rather collect welfare checks than work full time and earn 20% less

yes i acknowledge there's a lot of people who can't work for various reasons and need that assistance, but there's far more who take advantage of it - growing up working in seasonal manual labor jobs, i had plenty of colleagues who were maxing out the system telling their boss they'd only work x hours because once they earned more than a certain amount, they'd lose eligibility to receive welfare - what would happen is the bosses didn't care, they just needed the labor and would often times pay them under the table and off the clock if they needed them for additional hours

living in asia and seeing the "you're ugly because you put no effort into being attractive" and "you're poor because you have no ambition" was a breath of fresh air

i think a big part of it is they don't hide it

things like how much money you earn is public info, something someone will casually ask and if you're embarrassed by how much or how little your answer is, well that's a you problem

same fat people - they'd be like "hey rickroll, you need sally in hr to sign off on this, she's the fat one" - they aren't saying it to be mean, they know that's the best way for me to find who sally is

whereas we are so absurd about describing people accurately out of fear of offending them

this is a really good article about dove making a serious error in bringing there "everyone is beautiful" campaign to china

https://adage.com/article/media/festival...

Obesity and economic status are a bit more nuanced than just "lazy gonna lazy."

Having said that...yeah, lazy gonna lazy too. Definitely doesn't help.

oh yeah 100%

but 42% obese and 11% on food stamps is not a natural outcome - those numbers are 100% boosted up by culture

like asians are not better at math, they just work harder in school

they also get fat just as easily as we do - but they watch what the eat carefully in order to avoid that

yet we just pretend that it's due to their metabolism

On the macro, yes, the reliance on therapy is pretty bad in most cases, but on the other hand, having any woman for whom "therapy" is important enough to filter to filter me out (were I actually on the market, which PLOKJ willing I never will) seems . . . pretty great and a huge time and sanity saver.

Great discussion and I enjoy your thoughts as usual.

yeah on dating apps you see a lot of women who put in their bio "you must be in therapy" in their bio - never understood that, sounds like they've had some terrible experiences before

Last paragraph actually isn’t too far off from a normal day for me since switching to online coaching. Although it’s actually less than 5 hours work. And you are correct, it doesn’t really bother me since I’m married with two young kids. The freedom and quiet of WFH isn’t bad at all compared to the chaos of two kids under 5. If I were single I could see it driving me crazy and getting bored. I have added in some private in-person training to the mix as well so I’m not 100% online and have some social interaction.

I def would not recommend only doing online coaching unless you already had a ton of clients and a business and website and everything setup. Even then, there is a a lot of variance on the pay. I think you either need a significant other with a steady job or a steady job with the coaching on the side. Otherwise it would be too stressful whenever you lose clients

Wow. I’ve never seen this once. But I would be quietly appreciative of them letting me know up front that it could never work between us

I didn't think that acknowledging having meaningful human relationships and some sort of vague sense of "community", even with a bunch of nihilist losers on the internet was some sort of profound realization. But since we're on the subject, I regularly have a variety of people I talk to both online and in person. I also work/advise/invest in a bunch of stuff which range from personal passion projects to helping ghetto black people be less ghetto and black to things that actually make money (moreso to see whether I can do them and buy more luxury consumer goods than any other reason).

Gotta fulfill all your little social needs to be happy and it is pretty hard to do that while isolated. While Maslow's has its problems, socialization requirements are on the second rung right above stuff like food and shelter. Without someone to share things with or meaningful friends, work colleagues, and even the friends that gradually transition in and out of your life, you aren't really gonna make it beyond some sort of weird navel gazing level of self-actualization.

This whole "must be in therapy" thing is baffling. Maybe cause I live in a society that this hasn't permeated? Maybe cause I don't date? (Weirdly marriage has really put a crimp on the amount of time I spend on dating apps.)

I honestly think most dudes who are semi-losers could simply join a church, do the song and dance routine, get a trade job, and live reasonably happy lives with some other woman who just wants to find a guy that has a job and wants 2.2 children and wants them to believe in their chosen fable about the world and how to behave in it. Any church is a very slick gig for a trade since you now have an in built network of people that will contact you for no other reason than you're part of their tribe. I guess if you're the type of person who feels to urge to correct someone about everything, then yeah... gonna be tough. But if you can listen to Uncle Dave at thanksgiving rant about immigrants taking his dang jobs (clearly they're all low level middle managers), you can suffer through some songs about god and stand up/sit down at the appropriate times for an hour a week.

Sounds like you have some solid goals lined up, especially with your shift to a more bodybuilding-focused program. Staying injury-free while optimizing your diet is key, and your insights on PEDs are spot on—keeping it balanced and sustainable is the way to go. Looking forward to more of your fitness tips and seeing your progress. Keep it up!

wow that's an impressive job done by that marketing bot account - must be using chatgpt to read the thread and craft a response to put in the link in an appropriate looking post

This paragraph would do more for most semi-loser 18-24 year old dudes who get thrown into therapy than therapy will. I'm talking about therapy for low status/unattractive males who's main problem is keen awareness of their low status and inability to get a mate. They get pathologized and put on SSRIs/antipsychotics/mood stabilizers. They get the "you MUST go to college!" script. They get told that their response to being unable to attract a mate and observing the social cues of their own low status is somehow pathological and indicative of some psychiatric problem. They get into this cycle of talking about traumas over and over again and lead into believing that these traumas are an integral part of their identity. The archetypical semi-loser I'm talking about would be best exemplified by DBDR: sub 5/10 facial attractiveness, less than 6 foot tall, average IQ, divorced family without a present dad. "Go to church and take up a trade or military/police service" is more effective for this archetypal male than anything any therapist is going to say.

Did I fit into this category? Almost. I had very good academic ability and a very present dad despite the divorce, but otherwise yes. So at least the "go to college herp derp" thoughtless prescription ended up being effective for me, even if it was extremely counterproductive for DBDR.

thremp, your post hit pretty close to home because often times whenever i'm talking to someone i'm not too impressed with they will mention all the benefits they get out of the church they are a member of - how it provides an instant social group and is very good for their careers as well

are you still sportsbetting btw? i've been slowly transitioning to that from dfs over the last few years and it's been going pretty well, last year sports betting represented single largest earning source for the first time

not a crusher by any means, mostly grabbing low hanging fruit on pphs and kiosks, but i've read a lot of your posts over the years and i travel all the time so if you ever want a beer on me dm me your general location

btw that goes for all of you guys and i'm basically going to do a huge road trip from maine to seattle to texas with millions of stops along the way starting next week so decent chance i'll roll by your neighborhood

evo i'm really sad we never linked up during my china days, had to leave suddenly and then when i came back it was just in time for covid and assumed you were gone - will definitely seek you out next time i'm in asia - miss it majorly, especially the food