Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

The US university system is so dumb. If you look at Eurotardia schools, they fall into weird US-style campus experiences (Oxbridge, INSEAD, etc) with the accompanying price tags, or a merit based system where you go into a glorified office building and live in a shitty dorm that is identical to the other cheap apts near them with a cost that makes community college look expensive. Maybe having kids start to become adults instead of taking a 4y vacation and 200k of debt is a better solution?

Who ****ing knows. But you can make plenty of money fixing toilets and if you're feeling the entrepreneurial itch, put your name on some vans and hire some other bros. Then feel weird when you drive down the street to fix some surgeon's toilet and he realizes you make more money than he does.

I still live in Tallinn. You have prob 2ish years before I leave to live in some tiny ass village with under 500 people. Got my 4 acres on the river and plan to live out my days doing yard work and complaining about deer eating my garden.

I stopped betting during COVID. But we made a bunch of money off PPHs. "Sweat the payout, not the game" was the saying we found most apropos. Most have never had anyone beat them so they're utterly baffled when they realize they're in the hole 6 figs to you.

Tho I guess I'll be in Thailand again during Dec? Some gay interracial couple is getting married.

oh man, i was literally planning on going to tallin next year to visit my friend there but he literally just called me this week to say that he spontaneously decided to rent a place in austin texas

their wedding ceremony was at the old tallinn town hall in the old town square and then the reception was at the medieval brotherhood of the blackhead guild hall

was amazing

i have a lot of very distant finnish relatives we still keep in touch with so decent chance i still go back to that area anyway in next few years, if so will dm you and we can go drink vodka and eat wild boar

You were around 100m from where I live.

oh man, back then just purely dfs with the stupid bias that only degens or geniuses can sports bet but i'm good evidence you can do it with room temp iq

no 6 figure pphs these days, this is typical

also 500 is only for mainstream stuff, live betting and obscure stuff usually 50/100/200/250 limits - all props are 50

initally had 2k credit and took a while to break it open

usually getting 20k profit is about where they decide to cut you off, some though you can get for close to 6 figures if variance helps out with some periodic big losses mixed in that give them hope (and/or they just got so many marks that they're not really paying too much attention and takes them a long time to realize they are way down to you overall)

but it's still valuable even with the stiff potential because dk won't let me bet more than a few bucks even on some mainstream markets

this is for the olympic gold medal game and you can see despite that being a mainstream market it won't let me wager more to win more than $50

even trying to "mix it up" and be degen making an sgp out of it they'll still limit you to an insane amount

So finding people to get PPH accounts and giving them a win freeroll is how this is usually done. 5-10% will do it. Live poker is great for this.

lmao, love it man. PLUMBER-MOGGING

Same damn thing applies here. The richest people I know have ****ing 9th grade degrees and started majiang parlours, tea houses, repair big office buildings' air conditioners. But as we discussed several pages back, there's a whole interplay with status and connections that come with university and that impact is also strong in China. Marriage market outcomes are more on people's minds than just their bank accounts/lifetime earnings.

I'm in and out of Thailand. I won't go this October even with the opportunity; I'd just rather my partner come to me next time. Xmas is a possibility.

66 weeks out
Legs in the morning:
Seated Ham curls: 130x14, 100x15, 11
laying ham curls: forgotx3xfail
leg press: 3.5ppsx27, 16, 14
hip thrust machine: 150kgx12, 9, 8

Smashwerx internal rotation mobs evening

Getting to bed before 10pm tonight and trying to get training done first thing AM while on vacation so that I can have fun and explore the rest of the day without fearing getting distracted and not making it to the gym.

yeah going rate is about 10-20% these days :(

66 weeks out

Smashwerx internal rotation mobs+push

incline smith: 80kgx11, 60kgx15, 10 felt good but this smith is hard to rack and unrack
Various playing around with machines figuring out if anything feels good, no
machine ohp: 3 sets
pushdowns: 45kgx22, 3 more sets myorep matching

Kinda short.

Incline smith is starting to actually feel very good as far as feeling the movement where I'm supposed to. But it took a long time and my working weights are still pathetic.

I'm literally an investor in a company run by a guy who finished 9th grade. He employs 60 people making video games and runs a school to train people to use software to make games.

So yeah... if you can literally run a tech company without a HS degree... what exactly are you learning?

I think the obvious answer is that there are outliers that are going to be successful regardless of their level of educational achievement, but that the average salaryperson probably needs some further seasoning to be employable. College doesn't necessarily have to be what's providing that, but in this country it's developed as such for reasons that I think are pretty obvious. Going back to the liberal arts being reserved for the landed gentry to have a hobby probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

My brother’s son is very bright but couldn’t get an acceptance to Ivy, almost certainly for profiling reasons. (He was too 0.2% academically apparently). He’s ended up at Williams College doing some kind of Lib Arts degree/linguistics. It’s $70k+ per year and …short of going into the CIA (he’s learned Russian and Cantonese in his spare time) I’ve got no idea how he’s gonna get much value out of it

More likely it's just due to variance. There is not really a great way in the US for a top 0.2% person to reliably distinguish themselves on paper from a top 1% person or even lower. They will all get straight As in school and the common standardized tests that are given are easy, so all the kids in those groups score roughly the same. Moreover, both will probably do just fine once they get to college. So there are plenty of kids that are good enough and from there it is just a subjective variance-fest.

Within the context of a US-centric worldview, this is definitely true. The level of derpiness from someone 18 in the US (or even into young adulthood upto mid-late 20s for predominantly women). I think this is somewhat due to societal views in the US (apparently there is a belief that you can actually groom a consenting adult, which is wild) which prevent teenagers and young adults from effectively making a transition to adulthood. This is also highly class dependent. You meet a kid who's 21 who is now a trade who owns a trailer, a truck, and his own patch of dirt and compare that to upper middle class WASPy waman who is finishing her junior year of gender studies... and its pretty wao.

I think we have similar views on silly degrees vs actual degrees, which I assume any sane person does.

Going to the 10th best school in the US isn't that big of an L. As my interviewer from Yale once told me (spoiler: I didn't get in), "Doesn't really matter what you study. There isn't a degree for being COO of a some company running a factory."

He'll just get some exec job because to get in and complete a degree at an elite school is the litmus test.

Or he can become a glowie.

I think he was speaking more to the fact that many Asians suffer at the hands of the DEI/URM narrative, while white people just keep the nepo-baby narrative going. But maybe not, I certainly do not know this friend or what he's thinking. But lol AA initiatives that are generally pretty dogshit. (See research on the UC system.)

Re. my nephew, the thought was the middle class white kids aren’t getting into those schools because they limit the overall percentage of white kids to promote diversity and then favour sons and daughters of alumni and wealthy donors and then white kids from disadvantaged backgrounds .

I’m not totally against it tbh on a macro scale but it was tough on him as it was his dream and it wasn’t like he was some private school kid. Even though he of course had a head start given his comfortable upbringing

Williams was actually the only school I didn't get into back in the day - still feels bad, man.

Yeah, and let's not discount the value of social signalling and convenient heuristics, either. HR is still a function of an organization and if they had to deeply assess the competence of every single prospective employee without easy shortcuts it'd be an exhausting disaster. Not everyone has entrepreneurial talent or risk tolerance either. But the fancy dorms/gyms/swimming pools/climbing walls/enormous admin salaries and bullshit majors could use some scaling back.

Chinese universities are perhaps too severe on this... dorm rooms with 6-8 kids in bunk beds and 1-2 bathrooms. 0 serious sports teams, school gyms, swimming pools, etc. Profs usually making less base salary than international high school teachers and probably even some normal high school teachers too, but more free time/outside employment opportunities.

Something in the middle would be ideal.
pPull:
Chins: bwx15, 10, 12 rested too little. BW is around 104.xkg evening. Still got quad veins and abs without flexing and just standing there relaxed. But obv its making it hard to progress reps on chins with bw climbing.
underhand rows: 80kgx13, 11, 60kgx11. Different gym and I was not paying attention and misloaded and was like "okay here we go 70kgx18 wtf wow this feels so heavy how can I get 18 omg"
machine rows: 2 sets failure
dual handle pulldowns: 2 sets failure
curls: 2 sets failure, 20kgx33, 14 didn't feelt good on proximal bicep tendon so stopped.

**** I remember a few years back I'd do 3 sets of chins with worse form/fast eccentrics/some bounce and then do overhand rows with some body english and no pause at this working weight. Now underhand rows with a pause turbostrict Progress is accumulating slowly but it's coming.

I will start the diet basically immediately when I get back. I've never gotten a level of conditioning I'd be totally satisfied with on a national level stage and I want to get to that level well before I actually start a prep for a show like that. I have enough mass to win already and I seem to grow muscle better when lean and at the early stages of a diet anyway.

I can't give bodybuilding my 100% priority in life and don't want to anyway. So starting the prep leaner is going to be a requirement and I figure this go around will be the first time I both start lean and pace myself with stimulants/clenbuterol. I think 16 weeks out just caffeine+yohimbine, 14 weeks out try taking those condemned labz arsyn capsules and emptying out the powder and mixing 1/4th of the powder with morning coffee, somewhere between 12 and 10 weeks out finally start the clen. 25mcg t3 day 1 and keep it there. Same approach as last time with PEDs, low test between .5-1.5 ccs, high masteron over 800mg, low tren around 200mg/wk. That worked well and felt great. If I can find a show around January less than 6-7 hour flight away I will go ahead and do it. Thailand/Japan/Korea are all options because its unlikely we'll have any shows in Janaury in China. Just a mock prep/peak and a professional photoshoot is fine. Last one i bailed on from stomach issues leading up to it. I don't think I want to prep for more than 16 weeks this time or ever; if I need more than 16 weeks it means I was probably too fat offseason and I am going to maintain lower bodyfat offseason even if it means much more frequent dieting as much as 1.5x/yr on average.

Thursday I will have my first ever client competing at a show in men's physique division. I've only been working with him on his fat loss phases as he loves to just screw off during offseason and pound the beers and bbq. Nothing wrong with that but obviously it makes the contest preps very hard and long if you're starting fatter. He's down from 115kg in January to 88kg in August. I can barely imagine losing that much scale weight... even last academic year when I did 7 cumulative months of dieting I think my BW went from 103-104 to around 90 at the lowest.

Plus a posing only natty client but I can't really take credit for coaching him on anything but posing.

I've been doing more emoblogging so here it goes:
Years start and end in August for teachers. "August retrospective" and wow have things been on an upward trajectory. Last year at the end of summer break I was with that b1tch-4ss muslim girl while still pining for another ex, I was fat, dogshit sleep b/c fat and snoring, poor cardiovascular health, burnt out on training from too much of a powerbuilding approach that I'd only started getting away from a few months before. But weirdly despite all of this, I actually was happy though. I literally didn't know how much better things could be. It feels like literally days after I told her to kick rocks everything started getting better... I think about 2 weeks post breakup is when i started the diet. That was the easiest breakup ever tbh. She had a ton of potential but the flaws were just so glaring and she had no intention of addressing them. I regret not leaving sooner. The other 2 major relationships I had in China I'm still ambivalent about leaving them many years later... my life wouldn't necessarily be worse if I had stayed with them, just radically different to what it is now.

Career/social life was and still is excellent though so at least I had that going for me and I'm actually expecting my social life to get much worse in the next academic year. Right now it feels like stars are aligning and everything else is going perfectly. Now I just gotta wait for a delusional menopausal fempat in a position of power over me to materialize to screw up my good life run lately. If this happens, I've been around long enough not to flex my clearly superior knowledge of Chinese culture/language/classroom and how to actually deal with Chinese students in a practical and realistic way. Instead I will be mindlessly obedient, question nothing she says, defer to her as an expert, praise her for civilizing the locals (don't use that phrasing obviously) and generally be willing to say things you don't mean and do things you know aren't optimal to appease the egos of people who have power over you.

HR tacitly told me I can continue doing coaching on the side. All int'l schools in China forbid outside employment in the contract, but it's mostly so that you don't offer private tutoring to existing students or teach students from other schools on the side for big $. It's also because it's illegal to work for a company other than the one sponsoring your visa. They actually don't really give a crap about entrepreneurial efforts completely seperate from teaching but they can't write that in the contract. She told me I do need to STFU about it and create social media accounts seperate from work ones if I continue though. Can't have colleagues/students/parents or anyone in the school community as a client, which is very understandable of course.

This is what I figured and definitely a big glaring lol in the current zeitgeist in the US university system.

I got rejected from every Ivy except Brown and also NYU!!! Absurd. Didn't apply to Amherst/Williams, but would've actually had a reasonable shot there. College in the US is silly.

Obv I went to the shittiest school I applied to. Debt free life was pretty good.

You got it.

I'm sure you'll find a woman to ruin your life eventually.

Or you won't. 50/50.

there was a study where they compared thousands of Ivy grads and people who would've qualified academically but went to other schools for various reasons and they were basically doing the same financially within 5 years of graduating

yes, the first job offer would be better on average for an Ivy grad but a similarly smart and motivated human is going to catch up very quickly

doubtmeme.jpeg

the worst fate on earth is to love someone not for who they currently are, but who you think they could be - i've fallen for that a bunch (she'd be my dreamgirl if only you eliminated these 3 things which make her a terrible person

yeah i do this far too often myself, will often find myself wondering where my life would be today if i stayed in a relationship with various other women - there's definitely a few that i regret not turning into a serious relationship where i kept it casual for months and we eventually found other people

yeah i exploited common app free apply to the max and if it was a school i was remotely interested in that didn't require additional work i just sent it to them as well

got rejected from quite a few schools but oddly got into my top choice which was arguably the hardest one to get into - none of it made any sense to me but it ultimately wasn't a problem because i got into my first choice

is early application still a thing? that dramatically increases your accpetance rate because the schools will often reject a bunch of kids they'd otherwise accept if they get the feeling the kid may choose another school instead just to maintain artificially low acceptance rates for higher rankings

I had a great leg workout but it wrecked me a bit

66 weeks out
FFESS: 15kg dbsx16x3
Seated ham curls: 115kgx17, 12, 10
Toes elevated paused SLDL: 105kgx20 great, 110 next
leg extensions: 3 sets failure

Smashwerx shoulder mobs

Cut starting when I go home. I'm going to take the next 2-3 days off lifting and let my bicep tendon finish healing up before I get back at it. I think the new set of internal rotation mobs are really working well and I will probably be db pressing without issues within a few months. During this next upcoming 16 week "contest prep" cut I'll be focusing on smith+machines, but I might throw in some dbs as the 3rd exercise on some push workouts.

These SLDL paused 20s are working a lot better than doing multiple sets. I think I can progress on load on this quite far since I only do it every 3rd leg workout.

Next leg workout will be HBBS as the main character. I have 140kgx12 in my head. I'll do that on the 19th.

I definitely moved to the left a bit on my affirmative action views over the years. I'd say that all things being equal (and they normally never are, but we're talking theoretical here) I'm fine with the tie going to the kid from a disadvantaged background. Or even if it is pretty close.

When I think about my own kids, they've got pretty much every advantage when it comes to school. If some poor kid with a single parent and possibly has to deal with a good bit of racism can equal their achievements, I'd have a hard time thinking that this kid didn't have much higher potential and was just held back by their circumstances. However, when I was in the game myself, I didn't really have this view. Also taking this from theory to real-world application is extremely difficult.

I doubt it will make him feel differently but if you look at the stats, his being white is probably an advantage over being Asian. So wherever he ends up, there is probably some Asian kid with similar or slightly better stats who didn't get his spot.

I'm actually good with silly degrees if you have a plan. For example, if you want to become a lawbro, silly degree is almost optimal. Collect your 4.0 with no effort and crust the LOL LSAT. That's probably good enough for at least one of HYS, and then you're set.

There plenty of doors that having perfect grades will unlock for you. And if doing the silly degree is what it takes, then just do that. The key is in the execution. If you do the silly degree and then decide not to follow step two of the plan (e.g. becoming a lawbro), then you don't have much to show for it and it really is a silly degree.

I find this stuff exhausting to think about. None of us are going to affect any change and whatever damage it did to me is already over with. I just live my life and prefer to not even think about these things.

I still absolutely love the entertainment value of our presidental electoral cycles though. Why tf do candidates always have to ****** dance? so many damn videos of Kamala dancing looool.

65 weeks out
Push
Incline smith paused: 80kgx15, 60kgx16, 60kgx11
machine press: 3 sets of 12-20
machine fly: 3 sets failure
DB prone side raises: 5 sets
pushdowns: 50kgx22, 3 more sets myo rep matching.

Now that I've had a lot of time to practice incline smith more it feels actually really good. I'd say still not as good as db or bb incline; unlike legs or back, machines really don't feel better than free weights for chest exercises beyond just less stress on pec tendon/elbow. Literally nothing has ever felt better than incline 30 degree barbell, but I've been unable to do this exercise for years. 15 degree incline db is a good 2nd place.

Most of the time when I had proximal bicep tendon problems I'd have to totally stop training to let it heal, but since I've been doing smashwerx internal rotations I've been basically able to train through it all the way through and it's at around 90% now. I am going to stick to smith as my 1st exercise (unless it, too, starts becoming bothersome) for the next 17 weeks until the next big cut ends. i actually don't know how many smiths my new gym will have so this may end up being impossible because it's being crowded by people doing dumb **** on there like my last gym where the smith was just never free.

Last year we had a show on Dec 13. That'd be exactly 16 weeks out from when I start the diet... that would be really nice to go through the prep and every part of the pharmacology and step on stage again before I start prepping for the important show.

I think it was around 5-6 months between but with 4 weeks totally off the diet after the first 3 months.