tCK

Snatch doubles up to 96kg.

Hit the first double @ 96.  Missed the second rep of the second double.  Came back and hit 96kg twice on the third set.  I went for an additional set to try and make up for my miss on set #2, but I couldnt seem to get it.

Clean and jerk singles up to 90% (119kg).  Jerks felt weak, but mostly because my wrists weren’t warmed up adequately.  No misses.

Snatch triples up to 90kg (84%).

I missed the third rep on the first set, but then I was able to triple 90kg twice after that and each set felt stronger.

FS 135kg for a single then 4 doubles @ 122kg (80%).

So I have decided to squat to max (then possibly drop back for additional work sets) every day. I hit a new front squat pr (152kg) Wednesday, and hit 174kg in the back squat last night (not a pr, but nice). Hopefully 182 is coming soon…

I made this smoothie today, I enjoyed it.  Be careful to use very ripe fruit, otherwise you get very muddled flavors.

1 banana

1 half-pint of blueberries

2 peaches (ripe!)

heavy cream

can of coconut milk

a bit of honey

ice

All Pro Science Grass-fed Whey Vanilla

Directions:

Blend.

Don’t go overboard on the honey.  I have done this before and it really overpowers things.  1 tablespoon is plenty.  For coconut milk I find the best (and most expensive) is Taste of Thai.  It separates in the can but don’t worry about that.  You are blending it anyway after all.  A good strategy for the whey is to blend the whole shebang a little at first and then gradually add the whey in while it’s blending.  Whey, at least with my blender, has a tendency to clump and stick to the sides so if you add it in slowly like a powder this takes care of it.  Obviously this thing is super high in fruit sugars, but again its for post-workout.

Men:  Rarely in the course of human history have men been forced to rise up and shout to society, “WE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT”.  However, the culture we live in is increasingly telling men to deny their instincts and conform to a norm more acceptable in female dominated society.  

I can’t figure out when this started.  I have a hunch that in the mid to late 60s, when males stopped universally loving sports, beer, their high school football team and their best friend, Spud, and started singing beatnik songs at peace rallies we started down the wrong path.  When we traded in the popular high and tight for grimy flowing locks and turned on the men that wore that high and tight as a matter of function when fighting oversees, trouble began.  Dodging the draft became culturally acceptable.  Later, dodging fatherhood became tacitly permissible when “Big Brother” would step in and clean up the mess.  

Of course we had some good times.  Seems we were trying to turn things around in the 1980s.  Arnold and Stallone were making movies where men had to box or fight their way to the top (or Over it in the case of Stallone).  Gordon Gecko taught us all the values of capitalism and Stallone showed us that to beat the juicing Russians all we needed was some wood, an axe, and a big net full of rocks.  With a resurgence like that, how did we go wrong?

I think it started slowly, with things we couldn’t notice.  Our movie stars got downsized.  Instead of Stallone and Arnold, we had Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe.  Then, we went even smaller with Jason Statham.  Now we are in a real mess when Adrien Brody just starred in a movie based on a classic 80s Arnold film.  ADRIEN BRODY!  The guy weighs 145 lbs soaking wet.  

We traded this:

For this:

It didn’t just happen in movies, although we can see where society got their cues from.  We elected a president in 1992 who was overshadowed by his wife throughout his presidency.  We had the leader of our country, the Commander in Chief, not even wearing the pants in his own family of three.  How can this be a good message for the men of America?  And on top of that, we got mixed messages the whole way.  She didn’t give a crap that Bill went around philandering with every mediocre looking 165 lb blonde in a 15 foot radius of his office.  So, we can cheat, as long as we help our spouse get elected to office later in life?  But Tiger Woods taught us that we could be the greatest golfer in the world 10 times over but if we start stepping out on the misses, we will soon shoot an 82.  So that doesn’t seem like the best route either.

Around this time we decided that the diet du jour would be “low-fat”.  What does low-fat mean?  It also means low protein.  Large sources of protein in nature are invariably accompanied by large sources of fat.  So when we cut one, we cut the other.  We started pumping out chickens and telling men to get their protein from skinless chicken breasts.  Let’s look at the chicken.  It’s name is synonymous with cowardly behavior.  It is a flightless bird that pecks at insects and corn all day long.  Is this what we want to be eating?  

You know what happens when a man (or a woman but stick with me here) eats a cut of beef?  Well he gets a dollop of highly bioavailable protein and fat.  This causes his body to release only a tiny amount of insulin, but an even larger amount of growth hormone.  Think of early man, when he ate a cow, he knew “I’m gonna need to kill another one of these if I want to eat again soon.”  What did his body do?  It repaired the muscle damaged in the killing and prepping of the previous cow, signaled to his body to pump out some more testosterone for the next cow killing adventure, and it said, “Let’s start burning this fat for energy when we are on the hunt because if we are leaner we can run faster.”

What happens when a man eats some wheat?  His body says, “We gotta store this cause we know that wheat is only available part of the year, and since it can’t run away from us, we have no need to be lean and muscled.”

So now we have Adrien Brody out there telling us that to be action stars we need to eat the breast of a flightless bird and a couple of potatoes and some bread.

And what do we wash it down with?  A Guiness?  A PBR?  Whole milk?  A nice amber ale?  No.  We wash it down with some kind of squeezed fruit juice.  In the event we are even ALLOWED to order an adult beverage, a hot female bartender berates us for ordering anything BUT Miller Lite, which does have more taste.  Too bad that taste most accurately resembles 2 day old goat piss fermented in a can for a week.  

Obviously, things have gone horribly awry.  We have to reach out to the heroes of old to save us, like the Vikings who saught power from Thor or the early Americans who remembered those who bravely fought at the Alamo.  Arnold and Stallone are trying to save us.  They brought back the best of the heroes of the 80s, combined with the best the 90s and 2000s had to offer.  They packaged it in a neat film tightly wrapped and put it against the Oprah darling Eat. Pray. Love.  

The first step on our journey back to manliness starts August 13.  Let’s stop being males and start becoming men again.  I’ll see you at the theater.