weights

i added more pictures to an old set on flickr.
it was mainly to tell you this amazing story:

Clement is a physical training god.
he may just be a simple front desk worker, but this guy knows his shit.

i used to go into the weight room and lift near the heaviest shit i could.
then clement tells me of the stuff he reads about.
he talks about TUP (time under pressure) where the more amount of time that your muscles are resisting the weight, the better.
which makes much sense when you think about it.

but rather than pushing for an inordinate number of reps, the key is to find a good weight for you where you can do something like 10 reps while taking 3 to 4 seconds with each rep, slowly lowering and raising the bar.
his other key is rest. he says you should take 5 to 7 days of rest before reworking that same muscle grouping.
which i found to be true. when i went to Alaska, i was at a certain point, but when i came back, even though i hadn't been lifting, i felt that somehow i had recooperated and grown stronger.

coupled with the max time resistence technique, i've been doing fairly well.

there's this guy Tony, who comes in daily and is super buff.
He can crank out 30 continuous reps on the bench press with 45's on each side, which makes it 135 lbs.
in that picture however, he has 2 45's on each side. he put out about 5 of those.

but almost every time i work, if our paths happen to cross in the weight room and he's just done
or is about to do some reps, he'll point to the bar and give me some ungodly number to do.
he's says, "i did 30, now you do 30."

today must have been a bad day cuz he only did 25. so he tells me to do 25.
every time i try, i get nowhere near that number.
the closest i've ever gotten before was 17.
but on friday, something was different.
after doing the slow reps that Clement told me to do, even though i now do less weight, i'm somehow more buff.
Tony sat and watched as i cranked out 25 reps, easily.
thinking about it, i could probably have put out 2 -5 more, but meeting my quota, i stopped.

usually, everytime i stop and some measily low number, Tony will insatiably laugh his booming laugh.
that day, he just said, "you did it. good job."
and walked off.

ha! maybe i'm starting to scare him.
cuz he works his ass off to be able to do that, and i just follow the wise words of Clement.