Masters in Disguise
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It's unthinkable for me to enter the iron and steel chamber without seizing any number of its assorted implements and then flog myself till I howl. Eventually, typically clutching my throat with both hands, I stagger backwards into a wall and slide down to the floor in a battered heap before crawling out the back door. Very dramatic.
I mean, like, what are my options: pushy-pulley, patsy-platesy, sit on the leg extension while texting the girls...or blast it? I hate decisions.
It's not punishment I seek, nor do I find pleasure in pain. Victory is my goal and as I've long noted, the mean approach to the steel works best. In fact it's the only approach I know or have ever engaged. Enter chamber, bomb, burn and blast, exit chamber.
Clean and concise, simple and stunning. It works.
Over time, however, I discover this bullish Type A methodology has developed disadvantages: mainly swollen joints, body aches and fatigue; diminishing strength, muscle and appetite; loss of humor, friends and hair. I suspect my methodology needs re-tuning.
Here's the stinker: I have made adjustments throughout the years: exercises and exercise patterns, sets and reps, volume, duration and weight. These essentials have been finessed according to the highly accurate and scientifically sound principles of touch and guesswork, instinct and wonder developed in the iron research labs from the Dungeon off Muscle Beach to Minichello's Mid-City Gym off Times Square in Manhattan.
The only dynamic I've been unable to modify is the intensity factor. Kicking and screaming, I've fractioned the days in the gym, the hours of the workouts, the exercises performed and the weight on the bars. What remains is an anemic collection of sets and reps and a puny pile of metal. The least and the most I can do is shove the craven iron clump around the gym floor with all my might.
Thus, in my heart I know my input has not diminished. I did no less last year than I did fifty years ago: 100 percent, my very best, the maximum weight and the last rep with total intensity.
These thoughts in mind, I ask myself—the only mug who'll listen—why not alter this tactic as well?
Lighten the load, back off the last reps and move at a smoother and readier pace. Choose a weight for any given exercise that allows X reps maximum, but perform X reps minus two. Move on according to recovery, whether the same exercise or the second of a superset, and perform with similar intensity. This scheme enables more exercises, sets and reps in a shorter, less drastic period of time with less abuse to the joints and system.
I like the theory, as I sit here in my snug little nest in the woods. I think I'll dash to the gym and give the soft touch a try. I'll wear my smiley face as I skip to the front door and dance across the thick rubber mats to the dumbbell rack. No wraps, no ugly faces, no groans, no guts, no glory.
While I was daydreaming, up popped a bold and inventive arrangement of exercises you could try tomorrow:
Do legs, or walk home with a fifty-pound pack on your back. Take the short cut over the mountain, across the plains and up the five flights of stairs.
Rope tucks and hanging leg raises (3 sets x 25, 3 sets x 12)
Steep dumbbell incline press (4 sets x 6 reps)
superset with
Stiffarm pullover (4 x 8)Flat bench dumbbell press (4 sets x 6 reps)
superset with
Seated lat row (4 x 8)Standing barbell curl (4 sets x 6 reps)
superset with
Lying triceps extension (4 x 8)
Now this routine, probably to be awarded the Most Original at the Summer Bodybuilding Festival next year in Tuscan, Italy, can be comfortably accomplished in sixty minutes by any exercise enthusiast.
However, if it is muscle and might you seek, say, of the variety one imagines when huge and ripped are suggested (seriously, what other variety is there?), then you must consider adjusting the training intensity upward.
Here's the stinker, again. There's no avoiding intensity. It's the only thing big muscles know.
"Where are my wraps?"
As the years go by and I mature and grow strong, gathering wisdom and insight and clarity, as I develop depth of character and expand my spiritual dimension, bittersweet humility steps forward and seizes its ultimate role as the shaper of my soul.
"What a dork."
Where once I was bound to childish wanderings and inconsequential deeds, I am now on the path of the timeless masters, the dust of their footsteps before me yet unsettled. I remember "huge and ripped" and "lean and shapely," trivial and absurd as if these conditions held importance.
My face flushes as I recall the foolishness of my youthful pursuits; my heart aches with disappointment upon noting their meaninglessness. I sigh with frustration while summarizing their emptiness.
"What a sap."
What advantages do hugeness and rippedness of muscle offer eager seekers? What opportunities are missed in their quest? How does one stray so far from normality and rightness, and where were those whose duty it was to steer the lost aright? Ah, but only the fool looks back and regrets his behavior. We are who we are and we press on.
"You press on alone."
Here I sit and consider ways to make a workout more memorable, more effective and more precise—discipline, perseverance, gratefulness. I'm especially buoyant after the first two or three sets when the engine is warm and the compass is set. For the next hour I'm flying solo, feeling the winds beneath my wings and reaching for the sky.
Huge and ripped are masters in disguise.
Dave
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