Well… I went to the gym this evening a little tired and ready to kill myself for all the alcohol and crap food I’ve been endulging in. I had intentions of putting myself through a good hour and a half of torture, but the gym is closing early for the fireworks! That put me in a bind so I had to go through my workout in 25 minutes. Since I was so rushed I was not getting much rest between sets. I couldn’t believe my vascularity.. I had veins bulging from every last spot on my body, it was rediculous.

I got my buddy to snap a picture of it when I got home… not the best pic, but you can see my massive vascularity in my bicep and a little in my delt.

Anyways, here is how my chest workout went:

Chest
30/05

Flat Dumbell Bench
1×7 100s superset with 1×8 60s
1×5 100s superset with 1×8 70s

Incline Dumbell Bench
1×8 75s
1×7 75s

Inclide Dumbell Flys
2×11 50s

Hammer Strength Wide Chest
1×12 180

2×25 swiss ball crunches
2×20 Swiss Ball Pushups

Flat Dumbell Flys
1×12 20s < -- complete 2 second stop at the bottom

It’s currently 11am. I rolled out of bed about 30 minutes ago relatively hangover free to one of my friends giving me a call telling me that his drought ended. He was ranting and raving on the phone how his 11 month drought finally cleared up and he got a little action. I was proud for him.

It was right about two minutes into this call when I realized, holy crap, my buddy Luke (who is in town for the weekend from the island) and I were hanging out with Hippies last night!

Last night started off by us bouncing around between 3 different bars before deciding that it was extremely important we get to the corner store immediately. I needed a protein bar and Luke needed a few other items (no! not panty liners). We get on our marry little way and head over to the beach, to see what was going on… usually the answer is nothing at 3am, but tonight… tonight was special.

So, we arrive at the beach, slightly wobbly but not inebriated to the point we couldn’t sing and dance and communicate with other drunks. The cool thing about being at this level of a buzz, is that, as other people who drink will tell you, it allows you to communicate with other people who are in this ‘ drunk zone’ on a whole other level. This is usually the stage when you start pissing the sober people off, but other drunks will usher you into their social group and they will reveal intimate details about their lives they would never tell you when sober. If you’ve ever experienced this, you know if you see the person again, you pretend like the details revealed were never communicated and you casually just say hi.

Ok, I’m rambling again. So, we get to the park, and I see this group of what appears to be some hippies sitting in a group singing Bob Marley. They had a bongo drum, a guitar and a token black guy. There was roughly six of them sitting in this little group, and for some reason it attracted me over. Not knowing whether or not these hippies were hostile and would possibly attack me with their acoustic guitar, rendering me into a bloody hippie induced pulp, I took my chances and walked right up to them. They were all sitting on the grass by the way. Right when I showed up, the token black guy yelled at me…. “SING”. So what did I do? You know exactly what I did! I started to mumble a few words to “No Woman, No Cry”.

I still wasn’t fully comfortable with my new found friends whom which I just shared an intimate verse of ‘No Woman, No Cry” with, so I glanced around and about 10 feet away, to my surprise appeared to be a tight rope. You know the tight ropes they use in the circus. I decided I needed to get a closer look.

As I approached the tight rope, Brad came over and asked if I would like to give it a shot. Brad is a couple years older than me and has a big beard and long hair. He explained to me that the correct terminology for a tight rope is actually a ‘Slackline’. Me being the adventurous guy I am, I ignored the potential for injuries and decided to give it a go.

I have to be honest, my first couple attempts were significantly better than my later attempts. I made it a couple of steps the first time, but was unable to make it beyond 4 steps the entire hour I spent their without the help of a hand from one of the people watching. Luke also attempted the slack line numerous times, but his fate was similar to mine, constant wipeouts.

While playing around on the slack line, another set of random guys shows up. These guys had something a little off about them. What was off about them you ask? These people had some kind of funky accent that sounded like a blend between English and Australian. We introduced ourselves, and they actually were foreigners from New Zealand. They hung out with us for a bit, then I decided it was time to make my way back to the little circle of hippies playing music on the ground. They were one big group, singing and slack lining.

Anyways, in my drunken stupor I decided that I would pickup the Bongo and give it a few love taps. If you know me, I have virtually no rhythm what so ever. Maybe enough to pull off dancing for a song in the club, but I’m almost positive I consistently look an ugly duckling waddling across the dance floor. Luckily for me they were nice hippies and they taught me how to play it properly, I think I even developed a slight sense of rhythm. We sang a few more songs (Santeria, Long December), but the night was getting old and it was just about time for me to introduce my noggin to my pillow for a few hours of sleep.

We left the group and headed back to my house. I told Luke he could sleep on the couch and neglected to give him a blanket or pillow; he slept in his clothes.

So let’s quickly go over what we accomplished last night:

• Hung out on my rooftop
• Went to 3 bars
• Got some exercise walking to the corner store
• Met some hippies
• Learned the beginning steps to Slack Lining
• Learned to play the bongo
• Met some people from New Zealand
• Got drunk

All in all I’d say it was a pretty productive night. Tonight there are fireworks in Vancouver. 400K Maniacs running around the streets and beaches of Vancouver inebriated looking to get some ass or get in a fight. I should get out my camera

Ok ok, I lied. There were no knee sprains, and to be honest I actually have the opposite of hunger pains (I ate sushi for lunch). However, this subject isn’t completely off topic. Today was my first quasi serious leg workout because of my nagging knee and hip injuries.

OK, so now you are wondering what the hell is wrong with me knee right? No? Too bad, I’m telling you regardless of whether or not you care!

About 2.5 years ago, I was focusing on packing on some weight. I honestly looked like I fell off the back of a butter truck after consuming my body weight in coagulated dairy fat. I could respect that, if I didn’t have the lean body mass of a 12 year old professional tennis player.

Comparison of my saggy decrepit body then to my slightly anorexic appearance I sport today is below:

Anyways, part of my plan to pack on some mass involved eating very large amounts of what I thought was healthy foods in conjunction with squatting and dead lifting my brains out. While this is an absolutely phenomenal way to pack on lean tissue as well as create a much thicker look, you have to be very conscious of things like stretching. Stretching my upper body seemed very logical, as I had already been victim to numerous shoulder injuries. However, somehow I managed to overlook stretching my posterior chain as well as the majority of the muscles in the lower half of my body.

While some people are lucky and can get away with this, I unfortunately do not fall into the category of having luck in the health department. My knees and hips started to get a little soar, but I just blew it off like it was nothing, it wound up progressing to the point that I was barely able to walk. Going up stairs was excruciatingly painful and anything that involved hiking or prolonged walking was pretty much abolished from my list of things I was able to do.

So I stretch my brains out, and over time I get back to the point where I can squat 225 for around 20 reps pain free. The weight was not that heavy, but my joints would take a beating if I went much heavier. After I reached this level of flexibility I figured I would be good to go without injury as long as I spent some time stretching every day. Well, turns out I was able to continue adding weight for 8 reps up to about 305 lbs before I started noticing a little tightness. Me being the ignorant bastard I am, I shrugged it off and kept going. I kept on packing on the weight until I was throwing 315 for around 5ish. Well, a few days later, I woke up in the middle of the night and had to take a leak. I started walking up the stairs, and with every step, like clockwork, my knees popped.

This progressed over the next week or so until the pain was so excruciating it actually blew every other knee injury I’d had out of the water. I was incapable of sitting in a car for more than 15 minutes without a tear coming to my eye. I was forced to stretch for an hour each and every night; I stretched on my lunch break at work and I stretched when I rolled out of bed.

I finally recovered after a few months and again went back to squatting about 4 months later because I guess I’m a sucker for punishment. Long story short, it happened again a few months ago, and at this point, I’ve made a decision that I will no longer be doing any extremely heavy leg work, and unless some beautiful miracle of god occurs, where I become a rubber band man and have the flexibility of an 11 year old female gymnast, there is very little chance I will return to the world of hip and knee torture.

Anyways, now that you know my long ass drawn out story, I can go on with today. So today was my first day back in the gym doing any pressing exercises with my legs in nearly 3 months. I feel like it has REALLY hindered my overall growth, but am prepared to get back into it, minus squats and dead lifts of course.

My short term leg plan includes the following:

• Large volume of low weight high rep quad work with progressive resistance, 5 lbs per week (Leg extensions, Close Stance Leg press)
• Large volume low weight high rep calf work. I’m contemplating seeing if I can just add repetitions ever week.
• Body weight squats
• No direct hamstring work, to avoid tightness until my workload capacity has increased.

That’s it, that’s my plan. Nice and simple.

I’m going to get to my workout here because I think I’ve typed damn near a thousand words and I haven’t even gotten to the meat and potatoes yet.

Legs
July 29/05

Warm up
5 minutes Recumbent Bike
Stretching

Leg Extensions
1×10 70
1×10 100
1×10 140
1×10 160
1×10 180

Super Light Leg Press
3×10 270 Really easy, paused in the bottom position for 1 second then exploded

Seated Calf Raises
1×20 135
1×16 135
1×15 135

Swiss Ball Crunches
3×50

Swiss Ball Pushups
2×30

Jumping Jacks
30 seconds

Speed bag
1 minute

So that’s that. I think I’m going to do something lazy tonight like catch a movie and hit the hay. I haven’t slept much lately.