Do Cholesterol Lowering Drugs Work?

If your doctor has you on a statin to lower your cholesterol, you're wasting your money.

Squat - 170 x 5

Video from today's workout. I posted it to my thread on Strengthmill (see the post below) and Mark Rippetoe said: "Much, much better set." So, obviously I'm pretty happy about that.

Mark Rippetoe's critique of my squat & deadlift form

I'm honored to have Mark Rippetoe take a few moments from his busy day to watch my squat and deadlift videos and tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Check it out.

New Videos!

These were taken tonight at my first Starting Strength workout. The weights are pretty light, so I'm excited for my upcoming workouts so I can begin to make progress. I'll be increasing all lifts five pounds at each workout so in a few weeks things should start to get fairly challenging.

First up, a side view of me squatting 145 lbs. for 5 reps:



Next, a rear-side view of the same weight and reps:



Next we have me deadlifting 205 lbs. for 5 reps:



Finally, here's me bench pressing 145 lbs. for 5 reps:



My squatting form still needs work but it's improving. The biggest flaw I can see is that my knee(s) track forward sometimes when I'm at the bottom.

I Quit!

I've decided to bail on Hypertrophy I from the book "The New Rules of Lifting". I had five more workouts left before the official end but I've decided there's no point in continuing.

So, on Tuesday (5/13) I will begin Starting Strength. I'll post my workouts to this blog to track my progress in the squat, bench press, military press, deadlift and pendlay row.

Also my weight in the right nav. bar now reflects a five day running average as I have been weighing myself each morning upon waking (and after eliminating).

And Now For Something Completely Different!

May 20th will be my last day of the Hypertrophy I routine from "The New Rules of Lifting".

For a variety of reasons, I will no longer continue the NROL routines. I will be going back to basics, and on May 22nd I'll begin Starting Strength from Mark Rippetoe.

This is a "beginners" routine, and frankly my ego has a hard time accepting the fact that I should go back to a "beginners" routine. However, contrary to what you might expect, beginner routines are the most aggressive in terms of weight progression. As you become more trained and get closer to your physical limitations, you can no longer continue to increase weight lifted from workout to workout. That's when it's time to move to an intermediate workout where lifts progress from week to week instead. Eventually you'll be at a point where you have to use advanced programs where the weight you lift might only increase once every few months. The most elite lifters in the world train all year for a single increase in weight lifted.

Beginners can enjoy the rapid gains of a beginner program that uses linear progression in the amount of weight lifted simply because they have so much untapped potential. One of my big complaints with NROL is that it doesn't even bother to provide this sort of workout. ALL of the workouts utilize undulating periodization wherein reps and sets change from day to day, which is just not necessary for a beginner.

It may be that I am not a beginner and that I won't be able to advance from workout to workout, but I doubt it. Since I've spent almost all of my one year training in a caloric deficit my lifts have not gone up that much, so I am betting I have plenty of untapped potential left. If I find I can't progress from day to day with Starting Strength, I will move on to Bill Starr's 5x5 Intermediate routine.

So that's it.. I'm shaking things up a bit.. at a later date I'll write a longer post with all of my criticisms of NROL. I think it's a great book to read, even for beginners but I would NOT recommend someone new to weight training begin with those routines.

Think About It..

"Most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

New Progress Photos

I've added new photos to my progress posts. See the links in the right side-bar.

Over all, I'm not incredibly thrilled with my progress over the past few months, but only because I'm impatient, not because I necessarily think I should be farther along. For some reason in my mind I had imagined growing big and muscular rapidly by giving my body lots of food. Sadly it doesn't work that way. It will take at least a few more years of solid training before I am close to my ideal physique.

The last two photos on each series are from the first of April and the first of May.

In May there's definitely some lat and pec development. My right bicep is smaller than my left, either that or I'm not flexing it hard enough. I'm not sure what it is but experimenting in front of the mirror shows the same thing. Perhaps I need to think about tacking on a few isolation exercises for that bicep to the end of each workout.

So that's about it.. the bulking process continues and I've contacted the university professor who has done my hydrostatic weighing in the past, and he's going to weigh me again in late July or early August depending on when I decide to end the bulk.

Until next time..

Welcome U.K. Muscle Members!

It looks like I'm the subject of discussion here at this forum. Never heard of the place, but I'd like to thank them for driving all kinds of traffic to my blog!

It's interesting though how people think they know what such and such body fat looks like, when obviously they don't.

Mark Rippetoe Q&A

This is pretty sweet.. a forum where the legendary Mark Rippetoe, author of the definitive book on squatting- Starting Strength, fields questions from readers.

http://strengthmill.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=36