Month: March 2012

Follow through and recovery

/ hsoi

Karl pointed me to this great article by Tom Givens: Follow Through and Recovery: The Often Neglected Fundamentals. One of the best parts about the article is a great graphic they did on the shooting cycle. Click and read and look.

All too often what happens is someone shoots, and the moment the gun goes *bang* the follow-up motion is to drop the gun and cran their head over to try to see if they hit it.

That’s not right.

Gun goes bang, and you need to watch the front sight lift (which implies you were watching the front sight before the shot), gun recoils, you reset the trigger, gun comes down out of recoil, you reacquire the sight picture. That’s follow-through.

The hole in your target will be there 5 seconds from now, 5 weeks from now, 5 years from now. You don’t need to immediately determine if you hit or not; you can and should wait to make that determination. Follow through, recover, be prepared for the next shot. After all is done, THEN you can lower or reholster the gun and check your target.

What’s even better? If you keep watching that front sight, there will come in a time in your shooting when you’ll actually see the front sight lift up and out of the rear notch. When you can start doing this, you won’t need to look at your target. The moment the shot breaks you’ll already know.

Here’s a good video that USPSA GM Roy Stedman made to explain the concept:

 

Liberals, consider Ron Paul

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

It’s time to let go of the left-right paradigm. It’s even time to abandon the four-pronged Nolan Chart. We live in a time where the status quo is devolving into a bipartisan pro-war, corporatist, anti-free speech police state, and the only candidate who will turn it around is Ron Paul. If the likes of Nader or Kucinich were frontrunners in the 2012 primary, this blog post would be about them. Sadly, that’s not happening—but if liberals would reach across the aisle to embrace this iconoclastic libertarian’s surprisingly viable candidacy, iconoclastic progressives might have a chance in the future.

“Violasong” (Victoria) pens an interesting article about how she, as a progressive liberal, is going to vote for Ron Paul.

It’s well worth the read. No, she’s not 100% in agreement with him on all issues, but it’s one reason I’ve like Ron Paul as well: he stands for something. The man has principles and has stuck with them. He’s not like Mitt Romney nor Barak Obama, who are established flip-floppers, willing to do whatever it takes to get and stay elected. Thus who are they serving? Certainly not you.

Go read.

2012-03-02 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 6, squat 4

/ hsoi

Squat, and nothing else. It helped me make up my mind.

“Week 4”

  • Deload – Squat (working max: 260#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 2x5x105
    • 2x5x135
    • 2x5x160
  • Asst. #1 – Squat
    • 5 x 10 x 135

And that’s all I did. Squat.

I’ve been giving some serious thought to my future direction, and the more I think about doing the “Boring But Big 3 Month Challenge” the more it appeals to me.

It’s simple.

It’s pretty much all big movements. I’m finding I hate things like Good Mornings, Leg Presses, Leg Curls, and other such stuff. Give me the big movements and I’m pretty happy.

Assistance work is there to help with weak points. Where are my weak points? Everywhere and nowhere. I can’t isolate out much that is specifically weak, e.g. trouble locking out on bench press. But I just need to get overall strong (and big). So let’s just revert back… gravitate back to where I started, but with a bit more oomph.

The more I look at BBB/3Mo, the more I like it. The more I think that’s just what I need. If I want to get better at the squat, I should squat.

I did wonder if it ran counter to my fat-loss issues, but I don’t think it will. I think I will still lean up some. When I look at the food intake that Wendler suggests, it’s pretty much what I’m doing now, just a lot tighter. Between the ZMA forcing me to not eat after supper, plus a Lenten effort to stick to eating only what I’m to eat (i.e. can’t shove anything in my mouth between meals, even if it’s good for me), that ought to work out alright for me. I might try to see about upping my “cardio” some by changing my walking route to add a little more time/distance to the mix.

And so today? It was an effort to see if I really wanted to do it or not. So all I did today was squat. Granted it wasn’t quite like the program would be, but just squatting the whole time showed me that 1. this is going to kick my ass, thus I must do it 2. I actually enjoyed this a lot more than all the other crap I’ve been doing, thus I must do it.

So there we go.

Onwards.

Randi Rogers @ TGR

/ hsoi

Randi Rogers is now a contributing author over at Tactical Gun Review!

If you don’t know who Randi Rogers is, if you don’t know who TGR is, then click and find out.

Very exciting stuff. Keep up the good work, Charles and Mike. TGR is growing well.

Finally made the leap

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I finally did it. I upgraded to Lion.

Seems a little late in coming eh?

I’ve been writing software for a long time. I know how the process goes, and well… I have enough of my own bugs in a day to deal with, I don’t need to be hampered by someone else’s. Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8) was working fine for me, and out of the gate Lion had lots problems. Things are better in Lion, with Mac OS X 10.7.3, so maybe it’s time to upgrade.

Still, I didn’t. The main reason was stability. When you’re going through a development cycle, you don’t change your tools. You do this so you don’t introduce change and risk that’s outside of your control. Wait until you ship, then you can upgrade everything. Yes it might mean you get held back for a while, but that’s how it goes. But sometimes you can violate this, and I have because daily use of Snow Leopard was getting to be a problem.

See, at my day job I have to work on a MacBook Pro that runs Lion. The requirements of that project required Lion, Xcode 4.3, iOS 5 target, and so on. So I had to be all on the latest. Very cool for what it is, but well… let’s put it this way. When you use that computer all day and are forced to scroll “the other way”, when you switch to your other computer you get all messed up. I got to a point where I stopped knowing how to scroll and which way went which way on which machine, so any scrolling was always a “ok, just flick one way and if it doesn’t work then reverse direction”. Very inefficient and annoying since you become VERY aware of how much you scroll in a day. 🙂

Plus, since I had to work in Lion all day, I got to see that, for the most part, it’s working fine and not getting in my way. So I finally opted to upgrade.

Oye… what a slow, laborious process. Started it last night after supper, still working on it this morning. But now I’m turning on the whole-disk encryption and it’s slowly chugging away at encrypting everything.

The sad part? I think my current MacBook Pro isn’t going to make the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Hopefully that “Apple Event” next week will shed some light on new hardware options. 🙂

 

 

That’s a good question

/ hsoi

RB: If you could ask President Obama one question, what would that be?

PJ: What good things do you think the government should NOT do? What do you trust us to take care of ourselves?

— PJ is Penn Jilette

Full story here. It’s just a quick set of questions, “if you had 5 minutes with the President, what would you discuss with him?”.

Go read. It’ll take you less than 5 minutes.

Miscellaneous thoughts on dry fire

/ hsoi

I cannot deny the glory of dry fire practice. It really does pay off.

Getting the new M&P, I really ramped up my dry fire practice because I wanted to adjust to the new gun, help break in the trigger, and so on. So I’ve done a lot more dry fire recently than I have in a long time. I strive to do it every day, but some days life has other plans. Nevertheless, it’s been paying off quite nicely. I need to change up my routine tho to focus on some weak spots.

Try to dry fire 10 minutes every day instead of 1 hour a week. You’ll get more out of it. Plus, the skills will be fresher in your mind and body. I forget exactly how Tom Givens put it, but your skills matter more about proximity to the last time you practiced. So if you practice say 3x a week, you’re never more than a couple of days away from the last time you practiced. Whereas a marathon practice session once a month, you could be 30 days away from the last time you practiced, and that’s not going to carry you when it’s time to perform.

When you dry fire, focus on being correct. You’re working to ingrain good habits, so you have to strive to make every repetition a correct repetition.

Slow down. It helps you do things correctly.

One thing dry fire lacks is recoil. Because there’s no “force to fight against”, one thing we can get lax on is our grip. Don’t. Make a conscious effort to ensure your grip is using proper technique AND grip pressure. If dry fire is all about building lots of repetitions so it becomes “automatic” when we’re really shooting, then ensuring proper grip is an important part of successful dry fire.

Vary your routine, else it gets boring. There are tons of good resources out there. Look at Steve Anderson’s book, Refinement & Repetition, Dry Fire Drills for Dramatic Improvement. I listed a bunch of others in a prior article.

Most of all, just make a conscious commitment to dry fire. I guarantee if you have a good and focused practice routine and do it 10-15 minutes every day for a month, you’ll see an improvement in your skills.

Work on the things you suck at. Yes, that means more weak-hand-only for all of us. 🙂

After 6 cycles, looking back, and looking forward.

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

This post is really just me thinking aloud. Trying to sort out what I really want, what my goals really are, and trying to figure out the best path to get there.

If this is of no interest to you… well, you probably already stopped reading. 🙂

I’ve been lifting weights for under a year.

I’ve lifted on and off since I was a teenager, but it’s really sticking this time I think in part due to having better knowledge and programs. I started on the old “bodybuilding” routine because that’s what I knew. But then I got laid up, discovered Jim Wendler, went backwards and found Mark Rippetoe. I started doing a Starting Strength like routine (more along the lines of his Practical Programming Novice) and after a couple of months on that switched to the Wendler 5/3/1 program.

I’ve been really enjoying it. Never have I lifted such weight. Sure my weights aren’t anything major in the grand scheme of the history of lifting, but they’re all personal records to me.

What makes programs like SS and 5/3/1 work is the linear progression and focus on the basics. SS’s linear progression is great and certainly served to get me off the ground by keeping it uber-simple. The downside of the program is it’s better suited for young bucks, or those who can really focus on recovery. If you can do nothing but eat, sleep, and lift, you’ll do fine on SS for a good while. The impact was just more than growing-older-fart-me could recover from. So that’s where 5/3/1 comes in. It allowed me to progress at a slower pace, but it’s been a steady and solid pace with good gains, made possible by allowing for recovery. For some more logic and detail behind all of this, read Rippetoe and Kilgore’s book, Practical Programming for Strength Training.

Now that I’ve done 6 cycles on 5/3/1, what do I think about it?

Overall, I like it. Progress is steady. Progress is solid. You certainly have to stick with the program for a while before you’ll see results. For some that’s good — it’s a marathon, not a sprint. For others, they won’t see results quickly and will switch. That’s fine, there are other things out there for them.

To that end tho, it’s somewhat a downside: progress is slow. But that’s how it goes… you can’t keep up massive gains forever. I’m not sure how I would have taken to this rate of progress as a younger me… probably would have driven me crazy. I’d probably have gone from SS to something like the Texas Method. But older-fart me is finding this to be just fine. That isn’t to say 5/3/1 is for advanced lifters or old farts, but rather that’s the reality of the program: slow gains, but steady gains. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul.

But that all said, I keep thinking about changes to the program towards meeting my goals.

There’s no question I’ve gotten stronger. You can look at my logs and see that.

But I’ve also wanted to get bigger.

Sure, I’ve gotten somewhat bigger. There’s more muscle on me, but being as tall and lanky-framed as I am, I really would like to fill it out more with some meat.

I’ve struggled this whole time to shed the muffin-top. I see a glimmer of hope with my current plans, but it’s just hard to try to gain muscle/strength and lose fat at the same time. You really can’t do both. So I’ve generally let the gut hang and continued with strength.

But I want to pick it up. I started with the “Boring But Big” template, and that actually works nicely. I like how it’s simple and no-nonsense. But I realized something. It’s not laid out in the plans, but it’s frequently talked about: chin/pull-ups matter. The way to get enough back and bicep (i.e. upper body pulling) volume is that you HAVE to do chins after you pressing movements. It’s not one of the 3 exercises you pick for each day, but it’s there… secretly wedged in. I’m seeing that now as I’m finally able to do chin-ups.

I thought about the 5/3/1 bodybuilding template. That should help with strength and also mass, but you know one reason I don’t want to do it? That’s a MUCH longer workout. I like getting in the gym and getting out. This would keep me in the gym for a long time. Plus, some say it’s a LOT of volume, so I thought if I did do it I might trim it back by an exercise or two for a starting cycle then in later cycles add them back in. But still, I don’t know.

Then Jim recently came out with what he calls the BBB 3 Month Challenge. It’s taking BBB to a different level. It ups the weights, it mixes up how you do the assistance work.

I can see by how I’ve been changing the assistance work, keeping the spirit of BBB, merging in a bit of Triumvirate, wanting to round out the assistance work to bring up the volume and work a bit to see about more muscle… well… I’m starting to think BBB 3 month might be where to go. It keeps things simple and straightforward, but it’ll kick your ass hard. The only thing that I have to wuss out on is doing it 3x week instead of 4. Yeah yeah yeah, I know. So it’ll probably take me 4 months to finish it, and maybe there’ll be some loss in gain for doing it that way. I’ll live.

And I’m wondering if I should go ahead and change it up for this upcoming 7th cycle or not. I was kinda set to stay the course, but… maybe I’ll call an audible here.

I do wonder tho. I’m kinda expecting myself to reset soon. I’m seeing where my numbers are going. Will there be a problem if I have to reset while doing the challenge? I don’t know. But who cares. This is a journey, so just make a decision, forge ahead, and take things as they come. Who knows… the way it works me I might actually blow through any walls. 🙂