Author: hsoi

2013-01-16 training log

/ hsoi

Gah. That was tough.

Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 16 (mark 2), week 2

  • Work Set – Squat (working max: 285#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x115
    • 1x5x145
    • 1x3x175
    • 1x3x200 (work)
    • 1x3x230
    • 1x5x260
  • Asst. #1 – Squat
    • 5 x 10/10/10/10/7 x 145
  • Asst. #2 – Pulldown Abs
    • 3 x 15 x 130
  • sled drags
    • 6 runs, 75 yards each
    • 75# on the sled
    • 30 seconds rest every other run
    • attach sled around hips, walk forward with large, purposeful strides
  • Foam Rolling

    • Man, that was tough.

    First, the work set was really hard and I pushed like a mutha to get those 5 reps @ 260. But I was NOT going to let the weight crush me.

    I did call an audible and instead of going down the ladder with the assistance squatting I just did straight sets at 50%. That was I think a better thing because I got more reps and it pushed me much further. My lower back was dying by the end of each set, wicked pump in my quads. So hey… I hope it was good.

    Then on the ab work… never have I had such pain in my abs afterwards. It was really pushing things.

    So I opted to not do pullthroughs given how pooped everything was, and I could only muster 6 runs with the sled… glutes and hams were dying.

    Thing is… is this how it is? Or am I starting to feel some loss because of my tinkering with Carb Back-Loading, and I’m getting depleted here in my initial setup? Hard to say at this point.

    Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — and his guns

    / hsoi / 3 Comments

    Some people keep asking “why would anyone need one of those?”

    Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. needed “one of those”. From the HuffPo:

    Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

    A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.

    Granted King and his supporters didn’t use AR-15’s; they used the current technology of the time, as the AR-15 hadn’t been invented yet. But if it was today, they certainly would have because it’s the current technology of the time. Just like we use the Internet and iPhone’s, instead of black-and-white TV’s and hand-written letters.

    In fact, you can see some of the racist roots of gun control because of Dr. King:

    As I found researching my new book, Gunfight, in 1956, after King’s house was bombed, King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.

    Lordy no! We can’t be letting them filthy niggers have guns! that might allow them to stand on equal footing with us! That might enable them to stand up to our tyranny! Hooray for gun control and its racist roots. *sigh*

    Dr. King wasn’t the only civil rights activist that kept a gun:

    T.R.M. Howard, the Mississippi doctor and mutual aid leader who founded the pioneering Regional Council of Negro Leadership, slept with a Thompson submachine gun at the foot of his bed. During the murder trial that followed the horrific lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, Howard escorted Till’s grieving mother and various others to and from the courthouse in a heavily-armed caravan.

    Similarly, John R. Salter, one of the organizers of the famous 1963 sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi, said he always “traveled armed” while working as a civil rights organizer in the South. “I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms,” Salter said.

    The original HuffPo article ends with:

    Whether a broader acceptance of the King’s later pacifism would have made us safer than choosing guns, we will never know.

    Nothing said Dr. King was aggressive about his use of guns. He used them to stay alive in the face of obvious danger to his life. Granted his life was cut short, but how much sooner could he have been taken from us? Might we never have heard his “I Have A Dream” speech? No, we will never know.

    But this is why some people need guns. It may be that woman with a crazy ex, because a piece of paper called a restraining order will not keep him away from her. It may be the elderly couple that just cannot stand up to a strong young thug. It may be the black man in fear of his life because as far as we’ve come, we’ve still a long ways to go.

    Most gun owners I know are not violent people (conversely it seems lots of anti-gun people are rather violent). They do not wish violence, they do not want violence. They are peaceful people and try to undertake actions and options of peace and avoidance. They would prefer to just go through their lives peacefully and being left alone, and leaving you alone to live your life. The difference is we accept ugly things may happen to us, and we wish to be prepared to contend with them if they do — just like Dr. King was.

    Austin Gun Show Ban – next chapter

    / hsoi

    Austin wanted to ban gun shows.

    Much legal precedent, and the Texas AG came out and said “you can’t do that”.

    Now it appears Travis County officials have accepted that:

    AUSTIN (KXAN) – Travis County Commissioners on Tuesday voted to honor the existing contract with the organizer of the gun shows at the Travis County Expo.

    The unanimous vote came after the five-member body met with its lawyers and heard from people with an interest in the topic.

    Full story (h/t Tim)

    As far as I can tell, it wasn’t a question of if they wanted to or not, but merely a question of if they had any legal ability to do so. And they do not.

    “The first thing we ought to do is huddle with legal counsel in executive session for a follow up legal briefing,” Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe said before the vote. “We discussed it in part last Tuesday, and the preliminary determination was that we probably did not have the authority — which is why we didn’t take any action. ”

    The angle I took with the Travis County Commissioners as well as the Austin City Council wasn’t that of guns — because it’s evident they have their minds made up on that topic. So, it was better to take the approach of what a politician cares about: money and re-election. If they tried this, they would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in simple rental revenue, and they would have likely lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars from the resulting lawsuits. Given “these tough economic times” and how it’s been tough for the City and County to manage a budget, all the other cuts they’ve had to make, all the tax increases they’ve done well… to invite revenue loss through severed contracts and lawsuits, that would simply be irresponsible.

    Seems they realized this:

    Opponents argue the county would lose $128,000 in rental-fee revenues from the pending contracts of the nine Saxet Gun Show events scheduled this year.

    [Travis County Judge Sam] Biscoe said if they were to cancel those contracts, it’s more than likely the county would face legal battles for damages.

    I doubt this issue has been put to rest, but it seems at least a dose of reality has been taken.

    Updated:  I need to ammend this.

    First, it seems the devil is in the details. They are going to honor the existing contract. The implication is future contracts will be “considered”, and you can bet they’ll reject them for whatever reason. And in some respects, that’s their prerogative.

    Second, it seems the City of Austin is still going to figure out what they can do regarding city-owned properties. So yeah, the issue hasn’t been put to rest.

    Sporting Ammunition and the Fire Fighter

    / hsoi

    This video, produced by SAAMI, has been going around for a couple months, but because it’s 25 minutes long I didn’t have a chance to watch it until this past weekend. Make the time to watch it, because it’s informative and kinda cool too.

    The video was made to address concerns of firefighters regarding sporting ammunition. Things like dropping ammunition, ammo getting crushed, and of course, ammunition being involved in fires.

    The main takeaway is that sporting ammunition is difficult to ignite, and when it does it doesn’t propagate (e.g. one round going off doesn’t cause other rounds to go off and chain reaction into a big problem). As well, consider that gunpowder isn’t an explosion but rather an extremely fast burn with an extremely rapid expansion of gas. The gas wants to expand in the path of least resistance. This is why when a cartridge is contained within the chamber of a firearm, things work as they do because there’s only one path of least resistance: down the barrel and out the muzzle. But when the cartridge is “free standing”, there isn’t much to contain it so the brass case shatters, the bullet does fly, it’s nothing you still want to get hit with, but it’s all of such low velocity that it’s not a big problem.

    Watch the video, you’ll see.

    That said, still take care with storage of ammunition, and don’t be a dumbass and throw cartridges on a fire because you want to hear the rounds cook off.

    Bullshit

    / hsoi / 3 Comments

    President Obama is starting to talk about his gun control measures:

    The Biden task force has “presented me now with a list of sensible, common-sense steps that can be taken to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw in Newtown doesn’t happen again,” he told reporters. “I’ll present the details later in the week.”

    He added, “My starting point is not to worry about the politics. My starting point is to focus on what makes sense, what works, what should we be doing to make sure that our children are safe and that we’re reducing the incidence of gun violence. I think we can do that in a sensible way that comports with the Second Amendment.”

    I hate the phrase “common sense”. Any time anyone drags that phrase out, what they mean is “something that I like, that I agree with”. As humans, we are born knowing nothing. We must learn everything. Consequently, we all can not and will not know the same things. Nor will we have the same experiences in life that will color our perceptions. If “common sense” is defined as “equating to the knowledge and experience which most people already have, or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have”… well, the emphasis is on the latter part, because it’s what people believe you should have.

    We’re back to the same old thing of “agrees with me”. That if you don’t know the same things I do, if you don’t hold the same view that I do, then you lack common sense and you are a moron, to be looked down upon and shunned.

    How sad that we behave in such a manner. But one people trot out the “common sense” line, this is what the mean, and often it’s meant precisely to demean “the others”.

    Not worry about politics? Ha! This is precisely about politics. If you wanted to do things that actually worked, then you would. But you won’t, and you aren’t. You need to show some proof and data that your proposals actually do lead towards reduction in violence — because all the ones the gun control groups tend to trot out endlessly have a demonstrable record of failure.

    And a sensible way that comports with 2A? Well, hopefully you remember what 2A actually means — it’s about tyranny, not hunting.

    But will Congress adopt proposals like renewing the assault weapons ban? “I don’t know,” Obama acknowledged. Lawmakers opposed to such steps must “examine their own conscience.” In some cases, Congress won’t act but he will, the president said.

    Gee… way to make it seem like anyone that doesn’t agree with your proposals must be some sort of unfeeling, heartless bastards.

    He added that “responsible gun owners—people who have a gun for protection, for hunting, for sportsmanship—they don’t have anything to worry about.”

    Bullshit. First, this shows you don’t know what 2A is really about. Second, there are those of us that use AR’s for protection, for hunting, and for sportsmanship. So yeah… we’ve got a LOT to worry about.

    True, we haven’t seen precisely what the proposals are. But the track record so far, the words, the actions, the efforts of folks so far, it reeks. Sure, I do think it’s be wonderful to be pleasantly surprised if they actually proposed measure towards reduction of crime. I’d love it! But I doubt that would happen.

    I mean, for a start… if you want to stop the senseless killing of innocent children… why not start with banning abortion?

    Some of us already knew this…

    / hsoi

    Researchers who have evaluated gun control strategies say buybacks – despite their popularity – are among the least effective ways to reduce gun violence. They say targeted police patrols, intervention efforts with known criminals and, to a lesser extent, tougher gun laws all work better than buybacks.

    Full story, which I’ll deconstruct a bit.

    It’s good that this article is in the USA Today. Not only because their parent company is anti-gun, but USA Today is a fairly mainstream and popular paper. So it’s good to see some facts and realities being printed, even if they might not be popular.

    So why are buybacks ineffective?

    The biggest weakness of buybacks, which offer cash or gift cards for guns, is that the firearms they usually collect are insignificant when measured against the arsenal now in the hands of American citizens.

    […]

    The relatively small number of guns recovered isn’t the only problem, Scott said. Buyback programs tend to attract people who are least likely to commit crimes and to retrieve guns that are least likely to be used in crimes.

    […]

    That means buyback campaigns more often end up with hunting rifles or old revolvers from someone’s attic than with automatic weapons from the trunk of a criminal’s car.

    […]

    A buyback in Tucson, Ariz., last week collected about 200 firearms, many of them old or inoperable, in exchange for about $10,000 worth of grocery gift cards. A few hundred feet away, gun dealers set up tables and offered cash for any guns in good enough condition to resell.

    “Every gun that came in was an old gun, no assault weapons,” Tom Ditsch, who watched the event, told The Associated Press. “They didn’t even take any weapons off the streets.”

    That’s the thing. Criminals don’t participate in buybacks. Those who do participate are generally not involved in crime. The guns turned in tend to be junk (tho sometimes a rare gem comes along), and really have little effect upon things. I know amongst some gun-owners, they are happy to use these buyback programs as a way to clear the crap out of their attic and get more money for a broken gun than the junk is worth. So the program fails to achieve the aim.

    Alas, despite the up-front admission of facts, the article goes on grasping for justifications of the practice.

    “If we can save one life, if we can stop one act of violence, if we can get a gun out of one person’s hands, we have made progress in the fight to end violence in our communities,” said Ennis Tait, pastor of Church of the Living God in Avondale.

    I expected someone would trot out the “if we can save one life” line. Given the number of lives saved because of the defensive use of firearms every day — certainly at least one life saved — then I guess that means having guns, concealed carry, and other such actions are worth it then, eh?  I mean, that’s the logic, so if it applies in that realm, it applies in this realm too.

    Here’s some more facts from the article:

    But some say that energy could be better put to use in other ways. Alex Tabarrok, research director of the nonpartisan Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., said investing in buyback programs makes little sense when study after study shows they don’t work.

    A few researchers believe buybacks may even do some harm: A 1999 article in the Law and Order journal found that some people sold guns to police during buybacks and then used the money to buy new guns.

    Tabarrok said buybacks consume thousands of dollars, most of it donated, that would be better spent on police overtime to put more officers on the street, or on other law enforcement efforts that are more likely to have an impact.

    First, we have unintended consequences. But moreover, what we have is people saying that all this money and effort would be better spent doing things that are demonstrated to work to reduce violent crime. Gee… how novel.

    Look, I don’t know any gun owner that doesn’t want to reduce or eliminate violent crime. I mean, the fact some of us carry guns is because we accept the world contains violence and we’d prefer to not be a victim. We wish there wasn’t violent crime, we just accept that there is. Our approach tends to be looking at approaches that work towards the desired end. If the goal is to reduce violent crime, then let’s work on things that reduce violent crime. Just like this article stated: targeted police patrols, intervention efforts, those work. As well:

    The most successful efforts involve old-fashioned police work, in which officers, probation departments and other law enforcement agencies work together to identify and target the biggest threats.

    So it’s nice to see such a mainstream article presenting facts as they are. Gun buybacks make for sexy photo ops, but they just don’t do anything to reduce violent crime. When we have tools that we know work, we should focus our finite time, energy, and resources on them, instead of failed policies and processes.

    2013-01-14 training log (and dietary rambling)

    / hsoi

    Am I getting weaker on the Press? It feels like it… 😦

    Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 16, week 1

    • Work Set – Press (working max: 145#)
      • 2x5x45 (warmup)
      • 1x5x60
      • 1x5x75
      • 1x3x90
      • 1x5x95 (work)
      • 1x5x110
      • 1x8x125
    • Asst. #1 – Press
      • 5 x 101/6/10/8/10 x 95/95/65/65/55
    • Asst. #2 – Chin-ups (band assisted)
      • 5 x 6/6/6/5/5/ x BW
    • Asst. #3 – Stuff
      • Upright rows
      • Dips
      • Preacher Curls
      • 3 sets, 8-15 reps, enough weight to make it hard; on 3rd set immediately drop weight and keep going to failure
    • sled drags
      • 10 runs, 75 yards each
      • 75# on the sled
      • 20 seconds rest every other run
      • attach sled around hips, walk forward with large, purposeful strides

    Am I just sucking at Press? I used to be so good at it, but I feel just massive regression. Right now I’m just post-reset, and it feels horrible to only crank out 8 reps with 125. Yes, I’ve got some technique change. One thing is bringing it out of the rack, pausing for a bit to (re)set myself, then deep breath and hold, press up, come back down, reset and breathe, repeat. This may be having some effect on me because there’s energy taken up to wait and reset and hold that “down” position. But I’d like to do this instead of breathing at the top. While there’s something “natural” feeling about breathing at the top, a Press is more akin to a deadlift than a squat. It’s starting at the bottom and going up — that’s the nature of the movement. Plus doing it this way, there’s no rebound effect at the bottom, like you get from a squat. So, it may just be a technique change and I just have to live with it.

    I also decided in my assistance work at the end to use dips. Any other sort of triceps exercise feels either like it’s pointless or just hurting my elbows. But dips… well, hard to argue with how awesome they are. I only did 3×5 today and didn’t kill myself, tho that was certainly taxing for me. Mostly I wanted to feel out how my shoulders would take it, especially by that point in the session after all that other heavy pressing. So to get 3×5 was acceptable. I’ll just push from there.

    Sled drags got a slight intensity boost. Since today hit upper body, I decreased the rest time to 20 seconds (from 30). That certainly made things tougher. I’m also trying to ensure every stride is long and meaningful, and that I’m moving at a fast pace… not running, just keep the walking pace brisk.

    In diet news….

    If you read my logs, you know that diet is the hardest part for me. I struggle here. The hard part is finding a protocol I can stick to and not do for a couple weeks then regress. I’ve found some things in the past, but then for some reason the protocol doesn’t work out (e.g. too much depletion). I recently read this little tidbit from Jeremy Frey:

    Wow, you want to lose weight? Eat protein with every meal, limit your carbs to around your training, make sure that on days off you back down your carbs by half, and don’t worry about fat because I’m guessing you get enough.

    Calorie burn: 200-300 kcals.

    I know you are trying to be super scientific with this, and I can appreciate that… but at the end of the day, follow the simple guide of higher protein, vary carbs around training and off days, and take in good fats. And, of course, EAT CLEAN!

    – Jeremy Frey

    I’ve been trying to follow this sort of protocol for ages, but somehow this wording just sits better and gives me a clear and simple protocol. So I’ve been trying this for the past well, almost week. I try to get about 1g protein per pound of lean bodyweight on workout days, allow myself carbs on workout days, mostly centered around my gym time (since it’s in the morning, after lunchtime I pretty much cut out the carbs), and on my non-workout days strive for no carbs but given how things eat around the house here that doesn’t get to no carbs but certainly a LOT less than normal.

    It was rough over the weekend… my body started to scream at me for carbs. Funny thing is I tried having 1 beer and didn’t get through 2 sips before my body said “no thank you”. I did find another way, but kept it measured and light, and that was enough.

    And now? I’ve got this horrible taste in my mouth that won’t go away, and my pee smells funny. Could this be the start of ketosis? Not sure….

    But given all that, I finally opted to by Keifer’s Carb Back Loading book. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about it for many months, and from what I can tell it’s pretty legit and works well for folks, especially doing what I’m doing — that is, lifting and living life, not just sitting in front of the computer and tv all day and night but still wants to lose weight. My problem has been that I read the basics of CBL, it talks about working out in the late afternoon, how to adapt for morning workouts has received mixed responses (even from Keifer himself, but likely that’s due to time and refinement of protocol).. and I just always got hung up on it. Well, I realize that I’ve missed a lot of the concepts because I focused on the wrong thing. So, buy the book, read it, and well… we’ll see.

    Maybe next month

    / hsoi / 2 Comments

    Alas, didn’t make it out to my first IDPA match this past weekend. Older 2 kiddos were sick, so I had to be Dad. Not a problem of course, family first. So it just meant more dry fire practice instead. Oh well… these things happen.

    Just as well tho. I registered for an IDPA membership but haven’t heard anything back. I’ve tried contacting IDPA but received no response. It’s possible they have responded, but nothing by US Mail and maybe spam-filters caught email and I cleaned out the filters too quickly and missed it. I figure maybe start of the year, SHOT Show, they just were swamped. I’ll ping them next week and see.