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Get over it

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

I have an elderly neighbor (she’s in her 80’s). She’s capable: she totally lucid, drives herself where she needs to go, and you can tell she’s got her pride — she wants to be self-sustaining and not be a burden on anyone. We do help her out as she needs, but again you can tell she does NOT want to burden anyone and only comes to us for help when she’s exhausted all options. I respect that, and am always happy to help her out when she asks.

But let’s face facts. She’s in her 80’s. She moves slow. She’s fairly frail.

She is vulnerable.

I admit, I think about her vulnerability. Some days ago I was over at her house helping her set up one of those “medical alert” systems. She knows her state in life (thus why she got the system for herself). But it still weighs on me. I often find myself thinking about her vulnerability, and if there’s anything I can do to alleviate it.

Then I step back and think about greater issues.

Our neighborhood has recently had a rash of break-ins. Thankfully it’s mostly been cars, but I do know from time to time homes are broken into.

I cringe at the thought of her home getting broken into. And let’s face it. Most break-ins are not random. The criminal has stalked and monitored and determined ahead of time what houses are good targets.

What can she do? Some 16-35 year old male breaks into her home. How vulnerable she is. What can she do in the face of such a threat?

She’s not like Mayor Bloomberg, with her own “private army”, which she can enjoy in her own retirement. She’s not so privileged as to have to have a security detail. What can she do?

There’s so much big talk about “leveling the playing field” in so many other areas of life, but what about here when life itself is at stake?

Anti-gun mantras ring hollow with me. If you’re going to throw worn arguments at me, I say you should look her in the eye and tell her the same. Think about how your actions to deny our society’s most vulnerable citizens with a means of an equalizer actually serve to hurt them more than help them.

Because that’s what a gun is: a force equalizer.

It allows folks like her to tell some evil person bent on hurting her, on destroying her life, to stop and go away.

Can you look her in the eye and deny her?

I’ll even take pro-gun folks to task.

There’s so much rah-rah about guns, calibers, and what’s acceptable for personal defense. It’s not just internet message board bravado, but it’s even things like how Texas law requires a certain “big caliber gun” (.32 caliber or greater) to pass the CHL test. You could carry a .22, but you can’t test with it. Yes, I understand why they required things in this way… but it still kinda bothers me.

I think about my frail neighbor.

Could she fire such a gun?

Pull that trigger weight?

Manage that level of recoil?

I don’t know, but given what I’ve seen of her frailty, I’m not sure.

But because of her condition in life, why should she be denied?

Politician: “Let’s treat all homeschool parents like felony child abusers”

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

As a homeschooling parent and believer in individual liberty (plus a Dad that still thinks we parents should have the final say regarding our children)… I thought this article was spot-on.

The Matt Walsh Blog's avatarThe Matt Walsh Blog

Let me try to explain why you should care about homeschooling rights, even if you aren’t a homeschool parent:

Because we don’t have any rights at all if we don’t have the unquestioned and absolute right to teach and raise our own children. In a country where you do not have a right to your own offspring, to what else could you possibly have a right? Your home? Your car? Your body? Not in a nation ruled by bureaucratic deities so powerful that they may deign the very fruit of your loin to be their property. If we forfeit our jurisdiction over our sons and daughters, where else can we draw the line. “Sure, government, regulate how I educate my kids, but you better have a warrant if you want to take a peek in my glove compartment!” We all have to pick a hill to die on, I suppose…

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2013-04-26 training log

/ hsoi

To paraphrase Mark Bell “Fuck you, and fuck your shoulder.”

Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 19, week 2

  • Work Set – Bench Press (working max: 240#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x95
    • 1x5x120
    • 1x3x145
    • 1x3x170 (work)
    • 1x3x195
    • 1x5x220
  • Assistance – Bench Press
    • 5 x 10 x 125
  • Assistance – DB Rows
    • 5 x 15 x 50
  • 100 rep JM presses and Face Pulls

My left shoulder was hurting… still hurts as I write this. Something in the joint area. It sucks. But, I press anyways. Why?

Just happened to see that before going to the gym.

It was discomfort, but not major pain. So, press on.

220 for 5? I’ll take it. I did 215 for 5 this time last cycle. It’s all good. In fact, apart from my shoulder, this felt really good.

I also read on the Cube Method Facebook Group, someone posted about foot placement while benching for tall guys, keeping your butt on the bench. There were some tips there that I tried. The biggest one? Go ahead and let your feet go out, be wide. But when you arch, instead of trying to plant the upper part of your butt on the bench, put the part of your butt where the hamstrings come in. Or as another guy put it, put your balls on the bench. The wording of cues can make all the difference. A subtle difference, a subtle approach, but it can suddenly make it all clear. So I tried it, and it helped a lot. I felt a lot more stable and more push-through with my legs. It will take time to get it, but so far it feels like the best approach towards solving that problem.

I also realized another problem… which might be the cause of my shoulder pain.

I ended up realizing that my bar path is not “riding on rails”. Rippetoe teaches to not look at the bar, but many powerlifters say to watch the bar. I’m going to start watching the bar more. It’s all good at the top, but as the bar approaches my chest — you know, out of visual perception — the bar was shifting to the right. I didn’t realize I was doing that until today, when I just happened to catch it. So between that and the shoulder stuff, I went lighter on the assistance benching, moved slower, and really watched my bar path. Yeah…. when I went straighter? It felt very different. I let myself do what felt normal, and I shifted. Wow… and when I went straight, suddenly some things felt very weak, but it explains some um… imbalance? power? drive? I don’t know how to describe it but it explains a lot.

So today was not only good from a pure physical standpoint, but a VERY enlightening one in other ways too.

And yes… fuck you and fuck your shoulder. 🙂

If you can only learn one thing this year…

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

…learn medical skills.

Start with basic first aid stuff — boo-boos, bee stings, shock, hypothermia, dehydration, burns, etc.. Think “Boy Scout First Aid Merit Badge” sorts of stuff.

CPR.

And try some more serious stuff too, like how to work with tourniquets, pressure dressings, etc..

Make yourself a kit, or buy a kit. Keep something in the car. Keep something in your purse. In your briefcase or daily bag. Whatever. If you need it, you’ll need it pretty quick, so have it handy and be redundant.

Just consider events of the past week. Not just the explosion in West, Texas. Not just the bombing in Boston. But how many car wrecks did you pass during the course of your week? Medical skills are useful.

Shout out to my bud, Caleb Causey @ Lone Star Medics. If you can, try one of his courses. You’ll learn a lot.

What should we be doing right about now?

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

With all the talk of gun banning, collapse of our Constitutionally guarded rights, potentials for civil unrest… well….

Take a cue from The Suburban Dad Survivalist on how we should be behaving:

  1. Respect the Constitution.
  2. Pray for our leaders, even if you don’t agree with them.  Pray for God to heal our collective souls.  Pray for wisdom for yourself.
  3. Educate yourself and others.
  4. Remember you get more flies with honey than you do vinegar.
  5. Be vigilant about what’s going on in the news and in politics.  Stay on top of current events.
  6. Reach out to those who disagree with you.  Build relationships with them.  Let them see you are not a bad person or a nut job.
  7. Value truth.  Don’t hide from facts.
  8. Prepare for the possibility of more difficult times ahead, for you and your family.
  9. Support candidates who espouse your values.  This means supporting their campaigns financially.  It also means reaching out to them to let them know what’s on your mind.
  10. Be a nice person.  Don’t be a jerk, even if someone else is being a jerk to you.  Set a good example.

Emphasis on that last one: be nice.

Workout reassessment

/ hsoi

If you come here for the not-workout articles, leave now. 🙂  If you read the workout stuff, read on.

So my primary goal has been trying to shed the fat. I managed to drop 10# and plateaued. The fat loss work was driving me crazy. Too little to eat, stress of job and life, and it just drove me batty. I tried various adjustments of diet and plan to make it a little more manageable. For example, instead of spreading it out over 5 meals, try 4, or try 3. That helped to a degree, because I could have a meal and feel better in that meal… felt more satisfied, not so much like I was denying myself.

Still, I stagnated. I probably needed to drop my calories even more. But I am really hating that because I’m losing too much strength. My workouts are becoming less fun. But I am liking my switch back to a simpler workout program, basically the Wendler 5/3/1 program Boring But Big template. I cannot deny how much I like that program.

I also opted to start to find a different route to caloric and thus flab-reduction goals. I learned that I do need carbs to some extent. I cannot cut them out like I was doing when I was striving to be paleo — my body just won’t function well without some carbs. By my carb choices have changed a lot, settling on things like Ezekiel bread and brown rice, maybe some more carb-heavy veggies like squashes and whatever comes in our CSA box. I’m still toying with my macros, and currently leaning towards something like 1.0 to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight, and then maybe 0.5 or so grams of carbs per pound with fats being as minimal as possible but not sweating it too much. Basically, keep protein high and carbs low, giving me what I need to get through but no more. I’m still working to find where that exact balance is.

Then I want to change up my workout.

I’m going to stick primarily with Wendler 5/3/1 and BBB, but I’m thinking about some minor modifications. I’ve been reading a lot about powerbuilding, with guys like Josh Bryant and Metroflex. Trouble is, I’m trying to glean principles — what is it that makes it not powerlifting, not bodybuilding, but this new thing “powerbuilding”. Well, it’s not really new… but just like with 5/3/1 you can look at a lot of specifics but also fall back to see what Jim’s guiding principles are, I’ve been trying to glean out some principles in powerbuilding. I may not be on the exact right course, but I have some ideas of things I’d like to try throwing in.

One thing I’m thinking about is changing the movement assistance work. That is, BBB says to take your main lift, drop the weight to 50-60%, then go 5×10 across. Well, when you do that, if you want rep 10 of set 5 to be tough then rep 10 of set 1 is pretty easy. Or if you make rep 10 of set 1 really easy, then it’s tough to get all 10 reps out of set 5. Well, what if instead every set and every rep was tough to get 10 reps? The way to do that is vary the weight. So set 1 uses X amount of weight, and set 5 uses Y, with Y < X. In essense, you’re doing drop sets, or rest-pause, just that the rest might be a little longer (60-90 seconds).

Another thing is what I just did on the bench press 14-3 workout, throwing in some “pump sets” at the end. In that workout I did all my work, then did a set of flies with light weight and high reps to failure; immediately followed by rope-handle triceps pushdowns with light weight high reps to failure, dropping the weight, and continuing to failure; immediately followed by barbell curls with light weight and high reps to failure, dropping the weight and continuing to failure. Basically, just get a pump. I didn’t do much this first workout because I knew doing just a little bit would be enough to make me sore… work up to more sets of this.

Exactly what I’ll do, I’m not sure. But basically I want to lift more… heavier, more reps, more volume. Keep 5/3/1 for a core strength foundation, but do a little more work to get me pumped both in terms of muscle growth and my heart rate. I’m continuing to pour over the powerbuilding documents that I can find, to see what I can glean.

As an interesting aside… one thing I opted to get back to doing is pull-up/chin-up work. I considered buying a set of bands to assist me, but while searching around I stumbled upon this video from Scooby:

I might see about adding that in. I’ve read all the various ways to get your chin-up reps up, but stagnated in my progress. He’s laying out a nice progression here using all those same sorts of steps (negatives, holds, assistance, etc.), so it seems like a program worth trying. I’d probably start with his step 3 or 4. Not sure where or how I’d work this in, but it does fit nicely with my 2x week workout.

The other thing I need to do is get back to conditioning work. My ankle is just going to be what it’s going to be. Oddly, the more I’m getting back on it, the better it feels. It actually makes sense, and as long as I’m careful about it I should be OK. I’ll probably start out just doing some brisk walks. Once things are really feeling better, I hope to get back to dragging that tire sled.

I’m hoping these things will help me get closer to my goals. Yeah, I won’t shed the fat as fast, but you know what? If it takes me 6-9 months, if I’m working hard, if I’m feeling good, then so what? I can live with that. Hell… if it basically allows me to drop 1-2# a week and not be miserable, still feel like I’m making progress in all desired areas… heck, I’ll be OK with that sort of results. I’d rather be in this for the long haul.

I’ve got a bunch to still think about in terms of exactly how to mesh this all together, but these are the thoughts going through my head right now.

Motivation

/ hsoi

Arnold Schwarzenegger on motivation

Many of us cannot relate to his specific areas of bodybuilding, acting, politics. But it doesn’t really matter the venue because it’s all the same. It’s about what you want, and how bad you want it.

You got to get up and say, “I want to be a champion”.

You have to quest for the pinnacle. Everything you do must strive for that, including the sacrifices you must make. You must try, you cannot be afraid to fail. In fact, you must accept that somewhere along the way you will fail, but from that failure somehow you will grow and you will continue on your quest.

It’s all up to you.

 

Freedom is not defined by safety…

/ hsoi

“Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.”

— Ron Paul

Good source management

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Troy Hunt writes on The 10 commandments of good source control management. They are:

  1. Stop right now if you’re using VSS – just stop it!
  2. If it’s not in source control, it doesn’t exist
  3. Commit early, commit often and don’t spare the horses
  4. Always inspect your changes before committing
  5. Remember the axe-murderer when writing commit messages
  6. You must commit your own changes – you can’t delegate it
  7. Versioning your database isn’t optional
  8. Compilation output does not belong in source control
  9. Nobody else cares about your personal user settings
  10. Dependencies need a home too

Read Troy’s article for all the details. I’d like to elaborate on a few.

VSS – stop using it. Totally. “Back in the day” I worked at Metrowerks and they made the Mac version of Visual SourceSafe… or as it was jokingly called, SourceSuck. There were a lot of cool things about it, and sometimes I still think the ability to lock can be useful. But the main repository was constantly down, constantly being rebuilt. It was terrible. Thankfully tools have progressed since then. Subversion is great. I haven’t had the opportunity to try git yet, but that it’s maturing is a good sign.

Commit early and often. Very true. It always gives you a rollback point. A lot of people are afraid of this for whatever reason, especially fearing the merge. Understandable, but it’s just part of life and certainly using version control will help ease the pain — if you use it right. So put your work into a branch, every so often merge in changes from the trunk to keep you building and current, but still doing your thing. When it’s time for you to go back into the trunk, the merge won’t be so painful. If you must reconcile, you must. It happens, but it’s not the end of the world. Maintain that history, give yourself the protection that version control is for.

Going with this, #10. Over time I’ve changed how I lay out my Subversion repository. The basic recommended layout is:

/trunk
/branches
/tags

and while that’s a good start, I expanded upon it:

/branches
/sandbox
/tags
    /builds
    /candidates
    /development
    /releases
/trunk
/vendor
    /archives
    /src

Branches hold branches, labeled in a manner that describes what the branch is about. There’s no need to get too formal about the branch name, so long as it along with the commit message adequately describe what’s going on. Sandbox provides a place to play, perhaps you wanted to write a little testbed application that is relevant to the project, this is where to put it. Why put it into the repository? See #2, along with just all the good reasons for versioning source. Tags is broken down into a little more organization. Development tags are tags defined to ease development, like you’re about to make some big change and want to demarcate a clear rollback point. Build tags are tags made during your build cycle, perhaps by the automated build server, to of course denote a particular build. Candidate tags are tags to say “this is a release candidate”, and these tags are made from a build tag (e.g. “svn copy tags/builds/1.0.0.005 tags/candidates/1.0.0FC1”). Release tags then are the actual public releases, made from the candidate tags (e.g. “svn copy tags/candidates/1.0.0FC2 tags/releases/1.0.0”). This hierarchy of tagging allows a tracking of history. Trunk of course is the main development trunk. The vendor area is for any sort of third party product that is relevant to go in. I like to put the archive, as downloaded, into the vendor/archives/ area (e.g. the .gz or .zip or .dmg or whatever), so the archive as received is maintained. Into vendor/src I then like to put the expanded/opened distribution, but with minor modifications. For instance, they didn’t make a clean distribution and included .svn folders, or build products or other things that are irrelevant or dirty things up, or renaming the top-level folder to something more descriptive (e.g. from “distro” to “boost-1.46.1”) ; it should be as close to the original distribution as possible, just cleaned up. From there, the /vendor/src/whatever/ is svn copied into the /trunk. This allows the original distro to remain clean, but if say it’s necessary to make changes to the local version we can do that without risking dirtying the original distribution.

Of course, this setup may not work for you and your projects, but over the years it’s what has evolved to work for me and my needs.

#8 and especially #9 – yes. Please stop checking in your cruft.

Remember, version control is there to help us write better code. Not directly, but once code is written it will always have to be maintained. History is a part of that maintenance cycle. The more relevant history we can preserve, the better off we can be in the long run.