Demian Seale

What makes a good workout? That was my thought heading from the gym today. It was one of those odd days, the day when you don’t feel particularly great; in fact, you feel a bit drained, and perhaps anxious, thinking ‘am I going to be able to hang with my partner today? Will I let him down? Will I have to bail halfway through?’ And then, you begin and wham, the switch hits, and you’re absolutely tearing the house down.

In fact, by the conclusion, when my partner and I were slouched over the calf raise machine, sweating, he complimented me that I was the only training partner he had (with the exception of one other) that could push him on chest. We both agreed that it was my strength; however, I only grudingly conceded that point, believing that I, in fact, possess nothing but weaknesses in my physique. Even though it’s negative, that attitude is not a bad one to hold, since it makes you push hard on each and every workout.

Nonetheless, if you do possess a physique strength, it acts as a sort of centrepiece, around which you can ‘fill-in’ your other body parts (holes, or weaknesses). Getting back, then, to the original theme, perhaps it was only because I was working my strength that made the workout feel good? No, I don’t think so, the feeling after of total satisfaction, of not leaving anything in the gym — that feeling of completion could have been accomplished with any workout: back, legs, delts, arms, etc.

I think a good workout comes from the physiological response to psychological stimulus: it is the body perfectly responding to thought and emotion. When the body fails to respond to the thought and passion that you invest in your muscles — that’s when disappointment occurs. It’s more a feeling than an actual physiological truth: it’s the attitude that you are failing to meet your expectations, that your psychological arousal is not being met by a similar physiological excitation. When your mind and body meet like that it’s very difficult not to go beyond those original expectations.

And I think that’s it: when you have that convergence of mind and body, you are able to go BEYOND your previous workout; you hit PB’s, and crush them, and everything just…flows. It must be similar for other athlets, for artists, for scientists — for anyone involved in an activity in which some kind of rational thought gives way to inspiration. Call it the ‘zone’ or whatever garbage you will — it’s eventually an inarticulate phenomenon that must be felt or experienced, rather than described.

I’ve done my best, here, of course, to articulate it. ‘Good’ being what it is, an experience lived in the moment rather than a description laid down after the fact.

I might have something brilliant to say tomorrow. As for today, I just have an excerpted mot juste from powerlifting guru Jim Wendler:

TM: Finally Jim, there’s much debate on-line that anal with a woman is really like having sex with a guy. Can you put this issue to rest, once and for all?

JW: If someone really believes that, then go out and have sex with a dude and let me know how it goes. Any guy who thinks that must be named Richard Tucker.

I’m glad that bodybuilding has taken its place in my life. I don’t know if it’s the most important thing, but it ‘belongs’ I suppose. I’ve shaken off whatever stigma I felt about doing it, and whether or not that was self-imposed or something I perceive to be a social censure, I’ve accepted that it’s a natural thing for me — part of how I express myself or identify myself through that expression.

One interesting thing that has emerged, however, is that this growing into an avocation naturally has revealed how imbalanced or incomplete my life is. I guess the analogy that occurred to me is the chiropractic patient that is perhaps misaligned in a few ways; and the doctor is able to bring one vertebrae back into alignment; and that adjustment only reveals the fact that ‘it still hurts’.

The cool thing about achieving clarity about bodybuilding, however, is that whatever is lacking in my life is now more in focus. By accepting the fact that I am a bodybuilder, I know that the two things I am really missing are something creative/intellectual, and a partner.

Now what form those two interstices take is up in the air! What do I do to relieve the discomfort of a stagnant imagination? Write? Compose? Sculpt? Paint? Photograph? And as for a partner, is the universe simply going to manifest one for me now that I know I want one and am ready for a relationship?

At any rate the floundering vessel has got one sail up at least and is moving slowly; now I just need to hoist the mainsail and jib (is that a sail?) and really get underway! I’ll make these my summer projects.

At any rate today was leg day and my training partner and I were on fire. It was great.

Leg Extensions x 6
Squats x 4 + 1 drop set to failure
Leg Press x 4
Dumbell Lunges x3
Unilateral (left) Leg Extensions x6
Hacks x3
Single leg press x2
Squat Press Machine x2
Leg Extensions x2
Calf Raises x4

Well things have come full circle. I’ve begun training with an elite bodybuilder and the results, even after only a week-and-a-half, have been phenomenal. My weight has come up a good 10 lbs; however, beyond that, I’m feeling much more confident as a bodybuilder, and that I belong. It’s a sort of legitimisation: I am a bodybuilder.

Training with my partner has really been a very quick education in bodybuilding. I understand now the intensity and tempo of a proper workout. I had thought previously that I was more intense than anyone simply because I took sets to failure, and beyond. However, I didn’t have the right tempo: I rested too much, and did far too many sets (in order to do so many sets, I needed the rest). But instead of approach the session as an endurance activity, we’ve been sprinting. Basically, he goes, and then I go. By the time our second exercise is done, we’re sweating profusely. And yelling and carrying on like savages. It’s great.

It makes me wonder why I didn’t find a training partner previously; I suppose that I was worried they wouldn’t want to work with lots of intensity. I think it takes a special type of person to push to their limit. It’s good when you can find someone who matches you in intensity — it really is the key to a good training partnership. For me, having this particular partner is especially good, because he has a wealth of experience, and makes very subtle changes to my technique which absolutely change the exercise entirely. Suddenly I feel muscles activating that I did not know I had.

Pushing so hard in the gym basically makes this ‘real’. It’s happening now. It’s on. And my diet has come into line. It’s not right where I want it. It’s not perfect. But I’m gaining, and not looking horrible, so I’m happy. Occasionally I bloat a lot, especially in the morning, and I feel terrible; but I understand now that this is simply a speedbump on the road to ‘huge’; and any bloating or fat gained can easily be stripped away come prep time.

The contest is in November and I’m getting psyched now. I still labour with poor genetics, and am far behind, and with my structure as it is, I know I’m very limited. But I never played hockey because I was the best; I played it because I loved it. And the same with lifting. Lifting is different in that you invariably do feel like giving up A LOT when you forget why you’re doing it and begin comparing yourself to others. Once you realise it’s a great hobby, to pursue for the love of it, everything makes sense.

I weighed, at my highest today, 112.8 lbs. I hope by Sunday to weigh 215. The eventual goal is to weigh 230+ in August. I’m sure I’ll feel like the Graf Zeppelin by then, and about as nimble; however, it deflated, didn’t it: I just don’t want to burn and crash.

Back and Hams today:

Nautilus Pullovers
Barbell Rows
Hammer Bilateral Rows
Hammer Lat Pulldowns
Wide grip lat pulldowns with spade attachment
Standing single-leg curls
Stiff Leg Deadlifts, barbell
Lying Leg Curls (drop set)

then I did a few T-bar rows, and dumbell rows.

tomorrow: Delts & Traps

I was always that kid. That boy. Lifting anything. Just felt good to hoist logs at the beach. And my dad worked construction, so I could run around and bash things with sledgehammers and pry bars. It always felt right to be physical. When you’re older those kind of spontaneous gushings of puissance are frowned upon, perhaps rightly. I’m not sure grown men should be hefting everything in sight. We find, instead, a socially acceptable arena for displays of aggression and strength. I think fighting and lifting are the two purest expressions of that primal urge for physical dominance and mastery — twin outlets for aggression that are right at the fringe of social sanction.

Both fighting and lifting are socially stigmatised; and perhaps fighters have to suffer a greater share of misguided calumny: “it’s bloodsport”; “it’s violence”; “it’s rage”. So is lifting, however. And both, despite these allegations of incivility, have survived in myth since ancient times. Granted, Plato crowns poets the greatest members of civilisation (ironically, just before he expels them from his ideal community); however, in the Odyssey, Iliad and Aeneid, moments of leisure are immediately filled with contests: feats of endurance, strength and combat. It seems these great summary statements of Western Civ, which have constituted our social ethos for thousands of years, and guided us to our current sociopolitical situation, have embedded in them what could be thought of as alternative expressions to war of aggression and violence. And the greatest of these are feats of strength, and fighting.

Hercules endures. Strength has always been valued, but, perhaps, with the rise of technology, and the erosion of physical labour, it has come to be the whipping boy of gentrification. Yet it pokes us in a primal place. As Kai Greene said in his documentary ‘Overkill’, in order to take 700 lbs on your back, squat down to the floor, and lift it up again, you better be a “bad motherfucker”. What he meant, he said, was that if you want to lift that weight, you better be able to summon some rage — you better be able to go to a socially unacceptable, wrathful, antagonistic psychic place. Being strong isn’t enough. Having great lifting technique, and lots of practice, isn’t enough. You have to get a little primal.

I think it’s wired into us. We might not want to admit it, but it’s there, at root. When a young boy brings a piece of driftwood over his head, whirling and staggering, the wood ever dandling, threatening to cave his skull in, he’s just … doing what comes naturally. It is angry, it is wrathful, but we accept it, more or less. When you turn that against someone else, and ‘fight’, albeit in a cage, with rules, it veers ever closer to the edge of social censure. We summon all manner of objections against what we do not wish to admit about our eternal being — human condition. We may sympathise, we may lust, we may love, we may cry…but can we lift, and even more dangerous, may we fight? The answer, simply, I believe is, we do.

Tonight I was ‘supposed’ to rest. But I felt the need to lift; if I had better judgement I would have rested. I am still suffering from the ethos of ‘burning it off’, rather than bodybuilding; and my caloric surplus these days has been uncomfortable. I am determined next week to begin again with my 5 day split, taking Mon & Thurs off. My lifting session was decent, but not great. I did a bit of quads, but mostly attacked hamstrings:

Squatlift x 4 (worked up to 3 plates and a quarter each side = 320lbs + bar)
Barbell Stiff Leg Deadlift x 4 (worked up to 275)
Good Mornings x 3 (135)
Leg Press x 4 (worked up to 8 plates a side = 720)
Single Leg Leg Press x4 (2 plates a side)
Pull-Throughs x4 (110)
Lying Leg Curl x4 (Pyramid up to 170)
HS Seated Leg Curl x4 (90)
Leg Extensions x4 (Pyramid to 160)

I recall my first weight set. I was about 12 years old. It was a bench press rack. I believe my father and I inherited it from a friend of my stepmother’s. The wicked stepmother. She put my soul to rack and ruin, did me no good but suffering — I suppose through her in a weird and (wicked) way I learned the riddle of iron, however.

At any rate, it was a shrunken bench rack, kind of a faux brown leather vinyl pad coming unstuffed, held together with electrician’s tape. It required sea legs, as it yawed under weight. The rack itself was very narrow, which was okay, since the bar was not long. I had some York plastic sheathed concrete weights to sling on it. I also had some plastic dumbells; later I purchased some metal rods with plastic collars that you screwed down to keep the plastic plates in place.

The weight set was bunkered in the furnace room, adjacent to the Rec Room. My father promised a daily workout session, but he dropped out within the first week. I kept my lusty pace. Daily, I reconnoitred with iron, blasting out reps as the furnace fired intermittently. It seemed an apt place to enter into iron discipleship. I’d wear my Macho Man Randy Savage pink t-shirt and jogging shorts, knee-high white socks with banded stripes (oh so 80′s). And I’d complete a total body workout every day, praying for guns like Savage, so I could knock that cocky smile off Hulk Hogan for good. I had a ghetto blaster that I loaded with Metallica & Testament; the stacatto thrash riffs were the metronome to my endless reps.

Off and on I’d work out on this contraption for the next ten years. I never really progressed with muscle, however; I knew nothing about diet. I just exulted in the torture, the pain of slinging weight. Lactic acid, pump, sweat, stretched myofascia, bloated sarcomeres. Later I discovered hockey, and lifting went on. I had a brief flirtation with bodybuilding with the publication of Mentzer’s Heavy Duty II; but I had little success, even with the exhortation of a friend who had the genes of Ronnie Coleman and advised me to drink protein shakes loaded with whole milk, bananas and ice cream.

From hockey I went to triathlon, and from triathlon to cycling. I left iron, and my guns dessicated. I went from about 185 lbs to 155. I was a damned good cyclist; but I looked like an Auschwitz survivor. I love cycling still, but I can’t go back to it. Not without lifting.

The terminus of cycling were several accidents climaxed by a hit-and-run in Kelowna. That was apostasy. Not knowing what else to do, I went back to the familiar — the gym.

That’s how I came back to it. I pledged to do a contest after being harrassed by many gym goers: “do you compete? When is your contest? Do a contest!”

And I made the promise not to them, but to myself: yes, Demian, I will do a contest. This constant return to iron; I’ll do something with it. I want to continue this meditation. To explain how this initial love of lifting, became sort of narcissism, and then became something totally unexpected: an introversion, a going inside, a sifting of the soul. I’ll publish more on this.

Jeez this was supposed to be about rubber bands and pecs and tri’s. I’ll make good on that too.

Well, been a while. My Achilles Heel has been exposed, yet no arrow to dislodge, thankfully. Perhaps a dart. I don’t eat properly, not for a bodybuilder, hell, not even for a healthy person. There’s no sense in me continuing unless I can get down the right macros every day (carbs, fats, protein). No more sugar, no more fake sweeteners.

I start Monday, and hope to update this daily if I can. I have to be accountable to someone, even if it’s just the electronic etherperson.

My goal is the Sandra Wickham contest in November, seems like plenty of time — but it’s not. Not for a bodybuilding show. By my calculations, at MOST I have 2 months to bulk, and the rest to cut.

Bring it!

Talk to you soon…

I’ve seen a lot of different ‘types’ in the gym. At UVic I mostly see the ‘bros’ who want the Italianate puffy pecs, and bloated bi’s. That’s valid. If that’s your goal, go for it! Bite life in the ass, bro! Spider curl and pec dec your way to bar bliss. The club shirts will festoon your fleshly apparel.

I also see a damned lot of serious athletes. I envy them: 20-something year-old dudes, focussed, intense, supplementing properly, training hard, dieting hard; they have a valid goal too: the development of functional muscle. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind looking great (I see them scurry off surreptitiously post-deadlifts, to the preacher bench for a good 3 sets of bi blasting) but their ultimate goal seems to be the development of muscle that will improve their performance. As a result, they seem more focussed, more intense, because what they are doing has a definite END; and what they apply as energy in iron is simply a MEANS.

Bodybuilders are a different breed, of course; our purlieu is a graveyard: the resting place of the fallen athlete. “Failed athletes” is the brutal euphemism for most bodybuilders. I hope that isn’t the case for me; it might be. However, I resolutely maintain — and always will — that bodybuilding, for me, is not athletic. It is scientific. It is artistic. It therefore recruits upon both the analytic and rational, as well as the imaginative and creative. Furthermore, I bend the limb as I reach its snapping point, and claim it spiritual.

Why spiritual? It’s a strange confluence of the mental and physical that brings about a huge demand on the spirit: the discipline, focus, and intelligence necessary to design and implement a good training and dietary programme, and the will to stick with it; the physical capability to endure unbelievable suffering — and when I say suffering, I mean both purely intense physiological strain, and the pains of deprivation (of friends, of family, of things you enjoy eating, etc.). It becomes, after some time of practice, to be both the existence of an ascetic and warrior.

These demands simply test you. And they tested me. And I admit, before I conquer these demands — and I still have much work to do — I have to learn how to remain human despite the abjuration of friends and family (love), of food, of sexual intimacy, intense loneliness, overfeeding, underfeeding, and pain. How do you remain human? How do you keep balance? How do you avoid becoming a narcissist, a solipsist, a depressive — an asshole, essentially?

You MUST realise you are a spiritual being. How ironic is that? In what the public perceives is a purely narcissistic, megalomaniacal activity, men oiled and tanned in speedos, flexed grotesques, granite unfeeling statuaries: purely physical, surface, material. When you do find that soul, and you must to survive, I believe; you pass into this rhythm of diet, training, isolation with ease; you seek out balance in other activities. You find your friends and family again, you learn to establish boundaries with them (no, I can’t eat that carrot cake!), you survive the jests; and you know what, you earn their respect.

But more importantly, you earn your respect. You come to love yourself, not for your pec depth, your ‘christmas tree’ latissimus, your ‘boulder shoulders’, but because if you CAN DO THIS, you CAN DO ANYTHING. Furthermore, you learn you are not your body; that physiology emerges from the soul; it’s an expression of that warrior spirit.

For me, then, bodybuilding is a lesson. It’s a life lesson: a subject lesson in existence — a life well-lived. It’s about love, ultimately. If you live it right, it becomes less and less about yourself, as you come to love yourself more from within to without, and more about service to others. Anything that can crack you like that, anything that pushes you to that limit forces this upon you. I believe it is the shadow of your own mortality creeping up on you, ultimately. You overtrain, you push to exhaustive limits you can’t find elsewhere (or haven’t, they do of course exist in many other disciplines and endeavours), and, man, in that crucible, your soul is tested and hopefully brought forth.

I’ve seen the narcissists in the gym: the ones whose polished and sinewy exterior is cloaked in self-loathing; the ones who haven’t seen this end. They’re the sad ones, and they go on like robots, with a ‘thousand yard stare’ at each machine, repping, repping, repping…You may win, you may get that trophy; but in the end, mortis triumphus. You can’t take it with you, bro.

That doesn’t mean that God/the All Soul doesn’t want each and every one of us to achieve our best. But I truly believe that we need to divert that energy, like a prism, refracting that divine love, to others. Whatever milieu we choose, we have to convert that power to empowerment. Love is the only power. Love is the only salvation in this existence.

/pedantry

Yours irroneously,

Sexton Hardcastle

It IS a bodybuilding blog after all…priceless vanities bought with sweat, bloodshot eyes, nosebleeds, bashed shins, swearing…

Anyway that’s about the state of things. The illusion in bodybuilding is that, once your water is dropped, and every last molecule of fat is jettisoned, excised, annihilated, scorned, dispatched…you may drop up to 30 lbs or more; however, you actually appear ‘larger’; the illusion is created largely by the dissipation at the middle: the hips and waist vacuum in so drastically that it creates a real “V-taper” to the upper body; and if you are blessed with great legs (which I am not), your entire frame should appear as an “X”. So those are the only two letters in the bodybuilder’s vocabular, “V” and “X”: and now you know why.

My last two workouts have been fantastic, which is unusual, as I went into them a bit apprehensive, having not rested properly; however, I have been eating more, in the attempt to gain overall bulk; and I believe the extra glycogen deposited as a result of more carbs has given me that extra punch. I’ve also begun to understand bodybuilding a lot better.

What I mean by that is largely a matter of technique and focus. I believe there are three components to the actual workout (apart from the dieting, sleep, supplementation, etc. that precede and succeed a workout): technique, focus, and intensity. I post them seriatim like that because I prioritise them so. First, you must have thorough knowledge of proper exercise technique. While it helps to have a thorough knowledge of physiology, and what each muscle is responsible for, it is not necessary to proper technique. There are many youtube videos to be scoured for learning the essentials to each movement. This is especially important in the gross movements, like deadlift, squat, bench press, military press, etc.

Once you have perfected these movements, you can focus your mind intently on the movement itself, and on the targeted muscle. You must forget that you owe Telus Mobility 88.13$; you must forget that your dog will need to be walked in half an hour; you must forget the awkward argument that went unresolved this morning; you must forget everything but the weight and your body. Lock in on your muscles. Specifically, the target muscle. Feel it stretch, and contract; if you cannot stretch or contract that muscle, adjust the movement slightly — only slightly. Try various positions. Move slowly in this phase, experimenting, until you feel the pinch distinctly, right where it should be. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Now technique is a means, and not an end. The end is total stimulation of the muscle.

Once you’ve gone through this phase, INTENSITY must be added to the movement. Now that you can stimulate the muscle, annihilate it with intensity. How much intensity you are probably wondering? Intensity must be parcelled out intelligently. I see all too much very low intensity. Rarely do you see the opposite: the summoning of too much force, fury, willpower; those who truly overtrain are exceptional people! I will, however, deal with my ideas about overtraining another time.

I prefer doing 5 sets of a particular exercise. The first set is merely what I call a “tracking” set. Even if you’re the most experienced muscle practitioner, you need to kind of find the groove of every movement you do. Now a tracking set is not a warmup. Warmup precedes all workouts and should combine cardio with stretching and very light weight. Tracking sets are actual work sets of the particular movement one is preparing to do. You simply use a weight about 50% of your maximum (for 8-10 reps) and you perform the movement until you feel that stretch and contraction. Now, you are “tracked”, you are in the groove.

I believe that each set should be about 8 to 10 repetitions; this has been proven as the best range for muscle hypertrophy (gaining muscle size, apart from strength, though they are related of course). On your first set, go until you think you could do perhaps 3 more repetitions with proper technique (75%). On your next set, pull up 2 reps short (85%). On your third set you are now doing what i call a “working” set; you go until you could only do one more repetition with proper form (no body english!), or 90%. Your last set should be to temporary muscular “failure”: without assistance, you could not perform any more reptitions of the movement.

Muscular failure is maximum intensity. Now this is where it gets really interesting. What is maximum? How do you know, THAT was my maximum? Let’s say I put you in a puce-coloured dress, in a room painted baby-blue, and gave you a barbell, told you to curl it as many times as you could, and left the room, and piped in Enya. Could you achieve maximum? Now let’s say I put you in a hardcore, concrete-walled subterranean gym, with half-clothed crazed shrieking bodybuilders everywhere, acrid smells of sweat wafting about, and Rammstein blasting. Now could you do maximum? What if you were in this gym, Rammstein going, and I loaded you up on caffeine AND had the biggest, meanest guy in the gym swearing at you and cussing you out as loud as he could while you did your reps?

I assume if you’re like me you will get more repetitions in the latter scenario! But that scenario is not readily available to most, nor particularly alluring. There are many mental exercises you can try to achieve intensity. If you’re like me, you’re likely angry about a few things — we all are. On your last set, near your last rep, as you’ve been focussing intently on the muscle being fired, you switch mental gears and summon the image or idea that angers you. Or frustrates you. Whatever works. Use it.

Some days you won’t be able to summon that furious intensity; on those days just revert to the second phase, focus. Just focus intently. Bodybuilding is a marathon, and not a sprint.

Yours irroneously,

Sexton Hardcastle

Occasionally you have these very odd days in the gym, where you FEEL as if you are simply unstoppable, a juggernaut, a muscle missile headed to irondoom! And then, pow, you just deflate after your first set. The pump won’t come, you can’t hit failure; your weights and lifts are down. What’s the problem? I feel great!

The truth is, I believe, it lies in the CNS (the central nervous system). It’s not just muscle recovery that occurs in the gym; the central nervous system is supremely taxed; and it takes much longer to recover than muscles. You can repeat hard training for only so long before the CNS collapses; you’ll know! Because you become somewhat depressed, insomnia visits you, irritability (more than normal, lol), your immune system is compromised — and all sorts of other things.

So I have planned more rest in the next few days. For example, tomorrow I will do a chest workout (perhaps my favourite these days), and then take Thursday completely off, and visit my local food bank to do some volunteering before work.

I suppose the salient point here is that bodybuilding, or any other sporting activity, is both physical and mental. The mind, in fact, is what controls the body, of course. But it is overly optimistic, I have found, to say that ‘bodybuilding is entirely mental’. I have discovered that there are physical limits, and that the mind must run in pursuit at times, just as at others, it must lead. It must follow the body’s direction. If the body is ready, however (i.e. if your training and diet are both spot-on), then bodybuilding is entirely mental. Whatever you conceive, you can create.

I hope to post more soon on this interesting topic, and also on Bulgarian motorsports. I know, I know, you ladies all want pics. Forthcoming!

Yours irroneously,

Sexton Hardcastle