Link Theory Vol. 4

Here's what I've been reading this week:

At T-muscle, Chad Waterbury says that you can Add 20 lbs to Your 1RM Today and Eric Cressey gives us the techniques to Master the Deadlift (part one features the basics, part two discusses standard pulls, and part three is about Sumo-style deadlifts).

At Adam Khan's youmeworks, I've been reading his Antivirus for your Mind series: Antivirus for Your Mind, Moment of Truth, Learners will Inherit the Earth, and Can We Avoid Explaining Setbacks Altogether?

Mark's Daily Apple has a look at supermarket "food" with WTF... Where's the Fat?
At Whole Health Source: a couple of posts on Omega-6 vs. Omega-3, Eicosanoids, and Heart Disease: part one, and part two.

Ross at rosstraining.com discusses his version of Simplicity and Specificity.

An article about BPA in plastics.

Finally, take a look at Lance Armstrong's home gym. Looks familiar, huh?

See you on Monday.

How to Search Craigslist

Recently, I've found myself clicking through craigslist approximately 200 times a day. Between four geographical areas near me and a few items that I'm keeping an eye out for (power rack/squat rack with max weight capacity of 800+ lbs., weight trees, Olympic sets, and 45# and 100# plates) I found myself acting like a chain-smoking Vegas grandma playing the slots, hitting "refresh" on four tabs and praying for the good deals to come up.

Photo by Jeff Kubina

The refresh monster came out after I got beat out on a few deals. Let me explain:

Four 100# Olympic plates, $80 (20 cents a pound). I got the email off and it's already gone.

How about this: bench, Olympic weight set, and 15 pound EZ-curl bar, plus weight tree for $50. I offered this guy $75 just to hold on to it long enough for me to come pick it up!

For context, my local Play-It-Again Sports will buy your equipment at these prices: cash 20 cents a pound, trade at 25 cents a pound. They sell at 69 cents a pound for used weights and 89 cents a pound for new, though depending on the type of weight, you can easily pay up to $3-10 a pound.

How do you make sure you're there for the best deals?
For the last week, I was constantly going back to four local craigslists and trying to find the best deals before anyone else. Frankly, it was exhausting me. There had to be a better way.

There is a better way
I learned this technique from Get Rich Slowly. The trick is using RSS feeds to do your bidding. Don't know what RSS is? Check out the short video below:


Notice my feed icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen

So here's the hack. Go to your local craigslist, and enter the search term that you're interested in. Make sure that you're getting the right results, then scroll to the bottom of the screen and check it out: there's an RSS feed to the lower right.

Now you have a feed of just the search terms that you're interested in. I did this for the four cities nearby and four search terms that I'm interested in, then I cleaned up the names of the feeds in google reader so it's clear where the feed is from and what the search term was. Now, I quickly review my feeds, and I'm done, rather than doing my best imitation of a Vegas grandma.

Let me know how it works out for you in the comments. I'll let you know when I make another purchase.

Link Theory Vol. 3

Image by Toni Lazano

Way back in 2002, the Crossfit journal had this great piece about building a garage gym (the checklist at the end is particularly helpful).

Gary Taubes shows up at T-nation for an interview.

Also at T-nation, Dan John brings back the 40-day program from his Feb. 2005 newsletter. And over at Elite FTS, Darren Mallette tells us about how he went from bombing on the bench at 315 to hitting a personal best at 345 in two months on this plan.

I've been reading about how the body can store fat even without carbohydrate here and here. This is why you have to be cautious with your overall calories, not just carbohydrates.

That wraps this edition up--stay tuned for more in the Pulse series, Mnemonic techniques, and some lifting platform advice.

My Current Workout

Hey, I just wanted to give you guys a taste of what I'm doing with all my home gym equipment right now. This is the basic format that I build my workouts around. I'll give you some of the twists that I've come up with to burn more fat later in the Pulse series.

Here's the basic progression, which comes from Pavel Tsatsouline in his book Enter The Kettlebell! Strength Secret of The Soviet Supermen.

This is my version of the "Rite of Passage" program. The Rite of Passage is to be able to press 50% of your bodyweight and snatch a 24kg (53 lb) kettlebell 200 times in 10 minutes.

M: Light workout
T: "Variety" or off
W: Medium workout
R: "Variety" or off
F: Off
S: Hard workout
U: Off

On variety days, feel free to perform other workouts: do other kettlebell drills, calesthenics, just keep it light and easy. Or take the day off.

On the light, medium and hard days, what I do is alternate sets of chins and presses in a ladder format. You could easily substitute dips and chins if you don't have kettlebells or dumbbells, or just do the presses. You could also alternate bench presses and rows.

I do these as "ladders", meaning you take a short (5-90 second) break in between the sets. You can take a longer break after all the sets in a series are completed. Clarence Bass explains the technique here, and the reasoning here.

These are in the sets x reps format.
Week 1: Light 3 x 1; Medium 3 x {1,2}; Hard 3 x {1,2,3}
Week 2: Light 4 x 1; Medium 4 x {1,2}; Hard 4 x {1,2,3}
Week 3: Light 5 x 1; Medium 5 x {1,2}; Hard 5 x {1,2,3}
Week 4: Light 5 x {1,2}; Medium 5 x {1,2,3}; Hard 5 x {1,2,3,4}
Week 5: Light 5 x {1,2,3}; Medium 5 x {1,2,3,4}; Hard 5 x {1,2,3,4,5}

On the light days, do one clean and many presses, the medium and hard days, perform a clean before each press.


A kettlebell clean and press in good form

Take two days off and test your new maxes with a heavier kettlebell or dumbbell, or test the number of pullups or dips you can now do.

I vary the pullup type on each workout as follows:
I roll two six sided dice and the result indicates the pullup type that I do:

2: Towel Chin
3: Mixed-Grip Chin
4: Wide-Grip Chin
5: Narrow-Grip (hands touching) Chin
6: Standard chin
7: Standard Pullup
8: Narrow (thumbs touching) pullup
9: Wide Pullup
10: Neutral (palms facing) grip pullup
11: Side-to-side pull (pull to left hand, then pull to right hand)
12: Side grip pullup

If you know about probability, then you know that I will be spending most of my time doing numbers 5-9 and less time doing the outliers, so I designed the workout to focus on the basics in the center and only occasionally get into the weirder pullup variations. This is the idea of "different, but the same". You want enough variety to force your body to keep adapting, but not so much that the stimulus is random. Not enough variety leads to staleness (the guy who is still doing the workout that he learned as a beginner) and too much leads to a failure to adapt (just doing Crossfit WODs). The key words then are, "different, but the same".

Each workout is "finished" with swings or snatches. I roll two six sided dice again to determine the length of the finisher, from 2-12 minutes, and I perform 50-60% of my max snatches on the light day, 70-80% of my max swings on medium day, and 100% all out on the hard day. Again, this uses the "same but different" principle, by changing the difficulty and length of the rounds every workout.

I've just completed another cycle with the 32kg (70 lb) kettlebell. Since I weigh 100kg (220lbs) this is 32% of my bodyweight. My next "official" bell is the 40kg (88lb-40% of bodyweight) but I also have another 70lb kettlebell with 10lbs of plates duct taped to the bottom. This throws the weight distribution all off and makes it harder to clean the weight properly, so I'm hoping to bypass the 80lb "ghetto 'bell" altogether and move straight into the 88lb 'bell.

Coming up on Wednesday, a post about an 80s fad that I think should come back. Stay tuned.

Solving the Home Gym Conundrum

I think it's time for some more specifics on building and outfitting a home gym.

Let's take a few different scenarios and see what we can come up with:

1. Unlimited space, unlimited budget. (Suburban livin')
2. Limited space, unlimited budget. (City livin')
3. Unlimited space, limited budget. (Country livin')
4. Limited space, limited budget. (Solitary confinement)

Suburban livin'
The first, and easiest is unlimited space, unlimited budget. Just take exactly what you do at your commercial gym and take it into the home arena. Get the biggest, nicest power rack that you can find, a great olympic set with bumpers, and fill in with whichever other pieces of equipment strike your fancy--adjustable cable crossovers, a full rack of hex dumbbells, glute-ham raise, monolift, leg press, etc. Basically, you can replicate your gym right now, but eliminate the waiting, and increase the quality of some of the equipment (nicer bars that won't bend, nicer bumper plates, better power rack, etc.)

City livin'
A little more interesting is a situation where you have very limited options in terms of space. In this situation, think about the most space efficient equipment that you can: a lifting platform and olympic set, a chinup bar and rings, and kettlebells can all be options if you don't have enough room for a fully fledged gym. I would probably go with some power blocks or some other selectorized or adjustable dumbbell equipment in this scenario, and a simple flat bench. You can store the dumbbells under the bench and push them out of the way when they're not in use. I would probably go running or do calesthenics for cardio.

Country Livin'
If you're set up in a barn or an open field, but you have less than a hundred bucks, this would be your situation. I would prioritize your equipment needs and try to scavenge as much as possible. You can use sledgehammers and hit an old tire (free if you've got the sledge) or calesthencs or jump rope (five bucks) for cardio. For resistance training, I think I would look to do rafter pullups or look for a playground to do dips and chins. Again, try to get a basic olympic set and build a platform, or hang some playground rings for pull ups, muscle ups, and dips. You can push a wheelbarrow filled with scrap metal, build your own sandbags, build your own medicine balls, get a keg from a liquor store, or build your own isometrics devices for very cheap as well. Cinder blocks make for good ways to adjust the height of your exercises: you can do all kinds of varieties of push ups with your feet or hands elevated to change the emphasis.

Solitary Confinement
If you're a teenager living at home, or you live in a dorm, or if you are actually in prison, this is the scenario you find yourself in. A lot of the same things apply to you too. Calesthenics are your friends: burpees and jumping jacks for cardio, pushups, squats, pistols, and pullups if you can find the space. You can vary the height of your pushups using your bed.

Even this very abbreviated type of program can get results, and you don't even need any equipment or much space to begin. So start here, if you have to, and build from there.
Of course, a lot of you are going to have some combination of these, a medium amount of space and a small budget, or a medium budget and medium space. Combine these suggestions appropriately.

So given the time and space, what are the biggest bangs for your buck?

1. Homemade equipment: Ostensibly, this is the cheapest, and you can get a lot of benefit out of filling a bag or a keg with sand.
2. Inexpensive equipment: jump ropes and ab wheels make this very short list.
3. An Olympic set: Just with this, you can get a lot of the benefits of having a home gym. Deadlifts, rows, military presses, curls, Turkish-get-ups. (Add a lifting platform if you need to).
4. A chinup bar: The lats are the biggest muscles in the upper body, and nothing builds the lats better than a chinup bar. Pullups, chinups, hanging leg raises.
5. An adjustable bench: A lot more pressing options open up to you with this piece of equipment.
6. Dumbbells: These can definitely be an option to complement or replace the Olympic set. I would suggest getting adjustable ones to get the most bang for your buck, both in terms of money and adjustability. You can get hex dumbbells, but then you end up spending the same money over and over again. (I.E. if you buy a 70 and 80 pound hex dumbbell, you have to pay for 150 pounds of weights. If you buy a dumbbell handle with 80 pounds, you have both a 70 and 80 pound dumbbell). These are also good if you don't have a training partner or a power rack to spot you.
7. A power rack: If you're really serious about training, eventually, you're going to need a power rack. The issues are both space and money. A power rack can take up as much as 3x3x8 feet, and cost up to $5000. If you're serious about training by yourself, though, there is no replacement for a good power rack. This is where home gyms can become real replacements for commercial gyms.
8. High/low pulley systems: This opens up woodchoppers, lat pulldowns, pullthroughs, low rows, and some other fun options.
9. Adjustable/cable crossover pulley systems This is another fun addition, a little nicer than the last.
10. Serious training stuff If you've gotten to this point, and you're still building up your gym, you probably know what's going to help you reach your goals at this point. If you're trying to lose fat, maybe some cardio equipment would help. If you're gaining muscle, then some machines would be nice. If you're a powerlifter, Dave Tate has advice for you. Start with what I've suggested above and then start thinking in this direction as your budget, space, and ability level allows.

Also, check out this thread to give you some ideas of how other people have solved the home-gym conundrum.