What is reality...

Sorry its been...like...a year since I last wrote. Life has been crazy.

The question of reality was posed to me by myself recently, and I concluded that Descartes was correct in his assumption that "I think, I am" I know I exist based on my own awareness of my own consciousness. However there is no proof that the world is objective and not just subjective based on my own illusion...or something. So what is real, what is reality. Real it seems to me, is something that exists without my observance of it. For example If I die, if the world continues on without me, then the world would be objective because I would not be observing it but it would still continue on, thus not a projection of my own mind. This is all a fun mind game to contemplate, but I have also concluded that the evidence (not proof, but strong evidence) points to the world being objective. Although there is not logical absolute proof, I believe the world is objectively real based on the fact that I see and feel my hand. This may all seem odd to you all. But my blog is simply what's on my mind. So there you have it.

Does God Exist?

Yes. Why? Becuase. Because Why? This is a deep, deep question, in fact I just heard a sermon on this today and I could type for a long time on this subject. However I will address it with a few key points (one a day) to at least stimulate the mind and get you to start asking questions.
1. Irreducible Complexity- It means what it says, there are somethings in life that are so complex that you take away one part and the whole system is a bust. Now what does this prove and why is it important. This points to a creator. But before I can explain why I need to explain that according to evolutionary theory's principle of natural selection, "the natural genetic variation within a population of organisms may cuase some individuals to survive and reproduce more successfully than other in the current environment" and the ones that do not "genetically adapt" get selected out (go extinct). This means that creatures slowly evolve over time and the ones that do not adapt to their environments go extinct. This principle is a cornerstone of modern biology. But there are numerous examples of structures in nature that pose a serious problem for this and point to the necessity of a creator. A fine example is the bacterial flagellum, it has a certain number of tiny parts that allow the bacteria to use it as a motor to propel itself, the problem arises when even one of those parts is missing then the motor ceases to work. According to the principle of natural selection, the flagellum would have been "selected out" and bacteria that utilize this method of propulsion would not exist or have devloped a different method because all the parts have to be there at the same time for it to work. According to evolution the parts would have evolved over time, but that is not possible, because as mention, also according to evolutions natural selection this inoperable motor would have been selected out. However it exists today with all the working parts, which begs the question as how could it have evolved, it could not have.

Three Amigos

There is a legendary land called Barnes Campbell in which there lies three noble squires, not to be confused with McCormick where there lies one lowly despicable scribe who's christian name is still unbeknownst to us all. In this legendary land of Barnes Campbell, the three squires, appropriately named Si Pubes, Chastity Belt, and K-Nasty, like to mess stuff up. One extraordinarily awesome afternoon, which is very common yet still extraordinary, K-Nasty and Chastity Belt were lounging like kings in their Sleep hole and Kai Kai nests (beds) respectively, when in bursts Si-Pubes exclaiming extraordinary news. "The Scribe is dead!" K-Nasty and Chastity Belt burst forth with exuberance not to be outmatched even by the loudest of jousts in the kingdom. However, a look of mischief plastered across't the face of Si-pubes betrayed his true intentions, to make fools of and elicit feelings of false hope in the hearts of K-Nasty and Chastity Belt for the truth be told, the scribe unfortuantely is alive and well....no sooner had K-Nasty and Chastity Belt's looks of disgust worn off their faces, when in bursts none other than the Scribe himself, only to immediately expunged from the room with a barrage of insults along the lines of "Scribe...just ...just get out!" and a old stinky joust sock hitting the back of the door as the Scribe pulls the door shut behind himself just in the nick of time. If an untimely visit from the Scribe was not bad enough, a sniveling Lord of the sixth realm, the realm in which K-Nasty and Chastity Belt reside, named Lord Doug marches into the room and demands to know the origin of a certain couch that K-Nasty is resting his buttocks on. Doug is suspicious of K-Nasty and Chastity Belt because the couch they have in their possession is strikingly similar to that of the common room in the first realm of the land of Barnes Campbell, and with good reason for the Couch was indeed pilfered with expert care through a complex scheme involving the sweat of 7 other strong squires, totaling seven, each with a role to play. One man distracted the Barnes Cample sheriff to lower the level of security as two other squires dressed as simple scribes, to blend in with their surroundings, carried the couch from the common room up 6 flights of stairs , with a lookout on each realm. Upon reaching their room K-Nasty and Chastity Belt enjoyed a simple mug of grog, well deserved, after executing one of the most complex operations the land of Barnes Campbell had ever seen. All this to say, Doug was onto them, however we kicked doug out and tied him to a chair in the same room with the scribe as punishment for his curious nose.

THE END

I know its crazy, but its dedicated to Kyle, Chase, and Tim with the nick names respectively

Don't try to understand

Meals VS. Training

It's been said by the professionals that they would rather miss a training session than a meal. CRAZY RIGHT? Not so fast, It has also been estimated that nutrition is 80-90 percent of success in bodybuilding. That number is staggering because so many of us, myself included, get lazy, depressed, or just lack discipline to always eat our meals and eat the right things when we do eat. The problem is this, we all workout and give it our effort and think, "Oh I just need to push myself more, I just need to change up my routine etc..." and all thse are legitimate reasons for lack of growth, however, many times it is as simple as nutriont, if you eat better, eat more, and eat more often...you will grow.
Keep this in mind next time your stuck

My Routine right now

I'm essentially following a routine surrounding the reps 8,8,6,6 and a typical routine in a week looks like this

Monday - Chest Triceps
-Bench - 220x8 , 230x8 240x6 205x6 (Last set, very slow, flat back, feet up on bench, Flex at the top of the movement)
-Incline DB -70x8 80x8 85x6 90x6
-Life Fitness Dip Machine - 8,8,8,8
-Pec Deck Flyes- 8,8,6,6 (Good Form, Slow, Flex on every rep)
-Cable Tricep Extrensions (with a straight bar attachment) - 8,8,6,6 (Slow, Flex at the bottom of every rep)
-Chest Press Machine - 8,8,8
-P-bar Dips- 2x Failure

Tuesday - Back and Legs
-Pulls ups - 4x near failure (Slow, Flex lats at the top)
-Squats- 5,5,3,3
-Straight Leg Deadlifts - 3x10 (Slow, straight back, bend at the hips)
- Hammer Strength Rows- 8,8,6,6
- Leg Extensions - 8,8,8
-Leg Curls - 8,8,8
-Hammer Strength High Row - 8,8,6,6

Wednesday- Delts and Biceps
Military Press - 8,8,6,6
Preacher Curl - 8,8,6,6
Upright Rows- 8,8,8
Cable Curls -10,10,10
Lateral Raise - 10,10,10
21 Guns

Firday- Full Body
Whatever I feel like needs work, yoga, cross training, intensive abs

Life is about balance

I know this my second post today, but I feel like writing and given my track record of failure to update this blog on a regular basis I might as well write while the motivation is present. I read a verse last night that stuck out to me (Proverbs 30:8-9) which says "...Give me neither poverty nor riches- feed me with the food allotted to me; lest i be full and deny you and say, "who is the Lord?" or lest I be poor and steal, and profane the name of my Lord.." This author in this passage is praying that the Lord would neither bless him so much that his head inflates and he feels invincible and feels no need for the Lord, but also that the Lord would not let him suffer so much that he would be tempted to curse the Lord's name. I find that passage speaking to me and I want it to be my prayer as well because whenever things are going really well (I kinda touched on this a few posts ago) I am tempted to ignore the Lord but when things suck real bad I come back. I just hope that all of our prayers in life would be that God would give us as much blessing that we can handle without ditching him.

Another thing on my mind is that being balanced is very important. Not just from a spiritual standpoint but from a practical standpoint as well. listening to one type of music for example or focusing only on one of your God-given talents, and being content to sit on your butt while life passes you by is not acceptable. Life is about balance, trying to incorporate everything God has put before is important, it says that Christ came for us to have life and have it abundantly and limiting yourself because of narrow-mindedness or bias or just plain being stubborn and failing to appreciate other things in life is frankly immature and will hurt your ability to relate to other people. I'm not saying I relate to everyone all the time but the more life experiences I have the more avenues I am provided with for communication with other people. It is hard to reach out to people without establishing friendship first, so please, do not limit yourself in any aspect of life

Revolutionary? well it is to me

Muscle under tension baby, that's my motto these days, I benched monday and got the best pump of my life...why? Simple. I lifted using a "muscle under tension" concept rather than a numbers concept. Muscle under tension is just my way of explaining how the most muscle growth comes from having a targeted muscle under tension for a longer period of time. Strength training is about explosive, fast twitch muscle fibers and using overloading poundages to convince the body to recruit more muscle fibers. That is all good, however, if you want large muscles you will have to incoroporate muscle under tension techniques, which I firmly believe was one reason my growth has been slow because I was doing quick reps no matter if the ranges were as low as 3 reps or as high as 10, the time it took for me to perform the reps was the same. All this to say, the reason for the incredible pump I had was because I dropped weight and had a slow controlled lowering of the weight to my chest, then a pause, then a slow controled press and flex of the pecs at the top of the movement. After just one set of this, my chest had swollen up. I was amazed and now I'm hooked. I used this technique for the rest of the workout including my cable tricep extensions and felt extremely sore the next day. I think I am going to use this technique for a few more weeks or as long as I am not strength training. Give it a try.
...until next time..

...just to keep your mind right...

I once met a marine working out at my YMCA back home. This guy was a real roughneck, he probably liked to have a beer with his beer for breakfast by the looks of him. However, his strength was surprisingly very good, I sometimes attribute that partly to the mental strength he gained form being in the service. This guy had been in Iraq and ...yes... seen men under his command die, and needless to ask out of common decency, I assume he killed a few of the enemy as well. All this to say he knew the definition of stress and as we got to talking, he told me how when he was in Iraq, no matter how many hours of sleep he got, be it 3, be it 8, he and his crew worked out. This is interesting because in today's society so many people blame "fatigue" on why they never exercise with excuses such as "its been a long day at work *sitting at a desk*" or "I just want some time to myself". So why would this guy on 3 hours of sleep while carrying stress that most of the population can not relate too still go and workout? One quote he said sticks out to me that says it all, "When your in the military, you workout just to keep your mind right, because when you have men your responsible for that are dying, it can get to you." Or something along those lines. That really hit home to me, I came to realize that lifting weights no longer had to be just a physical therapy for me, but an emotional therapy as well. Something about the iron is always right, constant, you get what you put into it and there's no worry, no unknown factor "X" to be concerned about. So in a way, in a world that is unstable, especially in a war zone such as Iraq, weightlifting can be a sort of relief from the world , if only for a moment , into another world where Hardwork + Nutrition = Results ....PERIOD

Until next time

Is it too early or is it too late?

It's 2:23Am as I embark on writing this next post. I went to bed at approximately 11:30 pm and have unsuccessfully tried to fall asleep. So, I do what I normally do on nights I can't sleep. I pray, read my Bible, and chill. I have class at 8am, then a span for a nap, hopefully that will help me but I know God gives me the strength for any challenge I face so tomorrow will be surmountable. This first week back at school has faced me with some challenges again, one primarily is that I realize how far I drift in my walk with God and I realize also how similar I am to the Israelites of the Old Testament. Now by this I don't mean that I have a big nose and am Jewish, well actually my nose is a little big, but what I really mean is that when things are good in life I neglect my relationship with God and feel like I can do it on my own. Then when I am again faced with struggles, I come crawling back begging for help. It's really silly actually, I wonder how long I will be on this spiritual see-saw, besides when I was a kid, the see-saw always hurt my butt so I want off!
But how?! How does one get off the spiritual see-saw of self reliance vs. God reliance. I realize during hard times that apart from God I am nothing and can do nothing, literally, can not sleep, do nothing. However, when things start looking up I become as giddy as a school boy and run along with no regard for who corrected my predicament. The problem is this, I am all jacked up on emotions. I feel this, I feel that, it dictates my fellowship with the one true God. That is not the model shown by David of Israel, it is more like the model shown by Samson and we all know where that got him. David was a man after God's own heart, and in the midst of his screw ups, there is evidence from his Psalms that he understood that apart from God he was nothing. I pray that in the coming semeseter the Lord gives me direction, strength, and a desire to stay tight no matter the circumstances and kick emotions to the side because they never tell the truth anyway.
Until next time..

Growing up?

Now that i'm 18 and in college I have, over the course of the past several months, since been contemplating what it means to become a responsible adult. The months leading up to college I had these ideas that when I got to college I would, like a microwave that just finished cooking a meal, DING! all of a sudden shirk my childish ways and don the new coat of adulthood.....Yep....I was wrong. But, I will say that I have learned a few things about being adult, the first thing being that there is much more to learn. But after that I learned that being an adult does not mean you have to "act" anything, or change your personality and always be serious and no fun. I think being an adult means that you implement the passage in ecclesiastes 3:1-15 into your life where the idea is that there is a time and place for everything, and what I mean by that is that as an adult you learn not that you have to lose your personality and resort to the mundane, but you just learn that there is a time to be goofy and have a good time and there is a time to work and be responsible. Now I am not claiming that I have this life all figured out and know how to be an adult, in fact I know I am far from it, thank God, after all im still ONLY 18, but I do feel that one aspect of stepping into adulthood is learning how to behave and that there is a time and place for everything and learning when those times are

Training to the edge

I been training for awhile and I was reading on AnimalPak.com as I usually do for inspiration and I read the latest article about training on the edge. The point of the article that this bodybuilding game is a sport of extremes, you train too light? You suck...You train too hard? You over train and still suck. The goal is to get as close to that edge without going over it...that's where success is found. So since I read that article I have approached training with that mindset, the mindset being that if your not gonna go hard, get out, and if your not going to play it smart and no when to quit, you too can get out. Also, I have approached training recently focusing not on the weight I am using , but on the form to attain the greatest pump, and testing to see if that will jump start my muscle mass gains. I have noticed too lately that I have gone through the motions a little bit. I have been guilty of doing squats just to say that I did them. I think from now on I'm gonna go back to the crazy stuff, the stuff nobody wants to do that plain works. I'm not gonna attempt to hit the muscle from every possible angle. I am just going to use the basic compound movements, Bench, Squat, Deadlift, but use the techniques that suck while doing them. These would be, strip sets, high rep/intensity sets, strict form, deep reps...all the things people seem to forget when they star getting addicted to numbers...
Until Next time

The grass is always greener...or is it?

You know how they say that the grass is always greener on the other side, right? Well I think that that phrase is basically a different way of saying that folks want what they just can't have. Now, I'm not claiming that this is a unique concept that I have stumbled upon, I think actually it is fairly common knowledge for the most part. But what I would like to analyze is why people want what they can't have. The phenomena is very puzzling because I even notice it in my own life. So why is it that when our "girlfriend/boyfriend' breaks up with us we suddenly realize how much we really liked them and want them back, why is it that we have a good bench but want that great squat that someone else has, or why is it that people have a generally insatiable thirst for more "stuff"? Is it because people have an emptiness inside and feel that whatever it is that they don't have, if they get that thing, it will fill the void? I don't know, but the thing is that as Americans we are given certain unalienable rights among these being "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" and I think they nailed it when they wrote that because apart from God people will never feel satisfied or fulfilled and all they will ever have is a pursuit of happiness, but actual happiness will be just out of reach and people will forever be chasing that "green grass" just on the other side. So as I embark on another year, I will try to keep my focus that my purpose and fulfillment is not wrapped up in my successes, my have's and my have not's, but purpose is given to me because I have a relationship with the one true God.

Poindexters with tank tops and old men with swimming trunks

On any typical day in the gym there is a plethora of outfits you see ranging from women wearing clingy spandex that should have been donated to "good will" four sizes ago to former high school athletes who seem to ignore that the years of binge drinking and fast food has taken away their "hot bod' they had from high school sports and still insist on wearing their under armor shirts that are so tight they look like they were poured into it, and not in a good way. The outfit I would like to focus on first is very common tank top being sported by all sorts of bodies. Now I am not out to make people feel bad, but like the show "what not to wear" (not that I watch it or anything) there are somethings you SHOULD wear given your given body type, and somethings you SHOULD NOT wear. The tank top is no exception. Every time I go to the gym I notice folks sportin' the tank top that simply should not. On one side of the spectrum, you have the guys who look like they could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag or might get blown over if they stand too close to the birthday cake while the candles are being extinguished. Then on the other side of the spectrum you got the bigg'ns who also should not try to squeeze into that tank top becuase they are the reason the tank top is also known as the "Wife Beater"...they look the part.
The next common sight that irks me is the old man sportin the swim trunks. I really don't have much to say except...Can that netting really be that comfortable on the boys? I doubt it. Besides, we aren't swimmin, unless its in your sweat and that isnt a pleasant thought either.
The last thing I would like to discuss is gloves. Gloves just aren't cool, When I see the fella's wearing gloves walkin around I can't help but think they look alot like this guy

and there is nothing cool about lookin like chuck e cheese when your trying to build a large physique...there just isn't...besides if you can't handle the callouses that come from lifting then you shouldn't be in there anyway

Until next time...


P.S.
Come to think of it, is Chuck wearing swimming trunks?