Adarq.org

the people with the horse in the race named "sucking your belly button toward your spine" are betting on a three-legged nag. that's literally the dumbest thing i've heard so far today. you say you don't have a horse in the race, but you continue to acknowledge that "bracing inward" is a possibility, which it manifestly is not. bracing is neither inward nor outward, it is just bracing! your abs and obliques and other core muscles stiffen to preserve the neutral position of your spine! that's it!

i'll post a picture later of what pushing your diaphragm down and your abs out really looks like. most people can't do it at all. it's one of my several useless talents.

kelly starrett is a mediocre writer, the shrink-wrapping metaphor is sort of okay but it falls apart when he adds the bit about sucking your belly button in. you're right that his description is confusing.

you can't brace inward, unless the word "brace" has a different meaning in upside-down land. there's no pulling in or pushing out, you just get your spine and hips lined up right and squeeze your abs. they do tend to go out just a bit because you're flexing them, but that's the same as if you bent your hand to touch your shoulder and then flexed. you're already in position with your hand on your shoulder, the flexing just stabilizes you in that position.

WEIGHT: 172.5
SORENESS: none
ACHES/INJURIES: none
MENTAL STATE: good, excited to train

- warm up

- jump squat 45 x 2; 65 x 3,3

- squat 260 x 8,8,8,8
there we go.

- OHP 120 x 5,4+1(PP)
damn it.

- GHR x 1,1,1,1,1,1
strict all the way top to bottom. so fucking hard, got lightheaded after each rep because of the bracing on the concentric.

- pull up +25 x 5; +15 x 5
weak, also noticed that my shoulders are rounding forward at the top of the +25s. need to kill ego and ensure strict form with no weight before adding.

- TTB x 5,5,5

- stretch

solid workout. it's so hot in my room that my computer is hot despite me just waking it up five minutes ago. a/c on full blast but it'll take a while before it's tolerable in here. time to go make some food.

grey and red is an abominable color combination.

haha i'd agree that maurice clarrett might not be the best example to turn to. and i'm a little perplexed by your pointing out that i'm attaching an especially negative connotation to "lazy" -- of course i am! it's a negative word!

here's my point: you're arguing a counterfactual that's intuitively appealing but unprovable. i'm saying that in the face of that, tread with caution. could shaq have played longer or scored more points or grabbed more rebounds if he'd kept his weight down, or practiced free throws more so he was better at them so he got beat up less during games? maybe. but i don't know! and neither do you!

let's follow the bolt example: bolt is faster than any person that we know about, ever. to say that he is not maximizing his potential is ludicrous on its face: human beings AS A WHOLE have not yet demonstrated that we have the potential to go faster than he does. one day we probably will, but we haven't yet. by being the fastest person ever, he is maximizing the 100m sprint potential of the human race to date. all i'm saying that, especially in the absence of any special knowledge about usain bolt's training regimen, i have a hard time believing that if he took a different approach, he would be faster. and i have a really hard time calling him lazy.

i think my objection is that calling a super-elite/dominant athlete "lazy" is a judgment cast down without any thought for the person as a whole. i made this point already, but without knowing someone who is dominant at their craft intimately, you can't say that whatever approach they took to become dominant is a sub-optimal approach. maybe being relaxed and getting fat in the offseason is what shaq needed to average 26-30 points and 11-14 rebounds for ten years, be a 15-time all-star, 3-time finals MVP, and have his number retired by the lakers. you and i just don't know.

usain bolt has been training to be a sprinter since he was a kid. he might not be the hardest working sprinter out there, and he's clearly a freak among freaks, but calling him lazy robs the word of any meaning.

calling athletes like that lazy just smacks too much of easy armchair quarterbacking. "god damn brady, why didn't he see welker open in the flat? if he'd hit him that's 15 yards easy, first down, run out the clock, game ovah! instead he throws to god damn double-covered gronk and gets picked off. what kinda bullshit quarterbacking is that?" those two things are in the same category to me.

see the "shaq was lazy" argument drives me insane. shaq is a top-5 all-time center and was THE MOST DOMINANT PLAYER IN THE LEAGUE. how can you say he was lazy? i can just as easily say, if he'd worked harder he'd have burned out and stopped getting joy from the game and retired early.

it's like the idiots who talk about how lazy randy moss was. randy moss is the second-greatest receiver in nfl history. he played exactly the way he needed to play to be better than EVERYONE ELSE AT HIS POSITION EVER EXCEPT JERRY RICE.