Modern Wisdom podcast has been pretty stale the past few month, but this one was a homerun. Best episode since when he had Alex Date Psych on. Wildly black pilling. STAY AWAY FOR YOUR OWN MENTAL HEALTH!

I'm only 1/3rd in and feel like my soul is being banished into the shadow realm.


Behavioural genetics is undefeated. Another win.

But one thing I take from this is that I need to be more sympathetic to obese people/fatties. They can't help themselves. This is just how their brain is wired. It's genetics. They didn't ask to be born in a world of unhealthy bullshiet junk; the will they need to resist what their genetic blueprint is compelling them to do is just superhuman compared to a skinnybro like me. That feeling of a ****ing high you get after an hour of stimmed out cardio first thing in the morning? The feeling of elation and exhaustion from hitting a PR set of 10 on the ATG hbbs with your muscles and lung burning and your HR up in the low 200s? That enormous release of serotonin and dopamine you get from looking at your pumped muscles in the mirror when you're 40% into the workout? Yeah, they just straight up don't get that response in their brains from exericse. It feels like torture and a chore to go into the gym for them, even if its the highlight of your day. Stop bullying them. What you do doesn't even require discipline or will power. Going to the gym is pleasurable for you in the same way cheesecake and double cheeseburgers are for them. You get confused when people say they admire your willpower or discipline because going to the gym is like playing a video game or smoking crack for you in terms of brain response. Brutal.

You gotta be positive about all this and realize just how little control you really have and just enjoy the ride. It's a rollercoaster with a steering wheel that doesn't actually steer the cart. Enjoy the ride because it ends eventually and you die! Don't stress out about steering.

Oh it just gets worse and worse. Antecdotal tales of upper class American families dropping tens of thousands of dollars on growth hormone for their teenage kids to earn Hockey scholarships at Ivy League universities. Stay away. Blissful ignorance.

Being more empathetic generally leads to a more enjoyable life.

Genetic determinism is probably going a bit too far. You can overcome all obstacles is also probably going a bit too far.

Recognizing that the human experience is an extremely complex interplay between nature and nurture and that you really don't know what it is like to be someone else and that you should definitely give everyone else some slack and definitely not yuck their yum is probably about right.

Only worrying about your own "choices"* is definitely about right. Being judgemental about other people's "choices"* never leads to happiness.

*Air quotes

Even if it's not genetically deterministic on an individual level, it's still a damn good heuristic for guessing the outcome of somebody's life. There's going to be individual exceptions, and for that reason it isn't necessarily disempowering. But it's stil paints a bleak reality for humanity at large since not everyone can be an exception by definition. And even to the extent somebody can be classified as an exception it will be contextually and not universally; in some aspects of your life the steering wheel really doesn't have any power to change the course.

But yeah, when learning about this stuff it's hard not to be grateful to random chance for your own successes to some extent, as well as to extend some compassion to people in undesirable situations. They are more "unfortunates" than they are "losers".

Hey...saw Frank Yang video somehow pop up on my (99% chess - don't worry it's not about chess) Twitter.

Just gonna drop it here:

.

That was actually really beautiful. He started becoming increasingly coherent as the video went on. The very last section was both touching and insightful. He's incredibly skilled and capturing human emotion and atmosphere visually.

It's kinda wild how much Frank has shifted; going from proto-youtube fitness 2006 to weird shock value bbc stuff to bodybuilding to Buddhism and spirituality. But god damn is he great with cinematography.

Yes, yes, indeed.

Clicked wondering how many BBCs would pop up, then was impressed, then was more impressed, then wondered how the hell he evolved so positively.

wowowowow

https://www.bbc.com/sport/athletics/67974629

https://enhanced.org/

I only learned about this today. It'll be interesting. Albeit my guess is that I don't think the performances will be as good as the Olympics because I'm guessing it'll be past their prime athletes competing. and anyway, a lot of Olympians will be enhanced or have top tier sports science programs that these guys won't have

WLing being one of the five events is a god send. If this pops off and ends up happening every year, WLing is not just officially saved, but actually improved as a professional sport with a level playing field and higher degree of professionalism. I haven't performed a snatch since 2016 or so but I still watch WLing regularly and I'd be pretty crushed if it died or was relegated to powerlifting style fragmentation. The barriers to entry are just too high for it to succeed as a "professional amateur" sport in the way that powerlifting does. But some annual huge untested meet with a big prize pool and ostensibly national glory for the loser countries to feel more prideful about when they win medals? That could prevent WLing's death and make it even better, possibly.

I have a feeling the audience will be almost entirely gym bros and active people rather than NARPs who watch the olympics.

Yes agreed

Really hoping my all time boy Ilya Ilyn is in lifting shape

You’d think the entire Kazak WL squad will attend given they’re all banned from the Olympics

I remember a couple years back Ian Wilson admitted to getting on gear and working some full time job while lifting only 3x/wk for 90 minutes and ending up with results that would have been fairly internationally competitive. Having used gear myself, yes it really is that much of the equation in strength sports/bbing. Gear and limited training with imperfect nutrition will outperform optimizing everything perfectly with recovery/nutrition/training but no gear.

For this reason, paradoxically, we're not going to see a bunch of anglosphere country athletes dominate or anything. The sports infrastructure isn't there yet. But the gap will mostly definitely start to narrow. The anglosphere still has way more amateur/recreational olytards than any other part of the world and some of those people will reach Clarence type numbers in untested comp and draw more people into the sport.

Dreaming too big right now though... let's see what happens when the games actually happen. Maybe they actually won't be that popular or profitable.

maybe fat mendes will get off the reality TV circuit and rejoin the lifting lolz

John Broz suddenly became active again on youtube/instagram. I ****ing love the guy and his videos/athletes are legendary, but man he had some bad advice. There's another guy that's been doing a natural squat every day program for about 3 years straight and logging it on youtube. You know how much his squat has gone up? like maybe 30kg with 20kg of that being in the first few months... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X44bZMwEyGc

The squat everyday thing was island tribe volcano level of superstition. Take a bunch of dbol, squat every day, assume that the gains in squat were become of number 2 and not number 1. Plenty of people have put a **** ton of weight on their 1rm hbbs/fs squatting only 1-3x/wk too, but he just got so incredibly married to this squat every day thing it was complete insanity. He could have kept in the high dose long duration dbol part of the equation and done a more sensible program for squatting and probably ended up with the same or more increases in squat strength with far less burnout/injury/lifters quitting on him. If they'd used the dbol (even at a lower dose) and just front squatted a max set of 1-3 and 2-3 backoff sets on Sunday and a 5x5 with last set at RPE 8-9 hbbs on Wednesday, they probably literally would have ended up with more gains in 1rm.

that said, I can see a strong argument for snatch or jerk every day (not necessarily to max) for the skill/motor learning and mobility gainz and lack of CNS fatigue these cause.

I bought into it completely for a time, ******ed as it was. Broz training was just straight up suboptimal, but bear in mind his mentor was coached by somebody who was literally prescribing his athletes 180mg/day of dbol for more than 6 months at a time. In hardcore bodybuilding/pling circles, 50mg/day is considered a very hardcore dose you shouldn't run for more than 6 weeks and if you suggested 100mg people would call you ******ed. In modern intelligent bodybuilding or pling circles, people say any oral steroid should be used only during contest prep or meet peaking phase in the final 4-8 weeks and using one like dbol in the offseason is really stupid.

Remember how many of his lifters quit on him or quit the sport entirely and never came back at all? There's a reason for that. ******ed training and most likely ultra extreme PED regimens that make people on the Olympia stage look like pussies. They probably grew to hate it after a while. Clarence mogs all of them and he never trained like that and he's been going at it from age 15 to 32 or 33 or however old he is. AFAIK Clarence doesn't slam orals and just dose test+tren, or at least that's what he's inferred in a few of his videos when he addressed PEDs.

But Broz he's just so hard to dislike on a personal level. Not a grifter, really passionate guy, obviously believes in what he teaches, authentic, charismatic. Just wrong and misguided. If those guys like Pat and Rob were on the same amount of PEDs but with intelligent coaching they probably would have gotten a lot further.

I was dumb to listen to him also, but I was still new to this whole fitness world and everyone new ends up clinging to at least one ******ed and counterproductive training dogma.

Holy ****, Kelvin Kiptum apparently died in a car crash - he was one of a few candidates to break a 2 hour marathon legitimately.

https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/...dies-car-crash

Damn. That was depressing news. I really thought he was gonna get it in Berlin.

Guy,

There is something to be said for a self-selecting training method that will only yield the best and brightest. Westside is great and all, but would any truly elite lifter do great on that program? Prob not.

That being said grinding out a true 1RM every session is prob peak dumb. You can totally work upto a heavy single where bar speed deteriorates every session, use that metric to help track CNS fatigue and gauge other training. But I don't think Broz puts a lot of thought into how to change his method or how to optimize training for folks. Then again all your big WLing nations basically utilize some other equally insane variant of way too high intensity/volume or both and the 1% who thrive on it eventually become WR holders and the others have a bonk knee while working their janitor jobs.

For sure, but even within elite wling national programs there's a range. The Chinese are only 6 days/9 sessions per week with way more sub maximal work, the Russians even still follow a more periodization based model where heavy singles are restricted to pre-competition phases. Probably a lot of them might end up with a lot more good lifters but marginally worse GOATS by dialing it back a bit. Chinese at the elite level have a pretty surprising amount of efficacy over their own programming, as it turns out. There's an interview with one of their foreign physical therapists who says this.

OFC when you're a 20 year old kid who just saw a few Klokov videos on proto-youtube and read a few Broz posts in his legendary bb.com forum thread, you don't know any of this **** and just jump in at 110% because, as a wise man once said "I MUST TRAIN HARD, EAT RIGHT, AND **** DUDES IN THE ASS TO BE THE BEST". At least I had the foresight to develop good technique in the snatch and the clean (but not the jerk) before starting my own dumb oly overtraining nonsense. Going back I would have trained about 90 minutes 3x/wk with a lot of submaximal RPE 6-7 sets just emphasizing perfect reps and retested maxes after a little mini-peak/taper every 3-4 months or so. And a ****ton more mobility in the jerk overhead position, more front squatting, and very little back squatting.

Recreational oly is taking off in China and the retired bonk knee folks are way less screwed than they were in times past. Plenty of them are opening their own clubs and charging 3x the price of a commercial gym and still getting lots of members or doing the online coaching using Chinese tiktok to attract signups. But that's only the good communicators, most Chinese WLers come from rural backgrounds and are complete tards that wouldn't be able to handle managing an online coaching business or their own little studio WLing gym.

IDK about Russia, but just on my Thailand vacation so far I've met one forermly aspiring pro WLer (left b/c the war lol) who I watched hit 150/170 at 89 and one recreational amateur girl who was switching over after getting frustrated with powerlifting memery.


It's actually pretty wild to me just how much more the internet collectively knows about programming for bodybuilding/powerlifting/oly lifting than it did ~10-15 years ago when I was getting started. It actually seems like the amount of misinformation and bad advice has collapsed down to almost none these days.

Guys maybe this is gross/TMI/oldman, but I need some medical help. I get up to pee at night way too many times every night to where it affects my sleep and I feel like i need 9.5-10hours to get a full nights rest because I'm getting up 3-4x/night. It can be worse when cutting or the days when I train legs, especially since I usually train after work close to bed time.

What are some OTC supplements or pharmaceuticals I can use to help with reducing night time urination frequency? I tried flomax but it had bad sexual side effects. Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences with this?


I tried cialis at 5mg/day in the morning and that helped slightly but not much and the boners were a bit distracting.

At your age you should be getting up exactly zero times. I'd start by seeing a doctor

I’m over 50 but I’m generally a minimum once, often twice a night and sometimes more. More observations than recommendations below

- it’s definitely linked to anxiety. Ymmv but I pee more when Ive got difficult stuff on my mind and I’d bet most people are the same.

- drink less in the evening LDO.

- I do 2-3 visits in the last 15 mins before lights out. I’ve become obsessive about it

- seems to be related to dumps too. If I haven’t done a quality **** or two the day before, I need to get up to pee more. We have doctors in this thread and I’m sure they can refute/accept that

I'm also over 50. I go 0 times per night.

I used to go more frequently; it was because I was developing diabetes. Losing weight fixed the problem.

So seeing a doctor sounds sensible. I am a doctor, but of pure maths not medicine. So I'd be inclined to ignore my own advice for most medical things.

When I'm cutting/losing weight its exacerbated and I start going even more often than if I'm maintaining/gaining weight. It is definitely steroids+bodybuilding related. I'll go see a doc tomorrow.

At least once a night, usually 2 or 3. Been like this for years. Not a problem.