Yoda

I just learned on the HT forum that Trunk is a Xingyi practitioner and he lives in LA--you guys need to get together. You would rock at Xingyi, btw. Sounds like some pretty hardcore sparring--doesn't that burn up the ole jing, though? Let me know, I'm debating whether to encourage my 1.5 year old son to box. Pavel's protocol is good for bodyweight stuff b/c you don't have to be in the weightroom all the time. It's the best way for low rep strength but is also good for higher rep stuff if you don't push too hard per session. -Yoda

Thanks. He does say in the description that the practice can be counterproductive for young men due to the sexual energy that it brings up and that is definitely the challenge that I'm facing with it. It wakes me up in the middle of the night and commands me to mount Mrs. Yoda etc. It has caught off guard so far, but last night I remembered to meditate and it went away fairly easily. A middle of the night practice session will become the norm I'm guessing. If I can get the jing math to work, this practice will rock. -Yoda

I'm thinking that White Skeleton Meditation plus Pavel protocol is the ticket to seriously mutant strength gains. Do you have long term experience with WSM? If so, let me know what you think of this approach. thanks, Yoda

Congrats!!

Grease the Groove for Strength by Pavel Tsatsouline Copyright 1999 Advanced Fitness Solutions, Inc. This article was first published in MILO: A Journal for Serious Strength Athletes under the heading "Chain Yourself to the Squat Rack and Call Me in a Year." Back issues and subscriptions are available from www.ironmind.com. Grease the Groove for Strength by Pavel Tsatsouline, Master of Sports Our communist enemies, who are trying to bury us, have exercise breaks instead of coffee breaks. -Bob Hoffman, York Barbell Club Your grandmother used to tell you: to get good at something, you must do it often, do it a lot, and do it to the exclusion of other things. Yet you never listened, why you little..! If you did, how would you ever get the bright idea of deadlifting once every two weeks and doing ten assistance exercises for the bench press? Specificity + frequent practice = success. It is so obvious, most people don't get it. Once I came across a question posted on a popular powerlifting website by a young Marine: how should he train to be able to do more chin-ups? I was amused when I read the arcane and non-specific advice the trooper had received: straight-arm pull-downs, reverse curls, avoiding the negative part of the chin-up every third workout... I had a radical thought: if you want to get good at chin-ups, why not try to do... a lot of chin-ups? Just a couple of months earlier I had put my father-in-law Roger Antonson, incidentally an ex-Marine, on a program which required him to do an easy five chins every time he went down to his basement. Each day he would total between twenty-five and a hundred chin-ups hardly breaking a sweat. Every month or so Roger would take a few days off and then test himself. Before you knew it, the old leatherneck could knock off twenty consecutive chins, more than he could do forty years ago during his service with the few good men! A few months later Roger sold his house and moved to an apartment. A paranoid Stalinist that I am, I suspected that he plotted to work around the 'chin every time you go to the basement' clause. By the degree of the Politbureau Comrade Antonson was issued one of those 'Door Gym' pull-up bars. Roger wisely conceded to the will of the Party and carried on with his 'grease the chin-up groove' program. Roger Ivanovich's next objective is a one-arm chin. He just does not know it yet. My father, a Soviet Army officer, had me follow an identical routine in my early testosterone years. My parents' apartment had a built in storage space above the kitchen door (it is a Russian design, you wouldn't understand). Every time I left the kitchen I would hang on to the ledge and crank out as many fingertip pull-ups as I could without struggle. Consequently, high school pull-up tests were a breeze. Both Roger and I got stronger through the process of synaptic facilitation. Neurogeeks never got around to telling iron heads that repetitive and reasonably intense stimulation of a motoneuron increases the strength of its synaptic connections and may even form new synapses. Translated in English it means that multiple repetitions of a bench press will 'grease up' this powerlift's groove. More 'juice' will reach the muscle when you are benching your max. The muscle will contract harder and you will have a new PR to brag about. Four times powerlifting world record holder Dr. Judd Biasiotto set up a bench in his kitchen, got in the habit of hitting it every time he was in the area and put up a 319BP @ 132! Obviously, you do not have to be a Commie weightlifter with Rocky IV pharmacy to benefit from high volume heavy training. Here is how you can to set up a 'grease the groove' program for one rep max strength or for strength endurance in your dungeon: 1. Intensity The science of motor learning explains that an extreme, all out movement is operated by a program different from that used for the identical task performed at a moderate intensity. As far as your nervous system is concerned, throwing a football for maximum distance is a totally different ball game than passing it ten yards, no pun intended. According to Russian scientist Matveyev (yeah, the chap who invented periodization), you must train with at least 80% 1RM weights if you intend to make a noticeable impact on your max. According to Prof. Verkhoshansky, another mad scientist from the Empire of Evil, for elite athletes this minimal load is even higher -85% 1RM. Yet many comrades will be very successful greasing the groove with 60-80% weights as long they emphasize the competitive technique -high tension, Power Breathing, etc. Naturally, if you are training for strength endurance rather than absolute strength, you should train with lighter loads. To meet the Soviet Special Forces pull-up standard of eighteen consecutive dead hang reps stick to your bodyweight plus heavy regulation boots. It is critical for the program's success that you avoid muscle failure as aerobic classes and rice cakes. Do not come even close to failure, whether you train for max or repetitions! A triple with a five-rep max or ten pull-ups if twenty is your PR will do the trick. The secret to this workout is performing a lot of work with reasonably heavy weights. Pushing to exhaustion will burn out your neuromuscular system and force you to cut back on the weights or tonnage. 2. Repetitions According to former world weight lifting champion Prof. Arkady Vorobyev, one to six reps are optimal for training of high caliber weightlifters and increasing this number hinders strength development. Or, as Luke Iams put it, "Anything over six reps is bodybuilding." Do more reps, and your body will think that you are practicing a totally different lift. Dr. Biasiotto who once squatted an unreal 605 @ 130 has switched to bodybuilding and knocks off 325x25 these days. His legs are no longer 'a pair of pliers in shorts' as they used to be in his days of heavy triples and world records, but he would be the first one to tell you that there is no way he could put up a massive single training this way. Of course, for bodyweight pull-ups, push-ups, and other commando feats of staying power you will need to bump up the reps to satisfy the law of specificity. Roger Antonson worked up to training sets of nine by the time he set a personal record of twenty chin-ups. 3. Volume Vitaly Regulyan, one of the top Russian benchers, does fifty to seventy heavy sets per lift! What are YOU waiting for? A permission from Mike Mentzer? Up the volume! 'High volume' does NOT mean a lot of reps with Barbie weights. Such training is good or nothing but a muscle pumper's virtual muscle. Do I sound like Anthony Dittillo? -Good, the man is right, give him a cigar! 'High volume' on the synaptic facilitation power plan means maximizing your weekly tonnage with heavy weights. 'Tonnage' -or 'poundage' if you are not up on the metric system -refers to the total weight lifted in a given period of time, for example a day, a week, a mesocycle. Say your best deadlift is 500x1 and last week you did the following pulls: 400x5/20, 450x2/50. Here is how to calculate your weekly deadlift poundage: (400x5x20) + (450x2x50) = 85,000. As this number grows, so will your strength, at least up to a point. Make sure that volume does not come at the expense of intensity. Average intensity is calculated by dividing the poundage by the total number of lifts: 85,000 : 200 = 425 pounds. Intensity can be expressed in pounds or % 1RM. In the above example 425 pounds is 82,5% of 500 pounds one rep max; the intensity is on the money. The strong man must make an effort to gradually build up both the volume and the intensity while making sure his body can handle the load and does not overtrain. Trite as it sounds, listen to your body. 4. Frequency Prof. Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a Soviet strength expert who jump shipped from the Dark Side of the Force to America, summed up effective strength building as training as often as possible while being as fresh as possible. An eighties study by Gillam found that increasing training frequency up to five days a week improved the results in the bench press, something big Jim Williams knew a decade earlier when he benched in the neighbourhood of 700. Ditto for Dr. Judd. Before Biasiotto took up benching in the midst of his kitchen appliances, he had worked out in his training partner's spider web insulated and rat infested garage where he benched five times a week for fifteen heavy sets within an hour. That brutally efficient routine boosted skinny Judd's bench from 140 to 295 pounds in nine months! Russian strength researchers discovered that fragmentation of the training volume into smaller units is very effective for promoting strength adaptation, especially in the nervous system. In other words, one set of five every day is better than five sets of five every five days. It is even better if you chop up your daily workload into multiple sessions. Motor learning comrades know that while the total number of trials is important, the frequency of practice is even more critical than the total volume. Paul Anderson had it all figured out when he supersetted heavy triples in the squat with gallons of milk throughout the day. If you can swing it -all the power to you, people! 5. Exercise selection Concentrate your gains on the snatch and the C&J, SQ-BP-DL, or any other few select lifts and forget assistance work! The synaptic facilitation approach is very powerful because it greases the specific groove of your pet feat. Additional exercises will just distract you from your purpose. I plan to expand on the cloudy issue of specificity of strength in a future article. For now, be a good Communist and show some blind faith! The synaptic facilitation power plan can be summed up as lifting heavy weights as often as possible while staying 'fresh as a cucumber' (Russkies have a thing against daisies, you wouldn't understand). Contrary to what some snobby pantywaists believe, this heavy, high volume approach is not an iron fossil but one of the most scientific approaches to strength training there is. "Chain yourself to the squat rack and call me in a year." Words to live by. # # # Read about Clarence 'Ripped' Bass' experiment with the above method on http://cbass.com/Synaptic.htm. Learn more cutting edge strength building techniques in Pavel's books Power to the People!, The Russian Kettlebell Challenge, and Bullet-Proof Abs.

Your attainments are impressive as usual! Here's a crowd pleaser that I learned from you--just chug your pee! I've been gladdened by the responses I get from even from just talking about it--but the locker room really is the place for it. Pick a victim and dare them into it if you do it first. Let Yoda know how it goes! -Yoda 8)

Hagar, My almost 5 year old daughter, Freya, just came back from gymnastics saying that they are working on pistols in class! Apparently, you have to do them on the balance beam. So I got her started on airbornes--she'll be the first in her class to get them. Pavel's "Greasing the Groove For Strength" is the best strength training article that I've found. You can find it on dragondoor.com in the articles section. He took his elderly father in law to a personal record of 20 pullups--more than he did as a young man in the Marines. The glorious thing about strength training is that it doesn't take much time or energy if you follow Pavel's approach. A few minutes a day over the years will make you a mutant. When you grease the groove you stay away from maximum or even 70% effort. Only test your max once every 30-60 days. It's a good way to study for exams too--a few minutes a few times a day. When I was in college, I trained for several years to get to 15 pullups. Then in my thirties, I followed Pavel's approach for--I'm not kidding--about 6 months and got to 30. I could probably get that back in 45 days right now. Just for kicks, I grabbed my 72# kettlebell and *yes* I can still pistol it! 8) Failed on the military press though :evil: but that gave me an idea. I'm guessing it would take me 3 weeks of training to get it back. So that'll be my White Skeleton Challenge--I'll do the meditation, but no overhead strength work and see if just the meditation itself can deliver that modest level of strength increase. I bet it can. If I succeed there, I'll jump back into training for the one arm pullup. Between the White Skeleton and the 15# weight loss, I should be able to do it this time. I think you are right about making space--when I'm down I don't do that--I don't practice as much and the practice isn't as good when I do. I will shift that around. -Yoda

My whole life is a huge cycle. I'm in commission sales too, so one month I'll be on top of the world, burning through cash, can launch those kettlebells into orbit and a few months later you'd think I was Gandhi on a hunger strike. I'm a cusp Geminii born in the year of the Monkey, so some of that is just my fortune. Chikung has definitely "helped" but by no means has "cured" this situation. I'd get a normal job, but I refuse to have a boss and actually work, so here I am. Recently, I've been reading Bodri's stuff about changing one's fortune in this regard. I would like to either get off this cycle or just raise the whole thing so that the bottom is still cool to be at. Jing retention helps to the extent of my beginnner's level of mastery, primordial so far is excellent in a general soothing/smoothing manner, and I'm very bullish about White Skeleton even though it is brand new to me. It opens, distributes, grounds to earth and locks in practice energy-- recommended for us scattered types. You had mentioned that you might get a Bodri book. His Beautiful skin has some good stuff in it and includes White Skeleton, use of Nattokinase, basic practice concepts and a general good intro to his thinking imo. So my pet feats are obviously my high water mark. Actually, I've lost 15# in the last 6 months so I should be in range of the one arm pullup (you're a climber, so you can appreciate that one) but I want success with White Skeleton before it'll be cost effective for me to go for it. Still doing funny sound chi kung? I actually talked to Jack Johnson in person two weeks ago. He said go with whatever variant of the funny sound and out loud or whisper mode that works for you and your situation. But he said that his funny sound, as loud as possible is the best in his experience. -Yoda

Nice work!! I really like the red color. Thanks! -Yoda

I thought I was more or less the only one here who had messed with strength training and could just grab the Strongest Tao Bum Award. Damn! Not only that, but all the Tao Bums know about Pavel, Furey, Mahler, etc! Oh well. As I said, this White Skeleton is going to make me a badass on this front and that's why I'm pondering strength training again. Mahler is a mutant. He got me into a very short lived phase of combining kettlebells and Indo boards! One moment I was military pressing a 72# kettlebell and the next I was lying on my patio with a fucking near miss to my head as that sucker came back to earth. Notice that he trains with his indo board on the grass--not on the cement. I noticed that little pointer after the fact. Scott Sonnon won't bring a 72#er on the Indo. I also noticed that after the fact too! Fun stuff, but my Indo board is officially fired. -Yoda

At least for me, Pavel pushups are harder than one arm hindus. thanks for the suggestion--they are great as well. I'd love to do the one arm pullup but it seems to really go through that jing more than all the one arm type pushups and pistols. I'm thinking of dogging this White Skeleton practice for awhile and then check in to see if one arm pull up training is any easier as I'd love to do them if the cost is reasonable. I'm loving it that White Skeleton pays off in several dimensions! As for those airbornes... Pavel says to keep your reps at five or less when training for pure strength to keep the energy cost to a minimum. If you can do 15 reps start doing them on a stool to go deeper to go to a comfortable 5 rep max per set. Also, pistol training and one arm pushup training seems to give more energy back than one arm pullup training. Not quite sure why, but that's a consideration.

Any strength goals right now? -Yoda

Ron, what are your pet feats? I've gotten within 15# of a one arm pullup at 185# but shelved the project, and I can do a pistol with 72#, 30 pullups with crappy form and am good for doubles on the one arm/one leg "Pavel Pushup". How many reps on the Pavel pushup are you good for? Are you working on any strength goals? -Yoda

They'll evolve differently. It'll be fun! Maybe we can score some fembots on HT now that RJ is off that one... Bodri's material on practices are very complementary to Chia and Winn's stuff and I don't think there are too many big deal distinctions in terms of actual practices. It's an interesting thought experiment to take 1000 most enlightened masters on this planet and interview them. I think we'd find lots of similarities in terms of physiological attainments/compassion/joy but el nada agreement in terms of saviours/afterlives/Gods/immortality/hell realms/etc. To me, this signals that metaphysical beliefs are not as important. Cultivate as much grooviness as you can and then deal with whatever saviour shows up in the bardo. -Yoda

I haven't had much luck with aphrodisiac herbs b/c they make me live at the point of no return and I have a difficult time succeeding in jing retention with them. They are so powerful and easy, it's a shame that I have to set them aside. If there is an herb I might have overlooked, please advise. In contrast, this White Skeleton practice seems to increase sexual desire in a way that is easier for successful jing practice. Jing is aroused in the same way, but is not as inclined to escape. Maybe the bone connection locks it in better. Due to increased horniness, it seems to reduce the amount of sleep you need/end up getting and thereby provide the practitioner with more time to practice. I am NOT doing White Skeleton during this night practice time--as I do enjoy sleep, but I'll look into what kind of feedback loop doing White Skeleton during the night watch sets up. This is only after a few days of this practice, I'll be curious about long term results. Master Bodri didn't specify crosslegged sitting or stool sitting with the feet flat on the earth in the pamphlet. Anybody know which he recommends? The visualization seems to be easier to do when sitting rather than standing. Also, In Bodri's "Measuring..." book, he talks about feet, toes, and the left big toe in terms of their importance to focus on so I do spend more emphasis on my visualization on my left big toe and feet. I'll give my left big toe a title and a large, permanent inner smile, if he keeps up the good work!! -Yoda

I have the exact same question... Just bought How to Measure... and Beautiful Skin... and white skeleton... and White Fat Cow and will get the 5 elements book sooner or later. I'm thinking that I'll call off the dogs on 25 Doors. White Fat Cow is just okay--lots of theory, not very practice oriented. Everything else is a lot of fun. Beautiful skin contains white skeleton but not with the same background info. White Skeleton rocks and I'm sure the elements book is very good too. -Yoda

on the coast somewhere. If you live in Columbia, you should come over and check out Tao Lab. -Yoda

I'll treat you to lunch but lets put it off until January--I know things get busy toward the end of the semester and we'll both be out of town during the holidays. But if you score any surplus fembots in the meantime, I'm at 622-0606. -Yoda

ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I ordered it very late last night. I got it wrong--you don't get all the other ebooks with it, but I read 50+pp of it already and it is more practice oriented than what I've read so far in WFC so go with that after getting White Skeleton. That's one badass practice. -Yoda

I have read half of WFC and just ordered "how to measure and deepen your spiritual progress" for $97. Read the marketing about it, but if I understood correctly, you get WFC, White Skeleton, and all the other ebooks on the site with the purchase of "how to measure". While I'm not a Buddhist, Bodri is a brilliant teacher and the "how to measure book" with the other freebies is the best deal. -Yoda 8)

I agree with the Buddhist angle that wisdom is worth more than any amount of gold, chi, jing, superpowers, immortality points etc. But the more bright you burn, the more light you have to see with and gain more insight. So chi/bodhicitta cultivation is a precious goal and worth pursuing in its own right. It's a great practice. I'm sold on it. A big thanks to you and Plato for pushing Bodri all the time. I've come to appreciate his brilliance and clarity as a teacher. It's got strong wisdom and compassion components from an angle I had never even remotely considered before. Have you done it much? You can even feed the ghosts with your organs while you are at it and Plato can blast through that pistol barrier-- it's like Fantasy Island--something for everyone! :wink: Time will tell how I do with it! I'm doing primordial followed by standing white skeleton several times a day--yum! As far as a goal, I'm thinking that becoming a powerful psychic healer is a very attainable 'in one lifetime' goal. I want a goal that I consider to be strong progress yet easy to achieve. -Yodster 8)

You gotta get your paws on the White Skeleton. It's a very well-articulated bone visualization practice and you'll need anatomical bone diagrams especially of the feet. Goes great with K1 breathing/standing/etc. It's only $8 so buy it... (but if your wife has confiscated your credit cards, Bodri allows me to pass it on to a maximum of one individual without being cursed. So I can send it your way.) I'd like to hear your reaction to it. -Yoda

Seriously good idea. I'll check it out. Maybe I'll imagine them laughing too. I've bumped into similar Buddhist White Skeleton practices before but I thought they were revulsion or chod practices, not chi/samadhi practices. Very interesting stuff. I'm sorry I just missed doing it on Halloween. -Yoda 8)

http://www.anatomy-resources.com/human-ana...es/sh401-ba.gif Couldn't find any sheep bones for my pals, but this is a good one. -Yoda 8)