Week 2 of my 5/3/1 journey, the 3x3 week in the cycle.

On my AMRAP sets, I managed:

• 10 reps of 345 lbs on deadlift
• 10 reps of 300 lbs on squat
• 10 reps of 160 lbs on bench

I’m still getting decent bar speed and power, although not as good as last week. Next week’s 1+ sets, I think I’ll try to do additional sets at higher weight to 100%/105% or higher of the training max, to get a sense of whether I should jump up more than the 10 lbs/5lbs strongly recommended by Wendler.

Also felt good about 3x5x225 on front squat. I’m moving up pretty quickly on front squats since actually training them consistently for the first time in my life, even though they’re a lower priority (always after I’ve done my back squat work).

As for setbacks, I’ve got some bicep pain flaring up, probably related to how I hold my kids, but interfering a bit with rows and pull ups. I’m gonna take it easy on any pulling motions with my arms for a week or two, see if this goes away.

It wouldn’t be a 30% higher electrical bill overall. It would be 30% more for whatever power you’re using for this specific device, which, if it’s ordinarily 10W while in sleep and an average 100W while in use, and you use it 50 hours per week, or 215 hours per month, that’s a baseline power usage of 21500 watt hours in use and 5050 watt hours from idle/sleep/suspend. Or a total of 26550 watt hours, or 26.5 kWh. At 20 cents per kWh, you’re talking about $5.30 per month in electricity for the computer. A 30% increase would be an extra $1.60 per month.

That wasn’t the real Tesla, though. It was actually the Goblin King.

I halfassed every exercise and did nothing on my plan.

That’s actually fine. Most fitness goals require steady, long term progress, and the nature of a plan with 100+ workouts is that you can afford to have a suboptimal workout, to shift things by a day or two, without setting yourself back on that medium or long term journey.

Terry Crews has talked about how he sometimes has days where he just goes to the sauna, or sits on a bench, and does nothing other than getting his gym clothes on. And it counts. Because on many days where he just intends to go to the locker room, he figures “well I’m here” and does a few exercises. And doing a few exercises is better than no exercise.

Depends on sunlight, and the color of the pavement. For dark asphalt, simply preventing a dusting of white snow goes a long way at converting the sunlight into heat, basically for free.

That albedo effect is a big part of the reason why it’s so important to try to save as much snow/glacier/icecap now as possible at the poles. It’s a cascading effect where a little bit of melting early on ends up making a huge difference in how much melting happens overall.

Did a Zercher squat with 1 rep of 225 today. Felt so awkward. Compared to a front squat, it seemed like it was somehow more stable with my center of gravity and balance, but less stable in the sense that my arms had less control over its positioning. Maybe it’s a learned skill, could probably get used to it as an accessory.

What part hurts? Is it the pressure on the fingers or uncomfortable pinching pressure on a specific spot on your skin?

When I was learning how to deadlift, a big part of getting a good grip was finding a grip high enough on my hand, near the base of where the fingers meet the palm, that wouldn’t put pressure on folds of skin on my palm. At weights above my body weight, I found that I’d have to kinda roll my grip into place so that there was no excess skin being smushed (which causes calluses and then tears the calluses over time, which sucks).

And now that I know what that feels like, I find that I can adjust my pull up grip to also make sure I’m not causing my body weight to pinch my skin at the point of the grip.

If your deadlift is on leg days, how is it that your pull is interfering with your legs?

When I was doing 6 day PPL I generally wouldn’t try to move up on deadlifts and squats only one day apart. Then again, when I was on a 6 day split it never really felt like any given day was that important, and I just steadily made progress on all of it until I became accustomed to that volume.

puts you around 205lbs for a 1rm, a lot more than you thought?

I think 205 is about what I would have expected in a normal week. I had 180 as a 5rm last week, and the calculators put that at around a 205 1rm, too.

Still, though, this wasn’t a normal week. I walked into the gym already tired and sore from doing 200 push ups on Monday (I don’t think I’ve done 200 push ups in a day in like 15 years). So I was pleasantly surprised to be able to hammer out a 10-rep set on that one.

Yeah, I do front squats a decent amount. When I first started it took a bit of mobility work to be able to comfortably hold the bar in that position, but a few years of it being in the repertoire got that mobility/flexibility in place to where it isn’t at all uncomfortable for me.

My failure point on front squats is the loss of balance on my way back up, when my legs and lower back are fatigued, where I tend to want to lean forward (which throws off my whole balance). Raising my arms/elbows higher helps, but then my arms and traps get tired. That’s why I was wondering if Zerchers would be even more punishing of errors in form.

Above 200 lbs the minor imperfections in the movement really get amplified, so I appreciate that immediate feedback. I imagine Zerchers are the same way. Maybe I’ll try them out next week in the gym, see if I can do a set and see how they compare to front squats.

Zercher squat

What muscle/movement feels like the potential point of failure for you on these? Is it balance? Arm strength?

I’ve done Zerchers at 135 lbs, years ago, and it just felt super awkward, and I’m wondering whether if I got used to the movement I’d still be lagging way behind on weight from balance or arm strength.

@shittydwarf@sh.itjust.works has been super helpful at working through the details of switching programs.

I did my first week of a 5/3/1 this week. It was actually a good week to do so, as I was coming off of some soreness and fatigue doing a Murph workout on Memorial Day with some of my neighbors, which left me sore enough to where I was really questioning my motivation to push hard on weights. So sub-maximal sets this week were helpful, and I still got to push to failure on one AMRAP set per day:

Bench: 155 lbs x 10 reps
Squat: 285 lbs x 6 reps
Deadlift: 325 lbs x 8 reps

Overall, I feel like I was getting great bar speed on my reps, definitely had the feeling of following textbook form, despite having soreness from earlier workouts. I’m excited to see where I’ll be with AMRAP sets next week and the week after.

Dude don’t you have a department of health and human services to run?

why a train journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles has to be 12 hours long

That’s its own saga, with a bunch of factors specific to California politics (and national politics with funding and permitting California projects). The California High Speed Rail project intends to connect SF to LA in less than 3 hours (and the original 2008 plan aimed for a 2020 operational start date), but we’ll see if that ever comes to fruition.

Also, I guess you guys do not regularly travel from New York to Los Angeles for a weekend trip, just as we Europeans don’t usually do that with Stockholm and Barcelona (which is a distance the average European would also travel by plane).

One wrinkle in comparing things is that the US’s cultural affinity is less tied to geographical proximity than in Europe. Obviously European villages and cities and major population centers were established long before rail, much less before automobile highways and commercial air travel (or even before global television broadcasts), so each local region will have its own culture and language.

In the U.S., with the population centers built up much more recently, cultural affinity between cities or regions is distinct from geographical proximity. So for many, a weekend getaway or a one-week vacation will tend to look to other similarly sized cities. One joke in the TV show 30 Rock was the idea that someone from New York would want to move to, or even visit, Cleveland. This is especially true for those who aren’t straight white Christians, where much of the geographical footprint of the United States represents urban islands where you might feel like you belong, and where you’d want to hop from island to island rather than explore the vast areas geographically nearby.

Human life absolutely factors into predicted lawsuit losses. Wrongful death lawsuits are expensive.

You’re right about all that, but it’s worth noting that U.S. population centers tend to be coastal. New York to Chicago is one of the closer city pairs between the 10 largest cities in the U.S. Here’s the driving distance from New York to each of the other 9:

Los Angeles: 2800 miles (4500 km)
Chicago: 800 miles (1300 km)
Dallas: 1600 miles (2500 km)
Houston: 1600 miles (2600 km)
Miami: 1300 miles (2100 km)
Washington: 230 miles (370 km)
Atlanta: 900 miles (1400 km)
Philadelphia: 100 miles (160 km)
Phoenix: 2400 miles (3900 km)

Dallas and Houston are close to each other. New York, Philadelphia, and DC are close (and are already connected by the most popular passenger rail line in the US). But the others are all pretty spread out.

So the type of travel people might imagjne doing in the U.S. tends to be weighted towards pretty far distances.

The result is insane in my opinion, it means any sensible math system with basic arithmetic has a proposition that you cannot prove.

Stated more precisely, it has true propositions that you cannot prove to be true. Obviously it has false propositions that can’t be proven, too, but that’s not interesting.

with a rigorous, needlessly convoluted proof.

Again, Goedel’s theorem was in direct response to Russell and Whitehead spending literally decades trying to axiomize mathematics. Russell’s proof that 1+1=2 was 300 pages long. It was non-trivial to disprove the idea that with enough formality and rigor all of mathematics could be defined and proven. Instead of the back and forth that had already taken place (Russell proposes an axiomatic system, critics show an error or incompleteness in it, Russell comes back and adds some more painstaking formality, critics come back and do it again), Goedel came along and smashed the whole thing by definitively proving that there’s nothing Russell can do to revive the major project he had been working on (which had previously hit a major setback when Russell himself proved Russell’s paradox).

how about:
x = 2
2x = 3,000
omg! they’re inconsistent!

You didn’t define x, the equals sign, the digit 2, 3, or 0, or the convention that a real constant in front of a variable implies multiplication, or define a number base we’re working in. So that statement proves nothing in itself.

And no matter how many examples of incomplete or contradictory systems you come up with, you haven’t proven that all systems are either incomplete or contradictory. No matter how many times you bring out a new white swan, you haven’t actually proven that all swans are white.

And formal logic and set theory may have seemed like masturbatory discipline with limited practical use, but it also laid the foundation for Alan Turing and what would become computer science, which indisputably turned into useful academic disciplines that changed the world.