Please Don't Stare at My Kid...It Stresses Him Out!

Didn't your parents teach you any manners?

Usually my son is super happy go lucky, but this day he was sweating me to get out of the gym from the first warm up set. Note to self; don’t take the boy to the gym and ask him to record form checks when he’s hot, hungry, cranky, AND freaking out because a bunch of ignorant & rude guys are staring at him.

That's something I'm working on with him. Folks tend to stare like they are trying to burn a hole in him with Superman laser vision. He's only 9 years old and too polite and too sweet to say anything, so he just clams up and kind of balls up because it stresses him out. You know, like he's trying to make himself smaller.

Staring is aggressive behavior and it makes people uncomfortable, because on some primal level, we know that instinctively. That’s why our parents always scolded us and told us “it’s not polite to stare”. Unfortunately, it’s a part of living here that must be accepted. There is just an abnormally high amount of people that apparently, were never taught that it is rude to stare.

Limit Strength is Functional Strength: A Case Study

I went out to feed the pigs yesterday and found that they had broken out, and one of them fell into an unused septic tank hole.

This Pig

This Hole

It sure as hell wasn’t picture perfect, but I muscled up a circa 170lb fighting, kicking and screaming pig out of a 5.5 foot hole yesterday. I do a little bit of odd lifting at home, but I credit the success of this endeavor to pure squatting, deadlifting, and pressing strength. That coupled with a good bit of adrenaline and a no failure attitude; THAT pig was coming out of THAT hole…period!

Getting brutally strong from head to toe is great for self-defense and sports, but sometimes you just need to be strong to get shit done around here.

"Good times in the barrio"

Education in the Philippines for the Young(er) Expat (and the dumb crap people will tell you)

My wife is a Philippine American, and we moved here to attend school. It just makes sense for our situation. In the U.S. we would have to do the whole full time student with a full time job thing…AGAIN. Here on the other hand, we can comfortably live off of our savings and focus on school. My advice to anyone kicking around the same idea is to have an end plan, ignore what other people tell you and do your own research.

For instance, if you plan to attend medical school here, people will come out of the woodwork to dump all over your plan. And this is exactly what they will tell you, “If you get a medical degree in the Philippines, you will only qualify to be a nurse in the U.S.”. They will then support this “fact” with an example of a guy they know, that knows a guy who works in a hospital with a nurse, who has a Philippines medical degree.

Just ignore these people because they are simple minded crabs that make assumptions based on surface information. In fact, I’d try to keep your plans as vague as possible when talking to most folks. What they don’t know about said guy is that his career change might have been based solely on immigration issues. Maybe he couldn’t get a visa straight up, but he could secure a contract to work as a nurse and he swallowed his pride and went for it. Or maybe he’s at a point in his life where he doesn’t want to work for slave wages to satisfy a 2^nd residency requirement. Who knows?

I don’t recommend it, but if you come here to get a standard undergraduate degree that does not require licensing to work, you could probably just wing it. If you pursue a degree that will require licensing, then do your research and have a plan. The plan will be different for everyone based on their citizenship, where they plan to work, family, etc.

I’ll use my wife as an example because her citizenship makes her a more interesting case. I’m going by memory here so again, do your own research. She is in Law School and she plans to practice law in Hawaii when we return. There are three routes to qualify for the BAR exam there if I remember right:

1) Graduate from a U.S. accredited law school
2) Hold a BAR license from another state
3) Have a foreign degree (and) 5 years of practice in the foreign country.

So in this case she has two options. She can move to a state with a more favorable examination requirement and test there prior to testing to Hawaii (or) she can practice here for 5 years first. If I was in law school, option 2 would not be an option, because Philippines citizenship is a BAR requirement here.

Now I will say that in my experience the education facilities are quite different than the west. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself sitting on a plastic chair in an open air classroom, and eating adobo every day in the lunch room. My wife and I will both have some mini hurdles to navigate, but on the flip side, our tuition and living expenses are dirt cheap compared to Hawaii. Personally, I’m more than happy to deal with a few work arounds, if that means avoiding tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. Plus…really…the Philippines is kind of a fun place to kick around.

"Get your learn on!"

Barrio Conditioning

My Training Philosophy

My general philosophy is that I need to be as strong as possible, while maintaining an above average level of athletic ability. In other words, strength is the priority but I still need to be able to climb, jump, run, and generally put in some hard work when called upon. It’s kind of my mission statement if you will. In my mind, if I can squat 500lbs but I can’t climb a fence or chase down a thief, I’ve failed. So my training boils down to the basics; lift smart hard and heavy, condition, and prepare and recover hard.

It’s a strange concept in my gym, but personal appearance is absolutely the last thing I think about when it comes to training. I’ve been living in the Philippines for about 3 years, and the reality is that I’m thousands of miles away from any personal support system, and I have a family to protect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is a dangerous place; in fact I feel quite safe. But in the end if I do have a problem, it will boil down to me, and me alone, to take care of it. Appearance based training simply won’t get the job done; vascularity, huge bicep peaks and washboard abs are a waste of energy for me. Being able to throw someone around like a ragdoll on the other hand, well…that’s probably pretty useful.

Here’s my approach to training:

1. Lift smart, hard and heavy: This one has multiple points.

First…..Focus on compound movements: Now I’m not all or nothing here, but this makes up probably 95% of my weight training. For example, I do believe some direct arm work is necessary for injury prevention and bigger arms can support more weight, so straight bar curls make sense from a strength and durability standpoint. Having said that, these are the staples:

• Back squats and squat variations
• Deadlifts and deadlift variations
• Bench and bench variations
• Overhead pressing
• Rows
• Chins
• Dips
• Shrugs

I’m open to new things but I’m not really big on variety here. This is the kind of basic stuff that really strong guys have been doing for ages. It worked for all of the guys that came before me and as it turns out, it works for me too. Who would have guessed?

I’m also a big believer in keeping things simple and using the lift to build the lift whenever possible. Squat assistance…how about pause squats? Deadlift assistance…how about speed pulls? Obviously I need to venture out and try different stuff sometimes, but I’ll look to a variation of the main lift first.

Second…..Have a logical and reasonable progression plan and strive to keep getting stronger. There’s not much to say about this since getting stronger is the whole point.

Third…..Condensed training. Now I don’t mean this like the short sessions advocated in muscle mags where they tell you to keep your sessions under 1 hour or you’ll end up in some dangerous catabolic state. What I mean is that I focus on one or a few things at a time. On squat day I may schedule 1-2 assistance movements at most after squatting, but the squat is the event of the day and the other shit doesn’t really matter. I don’t try to save energy for what follows. If I roll in and squat for an hour and totally knock my dick in the dirt, I’ll leave and be perfectly happy with the session. Less really is more sometimes…think quality not quantity. That goes for knocking your dick in the dirt too…not always a great idea.

2. Conditioning: I really don’t foresee needing to run more than a mile or so in an emergency situation. If I’m stuck at home with a broken down car and need to get to my family in town, at most I’d have to run about 1 mile to the highway and catch one of the dozens of tricycles heading in that direction. If for some reason I had to run the whole thing, it’s only about 6 miles and I could get it done. I’ve been running since I was a kid and I’ve done triathlons. It would hurt, but I know I could sack up and get it done in a pinch. And really, this is the most off the wall extreme emergency stuff I could think of. So steady state stuff really is a very low priority for me. In fact, from a survival standpoint, it’s hard to think of many situations where extreme endurance would trump strength or speed.

Having said that, I still run a couple of miles per week because it’s a way to do my sprints without looking like a douche, but everything else is weighted endurance stuff:

• Carrying and throwing stones
• Pushing cars
• Tire flipping
• Weighted sled dragging
• Sand bag work

Like I said before, I’m not big on variety. I just grab bag something and hit it hard.
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3. Prepare hard and recover hard: These could be separated into two points but they also go hand in hand because it is an ongoing process. I don’t look at going into a weight or conditioning session as a workout, I look at it as an event and I prepare for it just like I would a race or a game. Now I’m not saying I’m going to go balls to the wall and knock my dick in the dirt every session; what I mean is I prepare to perform…hydrate, eat, mobility work, stretching, psych, etc. No fasted cardio at 5 a.m. to try to optimize my fat-burning and that sort of bullshit…I’m talking about preparing to dominate the session.

Recovery is just as important as everything else. Recovery is the focus during the training down time, to prepare for the next event. Obviously eating and sleeping…but also, stretching, mobility work, icing stuff, massages, contrast showers, etc.

That’s it. It’s not exactly magical groundbreaking stuff…just lift, condition, rest, repeat.

"Also, if you’re looking at yourself in the mirror between sets…you have failed as a man"