Haters Gonna Hate, Lifters Gonna Lift.

I like to think I run a pretty straightforward site and complementary social networking outlets (Synergy on Facebook and Joe on the Twitter.)   Hang out, share knowledge, talk training, act professionally and everyone has a good time. 

If a “keyboard warrior” jumps into the discussion I usually just delete it and don’t waste any time. 

At the most, I’ll just flip over to Dave Chappelle’s “Player Hater’s Ball” sketch and have a good laugh. 

Just for fun I figured I’d respond to this one.

I posted a picture of us training double over hand dead lift to show a popular “support grip” training method.  My brother Pat worked up to 500 with this more difficult grip and I shared a photo:

 The warrior comment: ” …when he gets to doing 500+ or – w/o belt hit me back…”

Not the meanest or the worst comment I had ever seen, but just really rubbed me the wrong way.  I’ve never talked to this person before.  I tried to talk about intra abdominal pressure and start an educated discussion.  Instead I got his resume as a USA track coach or something.   I should have known better…

Here’s my issues/response:

1. That is 500 lbs already….
2. “Hit me back.”  What’s next?  Are you going to “get at me bro?” 
3. We work up to around 75% 1 rm without a belt, then when the core becomes the limiting factor, then the belt is added to train the primary muscle groups…the posterior chain.   This allows for a greater load on that muscle group and increased volume that would not be possible or safe otherwise. 
4. If used correctly the belt should actually INCREASE core strength.  I’ll explain this in a later post.
5. I took the comment as disrespectful to the lifter’s accomplishment.
6. I’m not confident he understands the difficulty of the double over grip.

Anyways, consider this the “hit back, bro.”

Increasing Grip Strength With Dead Lift

505 lbs.  No belt. No hook grip.  Double overhand.  No problem.  Served.  Now I’ll go back to training smarter.

Now for the valued readers (and the vast majority of you are AWESOME and fun to talk training with) I’d be happy to write a post on the different grips and benefits in a post next week.  Just “like” the video if you would find that helpful and I’ll get it done!

Fun Story From Las Vegas

Enough chest thumping, it makes me uncomfortable, back to the normal content!  I was honored to speak at the 2012 NSCA PTC conference this weekend.   It was a great time – minus a scheduling issue that put me in at 4 am on Monday morning with work at 6:30 am!

Anyways, we were staying at the M Resort, which was beautiful.  In each room they provide their guests with a gift – a complementary deck of cards that were used in their casino.

So naturally I instantly took it as a invitation to try to rip them in half .  For those of you that haven’t tried, ripping a deck of cards in half is hard - but fun to do and try!

I posted the following message on twitter:

 Even though I didn’t send them the picture, they much have a search on for tweets with their name, and in a couple of minutes they tweeted to their 12,500 or so followers:

Haha, they called me out for ripping the cards!  I’m glad they had a sense of humor about it, but their tweet saved the Las Vegas phone book I was eyeing for my next attempt…

- Joe Hashey, CSCS -

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