I Hear Dead People

Hip dominant legs today:

Sumo Stance Deadlifts: 5 x 5
315lbs x 5
315lbs x 5
315lbs x 5
315lbs x 5
315lbs x 5

Walking Dumbbell Lunges: 3 sets
35lbs x 70 feet
35lbs x 70 feet
35lbs x 70 feet

Leg Extensions supersetted with Standing Calf Raises(6-8 second eccentrics):3 sets
170lbs x 20, 100lbs x 8
170lbs x 20, 100lbs x 10
170lbs x 20, 100lbs x 8

After lifting, I helped one of the local police officers train. She has been having hip and lower back problems for a while now and is getting aggravated because it is interfering with her running. I determined that it was an imbalance within the quad and hamstrings.
She is extremely quad dominant, powerful throughout her lower body, but not with hip extension. So we went over some movements that will help her recruit the glutes and hamstrings. We covered:

Bridges on Bosu Ball
X Band Walks
Deadlifts

I am hoping that once we get her firing with her posterior chain, it will fix the imbalance and get her running pain free again.

Great Article:

I Hear Dead People
by Chris Shugart


I held the dead guy in my hands and said, "So this is it?"

It was the summer of 1999 and I was working in a graveyard in Texas. At the time, I was actually a high school teacher. I always tried to get a physical job during the summer break to balance out my regular job, which consisted mostly of sitting behind a desk for nine months out of the year. Also, since teachers make less money than the custodians that clean the schools, I needed the extra dough.

It was an odd job to say the least. I usually told people I worked summers doing landscaping, but that was only partially true. At least once a week, I also had to play pallbearer. See, when you die at age 90, you don't have many friends and family members around to carry your casket anymore. After three summers of this, I'd probably carried more caskets than a Kennedy.

After a graveside service was over, I'd go help the guy who's job it was to dig the hole and set up the tent. The last part of the job involved lowering the casket into the concrete vault. (You don't do this until all the family leaves. The sight of their loved one being lowered into the ground is just too real for many to watch.) My job was to jump down in the hole with grandma's body and wrestle off the chain used to lower the massive concrete lid. One time my favorite cap blew into the hole and slipped down between the vault and the coffin. I had to lay facedown on the casket to retrieve it. Talk about coming to terms with your own mortality! As it turned out, that lesson was just beginning.

The day I held the dead guy was like any other summer day in West Texas. It was over a hundred degrees and the wind was blowing what was left of the topsoil around in a orange-red haze. I was manning the big Snapper weed whacker when the FedEx truck pulled up. I signed for a package, expecting it to be parts for our dilapidated Ford tractor.

Inside was a Glad freezer bag full of speckled gray powder and a note. It read,

"Bury in plot 223B."

That's when I realized I was holding what the funeral industry calls cremains, the cremated remains of a corpse.

I wasn't all that shocked. I mean, I'd been around dead people for so long that the act of passing by a body on display at the funeral home got to be routine. What got me was the finality, the cold note from the anonymous family member, and the lack of ceremony.

This was a human being I was holding in my hands, a person who'd been walking on this earth just a week before. His life had come down to this — a few ashes in a plastic leftover bag. For some reason, the worst part was the FedEx box, which still had the price of delivery on it. It costs nine dollars and eleven cents to mail a cremated human body.

I grabbed a shovel and headed out to find the plot. Two co-workers went with me, a friend of mine who's now in med school and the old man that had been working at the boneyard for years. We found the plot, dug a hole, and then debated whether we should toss in the bag, the whole box, or just pour him out. In the end, we tossed in the bag. The old man commented on how disrespectful the whole process was and wondered why the family didn't bother to put him in a nice urn. "Shouldn't we at least say something?" he asked as I covered the hole back up.

I did say something. I said, "I quit."

I don't believe in fate and I don't believe in "signs from above." However, I do believe in accidental lessons. A person only has to be on the lookout to find them occurring in everyday life. That afternoon at Rose Hill Cemetery, I'd been taught a lesson. It's a lesson we all know, but often try to forget. The lesson is this: We're all actors on the big screen, playing the role of friend, father, husband, brother, employer and employee. We may play bit parts as extras or we may get the lead role. It doesn't matter. The movie always ends the same way: a close-up of a hole in the ground. Fade to black.

About that same time, a fellow by the name of TC had been nice enough to publish an article of mine. By the end of that summer, he'd accepted a few more. School started back and I began my seventh year of educating the youth of America. I like teaching. The desire to teach was almost as strong as my desire to hit the gym and throw iron around. Bodybuilding and teaching had always been constants. Still, teaching wasn't exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I finished the school year and I kept sending in articles. My duties grew and by the end of the year I'd been offered a full time job as assistant editor of Testosterone. The other teachers and a few friends were astounded when I took it.

"You're going to quit the stable job you went to college for and work for a muscle magazine? Isn't that a little, you know, risky?"

I thought of the Glad freezer bag full of ashes and said, "You bet it is."

Now, I admit that switching jobs isn't a really big deal. It's not like I sold my worldly possessions, moved to Tibet and sought spiritual enlightenment or anything. But to me it was a big deal. I was getting off the merry-go-round that all the normal people ride and heading over to the big scary roller coaster. I was doing three things I always loved: lifting weights, helping people out, and writing. And I was getting paid for it.

I think there's a very big difference between stability and stagnation. Weight training, in many ways, is a physical manifestation of this idea. We go to gym to battle against "normal," to fight the good fight and stave off death, to make sure our movie is a double feature and that we look damn good up there on the screen in the time that we have.

For some, it goes beyond stagnation; it turns into atrophy. Look closely at those around you. The average person's life reads like a tasteless recipe:

Step one: Go to work at a job you don't really like.

Step two: Come home and watch several hours of TV.

Step three: Go to bed.

Step four: Wake up and do it all again.

Step five: Repeat until death.

Step six: Place leftovers in a Glad freezer bag.

I think about these things when I see people spending hours of their lives at meaningless hobbies instead of pursuing their dreams. As corny as it sounds, I think most people give up their dreams a few years out of high school and replace them with trivial diversions — watching TV, playing video games, collecting Beanie Babies. You hear them say, "I thought about opening up my own business at one time." "I should have tried out for that team." "I almost got my college degree." When they're 90, will they think, "So this is it?" What a petty epitaph to a human life.

It's like some people are on a remarkable quest to be average. They strive for nothing more than mediocrity. They sit in front of the boob tube and wait to die. They're not really happy living their lives vicariously through soap opera and sitcom characters, but they're content and that's much, much worse. They're people, but they're also sheep. They're sheeple. That's not a sin. Being satisfied with that role is a sin. I found myself playing this role once. You may be playing that role now. But as the Chinese say, the important thing is to be able to sacrifice at any moment what we are, for what we could become.

Happiness has been summed up by many as struggling, enduring and accomplishing in a field that you truly love. Maslow called it self-actualization, the state of achieving everything you're capable of. It sounds simple, but how many people are really doing this? Are you truly happy with your job or are you just going through the motions like a newbie at the gym who puts no effort into his training. Being a real T-Man goes beyond looking big, after all. It's about being in control and living your life the way you want to live it. Besides, isn't it decidedly un-Testosterone-ish to be a sheep? I'd rather be the wolf, wouldn't you?

As most Testosterone readers already know, you have to be strong to separate yourself from the crowd. If you're an avid reader of T-mag, then you've already taken the first step in removing yourself from the common flock. I sincerely believe that taking control of your body through diet and training is empowering. Sheep can't do this. Sheeple won't.

The flock is powerful, though. The crowd will do its best to draw you back in. ("Isn't that a little, you know, risky?") You may have to go it alone for a while. You may have to lose some friends. But that's okay in the end. You probably don't want to hang out with people who've given up on their lives anyway. They're uninteresting. They're boring. They're, in many ways, already dead.

Dead people speak to us. You only have to listen.

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