So, last week I started back into a working out slowly by doing some lighter deadlifts, pullups, etc, etc... Today, however starts the day that I am back on a normal routine.

Every day I'm astonished by the sheer stupidity of the fitness industry and how so much misinformation is passed around as knowledge.

Tonight while I was watching TV before bed, I saw an infomercial for Fluidity. It's pictured above and the woman that is in the photo was the one that actually said the following:

Do you know why strength training makes you bulky? You isolate muscles. There are over 300 muscles in the body so you don't want to isolate.

Granted, this wasn't *exactly* what she said, but I can't remember the exact quote. However, this is relatively close. She did say that strength training makes you bulky due to isolating the muscles and that there were 300 some odd muscles in the body, so you wouldn't want to isolate muscles. She said this while showing a girl the exact exercise that she's doing in the photo above. She's saying this while telling the girl to perform an isolation exercise.

This is wrong on so many levels and this tends to spread very quickly; especially amongst women that are scared to get "bulky". Ladies (and men) you won't get bulky with strength training. Not unless you want to. Also, strength training does not mean you isolate muscles. On the contrary, in an actual real strength training routine, you'd do the exact opposite and perform exercises that are way more compound than those silly movements on the fluidity bar.

Take the Deadlift for instance. This requires practically every muscle in your body in order to properly lift the weight. Not only this but it's a practical lift! You lift items off of the floor every day of your life. Worried about bulk? Watch this:

This is Jody. That was a 300 lb deadlift! I've watched a few of her video's that I have come across by watching Anthony and reading about him on a forum I used to post on regularly. She's an impressive girl. She can perform 43 Chin-ups and 8 Muscle-ups. Watch her video's. Do you see an ounce of "Bulk" on her? No. She has a very athletic body that is very feminine.

But, wait a second, she is strength training! Why isn't she bulky? Because, boys and girls, the entire myth of "strength training makes you bulky" is a lie.

Strength training is only part of the equation. Diet is a huge part of gaining mass. Your body must have the necessary nutrition in order to allow yourself to grow. To make it as simple as possible; just as when you reduce your food intake to lose weight, you must increase your food intake to gain mass. If you lift heavy and hard and eat a surplus of calories, the likelihood of you gaining mass greatly increases.

The girl in the video's above obviously has her diet in check. She probably eats relatively healthy and doesn't stick at a caloric surplus most of the time. I can show you countless other women that have this physique yet lift heavy and hard. My wife, for instance, is 107 lbs at 5'1" and while she doesn't deadlift 300 lbs, she can pull 135 lbs currently. You can see in photo's I have of her on this site, she's far from "bulky". Hell, look at me. Do I look "bulky"?

I can't believe this ridiculous line has resulted in an entire post about it, but sometimes it just makes me laugh or drives me nuts. I could go into even more detail but I will save it for later. However, do me a favor and stop listening to what these crazy people say on the commercials and in the magazine's. I'm astonished that companies use people like this and don't even check their credentials. It should let you know that if a company that makes an exercise product uses a spokes person that says something so retarded, they obviously know nothing about the human body which should make you extremely weary of buying their product (even if it's just a magazine or a crazy wannabe ballerina bar)

So, here is what I have been doing lately.

Coding

Yes, I've been coding. Primarily doing work on eMail. I have a list of bugs that have been submitted to me in the past 6 months that I have been fixing including some feature requests. The main issue that was being fixed was this "no smtp server specified" bug that people on Solaris and 64 bit machines were having which stemmed from me ignorantly casting an int to a (char *). Yes, stupid, I agree. Leave me alone.

Also, however, I've been working on this site. Trying to make it better while I test it in the real world, etc... I'm writing a ruby script on the backend that will accept blog entries via e-mail, so that will be fun.

Working

Of course, work comes first. I've been at work normally doing my daily duties and actually waiting quite a bit for an upcoming project. I'd like to get the design spec soon so I can start cranking out some code. Other than that, I've been reading some code and looking over the small description of the project.

Moving

I have recently moved back into my house in a suburb of Atlanta. We were having quite the number of issues trying to get it rented and it was sitting on the market for 5 months. I only had enough money to sit on it for a few month's... so that got stressful. We even put it up for sale and lease purchase. However, we're quite happy moving back into it. Living directly in the city is very nice and all, but the noise level is just far beyond my desire. I like peace and quiet. I also like the fact that we can mess with our house unlike we could in our condo. I've been busy painting for weeks now and it's been sort of fun to see the outcome. Plus, I have started creating my own home gym which I could have never done in an 800 square foot condo! I already have a nice squat rack (complete with chin-up bar) and barbell. I plan on picking up some bumper plates soon. I also plan on turning the garage into a sort of dojo where my wife and I can practice our martial arts. This is freakin' awesome.

The only downside to living in the burbs is the distance to certain things. However, this isn't as bad as I once thought. I'm about 45 minutes from work, which it seems that most people that living in the city that I work with are about the same distance as well. Also, there are a ton of new shops and restaurants going up about 5 minutes down the road from us which will make our area even nicer. We already have a decent amount of restaurants around us but not much shopping, so this will make things a lot more bearable. So, all-in-all, I'm quite happy with the move. Plus we went from 800 sqft to 2500 sqft. How can you complain about that???

Hi. This is my first post on my new site. If you don't know who I am, well... sorry. You can possibly head over to the about me section and see what I'm all about.

Basically, this is for me to talk trash, post up my workout routines, have a place to host random code and projects and track my training progress. I'm not sure how often I'll update it, but I'm pretty sure I'll at least keep up with my training on a regular basis as well as post when there are new projects or releases of existing projects (such as email).

So, I'm at work right now and I'm about to go eat. This will do for now.