Nat Arem's Blog

I’ve been progressing on the new design for the site. I have the two main layouts done (the homepage and the post page) so I’m just doing some tweaking and whatnot to make sure I like it. I expect I’ll put it up this week or possibly next week at the latest. I have, however, noticed over the years that readership on the site itself has gone down from it’s peak a few years ago. At first I was bummed out about it until I checked on my feedburner subscribers and realized that I have more readers overall than I’ve ever had — it’s just that a lot of them don’t bother coming to the site. Many of them (ie, you) are reading the site through Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. Then again I don’t travel around and take as many pictures as I used to so that probably contributes to the lack of “one time” readers who get to the site via a link and don’t bother coming back. Anywho, for the few of you that will see the new design, it should be up soon.

As I mentioned previously my friend Eric is out here. He’s out here partially to visit and partially because of his uncle’s wedding. The wedding was yesterday at the Graceland Wedding Chapel on Las Vegas Blvd. It’s just north of Gold & Silver Pawn (ie, where they film Pawn Stars) and when we were driving by the pawn shop, they were filming an episode of Pawn Stars. Pretty cool considering that I’m a big fan of that show. Anyway, the wedding was the second wedding for both of them so they just did a small thing at the wedding chapel. I have to say it’s an experience to be at a wedding where there is an Elvis dancing around and singing. I don’t know if I’d want to go to another one but I’m glad I got to see it once. The “reception” was at the Bellagio so thankfully we didn’t have to spend too much time in the downtown Vegas vicinity. It really is pretty seedy up there although the area definitely has character as well.

In sports stuff, I’ve been lifting more. I set another personal record (PR) with my deadlift the other day when I did 146 kilos (a bit over 320 lbs). It’s pretty awesome to set a PR pretty much every time you lift. When you’re an untrained novice like myself, that is how things tend to work. When I stop progressing from my pretty simplistic programming (a variant of the routine outlined in the book Starting Strength) I will have to get a bit more sophisticated and actually work pretty hard to make jumps of even 5 kilos.

Also, I am pretty impressed with the Miami Heat despite the weak game against Boston. The main reason I didn’t end up betting on their season prop bets (ie, whether they win the East) is that it isn’t super easy to bet on sports from the US these days. I’m still not sold on them being the best team in the league but they are definitely bonding well and I’m pretty excited to watch them over the next few months. And I never care about the NBA until, usually, February so this is kinda cool to have something interesting to watch from the start of the season.

I am just ridiculously sick of hearing about Brett Favre. Comebacks, retirements, playing great, playing poorly, texting, ankles, whatever. It is seriously endless drama. I was sick of the guy when he was still with Green Bay but it has gone over the edge. I’m taken to flipping to other channels whenever SportsCenter switches to Farve topics because it is just nauseating for me now.

Another player I’m kind of tired of is Lebron James but… I do have to admit I am actually intrigued by the Heat this year. Sometimes I think there’s no way they won’t win the Eastern Conference and then some other times I manage to convince myself that they are one injury away from being kinda average and that it’s unlikely their relatively few good players will be able to hold up under big minutes over the course of a full season. So I really don’t know what to expect. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them win the 2011 NBA Championship and I also wouldn’t be surprised if their season results in some injuries, ~50 wins and a second round exit or something like that.

I’ve been using my new garage gym a lot lately and I have to say it’s really amazing how fast strength gains happen when you lift frequently for the first time in a long time. Anyone who doesn’t make big strength gains (which are actually partly neuromuscular gains) at the outset of a strength program is doing it wrong. I’ve managed to get my deadlift PR up over 300 lbs and I think I had more in me. I just don’t like to truly max out on deadlifts for various reasons. My squat is climbing, my clean is climbing, etc. It’s been a lot of fun and I’m really interested to see where I’ll be in like six months and one year. I know the fast gains won’t keep up forever but with regular effort I expect to be lifting big weights in the future.

My good friend Eric Strauss is flying out to Vegas tomorrow for a ~1 week visit. Eric is the guy who worked with me on thepokerfilm and we’ve been great friends since, roughly, the age of 2. The visit should be a lot of fun and I’m really looking forward to it.

Okay I’m just kidding, I’m not moving to China. I just didn’t know what else to put for a title.

More seriously, I went to Athens GA last weekend. In what has become an annual ritual at this point, I visit Georgia in the fall. In Sept 2008 I went to UFC 88 in Atlanta and also visit yellowsub in Athens. Then last year I visited Athens in Nov 2009 for the Auburn at UGA football game. So this year I went in mid Oct (obv) for homecoming weekend which was the Vanderbilt at UGA game. I wanted to go to a better game but there wasn’t a better game weekend in Athens where I was free so, Vandy it was. The game itself was a destruction, UGA won easily. I still had a great time though, I love SEC football. If I ever get the chance, I’d love to roadtrip around the south some fall and go from place to place for SEC football games. I’d rent an RV and just spend a few months seeing the south and awesome football. I’d like to do it before I get too old to party with college students (I’m arguably already there at the age of 28) but that seems unlikely at best.

So the rest of the weekend was pretty much the standard stuff. We saw Social Network (better than I expected), ate out a bunch, I didn’t pay for a single meal due to my incredibly good luck at CCR, watched football on Sunday, etc. Also, sub’s friend Kyle (kpr16 on Stars) just got a stickshift Porsche 911 Turbo which looks kinda similar to a Carrera to the naked eye but is actually a totally different car/experience. It has AMAZING performance. I got a chance to drive it around on some local roads and, let me tell you, that car accelerates like nothing else I’ve ever been in. It has a strange torque curve though because at lower RPMs (like 2k-3k) it isn’t really anything special. It feels pretty standard when you’re accelerating in 2nd gear up to, say, 40 mph. But it kicks in like CRAZY when you give it a bunch of gas and get the RPMs up to 4k+. When I was getting on the highway it was just a stunning experience. Anyway, I don’t know that I would ever buy one (they start at around $140k new) but it was awesome to drive it around for a bit.

This week back was great. I’d been out of town a lot recently due to the trip to CR/Yale/Ithaca/Philly then another trip to Philly then the trip to Athens. Now I get to actually be at home for a bit. I’m doing a bit of a trade with the weightlifting coach that I mentioned in this post so I’ve been doing some work here and there on my end of the bargain. Basically we are trading his coaching + help building my garage gym in exchange for some web consulting on my part. So that has taken up a little bit of time although not too much.

Late friday night, for whatever reason, I just happened to be browsing around the WordPress site. For those of you who aren’t sure what WordPress is, it is a software platform which is mainly meant for blogging but can be modified to make websites on a rather large scale. It’s very user friendly and it’s a favorite among some web developers for making pretty basic sites. This blog runs on WordPress and many others that you see (although not blogspot blogs) run on WordPress also. One thing that WordPress does is run WordCamps which are seminars (usually 1 day) with speakers and various WordPress-related topics. Shockingly, when I was browsing around on Friday night, I noticed there was a WordCamp Las Vegas on Saturday! Amazing how timing works sometimes. Anyway, I didn’t preregister like I was supposed to but I went anyway and it was great even though I was operating on like four hours of sleep. The speakers were mainly good (a few duds in there) and even in the weaker presentations I managed to learn a number of things. I definitely left with some newfound inspiration to do some WordPress work in the near future. I’ve somewhat lost touch with the latest version of WordPress just because I haven’t made a complicated WordPress site in a little while. So I will be making a few for fun and I’ll also make a new skin for this blog.

Lastly, I will leave you with this hilarious video from College Humor. I was watching the Vikings-Packers game a few hours ago and I couldn’t stop thinking about this video while watching Greg Jennings play. Warning, language is NSFW.

I’m in Philadelphia right now. I flew in on Friday for my mom’s surprise 60th birthday party. She didn’t know I was coming so I couldn’t say anything until after Saturday. And I had to stay at my friend’s house on Friday night instead of staying at my parents house like I normally do when I come home for a visit. The party was great and she was definitely surprised to see a bunch of us there. Something like 75 people were there so it was a pretty big crowd to fit into a relatively small restaurant. But we all had a good time and my mom was thrilled so it was cool. Definitely worth coming back across the country for it.

So over the past few months I’ve noticed a bit of a tread. I purchased this shirt earlier this year: CutMe shirt on Designbyhumans. Here’s a picture of it:

At first glance this seems like a pretty normal artsy t-shirt. But I get an INSANE amount of compliments when I wear it. Like I’ve gotten at least 10 compliments on this t-shirt and I’ve never gotten a single other t-shirt compliment in my life that I can remember. I’ve gotten compliments from everyone from the toll booth lady (sigh, I didn’t have EZPass when I rented a car) to the women at the desk at the Continental President’s Club in the Houston airport to random people I walk by in Vegas casinos. The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that people think it’s some sort of gay pride shirt and that they feel like they’re supporting gay pride when they tell me they like the shirt. Pretty bizarre. What do you think? Some sort of gay pride thing or just a really nice shirt? FWIW when I bought the shirt I just thought it looked cool I didn’t even really connect the whole rainbow and gay thing.

When I was flying back on Friday night I got on the plane in Houston and we had DirecTV on board. Given that the plane was flying to Philadelphia and the Phillies were playing, I would estimate over 50% of the plane was tuned to TBS and watching Game 2. When we got on the plane they were down 4-0 and before we landed they’d come back and won the game. Whenever the Phillies did anything well the whole plane was cheering. I think it was really disturbing the guy sitting next to me because he was reading a book and he didn’t appear to know that the baseball playoffs were going on. He just looked around every time people started clapping and cheering with an annoyed look on his face, poor guy. Still though, good times. Little old ladies were high-fiving across the aisle, you don’t see that every day.

Tomorrow I’m headed back to Vegas so it was a short visit but also a lot of fun.

I’ve gotten pretty into Olympic weightlifting lately.  For those of you who don’t know what it is, Olympic lifting consists of the snatch and the clean and jerk.  The snatch is when you take a bar from the floor to overhead.  The clean is when you take the bar to the front rack position (shoulders) and the jerk is when you get it overhead from that spot (but the clean and jerk is treated as one lift, kinda).  Here are some example videos.

A 177kg (roughly 390 lb) snatch:

That guy is named Andrei Aramnau and he’s the 2008 Olympic games gold medalist in his weight class. He’s from Belarus which is kinda cool considering I have some ancestry from there. He’s also the world record holder for both the snatch and the clean and jerk (and total, which is the addition of both of them from a single meet) in his weight class. So, just in case you’re wondering, it’s pretty unusual to just throw that much weight overhead. He has actually progressed a lot since then (that was five years ago) although I think there might be some suspicion about some PED usage. These are all of his Olympic lifts in one video. He snatches 440lbs (200kg) in that video which is absolutely a stunning lift for someone of his size. It’s rare even for the super heavyweights to get to 200kg+ (although it happens at every major international competition, only a few guys are capable of doing it regularly) let alone someone who weighs 105kg. A lot of those super heavyweights weigh between 130kg and 160kg. Sometimes even heavier.

Anyway, here is an example video of a 250kg clean and jerk. That’s 550lbs. It is just insane for a human of any size to be throwing that sort of weight around. It might be hard for you sitting at home to conceptualize how much weight that is until you try to move it. I would venture to say that 99%+ of humans could not move it off the ground even the slightest. It isn’t even easy to roll it although I would say most guys could get it rolling .

I know that guy has a big belly and all but, like I said, the super heavyweights are not small guys. They have to be big to lift what they lift. Don’t underestimate the incredible athleticism involved in what he did in that video. Olympic lifting takes speed, flexibility, coordination, strength (obviously), timing, etc. It’s an incredibly complex movement designed to efficiently move as much weight as possible. Until you try it and realize how hard it is to do, you can’t fully appreciate it. It looks effortless and natural because he’s been doing it every day for a long time.

Also, just in case you think all Olympic weightlifters are fat and huge, here is a smaller guy. He lifted in the 82kg to 85kg range (depending on the time period, roughly weighing somewhere in the 180s) and this is him clean and jerking 213kg (or 468 lbs) at the Atlanta Olympics.

I know that he runs around like a little girl afterwards but you have to remember two things. 1) That is like winning the Super Bowl for him — it’s the biggest moment of his life to win a gold medal and break a world record. 2) He’s Greek (I kid, I kid). But that video is a good example showing that just because someone lifts every day that doesn’t somehow make them a lumbering fat ass. Contrary to popular belief lifting heavy weights will not bulk you up automatically. Bulking up is a whole different ballgame and should not be confused with Olympic lifting which is much more about speed and power generation (ie, force applied over short period of time). Gaining size is a bad thing for most Olympic lifters because they’re trying to stay in their weight class. In order to bulk up, you need to do a WHOLE lot more than lift heavy weights. Most importantly, you need a eat a ton but there is a lot more to it than that. So don’t avoid Olympic lifts for fear of bulking up, it won’t happen. You will, of course, gain some muscle although girls will basically not put on any muscle size of real significance unless they take steroids. To a certain point, putting on muscle is a natural byproduct of getting stronger. But you won’t automatically look like a ridiculous person who can’t put their arms by their side.

Anyway, now that I’ve explained the lifts a bit, I guess I should say what I’ve been doing. I got into this whole thing via CrossFit. Olympic lifts and variants are a huge part of CrossFit. I’d say, on average, most CrossFitters do between two and four Olympic movements in their workouts every week. So given that I have a background of doing weightlifting (I’ve been lifting on some level since I was twelve and I took it pretty seriously during part of my time in college) I kinda naturally took an interest in the Olympic lifts even though I’d never really done them before.

I found out a few months ago that there is a small Olympic weightlifting gym here in Vegas called “Average Broz Gym“. It’s named after the owner/coach John Broz who is an accomplished lifter in his own right but he is past the elite-level lifting age so I don’t think he trains as seriously as he once did (in his early 40s I think). He has a few REALLY strong guys lifting at his gym but the guy who stands above the rest is named Pat Mendes. Pat is a super heavyweight (I think he weighs somewhere in the low 130kg range) who is 20 years old and RETARDEDLY strong. Like by far the best heavy Olympic weightlifter in the US and it’s not even close. He isn’t quite at the super elite level on the world stage but he’s getting there. He has snatched 200kg (the same Aramnau did in the video above but it’s not quite as sick for Pat because Pat weighs 60 lbs more than Aramnau did) and cleaned 240kg (not quite what Udachyn did above). I don’t think his jerk is quite on an elite level yet though. I think his jerk is around 220kg which is certainly a ridiculous amount of weight but the winning jerk at the Olympics for his weight class is probably going to be in the 250-260kg range so he has some more work to do there.

Here are some videos of Pat lifting. This first one is a compilation done just before his 20th birthday to record how good he was in his last few days as a teenager. Keep in mind that he never trains bench press, they just did it for the video although they didn’t max it out. For most of you out there, the bench press is the only thing you might have done that is shown in this video. So you can see just how strong this guy is that he’s benching 500+ and he can throw it around. The 200kg snatch is at the end.

Also, this is a video of Pat from a recent session where he squatted 800 lbs raw. By raw I mean he didn’t use any assistance like a shirt (a specialized lifting shirt which can add several hundred pounds to a squat), belt, wraps, etc. Things that help to keep your core and joints tighter make a lift easier. Doing 800 lbs raw is almost unheard of. While a lot of powerlifters do 800 lb squats they don’t go all the way to the ground and they usually use a lot of assistance equipment.

So after I found out about these guys being in the area, I had to do what I could to take advantage of the knowledge sitting right in my backyard. After all, Olympic lifting requires a lot more coaching and technique than hopping on some Cybex machine at your local Gold’s Gym. So earlier this summer I went to two seminars held by John and Pat at two local CrossFit gyms. Then I inquired about doing a personal training session at their gym and they agreed to train me for two hours (this was about a month ago). I was supposed to be training with John but he couldn’t make it and sent Pat instead. I really enjoyed it and I learned a ton. To me it seems like an amazing opportunity to get advice from someone who is going to be competing for the US in the 2012 Olympics and very possibly winning a medal. Very few people have that chance. Then earlier this week I went in for another training session with John but I managed to hurt my shoulder the day before so the session was pretty weak. I couldn’t really do too much.

Now I’ve really caught the bug. I’ve gotten together a bit of a garage gym and I’m going to really work hard on getting a lot stronger and getting better at Olympic lifts. We’ll see how far I can take this but, for right now, I still suck. We’ll see where I am in 6 months, 1 year, etc.