The Experimental 12 Hour Workout

I originally created this blog with the intention of making it a place where I would describe my various dabblings in supplements, new gym routines, workouts, transhuman techologies, underground training regimes and other bodily experiments. I very nearly called it 'The Bodylab' (cool huh?) but thankfully didn't as I've mostly ended up rambling about nonsense here.
But the time is nigh where I talk about something actual relevant - an experimental 12 hour workout that my current steel-minded gym companion and I attempted. If you're a regular visitor to the site you may have read about Peary Rader's 'One Day Arm Blast'. Here he recommended working on muscle group (the biceps in the case of the article) with a single set at the end of every hour for 12 hours. We decided (fool hardedly), that this was a workout for pussies, and so we amped it up a little - by giving that muscle group (in our case pecs) a full and intense (albeit brief) workout on every hour. For us that full workout was performed on the chest press and consisted of 1 set to failure, then assisted reps - then a 10 second pause - then another set to failure, then more assisted reps... before dropping the weight and repeating. We had the added rule that if you must do 3 assisted reps, but if you managed to do one of those unassisted you then had to continue with the first set before doing the assisted reps again later. In total we dropped the weight twice meaning we did this three times overall - going past failure a minimum of 6 times in a session which took about 15 minutes in total. A great fast way to get your pecs burning on its own.
Then, just as in Peary Weider's arm blast, we would have a source of protein - either usually chicken or protein shake and then massage our titties until the next round. The theory here is sound - by continuously triggering an anabolic state followed by rest and protein we've created a micocosm of a full day's workout for that muscle group. Hyperthetically then the hope was that this would have the same benefit of 12 sessions - 12 or 6 weeks worth of training for most people - and add around half an inch over night.
What we didn't account for was quite how much it would hurt, or how constipated we would become. Nor how we would dread the top of each hour. More than anything this was a psychological challenge and we worried that we were doing more harm than good to our bodies. As we'd work out for nearly half an hour in total between us, then have to mix the shake on top of that, there was rarely time to do anything other than wait terrified like a POW for the next session. Our optimistic hopes of getting a jamming session (we're also a progressive rock band - Samsung calls Wednesdays 'Gym Jams'). Yet, being idiots, we ploughed on towards the final hour (which thanks to some bad organising was at 1am).
When it finished we were exhausted and I personally felt like I'd run the marathon. Obviously it was the next day we were worried about though (and I in particular was worried about my dump the next day after Simon had told me there was sometimes blood in it following too much protein). Surprisingly though, there was not really any severe pain in our pecs the following day (good thing too seeing as I had plans to drive to Southampton and go clubbing all night) and if anything it was my legs that ached. A bit like the bit at the start of Rocky 5 where Rocky says he feels as though something important has broken inside of him then curls up shaking in the shower. Another night's sleep though and we felt fine - and despite not pooing for around 66 hours (a record for me) there was no blood in my stool.
Stupidly we didn't think to measure ourselves before or after the workout, but I definitely at least feel bigger than I was previously and photographs seem to attest to this fact. It may be psychological, but I'd wager there's been at least a quarter of an inch of growth - which is still very impressive.
So was it a success? Maybe. Sort of. But it's really not worth and you'd be an idiot if you thought otherwise. An idiot that I respect.

This is how hard you should be working:

Self MOT

New Year’s resolutions are rubbish. No one sticks to them, and they generally do very little good. The problem is we should be making resolutions every day and we should be changing concrete useful things about ourselves to make ourselves perform and function more efficiently. The concept of the Resolution is outmoded and outdated. We proudly introduce the Self MOT.

With it coming up to New Year, people will likely be thinking harder about ways they can improve themselves. Normally this means they’ll be planning on quitting smoking, starting a training routine, being more confident, drinking less, going out more, getting a partner, or something else abstract or non-ambitious like that. Here at the Biomatrix.Net however, we’re of the opinion that self-improvement shouldn’t be an annual occasion but something we’re continuously working on. At the same time, we’ve always focussed less on these kinds of superficial changes and more on improving yourself in ways that will take you above your peers. We’re not so interested in improving our hygiene, or our people skills in order to get a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Here at the Biomatrix we’re more interested in improving the size of our biceps so that we can perform fantastic feats of gymnastic ability; learning to leap across chasms, bench giant amounts, think at twice the speed. Finding a girlfriend or a boyfriend, or getting over a social nervousness is a base-level ambition; that’s how you should start off not an ambitious way to improve yourself. If you think about it, it’s that kind of attitude that could have left you feeling unconfident in the first place. Of course work on those things too, but do it all year round, and at the same time work on yourself in more meaningful ways. The success in relationships and business will come as a result of how you now carry yourself and are massively more successful in general. Have some ambition, some self belief, and take yourself up and above the rest. As in don’t just work on your confidence, make yourself faster, smarter and stronger so that you’re naturally more confident. Learn skills, improve your body, improve your mind and set ambitious goals. Shoot for the stars and do it all the time. Furthermore, do this all year round rather than having a half-arsed attempt during the first months of January.

So a good New Year’s resolution for a lot of people is to stop making pansy-ish, lame New Year’s resolutions. Instead you should be setting yourself goals throughout the months and planning ways you can improve yourself and your situation throughout the course of the next few years. What can you change about yourself that will make you perform better, be more productive, be more physically imposing and impressive? How can you achieve these goals over a certain amount of time? I will call the Self MOT. Here you will make a detailed assessment of yourself, and of your achievements and write down notes about anything that’s lacking in either your life, or in your own capabilities. Decide what’s pressing and what isn’t, and look for things you can change about yourself that will change your circumstances and potential. As Jackie Chan says – don’t let your circumstances control you; control your circumstances. It may not be New Year, in fact it probably isn’t as this is going live around the first half of December, but you can start this right away – what’s the point of waiting half a month before you start making positive change?

Take a sheet of paper. Now rate yourself on the following factors and answer the following points:

Strength:

Measurements (biceps, chest etc):

Speed:

Intelligence:

Productivity:

Looks:

Agility:

Knowledge:

Areas of expertise:

Areas lacking:

Emotional Stability/Control:

Happiness:

Health:

Weaknesses:

Skills (list):

Finances:

Assets:

Relationships:

Spare Time:

Areas of concern:

Goals:

Ambitions:

Now fill these out and use the answers on each element to inform your answers in others. For example if you’re not happy then fill in goals and ambitions that will help improve your happiness, and fill out areas of concern that are causing you to be unhappy. Make and answer more items if appropriate.

With this done you should find you can now identify more accurately areas of weakness and problems and faults. So follow this up with a ‘four year plan’ that can help you fix each of these issues. This might involve elements such as increasing the size of your biceps or the strength of your bench press, along with increasing productivity and salary through getting a new job or improving your business. Ensure your larger plans are made up of smaller ones and set targets throughout the year. Spend large amounts of time focussing on problem areas and goals and know that there’s no problem you can’t solve given enough thought, no matter how abstract or how large – even if it takes a few days. You may find you also need to adapt the plan over time, and may choose to ‘internalise it’, so that you can adapt it to changing events without having to write it out. So long as you have a plan, active goals, and are aware of the problems in your life and in your performance; you will be able to keep moving forwards and keep improving to ensure you get the most out of life.

New Stuff at The Biomatrix and Friends

The Biomatrix as you know, is more than a mere website, it is a living breathing organism. It is in the shape of an octapus too, and like any good organism, it has tendrils which it is now extending throughout the internet. Oh and also... it evolves...

As a result there is now an awesome search bar on the front page bellow the new videos that will enable to you search the biomatrix for related subjects. Want to improve your pecs? Type 'pecs' and press enter. It's brilliant!

But it won't only show you results from the Biomatrix, but the whole of the NQR Network. NQR Network, you repeat irritatingly, what is that? Well it's the new conglomerate of new related sites from the producers of the Biomatrix, and that includes first of all: www.psychological-warfare.com - our brand new website! For everything you need to know about outsmarting your opponents using psychology.

Finally, as though all that wasn't enough you can now follow NQR on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NotQuiteReality

So go and do those things!

Action Hero Song

If you like the Action Hero advert from Channel Five on the front page of the Biomatrix then good news - you can download the mp3 for free from HERE!

The Expendables Trailer

Here at the Biomatrix we've been following the Expendables development rather eagerly - it's looking to be one of the most action filled films ever made and represents many of the Biomatrix's priniciples - training to make yourself the best you can be. Stallone's physique for 63 is actually insane, and any film that finally unites Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger has to be worth the price of admission.

Can You Survive on JUST Supplements?

Being a ridiculously big Rocky fan I have the 36 Maffia song from Rocky Balboa on many of my workout playlists. I like to sing along and pretend it's me giving the threats like 'you'll be drinking fried chicken through a crazy straw' etc which helps motivate me during a workout (I always imagined they deserved it though...). As it turned out however it was I who was to end up drinking fried chicken through a crazy straw after getting beaten up in Bournemouth (In my defence though I was drunk, outnumbered and apparently still took an abnormal number of hits to the face seemingly with a knuckle duster without falling over or going unconscious). I literally had fried chicken in one straw and the vegetables in another. The straw wasn't technically a crazy straw but it was crazy in that it was a Halloween straw with a skeleton on it. That's pretty crazy right?? I mean why would a skeleton be on a straw?

So anyway, that wasn't particularly nice and was tough work to suck through a straw. So I moved on to complan. That actually is quite nice - I had the banana one and that's nice anyway. In fact it was just like a protein shake... which got me thinking; why wasn't I having one of those instead? This was the perfect opportunity to get some hyper lean muscle - for Rocky 3 Stallone allegedly lived off just protein shakes and burned toast - why couldn't I? I would turn this unfavourable situation around and make my lack of mouth the catalyst for a great new bodylab experiment - I would live off of just supplements.

Of course though protein shakes only really contain one essential aspect of our diet - that being protein, and as I advise elsewhere on this site you need every aspect of your diet to stay healthy. So I decided that to do this properly I'd need some more supplements and training foods. Namely Berroca - for every vitamin and mineral I wasn't getting from vegetables (and everything my body needed to repair itself), Omega 3 for fats, and Lucozade for energy. I now had my carbs, my minerals and vitamins, essential fatty acids and my proteins. The only thing I was missing here was fibre but of course the prospect of a 'drinkable' fibre doesn't make any sense.

This meant I was getting high concentrated quanities of everything my body needed without anything extra, and all readily available for its biological purpose. As you might imagine then this lead to a rather more ripped physique pretty quickly and surprisingly on this meagre amount I wasn't too hungry either (though my apetite had been somewhat ruined). It doesn't sound healthy, but as a diet it's certainly preferable to the Atkins or some shit like that and I can't see anything immediately wrong with it. For bodybuilders looking to cut before a competition... why not?

At the same time I started to suspect that supplying my body with concentrated vitamin E and protein could help it to heal the scarring and broken bone, and that I could help this with other supplements. For that reason I added GABA to the mix to give myself extra growth hormone that my body could use to heal the wound and added vitamin E cream to my face at the advice of the doctors. Vitamin C I suspect helped fight infection (along with the antibiotics) too.

Oh and I took one other supplement for the swelling 'Arnica'... which is a 'Homeopathic Remedy' - read as bullshit. I can't believe a Nurse recommended it to me, but it's a substance claims to be so diluted by sugar that if there was just one particle in the observable universe it wouldn't be that diulted by all of the others. This only goes to prove a) that it has nothing in it b) that homeopaths are liars and c) you should always research anything before you start taking it - even if it was prescribed to you.

So I got a lot more ripped from this extreme diet, how did the supplements do at helping the healing? Well the Arnica unsurprisingly will have done nothing (my friend purposefully overdosed on them to demonstrate their lack of active ingredients and surprise surprise was fine), but the rest might have. In theory extra protein and growth hormone should have aided the healing and in fact both my cheek bone and my sewn up lip are showing more signs of recovery than the hospital staff predicted... It could be that my weird science worked, or just that I'm magic. Either is possible.

In the future I hope we'll have access to extracellular matrix for healing wounds, which has shown to be able to grow back the tips of fingers. Until then, other transhuman/bodybuilding methods might be able to help. As a way to get super lean fast then eating just supplements works well too; and until I can get KFC in a curly straw that will be my new liquid meals plan.

Report From The Trenches..

This site is focussed on self improvement with a heavy emphasis on training, and that includes martial arts and combat training. I practice what I preach and so can personally 'road test' what I learn. So how did my training hold up when I was set upon by 4 drugged up thugs?

I'm going to honest... it held up badly. For a rough idea of how badly, yesterday I drank my roast dinner through a straw and today I don't talk; I squeek like Sweep from Sooty and Sweep. So not perfect but in my defence I was rather drunk and the weird thing it I didn't try to fight back, or run, but instead just stood there getting hit in the face. And making what I thought were funny jokes.

So in terms of endurance I did well, and I think they were impressed that it took about seven punches to make me fall over and that I didn't seem to react at all. Thing was that at no point did it hurt, and still doesn't, which meant that rather than run I just stood there saying 'have you hit me? It feels like maybe you did?' followed by 'Stop hitting me!'. I thought it was funny. It wasn't really in retrospect... Kept my honour though...

The thing that annoys me is that I didn't try and fight. If I'd tried I'd almost definitely have still lost (while four were attacking me a lot more were after my friends... who survived scot free damn them!) and maybe have got hurt worse, but I reckon I could have taken two down. Which would have been a much cooler story. This took aboutThe problem was that they gave no warning that they were going to attack like they normally do and caught me completely off guard. After following us the main guy said 'Why you lippin' us?' when I said 'we weren't', I got hit straight in the face. From there I just stood there, for a good two minutes, asking Craig to inspect my eye before getting hit again. And again and again. It wasn't until I went down that my alcohol-addled brain realised it was time to flee and I rolled, yes rolled, away...

Though the extent of the damage may have been partly my fault for innactin. This demonstrates how you can't really prepare for that sort of thing. I couldn't attack him pre-emptively as then I'd have been the first to attack in a situation where he may well have then left us alone, and even getting into a stance could provoke a reaction. If you read my book you'll see the 'step back hands up' technique which would have been very useful. I need to carry that with me everywhere... It also supports my theory that the psychological element is pretty much key in a fight and is the one thing they don't really teach in Martial Arts (being why they're essentially useless). I'll work on it.

At the same time though the real moral of this story is 'get less drunk'. Craig managed to dodge them, and I would have been able to do the same (they were rubbish punches) which would have been great. No matter how good my reactions were normally though they weren't going to work great with that much alcohol in me... So it's key to always be ready. Drinking alcohol is fun, but I should stop at the point where my reactions have become useless.

Anyway what matters now that I'm sober is how I'm going to deal with the situation. I'm seeing it as a learning curve and am going to use the recuperation time to hopefully come back better and work on some new projects. When Green Arrow got beaten to a pulp he went in for training so it wouldn't happen again, when a Saijan gets the crap beaten out of him he comes back stronger, and when Iron Man gets busted he makes a new suit of armour. So that's what I'll be doing, and as I can't eat I'll also be using the time to try surviving on just supplements, you can read how that goes right here. Stay tuned! I'll be back...