Ordinary is for the Birds, Not Bombers
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We’re up to our ears in summer, the golden season we in this hemisphere longed for six months ago. The summer is like a large fleeting moment; it appears and is gone, a memory. Now that it’s here with its sunshine, warmth and extended days, grasp it with a sure grip and greet each day with eager and hopeful eyes. Don’t let it fly away.
Here’s a touchy question, bombers: Have you satisfied your summertime training goals launched in the early spring?
Me? Personally, I’m about on schedule; somewhere between 215 and 220 pounds, and the iron is moving up and down as it should. A lighter bodyweight is smarter and cleaner, but the heavier weight makes me feel bigger and stronger (duh!), and bigger and stronger is most seductive. Some days are better than others. Some workouts are great, some are predictable and, occasionally, some are the pits. Sounds like life; being human can be so ordinary.
Ordinary is okay. Given half a chance, ordinary can be spectacular. Ordinary is that straight line we walk every day, which accounts for our daily progress. It’s the two steps forward commingled with that one step back. It’s perseverance without force, achievement without aggression, moving on without command or demand. Force, aggression, command and demand can break a thing. Ordinary does not.
Extraordinary, meanwhile, is cool, very cool. I prefer this upgraded version of ordinary in that it’s more inline with the nature of bombers. We walk the daily straight line, skipping and leaping when we get that crazy uncontrollable urge. We don’t use outright force, though we are cleverly persuasive. We are never, ever aggressive, yet we do insist on the right thing being done at the right time. And commands never leave our lips, only straightforward statements of fact, and that’s the truth.
This is not to imply that bombers are conceited, pushy and self-serving; they are quite the opposite. One might define them as spirited, hard-working and genuine. Bombers humbly accept with tight lips the two steps forward, while striving for five or ten.
Ordinary describes those folks on the far side of the gym’s doors, whether the gym is in the corner of the bedroom, the underside of the house, the enclosed space usually occupied by a car and household junk, or the clanging place in the neighborhood where people gather to train. Ordinary does not describe the exertion against steel one applies to improve one’s health and strength. Nor does it define the character of the guys and gals eating to feed their bodies rather than their appetites. Ordinary folks are accompanied by ordinary attitudes, with ordinary expectations and ordinary accomplishments and ordinary muscles (small) and ordinary stomachs (large).
Sounds like I just clobbered the ordinary after declaring them and their condition okay and potentially spectacular. Average is fine for the average, its consistent plugging along, tolerating what befalls them and surviving a long life, which is sorta spectacular in this day and age.
Ordinary is so ordinary. It is proper, legal, unassuming, within bounds, non-provocative and almost effortless. Ordinary happens. Ordinary is dull.
It’s easy to slip back into the Big O. Work, sit, eat, root for the home team, pay your dues, shuffle your credit cards, bicker with your spouse, bring in the dog, put out the cat, skip your workouts and sleep restlessly. Ugh!
Skipping the workouts caused the whole catastrophe. But you knew that. Working out makes the workday go more smoothly -- you have less time to sit and sink; you find yourself routinely eating smarter and playing energetically and rooting less before the TV. Everyone pays their dues, big deal, but you decide the credit cards have got to go. Something about consistent exercise -- the order, the discipline, the energy -- encourages you to tie up loose ends and fix what’s broken. Goodbye Capitol One. Bickering -- evil in boxing gloves -- is naturally replaced with affection, communication and love. Exercise does that. Of course, the cat and dog, two of God’s many gifts to us, curl up at the end of your bed as ya’ll sleep the night away. Nothing ordinary about this scene.
Today I stood at the gym door anticipating an ordinary workout. Ordinary is good, I thought. You know, enough, sufficient, acceptable, average. With these expectations my shoulders sagged; I tossed my bag in the corner like yesterday’s Daily News, dragged out my gear and nodded to the guy dozing on the bench. Ordinary caused me to blend into the scene as I lugged my body in slow motion to the Smith Press. Will you look at all that cold steel, I thought; it must weigh a ton. Oh, my aching back. Just do the best you can, Draper, and get it over with.
Now there’s the spirit, Bomber. Ordinary at work.
Sometimes I intentionally allow these base emotions and thoughts to bully me to remind me how despicable they are: insidious, terrorizing, deceptive and cunning. Laughable when you can see through the cowardly lot. The futile harassment was long enough for me to hate it, but short in terms of training interruption. I was soon beyond my warm-up sets and working up a sweat. Metal was clanging, bars were rocking, plates were rolling and sets and reps were piling up on the floor in heaps. You could hear my burn sizzle across the gym and I had to walk sideways between racks and benches 'cuz of the pump.
Now, the ordinary ordinariness that threatened my blasting the workout was stretched into extraordinary by a simple extension of reps. You see, the first set of presses was bland and uneventful and was supersetted with pulldowns, which were tiresome and awkward. This would not do, not even for the commonplace bum. The road ahead appeared long and grim. I was desperate.
Think basic, let the instincts loose, keep moving and apply form, focus and work. The weights felt heavy (they do that when ordinary sneaks up on me), my form was sloppy (that happens when the weights feel heavy) and I struggled for each uninspiring, ineffective rep (yucko). I dropped the exercise weights just enough, I polished the reps with focus and form and engaged the Extended Set Principal (ESP) to add the joy of burning, pumping and flowing to the entire workout. Ordinary be danged.
ESP is best understood in example (below), and, then, performance (ahead).
Front press and widegrip pulldowns (as old as the paint on the barn), four supersets as follows: For the first set use a weight that enables you to achieve 8 to 10 clean reps, foregoing the last major rep that causes you to wriggle and puke. Without unnerving haste, remove a plate from each end of the bar -- or raise the pin one plate on the weight stack or go down one set of dumbbells on the dumbbell rack -- and resume your clean and steady reps till they almost become flawed (4 to 6 reps). You’re burning. Again, with attention and control, remove the appropriate plates and give the exercise one more intense and commendable blast (4+ reps). Three sweet sets in one: extra hard work, well paced, burning, pumping and without the risk and frustration of the mangled last rep. The unloading of plates allows enough time to regain your breath and re-ignite the fire. Pumping and smiling and crying and growing.
I continued my workout applying the same method of operation to dumbbell inclines and pullovers in superset, bent-over dumbbell rows in single sets and thumbs up curls supersetted with variations of pulley triceps extensions. No secrets, no inventions, no razor-edge technology or profound methodology; just hard work, body, mind 'n soul engagement and the iron. Hypertrophy, marvelous hypertrophy, lurks within persistent and intense overload, not the load of the ordinary variety.
Great workout: no awards for heavy lifting, yet personally fulfilling, physically rewarding, half beaten to death and smiley.
Ordinary is good. We’re all ordinary in many ways: presidents, governors, actors, race car drivers, doctors and musclebuilders. We blink, scratch, smooch, use the outhouse, yell and cry. But bombers are undeniably extra ordinary, or as they say, extraordinary.
Got Wings -- Will Fly -- The Bomber
…..
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