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We added a new weapon to our arsenal at the gym. [..] The 92.5″ Buffalo Bar with its magnificent curve boldly rests on the angled uprights of our Excalibur power rack. What a truly handsome piece of steel it is; super-long with it’s super-thick deeply knurled bar, smoothly rotating Olympic sleeves and cool silver-steel finish. We don’t use this ultimate squat bar for training purposes, as it is far too beautiful for clanging around, dropping and racking. We, girls and guys, take turns standing next to the thing like it was a frontiersman’s musket or a gladiator’s lance, vain warriors posed for a point n’shoot photograph.
Dave Draper: Buffalo Stampede.

Tongue in cheek aside, I followed in the footsteps of the Blonde Bomber and arranged to purchase my very own Buffalo Bar for Toffe’s. It all started when I got the latest issue of MILO and read Dr. Ken’s ravings about how this legendary bar is “made for one thing and one thing only and that’s the squat”. As it happened, some time later I browsed in at Voimaharjoittelu.net to look at their used equipment sections. The first thing I saw was a Buffalo Bar for 195 euros. For a second, I was torn between the Buffalo Bar and the Texas Powerbar (”the best all-purpose bar on the market“), but with Leistner’s words, a vision of my squat numbers continuing their climb and a 50% discount on my mind (the retail price is 395 euros), I went for the Buffalo. I contacted Sakke, the owner of the shop, and inquired about the condition of the bar. Turned out he had two (Europeans, one more is up for the grabs!), both in good condition. One had been in use at a public gym, the other one is from a private gym. He also readily agreed to hold the shipping until late April when dad will be at our summer cottage to pick it up. Saves me from slugging it all the way from Helsinki. Good service!

I will definitively need to replace the generic bar at Toffe’s with a proper bar at some point, but for now I am happy to have a legendary squat bar in my forest. Unlike what the thick layer of ice still covering the sea here in southern Finland suggests, the outdoor training session is just around the corner. Can’t wait.

Wednesday, 5 April 2006: Light bench/squat combo

Still got a slimy cough, but who can stay out of the gym forever? I eased back into it by doing a light combined squat and bench workout involving plenty of supersets. As you can see, I am indeed serious about upping my biceps strength. In fact, I think I will start my bench assistance day with plenty of biceps work and also put in a few sets on max effort day. I should probably start to do biceps pull-ups…

Saturday, 8 April 2006: ME Bench

On a whim, I decided to see how it would feel if I moved my grip out on the bench. I usually bench with pinkies on or just inside the rings, but now worked up with ring fingers on the rings. To my surprise, there was no shoulder discomfort. As is to be expected when using unfamiliar grips, the normal bench poundage was too much right now. I also moved the feet in as much as I could while still keeping my heels on the ground in an attempt to keep my arch better. If things continue to feel this good, I will likely keep the wider grip as I sure could use a bit shorter range of motion… Am also slowly bringing the total volume up a bit on the assistance work with shorter rest periods. I could use a bit more muscle and GPP. Then again, who couldn’t?

I feel thankful for paying per visit and not monthly at Metal… First I spent a week recovering from the latest bout of back trouble. For once, I actually managed to fix myself up in a record time by doing nothing but avoiding flexion and decompressing frequently. Eleven days after the relapse, I was in the gym doing front squats and feeling dandy. Then I suddenly lost my voice and caught a fever. A far nastier critter than the usual flu fare, I was down and out from work for the whole of week 13. If I don’t have any energy to compute, I know it’s bad. When Rufus also caught it we had our hands full. Then it was Sanna’s turn, who is at the time of writing still recovering from hers. I could have sweared Metal Gym was no longer in the same dimension.

Here’s a quick glance at the two workouts I got in before falling ill.

Tuesday, 14 March 2006: ME Bench

Being the first workout after the back pain, I played it safe and kept my feet up on all the benching. After posting a routine failure at 102.5 kg/227 lbs on the close-grip bench, I worked my way up on the dumbell bench with a light band around my back (VIDEO 1.8M). Not perhaps what you’d expect from a guy vehemently opposed to starting on the bands too early, but, or so the story goes, I did it in an effort to solve the two-fold problem I have with the dumbell bench: the lack of a dumbell pair between 36 kg and 41kg/91 lbs has proven to be too big a weight jump to continue the 5x5 progression and lowering the 41 kg/91 lbs bells to the floor seriously strained my weak biceps. With the band, I can achieve the same level of work with much less dumbell poundage while drastically cutting down on the weight I need to lower to the floor. The 26 kg/57 lbs dumbells were plenty for a set of six. And yes, I am going to bring my biceps up with more direct biceps work, for I really want to manhandle the heavier bells soon. If it takes bands to do it, then so be it.

Friday, 17 March 2006: Squat

Due to the aforementioned back episode, my newly acquired Sting Ray was confined to the stinky darkness of my gym bag for two weeks before it finally got out in the limelight. The Sting Ray does for the front squat what its cousin the Manta Ray does for the back squat, namely delivers a much increased surface area for the bar in the guise of blue high-tech polyurethane polymer that snaps readily unto the bar. The end result is sheer comfort that allows one to concentrate on the task at hand without worrying about the bar. For more ramblings on this, see my post on the Manta Ray.

The Manta Ray provides an easy way to do an extremely high-bar squat that taxes the quads to the max, but no serious powerlifter would consider using it exlusively since it is illegal in competition and a low bar placement gives better leverage anyway. Leave that for the bodybuilders. In contrast, I see little point in doing front squats without the Sting Ray since it does not noticeably alter the mechanics of the lift. As anyone who has done front squats extensively can attest, the front squat is an uncomfortable lift where you get to choose between sacrificing your shoulders or wrists to keep the bar in front of your body. With the Sting Ray the discomfort is virtually eliminated, provided you get the two pieces properly spaced on the bar. I also found that you don’t even need to hold on to the bar at all, but it felt more natural for an old front squatter to keep the arms over it. Just in case.

For obvious reasons, I took it easy with a few fivers at 70 kg/155 lbs, but it was more than enough to convince me that the Sting Ray will be worth much more over the years to come than the mere $39.95 plus $11.60 shipping that I paid for it suggests. Inspired by Alberto, I continued the quad assault with walking dumbell lunges from the end of the lifting platform to the Metal shop. Turned out to be sixteen lunge steps. The next day my glutes and quads were fried.

By popular demand… here’s the only video snippet (1.5M) I have of my heavy bag work, from a certain deload week in early January. It’s not pretty, it’s not serious, but it gives you the general idea. At this point, I still needed more than a few refreshers on latching on to the rhythm of the bag and a lot of the kicks show a glaring lack of follow through as a result. Who would have thought this man actually carries a black belt? Let’s just say that it’s been ten years and await the sequel.

I’ve been involved in a Tibetan digital library project for some time now in the capacity as the sysadmin responsible for the actual technical implementation. After more months of work than I care to recall, we are finally nearing a public release. Eager to get it done, both the guys in China and I have been working frantically on it for the last ten days or so. The good news is that we have made good progress, the bad news is that it was a decisive turn in the wrong direction for my back.

Monday last week, I worked non-stop from 9pm to 6.30am in front of the computer. With my brain deeply occupied with Perl code, I royally forgot to decompress every now and then. Minutes later, I was dashing hard to catch the customary bus. I made it, but at the expense of my lower back. First came the pain, two days later the lateral hip shift. I took muscle relaxants and pain killers left over from the previous pain saga, but still had trouble getting out of the bed in the morning. Decided to forget training until it had cleared. In the end, it cleared up faster than I had dared to imagine. It remains to be seen if I have managed to get past it at record speed or not as I break out the Sting Ray this weekend.

I commissioned dad to snap a few pics of Toffe’s as he drove over the ice to the summer cottage last week. As you can see, the snow level is abnormally low for being halfway up Finland in early March. It’s been a strange winter. Despite some periods with below -20°C/-4°F weather, snow fall has been sparse in recent weeks (not so in Glasgow). Now that the warm rays of the March sun tends to take the day time temperature up quite a bit, one could definitively break out the barbell were one to have the opportunity for a visit. Alas… sigh.

Wednesday, 1 March 2006: Bench weak point day

The press-centric raw bench program I sewed together after my layoff sought to address the weak incline bench, weak shoulder strength and weak bicep strength. I have been doing some decent progress on that, but this might not be enough, especially not for the biceps. After things stall, I will consider turning my accessory bench day into a pure weakpoint session and skip all the crud. Shoulder pressing, back work, cuff work and more than a few sets of biceps work might make the cut better.
Me and myself, January 4th

It is time. Henceforth, there is max effort bench day and weakness bench day. Let’s see what that does for me. The cable crossover shrugs, a shrug done by shrugging in the upper pulley of a cable crossover machine, together with the heavy rear delt work is designed to give me more strength to pull, and keep, the shoulders well retracted on the bench. The rest should be self-explanatory.

Friday, 3 March 2006: ME SQ

Everything clicked tonight. First of all, I didn’t miss the first bus as I usually do. My mind was where it was supposed to be; how could it not be as I listened to the Dark Tranquillity masterpiece Haven on my iPod with Koss Spark Plugs while sipping on an energy drink? Next to the bus stop where I change buses, the lightly falling snow was beautifully illuminated by light beams sent into the sky (and neighbouring building) by a spot light (larger pic). Once at the empty gym, I went through three PRs on the 13″ box squat ending up at 130 kg/287 lbs, a 12.5 kg/28 lbs improvement. No lateral shift this time. Three plates a side are soon mine on the squat.

VIDEO (3.1M), for the first time featuring reverse hypers on the real deal.

Sunday, 5 March 2006: Family GPP

Rufus loves his sled and we love pulling him. Having borrowed a car, we spent the morning at the Seurasaari Open Air Museum. While Sanna grilled us some sausage, Rufus and I enjoyed watching a game of kubb down by the ice, an old Viking game that is fairly popular here in Scandinavia. I had hoped to wrap up the nice day with a nocturnal visit to Metal, but the light sled pulling reluctantly convinced me that the biceps had again taken a beating after the squatting. Staying home instead, my biceps got a well-deserved cross-fiber massage by Sanna before being coated in the muscle rub I got from Thailand. Sauna next.

Finland too far away? Fear not, for the virtual three-minute video tour of Metal Gym is here. Everything included, except for the lever adjustable competition bench that I somehow side-stepped and a closer look at some of the specialty bars, bands and boxes. Also didn’t mark out all the supplementary benches that stand here and there.

TAKE THE TOUR (6.5M)

Wednesday, 22 February 2006: Light SQ and Bench

The biceps overuse problem got a nice natural solution: fever induced rest. Instead of being under the bar, I spent the whole last week under the weather. Still not quite sure if the normal gear was back in, I made a pilgrimage to a certain basement to find out.

Those of you who have been following Old-School Iron, the blog of my good friend and occasional training partner Måns, are no doubt well aware of the small gym located in a basement in his housing company. Known as kuntotila in Finnish, “exercise space” in a more international vernacular, the gym measures something on the order of 3x5 meters (15 square meters). Come to think of it, that’s a lot like our current living room, only weights are out of the question there. Anyway… with Måns now on the premises, the gym has been woken from its quiet coma with a bang. His buying of extra plates to supplement the measly 48 kg/107 lbs vinyl barbell set apparently got a former gym owning neighbor going too - a chinning bar, some more plates and other goodies appeared there soon after. Rumor has it that more equipment has been spotted in the parking lot since my visit. If Måns gets his way and the needed funds, this place will yet turn into a hardcore little beast, possibly even with a rack of some sort.

Here’s a panorama of the gym stitched together from several shots; the crooked bottom of the Proteus multistation machine is an artefact from the stitching. Click on the image for a larger version.

The workout, again done at the customary 11pm to way past midnight, turned out to be a little less light than I had anticipated. I worked up to 80 kg/177 lbs on the front squat, the most I wanted to do without a belt, and ended up doing a triple max on illegal wides with an extremely wide grip (grabbed the actual weight sleeves using a extra pair of locks to prevent the plates from moving into my hands). If loading up enough weight on the bar was no problem (can be taken to about 110 kg/243 lbs at the moment), then the multistation pulldown was a whole other monkey business with its teenage 100 lbs/45 kg stack. After I added a double miniband, brought with me for some band leg curls, to the pulley the stack was turned. I didn’t even need to use the whole stack… Tried a couple of different variations on setting up the band, see them on the video (5M) together with the rest of this workout.

Training in this gym brought back a lot of memories from the time I had my own home gym in my room. It had a huge Redwood Hanging Bar built according to the nice Hanging Bar Plans (1991) booklet from Health for Life, a Weider Cobra bench (briefly in use at Toffe’s Gym), some 80 kg/177 lbs of iron plates (now at Toffe’s Gym as dumbell plates), dumbell bars, a couple of different bars, a classic Armblaster, a home-made calf board and whatnot. The bar would barely fit between my bed and my closet, so not precisely a large gym that one either… I am still kicking myself daily for never taking any photos in there. I just wasn’t in the habit of taking pictures of myself or my habitat before I started this blogging business…

Passing lightly over that, here’s the workout. Thanks Måns for driving me to the gym and back home afterwards! Will come again, perhaps for deload week.

Saturday, 25 February 2006: DE Squat

Fuddled up the buss connections royally by forgetting (?) it was the weekend. Arriving at Metal some 40 minutes later than usual, I got held up trying to figure out the best chain setup for my dynamic effort squatting. You see, I have decided to alternate chains between DE bench and DE squat in three week waves.

This was the first time I tried chains on the squat, and boy, do they ever give you that max effort feeling even with light weights. Time being a scant commodity by the time I finally got myself into the rack and unto the parallel box, I only did 5x2 @ 85 kg/188 lbs with two pairs of chain per side. The longer kind of chain weighed 5 kg/11 lbs, the shorter 8 kg/18 lbs a piece. The script for Dave Tate’s three-week dynamic effort cycles wanted me to have 27 kg of chain at lockout, but based on the amount of chain left on the floor I estimate I get about 23 kg/51 lbs at lockout. After the speed work I worked up to a heavy double, something that is recommended that is done at least once in the cycle, stopping at 2 @ 105 kg/232 lbs on the bar plus the chains for a 128 kg/283 lbs lockout. It was getting hard, but could probably have loaded an additional 10 kg/22 lbs on the bar. This makes me believe I will annihilate the current parallel box squat PR very soon. Had to make a run for it to make it outside by closing time. Changing in an empty parking lot at midnight in the middle of winter after a very successful workout is my idea of fun.

Got a minor lateral shift after the workout, but it had cleared up by the time I was back home.

VIDEO (3.5M)

Thursday, 9 February 2006: DE Squat

Not one of the most dynamic dynamic days. The left biceps pain flared up after a few sets of speed box squats at 75% of my current 120 kg/265 lbs raw max. Had to do without the quad busting Manta Ray squats instead wrapping it up with reverse hypers, GHRs and even some easy flexion work in the guise of standing pulley crunches. Perverted as it may be, I spent the time between the sets systematically going through every single weight plate I could find at Metal. If you ever wondered how much weight it takes to open up a small hardcore powerlifting dungeon or what a respectable weight plate distribution is, wonder no more.

In American, this is a total of 4768 lbs of iron at a cost of about 7,675 dollars. The price is based on current rates at Voimaharjoittelu.net and does not include shipping. No doubt there would be some volume discount, but this gives a rough idea. These MB Euroclassic plates “has the same standards as most international brands training quality but for much lower price”. The weight tolerance on these are 1% as opposed to an extreme 0.1% for calibrated Eleiko competition plates. More than good enough.

Flying sideways now, here’s the workout.

Saturday, 11 February 2006: Bench accessory

Had a big piece of homemade pizza pre-workout. Not ideal, but sometimes pizza is the only thing that will satisfy a bottomless hunger. I almost burned it, but still yummy for the tummy. Sorry for being so graphic about it. Who said powerlifting blogs were always comfortable reading?

Standing smack in the middle of an industrial area in Helsinki, Metal Gym lives in one square box indeed. The gym occupies one side of the third floor. As I arrived at 22pm, only half of the lights were lit; a sure sign that everyone else is home sleeping. In retrospect, I would have been better off doing the same. I began the workout with the usual inclines, but the biceps pain flared up again and prevented me from reaching the reps I did last time. Ah well, got to take care of that before something really bad happens.

Hopping on the midnight transit bus back to downtown Helsinki after a bad workout, I almost felt like joining the party crowd for a few Entire Butts. I said almost.

The workout might not have been a good one, but the halo around the moon more than made up for it. I ended up staying outside for some time snapping pictures of it. I like this one, taken from underneath a pine standing in front of our house. According to a news flash on the web site of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, there have been a lot of halo sightings over the last few days. The Finnish Halo Observing Network has some further info and pictures of this wonderful phenomenon caused by the scattering of light by minute ice crystals in the atmosphere. Things like these must be nature’s way of reminding us of what is important in life. Snuggled in with the family in a warm bed.