Bodybuilding Classic Physique Division Offseason log

I legit dont know if I can beat my son at basketball 1 on 1 anymore. He is much more skilled than me (not a super high bar. I never played organized basketball but I was a decent pick up player in my younger days) and around the same height/weight (5'11" 175 lbs). I am still stronger and more explosive; but I really dont know if it is enough anymore.

He doesn't even realize what he is doing, but he does the Luka thing where he uses his bulk to his advantage, and puts you on his hip, and can pretty much always get some kind of decent shot off.

My daughter also has shown completely zero interest in sports, which is somewhat of a shame. As she is tall and has a wide frame/shoulders (especially for a girl) and reasonable upper body strength on the monkey bars, so one does wonder if that would translate into athletic skill. But if the interest isn't there, it is kind of a moot point.

Indeed.

I obviously mostly agree that 2) is orders of magnitude more important than 1); as you point out, being the kind of person inclined to ask the question and act on the answer is more important than the specifics. I do see more behavioral issues with kids that get more screen time, but hard to figure the arrow of causality with that one (it's obviously both nature and nurture).

Agreed. They're playing chess against each other on their laptops Battleship style instead of actually setting up the board, so we're not exactly Tiger parenting it up 24/7.

This is indeed an interesting question, but I have the opposite problem as you - the old man is still incredibly detailed and hyper-competent financially, so nothing really for me to assist with other than being aware of the order of operations when he finally goes.

With that said, we're all upper middle class plodders at heart, so unless I end up with equity in a start up in the next few years instead of just consulting for them, the best we're going to be is "comfortable" instead of "starting a home office". To the extent that we can help either/both of our kids get into a career or endeavor where they can surpass that if they so choose, we'd obviously do that. House down payment, safety net for a risky career, take some/most of the childcare burden if necessary, let our respective inheritances compound instead of boomering it away - all on the table, but unlikely to get us to the top .1%.

I have more or less a "don't ask, dont tell" attitude with my son's electronic/social media usage. With the understanding that it is basically a giant IQ/Social IQ test, and it is his responsibility to navigate things responsibly or face the consequences. Obviously this is asking a lot more than in the world me and you grew up in, and maybe it isn't fair, but it is what it is.

I think I will have to be more hands on with my daughter, but we will burn that bridge when we get there.

He has an older cousin whose parents were completely hands off, and it worked out ok, so hoping for similar results.

Like most So Cal upper middle class suburbs, the area I live in is diverse, and my son's friend group is diverse and AFAICT the most "off color" thing him and his friends do is joke about “Diddying” each other and “good natured" racial insulting each other. Which seems like an age/gender appropriate bonding ritual. Although obviously there are social risks in the present and future.

Luckily the social outrage pendulum seems to be swinging in a direction that it being exposed you called your Indian friend a "Curry head" on Discord when you were a teenager wont be cause for canceling you from polite society as an adult.

Interesting, Monte. Just my biased opinion: Movies/TV/Video games probably basically okay. Mobile technology, short form video apps, social media generally bad, with girls hit much harder than boys overall. Long form video apps and sites varied, can be extremely bad or extremely good. But it seems you're relatively more restrictive of technology and in general. That's another reason I'm quitting this job; this school allows tablets from grade 9. This is the first and only school I've been at that does this; the standard is they start in grade 11 and they're never allowed them in grade 9/10. In my previous school I banned tablets from my classroom for grade 11 for the first semester until we were close to exam time in the 2nd semester, but allowed it for grade 12. I got a lot of support from the school in enforcing/implementing this ban. But this school is actively undermining me on reducing tablet presence in my classroom and teaching 9th grade foreigners with tiktok brain who actually know what is meant by "BOP House" has been particularly difficult, particularly when I have native english speakers coupled with double digit IQs who acquire english very slowly. If I were a parent of pre-teen or teenage girl, I'm unsure how I would shield them from the corrosive mindpoison of foreign tiktok. Banning it somehow will just increase their desire for it and lead to them feeling excluded from their peer group for not having access to it. Chinese tiktok is really honestly not that bad as the algo punishes thirst-trapping incredibly hard and Chinese women are way more culturally averse to posing anything sexual online for an audience of people they haven't met in real life. (Based) Coming somewhere with foreigners has been a huge curse overall despite the lower language barrier and makes me realize just how toxic western youth pop culture has gotten. I feel like it wasn't that bad when I was still there in 2014...

Switch games are very wholesome and PG by design; nintendo generally doesn't allow anything excessively violent or sexual on its platforms and more or less never has.

Never married and n=4, but the amount of times I heard "I'm sorry, you were/are right" implicitly or explicitly from a romantic partner was directly correlated with SMV differential. The muslim girl Sally with the army of friendzoned suitors said it literally 0 times despite being by far the worst behaved partner. But she may have been a personality disorder outlier who literally isn't capable of being critical of her own behaviour in any context ever. I expect in marriage this will be less true and that I simply won't hear it no matter how much more attractive I am than my wife.

I'm surprised by how much more online popularity (wechat) I have than most attractive females in China. They look at the # of likes on my very innocuous and infrequent posts like it's important to strive for. They try so hard and often fail to get the same amount of cyber-recognition that I get entirely by accident.

I think I cared about the # of likes I received on an internet post exactly once when I posted a meme about GME suddenly gaining a ton of market cap. And another time in 2020 when I achieved a 48 inch box jump from standing, that was pretty badass I was proud of myself ngl.

I suppose if my hypothetical daughter looked more Chinese, it'd be easy to prevent her from using foreign tiktok by using less English in the home with her and keeping her in a school without western foreigners. But if she looks more western this could pose some huge problems as racism is baked into our blood and looking different/western among Asian children always leads to problems.

About half of the foreign parents of mixed children I know end up with kids who have better Chinese than English and generally insulating them from western pop culture is something I'd be doing if I had kids in 2025.

In the future, who knows... Maybe Chinese culture will have become just as degenerated by then.

I saw 向阳花 over the weekend. It's a movie about and for women starring mostly women, yet it didn't feel at all misandric or man hating and I enjoyed the movie a lot.

Evo,

All of that seems pretty reasonable; much of what we're doing is a compromise, as my wife hates video games. I don't mind them really, but limiting how long they can play is pretty necessary since they'd go for 8+ hours in a row if they could. My wife also hates YouTube/Tok style short form video, so to the extent possible we limit exposure to that too.

They're also in a school environment where all of the boys are pretty nerdy, so outside of having a text bubble that's the wrong color in the group chat, no real issues there, at least not that we're aware of. I agree to an extent with jdock that they're going to have to figure out all of this stuff eventually, but I don't think trying to help mitigate exposure until their brain is a bit more developed is a bad thing. Maybe it will end up being useless; I'll never know, so all we can do is our best.

my friend is being groomed to takeover his father's company when he finally passes

his father will likely never retire unless medically forced to, he's still showing up to the office every day and is in great shape for someone his age (regularly goes kiteboarding)

it's a very interesting dynamic original set of children, plus children from later wives and step children - many of whom were all interested in a career in the company

but it was never a real succession situation as it's always been clear that the other children either lacked interest in it or the capabilities so it's always been him as the clear successor

his dad still won't relent controlling things, so instead just has his son tail him to all important things to learn that way - something which he's only recently begun doing but has been a real blessing because now he finally feels like it'll be a smooth transition once he finally hits the ground running

ideally, he'd officially take over while his dad is still functional, that way he will have him as sounding board the first few times he's really tested

this is what i love about the show hacks

The challenge with withholding devices from them at tween/teen level is how much of the socialising and organising of events happens via the DMs.

You can actually end up excluding/making your kid a target

The original definition of "disinterested" was apparetly "not interested", and that usage is still valid.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinterested

merriam-webster

Definition of DISINTERESTED

To quote from this:

"The original sense of uninterested is still out of use, but the original sense of disinterested revived in the early 20th century. The revival has since been under frequent attack as an illiteracy and a blurring or loss of a useful distinction. Actual usage shows otherwise. The "free from selfish interest" sense of disinterested is still its most frequent sense, especially in edited prose; it shows no sign of vanishing. Further, disinterested has developed an additional sense—"no longer interested"—perhaps influenced by the "deprive of" sense of the prefix dis-, that contrasts with uninterested."

heavily agree that whether or not device restriction is useful or not is besides the point because any parent who actively parents is going to have better outcomes than those who parent passively so the parent that makes a decision and implements it is going to have a better outcome than those who don't

and since those who don't will predominantly have kids who are dominated by screens, i think this sets off a lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc cycles where parents see poorly behaved children on screens and blame the screens rather than the lack of parenting

i think the only time that "over parenting" can backfire is when they are too kind to the children - let me explain

by far the worst behaving kids i've ever seen are those who have no consequences because their parents do not punish but instead solely reward

they want to jump on the dining room table and listening to the "please get down from there" means they'll have to stop doing what they're doing but rather continuing to dance on the table not only allows them to do what they wanted to do in the first place, but they may even be offered a special treat in order to stop

so the choice is:

1 don't follow inner desire to dance on table - boring
2 dance on table - fun
2a stop when parents ask to stop - less fun
2b ignore parents and continue to dance and then get offered ice cream to stop - more dancing fun and ice cream!

i'm unsure what strategies i'll eventually deploy - but i'll never follow the "only positive reinforcement" or "treat your child like an adult" systems - idk if spanking will be factored in (will depend heavily on wife's philosophy on that i guess but i'm for it) but there will be serious consequences for bad behavior

and as mentioned earlier, one thing i think my parents really whiffed on (amazing parents overall imo) was that they kind of let me meander about in life

ie pinewood derby, other kids had parents who bought their kids books on optimal design, others helped immensely in the process, mine just showed me the tools and said "design your car" and of course i had the slowest car in the entire race finishing dead last - at the time it was just chalked up as variance, but no, if i wanted to win it (which i kinda did) i should have been encouraged to go on a path of discovery - of researching optimal design methodologies etc - instead it was "here's your block of wood do what you will with it"

same with college, parents were 100% hands off with it and while they were incredibly encouraging, not putting on limits and even driving me cross country to visit the schools i was interested in, they actively discouraged me from "wasting time" studying for the SATs and didn't even proof read my applications and essays for me

nor did they ever encourage me to put in more than minimal effort (they actually found it humorous how i would game the system to put in the least amount of work possible)

i have zero doubt that i would have gone to an ivy league college with just a little improvement because once i got to the school i went to (which i'm very happy with otherwise and still pretty highly rated with extremely low acceptance rate) i was shocked to learn that most of my classmates in college all did SAT prep work and raised their scores by 200-300 points by doing so matched my raw dogging random button clicking - which definitely dictated where i applied as i had the very bottom of the range of the ivies and thus figured no point in trying to apply myself to get straight As which was easily attainable but i didn't see the point because i could still get into second tiers

I didn’t read the second half of that but being too kind is definitely not the only situation where over parenting can have bad outcomes.

oh yeah, i've also seen american beauty 😀

Upper

Cable pullovers: 3 sets
Hammer row: 3ppsx12, 10, 9 each side
Incline bb: 80kgx10, 60kgx12, 10
High rows: 50kgx12, 40kgx15, 10
machine flies: 3 sets failure
single arm cable rows: 2 sets failure

Bayesian curl/prone delt raise/db skullcrusher: 3 rounds

Alright this wasn't it. I need to reconstruct back training. I think bringing back barbell rows is inevitable; nothing is more effective than this even if it's also hitting erectors.

Pulldowns: 2-3 sets, hammer rows: 2 sets, barbell rows: 2 sets, pullovers: 2 sets, single arm cable rows: 1 set

Barbell rows as 3rd lift maybe the stabilizing muscles will get a bit of a break with lighter loading. We'll find out.

Push/chest training is perfect and doesn't need any change. A DB press or a BB press and a machine fly motion, that's it.

stay away, do not watch

Monte,

Heavy screen time is mostly due to the parent's using it as a babysitter. However, there are exceptions. For example, watching mindless English language content at a young age will rapidly improve your language abilities. Weirdly there is now a huge issue here where younger children (like 5-10) have superior English skills to their native language, so speech therapists/linguists/etc have a pretty cushy amount of job security. This also ties into gaming. There is a huge realm of age appropriate gaming that is very beneficial. Ranging from Farmville-esque games for smaller children to strategy games (EU4/Civ/etc) for early teens that are not branded as "educational" but will teach complex systems (for their age). The problem isn't necessarily devices, but making sure the time is well spent (IE not mindlessly doomscrolling) and that rarely occurs. Letting your kid mindlessly watch Spanish Tiktoks to learn Spanish is gonna work pretty well and might be more interesting than watching mid-afternoon Mexican TV.

Even something like DOTA2 requires a huge amount of knowledge to be mildly competent something which noted billionaire SBF couldn't manage.

That being said, I'd rather save my arguing points for something more meaningful than "Well if the kids want to really learn teamwork and strategy they can play online game".

rt,

I'm aware. And while I am sympathetic that this could be an interesting literary device for novelists writing time travel fantasy where our heroic lead has a humorous and awkward interaction with his romantic interest due to not understanding the inversion of the words previously, I've yet to see an actual living human being use the words according to their historical usage and simply consider both to mean uninterested while also creating extra burden and confusion on the part of the reader. Also, **** Merriam-Webster for listing the definitions out of order when their usage guide specifically lists the impartial meaning as the most frequent, especially in formal settings.

Tho there are a decent number of people who fail to recognize that pronunciation varies across dialects and evolves. (The r can be silent in February for example.) But will blindly argue that disinterested/uninterested mean a certain and inviolable thing without realizing that they flippy floppied at some distant point in the past. But hey man, people eh? **** em.

good video, just annoying it's presented and dressed up the way it is - i think if it were done professionally it'd gain a lot more credibility than "blackpill this bruh"

I thought SBF was a LoL gamer not a Dota 2 guy. Maybe it was both, I don't remember. Either way you are right, the barrier to entry in terms of just how much stuff you need to know to even start being competitive at either game is just staggering. I didn't stop playing dota 2 until I was around 27. Never touched LoL because I disliked the cartoonish goofy art style.

I definitely inadvertently benefitted from good game choice as a child. Baldur's Gate 2 was near and dear to my heart as early as age 12-13 and I'm convinced it helped the development of my verbal skills. That short form content not explicitly made to be educational could also do this is not unreasonable, but perhaps happens with much lower frequency than this sort of "accidental education' via video games, particularly single player role playing games.

I finally bought Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I tried to read some Dostoevsky last academic year (Notes from the Underground). Frankly, i hated it and dropped it about 25% in. Typically our schedules during global exam season become very relaxed and I don't want to be on youtube/wechat/2p2/instagram with my spare time.

The cringiest parts of red pill/manosphere/alpha male/self improvement guru aphorisms is presenting a lack of sleep as some sort of flex. It flies in the face of biological reality to such a flagrant extent that it makes me question why anyone would take advice about anything for somebody that thinks getting inadequate sleep makes you somehow more masculine, badass, or hard working.

I think there are a few parts that are cringier, but you're correct that this is particularly dumb for the population writ large. This is beside the fact that those influencers that aren't just faking it for clout probably have some sort of genetic mutation that allows them to function on less sleep than would be optimal for everyone else (DEC2 or ADRB1 are the two I've heard about in passing).

You said this but then...

Hmm, cliffs? I just stopped it after he started mansplaining Malthusian doom as an apparent intro to why we're currently F'd.

Does he touch on not sleeping enough being a good thing in the video? I have to admit I didn't ever go too far with Malthus....but pretty sure not sleeping was a big tenet of his.

like i said, it's very poorly presented and specifically tailored to a specific niche that already embraces that style

basic premise is when when labor is cheap it's bad for society - something often mentioned in this and other threads in regards to NEETs being devastatingly bad for society in general

main examples are the coolies of india and china

no the author of this video is literally the ideological opposite of red pill.

I might have to go back to 2 work days 2 weekend days training. 4x/wk mo/tu/thu/fri is resulting in much worse sleep quality overall. Started mirabegron but it can take a couple weeks to really kick in. Peeing 3-5x per night on training days. Even going to bed before 9 and up at 5:30 I still feel kinda wrecked and have bad daytime fatigue. When I train that day, even if I don't over-exert, I gotta pee way more at night. If I train earlier in the day it doesn't seem to have much impact. High caffeine intake making it work. I'll give it another 2 weeks and see if mirabegron does the trick. I could also try very early AM training; I would probably spend way less time in the gym because it's not tard-flooded with people playing on their phones for half an hour on a machine with 7 minute breaks between RPE1 lateral raise sets. Maybe sleep around 7pm, up at 4, gym by 4:45, easy to get to work by 7:45. I'm not even sure if taxis are running that early in the morning, possibly not.

VigorousSteve and all the pearl clutching low dose influencers are calling it a fatburner as good or better than clen b/c it stimulates beta 2 and 3 receptors in fat cells. I think they're wrong because clen mostly works via its stim effect, not whatever its doing to beta receptors. Either way I'm taking it for nocturia and if I get any fat burning out of it on top of that, it's just a pleasant side effect.