The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Progress continues on my 200 snatch goal. I carved out some headroom above 130 reps. But man, it sucks getting old. First something in my mid right back tweaked the fuck out. Sprained or knotted something so fierce I could barely get out of bed the next day. Eventually stretched/massaged that out. Then something in my right shoulder hurt so fucking bad I couldn't reach behind myself to wipe my own ass with my right hand. And more or less only that movement in specific caused problems. I could actually still do tons and tons of snatches no problem. Lots of stretching and massage for that too. Both those problems have gone away and don't seem to be coming back. But now my fucking fifth metacarpal on my right hand, which I broke in my 20's, has decided to ache for days every time I do my 100+ snatch reps.
Fucking why?!
On a sadder note. We lost my cousin last month. The funeral was last week, and I found out he committed suicide. We weren't especially close growing up, but we had reconnected a few years ago, and unfortunately lost touch when I moved away. He was a good guy, struggling with what remained of a life of poor choices and core traits he couldn't reform, despite solid success breaking some of their more destructive manifestations. There was always such a tone of regret when we'd catch up, and he'd ask how the wife and kid were doing. He clearly wanted those things, he'd had chances, but he couldn't stop himself from fumbling them, badly.
I miss you cous'. I'm sorry you couldn't make it. I hope you're at peace now.
I'll put this here because I've never put it anywhere else and this has been a week of extreme not good for me.
One of my best High School buddies killed himself in November of 2022. There was a group of about five of us who were inseparable all of junior and senior year. College did college things and we start to drift apart, but would sometimes still catch up when people tended to come back to the hometown for Christmas or Thanksgiving. After I learned of "Dane's" (not his real name) suicide, it fell to me, for various reasons, to contact his High School girlfriend. She was also part of this friend group and everyone had bet money that she and Dane were going to get married. They really were a loving couple.
When I called her and relayed the news, her reaction was pretty predictable. Though they had split finally over 10 years prior, she was still quite upset though still in control of herself. After the initial shock had subsided she do the normal thing and asked me how I was feeling about it.
And that's when I exploded. I didn't break down. I didn't sob. I got intensely angry. Not at her, but at Dane. Because I saw that a saying I had heard before was true; suicide doesn't end pain, it just distributes it out. Here was a woman who had shared her first love with Dane and then gone about her life peacefully. Gutted. A friend group of four other dudes who perhaps lament the fact that we've fallen out of contact with each other is now brought back into contact via tragedy. The family opted for a family only funeral, so the four of us got on a Zoom with the intent of meeting up somewhere for an irish wake for Dane. But, 15 minutes in, we kind of looked at each other and collectively decided, "No, we don't actually want to fly to see each other like this." Dane's dead, and it's hard for me not to remember that with some anger.
I think the circumstances surrounding your cousin are much different. I was only adding a perspective on suicide that I think goes unsaid sometimes. It's a tragedy, of course. I don't know enough about the last two years of Dane's life to know what he was going through. There's some mystery, in fact, about the final few days, but that's for the family to know. Still, the fact remains that that final act wasn't final. All of the hurt is still out there floating in the corners of the hearts of so many other people now.
I get that. I don't know how old Dane was. I guess that doesn't matter so much though. I suppose everyone we grew up with feels perpetually young to us anyways.
My cousin was 50, and I don't want to speak ill of the dead, so I won't. It doesn't feel right airing all his assorted personal struggles, and the ruins of a life he was struggling to be "ok" with. Instead, here's the ending monologue from Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which feels appropriate.
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I approve of the anger. Suicide is too often taboo’d and romanticized. Strange that it’s so much more prevalent amongst men than women, given life satisfaction and women’s anxious and depressive tendencies.
One suicide I knew was also a high school friend, charismatic, wild and smart. Didn’t transition well to adulthood. Two were middle-aged men with large families who couldn’t ‘provide’ anymore because of invalidity and unemployment. What I’m getting at is that even though I believe one has a strong duty to others not to commit suicide (and not to threaten it), I’m not sure that increasing the list of their duties, the burden they feel, is the way to go. Part of the reason why I can’t condemn parents who abandon their children too harshly. Walking away should always be the available runner-up terrible option, in any situation.
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Extremely high volume work is for 20somethings. If you are past 40, extremely high volume work is the path to injuries. You can absolutely continue to build strength and reduce fat past 40 (source: self), but I think anything more than 5x10 (like the Wendler Boring But Big plan) is asking for trouble.
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Sorry to hear that about your cousin. I find that it's hard to say much on suicide deaths. They inherently create a lot of guilt in everyone around them, and I frequently hear people say "what a selfish thing to do" or blame them in some other way. Personally, life is just really difficult, and I can't say I don't understand someone who was already having a hard time of it for a long time deciding to check out. It is too bad that he couldn't figure out a better way.
As for snatches: the kettlebell book you linked me mentioned that they tear up hands pretty bad. Is there some reason you're throwing yourself at the goal this hard? The typical test is 100 snatches in 5 minutes, isn't it? Surely there are other ways to target those muscle groups. I think you should take it easy on the snatches.
I haven't actually learned the snatch yet, but I did manage to finally figure out the clean, though I am not using it in the intended way. I clean it once and then do 5 overhead press reps. I follow the previous routine I was doing: 3 sets of overhead press (5 reps) and 3 sets of pull ups (as much as I can manage, 5 intended but I can never do more than 3 good ones) on day A, 3 sets of push ups (10 reps, 20 reps last set) and 3 sets of high pulls (10 reps, 20 reps last set) on day B. My high pull is probably not what Pavel pictured, either; swinging so close to my face scares me, so I just pick it up and pull it high with no horizontal momentum. I am sort of butchering the workouts listed in the book, but it's closer to what I actually want to do for now, so I guess I'm going to keep it. I like the kettlebell a lot.
I thought you were FiveHourMarathon while reading this, which made it surprising when I read his comment below just now.
Because I can!
Snatches can be difficult on hands. But I've refined my technique to the point where they aren't for me. Or at least drastically less so. Basically at the top when you punch through there is a moment of weightlessness. This is the easy part for most people. I've seen a lot of people do different things on the way down. Some drop it straight down, some kind of unwind around the side like they are coming down from a press but then let it keep falling. I pull my wrist out of the handle as quickly as possible, back tracking the punch through movement. It recreates the moment of weightlessness from the punch through, and saves my palms a lot of wear and tear.
You just need to work on your pull out game.
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Dude, I sympathize, it feels like a constant flow of minor injuries all of a sudden. I've had trouble sticking to a workout program outside BJJ this whole year, because of near constant minor injuries leading me to abandon each exercise plan/challenge in turn. Start working squats; lower back injury. Start working kettlebells; trap injury. Start running; knees are bothering me. Get on the rower; elbows. I know I'll get a lot out of adding supplemental work to BJJ, but I can't seem to stick with anything at all.
So sorry to hear about your cousin. It's so sad when you see someone whose life is essentially tragic.
We'll have to compare notes on who's approach is better/worse. I'm just stubbornly sticking to my program, working through the injuries with extra stretching and warmup, instead of trying to change programs. Because I've more or less accepted, though I hate it, that something is gonna hurt. Avoidance of pain and injury is a myth.
I don't think we really have two different approaches. Your snatch goal is your goal, and you have to work through or around injuries to get to that. Right now, fitness wise, BJJ is my goal; everything else is an assistance exercise. I gut through soreness/injury for BJJ, but not for everything else where it might impact rolling every day I can.
The accountability mechanism right now for BJJ is very effective, I have several close friends who are about as good as I am at my gym and I can't let them get better than me and leave me behind, because right now our technique progress is huge month to month. Compared to that everything else is less important.
But at the same time, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm six or seven months into jiu jitsu as my main focus now, and it's important to keep up lifting and cardio, if only to avoid getting weaker. So I'm trying to figure it out.
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