DukeTheSlaya's Journey to Overhead Pressing Like a God

, i like the idea of Personal training, being a gym manager, or anything to do with physical labour or i wouldnt mind sonething where i sit on a conputer and sort / manage shit

Why not ?, just imagine the strength gains from bricklaying or even concreting.

I am not hands one with woodworking etc but electrician, or plumber i prefer out of those thanks man

Ha sounds like I just got the short end. I sanded enough architraves to last me a lifetime


Duke if you get a chance try some of these trades/jobs out (work experience? )
Find out how/if you like it.

Most of these are meant to be food for thought for duketheslaya than a direct reply to you Yogi1

I don’t think it’s fair to think of school strictly in terms of academics.

I don’t know how secondary school works in Australia, but the way people treat you will be significantly different between you having a high school diploma vs not having one in the U.S.

A high school diploma is meant to signify that you are a competent individual and that you are capable of picking up skills.

I agree with Oldbeancam when he says that school is easy. It really is. I was not a stellar student. I put in the minimum effort required for most of my classes and I still got B/B+ averages and I grew up in one of the more academically privileged public schools in the U.S. For all intents and purposes my motto up until I graduated college was “minimum effort minimum result”.

The trouble is that you don’t comprehend how easy it was until you graduate and actually get working in a non-school environment.

Regarding what Yogi1 wrote above on you never knowing what the right thing is to do-

I also graduated college with a pretty useless degree. I spent an year and a half or so trying to get 170+ on the LSAT after that and failed miserably. I then went to a trade school at age 26 or so, learned a trade and saw my wage go from ~50k/year to ~100k/year in about two years of employment.

If you were to take a single snapshot of my life at any point before this year, you’d consider me a failure who hasn’t achieved much in life, especially at the moment where I’m 26 with a pointless degree just going into a trade school.

You take a snapshot at any point this year after the month or March or so and you see a guy who is making almost double what he should be making giving his work-experience in the field.

I could call myself a success story of hard work and go on and on about how hard work and humility means success and other naive crap. The trouble is that I know that all of this could come crashing down at any moment and I’d have nothing left to show. It won’t take much, really.

The fun part is that it took me damn near six month to get hired after I finished at the trade school. The first company I joined went belly-up a month into my employment.

I definitely have put in the hours. I regularly work 50-60 hour weeks (weekends and nights add up) and have done 80-90 hours for weeks at a time.

But none of these mean that should I have gotten so many raises so quickly. I got them cause I got lucky. My boss asked me to evaluate a problem and write him a report. He had a meeting scheduled with the CEO of the company regarding this problem, and so I went all out. My boss happened to forward the whole report I wrote to the CEO and all the other higher-ups involved. I’m pretty sure he did it cause he was lazy and didn’t want to read through a 10 page report.

The CEO loved my report so much that he took a special interest in me. It was great.

Another fun part- I had the capability to write that report because my college degree required me to write paper after papers. I was a history major and so for a while analyzing and writing papers was my life. Engineers in my field cannot write the way I write cause they’re not trained to do so.

My college degree helped me. It got me a massive pay raise and the attention of the CEO!

I feel that what Yogi1 wrote is the most important thing so far when it comes to the issue at hand. What you do with it is up to you.

I would like to add one more though- In reality, your life is not in your hands. In the grand scheme of things, your actions will not matter nearly as much as the action of others in determining how your life will go.

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Those 4 jobs are very labour intensive. They will make you tough, but they will make working out and gaining mass quite a lot harder than the other options. They are also trades that seem to attract a fair bit of alcohol and drug use/abuse.

I actually didn’t know where to put painters! It’s not as physically demanding as bricky or roofing trades but it can be pretty relentless on the old shoulders and neck. Although painting new homes with a HVLP gun would be pretty cruisy I’d imagine.

Its pretty hard on the knees and shoulders but otherwise its not too stressful,
I think the worst part of being a painter is my terrible singing when the radios on.

You forgot painters lol majority I’ve worked with have been pot heads

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s not. I do them almost every workout, and I feel them in my hips just from my lower body being a lot more heavier than up top. . So depends on your proportions too. If you want you can do what Yogi said, or just cheat a bit and cross your legs at the ankles, and bend your knees to your chest, or cross and raise until your legs are parallel. Either way.

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Well if you eat a shit tonne and take every supplement under the sun wouldnt you progress better in the gym then someone who doesnt work labour intensive ?

Definitely man!

Yeah man i have alot of things to go through!, it also sounds like youve done well.

Today’s leg day training :
Went out to my cousins then went out fishing all day so no training. Im going to my dads for the next few days so ( farm) . Pics of the beautiful farm will be coming soon when i get there .
I also plan to do hill sprints and rock/tree branch lifting and bw stuff because i cant go to the gym.

Statements like this are exactly why I think you need to stay in school. It’s easy to think about the strength gains and shit now, but not in 20 years when everything on you is screaming in agony. Getting a summer job doing that shit is fun and helpful honestly, but not for life. Once you’re working 60 hours a week, have bills to pay, and a place to take care of, the last thing you’ll be thinking about is training. And believe me, I’ve done bricklaying in the past and generally, the first year you work with them you’re just running brick up for someone else to lay and by the end of the day you just want to eat, sleep and die. Supplements don’t help like you think they do brother.

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Also, doing this generally isn’t an option unless you eat MASSIVE meals a couple of times a day. You just simply don’t have he time, especially if you’re new because they expect you to show them you can work.

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Damnit man :frowning:

Personally i would be fine eating Massive meals a couple times a day but that definitely isnt optimal

I don’t believe so. Especially if your goal is mass. If your goal is better conditioning or work capacity, than perhaps.

Story time!

Twas the middle of winter and Irishmans usual boss went away for a snow trip. Work was light on, and so the boss basically said I could have a 3 week holiday. At the time, I had about $200 in the bank, had car to pay off, rent and groceries to pay for as well. Needless to say, I wouldn’t last a week without work, let alone 3.

I rang up an old roofing boss of mine and he got me a job with one of his mates working in town on a Cafe/entertainment precinct construction site. I got to work in the dark and was told they will be 11 hour days (630-530) and I will get 1 break at 10am.

Every day, I was sweating and running and climbing and starving from about 8am onwards. We were the last to leave the job site and had the least breaks.

Prior to this job I had been on a 3x8 mass building cycle. I believe I went from 66kg to 74kg in the months leading up to this point. At the end of my 3weeks I went to the Gold Coast to see a friend of mine (latina), she was shocked how skinny and sunburnt I was. I used her scales and saw that I was 67kg!

Now through this 3week block I ate a huge breakfast and a huge dinner, and ate very calorie dense things for smoko. I didn’t work out except the weekends due to fatigue (keep in mind I am a fit bloke, used to hard work and long days) and I really started to hate myself for losing so much so quickly.

Moral of the story - life is already tough, if you can choose the less tough option than do it!

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Aw well Wishful thinking i guess

That would suck!

What kind of physical labor have you worked in? IIRC you wrote that you worked on a farm before. What did you do and were you expected to finish the work within a certain time period?

Having dabbled briefly in physical labor as a summer job, that is the one thing that I would always want to avoid if possible. Standing and lifting odd objects that are occasionally heavy for hours on end in 90F weather is not fun.

Almost busted my ankle when a large dresser sorta fell on me too. That wasn’t very fun either.

I did lose like 15-20lb over a period of two and a half months and got leanish for the first time in my life though. Probably because I didn’t have much time to eat anything except at dinner. Good luck getting food in you when you’re up at 5:50AM and have to get to work by 6:45AM and you have a 45 min lunch.

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