What ever happened to Justin? I used to read his log on EFTS, but they took it off a while ago.
I liked his writing about the specialization that has happened with powerlifting and bodybuilding and how they were once very similar.
Anyone know what he’s up to these days?
He’s in school and focusing on other things, recently posted at another board and said he’s trained about 5 times in the last 2 years. Some health issues are at play there as well I believe but that’s his business.
i heard he has some rare disease, cant remember what though.
He was getting his PhD in Physics and last thing I had read from him was about he was having a hard time because he was having alot of physical problems. Big motivation for me as both an intellectual and athlete.
That’s too bad. Justin Harris is probably one of my favorites.
Last I heard he could barley walk. His log is still up over at elitefts, it just hasn’t been updated in awhile.
http://asp.elitefts.com/qa/training-logs.asp?tid=139&__N=Justin%20Harris
Actually I did see this back when he was still posting in that log but I thought there might have been some updates on his condition. Anyways here it is:
Last spring I was writing a lot about the various injuries and illnesses I was having.
They still haven’t gotten it all figured out, but I’m starting to be able to get back to some real training and that’s probably good enough for me.
I suppose I’ll just go through and list where I’m f’d up.
Starting about 5 years ago or so, after a particularly brutal leg workout, I’d get what I’d call a “leg fever.”
For a few hours after the workout, I’d have a fever. I thought that I must have had such a hard workout that I wasn’t able to recover and my body lapsed into a fever for a while. It kind of felt like the flu, but not bad.
Over the course of a few years, the leg fevers turned into every leg workout…not just the most brutal. Eventually it turned into a leg and back fever. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that I never got anything checked, but over a period of years you don’t really notice that it…I just kind of got used to needing to take advil and tylenol before and after squats or deadlifts to stave off the fever.
At some point it turned into getting a fever after every hard workout…then every workout…and then a fever every morning and every workout.
About a year ago it turned into a fever all day. By that time I didn’t really notice. I was used to taking tylenol, advil, aleve, aspirin, or excedrin every few hours…so it just became habit…if I didn’t take something, I’d start getting fever/flu symptoms and they’d get worse until I took something.
Again, it sounds ridiculous to never get it checked, but anyone that has trained heavy for years knows you just get used to having something always hurt. Around the same time this was going on I was having the elbow problems where the tendons would swell up like golfballs on the inside of my forearms. Before that I was dealing with hip problems. Before that I injured my back pretty bad…before that it was my left shoulder, etc., etc.
But it finally got to the point where I was just eating tylenol and advil all day at ridiculous levels.
To me it didn’t seem so outrageously crazy…but when my wife picked up a bottle of 100 tylenol for me one day and saw it empty in the trash the next morning, she made me go see a doctor. lol
After a number of tests, they found out I had Rhabdomyalysis…but couldn’t figure out why. It’s an “acute” form of myositis that you get from something like a building collapse. Somehow I had it chronically. They still can’t figure that out. I also have a bunch of nerve problems. My left arm was getting worse and worse at locking out and part of my left tricep was “dead.” When I flexed, it just stayed soft. They checked a bunch of nerve tests and pretty much all my nerves were jacked up.
All the nerves through my arms and legs are injured in some way. They’re also all “slow.” They’re supposed to fire at a minimum of 50 m/s and all of mine fire below that. Some of the nerves through the left side of my upper body fire well below 20 m/s.
One cool thing about that stuff is that I have no reflexes. lol
so if I go to a new doctor and they decide to check my reflexes…when they hit my knee, my leg doesn’t move.
So they go to my other leg…and get nothing. Then they check my calves and my feet, etc., etc.
They always figure the patient doesn’t know anything so they just act like nothing is going on…eventually they look at my chart and get that “ahhh…” look.
The nerve docs think that I have ruptured various discs in my spine over the years because the major nerve damage leads out of a few spots on the spine. So…when I heard that “gunshot” in my back back in '07, that is probably what it was. The elbow inflamation is probably linked to that as well.
My spine checks out okay though. There are a bunch of desiccations and other little things, but it doesn’t look like I ever fractured anything.
So, at the end of the day…they still have no idea what the hell is causing the fevers. They figure it’s all related (they’re brilliant…) but don’t know how.
It’s really not bad at all now. They have me on meds that pretty much keep the fever at bay and keep the nerve stuff down.
(I forgot about that, but I was also having nerve flair ups where it would feel like someone poured hot water on my leg, or someone was putting a flame on my hams, or it would feel like someone put a match out on various parts of my body…I’d also get phantom itches that were fucking annoying)
Another thing that sucks balls is that every once in a while I wake up nauseous as shit and barely make it to the bathroom before I’m yaking my guts out.
So I feel fine now, but the real shitty thing was that all the nerve stuff was making training impossible. Anytime I’d go through a hard workout, all the “fever” stuff would go into hyperdrive. All my nerves would go on alert and I’d get that “kicked in the balls” feeling through my stomach. Then I’d throw up all over the place and fall asleep for a few hours. So, it would be the same as normal only I wasn’t paying someone to kick me in the balls between sets.
It really did suck though because it fucking felt like I ran a marathon after any lame ass workout.
Anyway…that’s my story. I’m not looking for any sympathy and I know everyone here has a list of injuries at least as long. To be honest, if it was 5 years ago…I would have probably found a way to deal with the puking and passing out. It has mostly been frustrating to feel like a pussy. I could never stand all the dickwads that would miss a week of football practice because of a “thigh bruise,” or people that would be late returning from an injury for any reason. I never missed a single game of any sport my entire life. I broke and re-broke my nose every game my junior year in college. I cut a cast of my hand my senior year on the way home from the hospital. I passed a test by the team trainers to be allowed to play with a partially torn MCL by ODing on pills and having a teammate tape my leg up with some metal we stole from the dorms so that I couldn’t bend my leg with a crow bar. lol
So the hardest part has been feeling like such a pussy and using injury as an excuse to miss training sessions.
But I’m finally starting to feel better…I’m probably going to have to take pills for the nerve damage and stuff forever…but they’re not so bad. lol
I still have to get a muscle biopsy because they can’t figure out how the hell I have all the myopathies and what not, but I’ve given up hope of ever figuring that out.
So…if anyone actually read all of that…that’s why I’ve been gone.
Here’s that log entry that I remembered reading, interesting read about strength training:
Justin,
How did you get so strong training like a bodybuilder. I mean a raw squat in the seven hundreds only a few hours after that pose for flex magazine and bench 585 triple off a two board raw. That is some serious strength man.
Heres my question.
-I am going to assume that the majority of your training career has been towards bodybuilding so Im guessing you dont train the CNS that much? what Im saying is how do you get tha strong doing only bodybuilding stuff or is it just from gaining muscle mass that made you stronger .
-Or do you have great rediculous genetics in your opinion(please dont lie)?
I am looking forward to your response
I think people get too worked up defining the differences between bodybuilding training and powerlifting training.
In my opinion, things have become too specified, and not to the benefit for either group.
If you look through old powerlifting USA articles you’ll find an interview with Bill Kazmaier. In the article he gives his training routine…the routine he was using around 1981 when he put up some of the greatest raw lifts in history. Off the top of my head, I recall his “bench” routine being along the lines of:
Bench:
4 sets of 10
Incline:
4 sets of 10
Close grip
3 sets of 10
I don’t recall the exact sets and reps, but they very similar to what I’ve posted.
I won’t get too involved with the CNS training and strength sports, but I don’t get too excited about that concept either.
Adrenal fatigue is thrown around quite frequently these days and I don’t really know why. There is no medically recognized disease of adrenal fatigue. If you look into the term adrenal fatigue you’ll find many articles posted on bodybuilding and powerlifting forums, but you’ll find no scientific or peer reviewed articles on the subject.
If you search for peer reviewed journals on adrenal insufficiency, you’ll find addison’s disease, a disease which is caused when the adrenal glands do not produce enough of the hormone “cortisol.”
This is the exact opposite of what people write about when mentioning adrenal fatigue. They talk about excessive cortisol production from various forms of stress. Adrenal insufficiency is exactly the opposite of this.
The central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system are quite different systems. The system that is most readily affected by training and forms of physical stress is the somatic branch of the peripheral nervous system.
The PNS connects the “body” to the CNS and is exposed to injury and toxins in ways the CNS isn’t. The CNS is hidden away in the brain and spine and protected by the blood-brain barrier.
Specialized strength training is important and has come a long way, but I believe there can be too much specialization. Specialization to the point of limiting progress and variance in physical stimulus isn’t progress.
I’ve always trained to get bigger muscles by using heavier and heavier weights. I don’t know whether that is bodybuilding training or powerlifting training.
I know that my training didn’t really change a whole lot between training for football, training for bodybuilding, and training for powerlifting and I did well in each of them. Perhaps I could have done better with more specialized training, but I have too much fun at the gym to stress about those things.
I’m not here to get in a debate about the CNS. There are people who’ve had success with all forms of training. I am never one to discourage anyone from doing something that has brought themselves and their clients success. My feelings on the subject stem from what I understand about psychopharmacology and how it is affected from physical stimulus.
I think most people on this board are familiar with the notion that bodybuilders are in fact strong, though perhaps not on the big three but definitely with the lifts they’ve chosen to build their physique.
Take a powerlifter training heavy and add some fatigue (ie training reps to failure) and presto! you’ll have mass! (I say mass because the lifts a powerlifter does may not create a balanced bodybuilder physique depending on levers and the unique physiology of the person)
Take a bodybuilder and get him used to heavy singles efficiantly and presto! you have a strength athlete! (obviously this is a gross simplification as a bodybuilder may not have chosen to use the big three to build his physique and may have developement that is ‘unbalanced’ when it comes to bench squats and deads.)
In order to get big, you have to get STRONG!
And in order to get strong, you have to get BIG!
It’s really quite simple. The hard part is figuring out how to progress.
Well he did post it on a public forum so I guess it’s not a big deal but he said he was finally diagnosed with lupus.
He’s still looking pretty solid at 260 lbs and not particularly fat even after admitting he sometimes only eats 1 meal a day.
[quote]Scott M wrote:
Well he did post it on a public forum so I guess it’s not a big deal but he said he was finally diagnosed with lupus.
He’s still looking pretty solid at 260 lbs and not particularly fat even after admitting he sometimes only eats 1 meal a day. [/quote]
Really? That’s terrible. Although it’s good that he’s been able to hold onto all that mass under that condition.
Thanks for the info.
[quote]trav123456 wrote:
Actually I did see this back when he was still posting in that log but I thought there might have been some updates on his condition. Anyways here it is:
Last spring I was writing a lot about the various injuries and illnesses I was having.
They still haven’t gotten it all figured out, but I’m starting to be able to get back to some real training and that’s probably good enough for me.
I suppose I’ll just go through and list where I’m f’d up.
Starting about 5 years ago or so, after a particularly brutal leg workout, I’d get what I’d call a “leg fever.”
For a few hours after the workout, I’d have a fever. I thought that I must have had such a hard workout that I wasn’t able to recover and my body lapsed into a fever for a while. It kind of felt like the flu, but not bad.
Over the course of a few years, the leg fevers turned into every leg workout…not just the most brutal. Eventually it turned into a leg and back fever. Looking back, it seems ridiculous that I never got anything checked, but over a period of years you don’t really notice that it…I just kind of got used to needing to take advil and tylenol before and after squats or deadlifts to stave off the fever.
At some point it turned into getting a fever after every hard workout…then every workout…and then a fever every morning and every workout.
About a year ago it turned into a fever all day. By that time I didn’t really notice. I was used to taking tylenol, advil, aleve, aspirin, or excedrin every few hours…so it just became habit…if I didn’t take something, I’d start getting fever/flu symptoms and they’d get worse until I took something.
Again, it sounds ridiculous to never get it checked, but anyone that has trained heavy for years knows you just get used to having something always hurt. Around the same time this was going on I was having the elbow problems where the tendons would swell up like golfballs on the inside of my forearms. Before that I was dealing with hip problems. Before that I injured my back pretty bad…before that it was my left shoulder, etc., etc.
But it finally got to the point where I was just eating tylenol and advil all day at ridiculous levels.
To me it didn’t seem so outrageously crazy…but when my wife picked up a bottle of 100 tylenol for me one day and saw it empty in the trash the next morning, she made me go see a doctor. lol
After a number of tests, they found out I had Rhabdomyalysis…but couldn’t figure out why. It’s an “acute” form of myositis that you get from something like a building collapse. Somehow I had it chronically. They still can’t figure that out. I also have a bunch of nerve problems. My left arm was getting worse and worse at locking out and part of my left tricep was “dead.” When I flexed, it just stayed soft. They checked a bunch of nerve tests and pretty much all my nerves were jacked up.
All the nerves through my arms and legs are injured in some way. They’re also all “slow.” They’re supposed to fire at a minimum of 50 m/s and all of mine fire below that. Some of the nerves through the left side of my upper body fire well below 20 m/s.
One cool thing about that stuff is that I have no reflexes. lol
so if I go to a new doctor and they decide to check my reflexes…when they hit my knee, my leg doesn’t move.
So they go to my other leg…and get nothing. Then they check my calves and my feet, etc., etc.
They always figure the patient doesn’t know anything so they just act like nothing is going on…eventually they look at my chart and get that “ahhh…” look.
The nerve docs think that I have ruptured various discs in my spine over the years because the major nerve damage leads out of a few spots on the spine. So…when I heard that “gunshot” in my back back in '07, that is probably what it was. The elbow inflamation is probably linked to that as well.
My spine checks out okay though. There are a bunch of desiccations and other little things, but it doesn’t look like I ever fractured anything.
So, at the end of the day…they still have no idea what the hell is causing the fevers. They figure it’s all related (they’re brilliant…) but don’t know how.
It’s really not bad at all now. They have me on meds that pretty much keep the fever at bay and keep the nerve stuff down.
(I forgot about that, but I was also having nerve flair ups where it would feel like someone poured hot water on my leg, or someone was putting a flame on my hams, or it would feel like someone put a match out on various parts of my body…I’d also get phantom itches that were fucking annoying)
Another thing that sucks balls is that every once in a while I wake up nauseous as shit and barely make it to the bathroom before I’m yaking my guts out.
So I feel fine now, but the real shitty thing was that all the nerve stuff was making training impossible. Anytime I’d go through a hard workout, all the “fever” stuff would go into hyperdrive. All my nerves would go on alert and I’d get that “kicked in the balls” feeling through my stomach. Then I’d throw up all over the place and fall asleep for a few hours. So, it would be the same as normal only I wasn’t paying someone to kick me in the balls between sets.
It really did suck though because it fucking felt like I ran a marathon after any lame ass workout.
Anyway…that’s my story. I’m not looking for any sympathy and I know everyone here has a list of injuries at least as long. To be honest, if it was 5 years ago…I would have probably found a way to deal with the puking and passing out. It has mostly been frustrating to feel like a pussy. I could never stand all the dickwads that would miss a week of football practice because of a “thigh bruise,” or people that would be late returning from an injury for any reason. I never missed a single game of any sport my entire life. I broke and re-broke my nose every game my junior year in college. I cut a cast of my hand my senior year on the way home from the hospital. I passed a test by the team trainers to be allowed to play with a partially torn MCL by ODing on pills and having a teammate tape my leg up with some metal we stole from the dorms so that I couldn’t bend my leg with a crow bar. lol
So the hardest part has been feeling like such a pussy and using injury as an excuse to miss training sessions.
But I’m finally starting to feel better…I’m probably going to have to take pills for the nerve damage and stuff forever…but they’re not so bad. lol
I still have to get a muscle biopsy because they can’t figure out how the hell I have all the myopathies and what not, but I’ve given up hope of ever figuring that out.
So…if anyone actually read all of that…that’s why I’ve been gone.
[/quote]
holy shit.
damn that’s quite the list of injuries I mean…I hope none of that nerve shit happens to any of us. I don’t know anything about it but nerves always make me think that it’s pretty much impossible to “heal”. Train hard, but damn gotta be safe! lol
Damn… I wish him the best, I have a friend with lupus and its not pretty to say the least.
Seems a very knowledgable guy, great physique also
Oh shit… Troponin is one of the brightest guys in bbing/pling and nutrition… And not just there… I hope that he can recover somehow.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know who was bigger between him at his best and Dusty? I haven’t followed either of their careers much but I’ve talked to both in the past and they’re both cool/huge guys.
Both guys were of similar size, I believe Justin competed in the 260s in his last show and Dusty will be about the same.
Dusty = 300+ lbs with full abs showing and leaner than I’ve ever been in my life = crazy
Jesus evidently loves dusty 
And dusty diets down from there… I mean, what more do you want
Scott, you got any contact with Justin these days?