Hey Barbell Medicine team.
I was once upon a time a kid, then you know how time works - I saw MMA on youtube, thought it seemed wild and scary that folks would lock themselves in a cage and beat eachother senseless. Then I got intrigued, and as time went on I carefully started to want to be a fighter. I eventually got with a pro team, but found gradually as motivation waxed and waned, I gradually realized I didn’t want to be a fighter - I think what I went through at the time was the experience that the famous Aleister Crowley went through called “The trance of sorrow” - I didn’t see my life purpose here, and had this gnawing unrestful feeling that this isn’t it… I still struggle to formulate this feeling, but the intuition was right.. I don’t regret leaving, and following out my study of Thelema more.
But! After a couple of years going without MMA, I in 2012 realized I couldn’t just.. not train, I had to do something. I remember we had a nutritionist and “gym”type coach hanging around our forums and our gym at the time advicing us on strength and nutrition from time to time. I now in the later years realize he was known on the internet forums as Blade, I knew him as Børge Fagerli. It’s kind of trippy to see his Myo-reps being an international phenomenon now and implemented in even some BBM-templates.
Anyway…
I went to one of his seminars at the time around 2010 where he spoke of the squat, and told me my proportions was not cut out for it well, and I should frontsquat. He spoke highly of a guy named Mark Rippetoe, and I got this unmistakable, but again hard to describe, intuition that I should definitely start to train with barbells.
I “ran” Starting Strength for 11 years.
Then in 2023 I figured, maybe I should look closer at this concept called “programming” - I don’t know why I never did before.. I think something about just the mentality I got from SS landed me in a sort of mental stalemate - if the training is very hard, then I am doing the right thing to get stronger.. If I am still not very strong, but find the training very hard… why would I assume I am ready to look for more advanced stuff… that’s for very strong folks.
But the pain and frustration wad unmistakable. My most trained lift is the squat as per SS it is done every workout… yet it is my worst lift now, overuse pain comes so fast, shoulders hurt like hell if I put the bar low bar, my adductors strain easily once I push intensity.. Definitely have both golfers and tennis elbow, I blame all of it on my idiotic squat “program”.
Luckily I had started picking up on the Barbell Medicine team, as around the time I looked up Starting Strength stuff they were all in there. I really felt a surge of the fitness-world coming around to the SS-system as it attracted so many intelligent coaches, Baraki, Feigenbaum, even Alan Thrall.. Rip was attacking crossfit.. it all seemed so… right.
But then more and more people broke off. I thought “too bad, probably some business-stuff.. or someone trying to pretend we all didn’t get the nuts and bolts of training methods and mechanics from SS and owe that system a debt of gratitude.
Then Covid hit - now, I am a healthcare-worker.. I went to the university and obtained authorization as a radiographer, and have worked in public hospitals in Norway for years and was on the ground during covid. How Rip ripped on the vaccines, and how covid was a scam, and how gleefully he spread straight up misinformation along the rest of the dummies that suddenly reveal themselves in what is unwieldly called the “heterodox sphere” - so called I guess because the problem is too pervasive and multi-faceted to capture as a movement at all.
It caused me to look a bit closer at the critics.
I experienced a series of epiphanies that were highly pleasurable too numerous to describe in this little treatise. I guess autoregulation is the biggest one - you can train more and yet not run yourself into the ground. Also, by training MORE you can actually get in better shape. Who’d thought.
I started on the Bridge, and loved it! I got my deadlift up from around 180kg to 210kg in a hurry.. It felt like novice progression getting it up that fast, but unaccustomed as I was to RPE, the squatting was too intense and I had ran myself into problems. I got the BBM-coach Rheece for training and Vanessa, and the pain dissipated a lot and I got leaner than I have been ever since I started on SS.
I couldn’t afford more than a few months of personal coaching though, so after that I’ve just picked templates at will and enjoyed just exploring the gym and my capacity, albeit I’ve not been as systematic as I wished, it’s been a blast, and I love every opportunity to train now. I just bought an apartment with my girlfriend that happily let me bother her into the BBM-app and she let me teach her the lifts, and now a year later we have signed up for the same IPF-regulated meet.
My original plan after coming off the Hypertrophy II-template I just ran, was to just go with Strength II 4 day powerlifting block 2, as it’s a 6 week block to peak for powerlifting.
However, moving out of 2 apartments and into a new one has its challenges, plus… to jump from reppy hypertrophy straight into the most intense part of a strength-template with some ambition behind it… the old nagging hurts rears its head for the squat. I stretched my groin last week and squats are now a questionmark each session.
My plan is to just be careful with it.. not to expect to suddenly PR big with it, I don’t want to strain something then sacrifice my other lifts. I’ll aim for very conservative numbers on the squat to feel good going into the deadlift, my pride & joy at the moment. It’s my first meet, so I just want to make sure I come away with 3 good lifts and can leave my best deadlift on the platform and not let it die with a botched squat.
Current PRs as of 12.august 2025ev:
Squat: 162,5kg
Bench: 120kg
Deadlift: 230kg
And lets include:
Overhead Press: 92,5kg
