I have had a couple of workouts wearing the vest at 60 lbs now. First was a 60 minute hike & it was just fine.

Today I did some kettlebell work in the vest. 90lb swings and rows with a single KB and 120 lb racks with two KB’s in addition to the 60lb vest.

It was fine for most of the exercises and only became a nuisance when I tried to press overhead. I wont use this vest for presses or pull ups. For all else its excellent. I also has adjustable length – long or short and fully adjustable shoulder and neck girth – a great vest.

Here are the pics…

I actually got my MIR vest some two years ago when they had a sale. Living in New Zealand the shipping cost with the steel was over $1000 so obviously I bought it without for only $70 or so. But unfortunately the only local solution for the 140 lbs of weight involved me cutting & epoxying a lot of rebar.

So it sat in its box for a whole two years while I sweated it out. Finally I had $300 on hand for the rebar and was about to score when I recalled a local fitness supplier elitefitness was recently selling weight vests with steel blocks. I decided to see if these would fit my MIR vest & if so would they sell me 46 blocks.

Well it turned out their blocks are a teeny bit lighter – 46 blocks are 100 lbs not 140 but I scored immediately for $180.

Amazingly I now have a 100lb brand new weight vest for less that it would have cost retail in the USA – I’m very happy.

The MIR is very comfortable and snug. My first session was a one hour hike with 60lbs – I’m used to 40 from my old vest.

It started great but by the end I only just made it home – the home leg is up a steep hill & I was huffing & puffing – then I had an hours nap.

Here are a couple of places telling you how to assemble the vest:

MIR Instructions

Below is the link that saved my butt – would never have figured it out otherwise…

Best Instructions for MIR vest

Finally some videos from youtube & then my personal pictures…

Here’s Me.

Here’s the vest.

I look like an Australian Commando.

I’m 100KG and back in my army days I was 85-90 KG’s. Certainly I had no problem running back then as I was an infantryman. I never enjoyed it however and always wondered how to improve my style.

Well technique is more important the more you weigh & being large does not mean you are doomed to be a bad runner.

You need to check out the POSE running technique.

POSE RUNNING

It really is the best advise on running I have come across & I expect to get back into it this summer

Spermadine & resveratrol are autophagic – meaning they assist the cell to clean out waste tissue and cellular damage. This promotes longevity of the cells.

Autophagy mediates pharmacological lifespan extension by spermidine and resveratrol
Although autophagy has widely been conceived as a self-destructive mechanism that causes cell death, accumulating evidence suggests that autophagy usually mediates cytoprotection, thereby avoiding the apoptotic or necrotic demise of stressed cells. Recent evidence produced by our groups demonstrates that autophagy is also involved in pharmacological manipulations that increase longevity. According to the study by the INSERM, exogenous supply of the polyamine spermidine can prolong the lifespan of (while inducing autophagy in) yeast, nematodes and flies. Similarly, resveratrol can trigger autophagy in cells from different organisms, extend lifespan in nematodes, and ameliorate the fitness of human cells undergoing metabolic stress. These beneficial effects are lost when essential autophagy modulators are genetically or pharmacologically inactivated, indicating that autophagy is required for the cytoprotective and/or anti-aging effects of spermidine and resveratrol. Genetic and functional studies indicate that spermidine inhibits histone acetylases, while resveratrol activates the histone deacetylase Sirtuin 1 to confer cytoprotection/longevity. Although it remains elusive whether the same histones (or perhaps other nuclear or cytoplasmic proteins) act as the downstream targets of spermidine and resveratrol, these results point to an essential role of protein hypoacetylation in autophagy control and in the regulation of longevity

Organismal lifespan can be extended by genetic manipulation of cellular processes such as histone acetylation, the insulin/IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1) pathway or the p53 system. Longevity-promoting regimens, including caloric restriction and inhibition of TOR with rapamycin, resveratrol or the natural polyamine spermidine, have been associated with autophagy (a cytoprotective self-digestive process) and in some cases were reported to require autophagy for their effects. We summarize recent developments that outline these links and hypothesize that clearing cellular damage by autophagy is a common denominator of many lifespan-extending manipulations.

Spermadine is found in grapefruit & resveratrol in red grape.

The soul of Primitive Man

Primitive man was tasked with survival in the “real” world. I assume that as an alpha male a true primitive man lived alone in the wilderness.

Killing all other males upon contact & mating with females. His time tasked to survival and migration. I’m sure in prehistory there were many such primitives.

The environment of the primitive survivor put him into a deeper contact with reality. Morphology is the study of shape and form. The morphology of the primitives world was much more ancient than ours in the modern world.

The night sky for example is 15 billion years old, the ocean and shore also billions of years old, the clouds and wind just as they were 2 billion years ago. The trees and vegetation hundreds of millions of years old. This is the morphology primitive man was tasked with surviving in. He was challenged to survive in the raw universe with his flesh, blood and imagination.

Today modern man has been trapped into a morphological environment only tens or hundreds of years old. He has become weak, dependent, blind. While the machine that has entrapped him has grown man himself has diminished.

Primitive man was far stronger and fitter, his senses were sharp and he had inner vision, imagination.

Our modern society to him would be seen as a man trap, a death trap to ensnare the weak prey that men today have become. Ultimately to face slaughter of some kind as modern history has proven to often be the case.

You can walk away from the modern world when ever you want. Take a walk into the wilderness and discover your true purpose. To survive in the stars, the mountains and the ocean.

Just as it was a billion years ago before man.

To survive in the wild is the ultimate test of physical & mental fitness. Greater than even the test of war for the worst that war can do is send us back to the stone age.

If you can not just survive but flourish in this “real” world you will have found your true human potential. You will know that the modern world is no longer your master. No longer will it dictate your survival.

So there is a great opportunity for greater balance & perspective.

With this in mind I intend to undertake pure survival training in the wilderness. Alone without supplies for extended periods is the ultimate goal but I will build up to it sequentially.

This will require extreme strength & endurance plus many other skills. Its going to be a lot of fun.

If flickr is working you will see the picture above. That was a painful cavity – felt like a hornet sting at times but usually felt nothing.

I got it pulled 3 weeks back now for $40. The dentist just gave me a local & yanked it. No cleaning the hole or stitches. It was meant to have healed by now.

Well I took pain killers for 4 days afterward and the pain subsided. It wasn’t as bad as the cavity anyway. Then the gums began to regrow.
At some point about a week back the gum got infected. No pain just swelling and pus so I called the dentist yesterday & he said to go in today.

He immediately gave me a shot and started sucking bits of infected gum out. There was blood all over the place & I could feel it scraping the bone. I expected to be right back to square one after.

Well thank heavens the anaesthetic wore off and there is zero pain at all – none. So its nothing like the extraction.

He cleaned the wound properly and gave it stitches. I am on antibiotics too. My only fear now is the dreaded dry socket. That would be the icing on the fricken cake.

All along I cant eat a decent steak or lift real heavy – its a son of a bitch.

Consider this as it is how a great genius trained…

E = The number of days you have cycled (or other) more than E number of miles (or other)

Now the great genius was Eddington & his cycling E = 87

But you could do this with Kettlebell swings, snatches, hindu squats, any number of things. You could substitute weight vest hiking for cycling for example.

So E is your Endurance personal best.

Click for larger image.

You may be familiar with the training programs from OTS Optimum Training Systems. These are based upon research into bulgarian & Russian weight training. There is a website where you can get the ebook Big Beyond Belief” Big Beyond Belief

I recommend this ebook and basically it will give you a framework around which to structure your training.

They have a couple of older programs floating around too, titan training & bulgarian power burst.

Basically compound exercises that require maximum neurological response are used – hence heavy kettlebells are ideal for many exercises. Training is more frequent than you may be used to – I have nearly completed the first week of preliminary training & feel quite fatigued.

But I can tell a good program after 28 years of lifting & this is good – I think I could quite easily get up to 250 lbs on this system.

I’m actually training more like a wrestler than a bodybuilder these days.

I need to get some shots done flexed – will ask a young lady to help out with that.