drink your gallon of milk a day, too
One of the best ways to move in the direction of [high calorie numbers] is to drink a gallon of milk a day, most especially if weight-gain is a primary concern.
The only problem I have with this is that weight gain is really not a primary concern for me. For the record, I'm 6'0" and 165lbs. At the very most, I'd be comfortable weighing 175. It seems to make so much sense that in parkour, a person's weight is an important factor of their ability level. A person may be able to squat 400 lbs., but how hard is it to apply that sort of strength to a wall run or long jump if they weigh 215? I've noticed this is in my training recently, because I'm about as strong as my 5'10", 135lbs. friend, but it's like I'm training in a weight vest compared to him. He's capable of reaching places I'm not and konging heights I can't, simply because he's got that much less weight to move.
The issue here is absolute vs. relative strength. As a traceur, you want to monitor your relative strength and ignore absolute.
An example of this is as follows...
220# Man can DL 400# -- he can lift 400# (WOW) but thats only 1.8x his body weight.
180# Man can DL 370# -- Less absolute strength since he can't lift the height amount but he can lift over 2x his bodyweight.
Think these numbers are unreal? Jim from beastskills.com can DL 500# with a trap bar and weighs around 170 (thats almost 3x his weight!)
If you gain weight but monitor your relative strength, you can see when you will peak, then stop gaining weight. The strength gains will slow but your relative strength gains will continue up at a steady pace.
This is why football players can have 11' broad jumps. They lift heavy things explosively and don't gain much weight.
In short, if you want to gain weight, you need to keep track of your relative strength and bodyweight skills like broad and vert jump along with progress on BW skills like pushups and pullups.
But, why would you want to gain weight?
When your muscles are bigger it allows for 2 things:
1) Bigger muscles can generate more force, even when isolated from the bone in ex-vivo studies (when they rip the whole muscle out and stimulate it to test contractile strength)
2) Bigger muscles allow the muscles to pull on bones in-vivo (in the body) at a more advantageous angle causing increased force production through the whole ROM.
The key for someone like us is to get as much muscle mass as we can before the added weight starts negatively impacting performance....and this amount of muscle is a lot higher than most people think.
Following the gymnastics scheme for elite athletes, someone who is around 5'5 would need to be at around 135# to be elite. Every inch, add 7-10#. That means that someone at 5'10 with the same proportions would be 175-185#. Someone at your height may be closer to 190 since your bones are longer and require bigger muscles to pull on them from more efficient angles. This is why you don't see 6 foot tall gymnastics...their kinesiology makes performance more difficult.
Now, I am not trying to change your mind. If you simply want to get strong and don't want to gain weight, then just do SS without the milk. However, you will see great relative strength gains, which are the more important ones, if you put on a bit more mass.
Hope I wasn't overwhelming with this.
P.S. - Chris, this is by no means an attack on you or anything. Since this is my training log, I'm going to be putting goals down on here as I think of them, and your gallon of milk comment just got me thinking about it.
I'd have to be pretty silly to take offense to that
You are approaching your training with intelligence which is the best start.
Happy training man
