Matt Mehlhope - Page 2

How I Fooled Myself Into Thinking I Was Strong With Bad Squat Form

I caught the StrongLifts 5×5 bug 12 weeks ago as I really wanted to improve my strength. I started with the weight amounts the program suggests and moved up gradually as instructed. Starting out I was 5’11″, 180lbs, and my squats were a measly 115lbs with good form.

Before long I found myself knocking out 200lb squats with relative ease. As time progressed I was loading two plates and some change on each side, reaching a respectable 245lbs. In a little over 2 months I had increased my squat weight by over 130lbs, which by most standards is phenomenal progress. Unfortunately, I had become victim of my own ego along the way, sacrificing my form and squat depth for sheer weight and perceived strength.

As I increased the weight on the bar my form got progressively worse and it wasn’t until my spotter kindly pointed out that I wasn’t getting anywhere near parallel that I noticed it.
I figured I would simply correct the form. I un-racked the weight, set my stance and went down…and couldn’t get back up. There was no way in hell I was going to get 245lbs below parallel and back up.

Wow, that was…hard. Let’s try 225.

I couldn’t get below parallel with 225.

Uh ok, 185?

I got parallel and it was hard getting back up.

After the realization that I was not nearly as strong as I once thought, due to cheating on my depth, I worked hard and pressured my partner to keep me in check as far as my depth. Over the past 5 weeks I’ve been able to increase my weight, and as of yesterday I did 3 sets of 5 reps at 245, at parallel, failing on my last rep.

The take home form this brief piece is that you shouldn’t cheat in the gym because you’re only cheating yourself. Don’t swing your dumbbells when doing curls; don’t pack on a bunch of weights for your squats and only drop 6 inches; don’t do a pull-up or chin-up and not extend your arms all the way at the bottom. Force yourself to do it and do it right, otherwise you’re just lying to yourself and pretending you’re in better shape than you really are.

All ego leaves the moment you enter the door of the gym. The iron doesn’t lie.

June 16, 2011

Making Facebook and Twitter Useful Social Networks

This post is actually the result of a brief discussion I had with some friends on Twitter and I felt I needed to elaborate my positon more, particularly because I am not entirely sure of it myself.

I had made a fairly blanket statement, both on Twitter and Facebook, that the value of both of these social services is actually amplified by the number of people you remove from your following, not the more you add. I had said this with the notion of ‘quality > quantity’ in the back of my head, since instead of using Twitter and Facebook to see how many people I can spam with my life updates and witty commentary I like to simply keep tabs on the people I admire or am close to — both on a personal and professional level.

Some would respond and say, “Well, I just follow people I am close to as well!” Which very well may be true, but you aren’t close to 200, 500, 1500, or 5000+ people. When you (or I) sign into Facebook or Twitter, we scroll down the list of status updates keeping an eye out for specific people whose updates we want to read; the fact that we are scrolling and searching for these people in and of itself is an indicator that we really don’t care about most of the people we’re “connected” to.

So, if you’re ready to admit you really don’t care about the updates of those fringe people you saw in high-school or that awkward colleague that friended you, why not sever that digital connection? If you’re anything like me, your time is precious and there’s no need to waste it wading through the noise of updates just to hear from the people you really care about. After all, if you’re at a gathering you aren’t going to ask 15 people how they’re doing before going up to your best friend to see how his/her new baby is, are you? Of course not, so why do it on the internet?

I would ideally like my social network connections to mimic my real life connections, and that involves having a core group of people I interact with that I value and who value me in return. As a practica example, if I only had 50 twitter followers and each one of them read my tweets and articles I posted, obviously that is more valuable than if I had 1000 followers where only 10 really cared and interacted with me. Conversely, if I were to follow thousands of people instead of a select few I was very dedicated to, the value of each individual person I am following goes down as their updates are washed away almost as soon as they are posted — what’s the point in following them in the first place? The signal to noise ratio obviously applies to Facebook as well, which is why having hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends renders your Facebook utterly useless.

I may just “not get it,” but I try to be fairly pragmatic and if I am going to engage myself in these immensely popular services I want to make them valuable to me, not useless.

June 5, 2011

The Cost of Using Unskilled Web Agencies

Web design and its underlying layers of HTML/CSS are often far more complex than most will give credit to, especially considering that more people are concerned with the pure aesthetics of how a page looks rather than what it takes to make it look that way. When hiring an agency to do work, a non-technical person will often skim a variety of agency web sites, see which look the best and get a quote, choosing the one that falls within an acceptable price point. Unfortunately, the quoted price does not include the cost of bad practices and amateur development behind the scenes.

A Wealth of Information

In the early to mid 2000′s web design oriented blogs and agencies started sprouting up left and right as a web presence became mandatory for anyone that wanted to take themselves or their company serious. What’s more is that as a result of this, everyone was looking to get better at web development and design so that they could establish themselves as experts in the field and corner a portion of a very quickly growing market. Now that we’re waist deep into 2011, there are so many wonderful resources on web design and development that anyone with the drive can teach him or herself the basic best practices of the industry without once stepping foot into a formal classroom. Some may even argue that the formal classroom is one of the worst places to learn the intricacies of building a site because of how quickly the technology and standards change.

With the vast amount of information available, it seems asinine that anyone would take on work as a web designer without having read up on these best practices — after all, things as simple as good markup save monumental amounts of time and effort in the long run. Unfortunately, you and I both know that not everyone has the deep desire to learn, nor the common sense to deny a job over their skill level. Thus, the occasional schmuck is slung into a series of situations where their inadequacies are brought to the surface and it is the costly time of professionals that must clean up the mess they have created. This is often the reason that people say, “Hire someone to do it right the first time or it will cost you more in the long run.”

A Costly Lesson

In my many working years in the web industry I’ve known professionals and have personally been said professional called in to fix the mess of someone who cut too many corners and more broadly had little clue what they were doing. Not only are real professionals not cheap, but their time is doubled as they often have to re-work the blunderings of the person or people that did the work before them. With websites, re-work often means rewriting entire pages of HTML and CSS markup, which takes a great deal of talent and foresight to do on a website of any real caliber. Potentially more harmful is if a buffoon has gone and clowned up your SEO, causing extremely costly and sometimes irreparable damage.

Obviously the moral of the ~~story~~ post is to hire professionals whose talents are firmly grounded on the best practices of the industry. The average person obviously cannot tell what is good and bad markup, SEO, or anything other than pure aesthetics, so it should be left to someone who can pinpoint those said traits. In the worst case, take an hour and google to educate yourself — the last thing you want is to get ripped off!

May 29, 2011

6 Weeks into StrongLifts 5×5 and Why it is Now My Program of Choice

Ever since I was little I’ve been incredibly active. My parents encouraged my participation in sports from a very young age and since it was something I generally excelled at I was happy to oblige. Through my early years and into high school I was fortunate enough to try everything from flag football, to track and field, basketball, and even a bit of ice hockey; the commonality between all the sports I mentioned is that they required endurance more-so than strength, resulting in me always being tall and extremely skinny.

In the middle of my college years I took a hiatus from sports and exercise due to injuries, a grueling schedule, working 30+ hours a week, and frankly an unhealthy affinity for World of Warcraft. After getting several kicks-in-the-pants to get healthy as I had become my largest ever — 5’11″ and 210lbs — I’ve since made drastic changes to my lifestyle. With my wife actively participating, we’ve powered through the P90X program twice over, have moved from a largely junk food diet to an impressively healthy Paleo regimen, and am now knee-deep in the StrongLifts 5×5 Program.

Why StrongLifts 5×5?

As I mentioned earlier I have always been “tall and skinny,” able to run but never really lift. When I finished with the P90X program I had cut the fat accumulated in college and was looking once again like my lean athletic self. After 2 years of extremely devout gym participation I tried a lot of things, but my body decided it was done making drastic changes. As I dislike stagnation in any area of my life, much less my fitness, I decided to throw something at it that I had never done before — heavy lifting.

Hours of Mark Rippetoe videos later I knew the correct form for every major barbell exercise I was going to do, how to find my starting weight, and how to absolutely wreck my entire body 3 days a week. 6 weeks later I have seen perhaps the most drastic transformations in my body ever (I’ll spare you the pics, but trust me), and my strength has increased to a level I’ve never seen before. Below is a table of the weight that I do my 5 sets of 5 reps at now, versus when I started — the results speak for themselves.

stronglifts-5x5-progress

May 5, 2011

Website Optimization — Part 3: Gzip Compression and Why It’s Awesome

In the Website Optimization series I’ve discussed how reducing the number of HTTP requests and removing the unused portions of CSS/JS library files can dramatically decrease your site’s load speed — both of these methods I would consider “low hanging fruit.” As promised, in this article I’ll be discussing the wild and wacky world of Gzip compression. While not particularly difficult to implement, having your server Gzip requested documents is an often overlooked method that is potentially the single most effect optimization effort for a larger site with a lot of files.

Without Gzip

Without Gzip compression enabled, your browser will make a request to the server for a specific document — such as the index — and the server will return it as expected.

Typical HTTP_request - c/o BetterExplained.com

If that index file happens to be 100KB (ick), the user’s browser must download that entire 100KB file. While a 100KB file may be acceptable for an image or some other rich media, it is not for most any document on your site. “But Matt, we have a lot of html/css/js files that are monstrous! We’ve already followed your wonderful advice from Part 2, can Gzip help?” Absolutely.

With Gzip

With Gzip enabled, the server actually compresses the document being requested into a .gzip (similar to a standard .zip file), sends it to the browser in its compressed size, and the browser extracts the .gzip file and displays it for the user! As a caveat, it does require more processing power from the server, but the increase in page load speed is well worth it.

HTTP Request with Gzip - c/o BetterExplained.com

Since text documents compress extremely well, the transfer size is drastically reduced. We could load 10 of the compressed index files as seen above in the time we load a single uncompressed index.

How to Enable Gzip Compression

What’s great about Gzip is that it is not only a simple concept to understand, but simple to enable as well. If you’re using an IIS server, you can simply turn compression on, and if you’re using an Apache server all you need to do is add the following the your .htaccess file in your root directory.

# compress ONLY text, html, javascript, css, xml: AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

Once you’ve enabled the compression make sure to verify that it is enabled by putting your website’s URL into a Gzip tester to ensure that it is working properly. Note that we are not attempting to compress images as there are much better ways to optimize them, such as by using CSS sprites or compression tools.

With Gzip compression enabled you’ll not only see that site load speed decreases, but you get the tangential benefits of lower bounce rates and a more SEO friendly site. Enjoy!

April 30, 2011