When we think about rehabilitation of the body, we tend to think in terms of the physical.

How long it will take for a broken bone, or torn ligament to heal.  What type of surgery might be required.  What types of passive recovery methods will we employ – ice, heat, elevation, compression, massage, acupuncture, visits to the chiropractor, aromatherapy, etc.  What types of active recovery methods will we use to promote healing and restoration – walking, special rehabilitation exercises, stretching, resistance training, other types of exercise, etc.  What types of foods should we eat?  What medicines are necessary?  Which vitamins and supplements may help?

While all these physical efforts are certainly necessary, there are three items, if missing, can render all of your physical efforts relatively unproductive- your emotional state, your mental attitude, and your spiritual alignment.

Emotional State
Emotion is what happens in your brain.  It is a neurological reaction to an event.  For example, your brain releasing dopamine and oxytocin in response to seeing and old friend.  Emotions are lower level responses occurring in the subcortical regions of the brain, the amygdala, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortices, creating biochemical reactions in your body altering your physical state.  They originally helped our species survive by producing quick reactions to threat, reward, and everything in between in their environments.¹

What happens next is feeling.  Feeling is what happens in your body.  As dopamine and oxytocin hits the bloodstream, every organ in your body reacts.  Feelings originate in the neocortical regions of the brain, are mental associations and reactions to emotions, and are subjective being influenced by personal experience, beliefs, and memories.  A feeling is a mental portrayal of what is going on in your body when you have an emotion and is the byproduct of your brain perceiving and assigning meaning to the emotion.  Feelings are the next thing that happens after having an emotion, involve cognitive input, usually subconscious, and cannot be measure precisely.

Feelings are sparked by emotions are colored by the thoughts, memories, and images that have become subconsciously linked with that particular emotion for you.  But it works the other way around too.  For example, just thinking about something that happened to you can trigger an painful emotional response.  While emotions are temporary, the feelings they evoke may grow and persist over a lifetime.  In contrast to physical wound, which is finite, emotional pain can go on and on.

Mental Attitude
Your mental attitude is a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain ways.  Positive mental attitude (PMA) is a concept first introduced in 1937 by Napoleon Hill in the book Think and Grow Rich. … Positive mental attitude is that philosophy which asserts that having an optimistic disposition in every situation in one’s life attracts positive changes and increases achievement.  Positive energy attracts positive energy.

Why I Never Miss a Workout
My wife often asks me, “How do you do it?  How do you never miss a workout?  How do you never stop pushing yourself?  How do you stay so committed, no matter what?”  The truth is, I do not consider myself a healthy model for mental and emotional health.  Although I have worked at shifting my internal motivators towards positive emotions such as understanding, reverence, and serenity, when things get tough I still tend to retreat to more destructive emotions and motivators, my old friends, regret, anxiety, hate, and intense internal ANGER.  I did not start lifting weights because I wanted to be more attractive to females.  I did not start lifting weights because I was interested in becoming a bodybuilder, a powerlifter, or a weightlifter.  I did not start lifting weights because I wanted to get healthy and fit, and fix my cholesterol levels.  I started lifting weights because I was filled with anger and I needed a safe, constructive channel to physically release seemingly inexhaustible amounts of negative energy.  I just happened to discover that lifting weights was the ideal venue for working out my anger.


I have been relatively unsuccessful in letting go of some painful experiences of my youth.  Often, I acknowledge that my pain was, and still is, necessary for defining who I am.  When I was struck down by God for being arrogant and spent most of the month of July 2015 lying on my back, fighting to stay alive,  many times very close to exiting the planet, I experienced what it feels like to be stripped of my identity, and lose who I am, and who I am supposed to be, in this world.  I remember the absolute nadir of that experience when I was convulsing with emotion in my hospital bed, trying unsuccessfully to hold back tears, in a state of near hysteria.  My wife and my mother were there trying to comfort me in my hospital room on the 6th floor of Tufts Medical Center.  With tears streaming down my face, all I could manage to forcibly whisper as explanation to, “what’s wrong?”, was, “I don’t know who I am supposed to be in this world anymore”.  It was terrifying and crippling moment.  I felt betrayed and humiliated.  Thirty plus pounds of muscle had disappeared from my body in less than 30 days.  A lifetime of work, thousands of hours in the gym, ripped from my frame in a matter of a few hellacious weeks.  Instead of looking in the mirror and seeing a strong, intelligent, fit, accomplished strength coach, personal trainer, gym owner, and successful businessman, I saw someone who looked like he’d been doing heroin for a couple years straight – skinny, mangy, and lost.

As much as my physical body is tied to my identity, my pain helps define and redefine who I am.  After my mental and emotional collapse at Tufts, the familiar pain, guilt, feelings of helplessness, and unresolved anger I carry as a result of events of my childhood quickly stepped back in.  Comparatively, what I suffered through during my youth, specifically age 9-13, was worse than bypass surgery.

Given the choice, I would rather have bypass again than suffer through those fateful years a second time.  Even triple bypass with post-op complications (I had a post-operative blood clot in my heart that nearly killed me, 1 week after my Coronary Artery Bypass Grafts (CABG)) was not as bad as living with my stepfather.  It was not the physical pain of my frequent beatings that was so difficult.  That part I turned into a game of how much I could take and make it seem to him that he didn’t hit me hard enough, that he was too weak to hurt me, and silently inviting him to try again by quickly standing back up and glaring at him, without shedding a single tear.  The difficult part was watching helplessly when he “disciplined” my  younger sister.  Something that is still very difficult for me to talk about.  That emotional damage does not seem to be going away.  The truth is, I blame myself for not doing more to save my sister from what she endured.  It may stun some of you when I write this, but I believe everything that happened is my fault.

So, my anger, always lurking, quickly and quietly crept back in the back door of my consciousness and provided the force I needed to get started on rebuilding myself.

In the past, I have been able to elevate myself to an attitude of thankfulness and understanding… reasoning that without the pain I endured in my youth, I would not have the strength of mind and character that frequently makes life’s persistent challenges much, much easier to bear and overcome.  Adversity builds character?  Maybe.  But, in this broken state, I felt nothing but self-hate and anger, numb to virtually everything else, and blind to anything that might prevent me from reclaiming my identity.  In my nephew’s words, I was “salty”.  It is with this hyper aggressive and vengeful attitude that I dumped my prescribed pain medications (Dilaudid) and began my process of rehabilitation, four weeks after hitting the low point described above.  I dumped the Dilaudid because it was dramatically impeding my cognitive abilities.  Put bluntly, the Dilaudid was making me stupid.  “Without my mind, I have nothing”, I reasoned.

Spiritual Alignment
While my emotional state and mental attitudes pushed me onto the path of recovery, I did not have a conduit for spiritual alignment until I began my daily weight training.  I have often said that a good workout is more like meditation than it is hard work.  Weight training in a specific format, similar to yoga, allows you to connect to a higher source of intelligence or power, identifying with something greater than than yourself.  I know how this sounds, but I don’t know how else to state it.  Understand that I am not some sort of hippie, suggesting that you abandon your material wealth, go live in a commune, and try to realize your true spirit, the essence of your being.  I am saying that putting myself in a deep meditative state through intense concentration on my weight training process allowed me to let hope back into my life and help me foster the belief that I could reclaim my identity and become a valuable part of the world again.


If you have read Parts 1, 2, and 3 in this series of articles, you know the majority of the details.  I am bringing up my emotional state and my mental attitude here in part 4 because it is necessary for the reader to understand the depth of aggression that I applied during phase 4 of my rehabilitation program.  Phase 4 began roughly 16 weeks after my surgeries.  In short, in order to execute the workouts I will outline, you must be willing and able to inflict and endure PAIN with the belief that you will be rewarded for it in the end.  Many of you simply do not live in a deviated mental state where you prefer pain to pleasure, and I definitely am not suggesting that you should abandon your healthy mental state to get here.  But, if you find yourself frequently and consistently reflecting on events that cause you deep emotional distress, USE THAT.  Anger is more useful than despair.

So, I am not sure how well this workout format will work for you if you cannot push yourself to the point of discomfort.

You need to generate intense single mindedness and great force of will to execute this program properly.  I am skeptical, but hopeful, that this program will yield the dramatic, accelerated results they yielded for me.  I have given my weights, only for examples, in some areas.

Here is a snapshot of the DAY 2: CHEST AND BACK:

• A1 flat db press, all sets 1 min tut, 10 reps
  20lbs, 25lbs, 35lbs, 45lbs, 50lbs, 55lbs
• A2 bilateral seated cable row pro, all sets 1 min tut, 12 reps
  45lbs, 50lbs, 60lbs, 75lbs, 90lbs, 100lbs
• TEST MAXES

REST HERE.

• B1 flat db press at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps), 10 reps, 1 min tut
• B2 cable flyes at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps), 10 reps, 1 min tut
• B3 machine flyes at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps), 1 min tut, 15 reps
• B4 Seated cable rows pro at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps), 1 min tut, 12 reps
• B5 Seated cable rows sup at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps)
• B6 Seated cable rows semi-sup at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps)
• B7 cable pushdowns/pullovers, 20-25 reps
• REST
• REPEAT “B” CYCLE 5 TIMES

YOU CAN REST A LITTLE EXTRA HERE IF YOU NEED TO.

• C1 bilateral pulldowns pro at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps)
• C2 bilateral pulldowns sup at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps)
• C3 bilateral pulldowns semi-sup at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps)
• C4 incline db press at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps)
• C5 incline db press at 60-70% RM (12-15 reps)
• C6 1 hole decline db press at 60-70% (12-15 reps)
• C7 cable pushdowns/pullovers
• REST
• REPEAT “C” CYCLE 3 TIMES

There is approximately 66 sets here.  Because you are doing something almost continuously and resting very little, you should be able to complete this entire workout in under 75 minutes.  Typical your rest between sets in the A, B, and C cycles is only about a 10 second transition time.  You can take an extra couple of minutes rests between cycles A and B, and again between cycles B and C.

In the interest of providing the details of the full program, here is a couple snapshots of the rest of the program from this phase of my training:

DAY 3: SHOULDERS AND ARMS
A1 MAX PRESS (rotate exercises 1-8, each Day 3), find MAX for 1 min tut:

1. flat DB press ss
2. decline DB press 1 hole
3. decline DB press 2 hole
4. decline DB press 1 hole ss
5. decline DB press 2 hole ss
6. overhead DB press
7. dumbbell press on ball
8. dumbbell press on ball semi-sup

A2 simmons extensions on floor at 75-80% RM (8-10 reps)
A3 db floor press w/same weight as above AMRAP (15-20 reps)
A4 2 holes decline db simmons extensions at 50% of above, AMRAP (8-10 reps)
A5 bilateral seated cable row ss
A6 cable reverse flyes
A7 partial range bilateral pulldowns
A8 machine reverse flyes
REPEAT “A” CYCLE 4 TIMES

TRICEPS
B single arm overhead tricep ext at 75-80% RM (8-10 reps)
“even out the arms”
C reverse grip cable tri ext at 75-80% (8-10 reps)
“even out the arms” / 3-5 rounds 1 min tut

BICEPS
D1 DB curls at 75-80% RM (8-10 reps) 1 minute tut
D2 Barbell curls at 50% of above AMRAP
D3 Barbell curls at 50% of above AMRAP
REPEAT “D” CYCLE 3 TIMES

E single arm hammer curls at 75-80% RM (8-10 reps)
“even out the arms”
F arnold curls at 60-70% (12-15 reps) 1 min tut
“even out the arms” / 3-5 rounds 1 min tut


DAY 1: LEGS AND CORE
A safety squats 15 sets of 3 reps 331 (3 sec down, 3 sec pause at bottom, 1 sec up, EMOM (Every Minute On the Minute)
yoke facing toward me (“wrong way”)
warmup, then move up by 15 lbs every 2 sets
bar, 60, 75, 90, 105, 120 lbs

B1 Buffalo Squats at 85% RM (5 RM)
B2 Buffalo Squats at 50% of the above AMRAP (7-8)
B3 Bodyweight squats AMRAP (10)
B4 Deep Knee Bends or Sissy Squats AMRAP (15)
B5 Flexing
B6 Cable Pullovers for 1 min tut
REPEAT “B” CYCLE 3 TIMES

C hyperextensions 5×5
D1 Leg extensions at 90% RM
D2 Leg extensions at 50% of the above AMRAP
REPEAT “D” CYCLE 2 TIMES

LOWER LEG
E calf raises w/o added weight 5×5 each leg

calves triset:
F1 med stance 1 min tut
F2 wide stance 1 min tut
F3 narrow stance 1 min tut
F4 flexing out calves, isometrics
REPEAT “F” CYCLE 3 TIMES

TRAPS
G1 Barbell shrugs at 90% RM
G2 Dumbbell shrugs at 90% RM
G3 * Upright rows at 75% RM
G4 Upright rows at 50% of the above AMRAP
REPEAT “G” CYCLE 4 TIMES

ABS
H1 Crunching sit-ups at 50% RM ** WORKING ON 3X20 AT BODYWEIGHT FIRST
H2 Crunch sit-ups (without added weights) AMRAP
H3 Leg raises (without added weight) AMRAP
REPEAT “H” CYCLE 3 TIMES

¹https://www.thebestbrainpossible.com/whats-the-difference-between-feelings-and-emotions/