Intensification Season

A little humidity returned to the gloom this morning. Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows. But DOUBLE DIGIT PAX showed up at Olympus, even with a couple of our core HIMs, voodoo and The Worm, with excused absences from the circle. 10 strong for Week 5 of Iron Volume — Intensification. Fewer reps. Heavier bells. Lots of rest. Before any bells were lifted, Toto provided the first entertainment of the morning with his multiple parking jobs. Pepsi astutely commented “You’re actually parked worse than you were before.” The playlist theme took considerably longer to figure out than anticipated. YHC was shooting for something incredibly basic: Heavy Things. Brick House. Wrecking Ball. Cannonball. Mountain Song. Stone. Nightrain. Rocket. Big Gun. Iron Man. Sledgehammer. Airplanes. Titanium. Chains. Supermassive Black Hole. The PAX were all over the place. Metal things? Construction? Demolition? Eventually they took the scientific route. Gravity? Force? Mass? YHC finally conceded that, scientifically speaking, they were correct. Props to Krzyzewski (another HIM we missed this week) for doing this every Saturday—it was way more fun than expected watching the PAX circle the answer, but I’m not sure how he handles the grumbling every week. Apparently my chosen science educational system (aka Unplugged ) may be failing me, as Beaker did not know that a supermassive black hole is about as heavy as things get. Or, as Toto was quick to clarify, in the known universe. ickey_shuffle, went so deep into the playlist analysis that he nearly discovered a second theme YHC and ChatGPT didn’t know existed: a suspicious number of the artists had two first names. That’s that next-level pattern recognition. The longer rest periods brought an unexpected benefit this morning. Heavy doubles mean guys sharing bells and working in together. At one point I noticed that instead of our normal circle, there were little groups scattered around Olympus—sharing bells, knocking out sets, and then spending the 2–2½ minutes of rest talking before getting back after it. Heavy bells creating more fellowship. Pretty cool side effect of Iron Volume. T-claps to Benny, who continues to bell up and challenge himself. hoover was back out and pushing it too—when the weinke called for a single-bell overhead carry, he grabbed double 20s instead. YHC experienced the rare phenomenon of flipper borrowing one of my bells instead of the other way around. That was nice. Emoji supplied some bonus WOOOOOs throughout the morning. He’s got the Q Monday, so consider that your preview. By now, you know the spreadsheet, so a quick summary of the Thang would be a 3:30 warmup, 5 sets of 4 Double Cleans, 5 sets of 4 Double Front Squats, 4 sets of 5 Double Floor Presses, Gorilla Rows 8 Reps per arm, and overhead carries. We finished by joining the men of The Rock for a round of Mary before the Captain America theme concluded the beatdown. Great morning. Heavy bells. Plenty of mumblechatter. Even better fellowship. Iron Volume Week 5: Intensification is in the books. ANNOUNCEMENTS: check the spreadsheet, I’ll update it today. COT: O’Tannenbaum took us out.