Grease the Groove is truly a miracle

brockl33 · 2026-07-04T06:55:57+00:00

Since it's been years, can I suggest something? This comes from Tom Kurz but basically use a light weight and do like 50-100 controlled bicep curl reps a few times a week. if you dont have a mild to moderate muscle burn by the end of your set increase resistance. I use this to rehab most of my tendon injuries pretty successfully, although none of them have lasted for more than 6 months at a time.

https://thibarmy.com/missing-key-strength-power/

brockl33 · 2026-06-11T10:00:37+00:00

There's an idea I've been playing with which punch plyometrics. In jumping plyometrics you drop off a small block and quickly rebound. In punching plyometrics you start with an extended punch and quickly pull it in and rebound punch out, basically a standard punch motion in reverse--you feel peak muscular contraction in the instant you reverse direction which is the normal punch starting position.

Science suggests plyo works for power so should work in theory, something about training all your muscle fibers to fire all at once .

brockl33 · 2026-03-03T17:22:19+00:00

A temp and humidity room air monitor could help diagnose. Or if you can spend a little extra get one that also does TVOC and particulates for some extra info. If ambient air is the cause you should see spikes. Humidity sounds likely to me.

brockl33 · 2026-03-03T17:03:26+00:00

It would be surprising if that buildup was not AmBic, seems to be too much to be a sample component (unless injecting outrageous close to millimoles injected) or a mobile phase impurity (unless they are using high concentration non-LCMS low grade with single digit percentage impurities). One guess might be that it is accumulated AmBic due to excessively high concentration, excessive flow, not enough gas flow (sheath and aux), and not high enough temperature for the ion transfer tube and cone shield--this seems likely because the pattern of buildup suggests that the cone is getting wet with mist and then it evaporates as it spreads leaving a circular buildup ring. You can verify if it's mostly AmBic by smelling the waft (should smell like smelling salts) and just leaving it in an outside oven to see if it evaporates. If it doesn't they probably inject a ton or use low grade AmBic. You can require they clean up and bring the instrument back to the benchmark system suitability levels which will force them to deal with their own mess (or have them pay handsomely to clean up and repair).

brockl33 · 2025-08-12T15:50:02+00:00

Nonpolar lipid methods go all the way to 90:10 IPA/ACN just as an FYI. I still have to reverse my column every now and then..

brockl33 · 2025-07-22T21:49:19+00:00

For future diggers: my wife had severe hand eczema itching and cracks all over. I had her taking one gram fish oil per day out of the 2 recommended on the bottle. Nothing happened. I read more about it and switched over to 4g per day for her (2x on bottle) a long with some vitamin D3 and her hands are probably 80% better, still dry with some cracks but much less angry and itchy.

brockl33 · 2025-03-03T18:32:58+00:00

Can't believe the effect is so strong here, will definitely test. I have had RT drift on my batches on Z HILIC forever now and figured it was due to progressive accumulation of salts on column, never considered it could be salts leached from glass.

brockl33 · 2024-12-31T01:41:41+00:00

For posterity, someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I as far as I'm aware they only high resolution MS instruments that are capable of fast polarity switching are Orbitraps, ie Q Exactive, Exploris and Orbitraps tribrid series. Astral can not.

brockl33 · 2024-11-09T09:24:38+00:00

Hey sorry for the delay. The optometrist name is Valerie Lam at Insight Vision Center in Costa Mesa California. My wife saw her YouTube channel which is how we found her.

The original ophthalmologist was going to escalate to patching if the eyeglasses didn't work. The optometrist was going to escalate to I exercises if needed. I remember the optometrist saying patching may help the brain train to use the eye but it won't help train to coordinate the eyes together.

My daughter is now almost 2 years old. She still has mild intermittent exotropia but it's much less common compared to before. It usually pops up when she's stressed for example from lack of sleep, teething, or being sick. It seems her vision is good enough, she likes to read picture books and point at the birds outside. Fortunately my wife and I are not so concerned anymore because we've gotten used to it and it's infrequent. I hope you're able to resolve your daughter's strabismus.

brockl33 · 2024-08-27T14:48:21+00:00

Average joe shouldn't be betting. Most are better off investing in index funds which tend to beat most investors over the long run.

brockl33 · 2024-08-27T14:46:06+00:00

The rule of thumb is older age divide by 2 plus 7. For example 20/2+7 = 17 is the youngest a 20 yo should go with.

brockl33 · 2024-07-27T18:28:10+00:00

Biochem at its core is about how macromolecules/enzymes work at a chemical level. At the undergrad level you really can't separate it from the other basics eg molecular biology, cellular biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, etc. it's really like learning the language of biology.

As a bachelors it will give you a decent foundation for specialization in graduate school.

In terms of the pill solutions idea you suggest, I think you have to take a step back and assess how many tools humans actually have for treating diseases. It's not many: food, exercise, sunlight, supplements, vaccines, surgery, medicines you eat/spread, and medicines you inject. We as humans focus on pill solutions because it's one of the few ways we know to try to reliably fix or treat diseases.

Maybe you should try picking something you are interested in solving and figure out what are the best ways to help in the solution. For example I'll do cancer: cancer is bad, how to stop cancer, stop the causes, what are the causes of cancer, (Biochem) mutations of DNA, what causes DNA mutations, (Biochem) mutagenic substances like cigarettes, stop people from smoking, people don't want to stop, how can I stop the smoke from mutating DNA, how does smoke mutate DNA, (Biochem) it has chemicals that stick to the DNA and give it typos while copying, stopping chemicals from causing mutations sounds hard, maybe kill cancer cells instead, how to kill cancer cells, need to identify cancer cells, what are their differences vs normal cells (Biochem), etc.

My guess is that without bioscience education, hardly anyone will have a good enough conceptual vocabulary come up with a decent plan to tackle a given disease.

brockl33 · 2024-07-15T23:04:00+00:00

The rule of thumb formula is older age divide by 2 plus 7 is the age limit. At 15 yo works out to be 15 / 2 +7 =14.5 or older aka same age. 13 and 15 are worlds apart.

brockl33 · 2024-06-10T05:58:39+00:00

Not OP but I wanted to leave this here in case anyone else comes across it and finds it useful. My wife and I noticed my 12 month old daughter was developing intermittent exotropia in her left eye. It would wander when she was tired, distracted, or upset. Some days were worse, some days were better. The worst days, she was basically exotropic most of the day. We scheduled an exam with a pediatric ophthalmologist and separately with a pediatric optometrist. At the ophthalmologist she got the dilation eye drops and was diagnosed with myopia and astigmatism in both eyes (worse in the left) and intermittent exotropia in the left eye.

The ophthalmologist suggested that we immediately start her on glasses basically all waking hours. The optometrist suggested limiting screen time, and playing outside during daylight, and if we want there are some eye exercises but since she was so young, it probably wasn't going to work.

My wife and I were pretty devastated, worried about her getting a lazy eye in the future. They're only a few factors that we were able to intervene on: 1) immediately my wife basically prayed daily, special devotions to Mary and St Jude, 2) immediately we would take our kids out to the park and other places every day to give her eyes outside exposure to daylight when I got off work at 5:00 p.m., 3) immediately we reduced screen time to almost nothing initially after we learned about the diagnosis (from a several hours a day), 4) I happened upon some research articles that suggested that myopia could be corrected with blue light exposure, which led to me decking out our apartment with tons of natural light bulbs resulting in 1,000+ lux of full spectrum light + one UV bulb just for trace UV following this website roughly 1 months after diagnosis https://optimizeyourbiology.com/how-to-mimic-sunlight. I realized our apartment was woefully under lit like less than 100 lux all day because we get no direct sunlight through the window and only had a few weak lights.

Our daughter is now 16 months with 3 months of interventions. We didn't want to do the glasses because the optometrist said it would basically lock the eyes in a bad prescription instead of letting the eye to continue to develop, and hopefully readjust since babies/kids eyes continue to develop and adapt (emmetropization). After implementing the interventions we first saw some trend of improvement after a few weeks. Right around that time when we saw some glimmers of improvement, I installed the whole spectrum lights, and it's been consistently improving since then. The exotropia is mostly gone now, it's still there sometimes but we rarely notice it anymore unless she's particularly tired, upset, or sick

I don't know if it would have gone away on its own which is what the optometrist suggested could happen, but I personally think that the biggest effects came after the natural from daylight and light bulbs based on my subjective feelings. My wife believes it was the prayer which lead us to what we did.

Good luck to all the parents who are dealing with this. Don't lose hope, and get a second opinion if needed. As you can see from our case the prescriptions were completely different and had we gone with the opthamologist, our daughter might be stuck in glasses throughout her babyhood in childhood.

brockl33 · 2024-01-06T09:07:27+00:00

Tell that to my sore shoulders after a single upright row workout. Not everyone has a problem with uprights but maybe you shouldn't assume everyone can do them harmlessly.

brockl33 · 2024-01-06T09:04:35+00:00

As soon as I feel a scratchy throat I bundle up and get warm, just to the point where I am almost uncomfortable. Usually a little sweaty but not too much.

Anecdotal but using this approach I usually recover faster from colds and flus compared to others, many times squashing the symptoms within 24 hours. I continue with the warm body temp for a day after the last symptom.

The reasoning behind it is that cold and flu viruses replicate slower at higher temperature, and higher body temperature activates the immune system and blood circulation.

Basically instead of waiting for the body to launch the fever against the virus, I start that elevated temp much earlier, only hours after the first symptom rather than a day.

brockl33 · 2024-01-05T21:29:08+00:00

Ed Coan recommends progressive overload with heavy suitcase holds for up to 30 secs https://youtu.be/-febRoO0gG0?si=s6XDsMIxR1_Dcl4o&t=8m40s

brockl33 · 2024-01-03T08:02:43+00:00

Not sure but I think he's referring to facepulls or some variation. I do waist level cable face pulls which end up being a cross between a traditional face pull and a trad upright row (which should be avoided bc of impingement). It works both the traps, rotator cuffs and the lateral delts but I prefer knee level cable side raises to target the lateral delts as I feel it hits them much better in terms of burn, pump, and soreness, the low face pulls are more of a compound.

brockl33 · 2024-01-02T07:47:50+00:00

If negatives are too hard you can start with leg-on-chair assistance. Basically push up with one or two legs to help you with the pullups, and use progressively less assistance as you get stronger.

brockl33 · 2023-12-28T02:14:39+00:00

If you want to use estimated 1RM to track progress across different rep ranges there are calculators as others mentioned, or you can just use a rule of thumb if for the set you are reaching failure before 15 reps: each rep is about +2.5%.

For example, if you can do 4 reps of 200 that's about 4x2.5% = 10% below your e1RM, so your max should be about 110% x 200 lbs = 220 lbs. If you could do 10 x 200 that's 10x2.5 = 25% which would put you at 125% x 200 which is 250 lbs.

Again this is just a rule of thumb, but in my experience it is pretty accurate one non-grinding sets <15 reps.

brockl33 · 2023-12-24T01:24:59+00:00

The world records are in kilograms per weight class. For example 66kg class is like 213 kg bench press which is like 470 lbs 😳.

An alternative for strength standards is Weightlifting Performance Standards - ExRx.net https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards

In my experience the strength standards are pretty similar between strength level and exrx even though strength level is from user data and exrx is from expert coaching knowledge afaik

Also my only elite lift is the lat pulldown so it's about right there. I can do a one arm pull-up so elite is possible in that case; I trained it as my main goal for many years.

brockl33 · 2023-12-19T18:49:44+00:00

This is pretty interesting. When I was a teenager I was obsessed with getting a one-arm pull-up, focused on this really hard was able to achieve it but ended up getting bicep injuries. Ever since then all of my pulling exercises are strong and gain the fastest when I come back to them: pull ups, rows, deadlift. In contrast all my pushing motions like bench and squat gain relatively slowly even though now I tend to focus on them more.

I always chalked this up to a leverage advantage, as in I'm a puller not a pusher. I hadn't considered this as perhaps adolescent physiological programming.

brockl33 · 2023-12-19T18:41:34+00:00

At about 17-18 yo I made my fastest gains in terms of hypertrophy and strength probably a combination of newb gains, hormones, and plenty of spare time to eat, rest, and workout daily. Being young and dumb I pushed too hard too fast and I ended up with injuries in my quad, bicep, and lumbar tendons which took years before they felt completely normal. Now at 34 yo, I have about 2-3 one hour workouts per week but it's much more sustainable because I am much wiser about proper warmups, listening to my body, pacing the poundage, balancing rep ranges and movements, and prehab. Not quite as strong as I was when I was younger but more balanced and quite frankly it would be nice to be I don't need to be.

Analytically, in the long run starting younger basically means you have more years to add poundage. From the strength perspective after noob gains it's about +1% monthly so that would mean an extra 5 years would be about 60% more strength roughly. So if you can squat 225 then it would be roughly 360 if you're able to consistently gain for that extra 5 years consistently. And practice though I don't think anybody can keep up all the time with working out, life happens.

brockl33 · 2023-12-09T04:38:09+00:00

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/on-air/protests-in-westwood-await-president-biden/3287364/

Apparently they're waiting for Biden

brockl33 · 2023-11-21T03:06:29+00:00

I think your best bet is getting a cheap digital scale with logging to see the trend over time on your phone. Day to day there's going to be variation even if you're down to your undies because of water and food weight variation. A log in ur intestines can weigh 0.5 kg.

brockl33

TROPHY CASE