Hanging: Ride the Fatigue (Blink's Progress)
This is going to be my personal progress thread. I’m going to follow the advice, length first, girth second.
Decades of experience in Athletics have taught me patience, discipline, and reasonable expectations when it comes to gains. In athletics like in PE, you must learn to watch your body, and the signals you get to determine whether to increase or decrease the length and intensity of workouts, exercises, etc. I can draw one more major parallel between athletics and PE here too: injuries and sharp pain is always a bad sign, in addition to being counterproductive. I’m hoping the many minor injuries (and a few major ones) in athletics will help me know when I’m going too far in PE.
My emphasis is going to be on hanging (see title) and I’ll be following the school of thought that complete rest days are bad unless I have an injury (Bib and many other successful hangers adhere to this school of thought). I’m going to do my best to approach this from a very scientific and non-emotional angle (I’m not going to suddenly succumb to the temptation to double or triple my workout intensity, like I’ve seen many other newbies do).
Perhaps my desire for controlled, measurable force helped me choose hanging as my medium for gains. The forces exerted on my ligs and tunica will be very measurable and very controllable with hanging. This will lead less variables to chance, and for me, less chance + more control = reduced injury risk.
Once I start hanging, my goal will be to reach fatigue within the first two sets, keep doing more sets, while reducing weight as needed, and I’ll split my sets between morning and night. I’ll hang daily to pull those crimps out of my ligs and connecting tissues and keep creating new micro tears. I’m going to avoid allowing the ligs to completely heal so I will hopefully be able to use lower amounts of resistance for longer periods of time. I’m going to work on increasing hang time first, and slowly build up to 7-9hrs a day of hanging. I’m lucky because I have plenty of personal privacy and I plan on exploiting that while I have a chance.
I’ll be targeting BTC first based on my mirror test, palpitation test, and my LOT of 9. I haven’t decided what my secondary angle will be, although most likely it will be SO or a modified SO with the RSDT (Rice Sock Duct Tape Fulcrum). The secondary angle will come into play when the first angle is fatigued to the extent that I can no longer hang. As time allows, and once my tissues and ligs adapt allowing longer hang times I may add additional angles. Of course I’ll be changing the angles, as appropriate based on PIs as well.
I purchased a Bib hanger and I’ve been reading up on hanging on both this forum and Bib’s forum as well. I stumbled into DLD’s forum, but I think I found the ridiculous amount of advertising banners there a bit offensive compared to Thunders, which is completely (and impressively) devoid of commercial interests (sorry DLD). I have found Bib to be extremely friendly and helpful; he sincerely seems to care (he’s been giving me advice on his forum). In my opinion Thunders is by far the best forum with a ridiculous amount of good threads and lots of experienced and knowledgeable PErs as well.
I plan to jelq on hang days primarily to keep the blood flowing with perhaps some BTB jelqs to restore blood flow after workouts.
I’m keeping a detailed excel spreadsheet log of my progress and I’ll be posting my results here in this thread.
For now, I’m doing the standard newbie routine. I’m going to switch to hanging workouts, arbitrarily based on the date that my Bib hanger arrives. I’m expect that shipping arrival within a month, maybe longer.
My workouts can be described as ‘light’, although I observed most length gains after a few medium intensity workouts which caused no pain, but a slight dull soreness afterwards (I shot up .25” in length quickly at that point). Its only been a few weeks and I have had nothing near the semblance of an injury, nor any discoloration whatsoever. So far, I decided to keep things light and increase the duration of the workouts first (I’m up to 15 min Jelq/ 15 min stretch, up from starting at 5 minutes each).
I’ve gained much more than I expected so far. Perhaps multi-vitamins, protein three times a day, nitrox, and glutamine with each protein drink are helping. I also take slightly over two tablespoons per day of a flax/ fish oil/ borage based blend of omega 3, 6 & 9 (one tablespoon per 100lbs and I weigh 215lbs).
—BLINK vs. the PVC Pipe—
While preparing to hang, I purchased a 4” PVC pipe, which I plan to convert to a PVC halfpipe. The purpose of this is to provide a stable edge to the front of my chair to rest the apparatus or weights while hanging SD, BTC, or with an RSDT (I purchased some rope to attach the PVC to the front of the chair). I got pretty pissed off after realizing that using the hardware store’s recommendation of a hacksaw to cut the halfpipe, resulted in a VERY sloppy, and wavy cut (after clamping the pipe down). This is in addition to the realization that the hacksaw can only go about 6” deep into the 3’ total length of the pipe. To be continued.
Note: for these reports, my measurements will ONLY taken before workouts, to assure I’m not getting an artificial number, and to promote consistent, accurate measurements.
So now for the million dollar question, how are my stats doing:
—Starting Stats—
BPEL 6.0” EG 4.88” 16 June 2008
—Current Stats—
BPEL 6.31” EG 5.06” 1 July 2008
Gains—> .31” Length x .18” Girth
I’m surprised and pleased to see that I have already made gains. Tentatively my goal is the popular BPEL 8”x EG 6”, although I may go for 9” or 10” BPEL depending on how things look (if it looks like I’m growing a deformed third leg, I might stop).
Wish me luck on my journey to big dick island.