My Second Trip to the NJPW LA Dojo Part 1: Preparing for the Dojo

First Trip to the Dojo

Part 2

Part 1: Summer 2018: When getting final advice before leaving the first camp, one thing truly stuck with me. Scorpio Sky told me to keep working on my body and the only thing I could think was “Yeah… I should probably try to look as good as this dude does”. I formulated a plan to bulk up from 155 lbs (70Kg) to 185 (84), then cut back to 175 (79). Initially it started by trying to follow Shibata-San’s quote about the best diet advice. “Eat, Train, Eat, Train” he said using a few of the English words he knew. But the point was very clear. As much as I wanted to do things the right way by eating a ton of high protein meat and the handful of healthy veggies I actually like, this was a time where I was living in my car and had no access to a kitchen. So unfortunately, I had to do things the dirty way. I spent the better part of six months eating 5000-8000 calories every, single, day.

My days would start by eating 6 donuts from the grocery store markdown rack that they hide in the back of the store. Then for the first break at my day job, it would be a small pack of cookies that was somehow 500 calories. Lunch would usually be a footlong chicken bacon ranch sandwich from the Subway attached to the store, then second break would be another pack of the cookies. By the time I got done with work at 1:30 pm, I would usually be at 3000 calories. (2000 is the daily recommended amount for a normal adult). But after work is where the fun really began. I would go to the gym to do a dojo style warmup of either 1000 squats and 500 Hindu pushups or a Gotch inspired deck of cards workout before I would begin whatever my workout would be for the day. After all of that, I would do a few laps in the pool before showering and going for my big post workout meal. Usually this would be 4-5 Taco Bell Beefy Fritos burritos because they were extremely cheap and each burrito had 400+ calories. Sometimes I would switch it up by getting either a whole large pizza and 16 wings from Pizza Hut, or my fucking absurd Chipotle order (pictured to the side).

After hitting my calorie surplus goal for the day, it would be time to relax by going to play video games at a local Lan store/gaming arena. Once or twice a week, I would actually go to wrestling training so I could prepare myself for the wrestling portion of the dojo camp. One to three days a week were dedicated to wrestling in front of crowds at various locations around the Denver area. For the better part of six months, this routine was my life all the while I was waking up at 3:30 am after going to sleep anywhere from 10 pm to 1 am depending on how long I spent at the gaming place or if I wrestled at either training or a show. Did I mention that I was living in my car this whole time?

Due to the intense, literal week long soreness from the workouts, the lack of sleep, and eating 5000 calories of garbage, physically I felt about as fucking miserable as I have ever been or will ever be. But mentally, I was preparing for my grand entrance into the Tokyo Dome to main event Wrestle Kingdom. Before my workouts, I would blare Superstar by Pegboard Nerds featuring one of my favorite musical groups of all time, Krewella. I’m about 99% sure they didn’t do this intentionally, but a ton of Krewella’s songs are absolutely perfect to listen to while doing an unthinkable amount of squats. The two times I met them, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask them about this phenomenon. If you want my opinion on the best pace to do 1000 squats, here’s what I would use. The first 250 should be at the pace of Taylor Swift’s The 1 following the piano. 251-500 should be around the pace of Complicated by Avril Lavigne following the drums. 501-850 can be done by picking basically any 5 Krewella songs linked earlier and just vibing. The final 100-150 should be done at a near frenetic pace. I’m not saying you need to go full Shake It Off, because that might be overdoing it in this case, but you should be at least at a pace close to the drums of New Romantics.

Anyway, over the course of this 6 month period, I ate, trained, and milkshaked my way to 185 but didn’t have enough time to cut back to 175. In spite of how terrible I felt, I will say I looked fucking amazing with a shirt on (pictured on the left). Along the way I was also able to find a little trick that made it so that I experienced pretty much ZERO soreness from the days where I’d do the 1000 squats. When doing such an extreme workout, my body essentially had no fucking idea what the fuck was going on, so any time I did that many squats my legs would be sore for an entire week before I could do it again. However, after doing it a few times, I noticed that the soreness didn’t actually set in until about noon the day after the squats. You could definitely feel it coming at around 10:30 am or so, but there was no actual soreness until a few hours later. So from the moment I hit 1000 on my little hand counter, until around noon the next day, there was literally no soreness. Quite a bit of fatigue, but no soreness whatsoever. One of these times, I decided that while I was still in the clear, I would do a nice, easy 500 squat warmup before I got steamrolled by the unrelenting soreness. Noon was quickly approaching and I was dreading the soreness that would follow 1500 squats over a 12 hour period. Much to my surprise, noon came and went, but nothing happened. Everything felt perfectly fine! And weirdly enough, it stayed that way. I never actually got sore from that until I did another 1000 a few days later, but didn’t do the 500 the next day. My theory as to how doing 1000 squats every day works is similar to the Sterling Archer quote about drinking. If you stop, the collective soreness might literally kill you, but as long as you don’t stop, you’re good to go. But apparently this little trick only worked for me as when I tried to tell it to some people off of various dating apps, they did not have the same experience that I did. The end of my time away from the Dojo was quickly coming to an end. I had gained 30 lbs, got my body to a point where I would be much more capable of handling the workouts than I was the first time, and as I said before, I looked fucking amazing with a shirt on. However, with only a few days before camp was set to begin, it was time for some relaxation.

In the next chapter, I’ll talk about the multiple near death experiences I had on the way to LA, the best rest stop West of the Mississippi, bougie Santa Monica apartments, and LeBron James. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it, and always remember, Don’t let the bastards grind you down.