I'll Never Be "North of Vag"

Now that I'm six months out from my ankle break, I'm finally starting to get back to my previous workouts. I was making some pretty good progress with weightlifting before the injury, and I'm excited about getting back to it.

Since it's also now winter break, this seems like a good time to make a concerted effort to get back into things. I went to this blog post from Samantha Menzies to make a plan for next week. In this post, she uses an adaptation of the 5/3/1 program (and details some pretty impressive results from it for herself).

As I was printing out the sheet with the amount of weight I needed to lift for the program, I was asking my husband (who also lifts) what auxiliary lifts he thought I should do for each day. He said that he had the official 5/3/1 book on Kindle and handed it over so I could skim through it and see what I wanted to do.

The book, 5/3/1 by Jim Wendler, has a lot of helpful advice. I skimmed through the parts that had already been summarized in Menzies post and then started reading about the auxiliary lifts. As I moved ahead to the next chapter, I noticed it had an odd title: "North of Vag (N.O.V.)"

Consider me . . . suspicious. 

Now, Wendler admits that he can't "take credit" for this gem of a term; that honor goes to his "good friend" Jim Messer, who sent him an email about how great the 5/3/1 program was and now he has "moved somewhat north of being an utter vag."

Wendler muses on this and notes that "many people seem to be moving and staying well south of vag." Then he "started to contemplate how one stays in the Northern Hemisphere of the Holy Holes." 

Elsewhere, he gives some advice about conditioning, specifically running. You need to make sure that you make time for running and other conditioning because this should be a life priority when you "live in the Land of the Vag." By all means, you must get out.

Wendler also gives the sage advice to just "[s]top all the things that make you a pussy and steal your energy. Get your life back." 

I won't be reading any more of Wendler's book since it is clearly not for me. I will never be "North of Vag." I will, I'm quite certain, be squarely in the "Land of the Vag" my whole life. I will never, by his estimation, be able to "get [my] life back." This is it for me. All vagina. All the time. 

I'm not sure why Wendler felt like it was a smart economical move to sell a weightlifting program that immediately cuts out half of the human population, but I do know that living in the "Land of the Vag" has not stopped me from doing plenty of things that I think are pretty fucking amazing, including squeezing a 9-pound child out of my body using only my own muscles, and it sure as hell isn't going to stop me from squatting or bench pressing. 

Photo: Milestoned