#brosci; The Mufa Years; Concert Ready Fitness
I take on bro science, again, with 4 posts.
Images in this post were shockingly easy to make with some creative prompts
Bro Science
Social media feeds me clickbait from UniLad, BroBible, LADbible, and other pages that seem like copy-paste of the same content with tiny changes to branding. It’s honestly wild to hear BuzzFeed is struggling while this model thrives.
Was Buzzfeed the good guys?!
To be clear, I’m in my 30s and don’t follow any of this crap. I prefer my brainrot to come from classic cartoons, not hourly BS articles from WorldStarHipHop or some other e-tabloid that deliberately twists stories to farm clicks.
Anyway. Back to dumbbells in a “FREE FREE PUBLICITY!” world where each of these sites gets #poli-charged.
A viral video recently showed a Texas Tech football player joking that the team removed all weights under 40 pounds from the locker room. Naturally, the internet immediately ran with it.
It is a place that, at the same time, was convinced Bibi was dead, then, after he produced a video, insisted it was AI, then asked why there aren’t more videos of him during the war and insisted that IRGC are the good guys.
Page after page treated a joke like breaking news. Fitness experts weighed in on the dangers of taking a joke serious. Reaction videos popped up. Everyone had a strong opinion about Texas Tech’s Chads.
Football players rely on explosive strength, which absolutely involves lifting heavy. But, yes, if a football team actually removed all dumbbells under 40 pounds (18 kilo), that would be dumb. Doy.
Even the strongest athletes on earth use light weights. Shoulder isolation work, rotator cuff exercises, rehabilitation work, stabilization drills… those often involve dumbbells far lighter than 40 pounds. No matter who.
But that’s where we’re at: people take jokes literally, get mad, insist the people who get it are dumb. [See “Not the Bee” comments on an article about the UK not arresting pedos, many insisting they missed an Epstein joke that their article actually starts off by explaining.]
Which brings me to the strange part of this post.
As someone who doesn’t even watch sports, I’m about to repost a sports article just to get the story straight.
The site is called Football Scoop. If you like football, maybe check them out. IDK. At least they did the responsible thing and published the correction, a few hours before I was inspired to do the same. Here’s the article if you want to read it on their site and pay them one click:
https://www.footballscoop.com/2026/03/16/texas-tech-officials-respond-to-viral-video-regarding-40-pound-dumbells-or-less-in-weight-room-adam-breneman-joey-mcguire-red-raiders
[Also, TIL while writing this: LADbible Group bought UniLad in 2018 after UniLad ran into financial trouble. Which means two separate clickbait factories pretending to be the frat-boy version of BuzzFeed are now literally owned by the same company. The other “bro bible” site, BroBible, isn’t connected. Except in the sense that they look and feel identical. Really, if you told me they were all secretly owned by Barstool Sports, I’d believe you.]
Skip past the repost read why I might actually be bad luck for sports teams and my new fitness concept.
brrrrooooo like really?
Texas Tech responds to viral video claiming they've banned dumbbells under 40 pounds
Doug Samuels; Mar 16, 2026
Few folks have burst onto the social media scene the past several seasons like Adam Breneman has.
A former tight end at Penn State and UMass, Breneman had a brief coaching career at Arizona State under Herm Edwards before he began to carve out a name for himself in the sports media space.
Now several seasons into his off season tour around the country talking to some of college football's top coaches, one of Breneman's most recent stops was at the impressive facility that Texas Tech has put together.
While there's a "Wow" factor everywhere you look in Lubbock with some of their recent upgrades, including locker room that Breneman believes is the best in the country, one of the clips touring the facility went viral over the weekend.
The clip took place in the weight room where one of the hosts mentioned that the staff had banned dumbbells under 40 pounds.
"We're not going to be weak," the host in camera view shares to open the clip. "[Coaches] are like, 'If you want to do something like side raises or something, you're still going to have to do 40's"
Breneman chuckled and asked if it was actually true that there were no dumbbells under 40 pounds before walking over to a rack and seeing for himself the lightest weights there were in fact 40's.
That prompted Breneman to share a story from his Penn State days, where a coach removed all the 2.5 pound weights, with the logic that if you can do 2.5 pounds more, you can do 5 pounds more.
Below is the clip.
[No it isn’t, because I’m banned on IG now]
The clip had been seen over 5.6 million times since posting on Saturday, and while some of the internet loved and applauded the move, there were more than a few critics, and while it would seem the majority of those are nothing more than armchair strength experts concerned about (rather obvious) potential injuries, there were some high profile critics like former NFL Defensive MVP JJ Watt who knows a thing or two about proper training and took to X to call out the move as "wildly absurd and irresponsible."
[I don’t have X either]
The video prompted a response from a Texas Tech spokesperson, who told Chron: "We do have weights less than 40 pounds in that facility, just not in that area they were touring on video. Those less than 40 pound weights are maybe a 10 second walk from that area."
"We have a state-of-the-art weight room and training facility that opened a year ago, and the most important aspect of our program and this facility is the health and rehabilitation of our players."
The Red Raiders entered last fall with one of the most expensive rosters in college football, and wildly high expectations to match, and finished the year 12-2 and Big 12 champions before losing to Oregon in the opening round of the College Football Playoff. Joey McGuire's squad figures to be a contender for a national title again this season as they reload at some key spots to make a College Football Playoff run.
Chat GPT wouldn’t let me use Courage the Cowardly Dog, but you know what I’m referencing.
Guy: The Mufa Years
Hold up, there’s a man name Chron??? Anyway, this post reminded me of something else: my extremely unlucky history with sports. So I decided to write about it.
As someone with diverse friends, I often had bro-y friends asking me to watch games or play sports games with them. I hated it. Unless we’re talking the real man’s sport: Speech & Debate.
The biggest reason was probably my disability (read Stories Involving My Disability for a quick laugh), which made both myself and others worried about me getting injured when I tried to play American football or “everywhere else fútball,” the only two sports I ever really played.
The only team I ever played on was a 6th grade fútbol team. I refused to run laps during practice citing my disability, even though I ran up and down the field during games just fine.
The entire season our team scored two goals. One of them was an accidental own goal off a bad header, meaning the other team technically scored it for us. And I wasn’t even present the day the real goal happened.
So I developed a theory that I might be bad luck for sports teams.
The Italians call people like me la iella, basically a jinx. In Latin America they call it mufa. I personally don’t believe in sports superstition, but sports fans do. And my track record is their proof.
First, I went to a Jewish middle school one year after they had a Black basketball coach whose story was literally Disney turned into a movie. The film is Full-Court Miracle (2003), based on Coach Lamont Carr, who coached at the Hebrew Academy in Philadelphia (and South Florida’s DKJA). Yes, Jews being taught to play basketball apparently counted as a feel-good sports movie in the early 2000s, a decade that loved the “inspirational outsider coach” trope.
Side note: the movie took creative liberties, and according to people who knew him, the real coach was barely compensated for the story rights and continued coaching afterward.
Then came high school.
I attended Atlantic Community High School in Delray Beach, which had a reputation for being pretty good in Florida high school football. Naturally, the team started playing terribly the year I got there.
At one of the few games I attended there was a crowd disturbance that led to pepper spray being used in the stands, which is so #FloridaMan . At another game with our rival school Boca Raton High, there was a massive brawl that led to a ban on my school visiting theirs.
Then I went to the University of Florida in 2010, which turned out to be the exact wrong moment to leave SoFL and become a Gators fan. #gogators anyways.
Tim Tebow had just left for the NFL after the 2009 season, ending one of the most successful eras in Florida football history. The Gators immediately became bad, even as naive fans insisted “next years our year.”
Meanwhile, my ex-local team, the Miami Heat, went on a historic run with four straight NBA Finals appearances (2011–2014) and two championships (2012 and 2013). I personally believe my absence from SoFl was the Heat’s missing ingredient, not the $millions spent assembling the “Big Three” of LeBron, Wade and Bosh.
In 2010 I also “coached” a team of friends in an intramural rec league. The joke was that I genuinely had no idea what coaching advice to give. Instead I would just draw stupid things on a whiteboard before games to add comedy to a laughably bad team.
Never winning a game was predictable. But a string of six consecutive game cancellations was not.
In 2011–2012 I dated a Florida Panthers cheerleader, which I mention purely to brag. The Panthers were not great at the time. In 2013 they dropped the “Lady Panthers” cheer squad, which I cannot blame myself for, but like to.
A decade later they finally became Stanley Cup champions, twice, which conveniently happened while I was living in Israel. So I guess with ice hockey my curse was more of an East Coast thing than a regional thing. And since ice hockey has become USA vs Canada, that checks. [Get it? Sports!]
In 2015 I moved to the DMV. Their teams got worse. You get the point.
My sports luck only shifted when I met my fiancée, and boy did it shift. She’s Latin… so a huge fútbol fan. The year we met, Argentina won the World Cup. I watched each game. The next year, her favorite club Racing Club had an incredible season. They won the only game I attended, a big reverse from virtually every other game I attended.
Clearly Maru reversed whatever sports curse I had been carrying around.
Which brings us back to fitness and music, because that’s something I do know + I discovered the most practical workout in existence.
Note: I’ve written my serious thoughts on fitness in Guidance Space, “Guy’s Fitness Guide”, a thing I wrote out of pure spite for the stream of influencers pissing out new workout “secrets” to stay relevant in a field that is not nearly as complex as they pretend it is. OK, it requires about 10-pages to explain. That’s not so much.
Note 2: I also wrote about why women are good at hip thrusts.
What’s stopping you from tryng this?
Concert Ready Fitness
After attending a festival, I would like to propose a new fitness style: exercises you do while someone sits on your shoulders.
Here’s just a few options:
Shoulder Squats: Standard squats while carrying a person on your shoulders.
Danger Lunges: Step forward into lunges while balancing your passenger.
Festival Walks: Walk through seas of people with someone on your shoulders. Don’t trip!
Reach-the-Top-Shelfs: Stand on your hippy-tippy-toes while your shoulder-riding partner grabs items that would normally be out of reach.
Each one incorporates the most important movement of all: trying to balance enough that the person on top doesn’t get terrified.
The concept is simple. Instead of loading a barbell on your back, or building calluses all over your palms with heavy dumbbells and lame wraps, you simply put a person on your shoulders and exercise. Ideally to good music.
Before you @me, I know, I know, there are some safety concerns. All good training has some danger. You think Arnold or Sam Sulek got to their physiques by playing it safe all the time?! I don’t.
So let’s just look past the poor weight progression, questionable load placement, difficulty maintaining consistency, cervical spine compression, and the major falling risk. I told you, it’s fine! People are on Ozempic, so don’t worry.
Instead, let’s think about the benefits (assuming you’ve squatted at least once in your life).
First off, gym workouts isolate muscles using movements that almost never happen in real life. That’s why Nathan Fielder’s “The Movement” made so much sense.
You might lift groceries into your house. You never need to curl them repeatedly.
You might go upstairs. You never need to go up and down the same step twenty times in a row, unless you have extremely debilitating CDO (OCD, but the letters are in the right order).
Now carrying someone on your shoulders? That’s useful.
Maybe for a quick video at a concert, while the people behind you get mad. Maybe to show off. Maybe because someone’s injured but also weirdly good at sitting perfectly balanced.
You got your stabilizer muscles, constantly shifting weight and adjusting posture. Your core, hips, and back are all engaged just to keep the passenger balanced. Probably some other things too!
Next, think about how practical this style is.
No gym membership required.
No machines.
No waiting for someone to finish their set while they stare at their phone.
Just find a willing volunteer or hope they forgive you afterward.
Humans have been putting friends on their shoulders for thousands of years. Why not you?
It’s time to call it what it really is: functional training.
I promise you, your quads are going to feel it the next day.
Get motivated today. When else do workouts involve laughter? When else do you get to test how many people can form a human ladder? When else do you not just get to workout with a friend, but with a friend as the equipment.
Develop a real life skill with Concert Ready Fitness!
Legal Disclaimer: This is obviously a joke and not serious advice. If you try this and get injured, please do not sue me. But if a cute hunk or babe’s thighs end up squashing your head during the process, you’re welcome to thank me later.
