LESSONS LEARNED FROM 5/3/1

I previously reviewed “5/3/1 Forever” and have announced in many other posts how much I am a fan of the program and Jim’s philosophy.  That having been said, up until recently, I had been co-opting 5/3/1 principles into my own training to suit my specific goals.  After my most recent competition in April of 2017, I had enough downtime that I figured I might as well run some 5/3/1 programs legit and see what happens.  From that time, I ran “Building the Monolith” (which I have reviewed here), a leader and anchor cycle of “God is a Beast” and 3 leaders of “SVR II” before moving on to my own training approach which once again steals from 5/3/1.  I have sense observed some fantastic growth in my own training along with some paradigm shifting, and figured this was as good a time as any to share what lessons I’ve learned and what takeaways you may experience.

1: You don’t need to set PRs in training all the time

Dude, Kaz, we still have 2 more sets

One of the big critiques of 5/3/1 Forever is that “the PR sets are gone!”  What actually happened is that programs have built in leader and anchor cycles, and the PR sets don’t happen till you reach the latter, but in either case, you spend a LOT more time working in the 5 rep range now than you did with 5/3/1 first edition.  I’ll admit that I approached this with trepidation at first as well, because the meathead in me said that, if I’m ALWAYS doing sets of 5, then only the final week of the program is where I’ll really work hard, because the first 2 weeks will be too light.

And then I ended up setting a lifetime PR on the press during the anchor of God is a Beast. 

Solid PR on back bending too

I’m not going to pretend to understand it, but Jim is some sort of alchemist when it comes to training, and the way he structures the programs work in such a way that, when you follow them, you get stronger.  It seems all that time spent grinding away on the sets of 5 over a few cycles sets you up for some big results when you actually go to push for PRs.  In fact, I’m STILL reaping the benefits of this set-up, and despite being now 9 weeks removed from a 5/3/1 program proper, I am smashing PRs in the press every time I train it.  The non-PR sets are where strength is built, and the PR sets are where it is realized.

2: Full body workouts are viable at any level

Although you don't need to do the whole thing all at once

Maybe I’m being presumptuous with that statement as I’m not “advanced”, but odds are, if you’re reading my blog, you aren’t either, so this works for you.  I thought for sure I was beyond this point in my training, and so I used an upper/lower split for years, specifically ala 5/3/1 first edition with a day for benching, squatting, pressing and deadlifting.  However, Building the Monolith got me back into full body training, and Jim’s approach to assistance work has you train the entire body every day, even if the focus is on one movement.  In turn, frequency of muscle group training is high, as is total volume, yet it works in a fashion that is completely recoverable.  Instead of having 1 day where I absolutely hammered my delts, I’d hit them 4-6 times in a week, and get in even more volume.

This has also been a boon for training for strongman competitions, as before I would need to figure out how to fit event training into my 4 days a week of lifting.  Now, I’ve learned how to consolidate my lifting into 3 full body days so that I have more time in the week to focus on event work.  I still get in adequate volume and frequency in lifting, but don’t need to make events an “afterthought”.

3: You can train the same muscle groups many times in a row

In this case, you train none of them all the time

Similar to the above, I was stuck in the mentality that, after you train a muscle group, you have to let it rest for 48ish hours, because of reasons.  This mentality forced my training to be pretty restrictive, and many times my schedule would get chaotic.  However, with 5/3/1’s approach to assistance work being that the full body gets worked every time you train, I found out that it was totally possible to recover training the same muscle groups back to back to back, so long as volume and recovery were accounted for.  Yeah; if you do a full on hour workout just for your shoulders, you shouldn’t touch them again for a few days, but if all you did was 50-100 reps of some raises, you can come back the next day and so some presses and be fine.  And in the end, your total volume for the week will be about the same as if you hammered them for an hour on one day; it’s just a different approach.  This opens up a lot more options for training flexibility and more creative approaches to assistance work.

4: You can’t push supplemental work and main work hard at the same time

I swear to God I will pistol whip the next person that calls this an "accessory exercise"

This was the big revelation in Jim’s “leaders and anchors” approach to training, and something I never wanted to admit to, but was the absolute truth.  The main work in the program tends to be those lifts we are specifically focusing on; for a powerlifting, the big 3, for a strongman, upcoming competition lifts, etc.  We push those lifts hard whenever we’re trying to improve those specific lifts, but when that happens, it means that the supplemental lifts, those additional lifts that DRIVE up the mainlifts, need to throttle back.  Volume or intensity needs to be reduced in order to accommodate for how hard we’re pushing the top stuff.  So what do we do when we want to push the supplemental lifts?  We throttle  back on the main work, hitting hard and heavy but not super taxing sets in order to maintain our ability to move weight and our technique, but still allowing us time to backfill with more work in the supplemental portion.  This is also why, once the leaders are done and one moves onto the anchors, they get to experience so much growth; because resting on the mainwork and pushing the supplemental stuff laid down the foundation for this growth.

I HAVE DECIDED: SOLIPSISM AND TRAINING

Nothing is more powerful than the moment when you have decided on something, for it is at this moment that action can occur and change will be made.  Despite claims to the contrary, we ultimately have the greatest control of our lives.  You can be a stoic ala Aurelius and decide that the power you have is the ability to decide how you react to the world, or you can embrace the very tyranny of your radical freedom ala Sarte and understand that every action you make is a choice, but the end is the same; your actions are a result of when YOU have decided to do or not do something.  But I say you take this even further; cast out all reality and make it merely a product of what it is that you have decided.  Ignore science, good sense, convention, historical evidence and all doubters and let your battle cry be “I have decided!”

Not a bad second choice...yes, I realize this is censored from the original

Bend reality to your warped, fractured and diseased mind, and make it conform to YOU.  Make it such that, when you say “I have decided that I will lose weight and get stronger, despite all claims to the contrary”, it occurs.  “I have decided that I will train one side of my body while the other heals, and encounter no imbalances and only become stronger”, “I have decided that I will become stronger by lifting lighter weights”, “I have decided that I will get better at full ROM work by training partial ROM”, “I have decided that there is no such thing as overtraining”, etc etc.  In all these instances, the power resides in YOU to make things happen.  You are not an agent of reality; reality is an agent of you.  It is YOUR reality to bend, shape and beat into conformity, and you make it happen because YOU have decided it will happen. 

This means shutting out the negativity of others that refuse to take control of your reality.  Those that will quote studies at you, that assert their own failures at your attempts, that degrade your intelligence, that mock you by calling you crazy.  Crazy as a mockery?  That is true insanity; being crazy is the way that one becomes different, and different is a side-step away from average, allowing growth into something more.  Read your Focault; what was classified as “insane” was traditionally simply those behaviors that drew too much attention to the very failings of society.  You exemplify these failings WITH your success.  You should be so lucky that your methods are considered ridiculous by others, because those sane people are getting some pretty sane results.

It is amazing how many times I try to use this as a punchline and it ends up refuting the paragraph above it

I’ve done this many times in my life.  The instant I blew out my knee, I decided right then that I would do whatever it takes to heal and come back bigger and stronger than before.  Making that decision in that moment set me up to do what it took to accomplish my goals.  It meant getting surgery, training whatever I could, and using every tool I had access to for my recovery, and it meant I came back and won my first show post surgery.  I did the same thing the first time I decided to drop weight, in that I decided I wasn’t going to get weaker while it happened, and ended up dropping 30lbs while breaking through a 3 year deadlift plateau, hitting a 601lb deadlift at a bodyweight of 181 after failing to clear 550 at 217lbs 3 years prior.  Once the decision was made, it was up to me to execute it.

You won’t be beholden to what others have decided FOR you, because YOU have decided instead.  And this holds true for your negative decisions too.  Went on a 2 day ice cream bender because “the cravings got the best of me?”  Negative; YOU decided to indulge.  This was a choice, and you made it; embrace your empowerment.  Slept in and skipped a morning training session because you “really needed the sleep?”  Untrue; YOU decided to skip training.  Again, embrace your empowerment; how absolutely fortunate you are to HAVE such autonomy.  You are the ultimate arbiter of your own success and failure; what freedom!  The freedom to dictate if you reach your goals or never meet them; the freedom to be something great or something average, and all it takes is for you to make the decision. 

I CHOOSE THIS!

And when you make that decision, OWN that decision.  If you decide to skip training or eat poorly, admit that it was a decision you made, because that empowers you to also UNMAKE that decision in the future.  You are still in control of your reality and your destiny, and in being control you have the freedom to make poor choices just as much as you have the freedom to make good ones, but in all instances, the results are the product of something that YOU have decided.  When you attempt to pawn off your actions on outside forces, all you are doing is removing power from yourself.  As unintuitive as it may seem, you are much stronger when you decide you will not train than when the decision to train is removed from you and vested in outside cosmic forces.  The man who is able to decide his own fate will always be stronger than the one who is a mere victim of circumstance, for the latter, no matter how strong fate has made them, lacks power over the self.  And in turn, one who decides to fail STILL holds more power than one who fails because of circumstances.        

I have decided.  No one else decides but I.  And once I have decided, I will act in accordance with my decision.  Let it be your mantra.  Let no reality exist that is not the reality that you chose to create; the you decide to create.  Let nothing happen unless it is within your will; unless you got to say “I have decided it is so”.

NOT DRUGS, NOT GENETICS, JUST CRAZY

Lord help me I’ve been on the internet again, and I have a feeling one of you is to blame.  Someone took the photos I posted way back on entry 1 when this whole thing got started and uploaded them to a subreddit with the goal of determining if the person in the photo is natural or on steroids.  From there, much comedy unfolded, but thankfully with it came an opportunity to write, learn and educate, and thus I have the chance to write this post.  The more you get exposed to the paradigms of others, the more you get to understand your own operating paradigm, and through this process we find where the disconnects exists.  Fundamentally, during this experience, those that originally assumed I was a non-natural trainee discovered that the difference between them and I didn’t exist on a chemical level, nor did it exist on a biological level, but simply on a cognitive level.  It wasn’t drugs, it wasn’t genetics; it was being crazy.

Maybe even THIS crazy

The debate over my photos went in a pretty predictable pattern. First, accusations of steroid usage were based purely upon the appearance of certain bodyparts, because that’s apparently a thing now.  Somehow, WADA can’t tell if someone is on drugs unless they knock on their door at 0400 and demand a urine sample right there on the spot during the off season, but meanwhile there is a crack team of superheroes on the internet that can manage this amazing feat with just a photograph.  From there, they used alleged statistics to for certain know that I was on steroids, to include my height and weight combined with the exact bodyfat percentage they were able to determine from some blurry photographs.  Once again, I had to go sit naked and fasted in a bodpod with a swim cap on to get my bodyfat measured to within a 2% margin of error, but these experts have eyeballs that are so highly calibrated that they can tell within a fraction of a percentage, and they of course have SERIOUS hardcore studies to back up their findings.  And then, once that was all said and done, they looked at my youtube channel and from there could absolutely conclude I was on steroids, because I was “above elite” on lifts.  And again, these “elite” determinations were taken from a SERIOUS website that had lots of graphs and numbers that absolutely concluded without a doubt what was in fact an elite lift, irrespective of the fact that most of those very elite lifts wouldn’t even grant you entry into World’s.  But, once again, I digress.

Some were willing to concede to the ability that I may in fact be the natural trainee that I am, but from there we went in an equally silly direction; superior genetics.  The fact that I’m 32 and have been training in some manner since I was 14, and had been engaged in athletics since I was 6, was of zero consequence to the discussion; I simply MUST be in possession of superior genetics.  It’s the “no true scotsman” all over again, where the end result dictates the method, rather than the other way around.  Not only did I have these superior genetics, but with it I was apparently beholden to a moral imperative wherein I MUST “share my secret” with the rest of the natural trainee world, once again disregarding the fact I’ve been writing a free blog once a week for over 5 years now.  Since I was “gifted”, I now owed it to the world to share my gift.

Another gift no one really wants

And from here, things took a real interesting turn.  I refuted the charge of superior genetics under the baseline that, traditionally, one does not consider needing to train hard for 18 years to accomplish something an indication of superior genetics, and shared that I have had to make sacrifices along the way in terms of health.  Things turned ugly here, as people became outright upset that I would dare to get injured in pursuit of getting bigger and stronger.  The sheer notion was abhorrent, and I was called things such as irrational and crazy.  And I don’t refute that.  I am both of those things…but I am also big and strong.  And my goal was never to be rational or sane.

This is where we find the disconnect, and why large demographics of people have come to assume that anyone more successful than them must be using performance enhancing drugs; these people are operating under the paradigm that everyone ELSE must be as preoccupied with avoiding injury and being rational as they are.  These people cannot fathom the notion of someone willing to push hard enough that injuries occur, that pain is encountered, that sacrifices get made.  They believe that all people engaged in the pursuit of getting bigger and stronger do so thinking that being big and strong would be dandy, but being injury free is the goal.  They believe no one would want to blow out all the blood vessels in their face on a super ugly max effort set where form goes out the window and you just hold on and grind until the rep is over.  And when you believe that everyone else is training with the exact same lack of intensity as you are, it’s easy to believe that anyone achieving superior results must be using some sort of chemical assistance to get you there.

Sure, Lance Armstrong WAS juicing, but he ALSO didn't look like this when he trained

This is what I harp on when I talk about how some folks just plain don’t understand what effort means, and in turn, why they don’t get the results they want.  They’ll swear up and down on a stack of Bibles that they’re always busting their ass at the gym, but the truth is, they’re only pushing as hard as their own internal governor is allowing them.  They’ll approach right to the point where progress may finally start happening, and immediately ramp back down before they run the risk of actually succeeding.  And they’ll spin their wheels for years and make marginal progress at best, and assume this is an indication that they’ve reached their genetic limit.  Bullcrap.  Your genetics have TONS of potential, but they need to be unlocked, and that occurs through significant and consistent stressors that push you well outside your comfort zone and FORCE growth as the only possible recourse.  And yes, this is riding a razor’s edge, and it means sometimes you’ll push too hard and get hurt, but it’ll ALSO mean that, even while hurt you’re still ahead of the people refusing to do so.

I suppose the lesson out of all this rambling is that, if you see someone more successful than you, maybe it’s because they “cheat”, maybe it’s because they’re gifted, but maybe it’s because they’re simply working harder than you are because they are crazy.