BUT BEGINNERS SHOULDN’T

One of the constant criticisms I hear in regards to my writing is that everything I write is all well and good for an experienced trainee “but beginners shouldn’t” X.  It’s all well and good for an experienced trainee to focus on technique rather than form, for an experienced trainee to train in a weakened state, for an experienced trainee to hit stupid dropsets and stripsets, for an experienced trainee to keep pushing volume until they break, etc etc, but a beginner shouldn’t.  There are SO many guardian angels for beginners out there that it’s a goddamn miracle how many weak beginners are out there spinning their wheels for years.  Where are the results for the hard work of all these valiant guardians?  Why, with so many helpful, watchful eyes out there dictating what is good and not good for beginners, do we still see SO many beginners struggling with just the basics?  It’s because your mother henning has made them soft, weak, and fearful.  You’ve spent so much time preoccupied on what beginners SHOULDN’T do that you’ve completely forgotten exactly what it is that they SHOULD do.

It sounds better when he says it

First, let’s start with the obvious: I don’t write for beginners.  I don’t write for anyone but myself.  I’ve said many times that this blog is for me; it forces me to write about 1000 words a week and get rambling thoughts out of my head and onto paper, much like what is happening here.  The cautionary tale for beginners is unwarranted, especially when considering that my sphere of influence is GREATLY diminished, as I have minimal social media profile nor do I engage in self-promotion.  All of THAT aside, the warnings are STILL silly, because they seem to operate from people who must have forgotten what it was like to be a beginner.

I haven’t forgotten.  It’s been 19 years and I still remember.  I still remember saving up cash to buy a standard bench and dumbbell set from Play it Again sports at age 14, putting it in my backyard with a tarp over it to protect it from the elements, and doing bench and dumbbell curls 5-7 days a week on it.  I still remember that bench giving me the confidence to train in my high school weight room, where me and my buddies would take turns trying to max out on every machine and barbell lift possible.  I still remember slinging iron with wild abandon, not having any idea that there was a “right” pair of shoes to wear, how to brace, optimal training frequency, protein timing, MRV, low testosterone markers, fatigue management, etc etc.  And I STILL remember that, after a few years of that, people started considering me big and strong.

 
You gotta keep in mind that, as you keep training, the standards keep getting worse

I STILL remember getting into my college weight room, which was a dank little poorly outfitted afterthought that was STILL twice the size of my high school weight room, my eyes lighting up, and deciding I was going to get “serious” with my training and start a bodypart split.  Yes, the same kinds of splits that the internet SWEARS “don’t work”.  I remember gaining 20lbs in college while STILL having no idea what I was doing: just training hard, training often, and eating very well.  How did you forget?

How did you forget that it was effort, intensity and consistency that got you to where you are?  How did you forget that people had been getting big and strong for decades without ANY real knowledge of training?  How did you forget that what is now called “bro-science” was the stuff that WORKED?  And now, here you are, saying that ADVANCED trainees can get away with training hard, often and for a long time, but that BEGINNERS need to do something super duper special?  That beginners are just fragile little snowflakes that will rupture the instant they do anything outside of the party approved method for training?

Oh hey, a new one

“But if they fail, they’ll get discouraged and quit!”  Let them!  Folks, anyone who is going to quit the instant they meet resistance is simply not long for this activity.  It does you no good to coddle, protect and “save” them from themselves.  If the ONLY way they’ll stay on the path is by encountering nothing but success along the way, not only are they simply not going to last, but they’re also going to miss out on the ACTUAL value of training: learning how to overcome adversity. And I say this understanding how sheltered it is to say such a thing, but that’s the point.  For many of you, this is going to be the ONLY adversity you really have to overcome, and that is especially true for those beginners that are ready to quit as soon as they encounter failure.  If your first instinct is to quit, follow that instinct.  Find another hobby.  It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine.  I quit guitar for the same reason.  But if you have some tenacity and wherewithal to hit a wall and decide to figure out how you’re going to get past it, you might just make it.

There are no restrictions or limitations on what a beginner should or shouldn’t do.  They should absolutely copy the routines that are too high in volume, they should train like people far more accomplished than themselves, they should push their limits too far, burnout, fail hard, and crash.  The ones that survive are going to be pretty awesome.  “But that’s survivor bias!”  I certainly hope so.  Not everyone is going to succeed, and it’d be MUCH better for you to figure that out at the start of your journey rather than be 5 years deep because you followed every possible path that WOULDN’T lead to failure only to discover that the absence of failure isn’t success: it’s simply ambivalence.  But hey, maybe, just maybe, there are a LOT more survivors than failures among the population, and all we have to do is LET them go out on their own to figure it out.  Maybe just hitting the weight room hard for a few years will get you some results, the same way it gets results for thousands of high school kids every single year.  Maybe we’ll be surprised from the results, and maybe we’ll start saying that the only thing beginners shouldn’t do is go online and listen to every guru that comes along with minimal accomplishments and a lot of youtube videos.

I genuinely have no idea who this is, but he seems to pop up a lot on the topic of lifting

All I can do is hope.

ON WEIRDNESS: A STEP SIDEWAYS IS A STEP FORWARD IF YOU CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Recently, my post “What Have You Done To The Farmer’s Walk” was posted on a thread on the fitness subreddit, wherein many posters took exception to me having written about how the average person is en route to being average, and emulating them is how you end up being average.  This was taken as elitism, denigrating average people, and hipsterism purely for the sake of counter-culturalism.  I make no apologies for what I think or write in that regard, but moreso I feel a need to elaborate further on this, as it seems worth further elaboration.  The fact of the matter is that it is simply the truth that, if you do what everyone else does, you will get the results everyone else is getting.  To expect otherwise is simply madness.  What this, in turn, speaks to is the value of being different simply for the sake of being different.  People demean this concept and talk to “special snowflakes” and all other demeaning names, but again, consider the reality of it. Doing what average people do makes you average.  Doing what average people don’t do makes you NOT average, and maybe it won’t be greater than average necessarily, but it will be DIFFERENT than average, and different from average is at least A step closer to greater than average.  You may not always be stepping forward, but sometimes a step sideways is a step forward when viewed from a different perspective.

Trust me: it's going to get worse

I’ll level with you right now and tell you I have no idea where I’m going with this and that this piece is a total stream of consciousness, but join me for the ride will you?  It’s no secret that I’m a misanthrope.  I am a major non-fan of humanity.  I have said that Thanos lacked ambition, and I apologize if I managed to spoil an old comic book storyline for you with that last bit, but you get the picture.  Of course, misanthropy tends to be, like most prejudices, based off of stereotypes that are amalgamated regarding the majority of a demographic.  And quite frankly, the majority of humans are lacking.  That’s what makes them the majority.  It is what makes them average.  In turn, emulating them is hoping to be them, and this, in turn, is hoping to be something very uninspiring.  And I assume, dear reader, that if you read a blog tangentially based around training to become bigger and stronger, you have a vested interest in becoming bigger and stronger, both compared to your current self AND compared to the average baseline of humanity.  So, once again, why do what everyone else is doing if you hope to be different from everyone else?

And that’s the word we focus on here: different, not necessarily better.  Bigger and stronger is an outlier, as is smaller and weaker.  In both instances, you find yourself in that 10% part of the bell curve on either end, which is, at least, DIFFERENT than average.  To be different than average, one must do the things that are different than average.  Quite simply, one must be “weird”.  They must be off-beat, counter cultural, different, barbaric, alien, foreign, strange, etc, because all of these things are DIFFERENT than average, which in turn promotes a possibility of being GREATER than average.  If you simply do what the average person does, you have a 100% chance of being average.  If you do something that is DIFFERENT than average, you now stand a 50/50 shot of being greater than average, with the other possibility being to be less than average.  But hell, given a 50% chance of failure vs 100% failure, what odds would you take?

Although this is that 50% chance that will 100% of the time result in failure

What are the ramifications of this thought process?  It means you need to start listening, paying attention, and observing the trends around you.  And when you start hearing the same things repeated over and over, ad naseum, it’s time to start doing something OTHER than that.  This is legitimately how I achieved the best results I’ve managed.  Need to give muscles 48-72 hours to rest?  Time to start training everyday.  Need to eat carbs to grow?  Time to cut them out.  Deads have to be deadstop?  Touch and go only for years.  Need to stretch and do mobility work?  Time to cut out the warm ups.  Cardio kills gains?  Up the cardio.  Take time off for injuries?  Train 2 days post surgery.  The advice you hear the most frequently and with the greatest volume is the advice that resonates the greatest with the majority and, in turn, the advice that, if followed, will make you average.

Think of how often a superior trainee puts on a superior display and the majority rushes to rationalize it to fit within their paradigm to avoid cognitive dissonance.  “Oh, that trainee can only do those things because they are the genetic elite/on steroids/lucky/going to get injured ANY day now/fake plates/photoshop/actually a government engineered superhuman powered by the earth’s sun/Mariusz Pudzianowski (wait, I already said superhuman, crap), etc.”  Perhaps, instead, we should consider that MAYBE we observe those that are greater than average doing things DIFFERENT than the average trainee because these differences are HOW one becomes greater.  We see the “cheating” technique on lifts and say it’s something they can “get away with”, NOT considering that MAYBE it’s the thing that helped MAKE the difference.  Instead of diligently running the party program with the party technique, these individuals BECAME individuals, established themselves as different from the pack, and parlayed that difference into greatness.

*Psh* Everyone knows you have to be fat, tall and slow to be a strongman

This is NOT a call for you to go onto some poor forum and inflict yourself upon them, asking them to tailor make a program specifically to your needs.  That’s not being different: that is asking for the MAJORITY to help tailor the knowledge of the majority specifically to you in order to become a paragon OF the majority.  This is a call for you to find those things that no one else is doing and go do them, in the pursuit of getting results that are in any way DIFFERENT from the results everyone else is getting.  Maybe, sometimes, those results will be worse and you’ll have to start over.  But maybe, sometimes, they’ll be better than what everyone else is getting.  Either way, you’ll be on your way to getting different results, and that is the first step on the path to making yourself different from the norm.  If that means you end up better than the norm, that’s just swell.

NOWHERE TO GO BUT UP

Stalling and a general lack of progress is a crippling fear among the training populace.  Trainees are constantly scouring their sources to look for the secret of continued progress, and constantly self-analyzing to determine if something they are doing could potentially be setting them up to stall, or not progress as fast as possible.  Above all else, the trainee seems to want to never encounter a situation where their training isn’t working.  But why?  Stalls are a blessing, stagnation is a gift, ineffectiveness a joy.  Why is that?  Because now you know what DOESN’T work.  When you identify that, you now have a fantastic baseline to operate off of, because your current approach is failing, and it’s time to do something different.  And that is the joy of failure: when you reach rock bottom, you have nowhere to go but up.

This show was awesome when it was good

Why is that a good thing?  Because rock bottom is the very idea of freedom.  Think about how enslaved you are to the process when it’s working.  You have the faintest of idea of how all the pieces of the process come together, and are operating off a mere hope and a prayer that you continue success.  “But I am well researched!” you say?  How much credit are you giving yourself here on your mastery of human biology and exercise science?  Do you truly have a formal education in it, or are you a mere hobbyist who has read many an abstract and consumed much media on the topic?  I dare say, if the former, you would recognize just how incredibly limited we, as a species, are in understanding the inner workings of our own biology.  We are just now scratching the surface on some basic concepts of how the body operates, and still much of it remains a mystery where, at best we have correlations and observations to guide us.  …but I digress.  The point is, when things are working, it is fear of deviation from the path of success that compels us to act and, in turn, we become stagnant.

But in the face of failure?  NOW we know what doesn’t work; what we’ve been doing.  So now what?  Now we do whatever we want!  There are no more rules to govern us, because the system has FAILED us, and thus we owe it no more loyalty.  It is anarchy of training: anything goes, there is no right or wrong, there are no morals, there are no values, all that matters is to break from the old purely for the sake of doing something, ANYTHING, different than before.  Now is the opportunity to become wild and stupid.  Now we can try that training protocol we read about that seemed way too crazy to actually work (Super Squats anyone?  Or Deep Water?  Or HIT?  Or GVT?  Or Bulgarian?  Etc etc).  Now we can do high carb, low carb, no carb, paleo, keto, IIFYM, super clean, etc.  Now we can do ANYTHING, because we have a baseline of what DOESN’T work established, and as long as we quit doing that, we are making steps toward progress.

Maybe we need to give this a FEW more tries, just to be safe

And what if that next plan fails?  How fantastic: we found something ELSE that doesn’t work!  Do you know how valuable that data is?  For us to be able to continue to rule out ineffective processes?  By determining the ineffective, we determine the de facto effective.  By ruling out those things that will not work for us, we get closer and closer to finding out what is truly effective.  Once again, being at rock bottom is freedom, because we have the ability to continue experimenting, testing, and discovering.

And what are the implications of this notion?  It applies not just to training, but to competition as well.  If you compete, and you come in dead last…you have nowhere to go but up!  When you take first, or place well, you find yourself bound to the protocol of success, and the battle to remain at the top begins.  The pressure mounts, the self-reflection and doubt begins, but for those who have hit rock bottom?  They have the absolute and total freedom to try ANYTHING else.  I came in 4^th in my first 2 strongman competitions and 6^th in my next one, and I had been using the same protocol throughout them.  What I was doing wasn’t working…and I now had the freedom to try something, ANYTHING else, to succeed.  And in doing that, I experimented and found what works, and took second in my next and first in the competition after that, and have since always placed in competition.  Failing in competition was a benefit, because through it I discovered what DIDN’T work, which got me closer to figuring out what does.

Sometimes learning can be painful and frustrating

Failure is freedom.  This is something that needs to be embraced and understood by all trainees.  So many are crippled by the fear of failure that they end up FAILING because they refuse to fail.  Let the insanity of that sink in for a second.  Out of fear of the risk of consequences of experimenting, trainees will stick with an ineffective program simply because it’s the one they know versus trying something new and different and learning from the process.  You will have a LONG time to train.  A failure that takes you off course for 3-6 months is just going to be a blip in the grand scheme of things.  Meanwhile, the lessons you learn from it will be invaluable, and in that 3-6 months of failing, you may very well save yourself 3-6 YEARS of banging your head against the wall trying your absolute hardest to make a failing program succeed.  When you’ve hit rock bottom, you have nowhere to go but up, and honestly, that’s a pretty good direction to start heading.   

FIRST MEET POWERLIFTER: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Like a bad relationship, here I am coming back to powerlifting for reasons I myself don’t completely understand, but now you get to suffer.  This is once again about a phenomenon I observe constantly both on and offline: the almost powerlifter.  The guy that has been training for YEARS, has read every book (read: watched every youtube video[read: viewed every Instagram story{read: scrolled through every tweet}]) on the subject, has favorite lifters in the sport of powerlifting, owns a 13mm belt, squat shoes, Kevlar knee sleeves, every variation of the slingshot…but has never competed in a meet before.  And when asked why, they say “I want to spend a little more time training to make sure I’m ready.”  HUH?!  What insanity is this? How could you possibly get more ready than this?  Seriously: what are you waiting for?!

Seriously, if you own one of these but don't have a total, just start over

Once again, I feel the need to explain what powerlifting is in the context of other sports to understand how truly crazy this is.  In powerlifting, the “game” is the powerlifting meet.  The meet IS powerlifting.  All the time spent in the gym is simply time spent training to play the game.  Understanding that, what other sport on the planet has a following of people who dedicate themselves diligently for YEARS studying every aspect of the sport, buying all the gear, and training before they ever actually play the game?  Before the first time you ever played a pick-up game of basketball, did you train for years, practice your freethrows and strategize how to play defense, or did you and a bunch of friends just grab a ball, find a court, and figure it out as you went?  And you were awful at it.  And it was fine!  It was fine, because you were LEARNING how to play the game.  It’s the same for football, soccer, baseball, or any sport that can be played by 5 year olds.  Hell, my very first wrestling practice in high school, I was taught a double leg takedown and 6 minutes later we were wrestling.  And I sucked at it.  And it was fine!  First you play, THEN you learn.

Why is the play first part important?  Because you have to figure out if you even LIKE the sport in the first place.  Can you imagine what a letdown it would be if little Jonny first picked up a basketball at age 5, dedicated himself for the next 5 years to becoming the best player he could be, diligently practicing and sweating and drilling, only to play his first game at age 10 and discover that he didn’t really find basketball fun and he was more a baseball fan all along?  That can happen with powerlifting!  I’ve competed in 3 meets, and after the third I was done with the sport.  I just didn’t find it interesting.  I didn’t enjoy spending 10 hours to do 9 reps.  I didn’t enjoy how much focus was on form rather than just getting from A to B.  It just didn’t jive with what I thought a strength sport would be.  Thank god I figured that out at age 27 and had time to transition to strongman, where I found something I enjoyed.  Imagine if I had just kept waiting before taking the plunge into a sport I didn’t like.

I also think I'm going to take a pass on the javelin

And powerlifting IS a sport that you can just jump into.  All you have to be able to do is squat and bench a 45lb barbell to compete in a meet.  I honestly have no idea if they can support deads lower than 135lbs due to plate diameter, but whatever, you get the point.  It’s not like strongman, where the loads are determined by the promoter and you can be too weak to participate.  You can find out VERY early in your training career if you even LIKE the sport of powerlifting before you dedicate years, if not decades, “preparing” for your first meet.  And meet experience is invaluable in any capacity, because there is an immense difference between lifting in a gym and lifting in a meet.  Getting THAT sorted out early will only benefit you in the long run. 

So why do people delay?  Let’s be real honest here folks: because they want to win their first meet.  The sheer idea of coming in any other place than first in a competition is so upsetting to people it can cause serious emotional trouble and turmoil.  They will wake up in the middle of the night in a coldsweat fearing coming in second place.  Well hey, here’s some good news for you; the sport of powerlifting is so fractured (at least in the states) that you have a VERY solid chance of coming in first in your first meet…as you may be the only person in your weighclass and division.  If trophy hunting is so important for you, just sign up for 181lb liftetime natural left handed Methodist division and you’ll be set.  Probably set a record too.  However, IF your ego can possibly spare to do bad at something the first time you do it, you may find out that powerlifting is your thing.

I'm serious: EVERYONE will get a medal

Or you might not!  And that’s the point!  Get that sorted out NOW so you can actually vector your training towards A goal.  The amorphous sorta powerlifter hangs around many locales and spends a good amount of time accomplishing nothing, as they truly have no real goals.  They train “like a powerlifter” and they care about their “total”, but with no meet to peak for, no records to chase, no competition to defeat, they just spin their wheels for years.  Someone with a real deal meet on the horizon start transforming their training, things start to matter more, and growth start to happen at rates not previously observed.  When something is actually on the line, you start caring more, and it’s reflected in your training.  When the only thing that’s on the line is your ego in a not for real possible future meet, you’ll end up sandbagging your training so that you never actually ARE “ready” to compete, as that is the only way to truly ensure your feelings are spared.

Go do a meet and see if you even like powerlifting.  What are you waiting for?

I know my regular readers were waiting for this photo

And once you’re done with that meet and you find out powerlifting is boring, go compete in storngman.