DEFEATING THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

Let my flex my big liberal arts degree brain and talk some basic game theory (which is, of course, the only level of game theory they expose poli-sci majors to).  For those of you unfamiliar with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a VERY brief crash course goes like this: let’s say you and another person work together to commit a crime, and you both get caught.  You’re taken to separate rooms and told that, if YOU rat out your friend and they don’t do the same to you, then your friend goes to jail for 10 years and you go free.  If neither of you talk, you both get 2 years of prison.  If your friend rats you out and you don’t rat them out, you go to jail for 10 years.  HOWEVER, if you both rat each other out, you both get 8 years of prison.  Go look it up if you need more details, but the Dilemma is this: the BEST outcome is technically neither one of you talking, because it’s the lowest amount of prison time in total, BUT, it requires you to trust the OTHER person not to talk.  Of course, doubt creeps in, and you wonder if you’re going to not talk while your partner talks, so then you decide your best move is to talk, and now you’re both looking at 8 years in prison: not the MAXIMUM sentence for an individual, but the maximum amount of time that could possibly be served.

For some, prison is less a dilemma and more a vacation

I first learned about this dilemma as an undergrad, and it will shock none of my regular readers to know that I was just as much a deviant then as I am today, which is to say, initially upon hearing it, I had a solution to the dilemma: tell your partner you’re going to rat him out.  When you’re both in the squad car, riding to the police station, given your right to be silent, look over at your partner and crime and tell them “Hey, just so you know, I’m ratting you out as soon as we get to the station, so you might as well do the same thing.”  How is this a solution, you may ask.  This is electing to receive the WORST outcome possible.  Yes: but it solves the DILEMMA: now there is no longer any doubt, fear, anxiety, or any pressure to make any decisions anymore.  The outcome is now determined: now all that’s left to do is react.

Specifically what I love about this solution is that it robs power from those that feel empowered.  The authorities “place” you in the dilemma, and you hop right out because you CHOOSE the worst fate, rather than end up with it.  And now that THAT’S over, you can move on to other things, like working on your escape plan, or finding the best lawyer, or deciding which gang you’re going to join in prison, or just ANYTHING other than the prisoner’s dilemma.  You have radically shifted the dynamic from being completely out of control to totally in control of your fate. Things are back on your terms.

"I CHOOSE this!"

You have this power in life.  You are NEVER in a Prisoner’s Dilemma unless you CHOOSE to be.  Otherwise, your fate is yours to choose.  This is true in your training.  You can try to fight your fate, or you can choose it and move on to planning your prison break.  You are not in a dilemma with your genetics: you choose to maximize them.  Your injury is not a dilemma: you now choose to move forward with the injury.  And for the love of Crom, “should I bulk or should I cut” is NOT a goddamn Prisoner’s Dilemma: pick A choice and then go with it.

Because this is the thing about the Prisoner’s Dilemma: the dilemma is NOT about the fate you end up with: it’s that your power to control your fate has been robbed from you.  The dilemma is that your fate rests in the hands of others.  Specifically, the terms and conditions of the outcome are being set by the authorities, while achieving the “best” outcome depends upon another person to act in a specific way.  THAT is the dilemma: YOUR powerlessness in that situation.  But you can CHOOSE to still be powerful when you deny others the ability to control your fate.  You make the whole system crumble because you refuse to let the outside world dictate what is the ideal outcome.  The ideal outcome is the one wherein you got to choose your destiny.

Sartre would elect to just shut off the game

This is what frustrates me with so many trainees breaking out the spreadsheets and the MRV calculators and the studies on protein synthesis compared to optimal training frequency: they elect to make themselves powerless.  They WANT to be put into a prisoner’s dilemma, because they WANT to surrender their power.  They draw out the perfect diagram to illustrate how their success is totally and completely outside their hands, noting how genetics have to align perfectly with optimal training protocol and injury avoidance and so many things that are just outside their scope of control, and then they can just wallow and lament how much they have no ability to achieve their goals.  And honestly, it’s because it’s far more terrifying when your fate rests squarely in your own hands vs the hands of others.

Take back your power and choose your fate.  The truth is, the worst possible outcome in the Prisoner’s Dilemma ISN’T the outcome that results in the greatest prison time in total: it’s the outcome that is outside YOUR control.  An outcome that depends on the cooperation of external factors is far worse an outcome than one that you chose, as the former relied on the surrendering of your power.  Pick your fate and start planning your next move.

And hey, while you’re in prison, maybe they’ll let you lift some weights.    

THE FREEDOM OF LIMITATIONS

In the past, I have written of “the tyranny of freedom”, and today I come to argue the other side of the equation in the freedom OF limitations.  Yes, once again I must clarify that, despite my propensity for typos due to the nature of how I write, I do in fact mean freedom OF limitations rather than from.  What, specifically, I mean to discuss in the fact that, in truth, it is the granting of limitations that ultimately give many trainees the freedom they so desperately crave in their training.  Oftentimes, trainees find themselves paralyzed and hamstrung due to the absence of limitations in their training, for without limitation they are given such absurd degree of freedom of choice that they feel a complete inability to make any decision and commit to any action.  Ultimately, these trainees feel compelled to make the BEST decision when given no limitations, and in their attempt to discover the best decision, they find they cannot make any decision.  Enter limitations.

They're telling you to keep calm when there are no limits because you SHOULD be panicking

Once limitations enter the decision making matrix, suddenly the trainee has MUCH more freedom, for now they’ve been obviated of the obligation to make the best decision.  They must NOW, instead, make the best decision for right NOW.  We’ve gone from Plato’s forms to Machiavelli’s realism, and the latter is FAR more easier to operate within than the former.  Once there are a few hardset rules of engagement that one MUST operate within, certain elements are removed from the table and we must instead work with what we have.  Sometimes this occurs in the realm of injury removing certain movements from our training, sometimes it’s a time constraint, sometimes it’s an equipment constraint, etc etc, but no matter what the situation, SOMETHING forces the training to adapt and overcome in their planning. 

And this is, in turn, where we experience so MUCH freedom, because now we are freed from the yoke of having to make the absolute BEST decision.  Instead of “how do I build the best program” it’s “how do I build the best program WITHOUT bending my knee” or “with ONLY 225lbs of weight” or “with ONLY 1 hour of training time”.  These massive, wide-swath cutting restrictions force the trainee into making decisions to operate the best within a certain paradigm, and from here, decisions are far easier to make.  No longer is it about making the best decisions in total, but simply the best decisions for that moment in time.

Like maybe deciding not to show up for the fight...

This is the BLESSING of limitations, yet so many trainees lament them as a curse.  How bizarre.  And fundamentally, it boils down to a complete unwillingness to alter one’s approach and one’s thinking.  How many times have you seen a trainee in a ridiculously overstocked gym only to go “My gym doesn’t have a reverse hyper.  HOW am I going to run conjugate now?!”  Or they complain about how they only have an hour to train, or only 3 days a week to train, or are injured, or only have so much weight available, etc etc.  Here they are, being granted freedom from the responsibility of training the absolute BEST, and they complain.  They wallow in misery and defeat, rather than maximizing the blessing of being able to train creatively.  NOW is your chance to have real freedom.

But why wait until you are FORCED into these limitations?  Why not enforce these limitations upon yourself in absence of external forces?  This, once again, IS the freedom that you enjoy as an autonomous being.  You don’t need to wait until you are injured or constrained in order to enjoy the freedom of limitations.  When designing your training, from the outset decide ahead of time on what your limitations will be and let that shape your training.    You need no other reason for these limitations other than “I have decided these are the limitations of the training”.

"My training is ONLY going to be ineffective"

In turn, own these limitations once decided.  Often I am asked “Why don’t you train THIS way” when one views my training, and I answer honestly that it’s one of my self-imposed limitations.  The most obvious one is the limitation of time.  I budget an hour 4 times a week to lift weights, and 30-60 minutes once a week for conditioning.  For me, that is how much I will allow myself to train.  With that limitation, I am forced to be efficient with my exercise selection, and if I want to get in more volume, I have to find ways to ensure that I can get it done WITHIN that time.  This means making the most out of super and giant sets and short rest periods.  And in turn, now I am driven to start training FOR my training.  If I’m going to be doing supersets and giant sets and having short rest periods, I better have solid conditioning, or else the whole plan is going to fall apart.  How am I going to improve my conditioning?  Well let’s look at my limitations and let that decide how my programming will unfold.

You can observe how the mere addition of just ONE limitation works as the catalyst for further decision making, and has a domino effect that makes the entire training plan unfold.  Whereas before we stared out into a vast abyss of endless decision making potentials, each with a series of known and unknown consequences, we instead immediately shut off a whole spectrum of potential realities and vectored ourselves toward SOME sort of outcome.  Because, fundamentally, A decision is always better than no decision.  Make your decision to have limits and, in doing so, grant yourself some freedom. 

BE THE VILLAIN IN YOUR STORY

If you observe almost any human, you will note that they are “the hero in their story”.  This phenomenon refers to the notion that, when we consider our lives (and hence, our story), we see ourselves as the main focal character of said story.  Hell, who is going to see their lives and consider themselves to be a bit-part, an extra, an NPC, a throwaway character, etc.  WE are the star of the show, the world revolves around us, everyone ELSE is the side character to OUR story, etc etc.  But not only that: we are the HERO of the story.  We overcome adversity, triumph in the face of evil, beat the bad guy, save the world, etc.  But that’s the thing: to have a hero, one must also have a villain, and in that regard the villain gets EQUAL billing to the hero in the story.  So why not instead choose to be the villain in your story?

And if your story is full of villains, be the craziest one

The villain is CLEARLY the superior choice if you were going to pick a character to be in a story.  The villain has ALL the advantages.  Otherwise, they wouldn’t be a villain: they’d be the comedic foil, just some slapstick bully that gets punked early in the story.  No, the villain is all powerful from the get go, and may even continue to grow in power as the story progresses.  The hero, on the other hand, starts disadvantaged, because rising up from below as an underdog story is ever so inspiring.  Wanna know why it’s inspiring?  Because it’s not SUPPOSED to happen, and in life, it rarely ever happens.  99/100 times, David ends up a smear on the bottom of Goliath’s sandal, Rudy gets a concussion, Rocky gets knocked out in the first round, etc etc.  The villain is SUPPOSED to win: that’s what makes a hero’s story so dramatic.

And BECAUSE the villain is supposed to win, they are MUCH more self-assured than a hero.  Heroes ALWAYS inevitably end up in some melancholy soul-searching montage where they are forced to wonder if they’re REALLY doing the right thing, if they’re on the just-path, if they’re making the right choices, etc etc.  SNORE.  A villain KNOWS from the get-go that they are doing right for THEM, and anyone that gets in their way better watch out.  They will rip-off bookies, poison water supplies, and sacrifice their own kin to advance their agenda (for those of you playing along at home, see if you can spot the references).  And once again, this allows the villain to work SO much faster and amass so much more power than the middling hero, who ventures out on wobbly legs taking on the big-bad world.  Yes, that’s a better story, but it’s an unrealistic one.

This is why magic is for chumps

Along with not needing to justify their actions beyond the simple fact that it advances their agenda, one of the main benefits of choosing to be the villain is the ability to engage in depravity.  Heroes have rules.  They have morals.  They have codes of ethics, codes of honor, codes of valor, etc etc.  “Noble villains” that have these things are really just pandering to the reader for the eventual transformation of the “villain” into an anti-hero (I’m looking at you Vegeta) but a real dyed-in-the-wool bane-of-all-that-is-good villain is a totally irredeemable monster, possessing no qualms with taking actions that would give any other reasonable individual pause.  When you see yourself as the hero of your story, you limit yourself: you’re forced to walk the straight and narrow path which is, in turn, straight…and narrow.  LIMITED.  But man, villainy has all SORTS of potential to it.  There’s no telling just WHAT you can accomplish with enough evil, depravation and sin, and none of those pesky morals to hold you back.

Alright, before I go any further, let’s remember that this is a blog about getting bigger and stronger.  This is NOT a call to go rob jewelry stores and stage military coups.  What I’m saying here is that, when you start thinking of yourself as the villain in YOUR story, you open yourself up to so much MORE success than when you keep thinking of yourself as the hero.  When you picture yourself as the hero, you develop the “hero-complex”, and you have to go right the wrongs and do the good deeds.  In the training world, trainees make themselves heroes by refusing to give in to the “temptation” of training like all those people out there getting results.  There the hero is, surrounded by villainous “bros” in the gym, fiendishly hitting their muscle group splits and doing isolation exercises all in pursuit of the inglorious large, impressive muscles, but not the hero!  Oh no: he is on the good and noble one truth path of only compound exercises, heavy weight, low reps, and full body.  …what are you, nuts?!  Go train like those guys that are out there getting theirs!  Go train like a villain! 

Way to go, hero

Go self-destruct in the pursuit of power: like a villain!  Don’t be the coy hero that holds back until he really needs it, because guess what: doomsday already happened and you missed your chance.  You’re living in the aftermath: you’re dead and don’t even realize it.  Instead, give IN the hubris: keep pursuing greater and greater power.  But at what cost?  Probably some injuries, maybe even a surgery or two.  But remember how Goliath laughed at David?  Do you know why?  Because he was the Philistines’ greatest warrior: he had slaughtered scores of other, much more WORTHY warriors.  Pride may have been his downfall, but he EARNED that pride by BEING such an accomplished villain.  All the way up until the moment he died, he lived a life of opulence and greatness because he was something so fantastically great that nothing else could compare.  Pride was the downfall, but in order to have a DOWNfall, you have to be UP at the start.  Be villainous enough in your own story that when the hero of the story comes along, you’ve amassed so much power the narrative changes.  This is no longer an action-fantasy: this is a tragedy. 

And in tragedy, the villain gets to win.

“LET’S GO MAKE SOME BAD DECISIONS”

The title for this post is a quote I said to my wife right before we ran her first Murph workout together.  She had been training in prep for it for a few months, coming in as a half marathon runner, so the run was no concern.  We had been building up her pull ups in prep, and had spent time drilling the SSB squat just to help learn to overcome some misery, which became pretty critical in gritting out the workout.  After the first mile run, she sure did make a bad decision, because she hit 10 solid (band assisted) pull ups in the first set and said “I’m going to keep that up and get the 100 done in 10 sets”.  I’ve been there: I knew exactly how that was going to go.  Next set was something like 8, then 6, and now we were at 3s and 5s.  But hey: now it was done, and all we had left was 200 push ups and 300 squats and another mile run…yay. 

To drive the point home, we listened to this album the whole time.  It's a great one too: go get it.

This is just becoming storytime now, but let’s keep that going.  Some of my readers out there might be going “Dude, you’ve done Murph before, you were training your wife, you know her capabilities: WHY didn’t you tell her that 10x10 was a bad strategy?  Why didn’t you coach her to go submax and not burn out early?”  Because bad decisions are how we GROW: literally and otherwise.  Look, maybe the rest of you are super smart and mature, but I’m basically a child in a 30+ year old body, and if I just hear not to do something, that doesn’t register, but when I DO the thing I’m not supposed to do and I find out WHY, I LEARN that lesson for sure.  Because I knew not to burnout on Murph before the first time I did it…and I still burned out.  Because I needed to MAKE that bad decisions to learn the lesson of it.  And if I just told my wife “hey, no, that’s a bad idea: don’t do that”, MAYBE she woulda listened to me.  But if she did, I KNOW she woudla resented me for it (rightfully so), because I had robbed her of an opportunity to learn.  She woudla spent the rest of the workout thinking “Man, I HAD that 10x10.  Why wouldn’t he let me do it.”  Instead, she got to learn her limitations and find out what happens when you burn out on pull ups in Murph: a rite of passage, as far as the workout goes.

But that’s also why I love the woman, because she’s an athlete and will rush right into those bad decisions.  Because there’s a lot of folks out there that are so paralyzed with fear of making a bad decision that they refuse to make ANY decision.  Wanna know the worse decision you can make?  None.  At least a bad decision has you moving in A direction.  Even if it’s not the right one, it’s STILL movement, and sometimes we need to move backwards or sideways before we can move forward, but staying still is certainly NOT getting us somewhere.  There’s nothing wrong with making a bad decision, as long as we treat it as a learning opportunity.

What have we learned?

But therein lies the issue: our ego.  And it works in two different ways (before I go any further, I just wanna say that one of the little joys I get out of writing a blog is that I get to start sentences and paragraphs with “and” and “but” as much as I want and no one can stop me).  First, people can have such a low opinion of their intelligence that they doubt their ability to even make a GOOD decision, and assume all of their decisions will be bad or wrong.  These people, in turn, refuse to make ANY decision.  Dude, give yourself SOME credit.  You made it THIS far in life: clearly you can make a good decision every once in a while.  But then, there are those that suffer from the opposite issue: they refuse to acknowledge WHEN they made a bad decision.  The action is made, it was a total bust, but to spare their egos the ache of failure, they blame everyone BUT themselves.  In turn, they miss the value of the lesson.  Learning opportunity wasted.

This is why I say “let’s go make some bad decisions”.  Cut to the chase and declare the decision a bad one BEFORE you set out.  Because you know what happens when you f**k up a bad decision?  It accidentally becomes a GOOD one.  Sunuvabitch, I was trying to get rhabdomyolysis and all that happened was my conditioning shot through the roof!  I was trying to overtrain and instead I just got bigger and stronger than I ever thought possible.  But meanwhile, if it turns out your bad decision WAS a bad decision, acknowledging it at the start saves your ego and you get to right away benefit from the lesson contained IN that decision.  You don’t have to save it, you don’t have to defend it, you don’t have to damage control or spin it: you KNEW, from the start, that this was a bad decision: now we just have to get the benefit from it.

Who DIDN'T know this was a bad decision at the start?

And to end the story that I started: once my wife and I were no longer laying on the floor staring into space questioning ourselves, so told me that me saying “Let’s go make some bad decisions” motivated her through the workout.  There were times where she was questioning if she could actually make it through, but she pushed all the way through because she no longer needed to worry if she was making the right choice: she KNEW it was a bad one, so that’s one less thing to worry about.  She thanked me for not talking her out of the 10x10 pull ups, and definitely learned the lesson and will apply it to Murph next yet (another bad decision made already!)  And, as she discovered by not being able to straighten her arms for a week, it was DEFINITELY a bad decision, and a good lesson learned.

YOU ONLY NEED REASSURANCE IF SOMETHING IS WRONG

I’m going to take you into my personal life a bit here, dear reader.  I have a friend that I love dearly.  They are incredibly close, have been there through thick and thin, and they are very loving and nurturing.  However, when I’m driving, this person is terrifying, and it’s BECAUSE of their loving, nurturing, and caring nature.  You see, this person wants to ensure that the driver isn’t worried, and so, when I drive, they spend the entire trip reassuring me.  If we see a police officer, they’ll be quick to point out “Don’t worry: you’re going the speed limit.  They have no reason to pull you over.”  If we go through a traffic light that is yellow they’ll say “Don’t worry: the light was yellow.  You didn’t run a red light.”  If we’re driving by a cyclist they’ll be quick to let me know “You’re on your part of the road.  You’re in the right.  You get to share the road with them just like they do with you.”  But all this serves to do is get me wondering about WHY I need this reassurance.  If all of this stuff was obvious, wouldn’t it need to NOT be said?  The only time you NEED reassurance is if something is wrong.

Dude needed no one's opinion but his own

Am I wrong?  And did you appreciate the irony of such a question?  Perhaps I’m just completely off base on this one, but getting reassurance I did not ask for simply means, to me, that I’m doing something wrong.  Why?  Because correctness is self-evident, and typically further exemplified by results.  I pour the cereal into the bowl, then pour the milk into the cereal and breakfast is made: no one needs to reassure me.  Meanwhile, if I pour the milk into the bowl first, someone needs to say “Hey, its ok: you just have to pour the cereal in carefully now.”  Well crap folks: it’s pretty obvious I f**ked up.  It’s NOT ok.  I’m being reassured because something is WRONG and now someone is coming around to help damage control the situation.

And I bring all this up because those of you seeking “reassurance” are, in fact, seeking ASSURANCE.  Specifically, you KNOW you’re screwing up, and now you’re hoping someone can come around and make everything better.  You post your training plans online KNOWING that they’re a dumpster fire and hope that someone will come around and say “Hey, its ok: you just need to swap preacher curls with hammer curls!”  You haven’t eaten a vegetable since the last time a good Star Wars was in theaters and you hope someone will come and (re)assure you that vegetables are overrated and protein and carbs are all that matter.  You would not seek reassurance unless you already had the seeds of doubt sewn, and the reason you doubt is because you KNOW you’re making a mistake.

That's why there are two people in this photo

The power of positive thinking is real, as is the detriment of negativity.  You possess the ability to MAKE results occur, but when you seek reassurance, you, instead, take the very action needed to cripple your results.  BE your own reassurance.  When you decide on a plan of action, know that it’s the right one and seek no one else’s approval on it.  The sheer act of asking for a sanity check, reassurance, a second opinion, an expert eye, etc etc, is an admission of even the slightest possibility of error, and has no room in the place of an infallible conqueror.  When the decision has been made by YOU, that is the assurance.

And this means, if you’re unwilling to make that decision, DON’T act until you are.  My goodness folks, nothing hinders results better than “committing” to a plan that you won’t actually commit to.  And I know that’s going to chap a bunch of readers out there, but I am telling you that it does not matter HOW well put together a plan is if the person executing it does not believe in it.  I know we want to think that science dictates belief is unnecessary for outcomes, and that a trainee that performs the best approach (as dictated by science) in their training will get better results than someone employing an inferior approach, but I’ve seen it first-hand enough to know that it simply is not true.  Programs that I’ve witnessed first-hand result in fantastic growth with the majority of trainees will fail catastrophically when a trainee sets out and says “I don’t really think this program will work, but I’ll give it a try because everyone says it will.”  The “everyone says it will” is the reassurance that trainee sought because they KNEW they were doing something wrong.  In turn, that reassurance was worthless, because the trainee STILL couldn’t commit themselves to the training and, in turn, could not get the benefits of it.  You need to find something you’re willing to sign off on, and then execute it with full faith and confidence.

No matter HOW much it upsets everyone else

Abandon all plans and actions that require reassurance.  Let THAT be your reassurance.  “If I need the approval of others, then this is not a good plan.”  And let the inverse be true as well: if it IS a good plan, it requires NO approval of others.  Hell folks, the majority opinion is worth so little that it honestly has an INVERSE value.  I’m at the point in my training career that, if I hear enough people say something is a good idea, I quit doing it.  I genuinely don’t know WHAT a scapula is, but I’ve heard so many weak people say that I’m supposed to retract it that I’m about to open up an anatomy textbook and learn some latin so I can find my scapula and detract it when I lift.  If the majority starts reassuring you on something, you KNOW you messed up.  And, in turn, if they start questioning things, there’s a fair chance you’ve made the right call.  Among the accomplished?  I’ve got a feeling a fair majority of them will say “if it works for you: keep doing it.” 

Isn’t that reassuring?