ON LIMITATIONS

I know for sure I’ve written on this topic before, but at almost 8 years deep and writing an entry each week, I’m bound to repeat myself a few dozen times.  Recent events have forced most of the world into something of a “constrained” environment, where limitations are being harshly imposed, either by self or external forces.  People can’t go do the gyms they want to go to, use the equipment they want to use, eat the same foods they want to eat, etc etc.  What is frustrating is how much people lament this situation insofar as it relates to their ability to accomplish their goals.  Don’t get me wrong: the situation sucks at its most basic level, but as far as training and nutrition goes, limitations are a POSITIVE, not a negative.  Through limitations, we now have MORE freedom.

Relax: it's not that kind of blog

Why is that?  Because once limitations are imposed, we are no longer bound by the burden of “optimal”.  When all is well in the world and we have unlimited freedom, many experience significant existential angst due to a (self-imposed) drive to make full use of this freedom to only accomplish the absolute most best and optimal plan of action to achieve our goals.  It’d be a squandering of one’s freedom if they were to choose poorly, no?  Well hell, I already disagree with that, but supposing I didn’t, NOW that this freedom has been removed, we no LONGER need to be optimal, which means that the removal of one freedom opens up near UNLIMITED freedom to do anything we want to pursue our goals now.  With limits, we are FINALLY free.

All one need do is allow themselves to employ some lateral thinking and pursue things that AREN’T optimal.  I’m going to actually provide some actionable examples here, in the hopes that it gets some brains moving.  So your gym is closed down and all you have are some powerblocks: how can you possibly get in a good workout?  Now is the time to use all those bodybuilding tricks you thought either didn’t work or were too advanced for you.  You’re just too damn strong to get in a good chest workout with a set of 50lb powerblocks? Do some pre-exhaust work first.  Burnout with some light sets, or train your isolation exercises FIRST, or do a bunch of push ups before you start benching, or if you have an adjustable bench, set the incline as high as possible and work you way down to flat benching while keeping the dumbbell weight the same, or do some 21s.  And that’s to say NOTHING of if you had some resistance bands on hand, because now you have like a jillion different ways to tweak everything I just said.  Burnout with the DBs AND the band (hold an end in each hand and have the band go around your back), then drop the band and burnout with the DBs, then drop the DBs and burnout with the band.  If you have one of those super cool slingshots (or whatever name used by other companies), you could even work THAT in after you’ve burned out to just keep milking reps out. 

Take a page out of this dude's (absolutely insane) book

Is any of that optimal?  Who cares?!  We’re limited: we work with what we got.  We find new ways to progress.  It’s a revaluation of values!  Thanks Nietzsche!  And what doesn’t kill us is going to make us stronger.  Perhaps now is the time to stop training and start working out.  Somewhere Mark Rippetoe spit out his coffee (black of course, cowboy style), but do you REALLY think you won’t get big and strong as hell if you spend a few months just absolutely slaughtering yourself in the weight room with any diabolical method you can come up with just to make light weight feel heavy?  This is what dudes did BEFORE we were all so goddamn smart.  You just give the body crazy stimulus and force it to grow and heal.  Challenge yourself to come up with something even crazier than the last time you trained. 

And don’t stop there: start limiting your diet too.  I recently wrote my “the nutrition post” that detailed how I eat to gain and lose weight, but have recently started manipulating ANOTHER variable in my diet: saturated fats.  Specifically, I’ve been seeing if I can reduce them to the point of near elimination WHILE still maintaining my very low carb lifestyle.  This has forced me to eliminate a lot of staple foods from my diet, and has forced me to get creative with my nutrition.  The result?  I’m the leanest I’ve ever been in my entire life, and was 185.4lbs on Monday of this week: a bodyweight I haven’t seen since college.  The one exception to that statement is that I WAS 184.4lbs the week after my ACL surgery, but during that time my wife asked me if I had stopped eating as I looked completely emaciated, whereas now it’s a stark difference.  People constantly stress and struggle about how to eat, what to eat, when to eat, etc etc, but when you start REMOVING options from the table, you can suddenly laser focus your nutrition.  Some other limits I impose on myself: whenever possible, I don’t mix fats and carbs together, and I only eat carbs pre and post training.  It doesn’t matter if those ideas are scientifically true, accurate, proven, etc: by HAVING those limitations, my nutrition is stupidly easy, and crazy effective.  What more could I want?

For my regular readers, it's usually this photo

We’ve gotten soft with too many choices: we lost our ability to think.  In the absence of choices, people HAD to get creative to come up with solutions to problems.  We need to get back to “working with what we got”, instead of lamenting what it is that we lost.  The mind has such unfathomable, nearly unlimited potential: it just needs to be allowed to realize that potential, and we need to allow it that freedom by giving it limits to work within.  The world may give you limits, but if you’re not so blessed to be limited, give yourself some and see what you come up with.