MY PRINCIPLES

 

I’m finding myself with an abundance of reading time these days and have re-introduced reading about lifting into my life.  Typically, since my reading time is so compromised, I stick purely with philosophy, but now I allow myself some “fun” reading.  I’m primarily rereading at this point, and have once again circled back to Powerlifitng Basics Texas Style, Complete Keys to Progress, Super Squats, and the recently reviewed/panned Tactical Strongman book, but getting back to 5/3/1 Forever reminded me that Jim opens with a section wherein he lays out his principles for training, and it made me realize that I’m about due to do the same.  I’ve been lifting for 20 years now, and though I’m still no one special, I’ve done it long enough that I know what works for me, and, in turn, how I approach training.  None of these are “thou shalts”, carved in stone tablets and passed down Mount Sinai, but these are the things that shape my training and nutrition and make sense to ME.

 

 

1: The way the body gets bigger and stronger is by being subjected to a demand to grow.  

Not literally...although I suppose it could help

If the demand is not intense enough that growth is required, the body will not grow.  This, in turn, is why most of my training during periods where growth is the goal (vs, say, fat loss or technical skill improvement) is incredibly brutal, and why I am such an advocate for programs like Deep Water, Super Squats, and 5/3/1 Building the Monolith.  I fully and completely acknowledge that sub-max training must somehow work, because there are people out there getting results from it, but it just plain does not make sense to me and, in turn, I am unable to fully and effectively implement it.

 

I am more than certain there is some sort of science out there that explains that I am wrong and that sub-maximal training makes more sense, but, once again, this is how I understand things.  The body likes homeostasis.  It does not LIKE to change.  The only way you can make the body change is to subject it to such significant trauma that it undergoes change as a means of necessary survival.  If you do 20 rep squats for 1 workout, the body will go “wow, that sucked”, and then do nothing.  When you show up 2 days later and do it again, it’s going to start to sweat, and after the third workout it goes “Well sh*t, I guess the maniac is going to keep doing this: I better add some muscle QUICK!”  This is also why muscle gain and fat loss cannot be measured in a predictable linear fashion: one cannot always guarantee they will create the necessary stimulus on a consistent linear pattern.  Some days you’re going to go in and blast your body with a workout and it’ll go “well that was pretty awful but we got enough muscle to get through another dozen of those if we need to”, whereas other times you’re going to overreach enough that it forces adaptation.  And sometimes you’re going to create enough of a deficit that the body is willing to let go of some of its precious fat to keep you going, and other times it’s going to be stubborn and see if you REALLY mean it of if you’re just holding out on the cookies.

 

2: Whenever possible, do not mix carbs and fats.  

You knew this was coming

I’ve seen enough people say that there is research to back this up that you can easily look for some if you want to.  Some say it’s because carbs tend to be fast digesting while fats are slow digesting, and so you screw up your digestion, especially if protein is in the mix and you’re trying to feed your muscles.  I’ve seen others say that it has something to do with insulin.  And then, of course, there are the folks that say a calorie is a calorie and none of this matters.  I genuinely don’t know what is “true”, but I DO know that, once I started abiding by this policy, I made MUCH better nutritional choices in my life.  When you look at anything that is considered traditionally yummy, its carbs and fat put together, typically with very minimal protein.  Ice cream, French fries, donuts/pastries, the entire Taco Bell menu, grilled cheese sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, etc.  Same with condiments and toppings: butter AND syrup on a waffle, ketchup AND mayo mixed together, etc etc.  Once I decided that it’s either carbs with protein or fats with protein, but never carbs with fats, I had eliminated a lot of nutritional mistakes and laid out a super simple nutritional principle to follow.  It also makes cheat meals easy to figure out: I’ll have some carbs and fats put together.

 

3: Only eat carbs around training.  

Maybe not this close though

As I wrote in my “The Nutrition Post”, my 90s Atkin’s roots shine through, and I’m a blatant carbophobe, but I DO still permit myself to eat them: it’s just always around training.  These days, I still keep the intake light, and actually have been experimenting with a higher fat/no carb training meal on my lighter training days (bench and press), so that I’m only really ever intaking carbs before squat and deadlift days.  So far so good.  During Deep Water, I’d time my weekly cheat meal to be the night before the squat and deadlift days, since I trained first thing in the morning and figured that’d be close enough, and tended to go with fried rice and some Chinese food before that, but that was also a VERY intense program.  For day to day training, my pre-training carb meal is 1.5 cups of rice chex or life cereal mixed with 3/4 cup of Fairlife skim milk and 3/4 cup drinkable egg whites, with some PBFit mixed in and 1.5 tablespoons of raw honey (spread on toasted ketobread if you can find it at your local Costco, otherwise, just take it off the spoon).  When I’m really focused on gaining, I’ll have carbs in the post-training meal too, but I don’t do that these days, even though I’m a blatant believer in the post-workout shake and all THAT pseudo science.

 

4: Balance with training cycles; not IN training cycles.  

Speaking of balance...

By this, I mean that it’s not necessary to ALWAYS have enough pull work to balance out push work in your current training program.  It’s perfectly fine to have a training block (or several) where things are imbalanced.  You can focus on benching or pressing or deadlift or whatever.  Just have a plan to sometime LATER go back and get some balance in.  While I was running Deep Water, I was doing WAY more pushing than pulling, and I continued that trend for about another year leading up to hitting my all time best strict press of 5x241 and 1x266 with an axle.  Now that I’ve hit that, I’m doing significantly more back work.  My lats have also come out of hibernation and I’m looking much wider from the front than I was before. 

 

Trainees get too worried about imbalances during a training cycle that they end up perfectly balanced: every part of them sucks.  It’s totally fine to have GOOD and NOT GOOD body parts while you’re focusing on achieving a goal: you can always come back later and fix it.

 

5: Eating supports training, not the other way around/Train MORE when you’re gaining weight, train LESS when you’re losing it.  

Anyone else in the mood for 12 eggs?

This tends to be backwards compared to many other folks out there, but it’s always been what works for me.  When my calories are up, I can recover from much more training, so I train much more.  When my calories are down, my recovery is compromised, so I train less.  Doing it the other way tends to result in over-recovery in the first instance (also known as “getting fat”) and under-recovery in the second (also known as “getting hurt”).

 

6: If you want it to grow (bigger OR stronger), train it directly.  

See, this guy gets it

It’s weird I even need to have this principle, but it’s apparently something that others don’t believe in.  I very often see questions like “do I need to train my abs/neck/grips/biceps/rear delts/etc etc”.   If you want them to grow: yes.  I’ve tried the whole “compound lifts will hit everything” approach, and the results were unimpressive.  Meanwhile, after training problem areas with direct training (which means the dreaded isolation exercise), they grew bigger and stronger and, in turn, my whole body ALSO grew because now my weak links had become strong.

 

7: ALWAYS find a way to progress.  

I learned a LOT from this show

Too many trainees get fixated with weight on the bar as the sole means of measuring progress and, in turn, they crash HARD in their training, get dejected and give up lifting when they had SO much more potential to realize if they just changed paradigms.  I’ve dropped 30lbs of bodyweight since March: very few of my lifts are seeing improvements in sheer weight moved, yet I’m making progress EVERY training session.  You can always do another set more than last time, or take shorter rest times, or move the bar faster, or be under a greater state of fatigue than before, or tag an extra exercise onto a giant set, or set a PR by bodyweight, etc etc.  Never walk away from a session without having, in some manner, progressed from the previous workout.  Just like principle 1: you NEED to create a stimulus to grow in some way to the body.  If you come in and nothing progresses, the body figures it’s doing a good job.  Don’t let it feel that way.

 

 

I’m gonna cap it at 7, because this could easily become a tome, and as I’ve been writing my thoughts down for almost 8 years now, there’s a LOT more that could come out.  See if these resonate with you and, if not, sit down and come up with your own principles.