PLANNED INEFFICIENCES & NUCLEAR OPTIONS

  

Let’s go with some video game nerd stuff this time.  “Metal Gear Solid” game out on the original Sony Playstation in 1998.  Some of my readers were born in that year, and it makes me shudder, but meanwhile me and some buddies from school were playing the Demo Disk that came as part of a Pizza Hut promotion (already living that “getting big” lifestyle with some stuffed crust) and getting absolutely blown away with the revolutionary stealth gameplay.  All that aside, there’s a great bit of dialogue in the game between the protagonist, “Solid Snake”, and the technical genius support character Otacon regarding the construction of the war machine in the game (the eponymous “Metal Gear”).  Specifically, Otacon reveals that he designed the weapon in such a manner that there is a way to destroy the computer control system by forcing the operator to open the cockpit.

 

Snake: You intentionally designed it with a weak point?

 

Otacon: It's not a weak point--I like to think of it as more of a character flaw. People and weapons just aren't complete without a character flaw, don't you think?

 
I just wanted to prove to you that these things really did exist

Long video game lore intro aside now, this scene must have had a significant impact on me, because I am a big fan of designing intentional inefficiencies and flaws in my plans.  Why?  Because having those at the START means that, when times get tough, you can remove them and have some room to progress.  It’s the ultimate escape hatch/in-case-of-emergency parachute.

 

Examples?  Sure, let’s do that.  Nutrition is where I do this a LOT.  When gaining weight, there are SO many options that are available to get in a ton of calories quickly and painlessly, and I use NONE of them at the start.  I intentionally do things inefficiently, just gradually increasing the amount of meals I eat or slowly adding food to those meals (reference my “The Nutrition Post” for a more fleshed out description).  It is only when I’ve exhausted those means that I then start bringing out “the big guns”: processed and refined carbs (hello pop-tarts), dense creams, weightgainer products, etc etc.  Were I to have introduced those things at the START of the weightgain and try to do everything as efficiently as possible, I’d have nothing to fall back on once things got actually tough.  By intentionally running things inefficiently at the start, the easiest part of the process were getting results requires minimal effort, I can shift to a more efficient approach once needed.

 
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And then, when it comes to fat loss, those things that were once efficient are now INEFFICIENT, and I can just gradually chip away at them as needed.  When you’ve got a pre-workout meal of 2 pop-tarts and you want to lose fat, you can eat literally the exact same way you’ve been for months and just cut out the pop-tarts and lose fat.  It’s totally and completely painless, there’s no struggle, no suffering.  I save the suffering for when I am in DEEP into the fat loss.  If I just pulled a total and complete 180, cut out all the junk all at once and radically reduced my calories, what the hell would I have to fall back on once I hit a stall?  By having those planned inefficiencies in my diet, I can just keep chipping away at them gradually, making the smallest changes necessary and achieve my goals while still having “nuclear options” readily available for when they are needed.

 

It’s the same with training too: there’s always room for more volume or intensity modifiers when one is training in a weight gaining phase, and including ALL of them at the start just means you have no room to use them LATER when you need them.  By starting out the training in an inefficient manner, there’s something to attack later when you need to attack it.  And then, when it’s time to drop fat, you keep all that nonsense you introduced in the weight gain phase and just slowly chip away at it until you’re eventually doing the bare minimum necessary to hold onto muscle/make growth in new areas.  Hell, I go a step further: doing fat loss phases of training, I employ inefficiencies by training NEW movements: ones that, I PERSONALLY am inefficient at executing.  I can see growth in these movements week to week simply because I’m getting better at them, which is a big morale boost compared to watching your core lifts sink with your bodyweight.  Right now my supplemental work for pressing is weighted dips and behind the neck pressing: stuff I haven’t done since before I went into my weight gain phase.  I’m seeing improvements in them week to week, even though I’m sure my “strength” is dropping.  You can add chains to old movements and alter the strength curve to the point that it no longer compares to what you’ve done before as well: there’s all sorts of way to make things new enough that you no longer have proficiency in it.

 
Take this guy for instance

To go “anime nerd” now, we’re talking the analogy of the Dragon BallZ weighted clothing: we do it on purpose, and remove it only when we need to.  This breaks the brain of so many kids that will ONLY do things the most optimal and perfect way 100% of the time and where there’s only two worlds that exist: optimal and garbage.  Instead, you have to condition yourself to be at peace with NOT doing things as best as possible, because the truth is, the body can only change SO much in a given period of time.  It can only lose SO much fat, only gain SO much muscle, etc etc.  And so, if you CAN hit that cap while employing inefficient methodology, why wouldn’t you?  If the most you can score is 100% and there’s no extra credit, don’t break out the Adderall and study groups if you know you can skate into class and ace it with a little bit of cramming and memorization: save those absolute most perfect methods for when you NEED it. 

If you go full nuclear at the start of the war, you’ve got nowhere to escalate from there, but if you save it until you absolutely need it, it can be the perfect weapon at the perfect time.