ON PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION: SIMPLE, NOT EASY

  

A sentiment I find myself having to constantly repeat is “if physical transformation was easy, there would be more jacked people.”  I have to repeat this sentiment frequently because it seems as though this fact is lost on MANY people.  This is reflected based off the incredibly warped expectations people have regarding the very process of physical transformation.  Frequently I see a sentiment expressed that essentially boils down to “I’ve been training hard and eating well for 2 weeks: how come I’m not jacked?”  People are quick to rush to blame social media and steroids and “unrealistic body images/expectations”, but before all that we had Rocky montages which I’d say are the REAL culprit here.  We ALL love the idea of some scrub whose been living off ramen and vodka getting their head on straight, buckling down, and radically transforming themselves in the span of a few weeks…but the truth is, that dude gets his lunch eaten by the dude that has been doing that the WHOLE time, living it for YEARS on end, with no breaks, no deviations, and no signs of weakening.  And therein lies the rub: it’s all so simple, but it’s NOT easy.

 

Winning a boxing match is simple: just punch the other guy and don't get punched

Already I find myself acknowledging that I’m basically re-writing my “the secret is patience” post, but let’s just keep on going down this rabbit hole to really appreciate it.  We recently got youtube cleared through our firewall at work, and with nutrition being my newest obsession (since, as I’ve previously written, there’s nothing new to read about regarding training), I’ve taken to having videos of bodybuilders describing their diets on in the background while I get work done.  Wanna know something about bodybuilding diets?  They’re BORING!  It’s all the same stuff: some carbs (rice almost always, occasionally potatoes), some meat (lean when cutting, beef occasionally when gaining), and MAYBE some fats from oils.  There’s pretty much nothing to learn from these videos: it’s all very obvious stuff.  Eat a lot of single ingredient food (THERE: THERE is your definition for “clean food”.  Are you happy internet?!) and eat enough of it to grow if you’re growing and don’t eat too much of it if you’re losing fat.  So who is the best bodybuilder?  The guy that actually DOES it, because even though this is stupidly simple: it’s hard as f**k!

 

The guy that wins the competition is the guy that NEVER deviates from the plan.  They bring food EVERYWHERE for the entire contest prep.  They have everything measured, weighed out, and accurately calculated.  They eat WHEN THEY AREN’T HUNGRY (pay attention “I eat all the time and never gain weight” types), on the schedule, with no missed meals, no swaps, no substitutions, no “close enoughs”, etc.  That is SO stupidly simple: just eat the food dummy!  But it’s HARD.  It’s so hard that the EATING is what typically retires bodybuilders.  The training is something of an afterthought (something Justin Harris has spoken to, which again, reference my whole “there is nothing to read about” notion) and, for many, is the actual “fun” part of the process: it’s the eating that is all consuming (pun totally intended).  Hell, even the non-monklike athletes express something similar.  Pro-strongman, who are able to partake in some oreos and pizza and burgers, STILL eat like it’s a job, and STILL hate it…but it’s the dude that actually sacks up and DOES it that wins.

Meanwhile, Jay Cutler's favorite cheat meal was "nothing"

 

So if I’m writing this like it’s an instruction manual for a beginner (it’s not), the nutrition section would be: “eat healthy food, enough of it to grow if you want to build muscle, not too much of it if you want to lose fat”.  The training is ALSO simple.  Lift weights and do cardio.  Look: can we go further than that?  Sure…but MAYBE you need to make sure you’re actually doing those things FIRST before we start discussing the details. You think I’m joking, but HOW many dudes are skipping the cardio part of “lift weights and do cardio”?  COULD I do the whole “cardio vs conditioning” thing right now?  Sure, but really, if I could just get you dudes to go for a WALK every day, I’d be more than pleased.  Wanna add some more complexity to it?  You got it: go do something that makes your heart beat REALLY fast and where you need to gasp for air.  How many times?  Until you can’t, then do 1 more round.  How do I lift weights?  Let me give you the simplest program ever: go find something, pick it up off the floor and get it over your head.  Do it until you can’t, rest for a little and try it again.  After an hour, go home.  No joke, if you did that and the cardio AND the eating, and did it for a few years, you would be a radically transformed physical specimen.

 

But that’s not EASY.  Picking stuff up off the floor and putting it over your head is HARD.  It’s SO hard we give people GOLD F**KING MEDALS in the Olympics when they are the best at it!  Know who doesn’t get a gold medal?  Dudes that lay down on their backs and press the weight over their face instead.  Wild.  (Powerlifitng will always be my first love, please don’t get upset powerlifters).  Going for a walk EVERY day sucks.  It sucks so much that I tried to make my dog do it for a week and he actually HID in his kennel to avoid a walk one day…and that’s a dog.  Sometimes our schedule sucks and it means getting up at 0300 to get the workout in, sometimes something happens that throws off our plans, sometimes it’s raining and walking sounds lame…but it’s the dudes that still DO it that succeed.  It’s simple: it’s not easy.

This, of course, is neither

 

And this is why you observe so few physically transformed people…but we have to appreciate that.  No one is hiding the secrets, and there’s no knowledge one needs to get to succeed.  “It’s SO complicated!”  No: it really REALLY isn’t.  You KNOW what it takes to achieve physical transformation: hard work, consistency and time.  It’s stupidly simple…it’s just not easy. 

SURRENDER YOUR FATE TO THE 20 SIDED DIE

  

Those of you who grew up WITHOUT having your own lunch thrown at you by athletes and burnouts missed out on one of the most valuable decision making tools Gary Gygax (RIP…which proves Nietzsche right that God is dead) ever introduced to the world: the 20 sided die.  And from how highly I’m speaking of it, you may think that what I am writing about couldn’t possibly be as simple as it sounds, but it is exactly what it is: a die (as in the kind you toss/roll) that has numbered sides 1-20.  This is the cornerstone of any game of Dungeons and Dragons, and the hallmark of the franchise.  It is unique, yes, but also simple.  It is the decider of fate, outcome, results and effort.  Other die are used within the game, most definitely, but the 20 sider is your constant companion, because it is the “go to” die for the majority of actions in a game.  And, in truth, it would appear that MANY of you may need to start packing your own 20 sider, because it would solve a LOT of your problems.

I should have captioned this NSFW for the true nerds

 

Once again, for a brief overview for my uncultured readers: Dungeons and Dragons is essentially a game of make believe with rules.  It’s typically sold as “you can be anyone and do anything”, but really it’s more you can ATTEMPT to be anyone and do anything.  The tyrant of your fate is: the die.  Any time you attempt to take any sort of action in a game, like swing a sword at an enemy, cast a spell, try to bluff your way past some guard, etc etc, you roll a 20 sided die to determine if you succeed.  High rolls are good, low are bad.  1 is an automatic failure, and typically tragically so (you wanted to hit the Orc with your sword and end up dropping your weapon), 20 is an automatic success and can be spectacular (you wanted to hit the Orc with your sword and actually cut his head clean off).  Yes, some things simply can’t be rolled to success (no matter how many 20s you roll, you can’t eat the sun at level 1), but for the most part, rolling 20 sided die is how you navigate the world.   

 

So what does this have to do with lifting?  So many of you dudes can’t make a decision if your life depended on it, and the introduction of the almighty 20 sider would alleviate SO much of your anxiety and allow you to just move on with your life.  Because the truth is, the only bad decision is NO decision.  Inaction will always be worse than action.  “But what if I pick the wrong action and I get injured!  That’s surely WORSE than delaying an action!”  NOPE.  What happens when you get injured?  You LEARN something.  You discover your limits, get first-hand experience on rehab and recovery, and (if you’re not dead on the inside) figure out how to get creative in order to train around, over and through an injury.  “What if I pick a ‘bad’ program and make no progress?!”  Cool: you LEARNED something.  Do you know how many bad training cycles I went through in order to discover how to put together a GREAT one?  And meanwhile, here’s a dirty secret “the industry” doesn’t want you to know: you CAN’T train hard without getting SOME sort of physical benefit.  Mark Rippetoe just did a spit take (from his gallon of milk, of course), because god-forbid you do some exercising instead of “training”, but pushing your body hard and getting your heart rate up will result in SOME physical benefit, even if your 1rm doesn’t go up. 

I dunno: the effects of training vs exercise seem a little up for debate still...

 

No matter how much Jim Wendler says “the assistance work doesn’t matter”, people STILL ask questions about it.  So here’s what you do: assign 20 different exercises a number for upper body push, pull and single leg, core.  Roll the die 3 times: you just decided your exercises for the day.  How many reps per set?  Roll the die.  Or how many sets?  Roll the die.  Or how much weight?  Roll the die and add a 0 at the end as needed.  “I can’t think of anything to do for conditioning!”  Sure you can, but whatever: roll the die.  Looks I’m doing…EMOM…thrusters….10 reps…20 rounds.  Or maybe you end up AMRAP power cleans with 140lbs for 8 minutes. 

 

Folks, it doesn’t stop there: no joke, if you can’t figure out what program to run, roll the die.  Can’t figure out what diet to follow?  Roll the die.  What should be my cheat meal?  Die.  Not feeling it today, should I skip?  Die.  Is it time for a deload?  I’ll tell you one thing: it’s time for a die roll!  None of these decisions are NEARLY as critical as you think they are, because the timeline for training is SO stupidly long and there are SO many different approaches available that if you make a “wrong” decision you can just ride it out until the opportunity to make another one comes along.  Again: engaging in physical exercise and mindful eating is pretty much ALWAYS going to produce more good than harm, irrespective of the details.  It’s why every single diet “works”: when you simply start THINKING about what you put in your body, you already are doing yourself WAY more good than the mindless scavenger-esque eating that the average person engages in.  When you start engaging in regular physical exercise, no matter WHAT that exercise is, you do yourself a greater benefit compared to the sedentary lifetime of the average person.  I have a buddy of mine that was a lifetime picky eater: only ate frozen pizza, pasta without sauce and plain Burger King Whoppers.  He did zero exercise.  He dropped 30lbs by picking up “Dance Dance Revolution” and eating half a frozen pizza per meal instead of a whole one.  Consequently, he was also a DnD buddy of mine.  He rolled a 20 sider. 

Someone rolled a 1...

 

I am not joking: go to a hobby store sometime today and go get a 20 sided die.  Let it decide your fate.  For how long?  Roll the die and see. 

DIDN'T FEEL LIKE WRITING: HERE ARE BULLET POINTS!

* During my most recently asked “if you could only pick 2 movements” desert island sorta question, I settled on log viper press and prowler push, and I’m REALLY happy with that answer.  If you found an athlete that ONLY did those 2 movements, you’d find a dangerous athlete.  And in that regard, this works well for the “if you only had 20 minutes to train” question too.  

It doesn't get more anabolic than this

* I may make this a bigger post one day, but I finally “get” why beginners are advised to stick with compounds and avoid isolation exercises: they’re too WEAK to DO isolation exercises. And you think that’s crazy, because isolations are lighter than compounds, but they are necessarily that way because ONE muscle is much weaker than several.  And that’s the point of an isolation exercise: to ISOLATE.  I use the example that I’ve pressed 266lbs overhead before, and I use 20lbs for lateral raises, and even then, those are HEAVY lateral raises.  This is assuming I actually want to ISOLATE my middle delts.  Yeah, I could move more weight…by recruiting more muscles, which isn’t the point.  And so, when you have a beginner trying to isolate, they end up making the compounds anyway, at which point they may as well do some actual compounds and get stronger.    To say nothing of the fact that beginners tend to not even be able to FLEX the required muscle in the first place…

* I’ve had protein shakes since I was 15.  They’ve been such a staple of my lifting.  And these days, they don’t even make sense to me.  I keep them up pretty much out of habit, but I go through so little protein powder compared to what I did when I was a kid…and my results are SO much better.  Real food will always win: supplements for emergencies.  And people get that all backwards: using all their brainpower to figure out which supplement is best and then just buying whatever groceries are cheap.

* Still on the topic of nutrition, I really dove into Deep Water with some Mountain Dog influence in my 6 month gaining phase, and it had the interesting effect wherein I simply don’t crave junk anymore.  Emotionally I do, I’ll see a commercial for pizza or a burger or poptarts or something and THINK to myself “oh that looks SO good”…but when it comes time to actually EAT something, I have no interest in it.  All I want is more meat.  Folks have theories about this, gut biome being connected to the brain and other things, but even without understanding the WHY behind it, it’s still worth appreciating.  And it’s pretty cool to have my mind and body working together to self-perpetuatlize success.

* I really like weighted dips…and I feel like they don’t make anything else I do any better.  

But sometimes a thing in and of itself is enough justification

* But on the above, even if weighted dips worked for Pat Casey and don’t work for me, something from Pat that DOES work universally: meatloaf sandwiches.  Seriously: make yourself one.

* Its mind blowing to me how many times I’ve had to explain “how to work in”.  We learned sharing in kindergarten people.

* Ok people: macro ratios are silly.  I don’t even count macros and I think they’re silly.  It forces you to change THREE variables when you only need to change one.  Say I’m noticing some hormone issues because my dietary fat is too low, so I decide to add some to my diet.  Well, if I’m forcing myself to abide by ratios, I need to increase EVERY macro to account for that ONE macro increasing.  What sense does that make?  I wanna pull carbs out of the diet to cut some weight?  Nope: apparently I’m pulling PROTEIN out of my diet too.  Don’t I want to keep that protein HIGH when I’m losing fat? 

* Let’s keep going with the above.  It’s a bizarre combination of over AND under thinking.  We believe there’s something magical about a certain ratio of macros, but then we don’t tend to care about the SOURCE of these macros.  “Gotta up my fats because I upped my carbs”: ok cool, guess I’ll add an extra 20 grams of trans fats to my diet.  Man: why do I look, feel and perform like crap right now?  It I’m going to focus so much on ratios, why not think about things like omega 3 and 6 ratio, saturated vs poly vs mono vs trans fats, EFAs, EAAs, etc etc?  When it comes time to REALLY break out the big brain, suddenly we don’t wanna play anymore…

* Part of the reason it took me so long to release a rough cut of my e-book is that I keep coming up with bad ideas, and here’s my most recent one.  20 seconds of alternating DB snatches/10 seconds of goblet squats with the same dumbbell.  Make sure to actually move explosively on the DB snatches.  This will blow you out in 8 rounds.  Those goblet squats are where the magic lives.

* Someone took the time to upload all the issues of Mark Bell’s “Power” magazine.  It was honestly a great publication, had some fantastic articles, very cringe inducing at times, but I think the most entertaining part is looking through the old supplement ads.  SO many things promising to be the “next big thing” that you can’t even FIND on the market anymore.  A valuable lesson for anyone getting hoodwinked by the current Mr Wonderful: the secret is always the hard work and consistency, the supplements are simply subsidizing the dream.

When's the last time you saw this on the shelf?

* As long as there are nuts, nut butters and avocados, I’ll have no sympathy for someone that can’t gain weight.  You have allergies?  Go for sunbutter.

* Beginners wanting to bulk or cut from the get go is just insanity to me.  If you’ve NEVER trained before, you don’t need to manipulate your nutrition to see DRASTIC improvements in physique and strength.  Focus on eating for HEALTH with something that is sustainable and realistic for you.  Learn how to cook (because you most likely don’t know how to).  Train for 6 months and just eat WELL during that time and you’ll see some crazy improvements.  From THERE, figure out if you’re too fat or too scrawny.

* Somewhere along the line people felt like my theory on nutrition was to eat to support training.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I eat to support RECOVERY from training: no to support the training itself.  Eating to support training means pounding carbs before a training session to make sure you can crush the session: I’m the dude that slams some eggs and beef 10 minutes before a 0300 session because I’m already eating to RECOVER from that session.  No matter what, I’ll push as hard as I can, but, in turn, I don’t need to eat so that I can push harder: I eat so I can recover from how hard I pushed.  This is a big part of understanding nuance, which has absolutely been lost.  People try to employ heuristics and avoid thinking, and it just dooms their ability to understand.

* When in doubt, pick something up off the floor and put it over year head.  This holds true for getting bigger, getting stronger, and getting better conditioning.  The final one is big, because people ALWAYS say they don’t know what to for conditioning.  No joke: find SOMETHING, pick it up off the floor, get it over your head, get it back down to the floor and repeat.

* Fat loss for the non-calorie counter: put less stuff in/on stuff.  It’s really that simple: manipulating portion sizes.  I’ve kept the same amount of meals and even the same TYPE of meals these past 6 weeks: all I’ve done is have less stuff at the meals.  I went from slathering Nuts n More/sunbutter on celery to using a very thin smear.  I went from a 1/3 cup of cottage cheese to 1/4.  From 2 whole eggs and 1 egg white to just 2 whole eggs.  Etc etc.  My mind can’t tell the difference: I’m still sitting down at the same time and having “the same meal”, but my body is reflecting the impact of having less food.  This stuff really isn’t complicated.

* Yet another competition I signed up for reduced the weight of one of the events.  F**k’s sake: isn’t this sport called STRONGman?

* I’ve gotten a rash of people asking me if I’m on steroids or TRT recently.  That’s weird in a lot of ways.  I grew up where it was taboo to ask the steroids question in general, but along with that, lumping TRT in with steroids is weird to me.  It would be like saying “Hey man, you’re pretty lean: are you using insulin or do you have diabetes?”  

* People get legitimately angry with me when I say how much (or perhaps that is to say, how little) I sleep.  I can’t tell if they’d prefer I lie when asked the question or what.  

* “Sleep is the most important thing for growth!”  Funny: I slept a TON as a teenager and was pretty tiny.  I sleep less now, eat and train more…and I’m bigger.  Perhaps there’s more to it…

* Throwing in an unloaded “crucifix hold” at the end of my lateral raise sets has been a fun experiment.  If you struggle with pain tolerance/lactic threshold stuff, that’s such a simple way to get some training in.  I’m sure it’s bound to tear up the delts some too.

* Gains are honestly pretty hardy: you can’t kill them.  Think about it: we’re evolutionarily DRAWN to large muscularity because it confers a message of hardiness.  The idea that you could kill your gains with a little bit of extra cardio or a few missed meals/workouts is comical.  It’s not a soufflé people.

THE SECRET IS PATIENCE

  

I’ve found myself saying this for a while now, so it seemed like it was time to actually make a post about it.  People are always looking for “the secret” when it comes to physical transformation.  What should I eat (spoiler: it’s often what you DON’T eat that makes the difference)?  What supplement should I take?  3 day/4 day/5 day split?  Twice a week frequency?  Protein before the workout?  After?  Isolate or compound (am I talking about protein or movements when I say that?)  Etc etc.  Isn’t it frustrating to realize that NONE of these things are the secret?  Primarily because these would be EASY secrets.  You just pick 1 thing and then you picked right and you win!  It’s like Indiana Jones: choose wisely (sorry for spoiling a 30 year old movie).  And here’s the equally frustrating part: the secret, the REAL secret, is patience.

Dude, at least go for the name brand stuff...

 

Patience is a very long four-letter word.  We are particularly spoiled these days, as things really ARE instant.  My kid has no idea what a commercial is: they’ve only known streaming television.  Along with that, they’ve never known having to wait until their favorite show comes on: their favorite show is ALWAYS on.  We can order stuff from amazon and have it delivered in 2 days.  I recently released a free e-book and had a lot of people tell me the link to it didn’t work because it took about 20 seconds of waiting to fully load.  We’re very much conditioned to expect things instantly…which means requiring patience for something is downright asking the impossible among many.  No: they want their binary choice to make that is the RIGHT choice so they can shut off their brain and get their results.  And when 3 months go by and they aren’t jacked out of their minds and photoshoot ready, they DEMAND to know how they screwed it up and why the internet led them astray.

 

The secret is patience: physical transformation simply takes a LONG time to occur.  If it didn’t, more people would look great.  There would be no fat people on vacation: everyone would always be jacked and lean.  But they aren’t, because it requires patience, and patience is in short supply.  “But what about all those stories about people making radical physical transformations in short time periods?!”  Dude: why do you think those are stories?  Those are the exceptions that PROVE the rule.  We wouldn’t report stuff like that if it WASN’T miraculous.  They very fact it’s “newsworthy” is proof of concept that the NORM is for physical transformation to require a long time and, therefore, patience to work.  How do you know you’re not one of those fast radical transformers?  The fact you are reading about it rather than living it.

And case in point, it helps to start out pretty jacked BEFORE you transform

 

This is the “secret” as to why all those bros in the gym look so jacked despite training “wrong”: they exercised patience.  They adopted the gym as a hobby, went there 3-6 times a week for a dozen plus years, put In enough effort, and saw the results.  Much like how you can graduate high school if you show up enough and put in a minimal amount of effort, you can achieve physical transformation purely through patience.  You can “wait out” the gains.  Because let’s be real about being optimal here: if training optimally means getting 100% of your potential, how less optimal is training sub-optimally?  10% less?  So if you were to have put on 50lbs of solid muscle in 15 years of training, now it’s “only” 45lbs?  That’s still REALLY good.  80%? 40lbs of muscle is a LOT of muscle.  You’d have to train so COMPLETELY off the rails to not get a solid return on investment in your training that it would be painfully obvious you aren’t there to work.  Otherwise, picking A method, executing it diligently and waiting patiently remain “the secret.”

 

Here’s another dirty secret about patience: fat is much easier to lose than muscle is to gain.  Building muscle is a SLOW process.  Once again, were that NOT the case, more people would be muscular.  Fat loss can be incredibly rapid.  Once again, talking about “stories”, the story of rapid and extensive fat loss is a very well known and popular one because it happens ALL the time.  All people need to do to make it happen is…not eat.  That’s it.  It’s INaction.  Through sheer inaction, people have lost hundreds of pounds, shedding whole humans worth of bodyweight and radically transformed themselves.  Think of the last time you saw a story about someone doing the near opposite, and adding prodigious amounts of muscle in a short time span.  Even WITH chemical assistance, the rate that muscle can be added is paltry compared to the rate at which fat can be lost.  But interestingly enough, the impact of fat loss (insofar as it relates to physique) is significantly amplified by the presence of musculature.  We’ve all seen the trainee that starts off overfat and cuts all the way down to scrawny with loose skin compared to the dude that starts off overfat BUT with a significant degree of musculature underneath.  So again: patience comes into play.  Yeah, you can drop a ton of fat quickly if you want, but if the goal is to actually look good at the end, there STILL needs to be patience.

The 10 year bulk and 2 year cut plan still works

 

“But what about my friend that never lifted before and got huge quick!”  Your friend most likely had a solid childhood background in basic athletics, while you stayed inside playing World of Warcraft.  And there is that patience again: spending the ages of 4-18 playing sports year round is the accumulation of a LOT of training volume, even IF none of it was specialized toward gaining muscle and lifting weights.  That WIDE base of general physical preparedness can now be laser focused toward a single goal and the rewards can be reaped (hey, it’s that whole “accumulation” thing all over again).  If he got to start with a 14 year head start, he’s going to pull ahead faster.  You need to be patient.  Starting today will get you one day closer than if you start tomorrow.

---

 

BONUS SECTION: I honestly couldn’t figure out where else to put this, so here’s some interesting things to note.  Patience is the secret, but some things require more patience than others.  Muscle is going to take the longest to build, and, in turn, so will strength (because, again, the way you make a muscle stronger is by making it bigger).  Because of “beginner gains”, the further away we are from our potential, the faster we make progress toward it, so most new trainees will observe rapid progress at first that will come to a snail’s crawl soon after.  This is why the average powerlifting “career” is about 3 years: after that point, it becomes hard to progress and people quit and move on.  The secret was patience, and they failed there.  However, what’s cool about muscle and strength taking a while to gain is that it ALSO takes a while to lose.  Again, people get confused about what actually IS muscle, typically confusing inflammation/swelling/bloat with it, and think that they “lost their gains” when they go on vacation for 2 weeks and don’t train and eat right.  The truth is: when you have a REAL solid foundation of size and strength under your belt, it takes a LOT to lose it.

I've met the man in person, and he's STILL huge...

 

Below muscle, cardiovascular ability and conditioning can be improved quite rapidly, which, in turn, means you’re a real slack if your conditioning sucks.  Muscle can take months and years to accumulate: a solid baseline of conditioning can be obtained in a matter of weeks.  And once you have it, maintaining it really isn’t too difficult, and improving it is still not terribly taxing.  But, in turn, you can lose it pretty quickly as well.  So if you ARE the impatient type and want to see results NOW, go build up your conditioning.  And the cool thing is, when your conditioning is improved, your ability to build muscle will improve too.

 

Flexibility and mobility are also much quicker to improve compared to muscular size, which is why people like to brag about how DEEP they can squat vs how MUCH they can squat.  It was simply easier to do the former vs the latter.  I dedicated myself to stretching 30 minutes a day when COVID hit, and within a matter of weeks was back to the ROM I had when I was a teenager.  I subsequently ALSO suffered my first hamstring tear ever in training, and then tore something in my groin on a set of squats, at which point I resumed my previous campaign of no longer stretching.  I was doing it because I was teaching my kid some Tae Kwon Do as part of their ”at home physical education” program, and decided I’d rather just kick at the waist or lower vs keep breaking stuff.  But again, quickly gained, quickly lost.

FREE E-BOOK RELEASE

 Greetings Readers,

This week, I'm just going to share with you a free E-book I've written: "Mythical Strength's Little Book of Bad Ideas".  This is a rough copy, with hopes to expand in the future with more content and photos, but right now getting it off my plate and out into the world was my priority.

Read, enjoy, and leave any comments or questions below.

https://pdfhost.io/v/jbz4DfnwZ_Book_of_Bad_Ideas_rough_cut.pdf