BAD FORM BUILDS BIG MUSCLES/THE BROS WERE RIGHT ABOUT MUSCLE CONFUSION

  

If I may toot my own horn here, I constantly receive comments about my back.  Specifically, the size of it.  And if I may say, I think it’s a pretty impressive back.  

My good side: with a face for radio

What else do I constantly receive comments about?  How bad my form is on EVERYTHING.  

This video currently has WAY more thumbs down than up on youtube

My youtube channel is FULL of “helpful citizens” telling me that I need to improve my form on pressing, deadlifting, squatting, strongman lifts, snatches, cleans, etc etc.  Man…what an interesting relationship we’re observing here.  To quote Roger Alan Wade: “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough”, which would actually be a pretty good title to this post, but I’m already in too deep.  Bad form is absolutely being “dumb” and, in that regard, the only possible way to survive it is to be tough, which the body does by getting big and strong.  And that’s going to drive SO many internet lifters crazy, but I am here to say that bad form is what makes you big and strong.

 

Talking about me again (oh boy, my favorite subject), I again refer to the point that I have “bad form” on lifts.  What does bad form necessarily mean?  Two things: form that is unsafe (which, in and of itself is a debatable idea) AND/OR form that is INEFFICIENT.  We’re focusing on that second part.  Efficiency is awesome when the goal is PERFORMANCE, because an efficient athlete wastes no energy and recruits as many muscles as possible into a movement to generate maximal force (power, exertion, whatever science term you wanna use).  When a powerlifter squats, they use the most efficient squat technique possible, minimizing bar path travel by keeping it as straight/short as possible and calling in every single muscle they can.  Hell, when they bench, they use leg drive: but isn’t bench a chest exercise?  And there’s where we start talking about training vs competition: when we compete, we want to be efficient, but when we train?  Efficiency is the enemy.

Dude missed his calling as a strength coach

 

Dan John has written about this as it relates to cardiovascular training, and we can continue to expand it.  When we get good at something, we get efficient at it, and, in turn, it becomes less challenging.  Remember Mariusz Pudzianowski gassing out in his early MMA career?  He was inefficient at fighting such that, even though he was in fantastic shape, he exhausted his conditioning reserves with wasted energy and inefficient movements.  Contrast him with Butterbean, who despite resembling a melting candle, could fight for far more rounds without showing signs of fatigue.  But who was getting a better workout?  When our goal is improvement, we NEED struggle, we NEED to gas out, we NEED exertion and exhaustion and fatigue.  Being good at something is the opposite of what we want if our goal is to generate a stimulus that results in growth, because we fall back on our refined skillset and use the least energy possible to accomplish the goal.  Talking about powerlifters again, note the technique employed in a meet compared to what you may view in a bodybuilding training session.  A bodybuilder will squat with a closer set stance, sometimes with the heels obscenely elevated and an elongated ROM, because they’re trying to be INefficient with their movement: because they want this movement to result in growth!

 

And so here we are: bad form results in big muscles.  And circling back to myself, when it comes to building a big and strong back, you could do no better than using some bad form.  If you clean a weight from the floor with a REAL, honest to goodness clean, you got some awesome hip pop into it with that triple extension and make fantastic use of all the explosiveness contained in your whole body.  When you yank it off the floor and hope for the best, that’s a LOT of back work.  No leg drive in your deadlifts?  Better have a strong back.  You good morning your squats?  Hope your back is up to the task.  To say nothing of if you use a safety squat bar and pull the handles down so that you round like hell.  The back (and glutes) is the workhorse of your body, and will gladly take on the load in situations wherein the other muscles fail to step up, primarily because the operator “forgot” to use them.  My back is big and strong because I rely on it so much to get things done, and this is where strongman, as a sport, REALLY shines.  In powerlifting or weightlifting, if I were to employ the technique I use, I’d most likely get “red lights” due to some sort of rule violation.  Strongman is very much “get the weight from A to B however you can”, which means I can rely on my back to carry me through.

There is a precedent here...

 

This principle doesn’t just relate to the back though: if you want some yoked shoulders and traps, stop being so goddamn good at getting weight overhead and start getting bad at it. In particular: quit trying to jerk the weight, quit trying to push press it, and quit trying to be so quick on the press: press the weight strictly, with no leg drive, over your head.  Geoff Capes and Bill Kazmaier were “rivals” in the early 80s of strongman, both dudes could be some decent weight overhead, Capes relied on the jerk and speed, Kaz relied on brute strength.  Of the two, guess which one looked jacked?  Check out the physiques of weightlifters in the era where the press was a contested lift vs after the fact, particularly the development of deltoids, traps and upper pecs.  Check out the physiques of professional strongman competitors vs those aforementioned weightlifters.  Etc.  “Bad form” is building bigger and stronger muscles here, because when we can’t rely on technique, we HAVE to rely on muscle.

 

Man this is getting long and I haven’t even really expressed what I wanted to say, but let’s talk muscle confusion while I’m already alienating people.  It works.  Does it work for the reasons people say it works?  Who cares: the point is, changing up your stimulus prevents you from getting GOOD at lifting, which, if your goal is to build muscle, is a GOOD thing, for everything I outlined above.  Once we start getting good, we start getting stagnant, but when we are ALWAYS struggling, we’re always growing.  John Meadows was famous for saying he never did the same workout twice, which frustrates a lot of “beat the logbook” dudes, but if your goal is to get bigger and stronger, the variable we aim for is exertion.  Yes, when it comes to lifting maximal poundages we want repeatable performances that can be measured against and evaluated, but when it comes to BUILDING that strength, we need lots and lots of struggling and floundering.

 

But not like that...

And before I sign off, remember: me writing about something working does NOT mean that the opposite DOESN’T work.  Can you get big and strong WITHOUT variation and bad form?  Sure.  Mike Tuchscherer is famous for sticking with just the competition lifts and VERY close variations of it and just manipulating the training volume.  In turn, the first time I saw Mike in person, he was the biggest human I’d ever seen in my life and had a physical presence that just consumed the room.  There are jacked weightlifters and powerlifters that only do the competition lifts.  It certainly works.  BUT, the opposite is ALSO true: if you want to get big and strong from weird angles in stupid ways, bad form will get you there. 

THINGS I FELL FOR

As I start my 22nd year of training, I think it’d be interesting to discuss all the tricks, hooks and gimmicks that I totally bought into hook, line and sinker.  Maybe this will serve as a warning, maybe you can relate, but if nothing else, it should be fun.

Roots run deep

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* Fruit juice and bagels.  Could you imagine a healthier breakfast?  Back when I was in high school I sure couldn’t.  Bagels had all sorts of healthy whole grains in them, which were what we NEEDED back then, and, of course, the fruit juice was full of vitamins and nutrients.  And these were peanut butter and jelly bagels too.  F**k me I miss bagels.  Now, as a high school wrestler, this was definitely giving me tons of ENERGY, and it was certainly better for me than Pop Tarts and breakfast cereal (or skipping breakfast), but my dad was more than willing to make anything I wanted for breakfast, and if I could go back in time I’d have him serve me up some whole eggs, egg whites, meat and avocados (we actually had an orchid of them in our backyard…I REALLY regret not eating more of them growing up).

* Speaking of Pop-tarts, anyone eat the Fiber One toaster pastries?  I sure did.  “Healthy Pop-Tarts: how awesome!”  Yeah no.  No matter how you dress up a pop-tart, it’s going to be a pop-tart.  This one just tastes worse than the others.  And don’t get me wrong: Americans, in general, don’t get enough fiber in their diet…but that’s because they’re eating junk to begin with.  Eating DIFFERENT junk isn’t the solution: taking the junk out and replacing it with veggies and quality whole food sources is.  Fiber One was brilliant: I ate the Pop-Tarts, the brownies, the lemon bars, the breakfast cereal, etc etc.  And I can’t blame it on being a dumb kid: I was eating this stuff prepping for my 3rd powerlifting meet.

* “Cardio cuts”.  The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, I decided I wanted to get abs.  And I knew how I was going to do it: I was going to TRAIN MY A…BS…off?  On?  Either way: I was going to burn ALL the fat around my belly with some intense cardio.  There was an 8 mile loop I would run everyday during the school year in high school as part of my own conditioning for wrestling, so I took to running it twice a day: once in the morning, and once in the evening.  When I had downtime, I’d skip rope or do martial arts forms (kata for you japanophiles).  Of course, all that work makes you hungry, and I was staying at my parents’ place in San Diego, where I had access to all the greatest fast food in the world (thanks In-N-Out/Jack In The Box/Rubios!) AND a mom that LOVED to spoil her darling growing boy with the big pack of Costco cookies and muffins (muffins: ANOTHER thing we all fell for).  By the end of those 3 months, my cardiovascular system was insane, I had suffered at least one stress fracture in my ankle…and I was still doughy in the midsection.  You just plain can’t outrun a fork.

Why yes, I WAS living 20 minutes from the Mexican border and eating "tacos" like this...and I regret nothing

* Speaking of abs, I got it on both sides.  “200 sit ups a night and you’ll have a six pack”, “the ab wheel is the ONE trick you need for a ripped midsection”.  Reference my above: dude, where’s my abs?  BUT, then I completely went in the OTHER direction: “You don’t need to train abs: the heavy compounds are enough”.  I got stapled by a 500lb squat in two different powerlifting meets before I finally swallowed my pride and started doing direct core training.  Why?  Because the weight felt heavy as hell on my back…because my core was weak…because I wasn’t training it.  And ya know what: this whole thing applies to biceps too.  I was a curl king, then I didn’t do any of them because compounds will do it all.  Somewhere in the middle is the truth.

* Sets of 5 are all you need!  And amazingly, this wasn’t Mark Rippetoe getting to me: he’s actually a bit AFTER my time.  This was a product of Pavel Tsastouline and “Beyond Bodybuilding”, which was a BREAKTHROUGH text for me, don’t get me wrong, but also drilled in a bit of dogma that was HARD for me to shake.  I remember REALLY struggling to reconcile how Super Squats would work since it was a 20 rep set and 5s were all you needed…especially when Pavel ADVOCATED Super Squats.  I spent way too much time spamming 5s and just hitting the same numbers over and over again with every cycle reset.  A little bit of periodization would have gone a long way.

* Oh that almighty post workout anabolic window.  I STILL drink a protein shake after training today, because I’m not gonna shake that habit after 22 years of doing it, but I was nuts about it back in the day.  Perfectly balanced ration of dextrose and maltodextrin (hey, sweet tarts are PERFECT for that: candy post workout…for the gains, of course), scraping the sides of my blender (we didn’t have shaker bottles yet) to make sure I didn’t “waste” any of the protein, rinsing it out with water and drinking the residue, making sure I sipped it into of gulping it, absolutely NO milk, only water, HAS to be whey isolate: if you use a complex you’re just wasting your money, etc etc.  These days, I use drinkable egg whites mixed with a scoop of whatever tastes yummy and is low carb/low fat, and it’s honestly just a “reward” post training, because oh my god you dudes are SO spoiled these days with the flavor of shakes.  We had “chocolate” and “vanilla”, and I put them both in quotes because the chocolate was like a hint of cocoa mixed in a sawdust like powder while the vanilla was like something you’d drink on an episode of “Fear Factor”.  

Coulda been worse I suppose...

* “A fast eccentric means a fast concentric”.  Pretty sure I got that idea from Louie Simmons.  Maybe it works, but when I tried making my squat eccentric fast, my left hamstring snapped like an old rubber band and I couldn’t squat for 8 months.  On the plus side, I DID learn how to squat from suspended chains ala Paul Anderson, and THAT was useful.  I learn a lot from injuries.

* My regular readers will know that I fell for the “abbreviated training ALL the time” trap, as I talk about it in my earlier entries here.  Abbreviated training is part of lifelong periodization: FIRST you try EVERYTHING and, in doing so, build up a HUGE accumulation of volume.  Once that stops working and you’re that dude that’s training ALL the time and not growing, THEN you do some abbreviated training, let all that accumulated fatigue dissipate, reap the benefits of that volume and just grow and grow…until it stops and you need to go back to the volume well.

* Post weigh in carb ups!  Bring on the pancakes!  Once again, I was really just finding an excuse to eat like a pig.  But I ALSO suffered the consequences of eating a bunch of junk I wasn’t used to RIGHT before a major athletic performance.  My 2 biggest mistakes were the aforementioned pancakes (holiday season pumpkin spice at Denny’s, oh my) which, when put in a completely empty and dehydrated stomach and then flood with fluid will expand to like SIX times their size and make it so that you can’t actually sleep the night before a meet.  The other was a Sizzler salad bar, where “salad” needs to be put in quotes, because you know you’re just there for the chicken dinosaurs and nachos.  I hadn’t been to a sizzler in years, and it showed when I about pooped myself the next day at my second strongman comp.  Took me a LONG time to figure out that the post weigh in binge was just a meme and my best bet was to just eat the things I had been eating up until the competition.  And then I also stopped cutting weight, because it’s a dumb thing to do for a hobby.

Also, this is CLEARLY the superior reloading location

* Shotgun of silliness here: belts make your core weak, straps make your grip weak, running/cardio kills gains, knee sleeves/elbow sleeves are cheating: I believed it all.  Notice how all of these are ways to make it so I’m NOT working harder in training?  No belt means moving less weight, same with no straps (or getting fewer reps when pulling touch and go), and there’s the convenient excuse to avoid cardio right there.  People believe because they WANT to believe.

* “Squats and deadlifts increase testosterone!”  I get it: you need to sell these movements to dudes because they suck, but that’s such a silly line.  We got dudes in the paraolympics benching over 600lbs: I think you can get plenty jacked if you never do a squat or deadlift.  But boy did I believe it such that I ALWAYS had to be squatting and deadlifting.  And, of course, variations DID NOT COUNT.  It HAD to be the squat and the deadlift.  Which also meant I had no idea how to reconcile this with conjugate….unless all I did was rotate squat for 1 week and deadlift the next.  Yeah…that’ll work…

* GLUTAMINE SUPPLEMENTATION!  Man, I bet a lot of you dudes don’t even know that was a thing, but glutatmine was going to save us ALL!  It was the miracle we were all waiting for.  I would dry scoop it with my creatine.  It tasted…unique.  And it did...nothing.  It was a fantastic lesson regarding “missing link” supplementation…until I wasted money on some Animal Pak vitamins a few years later and learned how to turn my pee into a nuclear yellow color.  I’m getting a LITTLE smarter about this stuff at least…

At least I never did this!

* “If you can move a heavy weight, you can move a light weight FAST”.  Nope.  Nope nope nope. If you only ever train to move heavy weight slowly, you will move light weight slowly too.  It’s super cool to think that, with your Hulk-like strength you’ll be able to leap tall buildings, but the fact is, if you don’t train to be fast, you WON’T be fast.  Took me 3 strongman competitions to finally learn that lesson.  I could strict press the press weights, I could deadlift the pants off everyone…and I would come in last place by LONG stretches of seconds on the moving events.  Why was I listening to slow fat guys on how to be fast?

FAILURE IS ANABOLIC

   

Title is clickbaity, because I’m not going to discuss training to failure, but instead failING and why that is anabolic.

This dude got pretty jacked from it

 

Actually, let me discuss training to failure for a second here, because I can’t believe I need to do this.  Folks: if you racked the weights when the set was over, you did NOT train to failure.  What does it mean to fail?  Hint: it’s NOT succeeding.  If you completed the rep, you did NOT fail.  To train to failure means, you attempt a rep…and DON’T do it.  You fail in the middle of it.  You trained TO failure.  This is why when kids tell me they train to failure one every set, I have my doubts.  I always ask this question “So when you do squats, ever single set, you let the bar crash into the power pins, unload the bar, rack it, re-load the bar, and then do your next set?”  Suddenly we start clarifying things from there.

 

Alright, I’ve already digressed from my intro.  Failure is anabolic.  What do I mean?  Well perhaps I’m actually meaning to discuss the opposite: that success is NOT anabolic.  Which isn’t to say catabolic, because something NOT being one thing does not necessarily make it the opposite of that thing (much like how something that isn’t hot sauce isn’t necessarily cold sauce), but that always succeeding can often result in something of a “softening” process.  Not necessarily physically (although it can absolutely be that), but moreso losing one’s “sharpness” as it relates to the pursuit of physical transformation and improvement.  When we keep winning, we settle into complacency and satisfaction and, in turn, become uninteresting.

 

In the absence of a world threat, there is no incentive for abs...how very "Will to Power"

And with that I’m going to be completely honest: what sparked this blog was me thinking about just how much coolers “second best” characters always are.  Vegeta is a billion times more interesting and captivating that happy-go-lucky Goku, Clubber Lang was SO much more fascinating than Rocky, Kuwabara to Yuske, Sagara to Kenshin (man my anime side is showing), T-800 to T-1000, the Spartans to the Persians, etc etc.  I’ve ALWAYS cheered for the second best character and never really cared for the “clear winner”.  It’s why, despite my absolute love for all things strength, I can’t STAND “The Hulk” and am a die-hard Juggernaut fan instead.  When you’re at the top, where can you climb?  But when you look up and see that there is SOMETHING there, you know you can dig deeper, train harder, and do better.

 

And when we watch these “second best” characters, it’s exactly what we see: SO much more effort being put in compared to those at the top.  Goku trained at 100 times gravity, so Vegeta went with 400 times.  Sagara was always wrapped in bandages from pushing himself too hard.  Clubber Lang was training in a dungeon of a gym while Rocky was snapping photos.  THIS is what I mean when I say that failure is anabolic: when we fail to be the best, we do SO much more in order to pursue closing that gap compared to when we sit comfortably at the top.

Although sometimes those at the top DO set some high standards...

 

This is worth exploring because so many trainees are absolutely petrified of ever failing at anything in their pursuit of physical transformation, so much so that they won’t even TRY.  Irony of ironies: failing to fail it failing harder than succeeding at failing.  Woah.  When you refuse to put yourself out there and just hide in your little bubble of security, you never grow.  When you dedicate yourself to 6 months of intense training, spend your time, money, give up on hanging out with your friends, yummy foods, comfort, etc etc…and still lose?  Can you imagine the fire that lights under you?  Winning a competition after training hard for it honestly brings about a crushing degree of ennui, but losing?  You’re planning the next training cycle on the ride home, you already know the name of 3 nutritionists that are going to get you where you need to go, you clicked “buy it now” on a reverse hyper on your phone and will figure out the finances later, you have a chore of clearing out the frozen pizzas in your freezer to make room for the 40lbs of piedmontese beef coming your way: YOU, my friend, are anabolic.

 

And comically enough, this speaks a bit to the benefit of NOT being optimal: it gives you something to chase after.  Imagine the dissatisfaction that comes with doing EVERYTHING right…and still not being awesome.  The only conclusion to draw from there is that it is YOU that sucks (cue the genetics crying).  But if there is SOMETHING left off the table, there’s still another gear that can be hit, another level things can be taken to, another extreme.  You get to have your training montage and come up from the plucky underdog status.  And this isn’t an argument for the OBTAINMENT of optimal but the benefit of it being out of reach.  Like a dog chasing a car: what are you going to do when you GET optimal?  But just imagine the transformation you undergo as you try your damndest to ascend from second best to the top? 

You might even try some REAL silly ideas along the way

 

You could hope for no better gift than the gift of failure.  All the books (hah!  Who reads anymore anyway?), podcasts, videos, seminars, 1 on 1 consultations, etc etc, in the world won’t teach you as much as dedicating yourself for months to something only to have it blow up in your face will.  Nothing will make you grow faster, bigger and stronger than royally screwing up and not being able to rise to the top spot.  To always have it hovering over you, looming, taunting, THAT is what triggers anabolic, whole body, unstoppable growth. Avoiding failure is avoiding growth, denying that there is someone simply greater than you (by attributing it to genetics, drugs, money, luck, etc) is denying your growth potential.  Secure yourself squarely in second place and let the view of the lead dog compel you to work harder, push further, and become better.

START WITH A WIN

 

First, I know for a fact I’m not the first person to come up with this idea, but I’m writing this at 0540 on a day off of work after having gotten up at 0330 to crush the Kalsu WOD with 135lb log viper presses, so I’m living this as it’s being written, and I think that’s pretty cool.  Why do I train first thing in the morning when given the chance?  It’s not because I love training so much that I can’t wait to do it: quite the opposite.  I HATE training.  It just looms over me as a specter, always there, always present, and it will never go away and die. It’s something I HAVE to do if I want to achieve my goals, which in turn means it’s not something I’ve ever loved.  What I love is being able to spend time with my family, and training takes AWAY from that…unless I get up before they do and get it done.  And that’s why I do it, because even though I might FEEL better training on a full stomach, later in the day, properly warmed up and psyched up and built up, I won’t be able to actually do the things I love because I tried to make a bad situation better vs letting it be as bad as possible.  I started by day with a win by doing the thing I hated FIRST, getting it knocked out, crushing it and moving on.

And if you can make it as one-sided as this, even better

 

I do the same thing with my nutrition.  In fact, I DID the same thing with my nutrition.  I make my breakfast BEFORE going to bed.  These days, it’s 2 whole organic free range eggs, a slash of egg whites, 2oz of some sort of grassfed beef (typically ground, but I had some stew meat recently that was amazing), half an avocado, a little grassfed butter and some fat free cheese.  I cook it up like an omelet the night before, put it in a glass sealed container, wake up and zap it in the microwave, then throw it on an eggwhite wrap with some organic sunbutter and chow it down in about 4 minutes.  Sometimes I’ll have a keto waffle or pancakes on the side with a little more sunbutter.  It’s a substantial amount of calories and a lot of healthy fats and protein first thing in the morning, and typically I have my last bite about 5 minutes before my first warm-up set of the day, so it’s not really even fueling the workout.  But what it DOES do is set me up for success for the rest of the day.  If I get busy at work, or if the family decides they wanna do some all day adventure out and about and I have to live off protein bars and beef jerky for the next 18 hours, at least I got in a great source of nutrition at the start of the day.  I’m not playing catch up. 

 

And that’s fundamentally the message I want to spread with this: start your day off with a win.  How we begin our day can often dictate how it ends, and if we start off scrambling, behind the power curve, flummoxed, blind sided and baffled, we set ourselves up to effectively waste the next 24 hours, which, in turn, sets up a viscous self-perpetuating cycle.  In turn, you’ll note that often, starting off with a win means preparing yourself BEFORE you start.  I wrote about how I make my breakfast the night beforehand so it’s ready to go.  I do the same thing with my meals for the day: I prepare them in the afternoon or evening before, so they’re good to go.  Some people even prepare food for the whole week: that’s cool too.  My workout clothes were set up for me this morning to grab and go.  I have a home gym, and one of my favorite meditative rituals is setting up the equipment for the morning workout the evening before, so that I roll in and it’s ready.  Hell, what inspired this post was that, after my workout this morning, I slid my weightlifting shoes off my feet while the laces were still tied, and then I carefully untied them so that, the NEXT time I came in to train, I wouldn’t have to do that: they’d already be ready for me.  Because AFTER the workout, I have all the time in the world to deal with shoelace knots, but there’s nothing worse than when you’re scrambling for time and get a knot in your shoelace.

Especially true if you're working with these...and a million bonus points if you get this reference

 

And this extends to the microlevel as well.  I train first thing in the morning because I hate it and I just want to get it done and, in turn, I know I’m not going to SKIP training if it’s what I do first thing.  You can’t skip the first thing because…well…it’s the first thing.  So why not also do that IN your training?  Is your conditioning bad?  Do you do your conditioning at the END of your workouts?  Which is to say, do you frequently do your workouts and skip conditioning?  Do it first.  “But won’t my workouts suffer if I do conditioning first?!”  Aren’t your workouts ALREADY suffering because your conditioning is poor?  Your body will EVENTUALLY adapt if you do conditioning first, but it will NEVER adapt to you NOT doing conditioning: it will just continue to suck.  Weak abs?  Always skipping ab work?  Do it first.  I’d EVEN allow doing it in between your main work, but either way: start with a win.

 

Works for nutrition too.  Not eating enough veggies?  Eat them first.  Start your day with a salad.  I start my day with such a high fat meal because I had cut out WAY too many fats in my diet chasing after lower LDL numbers, and forcing myself to have a high fat meal first thing in the day meant there was no way I’d skip out on that.  Not enough protein?  Start your day with a protein shake.  That was my breakfast for the LONGEST time coming up, and then I’d have some real food an hour later.  I’d start my day with a win and get some protein in after an 8 hour fast. 

Still a better choice than some of these bad boys...and yes, I DID used to eat these thinking they were a "good choice"

 

And with this, we come all the way around to “get to yes”.  Strategize HOW you will start with a win.  You have NO idea how frustrated I am when I read someone say they don’t have enough time in the morning to eat breakfast.  This legitimately requires waking up FIVE minutes earlier than usual.  Who is operating off of such a shoestring time budget that they don’t have 5 minutes to spare?  And that same 5 minutes is time that could be spent doing Tabata burpees, for those that don’t have time for conditioning, which is ANOTHER fantastic way to start your day with a win.  I have, no joke, rolled right out of bed and set the Tabata app on my phone to go and knocked out burpees in my socks and underwear first thing in the morning just to get it done and move on with my life.  Funny enough, when you start your day with THAT kind of “win”, the kind of win that REALLY sucks, it makes the rest of the day seem SO much more awesome by comparison. 

 

Don’t try to build to a win: start with one, and let the rest of the game unfold from there.