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?