WISDOM OF YOUTH/EXPERIENCE OF AGE

  

In my 22nd year of training now, it’s been fun to look back and think of what I’ve learned along the way.  In a podcast I was recently featured in, I mentioned how I was SO much smarter about training when I was 14 vs when I went out and got “educated”, reading ALL the studies and the books and the articles and the forum posts that were out there on the subject of getting bigger and stronger.   Primarily because, at the age of 14, I was an action movie, comic book, video game and anime junkie that had been inundated with montages and over the top cliché so much that I KNEW, with every fiber of my being, that what you NEEDED to do to get big and strong was work REALLY REALLY hard.  And that was it.  That was “the secret”.  It HAD to be.  I saw Vegeta train at 400 times gravity and he was ALMOST as strong as a Super Sayian WITHOUT powering up!  And when Goku took off his thousands of pounds of training weights you couldn’t even see him move!  And The Punisher was ALWAYS training, even after busting up a drug ring and getting his bones broken.  And who could forget Rocky, or Vision Quest, or Bloodsport, or etc etc.  THAT was the wisdom of my youth: work REALLY hard and you get results.

Why yes, I DID train myself to the point of being able to do 1 armed push ups on my fingers...why do you ask?

 

So what led me to do all that damn reading in the first place?  Unfortunately, the folly of that very same youth: impatience.  I WAS working really damn hard: why wasn’t I REALLY damn strong?  It’s been 3 WHOLE months: what gives?!  I remember deciding one summer that I was going to get a six-pack, and to do that I was going to burn off ALL my belly fat with cardio.  There was an 8 mile loop around my house that I would run once a day, every day, during the school year to keep me in shape for wrestling, so for the summer I DOUBLED it.  I’d run the first 8 in the morning (fasted, to REALLY burn that belly fat) and then the other 8 in the evening before bed.  Looking at that, you’d imagine I’d have ZERO glycogen in my body…except for the fact I lived with my parents, with my mom being an absolute champ at buying those GIANT Costco muffins to have in the house for breakfast (which, after an 8 mile run, you gotta have at LEAST 2), and I lived in San Diego, so I had access to the BEST Mexican food in the world, to say nothing of the fast food mecca of Jack in the Box and In n Out.  As you can imagine, I was unsuccessful in my quest for abs that summer…but I DID have the most amazing cardiovascular system in the world afterwards, so that was cool.

 

But there were my 3 WHOLE months of effort and NOTHING to show for it, so of course, I turn to academia to figure out what I need to do different.  And some studies said that training fasted WAS the cure…and some said that I was being a big stupid dummyhead because I was being SUPER catabolic and eating away ALL my muscle, so no WONDER I didn’t have my six pack.  And by the way, don’t bother training those abs to get a six pack, because abs are made in the kitchen…except you SHOULD train them, because a bigger muscle shows through.  Except a six pack doesn’t even mean you’re in shape…but it IS the crowning achievement of fitness.  Maybe my issue was carb timing, or maybe I shouldn’t be eating ANY carbs, or maybe ONLY carbs.  Who was I kidding: clearly the issue was all the drugs and supplements I WASN’T taking.

In fairness, you could buy this over the counter when I was that age...

 

A few years later, one day, after a sparring session (we called them “McThrowdowns”, salute to bullshido.net, I miss you folks), someone took a group photo of us, and in it, I realized something: I had abs!  I hadn’t been training for them, I hadn’t dedicated myself to them, my diet was still whatever I could get away with…but there they were. 

 

What was the missing element?  The start of that sentence: “a few YEARS later”.  And therein is the experience of age: you do this LONG enough and you begin to realize that effort WILL pay off: it just takes time.  And yes, I know I just recently wrote “the secret is patience”, but herein we observe the detriment of IGNORING that secret.  I was letting my “lack” of results get to me, failing to understand that I wasn’t observing LACKING results: I was observing results occurring at the rate they occur at.  Which, for physical transformation, is SLOW.  If you ever get the chance, listen to Justin Harris break down the rate at which the body adds muscle, because he does a much better job that I do, but using the most extreme example (Big Ramy in this case), assuming you do EVERYTHING right, have the best genetics, are using the best drugs, eating the best food, following the best training, you’re adding GRAMS of muscle to your body each day once you’re past the beginner stages of training.  The solace of such information is that it means ONE bad day isn’t going to ruin anything…but it also means one GOOD day is also meaningless.  It’s going to take a LOT of decent to good days all stacked up in a row for anything to start mattering.

Just like you might get the gold with 1 good day...but you get to be a legend even in defeat

 

Which is something I got to learn with experience.  Because, eventually, I got fed up doing things the way I was “supposed” to do it.  I almost quit lifting entirely around 2010 because I had completely lost my passion for it.  I never liked training in the first place, but I at LEAST liked getting results, and now I wasn’t even getting that.  I was nursing year 2 of a 3 year long lower back injury I got from squatting to pins to make SURE I was squatting to the “correct” depth that kept me from deadlifting: the ONE lift I was decent at.  I was sick of doing EVERYTHING for 5 reps because that was “the best rep range”.  I was sick of ONLY doing the big compounds because “isolation work was pointless”.  And so I decided to give it one last push and just do what I was doing before…and goddamn if it didn’t work!  Because now I was willing to play the long game and give things TIME to shake out.  I had recovered from enough dislocated shoulders to know that injuries DO heal, so long as they are given time…the same time needed to see the results of the efforts of physical transformation.  And not fearing injury allowed me to push myself harder in my training, which comically enough made the results come faster than when I was trying to play it safe.  Because of my experience, I knew a TON of things that DIDN’T work: because I had tried them all before.  This made coming up with a plan for a way forward EASY: I could eliminate SO many choices.  And because of my experience, I could STILL remember being that teenager, relying solely on effort, and just how powerful it was.

 

And therein the two merged.  The wisdom of my youth met the experience of my age and I realized that, so long as I pushed myself as hard as I could, given enough time, I’d get the results I wanted.  And if I’m not getting the results, I just need to ask my younger self if I’m training hard enough and my current self if I’ve waited long enough.

PODCAST: "MOVE SWEAT SUFFER" FEATURING YOURS TRULY

     Howdy folks.

This week, instead of my normal written post, allow me to share a podcast I was on recently: "Move Sweat Suffer".  In it, I discuss my basic training and nutrition philosophy and approach and field a few questions.  Feel free to leave any questions or comments on this post

CONDITIONING IS MAGIC

I remember the exact moment I discovered that conditioning was magic.  My sophomore year of high school, I joined the school wrestling team.  Prior to that, I was a fat kid, and my freshman year I played football.  I went to a small enough school that I played both sides of the line, as a center and nose tackle…which is also how I was able to join the wrestling team my sophomore year with NO wrestling experience whatsoever.  I had lost about 25lbs the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, and no longer had the ONE thing I had going for me in football: weight, so now I had to try a different sport.  Wrestling is an awesome sport, because you’ll get taught how to shoot a single leg, how to sprawl, and then get cut loose to go wrestle at full speed.  Within 2 weeks of my first lesson, I was in my first tournament…and I did AWFUL.  BUT, thankfully, there was another “fish” just like me in the losers bracket, and I got to square off against him after my first loss.  Wrestling is an EXHAUSTING sport, and even though I had been doing a lot of cardio to help cut those 25lbs, being in the 3rd round of a match after only 2 weeks of wrestling training, this other dude and I were GASSED.  As we both stood there, hands on our knees, facing each other, waiting for the other guy to do something, it dawned on me that, if I just did SOMETHING right then and there, I could actually win.  So I gathered up my reserves, spear tackled the dude, fell on top of him and got a win by pin.  At that moment, I realized that conditioning was magic, and the guy who had the better conditioning stood the chance of actually winning.

Yeah, I imagine we looked like this by that point

So how is conditioning magic?  Conditioning makes EVERYTHING ELSE better when it gets better.  It’s the rising tide that raises all boats, and, consequently, the very same tide that, when it goes out, you discover who has been swimming naked this whole time.  What’s also magical about conditioning is the inside dividends it pays off.  A VERY small investment in conditioning pays off HUGE in matters of getting bigger and stronger, whereas the same cannot be said in regards to training for hypertrophy (and, by extension, strength).  

How does conditioning help you get bigger and stronger?  When your conditioning is better, you recover between sets faster.  This means that, in any given amount of time, you can accumulate more volume in your training.  You’ll either be able to get in more sets, more reps per set, or use a higher weight on your worksets compared to if you had worse conditioning.  In addition, conditioning can improve your recovery between workouts themselves.  A common trope is for a trainee to do a leg training session and then spend the next 4 days walking around like a wind up toy because their legs are sore.  BUT, if that said trainee were to engage in some prowler pushes or a few rounds of thrusters, they will get some restorative blood flow into the healing muscles and find that they bounce back quicker…which means having another opportunity to train due to having recovered quicker…which means more volume…which means more growth.

Sometimes recovery can REALLY suck

And this is just addressing the benefit of conditioning in the realm of getting bigger and stronger: the other benefits are rather obvious.  Conditioning will improve your cardiovascular shape, muscular endurance, give you extra avenues for skill practice of certain movements, improve mobility, etc.  Do a few bear complexes “Crossfit style” where you thruster out of the clean and push press out of the back squat and you’re going to become fast AND mobile.  Bodyweight circuits will get you moving your body through space JUST like one of those mobility drills you like so much while ALSO actually making you more awesome.  

In that regard, I’ve listed a whole bunch of things that are considered conditioning, which inevitably leads to the question of “how do I do conditioning?”  Whenever I get asked this question, it’s hard for me to grasp, because my approach has basically been “do something that sucks for longer than you want to”, but the more I think about it the more I realize I DO have some sort of system, so I figure I’d share it in case you’d like to use it.

CONDITIONING MATRIX

Realizing conditioning is magic sucks because now you HAVE to do it

Ok, so to start: conditioning WILL happen EVERY day.  When you start off with that, figuring conditioning becomes easier. 

From there, it becomes a question of how much time do I have that day to dedicate to conditioning.  If an hour is available, I then have another decision to make: hard or easy conditioning, to steal from Jim Wendler.  This decision is easy: if it’s ALSO a day I’ll be lifting, I do easy conditioning, typically in the form of a walk (either weighted or unweighted).  If it’s a day with no lifting, I then opt for a hard conditioning workout.  Some classics that fit within this are the Kalsu WOD, Faust, Murph, the Tower of Babel, Juarez Valley Front Squats, etc.  This is typically where a lot of my “bad ideas” are born, as I’ll come up with something that occupies the time and absolutely crushes me.

My brain ALL the time

If I DON’T have that kind of time, I then go for short, intense conditioning sessions.  A 4 minute walk is pretty worthless for conditioning, but a tabata workout can have a great training effect in that short of a timespan.  Here is where things like tabata, Fran, Grace, Hill sprints, etc, can go a long way.  

Some days, I start out thinking I’m going to have an hour to do conditioning and my schedule gets compromised, so I switch to a short intense session.  Other times, my schedule opens up out of nowhere and I grab a long, low intensity session.  Capitalize on every opportunity you get.  If you try to be too rigid in an attempt to “optimize” your conditioning, you’re going to get frustrated and end up simply NOT doing a conditioning session.  Some times, my schedule makes it so that I don’t get in a low intensity session for damn near a month, but then a light season of work rolls around and I end up getting in a TON of them.  It will all even out.

Regarding what movements to use once you’ve determined what protocol to take: conditioning can be restorative AND a good way to get in extra volume, so I try to maximize that.  What this means is, I’ll train muscles/movements that I’ve either trained THAT day OR the day/days before, BUT I tend to avoid movements/muscles that I have coming up.  The way my lifting week shakes out (ideally) is I press on the first day of the week and then squat on the second day of the week.  For my first day’s conditioning, this will mean I’ll typically do something like Grace later in the day so I can get in a little extra shoulder pressing volume AND start the recovery process of my shoulders.  BUT, I’m not going to do Fran, because thrusters are a front squat and press, and that could cause me to carry some fatigue into my quads coming into my squat day.  Grace is about cleaning and pressing, so it’s all good before squat day.  Now, on the NEXT day, AFTER my squats, I’ll most likely intentionally do something like Fran or something thruster focused, because the front squats will help my legs recover AND the pressing will be good on my shoulders.  And then day 3 is typically Tower of Babel with front squats, which will, again, get blood flowing into my legs to help them recover.

With all this, the best thing you can do now is try a bunch of different conditioning workouts so that you have a rolodex (super dated term) of workouts to rotate through on any given moment.  I wrote up my book of bad ideas, which contains an assortment of conditioning workouts, but along with that you can check out “Tactical Barbell II” or the website “wodwell.com” to mine some ideas.  Try out a bunch, see what suits you, and from there you’ll gain some ability to do some free styling.  Swap out movements, do longer rounds, shorter rest periods, stack workouts on top of themselves, etc.  

And if in doubt: do Tabata burpees.

   

JUST TAKE THE THING OFF THE FLOOR AND PUT IT OVER YOUR HEAD

I am a sucker for all-encompassing/all-in-one information sources.  I don’t think I have a particularly short attention span and, in fact, believe I have obsessive tendencies (as evidenced by a blog that I’ve written a weekly post in for nearly a decade on the subject of getting bigger and stronger), but just the novelty of having A book or A lecture that contains ALL the information you “need” in order to progress is just so satisfying to me.  It’s why I like “Powerlifitng Basics Texas Style”, as Paul took the time to include some nutrition/cooking sections in with the lifting: same with Marty Gallagher’s “Purposeful Primitive”, John Berardi’s “Scrawny to Brawny”, John McCallum’s “Complete Keys to Progress”, “Super Squats”, etc.  And, in turn, I recognize the limitations inherent in having an all-in-one approach, my like how a swiss army knife has a bunch of OK tools instead of 1 really good one, but, in turn, I’ve often been VERY happy to have a swiss army knife on me vs a REALLY good corkscrew.  All of this said, allow me to provide my own all-in-one answer to all things transformation related: take the thing off the floor and put it over your head

Colossus is here trying to get The Thing into position

                                                    

This just answers ALL the questions about training.  How do I train conditioning?  Just take the thing off the floor and put it over your head.  I plan on writing a longer post on “how to conditioning” later, just because people really seem to struggle with the HOW behind it, but if you want an “all-in-one” answer, you’d be hard pressed to beat this answer.  Taking things off the floor and putting them over your head is one of the most effective means of building whole body conditioning out there.  And there are SO many ways to make it work.  Do it all in one motion like a snatch, break it down into two parts like a clean and jerk, or start using permutations of all of this.  Just think: there are power snatches, muscle snatches, hang snatches, clean grip snatches, power cleans, muscle cleans, hang cleans, and then we can get into thrusters, clusters, one motions, etc.  And this is just using a barbell: if you have a log you can viper, you can continental an axle (or a barbell if you’re weird).  And you can do a lot of this crazy nonsense with dumbbells, kettlebells, sandbags, kegs, stones (natural or atlas): pretty much ANYTHING can be picked up and put over your head.  And since we’re doing it for conditioning, we just do it until our heart feels like it’s going to explode.  “What if the weight is too light?”  Move it faster, or do more reps with it.  Set a timer and do as many reps as you can in that time.  “What if it’s too heavy?”  Going Every Minute on the Minute, so you can recover in time and keep your heart rate up.  Snatch it until you can’t, then push press it until you can’t, then strict press it until you can’t, then just clean it until you can’t.  You will be gassed.

How do I get big and strong?  Would you believe the answer is “just pick the thing off the floor and put it over your head?”  Oh my goodness how AMAZING that approach is for that goal.  And pair this with my most recent post about bad form making big muscles and you’re REALLY onto something special.  If you wanna hit a beautiful, flawless looking clean and then split jerk the weight overhead in an instant, that’s groovy dude and it looks REALLY pretty, but if you wanna build some gnarly, ugly, brutal musculature, take something that DOESN’T want to be picked up, like an axle, keg, sandbag, fire hydrant, etc, pick it up and get it over your head.  It’s going to look TERRIBLE, and it’s going to call into play a bunch of muscles you didn’t even know you had, and, in turn, it’s going to make you TREMENDOUSLY big and strong.

I kept it dark to hide my shame

“But what about my legs/pecs/triceps/serratus/pineal gland/metacarpals?”  Oh my god I’m tired of those questions.  Do you know how often I get asked if Building the Monolith has enough chest work?  Do you know how often I ask those dudes if they’re dong the full 200 dips and the answer is “…no”?   Taking something off the floor that doesn’t want to be lifted and lifting it over your head is going to make your WHOLE BODY grow.  You are gonna need some strong legs to get the damn thing off the ground in the first place along with some strong biceps, a strong back to balance the load, that back musculature is going to extend all the way up to the base of your skull as you’ll need strong traps to get the weight to your chest and strong rear delts when you’re pressing to keep it stabilized, and then the shoulders and triceps are obvious in the press, BUT the chest comes into play as well because you’re going to be pressing at an angle, since the object will be big and bulky and NOT going in a straight line.  And then, of course, your abs will light up as your core balances everything into place.  Talking from personal experience, I saw the most significant whole body growth in my life when I tried to bring up my keg press from 200lbs to 275lbs in 12 weeks.  

Could a more specialized approach get different results?  Absolutely, but remember: this is a simple all-in-one solution, and in that regard it works FANTASTICALLY well.  You’d be well on your way to the kind of musculature that was popular among Greek statues, because hey: guess how those dudes built their bodies?  They picked the thing up and put it over their heads.

Sorry if you consider this NSFW, but it's art...and that dude is JACKED

“But how many reps?  How many sets?!  How long do I rest?”  Ya know what, I could outsource this and say go check out Dan John’s “One Lift a Day” program.  Or go Jamie Lewis “Chaos and Pain” style insanity and just see how many times you can press the weight overhead in a fixed amount of time, and then either break that record or go for more time next time.  You could run 5/3/1 for just the one lift, or go Bulgarian on it and just hit multiple workouts with it in one day.  I’ve taken to running Crossfit WODs with implements: axle, keg and log for Grace and Fran.  Hey, isn’t that conditioning?  It all comes full circle: you’re not gonna lift something and NOT build some muscle from it.  If your implement is a fixed weight, do lots of reps if it’s light and few reps if it’s heavy.  If it’s light, take every rep off the floor: if it’s heavy, take only the first rep or first rep reps off the floor and press out the rest.

And folks: this is instinct.  This is what your mind WANTS to do when it sees a heavy imposing weight.  It’s why it’s a show of physical dominance in professional wrestling to lift another man overhead and slam him down.  Almost any child, when given a weight, will immediately try to press it overhead.  They don’t lay down and floor press it, they don’t put it on their back and squat it, they MAY deadlift it if it’s just too heavy to press, but otherwise, we KNOW, on some sort of biological level, that the secret to physical transformation is to just take the thing off the floor and put it over our heads.     

Boy I hope this uploads as a .gif...

So if in doubt, just take the thing off the floor and put it over your head.  And use bad form when you do it to build big muscles.  And figure out your sets and reps by rolling a 20 sided die.  You’re onto something.