DOING EVERYTHING BACKWARDS

 This is something that dawned on me the other day that I felt like sharing.  I pretty recent wrote a piece on “doing what everyone else is doing will get you the results everyone else is getting”, and this goes down a similar path, but still: the observation is entertaining because it allows you to further understand the insanity of my logic.  Allow me to explain.

 

Around 2006 or so, I had been training for 6-7 years and enjoyed the success that came from simply smashing my head into the wall as hard as I could and eating a lot of food (side note: that method STILL works by the way).  A buddy of mine had turned me on to Super Squats, and, of course, from there the rest is history, but the story AFTER the happily ever after from that is that I got FAR into the “hardgainer rabbit hole”.  I read Stuart McRobert’s “Brawn”, which also got me pointed toward all manner of abbreviated training, to the point that my long time readers (hey folks: we hit 3 million views!  And we’re on 10 years running now…holy crap!) will know that this whole blog started as I was just BARELY clawing myself out of that pit of abbreviated training obsession.

 

But why was I so into this hardgainer stuff?  Those of you familiar with my history know that I grew up a fat kid and, until VERY recently, had what would best be described as “endomorphic tendencies”.  I never had an issue gaining weight, and tended to be a bit on the dumpy side of things: a hardgainer I was not.  But my “logic” was bulletproof: if THIS stuff can make hardgainers gain muscle, just imagine what it can do for normal folks! 

This all happened BEFORE Starting Strength was a thing

 

And so off I went!  I drank the gallon of milk a day and did the 20 breathing squats.  I followed the Dave Tate “nutrition” protocols of the early to mid 2000s and tried my hardest to eat entire packages of Oreos, Poptarts by the boxful, and all other manner of debauchery best fit for “hardgainers”.  I focused on making that scale weight grow whenever I found my lifts stalling.  I did all the tricks.

 

And hey folks: it DID work.  Yeah, I got pretty fat, but my late teens and early 20s were some prime growing years.  It was the first time I ever managed to get to be over 200lbs, which, being completely and totally transparent with you all, I very much miss, but I’m at a point in my life where that’s not the priority (more on that in a bit).  But herein we observe the logic at work: if I wanted to put on muscle, I wasn’t going to follow the advice for people who put on muscle easily (no thanks “bodybuilder training”): I followed advice to put muscle on people that are STRUGGLING to gain.

 

Well here I am 15ish years later and I realize I’m doing this all over again.  How’s that?  Check this out: wanna know a GREAT way to train to put on some size?  Do some fat loss workouts.

I can already feel how much you hate me after you try this

 

Come again?  Yeah, for one, I get that “fat loss workout” in and of itself is pretty silly.  Exercise, in general, doesn’t burn a whole lot of calories, and the way to lose fat is through some fork putdowns and table pushaways.  Diet diet diet.  Yeah, I get it, BUUUUUT we can’t pretend like there aren’t training protocols out there with a goal to generate a serious metabolic demand in order to help stimulate fat loss.  Examples?  Of course.

 

The classic “Tabata front squats” from Dan John is marketed as a fat loss workout, as it is short and STUPIDLY high in intensity.  It brings your heart rate into the redzone quickly, and then you can spend several hours “coming down” from it, hence a serious metabolic hint in short order.  Many High Intensity Interval Style training protocols are similar in that regard, along with some Crossfit WODs like Grace, Isabel, Fran, etc.  If you look at the core of all of these protocols, it’s pretty much the same thing: take a BIG movement that uses a lot of muscles (taking stuff from the floor and putting it overhead is a GREAT example) and then do a lot of reps of it in a short time with minimal (if any) breaks.  It’s totally anaerobic, and basically you are trying to outrun your heart and lungs before you flood with lactic acid and die.

This took me 1:45 to complete and several hours to recover from

 

But wanna know something cool about fat loss workouts?  Since they are so metabolically demanding, they can make you REALLY hungry…which is AWESOME when you’re trying to gain weight.  Because truth be told, you can undo 60 minutes of exercise with 30 seconds of eating.  So if you’re struggling to get in the calories due to a lack of appetite, a quick fat burner workout can go a LONG way in opening up avenues for more food intake.  But along with that, if our goal is to turn all these calories into muscle, what better way than to sprinkle in these little 2-10 minute workouts on top of hard and heavy training?  Folks, most lifting workouts last 60-90 minutes, and those of you with epic 3 hour long “workouts” are spending WAY more time resting than lifting.  So for 90 minutes in your day, you do something physical…and then you spend the remaining 22.5 hours being stagnant?  What do you think your body will reflect more: what you’re doing for 1.5 hours a day or what you’re doing for 22.5?  BUT, if we keep hammering the body with these little intense microworkouts, we keep triggering that response to change.  If we do that and DON’T feed it, it’s a fat loss workout….but if we do that AND feed it, we are primed for growth.

 

A few personal stories: I’ve been doing daily Tabata kettlebell front squats for the past month as part of this current mass building phase, and it’s just been remarkable for my conditioning along with keeping on the lean side while I continue to mainline calories.  And the real origin of this whole “doing things backwards” come by way of my Dad.  When my grandma came to visit us one day, she brought a bunch of “Slimfast” shakes (this was the 90s, go figure) that she left in our fridge.  My dad discovered that they were delicious…and was drinking them alongside a ham sandwich at lunch.  Damndest thing: those “weightloss shakes” are FANTASTIC for weight gain when you drink them WITH food.  And hell, I can keep going down the backwards rabbit hole when I discuss my whole “training drives nutrition: not the other way around” idea, which STILL blows peoples’ minds…BUT this is already getting on the long side here, so let me conclude…

 

Try doing things backwards for a bit.  Put your heavy compounds at the END of your workouts instead of the beginning: you’ll be able to push MUCH harder on them because you don’t need to save any energy for the rest of the workout.  Eat and train like a hardgainer if you’re an easy gainer.  Train for fat loss while you’re going for weight gain.   Run “punt block” on the first down.  Honestly, when I observe the results of people doing everything “right”, doing things wrong seems a lot more appealing.