ON GETTING STRONG: STOP ADAPTING

  

Once again I go on my tirade about what “real strength” is, and the more I pursue it, the more it becomes clear yet obscure at the same time.  When I started training, strength was easy to understand: it was how much you could lift.  As I get further along in my pursuit of it, I discovered I had confused skill for strength.  I saw those that had mastered the craft of perfectly maximizing every fiber of their being into one highly practiced movement in order to move as much weight as possible and considered them “strong”, but what I was witnessing was an expert.  An accomplishment to be sure: but it was not strength.  Not as I KNEW it within myself.  Not as I continue to pursue it.  Strength exists OPPOSITE of skill: skill attempts to take strength and confine it.  Like attempting to channel a bolt of lightning or corral a wildfire or harness the power of the cosmos: strength is an overwhelming force that skill tries to narrowly funnel toward a limited application.  Which, in turn, is why I propose that, in the pursuit of strength, REAL strength, one should strive to NEVER adapt.

This guy gets it!

 

Adaptation, in the pursuit of strength, is indicative that the body has become complacent with the stimulus provided to it.  We’ve all experienced this phenomenon.  You go run a mile for the first time in a long time (or ever), you end up gassed with sore connective tissues, and then, by the end of the month, you’ve adapted and the mile is no longer the challenge it once was.  Or, since most the folks that read my blog lift, your first leg day had you limping everywhere you walked and seriously strategizing how to get off the toilet, but by the end of the month, you could do leg day like a champ.  But why don’t we learn some lessons from this experience shall we?  Notice how awful it felt when we first started?  Notice how we experienced RAPID improvement after that initial awfulness?  How the body threw all of it’s available resources INTO adapting so that it would stop feeling so awful?  And then, notice how, improvement AFTER that initial growth is significantly slower, limited, and ultimately unsatisfying? 

 

Adaptation is death!  When we adapt, we stagnate: we become complacent and are no longer the “rapid adapter”, for we are ALREAY ADAPTED.  “Muscle confusion!”  “Newbie gains!” “Bro science!”  Folks: these reasons these ideas have had so much staying power is because they are TRUE.  Note: “TRUE”; not necessarily “right”.  Yes, science may have an ACTUAL answer about what is occurring here, but do we really need to “know” it to be able to understand it?  Why settle for science when art and poetry are so much prettier?

Keep in mind: he started off as one of the smartest beings in the universe, and understood that being big, strong, angry and dumb was FAR superior

 

When we seek to AVOID adaptation, we put our body in a state of frequently SEEKING adaptation, and this is the best place for it to be when our goal is to become stronger.  A body seeking adaptation is a body seeking to grow, and, in our case, grow stronger.  A body that is adaptED has already achieved that objective, and therefore has no incentive to grow.  Thus, it behooves us to constantly place the body in a state where it has no opportunity TO adapt, and we do this by constantly placing the body in a state where adaptation is not possible BECAUSE we are frequently placing different demands upon it TO adapt.

 

Oh boy will this upset those of you in the “anti-Crossfit” camp, but I hate to break this to you: Crossfit was a good idea.  Yeah yeah, its followers are insufferable: have you been online recently and perused a powerlifting or strongman forum?  I think we’ve learned that PEOPLE are annoying, and people with hobbies are annoying because they want to talk about them.  But meanwhile, the idea of frequently changing reps, sets, movements and modalities proves to be a VERY effective approach for becoming “strong”.  “But the top Crossfitters only deadlift 600lbs!  That won’t win a local powerlifting meet.”  Folks, if you can pull a 600lb deadlift WITHOUT specializing in training the deadlift, you are a goddamn monster.  Yes, a guy who spends 4 days a week for years at a time solely focused on pulling a single rep of a deadlift for as much as possible SHOULD be upset if they can “only” deadlift 600lbs: a guy who deadlifts once every 27 days and typically for reps doing this on top of a protocol involving running, swimming, gymnastics, quick lifts, odd object lifting, etc, is doing amazing with that kind of pull.

Keep pretending you aren't impressed

 

Anyone who follows my psychotic training has observed this unfolding recently.  I’ve employed a phasic approach to training, where protocols are changing every 6 weeks, and WITHIN those 6 week protocols, the conditioning is CONSTANTLY changing.  I’ll stick with something for a few weeks, grow too adapted to it, and move on.  I did daily Tabata KB front squats for 12 weeks, then overnight changed it to 5 minutes of KB Armor Building Complexes, and on top of that came other daily conditioning workouts, and daily bodyweight work, all subject to change.  “Chaos it the plan”.  And along with that, we change what days body parts get trained, what order, rest times, etc etc.  I heard Jon Andersen say in a podcast that he tries to never train a body part the same way twice, to include never training a bodypart the same day of the week 2 weeks in a row: you can’t let the body know what’s going to happen.  John Meadows endeavored to never repeat the same workout.  “They can do that because they’re advanced”.  Or hey: maybe they’re advanced BECAUSE they do that.

 

Let’s not let the body adapt nutritionally either.  Rotate different foods; eat seasonal foods IN season, what a thought.  Vary protein sources, get a wide variety of different nutrients, prepare food differently.  Remember carb cycling, and how well that worked?  How about Marty Gallagher’s idea of interchanging periods of fasting with periods of small, frequent meals?  Remember Dan John expressing something similar?  We continue to challenge the body, and as the body attempts to adapt to these challenges, it changes FAVORABLY.  It sheds excessively adipose tissue that is only serving to slow down metabolic processes, it adds muscular tissue to improve body composition into something better able to process all of this food, knowing that fat is “dead” while muscle is a furnace.  It becomes better AT processing a variety of foods, which, in turn, self-perpetuates the ability to take on a greater variety of nutrition.  Don’t be fat adapted, don’t be carb adapted: be adaptING.

Doctors are always saying we need to eat our colors!

 

And, of course, conditioning goes without saying.  Reference my “devilish strength, demonic conditioning” post.  This is our chance to build GENERAL physical preparedness.  Let’s do some GENERAL things.  Let’s NOT become the world’s greatest rope skipper; we’ll just include rope skipping as part of our normal chaos.  Running, swimming, medleys, combat sports, etc, they all work to make us stronger, so long as they actually work to make us stronger.  Once we start getting better: change it!

 

Be in an unadapted state of constantly adapting.  That is the feeling of getting stronger.