“GO EXCEL AT SOMETHING”

I owe this post to u/notKRIEEEG who, in turn, was commenting on one of my other posts over on reddit, so there’s a return on investment for you.  “Go excel at something” was a quote he shared as a guiding principle that I loved so much upon seeing it that I had to write my own thoughts on it.  Much like my “go pick the thing up and put it over your head” post and my love for books like “Purposeful Primitive” “Scrawny to Brawny” and “Powerlifting Basics Texas Style”, these “Swiss army knives” of training are just too awesome, and when you can use just 4 words to set someone up for success, you’re onto something.  So let’s go explore this.

More great, pithy advice

“Go excel at something” sums up periodization of training, and oh my god thank you for that, because I have to explain it ALL the time.  The comedy of the total lack of patience and attention span amongst trainees is that, in their unwillingness to be patient, they make things take MUCH longer than if they were willing to exercise a little patience.  Already I’m talking in circles, so let me clarify, because the whole point of this post was about taking complex ideas and making them simple.  All periodization IS is “go excel at something”.  We pick from qualities such as maximal strength, speed/power, hypertrophy or GPP, and we “go excel at it”.  And let’s steal another great quote, this one from Dan John “everything works…for 6 weeks”.  So we go excel at something for 6 weeks (or longer, sure, but ‘don’t focus on the wrong part of the story brother’), and then, once we’ve exceled there, we go excel at something else.

And WHY do we do that?  Because we make SO much more progress when we go excel at something for a chunk of time vs when we try to do everything all at once because we refuse to ever let anything fall to the wayside.  5/3/1 BBB Beefcake is a fantastic program for building mass all over the body.  It is a great physical challenge, it forces you to grow and it forces you to eat.  Do you know how many times I have to field questions about “what about direct arm work?” “can I throw in lateral raises?” “I don’t like 5s pro, why can’t I do PR sets for main work?”  GO EXCEL AT SOMETHING!  Quit trying to do everything all at once, because let me steal ANOTHER quote from Hank Hill regarding Christian rock music: “Can't you see you're not making Christianity better? You're just making rock and roll worse!”  A short, intense burst of focus on making the whole body bigger makes it such that, when you decide to specialize on arms, shoulders, etc, you have mass TO SPECIALIZE.  And, god forbid, if you decide to put that mass to use in something athletic, spending that time focusing on mass building will give you a solid foundation to work with when it comes time to specialize in whatever skills are necessary to reach your goals, vs trying to get better AND bigger while in season.  Ask any REAL athlete how well THAT tends to go.  It’s why we have an off-season.

And on that topic, with nutrition: “go excel at something”.  When it’s time to gain, GO EXCEL AT GAINING!  Quit trying to “lean gain”, “lean bulk”, “maingain”, “gaintain”, etc etc.  For DECADES, dudes that wanted to get big and strong knew, understood and embraced the idea that the process of growing bigger meant EATING, and eating enough that some necessary degree of fluff accumulated.  John McCallum referred to this notion as “softening up” and expressed how it was NECESSARY in order to reach great physical size.  Even with the introduction of steroids, trainees STILL understood the necessity of this process, and you can still find photos of Arnold and Dave Draper having let their abs go while they grew in the off season.  It’s only this recent pre-occupation of always being “photoshoot ready” due to the 365 day access of social media that people think there is some sort of need to have year round leanness.  Year round leanness is a recipe for lifelong smallness.  If your goal is to grow: go excel at something!  Go grow.

In case you didn't believe me

And when it’s time to lose: go excel at something!  What are we exceling at when we lose weight?  BEING HUNGRY!  Oh my god PLEASE quit trying to hack this.  The process of physical transformation is an inherently uncomfortable process, and it’s uncomfortable at all ends.  When we’re gaining, we’re eating when we’re not hungry, and when we’re losing weight we’re NOT eating when we ARE hungry.  That’s what getting lean “feels” like: it feels like NOT eating when you’re hungry.  I’d call that dietary discipline, but honestly: how hard is it to NOT do something?  If you can’t excel at INaction, you’re going to have a rough go.  

Can you imagine the kind of being you could be if you were CONSTANTLY exceling at something?  Someone in a perpetual state of excellence?  Envision what that means to you, compared to someone in a perpetual state of lukewarm.  Someone in a perpetual state of “ok at things”.  One is in a process of growing towards something supremely excellent, the other is stagnant or, at best, working TOWARD mediocrity.  Who do you want on YOUR kickball team for Ragnarok?    When the chips are down, wouldn’t you rather have something excellent you can fall back on?  

Right about now, it's pretty good to be awesome at sumo

And again, the irony here is that we are learning to be excellent from a quote that IS a general quote ABOUT excellence, but that’s the beauty of it: it’s such a simple concept.  Instead of over-complicating it, instead of trying to find the extra most best optimal way to balance all demands against each other, we just single-mindedly dedicate ourselves toward A goal and go excel at it, conquer it, then move on to the next one.  Constantly leapfrogging from one bit of excellence to the next, achieving it, and striving to higher and higher platforms.  That’s WHY periodization works: we get to build off a platform of excellence to reach higher and higher levels.  It’s why “bulking and cutting” works: we are constantly achieving better and better states to build onto the next platform.  It’s what makes competition so effective: we excel at one level and move on to the next to go excel there.  

Go excel at something.  Go excel at excelling.