STOP WORKING SO HARD TO NOT WORK SO HARD

 The title of this post is something I could only come up with in a post “Super Good Mornings” delirium state, because it’s an absolute jumbled mess and I love it.  And for those that don’t follow my every move, “Super Good Mornings” is the inevitable outcome of me having hurt my hamstring twice within 3 weeks of running Super Squats and having to come up with some sort of solution as to HOW I am going to meet the intent of the program when I can’t bend my leg fully.  My solution was to ask “What Would Bruce Randall Do?” (future blogpost: be on the lookout!), and the answer, alongside “gain 200lbs of bodyweight” was “good mornings”, because that’s what HE did when he broke his leg in 7 places in a motorcycle and couldn’t squat.  I figure, if it’s good enough for that, it’s good enough for a hamstring pull.  And that was ALL I needed in order to greenlight the idea and go and execute it.  I needed no studies to back it up, no research, no science, no blessings, no gurus: I knew the answer was simple: hard work.  And if the answer is so simple, why does no one else seem to realize it?  Because ya’ll are working SO hard so that you don’t have to work so hard.

Think how much energy was invested in these energy saving devices

 

Hah!  Speaking of working hard, I sure had to do that to shoehorn that transition sentence there.  Ok: let’s talk hard work.  Why am I emphasizing that?  Because it’s the most obvious and simple solution to the question of “how do I achieve physical transformation”.  And this includes positive AND negative transformation.  You don’t accidentally become obese: that takes some hardcore dedicated negligence.  And it’s the same when it comes to become a positive unique physical specimen: hard work is THE solution.  It’s hard work in the training space AND in the dinning space.  We train hard and we “eat hard”, in the sense that we put in the sweat equity to achieve consistent access to nutritious food that supports our goals, rather than live out of boxes (when Mark Bell summarized a pantry as “a closet full of dead food”, it was a great paradigm flip for me).  And this, in turn, is why the physique produced by hard work is so pleasing to view: it’s a reflection OF hard work, which communicates to other members of the species “I am strong, healthy and capable”.  We KNOW this.  On an instinctive, lizard brain, survival of the fittest level, this is all so obvious.

 

And yet…and yet.  How much research have people done in an attempt to DISPROVE hard work?  In an attempt to demonstrate that it is through EASE that one achieves physical greatness; NOT through labor, effort and exhaustion.  Someone came up with the idea of “junk volume”, to save us from 10x10s.  Don’t you know that you get the majority of your growth from those first 3 sets and anything after that suffers from “the law of diminishing returns?”  Yeah: talk with any Deep Water swimmer; you TRANSFORM between sets 7 and 9.  But ok, you wanna talk junk volume, then I’ll do Super Squats: ONE set.  Oh, but it turns out you need to train at RPE 8 to achieve maximal hypertrophy and going to failure is bad for us?  No, wait, I know: Super Squats doesn’t work because you HAVE to train EACH muscle group 2x a week, and the ONLY way to do that is with a 6 day a week push/pull/leg split.  No, wait, I KNOW: the program CAN’T work because the book says you can gain 30lbs of muscle in 6 weeks and I’ve read ALL the studies that say that’s not possible (yes: someone actually said that to me).  And don’t you DARE follow the Building the Monolith diet, because a dozen eggs a day is SURE to give you heart disease: as said by a trainee that’s eating breakfast cereal for carbs.  Should I even get started on the hormones you can find in a gallon of milk a day?  And oh my god, don’t you know you should NEVER gain weight if you’re above 16% bodyfat, as measure by a photo posted online?

And if you follow ALL that bad advice at once AND eat meatloaf sandwiches during workouts, you unlock Pat Casey

If you want research for ANY topic, you will find it.  If you want studies, they are there.  And the biggest issue is that so few people lack the academic rigor to even be able to READ a study to be able to mine the actual useful data from it that there’s SO much potential for miscommunication and misunderstandings when intentions are GOOD, let alone when someone goes looking just to disprove something they don’t like.  To say nothing of those individuals that don’t even look at the actual research, and instead simply take the interpretation of any talking head Mr Wonderful at full gospel truth value.  So if you WANT to find a reason not to work hard, whether it be in the training space or the kitchen, you WILL find it…but…

 

But that will never actually change reality. This isn’t quantum physics: the outcome doesn’t change simply because it’s been observed.  If someone works hard in the forest and no one is around to see them, they will still get jacked.  All my go to programs for physical transformation, from Super Squats to Deep Water to 5/3/1 Building the Monolith or 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake to what I imagine will soon be a full run of “Super Good Mornings” are simply codified methods of working hard.  If you don’t want a program, sign up for a strongman competition with lifts that are WAY outside your capabilities with a deadline of 12 weeks: you WILL grow.  The nutrition protocols I like for growing are ALSO codified hard work. A gallon of milk a day, 1.5lbs of beef and a dozen eggs, the Deep Water Diet, even Dan John’s PBJs: you are going to eat like it’s your job!  And some could even argue that this is “lazy hard work”, as it’s just building a diet around a cornerstone vs taking a more nuanced approach, but the latter is going to be even MORE hard work to MAKE it work. You’re not going to unlock the secret of anabolism with 4 protein shakes a day, cereal for carbs and peanut butter for fats.  Those that succeed in this endeavor AREN’T going to be the people who are the most well read, but the people that are the most well versed in working as hard as humanly possible. 

Bob Peoples was too busy farming all day and destroying the world at deadlifts to get bogged down with reading

 

When confronted with an absolutely bonkers way to achieve physical transformation, that looks like way too much volume, too much intensity, too much food, too much stress, etc etc, instead of working really hard to prove why it won’t work, why not work REALLY hard to prove that it will?

THINGS I BELIEVE AND CAN’T PROVE

* Why are squats sold as so critical to achieving a great physique?  The issue is that people just see the squat as a leg exercise, and, in turn, start down this rabbithole of “you gotta train the legs to make the whole body grow”, you get that whole “can’t fire a cannon out of a canoe” thing, people start talking about leg press: it get really stupid.  What makes the squat (THE squat, as is, barbell on the back, not front squats or zerchers or belt squats or whatever) so effective for achieving an impressive physique is because it places the BODY under load.  Specifically, the spine.  Remember: the body grows as a response to a stimulus/demand placed upon it.  The body experiences trauma of some variety, says “I wanna be ready the next time that happens”, so it adapts and gets stronger.  We do curls, the biceps get stressed, the body grows bigger biceps.  We lateral raises, bigger delts.   But the squat?  Yeah: the legs are being placed under stress and we’re going to get bigger legs, but the whole time that weight is on our backs, our whole BODY is getting stressed.  That can NOT be overstated.  You want bang for your buck, you want “whole body growth”, place your spine under stress for extended periods of time and think about what your body is going to do to respond to THAT demand.  And yeah: you should still directly train the muscles you want to train, no question, but in terms of “if I want to maximize growth”, THAT’S why the squat is sold.

And, of course, Bud took this to it's logical extreme

* In that regard, that’s why Super Squats “works”.  With breathing squats, we’re artificially increasing the duration that the bar is on our backs and placing us under load.  If we just squat until we drop, our legs and lungs become the limiter.  When we add in the breathing element, we can stand there with a very heavy weight for a VERY long time.  They came up with a great way to throw in some progressive overload on top of it all.  But it also means that the squat ITSELF is not magic.  I tested this by doing breathing Good Mornings (I’ll do a larger write up of that) on a day where my leg was hurt and I couldn’t bend it, and it absolutely had the intended training effect.  Ideas are abound about using a trap bar to achieve a similar effect, and I actually do that once a year on Thanksgiving with my stupid high rep high handle pulls.  Some have theorized you could accomplish this with a yoke, not even needing any real concentric/eccentric, and just carrying a heavy load on the spine for long durations.  I think there is some merit there.

 

* Thinking lean gets me lean, and thinking big gets me big.  I have to have my mind correctly vectored in order to get the results I want, and, in turn, I can will the changes I want to see.  And when you are thinking lean, you unconsciously make the “right” decisions.  I will put a thin smear of nutbutter on my celery vs a glob, I’ll leave some food behind on the plate, I’ll get too busy and skip snacks, etc.  And when I think big, I’m never away from food for too long.

 

* Fasted training improves nutrient partitioning once food is re-introduced.

 

* There is a significant genetic component to nutrition that harkens back to ethical heritage.  People from certain regions are genetically predisposed toward being able to better digest certain foods.  I gravitate toward high protein/fats and low carbs naturally.  I am primarily Northern European stock.  My wife is able to better handle carbs but does not eat nearly as much protein: she has some Asian heritage that I believe contributes there.  In turn, people need to stop trying to fit square pegs into round holes when it comes to nutrition.  There are certain overarching guidelines that I think are just swell (Justin Harris “if you can’t grow or hunt it, don’t eat it”), but beyond that, not all things work for all people.

It's my heritage! 

 

* All “programs” are is a method to balance the variables of stimulus and fatigue.  Different programs have different avenues for doing so.  For something like Super Squats, the understanding is that you’ll run the program for 6 weeks, effectively “burn out”, spend 6 weeks doing something opposite (it recommends a 5x5 bulk and power program) and turn return.  Simple periodization.  Others might make use of waving percentages during the training cycle and then implementing a structured deload, ala 5/3/1.  Some rely on RPE and autoregulation.  But all it boils down to is “We need to give you enough stimulus to grow without burying you so heavy in fatigue that you stop growing”.  And once you appreciate THAT, you can train HOWEVER you want…as long as you balance stimulus and fatigue.  The issue is that so many trainees just fixate on the former and not the latter, chasing after the stimulus dragon and never paying any mind to fatigue management.  This is how “milking beginner gains” grows to a zenith of stupidity: at one point, the milking has to stop and we have to recover, but instead dudes will just reset the weight and do the whole thing all over again.

 

* On the above, the “perfect” program is the one that fits your personality.  And just like nutrition: folks run into issues when they try to fit the square peg into the round hole.  They’re told “training 6x a week is optimal, because it means you hit the muscle 2x a week”, which is already goofy, but anyway, they end up taking on these 6x a week programs and just bury themselves in fatigue while also not being able to generate any decent degree of effort WITHIN a single set to cause any sort of growth stimulus.  If these dudes got on a program that fit THEM: they’d grow.  It’s no secret I like Super Squats and Deep Water for growing, and that’s because that style of programming speaks TO ME.  It’s effectively a challenge to overcome, and in the process of doing so, we grow.  Some folks DON’T need that: they need spreadsheets and trackers and gadgets.  Cool: don’t so Super Squats, find YOUR program and grow on it. 

 

* Rest times are a matter of confusing the symptoms for the disease.  “Rest 5 minutes for strength, 60-90 seconds for size”.  No: if you’re lifting VERY heavy loads, you’ll NEED 5 minutes to recover for the next set.  Taking 60% of your 1rm for a set of 3 and resting 5 minutes between sets won’t make you stronger.  Consequently, resting 60-90 seconds doesn’t make your bigger: it gives you more time to get in MORE WORK in a fixed amount of training time.  A dude resting 5 minutes between sets will flat out do less work compared to someone resting 60-90 seconds between sets assuming both have the same amount of training time.

 

* Carbs are in no way essential to getting bigger, stronger, or performing well.  They can absolutely ENHANCE those processes, but we constantly confuse being good with being necessary.  Reference: sleep.

No, shut up, you're being stupid

 

* Oh boy, yes, sleep is the lowest priority for physical transformation.  Gains (of any variety) are made of FOOD.  Without food, there is no gains.  Train as hard as you want, sleep as much as you want: if you don’t have the food in your body, you will not change.  From there, training vectors that food in a certain direction: shifting more toward muscle (and physical improvement at large) vs fat.  Without training, the gains of food are primarily gains of fat.  Sleep is the time when the majority of transformation occurs…but it’s not the ONLY time it’s occurring.  With enough food and hard training, we can transform with minimal sleep.  With maximal sleep and minimal food and training…we will not transform.  SHOULD we get much sleep?  Absolutely.  Is it necessary?  No.

 

* The first thing we do upon waking primes the body for the rest of the day.  We ease into the morning: we craft a body of ease.  We bolt into the morning: we craft a body for action.  I start each day with something physical and a very hearty meal.  I want my body to know that we are a creature of action and we eat to grow.  And sometimes it’s legit just a quick set of push ups or some bodyweight squats, but that goes to show just how little it can be to still have an impact.     

GO BEFORE YOU ARE READY

Credit goes to u/timmanser2 over on reddit for pitching this idea to me, because I’ve written AROUND it a bunch of times but never really just sat down and crunched it out.  Like most of my good ideas, I didn’t come up with this one.  Typically, I’ll THINK I did only to discover that I read about it in a Dan John article earlier, but I blatantly know I stole this idea from Jon Andersen.  “Go before you are ready” just perfectly sums up how I approach my training these days.  It’s all about never getting comfortable during the training session, never being fully recovered, and training the body to still operate on demand even when it’s sucking wind.  One of my most recent conditioning workouts perfectly captured this

 

 

There’s a fun backstory to this.  On this particular afternoon, training was the LAST thing I wanted to do.  I had to spend 5 minutes just convincing myself to get changed into my gym clothes, which meant I couldn’t do my normal 20 minute “Kindergarten” WOD (PBJs and ABCs…it’s a cute name), so, instead, I decided I was just going to combine two of my daily conditioning sessions into 1: 5 minutes of ABCs followed immediately by TABEARTA.

 

It was the hardest 10 minute workout of my life.  And when I shared it online, people commented on how ridiculous it was that I went for ABCs until the very last possible second before I switched over to the TABEARTAs.  In truth, I was upset at how long I spent setting up for those bear complexes, but the point remains: it’s all about not having any rests and recovery whatsoever.  We go before we are ready. 

These dudes, instead, would go before the OTHER side was ready

 

It's similar with my Monument to Non-Existence workouts

 

 

I’ve had a few people try to replicate this workout, and most of them screw up the most significant part of it: the transitions!  The only way this workout “works” is if you go STRAIGHT from the front squat into the squat, and straight from the squat into the SSB.  Sure, after I get in that first rep on the next movement I’ll let myself “rest” with the bar on me, but this is “go before you’re ready” summed up.

 

The body is VERY greedy and miserly.  It takes and it takes and it takes, and it does not give unless forced.  So if you give, it takes.  If you give it rest, it will take it.  The more you give, the more it will take.  This is how stories of dudes taking 15 minutes of rest between sets happens.  They conditioned the body to accept this rest as “the standard”, and that body now refuses to be ready to perform UNTIL it gets it’s demanded 15 minutes of rest.  And if you wait until you are ready, you are playing the body’s game. 

I am the greetest!

 

That’s why we go BEFORE we are ready.  The body says “Hey, we’re not ready yet, we don’t feel good” and we say “Too bad: it’s time”…and suddenly, the body performs.  We discover it was a liar.  That it had the potential all along: it simply didn’t WANT to perform.  In that 10 minute workout I posted, when I run TABEARTA on it’s own, 3 complexes per round tends to be “enough”.  This time around, running it post 5 minutes of ABCs, I STILL managed 3 per round, simply because my body had a LOT more in it than it wanted to admit.  And yes, you can see firsthand how my body protests: my lungs are short, I am folded over, I am hurting, but as soon as that timer goes off, I can walk up, smash out 3 rounds, and go back to dying.  I am going BEFORE I am ready…and I am performing.

 

We are too focused on perfect execution under ideal conditions.  There is a time and a place for that: PRACTICE.  When our goal is skill development, absolutely: we should endeavor for perfect practice to groove ideal reps so that our body “learns” how to move correctly.  The issue is: trainees want to treat EVERY session like it’s a practice session.  Which I attribute this to being a product of a generation of “inside kids” (I love that term) that never played a sport before.  In sports practice, we had times that were dedicated to skill work, time that was dedicated to live drilling, and time that was dedicated to simply getting physically better.  When we drilled skills, we went light and got in good reps.  When we live drilled, we added resistance to test those learned skills in a “live” environment.  When we did conditioning, it was simply about making things suck so we got good at dealing with that.  You can do all of that in ONE session if that’s what you like, or you can have some sessions where you practice, some where you live drill and some where you condition, but either way, the point is: you can’t ALWAYS be practicing.  At some point, you HAVE to perform while under fatigue so you can start getting good at doing THAT too.

Sometimes, flutter kicks are an ab exercise.  Other times, freezing water is poured on you while you do them in the ocean because they just suck

 

And in a bit of comedy, there’s something to be said about PRACTICING “going before you are ready”.  The more you engage in that practice, the better you get at doing it, and like all terrible drugs, you end up chasing a bigger dose to get the same boost as before.  Jon Andersen’s Deep Water program was such a great crash course into this concept, as it FORCED you to change your rest times as part of the program’s progression model.  If you haven’t tried it, do that FIRST and then take the lessons you learned and continue to apply them.  You’ll find, when you continually push the body to go before it’s ready, it eventually gets VERY good at doing just that.

 

Yes, it WILL suck.  Yes, you WILL hurt.  BUT, you will transform, and THAT, folks, is the whole point of it all.  Those who wait until they are ready will never make that leap, because the body is NEVER ready to transform…so we push it to go BEFORE it is ready.

THE “TRICK” IS TO HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE

 My sleep habits have become a recent hot topic of discussion among the internet lifting sphere, so allow me to talk about myself here.  Put straight: I average about 5.5 hours of broken sleep a night.  I get up around 0330 to train, and I go to sleep around 2200.  Whenever I announce what time I get up to sleep, people will immediately conclude I get to bed at 2000 and go on to bloviate about how they can’t POSSIBLY go to sleep that early so earl morning training is out the window…and then when they find out when I go to sleep they conclude that “It must be nice to not need 8 hours of sleep in order to function well and feel good.”  Folks: I’m tired.  I’m not the worst X-man ever, with the power to function on 5.5 hours of sleep like someone with 8 hours of sleep (or, for you DnD nerds: an elf).  I am “Human: all too human”.  It’s not a matter of me activating some latent super power: the “trick” is to have no other choice.

Alright, I've mentioned humans and elves: I needed to post this.  But you should pick the half-orc

 

In my list of priorities, being with my family, keeping my job, and continued physical transformation rank high.  All of these priorities require investments of time.  So I’ve shaved off time where I can: I meal prep, and use fast cooking devices (instant pots, air fryers, microwaves, etc) to make that a faster process.  Those who have watched my lifting videos know that I have a limited wardrobe, which shaves off decision making time.  I have a haircut that has meant not needing to own a comb since 2004.  But somewhere else I could find to shave off time was the end of my sleep cycle.  It was a great spot of time to discover, because my family was still asleep and my work day had not yet begun, so I wasn’t compromising there AND I could use that time to get in my training, so I could meet one of my priorities as well.  Win-win. 

 

“But how do you motivate yourself to get up so early to train?”  Folks: there’s no ROOM for motivation on this timeline.  If I spent 5 minutes rolling around in bed wondering if I should get up or go back to sleep, I just lost 5 minutes of training time.  The “trick” is to have no other choice.  I am either getting up and training or I am FAILING, and my priorities are so high that failure is NOT an option.  I’m not going to let anyone or anything take away that time with my family and I’m not going to let anyone or anything stop me from keeping the job that provides for said family, so when it comes time to get up to train, I am the only one that is stopping me if I choose to not wake up…and I’m not going to let me stop myself from reaching my goals.  That’s “the trick”. 

But don't forget the importance of good nutrition! 

 

“But how do you function with so little sleep?”  The “trick” is to have no other choice.  Again, what am I going to do: STOP being a husband, father and employee simply because I’m sleepy?  Quite literally just lay down and die?  These are my priorities: they are what matter to ME.  If they weren’t my priorities, I wouldn’t care for them.  That’s why I have a Playstation 4 that is covered in dust with a bunch of “new” games still in the plastic wrap sitting on top of it: I keep buying these things THINKING “I’ll get around to them”, but they simply don’t matter enough for me to dedicate time.  I am too sleepy for video games: I have no other choice but to succeed in being a husband, father and employee.

 

And this is SO dramatic too: all we’re talking about here is a sleepy dude that can still put in a full day’s work, come home, make dinner and eat with the family and hang out and play games/watch movies until it’s time to start it all over again.  Real deal “no other choice” situations are out there happening every day.  Mothers are lifting vehicles off their children, soldiers are engaged in 28 hour long fire-fights with opposing units, men run into burning buildings to rescue others, people cut off their own limbs to escape being trapped: all because they had no other choice.  The human body and mind are both incredible and we limit them significantly primarily because, if left unchecked, we’ll self-destruct in our pursuit of finding our own limits.  That’s Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” taken to it’s inevitable conclusion.  But before that happens, we’ll realize the amazing completely untapped potential that resides within us.  Which, tying back to Nietzsche again, is the whole “overman” concept.  We’re all operating at such a small fraction of what we could be at.  You “optimal” nerds out there, take note.  You really wanna maximize your output, start pushing yourself WELL beyond your preconceived limits.

Have you ever seen anything more optimal than this?

 

You have SO many opportunities to have “no other choice”.  I think about how many trainees refuse to try a new movement or new piece of equipment or new program until they have a “failure plan” in place, and it drives me absolutely bonkers.  “How do I safely fail a squat”, “what do I do when I stall on the program”: folks, have no other choice BUT to succeed.  “Failure is not an option” is a cliché BECAUSE it’s such an important piece of advice that it SHOULD be tattooed on your eyelids so that you never forget it.  When you approach a situation where the ONLY possible choice you have is to succeed, you’ll find yourself doing everything in your power TO succeed.  A mom who HAS to lift a car off their kid in order to keep them alive WILL do it.  If you walk the tight-rope without a net, you WILL make it to the other side. 

 

Have no other choice in your path to physical transformation.  It makes things so much simpler.  How do you possibly manage to stick to your diet?  By having no other choice.  Either we eat the foods we’re supposed to eat or we will fail.  How do you hit the weights, reps and sets that the training program prescribes?  By having no other choice.  And hey: if we ate that food we were supposed to eat, we’ll most likely hit those weights too: crazy.  You don’t need magic, voodoo, super powers, deals with devils or any other “trick” besides simply having no other choice.