HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER

I miss arcades: they were such a pivotal part of my upbringing as a child of the 90s.  These days, they’re a dying medium, but in the 90s, there was nothing better than a real live arcade cabinet, let alone a whole bank of them all in one concentrated location.  If it was a Round Table Pizza, it was really like having arrived at the land of milk and honey.  And of all the many amazing arcade games out there, “Street Fighter II” will always hold high acclaim among those of us that “were there”.  Even if you owned the home version for the Super Nintendo, the arcade classic just blew it away with its superior graphics and sound.  BUT, what made the game a TRUE classic was that, at the arcade, you could get challenged by random people: not just family and friends.  Yes, these days you can accomplish that by being linked up with the entire world over your internet connection, but back in the day, if you wanted some fresh blood, you waited for some dude to plunk down next to you at the arcade cabinet, throw in their quarters, and be greeted by the phase “Here comes a new challenger!” flashing across the screen.  Suddenly, you knew: it was on.

It's honestly for the best, because this match has been done to death...and Ryu is still better

What if you just wanted to play the game on your own?  What if you just wanted to square off against the woefully inadequate (yet often cheaty) computer AI?  Sorry dude: you showed up to the arcade, you opened yourself up to these random challengers.  Your hard earned quarters just got taken from you as some pro came by and whooped you into oblivion.  Little did you realize just how awful of a choice Dhalsim was compared to Ryu.  Little did you realize WHY, despite looking so awesome, Blanka was a terrible decision.  But from it, you learned, and you grew, and perhaps you even started your very own revenge epic to come back one day and claim what was rightfully yours.

Ok, I’ve bombarded you with my nostalgia long enough, thank you for indulging me.  Why am I talking about this?  Because as you’ve most likely sussed out: this arcade experience is a microcosm for training (and life for that matter). So many of us are content to just play against that familiar computer AI with our absolute favorite character and just keep spamming the same Hadouken over and over again until we win…but do we grow from that?  NO!  What creates growth?  When that new challenger shows up!  Some rando that we’ve never played against before who comes up with combinations couldn’t possibly fathom and just absolutely wipes the floor with us and takes our quarters away.  And if we wanna beat them, we gotta plunk down some more change and get in a few more rounds to learn their strategies and come up with our own to overcome.

At the arcade, this was proverbial, but for Mike...

And much like our time at the arcade, there won’t always be a “new challenger” to force us to grow.  Sometimes, we WILL have to spend a few lonely hours just beating up the CPU.  But when the opportunity finally DOES present itself: we need to be ready FOR our new challenger.  There’s so much in those thoughts already.  We just re-described Dan John’s “Park bench-bus bench” principle, wherein the majority of our training time is going to be “punch the clock” workouts, but occasionally we really dig in and pour ourselves into our training.  Dan’s “Mass Made Simple” program is one that Dan himself says can be run “2x a year, tops”.  It’s only 6 weeks of training, and 14 workouts today.  So that’s 12 weeks and 28 workouts in a year where you’re facing “a new challenger”: the rest of the time playing against a CPU.  But also, let’s talk about “being READY for the new challenger”.  THIS is about taking on these protocols WHEN APPROPRAITE.  If your work schedule is exploding, your wife is in her third trimester, and you’re getting a masters degree, it’s probably NOT a great time to start up “Building the Monolith”.  But you’re a high school kid and it’s summer and mommy and daddy are footing the foodbill, why AREN’T you eating your face off and lifting like an inmate?

And what IS a new challenger in the world of training?  It’s something that FORCES us outside our comfort zone.  It’s something different.  We’ve already memorized the pattern of the CPU: the rando down at the arcade is entirely unpredictable, and we have to learn how to adapt.  In the world of physical transformation, this can be a training program that forces us outside of our comfort zone (hello Super Squats/Building the Monolith/Mass Made Simple/Deep Water), or it could be a nutritional protocol that runs opposite of everything we know (Feast, Famine and Ferocity/Carnivore/ABCDE diet/Velocity Diet).  And these are simply self-imposed “new challengers”.  Think about the obvious: ACTUAL challenges.  Signing up to compete in a powerlifting meet, strongman competition, bodybuilding show, crossfit comp, a marathon, a triathlon, etc etc: SOMETHING outside of your comfort zone that forces you to grow.  

Both men seen here outside their comfort zones

And rest assured: you WILL get your quarters stolen from you the first time you square off against that new challenger.  If it DOESN’T happen: you cherry-picked and didn’t gain ANYTHING from the experience.  You became that predator of the arcade looking to stomp newbs just go bolster your own ego.  We don’t grow from that.  Being king of Chuck E. Cheese is a title that no one wants.  “You are not a warrior: you are a beginner”, “Go home and be a family man”, and all the other fantastic taunts from such a legendary game are all too ready to employ here.  Instead, use these new challenger opportunities to realize your max potential and grow into something TRULY fearsome.  Make it so that when “Here comes a new challenger” flashes across the screen, you’re all too excited for it.  Finally: a challenge!

 

YOU CAN’T OVERCOME A LACK OF EXPERIENCE WITH AN ABUNDANCE OF INFORMATION

I appreciate how the topic I’ve written for this post is just so straightforward, so I’m going to just keep on rolling with it.  This idea struck me this morning as I was finishing up my workout: a combination of Dan John’s Easy Strength AND his Mass Made Simple program (be on the lookout for a future write up there…alongside one called “Here Comes a New Challenger”, because my brain is absolutely schizophrenic along with obsessive and comes up with multiple ideas at once about the same subject all the time).  I had finished up the full workout and had 18 minutes remaining before I needed to get ready for work, so I decided to throw on the weighted vest and get in as far of a walk as I could in that time.  It was only at the end of that time that I remembered that I had intended to do a little bit more “bodybuilding” work after the workout: I was so…conditioned for conditioning (sorry, had to be done) post workout that I forgot my own plan (Chaos, of course).  So, upon my return to the garage, I quickly shucked off the vest and did 1 set of “Conan Curls” (band curls with the band around the wrists instead of held in the hand) and 1 set of full ROM lateral raises with 20lb dumbbells.  And that was “enough”…and in that I realized that I had learned QUITE a bit in 23 years of lifting weights regarding how to get as much as I could out of a single set…and, in turn, realized just how LONG it took me to accomplish that.  Because it doesn’t how much you academically “know” about training: without the necessary experience to actually IMPLEMENT it, it’s all just theory.

No, seriously: what's a widget? 

 

What’s funny is that this is something we know about any other physical activity on earth, but for some reason people treat physical transformation as a separate physical entity.  If I tell you that you can’t READ yourself into playing the piano, or shooting a freethrow, or swimming, you’ll go “duh!”  I suppose combat sports runs into this too, because I’ve known cats that thought they could teach themselves to fight from reading, but, at the same time, martial arts are so mired in mythos (“My Uncle TOTALLY learned from a Shaolin monk a pressure point that will KILL you with just 4lbs of pressure!”), but you get my point.  When it comes to acquisition of physical skills, we understand that they are just that: SKILLs.  NOT knowledge.  Yet the very Role-Play-Game-Playing nerds that can appreciate just that idea (in the “White Wolf” series there is literally a breakdown of “talents, skills and knowledge” for your character sheet!) are the same ones that rally AGAINST it when it comes time to actually put pen to paper…man these puns.  “I already KNOW how to maximize the lateral raise: I gotta keep my chin tight, not shrug my shoulders, control the weight, pinky down, chest high, brace, ground my heels, but I STILL only feel it in my traps”.  Dude: it’s because even though your brain might be smart on all this stuff, your body is stupid.  It needs more education, and that comes PURELY from experience.

 

No matter how much you read ABOUT the lateral raise, until you have a few hundred thousand reps under your belt, you’re going to need to PHYSICALLY learn how to do the movement.  That’s why cues are so popular in the first place: they’re little mental reminders on how to move PHYSICALLY.  BUT, if you haven’t ever “gotten in” when it comes to the movement, the cue is an answer seeking a question.  You don’t even know what “right” feels like to know if you’re GETTING there yet, and it just takes a LOT of practice to get there.  Again: this is obvious with any OTHER physical skill, primarily because we tend to get instant feedback.  Did the ball make it in the hoop?  Congrats: THAT’S how a free throw feels.  Did you NOT drown?  Congrats: you swam!  Knock down all 10 pins?  That’s a strike!  But how do we know when the lateral raise was done right?  When we finally have some goddamn lateral deltoids to show for!  And that takes TIME…BUT, at the same time, an experienced trainee can ALSO “know” when they’ve gotten it “right” because they’ve eventually gotten it right for so long that they “KNOW” the feel that they need to achieve in order to accomplish their goals…which just results in even MORE confusion for the junior trainee observing the experienced.

There is a reason this meme exists

 

How many times have you seen the critique that “so and so can do XYZ BECAUSE they’re a pro!”  Hell there Branch Warren/Johnnie Jackson/Ronnie Coleman/Arnold/etc.  It’s this idea that, somehow, these pros are “training wrong” because how they train doesn’t LOOK like textbook technique.  But winding it back to the combat sports reference: how many times have you seen an accomplished professional boxer with their HANDS DOWN?  Isn’t “hands up” that thing your boxing coach is CONSTANTLY shouting at you?  How come the pros have their hands down?  Don’t they know better?  They most certainly do: they know WHEN to keep their hands up, primarily because, after DECADES of experience, their sense of their opponent’s timing and range is so well tuned that they KNOW when they are actually in danger and NEED to have their hands up to defend and, in turn, they know when they can relax and SAVE their energy, rather than fatiguing their shoulders from constantly being “on guard”.

 

It’s no different from the experienced lifted that is seeking to achieve physical transformation: they don’t NEED to do all that “other stuff” to accomplish their goals: they are beyond the point of cues and can simply replicate the feel that they need to feel in order to achieve the goal they are seeking to achieve.  From there, they tend to develop their own unique style and approach to the situation that best suits them on an individual level, because they have MASTERED their bodies THROUGH experience: NOT through academia.  THIS is the value of physical experience: it can NOT be replicated through speech or text.  And yes, I fully appreciate the irony of me writing about this very subject in order to impart upon you the knowledge that knowledge in and of itself is not enough, but in turn maybe we can appreciate where knowledge IS valuable: in the sharing of ideas, concepts, notions and experiences in order for the reader to TRY IT and GAIN the necessary experience that comes from it.  It’s why I’m such a fan of story-tellers over researchers: SHARE with me a story, tell me a tale, let me learn FROM your experience so I can try to have experiences of my own.  As a parent, THIS is the valuable lesson you impart upon your own children.  They can learn facts from school, or books, or the internet (god forbid), but YOU get to share with them your experiences. 

In fairness, there's a lot of trainees that could stand to learn this lesson

 

And, much like junior trainees: most kids will ignore you because they can only REALL learn from the school of hard knocks…but at least, once they DO learn, they come back and say “oh wow….you were RIGHT!” 

WHO IS ON YOUR MIXTAPE?

Already the topic title is showing my age, and for some of my readers I’m going to need to explain what a “mixtape” actually is, so let me get that out of the way.  Back before everything was streaming, physical media was the only real way to enjoy electronic entertainment, outside of just plain old listening to the radio (which, oh man, doesn’t THAT sound ancient).  In the CD era, it was common for someone to have a large library of music from CDs from various artists and, before engaging on a long road trip, or as a gift to someone with a mutual interest, or simply “just because”, they’d create a “mixtape” (yes, tape would refer to the era of cassettes, but just stick with me here) of various songs from various artists.  Sometimes, these would be themed (a “Valentine’s” mixtape of love songs, or a “Hardcore Metal” mixtape of various hard hitters), and sometimes it would just be absolute madness of stuff mixed up, but the end was the same: different songs from different artists all on one CD.  Heck, you can even buy these NOW, ready made for you at your local Walmart, typically in the form of “Now That’s What I Call Music Volume Infinity”. But what was interesting about these mixtapes was more about what they revealed about the CREATOR of the tape.  Specially, what sort of musical interest they held, what artists they had been exposed to, and, quite simply, what they considered to be “good music”.  So tell me, dear reader: who is on YOUR mixtape?

Like this, but for music...and yes, I DID had this demo disc

 

This whole idea came to me in the shower this morning, as most good thoughts do, as I was recovering from my current workout of Dan John’s “Easy Strength” AND “Mass Made Simple” mashed together (which I intend to flesh out more fully in the future, as it’s just plain awesome).  I started thinking how fortunate it was that I stumbled across Dan John, and it was because I was so fortunate to start reading about training from a martial arts background rather than a meathead/bodybuilding one, which meant I got turned on the Pavel Tsastouline right from the get-go alongside Super Squats (both recommended to me by the same dude, which I owe a LOT for having done so), which got me pointed in the direction of Ironmind, which got me pointed at Paul Kelso and John McCallum while at the same time also got me heading to T-Nation, which got me pointed at Dan John’s book “Never Let Go”, which I DIDN’T let go of from start to finish (reading it on a cruise on an old school kindle when I should have been…enjoying the cruise).  And somewhere along the line I got pointed in the direction of the delightful lunatic of Jamie Lewis, of which I’ve written extensively of his benefit to my overall life, and how interestingly that matched up with Dan John’s high praise of “the Velocity Diet”, and how through T-nation I discovered Date Tate, which got me to Elitefts, which totally colored how I approached training and nutrition in my 20s, which got me pointed to Jim Wendler for 5/3/1 AND Mark Bell for “Power Magazine”, through which I RE-discovered Jon Andersen (“that jacked dude that competed in IFSA?  Hell yeah!), and there’s still SO much more in there I’m missing (Stuart McRobert, we love you!...some of the time!)   Man, what a wild journey: thanks for engaging me there.

 

But check out MY mixtape up there: what an eclectic collection of interesting lunatics.  But that’s also the key point there: almost all of those folks I listed are INTERESTING.  Many were trained WRITERS rather than lifters (Paul Kelso, Dan John, John McCallum and yes, even Jim Wendler’s degree was in English literature and Jamie Lewis’ academic background was on history), and those that weren’t trained authors were, legit, just absolutely insane (Jon Andersen was functionally illiterate and Mark Bell/Dave Tate BOTH overcome learning disabilities).  I was simply never drawn to those authors that were more academic, researched and scientific than they were talented storytellers.  I suppose it boiled down to, if I was going to spend time reading, I wanted to be entertained, since this was my “free time”.  But, as a result: isn’t my OWN training and nutrition pretty entertaining?  This is, of course, self-validating: I’m asking an audience of people that came here to READ me if I’m entertaining…but the sheer fact this blog has ANY sort of following means at least SOMEONE finds me entertaining (and hey, I’m in YOUR mixtape: inception!).

Really going the the early 2000s stuff today it seems

But SOME of you dudes out there are only listening to the top 40s!  Some of you dudes out there are PURE “bubblegum pop”, only listening to what’s popular, mainly because that’s “safe”.  You’re so afraid of having an actual opinion or feeling about the music that you let “the industry” tell you what to like and what not to like.  Alternatively, some of you stopped listening to new music once high school ended, and you’re that dude that just had to keep changing their radio station from “pop” to “modern” to “retro” to “classic” to “oldies”, trying DESPERATELY to hunt down SOMEONE who will play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” over the airwaves for you! (Sirius XM has you covered by the way).  Some of you have a mixed tape of 1-hit wonders: dudes that were right ONE TIME and could never recapture that magic, and you just keep going back to that well to relive that one moment even though their time is GONE. 

 

Flat out: I don’t wanna go on a road trip with some of you dudes, because your mixtape is BORING.  It’s awful.  It’s all stuff I’ve heard before.  Where are the DEEP TRACKS?  Where’s the stuff I haven’t heard before?  Where is the new, undiscovered artist?  Where are those artists who take risks?  Who try something new, different, that hasn’t been heard before?  Play THAT music for me.  Force me out of my comfort zone and let me see if I care for it.  And FORCE me to sit down and REALLY listen.  Did this artist achieve their goal of making ART, or did they achieve their REAL goal of making money?  Hell, I like ACDC, but what I really like about them is that after I bought one of their CDs I effectively owned their whole collection.  Meanwhile, Trent Reznor can release a CD where he sounds like a different artist THROUGH the CD, and for some of you cats he’s too “mainstream”.  And meanwhile, no matter how much I try to like Amon Aramath, since “Viking” and “metal” sound like they’d be great together, I can’t get over how much the lead singer sounds like Cookie Monster….but at least I listened to a LOT of their music before I came to that conclusion.

At least these guys knew they were a parody

A common phrase is “you are an average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”, and there’s a lot of value in that phrase, but it, of course, extends beyond just your friends and co-workers.  Your training and nutrition is going to be an average of the 5 individuals whose media you consume.  I had to re-write that line a few times, because I originally wrote “authors” until I realized that SO many of you dudes AREN’T F**KING READING!  …of course, I’m saying that ON my written blog, so most likely you AREN’T the machine I should be raging against (music pun: hah!) but ya’ll get my point: some folks ONLY consume social media for their information source on how to achieve physical transformation.  Folks: I read entertaining authors, but I was READING AUTHORS: it was 200-300 pages of information.  No matter how entertaining you try to be, over the course of 200-300 pages, you EVENTUALLY say something valuable (although I still think “The Sun Also Rises” was awful…).  But social media stars?  They pride themselves on stretching out how long they can get you to watch their videos and do so by padding the hell out of them with garbage and click bait so you hang out JUST long enough to hit whatever metric they need to hit to cash in.  And it costs them NOTHING to throw up a video, whereas a published author had to go through the rigors of actually having their work reviewed by SOMEONE ELSE that saw fit to publish it (not counting e-book trash directly flooded onto the market…as someone that release a free e-book with no publisher whatsoever).  Yes yes, if you wanna take this music metaphor further you could very well claim these are “undiscovered artists” and that publishers are just “the industry” dictating what is and is not popular: if you’re intelligent enough to be able to figure that out, maybe you can sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to these internet fellows.

 

But either way, take a step back and look at how is on YOUR mixtape.  Is it a mixtape you’d be ok sharing with someone else?  Or is your musical taste…a little embarrassing?  Would you throw your mixtape into the CD player on the roadtrip and let 3 other people jam to it?  If someone wanted a changeup, would you say “give THIS a listen!”?  If not: why not go pick up some new tunes somewhere and see where they take you?  Head down to Sam Goody (points if you know what THAT is), pick up a bunch of CDs from dudes you’ve never heard of before, given them a listen and see what jumps out.  Even if nothing grabs you right away, occasionally, and ear worm works its way in and you eventually think “hey, that was actually pretty good: I wonder what else they released?”

THE FREEDOM OF LIMITATION

I know I’ve written about this multiple times, but I’m observing this phenomenon outside of the realm of lifting so much that it’s sticking inside my head.  I’ve recently become addicted to “Erik the Electric” videos on youtube which, if you’re unfamiliar with Erik, are videos of a 5’9 160ish ultra endurance athlete tackling massive food challenges.  I already feel a kinship with Erik being of equal height, he is a San Diego native, much like myself, I’m (sadly) around his weight as well, I enjoy eating prodigious amounts of food as well, and my heart is one of an ultra endurance athlete, but Erik is also addicting just because he actually ENJOYS the food he eats in the challenges vs the horror one observes at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating competition wherein competitors are effectively choking down food to meet the goal.  But weird competitive eating tangent aside, Erik is so talented at his “craft” that he often goes out of his way to impose challenges WITHIN already absurd challenges, because the initial wasn’t challenging enough.  He’ll take on the infamous “octuplet bypass cheeseburger” from the Las Vegas Heart Attack Grill (yes non-US readers: all of that is really a thing) and then make it more challenging by eating a SECOND one AND only allow himself an hour to accomplish it.  These are no one’s rules but his own: a self-imposed challenge and limitation. And quite often, Erik will meet the ACTUAL challenge just fine, but fail to meet his own self-imposed challenge, and hold himself as a “failure” for having done so.  My friends, there is so much to learn from this black hole given human form.

If my subconscious could be photographed, it'd look like this

First of all, it’s worth observing that, again: Erik is not unique in this style of competitiveness.  We can observe this with video game speedrunners as well: people so good at games that they race to see who can beat them the fastest.  Eventually, they all learn the same tricks and strategies to maximize win speed, so they move on to FURTHER handicap themselves, with rules like “no moving left” or “without glitches”.  We’ve seen combat sports athletes that will only use 1 or 2 techniques to win a match.  The list is extensive, but the point to observe is that these folks are so GOOD at what they do that they need to impose limits on themselves “just to keep it interesting”.  But in keeping things interesting, they keep themselves sharp as well: they force themselves OUT of their own comfort zones and give the opposition a leg-up.  Growth is an outcome of overcoming, and in order to overcome one must experience adversity, and in the ABSENCE of the necessary adversity to promote growth, one is challenged to CREATE the very challenge necessary TO grow.  The challenge is to challenge: how fitting!

Let’s take a few lessons out of there.  1: no matter the situation, we can find a way to make it worse.  That almost sounds sarcastic, but here: it’s liberating!  This was a lesson many of us learned during COVID.  Resources were limited, and soon it became a competition on HOW we could make things more challenging.  Dan John (shocker) is a master at just this: give him 1 kettlebell and he’ll find a movement that puts you in such a poor position that this KB, irrespective of weight, will force you to grow.  Many people were limited to just bodyweight, so they had to learn all the tips and tricks OF bodyweight work to maximize it, finding ways to maximally disadvantage the body.  Some had SOME weights, but very limited amounts, and minimal ability to obtain more…so out came the pre-exhaust work, dropsets, stripsets, rest pause sets, etc etc.  And HERE there WAS a forreal limitation placed upon us: the world of COVID forced many away from their training spaces and stole their equipment.  Absent that FORCED limitation, we can still create our own.

Limitations in other ways I suppose

Along with that, though, consider the necessary degree of creativity that must be there when we CREATE these challenges AND formulate the execution plan to accomplish the goals.  First, there is a necessary element of creativity in creating a challenge: as the word “create” is right there.  We must be able to think and act in an inventive manner in order to invent a challenge for us to overcome, and if we lack said creativity the very repetition of attempting to create these challenges will drive us.   There’s no shame in employing dice or a spinning wheel or a random number generator to determine your fate.  Consider the mental bandwidth that gets relieved when one outsources their own creativity externally.  But, alongside that, there comes the creativity necessary once the challenge is underway!  If mere conventional manners of approach were enough to overcome the challenge, It would be no challenge at all: it would be the status quo.  Instead, because we created a unique challenge, we need to create a unique plan of execution.

You can again observe this with the elites like Erik.  If they give themselves an hour to eat a 5lb cheeseburger and order of onion rings, you’ll see them attack the food in an unconventional manner, eating the protein first and saving the carbs for last, since they are the most filling, for example.  There is an exponentially effect of creativity: creating the challenge forces us to create the solution.  But I’d say one of the biggest boons here is that we are no longer shackled by the chains of “optimal” once the challenge has been issued: we’ve now simply climbed into the realm of “survive”.  And through surviving we grow, and through growing we achieve.  By artificially hamstringing ourselves, we put ourselves intentionally off-balance and can now only simply maximize from our current position rather than from the most ideal position, which is to say that there now is no longer “THE” right way to do things: simply A right way to do things.  Once again: THAT is freedom.  When success has many avenues, you are in an ideal state.  When there is only one path, if you miss it: it’s game over.  Going back to the speedrunners: if they miss one jump in Super Mario on one particular stage, they’ll just quit and start over.  It’s known what needs to get done to reach “optimal”, and if it’s missed: it’s over.  But if playing the game with your feet?  Who KNOWS what the optimal time or strategy is for that: let’s just see if we can do it first!

Oh my god it all makes sense now

There are so many lessons to be learned from all of this, but what I want to impose on those reading is that this can happen TODAY.  We can place a limitation on ourselves and use it NOT as a limitation but as a vector.  As a “freedom granter”.  In a world with an abundance of choices, we can suffocate from too much freedom, but we, in turn, have the freedom to DETERMINE our limitations.  Much like “the myth of Sisyphus”, we can CHOOSE a less than desirable fate and, in doing so, be liberated.  I’ve been most likely boring many of my readers with how big a fan I’ve become of the carnivore approach to nutrition, but it’s because of this very freeing limitation that I enjoy it so much.  I thrive with restrictions and flounder with freedom, and for so long I employed the restriction of “low carbohydrate” that I became TOO GOOD at it, and was, in turn, consuming all manner of keto junk food, treats, tricks and hacks while still abiding by my own rules.  By making the game harder and saying “animal only”, I’ve once again placed myself in a corner and have to use creativity to solve it.  It is liberating: I no longer need to think about WHAT I am going to eat: it’s an animal of some variety.  I’m following Easy Strength right now, and therein is a program where the limitations are hard set: 40 workouts, 3-5 exercises, 3-5 days a week, no more than 10 reps, never miss a rep.  The program is SUCH a breath of fresh air if you’ve been suffocating on percentages and RPEs.

Take this homework assignment and run it to completion.  Give yourself some limits and see what you come up with.  Imagine if you said you could only use a rack and barbell, like the York lifters did back in the day.  The precious bench press is gone: however will you survive?  Probably by building a set of shoulders so massive and dense that they draw all surrounding light into themselves and actually prevent humans from being able to observe your pectorals.  You can only do squats AFTER 10x40 yard prowler runs: better get fit if you wanna get jacked!  Try a month of eating BELOW recommended protein intake and see how the REST of the world somehow manages to put on muscle DESPITE inadequate protein intake.  Use intermittent fasting during a gaining phase and learn how to get in 4000 calories in a 6 hour window.  Come up with your own, try it for a training cycle and see what the impacts are.  You don’t need to wait for an injury to train like you’re injured, you don’t need to wait for a food shortage to train like there is a famine, you don’t need to develop allergies to cut wheat out of your diet: these are all opportunities to learn, grow, challenge yourself, overcome and, through it all, improve your creativity so that, when the time comes, you have THAT skill readily developed and deployable.  

Tell me more stories Uncle Pavel

And you will be free.  There will be no right choice: just the choice that’s right at that moment.