LESSONS LEARNED FROM SOVIET ROCKET CLUSTERING: NOT ONLY IS FAILURE AN OPTION: IT’S AN EXPECTATION!

I’ve discussed my rather electric educational upbringing, so it should surprise absolutely no one that, at some point in my life, I was educated on the difference between American and Soviet rocket design theory as it related to space exploration.  The Americans employed a very American approach to the design theory: they would recruit the greatest scientific minds possible (Hello “Operation Paperclip”) in order to perform the most precise and exacting scientific calculations to determine exactly what/how and why to design a rocket to reach its intended destination, then contract out to those companies that could provide the top-of-the-line equipment necessary to build this rocket, ensuring a “zero-failure” scenario such that the goal of the space exploration mission could be reached.  And it was, in fact, “zero-failure”: if anything went wrong in the execution of the plan, typically, the entire plan would be scrubbed.  If it was an unmanned rocket and it went off trajectory, it was exploded before it could possibly harm anyone on U.S. soil.  The Soviets, on the other hand, employed a strategy known as “clustering”.  What is clustering?  Clustering is the idea that some failure is inevitable: so we plan FOR that failure: typically about a 10% rate of expected failure.  Putting that into numbers, if we know it takes 100 rocket boosters for us to reach our target, we’ll put 110 boosters on the rocket, figuring that 10 of them are going to fail, and therefore we’ll get our needed 100!  Compare this with the “no-failure” strategy of the Americans, and you can observe the much greater degree of flexibility allowed in such a plan: you can shed several rocket boosters before you need to start discussing scrubbing the mission.  As much as we love to say “failure is not an option”, the truth is that, not only is failure an option: it’s an expectation!

Someone experienced with rockets AND failure

Many trainees out there are wanting to employ “the American approach” when it comes to training and nutrition in pursuit of physical transformation.  They engage in a “zero failure” campaign, where everything is so tenuously strung together in the most precise of manners that there is absolutely no room for failure…which means, when the inevitable failure DOES occur, the entire thing falls apart.  “If It Fits Your Macros” is a primary example of one of these “no failure” nutritional approaches, which is so funny, because to many this would appear to be the most FORGIVING nutritional approach, but it is the infinite flexibility of this approach that lends to its downfall.  When we already decide “food quality doesn’t matter: all we need to do is meet our macros”, we’ve put ourselves into a “no-failure” situation: now we NEED to meet our macros, because we’ve already abandoned the pursuit of high food QUALITY.  So now, when we fail on IIFYM, we COMPLETELY fail: not only are we eating poor food quality, but we didn’t even meet our macro nutrient goal, so we’re eating a poor quality INEFFECTIVE diet.  Yes yes, the IIFYM apologists will always inform me that you don’t HAVE to eat bad food on IIFYM: I’m just gonna say that, if you WANTED to eat quality food, you wouldn’t pick this strategy.  We do this so we can justify the ice cream and Pop Tarts: let’s be real with ourselves.

And we continue to flip the script when we look at the “super restrictive” nutritional protocols and acknowledge how they fall so well within the notion of clustering and acceptable failure.  Diets like Carnivore or Paleo are both incredibly restrictive: the former saying “eat only animals, no plants” and the latter saying “eat only things paleo man could have eaten, nothing processed/alien”.  Attempting to abide by these protocols 100% by the letter of the law can be impossible for many trainees: these requirements are quite stringent and do not account for when “reality” shows up.  We overslept, the store was out of the food we needed, unscheduled travel, unplanned office luncheon, etc.  But herein we observe clustering: if we’ve been eating the high quality nutrition that is prescriptive of these plans, when we fail to meet them, we’ve now simply entered a realm wherein 90% of our diet was outstanding, and only 10% of it was less than adequate.  For most trainees, a 90% success rate for nutrition is MORE than adequate to accomplish many degrees of physical transformation.  We were eating VERY well for the majority of our journey: we can account for these rocket engine failures.

This failed carnivore meal is a successful vertical diet meal!

 

And along with that, consider where we “land” when we fail on these two different approaches.  For the Americans, when their rockets failed, they were obliterated and landed in pieces and fragments (ideally) across the ocean.  For the Soviets, their “failed” rockets MADE IT TO THE DESTINATION!  It’s similar with these nutritional approaches: when you fail IIFYM, you are REALLY obliterated: you’ve been housing ice cream, Pop Tarts and protein powder, and now you forgot the protein powder, so it’s been an ice cream and Pop Tarts diet.  But you were eating carnivore and you went and ate a vegetable or a piece of fruit?  How awful!  You were eating paleo and you broke down and ended up having a protein shake or a Quest bar?  For shame!  You were on a bro-diet of chicken, rice and broccoli and you had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?  For one: Dan John and Paul Carter approved, but secondly the IIFYM crowd claims that is how it’s “supposed” to be.  When your “failed” diet ends up being the ideal of the majority, you’ve definitely gotten your nutrition sorted out.  

 

Funny enough, one of the sloppier approaches to nutrition ALSO falls under the realm of Soviet clustering: The Gallon of Milk a Day. Now, I’m not going to try to sell you on the idea that a gallon of milk a day is a healthful approach to eating/living (they killed Socrates for sophism, although if I was sentenced to drink a gallon of milk rather than hemlock, I’d appreciate the irony).  GOMAD is an extreme method of achieving extreme results, but with that, it STILL employs clustering.  There’s nothing particularly magical about the amount of “one gallon”: it’s simply a handy way to measure the amount of milk you’re taking in.  If you drink a gallon of it a day along with eating a lot of food, you’re sure to grow.  But say you “fail” and only take in 90% of a gallon one day, or even a few days in a row?  You STILL took in a ton of calories: you’ll be alright.  You forget to buy milk one day and skip a whole day of it?  In a 6 week span, that 1 day won’t really matter.  Once again, even when we fail, we land at our intended destination.

Sometimes it's not worth trying to cram in those last few ounces

 

Wanna walk some Soviet Clustering training?  It ties perfectly into that gallon of milk: SUPER SQUATS!  And again, at face value, you may see Super Squats as a more American approach: either you get the set of 20 or you didn’t.  But look a little deeper: if we FAIL in our pursuit of that set of 20 that one particular day, isn’t that indicative of the amount of effort we put INTO that set?  Is there something particularly special about the number 20, or is it simply a number we utilized because the pursuit of it drives us to push our bodies hard and keep a weight on our back for a LONG time.  Super Squats pushes a VERY aggressive training protocol, paired with an aggressive nutritional protocol, and failure is pretty much a given, simply because we are human and we are flawed.  But when we fail, we obsess about it for the next 47 hours, pound the milk, come back strong, conquer it, and in conquering it prove to ourselves that very workout wherein we failed actually MOVED US FORWARD to our goals.  We have proof of concept right there: a weight that previously defeated us has now been defeated.  We failed on the program, and succeeded toward our goals.

 

The American approach to training would be something more akin to linear periodization (no, not linear progression).  Linear/Western Periodization (already with the American there) hinges on the idea of calculating a max weight we need to lift and then working backwards over the course of many training cycles to determine what weights, for what sets and reps, we will need in order to achieve that lift.  It is VERY precise and demanding, and those sets MUST be hit. …so what happens if we get sick during the training cycle?  Pick up a small injury?  Have to work late one night and miss a workout?  Etc.  How comical that a western approach to training required a real Soviet style approach to execution: like some sort of state sponsored athlete.  There is no wiggleroom: the expectations are set, and we must do so for the Motherland! 

Rocky IV really did it right here

 

Holy cow this is going long, but you can see where this all plays out.  It may seem cool to believe “failure is not an option”, but when you actually put yourself IN those situations, you don’t create the environment that produces perfection: you simply experience the very real and human experience of BEING imperfect, and your perfect plan falls to pieces.  Engage in a little bit of clustering: build failure INTO the plan, so that, when you fail, you end up where you were heading to anyway.  “Shoot for the moon, for if you miss you end up among the stars”?  No, shoot for the moon, plan to miss, for WHEN you miss, you’ll end up on the moon.

 

…yeah, that one probably won’t catch on…but I planned on that.