ON DEADLINES

This is going to be one of those moments where art imitates life, because I’m writing this with the 30 minutes I have available to me on a Friday to finish my self-imposed 1000 words a week rule for this blog, and I intend to discuss the value of deadlines as it relates to physical transformation.  So often I see a young trainee ask the question of “how long should I bulk” or “how long should I cut” or a question of WHEN to do these things, and the answer I see given are reflective of just how inexperienced so many folks out there are, despite having the loudest opinion.  “You want to bulk for as long as you possible can!” “You want a long slow bulk” “Bulk until you hate yourself, cut until you hate everyone else”, and all sorts of other pithy witicissms that offer no assistance whatsoever.  You want some real honest to goodness deadlines?  Bulk for 6 weeks.  Why?  Because that’s how long Super Squats, Building the Monolith, Deep Water Beginner/Intermediate and Mass Made Simple run.  You wanna know how long to cut?  Let’s call it 28 days. Why?  That’s how long the Velocity Diet runs.  Or we can say 2 weeks of cutting and 4 weeks of bulking if you want to run Feast, Famine and Ferocity.  What’s the big takeaway with this?  These protocols HAVE fixed timelines and deadlines.  Why?  Because physical transformation requires a NON-SUSTAINABLE effort! 

Meanwhile, this dude needed super serum 

 

How do we accomplish physical transformation?  We have to create a catalyst for change.  We have to introduce to our bodies some sort of stimulus that is SO shocking that our body decides that adaptation is necessary.  Our bodies LIKE homeostasis: they like NOT changing.  That is their preferred way to exist.  Change is laborious: it requires effort and resources, and our bodies are lazy: they don’t WANT to engage in labor.  So we have to somehow convince our bodies that the cost of homeostasis actually OUTWEIGHS the cost of adaptation.  That it will require MORE labor and effort to remain the same than it will need to expend in the act of changing.  We have to convince our body that, in the long run, it will be FAR less strenuous for it to expend some energy building muscle so that the loads we challenge it with feel lighter vs constantly having to struggle against the loads with the same 98lb weakling body.  And our course: our brain is SUCH a liar to our body.  We KNOW that we’ll never stop challenging it to grow, but we convince the body that, hey, just this one time, if it does us a solid and builds some muscle or sheds some fat or changes in SOME way, we’ll make it worth it’s while.  We have to give the body “an offer it can’t refuse” and try to somehow convince it to appreciate the value of long term investing.  We all know how well THAT goes.

 

But going back to the stimulus: imagine the kind of RIDICULOUS stimulus that would be necessary to convince the body to change.  The body is a master of homeostasis, and you see fit to challenge it.  You better be bringing your A-game.  And anyone who has ever BROUGHT their A-game to anything KNOWS that it’s called A-game for a reason: we can’t ALWAYS perform that way.  We can’t ALWAYS have the best game of our life, the best practice, the best anything: otherwise, it wouldn’t BE the best: it’d be average.  It’s why fighters spend weeks at a fight camp trying to get into top shape before a fight, it’s why any athlete anywhere has an off season and an in-season, it’s why “peaking” is a thing in powerlifting: we simply cannot perform at our best all the time.  That’s not how a human works. 

This is how I feel the majority of the time I read anything online

 

So knowing THAT, the idea that we can spend a PROLONGED period of time in a state of physical transformation becomes positively ludicrous.  The notion of a “long slow bulk” is quickly realized to be understood as the same “long slow bulk” that the majority of humanity has been undergoing: physically spinning one’s wheels while gradually getting fatter.  Telling the body to make muscle requires some HARD, strenuous training, and the idea that you’re going to maintain that uninterrupted for long durations is simply a sign that you’ve never actually undergone any of this hard training.  You’ve been trying to do “just enough” for so long that you’ve missed out on the “enough” part.  Those that talk about how you WANT to stretch out the bulking process for as long as possible sound like absolute lunatics for those that have been in the trenches getting results, for THOSE people know that you want the gaining phase to be OVER as quickly as possible.

 

Which is WHY these periods of physical transformation HAVE definitive deadlines associated with them: we need to know just how long we’re going to put in this skullspltting effort SO that we have an end in sight and a plan to move forward.  If you’re on team permabulk, you’re going to have a LOT of workouts where you just phone it in, knowing that “this is a long gaining phase”, and that, as along as a good amount of effort is applied on some of the workouts, things will probably be ok right?  Whereas when you’re on workout 15 of 18 in Super Squats, you tell yourself “only 60 more reps of squats to go and I’ll be DONE gaining”, and you pour your very SOUL into all 60 squats.  When you’re on day 10 of the 14 day protein sparing modified fast of Jamie Lewis’ famine protocol, you tell yourself that, in 4 days, you can feast again, and it gives you the tenacity to endure.  By having a light at the end from the start, you know that you’re going to have to sprint through this challenge so that you can force the body to change, and that AFTER this sprint can come the cooldown lap, where you allow yourself to get back into some sort of order and reconfigure yourself before your next grand stupid adventure at change.

Been in this situation many times

 

This is basic periodization spelled out for you.  It’s WHY periodization is a thing: we cannot always be forcing the body to undertake the same change over and over again.  Somehow, every lifter KNOWS that the Milo of Croton story is a myth, and then they rapidly forget it when they think they’re going to go on a 3 year bulk.  Carve out a specific chunk of time to transform in a specific direction, pour every fiber of your being into that chunk of time, then pivot the goal and go tilt at that windmill.  And hell: allow yourself some moments where the goal IS to just maintain.  Sometimes, we need to take a few steps back so that we can get a running start at giant leap forward.  But understand and appreciate WHY we employ these deadlines.  When we know we’ve only got 6 weeks, we’re going to make it count, and when we LIMIT ourselves to only 6 weeks, we CAN make it count.