LEARN FROM BACHELORS: FEAR COMITTMENT

A fun fact my readers MAY not know about me: I got married at age 21.  I was engaged at 20, to a girl that I had been dating for a year, and had been best friends with for a year before that.  We’re still together to this day, and are going stronger than ever.  I say all this to show that I clearly do NOT have a fear of commitment: I knew a good thing when I found it and locked on like a shark.  But from reading how some of you trainees out there operate, ya’ll put me to shame when it comes to not fearing commitment, because some of you dudes are locked in on a program/diet for LIFE.  Or at least, that’s the impression I get, because you guys are trying to make the PERFECT program/diet to run for the rest of your lives.  Ya’ll are ready for the long haul commitment, “till death do we part”, a true “ride or die”…and why?  Why do you owe so much loyalty to a single method?  What do you get from this?  Learn from the lifelong bachelors out there: don’t get hitched to just one wagon, don’t buy the cow when you can get the milk for free (GOMAD anyone?), go sew your wild oats and enjoy all those fish in the sea.  In general: fear commitment.

That sums it up well

 

Here’s what I see: a trainee says “I want a program for hypertrophy”.  Hey, great, go do Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, 5/3/1 Building the Monolith or 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake.  They’ll all get you big.  Within minutes, having not run a single DAY of the program, let alone a week, let alone a training block, the trainee fires back with “It doesn’t have any lateral raises/not enough curls/no calf raises/etc: this program isn’t for me”.  Dude, you wanted a hypertrophy program: these programs will get you big.  That’s what they do.  Are they absent of those movements?  Yeah, sure.  Know how you solve that?  AFTER you run these programs, you go do a program that DOES have these movements built into it.  Not EVERY program you run has to have EVERY movement you want to run.  Sometimes, movements get left out for THIS program so that they can be employed in ANOTHER program.  Because it’s true that there are a LOT of great movements out there to get big and strong and, in turn, EVERY decision we make is a decision with an opportunity cost.  We do barbell bench at the expense of dumbbell bench, we do squats at the expense of front squats, not all things can be done all the time.  But the solution is simple: we’ll just do those other movements LATER.  We’re not going to be married to this one program: we’re going to go out with it, have some fun, and then say “see ya later”.  And we very well MAY see it later, if we really DID have a good time with it.  And if we didn’t, hey: plenty of fish in the sea.  It’s why we date: to see what’s out there.

 

It's no different with diet, and once again, I’ll go to the topic of getting jacked, because that’s more fun to talk about.  “I wanna get big: what should I eat?”  Super Squats says a gallon of milk a day, Jim Wendler had his athletes do 1.5lbs of ground beef and a dozen eggs, Dan John recommends the Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich between meals (as does Paul Carter: very opposite sides of the coin reaching similar conclusions), etc.  What, inevitably follows up?  “Isn’t that unhealthy?”  I mean, maybe, sure.  Let’s say it objectively is: does that matter?  It’s 6 weeks: just how much damage can you do to yourself in 6 weeks?  How long will it take to undo 6 weeks of damage?  Especially if you came into this IN good shape to start with.  This isn’t a “for life” suggestion: this is a SPECIFIC approach for a specific block of training.  We match the nutrition with the training, because otherwise we WASTE the training by not providing our body the fuel it needs to achieve the objectives.  Once again, no one is saying “do this forever”: once you’ve gotten what you need, you get out.  This is the “one night stand”…just for 6 weeks.  Maybe consider it more like a summertime fling. 

Worst beach vacation ever

 

This is why periodization is a thing.  This is why there are “training seasons”.  But there’s an issue with that: one needs to be able to appreciate that there WILL be a future, and this, in turn, means a willingness to engage in some critical thinking and explore the realm of nuance.  People don’t want to do that: they want to make ONE decision ONE time and then just shut off their brains forever.  It’s why you see people run Starting Strength for 4 years, just running into the exact same stall over and over again, backing down the weights, ramping them back up, and stalling again.  They only wanted to take the time to learn ONE program (if that…most folks are just running an app to do all their thinking for them) and just do that forever.  Because learning TWO programs was too much…like, legit, read Super Squats: it gives you TWO programs to run back to back, and if you did just that and nothing else you could DEFINITELY get pretty damn far.  You need to be willing to play the field at least a LITTLE bit.  I can keep up the analogy here and say that you can get married, but you’ll want to have a mistress.  Just SOMETHING to keep the spark alive.  Dan John (who is NOT an advocate of bigamy, just to be clear) has “Bus bench-park bench” which is more than awesome to explain this.  You could easily take Easy Strength and Mass Made Simple and just run them back to back forever and be good.  It honestly doesn’t take much to get these benefits, but it takes SOMETHING.  It takes SOME degree of willingness to change.

 

I get it: change is scary.  This is how people end up in dead end relationships: they love the security of the relationship more than they love the actual person on the other end of that relationship.  But those relationships are so hollow they achieve the opposite of the intended effect: you’re now existing in isolation WHILE cohabitating with someone.  You rob yourself of the potential to actually have a connection with another human because you are TECHNICALLY “taken” and no longer available, yet you’re not getting ANY of the actual benefit of a real relationship.  Getting locked into these “forever” programs and diets do the exact same thing to you.  You will stagnate to the point that the effort you’re putting into the training and nutrition is having a NEGATIVE effect.  Once again: all decisions are an opportunity cost, and that hour you spent on workout 1,948 of Starting Strength where you just hit the same numbers as last time was an hour that could have been spent training ANYTHING else…or even an hour spent DOING anything other than that worthless workout.  Because MAINTAINING muscle doesn’t require that much effort: we could’ve done that in 20 minutes.  And it’s the same if we’re not going to vary our diet in any meaningful way to match our training: why did we just crush ourselves for an hour doing Super Squats if we’re just going to intermittent fast for 16 hours and then eat 1800 calories in our eating window?  Yeah, maybe that “works” day-to-day, but this is a NEW day: it needs a new approach.

Because if we do the same thing all the time it just gets stale

 

Fear commitment.  You’ve got your whole life to settle down: go out and have some fun.