Yes, a
Nietzsche quote: it never goes away.And
this is one of those that, upon reading it, absolutely changed my life, and
those of you who are regular readers have absolutely seen the influence of this
quote on all aspects of my physical transformation.I’ve frequently spoken on the idea that I
genuinely do not believe there is any such thing as willpower, which, in and of
itself, is an idea that took me a while to come around to.I’ve been lauded for my willpower, for my
ability to overcome, for my ability to endure so much misery and pain and
hardship in a singleminded pursuit of my goals, powering on like the
Juggernaut, unstoppable in my path.And
as cool as that image is, it’s all just a fairytale.The truth is: I am simply the manifestation
of a strong “why”, and it, in turn, allows me to endure any how.And just like I wrote in the very first entry
of this blog: I have no idea WHY I have this “why”: it’s simply always
been.My earliest memories are of
wanting to be physically great, and I’ve given up on trying to understand it: I
just know that it is there.Having this
why has allowed me to bear almost any how in my pursuit…which leads ultimately
to the question of “what WHY are you living for?”
I know that sentence reads about as well as this one: stick with me
That’s what
is interesting about this game: our “why” will always be revealed by the
how.Specifically, the hows we surrender
to are, in turn, our REAL “whys” that we live for.Examples?For 7 years, I’ve watched someone online manage to lose 10 kilos of
bodyweight.Yes: 10 kilos in 7 years,
which averages to about 3.15lbs a YEAR, a good rate of weight loss for a WEEK,
and if you want to be real nerdy, that’s .06lbs a week (no, not .6: .06).This person started off at 120kg…at a height
of 5’5.They made a goal to lose 100lbs
for their wedding that was happening in 9 months.I was SO excited for this person, gave them
all the resources I could, all the advice I could muster…and watched them
frequently lament about how they “cheated a little this weekend”, “forgot to
buy food: ate from the vending machine”, “needed sweets”, etc.The wedding rolled around (puns!) and they
were the same weight they were when they started.And as a married man, I’ll flat out say I was
upset that a spouse was NOT enough of a “why” to endure the “how” of avoiding
yummy foods…but there it was.We learned
this person’s TRUE why: eating yummy food.
It’s no
different when it comes to waking up early to train.Why do I train at 0400?I am honestly very blessed there: I have TWO
whys.I train, in general, because I
want to transform myself.I train at
0400 specifically because I have a family that I want to spend my time
with.I do NOT want to be lifting weights
or pushing prowlers or any of my other shenanigans when I could be spending
time cooking with my wife in the kitchen or playing a video game with my kid or
taking my dogs for a walk or just being present in some manner in their
lives…so I train when they sleep.My
alarm goes off (which I set on my phone on vibrate and hold close to my body,
so that I don’t wake my spouse), I get up, and I go train, and it sucks…but the
why makes the how endurable.Those of
you asking “HOW do you get up and train early” need to ask “WHY do you get up
and train early” instead.Oh my
goodness, I’m going to completely chase this pivot I just made, because THAT is
the crux here.
Not sure why I went with so many political photos with this one
Asking the
“how” to succeed will never work.Everyone is going to have a different how, and one person’s how may not
work for you.We must, instead, ask WHY
those who succeed do the things that they do.Derek Poundstone, WHY did you drink blended chicken in water?Because being a champion strongman was
important enough that he was willing to do what it took to get in the nutrition
he needed.Asking him HOW to do it is
pointless: it was done because it was necessary.Bodybuilders, WHY do you starve yourselves
and feel like zombies to get so damn lean?Because winning on the stage is worth it: asking about some trick to
make the hunger less awful (the “how”) isn’t going to work for you if you don’t
have the why.WHY do strongman and
powerlifters manage to step under heavy weights again after suffering horrific
injuries without fear of getting hurt again?Because victory is more compelling than fear, and they’d rather be
strong than weak and healthy.
Ask “why”,
NOT “how”.Ask YOURSELF “Why am I NOT
doing these things”.Ask yourself “why
WOULD I do these things”.What could be
compelling enough to get you to change your behavior?What “why” is enough for you?Your actions are a pure reflection OF your
why: you will always do the things that allow you to achieve your why.It just so happens that your “why” may not be
what you TELL yourself that it is.You
may SAY that your why is physical transformation, but when you come home from work
after a bad day and eat an entire cheesecake, your “why” is really
comfort.When you hit the snooze alarm
and blow off training for the 15th morning in a row, your “why” is sleeping
in.And there’s nothing wrong with these
BEING your “whys”: you simply have to make peace with them.That there’s no secret hack of “how” that
will have you accomplish your whys.It’s
not about some sort of psychological programming or reframing or magic potion
or powder or pill: your why will always determine your how.
Once again,
I found myself bringing home some hardware from a grappling competition,
despite the fact that I haven’t trained grappling in around 18 years and the
last time I grappled was…the last time I won a competition, which was back in
Dec.Since that last one was a novice
competition, I felt it was right for me to “step up” to the level of white
belt, which sounds funny, but when you technically don’t hold ANY sort of rank
in any grappling martial art, white belt is definitely the “next level”.Additionally, my previous competition was as
a “Masters” athlete, which was technically already me playing with the younger
crowd (at 38, I’m a Masters II), but there were NO geezers to be found this
day, so I ended up competing in the 18+ category.This was a fairly exciting development for
me: I’d REALLY have a chance to test myself.I managed to walk away with 3rd place out of 4 competitors, losing my
first match and winning my second, and I got to learn some more and push
myself, which was really my goal. With that, allow me to discuss how I got
here.
I can't tell if my face or my shorts are the most wrinkled parts of this photo
BACKGROUND AND TRAINING
A barbarian explaining to a fighter how training is a form of cheating
Once again,
I signed up for this competition completely on a whim.I was (and actually still am) training for a
strongman competition at the time when this showed up in my e-mail as an
opportunity, and I figured that the kind of strength and conditioning that
would support strongman should play well into grappling again.Last time I grappled, I was following “Chaos
is the Plan”, and this time I was STILL doing my own approach to training,
which I had titled “Phyrexian Dreadnought”, which, yes, IS the name of a card
from “Magic the Gathering” and I’m totally ok with that.I may do a write up of that sometime, but it
was a multi-phased competition prep approach with an early emphasis on
conditioning, middle emphasis on generate strength, and later phases focused on
strongman comp specific stuff.I did
some sort of lifting 3 days a week (MWF), limiting the mainwork to 30 minutes
and doing whatever I needed for assistance work afterwards, and would then
include 1 day of weighted vest walking and 1 day of events type work (carries,
prowler and throws).I’d do 1 set of ROM
progression pulls on Saturday, and either get in long walks on Sat and Sun or
get in some sort of short intense conditioning.The strongman competition I was training for was scheduled for Jul, and
ended up getting canceled, with me signing up for another one in Sep (14 Sep:
look for that write up) that had very similar events…so I just kept on
training.
Probably the
thing I did in this training that was closest to grappling applicable was max
distance 200lb sandbag carries.If I
could mandhandle that bag, I could handle a human no issues.Especially since I was going to be competing
in the 171-185lb class.I had just come
off a run of DoggCrapp prior to all of this, and was walking around at 185 on
my heaviest days, but averaging about 182.But, getting into MORE stupid details here, these were post workout
weights rather than first thing in the morning weights, and given how hot my
garage gets, I knew I was losing a lot of sweat before the weigh ins…so I had a
priority for this training cycle to drop my bodyweight a touch so that I’d have
no issue making the 185 class for the grappling comp and the 181 class for the
strongman comp.What was awesome about
this was, it meant I got to spend the week of the competition eating UP to gain
weight.Anyone who has ever done a combat
sport realizes what an inside boon that is, compared to starving yourself and sweating
out all your water to make weight.I got
to feel STRONG.
Dropping the
weight was no issue whatsoever: took a break from Feast/Famine/Ferocity and
instead went back to Apex Predator, which has always been awesome for getting
stupidly lean.And that’s exactly what happened, which was
kind of nice for the summer: I started walking around at 175, had all my abs
in, veins popping out, etc.BUT, unlike
last summer, I managed to hold onto a fair bit of strength for my squats and
deadlifts, actually watching both of those grow with a combination of Zeno
squats and DoggCrapp stuff for the squat and ROM progression pulls for the
deadlifts.My press strength dipped a
bit, as is what tends to happen with my bodyweight, but I was able to hold on
as much as I could.This boded well for
my goals of being competitive in grappling, considering I had no skills to
bring to the fight, so all I could rely on what strength and conditioning.
MORNING OF
Folger's is for chumps: wake up to THIS!
I more than
made my weight class goals, wake up and seeing 80.6kg on the scale (for some
reason, my bathroom scale has defaulted to metric and I can’t reset it), so I
engaged in my traditional pre-comp breakfast of “steak and eggs”, but REALLY
turned it up a notch: 4 pastured eggs, a sirloin cap from Costco, a grassfed
New York Strip from piedmontese, all swimming in grassfed ghee.I LOVE this fuel for comp, because it doesn’t
sit heavy in my guts, doesn’t slosh, and gives me VERY stable and sustainable
energy compared to a bunch of carbs.Plus, I just feel like a goddamn warrior eating like this.It’s what Conan would eat before
battle…although really, it would be ribs, so you can eat the meat off the bone.
It was a 45
minute drive out to the location, during which time I had my morning drink of
12oz of green tea mixed with 20oz of hot water (straight tea upsets my guts a
little) and some electrolytes.I bring
that up to demonstrate how fully hydrated I was when I weighed in at 183.0 WITH
a full set of sweats.And since I’m an
old man, that full set included compression shorts, then some Cerberus
strongman shorts, and THEN my “Sprawl” fight shorts from 2005, because I wanted
to REALLY show my age.
I only
needed to wait about 45 minutes for my first match.Timing was perfect.I rolled around on the mat a little to loosen
up beforehand, but otherwise had no real warm up.
MATCH 1: BLINK AND YOU’LL MISS IT
The first
dude I got matched up against was a 22 year old that seemed to tower over
me.I knew this dude cut some weight to
make 185.We shook hands, engaged, felt
each other out, and I could tell he was a strong kid, which meant that my
strategy of outmuscling him was going to be tough.Thankfully, skill made this a non-issue, as
he quickly took me down and got my back, at which point all my wrestling
instincts kicked in, I established a great 4 point base…which he immediately
recognized and slapped a rear-naked choke on me.He sunk it in DEEP and I tapped quickly.The force of the choke was so strong that my
jaw STILL hurts 4 days later as I write this.I take solace in the fact that this dude went on to win our
division.Looking back, I lost my first
match on my last competition for something of a similar reason: I need a “break-in”
to remember how to grapple.In this
case, I was afforded about 28 seconds to do that.I COULD have fought that choke a bit smarter,
or scrambled better once I hit the floor, but this was a lot of rust showing
up.
MATCH 2: GOING THE DISTANCE
I KNEW that
I needed to win A match if I wanted to bring home hardware, since there were 4 competitors
today. I didn’t actually get to see the other dude’s match, despite looking for
him, as I was hoping to learn SOMETHING about his game before we rolled. But,
as soon as I approached him, I looked at him and thought “lunch”. Once again,
it’s kinda cool that my killer instinct is actually coming out to play these
days, because in my 20s I was too much a “nice guy” and really missed out on a
lot of possible Ws.
We felt each
other out at the start and I quickly realized that I was much stronger than
this guy, so I played that to my advantage and broke him down standing as much
as I could: fighting off his underhooks, getting better positioning, dragging
him where he didn’t want to go. I tried some more aggressive takedowns, and
even felt the instinct to go for a double leg at one point, but instead I ended
up on my knees with him attempting to get my back. I managed to prevent that
and get him onto his back…and that’s where most of the match went.
I am pleased
at how I was able to impose my will on him the entire time. He never got to
have a say in where we were, what we were doing, or how we were doing it.
Occasionally, he’d keep a guard longer than I’d like, or roll out of something,
but that was about it. My conditioning was even better than last time, and his
was significantly worse than anyone else, so I could feel his strength fading
and it just got me to keep pushing even harder.
However, it
was also blatantly apparent how undangerous I was. I kept going for the handful
of subs I knew and none of them landed. I equated it to being like a Terminator
robot who never got the combat programming uploaded into their CPU: I was
relentless and unstoppable…and ineffective.
I keep my promises
BUT, the
advantage of that is, when the timer ran out, overtime decision gets to go to
the aggressor of the match, and there was no question that it was me. In
overtime, both competitors get a chance to escape from the other competitor
while they try to submit. I knew the other guy was exhausted, so I chose to be
on defense first, knowing I could escape from him. He DID try to get in a
choke, but in 22 seconds, I was out.
From here, I
knew that all I needed to do was hold onto the dude and squeeze the sh*t out of
him so that he couldn’t escape in 22 seconds, and that’s exactly what I did.
His conditioning fell apart and he had no strength to deal with me, and
eventually time ran out for him and I walked away with the win.
Some of the
things I pulled off that I’m happy with: I actually employed some of my old
wrestling tricks here, specifically the cross-face cradle. That was my go to in
high school, and it still works to get positioning. I also was fighting for
subs the ENTIRE time, up until the last second…to include what I’m pretty sure
was a backwards set up for a triangle choke. I also was pretty creative in
applying pressure from the top and just plain making the other dude
uncomfortable. And again: I’m VERY pleased with how my conditioning held up. I
actually felt better this time compared to last, where I was MORE focused on
conditioning training. I’m thinking taking this week a little lighter in
training may have helped.
THE FUTURE
At least it would make a good training block
I have that
strongman competition coming up on 14 Sep, and I’ve already signed up for
another grappling competition on 8 Dec, which is even closer to home for me, so
that’s cool.After the strongman comp, I
may keep leaning out for 2 more weeks before jumping on the gain train, because
I am tired of not eating, and my birth month is October, followed by
Thanksgiving, Christmas and another Disney Cruise, so it’s going to be a GOOD
time to gain.I also suppose I DO have a
Tang Soo Do tournament coming up in early Oct, but those are really just for
funsies.
Even while
gaining, I’m not worried about missing the 185 class for that comp on 8
Dec.I MAY even try to get in some open
mat time at a local grappling school between then and now…but at this point,
training feels like cheating.