DEFEATING THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

I was first introduced to the prisoner’s dilemma while I was an undergrad, lending me an overview to game theory in general, as part of my education in political science and philosophy.  For those that are unaware, a very brief summary of this dilemma is as such: Two suspects are arrested for a crime and interrogated separately, unable to communicate. They are both offered a deal: if one confesses and betrays the other, the confessor goes free, while the other receives a harsher sentence. If both remain silent, they both receive a lighter sentence. If both confess, they both receive a moderate sentence.  Per game theory, the dilemma here is that two individuals acting in their own self-interest may end up with a worse outcome compared to if they had cooperated.  HOWEVER, with my philosophy background, I posit that the REAL dilemma here is the angst inherent in wanting to make the BEST choice while in the face of the uncertainty of not knowing what the other individual is going to do.  Which is, effectively, the despair inherent in facing uncertainty in general, similar in turn to facing the absurd, as highlighted by Camus, or, truly, existentialism in general, or perhaps even Nietzsche’s observation of the loneliness and uncertainty of the death of God, for what shall we do now?!  And, in turn, upon learning of this dilemma, I came up with my own solution in order to defeat the dilemma: make a pact with your fellow criminal that, no matter WHAT happens, you WILL rat them out if you get interrogated.  Let there be no question: you WILL confess, so they may as well do the same and save their own skin as best they can.  Take THAT game theory!

Raul Julia perfectly demonstrated this by picking an awful movie to execute some amazing acting

Much like you are currently feeling right now, this sentiment greatly confused and frustrated my professor, but allow me to explain.  Once again, the dilemma here isn’t about ACHIEVING the best outcome: it’s the dilemma of picking the right CHOICE to achieve that outcome.  We experience the angst of the dilemma because we place great stress upon ourselves to HAVE to pick the “right” choice, knowing full well that we can’t rely on the other person on the other end to cooperate with us in doing so.  We are not in control of that other person, but we ARE in control of our OWN actions, and, in turn, what we can do is strip the power away from the dilemma by INTENTIONALLY selecting the worse choice.  We face a harsher sentence, but it’s on OUR terms that we face it.  We are no longer the victim of someone’s game and their machinations, no, WE control our fate.  We CHOOSE the worse outcome, knowing full well it is the worse outcome, such that we no longer face the dilemma.  We may be in prison, but we are free, for we arrived there by our own decision and NOT from the actions of another outside of our control.

 

This bizarre approach to problem solving has echoed in my own life on many occasions, and specifically in the realm of physical transformation.  Primarily because I have never been a victim of analysis paralysis OR program hopping, because I did not concern myself with ever making the “best” choice.  I took solace in knowing FULL WELL that whatever decision I was making was a less than optimal decision.  I knew full well that there was a better choice to be made, a better path to be taken, and a better plan to employ…and I ignored it all and did what I wanted to do anyway.  Why?  Because it meant I beat the dilemma!  It meant that I could move on with my prison sentence and get those days behind me soon so I could work to be free again, versus those poor saps STILL at the station trying to decide if they were going to confess or not.  They pitter away their “freedom” in a prison of their own making, while I lived freely IN prison, no different than those poor souls that spend 6 months trying to come up with the perfect program or hopping from program to program trying to find the “right one” when they could have just picked A program and ran it hard during that time and made guaranteed progress!  Yes: the person who picked the suboptimal program had a “harsher” sentence than those who picked the best one…but those who picked the best one ended up wasting away their youth trying to pick that best one such that they never had the opportunity to even ENJOY that freedom they worked so hard for.

Don't wait until you're 80 to finally pick your major...

 

And, of course, the same rings true with nutrition.  If you think training is nuts, just look at how religiously people treat their diets.  The pursuit of optimization is nuts when it comes to this, with people arguing points of whey isolate vs whey concentrate, what proximity of training to eat around, white potatoes vs sweet potatoes, etc.  There’s so much nuance and diversity that attempting to understand all of it is bound to drive someone mad, whereas simply making A decision and executing it, knowing full well that it’s NOT the best decision, gives one the freedom to be able to go accomplish SOMETHING.  Eliminate the processed junk and eat whole foods and you’ve already put yourself in the upper 90% of the world as far as nutritional habits go, and as Dan John has expressed, sometimes, “pretty good” is a REALLY high mark in the world of physical transformation.  We need to make peace with the fact that good enough is “good enough”.

 

Because, once again, this is NOT about making the best choice: it’s about defeating the dilemma!  The dilemma itself prevents you from making progress, for it forces you into a state of stasis as you navel gaze and contemplate well beyond the point of reason all the possible outcomes of your decision.  It forces you into a state of inaction, when, in truth, those that have succeeded in the realm of physical transformation know that the most important thing is to do SOMETHING.  In our current state of obesity related illness becoming our number 1 killer, almost every medical professional has concluded that ANY manner of nutritional intervention is superior to NO manner of it, for continuing on our current trajectory is SURELY leading to downfall, whereas even the craziest juice cleanse will at LEAST have us STOP eating the things that are directly killing us.  As much as some pub-med warrior might want to argue that doing 200 push ups a day is going to result in some sort of horrible shoulder imbalance, the rest of us will appreciate that an individual doing 200 push ups a day is going to be in a MUCH better physical state than the individual doing absolutely nothing to improve their physical well being.  We can course correct as time goes on, should we feel so inclined, as training tends to be a constant state of evolution, but in order to ACHIEVE that evolution, we need that initial spark of life to get us going. 

*PSH* doesn't that dude know about periodization?!

 

Don’t let anyone put you in a prisoner’s dilemma: KNOW that you’re going to pick the worse choice, so that you can have the freedom to go on and face other REAL dilemmas.           

WE DON’T STOP DOING IT BECAUSE IT STOPS WORKING: WE STOP DOING IT BECAUSE IT’S HARD

 That title is a mouthful, but the inspiration comes from an observation I read in James Pieratt’s “A History of Physical Fitness” which, alongside his other book “Preparing for WAR: the training of History’s Top Warriors” make for fantastic “toilet reading”, stealing the phraseology from Jamie Lewis, who himself said the same of his “bite sized history” book.  Just short passages of fun gee whiz info, rather than full on academic text.  But in either capacity, like many physical culture history nerds, a conversation eventually turned toward the Spartans, and how awesome they were in their prime as it relates to being warriors and a warrior/physical culture, which, of course, leads to the inevitable question of “what happened?”  And, ultimately, the Spartans eventually slacked on the warrior ethos that had made them so dominant in their region, which resulted in their fall from grace before the entire region was eventually conquered and history rolled on.  But WHY did the Spartans give up on this ethos?  Was it because they found a BETTER way?  No: clearly not, by nature of their outcome.  It was, instead, that they found an EASIER way, and, in turn, they chose THAT way, because being a Spartan is hard, and eventually NOT doing the hard thing won out over getting the results doing the hard thing got them.  In the world of physical transformation, we see this exact same thing transpire, and so frequently trainees interpret a NEW way as being a BETTER way simply because it’s an easier way…but, quite often, it turns out that being easier is the only thing that makes it better: not the outcome itself.

Yeah, bare knuckle boxing sounds brutal, until you realize this was the easier option than rough & tumble fighting

 

My go to example here is that, in 1967, we already had two men that could bench press over 600lbs raw: Pat Casey, and his training partner Billy “Superstar” Graham (yes, the professional wrestler and world’s strongest man competitor).  It’s worth pointing out the year because, in 1967, the bench press was a VERY new lift, with Doug Hepburn having managed a 400lb bench in 1950, and a 500lb bench in 1953, with other pro-wrestler Bruno Sammartino having set a record of 565lbs in 1959.  Contrast this with the clean and jerk appearing in the first ever modern Olympic Games in Athens at 1896, and 2 hands anyhow/strongman style overhead lifting having existed for LONG before that, and then take a look at the actual equipment being used for bench pressing (Doug Hepburn had to have the weights handed to him, since they didn’t have actual bench press stations yet) and you can understand the significance of TWO men being able to hit over 600lbs in 1967.  In the 58 years since that record has been set, we’ve yet to see it get eclipsed by 200lbs, with Julius Maddox having come the closest with a 355kg/782.6lb bench press in 2023.  Now consider, in those 58 years, the “advances” we’ve had in terms of drugs (I’ll start with the obvious one), nutrition (Pat Casey swore by meatloaf sandwiches smothered in mayo between sets), exercise science, the equipment itself AND the much larger talent pool to draw from, along with how much the bench press itself has become an ICONIC lift in our society (the very tool that is used to evaluate a man’s strength, whereas that was previously a sentiment reserved for the press overhead).  When we look at this, we KNOW, objectively, that the training approaches of the past ABSOLUTELY worked.  They made men big and strong, to near superhuman levels and, most likely, given access to the same drugs, equipment, and early exposure/technique improvement, these guys would be setting very similar records to what we’re seeing today.

 

So why did meatloaf sandwiches with mayo between sets of 8 hour long dip workouts (yes, he really did that, getting 200 reps with over 250lbs on his body) fall out of favor in place of intra-workout protein drinks and minimum effective dose?  Did the methods of the past NOT work?  NO!  They CLEARLY worked.  They worked INCREDIBLY well: they were just HARD.  And soon, easier ways came around, and we interpreted the existence of these easier methods to infer that they were SUPERIOR methods…but are they?  Or are they simply easier methods period, and with that we have a tradeoff in terms of effectiveness?

Seriously though: look at that garage sale special he's benching on

We cannot mistake newness as a marker for superiority: something being new or more recent does not immediately make it superior to what came before it.  This falsely presupposes that all new ideas SUCCESSFULLY build off the success of the old method, but take a page from Olestra and Pepsi Blue: sometimes “new” is far far worse from what came before it.  Or like when we replaced all those awful for us animals fats with all those super new transfats in our fastfood and Oreo creams.  Additionally, this same thought process puts us in a place where we immediately discredit anything that ISN’T the latest and greatest: believing that HUMANS operate like machinery, and that methods become obsolete.  The success of the present does not invalidate the success of the past, and, in truth, we have to appreciate that, absent the success FOUND in the past, we’d not be able to enjoy or appreciate our present successes.

 

What is the point of this ranting: that, so often, when I wish to find a new way forward, I, instead, look for an OLD way forward.  These methods worked: they were just HARD.  But why is that a bad thing?  Isn’t that the whole purpose of physical transformation?  You do hard things so that you, yourself, become a hard thing?  You endure, and in enduring you grow strong?  Because, quite simply, if this was easy, wouldn’t everyone be jacked?  The outcome of physical transformation is the outcome of one that regularly engages in things that are difficult, and that includes the difficulty of the training AND the difficulty of the nutrition, in the case of the former being willing one to DO something whereas, in the case of the latter, it quite often an instance of willing one to NOT do something (don’t indulge in the garbage).  And this constantly engaging in difficult things self-perpetuates: the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the greater a challenge you can take on in order to continue to grow. 

I mean, I'm fairly certain Sisphyus is REALLY jacked

 

Take some time to appreciate the past, rather than the present and the future.  Try a diet of nothing but whole foods and see what it can do for you.  Don’t reach for the protein powder when you need a fix: cook yourself some steak and eggs.  Don’t reach for the weight gainer if you’re short on calories: sit down and eat an honest to goodness meal.  Quit trying to calculate your minimum effective dose to get the maximum return on your training and go see how much weight you can squat for 20 breathing reps, or go knock out an 8 hour dip marathon where you absolutely NEED those meatloaf sandwiches in mayo between sets to power you through.

 

These methods STILL work. You aren’t handcuffed to ONLY use what modernity has afforded you: you have the entire history of humanity to draw upon for inspiration on how to achieve physical transformation.  People didn’t stop using the methods because they stopped working: they stopped using them because they’re HARD.  Don’t lose that Spartan edge: DO the hard things and get the hard rewards that come with them.         

 

 

BOYS WITH SWORDS: THE RIDDLE OF STEEL

Dear readers, I have, once again, returned from a cruise, wherein I engaged in a one-man reign of terror against the entire species of sheep in my quest to consume enough lamb to attempt to achieve the physique of the farnese Hercules.  But between bouts of consuming copious amounts of ruminant animals, I found myself inclined to walk in order to aid my digestion, and wondered into one of the shops onboard this Disney cruise, wherein I observed my inner-child and past-self all at once in the form of a pre-pubescent youth armed with a “Pirates of the Caribbean” plastic cutlass.  Disney sells a ton of these on the ship, as each cruise has a “Pirate Night” theme, wherein we all dress in our pirate gear, eat a pirate themed cuisine (which, yes, DID include lamb), and watch fireworks out at sea.  However, this youth was NOT in his pirate gear: he sported a pair of purple Crocs, green athletic shorts, tube socks and a baby blue hoodie, which did not hide the substantial paunch of a belly he was already sporting at a young age.  Which, again: I was observing my past-self there, for I was the same fat kid in the goofy get up.  But I also recognized in this youth the same mentality I had as well, for with the sword in his hand I saw him fixated on the blade and the implications behind it.  NOW he was a warrior: armed with a weapon of war and ready to engage the enemy.  And, in turn, it led me to realize how much we are all just boys with swords, completely oblivious to the fact that, though we may have sword in hand, we’re also sporting a set of Crocs and athletic shorts with our paunch pressing against our baby blue hoodie.  It doesn’t matter if you have the tools of a warrior in your hand if you, yourself, are not a warrior.

I'm sure that kid sees me just like Leela sees this fly

 

We see this so much in the world of physical transformation: trainees get so fixated on “the sword” that they never take stock in the arm that swings it.  What good is a cutlass in the hands of a small fat kid in a pair of purple Crocs compared to an unarmed man with the capacity for great physical destruction by the sheer nature of their physicality?  The same holds true with all the “swords” of physical transformation.  So many trainees fixate on having the right PROGRAM in order to achieve the results they need.  They spend months pairing the right movements with the exact right amount of reps and sets in the right split with the right frequency training to the right amount of failure…and achieve nothing.  Why?  Because the arm swinging this sword is the arm of a child: not a warrior.  They don’t actually put in the EFFORT necessary to make this program work, they don’t invest the necessary degree of fanatical adherence and reverence to the program, they don’t live, sweat and breathe the training…

 

…AND they quite often come in with the capabilities of a child rather than a warrior.  Which is to say, they are too unfit to actually train hard enough to make results or recover well enough to grow.  They are too poorly conditioned to recover well enough between sets and workouts, they are too poorly coordinated to be able to control the weights in a manner to achieve the intended training stimulus, and they simply lack the ability to even push hard enough to be able to even achieve any meaningful results, which is why many ultra beginner programs tend to have LOTS of reps and volume included, because we know that the beginner simply can’t push hard enough in 1-2 sets to be able to achieve an outcome.  Before we pick up this sword, let’s trade out our purple Crocs and green athletic shorts for a set of boots and pants, shall we?

Although sometimes we lose the pants in the pursuit of becoming a warrior...

 

And what of the sword of nutrition?  We see this with those that hyperfixate on quantity vs quality.  They wield the sword of macronutrients, armed with the power of CICO, and believe that they have all the tools necessary to achieve their desired physical outcomes.  As long as they eat X amount of carbs, Y amount of protein and Z amount of fats in order to achieve XX amount of calories, they will succeed!  …and then they achieve this by consuming the purple Crocs of nutrition inherent in packaged processed garbage, many times because it’s easier to count calories or macros when the food comes pre-packaged and measured for us.  I’ve known trainees that were spending top dollar for pre-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because they didn’t want to take the time to bust out the food scale to measure out their intake: and that was honestly the healthiest choice they were making!  These folks live off fast food and protein bars because it makes it easier for them to punch in their numbers into their app, and then they wonder why they still look like a melted candle after years of dieting and training.  As much as we want to fixate on the sword of CICO and Macros, the sword arm of QUALITY nutrition still holds true.  The hormonal impact of eating quality food, along with WHEN we eat it, is going to have a say in the impact of the CO portion of CICO, and if macros are the only thing that matter, go ahead and get ALL of your fats from Omega 6s for a few years and let me know how that turns out for you.  For a real fun trick, pair that with getting all your carbs from fructose: you will blow your cardiologist’s mind, especially when you did such a good job staying away from those “harmful” saturated fats in eggs…

 

And there are SO many other swords out there.  The sword of supplements?  How many perpetual undereaters think that they’ll see the growth they desire once they buy the latest “mass gainer” that is just a bunch of maltodextrin mixed with low quality protein powder?  Or those desperately seeking the “edge” of naturally elevating their testosterone with a supplement when they haven’t engaged in any of the other readily available natural remedies like sleeping more, eating better, being less fat, getting more sunlight, drinking less alcohol, having less stress, etc etc.  Or perhaps the sword of equipment?  All those trainess who are absolutely CONVINCED that it’s the glute ham raise or reverse hyper that’s missing from their lives, and once they get these they’re SURE to see the growth they need.  Ignoring the generations that came before them that got significantly big and strong armed with just a barbell and some plates: if THAT!  Hell, we can combine all those points into one, remembering the story of Henry “Milo” Steinborn, who grew up slight of frame and employed 20 rep squats with a barbell that he had to tip onto its side, since there were no squat racks, along with copious amounts of real food and milk, in order to become big and strong enough to earn his nickname.  He wasn’t focused on the sword: he was focused on the arm that swings it.

Or swings the barbell in this case

 

Let us assess and take stock of our current situation.  Are we truly warriors, or are we the boy in the Crocs with a plastic sword? 

COMING FULL CIRCLE PART 2: THE EATING

 Amazingly, it seems the training was really the "easy" part of this story, for when I finished writing out about how my eating has come full circle yet again, I discovered just how many goddamn circles I'd go on through these past 25 years.  Hopefully you can pick up some lessons from this and save yourself some time having to make these mistakes.

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The eating went full circle as well.  I grew up a fat kid, which, if you may recall, I later discovered I had a few factors working against me from the start, to include having cereal put in my bottle as a nursing infant so that I’d fatten up and sleep through the night, meaning I really didn’t have a chance from the get go…but I ALSO didn’t do myself any favors with my love for fast food, candy, and literal Koolaid vs the Pavel Tsastouline kind, drinking pitchers of artificially flavored and colored sugar water.  At the same age I took to lifting, I took control of my nutrition using, once again, the only tools at my disposal: effort.  I white knuckled it and cut my food intake to 1/3 of what it was before, which was easy to measure, since I was eating so much it was a matter of eating 2 slices of pizza instead of 6, 3 tacos instead of 9, etc.  I still had absolutely no idea WHAT to eat, and was operating off all the stuff I learned from television: a healthy breakfast of juice, bagels with peanut butter, breakfast cereal, lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, tins of fruit and protein bars, and whatever my parents served for dinner.  In doing so, I went from a bodyweight of 176lbs as a 5’9 14 year old to 152lbs over the span of the summer between my high school freshman and sophomore year, which also inspired me to quit football (where they ONLY thing I had going for me was my bulk) and take up wrestling (where my ability to control my food intake was quite valuable).  Wrestling would prove to probably be the most physically beneficial thing I ever did for myself, but that’s a post for another time: onto more tales from my nutritional journey!

A bow of Captain Crunch, 2 slices of buttered white bread toast, a tall glass of skim milk, a glass of juice, a bowl of fruit and a muffin...yes, we were told that THIS is what a healthy breakfast looked like in the 90s...

 

At some point, my interests in martial arts got me online, and I found a martial arts forums where, for some reason, low carb dieting was popular, and since this was the late 90s/early 2000s, we all knew that as “The Atkin’s Diet”, which, funny enough, I had learned about from my grandfather a few years earlier, but we all just thought he was crazy because he was eating bacon and butter and losing weight.  But, THIS time, I had internet access and could “research”, and had decided that THIS was the most absolute best way to eat because it made so much sense to me.  It was all these goddamn carbs were making everyone fat!  That wasn’t the wrongest conclusion to draw, but it’s clear the lack of nuance that such a ham-fisted approach achieves.  Still, I knew what I needed to do: cut out carbs!  Problem: I didn’t actually know what carbs were.  Sure, I THOUGHT I did: it’s bread, sugar, rice and potatoes…and yeah, those are SOME carb sources, but not all of them, nor did I realize just how many things I THOUGHT were safe contained these things.

 

Because there I was, in college, with a meal plan, thinking I was CRUSHING this low carb thing when I would go to the dinning hall and get my bacon and eggs for breakfast, and, since they eggs were more “egg loaf” since they were using powedered eggs, I’d use a healthy amount of ketchup to make them more edible.  The same ketchup I’d put on top of my stack of cheeseburgers (no bun, of course) I’d get for lunch.  With, of course, entire BOWLS of peanut butter for dessert, because there’s no carbs in peanut butter!...right?  And then, when I was hungry between meals, I’d hit up the on campus restaurant and ALWAYS get the chicken strip basket and make it a point not to eat the fries, because the FRIES were the carbs, of course…oh crap, why do they call it “breading” anyway?  I figured: they were CHICKEN strips…that’s pure protein, right?  It was the same when we’d sneak off campus to Panda Express, and I’d make sure to get the large ala carte Orange Chicken and avoid all that carby rice: pure protein baby!  And speaking of protein, I was making sure to take down my daily protein shake, using that delicious late 90s/early 2000s vanilla protein that tasted like wallpaper paste that I had to mix with a handmixer…alongside the care packages my parents sent me of Atkin’s cookies and treats that were none too pleasant on my digestive system.  Keep an eye on those Atkin’s treats: they’ll show up again sometime.

With enough denial, we can convince ourselves of anything!  

And let’s talk about the saint that is my mom, because as you can see: she was always a provider.  I’ve never questioned how much that woman has loved me, and she loves by providing, to include that cereal in my bottle, those care packages, and a house that was ALWAYS stocked with some amazingly incredible junkfood.  The best/worst of which were the gigantic cookies and muffins that Costco stocked, which were a quick lesson to me in just how much you CAN’T out train a bad diet, because one summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, I decided I wanted to get a six pack, and I would do it by burning off all my fat by running…sixteen miles a day!  Yes: I had an 8 mile run that I would do twice a day, and even then I’d also skip rope and do other training during this time.  And, when all that training was done, BOY did those cookies and muffins look good, so of course I indulged in my share of them.  Hey, I earned it. …yeah, no six pack that summer, but I DID get a pretty awesome stress fracture in my foot.

 

But while we’re on the topic of my college dinning hall, it was in my senior year of college that I did my first ever run of Super Squats, which was a great place to do it, because I could drink all the milk I wanted and eat as much as possible in that dinning hall.  At that point, the carb restrictions were gone and I was just going with the book’s recommendation of a LOT of food, which, at least with the dinning hall, it was far less processed than the “Dave Tate Method”…which is exactly the method I employed after I graduated college, got married, and decided to quit my pursuit of martial arts and fully invest myself into lifting, and, by extension, “getting huge”.  I made a home gym, was married to a wonderful woman that would cook and bake whatever I wanted, and suddenly had disposable income, which I disposed of at all the wonderful fast food locations in central coast CA.  3 double doubles from In n Out was a regular for me, as was 4-6 cheesy gordita crunches from Taco Bell, 4 sausage biscuits at Burger King, 6 double stacks from Wendy’s (you can tell this was back in the era when we still had $1 burgers at value menus), to say nothing of how I’d take the mini banana bread loaves my wife would wrap in tin foil and upwrap and eat them like candy bars.  While Super Squats had me put on 12lbs in 6 weeks and finally see more than 200lbs on the scale for the first time in my life, this way of eating got me from 190lbs to 217 in my desperate attempt to see 220 on the scale, because Matt Krocazleski was the same height as me and competed at 220lbs, and I was convinced that I’d look the same and be just as strong if I could weigh the same…

Surely I was just 3 burgers away from this!

 

…yeah, after 2.5 years of living and eating this way, I was done.  I remember the exact moment, having just put away my usual dinner of 2 “simple life quesadillas” from my work’s cafeteria that were comprised of just chicken, very low quality cheese and a pound of grease that I drowned in sour cream, alongside 2 apples and 2 servings of green beans (healthy fruits and vegetables), laying on my side in bed and wondering “Why am I doing this to myself?”  I decided to get back to what I knew: food and carbohydrate restriction.  This time, I at least had a better idea of what the hell a carbohydrate was, and was far better at kicking the junk out of my diet and, when I went and got fast food (because, truth be told and unbeknownst to me at the time, I was totally addicted to it), I at least knew how to operate portion control and restriction to make these visits NOT total disasters.  It was from this point I cut my weight down to a lean 190lbs…which was actually exactly where this blog initially started.  Those intro photos were the end of a long and gradual fat loss phase that had me at my leannest I had been up until that point.  It was from that level of leanness I was able to cut to 181lbs, take “best lifter” in my final (as of this point) powerlifting meet, set national records in the total and deadlift…

 

…and go on a 2 year junk food bender.  Apparently, my life has been marked with a constant cycle of “binge and purge”, as I am a man of extremes.  But really, the lesson I needed to learn (and this will come back a few more times) is that you can only white knuckle and deny yourself for so long before the body eventually DEMANDS payback.  And the longer and harder you do it, the more intense the demand.  My bender began with just grabbing a burger at Hardee’s after my meet, to celebrate my win, and it spiraled for years.  I, once again, abandoned my low carb principles, and instead discovered a newfound fondness for red velvet cupcakes, alongside dark chocolate Reese’s peanut butter cups, Quest Bars (hey, it’s protein!), post workout Poptarts and cereal, etc etc.  This also correlated with me transitioning to strongman, so I had the perfect excuse to justify this: I “needed the fuel”.  And again, it’s interesting to discuss all this, because you regular readers were there alongside me the entire time, to include when I would go on journeys to become lean again by employing those same principles that had worked before, only to balloon back up again when I was tired of being lean.

 

Spaghetti DID get me in and out of this jam...

At one point, in that journey, I discovered Jon Andersen’s “Deep Water”, and it REALLY clicked for me.  Stupidly hard training paired with low carb eating: EXACTLY what I want.  Jon also talked about small, frequent meals to keep the metabolism humming, which was actually something I picked up from my dad with a fad diet he followed in the 90s that I always employed as well, since I was ALWAYS hungry and perpetually grazing seemed to help with that.  However, my previous weaknesses shined through, as I completely glossed over Jon’s point about organic/grassfed high quality meat and, instead, found myself eating 2 bunless double quarter pounders from McDonalds, because they were “low carb”, along with all sorts of low carb frankenfoods via protein bars, quest treats, peanut butter powders, etc etc.  Despite all this, it STILL worked, because the training was so intense and I was still doing a decent job managing MACROS even if my micronutrient values were terrible that I got immensely big and strong running this program and was able to validate that I did NOT “need” carbs for energy…although I DO recall that I’d still have a weekly cheat meal the night before the hardest workouts of Deep Water, which, the weekly cheat meal itself was a habit I picked up during the powerlifting weight cut saga, and it was ultimately more a “binge eating episode” vs a cheat meal.  Once again: I took a LONG time to learn these lessons, but that’s how the circles get smaller: we learn lessons and make new mistakes.

 

And speaking of mistakes: strongman eventually led me to a competition that had an awesome event: a 275lb keg clean and press.  At the time, I could manage a 200lb press, and this competition allowed me to move up a weight class…so I dedicated myself to adding 75lbs to my keg clean and press in 12 weeks, which I was going to achieve by eating EVERYTHING.  I went right back to my Dave Tate style of eating that “worked” so well in my early 20s, but DID manage to use some of my lessons learned from my previous trips around this circle.  Fast food was still there (there’s that addiction again), but wasn’t the cornerstone, as I instead DID try to make use of whole foods, to include oats (PROTEIN OATS by Kodiak, of course), heavy cream, honey, peanut/almond butter, blueberries, etc, but there was also breakfast cereal, sourdough bread, and way too many quest frozen pizzas (they’re the GOOD for you frozen pizzas…right?).  I also really tucked into the “frequent meals” thing and found myself having a pre-pre workout meal, and then a pre-workout meal, and then a post workout shake, then a post-post workout meal, alongside my traditional breakfast, lunch and dinner, late night snack, and other foods.  And again, it worked, because I became the strongest presser I’d ever been in my life, nailing a 250lb keg clean and press in training along with 5x241 and 1x266 on the axle press.

5x241, 1x256, 1x266 and a near miss at 276, filmed like a snuff film

 

…and then I got an annual physical, my blood lipids were messed up, my doc put me on a statin, and I went on a VERY ill-informed attempt to resolve all of this through nutrition and lifestyle changes.  Once again, I leaned into what I was very talented at: restriction, and ultimately went on a low fat AND low carb diet…which, for those of you paying attention at home, is a TERRIBLE idea.  Yes, I got my blood lipids on track, and I got as lean as I possibly could, and horribly compromised my health through the process.  I also leaned into old habits of eating SO much frankenfoods in my attempt to avoid all the evil meat, eggs and animal products my doctor informed me were causing my blood lipids issue, basically living off of processed foods because the macros were sound, despite the fact the ingredients read like a horror movie. 

 

This kept up until I eventually reached a breaking point after my third run of Super Squats, trying to survive the intensities of that program through a diet of protein/keto bars, protein supplement enhanced nut butters, sunflower butter, “keto bread”, and basically all other manner of keto treats, cheats and hacks.  Remember those Atkin’s treats I talked about before?  There they were again, and I basically wasn’t eating ANY real food.  I eventually got sick of having to shop at 5 different grocery stores per week in order to get all my weird foods, so I decided to streamline everything by hopping on the Velocity Diet, since I had read Dan John’s glowing reviews of what a reset this was.  The most current version allowed for one healthy solid meal a day…and now that I could only eat food once a day, I no longer wanted to waste it on “food like products”: I wanted ACTUAL food.  This meant actually eating some for real meat, along with all those healthy veggies I had stuffed myself with when I was eating low carb/low fat as a means to chase away the all consuming hunger that was always present when I was eating that way.

When you're only eating once a day, there's no room for this nonsense

 

This, eventually, transitioned itself to Jamie Lewis’ Apex Predator diet, because I always wanted to try that as well, and it was basically just a more directed version of the Velocity Diet with the HSM.  And then, this naturally led itself to carnivore, since the Apex Predator’s one meal a day was pure meat, and I suddenly discovered that, the more meat I ate and the fewer plants I ate, the better I felt. …and that, for the first time in my LIFE: I wasn’t hungry.  I was finally eating the food that I WANTED to eat this whole time, and when I gave my body what it wanted, it stopped being hungry.

 

And THERE was the biggest lesson I learned from going full circle.  And what a BIG circle this one was.  I was a fat kid who was eating whatever I wanted, but what I wanted was a product of my environment.  I started off behind the 8-ball, weened on processed foods that just continued to perpetuate and lead to consistent and frequent poor decisions, and each and every time I tried to overcome my drive with just willpower and white knuckling, the rebound just became harsher and harsher.  Low carb kept calling to me for a reason: because it was transitioning me toward the foods my body was in NEED of eating in order to feel satiated.  Restricting myself would always result in a binge as a response, and when I binged, it was never on the food I NEEDED but on the foods I was addicted to.  Despite the fact that a carnivore approach may appear restrictive, it’s been the opposite to me: I’m finally eating the foods I WANT to eat, in the amount I want to eat them.  I wrote recently about how, during my “Operation Conan” experiment, where I gained on a carnivore diet, I went on a cruise and was totally OVER the idea of feasting, since I’d been doing it for so much time leading up to it, that the novelty of overeating was gone.  I was satiated: I’d had “enough”.  I’m back to being the same fat kid who is just eating whatever he wants: it just so happens that what I WANT to eat is the stuff that’s actually suited for me.

 

This IS a valuable lesson for sure

And for those of you that have stuck around this long, both through this post itself AND through the years of this blog: thanks for taking the time to read and enjoy this journey with me.  It’s not over yet!  I’m back at the start of this circle: let’s see how long it takes me to get back here again! 

COMING FULL CIRCLE PART 1: THE TRAINING

This is going to be totally self-indulgent, but I’m going to give myself a moment to reminisce and reflect, because as of recently, as I look back, I realize it’s not really like looking back but more like looking forward.  Primarily because it appears I have gone full circle from where I have started, which, in turn, means I have a pretty good idea of where I am going.  That’s one of the nice things about a circular timeline: they’re very predictable, it just falls upon us to recognize when they’re happening and where we are on them, once we’ve identified them.  And once we have that ability, we can use that predictable ability to anticipate where we are headed and, hopefully, apply some of those lessons learned from the LAST time we were on this part of the journey.  But, already, I’ve digressed.  Let’s go back to the beginning, which is to say, now, the present.

Trust me: it just gets more confusing

 

I started writing this blog in 2012, and during that time announced that I was a fan of abbreviated training.  Almost immediately after saying as such, I departed on a journey that was very much NOT abbreviated training, with 5/3/1 BBB having been a program that broke me out of that abbreviated rut, with 5x10 seeming like insane volume to my 3-5x3-5 based mind, only to go completely into “Deep Water” with some 10x10 efforts, “daily work” racking up volume totals, 2, 3 and 4 a day training sessions, and other just maddening feats of training volume, effort and intensity.  Yet, after all of that, here I am again, back to abbreviated training.  And I eased BACK into it, having 5/3/1 Krypteia lead me on a “high speed/low drag” approach to training, Mass Made Simple and Easy Strength reminding me just how little I needed to train to see results, Building the Monolith reminding me that I used to train 3x a week full body and see results, and DoggCrapp reminding me that just ONE big set is enough, before I re-read and re-remembered Tactical Barbell and found myself once again excited to train, primarily because the training no longer consumed my life, time and being.  It was something that ENHANCED me, rather than consumed me, and it created a positive feedback loop, wherein, the less I trained, the more I grew, which allowed me to train harder and better in the limited time I trained, which re-affirmed that I didn’t need to train so much.

 

But what got me to abbreviated training in the first place in 2012 for me to have been such a big fan of it?  The EXACT same process as before, just less refined.  I started lifting weights at the age of 14, armed with a standard adjustable bench press station I bought at a Play-it-Again sports from some birthday money I saved, equipped with a leg extension/curl and preacher curl station, along with 2 spinlock dumbbell collars.  I lifted weights 5-6 days per week, and just did all the exercises I could, which was a lot of flat and incline barbell benching, 2 different kinds of curls, leg extensions and leg curls, and then I’d finish each day with 200 push ups and 200 sit ups, because that’s what my dad told me would get me a six pack and a big chest.  This was during the summer, as once the school year rolled around, I got access to my high school weight room, which meant I got to do all sorts of benching and dumbbell work on top of maxing out all the machines with my buddies and doing tons of chin ups and pretty much everything that wasn’t a squat or a deadlift (we were told they were dangerous by our football/weightlifting coach…so much wasted potential).  I kept this up until I got to college, which, interestingly enough, was the same college Jon Andersen went to (he had graduated before I started attending, sadly), wherein I got access to an even BIGGER weight room and decided to “step up my game” by using a bodybuilding split, which I, of course, designed myself, which was FULL of volume and movements….and a leg day that had no squatting whatsoever and was all just machines.

In retrospect, there's probably a reason I was always such a fan of this guy...

 

BUT, eventually, I decided I wanted to be a “powerlifter”, since I was into martial arts and in the early 2000s we KNEW that powerlifting was how you got STRONG vs just “looking pretty” from lifting weights, so I FINALLY started squatting and deadlifting, and actually navigated my way into a Westside Barbell for Skinny Bastards workout.  But, of course, I had NO idea how to effectively run it, and just kept slamming the max effort lifts with too much frequency and did a bunch of bodybuilding for the supplemental and assistance work, before someone on the internet sent me a copy of Pavel Tsastoluine’s “Beyond Bodybuilding”, which was the SECOND book I had ever read on the topic of physical training.  The first being Loren Christensens’s “Fighting Power”, which was geared more toward building strength and explosiveness for martial arts…and it really pretty awful, but still holds a special place on my bookshelf for being the first book I ever got on the subject.  But for a SECOND book on training, “Beyond Bodybuilding” absolutely ROCKED MY WORLD.

 

I drank WAY too deep of the Pavel Koolaid, no question, but I “learned” how sets of 5 were the answer to all training questions, and how you only needed 1 movement for your pushing muscles, your pulling muscles, and your legs per day, and that full body was the only way to train, and read stories about Paul Anderson and Bob Peoples and learned about Stuart McRobert and Randall Strossen and Super Squats.  But I ALSO learned about deloading, practicing strength, and ultimately fatigue management balanced against training stimulus.  AND, coming from having absolutely NUKED my body with volume for YEARS up until this point, switching to abbreviated training allowed me to unlock a LOT of growth, as I was able to recover from all the fatigue I had accumulated and actually spend some time growing and gaining.  This, in turn, led to me becoming a big fan of abbreviated training, because it felt like magic to me.  After years of throwing everything I had into training and getting ok results, I started training LESS and getting MORE results.

That's how linear progression works, right?

 

Which, as I said, turned me into a total Koolaid drinker, and suddenly abbreviated training was the answer to everything, and I remember when I wanted to run Super Squats for the very first time I was trying to make all the OTHER lifts in it 5x5, and I tried doing the same when I attempted another run at Westside Barbell, and then I’d alternate between conjugate and 5x5 for a long time until I eventually blew out my back so hard I couldn’t deadlift for 3 years and almost completely quit lifting…until I discovered DoggCrapp for the very first time, which led me to elevated deadlifts, which had me remember that lesson I learned about ROM progression from Paul Anderson/Bob Peoples, which got me able to deadlift for my very first powerlifting meet….which led to me finishing my third meet in 2012, and then the blog started, and there I was…

 

As I said: full circle, and, of course, that’s an overview of 25 years of training in the span of 1000 words, but what IS worth appreciating is that, though things come full circle, it appears the circles get “tighter” as time goes on.  When I started, I was a babe in the woods, operating completely off of instinct and drive, with no real guiding knowledge.  But, at the time, that WAS enough to create some manner of change toward physical transformation, and, to this day, those principles of effort, consistency and time still hold true.  But, after coming all the way around to abbreviated training the first time, when I departed back to the land of volume before coming back to where I am here today with Tactical Barbell, I had picked up a LOT more tricks and knowledge along the way to help me apply that effort, consistency and time in a more focused and productive manner.  It’s fine to make mistakes: just avoid making the SAME mistakes.  Make new, INTERESTING mistakes, so that you’re always learning.  And that’s what I’ve been doing the whole time: making new mistakes on my circular path, so that, when I meet myself at the start again, I have so many interesting things to share before we go all the way around again.  Like Bill and Ted meeting themselves: “Don’t forget to wind your watch!”

EXCELLENT!

---

Folks, this was originally going to be a one shot, but when I finished up writing about how the eating has also gone full circle, it ended up being over 4500 words, so I'm breaking it up here and will post the second part next week.  Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!

SQUARE PEGS AND ROUND HOLES

I have written about this extensively over my time with this blog, but it’s what I want to write about today, and since it’s my blog I get to do that.  The longer I spend training and observing the training and eating of others, the more I realize that there are ultimately a nearly unlimited amount of ways to succeed at the goal of physical transformation that, in turn, it’s somewhat baffling to see just how often people fail in this quest.  I’ve deduced the variables of success down to 3: effort, consistency, and time, and ultimately conclude that a failure to achieve physical transformation stems from a failure to meet 1, or not ALL, of these variables.  But then, from there, we must ask the question of WHY a trainee is unable to meet these variables.  If physical transformation is so simple (which is it), what is it that makes it not EASY?  Because, as I’ve written before, and as Dan John has spoken of before I wrote it (because I don’t claim to be original), simple and easy are two different things, and we can intellectually KNOW what it takes to achieve our goals yet still be unable to do so due to some sort of (apparently) insurmountable obstacle.  And, like many monster movies, it turns out that WE are the monster: the obstacle is us.  Specifically, it is our minds, and specifically within that, it is our psychological PREFERENCES that dictate our success, and our inability to meet these preferences with the appropriate tools that results in our failure.  Put simply: you cannot put a square peg in a round hole.

Even if you're the smartest man alive

New trainees to physical transformation tend to bemoan the same point: they are overwhelmed by all the information that is out there.  The laundry list of training programs out there include the DeLorme Method, Conjugate, HIT, Western Periodization, DoggCrapp, Super Squats, Deep Water, 5/3/1, Juggernaut Method, RTS, Tactical Barbell Cube Method, NeverSate, and then programming styles without names that just belong to authors like Matt Wenning, Paul Kelso, Stuart McRobert, John McCallum, Alex Bromely, etc etc.  Go to nutrition and you run into the same issue: flexible dieting/IFFYM, primal paleo, whole foods keto, vegan, carnivore, Mediterranean diet, Dukan Diet, Atkins Diet, Warrior Diet, Vertical Diet, Velocity Diet, Apex Predator Diet, ABCDE Diet, etc etc.  And here’s the thing: all of these things WORK.  You WILL find someone, somewhere, that has succeeded with these methods.  That’s just simply the nature of this field: only the successful methods survive to the point of being in the gestalt.  A program or diet that 100% of the time fails will, eventually, fade out, because NO ONE will be able to point to someone that succeeded with it, and eventually people are gonna wanna see results before they buy off on it.  All of these programs work!

 

…but they don’t ALWAYS work.  Which is to say: they don’t work for EVERYONE.  All of these programs and diets HAVE produced failures, and those zealots deeply imbedded in their respective camps will always say the same thing: “they did it wrong.”  Well let’s say that’s true: the only reason the diet or program failed is because the trainee did it wrong.  WHY did they do it wrong?  It’s because the program and diet DID NOT FIT THE TRAINEE!  Specifically: it did not fit their psychology!  Something about the approach did NOT resonate with the trainee for some reason: they did not care for the movement selection, the progression model, the frequency, the split, or for the diet, it was made up of food they didn’t like, meal frequencies they didn’t care for, foods that they had experienced trauma with in the past, was too boring, etc etc.  Something about the approach resulted in non-compliance, which, in turn, resulted in failure.

This dates back to when we thought milkshakes were healthy AND the Simpsons was amazing

 

Which is ultimately HOW programs and diets matter: they MUST be something that the trainee can and will actually FOLLOW!  My second paragraph of this post wasn’t just mindless filibustering: it was me rattling off, from the top of my head, dozens of successful programs and diets that exist out there, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s out there.  What this indicates is that there are a near limitless amount of ways to succeed in physical transformation, because, ultimately, all these programs and diets are simply manners of ensuring some manner of achieving effort, consistency and time in the pursuit of physical transformation.  The 1s and 0s OF these methods are genuinely inconsequential: there is no magic to be found in their combination.  Instead, these are arranged in the manner that they are arranged in because they are looking to appeal to a certain type of individual.  And when that individual DISCOVERS this method and gets locked in, they WILL invest that necessary degree of effort, consistency and time to be able to achieve their goal of physical transformation.  But if they’re NOT locked in?  They pay lip service, go through the motions, invest no passion whatsoever into the process, and ultimately fail.

 

This is why the pursuit of the optimal approach completely misses the point: it operates off the premise that it is the method ITSELF that matters most, and it is incumbent upon the trainee to psychologically bend THEMSELVES to the method.  To make the analogy even more incestuous, that’s the Bulgarian training method put into practice on a macro level.  The Bulgarians basically made the hardest program on Earth and figured that any athlete that could SURIVE to the end of it must have the necessary genetic chops to become a world class athlete.  It’s a SELECTION process.  The program picked the lifter: not the other way around.  But we, AS the individual, must go about the from the other end: WE must pick the program that suits US.  And, in turn, it’s not about taking a program and BENDING it to our will: when we do that, we simply make a program that WAS effective for someone else now ineffective for two people: that person AND us.  Much like my post about “quit making it taste like ketchup”, we don’t need to find the perfect program and diet and then try to find a way for us to like it: let’s just pick the program and diet that we like from the get go and do THAT!

I mean...you DO get to eat PBJs...

 

Because we cannot escape the power of our own minds.  Ultimately, the heart wants what it wants, and it will do what it takes to secure that.  When we select a way of training and eating that does not align with who we are, which is to say, as per Sartre, we live “inauthentically”, we experience the necessary existential cognitive dissonance and ennui that transpires from that, and ultimately end up listless and unaccomplished.  When we force ourselves to act against our true will and desire, we simply exhaust our own willpower in the pursuit of achieving excellence.  We work AGAINST ourselves, and our outcome reflects as such.  My father always told me “you can swim further downstream in one hour than you can upstream in three”, and too many folks are attempting to be upstream swimmers.

 

This is where the value of introspection manifests: find out WHO you are and what drives you.  I KNOW that I can NOT stand to count, measure, weigh or track anything when it comes to nutrition: it’s why I vector toward nutritional protocols that are based on nutrient and time restriction vs energy restriction.  Other folks live and die by their spreadsheets: they CRAVE data, and if left alone without it, they’ll have a breakdown.  When I first discovered Deep Water, it was like the heavens opened up for me, as I found a program that pacified my desire at the time to train psychotically hard and eat a meat based diet and grow, and grow I DID!  Meanwhile, other folks have taken on that same approach and completely failed to physically transform, because it did not resonate with their psychology in the slightest, and they were living a life AGAINST themselves the entire time.  When I tried to address my health by following a low fat AND low carb diet, I got the leanest I’d ever been in my life and absolutely destroyed myself physically and my drive to train.  I was not eating in the manner that suited my psychology, and it took it’s toll, compared to the first time I ran Super Squats, where Randall Strossen’s PhD in psychology got into my head so well that I never felt more “authentic” in my life than I did between squats 17 and 18, knowing I had a full gallon of milk waiting for me in my fridge back home.  Meanwhile, other folks think there’s nothing special about a 20 rep set of squats.

What could Jesse Marunde have possibly known about getting big and strong?

 

…they’re wrong, but that’s ok: we can enjoy being wrong!  As long as we get results, it doesn’t matter what program or diet we’re following.  We need to follow the one that gets us to comply!  We need to fit the square peg with the square hole.  We need to make the obvious successful match ups that will ensure we are able to fully invest ourselves with effort, consistency and time toward our goal of transformation.  When we try to go about it backwards, carefully selecting the optimal diet and program in a vacuum, completely ignoring the very real element that is US and our humanity, we force ourselves to act against our nature, and in doing so work AGAINST ourselves in our pursuit to better ourselves.  When all parts of us are aligned, mind, body and soul, we work as one toward one goal, and our strength is all the more multiplied in that pursuit.