YOU CAN’T TRAIN HARDER TO LOOK BETTER

Much like the expression “you can’t outrun a fork”, I feel it’s time to address the notion of training to improve physical appearance and how, fundamentally, we, as a society, have it all wrong.  “No pain, no gain” has really done as a disservice, as did a lot of the 1980s, with the notion of jazzercise, aerobics, and all other leg warmer wearing zubaz monstrosities centered around the notion of training our way into a better physique.  Am I refuting the notion that training improves our bodies?  Absolutely not: what I am proposing is a discussion on the importance of DOSAGE as it relates to the matter of improving appearance vs improving performance.  Much like my highly controversial post where I said to stop lifting weights 6x a week if you want to get bigger (controversial, of course, because no one actually read the post before they commented), I am once again saying that, to LOOK better (not perform better), one needs to train LESS.

Oh christ I just realized what I've done here...

 

  Here’s the catalyst for this post: slumming around on Facebook, I found myself, once again, answering a question from someone that has “tried EVERYTHING” yet cannot lose the last bit of fat that is haunting them from achieving their physique goals.  And, predictably, when they say they’ve “tried everything”, what they MEAN is “I’ve tried everything ALL AT ONCE”.  This person is training 6x per week, with a combination of 3 lifting workouts a week and 3 kettbell and bodyweight sessions per week (with a focus on keeping the heart rate high the whole time), in conjunction with a heavy cardio demand, which they’ve stacked with a reduced energy intake to attempt to maximize fat loss.  This dude isn’t burning the candle at both ends: they threw the candle into the fire.  So why do they, ironically enough, resemble a melted candle?  BECAUSE they’re trying too HARD to look better.

 

We didn’t make it to the top of the food chain by having stupid bodies.  They don’t just receive inputs and demands in a vacuum and spit out a response: they get to figuring once they get some inputs.  So when you slam your body with SO much intensity AND you pair that with a starvation diet: it’s going to panic.  Have you ever seen the bodies of people in a panicked state?  They’re no enviable physiques.  Stress is stress: the body can’t distinguish the difference between physical and emotional/mental stress, and when we place stressors on the body physically through training AND through a nutritional deficit, we achieve a STRESSED physique.  Hormones are going to shift in a less than ideal way, cortisol is going to get jacked up, testosterone is going to plumet, metabolism will downregulate (no, shut up with your stupid “starvation mode isn’t real hur dur!” silliness: the rest of the academic world AND those who actually coach physique athletes understand that this is a real phenomenon where the body will adapt to a lower energy intake by naturally reducing NEAT and downregulating metabolic processes), and for all your “hard work”, you’re going to look WORSE than you started. 

People end on on the left when aiming for the right

 

And, of course, with your stupid hamster brain, you’re just going to think the only possible solution is to do it HARDER from here.  Holy cow: 6x a week of training and an hour of cardio a day with a 500 calorie deficit isn’t working?  I better do 2 a days, bump the cardio up to 90 minutes, and go for a 1000 calorie deficit.  No!  Stop!  You keep saying you’ve “tried everything”, but have you tried NOT trying so goddamn hard?  Have you tried actually letting your body have a break?  Have you tried actually RECOVERING from all this goddamn training?  Have you considered the reality that the ANABOLIC process of training is the RECOVERY process?  That the training itself is the CATABOLIC part of the process?  And that, if we just keep hitting the catabolism button and never hit the anabolism button, we’ll never be in a place to actually grow and realize the fruits of our labors?

 

Because if we’re trying to look BETTER, who do we look TO?  The most obvious choice would be bodybuilders and physique athletes: people that compete in the activity of looking better.  And WHEN we look at these folks, what do we see?  Yeah, they train hard, in TRAINING, but then how do they LIVE?  These folks make it a point to LIVE in a very unstressful manner.  Do you remember in Pumping Iron, the party scenes, lying on the beach to get a tan, the naps, etc etc?  The stereotype that most bodybuilders are bums, often leaching off their significant others or trying to find sugar mommas/daddys?  How about the story of the “Muscle House by the Sea”, headed up by Joy Cretaz, who let bodybuilders stay for minimal rent and housed the likes of Steve Reeves, Dave Drapper, Bill “Peanuts” West, etc, who, in turn, took full advantage of the local all-you-can-eat prime rib place down the street despite Joy’s insistence that all the boys eat a vegetarian diet?  To achieve great physiques, these individuals understand that stress itself is a controlled poison that, when applied intelligently, can have a hermetic effect, but when applied too greatly, will kill the organism.  They use just enough through hard training in order to elicit a desired response, and then they introduce enough “stress reduction” through a life of low stress in order to set themselves up in an ideal state to realize physical greatness.  They reveal a body that is NOT in a state of survival, but a state of thriving.  And it shows.

When "feel the burn" refers to how the tanning oil is working...

BUT, I hear you exclaim, I see so MANY great athletes that have enviable physiques that ARE the result of hard training.   Do you though?  I feel one of the greatest cons our brains play on us is making the cause for the effect.  One of my favorite examples is this: we like to believe that running marathons make us thin.  Why?  Because when we see elite marathon runners, we see thin runners.  Ok, but, in turn, are we to believe that playing basketball makes us TALL?  Whenever I see professional basketball players, they are always quite tall.  Shouldn’t it stand to reason?  No?  Why?  Because there is a selection bias for who makes it to the NBA by nature of genetic propensity toward height, and those that lack this propensity are weeded out at the lower levels of the sport (college, high school, middle school, grade school, etc).  …and now we have to start thinking…

 

Could it, instead, be, that those who have a genetic propensity toward physical greatness are, in turn, those who excel at athletics IN GENERAL?  Could it, instead, be the case that these athletes with enviable physiques posses them IN SPITE of their training?  That these individuals are simply so genetically otherworldly that they have bodies that can ENDURE the demands placed upon them and STILL grow, recover, and get stronger?  And that, in turn, if these individuals were to ever actually ease off the throttle, dial in the nutrition, switch drugs (sad but true) and dive fully into the world of bodybuilding, they’d have even crazier physiques?  We saw the physique that Hershel Walker built with just bodyweight exercises, or how Mike Tyson was built like a full grown man at the age of 13, or why they called Alexander Karelin “The Specimen”: are we really going to pretend that we can, in any way, shape or form, actually relate to these individuals as though we are honestly even part of the same species?  These are CLEARLY genetic outliers: to attempt to emulate them in any fashion is setting us up for folly.  Which is not to say we cannot admire them, co-opt them, steal from them, etc, but we will not BE them.

Same planet: different species

 

And am I the biggest hypocrite ever for saying to stop training so hard if you want to look better?  No, because again: you have to read the words I am writing.  This is about LOOKING better, NOT performing better.  Which, yeah, it’s a weird topic for me to address, but I’ve been so far down one rabbit hole that I think I’ve popped out the other side in a Bugs Bunny-esque manner of taking the wrong turn at Albuquerque.  I have ABSOLUTELY pushed myself to my physical limits on many occasions for long and sustained durations and the result was an INCREDIBLE improvement on my performance.  I achieved some absolutely ridiculous feats of physical conditioning when that became my focus, and when maximal strength was my focus, I set standards that I’m still in awe in to this day.  But in both of those instances, I did NOT look my best AND I ate in a manner that supported RECOVERY from the efforts I was enduring.  When I pressed 266lbs over my head with an axle, I had grown my bodyweight up to a sloppy 210lbs, and I was eating so much that I had a pre-pre workout meal of an entire quest frozen pizza, before I ate my peanut butter and honey sandwich on sourdough, leading into my post workout meal that started off as a protein shake and “evolved” into something I ate with a spoon comprised of breakfast cereal, oats (the protein kind of course), heavy whipping cream, fairlife milk, and THEN some protein powder.  I WAS lifting weights twice a day at that point, I WAS training for a strongman competition, my training WAS in high gear, but I WAS also getting fatter as part of the process, and I WAS at peace with that, because my goal was performance: not appearance.  I was placing great stress on my body, and I was attempting to mitigate it with an abundance of food, but I also understood the sacrifices that needed to be made.

 

In the (futile) hope that THIS post will not be misunderstood, allow me to attempt to summarize my point.  It IS possible to see physical improvements with LOTS of hard training.  You CAN lift weights 6x a week and engage in serious hard cardio/conditioning training and still see progress.  You could even do this on an energy deficit diet.  The results you will see, though, are PERFORMANCE results.  You will BECOME better.  But this is NOT the recipe for PHYSIQUE improvements.  If the goal is fat loss and we attempt this approach, we’re just going to tank our hormones, put us in a poor physical state, and look like a stressed out skinny fat version of ourselves.  This is why crash dieting doesn’t work.  If the goal is to put on muscle, we’re simply going to outpace our ability to recover and spin our wheels.  MAYBE, if we REALLY mainline the food, we can put on a little bit of muscle on top of all this training, but it definitely wouldn’t be as effective as a more dialed down training approach paired with a reduced stress lifestyle.  Once again, this boils down to periodization: we cannot have the throttle down ALL the time and, quite frankly, it’s when we ease OFF that we tend to see the MOST growth.  John McCallum called this “softening up”, real athletes call it the “off season”, but however you slice it, taking some time to reduce physical and/or dietary stress in order to get the body into an optimal state to RESPOND to training will lay down the foundation for success.  Dan John refers to this as quadrants: with training and nutrition, you can train easy and diet easy (that’s what most people do, and it’s why they’re broken and fat), you can train hard and diet easy (this is when we’re trying to push for physical performance), you can train easy and diet hard (this is when we’re prioritizing fat loss, cutting the physical stress down because the nutritional stress is up), or you can train hard and diet hard (which, like the first group, tends to end up with us being…broken and fat).  Find your balance.