THEY CAN’T ALL BE BOSS FIGHTS

The “boss fight” is a time honored trope in the world of Role Playing Games, from tabletop to videogame, from console to computer, and whether you know them as bosses or BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy), the experience is the same: you get to fight someone that is clearly a cut above the dungeon fodder you’d been mopping the floor with up until this point.  After countless battles against goblins and kobolds, or slimes, or sentient heads of lettuce (yes, this was an enemy in Final Fantasy 6), you run afoul of…a gigantic snail that stores lightning in it’s shell (yes, also an enemy in Final Fantasy 6), or perhaps some sort of dragon or an evil knight or something like that.  It becomes immediately apparent that these battles carry significance, as quite often the music changes, and the tactics that were previously slaughtering minions wholesale are now barely registering as effective.  We’re going to need to pool together ALL of our resources, and quite often, after the battle is fought, our party is in need of healing and resupply.  And it is precisely BECAUSE of this that not ALL battles can be boss fights.

Yes, this WAS the first boss I ever fought in an RPG, and I thought he was ridiculous even all the way back then

Boss fights are significant events within the realm of the game.  They tend to be milestone markers and rites of passage: an indicator that you have progressed to a “new level” in the game and, upon completion, validation that you have the appropriate skills to take on even BIGGER challenges.  Sometimes this is even underscored to the point that the first boss you fight in the game later becomes regular dungeon fodder, like fighting a demon known as “The Butcher” in Diablo, only to encounter many similar demons in the later parts of Hell.  And, in turn, as a rite of passage, we tend to walk away from them with the scars to prove our experience.  They are a draining and taxing encounter, and once completed, rest and recovery are in order.  If one were to go straight from one boss fight to another, they would surely face annihilation, the exception, of course, being FINAL bosses in games, which DO tend to be a series of boss fights linked together, culminating as the “capstone” experience of the game, where all the stops are pulled out and we have to REALLY prove how far we’ve come.

 

Which, in turn, leads to the argument of the NECESSITY of the NON-boss fights in the game.  We NEED these insignificant battles that string us from boss fight to boss fight, for they truly are NOT insignificant and, instead, hold the true significance of the fights themselves.  It is FROM these non-boss fights that we learn, grow, and develop those skills necessary to achieve victory IN the boss fight.  Funny enough, one of the clearest examples comes not from an RPG, but from the original Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System.  Bowser, the fire breathing turtle lord, awaits us at the end of his dungeon as our first ever boss fight, but to get there, we jumped on goombas and stomped on koopa troopas and kicked their shells and launched fireballs, grabbed stars, jumped from platform to platform…and effectively learned all the skills needed to defeat Bowser upon encountering him.  Had the game just thrown us Bowser at the start, we’d perish, having no idea how to overcome him, but the game TAUGHT US how to win simply by navigating from left to right, and it allowed us an opportunity to accumulate extra lives along the way so that we’d have the resilience to survive this encounter and move on to the next level.

This was sheer terror in 8-bit form back in the early 90s

All this talk about video games and RPGs and where are we headed?  I know I’ve been guilty of this: trying to turn every training session into a boss fight.  Hell, I’ve played boss fight music IN my training sessions.  And there is certainly a time and a place for boss fights in our training, but not EVERY training session can be a boss fight.  Boss fights are significant events that have negative impacts on our recovery: they are taxing and place a great demand on us to recover.  If one is to stack a boss fight on top of another boss fight, over and over again, they simply never grant themselves the necessary amount of recovery to actually grow from the process of training.  They simply run themselves into the ground and die, metaphorically or otherwise.

 

Those non-boss fight training sessions are what SHOULD make up the majority of training, just as they do the majority of a good game.  And just like how those fights are teaching us how to play the game, they’re teaching us how to win the boss fight OF our training.  These training sessions are the learning sessions: we try to grove strong and crisp techniques so that our bodies LEARN what success feels like, we find ways to progress from workout to workout to perpetuate a positive feedback loop and, in turn, we understand that progress does NOT necessarily mean “more weight on the bar” each workout.  We progress with faster reps, cleaner reps, less rest between sets, more sets than last time, more density, etc etc.  We often come out of the training session feeling BETTER than when we started, because these sessions are SUPPOSED to make us better.  We know the boss fight is coming, and we are preparing for it by NOT being too destroyed by the time it shows up.  If we have to kill ourselves on the WAY to the boss fight, it’s a sure sign that we’re underleveled for this part of the adventure, and need to spend more time grinding away and developing ourselves.

May need a few more sandwiches along with those levels...

 

And much like how the boss fight/minion fight paradigm exists within the scope of from training session to training session, it ALSO applies from training CYCLE to training cycle.  It’s blatantly obvious that some training programs are just plain harder than other.  Deep Water is a harder training program than Easy Strength, which neither author will take umbrage with me saying, as the names alone are dead giveaways.  It’s not wrong to run either of these programs, but it’s worth appreciating that, upon running a Boss Fight program like Deep Water, the smart move is to move onto something like Easy Strength, in order to take a little bit of time to recover, regroup, and grow for the next program.  Hell, Deep Water itself acknowledges this within it’s own program, with Deep Water Advanced being a different animal from Deep Water Beginner and Intermediate, focusing more on AMRAPs vs fixed reps, sets and percentages, and we see this same approach in Super Squats with the two different 6 weeks workouts to alternate between.  Dan John lays out structures like this alternating between Armor Building Formula, Easy Strength and Mass Made Simple, Tactical Barbell structures this with the Operator-Mass-Specificity layout, Dante Trudel has this with “Blast and Cruise” on DoggCrapp, Jim Wendler’s Leaders and Anchors function this way, etc etc.  And I write this fully acknowledging I cobbled together my infamous 26 week gaining plan that is 6 HARD months of training, but ALSO acknowledge that, once that plan was done, there was never a recommendation to run it again right afterwards.  The bigger the boss, the longer the time needed to recover, and one can certainly argue that the 26 week plan fit within that “final boss fight” capstone I mentioned earlier.

 

All this to say that we have to have the maturity to understand that a game of ALL boss fights simply wouldn’t be a fun game.  Boss fights are significant BECAUSE they are significant: there is some gravity to the situation because it’s immediately apparent that this is “different” from what we’ve encountered previously.  Much like how, when we try to make a greatest hits album, it just makes us appreciate all the songs on it a little less, if ALL we ever did was fight bosses, none of them would really seem all that cool or significant.  We’d end up minimizing their significance and ultimately robbing us of the fun and wonder of overcoming them.  The same becomes true in our training: trying to turn every single training session into some sort of significant rite of passage style event just ends up souring the whole experience while stagnating our own growth.  We NEED those fodder fights BOTH to allow us the ability to grow and improve en route to the boss fight AND in order to make the boss fight carry the significance it needs to carry.  Spend the appropriate amount of time doing battle with goblins and heads of lettuce UNTIL they are comically easy SO that you’re able to advance past the boss onto the next level and start the whole process all over again, after you’ve achieved your adequate rest and recovery.  You’ll appreciate the next boss fight all the moreso for it.

HYPERBOLIC LANGUAGE IS LITERALLY KILLING YOUR GAINS

Yes, that topic title is ironic like an Alanis Morissette song, because those clickbait titles drive me nuts, especially when I see them coming from legitimate sources (Dave Tate, I’m looking at you and your Table Talk titles that have practically nothing to do with what is actually being discussed).  The unfortunate thing about popularity when it relates to a hobby is that, the more people interested in your hobby, the more people want to try to find a way to make MONEY off of that interest and, in turn, the more disingenuous and unscrupulous practices tend to come to fruition.  And in the attempt to attract the attention of the lowest common denominator (as they tend to make up the largest demographic to pull from), hucksters take to the employment of hyperbolic language to create a false dichotomy in order to leverage their own product/approach.  “This is KILLING your gains”, “This ONE movement is all you need to gain”, “THIS approach is garbage”, etc etc, it’s a world where there are no shades of grey: everything is black and white.  If we want to talk gains killers, let’s talk the REAL gains killer here: hyperbolic language is literally killing your gains.

Anytime I hear the word "hyperbole", this pops in my head

 

First of all, let’s just go after that whole “killing your gains” comment, because it absolutely drives me nuts and I was equally guilty of thinking that this was a thing to be concerned about when I first started training.  Folks, when I first started drinking protein shakes, for one, I had to mix them in a big cup with a handmixer, because there WERE no shaker bottles and protein powder was stupidly thick, and, in turn, I’d look at how the sides of the cup were coated with the powder when I was finished and wondered if I “wasted” the shake because I didn’t get every single gram of protein.  So needless to say: I get it.  It’s too easy to get into our own heads when it comes to physical transformation and wonder if all of our effort is being wasted which, in turn, is a terrifying prospect that we could put SO much energy into something and get ZERO reward from it…which is EXACTLY what these predators attempt to capitalize on when they tell you that something is killing your gains.  They’re preying on your fear and anxiety, which, in turn, makes them total a-holes.  DON’T GIVE IN! 

 

Gains can NOT be killed.  This isn’t a thing.  They are slow to accumulate and, in turn, slow to lose, as much the reverse is true: anything quickly gained is quickly lost.  If you’ve ever allowed yourself to get out of shape as far as physical conditioning goes, you know you can get back in shape in a matter of weeks.  This is why fighters have fight camps that only last 8-12 weeks: it doesn’t take that long to get back into CHAMPIONSHIP shape.  And strength athletes have 8-12 week blocks to PEAK for a competition: it doesn’t take that long to get BACK to maximal ability.  What DOES take a long time is to build up TO the state of being able to perform at these levels IN a matter of 8-12 weeks: this is the foundation building, where the REAL “gains” exist.  And, in turn, it means that nothing done in the span of a day is going to kill or maximize your gains.  It also means one single training session isn’t going to make or break gains.  Gains are the result of consistent habits, applied over a LONG duration, with sufficient effort (where have we heard all that before?)  Little and often over the long haul, as Dan John says.

Unless, of course, you're this dude and you just deadlift 500kg on a whim

 

But because of these hucksters employing hyperbolic language, we ignore the obvious (effort, consistency and time) and hyperfocus on the minutia of training.  We get overly concerned about ensuring each muscle group is trained 2x per week, that we are training ALL sets to failure (hah!), that we get the party approved number of sets for each muscle, we rest the EXACT amount that is necessary, we eat EXACTLY when we’re supposed to eat and WHAT we’re supposed to eat, and we get so hyperfixated on the METHOD that we forget to actually track the RESULTS.  We have so much anxiety about correct EXECUTION that we forget that all of this work is for a purpose: to get results.  Because we end up mistaking correct execution for goal achievement, because gains take a long time to observe accumulating, and in the absence of patience to trust the process and watch the results roll in, we week self-assurance by ensuring we did everything “right” to ensure gains.

 

Because along with this, we deal with the hyperbolic language where methods only exist in 2 realms: awesome or garbage.  Something is either THE best approach/method/idea OR it is the WORST: there is no middleground in the battle of language.  And, in turn, this creates the false perception that not only does perfection exist, but that it’s obtainable and, in turn, EVERY decision is a navigating a minefield wherein we will either pick the BEST approach or accidentally choose the only other alternative: the worst approach.  And, again, this all boils down to the typical marketing approaching of not only promoting yourself but tearing down the competition.  It is not enough that I should win, but that others should lose.  We cannot peacefully and harmoniously co-exist in the world of physical transformation: it must be a case where it’s us versus them.

At least the creators of DnD made the right choice of "Half-Orc" VERY obvious

Folks, I saw this growing up between the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis, and quite frankly it looks just as goofy now as it did then.  We’ve lost perspective of the reality that most of us are, at most, going to achieve “good enough” when it comes to a method for physical transformation AND that enough time spent doing “good enough” over a long enough timeline is going to result in some INCREDIBLE physical transformations compared to the average populace who isn’t even bothering to try to do ANY manner of approach.  Paul Kelso did a fantastic job in Powerlifting Basics Texas Style of laying out his favorite movements per muscle group in a tiered system and, in doing so, explained how he felt some movements were BETTER than others, but all of them would achieve the goal of training the muscle and getting it to grow.  We saw Stuart McRobert do the same thing in Brawn, and Vince Gironda in “The Wild Physique”, and so many other credited and established authors who WEREN’T trying to fleece a bunch of beginners but, instead, genuinely interested and full of passion in the pursuit of helping others achieve their goals.  The common ground we find in the topic of physical transformation is that those who are truly passionate about this pursuit LOVE helping others “get to yes” by finding ANY means of succeeding, while those are in this game to make a profit for themselves LOVE to gatekeep by dictating that anything that isn’t THEIR specific approach is absolute garbage and totally ineffective.

 

Don’t let hyperbolic language hold you back.  Don’t listen to it, and don’t allow YOURSELF to adopt this framework in your own thinking.  Allow yourself some mental degrees of flexibility here when it comes to analyzing the approaches available to you.  If you just shut off your brain and only see things in terms of “awesome” or “crap”, you’re going to miss out on a LOT of the nuance between those two realms and, in turn, miss out on the little nuggets of gold that exist in even some of the poorest of ideas.  And if you let your own fear and anxiety overwhelm you regarding killing your gains you will, ironically enough, kill your gains due to all the cortisol this high stress ends up creating.  So relax: it’s just lifting weights.     

STARTER DECKS

I was first introduced to Magic the Gathering back in 1995, and I know this because “Ice Age” was the most current edition available, so it’s like combing through the fossil records to determine the era of the epoch.  I was 10 years old, and my adult second cousin who was a god in my eyes because he was in his late 20s/early 30s and played video games and DnD and all sorts of other nerdy stuff sat my brother and I down one day while we were visiting the family for Christmas and told us he was going to teach us “Magic Cards”.  I, of course, anticipated some sort of card trick, and was instead introduced to a new colorful world of imagination and tactics and mythological creatures and, truthfully, yet another reason for middle school bullies to throw my own lunch at me and steal my cards.  That next Christmas, my brother and I now being full on Magic the Gathering addicts, we got the coolest gifts ever in our stockings: brand new starter decks!  My brother given a deck from Mirage, and myself a 4th edition (I apologize for all my non-MTG versed readers out there, but this is one of those “if you know, you know” kinda things).  We tore the little plastic coating off of them, gave them a few quick shuffles, and immediately went to war.  And, dear reader: that’s the way it SHOULD be.  My brother and I, at this point, already had hundreds of our own cards, we have our own decks we had built by carefully hand-selecting each and every individual card, weighing and measuring it’s impact on the overall balance of the deck and it’s effectiveness as a weapon of war against another, and we even had decks specifically built to beat other decks (if they play a mono-burn deck, I play my counter spell/protection from red deck!).  But that morning, on Christmas, while we waiting for everyone else to wake up so we could open the rest of our gifts, we just opened up the decks, had NO idea what was inside them, sat across from each other and just played whatever came up, learning as we went.  Let’s bring back those starter decks on Christmas morning: let’s just play some Magic.

I genuinely don't care how niche' this photo is, it's a nostalgia bomb for me.  Also note how it uses the same packaging as a pack of cigarettes: not even trying to hide the addictive nature of the game

What are the starter decks of physical transformation?  I’m speaking on the topic of taking things that are already built for us and running with it.  Not starting from the ground up and trying to piece together something from a bunch of singular ideas, but, instead, accepting the gift of an entire system already built and ready to run.  Because what was a starter deck in MtG?  They were ALWAYS 60 cards, 20 of which were lands, 4 of each of the 5 colors, the remaining 40 cards were a combination of creatures and spells across those same 5 colors, giving the player a sampling of what was contained within that edition of Magic and all the tools they needed in order to successfully play a game.  They even came with a tiny manual explaining all the rules of how to play and what new rules were included in this current edition.  There was never any doubt when you opened up a starter deck that you WOULD be able to play a game with this deck.  Would it be exactly the way you wanted to play?  Was it 100% uniquely your style?  No, but it was totally and absolutely functional: you never had to worry that you had some sort of unplayable deck due to an inadequate amount of lands, creatures or spells.

 

That’s the same guarantee when we follow the programming of someone who is worth trusting: someone with the necessary credentials of producing results.  Yes: if we just jump on board with the latest influencer, we could in fact be using an unplayable deck, similar to if you were to just borrow a deck from a stranger or your friend who never seemed too sharp on the rules vs one officially endorsed and built by “Wizards of the Coast”.  And, similarly, just going onto youtube and grabbing a bunch of ideas from a bunch of different influencers and trying to cobble together your own SUPER PROGRAM from all the “best ideas” is most likely going to give you the same outcome as just grabbing a random pile of all the “best cards” and trying to make that into a deck: you may, in fact, find out you have no lands to cast spells with, or no idea how to actually USE all these “best cards” you grabbed.  Meanwhile, when you buy into a program with a proven track record, ala 5/3/1, Tactical Barbell, Super Squats, Juggernaut Method, RTS, Deep Water, Cube Method, etc etc, it’s like having a deck officially stamped with Ice Age, Mirage, 4th Edition, Revised, etc etc: you KNOW you’re playing with something that WILL work, and you can alleviate yourself of any anxiety of failure. 

This is pretty much how every "rate my program" thread goes online

 

And these starter decks apply to the world of nutrition as well.  Yes, for sure, you can absolutely try to build your own deck here with the world of “If It Fits Your Macros” and decide that you’re going to just set the bumpers of your diet and fill it in with whatever, no different than saying “I’m going to have 20 lands and 40 other cards and go from there”.  But without REALLY knowing “how to play the game”, there’s a fair chance that the deck you build just ends up being random janky garbage.  Meanwhile, if you pick a starter deck, like keto, paleo, carnivore, whole foods vegan, Mediterranean, Vertical Diet, Mountain Dog, etc etc, you KNOW that you are picking something that HAS worked before, and WILL produce some manner of result.  You don’t need to spend days, weeks and months trying to build your own deck to play: it’s Christmas morning, and you can just rip off the plastic, give it a shuffle and go to war!  And if we COMBINE these two approaches together, picking a program AND a diet that have already been built FOR us, we are really off to the races!  Nothing is slowing us down on our journey to progress: we are ready to play!

 

And just like I wrote about on that Christmas morning: we were learning our decks AS we played.  The same will hold true on the path of physical transformation: we play with these starter decks of programming and nutrition SO THAT we can learn AS we play.  Too many trainees want to learn BEFORE they play: they want to spend MONTHS trying to figure out the EXACT perfect program and diet before they embark on them, comically enough, in the interest of “not wasting time” by doing something suboptimal…not understanding that, by doing NOTHING during that time of research, they’re putting themselves SO far behind compared to if they had just started with SOMETHING and adjusted as they went.  We play with these decks, not knowing what’s inside but knowing it’s enough for us to play a game, and each turn we learn a little bit more about what we’re dealing with, such that, after we play a few games, we have a better grasp of our capabilities, limitations, and where we could stand to make some improvements.  Much like how I say to run a program AS WRITTEN before we make adjustments to it, let’s see how we play with these approaches and THEN see if it needs tweeking.

You didn't swap out the squats for leg presses because you thought it would be better: you did it because you thought it would be easier

 

Because you know what was a great thing to spend some of our Christmas money on?  BOOSTER PACKS!  (Yes, MtG was pretty much drugs for kids: there is a reason I got out of the game).  These were little 15 card packs you could buy for a few bucks (back in the day) that allowed you to add ONTO your starter deck.  We had a core with that starter deck, we understood how it played and what we would want it to do better, and now we’d buy a booster pack and see what sweet new cards were inside that could enhance our starter deck into something “more”.  Unique to these booster packs though: they rarely contained any manner of land, and if they did, it was something unique, rather than a basic land.  Lands, in MtG, are your powersource used to cast spells/summon creatures.  No lands, no power, you lose.  In turn, you could NOT build a 60 card deck by just buying 4 booster packs and slapping them together: you NEEDED that starter deck to have a foundation to build off of.  Again, this is no different than trying to build your own approach by just taking a bunch of random great ideas and forming it into a program/diet: it’s not going to fly.  SAVE those great ideas for AFTER you’ve got some sort of foundation established and THEN you can apply your boosters.  And those unique land cards will be an AWESOME little tweak to your foundation of basic lands, but if you try to build an entire deck off of JUST unique lands you’re simply not going to be able to play the game because you’re lacking in the basics, just like if you try to have a diet based around biohacks and nutritional tricks and don’t have a basic foundation of whole foods and sound principles.

 

I’m honestly having way too much fun with this metaphor and could write a LOT more about it, but let me try to just summarize what I’m saying here.  On the path of physical transformation, one day we may very well make our own decks from scratch and play with a playstyle that is totally and uniquely our own.  However, in getting to that path, we need to play SOME games first, and to get started there, we start with a starter deck.  We have starter decks for training AND nutrition, and some enterprising individuals will even package the two together to have an entire SYSTEM already built for a trainee, but by picking a deck and playing straight away, we can learn the rules of the game as we go and get better THROUGH playing, rather than trying to learn everything FIRST and try to build from scratch.  And just like there are many editions of MtG, there are MANY decks for us to choose from, cycle through, and learn from the process.  Once we have a firm understanding of the rules and how WE play, we can start applying some boosters from those random one-off ideas we picked up along the way, as the experience we’ve accumulated will help make these ideas make more sense compared to hearing them as a newbie and not having the context of experience to leverage them.  Ultimately, we do ourselves a service by picking an approach and running it full force and full compliance in order to learn as much as we can about the system at play and how we respond to it, and with enough time playing, we will build something mighty.