“I’VE GOT ON A SPORTS BRA AND MY HAIR IS IN A PONYTAIL: LET’S DO THIS”

The title of this blogpost is a quote from my amazing wife, who I’ve referred to as “My Valkyrie” ever since my experiment of training like a Viking several years back, because sometimes we method act so well that the role becomes us rather than the other way around.  But she also has earned that name, as demonstrated BY that very quote.  The context of the situation that created that quote is as such: it was a Saturday morning, which for most people sounds like a relaxing time, but in our household is actually one of the busiest moments of our week, because our child is enrolled in a musical theater program with a 1015 start time, requiring traversing through a “Lord of the Rings” esque portion of our community where I INEVITABLY end up with some sort of ridiculous unforeseen delay having me pull in at EXACTLY the last minute, always looking like father of the year (delays include getting shaken down by the Boy Scout popcorn brigade the instant I opened my garage door to leave, my next door neighbor picking that EXACT moment to give me the mail he’s been holding for us for a week, a 14 minute long train crossing on the railroad tracks, a gang of WILD TURKEYS traversing the freeway, the aforementioned freeway being entirely shutdown for unscheduled maintenance, someone driving the wrong way on one way street, and many many more…yes, chaos, IS, in fact, the plan).  Pair this with an overly energetic boxer puppy that NEEDS doggy day care and a limited window to drop THEM off, and our Saturday morning window of opportunity for anything ELSE is extremely limited.  HOWEVER, my Valkyrie has recently undertaken Dan John’s “Armor Building Formula”, and due to the insanity that is our WEEKLY schedule, with Tang Soo Do 3 nights a week, the only times we have to train is Friday through Monday…and today was a training day.   We had exactly 30 minutes of time available between the moment that quote escaped her lips and when we had to be in the vehicle getting the kid on their odyssey to music theater: we got the workout done in 14 minutes.  How?  Because it was the time to train, and that was the time we had to train. 

She's been our Dojang's sparring champion for multiple months as well, so this is pretty accurate...

But aside from this just being a textbook example of “get to yes”, I more want to dig deeper into “I’ve got a sport bra on and my hair is in a ponytail: let’s do this”.  As that quote met me, I had just returned from dropping the dog off and doing a brief grocery run, since the store was nearby where I dropped the dog off and this would save some time on the weekend to knock out both obligations in one trip.  For one: kudos to me for time management, but more a reflection of there I was, in a pair of sweats and my westside barbell hoodie, gazing at the set of kettlebells I bought for the program, hearing those words, and immediately transitioning into training partner, because it was the clean and press day of the ABF, and I alternate rounds with my Valkyrie to help keep timing (in an “I go-you go” format).  Because really: are you ALWAYS going to be ready to go when the time comes?  Are you ALWAYS going to be warmed up and stretched out and foam rolled and decompressed, sipping on your pre-workout and hyped up listening to your favorite tunes?  Or is it, sometimes, just enough to say “I’ve got a sports bra on and my hair is in a ponytail: let’s do this”?  So many of you who lament not having the time to train, is it instead and instance that, when the time IS there for you to train, you’re simply unprepared to take the opportunity?  Can you, like my Valkyrie, rapidly transition between making breakfast for the whole family (yes, I married up, there’s no doubt) to throwing on the sports bra and the pony tail to knock out 80 clean and press reps to BACK to more presentable attire before getting the kiddo off to practice?  Not just the physical transition, but the mental one as well?

 

But let’s KEEP digging deeper here shall we: a 14 minute workout?  Of course.  Why?  Because that’s all it takes to make progress.  How?  Because, despite what you’ve read, heard, watched or pirated, the “minimum dose” for the benefit of training is much lower than you may imagine IF the right elements are in play.  And the key most significant benefit here: faith.  And for my philosophically and theologically inclined readers there, I know I’ve opened up a can of worms by saying that, but I do not necessarily mean in an ethereal power here, but more a “higher power” in something bigger than ourselves.  In the case of my Valkyrie, it’s quite literal (for I am, in fact, much larger than her).  She has faith in me that I know what I’m doing.  Why?  Well, perhaps it’s because she’s observed me deadlift a car on multiple occasions, or she saw me rip the staircase out of the cement mooring on our backyard deck before I realized it had been anchored into the concrete, although in truth I’m fairly certain she’s become numb to my shenanigans and has just defaulted to me being the default setting for ALL men based on her inability to understand why her friend’s husbands can’t just carry the bedroom dresser up the stairs by themselves.  There’s also a chance she has faith in me because she’s known me since 2004, has seen all the insanity I’ve subjected myself to in the pursuit of physical transformation, observed me pouring over tons of books on the subject (to include buying me some of these very books for Birthdays and Christmases, along with my Ninja Woodfire Outdoor grill, because, once again, yes, I married up), gets into my truck and sees that it’s set to the latest absurd podcast on physical transformation, and constantly hears me interjecting into conversations with “Well, it’s funny, because Dan John/Jon Andersen/Dave Tate/Louie Simmons/Jim Wendler/Paul Kelso/John McCallum once said that…”  But in either case, when she came to me and said “I want to try some resistance training” and I said “I have a program I think you’ll like” and told her it was only 20 minutes 3 days a week, she didn’t bat an eye.  She came to me because she wanted my help, and she accepted my help because she had faith in me…and she came to me BECAUSE she had faith in me.  And, in turn, she’s been making incredible progress.

Real people AND mythological nordic religious figures

 

And why do we use the Armor Building Formula?  Because I had faith in Dan John.  It’s transitive faith: faith by extension.  And because of this faith, we give the program its due diligence, put in the requisite effort, and achieve the reward of the program.  It honestly IS that simple.  And yet, how many out there in internetland can’t have this same faith when it comes to executing a program?  How many of you out there have butchered 5/3/1 to the point of total unrecognizability and then complain that it “doesn’t work”?  How many of you couldn’t be bothered to read the 80 or so pages of “Super Squats” and ended up dorking up what should have been one of the simplest gaining programs in the world?  How many of you had to start a thread asking people to “rate my Juggernaut program variation” and then got mad when people actually took the time to rate it?  And think of the insanity of your own lack of faith here.  It’s awesome my Valkyrie has this faith in me, but by all accounts: I’m just some guy.  Though I HAVE had people come up to me and ask “Are you the internet’s ‘MythicalStrength’?” before in front of her, the reality is that there are FAR more accomplished people out there than me putting out material…which is why it’s incredibly absurd for people to lack faith in THEM.  Dude: Jim Wendler squatted 1000lbs and has been coaching athletes for 2 decades, Dan John has competed in the collegiate level and beyond in MULTIPLE sports while coaching everyone from high school athletes to NBA players to special forces operators: we, as a generation, are SPOILED with direct access to the minds of INCREDIBLY skilled coaches who can turn out swaths of accomplished athletes, able to directly ask them questions and get answers FOR FREE…and we still DOUBT them?  We still wonder if these dudes actually KNOW what they’re talking about when it comes to training, and feel a need to source a second opinion from some dude on reddit called “clownshoes69” on if Dan John programmed the right amount of curls into Mass Made Simple? 

 

Folks, if you can’t have faith in the figurative gods of physical transformation, what CAN you have faith it?  What WILL you invest your being into in order to actually achieve something?  Because you can have the “best” programming, according to the science-du-jour, alongside the “best” nutrition, with the “best” recovery protocol, but if you refuse to actually invest YOURSELF into the process, you’re simply not going to get the desired outcome.  You’re going to come up short, because you get what you put in.  Meanwhile, you can do a 14 minute workout on a busy Saturday morning, as part of your 3 weekly sub-20 minute workouts, and get INCREDIBLE results from it.  Why?  Because “I’ve got a sports bra on and my hair is in a ponytail: let’s do this”.

NOT MOTIVATION, NOT DISCIPLINE, NOT WANT, BUT IDENTITY

The longer I exist in this space, the more I refine my thoughts, which to the outsider can be interpreted as changing positions/opinions or just flat out flip-flopping, but the reality is that we often begin with a primitive operating premise that becomes more complex and sophisticated as more information and a better understanding presents itself.  Much like how many trainees are so upset that Jim Wendler dared to IMPROVE 5/3/1 over the years (which is to say, it worked just fine at the start, but now it works even better) or how people got mad at Louie Simmons for basically doing ANYTHING, it seems many in the physical transformation sphere (and, in truth, humanity) prefer that, once an idea is had, it never changes.  These are the people that listened to all of ACDC’s albums, despite them all sounding the same, and got mad at Madonna for reinventing herself every 3 years or so.  But, ultimately, what I want to discuss is where I’ve currently landed in regards to what it is that compels us to act in regards to physical transformation, because, quite often, this question gets asked.  “How do I start training hard and eating right?  Every time I try to start, I fail”.  This then turns into a question of how do I get motivated enough to do this, to which the individual is chastised because they have to be DISCIPLINED enough to do so, meaning they lacked the necessary degree of willpower, and even I have made a mistake because I claimed it was a matter of WANTING the results…whereas, now, I realize (for now) that it’s a matter of identity.  Much like my notion of “being that which does”: we do the things we do because we are the thing we are. 

In turn, some of us are REAL scary

So again, back to the beginning (as that’s a good place to start), we like to believe that the road to physical transformation begins with an initial spark of motivation.  We see that montage from a Rocky film or New Year’s rolls around and we decide that THIS is the moment that we are going to totally transform ourselves.  We’re going to start working out EVERY day, and we’re going to cut out the junkfood and soda and eating nothing but kale and chicken breasts and we’re going to get ripped inside of 3 months.  And by day 4, we’ve slept through the alarm, stopped at the drivethrough on the way home, and our shaker bottle smells rancid because it’s been in the back of the car for 3 days and hasn’t seen any use beyond the first shake.  What happened?  The internet tells us that motivation failed, and we needed DISCIPLINE all along.

 

What is discipline?  It’s what compels us to act even when we don’t want to.  We don’t brush our teeth every day because we’re motivated to brush our teeth: we do it because it’s part of our routine, and we are disciplined about following our routine.  The same is true of the training and the eating: we do it out of duty.  But here’s the thing: discipline is implying that we are working AGAINST our nature.  Discipline is a noun and a verb: we discipline people so that they will DEVELOP discipline, and, quite often, discipline applied as a verb is unpleasant, in order to compel someone to perform unpleasant things.  The military employs discipline in basic training in order to compel new recruits to have the proper discipline to function as a solider, which is to break them of their individuality and have them conform to the needs of the unit.  But how does one develop the noun of discipline in the absence of the verb?

How very Nietzsche of you

To this, my answer was willpower, which I defined as the energy that was developed and proportional to the incongruity between who we wanted to be compared to who we are.  The question is frequently asked “how do I develop more willpower”, and my answer was “you have to be so upset with what you are compared to what you hope to be that it empowers you to take the actions necessary to rectify the situation”.  Much like newbie gains: the further away you are from your maximum potential, the more rapidly you accelerate toward it, and as you get closer, it moves slower.  That individual that is only half a pound away from their goal weight isn’t going to have as much willpower to accomplish it compared to the individual that is 200lbs away, assuming that the dissonance between the two is strong enough.   But, the more I pondered, the more I learned, the more I realized that willpower is, in truth, a finite resource.  It eventually runs out, and any method dependent upon it as the sole means of accomplishment will eventually fail, and fail hard.  When we’ve been relying PURELY on willpower to not eat the donut everyday for 4 years, when that dam breaks, we are eating ALL the donuts, to include all the ones we didn’t eat for 4 years.  So, if not willpower, what then?

 

My initial thought was “want”.  Almost in a means of going back to motivation, we simply needed to WANT the results of the effort MORE than we disliked the effort.  THIS was the only real way for us to perpetuate success on the realm of physical transformation.  Humans will, fundamentally, ALWAYS do what they want.  The only way to get them to do otherwise is through motivation, discipline (verb and noun) and willpower, and, as we’ve observed: ALL of these are finite and prone to failure.  Motivation frequently fails, willpower runs out, and disciplined soldiers will eventually crumble if the situation is dire enough.  But want NEVER runs out: it simply changes.  In the instance of the 3 aforementioned failures, one observes that the WANT changing is primarily what impacted things.  At that moment of failure, we simply no longer wanted physical transformation more than we wanted something else instead.  When we comply with the diet, it’s because we want the results of the diet more than the 4 years of the donuts.  When willpower failed us, we wanted the donuts more than the results.  So then it simply becomes a matter of WANTING the results more than anything else, and once we accomplish that, we’re in the clear!

 

In truth, I still like that theory…but it definitely falls into an issue of being reductionist.  And, of course, now the question becomes “how do I MAKE myself want this?” and we’re back to square one, trying to get motivated again.  No, instead, where I’ve settled is this: in order to achieve our goals (true, in physical transformation, but even in other spheres), we must change our identity to suit the goal we pursue.  And no, not change identity as in get a new name and issued identification card: we must change who we ARE in order to change what we DO.  A reverse of Nicomanchean ethics, which presented the idea that virtue was what we practice, this concept premises off the idea that who we ARE dictates what we do. 

 

Joey is, in fact, an entire swarm of locust

How do I mean this?  I get up at 0400 4 days a week to exercise.  People ask how I do this, and I don’t have an answer to give.  Why is that?  Because it’s not motivation that makes me do it, it’s not discipline, it’s not willpower, and it’s not want: I am simply the guy who gets up at 0400 to exercise.  It’s who I am.  It’s what I do.  To NOT do it would be to go against my nature, and THAT would be difficult and cause me some manner of cognitive dissonance.  Similarly, I don’t eat processed food.  To the point that I don’t even recognize it AS food.  I’ll walk through a grocery store or a gas station, surrounded by all the shiny boxed products claiming to be some form of food, and it doesn’t register in my brain as “this is something I can eat”.  Like an alligator looking at a piece of bamboo or a panda looking at a fresh killed elk, I can recognize that it’s food for SOMETHING: just not me.  Why?  Because I’m the guy who doesn’t eat that.  It’s simply who I am. 

 

And this is CRUCIAL for the success of physical transformation: we CANNOT transform into something we aren’t.  Attempting to do so is simply fighting our nature, and our nature ALWAYS wins.  We can attempt to hide from our identity, but it always shines through at the end.  It’s why we see former Biggest Loser contestants put all the weight back on (and moreso): they were always a fat person, even when they lost the weight.  Lottery winners will go bankrupt in a year, because they were still poor, even with money.  Whenever we try to white knuckle and willpower a change to happen, we’re simply stretching that rubber band of our identity, and when it snaps, the results in a vacuum that is filled with some sort of binge behavior to course correct us back to who we are.

It IS rather impressive how his calves remained the same size.  Bodybuilders take note.

 

Which means, when embarking on a journey of physical transformation, the question is not “can do I do these things”, but “can I become the person who does these things?”  It’s not “can I wake up at 0400 to exercise”.  Anyone can do that.  Either through motivation, discipline, or willpower, we can get ANY person to wake up early and exercise.  But to keep doing it?  How does THAT happen?  It happens by BECOMING the person who does that.  We stay on point with nutrition not because it’s the right thing to do, not because our discipline compels us, not because we have a competition coming up, but because we ARE the person who eats this way.  Which means, when we see these challenges, we ask “can I become the person who does these things”.  And, fundamentally, we KNOW the answer to that question.  One of the greatest tools we, as humans, possess IS the ability to become that which we need to become when the situation presents.  We CAN reinvent ourselves to better suit our environment.  We BROKE natural selection through the power of our intellect and allowed ourselves to become what we needed to be in an environment that is completely alien to what nature ever intended for us.  We are the single most adaptable species on the planet: what CAN’T we become?

 

Herein, you stare down Sartre’s horrible “radical freedom”.  You have no limits here: it’s all a matter of, can you become what you need to become in order to accomplish what you desire?

COLLEGE KID PERIODIZATION

Much like how Dan John likes to comment on how, at the age of 14, he came up with the only 2 movements he’d ever need and STILL thinks it’s a good idea, upon review, I’ve discovered that 19 year old undergrad me really had this whole “physical transformation” thing figured out, and I spent a LOT of years unlearning all those lessons before I could really appreciate them.  In my instance, though, the lessons I learned where thrust upon me by circumstance, rather than something I discovered through a process of education, and, in turn, I wasn’t able to truly understand or appreciate them at the time.  These things were occurring organically, and with no other baseline to compare against, I could not truly fully appreciate just how significant and valuable these experiences were until I spent some time NOT experiencing them.  And already I can hear the collective “huh” from the audience, so let me go ahead and tell you a story from 21 years ago about a budding young future blogwriter, armed with only a handmixer and some vanilla protein powder that tasted like wallpaper paste…

It wasn't QUITE this bad...but it was close

 

I’ve been lifting weights since I was 14, had very little in the way of education for those first few years, relying on stuff my dad told me, high school folklore, a few magazine articles, and internet forums (I first signed up at age 16 on the GameFAQs Martial Arts forum, and 24 years later I am STILL terrorizing the internet).  But through internet forums, I had learned that powerlifting was how you lifted to get strong while bodybuilding was how you lifted to get big (yes: this was what “education” looked like in the early 2000s).  AND I THEN learned that Westside Barbell was THE powerlifting program to follow (once again: early 2000s information availability), and T-nation was the forum where the bad boys gathered, so from there I had gotten exposed to Joe DeFranco’s Westside Barbell for Skinny Bastards (version 1) program.  BUT, along with that, during my time terrorizing the internet, someone (I wish I could remember who, because they basically changed my life) set me up with a copy of Pavel Tsastouline’s “Beyond Bodybuilding”, and I immediately drank ALL the Pavel kool-aid and got hooked on his “3-5” program.  I wrote about this in my recent e-book, but the numbers tell the story: 3-5 movements, for 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps, trained 3 days a week, in an A/B/A, B/A/B format, no grinding reps, deload every 4th week, double progression, switch movements upon stalling.  I say all this to lay down the foundation of HOW I got myself into the situation I was in.

 

Because keep in mind, I was now effectively armed with two REAL programs, as opposed to the throwing spaghetti against the wall approach I was using before.  AND I was in college.  Why does that matter?  Because I went to school in Portland OR while my parents lived in San Diego CA, which meant my calendar year was split between two different locations and circumstances.  Specifically: my college had a FULL weight room AND a dinning hall with unlimited food, while my parent’s house had my old standard weight set or a gym I could get daypasses at and food was limited based on what groceries my parents had/how much I was willing to spend on fast food (reference that I learned NO cooking skills until I was married).  In turn, I was in a situation of FORCED periodization…and I made some INCREDIBLE gains because of that.

Don't get me wrong though: being in San Diego, an occasional order of carne asada fries DID factor into the diet...

 

Because, as I lamented in my book, if I had stuck with this protocol since the age of 19, I’m fairly certain I’d be much further along now than I currently am (but I also wouldn’t have had all the wild experiences I’ve had, of which the knowledge obtained from that cannot be traded).  Westside Barbell is full of variety: you’re switching the max effort lift every 1-3 weeks, and the supplemental and accessory lifts every 2-6 weeks.  It also lends well to big eating (“for skinny bastards”) with the bodybuilding work done after the Max Effort/Dynamic effort work.  Being in a college weight room that was fully stocked (it wasn’t Gucci, but it was enough) allowed me the ability to EMPLOY this variety, and having access to the dinning hall allowed me to eat enough to support the training (as evidenced by my gaining of 12lbs in 6 weeks when I ran Super Squats with this same dinning facility).  Meanwhile, Pavel’s 3-5 is entirely the opposite: very limited movement set, low volume.  So when all you have access to is a barbell and plates AND you’re eating on a budget, a program that doesn’t need much variety AND doesn’t have a lot of volume to recover from is perfect. 

 

Then, from here, the academic schedule determined my training schedule.  I’ve have the first semester to focus on Westside, with deloads as a result of our 1 week fall break and 1 week Thanksgiving break, then I’d get 4 weeks to do Pavel’s 3-5 during the Winter Break, second semester for Westside, then the 4 months of summer to do Pavel’s (yeah, we had a LONG break) before starting the whole process over again.  And think about how that translates from a training perspective: long periods of accumulation and variety, then short intense blocks of intensification, dialing in technique on a handful of lifts compared to the constant shifting that comes with Westside, and then taking that newfound strength and applying it right back into Westside.  And on top of that, 4 months in the summer to lean out put me in a PRIME position to get back to college and start gaining again.

Especially with that dinning hall waiting for me...

 

But it gets even better: back then, I was still heavy into martial arts. During the school year, I didn’t have the bandwidth to do any serious training, and would just get in a few classes here and there.  But in the summer, I had more free time, and would typically sign up for a boxing gym or grappling club or something along that line, and alongside the abbreviated programming of Pavel’s 3-5, I’d also be engaging in some extensive MMA training, effectively improving my GPP as well.  And once again: I could manage that because the weight training I was doing was low enough in volume that I could recover and still push the martial arts training hard, similar to Dan John’s “Easy Strength” program (which, coincidentally, he got from Pavel and took to refine).

 

And, of course, I squandered all of this, not realizing what the REAL magic was behind it all, and trying to force it artificially.  I had phases where I tried to gain while running Pavel, I had phases where I tried to run Westside without changing the lifts frequently enough because I wanted to improve proficiency on them, I had phases where I stopped all GPP training, etc etc.  Life had already provided me the periodization I needed, but time and experience was necessary in order for me to be able to understand and appreciate them.  But here I am now, reflecting, and thinking that, knowing what I know now: I definitely could have done worse than this plan that just sorta happened.  People will tell me “ya know, you’re not 19 anymore…”, but maybe I should still try to be sometimes…