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…

LET’S GET THE NEEDLE MOVING FIRST

Already the title of this post has got me flagged for performance enhancing drugs (although these days perhaps people associate “the needle” with GLP-1 agonist, but do we consider that a performance enhancing drug?…are peptides drugs?  Hey, perhaps that’s a blogpost in and of itself) but I’m referring to moving the needle in the more traditional sense here.  I spend a lot of my free time slumming on forums/social media trying my best to share my perspective in a manner that is hopefully helpful to the recipient, primarily because I was given such grace when I first got online at the age of 16, to include being pointed in the direction of “Super Squats” and gifted a copy of “Beyond Bodybuilding”: both of which I can attribute to directly changing my life.  And through my time online, I’ve observed an interesting tendency among many trainees who are stuck in their current situation…and that is, they continue to perpetuate being stuck.  Ultimately, they’re too focused on the aspects of physical transformation that need addressing once momentum has actually been established, but these folks are still hamstrung by Newton’s first law: they are objects at rest remaining at rest.  Folks: before we start trying to course correct, let’s get the needle MOVING.

And correct for the drift to the left

 

Where I observe this issue most frequently is in the realm of weight gaining.  As someone that grew up as a fat kid, it’s difficult for me to fathom the notion of trainees that have difficulty putting on bodyweight, but I spend enough time online attempting to assist these folks that I have become familiar with their struggles and accepted into their tribe.  And with my fat boy history, I try to share my fat boy tips to help these individuals achieve a similar level of excellence in corpulence…and BOY do I encounter some interesting resistance. 

 

As you may have read in my recently released e-book or through my various blogposts and story sharing, I’ve got experience with a LOT of unique and effective means of gaining weight.  The gallon of milk a day approach from Super Squats, Building the Monolith’s dozen eggs and 1.5lbs of ground beef per day, a Dave Tate inspired diet of fast food and packaged goodies, Dan John’s ode to the mighty peanut butter and jelly sandwich, etc etc.  All battle tested and proven effective.  Yet, whenever I share these methods, I observe the same criticisms…

What could THIS guy know about gaining weight?

 

“That’s unhealthy!”  “That’s too much sugar!”  “There’s not enough protein!”  Etc etc.  Meanwhile, these dudes are STILL 5’11 and 126lbs and crying out to the world in frustration: why can’t I gain weight!?  Folks, let’s get the needle moving FIRST and THEN we can start working on some course correction.  That’s all I’m aiming for here: let’s break inertia and get some momentum going and THEN we can try to improve from there.  And quite often, in that pursuit of breaking inertia, we’re going to use any which way we can to get there, because ANY movement is better than no movement.  Much like X-men’s the Juggernaut, just the smallest of steps forward can eventually snowball into something mighty.

 

There’s a self-defeating mentality out there that, if we can’t do things to the most extreme and best way possible, there’s no reason to do anything.  This is an interesting approach people take to allow them to not actually invest their effort, energy and resources toward obtaining goals: maintaining comfort with their status quo and avoiding the discomfort of new experiences and the effort and strain that coincide with them.  They create artificial rules and restrictions for their path that make it completely impossible to actually move in ANY direction: stuck in a prison of their own design while they lament their life sentence.

Pretty much like this

 

Instead, what we need to do is identify those baby steps we can take in order to build up to something much greater.  It is the SMALL habits that eventually accumulate and build into what we call our character and identity.  A couch potato does not need to embark on a 6 day a week lifting protocol paired with an hour of cardio per day in order to affect physical transformation: they can simply go for a 30 minute walk 3-4 times per week.  Is this the GREATEST intervention they can possibly engage in?  No.  Is it moving the needle?  YES!  And from there, a habit is built, physical improvements are accomplished, and we can course correct and improve from there.  No different than having an undersized trainee simply add one peanut butter and jelly sandwich to their daily diet.  Are there better choices?  Absolutely.  Will this choice fail?  NO!  Going from 0 PBJs to 1 a day for an undersized trainee will absolutely have an effect, and from these small victories we can chain together bigger and bigger ones.

 

It's too easy to sit back and snipe at solutions while offering none of our own.  We refer to that as “problem admiring”, NOT “problem solving”.  And it’s BECAUSE it’s too easy that we do exactly that: instead of taking action and committing to SOME sort of plan, we can just sit comfortably and deconstruct everything and point out how it’s not AS effective as some OTHER method or approach which has significantly larger barriers to entry, limitations and restrictions.  We deride the Gallon of Milk a day for having too much sugar and causing the trainee to put on “unnecessary amounts of fat”, completely ignoring the fact that said trainee is most likely DEFICIENT in bodyfat to the point it’s negatively impacting their hormonal profile and that at LEAST the gallon of milk will have them FINALLY moving in a positive direction as far as bodyweight gaining goes.  For a trainee that has experienced nothing but failure in their pursuits, can’t their be some value in achieving A success?  If, for no other reason, to be able to establish what it actually FEELS like to achieve success, so that we have that as a baseline for establishing future successes?  If someone has never won before, how will they know WHEN they’ve done it?  Why not get them A win for a frame of reference?

Remember: they eventually learned how to win

 

Let’s just get the needle moving FIRST.  We can figure it out from there.

I ACCIDENTALLY WROTE AN E-BOOK: HERE IT IS "LET ME GUIDE YOU ON YOUR VISION QUEST"

Lunatic fringe...

This was meant to be a blogpost, and suddenly I looked up from my writing and discovered I had written 10k words across 50 pages. So I slapped a cover, table of content and intro on it. I could polish it up a bit more, and maybe I will, but here is the first edition.

I walked through 26 years of lifting to review 17 programs and 8 ways of eating, and then created a matrix out of them based off of either days per week of training or training goal and matched the ways of eating to suit the training. It was fun to write: hopefully it’ll be fun to read.

LET ME GUIDE YOU ON YOUR VISION QUEST E-BOOK

THE “POVERTY PREMIUM”: WHAT IS YOUR TIME WORTH?

Much to the delight of every 80s era Neo-con Reganite who grew up watching Gordon Gecko on “Wallstreet” and to this dismay of those flying the banner of the hammer-and-sickle, I’m going to do the thing where I boil down our hours of existence into a dollar value, because for those of us in the working world that pull down a paycheck either by the hour of via a salary, most of us, at one point, have had it flat out spelled out to us exactly how much our time is “worth”.  And, in many cases, that number can be downright disheartening, but perhaps that, in turn, serves as a call to action to either BECOME more valuable or to seek out those who value US as much as we value ourselves.  In the case of the latter, we must, in turn, VALUE ourselves enough to believe that we ARE worth more than what others are willing to compensate us for.  We necessitate a certain degree of dignity such that we will not debase ourselves for the lowest bidder, and will, instead, perform for adequate compensation.  Holy cow, this just became far more political than I intended, but let’s get back to physical transformation here, because many of you out in internet land ARE, in fact, treating yourself like some sort of “Grapes of Wrath” era daylaborer; breaking your backs for inadequate wages that end up putting you further in debt than taking you out of it.  And the comedy upon comedies is that many of you have hoodwinked yourselves into thinking you’re somehow being FRUGAL with your approach: MAXIMIZING your worth by minimizing your expenses.  Instead, you have fallen victim to the “poverty premium”: the concept where poverty forces you to purchase poor quality goods more frequently than if you had the financial capability to buy higher quality goods at less frequent intervals.  You are spending MORE in your attempt to spend less.  Allow me to (finally) explain.

And most you will follow this dude's advice because he's a doctor

This is going to be a two-front assault on your brain here.  First, allow me to discuss those who are unwilling to spend the money to buy the books that are associated with popular and effective training programs, such as 5/3/1, Tactical Barbell, the Juggernaut Method, Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, Easy Strength, the Armor Building Formula, etc.  The internet age has conditioned many people to believe that ALL information should be free, and that creators should not be compensated for their intellectual property.  Typically, the people that feel this way are CONSUMERS of property rather than creators of it, and ain’t that the damndest thing (note: I’ve never charged for any of the content I’ve put out, quite frankly because, if I did and someone were to pirate it, I’d most likely track them down like Liam Neeson in “Taken”, and I don’t need the inconvenience of a prison sentence in my life).  In turn, those who are unwilling to pay the cost of these books, instead, turn to the internet to provide them all the information INSIDE the books.  And those who at least have the decency to not engage in piracy will, instead, simply go to social media and ask questions (“Does 5/3/1 say to do THIS?”), or download excel spreadsheets that (allegedly) have the programs prebuilt, or use apps, or read as many free articles as they can on the subject.  And, in truth, of all those things I mentioned, the excel sheets and the apps tend to beat out the question asking and the article reading by a LONG shot, because along with being cheap, these folks are lazy.  But again, I digress (and judge): let’s talk some dollars and cents here.

 

So, to save the cost of buying an e-book on a program, you decided to, instead, get all the information you needed off the internet.  Cool: how LONG did THAT take?  How many hours did you spend scouring the next for information, piecing together bits and pieces of blog posts, social media responses, articles written in 2010, finding the latest up-to-date spreadsheet and app software, in order to ensure that your “one piece at a time” training program, ala the Johnny Cash song, was “just as good” as the real thing (maybe even better than the real thing, if we’re going U2 instead)?  Do you realize that the Tactical Barbell e-books are literally $10 on kindle?  Same with most of the 5/3/1 books.  Same with Super Squats and Mass Made Simple?  Even if this took you only an hour to get done…are you really worth $10 an hour?  That’s barely minimum wage in many parts of the United States, and not even that in other parts.  Could you have done more VALUABLE things with that hour of your life?  Imagine if you just pulled the trigger and bought the book and saved yourself that hour: what could you have done instead?  And now you actually have ALL of the information you need!  …which leads into the next part of the discussion…

You missed out on many tacopportunities in your quest to save money

Think of the time you wasted by running your slapped together “just as good” program.  And don’t act like it doesn’t happen: just in Super Squats ALONE I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fielded questions from trainees who CLEARLY never read the book because they’re NOT taking 3 deep breaths between every squat AND they’re using weights that are STUPIDLY heavy on the pullovers and wondering why they’re running into problems achieving their goals.  Or trainees that downloaded Easy Strength and have no idea what weights they’re supposed to use, because Dan never SAYS a specific amount in the book.  Or f**k me in all the incredible ways trainees manage to screw up 5/3/1, despite Jim writing the simplest strength training book ever (here’s a hint: if you’re running a 5/3/1 program for a year: STOP).  Now we’re REALLY getting into the question of “how much is your time worth”.  Once again, in order to save, at MOST, $40+shipping (looking at you “5/3/1 Forever), you, instead spent anywhere from 6-52+ weeks RUNNING THE PROGRAM WRONG!  You literally wasted, at a minimum, 1008 hours for a 6 week program…to save $40?  This means that an hour of your time is worth approximately…4 cents.  For reference, in 1921, White Castle would sell you one of their slider hamburgers for 5 cents, whereas the current cost for one of those is $1.35.  So an hour of your time in 2025 isn’t even quite enough to cover the cost of a White Castle slider in 1921, and to be able to pay for one today, you’d have to give up 27 hours of your life…do you REALLY value yourself so little?  Have some dignity: your time is at LEAST worth a DOUBLE hamburger: easily.  STOP debasing yourself in order to “save money”, you are BLEEDING OUT finances by wasting so much of your time.

 

But it doesn’t stop!  Irrespective of the cost of education, let’s just talk about how even WHEN we have all the right tools for the right job, we can still squander our time in an attempt to SAVE it!  Yes, once again, our attempts at frugality run into the aforementioned poverty premium.  Herein I wish to discuss (to the groans of many of my regular readers) the “lean bulk”, and how it's simply wasting your time.  The current landscape of physical transformation has impressed upon young trainees a notion that they should ALWAYS be photoshoot ready at a moment’s notice, with razor sharp abs year round and never an ounce of fat to be found on them.  That’s all fine and dandy if you’ve given up on progressing (hey, it happens: at one point we can decide that we’ve achieved enough and it’s time to maintain), but if you’re on an honest to goodness muscle building phase of training (like one from the books mentioned previously, ala Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, Tactical Barbell Mass Protocol or the 5/3/1 workouts vectored toward size), then it means we’ve decided to progress in A direction: specifically that of…well…building mass.  In previous generations, we UNDERSTOOD that this meant a time of hard training paired with hard eating…but, currently, we seem to not quite understand or appreciate that second part.  Instead, trainees believe that they should eat only the BAREST amount necessary to add muscle to the frame without a single added ounce of fat.  Squeaking out the smallest possible incremental gain on the scale, and rapidly course correcting if they ever see that number jump beyond the acceptable bound.  Why?  Well to avoid having to cut, of course!  See, this way, the trainee is going to save themselves SO much time on the backend of the program, because whereas all those fools are overeating and having to cut later, THIS super duper intelligent trainee is just going to gain all the way through the program and then just switch to the next program and get those sweet sweet infinite perpetual gains.  A lifelong gaining cycle: does life get any sweeter?

Gaze upon the future!

…yeah…about that.  What ends up REALLY happening?  The trainee is so hyper-focused on not adding any fat that they ALSO don’t add any muscle.  Their nutrition was so on the razor’s edge that they often fell short of whatever nutritional needs they had and, instead, at BEST, maintained what muscle they had and, quite possibly, lost a little bit of fat.  Which is to say, they WASTED an entire 6 week (minimum) training block.  They spun their wheels for six weeks, training STUPIDLY hard and getting nothing to show for it…all in their attempt to save time!  The irony!  Because now we’re 6 weeks behind schedule and need to catch up!  And herein is when the second hammer blow hits this trainee: they have absolutely NOT desire to do ANOTHER one of those training phases right now.  If you’ve ever done 6 weeks of Super Squats, or Mass Made Simple, or the 12 weeks of Deep Water’s beginner and intermediate program put together, or 5/3/1’s Building the Monolith, you know that, after those programs are done, you kinda want a little break.  Which, typically, is a FANTASTIC time to either maintain (diet break) or lose some fat (what the net is calling a “mini-cut”).  Because those with some time under the bar understand that a cut isn’t something you HAVE to do: it’s something you EARN.  It’s something you look FORWARD to.  Oh my goodness, I FINALLY don’t need to have a bar on my back for a 4 minute set of squats before I go an try to eat until my stomach tells my brain it’s beyond capacity just so I can recover and refuel enough to make it through the next workout: I can, instead, do Dan John’s “Easy Strength for Fat Loss” which has frickin’ “easy” IN THE NAME and allows me to just lift some weights, go for a walk, and let the fat melt off me.  I can finally rest my digestive tract for a minute AND save some money on my food budget (hey, look at that: saving money!)  And then, once I’ve done enough of this, I’ll be champing at the bit and ready to push the training and food hard again, because this is cyclical training and periodization, and it works.  No one is in a forever gaining phase, because “ain’t nobody got time for that”, and if you value your time, you’ll surely agree.  Quit trying to save yourself from cutting, and, instead, train so hard that you look FORWARD to that phase, so you can recharge and come back strong.

 

Your time IS valuable…so start treating it that way.  Spend money to save money, and INVEST your time instead of wasting it.

EDUCATION VS INDUSTRY

Shoutout to Rob Simpson over at T-Nation for posting something in my training log that sparked this bloviation, because it was at that moment that I had a realization that ultimately should have happened about 25 years ago, but suffice to say I’m a slow learner, and that relates directly to what I’m going to discuss here.  There is confusion in the physical transformation space ultimately regarding the function of influencers and the fitness industry in general, as many seek these individuals/institutions as sources of education when, in fact, their entire existence is premised on the exact OPPOSITE of education.  These sources seek to UNeducate you, for doing so is 100% in their best interest, whereas education works against their very existence.  Educators remain outside of this sphere and, in turn, typically need to be sought out, for they are NOT hinging their existence upon you discovering them but, instead, working ultimately toward the goal of you not NEEDING them.  In my discussion regarding gathering around the communal fire, these are the keepers of lore, whereas the industry are the gossipers, the former needing no one else to perform their function, the latter requiring the existence of others, for how can we have gossip without people?  But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself here.  Let me go back to my own education, wherein I learned that, in order to have a discussion, we must first operationalize the terms OF the discussion, so that we all are in agreement over what the words mean before we try to discuss the words.  I believe, you will find, in most matters of online “debate”, it’s simply a matter of people using non-operationalized terms, wherein the words mean one thing to one side and another thing to the other, ensuring there can be no agreement because there is no actual discussion occurring.  So first, let’s talk education.

A fine example of when industry met education

 

What is education?  Well, already, it’s a noun AND a verb, but let’s use it as a verb here, and let’s use it to mean “the process of taking the complex and making it simple”.  COULD we define it as something else?  Most assuredly, either something else entirely or, at least, something more nuanced, but I feel like for the sake of my discussion here, that definition works very well.  Think back to your elementary education (for some of my readers, that won’t require thinking very far back, whereas for others [myself having turned 40 this week], we may have to dust off the cobwebs).  When you arrived at school, their initial goal was to take the complexity of reading and make it simple enough for you to gasp, and they did this by first teaching you the alphabet (through song, because historically man has done much better remembering stuff through song and story vs straight memorization) and all the sounds the letters could make.  This built up into combining letters to make other sounds, and eventually culminated into being able to sound out long strings/chains of these letters into words and being able to read them in print, and now here you are reading the bizarre ramblings of a madman.  They did a similar process with mathematics, teaching you the basics of arithmetic before you cruised through courses on algebra and geometry onto your way through calculus and beyond (or, if you were like me, tapping out at statistics).  Now consider the fact you were around 5 or 6 when you entered elementary school: it was the function of these educators to take complex concepts and boil them down to something a 5 year old can understand…THAT, my friends, is education!

 

But think further: WHY was it that you were getting an education?  As much as we’d like to believe it was out of the goodness of the state (assuming you went to a publicly funded school, please forgive my cultural bias here), it was, ultimately, so that you would not NEED these educators.  Fundamentally, the function of state funded education is to produce INDEPENDENT members of society who are able to function as adults without extra assistance and, specifically, be able to CONTRIBUTE.  Nothing is for free, and the state invested time and money into you so that you would produce MORE for them.  Education’s function was to make you independent and capable, and this theory of education dates back to the Ancient Greeks and beyond, and prior to that it existed on a tribal level, wherein the young were trained by the old so that they could one day grow and become contributing members of the tribe.  Historically, in all instances, the function of education is to create independent people that are able to contribute back to society, and this is achieved by taking the complex and making it simple enough to grasp at a young age so that it can be incrementally built upon.

Although sometimes they instilled discipline in us too

 

The fitness industry does NOT want to educate you.  Doing so completely serves AGAINST their best interest.  Why?  Because it’s in their name: the fitness INDUSTRY.  They are an entity that makes money by people NEEDING them in order to achieve fitness.  Because if there is no need for the industry, then there is no money being put toward it, which means it cases to exist.  So what does the fitness industry do?  The OPPOSITE of education: they make the simple COMPLEX.  They take concepts that should be fundamentally simple to grasp, and portray them as exceedingly complex and unapproachable, and then they SELL you “the solution” to the problem that THEY have created.  And, specifically, they sell you ONLY the solution to the problem: NOT the method used to discover the solution.  Oh no, THAT is a tightly guarded “industry secret” that only THOSE “in the know” are allowed access to (which, if you’re willing a pay a premium fee AND sign a non-disclosure agreement, you may be granted access to).  You know who else did this?  Nintendo, with the call-in 1900 number wherein they would tell you SPECIFICALLY how to beat certain sections of their video games (which secrets that literally could NOT be figured out without outside help), but never did they actually TEACH you about the game.  Answers for sale, but never education.

 

Because physical transformation is simple.  Starting from a baseline of nothing, literally ANY physical activity will achieve results.  Yet, we have members of the fitness industry that want to SELL you the idea about “wasting newbie gains” or “optimizing your first year of training”, because the new trainee is ESPECIALLY easy to prey upon.  They don’t have enough experience to smell bullsh*t when it’s nearby, and influencers know how to make their object far shiner than an educator can.  The same is true of nutrition.  With the current state of how we eat, the simplest AND most effective nutritional intervention is to eat single ingredient foods and drink only water.  Even without calorie counting or macro training, I literally just wrote THE most effective diet possible in one sentence, understanding effectiveness here to mean achieving 80% of the desired outcome and leaving the 20% for a more nuanced approach.  But we have influencers out there who seek to tell trainees that they are actively sabotaging their results by NOT consuming some manner of hyper-overpriced and overprocessed junk supplement and that eating single ingredient foods are making them fat, slow, old and sick.  They sell that it is CRITICAL to track every single bite of food that you take, and THANKFULLY they just so HAPPEN to sell an app that does exactly that, alongside a protein bar with the highest protein the calorie ratio (which, of course, they sell you is an absolutely critical element to achieving physical transformation success).  These people CREATE problems and sell solutions, whereas educators IDENTIFY problems and give you the tools to solve them. 

But sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease

 

Because, again, refer back to the function of education: to create independence.  What is the function of industry?  To create DEPENDENCE.  An industry NEEDS customers, and, therefore, it must go out and create a NEED for whatever it is that they sell.  Tobacco did this by literally getting people addicted to their products, creating a biological need for it that they were all too willing to provide.  The fitness industry does this by taking the simple concepts of physical transformation (hard work, consistency, time/patience/compliance), turning them needlessly complex, and then selling a solution to a problem THEY created.  The tobacco industry created a new problem for it’s customers: suddenly they had an addiction they needed to satisfy.  The fitness industry created new problem as well: we used to know how to eat right and work hard, but now we’re lost.  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for the rest of his life” is a rallying call for educators and a warning for influencers.

 

But how can you tell who you’re dealing with in this landscape?  Who is out there looking to educate vs influence?  It can’t all be about money, because even my favorite authors, such as Dan John, Paul Kelso (RIP), Jim Wendler, K. Black, etc, charge money for their products.  But look at the end results here.  You buy one of their books and you legitimately have the tools you need to train and eat for the rest of your life.  You are educated: their product gave you independence.  An influencer is going to sell you a monthly subscription, or a product that “runs out” (it’s why Bob Hoffman switched from selling power racks to protein powder, because people only ever bought ONE power rack, but they’d buy a new tub once a month.  It’s also why Glenn Pendlay[RIP] went bankrupt selling THE greatest weightlifting equipment in the USA), or simply “answers on demand”.  They’re not going to set you up to be educated: they’re going to set you up to be co-dependent.  But for the REAL test here, go back to your elementary school education.  As much as you may have thought your undergrad professors were brilliant MINDS, your kindergarten teacher was a brilliant EDUCATOR, because they were taking the MOST complex concepts and boiling them down to the SIMPLEST of ideas so that your 5 year old brain could grasp it.  Someone who actually KNOWS the material they are discussing will have that ability.  The greater one understands the material, the simpler they are able to explain it, whereas the more tenuous one’s grasp, the shallower their explanation, to the point that, if one does not understand it at all, and is simply parroting ideas that they’ve heard, upon being challenged, they will lash out at the question asker rather than thank them for the opportunity to further explain.  You all know this first hand.  I know that if my kid asked me why the planets revolve around the sun and don’t just fall out of the universe, I could give them a passing explanation of how gravitational pull works before I eventually say “let’s go read Wikipedia together”, but if they asked me to explain transubstantiation, my 8 years of Catholic education would kick into overdrive and we’d spend WAY too much time on the subject.  Because people who actually know things can talk WAY too long on the subject, and most often will need to be cut off from it.

You either die a hero or live to become a meme

 

Don’t go to the fitness industry seeking education.  That’s not what it is there for.  It’s there to make money off YOU, and if you go to THEM, you’re doing their work for them.  It’s their job to make a sucker out of you: don’t meet them halfway.  Fight them off every step of the way by becoming EDUCATED.  Seek out educators, living on top of mountaintops and shouting out their prophecies to all who will listen…and listen to them.  Let them make you independent, well informed, and able to cut through the crap.  Let them save you money and time by giving you the tools you need in order to be able to succeed WITHOUT anyone else.  Don’t let them give you answers: let them give you the tools you need to make your OWN answers.   

 

 

IT'S NOT SCIENCE, IT'S MAGIC...THE GATHERING PART III

Welcome back once again readers as we continue to explore the links between Magic the Gathering and the world of physical transformation.  Herein lies the final part of our trilogy.  Go back and re-read parts 1 and 2 if you need to re-orient yourself.

Let’s talk about some of those spells now, shall we?  I previously wrote about how the power of the spells themselves tends to directly correlate to the amount of mana we use to cast them.  There are, of course, exceptions, and I’ll discuss those shortly, because this metaphor just keeps on giving, but understanding spells through this lens, we’re effectively looking at training programs and what they represent.  A beginner in the realm of physical transformation does not NEED anything overly complex or precise: they can achieve results with the simplest of training protocols.  And, in turn, quite often, the training protocols for these individuals ARE very simple protocols.  Starting Strength’s 3x5 3 times a week is a classic example, alongside Tactical Barbell’s Base Building protocols, 5/3/1’s Prep School, the beginner program laid out by Paul Kelso in “Powerlifting Basics Texas Style”, and even just the very simple bodyweight/machine/dumbbell circuits that people develop on their own.  And again, understanding mana through the lens of our work capacity/output, we understand why these simple programs work and why there’s no need for anything greater than this.  However, as we continue to progress in training, effectively drawing more cards from our deck and playing lands from our hand, our physical capabilities improve and we outgrow these simple programs.  In the realm of physical transformation, it’s not that they’re “lesser programs” per se: they’re simply inappropriate programs.  The demands they place upon us are unrealistic given our current abilities.  Asking a 100lb squatting to squat 80% for 3 sets of 5 is hard work but manageable: asking an 800lb squatter to do the same is a polite way to ask them to kill themselves.  We can’t win the game by continuing to play these 1 mana spells when we have 10 mana to play with: we need to cast the spells that are appropriate for the amount of mana that we have.

Great work on the 510kg pull Thor, now just do 900lbs for 3 sets of 5 and the workout is complete.

 

This is what makes “advanced programming” advanced: it is programming suited for the physical capabilities of the advanced trainee.  Which is to say: it understands that an advanced trainee CAN’T just go into the gym and lift more weight for more reps today than they did 2 days ago, or else EVERYONE would bench 1000lbs by the time they got out of high school.  Advanced programs find a way to manage fatigue, balance intensity and volume (quite often through a phasic approach), spend time building work capacity, address weaknesses or deficiencies as they develop, etc.  Beginner trainees tend to think that these advanced programs mean achieving advanced gains, but the truth is, for them at their point in training, they’re inappropriate programs and won’t get them as good of results compared to if they stuck with something suited for their current physical capabilities.  Much like how cards that cost more than one mana tend to be a bit more nuanced: instead of being a creature with power and toughness of 1, it’s a creature with a special ability when it gets tapped.  Instead of a spell that simply does direct damage to a creature or player, it’s a spell that has lingering effects, or creates conditions that change the dynamics of play in favor of one of the players.  When you first start the game, victory seems simple: I’m just going to attack with my creature or cast my spell and take away life from the other player.  But as the game goes on further and we get more mana, more complex strategies develop and it's on us to be able to effectively employ our mana to capitalize on these strategies.

 

I said I’d discuss exceptions earlier, so let’s circle back to that.  Typically, simple programs get simple results, and once we’re done with that, it’s time to move on to more complex programming to appropriately progress for our current state.  However, there ARE some programs out there that, despite their simplicity, are able to achieve either incredible results OR are able to be used for LONG durations of training.  Something like Super Squats is incredibly simple, yet throwing a beginner on that is absolutely a baptism by fire and, if they survive, they will come out the other side transformed.  Meanwhile, 5/3/1 or Tactical Barbell are both programs that are incredibly simple to employ (just plug in the numbers and do the workout) yet are built in such a manner that they can effectively be run indefinitely.  These are those cards in MtG that are WAY powerful for how little mana they require: those gamebreaking diamonds in the rough that, upon being discovered, EVERYONE ends up building a deck around them.  And, consequently, there are programs out there that are needlessly complex for how little return on investment they churn out.  From my outside observation, just about every “science based lifting” program out there is failing to achieve it’s goals of physical transformation among those people that pursue these programs, most likely due to a demographic issue that the dudes most inclined to back a “science based lifting program” are the same dudes who lack the meathead capability to just grind through a training program and MAKE it work for them: simply not putting in enough effort to actually achieve the results they’re looking for.  In MtG, we’ve seen all manner of cards that require way too much mana for how little of a result they achieve, oftentimes cards that are victims of rulechanges in the games that invalidate whatever advantage they may have had.  Dave Tate had a comment on this regarding “lost exercises” that youtubers “rediscover”, that being that these exercises got lost because they sucked. 

Nothing goes away forever though

But let’s also get into the realm of discussing the spell types I presented earlier: enchantments vs sorceries/instants.  Aside from summoning creatures to fight for you in Magic, you can also just plain cast magic spells as a wizard.  These spells move/exist at different rates, with enchantments being a spell that, upon being cast, will hang out for the rest of the game (assuming the opposing wizard doesn’t destroy it somehow), while sorceries and instants are spells that, upon being cast, their effect occurs at that moment and then goes away.  A simple example would be an enchantment could say “you take no damage from red creatures”, and that’s now true for every turn for the rest of the game, while an instant may say “you gain 3 life”, and at that moment add 3 life to your life total and that’s it: you don’t get to keep adding 3 life every turn.  There’s more to it than that, but that’s enough for where I’m going to go with this.

 

Because Dan John has a great quote when it comes to supplements “if it works fast, it’s illegal.  If it works, it’s banned.  If it doesn’t work, it’s legal.”  Using that as our cognitive framing, we can understand that instants and sorceries are those spells in the realm of physical transformation that have very quick effects that, in turn, ALSO have short results.  People are so frequently in a rush when it comes to physical transformation, wanting to lose 20lbs of fat and gain 40lbs of muscle while adding 300lbs to their deadlift and they want it done yesterday.  And, quite often, these people go down “the darkside” of pharmaceutical assistance in order to “achieve” these goals, living the phrase “it’s not what you put your body through, it’s what you put through your body”.  Sadly, spending any time on the subreddit r/steroid will show you the sad outcomes of these stories.  The BEST case scenario for most of these dudes is that they spend way too much money on gear and get the kind of results they could have gotten had they invested that same amount on steak and eggs: they were simply too unfit at the start of their journey to actually take advantage of the drugs they were using.  Others aren’t so fortunate, and have to contend with a whole host of side effects, many of which being irreversible.  And, comedy of all comedies, those that manage to achieve any sort of result have to deal with the fact that, once they come OFF the gear, the results go with it, because they had no foundation to build upon at the start of their journey.  “If it works fast, it’s illegal”, but also “If it works fast, it unworks fast too”.  Nothing achieved quickly will ever last, and the body will ALWAYS fight for homeostasis.  Interestingly enough, MtG has a card named “Unstable Mutation”, that gives a creature +3 power and toughness to start with, and then every turn after that it loses 1 power and toughness until it eventually dies…and that’s just really fitting for this example.

Dig that mid 90s artwork

 

Enchantments, on the other hand, are those things we do for ourselves that DON’T have instant effects but, instead, long lasting effects that benefit us through the rest of the game.  In the world of supplements, creatine monohydrate could be one of the greatest examples of an enchantment.  It has clear, understood, well researched effects, yet anyone who has ever used it will comment that it’s not like Popeye eating his spinach.  There isn’t this sudden surge of strength and power with us crushing reps in the gym: we’re simply just a little bit better than we were before.  But that little bit, stretched over a LONG training history, will add up overtime.  “Little and often over the long haul”, another Dan John quote.  Many companies feel the need to package creatine with some sort of stimulant so that the trainee “feels” it working, similar to many pre-workout products, but this is just because we have stupid lizard brains that can’t appreciate small returns that accumulate overtime (which, consequently, pre-workouts are instants/sorceries as well, really stupid, damaging to your overall progress, and a waste of your money: stop using them).  Other enchantments could be things like Vitamin K2 for cardiac health, Fish Oil supplementation, electrolytes: basically all those unsexy supplements that simply allow us to continue living well and training hard WITHOUT turning our skin purple or making our resting heart rate jump 40 beats per minute.  It can also be simple daily habits, like going for a walk (this, for real, is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself for any kind of athlete, and I owe Jamie Lewis for pointing this out to me and Dan John for affirming it, which you could not ASK for a bigger “yin and yang” in the realm of physical training, so those two dudes vouching for it is a surefire sign it’s good for you), prioritizing sleep, getting in some feeder workouts, etc.  Just like how the enchantment’s effect happens every turn, if you’re getting in these activities every day, it’s going to have long lasting positive effects.

 

Alrighty, that was a wild journey: thanks for joining me on it.  I have no doubt that I could continue to write even MORE on the topic, but, once again, it’s fascinating to see how these parallels exist between two seemingly completely opposite activities.  I can tell you from my time playing Magic the Gathering that it did NOT tend to attract the meathead crowd, and that most often these dudes were throwing my own lunch at me in middle school, yet here we find that the mechanics of pretty much every “game” remain the same.  We start out small, build into something bigger, and along the way have to make decisions between overreaching and properly recovering to ensure we can play as long as we can while still winning the game.  Go have some fun.             

IT'S NOT SCIENCE, IT'S MAGIC...THE GATHERING PART II

Welcome back readers!  In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the basics of the game Magic the Gathering and it's application to the world of physical transformation.  Read up here, if you missed out

https://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2025/10/its-not-science-its-magicthe-gathering.html

Let’s just keep on exploring this metaphor now.  If mana is our power source, we tap it to cast spells, and then we have to wait until our next turn to be able to untap the land and then play another one from our hand, we just observed how MtG explained progressive overload, recovery and work capacity…in a game BLATANTLY for nerds.  Check out the cycle: you start with 1 land, you play one basic spell, and now you’re out of mana until the next turn.  The next turn, you get to untap that land (recover), play a new land (build your work capacity), and play a BIGGER spell (progressively overload).  And this cycle will continue each turn ASSUMING you keep drawing lands to play.  What does drawing lands to play mean?  It means SMARTLY doing the programming necessary to ensure that your work capacity improves to be able to match the output you wish to achieve.  If you didn’t put enough lands in your deck to be able to ensure you’re able to keep playing lands each turn, you’re going to eventually exhaust your ability to play bigger and bigger spells.  We see this phenomenon in physical transformation: dudes who REFUSE to take a GPP phase in their training, who just keep running up against the same wall over and over again because they quite simply don’t have the physical capacity to recover from their training and put in MORE input to receive more output.  This is the dude that has had only 3 lands in play for the past 17 turns and has a hand FULL of cards requiring 4 or more mana: they’ll just keep casting the same 3 mana spells and discarding better cards because they’re unfit to play them.

Eventually you need to do a training cycle that hits the legs Strong Guy...

 

The metaphor just keeps going though, because check this out: in the old days of Magic, we had something referred to as “mana burn”.  Basically, if you tapped a land for mana but ended up not using it, you would end up losing life equal to the amount of unused mana you had at the end of the turn.  Sometimes, we’d use this mechanic to exit out of a game we no longer wished to play, but otherwise it was a mechanic that could be carefully manipulated by crafty players to ensure the demise of their opponent.  But in the world of physical transformation, we see that MtG has explained the concept of overtraining/overreaching to us.  Mana is the source of our power: it’s our energy vested toward our goal of “winning”.   Consequently, if we put more effort than our spells can handle, we end up losing some of our own life in the process.  Mana burn is one of the clearest demonstrations of the axion “just because you can doesn’t mean that you should”.  If you are running a “3 mana workout” as it were, you do NOT benefit by putting in 5 mana worth of effort into it.  If your training program calls for 3 light sets of 60% because it’s dissipating fatigue to set you up for a bigger effort, doubling the reps or upping the percentage just because you “feel good” is just giving you some mana burn.  Oh my goodness I really love how this keeps on working.

 

In fact, let’s just discuss how life works in Magic and in…well, life.  The life total of Magic is a total representation of our training age, whereas the deck that we’re playing with is a representation of our chronological age.  Just as we observed with mana burn, some training decisions are going to make us age a bit faster than others.  The game ends when our life reaches zero, and depending on how some of you play the game, you may only be on card 14 of a 60 card deck by the time you get there: never even coming CLOSE to realizing the potential that was within your deck.  Other, smarter, craftier players may actually find themselves at risk of losing the game by running out of cards in their deck while their life total is STILL quite high.  These are those folks in life who found a way to train up until the day they die: the Jack LaLannes of the world, who made fitness a lifetime priority.  Consequently, there are some spells in the game specifically designed to give us MORE life: these are those smart training/nutritional/lifetime decisions that give us a bit more of an extension on our training age.  Basically, Dan John these days is a white mana Magic player, giving us all the tools necessary to try to draw the very last card out of our deck.  Inversely, the black mana of Magic is known as the “sacrifice” color, where players frequently trade away their life total in order to obtain greater power and ability within the game.  These are those training, nutrition, lifestyle and (most likely) pharmacological decisions we make that allow us to fly quite possibly too close to the sun in our pursuit for physical transformation. 

Though water is typically associated with blue mana, make no mistake: this is pure black mana madness

But let’s dive into THAT discussion a little bit as well.  I’ve written previously on this very topic of MtG, how “not losing is not the same thing as winning”, and it’s worth exploring the interplay that can exist between black and white mana (yes, there are other colors in MtG, but they don’t have the duality we’re looking for here, especially when we consider black and white are the exact “yin and yang” colors).  As we discussed, those white mana spells that give us life can most certainly allow us to make fitness a lifetime activity, playing until we run out of cards…but that means we still lost the game.  We WIN the game by reducing the OTHER play to 0 life or exhausting THEIR library of cards.  Which is exactly what the black mana cards can do for us: we can make some sacrifices to our own life total in order to achieve greater power in the game and actually achieve some sort of victory.  But, of course, we run the risk of sacrificing TOO MUCH in the pursuit of victory and ultimately self-destructing before we ever actually achieve our goal.  Quite clearly, we need some semblance of balance between the two forces here.  We need to tactfully employ those black mana spells in the right time and situation WHILE having some manner of white mana spells readily available to undo or, at least, reduce the damage we do to ourselves in the process.  We don’t need to make recovery THE highest priority of our training: RESULTS should be the priority.  However, self-preservation needs to at least FACTOR into our planning process.  If we just spam black mana spells all the time, we burn out, and if all we do is focus on gaining life, we get to die having not actually achieved our goal.  Somewhere in the middle is a reality wherein we got to actually accomplish some physical transformation while also living long enough to actually enjoy it.