RESTRICTION: NOT DENIAL

I write this post knowing full well I have a post titled “body by denial”, but, hopefully, longtime readers of the blog will recognize that, ultimately, these past 14 years have been a process of my thoughts changing and, ideally, evolving over time.  Starting off with rough edges and getting refined through experience and exposure, often times with me doubling back right back to where I began, but with a different lens, similar to that “Newgame+” post I wrote previously as well.  And in that regard, I wish to discuss the distinction that exists between restriction and denial, and how it relates to the path of physical transformation.  One of my readers pointed out that all effective training programs and diets employ some manner of restriction.  For nutrition, this restriction can come in 3 different variants: energy restriction (amount of calories we eat), nutrient restriction (cutting out 1 or 2 of the 3 macros) and time restriction (fasting).  In the realm of training, restriction is more far reaching, but ultimately it’s employed in a manner to balance stimulus, fatigue and recovery in a manner wherein we achieve enough stimulus to promote growth without requiring more fatigue than we have the ability to recover from.  We can either push our limits and restrict ourselves by employing a deload week, meaning a week where we DON’T get to push our limits, or we restrict ourselves by always employing a reasonable degree of stimulus so we don’t overfatigue, meaning we don’t get to always go balls to the wall.  But in all these instances, the operating word is restriction: NOT denial.  Because when we restrict, we merely temper the destructive drives for the sake of achieving something greater, but when we deny, we set ourselves up for the inevitably counter-reaction of denial, which tends to set us back further than we progressed, taking 2 steps back for every one step forward.  Let’s continue to discuss.

Had it just been restricted, we wouldn't be in this mess

 

What are the key operating differences between restriction and denial?  I’m going to be terrible and use the word IN the definition, but quite simply put: restriction does NOT deny.  Restriction ACKNOWLEDGES, whereas denial ignores, and as anyone that has ever raised a child understands: ignoring something only makes it become more powerful and urgent.  And it is this underlying understanding that guide the implementation of successful restriction WITHOUT denial.  We must understand that it is imperative we do NOT ignore in our quest to employ restriction, but that we instead acknowledge, so that we can,  in turn, strategize and effectively overcome and succeed.

 

Ok, that’s all pretty conceptual: let’s get to brass tacks.  In the realm of training, let’s say we have that athlete who HAS to go balls to the wall in their training.  They wanna huff chalk and smash their skull on the barbell and they have an ammonia habit that could send a kid to college.  If we tell this trainee to go do Dan John’s “Easy Strength” program, what we do is deny.  Easy Strength is an incredibly effective program, it has a proven pedigree and track record, and, if followed correctly, will make a trainee stronger.  But “if followed correctly” is the operating premise here, and we have to face facts.  Telling Johnny Cocaine that he needs to never come CLOSE to failure and the weight should feel easy for 40 training sessions in a row of the same 5 lifts is flat out denying his nature, and, most likely, he’s going to get through 2 workouts before he decides to make Easy Strength into “Hard Strength” and make all sets absolute and total grinders, and, assuming they SURVIVE the end of the 40 days, they are going to be ground to dust, with a fried out nervous system, a bunch of joint and ligament damage, and completely and totally weaker than when they started.  We attempted to deny this person’s nature, giving them “the best program”, and in doing so, we did them a disservice.

This is NOT how we should look before a set of Easy Strength...

 

For this individual, restriction would be to acknowledge their psychology and find them a program that suits it while putting in the necessary restrictions to keep them from self-destructing.  As previously mentioned, the simplest avenue would be structured deloads, which already are quite an ask for someone like this, but when presented with the idea that “you do these deloads so that you earn the right to be able to smash PRs in training”, we are at least ACKNOWLEDGING this individual for who they are, vs if we give them Easy Strength and say “It doesn’t matter what you like: this is the best way to train”.  And other interventions exist too: some have speculated that “dynamic effort” work at Westside was honestly just a method to get those meatheads to cool down a few days a week, Dan John’s “bus bench-park bench” openly acknowledges the dualistic nature of a trainee and gives them the opportunity to unleash as needed, Super Squats gives you 6 weeks of low rep work to rechamber for the next round of insanity, etc.  And, of course, it all works the other way as well.  We’re not going to take granny and tell her she HAS to do Super Squats if she ever wants to grow, but we will, at some point during the run of Easy Strength, let her know that the weight DOES need to go up at one point, and we can’t just stay in our comfort zone forever. 

 

And we, of course, see this all the time in the realm of nutrition as well.  We like to use the term “overly restrictive” when referring to dietary approaches, but “overly restrictive” simply means “denial”, because it says “no” not “not now”.  People, in the pursuit of physical transformation, will engage in nutritional protocols with SIGNIFICANT amounts of denial, primarily because ANYONE can diet hard for ONE day, or one week, or one month: it’s the consistent, day-in and day-out over the long haul that gets us.  And, consequently, it’s our consistent habits that ultimately define our outcomes: NOT the month long “lettuce and water” diet.  These “diets by denial” can achieve their intended short term outcome, but the long term consequence always leaves the trainee worse off than where they started.  In the realm of fat loss, hardcore crash diets result in the shedding of a significant amount of weight, yes, but this includes a significant degree of lean tissue, primarily because, when you tank the body’s hormones by piling significant stress on it through severe caloric denial, it compensates by prioritizing fat storage and hemorrhaging all that inefficient lean tissue.  So congrats: we’re now a smaller version than we were when we started: not a leaner version.  And while we’ve been denying our hunger for so long, as soon as we allow ourselves to eat again, we enter a compensatory state of hyperpagia, because “the house always wins” when we attempt to deny.  The body has a setpoint, and it wans to get back to that NOW, and it doesn’t care WHAT kind of mass it takes to get there.  So now we gain RIGHT back to our original bodyweight (most likely a little heavier) with LESS lean tissue than before: a significantly worse body composition.  And then, like idiots, we repeat the cycle AGAIN, except this tie we need to eat even FEWER calories to get that weight loss result, because we have less metabolically active lean tissue, which means MORE denial, which means GREATER compensatory binge, etc etc.

It's so predictable we actually have multiple television seasons of it to observe

Successful nutritional strategies do NOT deny: they restrict, and in doing so, they ACKNOWELDGE the individual where they are at.  In the realm of fat loss, we can NOT deny hunger.  Attempting to white knuckle it just results in what I wrote above.  Instead, we acknowledge it and find methods of restriction that manage it.  Some find time restriction the solution: allowing them to eat to satiety by limiting the window of time allowed, such that they can only physically stomach so much food and it happens to allow for fat loss.  Some operate better with macronutrient restriction, finding that, in the absence of carbs or fats, they do not get the same hunger triggers they experience compared to when combining those two macros together (notorious for creating hyperpaltable foods).  Some find that they are “volume eaters”, and can operate well in an energy deficit so long as they are consuming large quantities of food, figuring out methods to take low energy foods and consume large quantities of them.  No singular strategy is “the right one”: it’s the right one for the right individual, and attempting to employ one that is a poor fit simply because we feel it’s “the best” is an act of denial, and, in doing so, an act of sabotage.  And, of course, this was all in the discussion of simply fat loss: you should see what I deal with on the weightgaining subreddits telling trainees that they don’t HAVE to eat their “daily required fiber intake” while in a gaining phase and that it’s OK to eat a protein source that ISN’T chicken breast.  Social media has created so many artificial barriers and methods of denial that I’m so glad I grew up in an era where I was told to drink a gallon of milk a day and I’d be like Milo of Croton.

 

Honestly, this could go on forever.  It’s taken me QUITE a while in my own life to realize and discover this, but there is always a trial of breadcrumbs to follow.  Success leaves clues, as does failure, and I’ve seen firsthand the compensatory binges that happen as a result of denial (reference by 2 year fast food bender after making weight for my last powerlifting competition), and I’ve seen how I thrive when I operate within self-imposed restriction.  Funny enough, I got inspired by this post as I was driving to pick up my favorite Friday meal of a double order of pork spare ribs, sliced and chopped brisket from my favorite local BBQ place after a day of fasting, acknowledging how, due to the restriction I had employed with the fast, I didn’t have to deny myself the joy of delicious BBQ.  I’ve lived pure denial before, and it’s just plain not worth it.

Not when you have a place at home that serves this

A life without restriction is hedonism.  A life of denial is asceticism.  Somewhere in between is humanity, and it’s achieved with restriction.  For we cannot achieve our maximum human potential by denying our humanity, but we must restrict in order to refine, focus, and overcome.        

JRPGS AND WRPGS

I already feel bad for my audience that isn’t fluid in nerd, because this is going to be incredibly nerdy.  Let me start by breaking down the two acronyms in the title: Japanese Role Playing Games and Western Role Playing Games.  These distinctions will matter as it relates to the subject matter I’m about to discuss, and credit to u/JeremiahWuzABullfrog over on r/kettleballs for providing the inspiration for writing on this topic.  I don’t feel like this is even really an intro at this point: me a mea culpa, so let’s actually start talking.

In a few paragraphs, this will be hilarious

 

In the world of video game nerdery, role playing games are constantly divided into 2 categories (which, yes, like heavy metal, there are a million SUBcategories, but we’re not going to talk about them today): Japanese RPGs and Western RPGs. The distinction between these two primarily relates to degree of linearity present in playstyle.  Traditional JRPGs typically provide you with preset characters to play with and a direct path to get there, providing an almost “on rails” experience as you play.  The focus is on making the characters you have strong enough within their own playstyle to be able to get to the end of the game.  WRPGs define themselves through their “open” playstyle, wherein you typically get to build a character/party of characters in whatever style you like, and there are multiple solutions and paths to the end of the game, to the point that you can decide if you want to even be a hero in the first place or play as a villain instead.  WRPGs are like playing a video game coded version of Dungeons and Dragons, while JRPGs feel more like a traditional video game in general, where you’re trying to “beat the game” within its own specific set of rules.  Why even discuss this?  Due to the parallels that exist between this and the world of training.

 

Much like how you can never step into the same river twice, you can never play a JRPG for the first time twice.  The significance of this is that, the first time you play it, you’re discovering it as you go, and the world is magical and incredible (assuming it’s a good game) and the story is full of twists and turns and it’s an epic journey…but the second time you play it, it simply can’t be as magical because you already know what’s coming.  Sadly, in physical transformation, we experience this same phenomenon.  Joel Greene, among others, discuss the premise of how we aren’t able to keep eliciting the same responses to training/nutrition as we get when we first experience them, and how this relates to the necessity of variety in both instances in order to continue growing.  Aside from just newbie gains and the novel training stimulus effect in general, the body is a mechanism built around adaptation, and once it adapts we are no longer forcing it to change.  Super Squats will trigger ridiculous growth the first time you run it, and then pretty decent growth the second time, but if it ALWAYS added “30lbs in 6 weeks”, we’d be 150lbs heavier in just 30 weeks.  The Velocity Diet can trigger rapid fat loss, until our body downregulates metabolism and we’re forced to do some reverse dieting in order to rebuild our caloric runway.  Even my beloved Tactical Barbell necessitates changing the program through periodic training phases to keep growing, as does 5/3/1, as does just general basic periodization.

Change does a body good

So enter the WRPG, wherein we can actually have a NEW experience each and every time we play it BECAUSE it’s on us to make the character that we play and the decisions our character makes as they navigate the world.  You CAN get a new experience with multiple replays of the game, and as you do so you discover more and more about the gameworld.  Games like Fallout New Vegas can have over 100 hours of gameplay tucked away, with various secrets and hidden easter eggs, and hell, I still play the original Fallout released in 1997 and STILL find new things in that game with my replays.  HOWEVER, in order to discover these hidden gems, it necessitates NOT playing these WRPGs like a JRPG: you have to actually be willing to play a different character and do some experimenting.  It’s honestly why I was hesitant to tackle this topic at first: because it was originally proposed from the lens of DnD, wherein, in truth, I’m ALWAYS a barbarian because it’s what I love being, but it is from the branching out and discovering the contents of the game that we learn so much.

 

Which is the lesson we can take to physical transformation: the more we’re willing to get out there and explore, the more we’re able to pick up tips, tricks, hacks and skills that we can apply UNIVERSALLY to the quest of physical transformation.  Aside from the fact that you can avoid stagnation simply through the act of changing the approach, you’ll also learn along the way in order to discover what works best for you AND have a bunch of tools in your toolbox for whenever you encounter a challenging situation.  Much like how various playthroughs of a WRPG can equip you with the necessary background to be able to tackle the problems you encounter from a variety of angles, trying out different programs and nutritional approaches can allow you to personally craft the solutions you need in order to overcome the problems you experience.

I appreciate the irony of this meme being over 20 years old

 

But fascinating enough, we enter into another realm of discovery here: challenges.  Because for avid JPRG fans, this tends to be how one reconciles adding replay value into a game that has preset rules, limits and paths to explore.  In order to make the game “new” again, we impose artificial restrictions on ourselves to see what solutions we overcome.  I’ve played JPRGs where I didn’t allow myself to use magic, where I couldn’t use certain powerful equipment, didn’t allow my characters to level up beyond a certain point, etc.  The game was STILL beatable: but it was up to ME to figure out HOW to come up with the solution in order to succeed.  Since the traditional way “wouldn’t work”, I had to develop new strategies, and in doing so, I once again learned new things about the game that I could apply further.

 

These same challenges allow us to take what is old and make it new again.  Our training doesn’t need to ALWAYS be played like a WRPG: with a completely new take on the game each time. We can replay a game we’ve played before and just implement a new challenge.  I once ran Super Squats where, instead of 1x20 and adding weight each workout, I kept the weight the same and added a REP each workout, until I got to 1x30.  I took Jamie Lewis’ “Famine” workout and ran the whole thing like a circuit, instead of running it linearly.  Running Building the Monolith in under an hour is a challenge many other trainees have taken on.  OR we can take a method that worked for one lift and apply it to others.  I've taken ROM progression from deadlifts and tried applying it to squats and seated pin presses, and I've taken the Zeno squats workout and tried it in combination with deadlifts.  And nutritionally, I’ve run various permutations of the Velocity Diet, the Apex Predator Diet, The Maximum Definition Diet,  and my own “Red Meat and Black Coffee” variant. 

 

How my dietary changes appear to outsiders

Interestingly enough, we’re getting into the area that Dan John describes as “wild, mild and none” in terms of variation, which he originally applied to Easy Strength, but the theme applies universally.  Easy Strength completely captures the JPRG mentality: you’re doing the same workout 5 days a week for 8 weeks for a total of 40 workouts, effectively “level grinding” so you can level up at the end and be stronger than where you started.  Within the workout, there are no forking paths or game changing decisions to be made.  But once those 40 workouts are done, we now have the option to just replay the game again (which, sometimes, for JRPG fans, that’s exactly what we want, just like re-watching a favorite movie or re-reading a favorite book), or we can introduce a “mild” variation (going from flat bench to incline bench) or a WILD variation (going from flat bench to clean and jerk).  And then we have the WILDEST variation possible: we just do a whole new program.  Dan talks about cycling 8 weeks of Easy Strength with 8 weeks of the Armor Building Formula, and we can always throw in a Mass Made Simple block to really shake things up, or the 10k swing challenge…and these are JUST Dan John programs.  If we threw in some 5/3/1 or Super Squats or something else, we’d REALLY be playing something different: like transitioning from Squaresoft (they’ll always be Squaresoft to me, not Squarenix) RPGs to Interplay.  A whole different RULEST to abide by.

 

We’re seeing the lessons we can learn from these games here.  If we’re a JPRG fan and just want to keep running the programs and diet we like over and over again, we simply owe it to ourselves to implement some challenge runs from time to time in order to keep the game fresh.  As much as we may consider Final Fantasy 7 to be the zenith of game design and story, we can only play it so many times in a row before our eyes start to bleed.  And if we’re a WRPG fan, variety is a necessary part of enjoying the experience.  We can’t just keep playing the game the same way over and over again: it’s missing out on the point of the experience.  We must, instead, try new characters and make new decisions and see what we can learn and discover through that process.  We make the most of our games playing them in this way.        

ONE LITTLE SPARK

I recognize the insanity in my own writing, which I’ve often written off as “duality”, because I frequently find myself screaming sentiments that are the exact opposite of what I’ve said almost in the most recent post, and today will be no exception to that.  For though I’ve written much on the subject of going to extremes in order to get extreme results, today I wish to discuss the notion of just how LITTLE it takes in order to make progress.  But, in turn, because of that, we are truly so very liberated in our pursuit of physical transformation, for it means that effectively ANY avenue we take will lead to success: we simply need to take one.  Which, in turn, speaks more toward one of the most significant principles at play here: intention.  And this may well be the missing variable in many folks quest for physical transformation: a lack of clearly understood intent, operating instead of a nebulous constructs, hopes, thoughts and prayers.  And unwillingness to flat out say “THIS is the thing”, perhaps out of fear that, once identified, their intention is vulnerable to critique, whereas an undefined concept renders itself impervious to criticism by means of a “no true Scotsman” defense.  But let us explore just how little is required in order to achieve change, such that we no longer need fear having an understood intent and can, instead learn to embrace just what “one little spark” can ignite.

And now the song is stuck in YOUR head

 

Our current state of existence is alien to our biology.  Our bodies are old (at least 6000 years!  …if you believe certain schools of thought, but realistically more in the hundreds of thousands of years) and were designed to operate in old environments, and in such environments they operate VERY well.  Unfortunately, one of the cool things ABOUT our old bodies is the big brain they carry, and those big brains got our bodies in some trouble, because they went about INVENTING an environment that we were in NO way suited to exist in.  We had bodies built for migration and scavenging, but we created agriculture and a static environment.  We adapted to eating seasonally, but we learned how to force the plants to grow on OUR schedule.  We were built to experience stress in limited capacities, engage our sympathetic nervous system to mitigate the stress, and resume relaxing, but instead created “fake stress” by means of employment, deadlines, social obligations, etc, and put ourselves in a perpetual sympathetic state.  We were built for motion, and then we built chairs.  What is the end result of this?  We have bodies that were built to move, to flux between periods of feast and famine with the changes in the season, to exist in a state of low stress and instead we have locked ourselves down to a point where we can get HUNDREDS of steps per day while eating processed “food like substances” and still be stressed out of our minds without relief.  Our current existence is destroying us.

 

WHICH MEANS that literally ANY intervention is going to be a POSITIVE one as it relates to physical transformation, so long as it is one with intent.  So long as we specifically identify SOMETHING that we are going to do differently than what we are currently doing, we stand to make SOME sort of improvement to our situation, irrespective of how insignificant it is.  Quite simply, this is because, often, the introduction of ONE thing necessitates the cessation of some OTHER damaging thing that is in our current environment.  For an absurd example: if you decided you were going to go on the “Big Mac Diet”, where you ONLY ate Big Macs…this would ACTUALLY be a significant improvement from the current state of existence for the majority of Americans.  If you’re ONLY eating Big Macs, this means you AREN’T eating the fries, milkshakes, office candy, or other processed garbage that exists out there: you’re limited the dosage of your poison.  You cut OUT a lot of junk by deciding you’re only going to eat ONE junkfood.  We’ve witnessed these sorts of interventions work COUNTLESS times: people switching from regular soda to diet soda, people swapping from beer to vodka, from triple whoppers to double whoppers, etc.  When I was 14 and lost 25lbs over a summer, I went from eating 6 slices of pizza during “pizza night” to 3 slices, and from 3 cheeseburgers to 1.  In all these instances, the avenue to success is the same: IDENTIFYING that there is, in fact, something wrong with the current environment and engaging in AN intervention of some variety.

This outcome looks MUCH better than how the Subway diet went for Jared...

Again: this is liberation!  It means we can do whatever we want and make progress, because the only place to go from rock bottom is UP!  Which means we never need to stress on if we’re making “the best decision”, because ALL decisions are the right one.  It simply boils down to you making a decision you can actually sustain.  And THAT is “the rub”.  Interventions only work if you actually abide by them, which is WHY they must be “intentional interventions”.  People that approach transformation by just saying “I’m going to eat better and exercise more” do neither, primarily because they have no northern star to follow.  People that engage in seemingly stupid interventions STILL succeed simply because they actually ABIDE by them.  It’s why “fad” diets and programs work: because they are AN intervention from our currently destructive environment, and often it is the gimmicky nature of them that ALLOW for compliance, because it’s just ONE thing to do.  So many folks are simply lacking in bandwidth AS A RESULT of our ridiculous environment that they don’t feel they have the capacity to navigate anything with any actual nuance, but tell them “don’t eat bread”, “don’t eat after 8:00pm”, “do 300 push ups a day” and they can now approach intervention with intent and, in turn, succeed.

 

So give yourself the permission required to attempt any means of intervention you desire in the quest for physical transformation: it’s ALL going to work.  ANYTHING is better than our baseline, and “one little spark” will ignite a significant change simply because it will get us moving AWAY from center toward something different and better.