Holy cow that title has a lot of initialisms (which are different from acronyms: look it up), but it’s rather apropos for both Tactical Barbell and 5/3/1 given how they both tend to speak in their own language and code. And that’s why I want to celebrate my second consecutive year of running Tactical Barbell (the longest I’ve EVER stuck with ANY training system) but offering my review of both TB and 5/3/1 offered through the lens of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, of which I apologize for my non-American readers who find the notion of these sandwiches off putting, but for us yanks, they are iconic. Why that metaphor? For 1: it’s honestly incredibly fitting giving my having stuck with TB for 2 years, because PBJs were the lunch I ate everyday for all 4 years of high school (I switched from 1 PBJ my freshman year to 2 sophomore year through senior, coinciding with my having picked up wrestling as a sport in my second year and needing more nutrition), so PBJs and TB are both something I can stick with for a LONG time. And, much like TB, I looked FORWARD to my daily PBJ for lunch, and constantly remarked that the best part about eating a PBJ is immediately eating the second on that you packed. PBJs occupy a significantly space in my mind for nostalgia and dopamine. And, in turn, my dirty secret is also this: it was my DAD who made and packed PBJs in my lunch, and for good reason, because left to my own devices I discovered that I could NOT make a good PBJ for myself. I sure THOUGHT that I could, until I was tasked with making one for someone else (who would one day become my wife), who dutifully informed me that I was using about 8x as much peanut butter as was appropriate for such a sandwich. What was I to do in such a situation? Enter: The Uncrustable, a premade and packaged PBJ, stored in the freezer (which you were SUPPOSED to thaw before eating, but I definitely ate frozen more often than not, similar to cold Poptarts vs ones cooked in the toaster) which I first discovered in 2005, and immediately fell in love with, because it instantly took me back to my high school days of perfectly proportioned PBJs, wrapped and ready for me (to which, yes, the best part about eating 1 was the second one I ate immediately afterward). And with that allow to elucidate that, in this metaphor, 5/3/1 is the traditional PBJ and Tactical Barbell is the Uncrustable, and that neither is a declaration of superiority above the other, for as you can clearly see I have great love for both: they’re just simply “same but different”, and with that, let’s explore even further.
WHAT ARE THE COMPONENTS OF THE PBJ?
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| Based off some of these suggestions, you can see why we're struggling with an obesity epidemic |
Operating
under this framework, if we understand these training systems in through the
lens of the PBJ, we’re going to call the strength training the peanut butter,
the conditioning the jelly, and the overall structure of the program as the
bread. Why?
BREAD:
The bread
holds everything together: without that structure, we’re just eating peanut
butter and jelly straight out of the jar with no programming (this would be
doing Crossfit “workouts of the day” daily, and funny enough, was one of the go
to nutritionally approaches of 4x Crossfit champ Rich Fronning). The bread contains and vectors the peanut
butter and the jelly, much as the programming gives guidance to the strength
and conditioning. Bread also gets stale
and moldy, at which point we need to go buy a new loaf.
PEANUT BUTTER:
Strength
training is the peanut butter because, if we’re being real: people see 5/3/1
and TB as lifting programs first with the conditioning being an afterthought,
and even if that’s wrong, it is what it is.
In turn, it’s not unheard of for people to just flat out skip the jelly
and make a pure peanut butter sandwich (I’m guilty of just that, both within
the framework of this metaphor but also just making PB sandwiches).
JELLY:
When done
right, the jelly is the perfect balancing compliment to the peanut butter in
the PBJ. The PB offers that element of
salty and savory that the jelly’s sweetness balances, along with the slickness
there to balance the grittiness of the PB and the bread. But jelly also requires a bit of expertise
and finesse to work correctly, as pro sandwich makes know that it will turn the
bread soggy if applied incorrectly (pro-tip: put the PB on BOTH sides and then
put the jelly ON the PB).
…I promise,
this will get less crazy in a few more paragraphs.
WHY 5/3/1 IS A TRADITIONAL PBJ
Jim most certainly enjoyed some PBJs in his time
5/3/1 is a
programming system, and the books could best be understood as “cookbooks” if I
were to continue with this sandwich metaphor.
They give you the guidelines of how to build your sandwich, but it’s
still on YOU, the sandwich maker, to go buy the ingredients and assemble the
sandwich. In turn, this leaves open a
wide avenue of choices, options and, unfortunately, opportunities to completely
foul up the whole process.
The first
foul up: not actually READING the cookbook, and instead relying on second/third
hand sources to tell you what is in the cookbook, or just plain old winging it based
off what you THINK is right. We see this
all the time in the world of 5/3/1, where people don’t even know that conditioning
is PART of the program, or they’re relying on an app to tell them how to run it
and it’s relying on old crowd sourced information itself. There are all sorts of videos on youtube of people
trying to make AI recipes and turning out culinary abominations: this is no
different.
But for those
that read the cookbook, you need to actually FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS, and this
is the second area where people tend to screw up 5/3/1. Either they don’t follow it because they don’t
understand it (people say Jim is hard to understand, but I imagine these people
never read anything Louie Simmons ever wrote) or they don’t follow it because
they don’t want to. In the case of the
latter, it’s because these people approach the system already knowing how they
WANT to train, and they just keep “modifying” 5/3/1 until it becomes this
terrible Frankenstein’s monster of a program that is exactly how they like to
train, never appreciating that the reason they came to 5/3/1 in the first place
was BECAUSE they needed to do something different, since what they WERE doing
wasn’t working. I was very much one of these people, again
inside and outside the metaphor, making terrible sandwiches with way too much
peanut butter compared to the ratio of bread and running 5/3/1 programs with
WAY too heavy of a training max and a poor balance of main, supplemental and
assistance work along with conditioning.
Ratios matter, in sandwiches and in training.
But assuming
you read, understand and (attempt) to follow the instructions, you can still
screw up by using low quality/poor ingredients.
There is a WIDE range of peanut butters out there, with the Peter Pan brand
notorious for having salmonella, natural brands that are so oily that they run
clear off the sandwich onto your clothes, and highly processed brands that are
more “peanut frosting” than peanut butter.
There are jellies with so much sugar added that they technically qualify
as candy, and honestly some breads out there that are just as guilty. This runs true as far as the metaphor goes:
you can select strength and conditioning exercises that are absolutely
inappropriate for you, the trainee, despite TECHNICALLY being within the realm
of acceptable as far as 5/3/1 goes, permitting you to construct a program that “follows
all the rules” and STILL gets terrible results, just like making a wonderbread peter
pan and eggplant jelly (it’s a fruit..) sandwich.
And
continuing with THAT metaphor even further: ingredients eventually expire as
well, and need to be replaced. Jim Wendler
understands this, and his cookbook even TELLS you to swap programs every 2-5
cycles…but you have to listen to that. You
need to buy and use new bread to change the programming, and get new jars of
peanut butter to swap out the strength exercises and new jars of jelly to bring
in some new conditioning. And though I
DID eat PBJs every day of high school for 4 years, we at least bought new stuff
if the old stuff went bad, but some of you cats running 5/3/1 will do BBB for
14 months straight like you stocked up on a bread sale at your grocery store
but didn’t think to put any of the loaves in the freezer and have just been
eating stale moldy bread sandwiches.
After a few weeks, that’s going to start causing you some serious harm,
and you’re going to move backwards rather than forwards.
Which,
speaking of freezers, let’s get to talking about those Uncrustables now.
HOW TACTICAL BARBELL IS AN UNCRUSTABLE
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| So, I mean, the precedent is there |
Whereas the
5/3/1 books can be understood to be cookbooks, Tactical Barbell is more like a
catalog (which most likely alienates my younger readers to bring up such a
concept) or a grocery delivery website.
No one is telling you HOW to make the sandwich: you just pick which one
you want. Once you do, it’s delivered to
you, and all you have to do is unwrap and eat it.
What are the
implications of this? Ultimately, we’ve
outsourced the sandwich making process to the “experts”, and though the folks
at Smuckers may not be the greatest culinary artists in the world, they for
SURE did the necessary degree of research to make their product as palatable as
possible within the budgetary constructs they set in order to maximize profits
and their return on investment. This
means that the ratio of peanut butter to jelly to bread is exactly “right” in
terms of making the most people possible satisfied with their product by appealing
to the tastes of the greatest percentage of the population. And then they went and maximized shelf
stability of their product by allowing it to be stored frozen, reducing the
potential of spoilage and harm to the consumer.
What does
this mean in the realm of Tactical Barbell?
Like the Smuckers company, K. Black has put together something that
should be able to be applied to the vast majority of trainees in order to satisfy
the general needs of that populace, but per his own admission, the programs in
TB aren’t meant to achieve extremely specific training objectives, like a top
marathon time or elite powerlifting total.
Rather than giving the reader “all the tools” to build their program,
Tactical Barbell has multiple preset options that one selects (Operator, Zulu,
Fighter in the realm of TB1, or General Mass, Grey Man, Gladiator, Fighter in Mass,
etc etc) pairs it with the appropriate conditioning protocol from TBII or other
source materials, and then executes it until the duration of the training phase
before moving onto the next one (Operator-Mass-Specificity via Mass Protocol,
or the fully fledged out “Activation” from TBIII). We don’t need to be making any sandwiches
here: we just unwrap and eat.
But continuing
the metaphor even further: there isn’t just ONE Uncrustable, much like there
isn’t just ONE Tactical Barbell program.
And that’s how we seamlessly move between the Tactical Barbell programs:
one we’ve eaten all the uncrustables out of one box, we order a new flavor and
start with that one. This is the periodization
of OMS or Activation understood through the lens of PBJs: there are PB and honey
uncrustables, PB and raspberry uncrustables, PB and Nutella, and yes: even just
plain PB uncrustables, similar to how we can have TB programs built to
emphasize mass, strength, conditioning, power, strength endurance, etc. The difference between how 5/3/1 handles this
and TB is that the Uncrustable is STILL prebuilt to the specs designed by Smuckers:
they’re just a different flavor, where with 5/3/1 we’re having to build it from
scratch each time and hoping we know what the hell we’re doing.
And therein
is the fundamental difference between the two systems: 5/3/1 allows the reader
the necessary degree of latitude to be able to achieve a wide variety of
specific training goals, as evidenced by Vincent Dizenzo using it to achieve a
600lb raw bench press across various weight classes or how Jim himself uses the
system to train highschool football players.
However, this freedom is predicated upon the premise that the individual
knows how to actually make a decent sandwich in the first place. As I’ve demonstrated on multiple occasions: I
cannot make a decent PBJ. Both the
actual sandwich, and through this metaphor, the training program itself. Left to my own devices, my bread is basically
a saltine cracker on one side and a tortilla on the other, ineffectively
holding behind a tsunami of peanut butter alongside a small river of jalapeno and
pickle jelly. I have to rely on someone
else to make me a sandwich, while it’s MY job to simply dutifully eat them and
make sure I buy a new box in time to open up when the old one runs out. And THIS is why I’ve stuck with Tactical Barbell
for 2 years and don’t see myself changing any time soon.
IN SUMMARY/THE WAVETOPS
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| Don't let this man down: have some PBJs |
5/3/1 is the
traditional PBJ. It’s on you to make
sure you select the appropriate program, movements, and conditioning protocols
for your goals, and to then rotate all of these as appropriate in order to
continue to progress and grow without experience the consequences of “going
stale”
Tactical
Barbell is the Uncrustable. You open one
box, open the package, and start eating.
The box could be Strength, Mass, Conditioning or Base Building, but once
you finish the box, you open a new one and get started with that one. The ratio of strength to conditioning is
already established, as is the frequency of training and all the other
variables: we just have to do what we’re told and we’ll do just fine.
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