“THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH TIME TO DO IT RIGHT, BUT THERE IS ALWAYS ENOUGH TIME TO DO IT OVER”

The quote for today’s post comes by way of John W. Bergman, a retired Lieutenant General in the United States Marine Corps turned politician, and it is of no shock to me to find that such an outstanding quote comes from a Marine, because god bless them and I’m glad they’re on our side.  I still talk about how much it imprinted on me that Marines eat a meal of steak and eggs after completion of “The Crucible” because it is “A warrior’s breakfast” and, in turn, whenever I eat that meal I feel a connection to these warriors…but I’ve already digressed here.  I love this quote not just for it’s originator but for the message it contains, and how incredibly applicable it is to those in the physical transformation sphere.  At age 40, after 26 years of training in some manner, I have a degree of patience one tends not to observe amongst the younger population, simply because they do not have the experience I have to know that we DO have plenty of time in this pursuit, that there IS no real urgency, and that, often, all we can do is plant the seed and wait for it to grow.  We cannot rush the process, and funny enough, in attempting to do so, we tend to actually make things move SLOWER rather than faster.  And that’s the ultimate irony of all of this: so often, these efforts that trainees undertake in the pursuit of saving time end up COSTING them time, and if they had simply done things correctly the first time, they’d be SO much further ahead of the game than they end up being.  Success leaves clues, but, unfortunately, experience is a cruel mentor, as we have to wait until the hot stove burns us before we learn not to touch it, no matter what those who have been burned before try to warn us, and, in turn, here I am futilely attempting once again to impart the wisdom of my experience unto those future stove touchers because, in turn, it appears that I myself have not learned from my own experience yet.  But here we go: once more unto the breach dear readers.

That was always my experience with Ikea

The most frequent sin I see in regards to the attempt to save time having the reverse effect is, of course, in the pursuit of gaining muscle.  This should be the simplest physical pursuit (NOT the easiest, quite the opposite, but that’s also probably one of the contributing variables) a young trainee can engage in: lift weights, try to lift heavier weights, and when you can’t lift heavier weights, eat more food until you can.  That’s, quite literally, how it works.  Bruce Randall demonstrated that you can take that approach for YEARS and actually DOUBLE your bodyweight in the process if you are so inclined, and Paul Anderson achieved something quite similar, as did Doug Hepburn.  But, in turn, those individuals also demonstrated something else about the process: you’ll put on bodyfat when you eat a lot of food.  Which, again, should be of NO surprise to anyone with the most basic of understanding of biology and metabolism…yet this one fact is so ABHORRENT to many a young trainee that they put their fingers in their ears and go “la la la la MAINGAINING” in the hopes of chasing away the bodyfat boogieman so that they can piles on slabs of muscle without an ounce of bodyfat blurring their Instagram ready abs.

 

Which yeah: I’ll take the potshot at social media here, because it’s primarily responsible for this epidemic among younger trainees.  Prior to everyone ALWAYS being on camera ALL the time, there was an understanding that physiques themselves were seasonal, with a bulking and cutting season factored into anyone’s plan who cared to actually achieve physical greatness.  Arnold lost his abs in the off season, and he wasn’t alone.  To the point that some bodybuilders in the magazine eras actually took to have photoshoots done with multiple outfits for hundreds of shots that they could leak out over the course of the year to create the ILLUSION that they walked around contest ready year round as a method to SABOTAGE their competition in attempting to do the same: effectively robbing them of their off-season gains.

The internet would call this "fat" these days

 

And there it is!  The dudes in the 60s and 70s understood the value of the off-season bulk so much that they tried to STEAL it from their competition, and meanwhile young trainees are doing it to themselves on purpose!  They refuse to actually eat enough food to CAUSE muscular development to occur, because this tends to require ALSO eating enough food to cause bodyfat to accumulate in SOME manner.  So they engage in a 16 week “muscle gaining” training block, only to gain…no muscle.  BUT at least they were training really hard during that block so now they’re exhausted AND their hormones are out of whack because they’re a bubbling font of cortisol with no meaningful nutritional intervention in place to aid in recovery.  Why did they suffer for these 16 weeks to achieve nothing?  So that they wouldn’t have to go on a cut of course!  Why?  Because time spent cutting is time NOT spent gaining muscle.  Ok, that tracks…but isn’t time spent NOT gaining muscle ALSO time spent…not gaining muscle?  Didn’t we do exactly what we DIDN’T want to do IN our attempt to not do the thing?  Holy cow that’s a lot of negatives.  Let me see if I can dig us out of this hole.

 

We were trying to save the time of the cutting phase by not putting on enough fat during the gaining phase to need to cut, operating under the premise that this would mean MORE time we could spend gaining muscle.  But if we’re doing a 16 week gaining phase and then an 8 week cutting phase (a 2:1 ratio), This allots for 32 weeks a year to gain, 16 weeks to cut, and 4 weeks of fudgery (I imagine those could just be deloads between phases, but god forbid you suggest a DELOAD to this generation of trainees).  Ok, let’s do some more math here.  If muscle is 75% water, this means every pound of muscle you build is 4lbs of bodyweight total.  Lean bulking advocates quote lots of numbers, but let’s say that they’d all be comfortable with .5lbs of WEIGHT gained per week.  Assuming this weight is 100% muscle and water, no fat whatsoever (already impossible), this would mean putting on .125lbs of MUSCLE per week, OR .018lbs per DAY.  That’s 8g of muscle per day.  If we took that extra 16 weeks we “waste” by cutting and invested it 100% into gaining muscle, this means we get to put on an extra…2lbs of muscle that year.  THAT is what all of our diligence bought us.  THAT is what we get for weighing our toothpaste to make sure we didn’t accidentally overshoot our macros and put on “too much” bodyfat.

Except in this version, 6 weeks later, we're STILL getting sand kicked in our face at he beach

NOW consider, instead, what we’re missing out on when we do, in fact, squander those 32 weeks a year.  If we actually DID eat enough to maximize muscle growth during that time, we’re earning that 4lbs of muscle and, with it, 16lbs of bodyWEIGHT total each year, alongside whatever fat comes along for the ride.  And since we actually ATE well enough to fuel hard training sessions, we trained hard enough DURING those 32 weeks that some time spent cutting away the fat with some easier training is going to feel refreshing AND it’s going to give us a whole host of biological and metabolic benefits, such as improved systemic recovery, greater insulin resistance, a ramped DOWN metabolism so that it’s no longer an arm’s race to mainline food into us to gain (check out Bruce Randall’s legendary eating feats for some reference), etc.  But, here again, the attempt to save time will inevitably force the trainee to waste time, because if you ever want to see a trainee in a crisis, find a trainee looking to lose some bodyfat.

 

Bodyfat loss is NEVER on a “take it as it comes” schedule, but instead ALWAYS a crisis.  People always need to lose the fat YESTERDAY, and they’re willing to do WHATEVER it takes to make that happen…except be patient.  And the fitness industry thrives on this crisis through predatory business practices targeting these folks in crisis.  No one is selling “get abs in 2 years” but instead “lose 30lbs in 30 days” and other “get fit quick” schemes, and people gobble them up, because desperate people are willing to suspend disbelieve in the place of hope, which is how “the lottery” exists.  So IF a trainee somehow actually permits themselves to put on a little bodyfat during the gaining process, they completely undo any benefit they obtained FROM gaining by attempting to employ what is all too accurately referred to as a “suicide cut”.  

The sad thing is, this WAS supposed to be a punchline...

 

We’ve all seen these, 2-3 a day training schedules, hours of cardio, a diet of protein powder and lettuce, etc.  We’re going to burn off ALL this fat in WEEKS, if not DAYS, so we can get RIGHT back to gaining.  And we’ve also all seen the outcome of these approaches, primarily by way of the recent “Biggest Loser” documentary on Netflix, but even before that, yo-yo dieters were a well known phenomenon.  IF this person manages to see the diet all the way to the end, they end up stringy and strung out, with their hormones completely tanked, and though they are a SMALLER version of their previous self, they are not a LEANER version of that self.  They just hemorrhaged all that lean tissue they had spent time building.  And they are prone to fits of binge eating, which not only reverses the weight loss but tends to result in “bodyfat OVERSHOOTING”, wherein the body accumulates MORE bodyfat than what was lost as it’s attempting to rapidly re-acquire the lean tissue it lost, for it’s far easier for the body to BUILD that fat vs the lean tissue.  So now the trainee ends up in a worse place than where they started, ensuring they’ll need an even LONGER cutting phase if they want to lose a similar amount of weight, to say nothing of the fact that FIRST they’ll need to have engaged in a gaining phase in order to rebuild all that lost lean tissue in the first place.  In attempting to rush the fat loss, they’ve put themselves WAY behind schedule.

 

Because as Dan John says, the body has to be “nudged” toward fat loss.  And this IS a revelation from Dan, who has on previous occasions mentioned the need for short intense fat loss phases ala the Velocity Diet and Tabata Front Squats, but it’s proof of concept of the evolution of thought and wisdom of experience in the training realm.  Those short blitzes can be a helpful “running start” into a fat loss phase, but ultimately it’s gradual and sustainable modifications paired with appropriate training stimulus that wins the day.  And again: how incredibly unsexy.  No one is selling THAT program.  But that’s because it’s poor job security to give away the keys to the kingdom when you can INSTEAD sell people on the idea of maingaining and suicide cutting so that they’re always getting strung along for the next “fix” for the very problem YOU created.

An arms dealer selling to both sides sets themselves up for perpetual business

 

And I haven’t even touched the training aspect of this, but I’m already 2000 words deep, twice as long as a traditional post.  So here I am “not doing it right” the first time and putting myself in a place we’re I’ll have to write another post to get all my thoughts captured, but take the lessons from what we’ve seen here.  The trainees that try to avoid fat gain so that they can spend longer building muscle end up achieving neither outcome, while those that attempt to rush the fat loss process so that they can RETURN quickly to the muscle building process put themselves FAR off the timeline.  There’s no shortcut or replacement for time and patience, and those who are effectively able to implement and utilize those tools are those that are able to succeed “the first time”.