Welcome back! Now that I am ACTUALLY 41, and no longer the sham I was when I posted the first entry in this series, allow me to continue to bloviate on the things I currently believe, along with those things I’ve “learned” or re-learned over this last year.
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| It's amazing how profound a comedy about penis jokes could be |
· To coincide with the previous post’s ending thought on metabolic flexibility being the key to health/performance, fasting was the missing “lever” in my nutritional pursuit. I’ve written previously about how fasting is liberating, as we’re no longer beholden to a fixed eating schedule or slaves to our blood sugar. However, the reason fasting was missing was BECAUSE I lacked the metabolic flexibility to be able to effectively leverage it. Fasting should NOT be about denying hunger and white knuckling until the next meal. That isn’t fasting: it’s starving. Starving is NOT how one becomes healthy or fit: it’s part of a process of dying. Fasting should serve as the opposite, and be part of a process of thriving, which tends to mean it serves as the counter-balancing force to feasting. Which is what ties into the metabolic flexibility portion above. When my body wasn’t able to effectively utilize fat as a fuel source, if it I went longer than 30 minutes without eating, I’d be overcome with voracious hunger and unable to function until I satiated it. Fasting was completely non-viable: I was starving. With the flexibility restored, I can eat a large meal, walk away satiated, and not eat again for another day or more. And with that tool, it’s incredibly easy to modulate nutrition to suit whatever goal I have. If I want to be leaner, I just fast for longer. If I want to gain weight: shorter fasts. And this simplicity so perfectly suits my “high speed/low drag” philosophy of nutrition and training. Living by a calorie tracker just plain doesn’t suit me, nor does walking away from the table still hungry. Being able to eat until I am satisfied and then not eat again until I’m ready for another meal is incredibly simple and frees up bandwidth. I wish I had discovered this earlier, but at the same time, I needed to be in a healthy enough state to be able to implement it.
We are going to want to get this number up
· Coinciding with dedicated timelines
for training phases, another big “ah hah” for me is “make the method the
goal”. Most of these things I’m writing
about here I’ve written about at length in other posts, so I’ll not fully
rehash that here and just go with the wavetops.
Rather than saying “I’m going to gain .5lbs per week during this gaining
phase”, which is making the outcome the goal, I believe the way forward is to
make the METHOD the goal, and, in turn, strive to not deviate from the method
throughout the entire duration of the training phase, thus combining the two
principles. So if I’m in gaining phase, it would be “I’m going to
execute the Grey Man program, lifting weights 3x per week and doing
conditioning 2x per week, while ensure I eat twice a day on lifting days and
once a day on conditioning days”, and in turn the goal is to get as many consecutive
days together as possible sticking with the plan. This means, I don’t step on the scale one
week, see “too much gain” and decide to completely change the plan in a moment
of freakout. I step on the scale,
collect the datapoint from it, and continue to execute the method without
deviation. Once I reach the end of the
timeline, my consistency with the method will determine my success. The more consistent I remain: the better the
outcome.
Yeah, this is most trainees when it comes to volume
· “Enough” training/nutrition is, sadly, less than what most meatheads really want. This is something I heard Justin Harris mention on Jon Heck’s podcast (specifically the training portion), and the older I get, the more I appreciate it. There is a difference between recoverable training and effective training, and just because we CAN recover from training doesn’t mean it’s what we need. And I fully understand and appreciate the notion that diminishing returns are STILL returns, and that the dudes willing to do the extra 80% of work to get the 20% of missing gains on the 80/20 rule ARE going to come out further ahead than those of us looking to do “enough”, but having been on both sides of that spectrum, I appreciate that even IF we can recover: there will still be a cost. Perhaps it’s a downstream effect hormonally, or perhaps it’s the cost of that extra time spent training one quality that could have been invested toward another (getting 80% in 2 realms by vesting 20% effort twice, vs 100% in one realm by vesting 80% once), or perhaps it’s the risk of burnout, but in whatever capacity, I’m appreciating what it is I can achieve and accomplish while vesting a fraction of the time I had in the past. And, as much as it hurts my inner fat kid and love or Bruce Randall, I’m also finding I need far less nutrition to “feed the machine” than I’d like to believe…but, thankfully, fasting continues to be a great lever there, as I can consolidate all of my nutritional demands into one meal and feel satisfied with that feast, vs if I parsed that out over the span of several meals.
Yes, in the 90s, we were so extreme we had glow in the dark dominos to knock over
· Linking a lot of these ideas together
(and, in turn, being somewhat poetic) is the notion I’ve realize that workouts
should set up success for OTHER workouts, rather than detract from them. Which, again, most of the rest of the world
already figured out, but I spent a LONG time training in a manner that I can
best describe as “antagonistic” rather than harmonious. I’d perform some sort of absolutely
ballbuster of a weight training session, only to chase after it with a
ridiculous conditioning workout, and then just repeat the process until
something broke, calling the down time a “deload” before starting it up
again. The idea of an “easy day” was
alien to me, because it was time wasted.
I saw it as an opportunity cost: 20 minutes spent doing an easy rower
workout was 20 minutes I could have spent doing some sort of terrible Crossfit
style WOD that absolutely floored me. If
I wasn’t redlining, then it meant I was regressing, right? Now, I look forward to my 20 minute easy
rower workouts, not JUST because it means not having to feel like I’m dying,
but because the NEXT weight training session I do is even better than the
previous one. I come into it better able
to execute, fully recharged and refreshed, which allows me to absolutely crush
it and grow, whereas before I was just barely clinging on and surviving. Everything should fit together harmoniously,
balancing each other out, like a string of dominos setting up the next block to
fall. There are times when we run things
into the red, but it’s for a purpose, with a plan, which compliments achieving
the overall goal. And those easy
workouts we do ARE making us better: they lay down the foundation for GREATER
output when the time comes TO run us into the redline. Sometimes, we need to take a few steps back
to get a running start for a big leap forward.
I’ll
conclude here for now, while looking forward to seeing what this year will
bring and what lessons I’ll learn.
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