Last year, I wrote a post about “Things I believe at age 40 in the year 2025” because both of those numbers seemed significant from a “base 10” perspective, and with my birthday approaching next week, it seemed like a good gift to myself to be able to refresh that idea and write about the things I’ve “learned” or rediscovered during this year. This may, in fact, become a great idea rolling forward, doing a “year in review”. However, in true “me” fashion (boy I’m using a lot of quotes in this intro), I started writing and, what SHOULD have been just some quick bullet points, turned into single paragraphs that could be posts in and of themselves. So I’m chunking this out, allowing myself to write before AND after my birthday, to document the things that, at this moment in time, I currently believe. And what that having been established: here goes part 1.
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| I gotta say, it was kinda false advertising to put a dude on the cover who wasn't using the training style in the book... |
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It was THIS year that I finally figured out
something that I’d “known” all along but wasn’t intentionally implementing:
base training phases around timelines/deadlines rather than milestones. The very first time I really pushed myself
hard with lifting, deciding that THIS was going to be “my thing” and that I was
going to put martial arts on the backburner for 15 years, I made it a goal to
get my bodyweight up to 220lbs. I was 21
years old, 5’9, Kroc was all over the net, was ALSO 5’9, and competed at
220lbs, so, of course, if I weighed that much, I’d be as jacked and strong as
Kroc…even though I was EATING like early 2000s Dave Tate and following the Elitefts
Basic Training manual (which is honestly still a great book, but it wasn’t how
Kroc trained). I engaged in this in a
long, drawn out 9 month campaign of eating copious amounts of fast food and
baked goods while maxing out once a week thinking I was doing Max Effort work,
and eventually pushed my bodyweight to 217lbs before I had to put everything on
hold to move to a new location…dropping 10lbs of bodyweight over the process
and hurting my back so bad on my first new workout that I gave up deadlifting
for 3 years to let it heal. Much later
in my life, after a similar gaining phase where I was attempting to put 75lbs
on my keg clean and press in 12 weeks (that number will come up later), I
decided to see how lean I could get, and chased that leanness dragon WAY too
far down the rabbithole (do dragons GO down rabbitholes?), cut to a point where
I could watch my pancreas excrete insulin, and absolutely wrecked my hormones
in the process. In both cases, my
mistake was having no determined end date for the process, instead chasing an
end STATE and deciding I was just going to chase it for however long it took to
get there. What this did was set me up
for a negative feedback loop. Yeah, at
the START of the process, I was getting a wonderful return on investment for my
effort, but the longer I engaged on these protracted campaigns, the worse it
got. Hormonal responses to
training/nutrition blunted, as my insulin sensitivity crashed in that weight
gaining phase whereas my testosterone was plummeting during the fat loss
phase. My metabolism was ramping up to
unsustainable levels in the weight gain phase and crashing during the fat loss
phase. What I, instead, needed to do was
say “I’m going to spend the next 16 weeks chasing muscle building” or “I’m
going to dedicate the next 12 weeks to fat loss”, and then, no matter WHAT my
end state was at that time, shut off the phase and move on to the next
one. This would have created a necessary
degree of urgency to prevent meandering during the phase while ALSO putting me in
a state wherein I didn’t have a lot of damage to undo as a result of a
prolonged stressed period on my body.
And, of course, it allows for periodization, which I’ve written at
length of the benefits, which is exactly what improves that return on
investment.
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| Always trust this man for sound wisdom |
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The above is a good transition into the
realization that “the harder you push, the slower you go”. We all love to think that intensity is the
solution to all problems, but I needed to listen to myself after all this time:
“effort, consistency and time”. Those
weren’t in order of importance: they’re ALL parts of the triforce, and trying
to lean into one to obviate the other doesn’t work. The effort has to be there, sure, but once
enough is applied, MORE doesn’t make things better: it tends to make it
worse. The muscle will be built in time,
the fat will be lost in time, but trying to make it go faster by going harder
makes it go slower: we damage ourselves hormonally by training too hard and no
longer get the anabolic response we’re looking for. We crash our body’s metabolic processes by
trying to diet too hard and put us in a state where we’ve run out of runway to
cruise down toward our leanness goals.
We overtrain conditioning so that we CAN’T recover between workouts, etc
etc. “If some is good, more is better”
is foolishness. And tying this together
with the above, I’m a big fan of Tactical Barbell’s 3 week long work capacity
block, because whenever we REALLY feel like we need to do something stupid, 3
weeks is at least a short enough timeline that we won’t damage ourselves too
much.
Despite the inclusion of carbs and fats, this is NOT an example of metabolic flexibility
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“Metabolic flexibility” ultimately seems to be
“the goal” as far as health and performance goes. This refers to the notion of having a body
that can seamlessly transition between using carbs and fats as a fuel source. This seems like something that SHOULD be a
“duh” sorta thing that ANY human can do, but the reality is that the majority
of us are so fundamentally and biologically broken that we need to undergo
significant efforts in order to “right the ship” on this one and get in a good
way. I’ve been banging the low-carb drum
for decades, and that’s because, from my own personal experience, I had a
“broken carbohydrate metabolism” from a VERY young age. Insulin sensitivity was low and I was
predisposed to store fat rather than build lean tissue as a carb response. I also had a non-stop voracious appetite, as
my blood sugar was constantly spiking and crashing and registering as an energy
crisis that needed correcting. Those
following my nutritional insanity for years will recall that I was, at one
point, eating something every 30 minutes and basically counting down from
minute 29 until the next meal. It took
an EXTREME overcorrection by means of the Velocity Diet leading into eventually
a carnivore diet in order for me to hard pivot my body to start being able to
metabolize fat as a fuel source again.
And during THAT pivot, my carb metabolism was still broken, as I
remember eating a bunch of white rice, having my mucus membranes explode and
effectively falling into a coma. After
spending enough time in a state of ketosis, I was finally in a place where I
could move between fuel sources, primarily relying on fat as a fuel source but
being able to eat a weekly carby meal without any negatives and, most likely, a
lot of positives as far as hormonal health and energy goes. And THAT is what a healthy and high
performing human SHOULD be able to do: be able to use carbs as a fuel source
when present and, once depleted, shift to fats and use that without any
biological crisis response. Honestly, I
can bloviate on this at length (and most likely will at some point), but this
has been probably one of the biggest “ah hahs” for me this year.
Ok, that’s a LOT of writing already, and I got a few more points to bring up, so stay tuned next week for a follow-up!
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