Those of you who either grew up in the 90s or are into the retro video game scene know that early 90s Nintendo games were a certain kind of difficult. “90’s difficult”, people will say. Home video games were still a pretty new medium for entertainment, having just rebounded from the crash of ’83, and many companies were just getting their legs under them in the home console game and sort of learning as they went. And a big part of this learning process was dialing in the appropriate degree of difficulty for a game to make it challenging enough to be entertaining without being so difficult that it was impossible to play. And game developers failed at this task. Epically. To the point that one often wondered if there even WAS any sort of playtesting before these games were foisted upon the public. “Contra”, “Battletoads”, “Silver Surfer”, these “games” were the Omaha beach of 90s gamers, responsible for many lives lost and controllers destroyed in a fit of rage. Then, one glorious day, Galoob, a company with lots of ingenuity and little scruples, gifted our generation with “The Game Genie”. This nifty little device clipped directly onto the Nintendo cartridge (which already enhanced gameplay by allowing a shaper connection to the 72 pin connector of the typically flimsy NES console) and, through some sort of programming sorcery, allowed us gamers to put in codes that made the impossible games FINALLY survivable. Unlimited lives, unlimited continues, unlimited health bars, unlimited time on the clock, full power ups from the start, etc. People liked to refer to these things as “cheat codes”, but here’s the thing: this wasn’t cheating, it was getting even! These games started out SO blatantly stacked against us gamers that we NEEDED the Game Genie just to have a shot of actually PLAYING them: let alone beating them! And that, in turn, is what Super Squats gave to us out here in the realm of physical transformation: a shot. Super Squats isn’t a gaining cheat code: Super Squats finally made the game playable.
"Video Game Enhancer" sounds like the kind of marketing you'd see on suspect supplements
How did
Super Squats do this? Much like how the
Game Genie removed obstacles of gameplay, Super Squats removed obstacles of
physical transformation. To start,
Randall Strossen, a PhD in psychology, ABSOLUTELY uses the book to brainwash
the trainee in order to ensure compliance.
And as Stan Efferding would tell us many decades later: “Compliance is
the science”. Because what we’ve
observed through many decades, if not centuries, of physical transformation is
that the most important thing is showing up, and to KEEP doing that over a long
and sustained period of time. The
details are inconsequential if the consistency isn’t in place. And Randall brainwashed the trainees into
believing a few key things that were crucial to the success of Super Squats
and, in turn, physical transformation as a whole: that all the growth was in
the last rep of 20, that milk was magic, and that, with enough breathing
between reps, we can always add 5 more pounds compared to our previous
workout. These were his Game Genie
codes.
That first
code: all the growth is in the last rep of the 20 rep set of squats. What Randall was doing was explaining the
concept of “pushing close to failure” that is one of the key principles to
hypertrophy training. Decades later,
science would continue to confirm this notion, and though it’s absolutely true
that one does not NEED to train close to failure to grow (look at the physiques
of Olympic level male gymnasts), it’s definitely the FASTER way to achieve
hypertrophy compared to training away from failure (look at the TIMELINE it
takes to achieve the physique of an Olympic level male gymnast). However, trying to convey the significance of
this fact to trainees can become challenging, as one can observe in the current
era of social media influencers. You
tell a trainee that training to failure is important for growth, and they’ll
pick exercises that are EASY to fail on in order to make sure they get there,
and then they’ll STILL phone in the effort and just sorta quit the set when it
starts to suck. OR you run into the
dudes that are totally unboard the failure train, and just grind themselves
into the dirt session after session and have no way to grow because they have
no way to recover. Dr. Strossen
simplified this by just saying “All the growth is in the 20th rep of the set of
squats”, ensuring that the trainee would NOT quit before they got to 20,
pushing as close to failure as they possibly could WITHOUT actually failing. And anyone who has run Super Squats KNOWS
what happens if you fail on any rep shy of 20: you spend the next 47 hours
OBSESSING over getting that 20th rep “next time”, and then you roll back into
the gym and crush it. With this simple
code, Randall was able to convey the significance of training close to failure
with a challenging movement and the appropriate amount of weight (“take what
you squat for 10 reps and do it for 20”).
He cut through SO much debate and silliness and just got to what
matters.
 |
| Promising 30lbs of muscle in 6 weeks kinda helped with compliance as well |
His second
code: “GOMAD”. Milk is magic, drink a
gallon of it a day. What was he doing
here? He was giving trainees a “no
count/no track” nutrition protocol for gaining.
In this current era of smart phone apps, it’s hard to imagine there was
an era where tracking nutrition input was laborious: requiring the reading of
labels and actual BOOKS with nutrition information on it, and then hand jamming
all that into a notebook with a calculator to figure out your intake. There’s a reason I DON’T do that: it was the
era I grew up in. But by giving trainees
the task of drinking a gallon of milk a day, Randall created a SMART nutrition
goal (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time restricted) that would
provide all the nutrition needed to benefit from the program, ESPECIALLY when
paired with normal daily meals. There’s
nothing magical about milk: it could have been the Building the Monolith diet
of a dozen eggs and 1.5lbs of ground beef, or it could have been the Paul
Carter Blue Collar diet suggestion of adding 2 PBJs between meals, but no
matter the case, this Game Genie code equipped the trainee with the tools to
fuel training, recover from training, AND have the nutrition to build muscle
from the training.
The other code was adding 5lbs to the bar and breathing enough between reps to keep progressing. Selecting the squat was a genius move for this protocol, as Dan John has revealed in his own high rep squat program “Mass Made Simple” that, by nature of the bar being on the back rather than in the hands, there’s a bit of a physiological disconnect such that we don’t run into the normal governors one encounters with other resistance training movements. If you try to get “one more rep” on bench, deadlift, chin ups, etc, we can fall flat and fail. But on the squats, you take enough time between reps (via breathing squats!), dive down, and, somehow, like a miracle, you come back up again. And BECAUSE you’ve been brain washed, if you ever DON’T come back up, you NEVER think it’s because you’ve reached the limit of your abilities: instead, it was either you didn’t drink enough milk, or you didn’t breathe enough between reps, so, in 47 hours, you come back READY to do it all again. And when you succeed, you slap another 5lbs on the bar and do it all over again. Randall simplified progressive overload AND made it achievable AND created a positive feedback loop wherein each time we go to the gym, we can add weight, which makes us stronger so that, when we go back to the gym, we CAN add the weight.
It's just about as simple
The book put
in one more SECRET code: the 6 week 5x5 follow on program one is supposed to
run AFTER Super Squats…which no one ever does (guilty). BUT, if implemented, what Randall did was
create a simple and sustainable periodization approach to continue to
self-perpetuate the positive feedback loop of physical transformation that
Super Squats Game Genied into success.
Because, again, we see this with trainees currently: they want just ONE
program, and to run it forever, because they don’t want to bother
thinking. By equipping the trainee with
a second program focus on low reps and strength building, Randall created a
very simple 6 week to 6 week phasic training approach of accumulation and
intensification which, in turn, SHOULD coincide with a cyclical nutritional
protocol as well (as one need not be drinking a gallon of milk a day if NOT
doing 20 rep breathing squats). And, as
periodization is SUPPOSED to accomplish: that strength training block SHOULD
allow the trainee to lift even MORE weight on their bodybuilding lifts when
they return to the breathing squat program.
All this to
say that there wasn’t ever anything magical about Super Squats: the real magic
was the MIND magic that Randall Strossen employed to simplify the core tenets
of successful physical transformation.
He got the trainee bought in, and then took these complex concepts and
presented them in an easy to follow protocol in order to ensure compliance,
which resulted in observable success, which perpetuated even further
compliance. And after having read the
book 20 years ago (holy christ how did I get so old?) and run the program 3
times, I’m able to see and appreciate these codes for what they are. I’ll still always suggest this program as a
paradigm breaker, and I feel like every trainee owes it to themselves to do it
one time, because, much like running the Game Genie in the 90s, it can be
useful to use some codes to understand how to even PLAY the later stages of the
game before you go and try to tackle it “as intended”.