EDUCATION VS INDUSTRY

Shoutout to Rob Simpson over at T-Nation for posting something in my training log that sparked this bloviation, because it was at that moment that I had a realization that ultimately should have happened about 25 years ago, but suffice to say I’m a slow learner, and that relates directly to what I’m going to discuss here.  There is confusion in the physical transformation space ultimately regarding the function of influencers and the fitness industry in general, as many seek these individuals/institutions as sources of education when, in fact, their entire existence is premised on the exact OPPOSITE of education.  These sources seek to UNeducate you, for doing so is 100% in their best interest, whereas education works against their very existence.  Educators remain outside of this sphere and, in turn, typically need to be sought out, for they are NOT hinging their existence upon you discovering them but, instead, working ultimately toward the goal of you not NEEDING them.  In my discussion regarding gathering around the communal fire, these are the keepers of lore, whereas the industry are the gossipers, the former needing no one else to perform their function, the latter requiring the existence of others, for how can we have gossip without people?  But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself here.  Let me go back to my own education, wherein I learned that, in order to have a discussion, we must first operationalize the terms OF the discussion, so that we all are in agreement over what the words mean before we try to discuss the words.  I believe, you will find, in most matters of online “debate”, it’s simply a matter of people using non-operationalized terms, wherein the words mean one thing to one side and another thing to the other, ensuring there can be no agreement because there is no actual discussion occurring.  So first, let’s talk education.

A fine example of when industry met education

 

What is education?  Well, already, it’s a noun AND a verb, but let’s use it as a verb here, and let’s use it to mean “the process of taking the complex and making it simple”.  COULD we define it as something else?  Most assuredly, either something else entirely or, at least, something more nuanced, but I feel like for the sake of my discussion here, that definition works very well.  Think back to your elementary education (for some of my readers, that won’t require thinking very far back, whereas for others [myself having turned 40 this week], we may have to dust off the cobwebs).  When you arrived at school, their initial goal was to take the complexity of reading and make it simple enough for you to gasp, and they did this by first teaching you the alphabet (through song, because historically man has done much better remembering stuff through song and story vs straight memorization) and all the sounds the letters could make.  This built up into combining letters to make other sounds, and eventually culminated into being able to sound out long strings/chains of these letters into words and being able to read them in print, and now here you are reading the bizarre ramblings of a madman.  They did a similar process with mathematics, teaching you the basics of arithmetic before you cruised through courses on algebra and geometry onto your way through calculus and beyond (or, if you were like me, tapping out at statistics).  Now consider the fact you were around 5 or 6 when you entered elementary school: it was the function of these educators to take complex concepts and boil them down to something a 5 year old can understand…THAT, my friends, is education!

 

But think further: WHY was it that you were getting an education?  As much as we’d like to believe it was out of the goodness of the state (assuming you went to a publicly funded school, please forgive my cultural bias here), it was, ultimately, so that you would not NEED these educators.  Fundamentally, the function of state funded education is to produce INDEPENDENT members of society who are able to function as adults without extra assistance and, specifically, be able to CONTRIBUTE.  Nothing is for free, and the state invested time and money into you so that you would produce MORE for them.  Education’s function was to make you independent and capable, and this theory of education dates back to the Ancient Greeks and beyond, and prior to that it existed on a tribal level, wherein the young were trained by the old so that they could one day grow and become contributing members of the tribe.  Historically, in all instances, the function of education is to create independent people that are able to contribute back to society, and this is achieved by taking the complex and making it simple enough to grasp at a young age so that it can be incrementally built upon.

Although sometimes they instilled discipline in us too

 

The fitness industry does NOT want to educate you.  Doing so completely serves AGAINST their best interest.  Why?  Because it’s in their name: the fitness INDUSTRY.  They are an entity that makes money by people NEEDING them in order to achieve fitness.  Because if there is no need for the industry, then there is no money being put toward it, which means it cases to exist.  So what does the fitness industry do?  The OPPOSITE of education: they make the simple COMPLEX.  They take concepts that should be fundamentally simple to grasp, and portray them as exceedingly complex and unapproachable, and then they SELL you “the solution” to the problem that THEY have created.  And, specifically, they sell you ONLY the solution to the problem: NOT the method used to discover the solution.  Oh no, THAT is a tightly guarded “industry secret” that only THOSE “in the know” are allowed access to (which, if you’re willing a pay a premium fee AND sign a non-disclosure agreement, you may be granted access to).  You know who else did this?  Nintendo, with the call-in 1900 number wherein they would tell you SPECIFICALLY how to beat certain sections of their video games (which secrets that literally could NOT be figured out without outside help), but never did they actually TEACH you about the game.  Answers for sale, but never education.

 

Because physical transformation is simple.  Starting from a baseline of nothing, literally ANY physical activity will achieve results.  Yet, we have members of the fitness industry that want to SELL you the idea about “wasting newbie gains” or “optimizing your first year of training”, because the new trainee is ESPECIALLY easy to prey upon.  They don’t have enough experience to smell bullsh*t when it’s nearby, and influencers know how to make their object far shiner than an educator can.  The same is true of nutrition.  With the current state of how we eat, the simplest AND most effective nutritional intervention is to eat single ingredient foods and drink only water.  Even without calorie counting or macro training, I literally just wrote THE most effective diet possible in one sentence, understanding effectiveness here to mean achieving 80% of the desired outcome and leaving the 20% for a more nuanced approach.  But we have influencers out there who seek to tell trainees that they are actively sabotaging their results by NOT consuming some manner of hyper-overpriced and overprocessed junk supplement and that eating single ingredient foods are making them fat, slow, old and sick.  They sell that it is CRITICAL to track every single bite of food that you take, and THANKFULLY they just so HAPPEN to sell an app that does exactly that, alongside a protein bar with the highest protein the calorie ratio (which, of course, they sell you is an absolutely critical element to achieving physical transformation success).  These people CREATE problems and sell solutions, whereas educators IDENTIFY problems and give you the tools to solve them. 

But sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease

 

Because, again, refer back to the function of education: to create independence.  What is the function of industry?  To create DEPENDENCE.  An industry NEEDS customers, and, therefore, it must go out and create a NEED for whatever it is that they sell.  Tobacco did this by literally getting people addicted to their products, creating a biological need for it that they were all too willing to provide.  The fitness industry does this by taking the simple concepts of physical transformation (hard work, consistency, time/patience/compliance), turning them needlessly complex, and then selling a solution to a problem THEY created.  The tobacco industry created a new problem for it’s customers: suddenly they had an addiction they needed to satisfy.  The fitness industry created new problem as well: we used to know how to eat right and work hard, but now we’re lost.  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for the rest of his life” is a rallying call for educators and a warning for influencers.

 

But how can you tell who you’re dealing with in this landscape?  Who is out there looking to educate vs influence?  It can’t all be about money, because even my favorite authors, such as Dan John, Paul Kelso (RIP), Jim Wendler, K. Black, etc, charge money for their products.  But look at the end results here.  You buy one of their books and you legitimately have the tools you need to train and eat for the rest of your life.  You are educated: their product gave you independence.  An influencer is going to sell you a monthly subscription, or a product that “runs out” (it’s why Bob Hoffman switched from selling power racks to protein powder, because people only ever bought ONE power rack, but they’d buy a new tub once a month.  It’s also why Glenn Pendlay[RIP] went bankrupt selling THE greatest weightlifting equipment in the USA), or simply “answers on demand”.  They’re not going to set you up to be educated: they’re going to set you up to be co-dependent.  But for the REAL test here, go back to your elementary school education.  As much as you may have thought your undergrad professors were brilliant MINDS, your kindergarten teacher was a brilliant EDUCATOR, because they were taking the MOST complex concepts and boiling them down to the SIMPLEST of ideas so that your 5 year old brain could grasp it.  Someone who actually KNOWS the material they are discussing will have that ability.  The greater one understands the material, the simpler they are able to explain it, whereas the more tenuous one’s grasp, the shallower their explanation, to the point that, if one does not understand it at all, and is simply parroting ideas that they’ve heard, upon being challenged, they will lash out at the question asker rather than thank them for the opportunity to further explain.  You all know this first hand.  I know that if my kid asked me why the planets revolve around the sun and don’t just fall out of the universe, I could give them a passing explanation of how gravitational pull works before I eventually say “let’s go read Wikipedia together”, but if they asked me to explain transubstantiation, my 8 years of Catholic education would kick into overdrive and we’d spend WAY too much time on the subject.  Because people who actually know things can talk WAY too long on the subject, and most often will need to be cut off from it.

You either die a hero or live to become a meme

 

Don’t go to the fitness industry seeking education.  That’s not what it is there for.  It’s there to make money off YOU, and if you go to THEM, you’re doing their work for them.  It’s their job to make a sucker out of you: don’t meet them halfway.  Fight them off every step of the way by becoming EDUCATED.  Seek out educators, living on top of mountaintops and shouting out their prophecies to all who will listen…and listen to them.  Let them make you independent, well informed, and able to cut through the crap.  Let them save you money and time by giving you the tools you need in order to be able to succeed WITHOUT anyone else.  Don’t let them give you answers: let them give you the tools you need to make your OWN answers.   

 

 

IT'S NOT SCIENCE, IT'S MAGIC...THE GATHERING PART III

Welcome back once again readers as we continue to explore the links between Magic the Gathering and the world of physical transformation.  Herein lies the final part of our trilogy.  Go back and re-read parts 1 and 2 if you need to re-orient yourself.

Let’s talk about some of those spells now, shall we?  I previously wrote about how the power of the spells themselves tends to directly correlate to the amount of mana we use to cast them.  There are, of course, exceptions, and I’ll discuss those shortly, because this metaphor just keeps on giving, but understanding spells through this lens, we’re effectively looking at training programs and what they represent.  A beginner in the realm of physical transformation does not NEED anything overly complex or precise: they can achieve results with the simplest of training protocols.  And, in turn, quite often, the training protocols for these individuals ARE very simple protocols.  Starting Strength’s 3x5 3 times a week is a classic example, alongside Tactical Barbell’s Base Building protocols, 5/3/1’s Prep School, the beginner program laid out by Paul Kelso in “Powerlifting Basics Texas Style”, and even just the very simple bodyweight/machine/dumbbell circuits that people develop on their own.  And again, understanding mana through the lens of our work capacity/output, we understand why these simple programs work and why there’s no need for anything greater than this.  However, as we continue to progress in training, effectively drawing more cards from our deck and playing lands from our hand, our physical capabilities improve and we outgrow these simple programs.  In the realm of physical transformation, it’s not that they’re “lesser programs” per se: they’re simply inappropriate programs.  The demands they place upon us are unrealistic given our current abilities.  Asking a 100lb squatting to squat 80% for 3 sets of 5 is hard work but manageable: asking an 800lb squatter to do the same is a polite way to ask them to kill themselves.  We can’t win the game by continuing to play these 1 mana spells when we have 10 mana to play with: we need to cast the spells that are appropriate for the amount of mana that we have.

Great work on the 510kg pull Thor, now just do 900lbs for 3 sets of 5 and the workout is complete.

 

This is what makes “advanced programming” advanced: it is programming suited for the physical capabilities of the advanced trainee.  Which is to say: it understands that an advanced trainee CAN’T just go into the gym and lift more weight for more reps today than they did 2 days ago, or else EVERYONE would bench 1000lbs by the time they got out of high school.  Advanced programs find a way to manage fatigue, balance intensity and volume (quite often through a phasic approach), spend time building work capacity, address weaknesses or deficiencies as they develop, etc.  Beginner trainees tend to think that these advanced programs mean achieving advanced gains, but the truth is, for them at their point in training, they’re inappropriate programs and won’t get them as good of results compared to if they stuck with something suited for their current physical capabilities.  Much like how cards that cost more than one mana tend to be a bit more nuanced: instead of being a creature with power and toughness of 1, it’s a creature with a special ability when it gets tapped.  Instead of a spell that simply does direct damage to a creature or player, it’s a spell that has lingering effects, or creates conditions that change the dynamics of play in favor of one of the players.  When you first start the game, victory seems simple: I’m just going to attack with my creature or cast my spell and take away life from the other player.  But as the game goes on further and we get more mana, more complex strategies develop and it's on us to be able to effectively employ our mana to capitalize on these strategies.

 

I said I’d discuss exceptions earlier, so let’s circle back to that.  Typically, simple programs get simple results, and once we’re done with that, it’s time to move on to more complex programming to appropriately progress for our current state.  However, there ARE some programs out there that, despite their simplicity, are able to achieve either incredible results OR are able to be used for LONG durations of training.  Something like Super Squats is incredibly simple, yet throwing a beginner on that is absolutely a baptism by fire and, if they survive, they will come out the other side transformed.  Meanwhile, 5/3/1 or Tactical Barbell are both programs that are incredibly simple to employ (just plug in the numbers and do the workout) yet are built in such a manner that they can effectively be run indefinitely.  These are those cards in MtG that are WAY powerful for how little mana they require: those gamebreaking diamonds in the rough that, upon being discovered, EVERYONE ends up building a deck around them.  And, consequently, there are programs out there that are needlessly complex for how little return on investment they churn out.  From my outside observation, just about every “science based lifting” program out there is failing to achieve it’s goals of physical transformation among those people that pursue these programs, most likely due to a demographic issue that the dudes most inclined to back a “science based lifting program” are the same dudes who lack the meathead capability to just grind through a training program and MAKE it work for them: simply not putting in enough effort to actually achieve the results they’re looking for.  In MtG, we’ve seen all manner of cards that require way too much mana for how little of a result they achieve, oftentimes cards that are victims of rulechanges in the games that invalidate whatever advantage they may have had.  Dave Tate had a comment on this regarding “lost exercises” that youtubers “rediscover”, that being that these exercises got lost because they sucked. 

Nothing goes away forever though

But let’s also get into the realm of discussing the spell types I presented earlier: enchantments vs sorceries/instants.  Aside from summoning creatures to fight for you in Magic, you can also just plain cast magic spells as a wizard.  These spells move/exist at different rates, with enchantments being a spell that, upon being cast, will hang out for the rest of the game (assuming the opposing wizard doesn’t destroy it somehow), while sorceries and instants are spells that, upon being cast, their effect occurs at that moment and then goes away.  A simple example would be an enchantment could say “you take no damage from red creatures”, and that’s now true for every turn for the rest of the game, while an instant may say “you gain 3 life”, and at that moment add 3 life to your life total and that’s it: you don’t get to keep adding 3 life every turn.  There’s more to it than that, but that’s enough for where I’m going to go with this.

 

Because Dan John has a great quote when it comes to supplements “if it works fast, it’s illegal.  If it works, it’s banned.  If it doesn’t work, it’s legal.”  Using that as our cognitive framing, we can understand that instants and sorceries are those spells in the realm of physical transformation that have very quick effects that, in turn, ALSO have short results.  People are so frequently in a rush when it comes to physical transformation, wanting to lose 20lbs of fat and gain 40lbs of muscle while adding 300lbs to their deadlift and they want it done yesterday.  And, quite often, these people go down “the darkside” of pharmaceutical assistance in order to “achieve” these goals, living the phrase “it’s not what you put your body through, it’s what you put through your body”.  Sadly, spending any time on the subreddit r/steroid will show you the sad outcomes of these stories.  The BEST case scenario for most of these dudes is that they spend way too much money on gear and get the kind of results they could have gotten had they invested that same amount on steak and eggs: they were simply too unfit at the start of their journey to actually take advantage of the drugs they were using.  Others aren’t so fortunate, and have to contend with a whole host of side effects, many of which being irreversible.  And, comedy of all comedies, those that manage to achieve any sort of result have to deal with the fact that, once they come OFF the gear, the results go with it, because they had no foundation to build upon at the start of their journey.  “If it works fast, it’s illegal”, but also “If it works fast, it unworks fast too”.  Nothing achieved quickly will ever last, and the body will ALWAYS fight for homeostasis.  Interestingly enough, MtG has a card named “Unstable Mutation”, that gives a creature +3 power and toughness to start with, and then every turn after that it loses 1 power and toughness until it eventually dies…and that’s just really fitting for this example.

Dig that mid 90s artwork

 

Enchantments, on the other hand, are those things we do for ourselves that DON’T have instant effects but, instead, long lasting effects that benefit us through the rest of the game.  In the world of supplements, creatine monohydrate could be one of the greatest examples of an enchantment.  It has clear, understood, well researched effects, yet anyone who has ever used it will comment that it’s not like Popeye eating his spinach.  There isn’t this sudden surge of strength and power with us crushing reps in the gym: we’re simply just a little bit better than we were before.  But that little bit, stretched over a LONG training history, will add up overtime.  “Little and often over the long haul”, another Dan John quote.  Many companies feel the need to package creatine with some sort of stimulant so that the trainee “feels” it working, similar to many pre-workout products, but this is just because we have stupid lizard brains that can’t appreciate small returns that accumulate overtime (which, consequently, pre-workouts are instants/sorceries as well, really stupid, damaging to your overall progress, and a waste of your money: stop using them).  Other enchantments could be things like Vitamin K2 for cardiac health, Fish Oil supplementation, electrolytes: basically all those unsexy supplements that simply allow us to continue living well and training hard WITHOUT turning our skin purple or making our resting heart rate jump 40 beats per minute.  It can also be simple daily habits, like going for a walk (this, for real, is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself for any kind of athlete, and I owe Jamie Lewis for pointing this out to me and Dan John for affirming it, which you could not ASK for a bigger “yin and yang” in the realm of physical training, so those two dudes vouching for it is a surefire sign it’s good for you), prioritizing sleep, getting in some feeder workouts, etc.  Just like how the enchantment’s effect happens every turn, if you’re getting in these activities every day, it’s going to have long lasting positive effects.

 

Alrighty, that was a wild journey: thanks for joining me on it.  I have no doubt that I could continue to write even MORE on the topic, but, once again, it’s fascinating to see how these parallels exist between two seemingly completely opposite activities.  I can tell you from my time playing Magic the Gathering that it did NOT tend to attract the meathead crowd, and that most often these dudes were throwing my own lunch at me in middle school, yet here we find that the mechanics of pretty much every “game” remain the same.  We start out small, build into something bigger, and along the way have to make decisions between overreaching and properly recovering to ensure we can play as long as we can while still winning the game.  Go have some fun.             

IT'S NOT SCIENCE, IT'S MAGIC...THE GATHERING PART II

Welcome back readers!  In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the basics of the game Magic the Gathering and it's application to the world of physical transformation.  Read up here, if you missed out

https://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2025/10/its-not-science-its-magicthe-gathering.html

Let’s just keep on exploring this metaphor now.  If mana is our power source, we tap it to cast spells, and then we have to wait until our next turn to be able to untap the land and then play another one from our hand, we just observed how MtG explained progressive overload, recovery and work capacity…in a game BLATANTLY for nerds.  Check out the cycle: you start with 1 land, you play one basic spell, and now you’re out of mana until the next turn.  The next turn, you get to untap that land (recover), play a new land (build your work capacity), and play a BIGGER spell (progressively overload).  And this cycle will continue each turn ASSUMING you keep drawing lands to play.  What does drawing lands to play mean?  It means SMARTLY doing the programming necessary to ensure that your work capacity improves to be able to match the output you wish to achieve.  If you didn’t put enough lands in your deck to be able to ensure you’re able to keep playing lands each turn, you’re going to eventually exhaust your ability to play bigger and bigger spells.  We see this phenomenon in physical transformation: dudes who REFUSE to take a GPP phase in their training, who just keep running up against the same wall over and over again because they quite simply don’t have the physical capacity to recover from their training and put in MORE input to receive more output.  This is the dude that has had only 3 lands in play for the past 17 turns and has a hand FULL of cards requiring 4 or more mana: they’ll just keep casting the same 3 mana spells and discarding better cards because they’re unfit to play them.

Eventually you need to do a training cycle that hits the legs Strong Guy...

 

The metaphor just keeps going though, because check this out: in the old days of Magic, we had something referred to as “mana burn”.  Basically, if you tapped a land for mana but ended up not using it, you would end up losing life equal to the amount of unused mana you had at the end of the turn.  Sometimes, we’d use this mechanic to exit out of a game we no longer wished to play, but otherwise it was a mechanic that could be carefully manipulated by crafty players to ensure the demise of their opponent.  But in the world of physical transformation, we see that MtG has explained the concept of overtraining/overreaching to us.  Mana is the source of our power: it’s our energy vested toward our goal of “winning”.   Consequently, if we put more effort than our spells can handle, we end up losing some of our own life in the process.  Mana burn is one of the clearest demonstrations of the axion “just because you can doesn’t mean that you should”.  If you are running a “3 mana workout” as it were, you do NOT benefit by putting in 5 mana worth of effort into it.  If your training program calls for 3 light sets of 60% because it’s dissipating fatigue to set you up for a bigger effort, doubling the reps or upping the percentage just because you “feel good” is just giving you some mana burn.  Oh my goodness I really love how this keeps on working.

 

In fact, let’s just discuss how life works in Magic and in…well, life.  The life total of Magic is a total representation of our training age, whereas the deck that we’re playing with is a representation of our chronological age.  Just as we observed with mana burn, some training decisions are going to make us age a bit faster than others.  The game ends when our life reaches zero, and depending on how some of you play the game, you may only be on card 14 of a 60 card deck by the time you get there: never even coming CLOSE to realizing the potential that was within your deck.  Other, smarter, craftier players may actually find themselves at risk of losing the game by running out of cards in their deck while their life total is STILL quite high.  These are those folks in life who found a way to train up until the day they die: the Jack LaLannes of the world, who made fitness a lifetime priority.  Consequently, there are some spells in the game specifically designed to give us MORE life: these are those smart training/nutritional/lifetime decisions that give us a bit more of an extension on our training age.  Basically, Dan John these days is a white mana Magic player, giving us all the tools necessary to try to draw the very last card out of our deck.  Inversely, the black mana of Magic is known as the “sacrifice” color, where players frequently trade away their life total in order to obtain greater power and ability within the game.  These are those training, nutrition, lifestyle and (most likely) pharmacological decisions we make that allow us to fly quite possibly too close to the sun in our pursuit for physical transformation. 

Though water is typically associated with blue mana, make no mistake: this is pure black mana madness

But let’s dive into THAT discussion a little bit as well.  I’ve written previously on this very topic of MtG, how “not losing is not the same thing as winning”, and it’s worth exploring the interplay that can exist between black and white mana (yes, there are other colors in MtG, but they don’t have the duality we’re looking for here, especially when we consider black and white are the exact “yin and yang” colors).  As we discussed, those white mana spells that give us life can most certainly allow us to make fitness a lifetime activity, playing until we run out of cards…but that means we still lost the game.  We WIN the game by reducing the OTHER play to 0 life or exhausting THEIR library of cards.  Which is exactly what the black mana cards can do for us: we can make some sacrifices to our own life total in order to achieve greater power in the game and actually achieve some sort of victory.  But, of course, we run the risk of sacrificing TOO MUCH in the pursuit of victory and ultimately self-destructing before we ever actually achieve our goal.  Quite clearly, we need some semblance of balance between the two forces here.  We need to tactfully employ those black mana spells in the right time and situation WHILE having some manner of white mana spells readily available to undo or, at least, reduce the damage we do to ourselves in the process.  We don’t need to make recovery THE highest priority of our training: RESULTS should be the priority.  However, self-preservation needs to at least FACTOR into our planning process.  If we just spam black mana spells all the time, we burn out, and if all we do is focus on gaining life, we get to die having not actually achieved our goal.  Somewhere in the middle is a reality wherein we got to actually accomplish some physical transformation while also living long enough to actually enjoy it.

IT'S NOT SCIENCE, IT'S MAGIC...THE GATHERING

Settle in folks: this is going to be a long one and an excessively nerdy one, because I had this rambling thought enter my brain at about 0450 this morning after a poor night of sleep due to getting up to take care of our new puppy at 0200 (he’s an adorable male pug named “Luigi”, continuing with my nerdiness).  In fact, in the process of writing this, I realized there’s no way I could contain it within one post that anyone would actually READ in any one sitting, so I’ll chunk it out and give you a chance to marinade on it once a week, similar to John McCallum’s “Keys to Progress” series. 

Based on this artwork, at least SOMEONE over at Wizards of the Coast is a fan of being jacked

Once again, it turns out that ALL games play by the same rules and, fundamentally, physical transformation IS just one of many games we play in life.  In turn, allow me to walk you through how the journey of physical transformation mirrors the game “Magic the Gathering”, first by giving you a crash course in some pre-2000s MtG (because I’m old school like that and don’t like learning new rules) and then bloviating on all the parallels that exist between the two.  For those of you well versed in the gameplay, I apologize for how my brief oversite is going to butcher something you’ve most likely wasted FAR too much time and money on (I know I sure did: this was like heroin for middle schoolers), and for those of you NOT familiar with the game, I apologize for making you read about how to play Magic the Gathering, much like I’m sure I annoyed my father for years trying to explain to him how cool the newest card in my collection was.  So go ahead and grab your PBJs with the crust loving cut off by your mom and your favorite flavor of Capri Sun, because we’re going back to the 90s to learn how the nerds actually figured out how to get jacked WITHOUT relying on science, but, instead, on magic.

 

Ok, my attempt at the briefest of overviews here.  A MtG match is supposed to be a fight between two wizards that are casting spells at each other.  The deck of cards is effectively a spellbook: you start off with 7 cards in your hand and draw a card each turn.  Within this deck, you have land cards: these are the source of your power, referred to as “mana”.  Without lands, you can’t cast any spells: you need mana to cast spells.  You get to play 1 land per turn, meaning that, at the start of the game, you don’t have much power, but as the game goes on, your power increases IF you keep drawing enough lands to be able to play 1 each turn.  Consequently, low power spells require small amounts of mana, and bigger spells require more mana.  To obtain the mana from your lands, you “tap” them (literally turn them sideways), indicating that they have been used, and, in turn, cannot be used again until the next turn, when you get to “untap” them.  Spells themselves range from summon spells (creatures that will fight for you), enchantments (spells that have impacts that last the entire time they are present), and sorceries/instants (spells that have impacts that only last for that turn/moment in time).  Each turn, a player can cast a spell like those listed and/or use some of those summoned creatures to attack the other player/their creatures.  Players each have a total of 20 life to start with, and the game is won when one player either runs out of life or runs out of cards in their deck.  Yes: there is MUCH more to it than that, but that’s enough for now.

I can feel it through the screen

Ok, so now the parallels.  The deck of Magic the Gathering is a representation of genetics AND lifestyle.  We quite literally have to “play the hand we are dealt” in life: that’s genetics.  Sometimes, we draw a great hand and are afforded advantages the other player can’t fathom, and sometimes, we draw a terrible hand and know, from the get-go: it’s going to be a rough game.  We can’t change our genetics, but we CAN set ourselves up to MAXIMIZE our genetics to the greatest extent possible.  In MtG, this is “deckbuilding”.  Because, yes, you CAN just play a random deck slapped together with just the most basic of essentials (reference my post on “starter decks”), but you can ALSO take the time to plan out a deck, select cards that work best with your playstyle, ensure you a solid ratio of lands to spells in order to not find yourself in a situation where you have too much land and not enough spells or vice versa, and ultimately have some sort of logical strategy to win.  For those of us in the physical transformation game, this means things like taking nutrition seriously, our early adolescent athletic history (did you play World of Warcraft until you were 18 or did you actually play some sports?) figuring out the movements that work for our physiology (a 7’2 basketball player probably doesn’t need to squat to powerlifting legal depth), getting adequate sleep, regular sunlight exposure, reduced life stress, regular low intensity activity, etc.  Quite literally, we “stack the deck” such that we can realize the maximum potential of our genetics, so that, even as we play the hand we are dealt, we put ourselves in a situation such that the odds are we’ll have at least a DECENT hand to play.  Some folks are blessed with incredible genetics yet do so little to maximize them that they’re just flashes in the pan: rising to the top of the sport for a year or 2 before crashing HARD and completely fading from existence, while others may not have the best cards but are so talented at managing them that they can play a LONG time among the top of their peer groups.  And some folks are able to pull off both and just absolutely curb stomp the world for an ungodly amount of time.

 

Let’s dive further now.  As I wrote earlier, you start off with 7 cards in your hand, representing effectively how the interplay of genetics and proper prior planning have you set you up for your own personal “ground zero” before you start your physical training journey.  From here, we get to play our first land and quite possibly cast our first spell, representing our first foray into training.  Well, as discussed, these first few spells are going to be VERY basic spells, as that’s what a small amount of mana will afford you.  This is going to be a basic goblin with power and toughness of 1 (it can give and take 1 damage), or a simple spell that does 3 damage to the other wizard, or little things along those lines.  This represents those VERY basic and fundamental workouts we do at the start of our journey.  Why?  Because they’re enough!  You don’t NEED more than that at the start of the game, because, quite frankly, if you DID get more than that, the game wouldn’t last very long, and it wouldn’t be very fun.  Yes, there ARE some folks out there painfully looking for ways to win MtG in one turn, just like the dudes that are out there searching the internet for THE most optimal training and nutrition program out there before they even START training…but neither of those dudes will ever actually be able to have the FUN of “playing the game”.  And, in that regard, they won’t get the benefits OF playing the game: fun, or, in the case of physical transformation: results.  We need to settle in for a few turns to be able to accumulate some more mana to cast some bigger spells.

The irony that this dude was researching the optimal way to gain weight

Alrighty folks, there's a LOT more discussion to be had here, so stay tuned for next week.  

ARMOR BUILDING FORMULA II REVIEW

Like Terminator 2, it's rare for the sequel to surpass the first

Dan John released the sequel to his Armor Building Formula book last week, and I promptly purchased it the day I discovered it was available and read the whole damn thing in one sitting immediately afterward.  Much like my first time reading Super Squats, I found myself saying “I’ll just read the next chapter” over and over again until suddenly I had run out of book.  Suffice it to say, I’m giving away the end of this review by saying right now that, at $17.99 (2 dollars cheaper than the first book), it’s 100% worth buying and reading, irrespective of if you have any intention of running the Armor Building Formula at all.  Just like the Easy Strength Omnibook, though ABFII is premised around the Armor Building Formula, it contains so much general Dan John wisdom and awesomeness that you’re bound to walk away with SOMETHING worthwhile after you make your way through it and, most likely, you’ll have the bug to run one of Dan’s programs when you’re done.  I know I always do.  Anyway, onto the review.

 

WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT?

 

This actually sums it up pretty well

The Armor Building Formula itself is exactly as Dan John describes it: bodybuilding for real people.  That is to say, people with jobs, family obligations, and lives outside of the weightroom.  Armor Building Formula II is not the second edition of Armor Building Formula, but, instead, a sequel to it.  As such, it presupposes that you already know the material from the first book, to include the kettlebell AND barbell programs, and now expands upon it with a variety of different ideas, protocols, tweaks, and some sharing of different manners it’s been implemented by other readers/users.  It’s similar to Jim Wendler’s “5/3/1 Beyond” compared to the original 5/3/1 book.  It contains ways to implement the ABF while training only on weekends, the ABF for fat loss (Dan’s majority focus these days, given his 4 year long journey through that process), ABF for the over 55 crowd, integrating ABF and Easy Strength, ABF in a seasonal approach, and many other side tangents and useful tidbits.

 

WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T ABOUT

 

Yeah, none of this

This is NOT the book for becoming Mr. Olympia.  People have a tendency to read Dan’s programs and go “that’s it?!”  Yes, it is: because it’s ENOUGH.  Which is an idea that Dan talks about in the book.  The delta between the kind of training necessary to simply elicit hypertrophy and improve your quality of life vs the kind of training necessary to absolutely maximize your physical potential is a SIGNIFICANT delta, and it’s not going to be accomplished by going from 3 sets of 10 to 5 sets of 10.  For people that want to train twice a day, six days a week for 2 hours per session, there are books out there and gurus who will gladly fleece you.  Dan’s book never pretends to be the book to get you to the top of the physique pyramid.  Instead, it’s the book that gives you the tools you need in order to succeed at improving your physique while also giving you the permission to go ahead and still live your life.

 

THE CONS

 

The thing is, I'd listen to this story coming from Dan

I know it’s atypical to start with the negatives of a book in a review, but I’m honestly going to be gushing about this positives of this so much I figured I may as well just get these out of the way and not let them detract from why I enjoyed this book so much.

 

·       I literally was in the middle of re-reading the first ABF book when Dan released the second one, which meant I had a very clear ability to compare the two.  In doing so, you will find that Dan repeats stuff from the first book in the second one.  HOWEVER, Dan did not just lazily copy and paste sections from the first book into the second, as a means to pad the book.  Instead, Dan has done something that I’ve been guilty of as well in my own blog: he re-wrote ideas and stories he’s previously expressed elsewhere.  I know that I’ve literally re-written the same blog post on 2 non-consecutive occasions (“More Trouble Than You’re Worth” and “Defeating the Prisoner’s Dilemma”) wholly unaware that I was doing so, and if you listen to Dan’s podcast, you’ll know that he repeats stories and concepts previously expressed with no questions.  This is no fault of Dan’s: if you have a tool that works, you keep using it when the situation arises that requires it.  You don’t get a new tool for the same job.  However, if you ARE familiar with Dan’s work from the previous book, you may feel that you’re getting “shorted”, since some of the book repeats from the previous.  In the case of myself, I’ve said it before: Dan could write a phonebook and I’d read it cover to cover.  He’s got a way with words.

 

·       Not-insignificant portions of the book are comprised of graphs/lists/charts.  They are useful, not simply put there for the sake of bulk, ala Rodney Dangerfield’s character in “Back to School” beefing up his homework.  But, once again, for someone looking at the page number total and expecting a certain volume of reading, you may be disappointed.  Which, again, is a good sign: you wish there was even MORE book to be read.

 

·       As far as editing goes, the book starts out VERY strong and toward the end it seems the effort reduced a little.  Little typos, grammatical errors, a sentence that starts and ends the same way (something like “a good idea is to fast regularly is a good idea”), etc.  Given the state of my blog, I’m not going to hold anyone’s feet to the fire over editing, but I’ve seen enough people cry over Jim Wendler’s work that I figure I’d bring it up.

 

 

THE PROS

 

Honestly, just the nodding fatherly approval of this man is enough

·       “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is an incredibly true statement when it comes to Dan and his work.  I’ve been reading Dan John for at least 17 years, which I know because my wife and I took a cruise for our first anniversary and I bought “Never Let Go” on kindle and drove her nuts because I was glued to my kindle for the majority of the trip, devouring Dan’s words.  However, I was also still a punk 22 year old kid at that point (man time flies) and so much of Dan’s “reasonable, sustainable, repeatable” work fell on deaf ears, while I instead inhaled his stories of the Velocity Diet, tabata front squats and squatting 50 reps with bodyweight on your back.  However, as I grow wiser with experience, I’m so thankful to still have Dan there slinging the same wisdom now that I can actually digest and appreciate it.  If you’re an aging meathead like me, or perhaps a younger meathead ready to learn from the experience of others, this book is going to equip you with the tools necessary to train for the rest of your life WITHOUT having to have quite as many visits to the orthopedic surgeon.

 

·       This is honestly a total “no excuses” book, because no matter your situation, Dan has A way for you to be able to train.  If you only have 1 KB, Dan has you covered.  Same with mixed KBs.  Same if you can only train 1 or 2 days per week.  Same if you’re old, young, male, female, recovering from injury, etc etc.  And it’s paired with some no-nonsense simple nutrition and lifestyle habits (get adequate sleep, drink water, manage stress, etc) stuff that is going to have BIG impacts over the long haul.  Dan is the master at zooming out, finding the stuff that REALLY matters, and emphasizing that.  About the only negative to say about this book is that it would have been so valuable during the pandemic.

 

 

·       Because it’s a no-excuses book, progression is a bit more in the grey compared to something like Tactical Barbell, which can be a pro or con depending on your personality.  I know a lot of folks demand Dan lay down hard rules on how to progress with his programs, but he makes a compelling argument that, without being able to put hands on you and actually get to know YOU, the reader, he’s not going to be able to give you a hardset rule on how much weight to add, how many reps, how many sets, etc.  He leaves it up to you while still providing some solid bumpers to help guide you along the way.  Ultimately, this means, again, you have no reason NOT to be able to employ the system and find ways to progress and grow.

 

·       Dan includes a Q&A section that goes on to answer a LOT of common questions about ABF and help “unstick” people that have gotten a little too fixated on finer details and small obstacles on the way to progress.  There’s no way Dan can foresee all the issues people will encounter along the way (such as needing to explain that, between sets, one is supposed to put the kettlebells DOWN rather than hold onto them), but this should at least curtail a majority of the issues that come up along the way.

 

SHOULD YOU BUY THIS BOOK?

 

It's no lose!

Yes.  100%.  Dan has been on a streak, starting with the Easy Strength Omnibook, and from that, Easy Strength For Fat Loss, Armor Building Formula and now Armor Building Formula II we’ve been blessed to have some of Dan’s greatest work and thoughts all consolidated into one location.  I still am a major fan of Mass Made Simple, as a book and a program, and feel like that deserves some time in the spotlight as well as far as mass building goes, but for sustainable, reasonable and repeatable, the ABF is a winner, and all 5 of those books will easily provide you with the tools to train for the rest of your life.

 

 

LIFE GRADES ON ATTENDANCE

College was good TO me, but was not good FOR me.  I went to an all boy catholic high school, with a very regimented schedule.  I was a 4 year student athlete, starting with football my freshman year before transitioning to wrestling in my sophomore year onward, and when I wasn’t in season, I was in the marching band, and after I got home from school, we would quickly scarf down dinner and get to Tae Kwon Do practice.  This meant that my day was pretty much mapped out from morning to bed time, and I had minimal distractions from the fairer sex to contend with.  I then enrolled in a university with a 70:30 female to male ratio with NO wrestling team nor a band that wanted anything to do with me.  Suffice to say: my schedule was suddenly freed up, and I had many distractions from academia.  One of my classes, in particular, I had cracked the code on: I only needed to go every OTHER class.  Why?  Because our professor would always spend the FIRST half of class going over what he covered in the LAST class, and then would introduce new material in the second half, which, if you’re doing the calculations, means I had TWO opportunities to learn that new material.  However, the only reason this plan worked was because, unlike high school, this professor did NOT grade on attendance.  As long as I was able to demonstrate mastery of the material come the time of the test, my grade would reflect that.  Life, however, is not as gracious as that professor: irregular attendance will ultimately result in a failing grade.  Because folks, high school was honestly trying to teach you a lesson more valuable than the academic material we learned in undergrad: life grades on attendance.

Thankfully for me, THIS isn't true

 

Much like Woody Allen’s quote that “80% of success is showing up” and Dan John echoing a similar sentiment, irregular attendance in the pursuit of our goals is going to result in a failure to achieve them.  Because unlike academics: we have NO option to “cram before the exam”.  This meme is ever present in our culture, with one of my favorite movies of all time, Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School”, giving an outstanding montage of academic cramming before a major comprehensive exam. I know I’ve been guilty of employing the same as well, the notion of filling the brain to the brim of all manner of fact and figure relating to a subject, showing up, purging it all onto a piece of paper, and promptly forgetting everything for the rest of your life.  The outcome of attempting to cram for physical transformation is going to have the same ephemeral result.  We observe this frequently in training facilities: those folks who failed to attend throughout the majority of the year now DESPERATELY trying to cram before the exam of some sort of beach vacation or spring break or homecoming or whathaveyou, slamming 4 hour training sessions on diets of lettuce and water in a futile attempt to be ripped and jacked in a matter of weeks.  At best, they’ll lose about 4lbs, the majority of it being water, while bearing the looks of someone tweaked out of their mind on stimulants, dry, wiry, haggard and scrawny.  But it gets worse…

 

Not only is attempting to cram ineffective: it actively sabotages you.  In one of the cruelest ironies of physical transformation, the harder we try, the worse we get, like some sort of Chinese finger trap.  Oh sure, hard training IS important in order to achieve physical transformation, but it needs to be hard ENOUGH, and once we cross the threshold of “enough”, we immediately start UNDOING out progress.  As per Dan John’s quadrants, when we enter the realm of “train hard-diet hard”, we enter a realm that is ultimately unsustainable: we are existing on borrowed time.  And when we borrow, we ALWAYS pay interest.  As we continue to push our bodies beyond their ability to recover, we incur a debt that will be paid off once we inevitably crash, resulting in a rebound that quite often leaves us WORSE than when we started.  The crash diet we followed in order to try to lean out quickly had us drop significantly more lean mass than had we simply attended diligently, and when the cravings eventually overcome out willpower (which they will), the weight we put BACK on will NOT be mostly lean mass, meaning that we will end up WORSE than how we started: with more fat mass and less lean mass.  To say nothing of how whatever “strength” we accumulated through our ridiculous peaking program will rapidly deplete and our shattered and broken body will need to be rebuilt before we can train reasonably again, taking away training time that could have been better spent on the path to something more sustainable.

Sunvabitch, MtG figured this out so long ago...

 

The meme of the “lazy genius” is so appreciated in our culture because it re-affirms something that we WISH was true: that we can just coast through life without effort and STILL pass the test.  We deride those who actually dutifully attend class, do the homework, work on the project throughout the year rather than saving it all for the last minute as “try-hards”, nerds, and other such derogatory terms, primarily because we want to deny the reality that life grades on attendance…but it is quite simply true.  Large, all out efforts engage in irregular frequency will never beat out consistency over a long stretch.  And the thing is, those large all out efforts MUST be engaged in irregular frequency.  Simply by nature of the demands placed upon us, they’re unsustainable by definition, so attempts to pursue them are destined to fail.  This does not mean that they cannot be pursued every once in a while, when one is in need of some manner of shake up, but to attempt to live in such a manner is an attempt to be truant through the process of physical transformation, and life will be quite cruel in their employment of truancy officers. 

 

And, in truth, we can even observe these lessons IN the realm of academia.  I will shamefully admit that it took until my senior year of undergrad to realize the benefit of gradually working on the end of term paper over the course of the year, rather than saving it all until the night before it was due.  I had convinced myself that the latter approach was the superior one, primarily because I wanted to delude myself into believing this to affirm my own procrastination and laziness, but I operated under the premise that writing it all at once would mean all the information was fresh in my mind and the narrative of the paper would be comprehensively written in one sitting, maintaining continuity.  However, when I took the time to work on the paper gradually, I was able to pace myself and give each section I worked on my absolute and total focus, and when I had reached a point where my work quality was deteriorating due to fatigue, I’d simply put the paper away for the day and come back to it when I was ready for more.  When the day before the paper was due arrived, I was already complete with my work AND had already had the time to review it thoroughly, make revisions, and include new material I had discovered along the way, whereas, previously, all that “post work” had to be forfeited due to scheduling issues.  I also observed that I had earned the ire of many of my classmates, who wondered why I wasn’t staying up all night using the on-campus restaurant’s wifi (this was mid 2000s, so wifi was still limited) and mainlining energy drinks trying to condense an entire academic semester into 10 hours of work.  Because we WANT to believe in the lazy genius…but it doesn’t work.  Because life grades on attendance.

Although I suppose there ARE other ways to get the paper done...

 

And that paper is an allegory for our own results in physical transformation.  You will earn the ire of those who are irregularly attending when you’ve been dutifully attending for decades, because they THINK they’re putting in more effort simply because, during the brief periods that they DO attend, it’s quite intense…to the point of sabotage.  The final product they develop is ultimately inferior to the one developed gradually over time.  For much like how we shut down the paper when the quality starts to decline, we shut down the training and nutrition when high quality is no longer being produced, meaning we are ONLY the product of high quality inputs, resulting in high quality outputs.  Because life is grading us on attendance.  Even if we KNOW the material, even if we can demonstrate mastery of it, even if we can pass the test, if we haven’t shown up to every class along the way, we’re going to get a failing grade.