PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

(Once again, apologies for the delay, but moving is over and I should be stable again)

Time for me to take a quick break from nihilism and absurdism and speak on things as though there WILL be a tomorrow and it IS worth planning for, because I swear some of you folks are way crazier than I am based off how you live your lives.  Some of you seem to think that there is no guarantee of tomorrow, and you engage in some bizarre hedonism wherein you train and eat like there is no tomorrow, and, by extension, guarantee that.  And this isn’t a remark against gluttony, because that can serve a purpose, but more just a lack of foresight or planning entirely.  Put bluntly, your CURRENT training and nutritional approach needs to be setting you up for your FUTURE training and nutritional approach: NOT maximizing its own current self.

Because if you wanna talk about maximizing yourself, I know a guy...

This is getting at the fundamental difference between a routine and a program.  A routine is something that you simply do every day.  You wake up, eat breakfast, go to work/school, and serve out the rest of that day: that’s your daily routine.  A PROGRAM builds on itself towards something greater.  You may go to school as a kid as part of your routine, but your school was smart enough (hopefully) to have an academic PROGRAM wherein the current day’s lesson drew upon the previous day’s lesson and got you ready for the next day’s work.  If all you did in math class everyday was repeatedly drill that 2+2=4, you may have attended a lot of math classes, you may have had a very consistent and reliable routine, but you had NO program at all.  Lots of time vested: total lack of progress.

When it comes to your training and nutrition, it is no different: what you do TODAY needs to be building off what you did yesterday and prepping you for what you’re going to do tomorrow.  And yeah, it doesn’t have to be EXACTLY that linear, but still: your current training cycle should be drawing from your previous one and building toward your next one.  Instead, most trainees just tend to hit their routine, hit it hard, and give them no opportunity of availability to grow.

Gonna brush the HELL out of these teeth

Ok, let’s get some concrete and understandable examples going.  Bulking phase.  You already know I hate this idea, but we can see why here.  Many trainees, when they enter a weight gain phase of training, will REDUCE training volume (understood to mean volume of ALL training: not just lifting, but conditioning, cardio, sports practice, even basic recreational physical activity) under the notion of not wanting to “waste gains” through excess activity.  Here’s the problem with that approach: when you’re taking in a LOT of calories, your recovery is through the roof.  Nutrition is one of the key elements of recovery, and a surplus of it is a surplus of recovery.  IF you condition your body to a state of lethargy while taking in that great amount of calories, you become a deconditioned trainee.  Well what do these trainees want to do when it’s time to lose weight?  They want to jack up the training volume, so that they can burn more calories through an excess of activity.  This goes poorly, because that trainee’s conditioning base is completely shot, and NOW they’re in a state of compromised activity due to the reduced calories.  This is where one tends to observe fatigue, burnout and injuries.  INSTEAD, this trainee should spend their weightgain phase training as HARD and as much as possible, making the most out of that caloric surplus so that, when it comes time to drop the weight, they can start taking away from the activity level and not suffer the effects of the reduced recovery.

And, in turn, this means that, when one is gaining weight, one’s focus is on volume, NOT intensity.  I wrote about this in my “Deep Water effect” post, but to summarize, when you jack up the volume a whole bunch while keeping the intensity moderate, you’re going to observe a drop off in top end lifting ABILITY, but this does not reflect a loss of strength: simply skill.  When is a great time to start rediscovering that skill?  During a period of reduced caloric intake, primarily because SKILL development is not nearly as physically/recovery taxing as strength development.  One can relearn the handling of heavier weights in a pretty short timeframe (which is why peaking cycles are measured in weeks rather than months or years), and, if they spent their weight gain time SERIOUSLY hammering the volume, they can ride out that discovery for a LONG time during a fat loss phase.  This means that you can spend your fat loss phases actually PROGRESSING, compared to the folks who surrender themselves to periods of nothing but maintaining at best.  There’s no need to regress while losing fat: you just have to actually set yourself up for success beforehand.

Because EVERYONE knows you get weak when you get lean

And that’s the big takeaway with that: your training needs to have a plan BEYOND the mere routine.  All a routine does is give you some busywork to do that DAY: it doesn’t set you up for success down the road.  If you only live for today, you’ll look and perform exactly like you do today.  If you plan for the future, you’ll have something you can grow into.  And if you’ve been failing to plan up until this point, there’s no shame in shaking the etch-a-sketch and just starting from zero.  Don’t fall for a sunk cost fallacy here.  Your time hasn’t been wasted: you’ve learned through failure.  NOW you understand why you’ve just been in cycles of stagnation and regression: gaining and losing the same 10lbs over and over and watching your lifts waver in the same manner.  At this point, pick A direction to head into, go pursue that direction until you can’t, and then reverse course on it, knowing the strategies contained herein to be able to successfully plot your course.  Get your conditioning up so that you are in good enough shape to train HARD, then train hard and eat well until you can’t, then drop some excess fluff while pushing big weights until it gets stupid dangerous to keep it up, and then you can do it all over again.

STUPID WORDS AND PHRASES

Yup: gonna be one of these...

Alright, I’ve played the language game enough in my posts.  It’s time for me to just come out, embrace my grumpy old man side and ridicule the stupid things we say and show how it’s impacting us.

- “Unofficial World Record”.  What the Hell is that?  Who is keeping an unofficial record book?  How do you have a world record if it’s not official?  “Dude, it means that they didn’t set it under world record conditions, but it’s still the most anyone has ever lifted.”  How do we KNOW that’s true if it’s UNOFFICIAL dingus?!  Isn’t that the point of it being unofficial?  What proof do we have that someone ELSE hasn’t ALSO lifted that much, if not more, and just simply hasn’t’ recorded it?  That’s the stupidity we get into when we start keeping two separate sets of records.  The word you’re looking for is “personal record”, and hey, if your personal record is greater than the current world record, that’s awesome: now you just need to make it official.

Because let's not pretend there aren't a million more special people just like this who may have even BIGGER arms...

- “Lean muscle mass”.  What, as opposed to the other kind?  Like, fat, sloppy muscle mass?  No you idiot: the only kind of muscle mass IS lean mass.  If you put on non-lean mass, that’s not muscle: it’s fat.  What you’ve done is combined “lean mass” with “muscle mass” and made a stupidly redundant phrase.  What you’ve ALSO done is now confused the piss out of a bunch of inexperienced readers who CAN’T see through your buffoonery, and now they’re going to hear about people adding 30lbs of lean mass in X amount of time, think that means an absurd 30lbs of MUSCLE mass in that amount of time, and immediately jump to the conclusion of steroids.  People want to rally against “fake-nattys” creating false hope among natural trainees, but that stupidity is FAR less damaging than what you do when you convince people that water weight is the same thing as muscle weight.

I think I FINALLY found that second kind of muscle mass

- “Functional strength”.  I’ve done a whole post on this one, but to summarize: as opposed to that other kind of strength?  ALL strength is functional: it’s merely a question of if you’re using it for the correct function.  Being able to bench 700lbs isn’t very functional if you’re a marathon runner, but it sure as hell is functional if you’re a powerlifter.  What’s more, people inevitably confuse “strength” with muscle when they discuss this, because they’ll go “well huge biceps don’t matter in fighting”.  No, you’re right: but strong arms are certainly useful AND functional.

Mariusz, seen here, being totally unfunctional.  Rolles, seen here, having his memory wiped.

-“Newbie gains”.  Just stop.  Your body does NOT possess a countdown doom’s day timer that starts the instant you pick up a weight and rapidly expires.  You cannot “waste” your newbie gains, nor do you need to “milk” them.  That just sounds gross.  All this refers to is your ability to rapidly adapt to new stress, which is something you’ve been experiencing ALL your life and just never took the time to notice.  When you learned a new sport, how to play an instrument, how to play a goddamn video game, etc etc, you adapted RAPIDLY when you started because you started at such a poor untrained state that ALL progress was exponential.  It was after that initial wave of exponential growth that things slowed down.  That’s all a newbie gain is.

-“Train like a BLANK”.  Fill in strongman, powerlifter, bodybuilder, etc etc.  There are thousands, if not MILLIONS of these athletes out there, and they all train differently.  Yeah, there are TRENDS in the training (like powerlifters will TRADITIONALLY employ the Big 3, strongmen train events, etc), but unique competitors train in unique ways to better suit them.  The only thing that makes a powerlifter a powerlifter is that they compete IN powerlifting.  When I competed in my first powerlifting meet, I was running DoggCrapp up to it: was I training like a bodybuilder or a powerlifter?  Neither: I was simply training.  It’s only the people that DON’T compete in these things that say “I train like an X”. 

One of the world's greatest powerlifters and strongmen AND a pro-wrestler, seen here, training like a bodybuilder...

 -“Permabulk.”  Specifically, when employed in the past tense.  “Back when I was a permabulker…”.  Do you and I have different understandings of what the word “permanent” means?  Really, let me just strike out on all stupid portmanteau at this point.  “Powerbuilding”?  Boy, I can’t wait to hear about your powerbuilding meet!  Do you mean “getting bigger and stronger”?  Like what ALL good training does?  “Strongfat”.  For Christ sakes, if “and” is too hard for you to write, try an ampersand. 

-“Dirty/clean bulking”.  In its current form at least.  This USED to make sense.  If you were bulking while eating dirty food, you were dirty bulking.  If you were bulking while you were eating clean food, you were clean bulking.  And this is primarily because we used to be ADULTS and knew that Frootie Pebbles weren’t clean food and chicken breast was.  But somewhere along the line we decided to go full on “If It Fits Your Macros” stupid and say all calories were the same and that there was no such thing as “dirty” food, and this meant that ALL bulking was good.  So then we decided to say that a dirty bulk meant you got fat and a clean bulk meant you stayed lean.  No: know what we called it when you stayed lean when you bulked?  LEAN bulking.  Shocking idea, I know.  People got fat when they dirty bulked BECAUSE dirty food tends to not have a lot of protein associated with it, so you’d way overshoot your calories trying to get in the appropriate amount of protein to grow.  It was a side effect of the approach: not the approach itself.  Consequently, “clean” food tends to be clean because it is purely its source of macronutrients.  By that I mean a chicken breast is clean because it’s pretty much pure protein: very trace amounts of fat and carbs.  Rice is clean because it’s almost pure carbs.  Coconut oil is clean because it’s almost pure fat.  When using these food sources with a macronutrient based approach, it’s incredibly easy to hit your goals without exceeding macros or calories: you just dial in the dosage of the food.  When you try accomplishing this with a plate of nachos, things can get…dirty.

The IIFYM crowd going "It's got Salsa, that's vegetables.  And guacamole comes from avocados.  That's clean!"

-“Going to war”.  Let’s be real: it’s just lifting weights.

ON SNOWFLAKES

(Apologies for the late post: I am in the middle of moving and internet sucks)

I’m a big fan of language, which, as a statement, I realize is like saying “I’m a big fan of air”, but continue to humor me.  Specifically, I like observing the shifts and changes in language, along with the weaponization of it.  Terms that were once completely acceptable and positive can, in the course of simply a few years, turn derisive and unwelcome.  “Snowflake” is such a term now, as it was once used as a positive way of expressing the uniqueness and individuality of a person and is now mired in sardonic rhetoric and used to demean the recipient of it.  And I just have to say: that is REALLY stupid.  Why would you deride someone for being unique?  Why would someone chastise someone for NOT falling in with the majority?  What is up with people that take pride in being exactly like everyone else?  Snowflake is DEFINITELY a compliment, and if you receive it derisively, wear it with pride, because having a stupid person consider you to not be their peer is a high accolade.

In fairness, in a passing glance, I thought this was Nietzsche...

But where am I going with this as it relates to training?  Once again, “snowflake” is used to demean people who won’t train and eat like everyone else.  “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake”, as people love to quote Tyler Durden from Fight Club, completely missing the mark of the message in the first place, but still, the popular reply whenever someone wants a critique on their own training or nutritional approach.  “Just do what everyone else is doing”, “You don’t need to make your own training plan”, etc etc.  We’ve all seen the canned responses and replies, we’ve seen people get verbally eviscerated, we’ve seen the hopeful bright-eyed trainee’s light go out as they decide to just do what everyone else is doing.

But that is the problem with such an approach: if you ask the majority what you should do, you’ll get the reply to do what the majority does.  AND, if you’re inclined to ask the majority what to do, you’re denying your “snowflake-ness”.  If you truly, honestly, in your heart-of-hearts believe that you really are a unique snowflake, you do NOT need anyone’s advice, permission, consent or guidance.  If you ARE unique, then you will simply do what you do AND  you will succeed BECAUSE you are unique.  That is the whole point of being that snowflake: you’re different.  The rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to you.

Maybe...maybe some rules should still apply

And yes, not everyone is going to be a unique snowflake, but hell, SOMEONE will be, so why not let it be you?  The odds dictate that, at some point, it’s got to be someone.  It’s no different than winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning or your other low-odds situations: it’s not likely, but it’s possible.  And with the power of positive thinking, you may just well make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that it IS you.  Or hell, maybe it is the case that ALL snowflakes simply ARE those people that will themselves into being exactly what it is that they want to be, irrespective of how everyone else is succeeding.  Or maybe it’s even the case that what makes someone a snowflake IS that they possess the ability TO will themselves into what it is that they want to be.  But in all of those situations, it stands to reason that, if you decide it will be you, you have a chance that it WILL be you: all you simply need to do is make that decision.

In turn, upon making this decision, you need no other approval but your own.  In fact, approval would be antithesis to the whole endeavor.  If the majority of other people agree with what you’re doing, it’s not going to be what works for you.  You ARE that snowflake: you are different.  Your needs aren’t the same, nor do you respond the same, nor do you get the same results.  You must be different, you must train different, you must act different, and, in turn, you will get the results other people won’t get when they try to do what you do.  And that’s ok.  They’re normal: you aren’t.

And doubly in turn, when you find those training methods that appeal to you and everyone else says they’re bunk, that’s a great sign that you should try them.  There have been fellow snowflakes and lunatics in training: feel free to learn from them and ape their style.  What you’ll most likely find is that all they had in common was the right mindset.  They decided, before they even tried it, that how they were going to train was GOING to work, and then they executed it and made it happen.  You see this with the lunatics that did HIT, Heavy Duty, Deep Water, Super Squats, Dogg Crapp, Blood and Guts, and all the other hardcore sounding names that everyone likes to chide and say they’re scientifically impossible and unsound and yet they just keep working on the people that do them.  And whenever some normal person pays them lip service and sleepwalks through a program and then goes on to show how they don’t work, this just further reinforces the point: it doesn’t work for normal people.  But I’m sure it works for a snowflake like you.

You can’t have it halfway though.  If you truly think that you are a snowflake with special needs, this means you can’t go seeking out the approval of other people.  It’s not going to work.  They’re going to direct you toward what works for everyone, because that makes sense, because the odds are you’re just like everyone else.  But if you’re playing the odds here and deciding that you AREN’T, you get to make your own decisions, make your own mistakes, learn your own lessons and achieve your own victories.  If you want to take lessons from others, only take the ones you want and decide that they are the ones that are going to work for YOU, and then disregard the ones you don’t want.  Decide to mold and shape your reality the way you want it to be.  That is the luxury you get for being unique.

RANT WEDNESDAY VS VICTORY SUNDAY

The idea for this post comes by way of “bird_dream” on reddit, and their observation is so profound that I’m upset I didn’t notice it.  It’s no secret that I’m a denizen of reddit, and that they’ve once again sucked me in after I swore of forums (again), but for those of you not privy to that scene, there is a popular subreddit r/fitness wherein, once a week, members of the reddit are given 2 distinct opportunities.  On Wednesdays, denizens of r/fitness may engage in “Rant Wednesday”, wherein they are free to air any grievances they have as it regards to training.  Frustrated with their gym?  Frustrated with their own failures?  Frustrated with other people?  Just let it out.  On Sundays, they can engage in “Victory Sunday”, wherein they are free to share any victories they had in that week.  Maintained dietary compliance?  Hit a PR?  STARTED going to the gym?  Go celebrate.  Knowing that, the observation worth having is that, on any given week, Rant Wednesday gets up to 2000 replies.  Victory Sunday?  MAYBE 200.  What the Hell?  Where did everyone go between Wednesday and Sunday?  Why are people spending so much time ranting and so little time succeeding?

At least try to do both

Before I go any further, to save you all the trouble, I KNOW my blog is “Rants, raves and ideas about getting bigger and stronger”; the irony is not lost on me.  I have so many rants in me that I started my own blog and write 1000 words a week to get it out, and I’ve been doing it for nearly 7 years now.  However, let’s observe the fact that I made a blog so that I could contain my rant in one place, rather than having to spread it to multiple locations and force others to hear it.  That’s honestly the advice I give other people whenever they just “have to” get something off their chest.  It’s cathartic.  But I’m also not shy about celebrating my victories.  I share my competition results, I’ll plaster my PR videos wherever I can see fit to do so, and ultimately I’m not going to apologize for succeeding.  So where is this balance elsewhere?

What can we observe in the great abundance of rant posts and absence of victory posts?  Pretty much exactly what we expect: there are far more people that are too busy complaining vs succeeding.  They focus ALL of their energy on what is wrong that they never realize what is right, and instead of working hard to succeed, they work hard to justify why they fail.  These “rants” are so many excuses.  “Ugh, I went to the gym today and SOMEONE was on the squat rack for THIRTY minutes.  Guess I don’t get to squat today!”  No: guess you have to go ask to work in, like a human.  “My gym doesn’t have a dip belt!”  Cool: go buy one.  “I’m going on vacation and I HAVE to eat horrible the WHOLE time.”  Come on: no one buys that.  There are rants about EVERYTHING on rant Wednesday, and so many times its things that are entirely inconsequential or WELL within the control of the ranter if they simply exercised some self-control, discipline, or VERY basic social skills.  These people are “problem admirers”, NOT problem solvers.

And hey: maybe that person is curling in the power rack because they deserve it

And, in turn, we observe an absence of things to celebrate, because success is NOT happening when one is conditioned to simply sit and stew.  Once one dives in to the rant echo-chamber, there’s no incentive to escape and evolve.  Why fix these problems when you can just find a group of like-minded individuals that will commiserate with you?  It’s not YOUR fault: no no.  You’ve got the odds stacked against you.  These issues are insurmountable.  Why, overcoming these issues would be…well crap: it’d be a victory, wouldn’t it?  YES!  That’s the thing: the act of engaging in these rants is the direct opposition of success.  Once you determine that you’re going to go home and complain, you’ve made the active decision that you are NOT going to succeed today.  Instead of eyeing this adversity and overcoming it, you took one look and decided “today I will fail.”

SCREW THAT.  Quit trying to find things to write about on Wednesday and turn them into things you’re going to write about on Sunday.  It’s about adding more words to your rant.  “Someone was on the squat rack for 30 minutes…until I asked to work in.”  BOOM!  Rant turned to Victory.  “I blew out my knee on a set of squats…now my press is at an all-time high since I can train my upper body so much”.  Rant turned into Victory.  It’s about understanding that all challenges are simply opportunities.  Any challenge that is NOT an opportunity is literally certain death, at which point the whole “Rant Wednesday vs Victory Sunday” thing becomes inconsequential, as you won’t be around for either.

Jury is still out on if this challenge WAS certain death

And another part of that is that we really need to shed this modesty crap.  You SHOULD be proud of your accomplishments.  If you’re NOT, then they AREN’T accomplishments.  No, someone shouldn’t be proud of being a “nice guy” who isn’t a jerk to people: that’s called being a default human.  That’s not an accomplishment.  But if you hit a PR set of 24 push-ups after being stuck at 20 for months, OWN IT.  “But someone else is stronger than me?”  Yeah: who cares?  They’re not you: they don’t have your circumstances or situation.  YOU succeeded: you get to celebrate the success.  If you’re not content with it, don’t rant about how upset you are that you’re not further along: GET FURTHER ALONG.  If all you do is acknowledge the dissatisfaction, you have wasted it.  If you decide to use it as a catalyst to achieve something great, you have MAXIMIZED the benefit of that stimulus.  All these situations can serve as something to overcome and, in turn, grow stronger from.  OR, they can simply stop you in your path as you sit, wallow and complain about your inadequacies.  And guess what?  There will be PLENTY of people that will agree with you that you are inadequate, but you may be the only celebrator of your own victories on the onset.  Learn to be proud of YOURSELF such that, even IF you get the accolades of others, it’s immaterial. 

Let the people who need to rant have it.  It keeps their disease contained, and prevents you from getting contaminated.  Go out and celebrate your victories instead.