LIFE IS NOT A CONSTANT STATE OF JOY

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...my American readers just got chills reading that.  My philosophy fans realize it’s a bastardization of Locke’s “life, liberty and property”.  That aside, let’s analyze one of the key parts of that phase; the PURSUIT of happiness.  What is implied there?  That you don’t HAVE happiness, that you are in fact pursuing it.  Why is this the case?  Because you don’t become better while you are happy, but only while you are pursuing happiness do you achieve some manner of greatness.  This is a lesson many young trainees need to understand.

 
And don't trust everyone who calls themself a trainer

I bring this up because SO many trainees bemoan whenever their lives are not a constant state of happiness and joy.  Any degree of misery is considered insufferable, and all avenues must be taken to avoid it at all costs.  This is why these young trainees insist on having a routine that is “fun” and not boring, demand that a diet allow them to eat the foods they enjoy, cry foul whenever they must spend time or money or effort on anything that will actually help them achieve their goal, and in general refuse to at any point in their existence feel even the slightest hint of discomfort.

Does the above sound like the life of a warrior?  Does that remind you of the Spartans?  Or is that instead a life of decadence, hedonism, and depravity?  Can you name any significant historical figure that accomplished ANYTHING while living that sort of existence?  The only people that I know of that can live a life like that are sponges; leaching off of their parents, or friends, or their government, or the kindness of strangers, encountering no personal hardship and simply flowing through life.  Consequently, those people tend to not have the best physiques.  Rather shocking, no?

But at least their WoW characters are jacked

In order to be successful, at one point, you have to be miserable.  This is simply a fact.  This is not to say that misery equates success, as there are plenty of miserable people that are failures, and in many cases it is the fact that they are failures that MAKE them miserable.  However, the reality remains that one must endure some pain and suffering in order to make themselves something better than they are.  In order to be better than the herd, one must be willing to suffer in ways that others are not.

I know it’s cliché’ to bemoan the current generation in contrast to one’s past, but I can’t help it; the degree of uncomfortableness that people are unwilling to encounter is mindboggling these days.  I’m not even at the point where I am telling people that they have to squat until they puke to make the progress they want; I’m talking about telling people they have to wake up early to be able to train. I’m talking about telling people they have to learn how to cook 3 meals with a slow cooker to be able to eat right.  I’m talking about telling people that they have to ASK someone using the squat rack if they can work in (human interaction?!  God forbid!) so that they can actually get in a decent workout.  The threshold for discomfort has reached an all time low, and so has our physical ability as a whole.

Next time, go for diet soda

There are rewards ripe for the picking for those that are willing to suffer even the slightest.  He with zero fear of human interaction in many cases finds themselves a free squat rack where, upon asking the current trainee if they’d like to share, finds that the previous owner has literally fled the scene rather than risk having to speak with another human.  Someone that is willing to bring lunch to work just 3 days a week will end up with a significantly more impressive physique than the office lacky that eats potato skins at TGIFridays everyday of the week (you’d feel like that would violate their own policy).  And hell, while we’re discussing office lunches, he who is able to get OVER themselves and not care that people make fun of them for bringing in boring lunches and skipping out of office birthday cake will be significantly more accomplished than the trainee who caves to social pressure.  And for all that is holy, these are such INSIGNIFICANT sacrifices to be made, yet so many won’t be able to put in the slightest bit of effort.

For those willing to perform any manner of sacrifice, it’s an amazing era, as the average population is so far gone that it takes incredibly little to stand out as impressive.  For the trainee willing to push even further? You can be a god.  If you are willing to perform a routine based on how effective it is versus if you find it fun or safe, you will surpass those that managed to make it to the gym but are running Starting Strength for their 28^th consecutive month.  If you are willing to eat food that you know benefits your training regardless of its taste, you’ll triumph over those that are desperately performing nutritional voodoo in order to justify eating a sleeves of Oreos (hey, it fit my macros, right?).  Are you willing to put it all on the line, get in front of an audience, and perform against other competitors rather than just comparing your numbers online?  Congrats, even greater sacrifice, even greater reward.  It goes on and on.

 
Just saying....it could happen

Life is not a constant state of joy, at least, not for those that are actually succeeding.  Sacrifices need to be made, discomfort must be experienced, pain must be reality.  PURSUE happiness, don’t actually experience it.  Let happiness be just on the horizon, something that you crawl through broken glass after, something you run through hot coals to get to, something you smash through walls to have.  As soon as you get happiness, you get soft, but as long as you keep pursuing it, you’ll accomplish something.

AN ARGUMENT AGAINST BEGINNER PROGRAMS AND ABBREVIATED TRAINING

This needs to be said...again.

The pendulum is always swinging in the world of weight training (and really, in the world in general, but that’s not what this blog is about).  Phases come and go, round and round, the “eternal recurrence”, as it were.  I’ve read about and witnessed this swinging first hand, and I feel a need to try to combat its current location, to get it moving closer to center again.

I really just want to make a joke about having "really CUT abs"

Too many beginner trainees have drank the koolaid that they NEED to perform a very abbreviated training program with high frequency in order to make “optimal progress”.  I am a noted fan of abbreviated training, and frankly I have recently become one of its biggest COUNTER advocates due to how extreme the mobilization of this training approach has become.  Whereas before there was a concern of overtraining, I now say we have reached a critical degree of UNDER training.

Why is abbreviated training even a thing?  Because it was the last desperate attempt of trainees who had tried EVERYTHING else and gained no success on those methods.  However, this is something we need to keep in mind; they tried everything else FIRST.  After years of slugging away at the iron, high reps, low reps, high volume, low volume, 3 days a week, 5 days a week, 2 a days, etc etc, someone got fed up and developed an idea that was “so crazy it just MIGHT work!”  3 movements a day, 15 reps per movement, 3 days a week.  It was insanity, it broke all the rules…and it worked.

But mostly it was just insanity

But why?!  Because, despite not progressing with all the above training, the trainee WAS building up a solid foundation of work capacity, ability, coordination, basic strength and even just the tiniest bit of hypertrophy.  The body was fully primed for growth, it just needed a program to realize it.  That’s what abbreviated training does; it realizes the strength that has already BEEN built.

It caught on like wildfire among “hardgainers”.  Been training for years and not seeing results?  Go get yourself some abbreviated training and watch the numbers climb!  But, like any message that gets passed around, eventually it got distorted and the origins forgotten.  Soon, the element of “training for years” was lost.  The idea became “if it works for hardgainers, it works for everyone!”  The era of the beginner routine was born.

Beginners sure looked different back then

Allow me to analyze the double speak of the internet that I still cannot understand.  We give beginners these beginner routines because beginners are so ready for rapid adaptation that we have to have them train as frequently as possible to elicit the most growth, yes?  This is why a beginner should train 3 days a week doing the same movements each time, versus training a movement once or twice a week.  The latter progresses far too slowly compared to the former.  Am I understanding the argument correctly?

So wait…the beginner is ready for rapid adaptation, no?  So wouldn’t that mean that, regardless of frequency, they would adapt rapidly?  So then how does the program determine rate of progression?  Wouldn’t a beginner’s body rapidly adapt to ANY program, and in turn this means that the beginner (assuming they push themselves) could progress just as well training a movement hard once a week versus 3 time?

 
Keep reading, it gets better

Oh wait…so it’s not the beginner that is actually the key to rapid adaptation, it’s the program instead.  The program magically unlocks the beginner’s potential.  You see, if you have a beginner squat 3 times a week and add bar to the weight each week, THEN his beginner gains turn on and he gets stronger, but if you were to have him only train it once a week where he goes for as many reps as possible, he would actually not get strong because…wait why?  Does one program CHANGE the biological makeup of the trainee? How can a program even dictate progress in any capacity? The program does none of the training; that is the job of the trainee.

In one instance, we are told that beginners are magical, and that for some determined period of time they will have “beginner gains”, but in the same breath we are told that these beginners have to train as frequently as possible to “max out their beginner gains”, or else they go to waste.  This cannot exist in a logical universe.  Either beginners get beginner gains and they can apply this however they want and programs don’t matter, or programs DO matter and the beginner is just like any other training specimen. 

Pictured: The beginner, as the internet believes it to look

As an example, if you put a beginner on 5/3/1, each time the squat rolls around, they will be stronger on it than they were before.  Many are quick to point out that the training max progresses “too slow”, and that a beginner will advance in strength so quickly as to make it non-applicable…but what kind of sense does that make?  Wouldn’t that be evidence of the program WORKING if the trainee following it is getting so strong that they are surpassing the very program?  How could it be that a program is failing if the beginner is getting “too strong” on it?  This is evidence of programs being entirely inconsequential, with beginners having some sort of magical quality that allows them to progress irrespective of the program…which begs the question; why even HAVE beginner programs?

Ultimately, the reality is that anyone believing in “beginner gains” doesn’t understand getting bigger and stronger.  All beginner gains are is a beginner’s body rapidly adapting to a new movement. It’s learning how to move in a specific way, learning how to recruit more muscles and motor units to move BETTER, and this in turn results in more weight being moved.  A high frequency program allows a beginner to get more practice with a movement more frequently, which results in seeing more poundage on the bar due to being a BETTER lifter, but it’s not somehow transforming the biology of the trainee to add muscle at a faster rate than someone else who is doing a bodypart split or 5/3/1 or Westside or anything else for that matter.  Getting better and getting stronger are two different things.

Pictured: When stronger beats better

This is why the rush to put people on beginner programs and to steer them away from programs based on solid principles is the act of a snake oil salesman.  An abbreviated training program creates the ILLUSION of rapid progress. A beginner observes the numbers on the bar increasing rapidly and believe that they are rapidly getting stronger, and when they compare it with the “rate of progression” of other routines, they are convinced that their method is a faster (and therefore better) approach.  In reality, all these programs do is make the lifter better AT THE EXPENSE of getting stronger.  The high frequency, high intensity, low volume approach affords minimal opportunity to train at a variety of rep ranges or volume necessary to actually create muscular growth.  The demonization of additional training limits one’s ability to improve their conditioning.  The extreme focus on recovery via longer rest periods, more sleep, and more food EXTENDS how long one is able to continue NOT getting bigger and stronger.  It’s a self-contained formula to ensure one remains on these programs for as long as possible, avoiding all of the aspects of training that actually GET results.

In truth, these feared “intermediate programs” are simply GOOD programs.  They are based around sound principles and logical/sustainable progression.  The beginner/internet crowd simultaneously places them on a pedestal and tears them down in their claims that a beginner should not run them for fear of making “non-optimal progress”.  However, these programs simply provide an avenue for one to progress at whatever rate they are able TO progress at. Rather than being preoccupied with maxing out one’s ability to get BETTER at the movement at the expense of becoming stronger, these programs include avenues to practice the lift, get stronger at the lift, build muscle, improve conditioning, and address ALL the qualities that are necessary to get bigger and stronger.  A beginner following what the internet dubs an “intermediate program” may not see the weight on the bar advance at the same rate as someone following a “beginner program”, but they will definitely get bigger and stronger faster. You can quote me on that. 

What the internet dubs “beginner programs” DO have a place, and at one point in history they occupied that place well.  These programs are excellent for peaking weight room numbers that had been lost due to periods of inactivity; this is why Bill Starr built his program for football players (which was eventually repackaged by Rippetoe, copied by Mehdi who swore he got his from Reg Park, frankensteined by Blaha, etc etc).  Bill Starr’s 5x5 was a shotgun blast to quickly rebuild some lost strength with the understanding that the athletes were engaged in some ADDITIONAL training (off season football workouts), and therefore volume needed to be kept low to accommodate training demands of the athlete.  Keeping everything else fixed and only adding weight everytime one trains is an excellent way to recapture lost numbers by rapidly redeveloping the skillset under increasing loads.  However, we are talking about conditioned athletes who simply lost some numbers due to having to shift their focus to a different physical ability; not lifelong couch potatoes with zero musculature and coordination.

Don't train like the Captain of the football team when you look like the Captain of the Chess team

I honestly have no reservations at someone wanting to run a “beginner’s program” for 2-3 months just to get their feet wet, mainly because I don’t think you can do a lot of damage in that short of a timeframe.  2-3 months isn’t even a blip on the radar of a dedicated ironhead.  However, where I take exception is with these “career beginners”, who stay on these programs for a year plus, believing they have the milk their beginner gains to the max in order to make “optimal progress”.  If you want to use this as a running start, that’s your prerogative; in 10 years, the guy who did 3 months of Starting Strength before switching to 5/3/1 won’t be any further ahead than the guy who started with 5/3/1.  However, I can say with certainty that the guy that did Starting Strength for 12 months, resetting everytime the weight got heavy, eating 4000 calories a day, doing zero conditioning, avoiding assistance work, and falling victim to all other lifting clichés will be well behind the trainee that decided to quit worrying about “beginner routines” and just shut up and lift.