LESSONS FROM POKEMON: IF YOU WANNA BE THE VERY BEST, YOU GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL!

Oh my god I already love this blogpost.  

It should shock absolutely none of my regular readers to know that I totally bought into Pokemon when it first came stateside on Gameboy back in ’98 with the corresponding anime.  I first learned of the show at my best friend Mike’s house at his 13th birthday party while I was in the 8th grade, as he had some VHS copies of the show that we binged while eating Pizza Hut (the only way I could make that more 90s if I said they were personal pan pizzas).  I was mandated by Mike to buy the blue copy of the game, since he had the red, and this way he could get all 150 Pokemon (we had no idea about Mew at the time), and I dutifully complied.

It should also shock absolutely no one to know that I immediately fell in awe of the Machop/Machoke/Machamp pokemon, and made a team out of them that got absolutely slaughtered by the psychic gym.  But reference my blogpost on “playing the game the way I want to play it” to understand the significance of that.

My life motto

I’ve already alienated my non-Pokemon playing readerbase here, but let me continue.  In the opening them of the English dub of Pokemon, the first words are “I wanna be the very best”.  This, in turn, is the goal of SO many trainees.  NO one is willing to be “good enough”, everyone wants to be optimal, absolute most perfect, completely flawless, no wasted effort, etc etc.  I’ve rallied against that SO many times, and in truth, if you’ve PLAYED Pokemon, you know just how handily you can beat the game by NOT being the very best.  It was a game built to be beaten by 10 year olds: strategy is not required for victory, only persistence is.  Holy f**k: I kinda wish that was the direction I was going to go with this post.  You know what: we’re calling that a lesson right now.

Folks, I’m building this airplane as I fly it: please bear with me.  

So yeah, there’s a lesson learned from Pokemon: you can overcome an absence of strategy with a surplus of persistence.  If you just make all your Pokemon level 100, it doesn’t matter if they’re all Magikarps and Dittos: you will f**k up the elite 4.  PLUS, you get the joy of watching the faces of those trainers when they lose to a goddamn level 100 Magikarp.

I don't know what the word is to describe the simultaneous feeling of delight and disappointment that this image exists, but I bet it's in German

But I more want to get into how the theme song tells you EXACTLY how to be the very best: you gotta catch ‘em all!  

I LOVE this, I really really do.  Because, so often, trainees want to know the ONE move they need to do.  “What is THE best exercise for pecs?  Lats?  Biceps?  Should I do high bar or low bar squats?  Conventional or sumo deadlifts?”

"Oh, you didn't mean all at once?"

Folks: you wanna be the very best, you GOTTA catch ‘em all!  There’s no reason to pick JUST one movement.  There’s a reason your pokemon team is a team of 6: there’s a time and a place for EVERYTHING.  And as my failed experiment of a team of Machokes demonstrated: he who fails to diversify…fails.

Right away I know people are going to chime in about some Soviet lifter that only did the snatch and the clean-and-jerk for 20 years and ended up putting a Buick over their head at the age of 40 and has a resting heart rate of 6.  Cool story: you’re not him.  For us non X-men, there’s a lot of value in doing LOTS of things in our pursuit of physical transformation.  Precisely because the process of transformation requires a stimulus placed upon the body that forces it to adapt…and if the body is ALREADY adapted…what the hell is it going to adapt TO?  

It's how you end up staying puny like a Caterpie

Convoluted?  Yes.  Let me explain.  You start barbell benching on a flat bench.  First time you do it, you look like one of those inflatable dancing tube arm men in front of a used car lot: zero tension, flopping all over the bench, strength leaking everywhere.  You keep benching, your body starts adapting: it says “we are a being that benches a barbell on a flat bench: let’s become GOOD at that”.  You learn how to create tension, how to be stable, how to maximize force output, how to be strong.  Your body begins to prioritize the strengthening of the muscles that will best suit getting strong in the barbell bench.  And, eventually, the body ceases to adapt.  It says “We’ve adapted enough: we are a quality being that benches a barbell on a flat bench”

Well now what?  Well NOW we incline the bench.  And back to inflatable tube man we go!  And from there, muscles grow strong from different angles, or perhaps even brand new muscles get recruited into the process.  And we repeat the process.  And one day we can even cycle all the way back to that barbell flat bench, and THEN guess what?  All that strength we built from crazy angles and different movements can get recruited and help us bypass whatever initial plateau we hit when the body decided it had “adapted enough”, and we can get even STRONGER…until we don’t.  And then we know what to do.

It's amazing how WADA has the same motto

It's why I constantly say the phase “no reason to pick only one”.  “Some cycles one way, some another”, is my other go to.  Most people are in a rush to pick just ONE movement because it obviates them of the obligation to actually THINK, but, unfortunately, physical transformation requires a smart kind of stupidity.  I constantly talk about how people are overthinking their training, but here is a special kind of overthinking where folks are trying to out-think THINKING!  They’re trying to front load all the cerebral work.  They think “if I can just figure out the absolute most best move FIRST, then I’ll never need to think about training again!  I can just do that one move forever!”  

Going back to my Pokemon analogy that I started this with: it’s like wanting to know what ONE attack you should use for the rest of the game in order to win.  Or which ONE Pokemon to pick so you can win.  We know the game doesn’t work that way.  Yes: you can win the game with JUST persistence…but the other part of that is by having FUN with it.  The game was built to be won by 10 year old who picked a team because they LIKED the Pokemon on their team.  They weren’t slogging miserably through the game trying to put in the minimal amount of mental effort in order to win: they were enjoying the experience.  They were LIVING.  They were playing a game and having fun.  THAT’S what this is.   And that’s coming from the dude that fully admits he hates training.  I hate exercise, I hate exerting myself, I’d rather play Pokemon NOT as an analogy, but I have fun PLAYING this game of discovering just how many different and unique ways I can go about affecting physical transformation in myself.

Ok, "fun" might be the wrong word

Try a MILLION different things in your pursuit of physical transformation.  Catch ‘em all!  Run Super Squats into Deep Water into Building the Monolith into Korte’s 3x3 into Conjugate into Mass Made Simple into Tactical Barbell into Dogg Crapp into Smolov into whatever else you see fit.  Do a 6 week cycle of reverse grip bench pressing.  Try my patented “Super Good Mornings”.  Wanna do lateral raises with the pinkies up for some cycles and pinkies down for others?  Cool!  You wanna be the very best?  You gotta catch ‘em all!  If you try to take this game on with just 1 Pokemon who only knows 1 move, you’re gonna get stomped by the first trainer you find who is actually out there having fun.

  

LIONS AND SHEEP: BE THE SHEEP

  

In my typical contrarian fashion, I’m going take the trite “lions and sheep” expression and reverse it.  For anyone somehow NOT aware of what lions and sheep gets at, it’s your typical 1980s Gordon Gecko-esque metaphor talking about how the majority of people are sheep, meekly following the herd without question and with no real means of defending themselves, whereas the “apex predators” of the world are the lions: living prideful at the top of the food chain as the “king of the jungle”, carving their own path and doing things on their terms.  From this, we even get derisive terms like “sheeple” used to describe the majority of humans that just go with the flow and do what they're told, whereas WE, the “enlightened”, need to break free and embrace the powerful lion inside of us.  Bah I say!  Yes: pun-intended.  I’m here to argue in favor OF the sheep, and why we should embrace such sheepdom.

I was pretty close to going with this

 

What makes the lion so great?  They’re apex predators, cool.  What does that mean?  As predators, they hunt and kill the food that they eat, and as apex predators, they live without any other threats to their existence (outside of, of course, humans, which are such “good” predators that we’ll kill animals we have NO intention of eating…but I digress).  They are on top of the food chain, and anything they want: they take.  When they’re hungry, they know that they can just waltz into the savannah, find an animal, kill it and eat it.  And the lion is SO sure of its ability that it will even leave some meat behind!  The lion helps itself to the prime cuts of its kill and leaves behind the refuse for the scavengers: hyenas and the like, who possess the proper digestive enzymes to consume carrion without experience life threatening illness.  Isn’t biology and evolution a hoot?!

 

The sheep…is not that.  The sheep is the complete opposite of ANY sort of predator: apex or otherwise.  The sheep is prey.  The sheep is a vegetarian: its “prey” is grass and grain.  If you’ve ever mowed a lawn: you’ve engaged in the cat-and-mouse predatory game that a sheep engages in when it goes for the kill.  Lions live in prides, with a head male that sires heirs with a harem of females.  Sheep congregate in herds with no real social order.  Sheep seek the protection OF other animals FROM other animals, relying on a sheepdog or a shepherd to protect them from the very apex predators that make up the ranks of the lion.

 

But what I find admirable about the sheep is its eating habits.  Whereas the lion will eat until it is satisfied, then move on and nap for 18 hours until it’s time for the next kill, a sheep will literally eat until it dies. 

Amateurs!

 

That is not hyperbole: if left unchecked and unregulated, a sheep will eat until the point that they overload their digestive systems with too many calories and too much lactic acid and die from it.  They will die from the very act that is supposed to keep them alive.  The job of a shepherd is to PREVENT THE SHEEP FROM EATING TO DEATH.

 

FIND ME an animal more aware of its “purpose” than the noble sheep.  You wanna talk “biological imperative”, you wanna talk “will to live”, you wanna talk survival: the sheep.  The sheep is SO committed to living IT WILL DIE FROM IT.  Because the sheep ISN’T an apex predator.  It does NOT have the assurance of the lion that food will ALWAYS be available to it: all it has to do is go out and take it.  The sheep does NOT know when its next meal is coming, so when it HAS that meal, it takes it for ALL that it is worth.  It abandons all sense of self-awareness, self-preservation or basic comfort.  Marinade on that last point (Hah!  A food pun).  You ever eat a little too much at Thanksgiving and feel uncomfortably full?  Can you even fathom what it’s like to eat to the point you literally die from it?  Can you imagine how much agony you would have to be in prior to that moment, yet you STILL keep eating?  The sheep is admirable!

It's like this, but eating cheesecake

 

The lion quiet literally rests on its laurels!  It has grown lazy and complacent FROM its apex predator status.  It has no challenge, so it does not rise to meet any challenge.  It lives a life of resting and feasting: that is the life of most modern westerners!  But the sheep?  The sheep lives in such constant existential fear of annihilation that its drive to live overwhelms its biological governors!  This is the sheer manifestation of “will to power”: to engage in overcoming to such a large degree you exceed your actual capabilities and expire from it.  Look at how “game” this fear of destruction has kept the sheep, whereas the lion spends 7/8ths of its existence unconscious and unaware.  Which animal is truly living?

 

The sheep inspired me in my last run of Super Squats.  I was given a bar, a rack, and an objective: squat the weight for 20 reps.  I knew what squatting the weight would do for me: achieve physical transformation.  I know what I had to do.  And I remember feeling my hamstring tear on the eccentric on the 20th rep, just to hit the bottom and finish the concentric and rack the weight.  Because like the sheep: I was going to squat until I died.  Think of when you’ve seen someone pull a 15 second deadlift single, not even inching the bar up by MILIMETERING the bar up.  They are blowing out every blood vessel in their face, but they are GOING to get that rep, because they are the sheep, the food is there, and they must live.  Hell, consider taking a direct lesson from the sheep, and all the times you’ve observed a trainee that is CLEARLY uncomfortable with how much they are eating, but they continue to do so because they have goals.  John Berardi spoke about eating his post lifting meal IN THE SHOWER, because there was a fair chance he was going to throw up SOME of it and he wanted to be able to clean it up quickly. 

There's a reason I review this book so positively 

 

Do you have the dedication of the sheep?  Will you keep going until you literally die from it?  Or are you some sort of lazy, spoiled lion: going out for the kill only when it’s on YOUR terms on YOUR time, and merely eating until you are satisfied?  Try living so hard you die from it sometime.  You may find, in your pursuit of that limit, you reach some INCREDIBLE outcomes.

YOU AREN’T THAT OLD

 

Once again, my slumming on forums around the internet has allowed me to build up a headful of steam and rant about something.  Today’s discussion centers around the age-old desire to grow up too fast.  We see this with young children all the time.  Qualifiers on age (I’m 6 AND A HALF), attempts to jump to new milestones before they are ready (crossing the street too young, staying out too late, getting to that coveted “R” rated movie), dressing/acting older, etc.  The comedy being that, once you reach “of age”, you cling desperately to your youth, with many people aging without grace and denying their birthdays.  But this phenomenon extends into the realm of training as well, with young trainees RACING to be “just like the old dudes”…and in doing so co-opting habits, patters, quirks and traits that are not just ridiculous but actively destroying their opportunity to actually reach “of age”.  Allow me to explain…

How you look to me

 

Where I primarily observe this quality is in the realm of “injury”.  And I put it into quotes because, really, these are phantom injuries.  There is no source for them, they cannot be seen by MRI, there’s no diagnosis and, in turn, no treatment.  But despite all of this, I constantly observe trainees as young as teenagers bemoaning their “bad knees”, “elbow pain”, “junk shoulder”, etc etc.  These trainees, in turn, have written off a whole HOST of movements that are “no longer possible” due to their “injuries”.  No more back squats (god I hate writing “back squat”): our “bad back” will only allow us to do front squats.  Gotta give up all straight bar pressing because of our bad shoulders.  With my elbow pain, I gotta stick with just machines.

 

Jesus people: what did you do in your first 16 years of existing to wear out your connective tissue so quickly?!  Are you a Soviet era acrobat, recruited from age 1 into a rigorous training program paired with an unsustainable touring schedule to entertain the nobility?  Are you an impoverish Thai child that got roped into the world of Muay Thai prizefighting, boasting a record with a combined 367 fights as a means to put food on the table?  Are you one of 15 children performing manual farm labor in pre-industrial era America?  Did you have an illegal job working as a child coal miner?  HOW DID YOU GET SO BROKEN?!

Carpal tunnel doesn't count

 

These young trainees are in such a rush to grow up that they’re co-opting the brokenness of their idols…but forgoing to co-opt the breaking PROCESS.  You might see a 1000lb squatter talking about how they can’t use a straight bar at all in training because their shoulders are junk and they only save it for the meet: what you AREN’T seeing is the 10,000 squat sessions they did WITH a straight bar beforehand before they reached that status.  Or how the herniated disc that forces a lifter to rely on the Romanian deadlift for their hip hinged herniated on the 400th deadlift workout with 800lbs.  Folks: for Icarus’ wings to melt, he had to fly close to the sun FIRST!

 

You’re not going to achieve greatness through the mimicry of failure: you achieve greatness through the pursuit of the HUBRIS that eventually led to the failure.  The reason you’re watching these great athletes overcome their own injuries in the first place is because THEY ARE GREAT ATHLETES, and they achieved greatness due to a willingness to push their bodies WELL beyond the limits, to the point that they encountered disfigurements and injuries that are unfathomable to an average person.   They EARNED the right to be broken, and the “reward” is the option to compensate with alternatives, work arounds, and substitutions so that they can continue to push themselves stupidly hard, because they only know one way to live.  If you watch Ronnie Coleman these days, he will crutch himself to a machine and STILL give 100% of his soul into a set.  David Goggins ran to the point of passing blood through his urine on MULTIPLE occasions.  THAT’S how these people got so broken…and, before that, so fantastic.

More effort in this one set than some trainees put into a whole life

 

And, consequently, you’re not going to get so BROKEN by living a very average life.  Is that a threat or a promise?  So very few people are at risk of their reach ever exceeding their grasp.  Do you know how often I have to explain to someone what it means to eat to recover from training?  These are people who have literally NEVER “under-recovered”: they have ALWAYS trained so little and recovered so much that they were in a state of full recovery, to the point that they cannot wrap their brains around what it feels like when they are NOT recovered.  If you’ve never felt that feeling, you’re at NO risk of being so broken that you can’t actually do a proper barbell squat or bench with a straight bar. 

 

Growing up and growing old really is the perfect lens to understand this phenomenon from.  You need to get some age on you before you get to be so old.  And you can be old in calendar age and young in training age, and vice versa.  Mark Felix got into strongman at 37, which meant he was a child in the sport at an age where Kevin Nee was well into retirement.  And both were incredible athletes, simply hitting their primes at different points in their physical lives.  There’s even something to be said about the value of maturity as it relates to training, and a more “grown up” trainee may be able to make more intelligent decisions that prolongs their longevity…but there’s ALSO something to be said about the recklessness of youth allowing us to push STUPIDLY beyond our limits due to a complete lack of self-preservation instincts or sense of danger.  But, in either sense: it requires a willingness to GET broken before one ACTS broken.  Before you start babying your junk knee and garbage shoulders, go out and earn them.  

 

BOOK REVIEW: DAN JOHN’S EASY STRENGTH OMNIBOOK

**INTRO**

 

Dan John has been teasing the release of his Easy Strength Omnibook for months now over various podcasts and I’m just going to flat out say: it was worth the wait.  Folks: buy this book.  I’ll go into details shortly, but I want to lead with the conclusion.  I pre-ordered this book as soon as it was available and was able to download it on Christmas Eve and could not put it down until it was finished.  This is Dan in top form.

Here is where you can get it

https://danjohnuniversity.com/bookstore

 

**WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT?**

Almost...

 

Fundamentally, this is a 300+ page e-book on the Easy Strength program, which, in turn, is a program comprised of 5 sentences from Pavel Tsastouline relayed to Dan John a few decades ago.

 

“For the next forty workouts, pick five lifts. Do them every workout. Never miss a rep, in fact, never even get close to struggling. Go as light as you need to go and don’t go over ten reps for any of the movements in a workout. It is going to seem easy. When the weights feel light, simply add more weight.”

 

That Dan is able to write 300 pages on 5 sentences speaks to a few different qualities.  One is that Pavel is amazingly talented at taking a complex idea and boiling it down into a simple executable plan, and Dan, in turn, is amazingly talented at taking simple executable plans and digging VERY deep into the “whys” and “hows”.  Alongside that, it speaks to how, it doesn’t matter HOW simple you make the plan: people will STILL screw it up.  And Dan admits to doing just that a few times while running this on his own, going too heavy sometimes, too high in volume on swings, the many many MANY failed attempts to include squats into the program, etc.  And he does a great job of detailing all these adventures, and many more discoveries, through the book.

 

**WHAT THE BOOK ISN’T ABOUT**

This shouldn't be happening

Unlike Mass Made Simple (another fantastic read), this is not a book about putting on mass.  It’s not a book about maximizing conditioning.  It’s not a book about improving sports skills. 

 

Easy Strength, the program, is about doing exactly what is needed to ensure one has the necessary strength TO PERFORM.  One must remember that Dan coaches ATHLETES: not lifters.  And yes: you can lift AS an athletic activity (and Dan DOES have an Easy Strength with Olympic Lifting program in the book), but one has to approach the book and program with the understanding that lifting is the MEANS: NOT the end.  And strength, in turn, is a means to an end in the whole spectrum of how Dan approaches training.

 

As much as I (and many of you) would love to be superhuman strong, it’s worth appreciating that, for sports, there comes a point where enough strength IS enough, and the benefit of pushing strength further will not be worth the opportunity cost that comes with spending that time and energy in other venues (specifically, doing those things that get us BETTER at the sport).

 

By Dan’s admission (and demonstration), and Easy Strength workout takes about 15 minutes.  This is the amount of time dedicated in a whole athlete program toward the specific goal of developing strength to support athletics.  This does not necessarily mean that the athlete’s WORKOUT is only 15 minutes: it means we’ve streamlined the process of strength building down to its most essential elements so that we can now spend MORE of our time improving ourselves at sports.

 

**HOW WOULD I APPLY THIS?**

Keep in mind my track record...

 

I am not reviewing the Easy Strength program, because I have not done it.  What I am writing is merely my understanding, and a “what I WOULD do” approach.

 

But say you were an MMA athlete.  You have a demand to improve your conditioning, striking skills, grappling skills, and strength.  That’s a LOT of demands, and many struggle trying to balance all of them.

 

With Easy Strength, you could start your daily training with a 15 minute EASY workout that achieves the objectives of building strength to support MMA.  Dan picks basic, fundamental human movements for his 5 here (upper body push, upper body pull, hinge, ab wheel and loaded carry), which will cover all the basis of strength needed for an athlete.  As trendy as it is to have some sort of incredibly complicated and overly specific strength training protocol with bosu balls and stability training, those qualities can be developed through the actual ATHLETIC training of the athlete.  Here: we’re just making ourselves stronger.

 

After those 15 minutes, one can then move on to whatever objective needs covering that day.  Striking, conditioning, grappling, etc etc.

No

 

And, of course, you can see how to extrapolate that to other athletic realms. As a Strongman competitor, I could start my training day off with an Easy Strength workout to make sure I am strong ENOUGH for my sport, and from there spend time doing conditioning drills, working technique on the implements, or even turn it around and do some muscle building work if I’m in an off season.

 

The other application of Easy Strength would be in line with Dan John’s “bus bench-park bench” protocol, along with his discussions on minimalism.  Easy Strength is a “minimalist” program: it’s the lowest dose needed to still get results.  These protocols are great to follow after periods of MAXIMAL training: were we’ve been pushing the volume and intensity hard in order to accomplish some sort of radical physical transformation.  This is balance, it’s duality, it’s basic periodization.  And, typically, after that really intense training, a program like this allows us to REALIZE all that we’ve built, which is just a fantastic experience.

 

One could easily do this with some of Dan’s programs.  6 weeks of Mass Made Simple, 2 months of Easy Strength, 4 weeks of the 10k swing challenge, 2 months of Easy Strength, etc.  Dan even lays out a schedule just like this in the book. 

 

**WHY I LIKE THE BOOK**

 

It wasn't just the slick marketing

Dan John personifies signal-to-noise ratio and this book is in top form for it.  At 300+ pages, there is no filler.  Points get repeated, yes, but differently enough that they ENHANCE the understanding of the reader, compared to Stuart McRobert in “Beyond Brawn” who is just brow beating the reader with the same point, or Brooks Kubrik in Dinosaur Training (a book I have STARTED multiple times and simply cannot get through because of the writing style).  I never wanted to put this book down, and I was sad when it was over.  As soon as I’d finish a chapter, I’d see the title of the next one and think “Oh damn, THIS chapter is going to be even better than the last!”, and I’d get sucked in and discover I was right.

 

And I say all this as someone with no intention of running the program in the near future.  I was the same way with Mass Made Simple.  And I re-read that book constantly too.  That’s because Dan is able to take local lessons and apply them on a global level.  SO many of the lessons on Easy Strength that Dan shares are lessons that can easily be applied outside of that specific arena, to include training for athletes, balancing of workloads, an appreciation for what qualities matter and what don’t, talks on nutrition and fat loss, a fantastic discussion on what makes the squat a great mass building movement whereas the deadlift is more a strength building movement, etc. 

 

Dan took 40+ years of coaching experience and put it into 300+ pages of written word, broken down into easy to read and digest 2-4 page chapters that are laser focused and hard hitting.  This book is a gift to humanity. 

 

**WHO WON’T LIKE IT**

These people

 

If the only reason you read training books is for a spreadsheet and photos demonstrating how to do exercises, you will not enjoy this.  If you want a book on extreme transformation, you will not like this.  If you do not like to read in general, you will not like this.

 

**SHOULD YOU BUY IT?**

 

Yes.  100% yes.  It’s currently in e-book format: get it as an e-book.  If it gets a hard release: get that too. 

 

Be happy to field questions about my experience reading it.

7 DEADLY SINS, SLAVE MORALITY AND ASCENDING INTO THE OVERMAN

 Continuing on with the Nietzsche theme, let’s go full “anti-Christ” here and examine how the famed “7 deadly sins” are, in fact, aspects of “slave morality” intent on preventing you from achieving your goal of physical transformation, which is, in turn, to ascend to the overman (I avoid “ubermensch” because guys with shaved heads and high socks have totally ruined that).

 

But this DOES look pretty cool...

WHAT IS SLAVE MORALITY?

It doesn't refer to the karma hit you take when you get this trait

To quickly summarize: Nietzsche presented an idea that there are truly TWO different classifications of morals: slave and master.  This coincides with the differing classes of people: those who are ruled, and those who rule.  With two classifications of peoples, you need two systems of morality, for the qualities that make one a good peon do NOT make one a good leader, and vice versa.  Good leaders need aggression, ruthlessness, cunning, ambition, and an ability to operate within the morally grey in order to make the tough decisions to keep civilization in tact, but if a member of the ruled class develops these qualities they run the risk of attempting to topple over society via a revolution, so they, in turn, need to be meek, subservient, chaste, moderate and pacified. 

 

Nietzsche goes on to discuss how Christianity is a prime example of slave morality.  It emphasizes chastity, peace, equality, love, etc etc.   Fantastic qualities for a ruled class to be cohesive and manageable: not great qualities for someone with a job of leading people FORWARD and, eventually, allowing for the arrival of the overman.  The overman, of course, being the next phase in human evolution: that which we are ASPIRING to be.

 

With this established, allow us to examine the 7 deadly sins: Gluttony, Sloth, Wrath, Avarice, Pride, Envy and Lust, and how they apply positively to the qualities of physical transformation.

 

GLUTTONY

It can save your life!

Starting with the simplest here: gluttony stands in opposition of moderation and temperance.  The glutton is all consuming, traditionally considered with foodstuffs and beverage but, in truth, gluttonous behavior can manifest in all variety of manor.  We can be gluttons for entertainment, social media, adulation, punishment, etc etc.

 

Those seeking physical transformation, those seeking to ascend, must ABSOLUTELY engage in gluttony.  And whereas gluttony tends to be in opposite of the balance of temperance, we seek a balance IN gluttony by being gluttonous in MANY avenues.  We SHOULD be gluttons for food and drink…but that is primarily because we will be gluttons for TRAINING.  We will absolutely slam our bodies with hard, rigorous intense lifting and conditioning work, and then feed it copious amounts of food in order to facilitate the recovery from the training.  And again: we are gluttons.  We do not eat to FUEL the training: we eat in celebration of the training being DONE.  The food we are gluttons for is in response for the training we are gluttons for.   And how else will we recover?

 

SLOTH

The Superman shirt just made it too perfect

How interesting that sloth will be the opposing force of gluttony in order for us to find some sort of harmonious sin to achieve our overcoming, but here we are to discuss that.

 

I took a LOT of heat for a post I wrote a few years ago, and I’m going to die right on that hill again: if your goal is to get bigger, stop lifting weights 6 days a week.  PLEASE READ THE WORDS THIS TIME.  “Bigger”, not “stronger”.  “Lifting weights”, not “training”.  I train every day, and twice a day tends to be my standard, but I lift weights with a goal of growing muscular size 3-4 days a week.  I’ve been writing this blog for over a decade now: I’m VERY particular about words, and it’s for a reason: words mean things.  In this instance, my point is clear: lifting weights 3-4 days a week is a far superior approach compared to 6 days a week for most trainees.

Ask yourself this question

Those with the slave morality of “work ethic” BRISTLE at the idea of only lifting weights 3-4 days a week.  They only feel satisfied when they are ALWAYS working.  How else will they achieve their “reward” unless they are constantly at their Church of Iron, dutifully performing worship with work and acts of penance?

 

Meanwhile, the slothful sinners get by only lifting 3-4 days a week…and in doing so, transform into something monstrous in the process.  Why is that? In truth: these individuals NEED this sloth and gluttony paired together in order to recover and grow.  Why? 

 

WRATH

Because these individuals are the masters of the sin of wrath.  They bring wrath INTO training.  And no: I do not mean that these individual get hopped up on pre-workout and nose tork and crank up the thrash metal and slam their forehead on the bar before a set.  Those “in the know” recognize that this is FEAR, NOT wrath.  These are the acts of a trainee terrified of what lay before them in the training hall, and they are doing everything in their power to “scare the fear away”.  Fear is not what we seek.  Fear is what controls “the slaves”.

 

No, wrath in training is that ability to take that burning and seething that exists inside of you and pour it into your training in white, hot, pure concentrated unrelenting force in order to absolutely destroy what’s in front of you.  And once again, this is not about slamming bars and throwing plates: this happens on the INSIDE.  This is about being able to pour EVERY OUNCE of yourself into a single set.  Those without wrath, those who are peaceful, they can spend an entire training session never once actually accomplishing any sort of meaningful training reps or sets: training so painfully away from their capability that they do nothing to spark change.  Those who have mastered wrath can do just ONE set for a workout and, in that one set, pour every ounce of their wrath into the set that they have done more than enough to grow.  These individuals will require a substantial amount of sloth and gluttony in order to support their wrath.

 

What, in turn, fuels this wrath?

 

ENVY

Oh my god thank you!

I, to this day, STILL do not understand the big deal about “unrealistic expectations” as it relates to achieving physical greatness.  ALL of my heroes, idols and role models have been unrealistic.  From the ones that actually existed, like Arnold and Hulk Hogan, to cartoons and comics like Juggernaut and Colossus, to myths and legends like Hercules and Samson, I’ve always wanted to be just like these people.  And before I go on any further: stop getting upset about people in the spotlight using steroids.  Even if these dudes were natural, you would STILL never come close to them, because they picked better parents than you did.  You want to talk “unrealistic expectations”, how about we talk about how unfair it is that some folks are simply going to be born better than others.

 

But onto envy: it is BECAUSE I envied the success of these individuals that I had the drive to make myself INTO something “greater than”.  Envy is good: covet the success of others, because it is this covetous activity that will fester that wrath inside of you that is the driver of progress in your training.  Those told not to envy, to find “realistic standards”, to be satisfied with mediocrity…are mediocre.  Slaves.  Those that want only the best will set their sights on obtaining the best.  And once again, on that subject of genetics: they may not rank AMONG the best, but they can be the best that THEY can be.

 

And what should that result in?

 

PRIDE

It's working well for this dude

Much like how gluttony and sloth become the two balancing forces of sin, so too are Pride and Envy, for envy gave us the catalyst to pursue greatness, pride allows us to maintain that pursuit.  And just because we have pride in what we’ve accomplished does not mean that we cannot still have envy as we pursue even greater feats. 

 

But what pride ALLOWS us to do is actually train appropriately for the goal we are in pursuit of.  Oh my God (HAH!  Lord’s name in vain!  Let’s break some commandments too!) can you dudes running beginner programs for over a year PLEASE drop the false modesty and call yourself a “non-beginner” so that you can FINALLY start doing some REAL training?  Your unwillingness to take pride in your work is actually causing you to have results you SHOULD be ashamed of: it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy!  Instead, have the pride necessary to say “I know enough that I can train for real now”, and give yourself permission to run those programs that are going to get you results that OTHERS will envy.  Do your 12-16 weeks of a beginner program and then move immediately on to Super Squats, take a deload, then go after Deep Water.  Oh my God, if a beginner actually did that I would be so ENVIOUS of them, because that’s one HELL of a foundation to start kicking sand in the face of others on the beach.

 

And exercise that pride when it comes time to challenge those whom pride is their downfall.  Engage in that metaphorical sand-kicking.  When someone who has NO business offering advice is out there corrupting the youth with their own slave morality and mediocrity, ask them how much they bench.  Question why they are not big and strong if they know so much about how to accomplish those results.  Ask them why they have not TRAINED anyone to be big and strong if they respond that great coaches are not always great athletes.  Flex your pride and rob them of theirs.

 

And in that robbing…

 

AVARICE & LUST

I'll let you decide which is which

I’m going to combine these two, one reason being that this post has already gotten long, but the second being that both of these serve the function of driving us forward and being the balancing force of wrath.  Avarice and lust are both forms of passion and compulsion, and stand in contrast to the virtues of charity and chastity.  Once again, the “life denying philosophy” of slave morality shows through, in telling the ruled class that they must share amongst themselves their material goods yet keep to themselves their flesh.  An interesting bit of paradox there, but a ruled class that shares does not look to the ruler for wealth, and a chaste ruled class encounters far less instances of the dramas that result from too much promiscuity.

 

Well that was a wild tangent.  Let me bring it back to physical transformation: greed and lust are what compel us to continue toward this pursuit and, again, the balance to wrath.  Training is awful.  Eating well is awful.  In truth, these activities tend to be more associated with the virtuous than the sinner, and engaging in them with such frequency and regularity is sure to drive us to be wrathful.  We will grow to resent these activities rather quickly, and the repeated impact of performing them grows our wrath…but then why do we keep doing them?

 

Because we greedily lust after the RESULTS of this training.  We obsess over these results: we covet them and drool over them and fill our minds with them and will ourselves to perform all manner of nastiness in order to achieve them.  Our lust compels us to chase these results, and our avarice compels us to get more and more and more, with no end in sight.  There’s no satisfaction, there’s never “enough”.  But that is what is needed for physical transformation.

 

Those that are satisfied are those that are ruled.  The rulers are those constantly seeking more.  They expand their empires rather than maintain their households and they, in turn, are the bridge to the overman.  Going for a light walk after a light dinner is the journey of the chaste and the charitable: Super Squats and a gallon of milk a day are for the lusters and the misers. 

 

“BODY BY NIETZSCHE”: HOW IT ALL “WORKS”

 

This is going to be an ambitious piece that will most likely be one of my lesser read posts, but I wanna try to just capture how all of training and nutrition “works” in a rapid blitzkrieg (tapping into the German there with Nietzsche) of brain vomit.  So enjoy that.

 

WHAT IS A PROGRAM?

Gonna see this theme a LOT today

A program is NOT a routine.  A routine is just something we do on a regular schedule.  It does not build toward anything.  We brush our teeth as part of a routine: we’re not hoping to gradually build up from 1 minute to 40 minutes of brushing.  We’re simply doing it to MAINTAIN health.  A program is also not a workout: a workout is a singular part OF a program.  A program BUILDS toward a goal.  In turn, a program must have some manner of progression established within it.  This doesn’t need to be ultra nerdy and mathematical and charted by spreadsheets, but there must be SOME manner of climbing toward something.

 

In that regard, we have Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” at play, in that the program is a manifestation of our inherent drive to overcome and exercise our power over that which stands in front of us.  And again, this can be a codified expression of that will, employing 5/3/1’s TM progression or Super Squats “5lbs more each workout”, or you can employ the max effort method and simply achieve maximal strain, or you can employ a rate of perceived exertion, but in either case, the Will to Power is at play, and in following that will (no life denying philosophy allowed!), we progress.

 

But furthermore: what IS a program?  A program is simply a structured methodology balancing stimulus and fatigue.  That’s the razor’s edge of progression: enough stimulus to trigger growth, without too much fatigue to halt it.  The scales require balance (duality?!).  If we have too much fatigue, it does not matter how much stimulus we have: we will not grow.  Alternatively, if we do not have enough stimulus, it does not matter how much fatigue we manage: we will not grow. 

Check out all that fatigue being managed!

 

Fundamentally, this is why new trainees are told to follow an established program: someone ELSE has done the stimulus to fatigue balancing FOR us.  And, in true cookie-cutter fashion: it will be one-size-fits-all, aiming for an idealized middleground of success…for the most part.  Many argue that popular Bulgarian training, with multiple training sessions operating near max, was used as a “sorting out” program, wherein, those that SURVIVED the program demonstrated that they had the necessary genetics blessing to be Olympic champs in the first place.  It was designed to intentionally break average people so that only the above-average would remain, similar to special forces selection…but I’m getting off task there.

 

This is because new trainees are just going to be plain awful at figuring out this balance.  Often, it’s a weird grab bag where they won’t employ enough stimulus on the “money making” exercises (heavy compounds), will blow their load on small assistance work like forearms curls and ab work, and then train too often, limiting their ability to actually push hard enough in the gym in the first place.  Pair this with awful nutrition and terrible sleep and they just spin their wheels for months.  This is why I’m such a big fan of “Super Squats”: it gives you a training program that sorts out all that stuff AND the nutritional advice to recover.

 

So do you NEED a program in order to succeed?  Not necessarily one developed by someone else, no.  We need an approach to progression, alongside a way to balance stimulus to grow with fatigue.  Experience is one of the best ways to develop all of that, and one of the best ways to GET that experience is to run a bunch of established programs so we can see how we respond to certain approaches: physically AND psychologically.  And, of course, if you can get a coach to personally tailor an approach that fits you, that’s cool too…so I’ve heard.

 

STIMULUS

It's why I do so many bear complexes

 

“That which does not kill me only makes me stronger”.  Once again: Nietzsche had it figured out.  The Will to Power that exists in our bodies makes it such that our bodies have a propensity to attempt to grow in response to trauma.  The body encounters resistance, if said resistance does not kill the body, it seems to overcome this resistance.  It does so by making the necessary adaptations to do so.  In our case: it makes its muscles bigger, as a bigger muscle is a stronger muscle. 

 

And this is ALL stimulus is.  People get so wrapped up on THIS part of the process of achieving physical transformation, when really, you can boil it down to going into the training facility and putting yourself through extensive physical trauma that does NOT kill you, giving you an opportunity to be made stronger.  However, in order to create an environment wherein the process of becoming stronger occurs, stimulus must be met with recovery, and fatigue must be managed.

 

RECOVERY

Hey look: recovery!

Food is absolutely the most anabolic substance on the planet.  Gains are made of food.  All tissue growth is a result of food.  This cannot be overstated.  If you take ALL the steroids, train ALL the training, sleep ALL the sleep, take ALL the ice baths, etc etc, but do not eat enough food to support growth: you will NOT grow.  Your body does not possess alchemical abilities to create out of nothingness. 

 

I say that because SO many trainees are absolutely terrified of food.  Specifically, they are terrified of eating “too much”.  In the game of physical transformation, this is essentially fear of being “too successful”.  It’s worth appreciating that I’m writing purely from the perspective of building muscle here.  I’ll circle back and discuss fat loss briefly, as that’s not really a complicated subject, but if our goal is to subject our body to enough stimulus to not quite kill it, we must THEN make it our goal to eat enough food that the “makes me stronger” part of the process can occur.  If we do our best to eat just BARELY enough to facilitate that process, we run the risk of erring on the wrong side of this caution, and PREVENT ourselves from actually recovering and growing stronger.  Meanwhile, a trainee that engages in gluttony will more than cover this base of recovery.  Once again: no life-denying philosophy here, AND no room for “slave morality” either.  The 7 deadly sins were created to limit the slave class: the masters are gluttons (once again: Nietzsche’s words, don’t get too worked up here).

 

And while we’re on those sins: sure, go for sloth too.  I’m not a great sleeper, but sleep and rest are absolutely awesome for recovery…but remember we are sloths OUTSIDE the training space.  Inside, perhaps some wrath is necessary instead?     

 

FATIGUE MANAGEMENT

This man taught SO many people how to manage fatigue...only for them to completely ignore it and say the program didn't have enough volume

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster”. Too much time fighting your body with stimulus and not enough time managing your fatigue is how one fails in this pursuit.  There are many strategies available to manage fatigue.  The simplest one is a scheduled deload. 

 

Before I go further, a deload does NOT mean resetting your weights and starting over again.  I’m not sure who starting that trend, but it’s been SO damaging to the discussion of training.

 

A deload is simply a period of time where we reduce training stress.  This can be done by either reducing the weight that we move in training, or the volume of training.  You can even simply just take a week off.  However you go about it, the point is to spend some time NOT training to your limits. IF you train, you’re simply doing so in order to maintain skill/proficiency in the lift, because, quite frequently, when someone comes back from time away from training and finds out they are “weaker”, they are simply detrained in the movement.  Lifting weights is a physical skill, and physical skills require maintenance, just like playing an instrument, throwing a ball, riding a bike, etc.  In that regard, the longer you spend lifting, the more time you can spend AWAY from lifting and not lose the skill, whereas, if you’re new to lifting, you might take a week off and see your lifts drop immensely upon your return.  Don’t sweat it: your body doesn’t know how much weight it’s lifting only how hard it is struggling.  Keep struggling and you’ll get stronger.

 

Within reason of course

I like to employ a scheduled deload, training hard for 6 weeks and then deload on the 7th.  I’ve absolutely stolen that from Jim Wendler.  When I deload, I’ll spend the entire week performing conditioning work and not do any sort of strength training.  I once did Dan John’s 10k kettlebell swing challenge in 7 days during a deload.  Yeah: that was an intense period of training, but the loading on my body was minimal, which gave me time to recover from my heavy training.  And that’s the boon of a deload and fatigue management in general: by NOT carrying excessive fatigue, we can push the training harder.  This is why athletes will take downtime before the game/event: you train to a point of overreaching, then you rest and recover so that, when you show up on gameday, you give your BEST performance.

 

Other avenues of fatigue management include auto-regulation within a training day itself.  Essentially, instead of handcuffing yourself to fixed percentages, reps and sets, you evaluate how you are feeling/performing THAT DAY and base your training on that.  On good days, you reach far and dig deep, on off days, you hit the bare minimum and live to fight another day.  As Many Reps as Possible sets are a great employment of this in a program, and 5/3/1 was cool in that it employed AMRAPs AND Deloads in it.  With the AMRAP set, on good days you can really push hard, and if you’re having a bad day, you could hit the bare minimum reps (5, 3 or 1 respectively) and call it a day.  However, this requires a bit more self-awareness and experience, which is why scheduled deloads tend to be the preferred “cookie-cutter” approach to fatigue management.   With the deload, you KNOW the trainee is going to manage fatigue, whereas auto-regulation puts a lot of work on the trainee.

 

PERIODIZATION: ACCUMULATION AND INTENSIFICATION

Oh yeah: it's about to get nerdy

“When you gaze too long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you”.  We cannot gaze too long my friends: training necessarily NEEDS to change in order to allow us to continue to grow, overcome, and exercise our Will to Power.  We absolutely have the abyss gaze back into us otherwise.

 

Yeah, I know: I’m really forcing the Nietzsche stuff, but I’m having fun.  The point is: we can’t pursue one way of training indefinitely.  No one successfully does that.  Training needs to be phasic, because life in and of itself is phasic.  We have seasons, things are in a state of constant change, and we too must be changing.  Hey, more Nietzsche stuff: we’re the bridge to the Overman.

 

This phasic approach to training is known as periodization.  There is a LOT out there on that topic, so I’m going to just quickly summarize. 

 

To make a muscle stronger, you make it bigger.  That’s it.  Strength training IS hypertrophy training.  We KNOW this in an instinctive lizardbrain level.  This is why, when you see a big animal, you are more afraid of it than a small one: you KNOW that the bigger animal is stronger than the smaller one.  It’s why, when you see a large muscular human, you KNOW they are strong before you start “thinking” about how bodybuilders are weaker than strength athletes (stop thinking: it doesn’t suit you).  In turn, this is why those very strength athletes have an accumulation phase in their training: THAT is the phase where we make our muscles bigger.

 

Accumulation is essentially the “body by Nietzsche” I’ve been writing about up until this point.  It’s a phase of training wherein we’re constantly trying to kill ourselves, “failing” at that, and, with enough recovery and properly managed fatigue, growing stronger.  This is traditionally accomplished by employing higher training volumes, as this forces adaptations.  “Volume” as a concept is a contentious issue, and gets more like Tao than Nietzsche, in that anyone who has succeeded in physical transformation “understands” volume, but as soon as you try to ascribe words to it, it fails.  I appreciate the idea of “hard work sets” as a measurement of volume, BUT we’ve also observed that a single set can have enough volume in it to drive significant growth so long as that set is an absolute and total soul crusher (think Super Squats or Dogg Crapp work).  But, in the most traditional sense, during accumulation, one is doing more sets and reps.

 

Intensification is a phase of training wherein the intent is to display all that strength we built in the accumulation phase.  Because of that, this style of training is often (mistakenly, in my opinion) referred to as “strength training”, whereas accumulation would be “hypertrophy training”.  During intensification, the intensity (duh) of the lift increases, in this case meaning percentage of 1 rep max.  Simply put: we’re lifting HEAVIER weights than we did in accumulation.  Why?  Because lifting heavy weights is a skill in and of itself, and during all that time we spent accumulating, we weren’t lifting very heavy weights: so we lost that skill.  Skills, thankfully, can be built/re-acquired faster than muscle can be built, so often we can have longer accumulation phases and shorter intensification phases.  A 3-4 week intensification phase isn’t unheard of in order to quickly peak for an event.  However, it’s worth appreciating that, since the weight is going UP the volume has to go down.  Once again, it’s a matter of balance, similar to fatigue and stimulus.  If we just increase the intensity and keep the volume the same, we’ll most likely be unable to recover, which prevents growth.

 

PHASIC EATING

Hey: it works

I have written at length about how bulking and cutting is so backwards as far as how most trainees implement it, so let me just quickly rehash this.  Food supports training: not the other way around.  Earlier we discussed how food as an anabolic agent that supported recovery from training.  In turn, one does not just start eating more food when they want to get bigger and eat less when they want to get smaller: instead, we employ phasic EATING to support our phasic training.

 

From here, it suddenly makes SO much more sense.  During the accumulation block, our training volume is higher, meaning there is a greater recovery demand placed upon us.  This requires us to eat MORE food.  That, in turn, drives us to grow bigger.  HOWEVER, we are “human, all too human” and, in turn, our body has limits. Even Bruce Randall had to stop bulking at one point, because the demand placed upon our body to eat, digest and pass all that food eventually becomes too much, to say nothing of all the TIME we must spend on cooking and cleaning, to say nothing of the absolute pounding our body is taking from that hard training.  This is where intensification comes it: it allows us a BREAK from accumulation, yet we can still make progress in training during this time, because now we to get to realize all that strength we built.  However, since the volume drops during intensification, the food may drop as well.  It doesn’t HAVE to, no, but if you were doing accumulation correctly you’ll WANT it to drop: you will be DONE eating.  This, in turn, results in the loss of fat accumulated during the accumulation phase: a cut! 

 

It's all so simple: eating matches training, and training must be phasic, therefore, so is eating.

FAT LOSS

As a fat kid in the 90s, this movie was my Rocky

 

I spent SO much time discussing the building of muscle because, along with being more interesting, it’s more nuanced compared to fat loss.  Allow me to explain fat loss: eat less.  That’s it.  When we eat less food, we lose fat.  In order to ensure a favorable distribution of fat lost compared to muscle when eating less food, we do our best to eat a lot of protein (since muscle is made from it) while also ensuring we are consuming enough fats to maintain hormonal health.  As long as you aren’t really stupid with your nutrition, you should be able to manage that.  When in doubt, I find meat, eggs and dairy a good option.

 

As far as fat loss training goes, the one thing I appreciate about a dedicated fat loss phase is you can pretty much train however you want, so long as you’re training hard.  Herein it’s worth appreciating that by “train”, I’m referring to lifting.  Don’t abandon lifting, train for an ultramarathon and then wonder why you lost muscle.  It’s worth appreciating what the intent of the lifting IS now at this point.  Previously, we were on the Nietzsche “that which does not kill me makes me stronger” approach, but now we’re simply reminding our body that there is STILL a demand for all that muscle we built, and that it should prioritize the saving of that tissue when it comes time to determine what to lose and what to keep during periods of calorie restriction.  We no longer need a program, the training does not need to necessarily “build” to anything: it is simply there as a matter of ensuring that what we HAVE built does not get lost.

 

In turn, fat loss phases are a great time to experiment, try things out, throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks. Fat loss is the “reward” for all that accumulation, because it’s going to feel like a vacation to no longer base your life around food and training.  However, again, exercise intelligence here: trying out a program SPECIFICALLY intended to be one run during a period of weight gain is most likely not going to go well.  Save Super Squats, Smolov, Building the Monolith, etc, for another day: maybe try out some Crossfit WODs instead.

 

TO BE CONCLUDED?

This is already 3 times longer than the majority of blog posts I write, and I haven’t even discussed conditioning yet, which is one of the topics I’m most well known for.  I’m going to cap it for now and see how it trends, and if there is a demand for more (or if I simply feel like writing more), I’ll throw that in there.  This may honestly be the start of an e-book: who knows.  Hope you enjoyed!