BUFFETS AND MICHELIN STARS

My dad did a lot of business in Las Vegas, primarily because he worked for my Grandfather, who was a real-estate mogul that leveraged that into becoming a guru, who would put on seminars and sell books (so you can see this runs in my blood) but was also INCREDIBLY cheap (or “financially responsible” as he would put it) and Vegas in the 90s was marketed as being a very inexpensive resort town (very much different from today’s Las Vegas), which made it the perfect place to gather his subscribers and host events.  That was one helluva run-on sentence.  But anyway, Las Vegas in the 90s managed to be inexpensive because it leveraged the income it received from degenerate gamblers in order to subsidize family entertainment, which is actually probably about as twisted and evil as it sounds, but boy did WE benefit as kids.  There were arcades EVERYWHERE in Las Vegas, all with the latest and greatest games, and my dear sweet grandmother was one of those aforementioned degenerate gamblers who was entrusted with watching my older brother and I while the adults were away discussing real-estate and would, instead, swing by on occasion and go “The slots are running hot, I just hit it big, here’s $50 in quarters, I’ll be back in a few hours!” and we would live like kings of the arcade.  This same saintly woman, having no real concept of money, would one day give my brother and I $300 to “go buy a video game”, to which we purchased our first ever Super Nintendo.  This is way more of my family history than you ever wanted or needed, but it’s my blog and I get to tell the stories, and where this story is EVENTUALLY heading to is the fact that one of the other charming graces of 90s Las Vegas were the DIRT CHEAP buffets.  These days, a trip to the Bacchanal Buffet at Caesar’s Palace can run you $65-$95 per meal WITH a 90 minute time limit imposed on you, whereas in the 90s the average buffet cost was $5-12.  I say all this to establish the fact that: I KNOW buffets.  I grew up in buffets.  To the point that, whenever I visit some sort of TERRIBLE dingy poorly lit smoke filled buffet off the beaten path, with food trays that clearly haven’t been emptied out for hours and food that is of questionable origin and quality (like what we saw in “Vegas Vacation”), the dopamine centers in my brain light up like it’s Christmas, because my brain goes “you’re a kid again!”  I went to buffets so much growing up that I started to make it a game with each Vegas trip to ONLY eat a certain item the entire time I’m in the city: one glorious year it was fried chicken, which WAS at every single buffet, without question.  I bring all this up in this INCREDIBLY long introduction to discuss how many of those in the physical training realm are LIVING the buffet life, which, as we’ve established here, is really…a pretty scuzzy kind of life, subsidized by degenerate gamblers, in a city built by the mafia, premised entirely around fleecing you.  Many are missing out on some REAL gourmet Michelin Star experiences, where it’s not about the QUANTITY or variety of food, but the actual quality of the experience.  Let’s explore this metaphor.

Wonderfully awful movie and a time capsule of the era

 

On the surface (which is as deep as you ever WANT to look at a buffet, believe me), a buffet seems like the ULTIMATE dinning experience.  You get to pick WHATEVER you want, as MUCH of it as you want, and you don’t have to put ANYTHING you don’t want on your plate.  Watching children at buffets is especially delightful, because they’re shameless, and unlike adults that might try to ACT like adults by putting some sort of vegetable on their plate that they have no intention of eating, kids will have a mountain of French fries next to a lake of chocolate pudding while using mozzarella sticks to form a dam.  We then take our monstrosity back to our table, absolutely gorge ourselves, and even WITHOUT the 90 minute table limit, we still try to shovel the food in as fast as possible so that we can accomplish MULTIPLE passes at the buffet in order to take in even MORE massive quantities of bizarre food combinations: spaghetti and buffalo wings, next to pizza, nachos and sushi, with a hot dog chaser and 4 different desserts.  And at the end of the meal, we roll ourselves out of the booth, slough off to our vehicle, and spend the rest of the evening feeling absolutely miserable and swearing we’ll NEVER do that again…until the next night in Vegas, of course.

 

When we have a for real, sit down, gourmet experience, it’s entirely different.  The chef EXPERTLY prepares the meal, using years of culinary training to achieve effects in terms of taste, texture, aroma, and all other senses involved in the dinning experience.  Each element is expertly seasoned: many high end establishments will refuse requests for additional condiments or seasonings because they don’t want YOU to ham-fistedly RUIN the chef’s hard work.  The food is portioned appropriately in order to compliment the MEAL as a whole and as an experience: it’s not an arms race to simply give you the BIGGEST possible serving of meat next to a MOUNTAIN of potatoes, but instead the right amounts in order to achieve the right effects.  Many places will even employ palate cleansers between courses, to ensure that you are receiving the intended experience.  And when the meal is done, we are satisfied with our experience and feel BETTER than when we arrived.

Until this part of course

 

And speaking of “ham-fisted”, allow me to finally get this metaphor out: most trainees in the realm of physical transformation employ a “buffet approach” when it comes to their training and nutrition.  They look at all the “dishes” prepared by all the chefs of the world of training and nutrition, and only pick the parts that they like: excluding all the “yucky” foods and only gorging on the hyperpalatable delicious and overly indulgent parts.  And, along with that, they select portion sizes that are ENTIRELY inappropriate within the context of the meal: becoming overly saturated with one taste and completely neglecting the others.  And much like the buffet experience, they just keep on gorging on the parts that they like over and over again, never once making a pass over to the “lighter fair”, and once the meal is done, they’re in a worse place than where they started and are swearing that they’ll NEVER do that again…until they do.

 

We see this with the trainees that are addicted to just slamming themselves with volume and intensity and never once put in a thought toward the value of fatigue management as it relates to growth and recovery.  We see this with the trainees that cut out ALL the hard work in a program, designing some monstrosity of nothing but cables and isolation exercises and never managing to grow.  We see this with the trainees that lock in on “If It Fits Your Macros” and view it like it’s a Tetris like challenge wherein, through a strategic implementation of protein powder and ice cream they “win” at Macros.  I absolutely did this myself, “following” the Deep Water Diet by getting 2 double quarter pounders at McDonalds and “only” eating the meat and cheese.  And I got buffet style results from that.

Suffice to say he approaches it a LITTLE differently...

 

And I’m speaking about “Michelin Star Chefs” here when discussing this buffet style approach: coaches in the realm of physical training that have created “dishes” worth enjoying.  But the food at a REAL buffet is never going to be the same quality as what you get from an individual meal, even WITH the greatest possible chefs working there (which the aren’t…because it’s a buffet), because the sheer logistics of it don’t work.  And we see this in the realm of physical transformation as well: trainees COULD be sampling the dishes of Dan John, Jim Wendler, K Black, Dave Tate, Chad Wesley Smith, John Meadows, etc etc (seriously: it’s borderline unfair the amount of unrestricted access a modern trainee has to some of the GREATEST minds in the industry), but instead they’ll follow the plan of some influencer online whose only credentials are having abs and lots of followers.  THAT is buffet chow for sure, and they’re loading up on it, because these influencers are like true buffet line cooks and just producing “food” simply for the sake of producing it.  There’s no thought or consideration to portion sizes and putting together a meal: they just know that, today, they gotta make 400 chicken wings, 500 meatballs, 100lbs of spaghetti and enough taco meat to feed General Santa Ana’s army.  They don’t care who eats it or how much of it they eat: they get paid for QUANTITY, not quality.

 

It’s no wonder why you feel so terrible when your meal is over: you made a stupid meal to eat you big dummy!  Because think about that: as much as you may think “I’ve been eating my whole life: I know how to eat”, it actually takes YEARS of culinary training to fully understand how to build a MEAL such that it is a satisfying experience for the diner.  Yeah, you can take a nutrition course and figure out which foods are healthful, and you can take a food safety course to learn how to make food that doesn’t kill you, but the art of actual meal construction takes education and effort, which is WHY people entrust it to skilled chefs when dinning out.  In the realm of physical transformation, this is “working out” vs “training”.  Working out is about exhausting ourselves that one particular day: training is about building up to something greater over the course of many training sessions.  A skilled chef knows how to build training, whereas when you build your workout plate, it’s nothing but mac n cheese and mashed potatoes. 

When left to our own devices

 

And folks, I don’t say all this to overcomplicate food.  We don’t have to be Michelin star chefs in order to create a decent meal: we simply have to spend a little bit of time and effort learning and experiencing different element of cuisine to able to understand and appreciate the balancing act that occurs through the process.  But if we treat each meal with the buffet mentality, all we ever know is gorging, oversaturation/stimulation, flavor fatigue and a general malaise.  A trip to the buffet on occasion can be enjoyable: these are those stupid workouts that we KNOW we shouldn’t do but we do anyway.  But we can ALSO treat ourselves sometime by going out and getting a real gourmet experience from someone that knows what they are doing, where we just sit back and enjoy what is put before us. 

HOPE IS NOT A PLAN

Already it’s fascinating for me to discuss plans when I am the champion of “Chaos is the plan”, but let us appreciate that often, within chaos, there IS no hope, so the premise that “hope is not a plan” actually fits well here.  “Hope is not a plan” is one of my favorite quotes to introduce into discussions WHEREIN we are attempt to develop plans or courses of action because, quite often, I find that “hope” is the contingent variable OF the plans of many, in similar manner that the “Underpants Gnomes” of South Park had no real notion of what step 2 of their plan was to make a fortune.  Everything else will be laid out in meticulous detail, all variables accounted for and squared away, but finally, when it comes time to actually make the plan SUCCEED, we discovered that success is entirely premised around hope…and, in turn, destined to fail.  “Abandon all hope” is not necessarily a call to pessimism but, instead, actionable advice and guidance when it comes time toward drafting up plans for success, because in the absence of hope as a variable, one must begin to actually implement strategies and tactics that will succeed in the absence OF all hope.  Let’s discuss wherein we observe these failures in the realm of physical training.

It's practically foolproof!

Quite often, in the topic of “bulking” (a term I deride because it’s meaning continues to get twisted, abused and manipulated by hucksters and the ignorant that ape them), hope is the PRIMARILY tool being implemented, and the results go on to show just how hopeless we are.  The term “dreamer bulk” originally referred to a screename on Bodybuilding.com that went on to perform one of the most nutritious failed bulks of internet history but now goes on to accurately reflect the reality of all failed bulks: you must have been dreaming to think this strategy would work.  This is, again, because these bulking plans are premised entirely around hope.  Specifically, the dreamer bulker approaches the entire process backwards: they eat a LOT of food and then HOPE that it turns into muscle when they go lift weights.  Very often, these individuals have the diet “dialed in”, reflected by having a set macro and calorie goal that they ALWAYS hit, if not exceed, every day no matter what!...while the training is a bit of an afterthought.  “Yeah, I’ve been getting in 3500 calories a day, 250g of protein, I make sure to get in all my carbs pre, post and peri workout, and then I go do PPL 6x”.  What the f**k is PPL 6x?  That’s not a plan, it’s not even a training split, it’s 4 letters and a number.  It creates the ILLUSION of intensity because “everything is taken to failure”, of which you realize that, in order FOR that to be true, with a training protocol that necessitates training 6x a week, the actual effort employed in each session has to be SO paltry that there is ZERO stimulus FOR muscle to grow.  It’s all machines and isolation work with minimal heavy loading, “great pumps” and zero progress, followed by a gigantic caloric surplus, most often of “protein maxxed” hypergarbage, wherein the result is 16 weeks wasted and being in a terrible physical state that necessitates going on a “cut”…which oh boy, let’s talk about hope there!

 

Because thinking is hard, most in the fitness sphere want to sell all physical transformation as a math equation, and never is this more accurate than in the realm of fat loss.  “It’s all Calories In/Calories Out” which, though accurate, is unhelpful when it comes to formulating a plan for success, because new trainees will simply take THAT maxim and make THAT the plan.  “All I have to do is eat 500 calories below my maintenance and I’ll lose 1lb a week, and then I just do that until I’m lean.  How come EVERYONE isn’t a bodybuilder?”  And really, it’s the absence of THINKING that final thought that is the downfall here, because if we DID ask that question, we’d realize how much hope is the necessary operating variable in such a “plan”.  “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”, and diets are OFTEN punched in the mouth by things like…hunger.  Hunger, cravings, schedules, social obligations, feelings of fatigue, and all of these are issues we can run into when things are going RIGHT on the diet.  What if we discuss all the fun biological variables that come into play as well, like how our metabolisms will downregulate and NEAT will naturally reduce when food intake is restricted and suddenly we need to re-adjust our math equation, and how THAT might be an issue if we came into this fat loss phase overdieted with minimal caloric runway, primarily because we ran that “dreamer bulk” above and didn’t really build any appreciable lean tissue to begin with so we don’t have much of BMR to operate off of.  You came into this simply HOPING you could eat 500 calories below maintenance until you were lean, and reality punched you in the mouth.

"What's the harm of just one bite?"

 

Hope is not a plan.  We must be hopeless, which does NOT mean that we must be powerless.  Much as per Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead, when HOPE is dead, we “re-create yourselves: and let this be your best creation”.  Instead of relying on hope to get us to our objective, we take success into our own hands and MAKE it happen.  When we gain, we do so by ensuring that our TRAINING is dialed in and effective at the intended goal of building muscle and THEN we eat in a manner in order to fuel that metabolic process.  And that “manner” is not simply based on numerical value but on QUALITY of nutrition as well, understanding that our biology is complex and benefits from a wide variety of contributions from nutrition that are not necessarily easily quantifiable.  And, in turn, we appreciate that, on the opposite side of the spectrum, it’s not a matter of eating less food, but of developing the necessary strategies to ensure COMPLIANCE with such a protocol of controlled starvation.  Discovering the foods that trigger binging and coming up with strategies to remove them from the diet WITHOUT creating a sense of restriction that results in hyperfixation, figuring out how to navigate blood sugar response to avoid feeling foggy, weak, and experience significant sugar cravings, discovering the foods and eating windows that allow us to feel satiated, managing schedules in order to ensure access to the foods we need when we need them, etc etc.  Success in physical transformation means having a strategy that will lead us along the path toward the goal, NOT depending on sheer willpower and hope to make it all happen.

 

Hope is not a plan, which is not a negative, because in a world without hope, we still have ourselves to depend on.

 

     

“TRAIN LIKE/LOOK LIKE” DOESN’T WORK

One of the simplest pieces of advice that is frequently administered online is “if you want to look like X kind of athlete, train like X kind of athlete”.  If you want to look like a soccer player, train like one, wanna look like an MMA fighter, train like one, etc etc.  And as much as I am a fan of Occam’s Razor (it makes the cutting clean), this is one of those instances where it manages to fail us and, instead, a fair degree of nuance and analysis is required to really understand what is going on under the hood here.  And that’s where I want to take this discussion today, because it’s honestly a really fascinating world to explore.  I posit that the majority of top level elite athletes (I’m not being redundant there: I am meaning to speak specifically OF those athletes who are the best AMONG the elite) achieved their physiques IN SPITE OF their training rather than as a result of it, and what we are observing is the effect of “generational” genetics at play: those kind of unicorns that come around once in a generation, grace us with their presence, and then vanish once again into the ether.  We are simply blessed in modern times to get so EXPOSED to these generational talents that we take it for granted that they even exist, but in an era prior to instant information exchange as provided to us by the internet and satellite communications you very well could have just spent your whole life f**king off in your little hamlet and had no idea that the next township over there was a man who could carry a full grown bull through the marketplace.  But, in turn, BECAUSE we are so overly exposed to these individuals, we are unable to fully appreciate just what unique specimens they TRULY are, and that attributing their outcome to be a product of their training is misattributing cause and effect here.  They do not look the way they look because they train the way they train: they train how they train to get GOOD at their activity, and their physique is a reflection of just how genetically blessed they are SUCH THAT, when combined with the skills that come with athletic training, they are a total dominant athlete.

By all accounts, all of this was true

\

Ok, let’s begin by establishing something right off the bat: top level athletes in sports that are NOT physique competitions (bodybuilding and all the permutations of it) flat out do NOT look the same.  Already people don’t like to hear this, but it’s true.  One of the most dominant MMA fighters of all time was Fedor Emelianenko, which, if you looked at him, looked more like a world champion bowler than a dude that could put you into a coma, but he walked along fellow MMA heavyweight great Kevin “The Monster” Randleman who, by contrast, appeared to be carved out of obsidian.  And, already, in proof of concept, Fedor was clearly the superior fighter compared to Kevin (demonstrated both by competition record AND in their own match against each other), but Kevin’s immensely superior physique spoke to a reality such that he was such an incredibly genetically blessed physical specimen that he was able to exist AMONG the gods of MMA.  Both men trained for the sport of MMA, but training for said sport revealed VERY different physiques: both of which being the manifestation of the latent genetic potential within both athlete.  And the world of MMA is an excellent example of this, for you have Roy Nelsons, Tim Slyvias, Daniel Cormiers, and also Ken Shamrocks, Bas Ruttens, Brock Lesnars and Allistar Overeems.  Hershel Walker ALSO fought and won an MMA match…and why not discuss him as well?

Keep in mind he looked like this AFTER retiring "from his prime"

When God used “create-a-player” to make Herschel Walker, he was using cheat codes, because he breaks all the rules of reality.  He won both of his MMA matches at the age of 38-39 AFTER a full NFL career spanning 11 years itself.  NFL careers AREN’T known for their longevity promoting capacities: to win an MMA match AFTER such a long stint in a sport notorious for destroying bodies would be like running an Ironman in reverse, finishing off with the swim, and then killing a great white shark while still in the open waters.  But even CRAZIER about Mr. Walker is the absolutely bonkers physique he built for himself employing a protocol of ONLY bodyweight exercises.  He achieved a physique that physique athletes dedicate their lives ATTEMPTING to achieve, and his was simply a consequence of an attempt to get stronger for his sport: no actual desired physique based outcome motivated it.  Contrast Herschel Walker with the various other bodies that exist in the NFL, which in itself is a cultivation of the cream of the crop of the sport of American Football, to say nothing of those folks in MMA as well, and we further appreciate the reality that training is NOT what is driving the physical outcome here: the training simply made these folks GOOD at the sport, while their genetics elevated them to an elite level.  And before I’m accused of being myopic about sports here, appreciate how Usian Bolt doesn’t look like Tyson Gay, how Ronaldo Cristiano compares to Matt Turner, etc.  Even in the world of lifting, Mariusz Pudzianwoski and Derek Poundstone just plain looked DIFFERENT compared to the dudes they were dominating in the sport.  Some folks are simply “born better”.

Again: this is how Mariusz looked AFTER he retired from a sport focused on lifting and "got smaller"

Because, ultimately, every sport is simply a “genetics sifter”.  Sports operate at various levels of competition, starting with local and progressing through various echelons until you reach “elite”.  At the lower levels, one can overcome an absence of genetic talent with an abundance of heart and skill (we all love the Rocky story for this reason), and vice versa as well, but as we continue to advance higher and higher through the ranks, eventually EVERYONE has heart and skill…but you can’t train or learn genetics.  It’s why they’re called “gifts”.  And, in turn, as we climb higher and higher up the ladder, what we begin to see is that there are some folks who are so genetically blessed that they simply become Adonises whenever they do ANY sort of physical activity (if even that).  Not only do they have the necessary physical structure that lends itself well to the sport (being tall if they play basketball, having short limbs and a long torso if they’re a weightlifter, etc), but they also have a biology and anatomy that is just ready to explode with muscle while having an incredibly low personal fat threshold. 

 

Which ALSO means that we even have to discount the notion of the one sport MEANT to achieve physical perfection, because ESPECIALLY among bodybuilders, genetics are king.  It’s a truly unique double/triple whammy there, because in the professional setting, not only is it about genetic structure and response to training, but ALSO genetic response to drugs.  Some folks are able to get MUCH bigger outcomes with smaller dosages, which means greater longevity through the rigors of the sport, meaning more time/opportunity to continue to improve the physique.  Those of us remaining natural will only be able to rely on our natural genetic talent for putting on muscle in the first place, but if we’re built like a daddy longlegs, it won’t really matter HOW many 21s for guns we do: we’re just not going to look like Larry Scott.

Amazing basketball genetics: no future in bodybuilding

 

BUT, all hope is not lost here!  We have just made Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” by telling you that you can NOT look like someone else by training like them.  But in the absence of said god, Nietzsche provided us “amor fati”, and the quote “Re-create yourselves, and let this be your best creation”.  And our best creation IS what we can achieve.  Fundamentally, we must understand and appreciate that the “look like” portion of our results is the outcome of REVEALING our genetic potential through the employment of hard physical training, and from there it’s on us to discover that physical training that is best suited FOR our unique genetic predispositions.  That will allows us TO achieve our best outcomes is what is best for us.  Sport training is excellent for exactly that: becoming better at our desired activity, and we should do exactly that FOR that goal.  To improve our “look like” portion, we build as much muscle as we are able to and try to keep our fat at the level that allows us to continue to perform as best as we can.  And we do that by eating in the manner that is best suited for us as well: not by attempting to “burn away the fat” by training like said athletes.  I can assure you that Mariusz never had to do a cutting phase to be as lean as he walked around at, nor did Mike Tyson, or any of these other dudes that were simply “born better”.  Let us NOT lament that we are NOT these generational talents: let us celebrate that we even got to witness them in the first place, and allow them to motivate US to reach our own personal absolute best.  

LESSONS FROM LEMMINGS

Being born in the 80s and growing up in the 90s, access to a computer was a novel concept as a kid, and we were typically limited to short durations of that in what was deemed “computer lab” in school.  These 30-45 minute blocks once a week or so were supposed to expose us to the wonders of the modern world which, of course, to us kids, really meant a way to play video games in school.  Selections were extremely limited back then, and aside from Oregon Trail (which BOY could I write about some lessons learned from that as well), the other classic staple was a game called “Lemmings”.  The premise was simple enough: you had to guide a group of “lemmings” (which looked nothing like an actual lemmings) through a series of obstacle courses in order to get to the stage’s exit.  Stages were become increasingly more complex over time, requiring increasingly complex strategies to achieve the objective.  What did NOT grow in complexity over time were the lemmings themselves.  They only possessed the capacity to move forward and, should they run into an obstacle: turn around and move the other way.  The player has the ability to assign skillsets to certain individual lemmings (climbing, parachuting, demolition, building, etc), but he can not dictate WHEN the lemming employs this skillset: the lemming will simply use these skills when they encounter an objective where their skillset is relevant.  That is to say, the player couldn’t tell a demolition lemming “plant the bomb…NOW!”, but instead, he selects a lemming to be the “demolition lemming”, and as soon as that lemming runs into a destructible object, it will use its skillset.  This incredibly long explanation of a computer game from 1991 is here because the lessons this game taught us are SO incredibly relevant as it relates to matters of physical transformation.  Ultimately, our bodies are on a fixed trajectory: it’s up to our minds to do the necessary strategic implementation to ensure that, as we mindlessly shamble forward in hopes of reaching the objective, we don’t run into resistance that forces us to turn around and walk the other way.

This was the Fortnite of Second Grade 1992

Ultimately, and perhaps unfortunately, free will is an illusion.  Yes, that’s quite a deep proclamation on a blog about physical transformation, but allow me to demonstrate with a personal story.  Once again: I was born in the 80s, during a time when smoking was still pretty prevalent in American culture.  My mother was a smoker (note the past tense: she quit when I was in middle school and has never lit up again, I’m incredibly proud of her).  When she found out she was pregnant with me, the prevailing wisdom at the time was for smoking mothers to NOT quit smoking during the pregnancy, operating under the premise that the shock to the system of withdraw could damage the fetus.  For one: this is one of the many reasons I’m never too keen on the “latest scientific understanding”.  But, in turn, I was a low birthweight baby, because that’s kinda what happens when you smoke during pregnancy.  But not to worry, because the OTHER prevailing wisdom at the time was to put cereal in the formula bottle of low birthweight babies to help fatten them up so that they’d sleep through the night (on our stomachs, surrounded by soft pillows, to simulate the womb…SIDS was a real issue for my generation).  THIS meant I went from a low birthweight baby to a CHUBBY baby in rather short order, which perpetuated into me being a chubby toddler, and eventually a chubby kid.  And I stayed “90s fat kid fat” until high school, wherein I righted the ship effectively through sheer willpower and overcompensation and became the fitness addict/nut I am today.

 

None of the above is meant to be a sob-story, but more a demonstration of what I mean when I say free will is an illusion: I had NO say in the condition of how I was born, and we can see how it already set me on a path early in life that I had no control over.  I eventually gained the agency necessary to be able to implement INTERVENTIONS to overcome my condition, but all I was doing at that point was course correcting the trajectory that my body was sent on from day 0.  And I’m only discussing “nurture” here in the nature vs nurture: just imagine how deep this discussion can go as it relates to genetic predispositions. 

Thanks again mom!

 

Bringing up my mother again (I’m so blessed to have her as a mom): her blood has been studied by Princeton, primarily because her HDL was 125.  I did NOT inherit the fitness bug from this woman: she proudly tells the story of how, in her 4 years of serving in the Air Force, she managed to never have to do the annual physical fitness test and, to this day, is unsure if she ever COULD run a mile if called upon.  She pioneered intermittent fasting, because growing up she only ever ate dinner, and when she DID eat it, one of her favorite things to eat was either a loaded baked potato or bacon cheese fries from “Hot Dog on a Stick” at the mall.  And as a fat kid, I was envious of her BECAUSE she ate this stuff and maintained what was referred to as a “petite” frame at 5’1 and barely breaking 100lbs.  Her mom had a similar blood profile, and THAT woman grew up in that interesting generation that didn’t seem to care to eat any meat aside from hamburger patties, boiled hot dogs and lunch meat (I always knew when Grandma was coming to visit because suddenly our house was LOADED with the most incredible junkfood).  And, in turn, whenever I get my bloodwork taken, my docs, at first, scold me over my LDL (yup, got that from them too) and then go “Holy crap, what is going on with your HDL?!  How do you get it that high?” 

 

Now that you have a long and unasked for detailing of my family history, reflect on your own and realize, again: you had no say in any of this.  The day you were born, you were set on a path, you loyal lemming you.  There is an objective to be reached at the end of the level, and your goal is to arrive there, knowing full well that, as soon as you bump into resistance, you’re going to walk yourself back instead of forward.  With this understanding, it means that the only tools you have at your disposal is your ability to CLEAR THE PATH.  You cannot give the lemming directions, it has no ability to listen to you, all it knows how to do is walk forward until it either reaches the goal or runs into resistance that forces it to turn around.  You have to find a way to clear all the resistance so that the only option it has is to reach the end goal.  This means having an understanding of WHERE your body is heading so that you can find the obstacles that are in the way and implement interventions to clear them BEFORE you get to them.

Knowing where you are is helpful in knowing where you are going

 

Because, quite frankly, if there is no free will there is no willPOWER.  Which is why we see Nietzsche refer to the notion of “will TO power” instead: the idea of an instinctive drive to overcome.  Will TO power removes the notion of agency and, ironically enough, makes it that our actions DO exist outside of our control and that it’s some instinctive drive that compels us to overcome.  But in either instance, the takeaway is that we cannot rely on our ability to MAKE ourselves to do something as a means of achieving physical transformation.  At best, this is a short term “fix” which has long term and significant consequences downstream.  You may think that you found a cheat code for the game, but then you go on to discover that your lemmings have simply all walked off the cliff and died.  They bumped into resistance, you tried to just force them to walk through it, and it just made them turn around even HARDER and walk away faster.

 

All is not lost here though: it simply means that we have to appreciate that ALL of us are playing a different stage of lemmings, so, in turn, we’re all going to need to employ a DIFFERENT strategy to be able to get to the end objective.  Sure, we can borrow tips and strategies from others, but if we try to just copy them directly, we’re not going to get to the end of OUR level.  We need to appreciate what our predispositions are as they relate to nutritional preferences and strategies (are we fasters, grazers, meat eaters, grain munchers, etc), training (do we need variety, do we need numbers, do we need freedom, etc), along with the tools we’ve been given (are we hinge/pullers, squat/pushers, etc).  And once we get a lay of the land and an understanding of what the level looks like, we need to implement the correct and appropriate interventions to get us to the end of the level.  If we try to use someone else’s intervention because they swear “it’s the best one” but it does NOT fit our current situation, our little lemming is just going to run into an obstacle and turn around on us.   We need to clear their path so that they can keep walking forward.

 

That, or work out a deal with Cyttorak

But hey, at least in this game we don’t die of dysentery.    

SIMPLE IS HARD: OPTIMAL IS EASY

I’ve written on many occasions about the bane that is the hyperfocus on optimization at the expense of doing the things that actually MATTER when it comes to physical transformation, and it dawns on me at this point that what we’re observing is yet another form of advanced laziness on the part of those who claim they desire said transformation.  It’s no secret that physical transformation is a long and arduous process, and it’s ALSO no secret that humans, in general, detest such processes and desire ways to make it faster and easier.  Enter optimization, because the more we examine optimization, the more we realize that the optimal “tweaks” are just that: small, easy adjustments that are supposed to yield maximal output for minimal investment, but, in truth, they yield minimal output for minimal investment when performed in the ABSENCE of those initial simple interventions that necessitate LARGE adjustments in order to, in turn, yield large outcomes.  Allow me to demonstrate.

Feel free to check my math here

 

Over the years, I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite simple interventions as it relates to having significant impacts on physical transformation.  This is the much beloved “80% solution”: the gameplan that’s going to get you very near your ultimate goal, and leave it up to you to get the rest of the way.  Much like my development of “Chaos is the plan: the plan”, the driveby advice I’d offer to someone wanting to radically transform themselves would be: eat only whole/unprocessed food while aiming to get 1g of protein per pound of bodyweight per day WITHOUT protein supplements, walk 8k steps per day, to include 3 10 minute walks after meals, engage in resistance training 2-3x per week, drink only zero calorie beverages, sleep at least 7 hours per night.  Honestly, this is another great “e-book in a paragraph”, and if I wanted to flesh out what to do for the resistance training, I COULD just throw in the “Chaos is the plan” program and call it a day.  But observe the reality of what is written here: it’s simple, but it is NOT easy.

 

I’ve recently taken to lamenting the tragic state of our food environment, but in summary: the deck is stacked against us in the modern age.  It, truthfully, should NOT be hard to eat only unprocessed/whole foods, but for a lot of folks this is going to be a SIGNIFICANT undertaking.  They’re going to have to restructure their entire lives, most likely spend some time learning how to shop and cook, possibly buy cooking equipment, etc.  A call to drink only zero calorie beverages will be an eye opener to many folks regarding how they don’t ever actually drink ANY water whatsoever (self-included: I lived off diet soda).  People tracking their steps suddenly discover that they’re racking up 2k in an average day. And this isn’t even speaking to the possibly withdraw symptoms people may experience as a result of coming off “the dope” of the chemical crapstorm that is contained in many processed foods, or the actual cessation of drugs and alcohol as a start of this process. 

It's sad how fitting this metaphor is

But, appreciate the reality that NONE of these interventions are complex.  People bemoan how “complicated” health and fitness is when it comes time to start, but ultimately that’s a result of hucksters trying to make a buck by making fitness APPEAR complicated so that they can sell you a solution.  Because no one is going to make money selling what I outlined up above, yet, as far as results go, taking these simple interventions is going to yield MASSIVE returns on investment.  Legitimately, if everyone on Earth did this, we’d extend our livespans, eradicate many diseases, and no one would want to be a doctor anymore because there’d be no money in the business. 

 

Optimization, on the other hand, tends to be incredibly complex and, in turn, something sold by the aforementioned hucksters as a solution seeking a problem.  Eating whole foods?  Nah, what you NEED to do is make sure you take a FAST absorbing protein paired with a low molecular weight carbohydrate 38 minutes into the lifting session the MAXIMIZE anabolism, or else the workout doesn’t count.  But THANKFULLY we have that pre-mixed into a powder that tastes like Fruity Pebbles that you can put in your shaker bottle before going home and order Door Dash.  You don’t need more sleep: you need more pre-workout!  THAT is how you’re going to maximize gym performance, and instead of engaging in a sleep hygiene ritual, you can just take ANOTHER powder.  And how will we solve getting the necessary protein to gain muscle?  Why yet ANOTHER powder: this way we won’t have to deal with all that messy cooking or yucky “real food”: we can just have ice cream and protein powder.  The powder absorbs better anyway!

We got this all locked down!

 

This is the primary reason why folks hyperfixate on optimizing rather than settling for “good enough”: because the optimization part is the EASY part.  People like to argue that they already have the basics “locked down”…but do they really?  Are they actually sticking with the resistance training long enough to see a training effect, or are they changing programs every 4 weeks in order to continually re-activate the novel effect of training and feel sore all the time without any actual progression?  Are they ACTUALLY complying with the nutrition, or is it Monday through Friday on point and weekends are a free-for-all?  Did they pick binge watching Netflix over getting in their steps today?  Or, in an ultimate sense of irony, did we spend all day binge consuming media regarding optimization that we forgot to actually engage in our 80% solution? 

 

And again, it’s also why confusions exists amongst the ranks, because when you get the big names together in a room to talk, all they talk about IS optimization BECAUSE they have the simple interventions locked down…but for real for them.  It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for them to talk about eating whole foods for all their meals because they already got that sorted out.  And, if they have any interest in getting traction regarding what they’re discussing, they know people are going to disconnect once the conversation goes toward the basics.  But there are a few holdouts out there that are still beating this drum, with Dan John, of course, leading the charge, but there are a few others worth seeking out as well.  What we can take from this is the accuracy of Occam’s Razor: wherein often the simplest solution is the most correct one.  And, in turn, we can appreciate the inverse relationship between complexity and difficulty.  Which, in and of itself, can be extrapolated as it relates to training a more advanced trainee, such that, if we’re in a state where we need to increase the COMPLEXITY of the training in order to achieve a training effect, it means that the solution is not ALSO to increase the INTENSITY of the training program.  A beginner trainee MAY simply need to train HARDER in order to get better, but as we trend up the scale of ability, we may need to actually ease off the throttle a touch in order to implement methodologies that allow us to continue achieving our desired outcome.              

THOUGHTS ON SQUATS

I’ve been training the barbell squat since 2003.  Steely eyed readers will note that this does NOT line up with my persistent claim of (as of this writing) having lifted weights for 26 years.  This is, of course, a testament to the reality that, in 1999, when I first started lifting weights, all I had was an adjustable standard weight bench with spinlock collars with a leg extension/curl/preacher curl station built in, along with some spinlock adjustable dumbbells, which meant I, of course, only did bench and curls 5 days a week, with some occasional leg extensions and curls.  And then I joined our football team for 1 season, wherein our coaches demonstrated the barbell squat to us and then promptly informed us it was a dangerous lift that would hurt our backs and that we shouldn’t do it.  Yeah: our program wasn’t super great.  So I spent my formative high school years NOT squatting: it wasn’t until I got to college that saw OTHER lifters performing this “dangerous” movement that I got the gumption to actually give it a try (fun fact: THAT college weightroom had a rule against DEADLIFTS, because THOSE lifts were dangerous, required a high degree of skill, and could hurt your back.  You’d get kicked out if you were caught deadlifting…so I called all my deadlifts reverse hack squats.  Also fun fact: this was the same college gym Jon Andersen lifted in…)  This incredibly long and undesired background story is here just to establish my bona fides as it comes to the following thoughts, observations and blasphemy I’m about to express regarding the squat, but why don’t I provide a little more background: the ONLY way I knew how to squat from 2003 to about 2023 was a low bar squat.  I never even tried high bar.  I then went through a stint of ONLY doing high bar, no belt, stupidly full ROM squats for about 2 years before returning back to my beloved low bar squat, for reasons I will discuss momentarily.  But for now: here are some thoughts on squats…

 

IT’S A BODYBUILDER: NOT A LEG BUILDER

And a soul crusher

Alright, before I get any further, let me clarify that when I say “squat”, I’m referring to what many other people call “the back squat”.  Since I’m pedantic, I do NOT call it the back squat.  Saying “THE” squat means it is, by default, with a barbell on your back.  All other squats are variations of this squat, and I’m not going to say “back squat” the same way I’m not going to say “overhead” when it comes to the press.  So anyway…

 

The squat always comes under fire in discussion on building muscle because of the fact that we have numerous various studies that absolutely confirm that there are tons of better movements out there for building leg muscles.  Leg extensions, leg pressing, belt squatting, and I’m sure various other machines and exercises have all come out ahead of the squat.  And this argument is used to remove the squat from muscle building programs, saying that it’s an obsolete movement and there are better choices out there for building the legs.

But still not this

 

This is missing the point.  The function of the squat in a mass building program is not, specifically, the building of the legs: it’s the building of the body as a whole!  And as much as glasses pushers wanna make a meme out of “squats make your arms grow”, there’s a reason the old school folks believed that maxim.  For a while, the idea was that training large muscles released more growth hormone, and though that may be true, the amount raise is, most likely, inconsequential.  No, my thought (yes, it’s my theory, the joy of solipsism is I don’t have to prove anything) is that it’s the whole body systemic loading of the squat that, in turn, promotes a whole body systemic RESPONSE to grow from the load.  THIS is why the squat features so heavily in mass building programs, like Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, Building the Monolith, Deep Water, much of the work of Stuart McRobert, Paul Anderson’s training, etc etc.  It’s not about the bending and extending of the legs, because if that were the case the leg press would be an adequate substitute here: it’s about the time spent with a load on your shoulders compressing your entire body.  Let’s use a little philosophy to compensate for a lack of biology here with this follow on explanation.

 

We take it as a given that, if you train a muscle DIRECTLY, that muscle responds by growing (assuming the training is correctly executed of course, balancing stimulus against recovery and fatigue).  It’s the whole reason isolation exercises exist: we want to target THAT muscle and make it grow.  But we ALSO know, through studies and experience, that even if we train only ONE side, the OTHER side of the body will respond.  If we train ONLY one arm, the other arm will STILL grow in response to this stimulus.  The body does NOT want to be asymmetrical, and will attempt all manner of hormonal and metabolic tomfoolery to be able to achieve balance even if we ham-fistedly try to make it do otherwise.  This is why you’re advised to train the uninjured side when you have an injury: in order to limit the amount of muscle lost during the recovery process.  When we take both of these ideas to be true, we understand something Dan John has been saying to us for years: the body is all one piece.  It actually CAN’T be isolated.  Even when we try to do so, the stimulus travels to the OTHER side of the body.  Which stands to reason, then, that even IF we’re doing “squats”, and the targeted muscles are in the legs, due to the sheer load of the exercise being placed across the ENTIRE body, the entire body will, in turn, grow.

 

THE WORSE YOU ARE, THE BETTER YOU ARE

Yeah, kinda like this

 

Referencing even more Dan John, he talks of the 4 quadrants of lifters: pullers, pushers, hingers and squatters.  In this case, we’re going to ignore those first 2 and speak specifically to hingers and squatters.  Some people are naturally built to hinge, and some are naturally built to squat.  If you need examples of either, Mark Felix, Steve Goggins and Layne Norton are natural hingers, while Tom Platz is going to be our example of a natural squatter.  Why do these distinctions matter in this discussion of the squat?  Because it further reinforces the notion of the squat as a BODYbuilder rather than a leg builder.  Because for certain naturally built squatters, it may actually BE the case that the squat is an awesome leg builder.  Tom Platz built the most noteworthy set of legs in the world relying primarily on the squat, and set a feat of strength so incredible with his 525lb squat for 23 reps that Bill Kazmaier flat out said it was fake and it took 30 years, lots of drugs and about 100lbs+ more bodyweight for anyone else to top it.  In turn, though, when you watch the footage of Tom squatting, you see a human that was practically lab built to execute the squat.  His legs are short, his torso is long, and each rep looks like machine precision, with a bolt upright torso and feet close together.  Kaz referred to these as “sewing machine squats”, like the needle in a machine bobbing up and down.

 

Compare this to the natural hingers I referenced.  You look at their bodies and see long, gangly legs with short torsos.  When they squat, they lean far forward, practically in a good morning, and the ROM of the squat is a journey that would give Frodo pause.  It takes FOREVER for these folks to find depth, and the return from it is an agonizing and awkward process: EXACTLY what we need for growing!  I suppose they said the same thing about middle school.

Keep in mind he was the first person to squat 1100lbs in competition, so it's not like he was a BAD squatter...

Because, again, the squat is building our BODY through a prolonged systemic load.  Super Squats figured out how to extend the duration of the load by use of the breathing mechanic, Dan John figured out how to do it by just cranking the reps up to 50, Jon Andersen figured out how to do it by forcing you to do 10 goddamn sets of 10, but examples abound, we observe how spending significant time stressing the body under load results in the body growing significantly.  This means that those UNNATURAL squatters are going to get even MORE benefit from the squat as an exercise that builds the ENTIRE body by nature of them being poorly suited for the squat.  Each rep is going to take FOREVER to get done and will place the body under significant stress, whereas the natural squatter may, in fact, find that the squat is an EXCELLENT leg building exercise because they are actually built to benefit FROM the squat as a leg builder.  These folks may, actually, need to learn more into hinging as a means to achieve a similar effect.  “May” being the word there: I bet squats still do an excellent job of growing those folks too.

 

THE ROLE OF THE SQUAT

Close enough

The big takeaway from all of this is that the squat needs to be evaluated against its actual intended purpose, AND it must be implemented in a similar manner.   When I want to grow, I put a bar on my back.  I KNOW it’s going to do the job.  But when I need to start getting stronger?  The bar moves off my back and in front of me.  Front squats are always my featured lift in Operator phases of Tactical Barbell.  Why?  Because these WILL strengthen the legs for me more than a squat will AND they put less total systemic stress on me, which means I can SAVE that stress for MORE strength work: specifically strongman events that are taxing on the whole body WITHOUT allowing for the same loading I can experience with a squat.  Atlas stones, sandbag carries, log pressing, etc, all tax the whole body significantly, but don’t “build” like a squat does due to how the loading pans out.  There still needs to be a balance between stimulus, fatigue and recovery, and swapping out the squat for a front squat achieves that.  The Safety Squat Bar can potentially achieve a similar outcome as well, simply because loading can be manipulated with it, but I find it a bit more “playing with fire” compared to a front or zercher squat, and tend to still employ the SSB in gaining phases.

 

Dan John (again) has observed that increasing his squat doesn’t tend to have much significant impact on athletic performance, whereas improving the front squat DOES have much better carryover (along with the goblet squat, double kettlebell front squat, etc), BUT that increasing the squat number DOES tend to result in growth in an athlete, which, again, speaks to the premise that we need to employ to squat for its beneficial function.  CAN the squat make your legs bigger and stronger?  Certainly.  Is it the BEST tool to do so?  Most likely not, at least not directly.  There’s a reason we don’t tend to see it prominently featured in the training of strongman or weightlifters, outside of in the off season.  But when its time for us to grow?  It’s hard to find something better. 

 

IN SUMMARY

Yeah pretty much

 

Critiquing the squat as a leg builder is missing the point of the exercise (pun fully intended).  The squat is an excellent movement for what it does: adding size to the entire body.  Shying away from it in a mass building program because there are “better leg exercises” is shortchanging yourself from the benefits contained in a whole body load that comes from this movement, but at the same time, attempting to strengthen this movement in pursuit of improving your own athletic capabilities is most likely putting you at a disadvantage.  And if it feels awful, it’s most likely working for you even better!