OPTIONAL TRAITS AND MIN/MAXING

In 1997, the original “Fallout” game was released on PC and went on to subsequently blow my mind and influence my life to this day, to the point that I STILL have a file I’m playing through right now.  At the time, I had grown up on a steady diet of Japanese Role Playing Games (JRPGs) which, though quite enjoyable, were very much an “on rails” experience: you played with the characters you were given and followed the story set before you.  Fallout was billed as a game where you could be anybody and do anything, which, of course, meant that I IMMEDIATELY built the physically strongest character I possibly could and punched everyone I met in the groin with a pair of brass knuckles.  And when I say “physically strongest possible”, I wholly mean that, because central to the character creation process of Fallout are “optional traits”: quirks you can pick that help further define your character by offering them a trait/quality that has an element of “give and take” to it.  You gain advantages in one area at the expense of disadvantages in the other.  The one I immediately keyed in on was called “Bruiser”, which was described as “"A little slower, but a little bigger. You may not hit as often, but they will feel it when you do! Your total action points are lowered, but your Strength is increased.”  Oh my goodness yes, how do I take this one twice?  I actually BROKE the system by first increasing my strength score to 10 and THEN selecting Bruiser, netting me a strength score of 12, which the game informed me was “outside the limits” (“be anything” my ass!), which I’m sure is of no surprise to my regular readers who understand my propensity to love strength AND not follow rules.  But longwinded nostalgia bloviation aside, I bring ALL of this up for us to understand that life imitates art and that we are all playing our own game of Fallout right there, and for many of us, those things that we perceive to be “flaws” are, most likely, simply optional traits. And like any good little munchkin, it’s up to US to engage in the time honored tradition of “min/maxing”.

If you knew me in 1997, or you know me now, you know I'm always picking this

Ok, so now what is “min/maxing”?  Min/maxing is the dirty trick that “powergamers” engage in where they select traits that ALLEGEDLY have flaws to coincide with their bonuses and find ways to maximize the bonuses while obviating the flaws.  In Fallout, a classic approach to this is to select the “Fast Shot” optional trait, which allows you to shoot more times per round at the expense of not being able to do targeted shots to specific bodyparts, and then specializing in big guns, which don’t allow you to do targeted shots anyway.  All the advantages and none of the consequences.  It breaks the spirit of the optional traits without actually breaking any of the rules: fully “suffering” the consequences without actually suffering.  This is why min/maxers frustrate dungeon masters and game developers, but for us, the player: we’re just looking out for number 1.

 

Which means you need to recognize WHAT your optional trait is, what the alleged “consequence” is of it, and how to obviate yourself from that consequence.  I grew up a fat kid (a fact I’ve shared often), and frequently lamented an ever present voracious appetite AND capacity for food.  I was always hungry AND whenever I ate, I could eat a LOT of food without really feeling “full”.  For those of you that remember my write-up of eating the Stellanator, a 5lb cheeseburger, in 31 minutes, this was a fantastic demonstration of these abilities, especially when considering I am NOT a professional eater, and was just a dude that showed up on a Thursday and ate a burger that over 1000 people have tried and only 70 have succeeded on.  I viewed this wholly as a curse at the time, until I got into lifting, and suddenly discovered that I had a super power.  I NEVER had to worry about recovery, the notion of “overtraining” seemed like a myth to me, and I could take on RIDICULOUS training schedules and volumes, because the amount of food I could put away at any given time was more than adequate to replace whatever the energy demands were being placed upon my body.  And this created a positive feedback loop, wherein the ridiculous training volume and intensity significantly increased my work capacity and conditioning, which allowed me to train even harder and with more volume, which drove up appetite, which permitted me to eat even more to fuel the whole process.  It was effectively the Bruce Randall story, only stopping “halfway” (more around 220lbs than 402lbs).  And, of course, I didn’t really come to understand I HAD this superpower until I got online and observed other trainees who did NOT possess this ability: their appetite and capacity limited their ability to grow and recover from their training, as they simply could NOT eat enough food to maximize their results.

Laugh it up: we could honestly all learn a few lessons from Fred Dukes

But there’s a downside right?  Not feeling full until you’ve eaten a lot of food is pretty much WHY we have an obesity epidemic right?  Yes, that certainly CAN be a consequence, IF one does not employ min/maxing.  Because I’ve learned that my strength in the realm of eating ALSO makes it that I’m one of the few people out there that can successfully employ eating one meal a day while STILL meeting whatever protein threshold I have in order to spare/build lean tissue.  Because, again, one meal a day, in and of itself, often has the consequence that attempting to employ this manner of eating prevents people from eating adequate nutrients because they simply don’t have the stomach capacity or appetite to eat enough food to fuel hard training.  But tapping into my optional trait, I’m able to leverage my strength in a manner to obviate my flaw, sitting down to one meal and putting away enough food and nutrients to satisfy whatever demands I have.  And because of the timing of eating AND the foods that I’m choosing to eat, I find a way to quell the voracious appetite portion of the optional trait while still leaning into the “near unlimited capacity” for food element of it.  I’ve become a dirty powergamer.

 

And once again: life imitates art.  In Fallout, pretty much each optional trait had its dualistic counterpart.  For Bruiser, it was “small framed”, wherein one had an extra point of agility at the expense of how much weight they could carry (THIS trait was ripe for min/maxing, and a popular choice for powergamers), and in the realm of physical transformation, we’ve seen my opposites: either the people that have no natural appetite OR the people that can eat massive quantities and NOT put on weight.  I interact with these people frequently on the internet, as I have always been a fan of the prospect of transformation by way of eating big, training hard and growing, and look to encourage it whenever possible.  And, in turn, the min/max strategy I convey to these individuals is always the same: they have ZERO concern of ever getting “too fat” in a gaining phase, because they have the superpower of effortlessly existing/achieving leanness that, as soon as they are ready to get BACK there, all they have to do is get back to being “normal” and it’ll happen.  For so many OTHER trainees, the prospect of a cut is terrifying because it sounds like existing in a state of perpetual willpower and denial (which, I’ve written on many occasions, is the sign of a dysfunctional diet, but among the calorie counters and IIFYM crowd, it’s the ONLY way they know how to lose weight).  This prospect is so terrifying that these trainees will try to engineer the gaining phase in such a manner that there IS no follow-on cutting phase: they only gain “pure muscle” the entire time and, when it’s done, can just transition to maintenance.  Yeah, that NEVER works, and they just end up spinning their wheels the entire time because they’re too afraid to eat to grow.  Which is why, for these alleged “hardgainers”, I inform them that their optional trait is that they can “full send” in the gaining phase, drinking heavy cream mixed with melted ice cream mixed with ghee in order to get in the calories and REALLY live the Bruce Randall story, because they’ll very easily achieve the SECOND arc of the Bruce Randall story where he lost half his bodyweight to become one of the most jacked men on the planet.  And meanwhile, DURING that gaining phase, these dudes are going to be absolutely CRUSHING their workouts, because their effectively going to have rocket fuel running through their bodies through the sheer amount of calories put down, with no doubt whatsoever that they’ve consumed enough energy to maximize protein synthesis and achieve full muscular development.  Yeah yeah: science has determined that we don’t need “that much” in order to grow…but isn’t it awesome when you have NO doubt whatsoever that you’ve hit that mark?  THAT is your min/max: now YOU’RE a powergamer too.

Bruce Min/Maxed so hard it honestly looked liked cheating

And there are SO many more optional traits that can be discussed in this regard.  Anatomical structure, food preferences/aversions, sleep habits, etc etc.  The point is, in an era where kids will legit upload photos of themselves online to have their “genetics” evaluated while asking if they have any hope of a future in the pursuit of physical transformation, let’s take a step back and appreciate these optional traits for what they are.  They were put into the game to give a little character to our character: make them stand out beyond simply being the guy with the gun.  And they DO give us character, they DO make us unique, but they are also RIFE for exploitation by those who are willing to be creative IN a game where we are TOLD to explore our endless creativity.  Find your optional trait and find ways to min/max it, so that the rest of the world playing the game normally can get upset with you for being a powergamer while you coast toward the next level up and perk.      

TIME IS NOT ON YOUR SIDE: THE VALUE OF DEADLINES

In nearly 14 years of writing over 1000 words a week on physical transformation, I feel like one of the very few legitimately beneficial/revolutionary ideas I’ve introduced to the conversation is the notion of having training lead and nutrition follow, rather than the other way around.  I know I did not come UP with this idea, moreso I re-introduced it, for I myself grew up with this notion and it seemed to be “the norm” to me, only for me to wander out of my cave of shadows into reality and discover that the whole world was doing it the other way around (holy cow I’m doing this allegory backwards, but whatever).  With this post, I am hoping to (re)introduce a SECOND concept that may prove beneficial in the realm of physical transformation: operating off of deadlines based on time, rather than outcome.  And again, this is an idea that has existed WELL before my discussion here, along with my own rediscovery of it: this is a notion that perpetuates the realm of REAL athletes, who operate with seasons and periodization.  However, this notion has eluded those whose “education” subsists entirely of talking heads on social media, and most likely because it does not sell WELL on social media to tell people to operate based off a timeline, because it necessitates SOME degree of patience along with actually sitting back and observing the results roll in, compared to FORCING the results to come irrespective of if they’re ready or not.  But I’m already digressing here: what I intend to discuss is that, in the pursuit of physical goals, instead of basing our training and nutrition decisions on the ACHIEVEMENT of said goals, we need to base our decisions on how much time we will spend PURSUING those goals.  Time is NOT on our side: let’s make the most of that fact.

Our relationship with time perfectly demonstrated

To begin, let’s discuss what a lotta folks are doing right now, which is what I take issue with.  Let’s take a trainee who is unsatisfied with the amount of bodyfat they have.  They decide they’re going to go on a cut.  Quite often, they decide that they have a goal weight or a goal bodyfat percentage (the latter of which they measure using ridiculous methods, to include having AI evaluate a photo of them, using a bioimpedance scale, etc) and, from here, decide that the cut ends once they’ve reached their goal.  Because, quite often, one only decides to cut when bodyfat has becomes a “crisis”, these cuts tend to start with a LOT of steam, rapidly slashing caloric intake and engaging in some serious intense training, which, in turn, results in some metabolic slowdown and burnout, leading to a cycle of binging due to starvation, doubling down on the starving and training, and frequently failing to meet the objective of fat loss.  The “cut” goes on for MONTHS, and possibly even a year, and when it’s done, the trainee may have FINALLY reached the goal number, only to be stringy, burnt out, weak, fried, and with crashed hormones. 

 

And to keep this post from getting too long, let’s do a quick summary of the bulking trap.  Because trainees want to avoid that situation above, they’re so absolutely terrified of putting on ANY fat during a gaining phase that they handcuff themselves to the SMALLEST of bodyweight gains on a fixed weekly progression while aiming for a final bodyweight goal, only to frequently fail to put on ANY actual tissue in the muscle building process, spending months and months spinning their wheels while effectively “reverse dieting” by slowly upping their calories to the point that the body just keeps revving up NEAT and metabolic processes, eventually getting to a point where 3500+ calories per day is NOT moving the needle on the scale, their guts are exhausted from having to process SO much chicken and rice daily, their body is worn out from training hard to build muscle without enough actual nutrition to support it, and people STILL have to ask them if they lift weights, because it’s not readily apparent to any outside observer.  …I guess I didn’t actually do a quick summary there.

I'm sure you're used to this by now

 

What is it that I am observing as the flaw in these “plans”?  A lack of deadline.  “We’re done when we’re done” seems noble when understood from the lens of “we’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done”, but frequently a lack of established deadline means that projects can meander WELL beyond any reasonable measure of time to accomplish the objective.  A lack of urgency tends to result in a lack of focus and intensity, something that anyone who has ever written an academic paper can appreciate.  Hell, it’s why this very blog is written weekly: I force myself to come up with SOMETHING to write once a week, because if it was just “whenever I felt like writing something”, this would have significantly fewer posts (which, for some of you, may actually be a blessing, but again, I digress).  In the case of the fat loss trainee, because the objective was simply to hit a number on the scale, and there was no timeline associated with it, those binges were just met with a shrug and the thought “whelp, next week I’ll do better”, only for the cycle to repeat.  For the bulker, with each passing week wherein the scale didn’t budge, they just consoled themselves “well at least I didn’t get fatter: I’ll do better next week”.

 

We have to be able to run out of “next weeks” so that we CAN’T rely on them.  Just like Apollo Creed said in Rocky III “there IS no tomorrow”.  This is why signing up for a competition does such a great job of producing changes: we have a deadline wherein we NEED to be able to perform, and if we show up and we’re not ready, we don’t get to move the date back.  I’ve written many times how I got the strongest I’d ever been when I had 12 weeks to add 75lbs to my keg clean and press: a challenge that seems patently insane, but by having it in front of me it vectored all of my other training decisions and had me locked in and “on point”.  My time with Super Squats proved effective in a similar manner: knowing I had 6 weeks to make the most of the training phase, I dutifully drank my gallon of milk a day and breathed so hard my teeth hurt on those squats to watch my bodyweight climb 12lbs in 6 weeks.  Same with my 6 week run with Building the Monolith, same with my 12 weeks of Deep Water Beginner and Intermediate, and same with my 26 week “ultimate mass building block”

Locking in is locking in

Talking around the topic up until this point, let me lay this out into something actionable.  It’s totally fine to have goals based around outcomes (“I want to be leaner, I want to be more muscular, etc”), but we’re going to structure the PURSUIT of these goals based around time.  “I’m going to allow myself 12 weeks to get leaner”, “I’m going to allow myself 16 weeks to become more muscular”.  This is going to have multiple benefits.  First is the aforementioned artificially induced urgency: we know we ONLY have so many weeks to pursue this goal, and if we don’t achieve our desired outcome in time, we “lose”.  BUT, in something of a twist, having a finish line ALSO makes the pursuit of these goals far more endurable.  If I just tell you “go run” and never give you an idea of how far we’re going, you’ll have no idea how to pace yourself, if you need to conserve energy, etc.  If I say “go run 20 miles”, as much as that amount SUCKS, at least you know WHAT the end is, and once you get to mile 18 you can tell yourself “2 more miles: I got this”.  It’s no different when you’re deep in a fat loss phase OR completely exhausted in the pursuit of building muscle: if there is a finishline in sight, you can bear down for a few more weeks, make it to the end, and then ease off the throttle.  And finally, having predetermined and fixed periods of pursuit prevent us from allowing these pursuits to meander to UNREASONABLE stretches of time to the point that they start having deleterious impacts on our health.  Even if we’re frequently FAILING in the pursuit of losing fat, LIVING in a persistently restricted state is going to have negative impacts on our psychology and physiology, and trying to “bulk” for a year, irrespective of if the scale is moving, it just going to exhaust us.  By having an established timeline, we give our body and mind some necessary breaks along the way, allowing us to recover and revive between attempts, so that we can charge in full of vim and vigor for the next go round.

 

And therein lies my contribution to this dialog.  Let training lead the way, let nutrition follow, and structure the pursuit of that training and nutrition around time, rather than outcome.        

A PEEK UNDER THE HOOD

With my recent write-up comparing 5/3/1 and Tactical Barbell, I figured this would be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the “Uncrustableness” of Tactical Barbell as it relates to planning out the my training for the next year.  Because, yes: with TB, it’s simple to map out a year of training.  By knowing my bumpers and milestones to vector around, TB provides plenty of latitude to be able to maneuver, plan and execute.  Ideally, if you’re interested in employing TB in your own training, you can take from this approach and employ it on your own.

 

TO START: THE BUMPERS/MILESTONES

 

Not to be confused with this, which is how I lost my first ever Magic the Gathering tournament

I am a big fan of limitations, because they provide us structure.  If I just say “Go make a workout”, there’s too much openness in the statement and we end up suffocating with options.  If I say “Go make a workout using only 1 kettlebell and a chinning bar”, suddenly we have a vector and can make something incredible.  In that regard, when it comes to mapping out a training plan, I start with what my limitations will be.  These are the bumpers/milestones: events occurring during the year that will lend vector to my training.  In that regard, here is what I’m operating with.

 

* My birthday is late Oct, which is a day of feasting.

* After that, Thanksgiving happens: another feast.

* After that, Christmas happens, another feast.

* After that is the New Year, which is a time when anyone can engage in a hard training program and strict dietary protocol and no one will bat an eye.  It’s the expectation. 

* I am signed up for a strongman competition on 20 Feb.  I have no issue with making weight for it (Masters 220).

* I go on a Cruise for my kid’s spring break in late Mar.

* The wife and I run a 10 mile race in Apr.

* Memorial day is the end of May, which, along with a day of remembrance, we celebrate the memory with a feast.

* Though unannounced, there is most likely going to be another strongman competition in Aug.  And at that point, I’ve come full circle for the year.

 

STORYBOARDING

 

Sometimes you gotta break out the crayons

Knowing the bumpers and limitations, we can begin drafting up some general thoughts to help guide the actual plan development.  Here is what we know.

 

* Looking at the above, fall through winter is a lot of feasting opportunities.  It’d be a poor time to try to prioritize fat loss, while ALSO being an excellent time to try to leverage all that feasting toward hard training.  We’ll have no shortage of fuel, and recovery will be good.  This is sounding like a “Mass Protocol” situation.

 

* The New Year’s will be an excellent time to “detox” from all the feasting from Fall to Winter.  It also is leading right into a strongman competition.  It would be a great time to focus on getting fit, strong, and lighter.  This is sounding like an “Operator” situation.

 

* The cruise in Mar would be 3-4 weeks after the strongman competition.  That will be after about 7 weeks of leaning out since New Year’s, and the cruise itself will be an avenue for feasting.  Taking the above 2 data points, it sounds like it could lend to a 10-11 week leaning out phase before the start of some growing.  3-4 weeks is an opportunity to continue running Operator OR to do a Work Capacity training block.

 

* After the cruise, aside from that 10 mile run, the next milestone is a Memorial day Feast.  This means I have some feasting bookends: the start of feasting at the cruise, and the final feast on Memorial day.  This lends to a Mass Protocol situation for 8-9 weeks.  

 

* Now we’re in Jun, with a strongman competition in Aug.  It could be the start or end of Aug depending, so we’re looking at 2-3 Operator cycles for 8-12 weeks (factoring in a bridge week).

 

* The 2-3 Operator cycles mentioned above carry me through the summer, at which point I’m back to Sep, leaned out as a result of the strongman comp prep, eyeing another Birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas on the horizon.  So here we go again.

 

THE PLAN

 

Much like squatting with a bosu ball, you most likely saw this one coming

Now that we’ve drafted the storyboard, it comes time to get a little more granular and start planning out the actual training/phases.  Those that have read Tactical Barbell Mass Protocol are familiar with the periodization structure of OMS, but for those unaware: those 3 letters stand for “Operator-Mass-Specificity”, which are 3 different programs that exist in the Tactical Barbell universe.  Operator is strength and conditioning focused, Mass is (obviously) Mass focused, and Specificity would best be understood as “bodybuilding focused”.  Whereas Mass is about building mass in general, specificity focuses on higher rep ranges and more isolation/focus to bring up weak areas.  The idea is to move from one phase to the other and repeat as a means of basic periodization.  And that’s exactly how this plan will execute.

 

FALL PHASE (14 Sep – 2 Jan/16 Weeks)

* 2 cycles (6 weeks total) of Mass Protocol (Grey Man, in this case, my preferred Mass Protocol program, which I’ve reviewed in the past)

* Assessment: I use a low bar squat when I run Grey Man, and it can beat me up after too much time.  I’ve learned to value movement rotation, much like what Westside Barbell prescribes for Max Effort for the same reason.  So I’ll see how I feel at this point and, from there, make one of 2 decisions.

- Course of Action (COA) 1: Continue with 1 more cycle of Grey Man, 1  Bridge Week, 1 cycle of Specificity Bravo (currently at 13 weeks of training)

-COA 2: Implement bridge week to recover, then transition to Fat Zulu (from TB III) for 2 cycles, 1 bridge week (13 weeks of training). 

(COA1 assumes I feel fine and am able to continue pushing Grey Man, while COA2 uses Fat Zulu as an “escape plan” [reference previous posts] to let my body recover.  COA1 employs Specificity from Mass Protocol, while COA2 leans into the 4x a week approach of Fat Zulu to function in that regard)

* Irrespective of COA selected, end with Operator Pro (Green/TB III) using hypertrophy rep ranges with cluster based around the events for the Strongman competition.  3 weeks of training, for 16 weeks total.

 

NEW YEAR’S PHASE (4 Jan – 20 Mar/11 Weeks)

Looks like a pattern developing...

 

* 2 cycles of Operator Pro with strength ranges for the supplemental work, followed by 1 bridge week leading into the strongman competition (7 weeks total)

* Assessment: At this point, I’ll have been employing Operator Pro for 3 cycles specifically preparing for a strongman competition.  The comp is over: there’s no “need” to continue with Operator Pro, and the next milestone is the cruise.  I’ll need to assess what my needs are at this point, as I’ll have 4 weeks left to do something.

* COA 1: Continue with Operator Pro simply to maintain status quo and focus on moving heavy weights during a leaning out phase to maintain as much lean mass as possible.

* COA 2: Work Capacity/SE phase from TBIII in order to satisfy my inner psychotic need for self-destruction (being incredibly honest here) before a nice break on the cruise.

* COA 3: The 4 week base building plan from TBIII in order to, well, build my base, as it’s been a while since I’ve focused/prioritized low intensity long duration conditioning.

* Irrespective of COA selected, finishes with a 1 week bridge week due to the cruise.

 

SPRING PHASE (29 Mar – 29 May/9 weeks)  

Oh my goodness this is too ridiculous

 

* Coming right off a bridge week, 9 weeks is an excellent time to run 2 cycles of Grey Man or a similar Mass Protocol template and 1 cycle of Specificity.  I could play around and run different Mass Protocol programs, or take something from TB III/Green Protocol, but ultimately we know that this is going to be a period of gaining, and it’s tight enough to get in 3 consecutive 3 week training cycles.

 

SUMMER PHASE (31 May – TBD August/10-13 weeks)

Nailed it

 

* The date range on this is a little ambiguous, as the date for the strongman comp hasn’t been announced yet, so this plan will need to be further fleshed out.  Be we DO know it’s going to start with a bridge week, since we JUST finished 9 hard weeks of gaining.  It’s also going to have a bridge week before the comp, so we’re looking at realistically 8-11 weeks of training.  And since we’re prepping for a strongman comp, the plan is going to be Operator Pro.  It’s now a question of if we lead into it with the hypertrophy range work for the supplemental or cut straight to the strength work, and that will be determined by if the competition is in early August or late August.  More time means more training cycles.

 

REPEAT

 

THE NUTRITION

 

Yet surprisingly there's a fair bit of fasting ahead

I genuinely feel I’ve struck gold with “The Roulette Diet”, because it honestly makes this entire process so incredibly simple.  Ultimately, all I need to do is up my “2 meal day” frequency during the Mass Protocol phases and reduce it during the Operator phases.  Additionally, I’ve played around with altering the protein to fat ratio of my energy intake simply by transitioning from whole eggs to egg whites as priorities change.  I eat 10 egg whites at a time during my leanest phases, which, if I were to swap 1 egg white out for 1 whole egg, it means adding 40 additional calories to my intake (each whole egg contains 6g of fat and 6g of protein, while each white is 5g of protein and 0g of fat, so each swap means adding 6g of fat (x9 calories, for 36 calories) and 1g of protein (x4 calories, for 4 calories, 40 total).  So if I were to swap out all 10 whites for whole eggs, I’d add 400 calories to my total: right in that sweet spot between 300-500 calories…which would be cool, if I counted calories. 

 

But in either capacity, this is incredibly simple and streamlined and fits in perfectly with what I love about TB: fire and forget.

 

IN SUMMARY

 

Did I miss anything?

Tactical Barbell is so simple, effective and modular that, once you know what your milestones and limitations are for the year, you can map out a full year of training without much difficulty.  Keeping OMS as a framework and allotting for occasional bursts of Base Building or Work Capacity provides an easy to follow structure to operate off of.  And as always: chaos is the plan, don’t get upset if it all blows up once it comes in contact with the enemy.

TACTICAL BARBELL 2 YEAR REVIEW: TB VS 5/3/1 AS PBJS

Holy cow that title has a lot of initialisms (which are different from acronyms: look it up), but it’s rather apropos for both Tactical Barbell and 5/3/1 given how they both tend to speak in their own language and code.  And that’s why I want to celebrate my second consecutive year of running Tactical Barbell (the longest I’ve EVER stuck with ANY training system) but offering my review of both TB and 5/3/1 offered through the lens of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, of which I apologize for my non-American readers who find the notion of these sandwiches off putting, but for us yanks, they are iconic.  Why that metaphor?  For 1: it’s honestly incredibly fitting giving my having stuck with TB for 2 years, because PBJs were the lunch I ate everyday for all 4 years of high school (I switched from 1 PBJ my freshman year to 2 sophomore year through senior, coinciding with my having picked up wrestling as a sport in my second year and needing more nutrition), so PBJs and TB are both something I can stick with for a LONG time.  And, much like TB, I looked FORWARD to my daily PBJ for lunch, and constantly remarked that the best part about eating a PBJ is immediately eating the second on that you packed.  PBJs occupy a significantly space in my mind for nostalgia and dopamine.  And, in turn, my dirty secret is also this: it was my DAD who made and packed PBJs in my lunch, and for good reason, because left to my own devices I discovered that I could NOT make a good PBJ for myself.  I sure THOUGHT that I could, until I was tasked with making one for someone else (who would one day become my wife), who dutifully informed me that I was using about 8x as much peanut butter as was appropriate for such a sandwich.  What was I to do in such a situation?  Enter: The Uncrustable, a premade and packaged PBJ, stored in the freezer (which you were SUPPOSED to thaw before eating, but I definitely ate frozen more often than not, similar to cold Poptarts vs ones cooked in the toaster) which I first discovered in 2005, and immediately fell in love with, because it instantly took me back to my high school days of perfectly proportioned PBJs, wrapped and ready for me (to which, yes, the best part about eating 1 was the second one I ate immediately afterward).  And with that allow to elucidate that, in this metaphor, 5/3/1 is the traditional PBJ and Tactical Barbell is the Uncrustable, and that neither is a declaration of superiority above the other, for as you can clearly see I have great love for both: they’re just simply “same but different”, and with that, let’s explore even further.

 

WHAT ARE THE COMPONENTS OF THE PBJ?

Based off some of these suggestions, you can see why we're struggling with an obesity epidemic

Operating under this framework, if we understand these training systems in through the lens of the PBJ, we’re going to call the strength training the peanut butter, the conditioning the jelly, and the overall structure of the program as the bread.  Why? 

 

BREAD:

 

The bread holds everything together: without that structure, we’re just eating peanut butter and jelly straight out of the jar with no programming (this would be doing Crossfit “workouts of the day” daily, and funny enough, was one of the go to nutritionally approaches of 4x Crossfit champ Rich Fronning).  The bread contains and vectors the peanut butter and the jelly, much as the programming gives guidance to the strength and conditioning.  Bread also gets stale and moldy, at which point we need to go buy a new loaf.

 

PEANUT BUTTER:

 

Strength training is the peanut butter because, if we’re being real: people see 5/3/1 and TB as lifting programs first with the conditioning being an afterthought, and even if that’s wrong, it is what it is.  In turn, it’s not unheard of for people to just flat out skip the jelly and make a pure peanut butter sandwich (I’m guilty of just that, both within the framework of this metaphor but also just making PB sandwiches). 

 

JELLY:

 

When done right, the jelly is the perfect balancing compliment to the peanut butter in the PBJ.  The PB offers that element of salty and savory that the jelly’s sweetness balances, along with the slickness there to balance the grittiness of the PB and the bread.  But jelly also requires a bit of expertise and finesse to work correctly, as pro sandwich makes know that it will turn the bread soggy if applied incorrectly (pro-tip: put the PB on BOTH sides and then put the jelly ON the PB). 

 

…I promise, this will get less crazy in a few more paragraphs.

 

WHY 5/3/1 IS A TRADITIONAL PBJ

Jim most certainly enjoyed some PBJs in his time

5/3/1 is a programming system, and the books could best be understood as “cookbooks” if I were to continue with this sandwich metaphor.  They give you the guidelines of how to build your sandwich, but it’s still on YOU, the sandwich maker, to go buy the ingredients and assemble the sandwich.  In turn, this leaves open a wide avenue of choices, options and, unfortunately, opportunities to completely foul up the whole process.

 

The first foul up: not actually READING the cookbook, and instead relying on second/third hand sources to tell you what is in the cookbook, or just plain old winging it based off what you THINK is right.  We see this all the time in the world of 5/3/1, where people don’t even know that conditioning is PART of the program, or they’re relying on an app to tell them how to run it and it’s relying on old crowd sourced information itself.  There are all sorts of videos on youtube of people trying to make AI recipes and turning out culinary abominations: this is no different.

 

But for those that read the cookbook, you need to actually FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS, and this is the second area where people tend to screw up 5/3/1.  Either they don’t follow it because they don’t understand it (people say Jim is hard to understand, but I imagine these people never read anything Louie Simmons ever wrote) or they don’t follow it because they don’t want to.  In the case of the latter, it’s because these people approach the system already knowing how they WANT to train, and they just keep “modifying” 5/3/1 until it becomes this terrible Frankenstein’s monster of a program that is exactly how they like to train, never appreciating that the reason they came to 5/3/1 in the first place was BECAUSE they needed to do something different, since what they WERE doing wasn’t working.   I was very much one of these people, again inside and outside the metaphor, making terrible sandwiches with way too much peanut butter compared to the ratio of bread and running 5/3/1 programs with WAY too heavy of a training max and a poor balance of main, supplemental and assistance work along with conditioning.  Ratios matter, in sandwiches and in training.

 

But assuming you read, understand and (attempt) to follow the instructions, you can still screw up by using low quality/poor ingredients.  There is a WIDE range of peanut butters out there, with the Peter Pan brand notorious for having salmonella, natural brands that are so oily that they run clear off the sandwich onto your clothes, and highly processed brands that are more “peanut frosting” than peanut butter.  There are jellies with so much sugar added that they technically qualify as candy, and honestly some breads out there that are just as guilty.  This runs true as far as the metaphor goes: you can select strength and conditioning exercises that are absolutely inappropriate for you, the trainee, despite TECHNICALLY being within the realm of acceptable as far as 5/3/1 goes, permitting you to construct a program that “follows all the rules” and STILL gets terrible results, just like making a wonderbread peter pan and eggplant jelly (it’s a fruit..) sandwich. 

 

And continuing with THAT metaphor even further: ingredients eventually expire as well, and need to be replaced.  Jim Wendler understands this, and his cookbook even TELLS you to swap programs every 2-5 cycles…but you have to listen to that.  You need to buy and use new bread to change the programming, and get new jars of peanut butter to swap out the strength exercises and new jars of jelly to bring in some new conditioning.  And though I DID eat PBJs every day of high school for 4 years, we at least bought new stuff if the old stuff went bad, but some of you cats running 5/3/1 will do BBB for 14 months straight like you stocked up on a bread sale at your grocery store but didn’t think to put any of the loaves in the freezer and have just been eating stale moldy bread sandwiches.  After a few weeks, that’s going to start causing you some serious harm, and you’re going to move backwards rather than forwards.

 

Which, speaking of freezers, let’s get to talking about those Uncrustables now.

 

HOW TACTICAL BARBELL IS AN UNCRUSTABLE

So, I mean, the precedent is there

Whereas the 5/3/1 books can be understood to be cookbooks, Tactical Barbell is more like a catalog (which most likely alienates my younger readers to bring up such a concept) or a grocery delivery website.  No one is telling you HOW to make the sandwich: you just pick which one you want.  Once you do, it’s delivered to you, and all you have to do is unwrap and eat it.

What are the implications of this?  Ultimately, we’ve outsourced the sandwich making process to the “experts”, and though the folks at Smuckers may not be the greatest culinary artists in the world, they for SURE did the necessary degree of research to make their product as palatable as possible within the budgetary constructs they set in order to maximize profits and their return on investment.  This means that the ratio of peanut butter to jelly to bread is exactly “right” in terms of making the most people possible satisfied with their product by appealing to the tastes of the greatest percentage of the population.  And then they went and maximized shelf stability of their product by allowing it to be stored frozen, reducing the potential of spoilage and harm to the consumer.

 

What does this mean in the realm of Tactical Barbell?  Like the Smuckers company, K. Black has put together something that should be able to be applied to the vast majority of trainees in order to satisfy the general needs of that populace, but per his own admission, the programs in TB aren’t meant to achieve extremely specific training objectives, like a top marathon time or elite powerlifting total.  Rather than giving the reader “all the tools” to build their program, Tactical Barbell has multiple preset options that one selects (Operator, Zulu, Fighter in the realm of TB1, or General Mass, Grey Man, Gladiator, Fighter in Mass, etc etc) pairs it with the appropriate conditioning protocol from TBII or other source materials, and then executes it until the duration of the training phase before moving onto the next one (Operator-Mass-Specificity via Mass Protocol, or the fully fledged out “Activation” from TBIII).  We don’t need to be making any sandwiches here: we just unwrap and eat.

 

But continuing the metaphor even further: there isn’t just ONE Uncrustable, much like there isn’t just ONE Tactical Barbell program.  And that’s how we seamlessly move between the Tactical Barbell programs: one we’ve eaten all the uncrustables out of one box, we order a new flavor and start with that one.  This is the periodization of OMS or Activation understood through the lens of PBJs: there are PB and honey uncrustables, PB and raspberry uncrustables, PB and Nutella, and yes: even just plain PB uncrustables, similar to how we can have TB programs built to emphasize mass, strength, conditioning, power, strength endurance, etc.  The difference between how 5/3/1 handles this and TB is that the Uncrustable is STILL prebuilt to the specs designed by Smuckers: they’re just a different flavor, where with 5/3/1 we’re having to build it from scratch each time and hoping we know what the hell we’re doing.

 

And therein is the fundamental difference between the two systems: 5/3/1 allows the reader the necessary degree of latitude to be able to achieve a wide variety of specific training goals, as evidenced by Vincent Dizenzo using it to achieve a 600lb raw bench press across various weight classes or how Jim himself uses the system to train highschool football players.  However, this freedom is predicated upon the premise that the individual knows how to actually make a decent sandwich in the first place.  As I’ve demonstrated on multiple occasions: I cannot make a decent PBJ.  Both the actual sandwich, and through this metaphor, the training program itself.  Left to my own devices, my bread is basically a saltine cracker on one side and a tortilla on the other, ineffectively holding behind a tsunami of peanut butter alongside a small river of jalapeno and pickle jelly.  I have to rely on someone else to make me a sandwich, while it’s MY job to simply dutifully eat them and make sure I buy a new box in time to open up when the old one runs out.  And THIS is why I’ve stuck with Tactical Barbell for 2 years and don’t see myself changing any time soon. 

 

IN SUMMARY/THE WAVETOPS

Don't let this man down: have some PBJs

5/3/1 is the traditional PBJ.  It’s on you to make sure you select the appropriate program, movements, and conditioning protocols for your goals, and to then rotate all of these as appropriate in order to continue to progress and grow without experience the consequences of “going stale”

 

Tactical Barbell is the Uncrustable.  You open one box, open the package, and start eating.  The box could be Strength, Mass, Conditioning or Base Building, but once you finish the box, you open a new one and get started with that one.  The ratio of strength to conditioning is already established, as is the frequency of training and all the other variables: we just have to do what we’re told and we’ll do just fine.

 

“THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH TIME TO DO IT RIGHT, BUT THERE IS ALWAYS ENOUGH TIME TO DO IT OVER”

The quote for today’s post comes by way of John W. Bergman, a retired Lieutenant General in the United States Marine Corps turned politician, and it is of no shock to me to find that such an outstanding quote comes from a Marine, because god bless them and I’m glad they’re on our side.  I still talk about how much it imprinted on me that Marines eat a meal of steak and eggs after completion of “The Crucible” because it is “A warrior’s breakfast” and, in turn, whenever I eat that meal I feel a connection to these warriors…but I’ve already digressed here.  I love this quote not just for it’s originator but for the message it contains, and how incredibly applicable it is to those in the physical transformation sphere.  At age 40, after 26 years of training in some manner, I have a degree of patience one tends not to observe amongst the younger population, simply because they do not have the experience I have to know that we DO have plenty of time in this pursuit, that there IS no real urgency, and that, often, all we can do is plant the seed and wait for it to grow.  We cannot rush the process, and funny enough, in attempting to do so, we tend to actually make things move SLOWER rather than faster.  And that’s the ultimate irony of all of this: so often, these efforts that trainees undertake in the pursuit of saving time end up COSTING them time, and if they had simply done things correctly the first time, they’d be SO much further ahead of the game than they end up being.  Success leaves clues, but, unfortunately, experience is a cruel mentor, as we have to wait until the hot stove burns us before we learn not to touch it, no matter what those who have been burned before try to warn us, and, in turn, here I am futilely attempting once again to impart the wisdom of my experience unto those future stove touchers because, in turn, it appears that I myself have not learned from my own experience yet.  But here we go: once more unto the breach dear readers.

That was always my experience with Ikea

The most frequent sin I see in regards to the attempt to save time having the reverse effect is, of course, in the pursuit of gaining muscle.  This should be the simplest physical pursuit (NOT the easiest, quite the opposite, but that’s also probably one of the contributing variables) a young trainee can engage in: lift weights, try to lift heavier weights, and when you can’t lift heavier weights, eat more food until you can.  That’s, quite literally, how it works.  Bruce Randall demonstrated that you can take that approach for YEARS and actually DOUBLE your bodyweight in the process if you are so inclined, and Paul Anderson achieved something quite similar, as did Doug Hepburn.  But, in turn, those individuals also demonstrated something else about the process: you’ll put on bodyfat when you eat a lot of food.  Which, again, should be of NO surprise to anyone with the most basic of understanding of biology and metabolism…yet this one fact is so ABHORRENT to many a young trainee that they put their fingers in their ears and go “la la la la MAINGAINING” in the hopes of chasing away the bodyfat boogieman so that they can piles on slabs of muscle without an ounce of bodyfat blurring their Instagram ready abs.

 

Which yeah: I’ll take the potshot at social media here, because it’s primarily responsible for this epidemic among younger trainees.  Prior to everyone ALWAYS being on camera ALL the time, there was an understanding that physiques themselves were seasonal, with a bulking and cutting season factored into anyone’s plan who cared to actually achieve physical greatness.  Arnold lost his abs in the off season, and he wasn’t alone.  To the point that some bodybuilders in the magazine eras actually took to have photoshoots done with multiple outfits for hundreds of shots that they could leak out over the course of the year to create the ILLUSION that they walked around contest ready year round as a method to SABOTAGE their competition in attempting to do the same: effectively robbing them of their off-season gains.

The internet would call this "fat" these days

 

And there it is!  The dudes in the 60s and 70s understood the value of the off-season bulk so much that they tried to STEAL it from their competition, and meanwhile young trainees are doing it to themselves on purpose!  They refuse to actually eat enough food to CAUSE muscular development to occur, because this tends to require ALSO eating enough food to cause bodyfat to accumulate in SOME manner.  So they engage in a 16 week “muscle gaining” training block, only to gain…no muscle.  BUT at least they were training really hard during that block so now they’re exhausted AND their hormones are out of whack because they’re a bubbling font of cortisol with no meaningful nutritional intervention in place to aid in recovery.  Why did they suffer for these 16 weeks to achieve nothing?  So that they wouldn’t have to go on a cut of course!  Why?  Because time spent cutting is time NOT spent gaining muscle.  Ok, that tracks…but isn’t time spent NOT gaining muscle ALSO time spent…not gaining muscle?  Didn’t we do exactly what we DIDN’T want to do IN our attempt to not do the thing?  Holy cow that’s a lot of negatives.  Let me see if I can dig us out of this hole.

 

We were trying to save the time of the cutting phase by not putting on enough fat during the gaining phase to need to cut, operating under the premise that this would mean MORE time we could spend gaining muscle.  But if we’re doing a 16 week gaining phase and then an 8 week cutting phase (a 2:1 ratio), This allots for 32 weeks a year to gain, 16 weeks to cut, and 4 weeks of fudgery (I imagine those could just be deloads between phases, but god forbid you suggest a DELOAD to this generation of trainees).  Ok, let’s do some more math here.  If muscle is 75% water, this means every pound of muscle you build is 4lbs of bodyweight total.  Lean bulking advocates quote lots of numbers, but let’s say that they’d all be comfortable with .5lbs of WEIGHT gained per week.  Assuming this weight is 100% muscle and water, no fat whatsoever (already impossible), this would mean putting on .125lbs of MUSCLE per week, OR .018lbs per DAY.  That’s 8g of muscle per day.  If we took that extra 16 weeks we “waste” by cutting and invested it 100% into gaining muscle, this means we get to put on an extra…2lbs of muscle that year.  THAT is what all of our diligence bought us.  THAT is what we get for weighing our toothpaste to make sure we didn’t accidentally overshoot our macros and put on “too much” bodyfat.

Except in this version, 6 weeks later, we're STILL getting sand kicked in our face at he beach

NOW consider, instead, what we’re missing out on when we do, in fact, squander those 32 weeks a year.  If we actually DID eat enough to maximize muscle growth during that time, we’re earning that 4lbs of muscle and, with it, 16lbs of bodyWEIGHT total each year, alongside whatever fat comes along for the ride.  And since we actually ATE well enough to fuel hard training sessions, we trained hard enough DURING those 32 weeks that some time spent cutting away the fat with some easier training is going to feel refreshing AND it’s going to give us a whole host of biological and metabolic benefits, such as improved systemic recovery, greater insulin resistance, a ramped DOWN metabolism so that it’s no longer an arm’s race to mainline food into us to gain (check out Bruce Randall’s legendary eating feats for some reference), etc.  But, here again, the attempt to save time will inevitably force the trainee to waste time, because if you ever want to see a trainee in a crisis, find a trainee looking to lose some bodyfat.

 

Bodyfat loss is NEVER on a “take it as it comes” schedule, but instead ALWAYS a crisis.  People always need to lose the fat YESTERDAY, and they’re willing to do WHATEVER it takes to make that happen…except be patient.  And the fitness industry thrives on this crisis through predatory business practices targeting these folks in crisis.  No one is selling “get abs in 2 years” but instead “lose 30lbs in 30 days” and other “get fit quick” schemes, and people gobble them up, because desperate people are willing to suspend disbelieve in the place of hope, which is how “the lottery” exists.  So IF a trainee somehow actually permits themselves to put on a little bodyfat during the gaining process, they completely undo any benefit they obtained FROM gaining by attempting to employ what is all too accurately referred to as a “suicide cut”.  

The sad thing is, this WAS supposed to be a punchline...

 

We’ve all seen these, 2-3 a day training schedules, hours of cardio, a diet of protein powder and lettuce, etc.  We’re going to burn off ALL this fat in WEEKS, if not DAYS, so we can get RIGHT back to gaining.  And we’ve also all seen the outcome of these approaches, primarily by way of the recent “Biggest Loser” documentary on Netflix, but even before that, yo-yo dieters were a well known phenomenon.  IF this person manages to see the diet all the way to the end, they end up stringy and strung out, with their hormones completely tanked, and though they are a SMALLER version of their previous self, they are not a LEANER version of that self.  They just hemorrhaged all that lean tissue they had spent time building.  And they are prone to fits of binge eating, which not only reverses the weight loss but tends to result in “bodyfat OVERSHOOTING”, wherein the body accumulates MORE bodyfat than what was lost as it’s attempting to rapidly re-acquire the lean tissue it lost, for it’s far easier for the body to BUILD that fat vs the lean tissue.  So now the trainee ends up in a worse place than where they started, ensuring they’ll need an even LONGER cutting phase if they want to lose a similar amount of weight, to say nothing of the fact that FIRST they’ll need to have engaged in a gaining phase in order to rebuild all that lost lean tissue in the first place.  In attempting to rush the fat loss, they’ve put themselves WAY behind schedule.

 

Because as Dan John says, the body has to be “nudged” toward fat loss.  And this IS a revelation from Dan, who has on previous occasions mentioned the need for short intense fat loss phases ala the Velocity Diet and Tabata Front Squats, but it’s proof of concept of the evolution of thought and wisdom of experience in the training realm.  Those short blitzes can be a helpful “running start” into a fat loss phase, but ultimately it’s gradual and sustainable modifications paired with appropriate training stimulus that wins the day.  And again: how incredibly unsexy.  No one is selling THAT program.  But that’s because it’s poor job security to give away the keys to the kingdom when you can INSTEAD sell people on the idea of maingaining and suicide cutting so that they’re always getting strung along for the next “fix” for the very problem YOU created.

An arms dealer selling to both sides sets themselves up for perpetual business

 

And I haven’t even touched the training aspect of this, but I’m already 2000 words deep, twice as long as a traditional post.  So here I am “not doing it right” the first time and putting myself in a place we’re I’ll have to write another post to get all my thoughts captured, but take the lessons from what we’ve seen here.  The trainees that try to avoid fat gain so that they can spend longer building muscle end up achieving neither outcome, while those that attempt to rush the fat loss process so that they can RETURN quickly to the muscle building process put themselves FAR off the timeline.  There’s no shortcut or replacement for time and patience, and those who are effectively able to implement and utilize those tools are those that are able to succeed “the first time”.