19 MONTHS OF TACTICAL BARBELL: LESSONS LEARNED

 

INTRO

I've definitely followed worse trinities before

On 16 Sep 2024, I started employing the Tactical Barbell system of training, and I haven’t looked back.  It answered all the questions I ever had about training and, honestly, gave me a bit of the feeling of Alexander when he wept because there were no more worlds left to conquer.  I really no longer had a need to ever train any other way again, because the system was so comprehensive yet modular that, whatever I needed it to be, it was, and whenever I needed to pivot, it was there to pivot with me.  I’ve already written multiple reviews on my experiences with individual programs within the system (Operator, Grey Man and Specificity Bravo) along with my experience after a year of making it all work, so now I just want to capture a snapshot of this moment, my thoughts, what I’ve learned, what I’ve changed, and how it all fits together.

GENERAL STRUCTURE

Sometimes it's hard to agree even on this part

What I have found works best for the Tactical Barbell system is what was laid out in Mass Protocol (which was the book the finally got me bought into the system in the first place): “Operator-Mass-Specificity”, or “OMS”.  This is periodization/phasic training in a very digestible form, similar to what Jim Wendler implemented with “Leaders and anchors” or Dan John’s “Bus bench-park bench” concept, but with Tactical Barbell it really grabbed me due to how prescriptive it is yet still with room to maneuver.  In my case, that room comes from my ability to select the movements I need for my exercise cluster along with my conditioning workouts, but on a broader level one can choose entirely different programs (Instead of Operator, Zulu.  Instead of Mass, Grey Man, like what I do.  Instead of Specificity Alpha, use Bravo), meaning there really is just an unlimited combination of approaches that can be implemented to alleviate even the most intense of training ADHD while still “sticking with the program”.  And again: that freedom with the conditioning work really opens up a LOT of avenues to get creative.

 

YEAR LONG STRUCTURE

 

Always good to have a plan

Now that I’ve had a chance to run Tactical Barbell for longer than a year, I’ve noticed a rhythm that I fall into that may be helpful for understanding Tactical Barbell in the “long term”.  One COULD simply run OMS indefinitely, going 3-6 weeks each phase, and be more than fine, but per Dan John’s “Armor Building Formula” being “Bodybuilding for REAL people”, I find that, often we humans have lives that can dictate what our training looks like.  So here’s a snapshot into mine.

 

·       My birthday is in late October, near Halloween.  After that is Thanksgiving.  After that is Christmas.  And it’s cold during this time where I live (middle America).  All of this means it’s an excellent time for feasting and not doing a whole lot of extra physical activity.  So I take these 3 months to focus on Mass Protocol, using Grey Man and Specificity Bravo.  I already know I’m going to be eating well and I’ll be able to recover, so it’s an excellent time to get bigger and stronger and put conditioning on the back burner.  With the OMS structure, if I DO decide to include a block of Operator in here, it will just be a 3 week block, basically to give me a break from the high reps and keep me from getting too sloppy.  Typically, we do a cruise vacation around New Years, so I make that my bridge week, but if I need one sometime before that during that block of training, I’ll take it.

·       Now it’s January.  January is an awesome month, because EVERYONE has a New Year’s resolution, so no one bats an eye if you are on a strict diet and doing a lot of exercise.  After 3 months of intense gaining, it makes it a perfect time to prioritize fitness and eating leaner.  For me, this means a 6 week block of Operator with a heavy conditioning focus while shifting the lifting cluster toward less heavier weights (I use a front squat, rather than a back squat, because it means I don’t move as much weight AND I can spare my back for more conditioning work).  Since I’m not moving as much weight in the gym, I don’t need as much food.  I’m not specifically trying to get lean (training is always my focus, not bodycomp), but by nature of focusing on conditioning and not feasting, I naturally lean out.  Often, there’s a strongman competition for me to compete in somewhere around here, so the week before that is when I’ll take a bridge week.  If that doesn’t happen, I’ll grab one before the next phase of training.

·       After those 6 weeks, I’m in Mid-Feb.  What I’ve discovered is that this is a great time to do more of a body re-comp/reverse diet sorta thing for 12 weeks.  I move from Operator back to Mass protocol, but I don’t eat like I was eating during the Oct-Dec block.  Again: it’s not a time of feasting and, in fact, it’s typically Lent during this time (not that I’m Catholic, but I attended their schools for 8 years), so some fasting can be appropriate (more on that when I discuss nutrition).  But what I’ve discovered during this most recent training block is that I can slowly/gradually up the food intake without putting on much bodyweight, effectively “rebuilding my metabolism” from the January push and give myself some caloric runway, which is good for the NEXT phase of training.  Typically, my kid will have Spring Break in where, which is where I’ll find a Bridge week.

·       So now it’s June.  Summer is here, the weather is warm, it’s good to get outside and be active, so I’m onto Operator.  Once again, I’m not planning on leaning out, but it’s inevitably going to happen as a result of getting outside more, being active, and improving my conditioning.  Along with that, there are lots of strongman competitions that happen in the summer, so I’ll typically find one to train for, which further vectors me toward Operator.  As of my writing this, I have one scheduled for 8 Aug, so it’s my “zero hour” to train for, giving me 9 weeks and a bridge week to prep.  For me, that’s 6 weeks of Operator and 3 weeks of Operator Pro to act as a peaking cycle.  But for a non-strongman competitor, this could also be an excellent opportunity to do Base Building from TB1 and spend the good weather getting some outdoor mileage. 

·       And now we’re looking at October’s feasting block again.  In between August and the end of Oct, I have some time to play around.  Basically, I can analyze where I’m currently at, decide what needs improving, and build on that.  This is effectively a “free block”.  I could just run a simple OMS (having just finished the “O”, I’d roll into Mass and then Specificity before cycling back to Operator) if I’m at a loss, or it could be a great time to tackle Base Building from either TB1 or Mass Protocol.  I’ve also had situations where I’ve had multiple strongman competitions in a row, and if that’s the case, I’ll just keep knocking them out until I get closer to the end of Oct to start the feasting block.

 

MY TWEAKS

Why would I trust experts when I can just do it myself?

I’ve detailed this more extensively in my other write-ups, but I wanted to recapture the hows and whys of the modifications I’ve made to have Tactical Barbell suit me.

·       For all Tactical Barbell workouts, instead of following the Rx plan for deadlifts, I do 1 set of pulls at reps above 5.  Specifically what I am doing is my ROM progression protocol that I’ve used for over a decade, where I start with 6 rubber patio pavers under the plates to create a partial pull, and each week remove a paver, eventually working my way to the floor.  I skip the “1 mat” week, which makes this a 6 week cycle, and allows it to slot in perfectly with the TB 3-6 week training cycles.  I use a higher rep range on this, starting at 12-15, adding weight each cycle until I’m around 6-8, then re-starting it back at the 12-15 (ideally with higher weight than last time).  This is something that I’ve worked with over the years that just plain works for me, whereas trying to pull from the floor every week is always a disaster.  I’ve written about this idea in the past, but essentially, my body is built for conventional deadlifting (long arms, short torso, I lockout nearly at my knees), which means I can move a LOT of weight on it (relatively), which ALSO means I put a LOT of stress on my system when I deadlift, and trying to pull from the floor with heavy weights frequently just burns me out, while this approach seems to spare me and continues to foster growth each cycle.

·       I don’t include weighted chins in any cluster for any program.  The same thing that makes me a good deadlifter makes chins a challenging lift, as I have a stupidly long ROM on it, and I never seem to get anything out of programming them like a traditional lift.  For a while, I relied on just getting in sub-max sets of chins throughout the workout, but these past few cycles what I’ve stuck with is just setting a daily chin up goal and getting it down in a “grease the groove” style by knocking them out throughout the day.  Right now, I’ve settled on 3 sets daily, and up the reps by one per WEEK.  This week, I’m doing 18-17-17, having done 3x17 the previous week, and once that’s done, I’ll go to 18-18-17.  The slow increase spares my elbows.

·       When I run Grey Man, I run it A/B/A indefinitely, rather than A/B/A, B/A/B.  The B workout is my deadlift workout.  This makes it so that I only ever deadlift once per week (for the reasons outlined above).  I pair the press with the squat on workout A, and the flat bench with the deadlift on workout B, primarily because the press is more valuable to me as a strongman than the bench.  But I also use the Grey Man supplemental clusters to make it that I’m still benching in some manner 3x per week, the same with squatting.

·       When I run Specificity, I STILL only deadlift once per week.  When I repeat that workout later in the week, I swap the deadlift with unweighted chins, and add reps each workout.

·       When I run Operator, the goal is to improve my strongman lifts, which includes a LOT of lower back taxing stuff (atlas stones, sandbags, logs, farmers carries, yokes, etc).  In turn, I use a front squat in my cluster rather than a traditional squat.  People mistake this into thinking that the front squat has “more carryover” to strongman, but it’s more that saving my lower back in the weightroom allows me to expend it more in the conditioning/events training.  If I tried to do it all at once, I’d overtax myself.

·       Just as an aside, on top of all the Tactical Barbell training and scheduled conditioning, I also train Martial Arts 3x per week and I join my family in running Dan John’s “Armor Building Formula” 3x per week as well.  However, to make that all work, it’s worth noting that the martial arts are “traditional martial arts” rather than MMA/BJJ/etc, with classes lasting 60-90 minutes vs 2 hours, and since I’m joining my family with ABF, I’m using their loads vs ones appropriate for me, so the workouts are more a tonic recovery workout vs an additional stressor.  I also try to get in a walk at lunchtime when I can…since I’m not eating lunch. 

 

NUTRITION

I genuinely don't know what this is but it exists, so here

I’ve done a bunch of different nutritional protocols through my run of Tactical Barbell, but most of them are pretty much more of the same to an outside observer, as I still each practically zero carbs outside of 1 meal a week.  That said, I’m really jazzed up about my “Red Meat and Black Coffee” protocol I wrote about earlier, and I feel like it’s “the one…for real this time” as it relates to a protocol that fits well with the modularity of Tactical Barbell, so let me give a brief re-summary of how it slots into the program.

·       On days where I lift, I eat 2 meals: one post training, and an evening meal.

·       On days where I do conditioning, I eat one meal: an evening meal.

·       Between/before meals, I permit myself black coffee.  No bulletproof or other keto magic: just plain black coffee. 

·       On rest days, it’s flexible.  Sometimes 1 meal, sometimes 2.

·       For all but 1 meal, I only eat animal products, and primarily fats and proteins.  Dairy is used in very limited quantities: primarily meat and eggs.

·       For 1 meal per week, I include carbs/plant sources.  This isn’t a binge/cheat meal: it’s a social meal.  It’s more about enjoying the company and the experience, rather than mainlining carbs into my face.  With it being a social meal, for me, this happens in the evening on a rest day.

·       I don’t consider this a meal, but before bed every night I eat 170g of full fat Greek yogurt with 1 scoop of protein powder mixed in.  This is something of a “protein failsafe”, especially for those single meal days.  And since I train first thing in the morning, it’s nice to have something in my system before I go to bed and get up to train.

What I like about this is the simplicity.  I don’t measure/track my calories or macros.  Instead, I evaluate outcomes.  I look at how my performance is doing, and how my clothes/weightbelt fit, and can adjust as needed.  And with so few meals to eat AND such limited food selection, it’s pretty easy to manipulate if you aren’t getting the outcome you’re looking for.  So with that basic framework, here’s how it modulates based on training phase.

·       During Operator, I don’t need as much food to recover, because the weight training isn’t as intense, and since I’m keeping carbs stupidly low, I don’t need to replenish glycogen from hard training sessions as I’m running off of ketones.  This means I can eat fewer meals on rest days, or eat smaller meals during the training week.  They don’t even need to be particularly smaller: I saw success slowly transitioning from 16oz of meat at breakfast to 12oz, while still keeping eggs at 3 whole/5 white.

·       And, of course, in feasting phase, the reverse is true.  I can eat 2 meals a day on the rest days, or allow myself to eat bigger meals at those opportunities.  I still keep a minimum of 2 days a week with 1 meal per day, as I find this allows me to maintain insulin sensitivity and keep up a healthy appetite while also not getting too sloppy during the gaining phase.

·       During the re-comp/reverse diet phase I mentioned previously, it’s a middle ground.  I will slowly increase the amount of food I eat at my regular meals, but I’m not feasting like I would from Oct-Dec.  This is what “maintenance” looks like.  I walk away from each meal satiated, whereas in the feasting phase there was definitely more “enjoyment” had during the meal.

And now just a bit of nuance.

·       This “works” BECAUSE of eating only fats/proteins during the majority of the meals.  Becoming fat adapted/ketogenic makes it very easy to subsist off so few meals with long times between meals.  There is no “white knuckling” hunger with this, no starving.

·       Along with that, because the only food I’m eating is fat and protein, there’s a good chance I’m still hitting whatever protein requirements I need.  Ketones are protein sparing, but I’m getting 50g of protein in egg whites alone each day.  If I tried this with a mixed diet, it’d be much harder to hit those goals.

·       This way of eating requires the capacity to eat large quantities in a single sitting.  I’ve never struggled with that, and most likely had some form of binge eating disorder as a child.  If you have a small appetite, this may not work.

·       The coffee is NOT a replacement for poor sleep.  In truth, I’m fairly certain I’m a “rapid caffeine metabolizer” or simply a non-responder, as I can drink a cup of coffee and go right to sleep.  For me, it’s a bridge between meals, because something warm is soothing and the small cortisol spike from the coffee will blunt any appetite.  It’s not at all required: simply permitted.

 

 IN SUMMARY

Eat like, train like

Through 26 years of training, I feel like I've settled on a home as far as training and nutrition goes.  Tactical Barbell provides the skeleton that I need and is malleable to meet my current needs, demands and goals.

 

BEGINNERS ARE DOING DUALITY WRONG PART II: NUTRITION

Often, when I write about the subject of nutrition and, specifically, the poor state of it among the general populace, I got out of my way to clarify that I’m writing about a western audience and, more specifically, the United States, in order to provide my perspective.  However, as globalization increases, we’re finding that more and more previously uncorrupted areas are suffering the same experiences that we have in the states, so hooray for global reach, and what I’m writing may apply even more universally than usual.  But in that regard, the food environment in the United States is absolutely abhorrent and has resulted in what has been termed “The Standard American Diet” (“SAD” for short…and in practice).  There is no one single codified SAD, but it’s benchmarked by the qualities of daily eating being entirely ad hoc, no actual plan for what to eat for any meals, frequent snacking (with some quotes estimating people eating up to 18 times per day when we factor in ALL incidents of food going into the mouth), the majority of the intake being ultraprocessed food AND from sources outside the home (restaurants/door dash/etc).  It is low protein, low fiber, high fat (primarily from ultraprocessed sources), high carb/sugar (again, ultraprocessed) and low in nutrients, resulting in an interested dilemma where the majority of Americans are overweight AND undernourished.  This has been deemed as “energy toxicity”, wherein we are consuming too much energy (calories) such that we experience the health maladies associated with it (diabetes and heart disease) while also not consuming enough actual NUTRITION due to the hyperprocessed nature of the foods we’re consuming in order to actual achieve a meaningful degree of satiety or general health.  Yes: the “foods” we eat make us HUNGIER when we’re done eating them and leave us LESS nourished when we’re done: Kafka couldn’t write something crazier and Satan couldn’t come up with a more ironic punishment for gluttons.  And it is BECAUSE of this food environment that literally ANY dietary intervention proves successful as it relates to improving health markers, because, quite simply, the sheer act of THINKING about what you are eating is, in and of itself, enough to start mitigating some of the damage of the SAD.  …and yet, somehow, when the ONLY option is “success”, beginner trainees manage to find a way to failure and it is, much like training, because they refuse to follow A plan and, instead, feel the need to construct their own!

Only 3 steps and you still manage to screw one of them up...and meanwhile, you CAN succeed on the "Filet o Fish" diet

 

Mitch Hedberg was a comedic treasure that we lost way too soon, but he imparted on us the gem that “I play guitar.  I taught myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision….because I didn’t know how to play it, so I was a sh*tty teacher”.  And, in turn, a beginner that trusts themselves to write their own diet after years of failing at dieting has already set themselves up for failure.  Because, inevitably, much like building a training program, beginners just take a bunch of ideas from successful diets and try to Frankenstein them together into the PERFECT custom diet for them, not understanding that physical transformation operates off the Gestalt principle, wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  I realize I’m bloviating here, so let me try to just say what the actual problem is.

 

Beginners want concrete, definite, finite answers, because it obviates them from having to think, learn or understand nuance.  So what they seek is a mathematical equation to understand nutrition.  This inevitably results in the pursuit of a nutrition app which spits out numbers which become their “goals” in terms of total calories and the macronutrients necessary to get there.  Armed with these goals, the beginner then wonders right back into the VERY food environment that got them all messed up in the first place, and decides to set themselves up for success using the VERY foods that got them all messed up.  As though the whole problem was simply a matter of not COUNTING the “food like products” properly.  Now that I KNOW my macros, I know exactly how many Poptarts to eat for my carbs and fats and then how much whey protein powder to take to get in my protein content for the day.  The perfect diet!

Hah!  Eliminate the middleman!

 

The “If It Fits Your Macros” crowd always likes to talk about how that is a hyperbolic example, but that’s because they approach their nutritional approach with more nuance than their soundbite of a diet name implies, because even THEY emphasize that the majority of the macros SHOULD come from whole/unprocessed foods while having SOME wiggleroom for junk as long as the macros don’t get exceeded.  What these folks can’t fathom is just how much a “babe in the woods” a brand spanking new beginner can be when they were raised in a food environment where it was NORMAL to go multiple days in a row eating “food” out of boxes that had a near infinite shelf life and in no way resembled anything that could be found in nature: so far removed from reality that the “fruit” in the Trix cereal has to be artificially shaped, flavored AND colored to resemble the very fruit it’s trying to be.  For so many of these trainees, they’ve been so inundated with a ridiculous food environment that they’ve lost all perspective on what actual for real food IS, and when left to their own devices to construct their own nutrition, their diet STILL looks like the food choices of an unsupervised 12 year old: there is simply LESS of it.

 

Folks, you can’t get healthy eating the same stuff that made you sick in the first place, even if you reduce the dosage.  There needs to be an actual DETOX that occurs to get you off the junk for a little bit BEFORE you consider re-introducing it into your life (please try not to).  This is why ACTUAL for real nutritional interventions work: aside from whatever gimmick they tend to employ, they ALL hinge upon the principle of removing some or ALL of the poison from the nutritional environment.  Yes, even the juice cleanse diets or the lemon water and cayenne pepper diets “work” because you’re at least NOT eating Poptarts (man they’re an easy target) and Doritos and other junk while you’re living off of condiments, but other approaches (ketogenic, Mediterranean, vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, whole 30, paleo, Atkins, carb cycling ala Justin Harris, Deep Water, Mountain Dog, The Complete Keys to Progress diets, DASH, Dukan, Vertical Diet, Warrior Diet etc etc) predicate themselves around the notion of unprocessed foods comprising the MAJORITY of the nutrition, and then, from there, they vary.  Or, at least, the successful ones do.  There are ABSOLUTELY predators out there that have found a way to make keto/vegan/paleo/every diet junkfood, using the exact same ingredients that got us sick in the first place and finding a way to engineer them into meeting the letter of these diets while completely violating the spirit of them.  Folks, take a look at the ingredient on “low carb tortillas”: I’d MUCH rather just eat one that is corn, water and salt and deal with whatever the carb consequences are of THAT.

You could definitely pick a worse diet

“But why does it matter?  If they meet their macro goals, won’t they achieve their transformation goals?”  Alright, well, for one, their “macro goals” are often not, because if you ask this beginner WHY they picked those macros as their goals, they’ll say “it’s what the app told me”, so they don’t even HAVE an actual “goal” for their macro: just instructions.  But, beyond that, Stan Efferding (writer of the Vertical Diet, which I’ve reviewed and think it’s just flat out awesome) said it best: “compliance is the science”.  And trying to comply with the goals of these apps while eating the food that makes up the SAD is setting you up for NON-compliance.  Again: this food is SPECIFICALLY engineered to make you overeat.  The same scientific brains that worked to make cigarettes as addictive as possible pivoted to the food industry and employed their exact same talents there to find the most precise way to combine cheap ingredients ala low quality fats, carbs/sugar and salt to create an umami experience that has never existed in nature in order to override your body’s natural satiety signals and trigger binge behavior with an impossible to match dopamine spike.  Now you’re hooked, and because the body is awesome, it adapts to this dopamine hit such that you now need a BIGGER dose in order to achieve the same high, which, when combined with a hyperpalatable food that never triggers satiety due to a lack of protein and fiber, compels you to just eat more and more in pursuit of this high.  The ONLY tool we have available to resist this situation in the presence of this food is willpower, and that is a FINITE resource that, once expired, results in a compensatory binge that tends to UNDO the results of the diet up until that point AND cause further damage.  We observe this phenomenon occur in former Biggest Loser contestants who put on MORE bodyweight than when they started, along with bodybuilders who finish the show and go on to put on 20-30lbs in the weekend afterward as they indulge in all that they had denied themselves up until that point.

 

And none of this addresses the terribly hormonal state all of this junk puts a trainee in, making their attempts at physical transformation far less successful than they would while eating similar macros from better sources.  Getting the majority of your carbs from hyperprocessed sources tends to result in far more significant insulin spikes compared to something more natural, which, in turn, over time, drives down insulin sensitivity, making fat storage more prominent and muscular gain more difficult.  And the terrible fat sources being employed also wreck testosterone production/jack up estrogen, further complicating matters.  And then, feeling like garbage from eating garbage food, especially in a caloric deficit, is going to mean ineffective training, once again achieving less desired benefit.

Funny enough, these dudes think "cycling" is the solution

 

Because, again, in the face of the Standard American Diet, literally ANY nutritional intervention is a better option…but in terms of duality, it’s a balancing act between food quality and food quantity that is the driver of results, and beginners manage to find a way to balance both sides of the equation such that they get the worst of both worlds and achieve the opposite of success.  Don’t trust yourself to find a way out of the mess you got yourself into: if you knew HOW to do it, you wouldn’t be there in the first place. Don’t try to make the plan fit you: find the plan that FITS you.  Or become the person that fits the plan.       

BEGINNERS ARE DOING DUALITY WRONG PART I: LIFTING WEIGHTS

I have expressed my love for the concept of duality quite frequently in this blog, and I myself have demonstrated how it exists within me through my journey here, as many noted I started off a fan of abbreviated training, transitioned into what can best be described as “maximalism”, and have, once again, found myself on abbreviated training.  I am a fan of Jamie Lewis AND Dan John, with programming and philosophical styles at opposite ends of the spectrum, much like how I appreciated Jon Andersen’s Deep Water 10x10 squats and Randall Strossen one set of 20.  I’ve had nutritional protocols where I ate every 30 minutes and ones where I’ve had one meal per day.  But through that all, this duality is a form of balance, which is the intent of the principle.  Extremes exist harmoniously as a necessary means of counter balance.  Dan John’s “bus bench/park bench” exemplifies this: periods of extreme balanced with periods of moderation.  However, amongst the beginner populace of trainees, I observe a bizarre form of reverse duality, wherein somehow the negatives of the extremes manifest with none of the positives, resulting in a complete unbalancing and disruption of the system.  They achieve no progress and, in fact, tend to reverse their growth as a means of this existence.  Somehow, these trainees are doing duality wrong.

Yup, all the parts are there: it's just built backwards

 

In the sphere of the actual training to accomplish physical transformation, I frequently observe this in the instance of trainees attempting to make their own programs, or modify existing ones.  The longer I train, the more the veil of mysticism around programming lifts from my eyes and the clearer I see, which is one of the cruelest tricks of time, because by the time we learn all these things, we’re too old to be able to make the most of it, and all the folks that are young enough to able to benefit from us wisdom won’t listen to us…much like I ignored those who tried to tell me otherwise back then.  But I digress, and perhaps you, dear YOUNGER reader, will prove me wrong.  Ultimately, all a (good) program does is find a way to balance the stimulus to grow muscle (or elicit whatever specific gain one endeavors for) against the fatigue that is accumulated in the process such that it does not exceed one individual’s ability to recover.  Sending a signal to the muscle to grow generates fatigue as a necessary part of the process: it is fatiguing to exert oneself in the process of sending the signal.  If we do not send a strong enough signal to the muscle: it does not grow.  If, in the process of sending the signal to the muscle, we generate too much fatigue such that we exceed our ability to recover, the muscle does not grow, NOT due to an absence of signal, but due to an inability to recover from the training effort.  It’s a balancing act of sending “enough” signal without “too much” fatigue. 

 

Beyond THAT, the function of a program is ensuring compliance.  And THIS is why there are a million programs out there.  The balancing act of the forces of stimulus, fatigue and recovery DO require SOME degree of thought, but not a terrible amount.  If in doubt: schedule a deload and you’re most likely good.  But getting a trainee to actually STICK to the training program is where the REAL money is made, because we humans are fickle and stupid and prone to chase after shiny objects.  The best program in the world isn’t worth a hill of beans if the trainee flat out won’t follow it, so program developers will find A way to hook A populace on their program.  It’s clear what it takes to get my attention: some sort of intensity gimmick or counter culture appeal.  My instincts are ALWAYS to do what everyone else ISN’T doing, and I’m fully aware of what a caricature of a real functioning human I am as a result of that, but with that self-awareness I am at least able to leverage these quirks of mine into outcomes.  A simple, straight forward, percentage based program will NOT grab my attention, but throw in 20 breathing squats, 10x10s with reduced rest periods, a 50 rep set with bodyweight on the bar, etc etc, and you have my attention.  FULLY aware that I’m over 1.5 years deep into Tactical Barbell at this time, but even THAT has enough shiny objects to keep my attention.  But whatever the case may be, we understand and appreciate that “different” programs really aren’t.  There isn’t anything magical about one program or the other.  Once programs manage to crack balancing fatigue, stimulus and recovery, everything else is just window dressing designed to make you actually show up and DO the program.

Sometimes this means wrapping a WHOLE bunch of beef and pasta around a single serving of veggies...and classifying tomatoes as a vegetable...

 

Soooo, with THAT established (that took much longer than I planned), we go into how beginners screw up the whole process.  Beginners focus on that SECOND part FIRST.  They either make their OWN program out of all their favorite moves and training principles OR they take a program that WORKS and chop the hell out of it to “tailor it” to themselves.  In either case, they’re working on the “ensuring compliance” portion of the training program.  However, in doing so, they manage to accomplish reverse duality: they somehow manage to not train hard enough to send a signal to the muscle to grow while, at the same time, accumulating too much fatigue to recover.  In the current culture, the primary issue is trainees claim they love going to the gym, so they want to lift weights 6 days a week, despite the fact their arriving at training from a completely sedentary state.  So, already, we’re training too much for what our body has the ability to recover from.  They then operate under the premise that training to failure is the ONLY way to send enough signal to the muscle to get it to grow, AND that EVERY set has to be taken to failure.  If you ever want a quick counter-point to this, show them an Olympic level male gymnast and ask them how many times they think this dude trained “rings to failure” to become “Marvel Comics” level of jacked.  Then, the trifecta of reverse duality is accomplished because, in order to accomplish 6 days of training with every single set to failure, these trainees select the EASIEST exercises available to them, because attempting this with the big 3 would put you in the hospital.  So, instead, we’re doing machine lateral raises 3x per week for 20 sets to failure, grinding our rotator cuffs into a fine powder, feeling like we have the flu, and looking exactly the same after months of “training”.  These trainees somehow managed to reverse duality and tip the scale the wrong way in BOTH directions as it relates to stimulus and fatigue.

 

Let me continue saying the thing that upsets the internet: if you LIKE training, you’re most likely not doing it effectively, and if you’re lifting 6x a week to build size, you’re most likely not training hard enough to get the results you want.  Because, again: recovery.  Fatigue doesn’t just accumulate locally: it accumulates systemically as well.  The training that causes the WHOLE BODY to grow all causes the whole body to FATIGUE.  In turn, we need to allow the WHOLE BODY to rest.  The notion that you can somehow bypass this with bodypart splits doesn’t check, and we can prove this with something that actually is a feature rather than a bug.  Remember how we all learned about how, if you injure a bodypart, you can STILL help maintain and even GROW muscle in it by training the OTHER side?  Why is that?  Because the STIMULUS to grow occurs on a systemic level ALONG with a local level.  This is why that notion of “do squats to grow your arms” seemed like stupid bro-science, and we tried to claim it was the hormones released from lower body movements and all other things, but the simple reality is that putting a bar on your back and moving up and down with it sends a signal to your ENTIRE BODY to grow.  This is a GREAT thing: we just have to know what to do with that information.  And what to do with it is the value and prioritize RECOVERY from training, because that is when we grow.  It also means we don’t need to be slaves to the 6x per week schedule to “hit the muscles twice a week”, because those muscles are getting hit WHEN we train.  We can BIAS how our body grows with some focus, absolutely, but we’re going to make the whole thing grow by training it.

There is a reason this is a meme...don't be this guy

 

As has been the case with many blogs, this one got away from me, and what was supposed to be a quick one shot is now going to turn into a multi-part monster.  I intend to discuss how trainees screw up cardio and nutrition as well by doing these same things, so stay tuned! 

 

       

RACING TO REDLIGHTS

Driving is when I tend to do most of my thinking, and when a vast majority of my blog post ideas tend to populate in my head.  I’ll actually have to get my phone out once I reach the parking lot and send myself a quick summary of what I came up with before the thought fleets away.  Amazingly enough, it’s not the actual DRIVING that tends to inspire my thoughts: it’s just a time when I am by myself and my brain can ruminate.  However, today’s post is different, for it is inspired by observing driving behavior, and understanding how much it maps on to what we see in the world of physical transformation.  Because one of the silliest things I observe when driving is people racing toward a redlight.  The light is blatantly red, yet the motorist shows no sign of yielding, and, instead, slams on their breaks at the last possible second upon reaching the light.  Aside from the fact this is very distressing for fellow motorists, as it appears the driver does not recognize the light and is going to run it, it’s also just flat out not good for your vehicle to drive it like that.  You exhaust your break pads and put needless wear and tear on it.  The more prudent action upon seeing a redlight is to ease off the accelerator early in hopes that, by the time you arrive, the light changes and you never even need to apply your breaks in the first place.  And much as life imitates art, so often trainees, in turn, find themselves racing toward a redlight of physical transformation, blunting their progress and causing damage that could easily be prevented by easing off the accelerator a little.

A video game about a cartoon about a commercial about crash test dummies...the 90s were a trip

 

We see this so frequently in the world of training, with 5/3/1 being the easiest example to go do.  SO many trainees absolutely refuse to even ENTERTAIN the idea of employing 5/3/1 for the same trite reason: “it’s progresses too slowly”.  I’ve written numerous posts on how this is a silly critique, but for today’s focus, let’s go examine what the alternative is.  What is the BENEFIT of progressing quickly compared to slowly?  What do we achieve, aside from simply arriving at the stall EARLIER?  What is the benefit of racing toward this redlight?  If we just slap 5lbs on the bar every workout irrespective of how the last one went, how we’re feeling today, how we’re eating, what our workload is, etc, we’re simply going to reach a point where it’s unsustainable, we stall, most likely regress, and we are simply DONE with this protocol.  As Dan John famously asks: “Now what?”  But if we employ something like 5/3/1, with an intelligent and nuanced progression scheme, we ease off the accelerator of progress and more slowly approach this impending stall.  And what is the benefit of THAT?  By approaching it SLOWLY, we actually have the time and opportunity to get STRONGER before we get there: meaning that the stall won’t actually happen!  We see it coming on the horizon, decide to ease off and allow ourselves a chance to get strong enough to overcome it, and we get to keep on cruising through, getting stronger and better, compared to our compatriot in the other lane that is now just hitting the reset button an in attempt to generate another running start at this stall.

 

We see this same redlight racing in the world of nutrition as well, with fat loss is the biggest culprit, and that’s because everyone is totally fine taking a long time to GET fat, but no one is willing to do the same when it comes to fat LOSS.  Once the decision is made to lose fat, it’s a crisis event, and it’s attacked with that level of ferocity.  DRASTIC calorie restriction is employed, and training is doubled in terms of frequency, duration and intensity.  And in one week, 5 pounds are lost…and then a stall.  And for the next 3 weeks, a stall.  And maybe even a little jump up in weight.  What happened?  The body ADAPTED, because that’s what bodies do.  And it’s that adaptation that one is supposed to FIGHT during fat loss.  They’re supposed to bamboozle the body into giving up the fat by HIDING the fact that we’re losing fat.  It’s going to be a slow, gradual process where we sneak a few calories away and do a little more walking than usual and save harder interventions for when the body displays some stubbornness.  But if we try to race to the redlight of adaptation, we achieve exactly that, and, once again “now what?”  We WERE eating 800 calories of lettuce and water while running a marathon a day: do we now eat 400 calories and run 2 marathons?

The IIFYM crowd double checking their calorie counting apps

 

I was going to write that we see this in muscle gaining as well, but in truth, we’ve moved SO far away from THAT issue due to everyone being so afraid of losing their abs in pursuit of building muscle that, instead, we have people that have been sitting at the greenlight for 4 full cycles and STILL refuse to hit the accelerator, so perhaps a discussion for another time.  So instead let’s talk about the dreaded “deload” and how this is a prime example of easing off the accelerator BEFORE we hit the redlight.  There’s some sort of bizarre stigma against employing deloads right now, hinging on the premise that needing a deload is a sign that you’re improperly managing intensity and volume in the first place.  But let’s go back with that traffic metaphor again.  Sure, in theory, if you drive your car at exactly the right speed with lights that are perfectly timed, you’ll never need to hit the breaks: you’ll always hit greenlights and just coast right through.  But what can happen?   An animal can dart out into the middle of the street and force you to slowdown or swerve, or a car can pull out in front of you and start going slower than you intended, or you miscalculated the size of your bladder and suddenly you need to arrive at your next destination with a little more urgency.  What happened?  Life.  It’s a full contact sport: wear a helmet.  And we encounter that same entropy when we train as well.  Illnesses happen, unexpected social obligations, late nights, minor tweaks, etc.  Sometimes, a planned and scheduled deload IS properly managing volume and intensity, because it’s like a training slush fund, set aside to deal with those less than desirable elements that impact our recovery.  We budget a necessary degree of “oops” into our planning, so that we don’t find ourselves racing toward a redlight of a stall.  The deload lets us take our foot off the accelerator for a minute so we can keep on cruising through greenlights.

 

For all of our sakes, please be a good driver out there. 

INTENTIONAL INACTION: WHAT WE DON’T DO

I find one of the most challenging notion for westerners to accept and appreciation is that of NOT doing something.  We are a culture of doing: that is how we know we are BEING.  “I think, therefore I am” ala Decartes was there to resolve an existential crisis, the notion that, because I am thinking, I MUST therefore exist, premised upon the idea that action affirms existence.  Contrast this with an eastern philosophy of duality, wherein action is necessarily balanced by inaction, and this audience can far more appreciate the importance of NOT doing along with doing.  This comes to a head in the realm of physical transformation, because those who embark on this journey with a western mindset are always fixated on what they can DO to achieve results, rather than what they can NOT do.  “What foods do I eat to lose weight?”  Already that question seems so ridiculous on the premise: how will EATING make us LOSE weight?  But it’s the question fired right out the gate.  “What workout do I do to get in shape?”  “What supplements do I take?”  Why do we need supplements BEFORE we even know what’s wrong?  People will ice plunge and detox and juice cleanse and red light therapy themselves to hell and gone, but few will actually STOP doing stuff, because DOING is satisfying, while NOT doing feels like stagnation, decline and death.  But I propose a notion of intentional inaction as a necessary counter balance to action.  To satisfy this western sensibility, we must ACTIVELY practice inactivity.

Nailed it!

What does this mean exactly?  It means to be inactive WITH INTENT.  It’s easy for us to equate inactivity with sloth, what the west considers to be a sin due to puritanical values that praise industry (which Nietzsche would most likely argue is, in fact, slave morality, crafted by the masters, to have a content workforce out there producing goods while the masters enjoy luxury, but I digress), but we can instead turn the act of inactivity (boy that’s confusing) into a form of intentional action.  We CHOOSE inactivity as a means to specifically achieve the effect that the inactivity produces.  Because yes, “an object at rest remains at rest”, but we exist in a system where all the objects have already been placed into motion.  In turn, by placing an object INTO a state of rest, we actually disrupt the system and create effects. Inactivity is not merely the cessation of action, but instead to catalyst for an outcome that can ONLY be achieved THROUGH inaction.  We achieve results that cannot be achieved through action.

 

By INTENTIONALLY fasting, we engage in the inaction of not eating.  We are NOT doing something, but we are NOT doing it for a reason.  Fasting from carbohydrates makes it so that we are NOT experiencing blood sugar and insulin spikes during the day, which, in turn, gives us an opportunity to improve insulin sensitivity.  When we fast from protein, we can increase secretion of the FGF21 hormone, which can improve lipid metabolism and increase insulin sensitivity.  And just fasting in general gives our digestive tract a rest and gives us a chance to trigger autophagy (which, yes, training can ALSO do this, but we’ll talk about training in a bit).  We’re also not triggering mTOR as much when we engage in some intentional fasting, AND we give the metabolism an opportunity to ramp down, which, if you’ve been pounding food in an arms race to put on size and find yourself staring down the barrel of 8000 calories a day just to put on some size, a chance to drop demand is a blessing.  We re-sensitize our bodies to food by denying it some for a little bit.  We’re not simply “not eating”: we’re INTENTIONALLY not eating because of the effect that NOT eating achieves.

Like fame and fortune!

NOT training IS action: it’s the action of letting fatigue dissipate so that we can train HARDER upon our return.  For some reason, it’s become en vouge now to claim that, if you NEED deloads, your training is poorly set up, and this absolutely smacks of the HIT reductionists claims that “if it didn’t work, that means you didn’t train hard enough, because HIT ONLY works if you train hard enough”.  Hey Emperor: hate to break it to you, but you’re naked.  For those of us living on planet Earth, life happens, fatigue builds, and taking a week off of training is a surefire way to let that fatigue go away.  And along with FATIGUE, even IF you have somehow managed to find the perfect balance of training such that you never exceed your recovery abilities, there’s no denying that the sheer act of training itself is an inflammatory activity, and simply allowing your body a week off from constantly exposing it to inflammation can ALSO have some positive effects.   Yes yes: acute inflammation of hormesis and chronic inflammation is the concern, but just from a “making weight class” perspective, taking a week off of training means letting some of that fluid out of your body so you can step on the scale a little lighter.  It means letting your connective tissues have a little break so all those chronic aches and pains can go away.  It means, psychologically, relighting the fire, as the week off should ideally have you champing at the bit to come back to training.  It also means having a light at the end of the tunnel of a hard training block, knowing you can REALLY go all out on that last week, as you’ll have a full week off to recover.  These are all objectives that we CANNOT achieve through DOING: it’s the NOT doing that allows us to achieve this.  The deload is an ACTIVE process: we are actively NOT doing the things that prevent us from experiencing these outcomes.

 

And what’s comical about all of this is I’m discussing intentionally not doing the things that we understand are GOOD for you.  NOT eating foods, no matter how healthy or unprocessed they are.  NOT doing exercise, no matter how effective it is for producing lean mass or positive cardio health outcomes.  Just imagine the benefits from all the NOT doing of things we know are BAD for us.  Not drinking alcohol, not doing recreational drugs, not eating processed garbage, etc.  These are some of the simplest wins we can rack up in the quest for physical transformation, and they’re the most overlooked because they’re NOT doing things rather than doing things.  And then we can go even further and try to NOT do the things that we THINK are good for us but we know are really self-destructive.  NOT making every single training session a max out, NOT trying to destroy ourselves with conditioning but instead let it build us up into something great, NOT focusing on our strengths and ignoring our weaknesses, etc.  If we dedicate some serious effort into NOT doing things, we might actually become something.