RUBBER BAND PHYSIOLOGY

I heard this term in a podcast recently and it was really eye opening having this notion expressed so succinctly.  So, of course, I’m going to spend time taking something that says all it needs to say in 2 words and blow it up into 1000, because if 2 is good, 1000 is gooder!  The notion being presented here is similar to the “bodyweight/bodyfat set point” theory, wherein the body, desiring to remain in a state of homeostasis, will naturally gravitate toward a specific fixed destination as it relates to bodyfat/bodyweight.  Typically, this amount is “set” via our lifestyle during adolescence, and impacted by genetic and environmental factors, but eventually we reach a point where our body is comfortable, and when we attempt to push it BEYOND that comfort level, it may adjust temporarily, but ultimately it will fight its way back to its original starting point.  We’ve seen this with individuals that have undergone significant amounts of weight loss, losing 200+lbs of bodyweight only to put it all back on (and more) withing a few years, and we also see it with the perpetual hardgainer who fights so hard for that 20lb weight gain only to lose it all in a few weeks of poor eating.  The “rubber band” element here is the metaphor of us stretching the rubber band of our physiology only for it to snap right back to baseline on us…but let’s explore this a little more and see what lessons we can take from a rubber band.

Like don't believe everything you see from 2010s Elitefts...

 

Rubber bands, comically enough, have had a unique presence in the world of physical transformation, such that we can easily observe the lessons from them and apply them to our own biology.  Westside Barbell made their use incredibly popular, attaching them to barbells and employing them with the “Dynamic Effort” method.  This was taking the principle of accommodating resistance and applying it: the idea of making a lift HARDER the further along the range of motion that we travel.  The idea here was to teach the body how to accelerate through the hardest part of the lift, because the best way to overcome the resistance of the rubber band was to move against it as fast as possible.  If a lifter were to attempt to slowly overcome the resistance of the rubber band, they would get stapled in the lift.  If they moved quickly, they had a chance to survive, and then, when the bands came OFF the bar, the lifter would be accustomed to blowing through the lift as fast as possible.

 

However, what we ALSO observed through the use of resistance bands was something Louie Simmons deemed “overspeed eccentrics”, wherein, by employing the resistance band in the ECCENTRIC phase of the lift, the trainee was able to improve their CONCENTRIC force, in a manner similar to how plyometric training achieves outcomes.  Rather than discuss the specifics of this training, let’s observe the fact that, in order to achieve a maximal return on the eccentric phase of the lift, the resistance band needed to be started in a maximally stretched position.  If there was slack in the band, there was no overspeed eccentric achieved, whereas a tensed band would snap hard back into place.

Squats against bands are also less prone to these sorts of issues

Why does this matter?  Because, as we understand the set point as it relates to the notion of “rubber band physiology”, we are appreciating the reality that hard, strong, fast charges against our physiology stretches out our rubber band, resulting in an equally strong counter reaction of the band snapping back into place.  Effectively: the harder we push for change, the harder the body pushes BACK to revert and maintain homeostasis.  This is why crash diets create results that don’t last: the trainee loses the 10lbs in a week, and then the next week they’re up 12lbs.  Or they ran Smolov, added 50lbs to their squat at the end of the cycle, and 2 weeks later their squat has reverted to BELOW their previous max.  Or even in bodybuilding show prep, we see folks achieve ridiculous levels of leanness only to “rebound” and put back on 20-30lbs in a month.  They stretched the rubber band too fast and got snapped back on.

 

But what else can rubber bands do?  They can SNAP.  We decide to just keep on stretching and stretching until we’ve reached the end of their structural integrity and now we have a broken rubber band.  And if you’re the one STRETCHING that band, you know the end result in some pain when it snaps back and hits your flesh.  The body, once again, is no different.  If we decide to take these extreme measures beyond their “reasonable” periods of implementation (these quick fixes tend to at least have sanity in their prescribed durations), we end up with a BROKEN physiology.  In the training world, this is entering a state of being “overtrained”, in the nutritional world, it’s being “overdieted”, but in both cases, you have a BROKEN trainee now, and it’s going to take several months, if not YEARS to put humpty dumpty back together again.  We now need to rebuild the metabolism after months of running a 1500 calorie diet trying to FINALLY get abs, or we need to reduce our training volume and intensity down to bare bones to be able to FINALLY recover from fatigue enough to actually be ABLE to train.

 

So what option do we have?  Well, once again, for those of you that bought a set of original jump stretch bands, you may have noticed that, over time, they seems to LOSE some of that elasticity.  When we try to race against the band, it snaps right back, but when we just sort of gradually expand it, slowly, intentionally, we get the rubber band to accommodate to the new shape we’ve imposed upon it.  The rubber band is able to relax its contraction and stretch less and, eventually, it’s wider than we originally intended.  And if we were to take this rubber band to its logical extreme through this practice, on the day it DOES snap, it will not snap with a whiplike retraction and smack us back on our flesh, but instead more just sort of fizzle and dissolve.

 

This is one of those inconvenient truths about physical transformation: it simply can’t be rushed.  But not in the sense that “if you try to rush it, you won’t get results any faster”, but more “you won’t get results any faster AND you’ll end up worse than when you started”.  There are CONSEQUENCES for rushing.  In the case of crash dieters, due to bodyfat set point, after they end up crash dieting and losing a lot of weight through a combination of fatty AND lean mass, the body will try to rush itself BACK to its original bodyweight, and it's agnostic about how it gets there.  It wants ANY sort of mass, and this is why yo-yo dieters struggle so much.  They come back from the crash diet with more fat and less lean tissue, and then they try to crash diet again.  And since they have less lean tissue, they need to eat even FEWER calories than before to get the same results, so they’re MEGA starving, only to shave off what little lean mass they have, just to put back on even MORE fat and repeat the cycle until it can’t be sustained and now they’re in the worse possible place they can be.  The dude that just keeps chasing the intensity dragon, running peaking program after peaking program, just fries out their central nervous system and loses what little muscle they had due to a total lack of accumulation phases in their training, and eventually they find themselves trying to peak to a 1rm that is lower than their warm-ups when they first started training.  The consequences of trying to rush are that they make us go BACKWARDS.

 

Instead, a gradual and sustainable approach needs to make up the majority of our time in the world of physical transformation.  Which, upon review, I basically took a long time to come to Dan John’s “Park bench/bus bench” concept, but it’s a good concept.  The majority of our time, in pursuit of physical transformation, we need to be just slowly stretching this rubber band of ours so we can sneak up on our biology and not even let it know that we’re transforming.  We make the process gradual and gentle so that the body gives way to the changes and finds it an acceptable state of homeostasis.  When we undertake those BRIEF moments of intense rubber band stretching (think Super Squats with a gallon of milk a day or a 28 day Velocity Diet run), we take that runway we gained against the rubber band and resume the GENTLE stretching of it, fully understanding that the body is going to try to snap that rubber band back at us, and the “gains” we made during that time AREN’T going to last.  But, perhaps, they’ll be a slight head start that we can work from, so long as we give the rubber band a moment to adjust.    

 

         

BEGINNERS DON’T PROGRESS FASTER: THEY’RE JUST BAD AT TRAINING (A DISCUSSION ON BEGINNERS, INTERMEDIATES AND ADVANCED TRAINEES) PART II

I actually already wrote the end to this earlier, but the more I think about it the more I want to continue writing on it, so if these next few paragraphs come out of the blue, it’s because I wrote them AFTER I thought I was done.  And, in fact, now I’m just making this “part II”.  But stick with me here: we’re learning that our attempt to shortcut language has limited our dialog on the discussion of training.  By classifying trainees as “beginner, intermediate and advanced”, we, unfortunately, made it a COMPETITION to STOP being a beginner as soon as possible and try to ACHIEVE being intermediate/advanced.  But really, what we understand here is that these classifications were simply meant to identify PROFICIENCY in the skill of lifting: NOT achievement.  It was not “congrats: you trained hard/long enough that you’re now lifting some REAL intermediate/advanced weights and have earned the right to use an intermediate/advanced program”, it’s “congrats: you’ve learned how to more effectively recruit your nervous system toward the task of these SPECIFIC movements and can now exhaust yourself harder/faster than a less proficient trainee”.  Which, honestly, is kind of a terrible prize to win, because it requires us to NOW employ advanced TECHNIQUES to be able to achieve the same kind of results we witnessed when we were using a more basic protocol previously, but let’s keep diving in as far as pros and cons go.

We should have the same reaction for winning this prize

 

We’re establishing exactly what newbie gains are: it’s the rapid growth that occurs simply because improved proficiency moves in an exponential rather than linear pattern, and the further away we are from our maximal potential, the faster along the line we move.  With that, we can use that to our advantage as an advanced trainee by selecting to train movements in manners that we do NOT possess an advanced level of proficiency in.  And, in fact (sorry, my mind is all over on this), this explains why Maximal Effort lifts are rotated in the first place in a conjugate training system, and WHY they’re rotated more frequently for more advanced trainees than junior ones.  When we rotate in a brand new lift, proficiency is poor and we aren’t able to actually get all that close to our REAL “100% of 1rm” on the movement, so we train it hard that day, put in a lot of effort, but don’t dig as DEEP into our recovery well as we could if we were better at it.  But when we come back to it NEXT week, we take those skills we developed and find ourselves in a position wherein we CAN dig deeper AND, in turn, impose a greater recovery demand on ourselves.  A more advanced trainee is going to develop those skills faster than a novice one, simply from having “been there/done that” over the course of their training history: they’re better capable of developing the skills to maximally recruit their nervous system.  This is why a more novice trainee can stick with a max effort lift longer than a more advanced one, with 3 weeks with 1 lift being possible for a novice while an advanced will either rotate in a new movement each week OR make changes to the parameters of the lift (go for a 3 rep max on the first week, then a 1 on the next week, for example).

 

But back to newbie gains: this means that an advanced trainee can use this principle to their advantage OUTSIDE of the max effort lift example.  From a mass building perspective, this is the genius DoggCrapp, because having 3 different workouts you rotate between limits the ability to acquire skill rapidly in the lift AND there is a protocol in place that, once a lift stalls, you simply swap it out for a new one and repeat the process.  But we even see this in the strength building world as well, with Dan John’s “No, Mild, Wild” movement variation protocol in “Easy Strength”, wherein a trainee either makes NO change to movements between cycles (or after 20 workouts, depending on their approach), a Mild change (from flat bench to incline, for example) or a WILD change (from strict press to dips, for an example).  Funny enough, many would consider these programs and protocols to be ADVANCED programs (Dante himself advised no trainee under the age of 26 with less than 3 years of training experience take on his program), but they’re advanced programs that endeavor to generate a BEGINNER response to training.

You say that like it's a bad thing!

 

But on that note, let’s also discuss some of the advantages that COME with being an advanced trainee compared to a beginner.  Because, as previously established, it’s a game balancing stimulus, fatigue and recovery, and the advanced trainee runs into the issue that they’re so GOOD at lifting that they can generate more fatigue than the beginner trainee despite doing the same AMOUNT of work.  But we have to understand that, BECAUSE of the differences of abilities between the two trainees, what is prescribed vs what is performed differ.  Where this shines through is in the instance of “single set work”.  This is something that an advanced trainee can actually excel in, whereas a beginner will most likely flounder.  An advanced trainee, so capable in recruiting their nervous system to the task of lifting the weight, can, in ONE set, generate sufficient stimulus such that they WILL get a growth response.  They’ll also, in that one set, generate enough FATIGUE that they, most likely, will get minimal benefit by adding an additional set, as the fatigue they generate will outpace the stimulus benefit, meaning they’ll be forced to recover MORE while receiving FEWER gains.  A beginner, however, will most likely NOT be capable of generating much stimulus OR fatigue in one set of work.  The solution?   More sets, of course.  We can’t dig as deep, so we, instead, dig many shallow holes so that we achieve the same AMOUNT of stimulus and comparable fatigue.

 

So then the question comes up: why aren’t ALL advanced programs simply single sets then?  In fact, why is it that, frequently, we see instances of advanced trainees performing training programs with volume that we say is TOO MUCH for a beginner?  Doesn’t that work in opposition to the previous realization?  Not quite, because we previously established the notion that recovery ITSELF is a multifaceted attribute, influenced by a variety of variables which, in themselves, can be manipulated.  The obvious answer is “drugs”, and yes: those CAN impact recovery, but so can simply general fitness levels, nutrition, sleep and age.  Someone who has maximized their recovery capabilities opens themselves up to the potential of being able to endure greater degrees of fatigue than other trainees, and what this means is that they can continue to generate stimulus beyond levels most trainees can WITHOUT generating an unrecoverable amount of fatigue.  From a practical standpoint, the issue here is the law of diminishing returns, in that the amount of fatigue generated from each additional set of training does NOT return an equal amount of stimulus, but, instead, the stimulus tends to drop off exponentially while the fatigue increases linearly.  HOWEVER, for those that ARE in pursuit of the absolute peak of physical achievement, diminishing returns ARE STILL returns.  While most folks can get 80% returns with 2 sets of hard work, if you can get 90% returns with 10 sets AND you can still recover in the same amount of time as the guy that can only manage 2 sets, you put yourself in a position to be able to outpace that individual over a long enough timeline and stand out as a “freak” amongst normal people.

10 sets of 10 may be called "junk volume", but it sure seems to have some non-junk results

 

Which is an argument for the benefit of physical preparation, nutrition, sleep hygiene, etc.  People wonder the “why” behind that, and there it is.  And, in turn, it also shows that all of that stuff is irrelevant if you’re not willing to actually CAPITALIZE on it once it’s present.   If you’re the recovery master but you’re just putting in the bare minimum, you’ll get those returns.  But if you’ve mastered recovery and LEVERAGE it to eek out those diminishing returns, you’ll see the benefits of your efforts.

 

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Folks, in truth, I wrote this post more for me than for you, because I was learning AS I wrote it.  But that said, I hope my ramblings proved beneficial in some way here.

BEGINNERS DON’T PROGRESS FASTER: THEY’RE JUST BAD AT TRAINING (A DISCUSSION ON BEGINNERS, INTERMEDIATES AND ADVANCED TRAINEES) PART I

 

I’m completely late to the party on this one, but it’s one of those things that sorta dawned on me while I was thinking to myself (because, again, something is broken in my brain and this is what I default to) regarding the way we perceive beginner trainees vs advanced.  Beginner trainees are constantly provided a basic linear progression program as a novice program in order to “get their newbie gains”.  These programs will use a limited number of movements, to give the trainee less to screw up and more to focus on, along with a limited number of sets and reps, because the effective dose to get a beginner to progress isn’t significant.  As we’ve observed in the sphere of physical transformation: pretty much ANY physical intervention will result in progress, something that Alexander Bromely highlighted well in his “Base Strength” book discussing a trainee who undertakes 100 push ups a day in an effort to change.  And along with this bare bones approach to training, the trainee is instructed to add weight to the bar every time they train.  Keep the sets and reps the same: just keep adding 5lbs total per workout.  If you’re training 3x per week, in 6 weeks, you’ll have added 90lbs to each lift (in theory).  By about week 12, you’ll have “milked your beginner gains” dry, and be ready to progress to a REAL program: one that does things like balance fatigue against recovery, employ a variety of exercises, a range of sets and reps, etc etc.  But when asked why only beginners use these programs, we’re told the same line: “beginners can progress faster than advanced trainees/advanced trainees need slower progression”.  And we believe it, because it certainly APPEARS this way.  However, upon review, I think we have this wrong.  I don’t think beginners can progress faster than advanced trainees: I think beginners are so much worse at training than advanced trainees that they never generate significant enough fatigue in the first place to NEED more time to recover.

Granted some beginners DO have supernatural recovery abilities...

 

That was a long climb for this slide, but I don’t think it’s going to get any better, so strap in.  As I previously mentioned, training is a game of balancing stimulus with fatigue with recovery.  We have to generate enough stimulus to trigger a growth response, but doing so necessitates accumulating fatigue from the stimulus triggering (training), and we have to ensure we’re able to recover enough from the bout of training to be able to train again and generate the stimulus.  If we’re too fatigued from the previous bout of training, when we go into the next round, the body won’t be able to divert recovery resources to IMPROVEMENT: it’s going to still be working on recovery from the previous session.  And so now, we’ve dug the hole of recovery even DEEPER, and we just keep going further and further into recovery debt until we eventually burnout and crash in some sort of horrific manner and are FORCE to just plain take time away from training and focus SOLELY on recovering.  We can employ recovery interventions as safeguards to mitigate against this withing a training block (ala a deload/recovery week, increase sleep/food/make use of drugs/etc), but that’s just getting into more advanced methods of recovering against the fatigue.  Regardless, we understand the interplay between these systems as it relates to training.

 

Alright, cool, so what?  The “so what” here is that we acknowledge that training itself is what generates the fatigue, but we must ALSO acknowledge that you have to be GOOD at training to be able to generate a LOT of fatigue.  Similar to how anyone can throw a punch, but a trained boxer (following under the instruction of Jack Dempsey) understands how to actually put their weight into their punch in order to have more devastating effects, someone who is capable in the ways of training is able to generate MORE fatigue THROUGH training than someone who is new to training.  We refer to this as “neurological efficiency”, the notion of someone being better able to recruit available motor neurons to more effectively express available strength/strength potential in an effort, and consider this to be a FEATURE for an advanced trainee…but it may, in fact, also be a bug.  A powerlifter who is more neurologically efficient at the powerlifts is going to be able to dig much deeper and access further levels of strength when it comes to executing the big 3 lifts compared to a newer trainee, but, in turn, that means they will generate greater FATIGUE by digging so much deeper in the process.  This is why the advanced trainee is unable to follow these novice programs as written: the fatigue they generate in one training session cannot be recovered from in the time allotted for the next training session.  They will either need a longer gap between training sessions OR to train at a lower percentage than the true novice does, such that their training does not generate unrecoverable amounts of fatigue.

Just because you SAY it's light doesn't mean it is

 

But why this is enlightening is due to what it points out about our assumptions on the realms of training.  When discussing percentage based systems, it would appear that the percentages of a novice do not match up to the percentages of an advanced trainee.  An advanced trainee’s “90% of 1rm” may actually BE something like 90% of their 1 rep max, but a novice trainee’s 90% may actually end up being more like 60% of their 1rm, and that’s because they can’t generate enough force when attempting 1 rep to actually get WITHIN the realm of their 1 rep max potential.  The strength is there, latent in their system: they simply lack the tools to realize this.  It explains why training maxes are a necessity for some while an obstacle for others: some folks actually CAN achieve close to their maximum potential when they try and, in turn, training can be incredibly fatiguing when training around their max loads, while others are near their max loads simply because they’re so bad at training that their “max” isn’t anywhere NEAR their potential max.

 

But beyond this, it also explains situations wherein a trainee undertakes a novice program and stalls out much faster than another novice who achieves ABSURD levels of strength.  The individual in the former more rapidly progressed in their ability to realize true maximal strength within their training sessions and, in doing so, found a way to generate unrecoverable fatigue within the timeframe of the training program, whereas the latter is simply someone gifted with an abundance of strength while still struggling to maximally realize it.  If you think of an ape in the wild, they are significantly stronger than us humans, but they do not invest the types of efforts we do in learning how to maximally express their available strength.  Were they to undertake such training, they could progress for a LONG time adding 5lbs per session before they eventually finally started working within the realms of the max capabilities, generating too much fatigue to be able to recover and being forced to undertake a different training modality.

And if the ape is alone in the woods and no one is around to see it lift, does it still get +1/+2?

 

Which, in turn, means that the internet witchhunt that occurs when a novice trainee stalls out early in a novice program is even sillier than usual.  All we are observing, when this occurs, is someone having found a way to generate more fatigue than they have available recovery.  Now, yes, part of the intervention here COULD BE to engage in some manner of physical fitness improvement in order to improve one’s ability to recover in general (because many raw beginners in this era come into training incredibly unfit) but it can ALSO be to acknowledge that this individual simply outpaced their available strength with advancing neurological efficiency. 

 

When you think about “natural athletes”, these are simply people that are blessed in such a way that they are able to rapidly adapt to the demands of a new activity.  Their bodies are simply more aware and capable at learning physical skills compared to us of the more oafish persuasion.  If we acknowledge that such individuals exist, surely there is the case where one such individual could be naturally gifted as an athlete AND they’ve squandered their gifts through a sedentary lifestyle.  What we’d have there is the perfect storm for early novice burnout: a trainee with minimal strength potential that can be rapidly realized.  Within a month of the novice program, this individual has figured out how to more effectively recruit available motor units than the average trainee, and soon enough they’re just digging the recovery hole deeper than the next guy can.  This isn’t a failure at all: this person has graduated early!  The internet will chide this, saying that someone with a 135lb bench is still a novice and just needs to keep on eating more and doing their 3 sets of 5, but that’s absolutely slapping a bandaid on the problem (effectively just making the trainee heavier so that the weights they are moving a reduced percentage compared to their bodyweight, ala the “mass moves mass” mantra).  Instead, it’s time to acknowledge that this trainee needs to move onto a protocol that allows them adequate time to recover between training bouts WHILE shifting emphasis to improving their strength potential.  They’ve realized all the strength they have: it simply isn’t much.

Time to accumulate

 

And then the theory can get REALLY interesting when we consider how to reverse this and get an advanced trainee to employ a novice progression program.  Primarily because Dan John, by way of Pavel Tsastouline, already figured this out: Easy Strength.  Easy Strength looks a LOT like a basic linear progression program, especially when trained 3x a week (which is within tolerances of the program).  3 sets of 3 of a limited number of movements, trained 3x a week, for 40 total workouts.  HOWEVER, the load of Easy Strength is what makes the difference, for the trainee is told to NOT strain during this lifting (hence “Easy” strength), which, if we use percentages, can put the load around 50-60%.  However, again, with an advanced trainee, this is a REAL 60% load, which is a GOOD thing, because it means it’s enough to generate the STIMULUS to create change yet won’t cause such excessive fatigue that there is an inability to recover.  It’s why Easy Strength is set up the way it is and works the way it does: we took that same novice program and simply set up a training load that won’t floor the advanced trainee.  In turn, novice programs won’t work solely on novices because of some unique ability to progress faster than advanced trainees: they work on ALL levels of trainees, so long as the actual appropriate load is implemented.

 

I originally thought I was done at this point and wrote a concluding paragraph, and then I came back and wrote another 1500 words or so, so let’s call this “part I” and stay tuned for part II.

RED MEAT AND BLACK COFFEE

Once again, I have engaged in some nutritional experimentation and wanted to share my approach and outcomes with you.

Maybe one of these days I'll copy his idea with the worms instead and REALLY get jacked

 

BACKGROUND INFO

It goes back quite a ways

On 6 Jan 2026, I returned from a New Year’s Disney Cruise vacation.  Leading up to this vacation, I was in a gaining phase of training (my birthday is late October, and with Thanksgiving and Christmas soon after that, I leverage that timeframe for gaining/feasting), and the morning after my travels home I weighed in at 89.1kg: a gain of 6kg in 15 weeks.  Now it was January, which is an excellent time to lose weight, because the WHOLE WORLD is doing it, so no one is going to question/judge you for doing so.  But along with that, I had a strongman competition on 21 Feb to prep for, and the kind of training I do for that is the kind of training that DOESN’T require the excess food that gaining training requires, so I knew I was going to reduce my food intake.

 

It's 29 Jan as I write this, and I weighed in this morning at 81.4kg.  Now, already I’ll cop to the huckstering going on here: the 89.1kg weigh in is a post travel weigh in, and we all know that traveling bloats us and this morning’s weigh in was after a 90 minute ruck, so there’s a sweat element involved.  HOWEVER, if my goal was to make weight for a weight class, none of that would matter, as all that counts is what the scale shows.  But, along with that, my performance in training hasn’t suffered (and, in fact, I’ve continued to make steady progress) and I’ve achieved “non-scale victories” as well, primarily that latching the lever on my lifting belt is no longer a workout in and of itself and my clothes are fitting better.  So with that, allow me to document the approach I employed, which I am referring to as “Red Meat and Black Coffee”…primarily because I love how well that syncs up.

 

PRINCIPLES

 

Flexibility is key

·       Don’t get hungry.  This isn’t white knuckling.

·       When you eat, eat carnivore/animal.  You’re going to need to maximize opportunities to get in protein, and being ketogenic/fat adapted will limit hunger.

·       When you DON’T eat, allow yourself black coffee.  Don’t add sweeteners/cream/butter/etc.  This is fasting with an aid.

·       Eat after lifting weights.  Don’t eat after conditioning.

·       2 meals a day on non-fasting days, 1 meal a day on fasting days.

 

THE METHOD

He probably could have stood to have a little less coffee

 

Put very simple: twice per week, instead of breakfast, I have black coffee.  And all my meals are carnivore.

 

But now let’s expand.

 

Prior to this, I’d settled into a pattern of eating 2 meals per day: a breakfast and a dinner.  I still like that approach, so it’s the framework I operate within.  Understanding that, it seemed logical that, if I did NOT eat one of those 2 meals, I’d be taking in less food, and the outcome would be weight loss.

 

Shocking, I know, but I’ll continue.

 

One of the things I like about a carnivore approach to nutrition is how satiating it is.  When you eat ONLY animal products, you have limited opportunities to spike your blood sugar.  This means you don’t experience the compensatory crash that coincides with the spike, which means you never get “hangry”.  Hunger does eventually show up, but it’s a slow burn, in the background, easy to ignore unless it becomes dire.  It sounds like how people describe GLP-1 agonists shutting off “food noise”.  It makes any manner of fasting pretty easy, which is something I noticed on my travels during long flights.

 

Along with that, there is something of an “opening the floodgates” when it comes to eating.  Once we START eating, we get a taste for it (pun unintended but whatever) and want to KEEP doing it.  If we never really start the process, we just remain at baseline.

 

And then, along with all that, black coffee is a known appetite suppressant.  Part of that is the caffeine content, but even decaf can have the effect.  And since it’s winter, a warm beverage is honestly a treat, and can go very far to satisfy cravings for comfort that can be misinterpreted for needs for food.  And much like pain medication, I don’t drink coffee when I feel hungry: I drink coffee before I feel hunger.

 

All this having been said, I want to make it ABSOLUTELY clear that at no point am I actually HUNGRY during this process.  This is NOT about white knuckling my way through hunger to achieve a fast.  I feel like that’s an unsustainable AND problematic approach to fat loss.  This “works” because I’m able to reduce food intake WITHOUT actually ever being hungry.  That’s the ideal fat loss solution.

 

THE HOW AND WHY

Sometimes it really is all that simple

 

I’ve paired this nutritional approach with the Tactical Barbell Operator program, which, without going into too much detail, is 3 days per week of lifting.  I train first thing in the morning, fasted.  After the lifting workouts, I’ll have a post training breakfast, and then, about 10-12 hours after that, I’ll have a dinner.  I’ll also have some protein before bed (more on that later). 

 

During a standard workweek, this means I have 2 days where I DON’T lift weights first thing in the morning.  On those days, I do conditioning workouts (a 90 minute ruck on Thursdays, and a fast/short high intensity conditioning workouts [HIC] on Tuesdays).  On these days, I don’t have breakfast: I just have a black coffee (usually mixed with unflavored electrolytes).

 

From there, I try to limit myself to only 2 cups of coffee on lifting days and 3 cups on non-lifting days, primarily because I have an addictive personality and things can quickly get out of hand, but I honestly see no issue with drinking however much black coffee one wants so long as it’s not having consequences (primarily sleep impacts, but also digestive any otherwise).

 

Weekends, I allot for having a breakfast and a dinner (primarily because my wife is an absolute saint and will make breakfast for the whole family on both days), but if an opportunity presents where I can fast through one of those breakfasts (we all slept in and the day is getting away from us), I’ll just go with the black coffee.  As far as training goes, for this particular experiment, I was doing the Crossfit WOD “Grace” on Saturdays, while Sunday was a down day (at most, getting in a long walk).

Yeah, I suppose that works

 

So we end up with effectively a 2-3 meal deficit over the course of the week.  COULD that same end result be achieved by keeping the meals the same and simply eating less at them?  Yes, of course…but I find that this requires willpower to be able to accomplish. One has to actually STOP eating, even though they are STILL hungry for more food.  And, ultimately, I believe that a nutritional protocol that is reliant upon willpower is one that will ultimately fail, as willpower is a finite resource.  And then, along with that, ONCE willpower fails, there is a compensatory counter-binge that occurs as a means for the body to “correct” what has been done to it through willpower.  This is how/why people end up going on junkfood benders after sustained periods of intense dieting. 

 

Instead, I am able to eat to satiety at all meals: I simply have fewer meals.  Mark Bell has a good quote that “after you fast, you have to pretend like it never happened”, which is a cautionary tale to avoid gorging after fasting under the premise that you get to “eat back” all those calories you didn’t eat.  This IS good advice, because it’s very easy to undo the caloric deficit of one skipped meal with a binge, BUT, this is where the “red meat” portion of the approach is helpful.

 

As previously stated: animal foods tend to be more satiating than others.  Dr. Ted Naiman has discussed the notion of a protein threshold that compels us to hunger and that, upon reaching it, hunger fades.  Yet we ALSO are all familiar with the concept of a “dessert stomach”, wherein, no matter HOW satiated we are, we tend to find room for desserts at the end of the meal.  So by eliminating sweet/carby sources of nutrition and focusing purely on animal foods, we put ourselves in a position wherein, even eating just ONE meal a day, we can reach satiety BEFORE we put ourselves at risk of overconsuming.  But let’s dig even deeper.

 

One of the concerns regarding eating only one meal per day, for someone interested in physical pursuits, is not getting in adequate amounts of protein.  Well here’s another 1-2 punch: by ONLY eating animal foods at our one meal, we allow for the possibility of taking in a significant enough amount of protein to have a sufficient amount to ward off muscle sparing AND there is evidence that ketones THEMSELVES are muscle sparing.  And given the nature of this diet (fasting mimicking AND fasting legitimately), there is a fair chance we will BE in a state of ketosis.  Plus, those 2 meal days give us ample opportunity to REALLY overload on protein, which can carry the water on those days where we’re only having one meal.  And on top of all this, one those 1 meal days, we can find ourselves a little hungrier come dinner time compared to the 2 meal days, so we may end up taking in even MORE protein than usual.  Yes: this means we’re not achieving a FULL “2-3 meal deficit” if we’re eating like a 1.5 meal at the end of those 1 meal days…but we’re STILL achieving a deficit, because it’s quite challenging to eat 2 meals worth of food in the span of 1 meal.  Yes: I’ve done it before…but it’s not something I can do EVERY day.

 

But, aside from that, I DO have a protein feeding before sleep as well.  Some could classify that as a meal, and feel free to do so if that helps you understand the system, but this was initially a scoop of Metabolic Drive protein powder mixed in water, and has now become the same scoop of powder but mixed with 170g of full fat Greek yogurt/skyr.  Stan Efferding’s “Vertical Diet 3.0” book (recently reviewed) convinced me on the value of bringing this back into my nutrition.  This gets in a little extra protein AND gives the body something slow absorbing to work on while we sleep.

 

QUICK SUMMARY

Yeah this is pretty much it

Monday/Wednesday/Friday: Lift weights and eat 2 carnivore meals per day (post training and one other) along with one pre-bed protein feeding.

Tuesday/Thursday: Train conditioning and eat 1 carnivore meal per day along with one pre-bed protein feeding.

Saturday/Sunday: Short high intensity workout on Saturday, allow up to 2 meals on each day, but free to skip 1 meal on one day, still include pre-bed protein feeding.

 

On all days: allow for black coffee as a beverage.

 

 

YOU CAN’T ACHIEVE PEAK HUMAN POTENTIAL BY DENYING YOUR HUMANITY

This is a bold topic for me to take on as a self-professed misanthrope, but I have constantly remarked that what I despise most about our species is our unwillingness to realize our TRUE potential, and this segues perfectly into that discussion.  What ultimately triggered this thought was my reading of a “fitness hack” online the other day, which advised those tracking their macros to save themselves frustration through the following approach: instead of tracking everything you eat in a day, calculate everything you’re GOING to eat FIRST, put it in the tracker, and THEN eat it.  …and it was the most alien, NON-human idea I had read in a LONG time.  That someone actually sat down and wrote it thinking it was a legit “ah hah” sort of realization made me think that this specific “person” couldn’t pass the Turing Test.  I would have thought for sure that this was some off-brand AI currently experiencing the robot equivalent of a stroke were it not for the fact that several OTHER “people” chimed in with what an EXCELLENT idea this was and how they’ve been doing the same and it TOTALLY revolutionized their results.  Folks: we’re in this to maximize our human potential: how are you going to do that by doing very NOT human things?

HE achieved peak human potential the AMERICAN way: with dodgy research pharmaceuticals 

Yes yes, I know: here I go to rally against calorie counting/macro tracking again, but come on people: we HAVE to admit that it’s weird.  My most recent post on “all diets are fad diets” spoke to this.  There is literally NO other animal on the planet that has to live this way.  Every other animal KNOWS what food it’s supposed to eat and EATS THAT FOOD, and it eats it until it’s had enough, and then it doesn’t eat again until it’s time to eat.  If we are unable to do the same, isn’t this indicative that something very WRONG is afoot?  What’s one of the drivers here?  Scheduled meals.  Again: the only OTHER animals that operate in such a way are the ones we’ve domesticated, and, in turn, those are ALSO the only other animals that are at risk of obesity and diabetes.  Why are we eating lunch?  Because it’s “lunch time”.  Are we even HUNGRY?  Although, truthfully, the answer to that question is often “yes”, and it’s from a combination of issues.  Either it’s because we ate a “breakfast” of processed sugar stacked with sugar (remember pouring sugar ON TOP OF rice crispies?) so our blood sugar massively spiked and crashed and now we’re absolutely starving OR we didn’t eat upon waking because last night’s sweets binge right before bed had us wake up nausea and hungover, plus we slept until the VERY last minute because our sleep in general is abysmal due to a combination of poor sleep hygiene and caffeine abuse…primarily because our sleep is awful.  Do you SEE how these cycles of “non-humanity” perpetuate? 

 

So yeah, let’s dive deeper into the weirdness of pre-logging your food.  This, again, hinges on the idea that you’re going to eat pre-designated meals at pre-designated times IRRESPECTIVE of if you’re even hungry at the time or in need of the energy.  And again: this is because we’re loading up on stuff that is so alien to our species that our body doesn’t know how to respond appropriately to be able to send us the proper signals to engage in any sort of natural manner of nutritional regulation.  And we’re doing all this in an attempt to get CLOSER to our end potential?  What sort of sense does it make?  We should be moving BACKWARD, closer to our origins, in order to be better able to realize our species’ potential.  Whatever it is that we’re becoming as a result of these practices, it certainly isn’t “more human”, unless it is to be understood in the Blade Runner sense of “more human THAN human”.

And YOU thought it was just a great White Zombie track

 

And this extends into the sphere of training as well.  Allow this to be the rallying cry for auto-regulation and intuitive training because, again, folks are missing out on the human aspect of this.  And let’s even extend it further as to WHY periodization is a thing, because we humans exist WITHIN nature, and nature operates in seasons and cycles that, again, the REST of the animal world fully embraces and WE attempt to deny, once again, in some sort of backwards attempt to realize our maximal human potential.  But folks want to outsource their training to an APP and to AI: they want a program (not in the training program sense, but in the computer program sense) to decide their path toward becoming their best human possible.  Can this possibly make any sense?  No matter how much data you feed the machine, it’s simply not going to know how to “go by feel” as it relates to an athlete: it’s why coaches are coaches.  Inexperienced trainees like to think that coaches are just information ATMs that know ALL the things and just administer them as needed, but, amazingly, many coaches AREN’T that knowledgeable academically and, instead, simply know the fine and delicate craft of ATHLETE management.  They know how to tell when an athlete is having a good day and it's time to push, when it’s time to backoff, how to tailor the training to meet the PSYCHOLOGY of the specific athlete (some guys ALWAYS need to move, so they find filler junk to keep them occupied without compromising recovery, others need little achievements throughout a training session to pursue, etc), and they know how to keep them fit enough to be able to perform when it’s time to perform.  And this simply comes from years of experience: it’s not something that can be programmed into an algorithm and spat out.

 

And it all mirrors up into something I’d discussed so many times: we need to make the NUTRITION match the TRAINING.  Which, again, all other animals but US understand.  An animal that has worked hard will eat more, because it needs to recover from the hard work it performed.  It will drink more, because it is thirsty.  And when the activity drops, so does the food, such to the point that SOME animals will enter a state of torpor and eat NOTHING.  Whereas us humans would set an alarm to make sure we’re STILL eating every 2-3 hours to “maximize protein synthesis”.  We’ll decide “time to lose weight!” and engage in some alien caloric restriction protocol wherein we have to employ hacks and tricks to overcome hunger (hello GLP-1 agonists), a sign our body is CRYING out for nutrients, and then double it up with some sort of soul crushingly exhausting training protocol to try to burn every last calorie in our system and get us TOTALLY diced for summer…and then experience a necessary compensatory binge after the fact that leaves us in a worse place than where we started, as we hemorrhaged off our lean tissue during the weight loss and put on a bunch of additional fat mass during the binge.  Or we’ll decide “it’s time to gain weight!” and, of course, put LIMITS on how fast we accumulate the weight, train hard, underfeed ourselves because we don’t DARE bypass the holy limit of weight gain, run ourselves into the ground due to inadequate recovery, and, when the whole process is done, we need such a break from training to ACTUALLY recover that we lose what minimal lean mass we accumulated and end up in the perpetual skinny-fat cycle of “bulking and cutting” the same 8lbs over and over again.

This is a terrible physique advert but actually ok if you're selling tanner

 

Match it all together: train with some auto-regulation and intuition, wherein you can HAVE a structure to operate within while also allowing yourself to call the necessary audibles based on your body and brain’s real HUMAN inputs.  Train seasonally, the way that nature moves, so that you HAVE some form of periodization.  Eat real HUMAN foods, such that your body and brain will send you appropriate signals for when it’s time to eat, and then eat based on those signals SO that you actually eat in a manner that supports the training you’re performing.  This could mean actually SKIPPING a meal or 2 during a fat loss phase (how bizarre!) because you’re not training so hard that you NEED all those meals.  This could mean actually putting away some food during a gaining phase because (surprise!) your body NEEDS that food to recover.  Spend some time actually BEING human and you may, in fact, find yourself becoming the BEST human you can be.            

EVERY DIET IS A FAD DIET

Oh boy here we go again.  I’ve been on the nutritional fringe since 2002, because a lot of my early “education” in physical transformation came by way of the GameFAQs martial arts message board.  By 2002, I had already been engaging in regular exercise for over 2 years, and had lost 25lbs through portion reduction (still eating the same foods, just less of them) and had been training in Tae Kwon Do since 1994 while also being a massive video game nerd (among other hobbies), which is how I ended up in this specific corner of the internet.  And for reasons I myself am not particularly sure of, at this specific moment in history, the Atkins diet had gained a resurgence in popularity, and the loudest members of this corner of the internet championed it and ketogenic diets in general.  And exposed to this “radical” idea (in truth, my Grandfather and Grandmother had both already employed the Atkin’s diet a few years earlier and successfully lost a significant amount of weight with it, while my family considered them all nut jobs at the time), I drank up ALL the (low-carb) Koolaid, employed a terribly stupid attempt at it by living off of lunch meat and fast food burgers without the bun, and thus my journey into nutritional fringe was well underway.  And over 20 years later, I still find I prefer low/no-carb diets and tend to look, feel and perform my best in this manner, and I STILL find people chiding me for “falling for a fad diet”, to which I retort that, today: EVERY diet is a fad diet.

It's amazing how you had to be around in the 90s to even understand this

 

How so?  Well let’s examine the initial argument.  Those that deride low/no-carb/paleo/intermittent fasting/carb cycling/etc nutritional approaches tend to prose that the NON-fad approach to nutrition would mean simply counting one’s calories and eating the right amount of macronutrients based on one’s goals (weight gain, weight loss, or weight maintenance).  Some will simply end the conversation there, existing in a camp of “If It Fits Your Macros”, whereas some will further contend that it’s ideal to eat nutritious foods in this pursuit, which tend to be those foods that are NOT hyper-processed, and, instead, exist in a mostly whole/unprocessed state.  Eating in a manner OUTSIDE of this confine is considered a “fad diet”.

 

Ok, so now let’s look at what a fad is, and in doing so I’m going to employ the horrible trope of using the dictionary.  Oxford defines it as “an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities; a craze” and Merriam-Webster goes with “a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal”.  So why are ketogenic diets, paleo diets, intermittent fasting, etc etc “fad diets” while calorie counting and macro tracking are non-fad diets?  Because of their recency in employment?

I have that talent

 

Well hold onto your butts folks: when did we discover the calorie?  In the early 1800s, Nicolas Clement created the definition of the calorie as it related to thermal energy, but it wasn’t until 1887 that Wilbur Atwater used a calorimeter to measure energy in food, and it wasn’t until the late 1890s that he published food composition tables to allow for the measurement of calories in food for public consumption.  When did we first see ketogenic diets employed?  The first documented case was Dr. Russell Wilder in the Mayo Clinic in 1921 YET we had William Banting recommending a low-carb/high-fat nutritional approach in his “Letter on Corpulence” in 1863.  This means that macronutrient restriction, as a form of nutritional intervention, predates calorie counting OR, at most, is only 30 years behind.  And when you factor in that we emerged as Homo Sapiens about 300,000 years ago, we really can’t let 30 years make or break what is and is not a “fad”.

 

But let’s go even FURTHER down that rabbit hole, shall we?  What of those that are claiming to quit being so weird about nutrition and just eat a healthy whole food diet?  Healthy whole foods ARE a fad.  If we’re judging fads as short-lived/followed for a time with exaggerated zeal, the modern food environment is INCREDIBLY faddish.  Because if you’re eating any vegetables TODAY, those things flat out were NOT around for our ancestors to eat.  Almost every vegetable we eat today is derived from Brassica oleracea, a type of wild mustard plant that we, as a species, SELECTIVELY bred in order to create the vegetables we WANTED to eat, vs what nature actually provided us.  Modern fruits are also a total abomination, with bananas that are almost pure sugar and seedless, compared to the heavily seeded bitter monstrosities that our ancestors had access to.  Apples have been engineered to ridiculous proportions, and we have grapes that taste like cotton candy for the love of god.  And don’t think I’m letting the carnivore community off easy here too: modern livestock and farming is abhorrent from a historical-biological perspective, with animals selectively bred to remove all biological defensive advantages and effectively only exist SOLELY as a food source, fed on a diet of bioengineered feeds and shot up with all manner of substances to improve their yield.  And even if you try to hunt, you’re STILL not out of the woods (pun partially intended), because your game meat is most likely getting into our frankencrops and eating that stuff.  I know the deer here get into the sweetcorn and will end up with marbling in their meat: that should NOT exist in nature.

Even Bobby can tell this isn't "natural"

 

And all of this is if you are TRYING to “eat clean, healthy whole foods”.  If you’re eating ANYTHING out of a box, you’re DEFINITELY eating a “fad diet”.  Food processing is a VERY modern advent as far as our nutrition goes, with the very basics of it dating back to dehydrating/salting meat to preserve it but the more contemporary approaches resulting in us having stuff like “blue raspberry pancake syrup” amongst other monstrosities.  Count your calories while eating your Pop-Tarts and explain to me how you’re not eating a “fad diet”.

 

Because we, as humans, have constructed an artificial food environment such that there is NO diet that ISN’T a fad diet.  If you look at any other animal on this planet, NONE of them have to think about how they eat: they just do it.  They know WHAT they’re supposed to eat, and they know how MUCH they’re supposed to eat.  The only fat animals that exist are the ones that we domesticate, and that’s primarily because we feed them the foods that WE made, similar to how we, as humans, have gotten fat and sick eating our own foods.  We, unfortunately, no longer exist in an environment where we can just eat what we’re supposed to eat until we’re done eating it and move on with our lives.  Unfortunately, SOME manner of nutritional intervention is necessary in order to survive this environment we’ve created, and ALL of them are fads.

Meanwhile, Crom laughs at your modern solutions

 

With that being said, it means there’s no shame in following a fad diet: simply follow the one that suits YOU.  EVERY manner of nutritional intervention that exists is a VERY recent form of intervention, for it’s only very recently that we’ve created this impossible environment for us to navigate.  300,000 years ago we arrived on the scene and knew what to eat and how  much of it to eat, but as time went on and we got “smarter”, we stupidly tried to circumvent the system and ended up with quite the Faustian deal.  So if your way of surviving is to try out this new-fangled calorie counting so that you can make sure you don’t eat too much of the weird mutant “food like substance” we have to live off of: go for it.  If your approach is “I’ll eat the animals but not the plants”, that’s cool too: you’ll probably avoid a lot of bad stuff by cutting out so much stuff.  If your approach is “I’ll only eat during THESE times”, you’ll probably eat LESS of that weird stuff, since you’ll be eating less in general.  And when the new fad comes out, give THAT one a go and see how you like it, because it looks like, for the foreseeable future, there really isn’t going to be any other solution readily available to us.