PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE

(Once again, apologies for the delay, but moving is over and I should be stable again)

Time for me to take a quick break from nihilism and absurdism and speak on things as though there WILL be a tomorrow and it IS worth planning for, because I swear some of you folks are way crazier than I am based off how you live your lives.  Some of you seem to think that there is no guarantee of tomorrow, and you engage in some bizarre hedonism wherein you train and eat like there is no tomorrow, and, by extension, guarantee that.  And this isn’t a remark against gluttony, because that can serve a purpose, but more just a lack of foresight or planning entirely.  Put bluntly, your CURRENT training and nutritional approach needs to be setting you up for your FUTURE training and nutritional approach: NOT maximizing its own current self.

Because if you wanna talk about maximizing yourself, I know a guy...

This is getting at the fundamental difference between a routine and a program.  A routine is something that you simply do every day.  You wake up, eat breakfast, go to work/school, and serve out the rest of that day: that’s your daily routine.  A PROGRAM builds on itself towards something greater.  You may go to school as a kid as part of your routine, but your school was smart enough (hopefully) to have an academic PROGRAM wherein the current day’s lesson drew upon the previous day’s lesson and got you ready for the next day’s work.  If all you did in math class everyday was repeatedly drill that 2+2=4, you may have attended a lot of math classes, you may have had a very consistent and reliable routine, but you had NO program at all.  Lots of time vested: total lack of progress.

When it comes to your training and nutrition, it is no different: what you do TODAY needs to be building off what you did yesterday and prepping you for what you’re going to do tomorrow.  And yeah, it doesn’t have to be EXACTLY that linear, but still: your current training cycle should be drawing from your previous one and building toward your next one.  Instead, most trainees just tend to hit their routine, hit it hard, and give them no opportunity of availability to grow.

Gonna brush the HELL out of these teeth

Ok, let’s get some concrete and understandable examples going.  Bulking phase.  You already know I hate this idea, but we can see why here.  Many trainees, when they enter a weight gain phase of training, will REDUCE training volume (understood to mean volume of ALL training: not just lifting, but conditioning, cardio, sports practice, even basic recreational physical activity) under the notion of not wanting to “waste gains” through excess activity.  Here’s the problem with that approach: when you’re taking in a LOT of calories, your recovery is through the roof.  Nutrition is one of the key elements of recovery, and a surplus of it is a surplus of recovery.  IF you condition your body to a state of lethargy while taking in that great amount of calories, you become a deconditioned trainee.  Well what do these trainees want to do when it’s time to lose weight?  They want to jack up the training volume, so that they can burn more calories through an excess of activity.  This goes poorly, because that trainee’s conditioning base is completely shot, and NOW they’re in a state of compromised activity due to the reduced calories.  This is where one tends to observe fatigue, burnout and injuries.  INSTEAD, this trainee should spend their weightgain phase training as HARD and as much as possible, making the most out of that caloric surplus so that, when it comes time to drop the weight, they can start taking away from the activity level and not suffer the effects of the reduced recovery.

And, in turn, this means that, when one is gaining weight, one’s focus is on volume, NOT intensity.  I wrote about this in my “Deep Water effect” post, but to summarize, when you jack up the volume a whole bunch while keeping the intensity moderate, you’re going to observe a drop off in top end lifting ABILITY, but this does not reflect a loss of strength: simply skill.  When is a great time to start rediscovering that skill?  During a period of reduced caloric intake, primarily because SKILL development is not nearly as physically/recovery taxing as strength development.  One can relearn the handling of heavier weights in a pretty short timeframe (which is why peaking cycles are measured in weeks rather than months or years), and, if they spent their weight gain time SERIOUSLY hammering the volume, they can ride out that discovery for a LONG time during a fat loss phase.  This means that you can spend your fat loss phases actually PROGRESSING, compared to the folks who surrender themselves to periods of nothing but maintaining at best.  There’s no need to regress while losing fat: you just have to actually set yourself up for success beforehand.

Because EVERYONE knows you get weak when you get lean

And that’s the big takeaway with that: your training needs to have a plan BEYOND the mere routine.  All a routine does is give you some busywork to do that DAY: it doesn’t set you up for success down the road.  If you only live for today, you’ll look and perform exactly like you do today.  If you plan for the future, you’ll have something you can grow into.  And if you’ve been failing to plan up until this point, there’s no shame in shaking the etch-a-sketch and just starting from zero.  Don’t fall for a sunk cost fallacy here.  Your time hasn’t been wasted: you’ve learned through failure.  NOW you understand why you’ve just been in cycles of stagnation and regression: gaining and losing the same 10lbs over and over and watching your lifts waver in the same manner.  At this point, pick A direction to head into, go pursue that direction until you can’t, and then reverse course on it, knowing the strategies contained herein to be able to successfully plot your course.  Get your conditioning up so that you are in good enough shape to train HARD, then train hard and eat well until you can’t, then drop some excess fluff while pushing big weights until it gets stupid dangerous to keep it up, and then you can do it all over again.