“HOW LONG SHOULD I BULK?: THINGS THAT ARE EASY AND THINGS THAT ARE HARD”

 

 

I have upset a lot of the internet with the following sentiment that I have expressed on numerous occasions: losing weight is easy.  It’s honestly probably the easiest thing in the world.  All you have to do is this: NOT eat.  That is INaction: the NOT doing of something.  Do you realize how easy it is to NOT do something?  Inertia is a powerful force: objects at rest stay at rest unless force acts upon them.  So for someone to lose weight, they simply have to just keep NOT doing something and then weight will be lost.  Hell, people NOT eat ALL the time.  Sometimes they even do it so much that they die from it.  Yes, that’s callused, but it proves the point that all these folks that try to dramatize losing weight as the most difficult thing in the world are significantly misunderstanding what actually is challenging.

Losing weight ranks somewhere along "dry pasta" at this event

Inevitably, someone will fire back at me and go “It must be nice for weight loss to be easy for you: I just LOOK at food and I gain weight.”  No you idiot: weight gain is easy too.  Gaining weight is another one of those stupidly easy things to do.  Want proof?  How about the fact that the majority of adults in the United States are overweight, and a significant portion of those that are overweight are even obese.  If the AVERAGE person can accomplish something, it’s not difficult: it’s, at best, of AVERAGE difficulty.  And, in truth, the average person is only going to put the bare minimum effort into something anyway, so if we really think about it, gaining weight is honestly stupidly easy to do.  Sit in front of the TV and pound away at some food that came packaged in a box until that box is empty.  Pick up a fast food combo on your way home from work.  Hell, just eat out ANYWHERE and eat everything that is served to you: portion sizes are ridiculous these days.  And much like NOT eating, gaining weight is another one of those things that people do so much that they die from it, as obesity related maladies are the #1 killer for the US.  In either capacity, the point stands: just because losing weight is easy doesn’t making gaining weight hard.  They’re BOTH comically easy.

 

So what IS hard?  Gaining MUSCLE.  No, not “lean muscle mass”: that’s a stupid phrase.  ALL muscle mass is lean: there is no fatty muscle.  Gaining actual muscle tissue is VERY hard, especially compared to losing fat.  This is why you see so many success stories about dudes losing 300+lbs and so FEW success stories about dudes WEIGHING 300+lbs with low bodyfat and being absolutely jacked out of their minds: building muscle is a VERY tough process.  Same reason there are so many ripped out of their minds dudes modeling on Instagram and so few folks with a decent amount of muscle.  Getting ripped takes months: getting jacked takes years.  I’d be sorry for all the brospeak if a cared, but honestly, I think in this instance, the vernacular is appropriate, especially since I’m about to use the word “bulk”, despite how much I hate it.

Check out that strength rating...just saying

 

But why am I going to talk about bulking?  Because the question “how long should I bulk” is a question that demonstrates that the trainee asking it has not fully grasped the DIFFICULTY of gaining muscle.  No one that actually understands the process of gaining muscle is going to ask that question, because someone with an understanding already KNOWS the answer: you bulk until you can no longer sustain it.  And that’s not some sort of stupidly dramatic “no pain no gain” thing, nor is it a license to “permabulk” (another REALLY stupid phrase): it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that muscle gaining phases of training are INCREDIBLY difficult and unsustainable.  It’s why so many muscle building programs tend to be 6 week long shotgun blasts: that’s about as long as a regular adult is going to be able to put up with a muscle building phase of training without some sort of break.    

 

What do I mean?  Just examine the logistics of it.  Again, we acknowledge that gaining muscle is different from gaining weight.  What’s the difference?  Presence of stimulus to cause the body to gain muscle.  Sure, if you just overeat you’ll gain a LITTLE muscle along with a bunch of fat, but if your goal is to gain a significant amount of muscle, this means you have to train, and you have to train HARD.  If you just perform a moderate amount of training for a moderate amount of intensity (understood to mean “effort” vs percentage of 1rm, for you nerds out there), you place no real demand on the body to grow.  You must, instead, train STUPIDLY hard and put the body in a severe state of recovery in order to force it to want to grow.  This is why muscle building programs are so ridiculously hard, like Super Squats, Deep Water, 5/3/1 Building the Monolith, 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake, DoggCrapp, Mass Made Simple, etc.  These aren’t maintenance programs, they’re not fat loss programs: they are INTENSE efforts intended to put your body in a compromised state so that you can feed it and it will grow.  This sort of training WILL break you if you run it for too long.  I legit had to throw away one of the t-shirts I wore during my Deep Water squat workouts because it was so saturated with fear sweat that it smelled like an open grave, and no amount of washing would get it out.  I would spend 13 days in between squat workouts just DREADING going into the gym.  I laid on my back in between sets 7 and 8 of squats and seriously contemplated quitting lifting and selling all of my equipment because I did NOT want to train anymore for the rest of my life.  You wanna ask how long you should bulk?  How about: how SHORT can I bulk?  That’s what the experienced dudes wanna know.

Alternative title was "How To Make 6 Weeks Feel Like Eternity"

 

And this doesn’t even take into account the OTHER logistics of gaining muscle: all the EATING you have to do which, unless you’re independently wealthy, ALSO means all the cooking and cleaning that goes along with it.  The gallon of milk a day is so popular for gaining because it doesn’t require any additional prep to get in 2k calories, and it sounds stupid to people that haven’t ever seriously tried to gain, but for those that have exhausted all other avenues it makes TOTAL sense.  Otherwise, eating basically becomes a second job, and your life revolves around food, because you need to keep eating in order to recover from the stupidly intense training you’re doing, and if you miss a single meal you’re suddenly behind the 8 ball and now you gotta do some serious triage work.  You’re treading water the whole time and just barely able to breathe.  It absolutely sucks.  And you wanna know how long you should bulk?  You’ll know when you’re done: believe me.  And I haven’t even gone into the simple reality that, on top of all of this, make sure to budget extra time on the toilet into your day, because more goes in and more comes out.  That seems to shock some people.

 

THIS is why young dudes in high school are constantly told to bulk: it’s not about “puberty is natural steroids” (holy cow another REALLY stupid phrase): it’s because you’ll never have a better lifestyle suited to sustain gaining muscle.  I realize high school kids love making their lives seem dramatic with AP classes and sports and social obligations and etc etc, but when you’re working full time and pursuing higher education with family obligations, you’ll look back at high school and remember fondly all that extra time you had.  Absolutely: some high school kids have it rough, but the AVERAGE kid has someone ELSE making their food, cleaning their dishes and taking care of all the finances and obligations in the house.  All a high school kid needs to do is not get arrested, graduate, maybe work a job, and otherwise they can dedicate themselves to eating and training.  If you’re OUT of high school, wait until you find periods of your life that remind you of high school living and make THAT the time you focus on gaining muscle.  If you have a period coming up where your life obligations are going to be low, stress is going to be reduced, and you have an abundance of time, you are approaching a period where you can bulk.  Bulk until you cannot sustain it.  Life will determine when it’s time to stop.

ON LIES

 

As much as I am a fan of living authentically, I think it’s worthwhile to discuss the value of lies and deception as it relates to getting bigger and stronger.  Before you begin thinking I’m talking about “e-stating” and rounding your bench to the nearest 100lbs when people ask, or calling yourself 12% bodyfat when you’ve got male breast tissue and love handles (or how, somehow, NO ONE on the internet is ever above 20% bodyfat), I’m not talking about lying to other people: I’m talking about lying to yourself.  And, of course, in order to appreciate that, one must have an understanding of the “self” being a separate entity than the body and, in many cases, the mind.  With that deliciously psychotic sounding intro, let me dive in to when and how lies and deception can be valuable for the trainee looking to get bigger and stronger.

 

The catalyst for this post comes from a recently performed 301 rep set of 135lbs on the high handle trap bar pull.

 

 

I’ve received MANY questions regarding that set, the primary one being “why”, which seems obvious to me: it makes me bigger and stronger.  But “how” is the second most popular question, and THAT is where lies and deception kick in.   Yes, I DID need to be strong and fit to accomplish this set, but many individuals are strong and fit (and strongER and fittER than me) and find themselves unable to accomplish sets like these.  That is because these people, most likely, lack the ability to lie to themselves like I can.

 

My previous PR on this exercise was 251 reps, set on Thanksgiving morning, in an attempt to make some room for some nutritional debauchery.  I felt VERY good that morning, and the 251 reps moved rather smoothly.  The day I set 301 did NOT feel that way.  I hit fatigue far earlier in the set than I did previously, and by rep 100 already knew I had made a mistake.  And that is when I told myself my first lie: I was only going to do 150 reps that day, and I would make it for it by taking fewer breaks at the top of the rep.  Well that was a lie, because we got to 150 reps and kept on trucking.   Observe my use of “we”, because yes, I DO consider my body, mind and self all different entities, and we’re all forced to work together on this awful group project I’ve come up with.

Like this, but more psychotic

 

But that first lie got me to 150 reps.  In the absence of that lie, I most likely would have quit at 100 reps, because it sucked at that point and I didn’t wanna do it.  I told myself we’d stop at 150 reps KNOWING it was a lie, but my body and mind can be pretty stupid, and they bit.  So 150 happened and reps kept coming, and I told myself “look: you’ve done 150.  What’s 50 more at that point?  That’ll be close to your first PR of 212, and then you’ll know you got good training stimulus”.  200 happened and I told myself “Are you really going to get to 200 reps and NOT set a PR?  It doesn’t have to be 300 today, but get at LEAST 252.”  252 happened and I told myself it was going to be 270: split the different.  And, of course, am I really going to do 270 and not hit 300?  And the cherry on top, of course, being, that ending at 300 JUST because it’s 300 is really stupid, so 1 more rep happened.

 

These sort of lies and broken promises are incredibly regular features in my training, and I know many endurance athletes that have laid claim to a similar approach.  The truth is: in times of duress, people are more willing to believe deception so long as it’s HAPPY deception.  People create more hope in dire situations, because it’s the only way to continue onward.  You can take advantage of that fact by openly deceiving yourself and having yourself believe YOUR OWN LIES.  It’s madness, but sanity never got anyone jacked.

See!

 

Other common lies in training: breaking high rep sets into smaller rep clusters.  A 20 rep squat is awful: counting 5 reps 4 times?  So much more manageable.  You’re at rep 12, but you’re TELLING yourself you only have 3 reps left rather than 8.  And you get those 3 and tell yourself you only have 5 reps left.  And Dan John turned me on to the idea of counting DOWN rather than up, which I found works really well too.  Running on a treadmill?  Keep telling yourself you’ll stop after the next quarter mile.  On a diet?  Promise yourself a delicious cheat meal at the END of the week.  Soul breaking conditioning workout?  Just 1 more round.  They key is, YOU have to know when you’re lying.  If you lie to yourself but then actually do what you lied about well, quite frankly, it was no longer a lie.  You told the truth, and that sabotaged your results.

 

Don’t feel bad about lying to your body like that either: your body sucks and lies to you ALL the time.   It’s always telling you that it CAN’T do any more, that it has reached its limit, that if you keep going something will break, or you’ll puke, or etc etc.  Bullcrap.  Your body has SO much more to give when you start pushing it.  Anyone that has ever done a set of Poundstone curls knows that the biceps start cramping around rep 30, but that, if you keep pushing it, the cramping goes away around rep 50-60.  So many trainees, saying they’re going to puke, upon being given permission to go do so, find themselves coming up dry.  The body lies to you because it wants to UNDERperform, because the body is lazy and only concerned about self-preservation and maintaining the status quo.  It’s not at all interested in getting bigger and stronger.  The body is a hedonist: it’s up to YOU to force it to do the things that will result in growth.  And that’s going to take a lot of lies and deception.

Even the great ones do it

 

And that’s no lie.

BOOK REVIEW: MARTY GALLAGHER’S “PURPOSEFUL PRIMITIVE”

  

My voracious appetite for reading about lifting stuff continues for some reason, and I just put away 692 pages of Marty Gallagher’s “Purposeful Primitive” in about 4 days. 

 

Let me start the review with the ending: this was a great read and I highly recommend it.  It’s only $8.50 on Kindle right now, which is what convinced me to get it in the first place.  I was originally looking for Steve Justa’s “Rock Iron Steel” book, which I intend to read soon, and this showed up as a suggested reading and when I saw the page total, cost and reviews I figured I had nothing to lose.

 

Unlike some of my other reviews, I did not take notes as I went, simply because, at nearly 700 pages, it would have made the reading process INSANELY long.  Instead, I’m just going to go over what I liked and what I didn’t like.

 

QUICK REVIEW OF THE BOOK

 

The book is divided into 4 areas of focus: lifting (iron), the mind, cardio and nutrition.  Each of the 4 areas are, in turn, subdivided into 3 sections: 1 that details the work and philosophy of the “masters” of that area, 1 that constructs a plan to implement the lessons FROM the masters for the reader to use, and from there a series of essays written by Gallagher regarding the topic.  I really enjoyed this approach to the subject matter, but it became a little obvious that the “essays” on the subject were just collections of previously written articles from Gallagher.  Nothing wrong with that necessarily, but I’m getting tired of “books” that are just a bunch of articles put together.

 

The iron section is the most expansive, taking up about a third of the book, but each section contains a large amount of information.  Nothing is skimped over or given lip service.

 

THE GOOD

 

Captain Kirk, being insane as usual

-This is clearly a labor of love, and Marty put a TON of work into it.  I’ve been reading a lot of different books from different authors recently, and it’s become easy to tell who just slapped something together to get a paycheck vs who really wanted to put out a quality product, and this is firmly in the latter.

-This is a completely comprehensive tome.  One of those books you could give to someone and be like “Ok, you wanna know how to train and eat for the rest of your life?  Here you go.”  I love books like that.  Sure, it’s 700 pages, but it’s still so much time and effort saved to have it all in one place.

-Along with that, it’s a VERY easy read.  Marty is a professional author, having written for many publications, and his chops show on that.  It’s not his first time stringing together sentences.  He can attempt to get a little too eloquent at times, but he’s still very talented at his craft.  But along with that, he has walked the walk, with an 800lb squat and various lifting titles earned.

-Every section is VERY fascinating.  Marty’s “Purposeful Primitive” approach is all about stripping out complexity and getting back to basics, which, in turn, ends up going in some VERY unique directions.  I found the nutrition section particularly fascinating, as it basically splits between a dichotomy of very frequent eating of small meals or intermittent fasting via “The Warrior Diet”. 

-To go further into the above, Marty is big on Taoism and, in turn, duality.  His nutrition protocol fits right in there, but much of how he approaches training does as well.  It’s very much about how opposites compliment each other, and works itself out through some old school periodization. 

-Because of Marty’s unique position as an interviewer for magazines as well as a coach for some of the greatest strength athletes ever, he allows readers a very deep “insider look” ito some unique characters.  I’ve relayed this book as what Jamie Lewis’ “365 Days of Brutality” was supposed to be, because while Jamie wrote about what he’d read/heard about great athletes, Marty wrote about what he actually personally witnessed.

 

THE BAD

 

Swing and a miss

-On a few occasions, Marty tries to emphasize how badass he and his friends are in the lifting world, and it just comes across as either cringey or douche-y.  One particular section talking about New Years Resolution “mullets” was really just plain old off putting.  Paul Kelso did a much better job in Powerlifting Basics talking about how we all need to come together as iron brothers, and this was too much “us vs them” stuff.  It’s not often enough to detract from the overall quality of the book, but there were times I felt like abandoning the essay portions because I didn’t think there’d be anything worthwhile with that nonsense in it.  I was happy to be proven wrong.

-Marty sees cardio primarily as a fat burning device and is very big on employing a heart rate monitor to ensure one has their heart rate in the correct zone to employ this.  That’s a fine use of cardio, but as an athlete it didn’t gel with me.  Never cared for heart rate monitors, and my big emphasis is improved conditioning.

-The mind section contains a lot of helpful tips for how to psyche up for the big set in your training, and that truthfully goes against everything I’m about.  I save psyching up for competitions.  Marty’s claim is that you get more out of your training by tapping into this potential, but I find it’s a recipe for burnout.  In turn, I didn’t get a whole lot from the mind sections.

 

SHOULD YOU BUY IT?

 

Unquestionably yes.  No qualifiers.  Anyone with even the slightest interest in physical training should own a copy of this book.  You get a ton of value for your dollar, get to read about a bunch of different experts in different fields, and will be presented with at least ONE new idea, or find out you were mistaken about one you held before.  I thought I knew what the Warrior Diet was, and honestly, after reading the book, I genuinely want to give it a try someday, despite how much I’ve chided intermittent fasting.  I loved learning the logic behind it.  Same holds true with learning about how and why the great ones trained and ate the way they trained.  Add this one to your collection and share it with a friend when you are done, because it’s worth getting out there in circulation.

ON LEMONADE

  

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” is one of the most stoic pithy phrases out there that people are willing to drop at a moment’s notice whenever a bit of misfortune occurs.  However, the truth is, this expression could be SO much more inspiring if people were willing to look a little deeper.  Specifically at the fact that life will NEVER give you lemons.  And by that, I don’t mean in some grand cosmic sense that all of your bad luck and misfortune is self-generated and that life only seeks to provide for the good and it’s merely how you respond to that stimulus that causes you misery ala what Marcus Aurelius wrote in “Meditations”: I mean lemons literally do not exist in nature.  It’s true: the lemon as we know it is a hybrid of a bitter orange and a citron.  Someone or something OTHER than life MADE the lemon, and then, after we got done making lemons, THEN we made lemonade.  Just imagine how much more powerful the expression has now become: “When life DOESN’T give you lemons, go make lemons.  Then, go make lemonade.”

As usual, Bender is right

 

I honestly really dig this because it can go in a couple of different directions.  First, let’s tackle the obvious: this is about genetics.  Anyone who has read my blog knows how much I love to discuss this, primarily because it’s the immediate go to for those who fail to accomplish anything in training.  Trainees with a whopping 3 months of off and on training will instantly bring up how awful their genetics are and THAT’S why they can’t grow.  I already wrote in my last post about how you’ll get no sympathy from me, but folks: it’s time to go make some lemons.  You can’t control your genetics, nor can you control the genetics of others (I mean, you can genetically engineer things now, but that’s getting off topic), but you CAN control how hard you apply the things you have.  I’ve always said that some dudes are gonna be bigger, stronger, faster and better than me, but I’m not gonna let any mother f**ker be CRAZIER than me.  Life didn’t give me the lemons of natural athleticism, and it takes me a LONG time to grasp very basic physical skills, I have zero explosiveness, I am long limbed with a short torso and a slight frame with a shoulder that slips out of the socket if I turn over funny in my sleep or shampoo my hair too aggressively and my left ACL is actually a harvested portion of my hamstring while I’m missing 20% of that meniscus, but I can still make the choice to push myself harder and further than anyone else will willingly push themselves.  That’s my lemonade.

 

But going further than that, we understand that the original phrase of “when life gives you lemons” refers to receiving adversity from life.  Well when we turn the phrase to say “when life DOESN’T give you lemons, make lemons”, what we are discussing is the notion of MANUFACTURED adversity.  Adversity and hardships are opportunities for growth, and quite often it is those exposed to the greatest of hardships that demonstrate the greatest of growth.  Is that survivor bias?  Absolutely!  I don’t care about the non-survivors: they were going to not survive no matter what.  But I take significant interest in those that experienced, endured, and grew.  I recall Bill Kazmaier lamenting at a seminar how tough it must be for those strongman competitors that DIDN’T have a rough upbringing to try and make it in the sport, because those dudes that had it rough their whole lives were going to eat them alive in competition.

You don't get eyes like this from a normal life

 

All that said, sometimes life won’t GIVE us the lemons of adversity in order for us to make lemonade.  Sometimes we have to go MAKE some lemons so that we can make lemonade.  Just as adversity is an opportunity for growth, life is an opportunity to create adversity.  Try putting yourself BEHIND the 8 ball every once in a while.  It’s why I am so vocally and vehemently AGAINST pre-workout supplements: the last thing you should be doing in TRAINING is stacking the deck in your favor like that.  Don’t get me wrong: in a competition, I’m sucking down Rockstars as good as anyone else, but before I train?  Hell no.  I’m not going to come in with an ADVANTAGE: I’m going to come in hurt, tired, hungry, sore, and in a bad mood.  Why?  Because when I thrive in THAT environment, I absolutely KILL it when things are going my way.  Meanwhile, I’ve seen dudes completely fall apart in competition because they were so used to everything being optimally configured for them in the training hall that, the instant they couldn’t have EXACTLY 4 minutes between warm up sets, or they had to lift in the morning when they ALWAYS train in the afternoon, or McDonalds ran out of McMuffins and they had to get a biscuit instead and it totally threw off their pre-workout nutrition ritual, they crumbled and performed well below how they did in training.  Training is the worst place to set your PRs, because no one cares.  PR in competition, because then you win something.

 

And I’m just talking pre-workout prep there.  There are unlimited opportunities to go make some lemons.  Choose to train with inadequate sleep, poor nutrition, stomach too full, not properly warmed up, too many days in a row, 2 a days without adequate recovery between sessions, etc etc.  Make yourself so many lemons that you can open up your own lemonade stand.  I genuinely don’t know how that metaphor shakes out: those of you playing along at home can probably make something of it.  But the point is that those who sit around waiting for opportunities to present, for good OR for ill, are going to get passed by by those that are out there making lemons so that they can go make some lemonade.  Sometimes, life isn’t going to give you what you need to make lemonade: sometimes it’s gonna fall on you to make something that wasn’t there before.