SOME MORE BAD IDEAS

 

 

Currently working on an update/new edition of the Book of Bad Ideas and wanted to share some of them for those of you looking to take on some new challenges.

 

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**CLUSTER BOMB**

Inspiration from wherever we can get it

 

EMOM (Every Minute on the Minute), do Kettle Bell clusters (a clean into a thruster).  In between clusters, do burpee chins (a burpee where you jump to the chinning bar, do a chin up, then land back into a burpee).

 

Either go for a predetermined amount of rounds and see how many burpee chins you can do OR set a set amount of burpee chins and try to beat time.

For the cluster, I've found doubles with 60lb bells or triples with 45s work well.

 

**SNAKE HANDLER MASS**

You most likely will at the end of this

 

3 movements

Front squat for triple

Log Viper Press for 4

Burpee chin for 5

 

Get as many rounds as possible in 50 minutes.  For weight, I used 225 on the front squat and 135 on the log.

 

**SPARTAN DOOM**

I don't care how cheesy it is: it will always be awesome

 

60 minute workout.  EMOM, for the first 20 minutes, do 5 chins and 3 Devil Presses (DBs or KBs).  Next 20 minutes, 5 chins and 4 Devil Presses.  Next 20, 5 chins and 5 Devil presses.

I was using 50lb DBs for the devil presses.

 

**LEVEL UP**

Oh my god I love this

 

40 minute workout.  Do 4 box jumps, then 1 log viper.  Next round, 4 jumps and 2 log vipers.  Keep adding reps to the log viper press.

I used 135 on the log.

 

**TABEARTA**

Adding bears to anything is a recipe for awesome

 

Using the tabata protocol (20 seconds on/10 seconds off), do Bear Complexes with a barbell loaded to 95lbs.  I did this as a 40 minute workout where I got 2 complexes per round for the first 20 minutes, then 1 per round for 5, 2 per round for 5, 1 per round for 2, and 2 per round for 8.

 

I'm using 95lbs here.

 

**BURPMUDA TRIANGLE**

You'll definitely get lost in this one

 

3 movements, tabata intervals

 

KB swing

KB cluster

Burpee chins

 

Go cluster-chin-swing-chin-cluster-chin, repeat.  Again, you can set a set amount of chins or go for a set amount of rounds.

 

I go with 40kg for the swing and 45-60lbs for the cluster.

**MONUMENT TO NON-EXISTENCE**

Still gives me chills

 

20 rep squat straight to 20 rep deadlift to KB Fran to keg grace to stone to shoulder

 

Basically, start with the 20 rep squat/deadlift superset and just keep adding stuff to it.  It's name comes from Final Fantasy 6, and it's a riff on a SUPER long boss fight where there are just more and more stages to fight.

 

I was using 3 plates on the bar for squats and deads, 45lbs for the KBs, and a 155lb keg. 

**PROWLER THOUGHTS**

That about sums it up

 

I've done this a million different ways, but this was the final evolution of my prowler workouts for 50 minutes

 

KB front squat triples-carry the bells 60 paces--run back to start-low handle push the prowler to the KBs-front squat triple-carry 60 paces-run back to start-low handle push prowler to KBs-front squat KBs triples-front rack carry KBs 60 paces back to start-run back to prowler-high handle push it to KBs-front squat triples-front rack carry 60 paces-run back to prowler-backwards drag prowler to start

 

That's ONE round.

I load a total of 90lbs on the prowler, and used 45lb KBs.

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ENJOY!

THIS ISN’T LIFE: THIS IS CANDYLAND

My dad side is gonna show through here, but I imagine some of you are young enough that, if you’re not a parent, it hasn’t been that long since you’ve played Life and Candyland.  But allow me to give you a quick primer.  Life and Candyland are board games typically played by children, the latter for an even younger crowd.  Board games were things we played before we discovered electricity and fun.  As a Pen and Paper RPG player, I’m hoping the full tongue-in-cheekness of that comment has registered with you.  One of the reason why Candyland tends to be more appropriate for younger players compared to Life is due to its simplicity.  There are no die to roll: movement is determined by drawing from a stack of cards shared amongst the players, telling you which colored space to move to.  There are no words to read: everything is done by pictures.  There are no decisions to make: you just go where the cards tell you to go.  Winning is simple: get to the end first.  Life, meanwhile, utilizes a spinner to move, requires literacy, constant decisions to be made, money to be tracked, and reaching the end doesn’t ensure victory: it’s the person that gets there with the most money who is the REAL winner of life.  Funny enough, there’s a reason why we start off with Candyland before moving on to Life: it’s because “Life” isn’t life, but Candyland is.

He was SO close

Alright, I’m gonna wheel this back to training before it gets too out of hand, but for those of you super interested in the real philosophical ramifications of this, you’d get a kick out of looking into arguments against free will and for predestination.  But today, as we talk about endeavoring for physical transformation, there are FAR too many Life players and not nearly enough Candylanders.  Life has conditioned you to the notion that your decisions matter.  Not only do they matter: they’re critical to your success.  Do I go to college or join the workforce right away?  Go the family route or focus on my career?  Should I invest in “6” at the start of the game?  You do this same nonsense with your training.  Should I lift 3 days a week or 4?  Carbs before or after training? Westside or Sheiko?  BULK OR CUT?!

Folks, this isn’t Life: this is Candyland.  Once the game of Candyland is set up, the outcome has already been determined: it’s simply up to us to play it out and see what happens.  It’s honestly wild how apt Candyland is as a metaphor for the absence of free will and predestination.  Once the cards are shuffled, there is no longer and randomness at play: the players will draw the cards in their predetermined order, advance where the card tells them to go, and effectively “discover” the winner over the course of the game.  No player actually has a say or impact on the outcome: they are mere observers.

For some, this is helping prep for the future

These decisions DON’T matter.  They really really don’t.  They REALLY don’t.  Folks, I have been training “wrong” for SO long and I get accusations of good genetics and steroids quite frequently.  I’ve won competitions against people training right.  I’ve put on muscle without carbs and sleep.  We confuse “optimal” with “effective”, but the truth is that NONE of us are doing things optimally, so at this point it’s simply a matter of riding out time and compliance to experience the inevitable outcome that is “success”.  The cards are already shuffled, the deck is laid out, all that’s left for us to do is play the game and get to the end.

THAT is the ONE decision you get to make: the decision to play.  You can always say “I don’t want to play Candyland”, and then the cards remain in the box, no one reaches the end, and there is no winner.  But if you choose to play, all that’s left for you to do is keep drawing cards, moving where it tells you to move, and watch the end unfold.  None of your decisions beyond that first one matter: this is the illusion of choice.

This is missing the real end screen where you decide between the ribeye or the porterhouse

This is NOT a bad thing at all.  There could be nothing greater than knowing that victory is assured: we simply have to play.  This is the mentality I bring to every intense workout.  When I do the Deep Water deadlift workouts, I approach them KNOWING that I’ve already DONE the workout.  I’ve already pulled all 100 reps, I’ve achieved success, I got the results I wanted.  THAT victory is already out there: it’s simply up to me to play the game and experience it.  It’s the same for any skullbreaking conditioning workout: I know the end has already been reached, I simply need to play the game.  There is no anxiety, no fear, no concern about “not being able”: I KNOW that victory is on the other side.  And I know that I have no control over reaching that end.  I am simply observing the game unfold in front of me.

This ALSO means you can stop “trying to win”.  Stop trying to cheat, quit trying to sabotage the other players, stop running back to the rulebook while you look for loopholes: the end has already been determined and you are merely observing it play out.  We’re sitting down and having fun.  There will be no table flipping, arguing, grudge matches or belligerence.  Hell, just imagine if we were trying to play Monopoly?  No: This is Candyland, fun for all ages, everyone has an equal shot, all we have to do is decide to play.

Had a few deadlift sessions go this way as well

**BONUS CONTENT**

Folks, while we’re talking about kid stuff, allow me to share a fun spin on an old topic.  Dan John has a FANTASTIC quote about “eating like an adult”, which I will share here

“Here is an idea: Eat like an adult. Stop eating fast food, stop eating kid's cereal, knock it off with all the sweets and comfort foods whenever your favorite show is not on when you want it on, ease up on the snacking and—don't act like you don't know this—eat vegetables and fruits more. Really, how difficult is this?”   

Dan, seen here, clearly tired of your sh*t

I fully support and endorse the words and sentiment behind this statement.  And then, of course, here comes the but.

BUUUUUUUUUT…for an interesting idea of a middle ground, between eating like an adult and eating like a child, I propose, for a trainee looking to gain: eat like a SUPERVISED child.

So not like this

And, interestingly enough, it was Dan John that inspired this as well.  His fantastic work, “Mass Made Simple”, makes a solid argument for the use of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the sake of gaining, based around the premise that they are calorically dense, easy to transport, and a food you will actually be inclined to eat en masse during a weight gaining phase.  Anyone that has ever engaged in serious weight gaining attempts will understand how significant all those variables are.  And what’s interesting is: those same factors that are valuable for an adult to gain weight are ALSO valuable for a kid to eat…anything.

Anyone who has ever been a parent, cared for a child, or remembers being a child will understand the frustration that surrounds “meal time”.  It’s a time of compromise.  Anyone that claims that they don’t make any special meals/everyone eats the same thing is most likely living in a fantasy household.  For those of us in reality: our parental instincts compel us to feed our kids SOMETHING so that they will live.  And what’s interesting about kids is that they’re in a state of RAPID growth.  People talk about steroids and puberty like they are something magical, but dude, go watch a 5 year old put away 3 hot dogs at a cookout and realize that they weigh like 50lbs and put away the equivalent of an adult winning a Nathan’s competition.  Kids will regularly out eat adults in a direct 1 for 1 comparison, with room for dessert.  In turn, when you look at food that is “kid food”, it tends to be INCREDIBLY calorically dense, because along with just being more palatable (sugar and fat fix everything), it’s a question of getting in as much calories per bite to accommodate stomach size and logistics.

Check out how little food that is for 430 calories.  Put in perspective, that's like eating a 1lb Piedmontese sirloin steak

For a trainee looking to gain, they could stand to bring back a few of these “kids dishes”, but, once again, approach it like a SUPERVISED child.  A child, left to their own devices, will have a dinner of Pop-tarts covered in ice cream.  A child, under the watchful eye of a caretaker, most likely won’t be eating steak, broccoli and rice, but there’s a good chance they get some mac n cheese (pasta with fat and protein on top?  Anabolic!), or some chicken drumstricks or tenders instead of breasts, or a quality made cheeseburger (lean ground beef, high fiber bun), or the already aforementioned PBJ.  If they get the munchies, the kid will probably grab some Cheetos (orange powder dust is delicious fresh off the fingers), but if they bug mom for a snack they’ll probably get some ants on a log (peanut butter spread on celery sticks with raisins), or some apple slices with peanut butter to dip in, or a plain old piece of fruit.  Dessert time? How about some old fashioned rice crispy treats?  A bakesale classic, pretty much pure carbs, honestly great for around workouts, and you can make them at home with quality ingredients.  Or how about some jello?

As I wrote: meal time is a time of compromise with children, and nutrition, as we grow, will always be a system of compromises.  There’s a balancing act between being locked in our diets vs having a damaged relationship with food, and there’s also a compromise between “eating to gain” and “eating like a child”.  Sometimes, when the situation requires it, we compromise between eating like a child and eating like an adult into eating like a supervised child.  

DUALITY PART II

Sometimes I write one of these and, upon thinking about it, realize that I completely forgot to write the things I WANTED to write about.  And this originally started out as just being bonus content to the original piece, and then eventually grew to the length of a full post, and I could honestly STILL just keep writing about it, but I feel I’m just repeating things already expressed.  This duality just keeps going on, and one of the aspects there is the ability to hold these two opposing forces in your head in harmony.  For my own case in point, I bring up how I am simultaneously a fan of Jim Wendler AND Jon Andersen.   Jim is all about sub-maximal training, NOT pushing to the absolute limits, staying fresh, training to perform, not slaughtering yourself in the weightroom, etc.  Jon is much the opposite: training is about pushing to the limit and beyond, reaching “Deep Water”, finding your portals, etc.  The training itself is a spiritual experience in overcoming, an idea also expressed by Derek Poundstone, who I’m also a fan of.  And again: these two ideas work.  Not only do they work: they work TOGETHER.  Case in point: my 26 week gaining protocol that spends the first half with 5/3/1 and the second with Deep Water, wherein I’ve annotated just how INCREDIBLY well 5/3/1 sets you up for Deep Water success.  

Colossus being the jelly to Juggernaut's peanut butter right here

The first time I ran Deep Water, I was “unbalanced” my focus was on strongman performance, and I was lacking in so many other areas that the program absolutely floored me.  Literally.  I spent half the workout on the floor.  My conditioning was garbage, my GPP shot, I was only good at one thing: being a strongman.  I’m currently halfway through my third run of Deep Water (having finished Beginner and starting Intermediate on Friday) and I’m absolutely slaughtering the workouts, and in both of these runs I led off with 5/3/1.  It gave me a chance to get my conditioning and GPP where they needed to be AND get comfortable with my rep and heavy work so that the program was far more manageable.  I came into this “balanced”.

And in a similar discussion, I am a huge fan of Dan John, who, himself, IS duality.  First, Dan perfectly captures this idea with his “park bench/bus bench workout” idea, which you might think of as Dave Tate’s “Blast/Dust” idea or Dante Trudell’s “Blast/Cruise” (holy cow MORE DUALITY).  And if all of THOSE references are over your head: it just means that, sometimes, we have workouts where we just punch the clock and get on with our lives, and sometimes the stars align and we just pour it all out there.  We can’t ALWAYS be on, but we can’t always punch the clock either: we need balance.

There is a reason barbarians are fatigued after raging

But Dan also just plain IS duality.  Look at what Dan has gifted us.  For yin, we have Easy Strength, we have 1 lift a day, we have “minimalist training”.  For Yang, we have Litvinov (just 3 rounds of 8x405 front squats followed immediately by a 75 second 400m sprint), we have “The Eagle”, we have Tabata Front Squats.  Listening to a podcast with Dan John is a trip, because he has so seamlessly mastered duality that he effortlessly flows between yin and yang while advising someone that, if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it.  He’ll advise someone to train 2 sets of 5 5 days a week of the same 5 movements and then throw in “if you wanna get big, do a 5 ladders of 2-3-5-10 with double kettlebell front squats”, and then you break out your fingers and toes and realize Dan just tricked you into doing 100 reps.  Dan came up with “Mass Made Simple”, which is like the Taoist gaining program, with one single set of massively high rep squats contrasting and complimenting directly with a barbell complex performed immediately beforehand.  Oh my goodness: the nutrition hinges heavily on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Peanut butter and jelly: can we GET more duality?  Fats and carbs?!

Dan IS duality because he’s lived it, in much the same way many of us have.  I was a big fan of abbreviated training when I first discovered it.  Why?  Because it worked!  WHY?!  Because prior to that point, I was just training like an animal and throwing everything into my training, which will work…until it doesn’t (hey, another Dan John lesson: everything works for 6 weeks).  After drowning myself in variety and volume, I laser focused with abbreviated training, and it worked!  …until it didn’t.  I was imbalanced, got balanced, got imbalanced again.  Duality!  Periodization!  But, in turn, we have to EARN that minimalism, and then, we have to EARN that extremism too.  So many trainee pick minimalism without any sort of actual base to draw from, and they just ride it so far into the ground that they end up doing themselves harm.  And, of course, you have the trainees that just “go for the burn” forever that they never actually lift anything heavy enough to actually matter!'

Some dudes manage both

And this is why we read and appreciate from the so many different perspectives: they are all part of balance.  For every Stuart McRobert, a John Broz.  For every Derek Poundstone, a Mike Tuchscherer.  A Sheiko for a Simmons (RIP) .  Duality of thinking and duality of methods.  Single sets vs 10x10s.  Training everyday vs 3 days every 2 weeks.  Compounds only vs machines galore.  And nutrition too: fasting vs eating every 2-3 hours.  Carnivore and vegan (they both work somehow).  And best of all: read all this stuff, be super studious and the FORGET IT ALL and just throw stuff against a wall and see what works.  It’s duality, its periodization, it’s balanced!    

CHAOS IS THE PLAN

  

I really, truly appreciate the support I get online from all the folks that read my blog and watch the videos I upload to youtube.  When I first started this, I had no idea it would pick up any sort of following.  In truth, I just wanted to get some thoughts down, and ultimately have a lot of my arguments “pre-built” so that, when things escalated online, I could just link to my thoughts on it instead of having to re-write things every single time.  I frequently get messages from various readers that let me know that what I’ve written has changed their lives, changed their training, had them hit goals they never thought possible, etc, and reading that blows my mind and brings me joy.  I write all that because, sometimes, I feel like there may still be some miscommunication between what I’m writing and saying and what is being understood.  And I say THAT because I find that, often, I am asked “what is the plan?”  Folks: CHAOS is the plan.

I'm just saying

 

For the past few years I’ve been asked if I have any plans to compete in strongman again.  The question baffled me every time: was I the only one experiencing a global pandemic these past few years?  Sure: I had TONS of plans to compete: none of the came to fruition.  Why?  Because chaos.  Completely unforeseeable events occurred and there was no defined end state to reach.  Travel became impossible, along with mass gatherings and all those other things that are kinda necessary to compete in strongman.  I stopped planning and decided to just let fate sort itself out.  And in that regard, a competition has opened up within 20 minutes of where I live, so I can travel there, and we seem to be on the downward trend currently for infection rates, so I can mass gather.  And IMMEDIATELY upon signing up, people asked “So how do you plan to train for the competition?”  How do I plain to train for a competition that JUST opened up and has no events listed?  I don’t.  CHAOS IS THE PLAN.

 

I share my insanity on youtube.  I took it upon myself to run “Keg Grace” for 6 weeks on my pressing days as a way to get in some extra volume.  After that, I took up a workout Jon Andersen detailed where you squatted for 20 reps and turned around and immediately deadlifted for 20 reps.  JUST recently I took up a challenge to get in 30 of Dan John’s Armor Building Complexes with 24kg kettlebells in 5 minutes.  In ALL of these cases, I had multiple people ask me “what’s the plan?”  “You’re SO close to sub-2 minutes on Keg Grace: what’s the plan to get there?”  “What’s the plan to determine starting weights for the 20 rep squats and deadlifts?”  “What’s the plan to get from 20 rounds to 30 on the ABCs?”  Folks: CHAOS IS THE PLAN!

Found my spirit animal

 

Quit trying to understand this: understanding it will cheapen it.  It will make it less effective.  This NEEDS to be “not-understandable”.  Observing it should be confusing and disturbing.  It should be concerning.  It should break your brain and make ZERO sense, because this is chaos.  Order is gone, reason does not exist, trying to copy, emulate or adapt this for yourself is just going to make it yet another plan.  In order for chaos to be the plan, even YOU have to not understand what it is that you’re doing.

 

My goal is to be “more trouble than I am worth”: I can’t be going around having plans.  Plans are the first step toward adaptation, and adaptation is the first step toward stagnation.  We are endeavoring for TRANSFORMATION!  This requires placing the body in a situation where it NEVER adapts.  It never has a chance to get used to the demand being placed on it, it’s constantly being assaulted from every angle with multiple differing intensities and requirements and all it understands is that it needs to start changing NOW, but it has no idea how.  So it just grows in EVERY direction.  It gets bigger AND stronger AND faster AND better conditioned, because the information it’s receiving is “We are in a highly stressful, chaotic environment, surrounded by violence, with no end in sight”.  There’s no plan: it’s been thrown into the meat grinder and is just trying to survive.

It's just one long battle at Stamford Bridge for my body

 

“But don’t you follow training plans?”  Had that question pop-up recently, because folks love plans.  I sure do follow training plans, and mutate them into something horrible.  I’m currently undergoing my third run of Deep Water.  Remember when Jon told you to do Tabata front squats with kettlebells everyday through the program?  Me neither.  I also remember Dan John effectively saying “Good luck!” at doing just that as well.  And here I am.  Along with conditioning sessions tacked onto the end of every workout.  Along with daily work.  Along with my weighted vest walks on weekends.  Along with taking all my sets from the floor with my overhead work.   Oh, and I’m training for a 10 mile race that I’ll be running tomorrow as of me writing this…which is also the day after I did my 100 squats in 9 sets.   There sure was a plan, and I threw a whole heaping load of chaos at it.

 

And I’ve written about those Tabata KB front squats a lot recently because I’m loving this new element of chaos I’ve come up with.  4 minutes a day and I’m gassed.  And suddenly, I’m squatting everyday: that thing that people spend WAY too much time trying to figure out how to do.  And I don’t even like squatting.  And I have NO idea what the end state of this looks like.  I might do it for a full calendar year just to be able to say I did and it could be done, or something shiny might come my way and take this off course.  Because chaos IS the plan.  Because I want a body that is formed and shaped BY chaos.  Because I’ve seen the bodies that are shaped by order.  You have too.  You’ve seen what happens to those that have settled into a rut, go to work, come home, slump on the couch and stuff themselves with some sort of boxed comfort until they’re ready to sleep and start it all over again.  They NEED some chaos.

Yup

 

“But haven’t you written about eating every half hour?  About book ending?  About ‘starting with a win’?” 

 

Yup, I sure have.

 

And there, folks, is duality.  Which we’ve talked about before, and will do again. 

 

When?  Who knows: chaos is the plan. 

BEING THAT WHICH DOES

 

In a very rare move for me, this is actually my second attempt to get this concept down in writing, which goes on to demonstrate how “fresh” this is in my head.  I’m still trying to really be able to express it, because, inherently, I understand it and I’m living it, but much like “The Tao”: speaking it destroys it.  So bear with me as we go on this journey together.

Probably gonna be like this

 

As my training and nutrition continue to evolve, I realize that, fundamentally, I want to “be that which does”.   What does this mean?  It’s a simple guiding philosophy for determining the course of action that best suits my goals, which is awesome, because SO many trainees get stuck with analysis paralysis that this works to effectively find the end first and work backwards to get to the method.  Like cheating on a paper maze by starting at the end point and working backwards which, if that metaphor is lost at you, go to any local restaurant and pick up a kid’s menu with a pack of crayons and they will set you straight.  And order the Mac n Cheese.

 

Delicious kids’ menu cuisine aside, “being that which does” is effectively the training and nutritional equivalent of “fake it until you make it”.  You could go classic Aristotle as well and consider it the notion that virtue is what we practice vs what we think or feel, and considering the Greeks made Pankration and Heracles and lifting weights and stuff, they’re pretty good to listen to on this.  When we set out to “be that which does”, we look at what it is that we would want to be DOING, and, in turn, we endeavor to be that which does those exact things.

Being "ancient Greek jacked" may require cleaning some stables

 

Still confused?  Let me talk nutrition.  I eat a diet that is very rich in meat.  I eat a lot of animals: both in terms of capacity and variety.  I apologize for any of my morally vegan/vegetarian readers out there if that offends your sensibilities, but this is the path I’ve chosen.  And why is that?  Because I want to BE that which DOES eat a lot of animals.  Because what eats a lot of animals?  A predator!  And that which does eat a LOT of animals, in terms of variety and capacity, is an apex predator.  They are on top of the food chain.  Yes, a scavenger CAN eat meat, but they are limited to the left behind pieces, rotting in the sun, abandoned by the predator after they have gorged themselves (which, cool science trivia, means scavengers have unique digestive enzymes which allow them to eat putrid meat and not get sick, as a means of evolution…try not to develop those).  A predator’s digestive system is constructed to survive and THRIVE off the meat of others, and in order to satiate this appetite, a predator MUST be accomplished at stalking, fighting, killing and defending the kill so that they can gorge.  By being the being which does eat a lot of animals, I become closer to being the being which does well at stalking, fighting, killing and defending.  And, if I decide to be the being which does eat a lot of gains and starches, I become closer to being the being which does become the prey of the predator.

 

To continue on the nutrition, and bring it a little closer to home, let’s talk “nutritional deviance”, aka cheating.  Say we all buy in on the above: we’re going to become predators.  Cool.  Then cheesecake shows up.  We’ve come to a decision point: do we stick with the plan, or do we have the cheesecake?  Well: do we wish to be the being that does stick with the plan, or the being that cheats?  I’ll tell you: I’ve seen the being which does cheat on their diet: they aren’t the kind of being I wish to be.  I’ve seen the beings that don’t.  I wish to be the being which sticks with the plan.  And once again, this ties in so well with my “no free will” argument (which I’m not unique in presenting): there is no need to “resist” the cheesecake: we are doing EXACTLY what we want to do.  We are pursuing being the being that we wish to be.  To deviate would be to go AGAINST our desires.

And for some, the cheesecake IS the goal

 

I’ll say, flat out, this concept has revolutionized my training.  Those that have read my “More Trouble Than You’re Worth” manifesto of recently know that I laid out some ground rules for my current goals and phase of training, and it included things like starting every day with physical activity, doing conditioning every day, taking all overhead work off the floor, etc.  This was because, yet again, my goal was to become the being which does these things.  It wasn’t so much about the specific biological effects of these protocols, but about the whole person transformative effect that occurs when one is this person.  I get up at 0330 to train because I want to be the person that gets up at 0330 to train.  I do conditioning every day because I want to be the being that does just that.  And what’s cool about this process is that it’s unscripted: there’s no recipe, protocol, program or magic 8-ball to consult to know what the future holds: I’m discovering as I go just exactly what this “being” is like.  And, quite frankly, this being is an awesome being, and I want to be more like the being which does these things, so I continue to do these things.

 

And this guiding principle allows me to make audibles and interesting decisions along the way. I tend to get a wild hair in my training and fixate on some sorta silly challenge for a few weeks and see what I can do.  I was doing a weekly Keg Grace workout for a while, and then went on some tear with 20 rep squat/20 rep deadlift supersets with a bunch of Crossfit WODs tacked on.  Recently, after some Dan John inspiration, I’ve taken to doing a daily set of Tabata kettlebell front squats.  Dan, in his initial Tabata article, sarcastically responded to the question of “if Tabata front squats are so effective, why don’t you do it everyday?” with “give it a try and find out”, to which I said “OK THANKS” and went after it.  Know what I’ve learned about the being which does Tabata KB front squats every day?  That being is in phenomenal shape!  He can run his heart rate far into the red and get it back to baseline in a matter of minutes.  He stays impossibly lean despite putting away enough food for an army.  He recovers from Deep Water workouts (yes, I’m doing those as my baseline and doing these squats on top, and STILL doing daily conditioning) incredibly quick.  He has HUGE quads that get caught on rehband warm-up pants.  The being which does these things is an amazing being.

The look of a man who regrets his own creation

 

There’s no permission needed for this, there is no plan, protocol, no rules, laws, and hardly any principles.  We are simply being that which does.  If being awesome is the goal, let us be that which does awesome things and, in turn, we will transform ourselves into a being that is capable of doing these awesome things because doing awesome things is a matter of practice for this being.  It’s circular, which is perfect, because it’s self-sustaining and self-perpetuating.  We are being what we are doing, and what we are doing is being awesome.