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.