ON GETTING STRONG: STOP ADAPTING

  

Once again I go on my tirade about what “real strength” is, and the more I pursue it, the more it becomes clear yet obscure at the same time.  When I started training, strength was easy to understand: it was how much you could lift.  As I get further along in my pursuit of it, I discovered I had confused skill for strength.  I saw those that had mastered the craft of perfectly maximizing every fiber of their being into one highly practiced movement in order to move as much weight as possible and considered them “strong”, but what I was witnessing was an expert.  An accomplishment to be sure: but it was not strength.  Not as I KNEW it within myself.  Not as I continue to pursue it.  Strength exists OPPOSITE of skill: skill attempts to take strength and confine it.  Like attempting to channel a bolt of lightning or corral a wildfire or harness the power of the cosmos: strength is an overwhelming force that skill tries to narrowly funnel toward a limited application.  Which, in turn, is why I propose that, in the pursuit of strength, REAL strength, one should strive to NEVER adapt.

This guy gets it!

 

Adaptation, in the pursuit of strength, is indicative that the body has become complacent with the stimulus provided to it.  We’ve all experienced this phenomenon.  You go run a mile for the first time in a long time (or ever), you end up gassed with sore connective tissues, and then, by the end of the month, you’ve adapted and the mile is no longer the challenge it once was.  Or, since most the folks that read my blog lift, your first leg day had you limping everywhere you walked and seriously strategizing how to get off the toilet, but by the end of the month, you could do leg day like a champ.  But why don’t we learn some lessons from this experience shall we?  Notice how awful it felt when we first started?  Notice how we experienced RAPID improvement after that initial awfulness?  How the body threw all of it’s available resources INTO adapting so that it would stop feeling so awful?  And then, notice how, improvement AFTER that initial growth is significantly slower, limited, and ultimately unsatisfying? 

 

Adaptation is death!  When we adapt, we stagnate: we become complacent and are no longer the “rapid adapter”, for we are ALREAY ADAPTED.  “Muscle confusion!”  “Newbie gains!” “Bro science!”  Folks: these reasons these ideas have had so much staying power is because they are TRUE.  Note: “TRUE”; not necessarily “right”.  Yes, science may have an ACTUAL answer about what is occurring here, but do we really need to “know” it to be able to understand it?  Why settle for science when art and poetry are so much prettier?

Keep in mind: he started off as one of the smartest beings in the universe, and understood that being big, strong, angry and dumb was FAR superior

 

When we seek to AVOID adaptation, we put our body in a state of frequently SEEKING adaptation, and this is the best place for it to be when our goal is to become stronger.  A body seeking adaptation is a body seeking to grow, and, in our case, grow stronger.  A body that is adaptED has already achieved that objective, and therefore has no incentive to grow.  Thus, it behooves us to constantly place the body in a state where it has no opportunity TO adapt, and we do this by constantly placing the body in a state where adaptation is not possible BECAUSE we are frequently placing different demands upon it TO adapt.

 

Oh boy will this upset those of you in the “anti-Crossfit” camp, but I hate to break this to you: Crossfit was a good idea.  Yeah yeah, its followers are insufferable: have you been online recently and perused a powerlifting or strongman forum?  I think we’ve learned that PEOPLE are annoying, and people with hobbies are annoying because they want to talk about them.  But meanwhile, the idea of frequently changing reps, sets, movements and modalities proves to be a VERY effective approach for becoming “strong”.  “But the top Crossfitters only deadlift 600lbs!  That won’t win a local powerlifting meet.”  Folks, if you can pull a 600lb deadlift WITHOUT specializing in training the deadlift, you are a goddamn monster.  Yes, a guy who spends 4 days a week for years at a time solely focused on pulling a single rep of a deadlift for as much as possible SHOULD be upset if they can “only” deadlift 600lbs: a guy who deadlifts once every 27 days and typically for reps doing this on top of a protocol involving running, swimming, gymnastics, quick lifts, odd object lifting, etc, is doing amazing with that kind of pull.

Keep pretending you aren't impressed

 

Anyone who follows my psychotic training has observed this unfolding recently.  I’ve employed a phasic approach to training, where protocols are changing every 6 weeks, and WITHIN those 6 week protocols, the conditioning is CONSTANTLY changing.  I’ll stick with something for a few weeks, grow too adapted to it, and move on.  I did daily Tabata KB front squats for 12 weeks, then overnight changed it to 5 minutes of KB Armor Building Complexes, and on top of that came other daily conditioning workouts, and daily bodyweight work, all subject to change.  “Chaos it the plan”.  And along with that, we change what days body parts get trained, what order, rest times, etc etc.  I heard Jon Andersen say in a podcast that he tries to never train a body part the same way twice, to include never training a bodypart the same day of the week 2 weeks in a row: you can’t let the body know what’s going to happen.  John Meadows endeavored to never repeat the same workout.  “They can do that because they’re advanced”.  Or hey: maybe they’re advanced BECAUSE they do that.

 

Let’s not let the body adapt nutritionally either.  Rotate different foods; eat seasonal foods IN season, what a thought.  Vary protein sources, get a wide variety of different nutrients, prepare food differently.  Remember carb cycling, and how well that worked?  How about Marty Gallagher’s idea of interchanging periods of fasting with periods of small, frequent meals?  Remember Dan John expressing something similar?  We continue to challenge the body, and as the body attempts to adapt to these challenges, it changes FAVORABLY.  It sheds excessively adipose tissue that is only serving to slow down metabolic processes, it adds muscular tissue to improve body composition into something better able to process all of this food, knowing that fat is “dead” while muscle is a furnace.  It becomes better AT processing a variety of foods, which, in turn, self-perpetuates the ability to take on a greater variety of nutrition.  Don’t be fat adapted, don’t be carb adapted: be adaptING.

Doctors are always saying we need to eat our colors!

 

And, of course, conditioning goes without saying.  Reference my “devilish strength, demonic conditioning” post.  This is our chance to build GENERAL physical preparedness.  Let’s do some GENERAL things.  Let’s NOT become the world’s greatest rope skipper; we’ll just include rope skipping as part of our normal chaos.  Running, swimming, medleys, combat sports, etc, they all work to make us stronger, so long as they actually work to make us stronger.  Once we start getting better: change it!

 

Be in an unadapted state of constantly adapting.  That is the feeling of getting stronger.

WISDOM OF JOE DIRT: DON’T FOCUS ON THE WRONG PART OF THE STORY BROTHER

Some of my readers may be too young to appreciate the cinema masterpiece that is 2001’s “Joe Dirt”, but it truly ranks among the greats.  It is, of course, an absolute garbage comedy of a movie, but also demonstrated David Spade’s acting range to an amazing degree, as prior to that moment in time he had only played straight laced, upperclass snooty business-types, the “straight man” to Chris Farley’s…Chris Farley.  In Joe Dirt, Spade fully sells the white trash backwoods hick so well that you spend the entire movie FORGETTING that it’s David Spade.  David Spade has ALWAYS been Joe Dirt: everything up until that point was the lie.  But, I digress, because today we’re going to talk about one of the many (MANY) nuggets of wisdom dispensed by Mr Dirt.  It’s not “you can’t have ‘no’ in your heart” (which is an AWESOME bit of wisdom”, it’s not “life’s a garden: dig it”: it’s “don’t focus on the wrong part of the story brother.”

It's still hard for me to accept that this is David Spade...

This quip is given as Joe is relating a story to “Kicking Wing”, a Native American fireworks salesman, whose sales tactics are woefully underperforming.  Throughout Joe’s attempt to teach through allegory, Kicking Wing keeps questioning details of the allegory, forcing Joe to say “don’t focus on the wrong part of the story brother”.  SO many trainees need to take that wisdom to heart, because SO many times, when attempting to explain a valuable concept as it relates to training and nutrition, these trainees latch onto the wrong part of the story and miss the forest for the trees.

Example?  Super Squats, of course.  You knew that was coming.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve linked this book to some young, impressionable trainee, brimming with potential, only for them to look at the cover and say “You can’t build 30lbs of muscle in 6 weeks: it’s biologically impossible”.  Dude, do they NOT teach you “don’t judge a book by its cover” anymore in school?  Or at home?  Or on television?  Or anywhere?!  That’s one of life’s oldest lessons, and it’s meant to be an expression to be applied toward a deeper meaning, but here you are screwing it up on its most basic level.  Who cares what the tagline of the book says: the book and program have remained on the lips of lifters for decades BECAUSE IT WORKS.  Don’t focus on the wrong part of the story brother: it’s not about “building 30lbs of muscle in 6 weeks”: it’s about how big and strong we get in the PURSUIT of such growth.  Which, by the way, I found, when you chase after 30lbs in 6 weeks, you can put on 12…and that’s pretty awesome.

And that was without turning into this...we still miss you Chris!

I’ll go to Deep Water from here, because I’m a one-trick pony (or two tricks, since it’s Super Squats or Deep Water).  Right away, people see the 10x10 and either 2 things happen: they call it German Volume Training, or they talk about how 10x10 is “junk volume” and you don’t need to do that to grow.  Let me pick apart the first one: calling all 10x10s “GVT” is like calling any program with the bench, squat and deadlift in it a “powerlifting program”.  Which, I imagine, some of you are ALSO guilty of, because you focus on “the wrong part of the story”.  10x10 is merely a PIECE of GVT, and, in turn, it’s merely a piece of Deep Water: beyond that, they are quite different, and worth appreciating for their differences.  But junk volume?  Absolutely spoken by someone that has spent more time with the books than with the iron.

Folks: there is more than biology at play when it comes to hard training.  Hard training transforms you IN TOTAL.  It doesn’t just change your body: it changes your MIND.  It changes how you approach adversity.  It changes how you cope, deal, strategize and overcome hardships.  Constant exposure to anguish improves your ability to navigate it, whereas avoiding all manner of suffering beyond what is “necessary” to grow is what makes us stagnant.  Programs like Deep Water and Super Squats absolutely push WELL beyond what is necessary to trigger growth…but, in doing so, they give you the TOOLS needed to KEEP pushing once we reach those inevitable plateaus in our training.  What a fantastic deal: not only do these programs make you grow PHYSICALLY, but, unlike the perfectly dialed in minimum necessary dose approach, these programs ALSO make you grow in terms of resilience.  Growth now AND growth later.

Can I beat my usual war drum on nutrition here too?  “Can I just eat junk food to fill in my calories if I already hit my protein goal for the day?”  I am genuinely baffled whenever I read this question from an alleged adult.  Don’t focus on the wrong part of the story brother: it’s not a game where you have to hit the bare minimums for some macronutrient values: you’re talking about the NUTRIENTS you are putting into your BODY.  Is that really how you want to live your life?  Do you REALLY think it’s a sound strategy to just hit a protein value and then eat a bunch of junk food?  Because you KNOW these dudes aren’t getting that protein value from lean meats and clean dairy sources: they most likely put 6 scoops of protein powder in some water, pounded it in 6 seconds and said “protein is done for the day: bring on the Taco Bell!”  Macronutrient numbers are just a SMALL part of eating as far as it relates to the process of physical transformation: but, of course, since their easy number to track and measure, that’s all trainees want to focus on.  Nuance is annoying, and discussions about omega 3 to 6 ratios, vitamin B6 deficiencies, the interplay between potassium and sodium, etc etc, require actual READING and not just plugging numbers into an app…but the payoff for the effort is worth it.  It ALWAYS is.  And that’s what this boils down to: the effort of one HARD set of squats, or 10 sets of squats, or actually learning some basics of nutrition: if we actually invest ourselves INTO something, we get something out of it.  That’s what makes it an investment.  Minimal investment: minimal return.

Don’t focus on the wrong part of the story brother.  Try and appreciate what it is you’re being told.    

 

ON OPPORTUNITY COSTS

I am more than certain I’ve written about this topic, and, quite frankly, I may have written this very post before, since that’s what happens when you write once a week for a decade.  But since I keep running into this situation, it’s worth discussing again.  People like to be binary, primarily because black and white is FAR easier to understand than nuance.  The thing is: nuance is what MAKES us human.  And adult for that matter.  Children operate in black and white because they don’t have a fully formed pre-frontal cortex to be able to appreciate nuance and, as adults, we honestly prefer that they DON’T operate “in the grey” for a bit.  It’s easier to tell a kid “lying is wrong” vs explaining the intricacies of social interactions wherein sometimes we tell small lies as a matter of “social lubricant”.  I’m already getting so off-track here, but I bring all this up because people who operate in black and white when it comes to training and diet don’t quite appreciate that “in the grey” lay opportunity costs.

Were it not for those shades of grey, we'd never have the opportunity to enjoy this

Before I get any further: what the hell is an opportunity cost?  As the name implies, “opportunity cost” describes the phenomenon of how choosing to do one thing takes away your ability to choose another thing.  We only have so many opportunities, and whenever we capitalize on one, we shut off others.  I wrote about the board game “Life” recently, and that’s an excellent example in opportunity costs.  At the start of the game, you can go to college or start down your career path.  You quite literally pick between two paths and cannot go down 1 if you pick the other.  I suppose Robert Frost’s “road less traveled” would have been a more profound example, but I am but a simple barbarian.  Hey: DnD works there too: when you pick one character class/race to place, you cut off your opportunity to play the others.  Opportunity costs abound!

And herein we reconcile those above 2 paragraphs.  Trainees frequently ask if something is good or bad.  “Is IIFYM a good approach to nutrition?”  “Is it bad if I only eat beef and rice for gaining?”  “Is a 6x a week Push/Pull/Legs split good?”  Etc etc.  I tend to make few friends when I point out that ascribing morality to decisions related to eating and training is silly, but digging deeper: neither choice is good or bad, they simply represent an opportunity cost.  The question is: can you AFFORD this opportunity cost?

Some see a buffet, others: an existential crisis

Let’s talk nutrition.  Your stomach only has so much room in it, your intestines can only digest so much, and there are only so many hours in the day to cook and eat.  Everything you eat represents an opportunity cost.  Hell, V8 vegetable juice summed this up adequately with “You coulda had a V8!”  This is where nuance comes into play in the discussion.  Trainees like to ask “if I already covered my protein and essential fats, can I just eat junk food to get in my calories?”  Sure, you CAN…but at what cost?  Specifically, at what OPPORTUNITY cost?  It’s not that eating an Oreo actively detracts from your health (maybe it does, I don’t have the background to speak to that), but it represents an opportunity you had to eat ANYTHING else that may actually benefit you.  The obsession with macronutrients as a goal has made us forget about all the super cool micronutrients out there and the immense value they can provide.  Vitamins, minerals, fiber, antioxidants, etc etc.  To say nothing of us counting grams of fat but not factoring in which grams are polyunsaturated vs mono vs saturated vs trans, which ones are omega 3s vs 6s vs 9s, etc.  To say nothing of the fact that, try as we might to ignore it: we feel just plain BETTER when we’re not stuffed with junk.  Look at the average person: they live a junk food life and experience a junk food existence.  They’re sweating Crisco and just plain miserable.  The only “joy” they get is that moment the Oreo hits their lips: then they spend the rest of the day trying to digest it and feeling the anguish.  This represents an opportunity cost to NOT experience that.

Let’s talk training.  Why can’t I rest 8 minutes between sets?  You can: but you could have also done So much stuff in that 8 minutes.  That could have been 8 minutes of MORE sets of the same stuff, or some conditioning work, or a chance to work on mobility.  What’s wrong with doing a 6x a week weight training program?  Nothing is wrong with it…but when were you planning on getting in your conditioning?  Why can’t I add an arms day onto 5/3/1?  What do you take AWAY by doing that?  Once again: you only have so many hours of the day, your body can only recover from so much work, you can only put on so much  muscle, etc etc.  Every choice you make is not necessarily a choice that does harm BUT it IS a choice that takes away other choices.  

But this was a bad choice

And, of course, the opposite works too.  Choosing the “good” choice removes our ability to make bad decisions.  When I’m gaining weight, I have SO much “good” food to get through that I flat out don’t WANT to eat anything “off menu”.  I know that doing so is just going to put me behind the 8-ball as far as my eating for the day goes, and now I’ll need to catch up while also dealing with the increased fullness and feeling of awfulness that came with it.  My training is so full of “good” choices that I just flat out don’t have room to do a lot of silly things.  And this, in itself, represents an opportunity cost: if we fill all available space/make all possible choices, we no longer have room for more choices to be made.

When making decisions about your training and nutrition, don’t focus so much on “what does this decision do for me”, but instead, consider “what does this decision PREVENT me from doing”?

 

QUIT ASKING FOR MORE RULES

I’ve been bigger and stronger than my peers for longer than I haven’t been at this point.  I started lifting weights 22 years ago, and once I got to college and had access to a real weight room and a dinning hall that served me all the food I could want, I exploded in size and strength and road that out for quite a while.  Along with that, I’ve trained martial arts off and on since the age of 9.  I say all this not to bloviate about what a badass I am, but more to point out that I’ve never felt a need to threaten physical violence on anyone.  If nothing else, there’s always just been an assumption of my capabilities (which fits in well with my “more trouble than I am worth” approach).  But ONE time, I was compelled to break kayfabe and actually threaten someone.  Allow me to explain.

Oh my god I just love this

One time, as part of a workplace “leadership building” seminar/retreat, I was put in a team of around 10 people, and we were given a task to accomplish and told the rules of engagement.  Right away, my deviant mind identified some holes in the rules that were going to make the project MUCH easier…and suddenly, to my horror, I saw one of my peers raise their hands and ask a clarifying question about the rules that, in turn, resulted in MORE rules being established there on the spot, reducing my ability to exploit loopholes and game the system.  I said point blank “Oh my god: did you really just ask for MORE rules?”  They laughed it off and raised their hand again, at which point, I said flat out “If you do not put your hand down, I will beat you into a coma”.  Once again, they laughed…then looked at me and saw no smile or sign that I was joking.  They looked at the person proctoring our assignment, looked back at me, and then put their hand down.  The best part of that story?  The proctor thanked me after that.

So first, a good lesson that, sometimes, the simplest solution is the most effective.  Rather than try to argue, persuade, or convince this person, I resorted to the quickest solution I had.  Let’s take that lesson with training and nutrition and keep things simple until they can’t be.  But the REAL big lesson here: QUIT ASKING FOR MORE RULES!  Oh my god, seriously!

You are everything I can't stand whenever we play

What do I mean by this?  I’m talking about all the self-imposed rules that trainees inflict that absolutely limit themselves in reaching their goals.  I spend a LOT of time on a subreddit dedicated to gaining weight, which I’m sure to many readers is a confounding idea when we exist in a world where obesity is rapidly becoming the number 1 killer of the population, but that just goes to prove the point.  The folks who are struggling to gain weight struggle BECAUSE they keep asking for more rules.  Gaining weight should be simple: eat more food.  If we want this weight to be MUSCLE, it’s a LITTLE more nuanced: eat more food AND train so hard it becomes muscle.  But you’d be SHOCKED at some of the “more rules” these folks want.  They have to hit certain macro percentages, they can only do it while eating “clean” bodybuilding foods ala chicken breasts, white rice and broccoli, they have to do it while intermittent fasting, they have to do it using only shakes, they have to do it eating only yummy food that is cheap and takes no effort to prepare (let’s call a spade a spade there and just say they’re being lazy), etc etc.  WHY do they want so many rules?  Why can’t it simply be “I want to gain weight, there’s food to eat, I’ll eat more of it!”  There are SO many stories of athletes crushing Little Debbies and fried chicken and burgers and pizza and etc etc on their quest to gain: surely we can at least put away a PBJ and not have an existential meltdown?

And oh my goodness the rules around training that we HAVE to follow.  We apparently HAVE to train a muscle group 2x a week or else we wasted ALL of our gains.  And this means the only appropriate way to train is a push/pull/legs split where we lift 6 times a week, or else we didn’t use enough volume to generate stimulus.  Jesus Christ, folks, Stuart McRobert has programs where you train the whole body 3 times in 2 WEEKS and he STILL got kids to grow.  People have been lifting weights without rules for SO long and seeing crazy growth.  It’s honestly REALLY hard to lift weights wrong: believe me, I’ve tried.  My best growth happened when I started doing EVERYTHING “wrong”.  My 3 “rules” are effort, consistency and time, which, surprisingly enough, so many trainees try to come up with their own rules to circumvent THOSE rules.  “I HAVE to leave 2-3 reps in the tank if I wanna grow!”  Sure thing chief: let’s talk about the fact that when you go “to failure”, you’re ALREADY leaving 2-3 reps in the tank, so when you make the choice to do that, you’re leaving like 6-7 reps in the tank.  But no, I’m sure you’ll grow: you’re following the rules!

When reps DON'T get left in the tank

Should I even get started about the rule on how you absolutely can NOT get injured from training?  How about rules regarding overtraining? What about the rule that says you HAVE to have a coach if you want to learn how to power clean?  Never mind that, every year, thousands of high school freshmen learn how to do it in 15 minutes at some football summer program.  How about the rule that says if you want to get bigger that means you’re training a bodybuilding program?  Ever see how goddamn huge a pro-strongman is?

Quit asking for MORE rules!  You are doomed by your freedom: appreciate that and make the most of it.  You can absolutely carve your own path through this process, do things the way you want to do them, and get the results you want to get.  The only “rules” are working hard, staying consistent, and being patient.  Go low carb, go high carb, go low protein (GASP), do single sets, do 100 sets, do machines only, do natural stones only, pick whatever rules you want and quit asking for MORE of them.  There are TONS of people out there that will give you more rules if you ask for them: it’s how they make money.  They are fleecing new trainees with the enticement of limitations and restrictions, because people ultimately fear freedom and crave confinement.  Embrace your freedom: quit asking for more rules, go out and exploit the loopholes, and if someone wants to limit you, beat them into a coma.

…metaphorically, of course.