GIVING 100% OF 80%

This topic title comes off of something I told the wife the other day.  My run of Super Squats has been about as full of misfortune as possible, and the write up on it is going to be nuts, but currently I’ve pulled my hamstring pretty badly which forced me to have to do one more “Super Good Mornings” workout for the immediate follow-on.  For the follow-on after THAT, I wrapped up the hamstring as best I could, loaded the bar to 315 and tried my hardest to get it to over 20 reps, but the hamstring gave me a warning at rep 16.  So I racked it, paused long enough to recover and assess, went for more reps, got 1 more while still feeling the same issue, racked it, did the pullovers…then decided I’M STILL going to get my Super Squats on, so stripped the bar down to 245, got in 20 MORE breathing squats, promptly died and did the pull overs

 

This is like a 13 minute snuff film

And this is how it looked when it felt GOOD!

I came back inside from the garage after finishing the workout and the Mrs asked me how it went.  I told her “I’m not 100%, but I gave 100% of the 80% I am”, as since she’s a psychotic athlete like me, she TOTALLY got that as she watched me limp to the couch and collapse while muttering profanity to myself under my breath.  It also helps we were both political-science majors in college, and therefore have no issue with Sophistry and butchering mathematics.  But this does speak to something in the training sphere that I feel is significantly under-appreciated.  People strive so hard to BE 100% that they tend to (at best) only GIVE 80% effort, whereas I argue that giving 100% of 80% is vastly superior than 80% of 100%.

 

Ok, NOW I’ve made it insane and confusing.  Good.  I like it when my opponent is off balance.  I learned that from martial arts.  And martial arts ALSO taught me the valuable lesson that NO ONE shows up to a fight at 100%.  Through the process of PREPARING for a fight, we tend to get beat up.  Training to fight means FIGHTING, and fighting HURTS.  Even with compliant partners and controlled drills, we get dinged and banged up and bruise and worn out, and, inevitably, when the time comes to actually fight, we have some issues we need to work around.  Sore knees and joints, a cut over the eye that keeps opening up, or in the case of Mike Tyson: a broken back

 

Knowing Mike, I am 100% certain this was without hyperbole

And despite all of this, the bell goes off and we go and give 100% of the 80% that we are.  And the “trick” there is to make it so that, even at 80%, we are STILL quite the handful, so long as we’re willing to give 100% OF that 80% to whatever is opposing us.  And folks: that’s when it comes time to make another human go to sleep when they don’t want to.  When it comes to physical transformation, our only opponent is ourselves: they are outmatched and outnumbered when they have to face off against our ID, ego and superego!

 

Which is why it’s so patently ridiculous how much trainees want to be 100% just to TRAIN for “the fight”: not even the fight itself.  How many trainees have to time their pre-workout meal and supplements JUST right, while resting JUST the right amount of time between workouts, with perfectly calculated macros and MRV against RPE with the exact right frequency of training movements paired with exactly 9 hours of sleep or else the whole workout was wasted!  I’ve known dudes who simply WON’T train if they had a bad nights sleep or not enough protein for the sake, operating under the premise that it’s better to have NO workout vs a bad one.  And people think I’M crazy!? 

And I know a thing or two about bad ideas!

 

I stopped caring about optimal a LONG time ago, because I realized something: we will NEVER be optimal.  We are a SUB-OPTIMAL species.  A big part of that is we managed to side-step “survival of the fittest” such that we have no natural selection process to weed us down to “the elite”, which is why Nietzsche believe that we were merely a bridge/stepping stone for the REAL humans to come along as the Overman/Ubermesnch.  And please, don’t go crying “eugenics” on me here or explain to me how we ARE the product of survival of the fittest because circumstances of survival have changed etc etc: we’re both smart enough to understand where I am going here.  As a species, we’re flawed.  Amongst the flawed, very very VERY few of us are “the ELITE flawed”, which is why we pay SO much money to watch them on TV and in movies.  From elite athletes that get paid millions to play a game in front of us to elite actors who get paid to PRETEND TO BE OTHER PEOPLE (so elite that we want them to be someone else instead so we don’t have to remember) in front of us, we are enamored by the elite of us species…and if you’re reading this blog, you aren’t one of them.

 

So, knowing that you’re part of a flawed species and that, amongst the flawed, you’re NOT part of the upper echelon, it’s a given that you are, ALREADY, not 100% of what you COULD be.  Your potential was pre-emptively squandered.  In turn, your pre-occupation with “being optimal” is goofy, because optimal went away a LONG time ago.  You’re operating off of a NON-OPTIMAL framework: why not just push it as hard as IT can go?  You don’t have a Ferrari, you have a Ford Windstar: but that baby can STILL go 126mph before it hits the governor chip, so long as you have 40 miles of straight open road on a downhill incline and don’t mind rattling the whole way while your suspension barely holds on (don’t ask how I know about that…)

These guys are absolutely in the spirit here

 

What inevitably happens is that, in the pursuit of trying to BE 100%, there’s no room to actually GIVE 100%.  The dudes that try their absolute hardest to ALWAYS have perfect form, in turn, prevent themselves from ever exerting themselves to the point of actually creating the stimulus for muscle to GROW, because when we EXERT force, form tends to get compromised.  Hell, for me, that’s when I know the set is STARTING TO WORK: it’s the moment when I can no longer control the weight and, instead, and SURVIVING it.  The dudes who try to have their died dialed in to the EXACT calorie for growth end up…not growing, because they can’t account for the reality that our flawed human bodies do NOT grow in a predictable, linear and fixed pattern, and sometimes we need to OVEReat in order to capitalize on a growing phase (anyone who is a parent and ever watched their kid put away enough food to give Brian Shaw pause during a growth spurt “gets” this).  The people who strive for the absolute PERFECT frequency of 2x per week on a muscle group will NEVER have one of those squat workouts where you so completely blow your legs away that you NEED 6 days of rest before the next workout.  In attempting to BE 100%, we do not allow ourselves to GIVE 100%.

 

Accept being flawed, broken and “less than”.  “You have to consider the possibility that God doesn't like you, he never wanted you. In all probability, He hates you... We don’t need him. F--k damnation. F--k redemption. We are God's unwanted children? So be it!”, to quote Tyler Durden from Fight Club.  “Only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”  Once you free yourself from the shackles of everything having to be “right” are you able to finally realize 100% of what you are.  When I set up for my set of breathing squats, I didn’t care that I had to wrap my hamstring with a knee wrap to get it to stay in place, I didn’t care that I had to lean slightly to the left to take weight off the healing leg, I didn’t care that I had to put the bar even LOWER than usual to shift to pressure away from the injured leg: all I cared about was giving 100% of the 80% that I was.  No different than when I set up for some Super Good Mornings, knowing full well that my legs were going to have some bend in them, that I wasn’t going to do things textbook: when it was all said and done, I could barely stay standing because I had given so much goddamn EFFORT into that set that it didn’t matter if it was “80% good”: it was ONE HUDRED PERCENT given.

Not shown: "good form".  Shown: one hundred perfect effort

 

Give 100% of the 80% you are, and you will, without question, be MORE than those who can only give 80% at 100%.