LESSONS FROM POKEMON: IF YOU WANNA BE THE VERY BEST, YOU GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL!

Oh my god I already love this blogpost.  

It should shock absolutely none of my regular readers to know that I totally bought into Pokemon when it first came stateside on Gameboy back in ’98 with the corresponding anime.  I first learned of the show at my best friend Mike’s house at his 13th birthday party while I was in the 8th grade, as he had some VHS copies of the show that we binged while eating Pizza Hut (the only way I could make that more 90s if I said they were personal pan pizzas).  I was mandated by Mike to buy the blue copy of the game, since he had the red, and this way he could get all 150 Pokemon (we had no idea about Mew at the time), and I dutifully complied.

It should also shock absolutely no one to know that I immediately fell in awe of the Machop/Machoke/Machamp pokemon, and made a team out of them that got absolutely slaughtered by the psychic gym.  But reference my blogpost on “playing the game the way I want to play it” to understand the significance of that.

My life motto

I’ve already alienated my non-Pokemon playing readerbase here, but let me continue.  In the opening them of the English dub of Pokemon, the first words are “I wanna be the very best”.  This, in turn, is the goal of SO many trainees.  NO one is willing to be “good enough”, everyone wants to be optimal, absolute most perfect, completely flawless, no wasted effort, etc etc.  I’ve rallied against that SO many times, and in truth, if you’ve PLAYED Pokemon, you know just how handily you can beat the game by NOT being the very best.  It was a game built to be beaten by 10 year olds: strategy is not required for victory, only persistence is.  Holy f**k: I kinda wish that was the direction I was going to go with this post.  You know what: we’re calling that a lesson right now.

Folks, I’m building this airplane as I fly it: please bear with me.  

So yeah, there’s a lesson learned from Pokemon: you can overcome an absence of strategy with a surplus of persistence.  If you just make all your Pokemon level 100, it doesn’t matter if they’re all Magikarps and Dittos: you will f**k up the elite 4.  PLUS, you get the joy of watching the faces of those trainers when they lose to a goddamn level 100 Magikarp.

I don't know what the word is to describe the simultaneous feeling of delight and disappointment that this image exists, but I bet it's in German

But I more want to get into how the theme song tells you EXACTLY how to be the very best: you gotta catch ‘em all!  

I LOVE this, I really really do.  Because, so often, trainees want to know the ONE move they need to do.  “What is THE best exercise for pecs?  Lats?  Biceps?  Should I do high bar or low bar squats?  Conventional or sumo deadlifts?”

"Oh, you didn't mean all at once?"

Folks: you wanna be the very best, you GOTTA catch ‘em all!  There’s no reason to pick JUST one movement.  There’s a reason your pokemon team is a team of 6: there’s a time and a place for EVERYTHING.  And as my failed experiment of a team of Machokes demonstrated: he who fails to diversify…fails.

Right away I know people are going to chime in about some Soviet lifter that only did the snatch and the clean-and-jerk for 20 years and ended up putting a Buick over their head at the age of 40 and has a resting heart rate of 6.  Cool story: you’re not him.  For us non X-men, there’s a lot of value in doing LOTS of things in our pursuit of physical transformation.  Precisely because the process of transformation requires a stimulus placed upon the body that forces it to adapt…and if the body is ALREADY adapted…what the hell is it going to adapt TO?  

It's how you end up staying puny like a Caterpie

Convoluted?  Yes.  Let me explain.  You start barbell benching on a flat bench.  First time you do it, you look like one of those inflatable dancing tube arm men in front of a used car lot: zero tension, flopping all over the bench, strength leaking everywhere.  You keep benching, your body starts adapting: it says “we are a being that benches a barbell on a flat bench: let’s become GOOD at that”.  You learn how to create tension, how to be stable, how to maximize force output, how to be strong.  Your body begins to prioritize the strengthening of the muscles that will best suit getting strong in the barbell bench.  And, eventually, the body ceases to adapt.  It says “We’ve adapted enough: we are a quality being that benches a barbell on a flat bench”

Well now what?  Well NOW we incline the bench.  And back to inflatable tube man we go!  And from there, muscles grow strong from different angles, or perhaps even brand new muscles get recruited into the process.  And we repeat the process.  And one day we can even cycle all the way back to that barbell flat bench, and THEN guess what?  All that strength we built from crazy angles and different movements can get recruited and help us bypass whatever initial plateau we hit when the body decided it had “adapted enough”, and we can get even STRONGER…until we don’t.  And then we know what to do.

It's amazing how WADA has the same motto

It's why I constantly say the phase “no reason to pick only one”.  “Some cycles one way, some another”, is my other go to.  Most people are in a rush to pick just ONE movement because it obviates them of the obligation to actually THINK, but, unfortunately, physical transformation requires a smart kind of stupidity.  I constantly talk about how people are overthinking their training, but here is a special kind of overthinking where folks are trying to out-think THINKING!  They’re trying to front load all the cerebral work.  They think “if I can just figure out the absolute most best move FIRST, then I’ll never need to think about training again!  I can just do that one move forever!”  

Going back to my Pokemon analogy that I started this with: it’s like wanting to know what ONE attack you should use for the rest of the game in order to win.  Or which ONE Pokemon to pick so you can win.  We know the game doesn’t work that way.  Yes: you can win the game with JUST persistence…but the other part of that is by having FUN with it.  The game was built to be won by 10 year old who picked a team because they LIKED the Pokemon on their team.  They weren’t slogging miserably through the game trying to put in the minimal amount of mental effort in order to win: they were enjoying the experience.  They were LIVING.  They were playing a game and having fun.  THAT’S what this is.   And that’s coming from the dude that fully admits he hates training.  I hate exercise, I hate exerting myself, I’d rather play Pokemon NOT as an analogy, but I have fun PLAYING this game of discovering just how many different and unique ways I can go about affecting physical transformation in myself.

Ok, "fun" might be the wrong word

Try a MILLION different things in your pursuit of physical transformation.  Catch ‘em all!  Run Super Squats into Deep Water into Building the Monolith into Korte’s 3x3 into Conjugate into Mass Made Simple into Tactical Barbell into Dogg Crapp into Smolov into whatever else you see fit.  Do a 6 week cycle of reverse grip bench pressing.  Try my patented “Super Good Mornings”.  Wanna do lateral raises with the pinkies up for some cycles and pinkies down for others?  Cool!  You wanna be the very best?  You gotta catch ‘em all!  If you try to take this game on with just 1 Pokemon who only knows 1 move, you’re gonna get stomped by the first trainer you find who is actually out there having fun.