IT SHOULD SCARE YOU

 

Readers, I’ve once again taken off on a wild tear tilting at windmills with a new protocol and program.  After reading Jamie Lewis’ “The Feast, Famine and Ferocity Diet” ebook (which is absolutely fantastic, along with the bundle he’s currently selling at plagueofstrength.com), I was all too ready to take on the “Famine” training protocol, and am currently midway through the first week.  Jamie has actually given me permission to do full uploads of the workouts on my youtube, so feel free to check them out to get an idea of what the lifting looks like.  And part of the reason I took on this training program was because I was already in the process of following Jamie’s “Apex Predator” diet, itself a variation of the T-nation/Biotest “Velocity Diet”, which, in turn, is very close to the nutritional protocol advocated IN the “famine” phase, so it was a pretty easy switch.  I’ve been logging all of this in my various logging locations, and perhaps it’s the copious amounts of caffeine I’m consuming alongside this protocol, per the recommendations (I’ve re-discovered black coffee, but this time ALSO discovered a love for it), but I’m genuinely excited to eat and train again, which is something that typically only occurs when I have a competition on the horizon.  But, in turn, upon looking deeper, I realize that this has occurred other times in my training history: when I began “Building the Monolith”, when I began “Deep Water”, when I took on my own 6-month gaining block, and each and every time I ran Super Squats.  And, in turn, I’ve identified the common variable: before starting all of these protocols, I was scared of them.

This is scary for all sorts of reasons

In disclosing that, I need to one again re-iterate that I am in fact human.  All too human.  It’s too easy for people to write me off as a machine, or insane, or a bit of both (Futurama proved that they do exist), but the truth is, when you prick me, I do in fact bleed.  The only difference between me and “normal” people is simply WHERE my limit is, but I DO have limits just like everyone else.  In turn, I will read a training or nutritional protocol on occasion and immediately say “Oh f**k that”.  That is fear.  That is my mind taping out and saying “No”.  It absolutely happened the first time I read the Deep Water e-book and got the program and saw the 10x10 squats that had a reduced rest time over 6 weeks.  It happened when I read Randall Strossen suggest drinking a gallon of milk to survive Super Squats, or Jim Wendler suggest a dozen eggs and 1.5lbs of ground beef.  I actually BOUGHT the Deep Water e-book and had it in my kindle for a full year before I ever ran the program…because what happens is, I say “f—k that”, put the book away…and then it gets inside my head…

 

…and I begin to think “…well HOW could I make that work?”  For Building the Monolith, it was “HOW could I do that in an hour?”  For Deep Water, it was “What day could I put the 10x10 squats so I could get it done?”  For Super Squats, it was “how much milk will the college dinning hall let me take home?”  and then 15 years later “How much FOOD will I need to eat if I won’t drink the milk?”  THIS, in turn, is the facing OF these fears.  It’s my own personal “exposure therapy”, where in my own headspace I manufacture the necessary degree of safety in order to encounter these fears.  I create control of the variables that I CAN control so that I can assert myself over these things that generate fear, which, in turn, allows me to encounter, face them, and eventually conquer them.  And, in turn, that’s what allows me to have a greater threshold limit than most: I’ve simply DONE this more.  I’ve been around longer.  Like an RPG: I’ve been grinding, so I’ve leveled up, but we’re all still the same character class.

I am absolutely a level 100 Magikarp

But all these programs I’ve mentioned are ALSO the ones that I credit with creating the MOST profound physical transformations in me.  Much like my most recent post on doing what you’re bad at to get big and what you’re good at to get strong: doing these things I was afraid of triggered a necessary growth response, whereas doing the things that looked like they’d be “fun” or “easy” were the things I did when I needed a break.  And this, of course, speaks to the consistent recurring them I keep noting, the “will to power”, and how, in order for the body to grow, it has to be subjected to a stimulus that tells it “if we do not adapt, we will die”.  The body MUST be afraid of the current environment in order to be triggered into changing, for absent such fear, it will have no motivation or catalyst for change.

 

Which is “the rub” when it comes to this pursuit of physical transformation: we must seek out exactly what which we fear in order to grow.  And no: this is NOT masochism.  That defeats the purpose.  The masochists seeks out exactly what it is that they want: pain.  They enjoy pain, revel in it, desire it: when they receive it, they are satisfying a want.  That’s just another form of hedonism.  For the masochist to grow, they would have to intentionally seek COMFORT, as paradoxical as that seems.  But for those not-afflicted, it’s a far more straight-forward process: when you look at a training or nutritional protocol, if you want it to create physical transformation, it should scare you.  At least a little.  SOMETHING about it should seem terrifying.  Some aspect of it should seem…wrong.  It should be different.

Too far

 

For many, this “fear” is going to be fear of the unknown.  In fact, I’ll say that for MOST that is the very fear that must be experienced.  I have known trainees that have stalled for YEARS because they refuse to abandon their paradigm of “what works”.  The irony, of course, is lost on them that “what works” STOPPED WORKING.  The “sets of 5” acolytes that REFUSE to use any other rep range, the “must hit each muscle twice a week” gurus that only know how to lift weights 6 days a week to train, the HIT Jedis, the bro-splitters, the camps that either can’t figure out 5/3/1 or can’t do anything BUT 5/3/1: it’s all the same.  You MUST be willing to make that jump without the parachute in order to actually get that growth that lies beyond what you know.  You must face the fear of NOT having a map and simply getting lost in the woods and hoping you can find our way out.

 

And what’s wild is: you face THAT fear often enough and you suddenly develop the habit of seeking out these uncharted territories and exploring them.  People will think you’re fearless, but no, quite the opposite: you’ve become a fear JUNKIE, because you KNOW that it is this constant exposure to and overcoming of fear that creates growth.  You establish a new baseline of “bravery” with each successive attempt, wherein it takes more and more to scare you which, in turn, opens up avenues for even crazier methodologies that may in fact lead to some even wilder success.

To think Milo of Croton merely LIFTED the bull...

 

Start small, sure.  Find something that scares you a little…and conquer it.  Then find the next thing and conquer that.  Think of what program or protocol you’ve had in the back of your mind for a while now and resolve to take it on.  It SHOULD scare you.