ON KETCHUP

Anyone who is a parent or who spent time being a child (so humans, who make up the majority of my readership) most likely understands the propensity of children to cover their food in ketchup.  Before I go further, my kid is unique in that they don’t use ketchup but they DO put applesauce on everything, which is honestly pretty similar: some sort of sugary sauce (we get the unsweetened stuff, because apples are sweet enough…but already I digress).  Kids tend to have sensitive taste buds, given that they haven’t had years to burn them all off with coffee, spices, and other gastrointestinal offenses, and they tend to also have simple palates, so it’s a challenge to get them to eat new and different foods.  Often, the compromise is to give them ketchup as a vehicle to bypass the tastebuds.  You put enough ketchup on anything and it’ll….taste like ketchup.  Ketchup will, of course, go on hotdogs (much to the chagrin of “true hotdog fans”, which are bizarre elitists), French fries, cheeseburgers, steak (ok, that’s horrible), pork chops, pretty much all meat, and then make its way onto the veggies and everything else on the table.  But the thing is, there’s an expectation that ONE DAY, we’ll grow out of the ketchup phase, ween ourselves off of it, and start actually eating the food that was cloaked under a veil of ketchup.

I still can't believe they had Chris on a kid's show...

Why the hell and I talking about ketchup so much?  Because many of you trainees out there are approaching your training like a 7 year old at the dinner table with a bottle of ketchup.  At least TRY the new food WITHOUT ketchup before you go and cover it up!

I came about this idea while I was driving this morning.  I just completed my first week of Jamie Lewis’ “Feast” routine, which had me do Klokov presses for the first time in my life.  I was aware of the movement, but simply never did it before.  It looked gimmicky and like something that would destroy my already borked shoulder.

A bad idea well executed

BUT, it was in the program, and like a new food on the table: I ate it.  And I LIKED it!  Holy cow, WHY was I sleeping on this movement?  It’s unique, challenging, and blew up my shoulders in a great way.  

But what could I have done instead?  I could have covered Jamie’s program in ketchup.  “Klokove presses?  I’ll just do behind the neck presses instead: good enough”.  And that might STILL be steak tartare to many people’s plain McDonald’s cheeseburger, who would say “Klokov presses?  I’ll do seated dumbbell overhead press”.  You make the program easier to swallow….but is that why we’re doing it?

To this day I make fun of myself for thinking this was healthy

The more I do new programs and diets, the more I understand WHY I do them: because they FORCE me to try new things, and when I do that, I LEARN new things.  I learned, TODAY, that klokov presses are awesome, and you can bet they’ll feature in future programs now.  My most recent blogposts all speak to the immense value of experimentation with my nutrition and training leading up to this as well.  I’m always picking up SOMETHING from trying a new program or protocol, even if that thing I learn is “that DOESN’T work.”

But SO many trainees will just cover it all in ketchup.  They’ll look at a program and say “That looks YUCKY!  Pass the ketchup!”  TRY IT FIRST!  That’s what every parent yells at their kid before they grab for the ketchup bottle.  Yes: the ketchup is on the table, and we’ll use it if we NEED it, but let’s TRY the new food first and see if we LIKE it before we hide its flavor.  I get messages ALL the time from people that want to change a program or protocol without having ever even tried it before.  “I wanna do sets of 5 for everything else on Super Squats because I grow better on sets of 5”.  Hey: if you REALLY grew better from that, you wouldn’t be looking into Super Squats: you’d keep doing what is working.  It clearly stopped working, so let’s try something NEW on the table.  

Don't debase yourself by eating here

Because those of us that approach each meal with the ketchup bottle in our hand grow up to become weird adults with limited palates.  We can’t go out to eat with our friends because “there’s nothing there for me to eat!”  Dating is a minefield.  And I know it’s embarrassing for these people and they WANT to overcome this, but they’re buried so deep into their habits that it seems impossible.  Training and nutrition (aside from simply flavor based, although really that overlaps nicely here) can be exactly the same.  We’ve seen this struggle with those who worship at the altar of Rippetoe or Pavel and ONLY know sets of 5.  As much as I love 5/3/1, there are dudes that ONLY know those numbers.  And I’m sure if all you ever knew was Deep Water you’d eventually run into limitations too (most likely dying at the age of 30 while attempting to suplex a train, but whatever).

But when we open ourselves up to new experiences WITHOUT modification, justification, normalization, coping: just taking it on AS is, we have an opportunity to learn, grow and EVOLVE.  Our thinking changes, and we increase the size of our toolbox.  So many young trainees want to know how to do their own programming, and they think it’s information that can be gained academically, but there’s a human element to it: you have to find what works FOR YOU.  And this is done by TRYING a bunch of different stuff and finding out.  I’ve square pegged a round hole before, trying SO hard to do the thing “that works” and have it not at all work for me (hello dynamic effort box squats).  But at least I TRIED it, and in doing so found out it didn’t work, and knew that, when it came time to program for myself I should NOT include it.  That’s a part of the process: knowing what NOT to put in the program, so we know what TO put in.

Yeah, just cut that sh*t out

When you look at a new program or protocol, don’t try to make it like your OLD program or protocol.  That completely misses the point.  Don’t try to make it taste like ketchup: try to enjoy its real, true, authentic flavor.  And give it a GENUINE try.  No “front teeth bites”, as we chide my kid about, where we take the absolute smallest measurable bite in human history to meet the requirements of “trying it” without actually tasting it: take a few BIG mouthfuls, let it mill around for a bit, savor the flavor and see if there is SOMETHING in this worth enjoying.   If we truly can’t gag it down, we can go reach for the ketchup bottle to get through THIS meal, but tomorrow is another night at the dinner table, and we’re having liver and onions.

Try it.  You might like it.