STAY TUNED

For my readers out there that aren’t parents, allow me to expose you to a pitfall modern parents will experience that did not exist when I was growing up: you can accidentally let your kid watch 8 hours of television.  Its true!  One minute, it’s Saturday morning and your kid is watching cartoons, and suddenly you turn around and it’s Saturday night and your kid…is STILL watching cartoons.  How?!  Because television is STREAMING these days: it’s on demand!  What does that mean?  It means your kid can pick a show and bingewatch it, just like any degenerate adult can do.  As opposed to?  As opposed to when so many other of us grew up, when there were Saturday MORNING cartoons that ran for about 2 hours (WITH commercial interruptions) and then it transitioned onto terrible infomercials for the Chuck Norris TotalGym and the Flowbee (look that up).  Sure, you COULD sit there for the rest of your Saturday and watch that awful programming…but why would you?  At that point, the cartoons were over and you moved on to something ELSE on Saturday: playing some sports outside, reading comic books, playing video games, arts, crafts, just plain ANYTHING else.  But now?  Now, the cartoons NEVER end, and if you let your attention slip, when your kid asks “can I watch some cartoons” and you say “sure”, you created a Saturday television zombie.  Why do I even bring any of this up?  Well, for one: it’s legit something to watch out for as a parent (don’t be fooled: EVERY parent is just winging it, there is no book, and just like lifting, it’s often good to learn from the bros that have “been there/done that”), but additionally, this streaming on demand access can absolutely negatively impact your training and nutrition.

Granted, THIS particular show definitely helped me find some training intensity (RIP Akira Toriyama)

 

I started this by going back to the past, so allow me to continue that approach in discussing what physical transformation USED to be like: the information was controlled.  And not controlled in the sense that there was some sort of conspiratorial elite mastergroup out there that was hoarding all the knowledge on lifting and nutrition and parsing it how they saw fit: the FLOW of the information was controlled.  Much like old television, information was released episodically, typically in the form of a monthly muscle-magazine (Muscle and Fitness, Flex and Powerlifting USA if you wanna talk the 90s, Hardgainer for the 80s, and Strength and Healthy for the golden era, and I’ll give a shout to Mark Bell’s “Power” magazine, which was pretty awesome when it was out) and a select few books (EVERY lifter owns a copy of Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, and you had Fred Hatfield’s “Power: A Scientific Approach” and Bill Pearl’s “Getting Stronger”, or perhaps something from the HIT crowd).  In both cases, you, the consumer, had to WAIT until the next installment of information was released.  You’d read every article in your magazine, tear out the routines and bring them to the gym, go to the grocery store to buy the food for the diet du jour, and THAT was what you had to work with for that month.  You poured over Arnold or Fred or Art Jones’ book and THAT was all the information you had until the next book got released.  There was a DELAY between chunks of information…which meant you had time to digest it all (whether you chose to use that time or not was entirely up to you).

 

 

Now?  Information is streaming: it’s ON DEMAND.  At any point you can plug in to nearly LIMITLESS information on the realm of physical transformation: irrespective of if any of it is of value.  On that last bit: at least these magazines and books had editors, I say FULLY aware that I’ve written a blog rife with typos and grammatical errors for well over a decade now, because I’m part of the problem (but at least you have to wait a week between my posts!)  And you can absolutely literally bingewatch lifting media if you so choose: you can lose 8 hours on youtube sifting through various channels and talking heads and still not even SCRATCH the surface of all available content.  And that’s just LIFTING: if we wanna discuss nutrition, that world is SO diverse and rife with varying opinions that it’s effectively endless.  No one human will ever consume all of the media that is out there: we simply don’t live that long, and in the process of ATTEMPTING to consume it, MORE will come out.  It’s a truly Sisyphusian task.

 

At least rolling a big rock up a hill will get you pretty jacked...

 

And what’s the consequence of all this?  Aside from the fact that you can lose a whole day to what is effectively brain poison, we’ve once again lost the opportunity to actually think, digest and marinade on the information we’ve received.  Much like economics, when you increase the supply, you decrease the VALUE of the supply.  We’ve created information inflation, and now we the consumers don’t actually take the time to appreciate anything of value: we just immediately move on to the next bit of information.  “Everything contradicts everything else” cries to babe in the woods of physical transformation, who finds themselves swamped with information from a variety of sources, not able to understand or appreciate how the words of a 1000lb squatter turned coach or the words of an elite track athlete that has COACHED elite athletes SHOULD hold more weight than some dude on TikTok with a set of abs.  No different than how you can equally choose to watch “Casino” or “The Human Centipede” on your streaming service: it’s on you, the consumer, to make wise choices.

 

 

But this binge watching also points to another interesting bit of duality: we have an attention span willing to sit down for 8 hours and consume media, yet too short to actually see anything through!  In an era where information and entertainment was released episodically, we HAD to be patient.  “Stay tuned!” we were told, as the commercial breaks interrupted our programming, and “tune in next time!” as the show concluded and we had to wait a whole WEEK before the next episode.  To say nothing of waiting for next month’s muscle mag to come out, or YEARS for the new book to come out.  We waited because we HAD to.  Which is to say, we weren’t necessarily BETTER at waiting, we didn’t necessarily have a longer attention span: we simply had no other choice.  But the IMPACT of not having that choice was profound, as we were forced to engage in de facto periodization: we changed in accordance to the rate that information was received.

 

When demand attempts to meet supply...and yes, this is SUPER old school television

 

You see this play out perfectly in John McCallum’s “The Complete Keys to Progress”.  John was fully aware that his articles were released monthly, in accordance with the rate that “Strength and Health” was published, so he would WRITE programs to be followed for a month, tell the trainee to stick with the program, and in the next month he would release the next phase.  When you read the book, the sections end telling the reader something to the effect of “Focus on this for now, and next month we’ll move on to the next phase”.  And after 3-6 months, an entire training block would be accomplished.  He had a similar approach with nutrition too: slowly adjusting and phasing things over time.  The irony of all this being that my only exposure to John’s work was a book that had compiled all the articles into one spot, which I, in turn, absolutely bingeread, further demonstrating the very problem we have with wanting to consume everything all at once rather than taking the time to digest it and appreciate it. …which is, in fact, where we are today.

 

 

There is a complete absence of patience as it relates to periodization BECAUSE we exist in a state where “the next phase” is already there for us.  Trainees of the heyday understood the value of phasic training and nutritional approaches: there were off seasons and in seasons, various times to emphasize certain qualities depending on the specific demands we had.  Now?  Trainees want to be good at everything all the time, and getting them to stay with one program for a week is already a significant ask, and they’ll be 2 weeks into a half-hearted cut before they decide they got too small and need to add size OR they’ll watch a slight degree of blur happen to their abs on a bulk and decide it’s time to pull all the carbs out and try to get shredded.  And let’s talk about THAT for a second now, shall we?

 

It's not as though you actually get a vote on the matter

 

Another interesting byproduct we see from information being available instantly on demand is that WE are, in turn, available instantly and on demand.  What do I mean?  Once again, in the past era, lifters, even famous ones, like top level bodybuilders, were NOT visible 100% of the time.  Not every single training session was documented, people weren’t taking photos of their meals and sharing them with the world, there was not a daily selfie update: we’d have month long stretches where we would not see or hear from these folks.  During THESE times, these trainees tended to make the MOST growth: it was the off season, where they could focus on bringing up weaknesses and letting their physiques soften up a little while they focused on growing some size.  What does that sound like to a modern trainee?  That sounds like a period of time where you AREN’T setting a PR every time you step in the gym (doing something you’re WEAK at?  Why would you ever do that?!) and it sounds like NOT looking your absolute best for your adoring fanbase.  How horrifying!  If I can’t always be at my most absolute best while everyone is watching me ALL the time, why bother? 

 

 

Because sometimes, in order to make a giant leap forward, we need to take a few steps back for a running start.  If you’re already AT your peak, you can’t “peak more”: really, all you can do is just get slowly and gradually worse.  But if we take a strategic pause to come down from our best, rest, recover, soften up and shore up some weak points, we’ll have recovered and grown enough that we can easily blast forward and surpass our previous best.  We just needed to “stay tuned” for a moment there.  We needed to be patient enough to wait for “the next episode” of our own lives.  If we try to bingewatch our lives, we end up going nowhere, but when we take an episode, pause, wait, reflect, contemplate, and grow, we get SO much more out of the experience. 

 

Because even the greats knew to let their abs go away every once in a while

 

Don’t hit that “next episode” button on your physical transformation: stay tuned and take it one episode at a time.  You’ll enjoy the show more, and being on the couch for so long isn’t good for you.