COMPETITOIN WRITE UP: SUBMISSION CHALLENGE 8 DEC 2024, OMAHA NEBRASKA, MEN'S MASTERS 1 171-185LB WHITE BELT

 

**INTRO AND SPOILERS**

 

It's a gaining phase, and I'm eating EVERYTHING

Once again, I have competed in a grappling competition, despite the fact I DON’T train in grappling.  The martial art I currently train in, Tang Soo Do, is primarily a striking martial art, with a heavy base from Shotokan (which is why it’s referred to as “Korean Karate”), that includes what could best be described as “situational grappling”, but what Matt Thorton (there’s a blast from the past) would describe as “dead training”.  Basically, the only time I get to grapple is when I compete at these things, as I’m otherwise relying on high school wrestling instincts and brief MMA training that I stopped doing when I was 21…and now I’m 39…so yeah…

 

But, relying on just that, and a LOT of strength and conditioning, I managed to take home another gold medal in the Men’s Masters 1 White Belt 171-185lb division.  That was actually me stepping UP, as I’m technically a Masters 2 athlete…because I’m getting too damn old.  There was one other guy in the division, so we were paired off in a “best of 3” match up, which, from this, you can tell that I won 2 matches, but I’ll leave the HOW I won as a bit of a surprise. 

 

**TRAINING**

Yeah, that's about right

 

Of course, I did zero grappling leading up to this grappling competition.  I’ve been advised by many people that this would improve my ability to grapple, but it’s a question of bandwidth for me. 

 

Instead, I’ve been following the Tactical Barbell Mass Protocol, as detailed in my most recent blog post.  This did result in me coming into this competition much heavier than before, weighing in at 185.6 in full sweats with a full belly, whereas before it was more like 181 with all that AND 40oz of tea/electrolytes in me.  I felt like coming in bigger and stronger would help.

 

Mass protocol doesn’t push conditioning too terribly hard, but I’ve been diligent about keeping my rest periods short, and I feel like that all helped me maintain a solid conditioning level coming into this.

 

 

**NUTRITION**

 

I'm pretty much following these guys for grappling techniques; might as well go with nutrition

I’ve stuck with my “protein sparing modified intermittent feasting” carnivore protocol for weekdays, and 2 meals a day (breakfast and dinner) on weekends.  Since this competition was on Sunday, I had a hearty breakfast on Saturday (2 omelets filled with some leftover thanksgiving turkey with swiss cheese, covered in grassfed sour cream, beef bacon, grassfed beef hot dog, some grassfed cottage cheese and pork cracklin) with a lighter dinner of 6 beef patties with butter from Culver’s.  Sunday Morning, I had my traditional pre-competition meal of steak and eggs.   And if you’re really curious, I had a full rack of ribs (no sauce), pulled pork, scrambled eggs and grassfed cottage cheese on Friday evening.  I stuck with beef for Saturday and Sunday because I find pork can make me somewhat inflamed, and I didn’t want to deal with holding water leading into the weigh in.

 

Saturday Dinner

Morning of comp Breakfast

Friday Dinner

Saturday Breakfast

 

**MORNING OF**

Gotta get started early

 

Where in my past 2 competitions I was WELL within the weight class, my recent focus on gaining actually had me in a state where I needed to be somewhat cautious, so I ensured to weigh myself on my home scale in full sweats first thing.  Upon seeing 83.4kg, I knew I was in the clear, but still decided to forego my traditional 40oz of green tea mixed with electrolytes until AFTER weigh in.  With a belly full of 14oz of piedmontese ribeye, 4 sunny side up eggs, a bunch of ghee and 1.5 strips of bacon leftover from my kid’s plate, I weighed in with full sweats at 185.6, which, with the 1lb allowance, meant I was cleared.

 

I got on the mat about an hour before my match, just to feel what it felt like.  Did a butterfly stretch and rolled onto my back, but ultimately spent 2-3 minutes “warming up” before sitting down and waiting for my match to start.

 

**MATCH 1**

 

 

 

 

The dude I was competing against chatted with my briefly before the match.  He asked where I trained out of and I said "I don't...but I wrestled in high school".  Well he relayed that to his coach, who stereotyped the hell out of me and kept yelling "He's going to hunt for the shot!  Watch out for the shot!"

 

Fun fact: I never shot in wrestling.  I was terrible at it.

 

But, that said, after too much time standing, we were warned that if we didn't have a takedown in the next 15 seconds, they were going to implement some sort of "get down" rule.  I'll admit I panicked upon hearing that, and decided to go for a takedown.  He responded by sinking a standing guillotine that was VERY locked in.  I got a little upset because I was violently tapping him and the ref was just ignoring it for nearly too long before finally someone from the audience yelled "He's been tapping for a while".

 

Upon reflection, there was no need to go for that takedown, because I realize, in all of these tournaments, I have NEVER felt threatened when I've been on the ground.  I may not have much in the way of offense there, but no one has ever put me in a threatened position.  So from here on out, I'll make them play my stupid game of standing until something happens, and if we get forced to the ground, even better.  Because on top of all that, I’ve never been taken down: I can keep things standing forever.

 

 

I DID benefit from that first round though.  Got to feel him out, determine he wasn't stronger than me, nor did he have better cardio than me.

 

**MATCH 2**

 

 

 

 

I took some lessons learned from that first match.  I decided to just be a bully this time.  I came out aggressive, shoved him, secured a thai clinch, which was of no value whatsoever but still cool, and forced my will on him.  At one point, we nearly repeated the same ending as before, with him locking in a guillotine, and it got me angry and I said to myself in my head "no this time motherf*cker!"  He pulled guard on me, and that's where I was better able to work my "magic".

 

 

I got out of the guillotine, and then just kept pressuring him as much as I could.  He went for a triangle, but I never felt threatened by it, and I just kept stacking and pressuring him.  Whenever I was in his guard, I'd put my weight on him, and I noticed that, whenever I got a forearm across his throat, he REALLY didn't like that.  He'd panic and give up position.  So, of course, I kept doing it.

 

 

Just like my other 2 competitions, I could feel the exact moment that his energy and strength left him, while I still felt dandy.  In my head I said "You seem tired: I can do this all day".  I guess I'm a nasty person inside my head.  I eventually wore him down to the point that he could no longer put up any resistance, at which point I locked in an Americana I had been hunting for for the whole match. 

 

Come time for the third match, and his corner informed me he wouldn't be coming out.  I had exhausted him so much he didn't want to do a third with me.  I had noticed between the first and the second match his fatigue level was already pretty heavy, and it seems he reached his limit.

 

 

What's cool is, on my record for this organization, it categorizes that final win as "win by KO"

 

              **WHAT’S NEXT?**

 

I’m just going to keep signing up for these as long as they’re convenient for my schedule.  In an ideal world, I’d love to get back into training again, but it’s just not in the cards currently as far as my available bandwidth goes.  It’s not “I don’t have time”, it’s “The time I have, I prioritize for other things”.  Ultimately: time with my family.  That’s WHY I lift weights at 0400 in my garage: that’s when my family is asleep, so they don’t miss me.  Sooooo, if I found a school that was open at 0400, I’d give them a go.

 

Meanwhile, what’s next on the competition front is a 10 mile race in the first week of April and a strongman competition in the second week.  In between that, I have 2 cruises and have drafted out a plan with Tactical Barbell to carry me through this next cycle of competition.

OPERATION CONAN SITREP 2: TACTICAL BARBELL MASS PROTOCOL 12 WEEK CHECK IN

**INTRO**

This captures so much of the awesome in just one shot

 

My love affair with the Tactical Barbell Mass Protocol continues, and I don’t foresee any stopping in the near future.  In fact, I’ve already planned out my training until my next strongman competition on 12 Apr, and it’s all Tactical Barbell, and even after that I genuinely don’t see any reason I would pivot (although, fair warning, I’ve been listening to a lot of Matt Wenning recently, and the idea of Wenning Warm Ups and conjugate is sounding cool, so who knows).  And with that understanding, I figured it was appropriate to do another “check in” rather than a program review, because I’m not done yet, but I’m approaching the conclusion of the 12th week of running the Mass Protocol, and given that so many of my program reviews were on 6 week programs, writing at the 12 week point seems fitting.

 

**WHERE I AM RIGHT NOW**

Honestly a bit dramatic

 

If you recall from my previous check-in, the Mass Protocol contains a base building section, which transitions into a general mass section, and then into a specificity section.  I skipped the base building (at my own peril) as I felt I was in a good enough place for that before starting, and ran the general mass protocol of “Grey Man” for 3 cycles (9 weeks).  From there, I made the transition to the specificity programs, selecting Specificity Bravo (for reasons I will detail momentarily).  Traditionally, one would do a bridge week between the programs here as a transition, but I opted not to PURELY due to scheduling: I have a cruise (like, buffet on a boat kind) coming up between Christmas and New Years that will time out PERFECTLY with me completing 2 3 week Specificity cycles at this point, which will serve as an EXCELLENT bridge week before I return home and start back into training/eventual strongman prep.

 

With this being the 12th week, it means I am finishing my first cycle of Specificity Bravo and prepping to start my second one.

 

**FROM GENERAL TO SPECIFICITY: WHY I WENT FROM GREY MAN TO SPECIFICITY BRAVO**

The B game is always the better choice

In full disclosure, my original plan WAS to do Specificity Alpha rather than Bravo.  The former is similar in structure to the ever popular PHUL program (which I’ve never run myself, but am familiar with) it that it’s 4 days of lifting with 2 days dedicated to lower reps with higher weight (strength days) and 2 days dedicated to higher reps and moderate weights (hypertrophy days).  Bravo, meanwhile, is pure hypertrophy days, still 4 days a week, with a A/B/A/B alternating approach, with the percentages ticking up each workout.  For the sake of preserving the content of the book, I won’t go into further detail, but you see the difference: once had all hypertrophy days, one had a mix.

 

Alpha appealed to me, HOWEVER, on the final week of 3 cycles of Grey Man, I found myself unable to complete a single trap bar pull at the prescribed weight, let alone a work set.  My lower back was incredibly overtaxed, and in dire need of fatigue dissipation.  I’ll address WHY I was experiencing that fatigue later, but to assuage your fears: it was not a fault of Grey Man/Tactical Barbell programming.  I COULD have accomplished fatigue dissipation with a bridge week, but as I noted earlier: my schedule didn’t support that.  I realized my other option was to select Bravo instead and let the time with the lighter weights give me some time to let that fatigue dissipate. 

 

However, the more I looked into it, there was one other thing I really appreciated about transitioning from Grey Man to Bravo: I could use ALL the same exercises.  When it comes to the specificity phase, you’re supposed to select a certain amount of movements to train depending on the protocol, with the strength cluster of Alpha being pretty rigid on the squat, bench press, weighted pull up and deadlift, and the hypertrophy cluster being in the 4-8 range of TOTAL movements.  Bravo, being absent of the demand for a strength cluster, allots for 6-12 movements to be selected.  If you recall from Grey Man, there are a total of 4 strength movements each day (2 trained on day A, 2 on day B) and 6 (max) supplemental cluster movements (3 on day A, 3 on day B).  This results in a total of 10 movements…which meant, when it came time to design my hypertrophy clusters for Bravo, I could just select all 10 movements from Grey Man and call it good.  Not only did this require no thinking/tinkering on my part, but it ALSO meant that whatever I did on Bravo was going to have direct and immediate carryover for whenever I transitioned back to Grey Man.

 

**HOW I STRUCTURED THE TRAINING**

Hah!  As if I have monkey/typewriter funding

 

With Grey Man, my day A was Squat, Axle Strict Press (overhead), Incline DB bench, chins and Glute Ham Raises.  My day B was Low handle trap bar lift, axle bench press, dips, lever belt squat and axle curls.  Because Bravo trains 4x a week, there was no way to allow for a minimum full day of rest between days while staying within the 7 day structure of the cycle, which meant the same muscles could NOT be trained on Day A and B (according to the rules of the program).  To make this happen, I effectively created an “anterior chain/posterior chain” split, or a full body push/pull split.  My day A for Bravo was Squat, Lever Belt Squat, Axle Strict Press, Axle Bench Press, Incline DB Bench, and Dips.  This left a Day B that was Trap Bar Pulls, Chins, Curls and GHRs…which WAS 10 total moves, but somewhat imbalanced between the two days.  I contemplated removing flat bench from day A, as it felt redundant with all the other pressing on that day, but after running day A the first time as written and seeing how outstanding awesome it was, I settled on throwing in reverse hypers on Day B.  I had been doing them on my non-lifting days when running Grey Man, so now they were legitimately established into the protocol.

 

Because you’re allowed 1-2 minutes of rest between sets, and because the workouts repeat twice in the week but with higher percentages on the second workout, I tried as hard as possible to stick with strict 1 minute rests for the first two workouts of the week.  This way, I had some leeway to creep into that 2 minute mark later in the week when the weights were heavier.  If I took max rests at the start, I had nowhere to “hide” on those second workouts. 

 

Similarly, because the plan called for 4-5 sets, I stuck with 4 sets for this first cycle.  It gave me the option to keep the weight the same and do 5 sets on the next cycle, or up the weight and stick with 4 sets.

 

**CONDITIONING**

Not as much of this as you would think

 

Conditioning during Specificity phases is a departure from general mass.  Whereas I was going 1 hour of walking twice a week, alongside getting in much leisure walking, specificity calls for 1-2 high intensity sessions per week.  These sessions do not exceed 20 minutes, and are focused on getting the heart rate high and then letting it return before starting the whole process again: interval training.  I took to doing hill sprints once a week and then “Reset 20s” on my Bas Rutten Body Action System (basically a free standing heavy bag) once a week.  The sprints were doing on Wed, between lifting workouts (trained on Mon/Tue/Thurs/Fri), while reset 20s were on weekends (typically Sundays).  I still engaged in leisure walking as often as I could, not for the sake of the program, but because it’s one of my favorite physical activities to do and it was imposing no recovery demands on me.

 

I enjoyed the higher intensity work as a departure from the low intensity stuff.  The workouts were short and I could squeeze them in a bit easier on my schedule.  It took a lot of self control to NOT try to push them harder/longer, but I’m trying REALLY hard to comply with the instructions and give this an honest approach.

 

**WHAT WAS UP WITH MY LOWER BACK?**

 

I don't understand why this is so hard to understand

I’d like to be brief here, but this check in is already getting out of hand.  Prior to even starting Tactical Barbell, my body was wrecked as a result of prepping for my most recent strongman competition, which I detailed in my last write up.  Biggest issue I was dealing with was some intense hip pain, which would, in turn, force me to squat VERY slowly, which ended up loading up my lower back quite a bit. I found a solution in the form of reverse hypers, HOWEVER, like many tragic stories, eventually the cure became the poison, and I was doing reverse hypers too often with too much load.  Along with this, when I first began eating carnivore back in Mar of 2023, I completely changed my squat form, going from low bar, belted, moderate stance width powerlifting legal depth to VERY high bar, no belt, close stance, rock bottom squats.  I did this because I was going to be losing weight, and I didn’t want to see my numbers on the squat fall, so I decided to use an entirely new style of squat so I could actually progress on that WHILE weight dropped.  However, this style of squat TOTALLY doesn’t suit my body, with a short torso and long legs, and I would end up loading up my lower back quite a bit to maintain form WHICH, without a belt, just compounded things.  There were a few other factors at play as well, but ultimately I was just slamming my lower back with too much stimulus and never giving it time to recover.

 

So what I did during Specificity Bravo was bring back the belt in limited dosages.  Since workouts repeat in a week while percentages increase, I would do the first week’s workout WITHOUT a belt, and the second week’s workout WITH a belt.  This gave me a chance to still groove beltless work and get whatever benefits are associated with that, while also allowing me to belt up and reduce lower back fatigue on the heavier workouts, right before my 2 day break on the weekend.  I also reduced the weight I was using on my reverse hyper warm-ups, and went from training the reverse hyper 7x a week to 4-5x.  One other change I made was, instead of using the ab wheel after every workout (more on that in a bit), alternated between ab wheel and hanging leg raise every other training day.  Switching up the stimulus seemed to go a long way.

 

**WHERE I DEVIATED**

I try to keep mine cheeky and fun

 

Minimally.  I am really trying to give this program a fair shake.  I included ab and rear delt training on every lifting day (ab wheel/hanging leg raise and band pull aparts), and I entertained the idea of using the prowler vs doing sprinting, but so far I’ve stuck with the recommendations.  I do train martial arts 3x a week, and I engage in as much leisure walking as I can, but that’s about it as far as the training does.

 

As for the nutrition…

 

**THE NUTRITION**

THIS is best in life

 

I am still sticking with the protocol I was using the last time I wrote about this: protein sparing modified fast on weekdays, leading up to one big meal in the evening.  On weekends, I eat two meals: a breakfast in the morning and an evening meal.  When I eat, its carnivore.  I’m eating this way because it’s been my favorite way to eat.  I love feasting, and I don’t care about eating frequently.

 

**RESULTS**

Pretty much like this, without having to send in box top receipts

 

In total, I’ve been following Mass Protocol for 12 weeks, and as of the start of the 12th week I’m up 9lbs, having started at 79.1kg and weighing in at 83.2kg.  I apologize for mixing pounds and kilos, but my bathroom scale is stuck in kilos for some reason.  And again: I have gained this weight WITHOUT macro or calorie counting, on a VERY low carb diet, with one big meal a day on weekdays.  Pretty much eating the wrongest way possible.

 

Along with that, I’m absolutely getting stronger.  When I first started Mass Protocol, I did 4x8x285 on the squat as part of a superset with 4x8 sets of axle strict press.  After the set of squats, I’d rest 1 minute before starting the press, and then I’d rest 1 minute from the press to start the next set of squats.  So I was getting well over 2 minutes of rest between sets, and by the end of those 4 sets, I legit thought I would have to quit lifting, as I was in so much pain and so exhausted.  On the start of the first workout of the third week of Specificity Bravo (12 weeks total on Tactical Barbell), I did 4x8x285 with 1 minute strict rests between sets with MUCH faster squats and rapidly transitioned to 4 sets of belt squats with the same rest periods.  My pressing strength continues to climb as well. 

 

Suffice to say: I’m a fan of this program, and excited to continue running it through April.