DON’T SKIP THE SIDEQUESTS

Anyone who has regularly read this blog most likely knows that my favorite genre of video game is role-playing game (RPG), with an affinity in particular toward western RPGs, because they will allow me to live out my power fantasies and develop a stupidly overstrong character at the expense of all other variables and attributes.  I like Japanese RPGs too, of course, and between those two, my favorite games include the original Fallout, Baldur’s Gate II, Final Fantasy 6 and 7, with, of course, several other honorable mentions, but this is supposed to be a blog about physical transformation rather than video games, so I’ll try to wrangle this back on topic.  What tends to appeal to many RPG fans is that your characters “level up” over time: through the acquisition of experience points, accumulated through a combination of accomplishing objectives and winning battles, the characters in your game get stronger, hardier, more powerful, and more able.  It’s awesome and rewarding to watch your characters grow from those that could get one-shotted by a rogue pack of goblins to a total world ender by the end of the game.  However, in mentioning “by the end of the game”, we acknowledge the fact that these games HAVE beginnings and ends, and between the two points exists the “main quest”, which is supposed to drive you from point to point…but OFF that beat path lay the “side quests”. And folks: we must NOT skip those side quests.  For WITHOUT these quests, we’ll never BECOME that world ender: we simply won’t realize our REAL potential.

If it wasn't true, they wouldn't make memes out of it

 

Alright, so what the hell is a side quest?  Again, western or Japanese RPG, BOTH have a main quest that you need to solve.  Typically, there’s one mega-bad guy that needs to be destroyed.  HOWEVER, along the way, you encounter side quests: jobs/tasks you don’t HAVE to do in order to accomplish the main quest, but if you do them, you get more experience points or goodies (new weapons/armor/items/etc).  These can be as menial as performing pest control to kill some rats to rescuing someone’s children from a group of bandits to deciphering from ancient magical code to all sorts of other stuff, but they’re not required in order to beat the game: they’re just there in case you want to do something else.  However, in DOING these quests, you will end up SO much more powerful by the end of the game compared to if you just try to blitz through to the end of the main quest…and such is true in the realm of physical transformation.

 

I’ve competed in strength sports since 2010, starting with powerlifting, transitioning to strongman, and now I have some recent forays into grappling as well.  It’d be easier to consider the competitions the “main quest” of my training life…but those competitions only happen so frequently.  I can’t ALWAYS be competing.  Additionally, I’ve witnessed first hand what happens when I spend too long in a competition prep phase, as I was training for one comp that ended up getting canceled and then just signed up for another one 2 months later and kept up the same training style.  When it was done, I was so physically broken from the prep that it took about 12 weeks to finally get my body healed up enough to be able to train regularly.  Just like blitzing through the main quest, I got to the “boss fight” and was so woefully underleveled that it took just about everything out of me to win, expending all my value healing items/elixirs and having to spend time grinding again so I could have enough wealth to continue.  Enter: the side quest.

Racing to the end doesn't matter if you get killed by the boss

 

What’s a side quest in the world of physical transformation?  They’re those little challenges we set for ourselves OUTSIDE of whatever our main quest is in the realm of physical transformation that allow us to get bigger/stronger/more powerful WITHOUT advancing the main quest.  Examples would include running the Super Squats program, or Deep Water, or Mass Made Simple, but it doesn’t HAVE to be a program that absolutely crushes your soul.  ANOTHER challenge could be the challenge of actually maintaining program compliance for a WHOLE program.  Not deviating, changing it, “improving it”, etc.  Stack together 12 consecutive cycles of 5/3/1 or Tactical Barbell in a row following the instructions to the letter, or 1 entire year of Conjugate or DoggCrapp.  You could even combine the two, and follow Dan John’s park bench-bus bench thought process of doing 8 weeks of Easy Strength into 6 weeks of Mass Made Simple into another 8 Weeks of Easy Strength into 8 weeks of the Armor Building Formula into 8 weeks of Easy Strength into 4 weeks of the 10k Swing Challenge, not missing a single workout, doing it EXACTLY as laid out, and ALSO getting absolutely crushed during MMS and the 10k swing.  To say nothing of a nutritional intervention side quest, wherein you decide to try out the Velocity Diet, the Vertical Diet, the Steak and Eggs diet, the Carnivore Diet, Intermittent Fasting, Warrior Diet, Ketogenic Diet (in tasty traditional, cyclical and targeted fashions), Apex Predator Diet, Feast/Famine/Ferocity, possibilities abound! 

 

We gain quite literal experience in these instances: it’s no longer about points serving as a proxy to simulate the effect of growth.  And we also grow!  This is real life leveling up! These side quests allow us to experiment, discover new ideas, find out what works and what doesn’t work, and it does so under the codifications of a carefully worked out construction that establishes bumpers and guidelines for us.  For what is the alternative?  In the world of RPGs, that is simply “grinding”: wondering aimlessly through the world, looking for random encounters with roving bands of enemies and defeating them over and over while you SLOWLY accumulate some experience to force some level progressions.  It’s WHY it’s called “grinding”.  It never pays off as much as a side quest, and it’s typically something we resort to when the side quests are all dried up.  In the world of physical transformation, grinding are those periods of training/dieting ennui, where we are just going through the motions or, even worse, when we are left to our own devices and go make up our own training which “seems like a good idea” and just end up getting stupidly hurt, overfatigued, and regress while leaning nothing of value.

Yup

 

Don’t be in a rush to complete the main quest, because once you do, the game is over and you don’t get to play any more.  If you really are having fun playing the game, why not play as much of it as possible?  And grinding isn’t “playing the game”: no one has fun doing that.  But side quests?  Quite often, they can end up being more fun than the main quest itself!  Quite often, THESE are the quests that we remember when looking back fondly at our memories of the game: they’re the quests we talk about with others who enjoyed the game, marveling at some of the twists and turns, the unexpected rewards, the feeling of satisfaction when we take our time to achieve these objectives before returning to the main quest and realizing just how powerful we’ve become through tackling these side quests.  They’re not “add ons”, they’re not annoyances: these are there to enhance our experience and really allow us to fully enjoy our game.