IT'S NOT SCIENCE, IT'S MAGIC...THE GATHERING PART II

Welcome back readers!  In the previous installment of this series, we discussed the basics of the game Magic the Gathering and it's application to the world of physical transformation.  Read up here, if you missed out

https://mythicalstrength.blogspot.com/2025/10/its-not-science-its-magicthe-gathering.html

Let’s just keep on exploring this metaphor now.  If mana is our power source, we tap it to cast spells, and then we have to wait until our next turn to be able to untap the land and then play another one from our hand, we just observed how MtG explained progressive overload, recovery and work capacity…in a game BLATANTLY for nerds.  Check out the cycle: you start with 1 land, you play one basic spell, and now you’re out of mana until the next turn.  The next turn, you get to untap that land (recover), play a new land (build your work capacity), and play a BIGGER spell (progressively overload).  And this cycle will continue each turn ASSUMING you keep drawing lands to play.  What does drawing lands to play mean?  It means SMARTLY doing the programming necessary to ensure that your work capacity improves to be able to match the output you wish to achieve.  If you didn’t put enough lands in your deck to be able to ensure you’re able to keep playing lands each turn, you’re going to eventually exhaust your ability to play bigger and bigger spells.  We see this phenomenon in physical transformation: dudes who REFUSE to take a GPP phase in their training, who just keep running up against the same wall over and over again because they quite simply don’t have the physical capacity to recover from their training and put in MORE input to receive more output.  This is the dude that has had only 3 lands in play for the past 17 turns and has a hand FULL of cards requiring 4 or more mana: they’ll just keep casting the same 3 mana spells and discarding better cards because they’re unfit to play them.

Eventually you need to do a training cycle that hits the legs Strong Guy...

 

The metaphor just keeps going though, because check this out: in the old days of Magic, we had something referred to as “mana burn”.  Basically, if you tapped a land for mana but ended up not using it, you would end up losing life equal to the amount of unused mana you had at the end of the turn.  Sometimes, we’d use this mechanic to exit out of a game we no longer wished to play, but otherwise it was a mechanic that could be carefully manipulated by crafty players to ensure the demise of their opponent.  But in the world of physical transformation, we see that MtG has explained the concept of overtraining/overreaching to us.  Mana is the source of our power: it’s our energy vested toward our goal of “winning”.   Consequently, if we put more effort than our spells can handle, we end up losing some of our own life in the process.  Mana burn is one of the clearest demonstrations of the axion “just because you can doesn’t mean that you should”.  If you are running a “3 mana workout” as it were, you do NOT benefit by putting in 5 mana worth of effort into it.  If your training program calls for 3 light sets of 60% because it’s dissipating fatigue to set you up for a bigger effort, doubling the reps or upping the percentage just because you “feel good” is just giving you some mana burn.  Oh my goodness I really love how this keeps on working.

 

In fact, let’s just discuss how life works in Magic and in…well, life.  The life total of Magic is a total representation of our training age, whereas the deck that we’re playing with is a representation of our chronological age.  Just as we observed with mana burn, some training decisions are going to make us age a bit faster than others.  The game ends when our life reaches zero, and depending on how some of you play the game, you may only be on card 14 of a 60 card deck by the time you get there: never even coming CLOSE to realizing the potential that was within your deck.  Other, smarter, craftier players may actually find themselves at risk of losing the game by running out of cards in their deck while their life total is STILL quite high.  These are those folks in life who found a way to train up until the day they die: the Jack LaLannes of the world, who made fitness a lifetime priority.  Consequently, there are some spells in the game specifically designed to give us MORE life: these are those smart training/nutritional/lifetime decisions that give us a bit more of an extension on our training age.  Basically, Dan John these days is a white mana Magic player, giving us all the tools necessary to try to draw the very last card out of our deck.  Inversely, the black mana of Magic is known as the “sacrifice” color, where players frequently trade away their life total in order to obtain greater power and ability within the game.  These are those training, nutrition, lifestyle and (most likely) pharmacological decisions we make that allow us to fly quite possibly too close to the sun in our pursuit for physical transformation. 

Though water is typically associated with blue mana, make no mistake: this is pure black mana madness

But let’s dive into THAT discussion a little bit as well.  I’ve written previously on this very topic of MtG, how “not losing is not the same thing as winning”, and it’s worth exploring the interplay that can exist between black and white mana (yes, there are other colors in MtG, but they don’t have the duality we’re looking for here, especially when we consider black and white are the exact “yin and yang” colors).  As we discussed, those white mana spells that give us life can most certainly allow us to make fitness a lifetime activity, playing until we run out of cards…but that means we still lost the game.  We WIN the game by reducing the OTHER play to 0 life or exhausting THEIR library of cards.  Which is exactly what the black mana cards can do for us: we can make some sacrifices to our own life total in order to achieve greater power in the game and actually achieve some sort of victory.  But, of course, we run the risk of sacrificing TOO MUCH in the pursuit of victory and ultimately self-destructing before we ever actually achieve our goal.  Quite clearly, we need some semblance of balance between the two forces here.  We need to tactfully employ those black mana spells in the right time and situation WHILE having some manner of white mana spells readily available to undo or, at least, reduce the damage we do to ourselves in the process.  We don’t need to make recovery THE highest priority of our training: RESULTS should be the priority.  However, self-preservation needs to at least FACTOR into our planning process.  If we just spam black mana spells all the time, we burn out, and if all we do is focus on gaining life, we get to die having not actually achieved our goal.  Somewhere in the middle is a reality wherein we got to actually accomplish some physical transformation while also living long enough to actually enjoy it.

IT'S NOT SCIENCE, IT'S MAGIC...THE GATHERING

Settle in folks: this is going to be a long one and an excessively nerdy one, because I had this rambling thought enter my brain at about 0450 this morning after a poor night of sleep due to getting up to take care of our new puppy at 0200 (he’s an adorable male pug named “Luigi”, continuing with my nerdiness).  In fact, in the process of writing this, I realized there’s no way I could contain it within one post that anyone would actually READ in any one sitting, so I’ll chunk it out and give you a chance to marinade on it once a week, similar to John McCallum’s “Keys to Progress” series. 

Based on this artwork, at least SOMEONE over at Wizards of the Coast is a fan of being jacked

Once again, it turns out that ALL games play by the same rules and, fundamentally, physical transformation IS just one of many games we play in life.  In turn, allow me to walk you through how the journey of physical transformation mirrors the game “Magic the Gathering”, first by giving you a crash course in some pre-2000s MtG (because I’m old school like that and don’t like learning new rules) and then bloviating on all the parallels that exist between the two.  For those of you well versed in the gameplay, I apologize for how my brief oversite is going to butcher something you’ve most likely wasted FAR too much time and money on (I know I sure did: this was like heroin for middle schoolers), and for those of you NOT familiar with the game, I apologize for making you read about how to play Magic the Gathering, much like I’m sure I annoyed my father for years trying to explain to him how cool the newest card in my collection was.  So go ahead and grab your PBJs with the crust loving cut off by your mom and your favorite flavor of Capri Sun, because we’re going back to the 90s to learn how the nerds actually figured out how to get jacked WITHOUT relying on science, but, instead, on magic.

 

Ok, my attempt at the briefest of overviews here.  A MtG match is supposed to be a fight between two wizards that are casting spells at each other.  The deck of cards is effectively a spellbook: you start off with 7 cards in your hand and draw a card each turn.  Within this deck, you have land cards: these are the source of your power, referred to as “mana”.  Without lands, you can’t cast any spells: you need mana to cast spells.  You get to play 1 land per turn, meaning that, at the start of the game, you don’t have much power, but as the game goes on, your power increases IF you keep drawing enough lands to be able to play 1 each turn.  Consequently, low power spells require small amounts of mana, and bigger spells require more mana.  To obtain the mana from your lands, you “tap” them (literally turn them sideways), indicating that they have been used, and, in turn, cannot be used again until the next turn, when you get to “untap” them.  Spells themselves range from summon spells (creatures that will fight for you), enchantments (spells that have impacts that last the entire time they are present), and sorceries/instants (spells that have impacts that only last for that turn/moment in time).  Each turn, a player can cast a spell like those listed and/or use some of those summoned creatures to attack the other player/their creatures.  Players each have a total of 20 life to start with, and the game is won when one player either runs out of life or runs out of cards in their deck.  Yes: there is MUCH more to it than that, but that’s enough for now.

I can feel it through the screen

Ok, so now the parallels.  The deck of Magic the Gathering is a representation of genetics AND lifestyle.  We quite literally have to “play the hand we are dealt” in life: that’s genetics.  Sometimes, we draw a great hand and are afforded advantages the other player can’t fathom, and sometimes, we draw a terrible hand and know, from the get-go: it’s going to be a rough game.  We can’t change our genetics, but we CAN set ourselves up to MAXIMIZE our genetics to the greatest extent possible.  In MtG, this is “deckbuilding”.  Because, yes, you CAN just play a random deck slapped together with just the most basic of essentials (reference my post on “starter decks”), but you can ALSO take the time to plan out a deck, select cards that work best with your playstyle, ensure you a solid ratio of lands to spells in order to not find yourself in a situation where you have too much land and not enough spells or vice versa, and ultimately have some sort of logical strategy to win.  For those of us in the physical transformation game, this means things like taking nutrition seriously, our early adolescent athletic history (did you play World of Warcraft until you were 18 or did you actually play some sports?) figuring out the movements that work for our physiology (a 7’2 basketball player probably doesn’t need to squat to powerlifting legal depth), getting adequate sleep, regular sunlight exposure, reduced life stress, regular low intensity activity, etc.  Quite literally, we “stack the deck” such that we can realize the maximum potential of our genetics, so that, even as we play the hand we are dealt, we put ourselves in a situation such that the odds are we’ll have at least a DECENT hand to play.  Some folks are blessed with incredible genetics yet do so little to maximize them that they’re just flashes in the pan: rising to the top of the sport for a year or 2 before crashing HARD and completely fading from existence, while others may not have the best cards but are so talented at managing them that they can play a LONG time among the top of their peer groups.  And some folks are able to pull off both and just absolutely curb stomp the world for an ungodly amount of time.

 

Let’s dive further now.  As I wrote earlier, you start off with 7 cards in your hand, representing effectively how the interplay of genetics and proper prior planning have you set you up for your own personal “ground zero” before you start your physical training journey.  From here, we get to play our first land and quite possibly cast our first spell, representing our first foray into training.  Well, as discussed, these first few spells are going to be VERY basic spells, as that’s what a small amount of mana will afford you.  This is going to be a basic goblin with power and toughness of 1 (it can give and take 1 damage), or a simple spell that does 3 damage to the other wizard, or little things along those lines.  This represents those VERY basic and fundamental workouts we do at the start of our journey.  Why?  Because they’re enough!  You don’t NEED more than that at the start of the game, because, quite frankly, if you DID get more than that, the game wouldn’t last very long, and it wouldn’t be very fun.  Yes, there ARE some folks out there painfully looking for ways to win MtG in one turn, just like the dudes that are out there searching the internet for THE most optimal training and nutrition program out there before they even START training…but neither of those dudes will ever actually be able to have the FUN of “playing the game”.  And, in that regard, they won’t get the benefits OF playing the game: fun, or, in the case of physical transformation: results.  We need to settle in for a few turns to be able to accumulate some more mana to cast some bigger spells.

The irony that this dude was researching the optimal way to gain weight

Alrighty folks, there's a LOT more discussion to be had here, so stay tuned for next week.  

ARMOR BUILDING FORMULA II REVIEW

Like Terminator 2, it's rare for the sequel to surpass the first

Dan John released the sequel to his Armor Building Formula book last week, and I promptly purchased it the day I discovered it was available and read the whole damn thing in one sitting immediately afterward.  Much like my first time reading Super Squats, I found myself saying “I’ll just read the next chapter” over and over again until suddenly I had run out of book.  Suffice it to say, I’m giving away the end of this review by saying right now that, at $17.99 (2 dollars cheaper than the first book), it’s 100% worth buying and reading, irrespective of if you have any intention of running the Armor Building Formula at all.  Just like the Easy Strength Omnibook, though ABFII is premised around the Armor Building Formula, it contains so much general Dan John wisdom and awesomeness that you’re bound to walk away with SOMETHING worthwhile after you make your way through it and, most likely, you’ll have the bug to run one of Dan’s programs when you’re done.  I know I always do.  Anyway, onto the review.

 

WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT?

 

This actually sums it up pretty well

The Armor Building Formula itself is exactly as Dan John describes it: bodybuilding for real people.  That is to say, people with jobs, family obligations, and lives outside of the weightroom.  Armor Building Formula II is not the second edition of Armor Building Formula, but, instead, a sequel to it.  As such, it presupposes that you already know the material from the first book, to include the kettlebell AND barbell programs, and now expands upon it with a variety of different ideas, protocols, tweaks, and some sharing of different manners it’s been implemented by other readers/users.  It’s similar to Jim Wendler’s “5/3/1 Beyond” compared to the original 5/3/1 book.  It contains ways to implement the ABF while training only on weekends, the ABF for fat loss (Dan’s majority focus these days, given his 4 year long journey through that process), ABF for the over 55 crowd, integrating ABF and Easy Strength, ABF in a seasonal approach, and many other side tangents and useful tidbits.

 

WHAT THIS BOOK ISN’T ABOUT

 

Yeah, none of this

This is NOT the book for becoming Mr. Olympia.  People have a tendency to read Dan’s programs and go “that’s it?!”  Yes, it is: because it’s ENOUGH.  Which is an idea that Dan talks about in the book.  The delta between the kind of training necessary to simply elicit hypertrophy and improve your quality of life vs the kind of training necessary to absolutely maximize your physical potential is a SIGNIFICANT delta, and it’s not going to be accomplished by going from 3 sets of 10 to 5 sets of 10.  For people that want to train twice a day, six days a week for 2 hours per session, there are books out there and gurus who will gladly fleece you.  Dan’s book never pretends to be the book to get you to the top of the physique pyramid.  Instead, it’s the book that gives you the tools you need in order to succeed at improving your physique while also giving you the permission to go ahead and still live your life.

 

THE CONS

 

The thing is, I'd listen to this story coming from Dan

I know it’s atypical to start with the negatives of a book in a review, but I’m honestly going to be gushing about this positives of this so much I figured I may as well just get these out of the way and not let them detract from why I enjoyed this book so much.

 

·       I literally was in the middle of re-reading the first ABF book when Dan released the second one, which meant I had a very clear ability to compare the two.  In doing so, you will find that Dan repeats stuff from the first book in the second one.  HOWEVER, Dan did not just lazily copy and paste sections from the first book into the second, as a means to pad the book.  Instead, Dan has done something that I’ve been guilty of as well in my own blog: he re-wrote ideas and stories he’s previously expressed elsewhere.  I know that I’ve literally re-written the same blog post on 2 non-consecutive occasions (“More Trouble Than You’re Worth” and “Defeating the Prisoner’s Dilemma”) wholly unaware that I was doing so, and if you listen to Dan’s podcast, you’ll know that he repeats stories and concepts previously expressed with no questions.  This is no fault of Dan’s: if you have a tool that works, you keep using it when the situation arises that requires it.  You don’t get a new tool for the same job.  However, if you ARE familiar with Dan’s work from the previous book, you may feel that you’re getting “shorted”, since some of the book repeats from the previous.  In the case of myself, I’ve said it before: Dan could write a phonebook and I’d read it cover to cover.  He’s got a way with words.

 

·       Not-insignificant portions of the book are comprised of graphs/lists/charts.  They are useful, not simply put there for the sake of bulk, ala Rodney Dangerfield’s character in “Back to School” beefing up his homework.  But, once again, for someone looking at the page number total and expecting a certain volume of reading, you may be disappointed.  Which, again, is a good sign: you wish there was even MORE book to be read.

 

·       As far as editing goes, the book starts out VERY strong and toward the end it seems the effort reduced a little.  Little typos, grammatical errors, a sentence that starts and ends the same way (something like “a good idea is to fast regularly is a good idea”), etc.  Given the state of my blog, I’m not going to hold anyone’s feet to the fire over editing, but I’ve seen enough people cry over Jim Wendler’s work that I figure I’d bring it up.

 

 

THE PROS

 

Honestly, just the nodding fatherly approval of this man is enough

·       “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is an incredibly true statement when it comes to Dan and his work.  I’ve been reading Dan John for at least 17 years, which I know because my wife and I took a cruise for our first anniversary and I bought “Never Let Go” on kindle and drove her nuts because I was glued to my kindle for the majority of the trip, devouring Dan’s words.  However, I was also still a punk 22 year old kid at that point (man time flies) and so much of Dan’s “reasonable, sustainable, repeatable” work fell on deaf ears, while I instead inhaled his stories of the Velocity Diet, tabata front squats and squatting 50 reps with bodyweight on your back.  However, as I grow wiser with experience, I’m so thankful to still have Dan there slinging the same wisdom now that I can actually digest and appreciate it.  If you’re an aging meathead like me, or perhaps a younger meathead ready to learn from the experience of others, this book is going to equip you with the tools necessary to train for the rest of your life WITHOUT having to have quite as many visits to the orthopedic surgeon.

 

·       This is honestly a total “no excuses” book, because no matter your situation, Dan has A way for you to be able to train.  If you only have 1 KB, Dan has you covered.  Same with mixed KBs.  Same if you can only train 1 or 2 days per week.  Same if you’re old, young, male, female, recovering from injury, etc etc.  And it’s paired with some no-nonsense simple nutrition and lifestyle habits (get adequate sleep, drink water, manage stress, etc) stuff that is going to have BIG impacts over the long haul.  Dan is the master at zooming out, finding the stuff that REALLY matters, and emphasizing that.  About the only negative to say about this book is that it would have been so valuable during the pandemic.

 

 

·       Because it’s a no-excuses book, progression is a bit more in the grey compared to something like Tactical Barbell, which can be a pro or con depending on your personality.  I know a lot of folks demand Dan lay down hard rules on how to progress with his programs, but he makes a compelling argument that, without being able to put hands on you and actually get to know YOU, the reader, he’s not going to be able to give you a hardset rule on how much weight to add, how many reps, how many sets, etc.  He leaves it up to you while still providing some solid bumpers to help guide you along the way.  Ultimately, this means, again, you have no reason NOT to be able to employ the system and find ways to progress and grow.

 

·       Dan includes a Q&A section that goes on to answer a LOT of common questions about ABF and help “unstick” people that have gotten a little too fixated on finer details and small obstacles on the way to progress.  There’s no way Dan can foresee all the issues people will encounter along the way (such as needing to explain that, between sets, one is supposed to put the kettlebells DOWN rather than hold onto them), but this should at least curtail a majority of the issues that come up along the way.

 

SHOULD YOU BUY THIS BOOK?

 

It's no lose!

Yes.  100%.  Dan has been on a streak, starting with the Easy Strength Omnibook, and from that, Easy Strength For Fat Loss, Armor Building Formula and now Armor Building Formula II we’ve been blessed to have some of Dan’s greatest work and thoughts all consolidated into one location.  I still am a major fan of Mass Made Simple, as a book and a program, and feel like that deserves some time in the spotlight as well as far as mass building goes, but for sustainable, reasonable and repeatable, the ABF is a winner, and all 5 of those books will easily provide you with the tools to train for the rest of your life.

 

 

LIFE GRADES ON ATTENDANCE

College was good TO me, but was not good FOR me.  I went to an all boy catholic high school, with a very regimented schedule.  I was a 4 year student athlete, starting with football my freshman year before transitioning to wrestling in my sophomore year onward, and when I wasn’t in season, I was in the marching band, and after I got home from school, we would quickly scarf down dinner and get to Tae Kwon Do practice.  This meant that my day was pretty much mapped out from morning to bed time, and I had minimal distractions from the fairer sex to contend with.  I then enrolled in a university with a 70:30 female to male ratio with NO wrestling team nor a band that wanted anything to do with me.  Suffice to say: my schedule was suddenly freed up, and I had many distractions from academia.  One of my classes, in particular, I had cracked the code on: I only needed to go every OTHER class.  Why?  Because our professor would always spend the FIRST half of class going over what he covered in the LAST class, and then would introduce new material in the second half, which, if you’re doing the calculations, means I had TWO opportunities to learn that new material.  However, the only reason this plan worked was because, unlike high school, this professor did NOT grade on attendance.  As long as I was able to demonstrate mastery of the material come the time of the test, my grade would reflect that.  Life, however, is not as gracious as that professor: irregular attendance will ultimately result in a failing grade.  Because folks, high school was honestly trying to teach you a lesson more valuable than the academic material we learned in undergrad: life grades on attendance.

Thankfully for me, THIS isn't true

 

Much like Woody Allen’s quote that “80% of success is showing up” and Dan John echoing a similar sentiment, irregular attendance in the pursuit of our goals is going to result in a failure to achieve them.  Because unlike academics: we have NO option to “cram before the exam”.  This meme is ever present in our culture, with one of my favorite movies of all time, Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School”, giving an outstanding montage of academic cramming before a major comprehensive exam. I know I’ve been guilty of employing the same as well, the notion of filling the brain to the brim of all manner of fact and figure relating to a subject, showing up, purging it all onto a piece of paper, and promptly forgetting everything for the rest of your life.  The outcome of attempting to cram for physical transformation is going to have the same ephemeral result.  We observe this frequently in training facilities: those folks who failed to attend throughout the majority of the year now DESPERATELY trying to cram before the exam of some sort of beach vacation or spring break or homecoming or whathaveyou, slamming 4 hour training sessions on diets of lettuce and water in a futile attempt to be ripped and jacked in a matter of weeks.  At best, they’ll lose about 4lbs, the majority of it being water, while bearing the looks of someone tweaked out of their mind on stimulants, dry, wiry, haggard and scrawny.  But it gets worse…

 

Not only is attempting to cram ineffective: it actively sabotages you.  In one of the cruelest ironies of physical transformation, the harder we try, the worse we get, like some sort of Chinese finger trap.  Oh sure, hard training IS important in order to achieve physical transformation, but it needs to be hard ENOUGH, and once we cross the threshold of “enough”, we immediately start UNDOING out progress.  As per Dan John’s quadrants, when we enter the realm of “train hard-diet hard”, we enter a realm that is ultimately unsustainable: we are existing on borrowed time.  And when we borrow, we ALWAYS pay interest.  As we continue to push our bodies beyond their ability to recover, we incur a debt that will be paid off once we inevitably crash, resulting in a rebound that quite often leaves us WORSE than when we started.  The crash diet we followed in order to try to lean out quickly had us drop significantly more lean mass than had we simply attended diligently, and when the cravings eventually overcome out willpower (which they will), the weight we put BACK on will NOT be mostly lean mass, meaning that we will end up WORSE than how we started: with more fat mass and less lean mass.  To say nothing of how whatever “strength” we accumulated through our ridiculous peaking program will rapidly deplete and our shattered and broken body will need to be rebuilt before we can train reasonably again, taking away training time that could have been better spent on the path to something more sustainable.

Sunvabitch, MtG figured this out so long ago...

 

The meme of the “lazy genius” is so appreciated in our culture because it re-affirms something that we WISH was true: that we can just coast through life without effort and STILL pass the test.  We deride those who actually dutifully attend class, do the homework, work on the project throughout the year rather than saving it all for the last minute as “try-hards”, nerds, and other such derogatory terms, primarily because we want to deny the reality that life grades on attendance…but it is quite simply true.  Large, all out efforts engage in irregular frequency will never beat out consistency over a long stretch.  And the thing is, those large all out efforts MUST be engaged in irregular frequency.  Simply by nature of the demands placed upon us, they’re unsustainable by definition, so attempts to pursue them are destined to fail.  This does not mean that they cannot be pursued every once in a while, when one is in need of some manner of shake up, but to attempt to live in such a manner is an attempt to be truant through the process of physical transformation, and life will be quite cruel in their employment of truancy officers. 

 

And, in truth, we can even observe these lessons IN the realm of academia.  I will shamefully admit that it took until my senior year of undergrad to realize the benefit of gradually working on the end of term paper over the course of the year, rather than saving it all until the night before it was due.  I had convinced myself that the latter approach was the superior one, primarily because I wanted to delude myself into believing this to affirm my own procrastination and laziness, but I operated under the premise that writing it all at once would mean all the information was fresh in my mind and the narrative of the paper would be comprehensively written in one sitting, maintaining continuity.  However, when I took the time to work on the paper gradually, I was able to pace myself and give each section I worked on my absolute and total focus, and when I had reached a point where my work quality was deteriorating due to fatigue, I’d simply put the paper away for the day and come back to it when I was ready for more.  When the day before the paper was due arrived, I was already complete with my work AND had already had the time to review it thoroughly, make revisions, and include new material I had discovered along the way, whereas, previously, all that “post work” had to be forfeited due to scheduling issues.  I also observed that I had earned the ire of many of my classmates, who wondered why I wasn’t staying up all night using the on-campus restaurant’s wifi (this was mid 2000s, so wifi was still limited) and mainlining energy drinks trying to condense an entire academic semester into 10 hours of work.  Because we WANT to believe in the lazy genius…but it doesn’t work.  Because life grades on attendance.

Although I suppose there ARE other ways to get the paper done...

 

And that paper is an allegory for our own results in physical transformation.  You will earn the ire of those who are irregularly attending when you’ve been dutifully attending for decades, because they THINK they’re putting in more effort simply because, during the brief periods that they DO attend, it’s quite intense…to the point of sabotage.  The final product they develop is ultimately inferior to the one developed gradually over time.  For much like how we shut down the paper when the quality starts to decline, we shut down the training and nutrition when high quality is no longer being produced, meaning we are ONLY the product of high quality inputs, resulting in high quality outputs.  Because life is grading us on attendance.  Even if we KNOW the material, even if we can demonstrate mastery of it, even if we can pass the test, if we haven’t shown up to every class along the way, we’re going to get a failing grade.

YOU ALREADY HAVE THE TOOLS

 

A phrase taught to me by one of my mentors was “learned helplessness”, which effectively describes a phenomenon wherein a group of people, fully capable of solving their own problems with resources already available to them, find themselves in a state where they feel powerless to proceed.  They have, ultimately, learned how to shoot down their own approaches before they have a chance to succeed and, unless hand-held and stepped through the problem solving process, believe themselves to be powerless to being the masters of their own fate.  This is a situation that I frequently observe among trainees in the realm of physical transformation: this self-fulfilling prophecy that they lack the skills, tools and resources to be able to overcome whatever obstacles they face on their quest for transformation.  What I hope to be able to establish here is that we all already possess all the tools we need in order to achieve success: we may simply need to go about applying them in unconventional manners in order to obtain the results we seek.  Much like how one may find themselves screwing in screws with a butterknife because their screwdriver is MIA, or how they leave up their Nightmare Before Christmas Halloween decorations because they realize they can also double as Christmas Decorations (and if it’s Jack and Sally, you can leave them up through Valentine’s Day too!), or how Wendy’s figured out that it can make chili by taking unsold burger patties and letting them stew for a day, sometimes all it takes is a little creativity in order for us to effectively utilize the tools we ALREADY have in order to solve what appear to be “new” problems.  Allow me to demonstrate.

Hopefully with fewer mistakes

 

One of the earliest barriers to entry in the realm of physical transformation is, quite literally, the barrier to entry: the actual entering of the gym itself.  This is primarily because new trainees often find themselves intimidated at the prospect of physically entering the gym and being among a group of people that are advanced in the ways of physical transformation.  People that are bigger, stronger, leaner, fitter, and ultimately far more comfortable in the training environment are off-putting and intimidating to the new, soft trainee standing there in their Walmart mesh training shorts and bright white New Balance sneakers looking up “how to” lat pulldown videos on youtube.  Often, trainees want to train BEFORE they train: aiming to actually get in shape and comfortable with lifting weights BEFORE they actually join a gym, so that they can “be ready” to join a gym.

 

But folks, we already HAVE the skillset to overcome this anxiety.  I imagine the vast majority of my readers have received SOME manner of formal education (but I do allow for the possibility that some of you were raised by wolves and learned how to read through the help of missionaries, so good on you).  Think about the process of attending a school: when you show up, you are, quite literally, the STUPIDEST person there, SORROUNDED by people that are much smarter than you, because they’ve been going to that school for longer than you have.  You are completely out of your element, the lowest on the totem pole, starting from zero.  How did you overcome the anxiety of this situation?  What coping strategies did you employ?  Would that same strategy not work here, in the gym, under the same circumstance?  All these people that are fitter than you are no different than all those upperclassmen from before: they’re simply people that have been attending for longer than you have.  No one is a superhuman, no one was born that way.  SURE, there are some genetic outliers that had things come more NATURALLY to them, in much the same way that some folks are simply more intelligent than others, but in general: life grades on attendance, and so far yours is minimal.  Rack up a solid streak of no absences and you’ll be in a good way.  As Hank Hill said about Bobby “My boy here might not be the best test taker, but he’s got near perfect attendance”.

Plus he's got nutrition locked DOWN!

 

Note that I’m not saying WHAT that specific strategy is…because I genuinely don’t know how YOU overcame that.  I just know that, somehow, most of us did.  Very few of us showed up to day 1 of Kindergarten, completely melted down and got locked in a psych ward until we turned 18 (and those that did most likely aren’t reading a blog about physical transformation written weekly by a lunatic).  Or, for those of us that got an undergrad degree, show up on campus the first day, observe PhD students, and decided to just go quit and become tattoo artists instead.  And same with those of you that have every played some sort of organized sport (possibly as part of a team OF the very school we’re discussing): you showed up to practice on day 1, not knowing how to do anything, surrounded by people that were better than you, but somehow managed to keep attending and get better.  For me, it was the sheer enthusiasm of the prospect of self-improvement that compelled me forward: how awesome that I’m going to get to learn and do new things!  How awesome that I’m going to become better each and every day!  If that wasn’t what helped you succeed, just think about what you DID do to get there…and do that.

 

I find a similar situation occurs when it comes to nutritional compliance.  First, a discussion on language, because we talk about “cheat meals” or “cheat days”, in reference to “cheating on our diet”.  So here’s the thing: when we cheat in sports or a game, we refer to that to mean “breaking the rules to gain an advantage”.  When one cheats on their diet, they break the “rules” of the diet, but gain no advantage: they actually set themselves BACK.  They regress.  It’s more like cheating and getting CAUGHT: you get penalized.  So, instead, we must understand that a dietary “cheat” is more to be understood in the same manner as cheating in a relationship: it’s a violation of the sanctity of the bounds of the relationship.  It’s unfaithfulness.  One is not remaining faithful to the bounds of their way of eating.

I am SO proud of myself for thinking of this image to tie that whole paragraph together

 

So, in THAT regard, let’s dig deeper there and talk about skillset.  Now, here, I AM being presumptuous of my readers, but I am hoping that many of you have had some manner of long term relationship with another human wherein there was an understanding of faithfulness shared between you.  It doesn’t have to be marriage, or even anything named, but simply an understanding.  Within this relationship, HOW did you manage to “endure” the temptations out there to cheat?  All the other beautiful people that exist in the world, all the other people that you could share a bond with, all the other people that you could have this similar relationship with, what strategies did you employ to SOMEHOW manage to remain faithful in spite of it all?

 

Can we not employ that exact same strategy when it comes to nutritional faithfulness?  Does that sound whacky?  Then maybe you’ve had some poor relationships, either with people or with food.  Think about it: if you have to “white-knuckle” your relationship (with food OR with a person), you KNOW it’s not going to last.  We’ve all seen OR been part of those relationships that are hanging on by a thread that EVERYONE else knows aren’t going to last, where it almost seems like an endurance race of spite between the two entities to see who is going to crack first.  In such an instance, cheating isn’t cheating: it’s an escape hatch.  It’s a way to get OUT.  The only REAL issue with cheating here is that it demonstrates a lack of maturity: an unwillingness to confront the REAL problem and to resolve it by officially terminating the relationship.  Instead, cheating is just seeking MOMENTS of escape before returning back to the failed relationship.

For anyone else, this is a cheat meal.  For Joey, this is remaining faithful.

 

In turn, we discover that the skillset for nutritional compliance is no different from the skillset for relationship compliance: picking the right partner.  Ultimately, we need a compatible relationship: we need to have a relationship with someone/something that we actually RESONATE with on a deep enough level that the prospect of cheating is undesirable, NOT because of the consequences of cheating (ala cheating in a game) but because the relationship itself is so rewarding that we gain NO advantage FROM cheating.  If you’ve ever been in a good human relationship, you understand the positive feeling associated with having another person in your life that is a joy to be with, who makes you better by nature of simply being with you, who evens out your odds and brings you balance as a person, such that your mind exists in a harmonious state wherein the notion of cheating never even enters your thoughtspace.  Much like those who fail diets speak of “food noise”, you have no “cheat noise” when you are in a GOOD relationship: it simply isn’t on your mind.  How we eat needs to model such a relationship: it needs to be an approach that is so infinitely sustainable and natural that we do not exist in a constant anxiety ridden state worried about “going off path” or living in a state of consistent FOMO and regret from restriction.  And much like how not everyday of a human relationship is sunshine and puppies, not every meal of a good way of eating is going to be the best food we’ve ever had in our lives, but it SHOULD be an approach wherein we exist with such inherent contentment that we feel no temptation TO cheat.  The successful strategy for relationship compliance isn’t some sort of psychological trick or biohack to prevent us from being hungry (looking at you GLP-1 agonist): it’s to have a relationship that is so right for who we are that we have no desire TO cheat.

 

And hey, let’s just keep this analogy going, because honestly this could be it’s own entire blog-post but I know that the ones that are just about nutrition tend to go over poorly.  But it’s true that we CAN sometimes intentionally enter into relationships that we KNOW aren’t going to work out for us.  On the human side of things, we refer to these as “flings”, or they could also be hook-ups or one-night-stands, but whatever we’re calling them, these are very much transactional/functional relationships where you’re effectively just extracting as much enjoyment as you can out of another person before you go your separate ways, knowing full well that whatever it is that you have is never going to go the distance.  We see these same things in the world of nutrition.  This is a bodybuilding prep diet, or a gallon of milk a day gaining diet: EXTREME nutritional approaches meant to accomplish a specific goal in a finite amount of time before moving on to the next new thing.  But in either case, we STILL need to employ the same strategy: we need to know when it’s time to call it off, move on, and not look back.  Because much like it’s painful to see one person in a relationship who never got the memo that it was just a fling and nothing serious, it’s VERY hard to observe the trainee who is STILL eating like it’s prep-mode months after the show has ended.  Or the dude who is PERMANANETLY in “gain mode”.  All of these approaches are going to have some short and long term damaging effects to one’s health: psychological or otherwise.  If we engage in these flings, we have to know them for what they are, and know when it’s time to call it quits. 

Because even the strongest men in history knew when to walk away from softshell crab

Holy cow this spiraled on me, and I actually feel like I can keep writing on it, so maybe that’s what I’ll do in the future, but I’ve already written twice as much as I usually do, so let me give you some short words of closing wisdom here.  Much like how the Greeks postulated all narratives are built upon a limited number of universal themes, the obstacles that we encounter in life aren’t nearly as unique as we would like to believe that they are.  Most likely, we have encountered SOMETHING similar before, much earlier in our lives, when we weren’t NEARLY as well equipped to deal with them as we are now, yet somehow we were able to triump THEN.  If we take those same skillsets and strategies and employ our even larger experience and knowledge base, we’re sure to come up with even more superior solutions.

LIKE A DOG WITH KIBBLE

Dogs are amazing.  I grew up with a Dalmation, a total sweetheart that my brother and I named “Zelda”, for obvious reasons for anyone that has read this blog and knows how big of a nerd I was growing up…and presently, as this trend continued with dogs named Kirby, Yoshi, Toadette and a soon to be welcomed into the family Luigi.  We, as a species, do not deserve dogs, and, in turn, we can learn a LOT from them.  They teach us unconditional love, they have a zest for life that is compelling, they know how to play hard, and they tend to be incredible judges of character, because, quite frankly, if my dog doesn’t like you, then I don’t like you either.  But one of the most admirable qualities of a domesticated dog is displayed when you feed them.  Now, before I tell this story, I’m going to warn my readers that I DO feed my dogs kibble, so I apologize if that triggers those of you that ONLY feed your dogs a raw diet of berries and figs that were massaged by virgins from Nepal before blessed by at least 4 different Popes: that’s just not my situation.  But, anyway, if you’ve never owned or fed a dog before, there’s something really incredible to observe whenever you feed them their bowl of kibble: the dog is ALWAYS excited for it.  We feed our dogs twice a day, and as soon as you say “breakfast” or “dinner”, their ears perk up, their eyes get big, they start drooling, and as you walk over to the foodbowl, they are ALL up in your business.  Our female pug, Yoshi, used to do a little prance on her way to the foodbowl, and it got to the point that, if it was even REMOTELY close to food time and you were walking ANYWHERE in the house, that dog would follow you the entire time,  prancing, as if to give you a subtle reminder that it may, in fact, be time to feed her.  Yet, there’s never anything NEW on the menu: it’s ALWAYS the same kibble.  It’s the same kibble it was yesterday, and it’s the same kibble it will be tomorrow…and the dog is SO excited about it.  It cannot WAIT to get that kibble: this is THE highlight of the day, as far as the dog is concerned.  Why can’t WE be like that?  Why can’t WE be like a dog with kibble?

I suppose some of us ARE like that...

Believe me: I get it.  I grew up with the Animal Pak ads of the early 2000s, where Frank McGrath was always slumped over in a hoodie and a pair of workboots in a morose black and white photo, looking like a broken shell of a man while a loaded barbell mocked him inside the confines of what appeared to be the set of a snuff film with one dimly lit dangling light blub adjacent to a water heater and a radiator.  It was a striking visual that told us to “embrace the grind”…but perhaps we focused too much on that “grind” part and not enough on the “embrace”.  We thought we were so cool to SUFFER through the day to day grind of training, but it appears that we completely missed out on what it means to truly embrace something.  Instead of enduring the grind, instead of suffering through the grind, instead of surviving the grind, we should very well WELCOME the grind.  We should be EXCITED for the grind.  Like a dog with kibble, every time that grind shows up, we should be able to think to ourselves “oh boy: I get this AGAIN?!  How many times in a row am I going to be so lucky?!”  It should not be “I HAVE to train”: it should be “I GET to train”.

Just in case you thought I was being hyperbolic describing the ads

 

And like a dog with kibble, the analogy very easily transcends to our own experiences at the dinner table.  WHY are you sitting there, choking down dry chicken breasts and rice with broccoli with no flavor whatsoever?  Because it makes you hardcore to do so?  Because suffering is how we progress?  Here we are flawed in many ways.  For the one: we display a SIGNIFICANT degree of ungratefulness: to be afforded the LUXURY of such an abundance of nutrition that we feel as though we SUFFER when we eat a highly nutritious meal in the pursuit of vanity while others must go without, subsiding on scraps or, simply nothing.  We overstate our own significance here.  And if we could rightly orient our perspective, we could learn to approach this meal like a dog with kibble: so amazed that, somehow, we get to eat AGAIN at a time of our choosing with the food that nourishes us.  But thirdly, we display that we’ve set ourselves up for failure by intentionally pursuing a nutritional strategy that is, flat out, unsustainable.  Any approach that requires willpower to succeed is an approach that is simply not indefinitely sustainable, for willpower itself is a finite resource.  And perhaps this IS a phasic approach to nutrition you are employing, perhaps the intent IS to only do this for a little bit to achieve a goal, but then, as Dan John points out, we must ask the question of “now what?”  What is our plan to move OUT of this unsustainable approach into something that we CAN approach like a dog with kibble?  An approach wherein, each and every time we are presented with the opportunity to partake, we don’t approach with resentment or ennui but, instead, a legitimate excitement.

And yes, I realize that for years I’ve written about how suffering is a necessary part of the process of growing, but understand what is being said here.  This is not to say that, as we are enduring the suffering of the training we must be jubilant, excited and happy. This is a call for that excitement when the time comes to engage IN the suffering.  That we are excited that we GET to train, that we GET to eat, that we are, once again, afforded an opportunity to further our physical transformation and become closer to the ideal image we have of ourselves.  That if we are approaching these situations with dread, with reservations, with resentment, we are simply on an unsustainable path that will have consequences with the rebound inevitably strikes once the willpower is exhausted.  That if we have handcuffed ourselves to a nutritional dogma because it’s “the right one”, if it results in us dreading the experience of eating and never feeling “right”, we will inevitably crash hard as our body claws and scratches it’s way back to what it KNOWS is right for itself.  That if we marry ourselves to a training protocol that just never gels with our psychology, irrespective of how backed it is by science, it will never allow us to realize our true potential, as we will simply never give to it the amount of diligence it is due.  That, if we do not approach our training and nutrition in the same manner a dog approaches it’s kibble every single day, we will be unable to exist in the same naturally blissful state as our canine companions, who never worry about achieving the right macros or getting the correct amount of exercise per day and, instead, are simply out there living a far more authentic life than the majority of us.

See: it's ok to smile

 

We don’t deserve dogs, and they love us so much that they’ll teach us these lessons in spite of that.