IT’S WHAT YOU DON’T DO

Americans, and possibly other westerners, are obsessed with doing.  We take pride in it: “we’re doers, not talkers!” and other such trite bravado.  We see inaction as sinful and action as virtue, and even I have displayed this mentality with one of my favorite Klingon proverbs of “in battle, make a decision: if it’s a good one, even better”.  However, quite often, it’s the stuff we AREN’T doing that is responsible for our success, while the doing becomes our undoing.  And this fact is the cause of so much cognitive dissonance, because we take so much satisfaction when we are in the process of doing, whereas we experience so much anxiety from not doing.  But, in that regard, the basic premise of physical transformation continues to hold true: physical transformation is an uncomfortable process.  The body transforms BECAUSE of discomfort, as the body is attempting to adapt as a means to avoid this discomfort.  And this will include the discomfort associated with the stuff you AREN’T doing.

In this case: exhaling

 

The fitness industry has latched onto this broken part of our psychology and weaponized it against us in order to make a profit.  Growing up in the 90s in San Diego, I heard radio ads (holy cow what a 90s sentence) for a product called “Metabolife”, which was a miracle weight loss powder.  All you had to do was, stop eating 3 hours before bed, and then mix this powder with water and drink it before bed, and like magic, the fat would just come off.  Hey, what happens if you stop eating 3 hours before bed and DON’T drink the powder?  …oh yeah…but you can’t sell “Don’t eat for 3 hours” to people for fat loss: where is the DOING?!  Where is the ACTION that MAKES the fat loss happen?  Surely it can’t be the INACTION causing this!  And it was the same with the “shock your abs to a six pack” electro stim products sold by infomercial.  Ever notice how those products came packaged with a diet?  What happened if you followed the diet WITHOUT the ab shocker?  Oh yeah: abs.  Because they’re made in the kitchen.  But where is the DOING!?  Same with 8 minute abs, the ab wheel (which is a GREAT product for training abs, but won’t make a size pack happen) and, honestly, the entire “health food” industry.

 

Why health food?  Because it’s not what we eat that is making us healthy: it’s what we AREN’T eating.  We, again, see this trap all the time: people fill their shopping carts with kale and wheatgrass, and chow down on it alongside their Captain Crunch and 5 drinks per evening.  This idea that the “health food” will “undo” the consequences of the unhealthy food.  That drinking a diet coke will undo a Big Mac.  That Manuka honey and protein bars will undo eating out of the vending machine at work.  That slamming a Slim Fast shake alongside a Subway footlong will make us skinnier.  Because, again: now we’re DOING something.  No one wants to believe that the path to health and fitness is traveled by NOT eating the stuff that’s killing us.  No one wants to believe that the health food DOESN’T come in a box with special labeling and mixing instructions: that it’s just ACTUAL food.

We figured this out decades ago...

 

This is why REAL nutritional interventions are successful, irrespective of the specifics of them.  Whole food vegans experience similar health benefits as carnivores when it comes to the initial phases of the intervention, because both AREN’T doing the same thing: eating highly processed hyperpalatable chemically engineered “food like products”.  One is only eating plants, one is eating no plants whatsoever, but both have eliminated the stuff that was actively poisoning and killing them, and their health improves.  And, consequently, you can go on the other end of the spectrum, eating “dirty vegan” or “dirty keto”, living entirely off of Oreos (yes, they’re completely vegan) or Atkins frozen pizza (yes, ALSO a thing), completely following “the rules” of the diet, DOING all the things, and end up in far worse health than you started, because now you’re ONLY living off of hyperprocessed junk.  The only “not doing” that’s happening here is NOT eating actual, real food, which is absolutely setting you up for failure.

 

This, of course, exists in the training world as well, with examples abound.  Both Chris Duffin and Stan Efferding have spoken of how, during their peak performance in the sport of powerlifting, they were training about 3x per week.  But the ENTIRE internet has decided that we NEED to lift 6x a week to get the OPTIMAL muscle protein synthesis: why can’t these dumb strongest humans to eve live figure that out?  Both these dudes were forced into these training frequencies as a result of life circumstances…and both talked about how, with such infrequent training, they were able to RECOVER so much better from the demands on their training, such that they could develop SO much more strength, now that their fatigue was better managed.  It’s the whole reason deloads exist: we let fatigue heal so we can continue to push hard.  Dan John has shared a similar sentiment with the origins of Easy Strength: life as a busy father and teacher confined him to 15 minute workouts 3-5 times a week, and it was during that time he had his best ever performances in throwing the discuss. 

What's the point of training 3 days a week if you can only deadlift 1000lbs?

 

Hell, what we just described is WHY abbreviated training itself became so popular: trainees had been slamming themselves with volume for so long in the pursuit of growth that, when they FINALLY backed off, they were ABLE to grow.  They were SO obsessed with doing that it was their UNdoing.  They had it in their minds that they HAD to do more sets, more workouts, more training, more frequency, more more more…and, ultimately, it was the NOT doing that would get them results.  Stuart McRobert wrote about this exact experience in Brawn, and he was not alone in that era.  What weren’t the trainees doing?  RECOVERING from the training.  Because the recovering WAS the “not doing”, and not doing was so hard to accept.

 

 

Take stock of all the “not doing” you need to be doing.  Stop doing the things that are taking away from your progress.  Stop OVERdoing the things that are supposed to be BRINGING you progress. 

GREATEST HITS ALBUMS SUCK

Full credit to Brandon Crawford over at T-Nation, who pointed out that this would be an excellent blog post topic on the very day I was struggling to come up with something to write.  This delightful lunatic has already taken it upon himself to run “Chaos is the Plan: The Plan” for well over 4 months at this point, so needless to say, I’m a fan of his.  But unto today’s topic: Greatest Hits albums.  We’ve ALL fallen for them.  They seem like a great idea: why not just get ALL the best songs from one band and put it all on one album, and then you get all the best parts and none of the bad ones.  It’s the Jeet Kune Do of music (which, I’ll go off on that tirade one day, believe me): take what it useful and discard what is worthless.  Ever notice how rarely you end up actually listening to that greatest hits album in full?  If you listen to it at all, you often will just skip to the one song you actually WANT to listen to and then be done with it?  Hell, I’ve got an MP3 player (dating myself, I know) that is full of only my “favorite songs”, and I CONSTANTLY find myself skipping tracks on it looking for “something good”.  What’s going on here?  Why aren’t I having the MOST enjoyment by gathering all the best things onto one platform?  It’s because, as I wrote: greatest hits albums suck.

Especially when you get the generic version of the greatest hits...

 

When an artist (with integrity) creates an album, they often times do so with an overall vision for the album.  Sometimes, these are concept albums, like Nine Inch Nails “Downward Spiral”, intended to be listened to from beginning to end in order to hear the full story of the narrator’s downward spiral, forsaking their own humanity.  Other times, it’s an opportunity for an artist to explore a new sound, like how Madonna would reinvert herself every few years, or how ACDC would do the opposite and just release 8 albums that sound exactly the same, but that’s ALSO another blog post for another time.  The point is: the albums exist as whole, rather than simply a sum of its parts.  It was not merely a gathering place of songs wherein the artist just waiting until they made enough of them to fill up an album: there was a reason it was put together the way it was put together.  Again: this is for those artists with integrity.  Yes, some bubblegum artist just like people write songs for them that they grind through without any passion and foist upon the public just to make a buck, which is pretty analogous for the state of online coaching today, but that will have to be ANOTHER blogpost for another time. 

 

 

Because why am I writing today?  Because this conversation was brought about because of the realization that I can NOT do my own programming, primarily because I WILL try to make a “greatest hits” album whenever it comes times to that…and that album SUCKS.  Why?  Because all of my “greatest hits” were in context of the supporting songs in the album of my training, and when I try to just isolate them and mash them all together, rather than something that flows and builds off itself, I get a disjointed cacophony that only bears a passing resemblance to its source material: losing to nuance and greatness that it was derived from.  I KNOW that, when I ran Super Squats, I grew well, and I also know that, when I do ROM progression deadlifts, my deadlift grew well, so why not do Super Squats with ROM progression deadlifts, so I get really big and really strong?

Yeah, it was about this intelligent

 

…because when I ran Super Squats, I wasn’t doing ANY heavy deadlifts: just some straight legged deads after the breathing squats.  And when I grew the best during ROM progression deadlifts, I only squatted once a week, employing my Zeno squat workout.  Which, consequently, I’d do the Zeno squats AND the ROM progression deadlifts in the same workout, well before hearing Stan Efferding and Derek Poundstone employing a similar strategy, because it’s easier to recover if you just completely blow your brains out in one workout and spend a week recovering vs doing something stupid and heavy and one day of the week and doing something stupid and heavy on ANOTHER day of the week in the middle of your recovery…kinda like how it’s a bad idea to do 20 breathing squats 3 times a week while trying to do ROM progression deadlifts.  Or like when I tried to shoehorn in the 10k swing challenge in the middle of my own run of “Chaos is the Plan”, already a protocol that had so few rules in it and I sought to break it, because on the topic of music again, there’s a great lyric from Nine Inch Nails’ “Even Deeper” that goes “and in a dream I’m a different me/with a perfect you, we fit perfectly/and for once in my life I feel complete/and I still want to ruin it.”  So often, things are working so well that we can’t HELP but destroy them.

 

I tried to write my own training for my last strongman competition, and when it was over, my body was so badly beat up that I needed about 3 months to recover and heal from it before I could move and train normally again (which, true enough, I did so by trusting my programming over to Tactical Barbell and following it EXACTLY as written).  Did my programming “work”?  I won the competition and I set some state records, but this was very much the definition of a pyrrhic victory, as I truly won in SPITE of my training.  I was in so much pain during the competition that it was really my ability to grind THROUGH the pain that allowed me to tap into any of the strength I had built along the way, and were I healthier and in less pain, I could have done much better.  My best performances happened IN training, and by the time I got to the comp, it was too late (part of the issue being my competition was effectively postponed for 2 months, which was a LONG time to be in “prep mode”, but still).  I had pulled out all my “greatest hits” to design that training block, and they all worked…until they didn’t.  Like a greatest hits album, it was fun for the first rotation, but after that, the lack of cohesion became VERY apparent, and all those blockbuster numbers without the necessary b-sides and experimental tracks to even things out took their toll on me.

I can't afford all this winning!

 

These lessons exist on a micro and a macro level.  Within a workout itself, it can’t all be “greatest hits”.  Some parts GOTTA be b-sides.  The big 3 may be your bread and butter if you’re a powerlifter, but you’ll hamstring yourself (pun partially intended) in the absence of some boring assistance work to shore up weak areas, along with some GPP to make it so that you can SURVIVE your hardcore training sessions.  And, in turn, the overall structure of the plan itself cannot be all greatest hits: you’ll need some sessions that are there for recovery, for bringing up weak points, for setting up FOR those bigger workouts.  You’ll need some training CYCLES that aren’t greatest hits: this is effectively what periodization itself boils down to.  Even Ronnie Coleman said he’d take 3 months off after Olympia to get his body healed up from the beating it was taking.  And none of this is meant to denigrate those “non-greatest hits” tracks in life: like in the albums, they’re there to set UP those big hits and even out the rest of the album.  They serve an important role, and their absence is noted whenever we try to compile only the best in one spot.

 

Enjoy the hits as they come and quit trying to force them all together.  You’ll appreciate them more that way.

IGNORANCE VS STUPIDITY

At one point in my life, I found myself in the position of a professional educator.  During that time, my fellow educators and I found ourselves frequently having to differentiate between those students who were ignorant and those that were stupid, because we frequently equate the two, when, in fact: they are different.  Put simply: someone who is ignorant is someone who simply does not KNOW something.  Everyone on the planet is ignorant: their ignorance simply needs to be uncovered and, in turn, it can be rectified.  No one can know everything, and you can easily corner someone and “stump the dummy” with some sort of gee whiz pop-quiz on random state capitals or the atomic symbol for Boron or the melting temperature of copper, etc etc.  And once this knowledge has been imparted upon that person, their ignorance has been corrected: now they are slightly less ignorant than there were before.  But stupidity?  My co-workers and I had to constantly repeat the mantra of Ron White: “You can’t fix stupid.”

Yes yes, I know: he never actually said that.  Sometimes, a good story is more important than the truth.

 

While ignorance is a lack of knowledge, stupidity is a lack of ability to COMPREHEND and apply knowledge.  Stupidity is a character trait, a quality, a part of one’s being, whereas ignorance is simply the absence of information.  A car with no gas is ignorant of gas: a car with no gas tank is stupidly broken.  Why does this distinction matter?  Well, as educators, it was important for us to understand when we were dealing with an ignorant vs a stupid student because the approach to rectify the situation was different.  An ignorant student simply required more time: more time to teach, more time to study, or more time to employ different strategies to convey the information in a manner that they COULD understand.  But once it was determined the student was stupid?  We were now beyond the point of fixing: we had reached the limit of this student’s ability to absorb and retain information, and now it was on us to find a better place for them.  …I realize that reads as though we euthanized them, but we enrolled them in a program that was better suited for their abilities.

 

Ok, why does this discussion matter?  Because ignorance and stupidity can exist in both an intellectual capacity AND in a physical capacity as it relate to the matter of physical transformation, and trainees get this confused in all sorts of ways, resulting in them spinning their wheels in an attempt to resolve the wrong problem.  So many young trainees are operating off the false assumption that they are, somehow, intellectual ignorant on the matter of physical transformation.  These trainees consume TONS of media on the matter of physical transformation, typically in a matter best suited for those with short attention spans, ala Tik Tok and Instagram reels, but some even legitimately read studies (not just the abstracts), watch multihour long podcasts, attend seminars, read published books, etc etc.  Yet, despite obtaining ALL this knowledge, these folks still have nothing to show for all that effort.  What gives?  How much more do they need to KNOW before they can finally unlock the secrets?

No matter how smart you get, a strong man with a sword will still be valuable

 

These trainees are, in fact, stupid, and in a variety of ways.  Intellectually, they are stupid because they simply don’t realize that physical transformation is NOT that complicated.  I always point out that we had TWO men that could bench press over 600lbs in 1967: Pat Casey, who did it officially in a meet, and his training partner “Superstar” Billy Graham.  The bench press itself was a new lift at this point, and bench PRESSES were shoddy pieces of equipment that you wouldn’t risk yourself on in a modern setting with even an empty bar, and these two dudes benched that weight raw.  Nearly 60 years later, with all the advances we’ve had in drugs, training “knowledge”, nutrition AND a much bigger pool of athletes to select from, a 600lb raw bench press is STILL insane, and the record has only advanced by less than 200lbs.  We KNEW everything we needed to achieve ridiculous physical transformation well over 60 years ago, and, in truth, far earlier than that as well, as humans have been getting big and strong for years relying on the basic principle of straining hard, eating big and recovering well.  “Effort, consistency and time”: it always comes back to these 3.

 

However, these trainees are ALSO, quite often, intellectually stupid: despite the VOLUME of material they consume, they lack the ability to understand and apply the majority of it.  My background is POLITICAL science, and even from that I learned how to read a study, which, in turn, also gave me the ability to learn how to determine when studies were performed poorly, by observers who didn’t know what to observe with volunteers who were unfit to volunteer and controls that were poorly implemented, to say nothing of epidemiological studies that rely on self-reported information from a populace that has a terrible ability to recall information.  So many young trainees just cut straight to the conclusion or the abstract: not looking into the details of the study, or rely on some internet talking head to do all the interpreting for them, ignoring the strong possibility of bias in reporting due to the fact that many of these folks have an agenda based around promoting their own brand (to say nothing of biases in studies based on who is funding them, but I digress).  And many other trainees (myself HEAVILY included) are simply too stupid to understand any of the actual SCIENCE within the study itself.  I was a straight D student in all of my chemistry and physics classes: biology was the only form of science I ever did well at, and whenever I try to read about chemical reactions and bonds, my eyes just plain glaze over.  I recognize this limitation in myself, which is also why I default to the case of Pat Casey: this stuff AIN’T that complicated.

Meatloaf sandwiches between sets and hard work got you a 600lb bench on a bench you wouldn't pick up for free off the side of the road

 

But trainees remain ignorant and stupid in another sense as well: the physical sense!  Often times, trainees cannot apply all the knowledge they soaked up from all their study because they lack the physical EXPERIENCE necessary to be able to implement it.  And the worst part about this type of ignorance is that it is very much a “if you know, you know” sort of phenomenon.  Like trying to describe the color red to someone that has been blind since birth, physical experience is one of those things that, once you obtain it, it’s obvious, but until you do, it’s elusive.  One of the greatest examples can be found in maximal exertion and training to failure.  A physically experienced trainee knows HOW to push themselves to their absolute physical limits: well beyond the point is discomfort, pain, and agony, and bypassing many of their natural governors, digging DEEP into their own recovery wells and going all out for one BIG push that tends to leave them exhausted for days, if not weeks.  A junior trainee simply lacks this ability: it’s something that can only be developed through years of consistent practice.  In turn, an advanced trainee discussing the significance and impact of training to failure or maximal effort is speaking to an entirely different impact than what this junior trainee can generate, yet, if that same trainee tries to implement the instructions FROM that advanced trainee, they will achieve a less than ideal outcome, simply as a result of their physical ignorance.  Their body needs to “learn more” before it can excel.

 

And, of course, physical ignorance can be even more rudimentary.  Some trainees simply haven’t been taught how to perform certain movements and, once they receive instruction, they are now less ignorant and able to perform.  Dave Tate talks about adding 50lbs to a trainee’s bench simply by teaching them the correct way to bench.  Some trainees, however, are physically stupid: they have problems that simply aren’t going to be overcome through more physical knowledge, and they need to recognize this limitation.  Some trainees are going to be in possession of leverages that are simply NOT suited for weightlifting (as in, the sport of the clean and jerk/snatch, rather than the mere lifting of weights): doomed with a short upper torso and long limbs, these folks will make great deadlifters.  Some trainees are going to be severely lacking in type I muscle fibers and find explosive work ill-suited for them.  And some folks, no matter how hard they try, are going to flat out have some movements just NOT click for them.  Rather than try to put the square peg in the round hole, they need to get enrolled in a “new program” and find what works for them.  And yet again, these trainees need to recognize their physical stupidity in order to understand how their attempts to rectify all issues via resolving intellectual ignorance is amiss: no matter how much they “learn”, they won’t be able to apply it.

Sometimes our talents are just waiting to be discovered

 

All this to say that nothing is hopeless here: we simply need to understand what is the right solution for the situation.  You can’t “fix” stupid, but you can redirect it to the appropriate program.  Ignorance is easy to resolve: it simply takes time, but if your issue ISN’T ignorance, your time is being wasted.     

THE SWORD OF BERSERKING: EVERY CURSE IS A BLESSING

 

For some reason, I’ve always been a fan of the “Faustian Deal”, which, for those unaware, is a reference to the character of Faust, who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power.  The idea of simply having power without consequence was always too boring to me: I really enjoyed the notion of power “but at what cost?”  In turn, Dungeons and Dragons afforded me an avenue to really geek out of this with the notion of “cursed gear”, which were items your character could employ but, once wielded, could not be removed, and typically featured some sort of consequence to balance out whatever blessing they bestowed upon you.  There was powerful armor that reduced your charisma because it had a foul odor associated with it, shields that would deflect swords but attract arrows, a spear that damaged you AS it damaged the enemy (referred to as “the back biter”), etc etc.  But one of the most classic examples of this was the “Cursed Sword of Berserking”, which, of course, I loved, because it was a stupidly powerful two-handed sword that forced your character into a berserk state upon the start of battle, wherein he would simply attempt to murder whoever was closest to him and move on from there.  Yes: this INCLUDED those that were friendly members of your party: berserkers don’t discriminate.  And while many would discover such a sword and quickly discard it, or try to find some sucker to pawn it off too, I was a much bigger fan of keeping that sword in my inventory and employing it when the benefits of the blade outweighed the consequence of the curse.  A lesson, of course, for us to understand and employ outward, in that EVERY “curse” we endure carries with it a blessing: we must simply learn how to leverage and employ it in the correct context.

 

Some even manage to leverage it for some quick cash

 

What ultimately inspired this post was my own personal reflections on growing up as a fat kid.  At that time, being fat absolutely felt like a curse: I was the constant target of bullies, as I was, quite literally, a big target.  I was slow, unathletic (which, in a point of irony, I was denied access to the pop-warner football program because I was TOO heavy…a program I was hoping would help get me in shape), awkward, and of course didn’t care for how I looked.  However, that fat kid background has been quite the blessing during these later years in my continued quest for physical transformation.  Primarily, during my most recent shift to “protein sparing intermittent feasting”, I’ve learned that my ability to eat MASSIVE quantities of food in a single sitting is an absolute boon, as I have zero issues with sitting down at a single meal and getting in enough food with enough vital protein and fat in it to be able to successfully gain weight.  I think of all the dudes that are out there eating 6 to 7 times a day and STILL struggling to be able to put on weight because they simply don’t have the capacity to get all the food in, and I realize that these fat kid tendencies are really coming through for me…and moreso in another way too.

 

I’ve already BEEN fat, which means, unlike SO many trainees out there these days: I’m not afraid of it happening.  It honestly saddens me how many dudes I see that are struggling with this absolute FEAR of adding an ounce of fat to their bodies in their quest to gain muscle, such to the point that they are tragically undereating and wasting all of their training time and energy because they simply won’t eat enough food to actually get anything out of the process.  They prize their current appearance over their future, unable to focus on the long term objective due to a focus on near term issues.  For me, looking peeled is a novelty: not a norm.  Even though I’ve been “fit” for 25 years now, having started the process at age 14, meaning I spent MORE time being fit than unfit, in my mind I’m still a “fat kid” and, in turn, when my abs go away while I’m in the quest to gain muscle, it causes no psychological disturbance: I’m simply “returning to normal”.  And, additionally, I have all the assurance in the world that I KNOW how to lose fat, because I’ve done it so many times.  The fear of the unknown tends to be the biggest obstacle for these trainees to overcome: they’ve never gotten fat in the first place, so they don’t realize how simple it is to become “unfat”.  They’ve built up the process so much in their head, made it so mythologically impossible, when, in reality, people do it EVERY day.  The curse of my childhood is truly a blessing. 

Little did I realize I was in training my whole childhood...

 

But this wasn’t meant to be simply a celebration of growing up fat: those on the opposite end of the spectrum have a curse that is a blessing as well.  The “hardgainer” (which, despite how often the internet wants to say it’s not really a thing, I believe it’s really a thing, and I can go into that in the comments if people are interested) has the curse of having to eat SO much in order to gain weight…but ALSO has the very same blessing.  Think about how non-nuanced your nutrition can become when you decide to embrace Stalin’s philosophy that “quantity has a quality all its own”.  While other dudes have to calculate macros and calories and perfectly craft their nutrition to achieve their goals, you’re putting away the J M Blakely special of pizzas drenched in olive oil and speed eating oreos.  You have absolutely ZERO fear of “accidentally getting fat”, because not only is it practically impossible for you to gain weight, but you KNOW that, IF you were to somehow finally put on fat, all you have to do is NOT eat like a death row inmate at their last meal in order to strip the fat right back off again.  Whereas my cursed blessing was to not care about getting fat, yours is to not WORRY about it.

 

Injuries are a classic cursed blessing.  Were it not for injuries, I never would have discovered ROM progression, or DoggCrapp, or Tactical Barbell, or so many other cools tips and tricks, nor would I have been able to justify many of the super fun gym toys now in my possession which afford me a wide variety of options in training.  What about a bad training cycle?  Picking “the wrong program?”  The cursed blessing of KNOWLEDGE.  Of EXPERIENCE!  We learned something: we learned what DOESN’T work.  You scoff, but isn’t that SO much better than those dudes who just run Starting Strength for 6 straight years, constantly resetting to the same lifts before building back up and regressing all over again because they’re too afraid to try something new?  Often, we need to take a few steps back so we can take a giant leap forward.

Being a little lighter might also help

 

These are all swords of berserking.  The curse is only a curse when the situation is wrong, but in the right situation, under the right context, the blessing is worth the curse.  Look at all the curses inflicted upon you and discover the blessing contained within them.