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.