TACTICAL BARBELL OPERATOR (FOR STRONGMAN) 8 WEEK CHECK-IN

INTRO

As far as trinities go, you could do a whole lot worse

* I intended to keep this short.  I failed.  It’s over 4000 words.  I don’t know why I do that.  But I’ve been running Tactical Barbell Operator for the past 8 weeks now in order to prep for a Strongman Competition in the second week of April along with a 10 mile race in the first week of April, all while dropping bodyweight in order to make the weight class for said strongman competition.  I made a few adjustments to make the program best fit my needs for strongman and running, but still stayed within the lanes and rules OF the program in order to do so, and wanted to lay out what I’ve done, how it’s gone, and what I’ve learned.

 

BACKGROUND

Reading this book will sum me up pretty well

 

* In preparing for my last strongman competition, I ended up breaking my body HARD.  Two biggest contributors were doing my own programming for it combined with my initial competition getting canceled and signing up for a new one that was 2 months down the line from the last one.  If I isolated these variables, I probably would have been fine, but I ended up pushing myself too hard in training for too long that, by the time I got TO the competition, I could barely perform, and then I had to spend the next 8 weeks AFTER the competition healing from my efforts.  This can be observed in the training videos post comp/my first run of Mass Protocol’s Grey Man, as I struggle just to get into deadlift position and basically combust after every set of squats.  The day of my first post comp workout, I had a co-worker ask me if I had a compressed disk, because I was limping hard and favoring one side.

 

* On top of all of this, I’ve genuinely lost my appetite to lift weights more than 4x per week, and even then that’s a bit of an ask.  I didn’t care for that during the Specificity phase of Mass Protocol, so 3x week is my sweet spot.  I discovered that during my most recent run of Building the Monolith, which led me back to DoggCrapp, and even my own self-built programming was 3x week, so this made Operator a great fit.

 

* I had a few specific goals to train for.  One is the strongman competition in April, the other is a 10 mile race my wife and I run every year, which was the week BEFORE the strongman competition, and I also had a Disney Cruise in March and one in June, for which I wanted to be lean for the sake of looking awesome on the pooldeck AND being able to just absolutely eat my face off without regard for the impact it had on me. 

 

* Which, on the subject of cruises, before starting my strongman competition prep with Operator, I had just finished running 2 cycles of Grey Man followed by 2 cycles of Specificity Bravo from Mass Protocol before going on a 1 week New Year’s cruise, resulting in me putting on 15lbs of bodyweight in 16 weeks, landing at 190lbs and needing to be 9lbs lighter in order to make weight for my weight class, meaning I needed to engage in training where building muscle WASN’T the focus.

 

* All of the above led me to select Operator from TB1, and the Black conditioning protocol from TB2.

 

HOW I RAN IT

About the only kind of running I can stand

 

* The strongman competition I was preparing for had a press medley, topping out with a log press for max reps, a car deadlift, atlas stone over bar, a triple implement carry medley (husafel stone, keg and sandbag) and a sandbag throw over bar series.  This helped determine my movement selection for the Operator Cluster: SSB front squat, log clean and strict press away, weighted chins, kb swings and trap bar lift for my deadlift.  For the first cycle, I’d train the deadlift once per week for 3 sets on Wed, and then would perform the KB swings on Mon and Fri for 1 set of 100.  For the second cycle, I kept the deadlift the same, but started including the KB swings in an assistance circuit (detailed below).

 

* Thought process: the other two implements in the press medley were the keg and the axle, and the weights were light enough that I wasn’t concerned with my ability to clean and press then, so I wanted to max focus on the log.  The trap bar deadlift doesn’t EXACTLY replicate the car deadlift, but it’s close enough for my purposes, and easier to program compared to a lever deadlift set up.  Neutral Grip chins spare my elbows from pain, which is crucial when training for strongman, as they tend to take a beating from heavy loading, but keeping that pull in the program is good for the sake of maintaining a strong back.  I opted for a front squat variant over a back squat because I knew that, training for strongman, my lower back was going to get heavily loaded from the stones, deadlifts and carry medleys, and I didn’t need to add on top of that.  A front squat naturally forces one to use a lower amount of weight, which is less load in general.  I went with the SSB because my ability to maintain a front rack is limited by mobility, and the SSB front squat actually feels a bit more like a log and stone movement based on where the weight sits on the body compared to a barbell front squat.

 

 

* For the first 3 weeks of my first cycle of Operator, I did no strongman implement work for conditioning.  I, instead, opted for very general conditioning, with a focus on running in the 400-800m range along with some bodyweight work.  Strongman implements can really beat up the body, as I learned in my last training phase, and I didn’t want to burn out too early.  I went through a variety of workouts in TBII, to include Black Out on Oxygen, Buffalo Laps, Meat Eater 1, etc.  We had good weather, with no snowfall, so I was maximizing my outdoor training capability during that time.  I also would include a regular 90 minute walk/ruck.  After those 3 weeks, I started training stone over bar and carry medleys on my conditioning days, specifically on weekends, performing the Operator Workouts Mon/Wed/Fri with some TBII workouts on Tues and Thurs.  I started including some non-running based workouts for the TBII work, like Heavy bag resets and Meat Eater II, primarily when weather was bad or when I was short on time.  I continued this protocol into the second cycle, at which time I settled into a pretty steady rhythm of M/W/F Operator, Tues Oxygen Debt 101, Thurs 90 minute ruck, Sat Stone over Bar, Sun carry medley.  I would train throws when I had time to do so, but they weren’t a high priority.  I picked weekends specifically to train events because they’re LOUD, and I train at 0430 on weekdays, so I wasn’t going to wake up my family.  It did make it so that my weekends weren’t very restorative for my lifting efforts, but I just had to manage recovery as best I could.

 

* On the first cycle, I would finish each lifting workout with some ab/core assistance work.  I took to performing a circuit that was 3 rounds of a 30 second timed front rack hold with the SSB heavily loaded, along with either a set of 10 standing ab wheels or hanging leg raises.  The front rack hold was something I remembered from the aughts/10s that people were really into, and it’s like a heavily loaded standing plank.  After that, I’d get in 100 band pull aparts, and then either direct chest work via dips and push ups, direct arm work with curls and band pushdowns, or a lateral raise dropset.  During the second cycle, I started training the assistance as a circuit, turning it into a small conditioning workout.  I would do 3-5 rounds, 30 seconds each, of SSB front rack holds, standing ab wheel OR hanging leg raises, dips, KB swings and push ups.  The first time I did this, it just happened to fit my schedule, but I ended up appreciating it so much I made it a permanent feature on the second cycle.

 

* Two other additions I made on the second cycle was the inclusion of 1 heavy log clean per week, performed on Wed before the trap pull sets.  The intent was to condition my body to moving heavy weight on that one lift so that I wouldn’t waste energy on it during the competition.  Along with this, I added 1 push press rep after finishing my 5 strict reps on the log for each set, once again with the intent of re-grooving the motor pattern of push pressing.

 

HOW I CHANGED IT

Nailed it

* I didn’t.  My cluster was basically the grunt cluster (front squat, overhead press, weighted chins and trap bar lift), the 100 KB swings was something I lifted directly from TB2, I stuck with the recommended structure of the Black conditioning protocol and considered my strongman events as HIC workouts.  About the only thing that could be called deviations was my inclusion of direct arm and side delt work, as even my core work was permitted as assistance work and the push ups and dips fit within the general conditioning workouts.  I wanted to make sure I ran this program as laid out so I could give it a fair evaluation.

 

* If I WERE to change anything, I’d consider changing the order of the weeks, employing a 3/5/1 rather than 5/3/1 structure.  Which is to say, instead of going 70% week 1, 80% week 2 and 90% week 3, I’d go 80% week 1, 70% week 2, 90% week 3.  I liked that layout from 5/3/1, as the 70% in week 2 effectively primes you for a big performance in week 3, whereas the gradual scale up in weight week to week can leave me feeling beat up by the time I get to the final week.  I may experiment with that in future runs, but as it stands, I’m not messing with success.

 

* I also think, instead of straight deadlift sets, I’m going to bring back ROM progression.  I’ll still only pull once a week for 1 set, go for max reps rather than a fixed set of 5 at a percentage, and increase the ROM each week.  I’ll have to experiment and see how much it impacts recovery: I may have to do it on Friday vs Wednesday in order to have more recovery time.

 

WHAT I LIKED

Hey, double Homer Simposon

 

* 3 days of lifting gave me 4 days to do things OTHER than lifting.  It made it easy to balance strongman event work, alongside general conditioning work, walking, and 3x a week martial arts classes. 

 

* Sustainable progression.  Lifting the same weight 3x a week gave me ample opportunity to recover and “master” the load before moving on, and the percentage increases between weeks were gentle enough that I didn’t get crushed in the next week, even WHILE losing bodyweight.  I employed a forced progression between cycle 1 and 2, rather than testing maxes, because I had specific marks I had to hit for my competition.

 

* Flexibility of set and rep ranges to account for demands outside of lifting and recovery.  There was a bare minimum and a maximum to work within, and it gave me a chance to autoregulate as necessary.

 

* Wide variety of conditioning workouts to choose from in TB2.  There were some days I wanted to sleep in, and I’d pick a very short and intense HIC workout, and other days I had more time and could expand to a 90 minute E workout. 

 

* This was the first time in quite a while I managed to drop weight without just completely jettisoning it.  Muscles stayed full as I leaned out, and my strength improved through the process.

 

* I liked how the conditioning was laid out that we did an easy week during the heaviest week of lifting.  It made this week a week where I could sleep in more, since the workouts were shorter, which meant I recovered better, and therefore could put in my best performance.  I also liked how K. Black had specifically scaled workouts in TB2 so I KNEW how to “make it easy” vs leaving it up to my own devices (since I would inevitably do something stupidly challenging instead).

 

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

Just please, don't give him any more ideas

 

* Resting a minimum of 2 minutes between sets.  Try as I might, there was no way to avoid it.  K. Black had me beat at every turn when I tried to find a way around it. I thought about super/giant setting the main lifts, only to read in his FAQ that you’re free to alternate between movements: just rest 2-5 minutes between them.  When I ran the Mass Protocol workouts, I rested the bare minimum 1 minute between sets to make it really challenging, but there was no avenue for that here, and it honestly just killed my soul to rest that long.  BUT: I did it.  Because I wanted to give the program a fair chance, and not change it from the start and then complain about it not working.

 

* The very consistency that made progression sustainable is also going to be flat out boring.  Doing the same workout 3 times in a row makes you start to wonder if the third workout is any more valuable than the second, and the temptation to skip or mess around is there. 

 

WHAT I LEARNED

I could kinda see why Skynet wanted to kill John Conner after this movie...

 

* My entire time with Tactical Barbell has been a real eye opener on the balancing act between stimulus and recovery, and how one needs to work “hard enough” rather than trying to make every single training session a war.  At least, if the goal is to improve in the metrics of strength and size, AND to do so while also still improving conditioning.  There’s definitely room for the maniac training I’ve done in the past, but that ultimately did a great job of building my conditioning at the EXPENSE of other qualities.  I DO have a resting heart rate of 38 these days, which I attribute to all that time, energy and effort, but now, with Tactical Barbell, I can throttle back on maximizing conditioning and instead allow my other qualities to grow.

 

* Make the strength work strength work and the conditioning work conditioning work.  Similar to my above point, I tried too hard to make my own workouts everything at once, and in turn none of it was much good.  Similar to my blogpost about greatest hits albums, I also may write a post where I equate this to buying the jar of peanut butter mixed with jelly vs just getting two separate products and mixing them on your own: the latter will work out better than the former.  When strength work is JUST strength work, you focus hard on that one objective and you crush it, and then, when it’s time to do conditioning work, you do the same, and you maximize the RESULTS of both efforts.  When you try to sneakily turn your strength work into conditioning by playing around with rest times and giant sets, you end up degrading your strength work so you can accomplish a not great conditioning workout along with it, which is, as Stan Efferding puts it “stepping over dollars to pick up dimes”. 

 

* And with that above point, K. Black DOES employ a good “no dessert until you eat your dinner” approach with how he lays out Operator.  You want intensity?  You want variety?  Cool: that’s what CONDITIONING is for. You do your lifting to get your strength done, and then, when it’s conditioning time, go wild.  Pick any workout you want (within the prescription of Green or Black) and have at it.  You want to suck wind?  Do Oxygen Debt 101.  Feel like suffering for a long time?  Do a 90 minute LISS session.  Need some Crossfit stuff?  Do the general conditioning circuits.  And he’s got challenges in there too. I suppose this is more of a “what I liked” bullet, but it ties into the above.  You CAN make the strength work the strength work, because you know that, after you get that done, you can go wild with the conditioning.

 

* On THAT note, what I like about TB is how easily it can map to other programs.  TB1 is basically a structured version of Dan John’s “Easy Strength”: it just slightly breaks the rule of 10 reps, but you’re still not struggling on the reps and focusing on building the SKILL of strength.  Meanwhile, TB2 totally answers the 5/3/1 question of “what should I do for conditioning”, and could ALSO be mapped directly onto Dan John’s Easy Strength if you wanted to use THAT program instead.

 

NUTRITION

Trying to get more Dakota Dude and less Buffalo Bull with the high beef intake...and props if you get this reference at all

 

* Since my goal was to drop weight, I still stuck with a similar approach to what I did during the weight gain phase: I just changed the end of day meal.  To recap: I’m employing the Velocity Diet/Apex Predator diet, wherein I consume a protein supplement throughout the day leading up to one evening meal of solid food.  Specifically, I’m using Metabolic Drive by BioTest, with me training first thing in the morning at 0430, then having 2 scoops of MD at 0615, 0930, and 1230, then a solid meal around 1730, 2 scoops of MD at 2030, and then 1 scoop of MD in the night, kept in a shaker bottle in my bathroom that I’ll drink at some point when I wake up to pee. 

 

* When I was gaining, that evening meal was MASSIVE, and very high fat.  I’m sticking with carnivore, so the main feature was some sort of large amount of fatty meat, and then 4-6 whole eggs, pork crackling and cottage cheese, with ghee typically to backfill some energy.  Now, with fat loss as the goal, I’ve leaned out the protein source, switched to egg whites, and cut out the cracklin and cottage cheese.

 

* I should point out that the above describe my weekday nutrition.  On weekends, I have 2 solid meals: my wife makes me a great breakfast, consisting of 2 omelets made with 3 whole eggs, ghee, swiss cheese and whatever meat we have leftover from the week, alongside 3 strips of beef bacon and a piedmontese grassfed hotdog.   For dinner, on Saturdays we go out somewhere (frequently it was either our favorite local BBQ spot where I’d get a full rack of pork dibs without sauce or an awesome Hibachi/buffet spot where I’d load up on all sorts of grilled seafood) and on Sundays I’d typically cook steaks.

 

* Aside from water with electrolytes, the only other thing I’d drink is a green tea twice a day, also mixed with electrolytes.  I picked up some sort of cold around week 5 of the program, and took to including a teaspoon of cinnamon in the tea, as it felt good on my throat.

 

* After week 9, my intent is to attempt Vince Gironda’s “Maximum Definition Diet” of steak/meat and eggs for all of my meals, ideally doing a breakfast and dinner daily with this approach.  I’m currently below weight for my weight class, and should ideally be able to eat UP to weight leading up to the competition.

 

 

OUTCOMES/LESSONS LEARNED

Honestly, this would be just as accurate for many program jumpers

* Since I’m still running the program with the intention of competing at the end of the second cycle, this is a “check in” rather than a program review.  Along with that, I have no intention of testing maxes to evaluate results, as this is the year I turn 40, and I’ve only got so many maxes in me and I intend to use those IN competition.  So instead of “results” or “before/after”, I’m going to list the current outcomes I’ve gotten from running Operator for these past 8 weeks (along with TB programs in general for these past 23 weeks).

 

* The biggest thing is that I healed up a lot of nagging injuries by following programs with controlled volume and intensity.  Once again, if you roll back to my training videos at the start of Mass Protocol, you can see how dysfunctional my squat pattern is, and it was because my right hip was in so much agony that racking the bar after each set effectively crippled me.  It was a significant amount of nerve pain, and there’s a fair chance I had/have some manner of compressed disc that is pressing against a nerve, but with enough time on an intelligently laid out program, I’ve managed to heal to the point that I have much better mobility and do not need to hang from a bar between sets to stretch out my back.  My warm-ups have also gotten shorter, as I need less prep for training.  I’ve also eliminated the persistent pain I have in my elbows, which typically grows during strongman competition prep.

 

* But all of this healing has come along with consistent performance IMPROVEMENT as well, compared to the results one gets when they simply rest to recover.  I haven’t tested maxes, no, but I am moving weight easier in training while my bodyweight continues to drop, which in and of itself is an observable form of progress.  My Stone of Steel workouts get stronger each week, I’m able to lift more loads during my strongman medleys, I see progression on my log clean maxes, and my technique is getting sharper from all the consistent practice. 

 

* Part of the healing process was also about me not being stubborn any more.  I was still dealing with pain during Grey Man, and it was primarily a result of my squatting style.  2 years ago, when I radically changed my nutrition, I ALSO radically changed my squat style, because I was taking a page from the Dave Tate injury playbook of picking brand new movements so that I wouldn’t have my old ones to compare against.  I went from a belted, VERY low bar moderate stance squat to a beltless very high bar VERY close stance squat, to the point that my heels practically touched.  When I first started squatting this way, there was no problem, as the weights were so light, but once I started getting strong on it, it started putting pressure on my structure that I wasn’t able to support.  If you look at me, I’m built for conventional pulling and low bar squatting, as I’m pretty much all femurs with no upper torso.  Squatting high bar with a close stance had me squatting about a mile before I reached depth, and without the belt my core was getting hammered.  Eventually, this resulted in my grinding up my right knee (I tore the meniscus in it on a log clean over a year ago, which most likely happened because I was stressing it with this squat style), forcing me to squat SLOW to work around the knee, which put more pressure on my core, which I imagine is why my hip was so beat up.  I finally got over myself and put the belt back on and widened up my stance a little for the Operator phase of training, and since that time my healing has really taken off and I’m feeling incredible.  I think there IS still a place in my training for that style of squat, but not as a main strength movement.

 

Day 1 of Mass Protocol

Training as of today. Note the difference in squats

* I’ve lost around 10lbs in 8 weeks, once again without having to count or track anything that I’m eating, and through the process have grown in strength and managed to hold on to enough lean tissue that I don’t like stringy as I did after my last strongman competition prep/fat loss experience.  I imagine this is a product of NOT trying to turn the lifting workouts into conditioning workouts, and actually giving my muscles an opportunity to recover from heavy work while still getting stimulus from that and some of the conditioning work.  That, and also keeping conditioning on point, to either be short and intense or low effort and long, avoiding the middle ground of moderate intensity for moderate durations.  As I learn more, I realize how significant it is to understand what energy systems you’re training and what fuel sources they’re using.  I don’t want to be a “sugar burner”.

 

SUMMARY

You mean to tell me there is no room left for a trained weapon of mass destruction?

* These past 8 weeks with Operator have been a success, and I imagine that will continue until I get to my competition.  After I finish week 9, I go on a 1 week Disney Cruise, which I will be counting as a bridge week, then come back and finish up the last 3 weeks of the program, culminating with the 10 mile race, followed by another bridge week, and then my competition.  I’ll do a write up of those events, and from there we’ll see what happens.  8 weeks after the competition, I go on ANOTHER cruise, this time for a longer time, to Greece and Italy, of which I am excited for the cuisine and my attempt to LARP Heracles.  I’m kicking around a few ideas of how I’ll train leading up to that, but ultimately how I’m doing after my competition will determine that. 

 

* And, of course, if you want to watch all the videos of the training up until this point, here is the playlist.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfcuGAffLlSc5VdM9E8i5dZLsMN84dfNg&si=eI-23nA67HJL4FKw