INTRO
 |
| Prepare yourself for a WHOLE lotta bull... |
In an
unprecedent display of whatever the opposite of ADHD is, I’ve managed to stick
with a training protocol for almost a full calendar year. 16 Sep 25 will mark a full year of training
under the Tactical Barbell system, and I’ll be sure to release a blogpost
detailing my experience and lessons learned over that time, but suffice it to
say I’m clearly a fan of the system and this is now my second time running The
Mass Protocol, which was the original program that got me hooked in the first
place.
Since it’s
my second time through, I’ve allowed myself a little bit of leeway regarding
how I’m running it, and have also engaged in a fun side-project that I’ll be
carrying forward (pun partially intended and you’ll see why) through my next
few cycles as well.
I don’t
really write “program reviews” at this point because I don’t tend to take the
diligence to fully establish “befores” to contrast against “afters”, and
instead just offer “check-ins”, where I discuss how the program is going, what
I’m liking, and what I’m learning. And
that’s what this is here now.
WHAT IS
OPERATION MILO?
 |
| This is like the world's whackiest Charles Atlas ad |
I totally go
full “tacti-cool” when it comes to Tactical Barbell stuff, and will label my
phases of training as Operations. The
very first Mass Protocol outing was “Operation Conan”, as it was all about
gaining with a carnivore diet.
“Operation Planet Mongo” was my attempt to emphasize back growth after I
had neglected it for so long. So
Operation MILO?
MILO is an
acronym that stands for “Mass Increase, Lifts Overload”, because I needed to
keep reminding myself of what the goal of the training was: get bigger and get
stronger. Which is primarily me telling
myself “Don’t be stupid about conditioning: you can come back to that during
Operator”, along with “Eat up!” HOWEVER,
MILO is also an inside reference to the side project I spoke about in the
intro.
Taking the
approach of Milo from Croton, who carried a baby calf everyday until it grew to
be the size of a bull in order to become monstrously strong and one of the
greatest wrestlers to ever live, I decided I was going to take my loadable
strongman keg and carry it for 1 trip down and up my driveway everyday (about
80’ total) and increase the load by 1-1.5lbs.
I choose that load because I have an amount of spacers for the keg that
equals a pound, and I have many 2.5lb plates, so I would just alternate between
the two each session, meaning the weight would increase 8.5lbs each week. I
started at 175lbs (keg plus a 25lb plate) and as of this writing have
increased it to 225lbs. I’ve noticed that the carry has actually
gotten EASIER as time goes on.
I figured,
while I’m gaining weight, that’s the best time for the keg to gain weight as
well, and ideally my strength will grow in proportion to the weight of the
keg. This also puts me on a trajectory
to carry over 500lbs in a year…which we know won’t happen…but the real question
is: when WILL it stop working?
HOW I SET
UP GREY MAN
 |
| The instructions were so clear! |
I’ll start
by saying there is absolutely noting wrong with Grey Man as it is written. K. Black writes awesome programs that work,
and most people tend to screw them up by messing with that. That having been said, I had specific goals I
wanted to accomplish, and the framework of Grey Man suited them: I just needed
to make some tweaks.
· The biggest change is, instead of
performing a rotating workout structure of A-B-A, B-A-B repeat, I stuck with a
static “A-B-A repeat” approach, meaning workout B was ALWAYS the middle workout
and workout A would be performed twice as much as workout B.
· That big change was due to the second
biggest change of the program: I cut out the deadlift protocol and, instead,
swapped it with my (in)famous deadlift ROM progression protocol. This is primarily because this approach
ALWAYS works for me, and whenever I deviate from it, I regret it. I’m willing to face the consequences of my
actions here. And in that regard, this
protocol is a once a week deadlift protocol, so I needed to keep my deadlifting
day to once a week, and slotting it right in the middle of the week worked out
well there. I COULD have accomplished
something similar by just running Mass Template and having that 1 day a week
deadlift week, but after 40-ish weeks of running Operator, I felt like I needed
the supplemental clusters found in Grey man.
· The third biggest change is that I
eliminated chins/pull ups as main cluster work, and didn’t include them in the
supplemental cluster as well. Instead, I
would just accomplish sets of sub-maximal chins during my warm-ups and in
between sets of main cluster and supplemental cluster work. Similar to the ROM
progression, I’ve noticed my best results from chins came when I was following
this approach, and it didn’t seem to impact my recovery. Diligent readers will recognize that I did
the same thing during “Planet Mongo”
· I paired the squat with the press on
Day A, and the bench with the mat pull on day B. Part of that is logistics (I can set up the
squat and press at the same time in my gym, and same with he bench and the
deadlift, but bench and squat can’t happen because they both occupy the power
rack), but the other part is that I prioritize the press over the bench, so I
want to hit it more often. Squatting
only twice a week was a nice change compared to Operator’s 3x week.
· For supplemental cluster lifts, Day A
was incline DB bench, DB row, and GHRs.
Day B was Lever belt squat, dips and axle curls. Once again: logistics were a partial factor
here. I wanted to do squats on the days
squats weren’t in the main cluster and posterior chain work on the days they
were, and when I have the lever belt set up I don’t have room for the incline
bench, so I employed dips on those days.
· For assistance work, I used GHR sit
ups on day A (since I was already at the GHR) and a reverse hyper/standing ab
wheel superset on day B. If I ever had
additional time, I’d include some lateral raises or band pull aparts. And, of course, all the chins between sets.
CONDITIONING
 |
| Treadmills have always sucked |
· I abided by the rules somewhat with
conditioning, but also re-read Mass Protocol and saw K. Black say we COULD use
workouts from TBII if we had a solid grasp on our own recovery and
conditioning, so game on! This meant
that, along with a 20 minute recovery row between workouts A and B, I would do
a 90 minute treadmill ruck between workout B and A, and then 10 minutes of
Stone of Steel over bar on the Saturday after the final A workout.
· For that ruck, I at least made it
easier than what I was doing during Operator by using a lighter load and a
lower incline. I was just doing 30
minutes more than what was recommended.
· I also still kept a decent amount of
daily steps, aiming for 10k per day, often exceeding it, sometimes coming
short.
· On top of all this, I trained Tang
Soo Do 3 days a week, typically after work, but occasionally we’d do a class on
late Saturday mornings. These weren’t
terribly exhausting classes, but they could accumulate at times.
NUTRITION
 |
| Talk about paleo! |
To the
outside observer, my nutrition has remained completely the same throughout my
time with Tactical Barbell, but the truth is that there HAS been some nuanced
difference. When I started, I was
basically following Jamie Lewis’ “Apex Predator Diet”, where I lived off
protein shakes through the day and then ate one solid food meal at night. When I started Operator, I switched to Vince
Gironda’s “Maximum Definition Diet”, funnily enough because BioTest had a
shortage of Metabolic Drive at that time and I could no longer rely on protein
powder as a staple. However, I honestly
really grew to enjoy having a large breakfast in the morning, fasting through
the day, and eating again at night (reference by full detailed write-up on my
experience with the diet), so I decided to take that approach with Mass
Protocol this time around.
So how do
you take a Maximum Definition Diet and turn it into a gaining diet? You gotta turn the food volume UP! Now, when I was running “Operation Conan”, I
noticed that I was relying primarily on pork cracklin and cottage cheese to
make up the bulk of my “augmentation” food: stuff I was adding on TOP of the
meals in order to gain. I don’t think
there’s necessarily anything WRONG with these foods, but I do prefer to keep
pork a little on the low side due to the higher concentration of Omega 6s in
their fat compared to beef, and cottage cheese can get a little carby for my
liking when consumed in large quantities.
Plus, I find cheese, in general, does not trigger my satiety signals,
and with the presence of casmorphins, there is an argument that it can be
addictive (I know I certainly enjoy it).
So I decided to still stick pretty strongly with the “Maximum
Definition” guidelines of no dairy aside from butter (I use ghee, it still
counts) and heavy cream (never found myself using that). I WOULD occasionally permit myself cheese (my
wife makes me omletes on the weekend, they’re amazing, and cheese makes a great
binder, and occasionally I’d do a burger night where I made chaffle buns), but
it was much more controlled compared to previous outings.
So, instead
of relying on pork cracklin’ and cottage cheese, I engaged in a protocol of
“side meats”. I had my breakfast and
dinner pretty clearly established: around 1lb of some sort of meat, 3 whole
eggs, and 5 whites (both topped with ghee and cooked in beef tallow). Breakfast would have some beef liver with it
as well, and dinner could often go above 1lb of meat. From here, in order to gain, I would add some
sort of meat alongside this meal. I have
2 big freezers in my basement, and had accumulated all sorts of meats through
buying bulk sales, hunting, and my wife’s family farm in Iowa making generous
donations to my cause, and decided to start cooking all that stuff up on the
weekends for some meal prep. This
included smoking 2 whole chickens so I could have drumsticks with 4 breakfasts,
then a thigh and a wing for 4 breakfasts, pork belly, pork shoulder, sardines,
a bunch of chicken thighs, etc. It was
honestly straight out of the Bruce Randall playbook: just take what you’d
normally eat, and then add more food to it and eat that as well.
 |
| A pretty standard breakfast |
 |
| Surf and turf |
 |
| Ribs and brisket (going out to eat) |
 |
| But we also have ribs at home |
For the “1lb
of some sort of meat”, I always tried to make this some sort of ruminant
animal. I found that I just felt and
performed better when I was eating that.
I lucked out and got some great sales on leg of lamb and a bunch of
frozen corned beefs that I soaked overnight to wash off the brine, and I’d
slice these into 1lb steaks and air fry them in the morning. On weekends, we’d go out and I often would
have a dinner of a full rack of pork spare ribs, a 26oz bone-in ribeye, a bunch
of steak, eggs and seafood from a Hibachi buffet, or just a ton of burger
patties.
And, in
keeping with the Maximum Definition diet, I’d have 1 meal a week with some
carbs in it. This was often some sort of
American mid-west pasta based casserole dish my wife would make alongside some
of her (amazing) homemade cookies with some raw local honey and a mug of
fairlife skim milk.
RESULTS
AND TAKEAWAYS
 |
| I guess we know what phase II is going to be now... |
My bodyweight is up 1.4kg, once again, without counting or tracking calories or macros: just eating big from my choice of foods. Along with this, all of my lifts had gone up in accordance with the percentages set up in the program, and my deadlift ROM progression was successful, resulting in a 10x440lb pull, which is a 15lb PR from my previous best 6 weeks ago, and much easier.
I’ve
continued to increase the weight in the keg everyday. I also just plain FEEL good: not beat up,
exhausted, strung out, etc. This remains
a sustainable and appreciable way to set up training for the long haul, and I’m
honestly excited to continue down the Tactical Barbell rabbit hole with the
“Operator-Mass-Specificity” protocol.
I’m effectively there: I did a LONG stint of Operator, am finishing up
Mass, and will move on to specificity. I
intend to run that for 3 weeks, Operator for 3 weeks, then back to mass for 6
weeks. The fall and winter are great
seasons for gaining and I want to make the most of it, but I also feel like 3
weeks of Operator with lighter rations will give me a chance to resensitize
myself to food.
I still
intend to carry the keg until I can, at which point, I may just start over
lighter, or find a new project to take on.
Thanks for
reading, happy to answer any questions, and if you want to observe every
training session, be sure to follow this link.
