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.