I ACCIDENTALLY WROTE AN E-BOOK: HERE IT IS "LET ME GUIDE YOU ON YOUR VISION QUEST"

Lunatic fringe...

This was meant to be a blogpost, and suddenly I looked up from my writing and discovered I had written 10k words across 50 pages. So I slapped a cover, table of content and intro on it. I could polish it up a bit more, and maybe I will, but here is the first edition.

I walked through 26 years of lifting to review 17 programs and 8 ways of eating, and then created a matrix out of them based off of either days per week of training or training goal and matched the ways of eating to suit the training. It was fun to write: hopefully it’ll be fun to read.

LET ME GUIDE YOU ON YOUR VISION QUEST E-BOOK

THE “POVERTY PREMIUM”: WHAT IS YOUR TIME WORTH?

Much to the delight of every 80s era Neo-con Reganite who grew up watching Gordon Gecko on “Wallstreet” and to this dismay of those flying the banner of the hammer-and-sickle, I’m going to do the thing where I boil down our hours of existence into a dollar value, because for those of us in the working world that pull down a paycheck either by the hour of via a salary, most of us, at one point, have had it flat out spelled out to us exactly how much our time is “worth”.  And, in many cases, that number can be downright disheartening, but perhaps that, in turn, serves as a call to action to either BECOME more valuable or to seek out those who value US as much as we value ourselves.  In the case of the latter, we must, in turn, VALUE ourselves enough to believe that we ARE worth more than what others are willing to compensate us for.  We necessitate a certain degree of dignity such that we will not debase ourselves for the lowest bidder, and will, instead, perform for adequate compensation.  Holy cow, this just became far more political than I intended, but let’s get back to physical transformation here, because many of you out in internet land ARE, in fact, treating yourself like some sort of “Grapes of Wrath” era daylaborer; breaking your backs for inadequate wages that end up putting you further in debt than taking you out of it.  And the comedy upon comedies is that many of you have hoodwinked yourselves into thinking you’re somehow being FRUGAL with your approach: MAXIMIZING your worth by minimizing your expenses.  Instead, you have fallen victim to the “poverty premium”: the concept where poverty forces you to purchase poor quality goods more frequently than if you had the financial capability to buy higher quality goods at less frequent intervals.  You are spending MORE in your attempt to spend less.  Allow me to (finally) explain.

And most you will follow this dude's advice because he's a doctor

This is going to be a two-front assault on your brain here.  First, allow me to discuss those who are unwilling to spend the money to buy the books that are associated with popular and effective training programs, such as 5/3/1, Tactical Barbell, the Juggernaut Method, Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, Easy Strength, the Armor Building Formula, etc.  The internet age has conditioned many people to believe that ALL information should be free, and that creators should not be compensated for their intellectual property.  Typically, the people that feel this way are CONSUMERS of property rather than creators of it, and ain’t that the damndest thing (note: I’ve never charged for any of the content I’ve put out, quite frankly because, if I did and someone were to pirate it, I’d most likely track them down like Liam Neeson in “Taken”, and I don’t need the inconvenience of a prison sentence in my life).  In turn, those who are unwilling to pay the cost of these books, instead, turn to the internet to provide them all the information INSIDE the books.  And those who at least have the decency to not engage in piracy will, instead, simply go to social media and ask questions (“Does 5/3/1 say to do THIS?”), or download excel spreadsheets that (allegedly) have the programs prebuilt, or use apps, or read as many free articles as they can on the subject.  And, in truth, of all those things I mentioned, the excel sheets and the apps tend to beat out the question asking and the article reading by a LONG shot, because along with being cheap, these folks are lazy.  But again, I digress (and judge): let’s talk some dollars and cents here.

 

So, to save the cost of buying an e-book on a program, you decided to, instead, get all the information you needed off the internet.  Cool: how LONG did THAT take?  How many hours did you spend scouring the next for information, piecing together bits and pieces of blog posts, social media responses, articles written in 2010, finding the latest up-to-date spreadsheet and app software, in order to ensure that your “one piece at a time” training program, ala the Johnny Cash song, was “just as good” as the real thing (maybe even better than the real thing, if we’re going U2 instead)?  Do you realize that the Tactical Barbell e-books are literally $10 on kindle?  Same with most of the 5/3/1 books.  Same with Super Squats and Mass Made Simple?  Even if this took you only an hour to get done…are you really worth $10 an hour?  That’s barely minimum wage in many parts of the United States, and not even that in other parts.  Could you have done more VALUABLE things with that hour of your life?  Imagine if you just pulled the trigger and bought the book and saved yourself that hour: what could you have done instead?  And now you actually have ALL of the information you need!  …which leads into the next part of the discussion…

You missed out on many tacopportunities in your quest to save money

Think of the time you wasted by running your slapped together “just as good” program.  And don’t act like it doesn’t happen: just in Super Squats ALONE I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fielded questions from trainees who CLEARLY never read the book because they’re NOT taking 3 deep breaths between every squat AND they’re using weights that are STUPIDLY heavy on the pullovers and wondering why they’re running into problems achieving their goals.  Or trainees that downloaded Easy Strength and have no idea what weights they’re supposed to use, because Dan never SAYS a specific amount in the book.  Or f**k me in all the incredible ways trainees manage to screw up 5/3/1, despite Jim writing the simplest strength training book ever (here’s a hint: if you’re running a 5/3/1 program for a year: STOP).  Now we’re REALLY getting into the question of “how much is your time worth”.  Once again, in order to save, at MOST, $40+shipping (looking at you “5/3/1 Forever), you, instead spent anywhere from 6-52+ weeks RUNNING THE PROGRAM WRONG!  You literally wasted, at a minimum, 1008 hours for a 6 week program…to save $40?  This means that an hour of your time is worth approximately…4 cents.  For reference, in 1921, White Castle would sell you one of their slider hamburgers for 5 cents, whereas the current cost for one of those is $1.35.  So an hour of your time in 2025 isn’t even quite enough to cover the cost of a White Castle slider in 1921, and to be able to pay for one today, you’d have to give up 27 hours of your life…do you REALLY value yourself so little?  Have some dignity: your time is at LEAST worth a DOUBLE hamburger: easily.  STOP debasing yourself in order to “save money”, you are BLEEDING OUT finances by wasting so much of your time.

 

But it doesn’t stop!  Irrespective of the cost of education, let’s just talk about how even WHEN we have all the right tools for the right job, we can still squander our time in an attempt to SAVE it!  Yes, once again, our attempts at frugality run into the aforementioned poverty premium.  Herein I wish to discuss (to the groans of many of my regular readers) the “lean bulk”, and how it's simply wasting your time.  The current landscape of physical transformation has impressed upon young trainees a notion that they should ALWAYS be photoshoot ready at a moment’s notice, with razor sharp abs year round and never an ounce of fat to be found on them.  That’s all fine and dandy if you’ve given up on progressing (hey, it happens: at one point we can decide that we’ve achieved enough and it’s time to maintain), but if you’re on an honest to goodness muscle building phase of training (like one from the books mentioned previously, ala Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, Tactical Barbell Mass Protocol or the 5/3/1 workouts vectored toward size), then it means we’ve decided to progress in A direction: specifically that of…well…building mass.  In previous generations, we UNDERSTOOD that this meant a time of hard training paired with hard eating…but, currently, we seem to not quite understand or appreciate that second part.  Instead, trainees believe that they should eat only the BAREST amount necessary to add muscle to the frame without a single added ounce of fat.  Squeaking out the smallest possible incremental gain on the scale, and rapidly course correcting if they ever see that number jump beyond the acceptable bound.  Why?  Well to avoid having to cut, of course!  See, this way, the trainee is going to save themselves SO much time on the backend of the program, because whereas all those fools are overeating and having to cut later, THIS super duper intelligent trainee is just going to gain all the way through the program and then just switch to the next program and get those sweet sweet infinite perpetual gains.  A lifelong gaining cycle: does life get any sweeter?

Gaze upon the future!

…yeah…about that.  What ends up REALLY happening?  The trainee is so hyper-focused on not adding any fat that they ALSO don’t add any muscle.  Their nutrition was so on the razor’s edge that they often fell short of whatever nutritional needs they had and, instead, at BEST, maintained what muscle they had and, quite possibly, lost a little bit of fat.  Which is to say, they WASTED an entire 6 week (minimum) training block.  They spun their wheels for six weeks, training STUPIDLY hard and getting nothing to show for it…all in their attempt to save time!  The irony!  Because now we’re 6 weeks behind schedule and need to catch up!  And herein is when the second hammer blow hits this trainee: they have absolutely NOT desire to do ANOTHER one of those training phases right now.  If you’ve ever done 6 weeks of Super Squats, or Mass Made Simple, or the 12 weeks of Deep Water’s beginner and intermediate program put together, or 5/3/1’s Building the Monolith, you know that, after those programs are done, you kinda want a little break.  Which, typically, is a FANTASTIC time to either maintain (diet break) or lose some fat (what the net is calling a “mini-cut”).  Because those with some time under the bar understand that a cut isn’t something you HAVE to do: it’s something you EARN.  It’s something you look FORWARD to.  Oh my goodness, I FINALLY don’t need to have a bar on my back for a 4 minute set of squats before I go an try to eat until my stomach tells my brain it’s beyond capacity just so I can recover and refuel enough to make it through the next workout: I can, instead, do Dan John’s “Easy Strength for Fat Loss” which has frickin’ “easy” IN THE NAME and allows me to just lift some weights, go for a walk, and let the fat melt off me.  I can finally rest my digestive tract for a minute AND save some money on my food budget (hey, look at that: saving money!)  And then, once I’ve done enough of this, I’ll be champing at the bit and ready to push the training and food hard again, because this is cyclical training and periodization, and it works.  No one is in a forever gaining phase, because “ain’t nobody got time for that”, and if you value your time, you’ll surely agree.  Quit trying to save yourself from cutting, and, instead, train so hard that you look FORWARD to that phase, so you can recharge and come back strong.

 

Your time IS valuable…so start treating it that way.  Spend money to save money, and INVEST your time instead of wasting it.

EDUCATION VS INDUSTRY

Shoutout to Rob Simpson over at T-Nation for posting something in my training log that sparked this bloviation, because it was at that moment that I had a realization that ultimately should have happened about 25 years ago, but suffice to say I’m a slow learner, and that relates directly to what I’m going to discuss here.  There is confusion in the physical transformation space ultimately regarding the function of influencers and the fitness industry in general, as many seek these individuals/institutions as sources of education when, in fact, their entire existence is premised on the exact OPPOSITE of education.  These sources seek to UNeducate you, for doing so is 100% in their best interest, whereas education works against their very existence.  Educators remain outside of this sphere and, in turn, typically need to be sought out, for they are NOT hinging their existence upon you discovering them but, instead, working ultimately toward the goal of you not NEEDING them.  In my discussion regarding gathering around the communal fire, these are the keepers of lore, whereas the industry are the gossipers, the former needing no one else to perform their function, the latter requiring the existence of others, for how can we have gossip without people?  But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself here.  Let me go back to my own education, wherein I learned that, in order to have a discussion, we must first operationalize the terms OF the discussion, so that we all are in agreement over what the words mean before we try to discuss the words.  I believe, you will find, in most matters of online “debate”, it’s simply a matter of people using non-operationalized terms, wherein the words mean one thing to one side and another thing to the other, ensuring there can be no agreement because there is no actual discussion occurring.  So first, let’s talk education.

A fine example of when industry met education

 

What is education?  Well, already, it’s a noun AND a verb, but let’s use it as a verb here, and let’s use it to mean “the process of taking the complex and making it simple”.  COULD we define it as something else?  Most assuredly, either something else entirely or, at least, something more nuanced, but I feel like for the sake of my discussion here, that definition works very well.  Think back to your elementary education (for some of my readers, that won’t require thinking very far back, whereas for others [myself having turned 40 this week], we may have to dust off the cobwebs).  When you arrived at school, their initial goal was to take the complexity of reading and make it simple enough for you to gasp, and they did this by first teaching you the alphabet (through song, because historically man has done much better remembering stuff through song and story vs straight memorization) and all the sounds the letters could make.  This built up into combining letters to make other sounds, and eventually culminated into being able to sound out long strings/chains of these letters into words and being able to read them in print, and now here you are reading the bizarre ramblings of a madman.  They did a similar process with mathematics, teaching you the basics of arithmetic before you cruised through courses on algebra and geometry onto your way through calculus and beyond (or, if you were like me, tapping out at statistics).  Now consider the fact you were around 5 or 6 when you entered elementary school: it was the function of these educators to take complex concepts and boil them down to something a 5 year old can understand…THAT, my friends, is education!

 

But think further: WHY was it that you were getting an education?  As much as we’d like to believe it was out of the goodness of the state (assuming you went to a publicly funded school, please forgive my cultural bias here), it was, ultimately, so that you would not NEED these educators.  Fundamentally, the function of state funded education is to produce INDEPENDENT members of society who are able to function as adults without extra assistance and, specifically, be able to CONTRIBUTE.  Nothing is for free, and the state invested time and money into you so that you would produce MORE for them.  Education’s function was to make you independent and capable, and this theory of education dates back to the Ancient Greeks and beyond, and prior to that it existed on a tribal level, wherein the young were trained by the old so that they could one day grow and become contributing members of the tribe.  Historically, in all instances, the function of education is to create independent people that are able to contribute back to society, and this is achieved by taking the complex and making it simple enough to grasp at a young age so that it can be incrementally built upon.

Although sometimes they instilled discipline in us too

 

The fitness industry does NOT want to educate you.  Doing so completely serves AGAINST their best interest.  Why?  Because it’s in their name: the fitness INDUSTRY.  They are an entity that makes money by people NEEDING them in order to achieve fitness.  Because if there is no need for the industry, then there is no money being put toward it, which means it cases to exist.  So what does the fitness industry do?  The OPPOSITE of education: they make the simple COMPLEX.  They take concepts that should be fundamentally simple to grasp, and portray them as exceedingly complex and unapproachable, and then they SELL you “the solution” to the problem that THEY have created.  And, specifically, they sell you ONLY the solution to the problem: NOT the method used to discover the solution.  Oh no, THAT is a tightly guarded “industry secret” that only THOSE “in the know” are allowed access to (which, if you’re willing a pay a premium fee AND sign a non-disclosure agreement, you may be granted access to).  You know who else did this?  Nintendo, with the call-in 1900 number wherein they would tell you SPECIFICALLY how to beat certain sections of their video games (which secrets that literally could NOT be figured out without outside help), but never did they actually TEACH you about the game.  Answers for sale, but never education.

 

Because physical transformation is simple.  Starting from a baseline of nothing, literally ANY physical activity will achieve results.  Yet, we have members of the fitness industry that want to SELL you the idea about “wasting newbie gains” or “optimizing your first year of training”, because the new trainee is ESPECIALLY easy to prey upon.  They don’t have enough experience to smell bullsh*t when it’s nearby, and influencers know how to make their object far shiner than an educator can.  The same is true of nutrition.  With the current state of how we eat, the simplest AND most effective nutritional intervention is to eat single ingredient foods and drink only water.  Even without calorie counting or macro training, I literally just wrote THE most effective diet possible in one sentence, understanding effectiveness here to mean achieving 80% of the desired outcome and leaving the 20% for a more nuanced approach.  But we have influencers out there who seek to tell trainees that they are actively sabotaging their results by NOT consuming some manner of hyper-overpriced and overprocessed junk supplement and that eating single ingredient foods are making them fat, slow, old and sick.  They sell that it is CRITICAL to track every single bite of food that you take, and THANKFULLY they just so HAPPEN to sell an app that does exactly that, alongside a protein bar with the highest protein the calorie ratio (which, of course, they sell you is an absolutely critical element to achieving physical transformation success).  These people CREATE problems and sell solutions, whereas educators IDENTIFY problems and give you the tools to solve them. 

But sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease

 

Because, again, refer back to the function of education: to create independence.  What is the function of industry?  To create DEPENDENCE.  An industry NEEDS customers, and, therefore, it must go out and create a NEED for whatever it is that they sell.  Tobacco did this by literally getting people addicted to their products, creating a biological need for it that they were all too willing to provide.  The fitness industry does this by taking the simple concepts of physical transformation (hard work, consistency, time/patience/compliance), turning them needlessly complex, and then selling a solution to a problem THEY created.  The tobacco industry created a new problem for it’s customers: suddenly they had an addiction they needed to satisfy.  The fitness industry created new problem as well: we used to know how to eat right and work hard, but now we’re lost.  “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for the rest of his life” is a rallying call for educators and a warning for influencers.

 

But how can you tell who you’re dealing with in this landscape?  Who is out there looking to educate vs influence?  It can’t all be about money, because even my favorite authors, such as Dan John, Paul Kelso (RIP), Jim Wendler, K. Black, etc, charge money for their products.  But look at the end results here.  You buy one of their books and you legitimately have the tools you need to train and eat for the rest of your life.  You are educated: their product gave you independence.  An influencer is going to sell you a monthly subscription, or a product that “runs out” (it’s why Bob Hoffman switched from selling power racks to protein powder, because people only ever bought ONE power rack, but they’d buy a new tub once a month.  It’s also why Glenn Pendlay[RIP] went bankrupt selling THE greatest weightlifting equipment in the USA), or simply “answers on demand”.  They’re not going to set you up to be educated: they’re going to set you up to be co-dependent.  But for the REAL test here, go back to your elementary school education.  As much as you may have thought your undergrad professors were brilliant MINDS, your kindergarten teacher was a brilliant EDUCATOR, because they were taking the MOST complex concepts and boiling them down to the SIMPLEST of ideas so that your 5 year old brain could grasp it.  Someone who actually KNOWS the material they are discussing will have that ability.  The greater one understands the material, the simpler they are able to explain it, whereas the more tenuous one’s grasp, the shallower their explanation, to the point that, if one does not understand it at all, and is simply parroting ideas that they’ve heard, upon being challenged, they will lash out at the question asker rather than thank them for the opportunity to further explain.  You all know this first hand.  I know that if my kid asked me why the planets revolve around the sun and don’t just fall out of the universe, I could give them a passing explanation of how gravitational pull works before I eventually say “let’s go read Wikipedia together”, but if they asked me to explain transubstantiation, my 8 years of Catholic education would kick into overdrive and we’d spend WAY too much time on the subject.  Because people who actually know things can talk WAY too long on the subject, and most often will need to be cut off from it.

You either die a hero or live to become a meme

 

Don’t go to the fitness industry seeking education.  That’s not what it is there for.  It’s there to make money off YOU, and if you go to THEM, you’re doing their work for them.  It’s their job to make a sucker out of you: don’t meet them halfway.  Fight them off every step of the way by becoming EDUCATED.  Seek out educators, living on top of mountaintops and shouting out their prophecies to all who will listen…and listen to them.  Let them make you independent, well informed, and able to cut through the crap.  Let them save you money and time by giving you the tools you need in order to be able to succeed WITHOUT anyone else.  Don’t let them give you answers: let them give you the tools you need to make your OWN answers.