RACING TO REDLIGHTS

Driving is when I tend to do most of my thinking, and when a vast majority of my blog post ideas tend to populate in my head.  I’ll actually have to get my phone out once I reach the parking lot and send myself a quick summary of what I came up with before the thought fleets away.  Amazingly enough, it’s not the actual DRIVING that tends to inspire my thoughts: it’s just a time when I am by myself and my brain can ruminate.  However, today’s post is different, for it is inspired by observing driving behavior, and understanding how much it maps on to what we see in the world of physical transformation.  Because one of the silliest things I observe when driving is people racing toward a redlight.  The light is blatantly red, yet the motorist shows no sign of yielding, and, instead, slams on their breaks at the last possible second upon reaching the light.  Aside from the fact this is very distressing for fellow motorists, as it appears the driver does not recognize the light and is going to run it, it’s also just flat out not good for your vehicle to drive it like that.  You exhaust your break pads and put needless wear and tear on it.  The more prudent action upon seeing a redlight is to ease off the accelerator early in hopes that, by the time you arrive, the light changes and you never even need to apply your breaks in the first place.  And much as life imitates art, so often trainees, in turn, find themselves racing toward a redlight of physical transformation, blunting their progress and causing damage that could easily be prevented by easing off the accelerator a little.

A video game about a cartoon about a commercial about crash test dummies...the 90s were a trip

 

We see this so frequently in the world of training, with 5/3/1 being the easiest example to go do.  SO many trainees absolutely refuse to even ENTERTAIN the idea of employing 5/3/1 for the same trite reason: “it’s progresses too slowly”.  I’ve written numerous posts on how this is a silly critique, but for today’s focus, let’s go examine what the alternative is.  What is the BENEFIT of progressing quickly compared to slowly?  What do we achieve, aside from simply arriving at the stall EARLIER?  What is the benefit of racing toward this redlight?  If we just slap 5lbs on the bar every workout irrespective of how the last one went, how we’re feeling today, how we’re eating, what our workload is, etc, we’re simply going to reach a point where it’s unsustainable, we stall, most likely regress, and we are simply DONE with this protocol.  As Dan John famously asks: “Now what?”  But if we employ something like 5/3/1, with an intelligent and nuanced progression scheme, we ease off the accelerator of progress and more slowly approach this impending stall.  And what is the benefit of THAT?  By approaching it SLOWLY, we actually have the time and opportunity to get STRONGER before we get there: meaning that the stall won’t actually happen!  We see it coming on the horizon, decide to ease off and allow ourselves a chance to get strong enough to overcome it, and we get to keep on cruising through, getting stronger and better, compared to our compatriot in the other lane that is now just hitting the reset button an in attempt to generate another running start at this stall.

 

We see this same redlight racing in the world of nutrition as well, with fat loss is the biggest culprit, and that’s because everyone is totally fine taking a long time to GET fat, but no one is willing to do the same when it comes to fat LOSS.  Once the decision is made to lose fat, it’s a crisis event, and it’s attacked with that level of ferocity.  DRASTIC calorie restriction is employed, and training is doubled in terms of frequency, duration and intensity.  And in one week, 5 pounds are lost…and then a stall.  And for the next 3 weeks, a stall.  And maybe even a little jump up in weight.  What happened?  The body ADAPTED, because that’s what bodies do.  And it’s that adaptation that one is supposed to FIGHT during fat loss.  They’re supposed to bamboozle the body into giving up the fat by HIDING the fact that we’re losing fat.  It’s going to be a slow, gradual process where we sneak a few calories away and do a little more walking than usual and save harder interventions for when the body displays some stubbornness.  But if we try to race to the redlight of adaptation, we achieve exactly that, and, once again “now what?”  We WERE eating 800 calories of lettuce and water while running a marathon a day: do we now eat 400 calories and run 2 marathons?

The IIFYM crowd double checking their calorie counting apps

 

I was going to write that we see this in muscle gaining as well, but in truth, we’ve moved SO far away from THAT issue due to everyone being so afraid of losing their abs in pursuit of building muscle that, instead, we have people that have been sitting at the greenlight for 4 full cycles and STILL refuse to hit the accelerator, so perhaps a discussion for another time.  So instead let’s talk about the dreaded “deload” and how this is a prime example of easing off the accelerator BEFORE we hit the redlight.  There’s some sort of bizarre stigma against employing deloads right now, hinging on the premise that needing a deload is a sign that you’re improperly managing intensity and volume in the first place.  But let’s go back with that traffic metaphor again.  Sure, in theory, if you drive your car at exactly the right speed with lights that are perfectly timed, you’ll never need to hit the breaks: you’ll always hit greenlights and just coast right through.  But what can happen?   An animal can dart out into the middle of the street and force you to slowdown or swerve, or a car can pull out in front of you and start going slower than you intended, or you miscalculated the size of your bladder and suddenly you need to arrive at your next destination with a little more urgency.  What happened?  Life.  It’s a full contact sport: wear a helmet.  And we encounter that same entropy when we train as well.  Illnesses happen, unexpected social obligations, late nights, minor tweaks, etc.  Sometimes, a planned and scheduled deload IS properly managing volume and intensity, because it’s like a training slush fund, set aside to deal with those less than desirable elements that impact our recovery.  We budget a necessary degree of “oops” into our planning, so that we don’t find ourselves racing toward a redlight of a stall.  The deload lets us take our foot off the accelerator for a minute so we can keep on cruising through greenlights.

 

For all of our sakes, please be a good driver out there. 

INTENTIONAL INACTION: WHAT WE DON’T DO

I find one of the most challenging notion for westerners to accept and appreciation is that of NOT doing something.  We are a culture of doing: that is how we know we are BEING.  “I think, therefore I am” ala Decartes was there to resolve an existential crisis, the notion that, because I am thinking, I MUST therefore exist, premised upon the idea that action affirms existence.  Contrast this with an eastern philosophy of duality, wherein action is necessarily balanced by inaction, and this audience can far more appreciate the importance of NOT doing along with doing.  This comes to a head in the realm of physical transformation, because those who embark on this journey with a western mindset are always fixated on what they can DO to achieve results, rather than what they can NOT do.  “What foods do I eat to lose weight?”  Already that question seems so ridiculous on the premise: how will EATING make us LOSE weight?  But it’s the question fired right out the gate.  “What workout do I do to get in shape?”  “What supplements do I take?”  Why do we need supplements BEFORE we even know what’s wrong?  People will ice plunge and detox and juice cleanse and red light therapy themselves to hell and gone, but few will actually STOP doing stuff, because DOING is satisfying, while NOT doing feels like stagnation, decline and death.  But I propose a notion of intentional inaction as a necessary counter balance to action.  To satisfy this western sensibility, we must ACTIVELY practice inactivity.

Nailed it!

What does this mean exactly?  It means to be inactive WITH INTENT.  It’s easy for us to equate inactivity with sloth, what the west considers to be a sin due to puritanical values that praise industry (which Nietzsche would most likely argue is, in fact, slave morality, crafted by the masters, to have a content workforce out there producing goods while the masters enjoy luxury, but I digress), but we can instead turn the act of inactivity (boy that’s confusing) into a form of intentional action.  We CHOOSE inactivity as a means to specifically achieve the effect that the inactivity produces.  Because yes, “an object at rest remains at rest”, but we exist in a system where all the objects have already been placed into motion.  In turn, by placing an object INTO a state of rest, we actually disrupt the system and create effects. Inactivity is not merely the cessation of action, but instead to catalyst for an outcome that can ONLY be achieved THROUGH inaction.  We achieve results that cannot be achieved through action.

 

By INTENTIONALLY fasting, we engage in the inaction of not eating.  We are NOT doing something, but we are NOT doing it for a reason.  Fasting from carbohydrates makes it so that we are NOT experiencing blood sugar and insulin spikes during the day, which, in turn, gives us an opportunity to improve insulin sensitivity.  When we fast from protein, we can increase secretion of the FGF21 hormone, which can improve lipid metabolism and increase insulin sensitivity.  And just fasting in general gives our digestive tract a rest and gives us a chance to trigger autophagy (which, yes, training can ALSO do this, but we’ll talk about training in a bit).  We’re also not triggering mTOR as much when we engage in some intentional fasting, AND we give the metabolism an opportunity to ramp down, which, if you’ve been pounding food in an arms race to put on size and find yourself staring down the barrel of 8000 calories a day just to put on some size, a chance to drop demand is a blessing.  We re-sensitize our bodies to food by denying it some for a little bit.  We’re not simply “not eating”: we’re INTENTIONALLY not eating because of the effect that NOT eating achieves.

Like fame and fortune!

NOT training IS action: it’s the action of letting fatigue dissipate so that we can train HARDER upon our return.  For some reason, it’s become en vouge now to claim that, if you NEED deloads, your training is poorly set up, and this absolutely smacks of the HIT reductionists claims that “if it didn’t work, that means you didn’t train hard enough, because HIT ONLY works if you train hard enough”.  Hey Emperor: hate to break it to you, but you’re naked.  For those of us living on planet Earth, life happens, fatigue builds, and taking a week off of training is a surefire way to let that fatigue go away.  And along with FATIGUE, even IF you have somehow managed to find the perfect balance of training such that you never exceed your recovery abilities, there’s no denying that the sheer act of training itself is an inflammatory activity, and simply allowing your body a week off from constantly exposing it to inflammation can ALSO have some positive effects.   Yes yes: acute inflammation of hormesis and chronic inflammation is the concern, but just from a “making weight class” perspective, taking a week off of training means letting some of that fluid out of your body so you can step on the scale a little lighter.  It means letting your connective tissues have a little break so all those chronic aches and pains can go away.  It means, psychologically, relighting the fire, as the week off should ideally have you champing at the bit to come back to training.  It also means having a light at the end of the tunnel of a hard training block, knowing you can REALLY go all out on that last week, as you’ll have a full week off to recover.  These are all objectives that we CANNOT achieve through DOING: it’s the NOT doing that allows us to achieve this.  The deload is an ACTIVE process: we are actively NOT doing the things that prevent us from experiencing these outcomes.

 

And what’s comical about all of this is I’m discussing intentionally not doing the things that we understand are GOOD for you.  NOT eating foods, no matter how healthy or unprocessed they are.  NOT doing exercise, no matter how effective it is for producing lean mass or positive cardio health outcomes.  Just imagine the benefits from all the NOT doing of things we know are BAD for us.  Not drinking alcohol, not doing recreational drugs, not eating processed garbage, etc.  These are some of the simplest wins we can rack up in the quest for physical transformation, and they’re the most overlooked because they’re NOT doing things rather than doing things.  And then we can go even further and try to NOT do the things that we THINK are good for us but we know are really self-destructive.  NOT making every single training session a max out, NOT trying to destroy ourselves with conditioning but instead let it build us up into something great, NOT focusing on our strengths and ignoring our weaknesses, etc.  If we dedicate some serious effort into NOT doing things, we might actually become something.   

A FOUNDATION OF LIES

As a parent, it breaks my heart how much we have to lie to children in order to educate them, because all you want is to build trust between you and your child so that they’ll have the faith and confidence to come to you in times of need.  Our lies are non-malicious and, in fact, intended to be benevolent, but this does not change the fact that they are lies.  And since these are the lies we tell our children, we build their knowledge upon a foundation of lies, resulting in us having to later go on to CORRECT the lies that we used to establish the foundation once they’re better equipped to handle the truth.  And it’s because our brains develop incrementally, and not at the rate that is best suited for our own survival.  Children aren’t equipped to handle the nuance and, quite simply, barbarism of our history as a species (or our current barbarism for that matter), so we tell them heavily sugar coated stories to the point of being completely inaccurate regarding the founding of our country (which, for the majority of us, the country as ALREADY founded: just by indigenous people that were murdered and exiled by our own ancestors) along with world historical events in general.  When it comes to Christian theology, children are given sanitized stories, because the Bible itself is honestly WILD.  We tell kids not to talk to strangers because we don’t want to explain the nefarious intent of CERTAIN strangers, even though, later in life, talking to strangers is going to be a valuable skill, and the inability to do so is going to severely limit one from being able to have basic social interaction skills.  But therein lies the rub: if we do not, eventually, UNDO these lies, we leave one in a childlike state: unprepared to face the challenges of adulthood and unequipped to succeed.  And it is no different in the realm of physical transformation.  Quite simply, the foundation you build upon is a foundation of lies, and, eventually, the truth will need to come out.

Learning the truth about Santa can cause violent reactions in some...

When we start training, we start with the lie of progressive overload.  And that already upsets many to hear me call it a lie, but like all GOOD lies, it contains an element of truth within it.  We love the story of Milo of Croton and the bull, but that story is FULL of bull…but it’s a good story that helps teach us the lesson of doing more this time than we did last time.  And so we equip a trainee with a basic linear progression program and tell them “this is how you get stronger: you put more weight on the bar this time than you did last time”.  And thus, the foundation of lies is built…but eventually we must put away childish things!

 

We’ve seen this before: a trainee learns ONE program and decides that their education on the matter has stopped.  And hey: some authors DO manage to make that work.  You COULD just buy 5/3/1 Forever, or the 3 Tactical Barbell Books and have all the tools to train for the rest of your life, but even then, you’re still using MULTIPLE programs under one methodology to accomplish this goal.  And it’s because of the principle of periodization: get good at something until you can’t, then pick a new thing to get good at until you’re able to get good at that other thing again.  But a new trainee is such a babe in the woods that simply the act of training in ANY capacity is going to raise ALL of their abilities at the same time.  It’s only once they’ve exhausted that newb superpower that new interventions must be undertaken, at which point the magic of linear progression ends and we must employ different avenues of progression.  But for that trainee who does NOT unlearn the foundational lie, they just keep running the same basic linear progression until they stall, the they reset and repeat, hitting the same stall over and over again.  Like a child stuck repeating the 3rd grade, they never learn the TRUE history. 

Or repeating the 4th grade for 38 years

 

And we fuel these trainees upon a nutritional foundation of lies as well!  The lie of protein, and specifically, its significance and importance.  And once again, a scared cow is slaughtered, but I come here merely to speak the truth: not to make people happy.  Is protein necessary to build muscle?  Indisputable.  Is it as important as we PORTRAY it to be?  This, of course, is a SUBJECTIVE area to refute, but from my lens, the significance has been overstated.  And like the lies we tell children, it was, initially, for noble intent.  This is because it is QUITE possible to go a full day of eating and take in a VERY low amount of protein.  If you have children or have been around children, you know very well this is possible (once again, children the carrier of the lies).  A kid can go a whole day eating cereal for breakfast with toast and jam, possibly even fruit, a lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with applesauce and goldfish crackers, and then a dinner of sauceless pasta and breadsticks, with a dessert of ice cream.  Take a kid to a buffet and see what they pick out…and realize that many adults don’t outgrow these childish tastebuds.  And THEN factor in that we exist in a food environment where junkfood manufacturers have keyed in on the fact that protein and fiber are satiating and work AGAINST making food hyperpalatable so they intentionally engineer it to be low in those properties and that MANY folks live off these foods because they are shelf stable and require no preparation and, once again, it’s clear that one CAN operate in a low protein state.

 

That said, though: as soon as one simply has the AWARENESS to NOT do this, protein’s importance really tends to wane.  It honestly doesn’t take a significant amount of protein in order to build muscle: with every passing day the numbers seem to drop lower and lower.  In fact, what we observed is that those who were pushing at the top end range FOR protein requirements tended to be the same folks who were selling us protein supplements: they were creating a problem and then selling us a solution.  Specifically in the realm of muscle BUILDING, we find that the presence of adequate fuel from EITHER fats or carbs will have a protein sparing effect such that they body won’t be forced to breakdown protein for fuel and, instead, can use it purely for the sake of building muscle.  It’s only in the absence of a fuel abundance (fat loss phases) that protein requirements tend to drive higher, and even then, still to a manageable level.  We tell new trainees the lie that “protein is VERY important” simply to get them to start eating the damn stuff, but once THAT is figured out we can say “ok, it’s not QUITE that important, but it’s still good to have some”, because we soon find ourselves with trainees that are fixated on getting that protein that they don’t care to consider the source NOR do they have awareness of where they are obtaining their other sources of fuel.  They eat protein poptarts and protein breakfast cereal and protein bars and drink protein shakes and all other manner of shenanigans, because much like those strangers we warn children about: companies are predatory, and they found a mark in the new trainee. 

A whole EIGHT grams of the stuff!

 

But think about it: protein ISN’T an energy substrate the body can readily use: WHY would you need a “protein snack”?  A snack is there to address an energy demand: we ran out of energy and need a quick pick me up to get more.  This means, traditionally, a simple carb, but could also be complex carbs and fats (trail mix is a great example of this): it makes no sense for us to need a snack of protein.  That can wait until we can sit down for an actual meal.  And this is the TRUTH about nutrition that is a bit too much for the new trainee to take in.  Do we need to bog them down about energy substrates when they’re ALREADY eating a diet of almost pure fats and carbs?  No: we tell them that protein is important. But once they HAVE that foundational lie established, THEN we start slowly leaking the truth into them.

 

And much like when it comes to your parents, do not begrudge the foundational liars.  They had benevolent intentions.  Do not discover the lie and think to yourself that now you can no longer trust them to provide you the truth.  Do not mistake EVOLUTION in thought for REVOLUTION.  This is not them completely changing their position: this is them allowing you to build up appropriately to where you need to be.  And, in turn, do not doubt YOURSELF when what worked no longer “works”.  You’ve simply grown up.  It’s now time to unlearn the lies and start learning the truth.