I co-opted “Chaos is the Plan” about 4 years ago, and during such time I’ve had many folks ask me “how, exactly, CAN chaos be the plan?” Which, in turn, was the whole point of the exercise: it’s a paradox. But the premise behind it is simple: it’s about taking control, specifically in situations that SEEM uncontrollable. In a similar manner as Camus having us embrace the absurd, when we say “chaos is the plan”, we acknowledge that we have no control over what happens to us but we DO have control in how we exist within this environment, similar to what Aurelius wrote in “meditations”. Despite having no control of the environment itself, we are far from powerless: we must simply take the power BACK. And interestingly enough, this can often be accomplished by being the one that inflicts the hardship upon ourselves, before life has an opportunity to do so to us. In a manner similar to “you can’t fire me: I quit”, we can take the power back by saying “it is not you, life, that makes me suffer, for I inflict the suffering upon myself in spite of you!” But “suffering” is honestly a bit dramatic as it relates to the realm of physical transformation: ultimately, it is luxury and leisure that we can afford to have the free time and facilities necessary to even pursue these endeavors. So all that having been said, allow me to provide you some examples from my own experience, wherein, with chaos as the plan, I take the power back.
This is also where all of my medical knowledge comes from
The first
such example I have is how I train first thing in the morning. This is a habit I picked up once I became a
father, having previously experimented with some early morning training but
ultimately preferring to train in the afternoons/evenings. The reasons for that preference are obvious:
I got to sleep more and I performed better in training because my muscles and
joints were warmer, looser and more limber, and I have more meals in me to fuel
the training. What advantage does
training first thing in the morning have?
It means that the training gets DONE.
It is literally THE first thing I accomplish in a given weekday. Aside from taking care of basic body
functions, I wake up, put on clothes, and I get my training done. And BECAUSE of that: no person or thing can
TAKE my training away from me. No last
minute emergency meeting at work that happens during my gym time can cancel my
training, no unforeseen family emergency in the middle of the day, no traffic
accident that compromises my schedule: the chaos that is life has NO say in my
training. I get up at 0400, I feel sorry
for myself that I do so, and then I go and train because it means that, once
it’s done, my training is over and nothing can take it from me that day.
In a similar
manner discussing training, within a training session itself, there is always
the potential for chaos. An emergency
CAN happen in the middle of a training session: the world CAN decide to wake up
before you and get in your way. An
injury can occur at the start of the session which shuts the session down OR,
at the very least, forces you to change what was originally intended. Which is why we can take the power back by
taking our greatest priority and doing it FIRST in the training. Which seems incredibly obvious…but how often
do we actually DO this? Specifically, I
refer to trainees who say “I need to train my abs more, but I put it at the end
of the session, and then I just skip them”.
Or the same with trainees who lament their lack of conditioning while
having ALSO skipped their end of workout conditioning session for the past 17
years. Chaos is winning: take the power
back! You’ll never skip the FIRST thing
in your workout, so take what it is that NEEDS doing and do it first:
irrespective of how much “sense” it makes to do so. It may be “sub-optimal” to train biceps
before back, but if your biceps are lagging and every time you train back first
you have no juice left for biceps, the answer presents itself. Training your conditioning before heavy
squats may make your squats less heavy…but it will also FINALLY fix your
conditioning. And after enough training
cycles of putting what matters FIRST, you may have finally transformed yourself
in a way that you CAN go back to prioritizing back and heavy squats, because
NOW you are better than you were.
So, ya know, maybe more biceps and less forearms this training cycle
Nutritionally, I have found that FASTING (intermittently,
specifically, as outlined in “Red Meat and Black Coffee”, having 1 meal per day
in the evening) is one of the ultimate ways to take the power back from
chaos. Fasting is fascinating in that
regard, as it is the act of NOT eating, which, in turn, is no act at all, but
in DOING so chaos happens on OUR terms.
In a similar manner that chaos cannot take my training from me when I do
it first thing in the morning, chaos cannot compromise my nutrition if I’m NOT
eating. In a conventional, 3 meal a day
scenario, the most easily compromised meal is the midday meal (lunch), as quite
often work will have some sort of surprise emergency or meeting that lands on
that time, or co-workers will invite one out to lunch, or someone will bring
treats and goodies into the work center, or, for those of you that AREN’T
office drones, some other element of the chaos of life will present itself (you
cut off your thumb roughnecking on the oil rig…I don’t know what you do for a
living, forgive me). And if we’re
traveling, lunch can be a completely unknown variable: it’s whatever is being
served on the airplane/at the airport/on the road/in the hotel/etc etc. Our midday meal is at the whims and whimsy of
chaos…unless we’re simply NOT eating. If
we’re fasting until the end of the day, or only eating in the morning and the
evening, the chaos of life cannot have a say in our nutrition: we CHOOSE to not
eat during this time.
And after
enough time operating under this paradigm, you begin to realize how much a
midday meal is honestly enslaving, while fasting is liberating. So many folks LIVE for that midday meal and,
in turn, when it is TAKEN from them, they experience significant emotional
turmoil. Think of the people you know
that get “hangry” if they don’t get lunch on time, people that experience “low
blood sugar”, people that raid vending machines looking for quick fixes and
plop down $35 at an airport eating fried grease prepared by inept and
unmotivated drones (why is it that the least capable people seem to operate
airport restaurants?) just so that they can have SOMETHING for lunch…whereas
you can just let that midday time pass by, knowing your next meal is only a few
hours away. And if THAT meal doesn’t
happen? Then we’ll sleep, wake up, and
eat THEN instead. We eat on OUR terms:
chaos doesn’t get to have a say.
This plan will not survive contact with the enemy
Chaos is the
plan, because life is chaos but WE are not powerless in light of that.
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