ESCAPE PLAN

Ya know, I’m honestly torn on writing this, because I’m already seeing how this is going to conflict with some previous notions I’ve expressed, but perhaps, once again, we’re experiencing “duality” live and in person.  So allow me to explain myself to myself, as right now this conflict is in my head and I haven’t even clued you in yet.  I’ve written before about the notion of “burning the boats”, how the Art of War talks about never backing your enemy into a corner they can’t escape from, because then they’ll fight like they have nothing left to lose, the whole Gatticka notion of “not leaving anything for the swim back”, the 300 Spartans that fought to the last man, etc etc.  All of these notions are quite romantic and useful TO A POINT, because quite often a newer trainee simply has no notion of what “intensity” is when it relates to effort that we have to FORCE them into these positions in order to get them some exposure and awareness.  Have them unrack the bar and then take out the safety pins so that they just plain HAVE to squat until failure: that’s cool.  But, at one point, we need to sit down and have a legitimate discussion about escape plans.  Why?  Because as cool as it is to scream Apollo Creed’s quote about how “There is no tomorrow!”, the reality is…there most likely will be.  I’m 40 years old: I’ve seen a LOT of tomorrows become todays and whip by to yesterdays, and when we live our life like there’s no tomorrow, we can quite often turn that into a self-fulfilling prophecy, because we’ve cultivated an environment where longevity is an impossibility.  Aesop had a fable exactly about this very notion: the grasshopper and the ant, so here, once again, we discover that nothing is original and everything comes from the Greek’s (thanks for progressive overload Milo of Croton!), so let’s go ahead and discuss what I’m referring to as “escape plans”, and how they benefit us.

This is why you want to come up with your plan BEFORE you need it

What do I mean when I refer to an “escape plan”?  Another notion would be an “exit strategy”, but ultimately what I am intending to convey is some sort of plan to get us OUT of the situation we got ourselves INTO.  Dan John wrote an entire book on this concept titled “Now What”, so once again, I’m out of my depth and someone else has already covered this, but it’s my blog and this is what I want to write.  What inspired this discussion was observing a trainee walk directly into a trap that I fell for myself and, despite my warnings, they are now in the middle of it with no escape plan.  They’ve set a goal and a deadline for themselves: abs by 1 Oct.  This means they are doing EVERYTHING in their power to accomplish this goal, to include upping the drugs they are taking while dropping the “food” (I use the term loosely, as it’s primarily a gruel mix of protein powder, egg whites and oats) to unsustainable levels and just “white knuckling” their way through the hunger until their goal date arrives.  To which I asked the question: what happens on 2 Oct?  After we reach the goal and the celebration and merriment ends…what’s the escape plan?  How are we going to get OUT of this mess?  Because I’ll tell you from experience what happens otherwise: a “cheat meal” turns into a 2 year junkfood bender, where not only do we lose those precious abs we worked so hard for, but we end up in a WORSE place than we started the whole process.  We fail to rebuild all that lean tissue we hemorrhaged during the hard cut while still managing to overshoot the bodyfat lost, so now we have less muscle and more fat than when we started the whole process, which means, if we want abs again, we have to diet HARDER than before, which is just going to set us up for an even WORSE rebound when we get to abs again, and the cycle continues.  In this situation, there IS no escape plan: we’re stuck in the trap, going around and around.

 

We see this in the training side of the equation as well.  How many folks are stuck in the “milking the beginner gains” trap, where they just keep running the same 3-5x5 program for 3 lifts until they stall, just to reset back to baseline, run it again, hit the EXACT SAME LIFTS as last time, stall and repeat?  Or what of people that just keep running the same peaking program (looking at you Smolov: why NOT run a program written by a coach who never existed that produced athletes no one ever heard of?), manage to barely survive to the end, hit a high squat, completely fall apart, spend months undoing the damage they did to themselves, and never actually get any stronger?  Hell, even my beloved programs, like Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, Deep Water, Building the Monolith, etc, after week 6 is done, what are we doing on day 1 of week 7?

Probably get some R&R

I’m in no way innocent in all of this.  As I wrote above: I’ve walked straight into the very traps I’m warning others about.  Which is WHY I understand the value of an escape plan now.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with engaging with these practices where we ACT as though there is no tomorrow, but “act” is the key here.  This is just kayfabe baby.  We are playing a part, but when the curtains close, we have to be ready to take off the stage makeup and come back to reality.  And this means we need to have some manner of escape plan or offramp to allow us OUT of the mess we got ourselves into through this process.  If we’re going to do some sort of stupid hard cut to hit some bodyfat mark, what’s our dietary strategy going to be coming OUT of that?  This is how “reverse dieting” has become popular, which is really just slowly increasing the food volume to gradually return back to a state of normalcy, rather than that “post show rebound” which used to be sold as some sort of anabolic alchemy but has since been understood to just be a speedrun to edema and diabetes.  But even then, this is just looking at VOLUME: if we’ve restricted ourselves to a diet of nothing but protein shakes and lettuce, we’re going to have to have an escape plan for the introduction of foods IN GENERAL back to our diet, so we can watch out for potential “trigger foods” that send us spiraling.  If we just spent 6 weeks hammering out Super Squats, we may need to escape plan that comes up with a way to get our shoulders and elbows recovered from having a bar on our back for 5 minutes a pop 3x a week, because many of us simply don’t have that mobility any more.  If we’ve just run a bunch of accumulation blocks in a row, maybe we come up with a plan to implement some intensification to get a break from that heavy volume (and hey, since nutrition and training tie together, maybe this will mean giving our digestive system a break).

 

None of this is revolutionary.  Smart people would simply call this periodization.  It’s thinking ahead and planning for the “next stage”.  But it ALSO means having to appreciate that THIS stage NEEDS to have an end state at some point.  And like a good plan, we need to have our escape figured out BEFORE we get ourselves into the mess, because trying to figure out how we’re going to escape ONCE we’re trapped is trying to come up with a plan while we’re panicking.  We can walk into the trap: let’s just know how we’re going to walk out of it as well.