PROGRAM CHECK IN: TACTICAL BARBELL OPERATOR: OPERATION "PLANET MONGO"

I got bit hard by the Tactical Barbell bug and have been diligently following Operator for the past 19 weeks, having completed 2 6 week cycles for my most recent strongman competition and appropriate bridge weeks before embarking on my most current 6 week cycle.  And I have full intentions of chasing this with another 6 week cycle after a 2-ish week cruise vacation, which will lead to another bridge week before I do ANOTHER strongman competition, after which point, my intent is to get back on the Mass Protocol so I can gain during the end of summer through the fall and into the Christmas holiday season, because that’s going to be an awesome time to eat and get huge.

 

Since I ran the last 2 cycles VERY “by the book”, I allowed myself some liberties with this cycle, and I wanted to document my deviances and experience with them.

 

Welcome to Operation “Planet Mongo”

 

WHAT IS PLANET MONGO

Thankfully, Planet Mongo came out in the 80s instead of the 90s

 

“Planet Mongo” is a reference to a quote from Paul Kelso in the book “Powerlifting Basics Texas Style” where, while advising a trainee on a program that prioritized back growth, he said “We’re going to build you a back from the Planet Mongo”.  For this cycle of Operator, that was my goal.  I used to be able to do 20 dead hang chin ups on demand without issue, but as I deprioritized my back, I found this ability dwindling, and at one of those USMC chin up stations this summer, I found myself struggling to get 14 done.  I noticed the absence of my back strength while competing in strongman as well, and I attributed it to my deadlifts wanning performance: a lift I used to be quite talented at.  So I decided to spend some time improving my back strength by going back (pun) to what has always worked best for me: submax training with high volume.  This was in contrast to what K Black recommends regarding weighted chins, to which I had tried his approach and found that (for me), it was not giving me the results I was looking for.

 

MAIN WORK

When you're eating carnivore, "meat and potatoes" becomes a meaningless expression

 

I saw my best growth back when I ran 5/3/1 and followed Jim Wendler’s suggestion to just do chins in between sets of the main and assistance work.  I made this work by NOT including heavy weighted chins into my cluster for Operator.  Instead, I settled on a very limited cluster of

* Buffalo bar squat
* Axle strict press

This cluster was limited in terms of movements AND total volume.  I went with 3x5, rather than 5x5.  The intent was that, by shortening the main work workout time, I’d have more time for follow on work (to be discussed later).

 

With this cluster, I set to the task of doing a set of some sort of chin (I alternated grips all the time) between all of my warm-ups and all of my main work sets.  I’d start the rest period once the chin was completed, rather than the main work lifts.  I kept it VERY sub-max: ensuring I never struggled on the set, in order to not allow this to compromise my recovery between sets of the main work, and allow me to rack up a lot of volume.

 

Along with this, on my non-lifting days, I made it a point to get in 3 sets of chins, spread through out the day, using a variety of grips.  Once again: just to get in more volume and practice.

 

As far as deadlifts go, I once again went back to the well of what worked best for me.  I stuck with K Black’s recommendation regarding incorporating deadlifts into Operator by sticking with 1 day a week to perform it (Wednesday), but instead of following the rep and set protocol with a traditional deadlift, I went back to my ROM progression style, employing a single set with 2 rest pauses, and settling on a fixed weight of 405lbs with a Texas Deadlift Bar.  Once again: my deadlift had fallen apart and I needed to get it back in good order, so I picked a light weight and sought to master it.  I selected a 6 week progression cycle, so I’d be pulling from the floor on the heaviest week of Tactical Barbell.  I saw great growth in this through the cycle, initially getting 14 reps on the first pull at 6 mats high and getting 15 reps on the 2 mat high setting later, and none of these pulls were to failure.  Still had a rep in the tank.  It was a good progression for me, and as of my writing this I haven’t pulled from the floor yet, but I’m feeling in a good way for it.  My technique has improved immensely, and I no longer experience significant pain with my pull.

 

Before I go further into Planet Mongo, I’ll discuss the remainder of my main work selection.  I was using SSB front squats for 12 weeks before this, in prep for a strongman competition.  I switched back to the buffalo bar because I wanted to move some heavier weight and get used to having a load on my back again.  I went back to a low bar style of squat vs high bar, because it just naturally suits me better and, in turn, I noticed that my right knee kept feeling better and better as time went on with this squat style.  That ultra high bar close stance style was tearing my knee apart, whereas this really suited me well.  I’m on the fence on if I’ll keep the buffalo bar or switch to a safety squat bar for the next cycle, but either way I’ll keep a bar on my back.

 

The axle strict press was selected because my strongman competition will have an axle press in it, and pressing with the axle always makes me stronger.  Just like the last cycle: I included a push press rep at the end of every set, in order to keep that movement pattern grooved.

 

FOLLOW ON/ASSISTANCE WORK

Yeah, a whole lotta this

 

Here is where I put my political science degree and philosophy minor to work, as I was able to justify a bunch of additional work in the program under the guise of “general conditioning” or “strength endurance” work.  In the books, K. Black gives the green light to getting in your conditioning after the lifting workouts of Tactical Barbell, and he gives examples of workouts that fit within that frame, but also leaves it open to the trainee to use what they need to benefit them for their activity (reference Crossfit athletes, martial artists, etc).  Operating under that framework, and with this still being “Planet Mongo”, I picked 3 different follow-on workouts to go with my main work.

 

For Workout A, I legit took the assistance work from Day A of 5/3/1 Building the Monolith and turned it into a 20 minute EMOM workout.  This is 100-200 dips, 100 band pull aparts, and 100 chins.  I selected this because it got me in a bunch of chinning volume (especially when paired with the chins between sets of main work), and Building the Monolith always does a great job of getting me to grow.  I threw in some ab work into the circuit as well (hanging leg raises), and doubled the pull aparts, because you can never do too many.  I started off with 7 dips, 3 chins, 2 hanging leg raises and 10 pull aparts per round, and finished with 10 dips, 4 chins, 2 HLRs and 10 pull aparts per round, getting me 200 dips, 80 chins, 40 HLR and 200 pull aparts.  I’m technically 20 short on the chins for BtM, but because of the work I get done before this assistance/conditioning circuit, I came out ahead.

 

I also did a lateral raise dropset once the EMOM circuit was done, because lateral raises make shoulders awesome.

 

Since Workout B is my deadlift/mat pull workout, I was much gentler with my follow-on workout.  I used BtM’s workout B here, because it, once again, met “Operation Mongo’s” intent, and it’s better that I follow someone else’s program vs do my own.  I still trained a circuit, but in a non-EMOM fashion, comprised of unilateral DB rows, reverse hypers, standing ab wheel and axle curls.  Technically only the rows and chins follow BtM, but reverse hyper and direct ab work are good things.  In keeping with BtM, the rows were 5x10-20 (I stuck with 10s) and the chins were 100 total (I stuck with 5 sets of 20 on an axle).  I honestly only had enough gas for 3 rounds the first time I did this post deadlift, but over time built up to the 5 full rounds.

 

Workout C got interesting.  I started this training block in time for Memorial Day weekend to hit at the end, and I try to make it a point to do the Murph workout for that.  And Murph honestly aligns really well with Planet Mongo due to the 100 weighted pull ups.  So for Workout C, I did the Crossfit WOD “Cindy”, which is effectively all the bodyweight work of Murph.  20 rounds of 5 chins, 10 push ups and 15 squats.  I started week 1 pure bodyweight, and then added 5lbs in a weighted vest each week, getting to 20lbs on the weekend of Memorial Day.  I kept an eye on time and tried to do my best to not have significant deltas between weight increase, managing to keep my time at exactly 21:42 for the 5lb and 10lb session and only adding 10 seconds when I did the 15lb session.  The 20lb session fell on the day that I was going to do Murph anyway, so I just did Murph after my Tactical Barbell lifting, getting a time of 46:08 with a 20.4lb vest and using strict chins rather than kipping.

 

After Cindy, I’d do 100 band pull aparts, as that’s all I had any gas for.

 

FOLLOW ON CONDITIONING

 

What I pretended I was doing...

It gets more ridiculous here, and it’s why I discuss the liberties I was taking here, but as part of Planet Mongo, in order to get in MORE back work, I purchased a second-hand Concept 2 rowing machine on Facebook market, got a great cardio workout kicking myself for having not picked one up earlier, and made it a point get in some sort of rowing workout after I was done with the Main and Assistance work.  There were NOT long, extensive sessions: quite often they lasted about 5-10 minutes, and very often they were low intensity cooldowns (especially after the mat pulls on B day and Cindy on C day), but it was another way to accumulate some volume in my back without having to deal with an eccentric load.  Typically, on Day A, I had enough juice to do something higher intensity, and would settle in on power intervals with a 1:2 work to rest ratio (30 seconds on/60 seconds off).

 

REAL CONDITIONING

 

Not to be confused with fabled conditioning

For the ACTUAL conditioning of Tactical Barbell, I continued to prioritize the rower.  Between Day A and B, I would either do indoor power intervals with the rower, Oxygen Debt 101 with the rower (I googled what 200m sprint times were for a masters athlete my age, found them to be about 25 seconds, and set that as my time to chase for the interval), or Fobbit intervals with the rower and kettlebell.  Between day B and C, I would do a weighted vest treadmill walk/ruck, as I found it restorative after that hard deadlift workout.  The day after workout C, I’d do sandbag over bar workouts, as that was an event in my upcoming strongman competition that I wanted to improve on, and it totally fit in with “Planet Mongo’s” priorities.

 

On top of all this, I prioritized walking whenever I could, trying to get at least 10k steps a day, and often getting well over double that on weekends.

 

SPEAKING OF SANDBAGS…

I genuinely don't know why someone made this meme but now I HAVE to use it

 

I also kept my habit from the previous training block of doing a daily sandbag carry in my driveway.  The event I was training for was another “max distance sandbag carry”, so I would do 2 trips down and back, with a goal of minimizing rest/pause/recovery time and minimizing inefficiencies in lapping the bag.  It would do a decent job getting my heart rate up.

 

NUTRITION

There are definitely worse plans out there

 

Here’s where I REALLY broke some rules, because even though this was Operation Planet Mongo and I was prioritizing growing my back, I STILL had a strongman competition to compete in and a weight class to make…PLUS I had ANOTHER cruise vacation coming up in Italy and Greece, of which I was going to enjoy the local cuisine and my time on vacation.  So I wanted to lean out some more while running Operator to give me a buffer room.  It just so happens that there was a protein powder shortage at this time, and my default Velocity Diet/Apex Predator diet was no longer viable, so I tried out something I’ve always wanted to try: Vince Gironda’s “Maximum Definition Diet”, aka “The Steak and Eggs Diet”.

 

I actually purchased Vince’s book “Unleashing the Wild Physique” per Dan John’s recommendation, and was delighted to find out that the diet was incredibly simple: eat (unlimited) meat and eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Only consume cream or butter for dairy.  Every 3-4 days, eat a meal with carbs to replenish glycogen stores.  Vince also recommended a truckload of supplements, with liver tabs ranking high on his priorities, but I met intent there b just including liver in my daily meals, and using a lot of BioTest supplements.  I also stuck with two meals a day vs three, because I quite frankly just prefer to eat that way.  And my carb meal was once a week, rather than every 3-4 days, because that’s how often I prefer to eat carbs.

 

Despite those deviances, I was able to drop 1.2kg in 5 weeks eating this way, a rate of .528 pounds per week…without any sort of counting or tracking of macros or calories.  That’s pretty baller.  And I, of course, got leaner, meeting the intent of the Maximum Definition Diet.

 

I was fortunate that Costco had some awesome meat sales during this time.  I did 3 weeks living off of Australian grassfed boneless leg of lamb, then 3 weeks of beef chuck roast, then there was ANOTHER sale on leg of lamb.  I’d use this meat for breakfast, and pair it alongside an omelet of 3 whole pastured eggs, 5 whites, and a tablespoon of beef tallow, along with some beef liver.  Dinner was a bit more “ad hoc”, during the week including steak, burgers, chicken meatballs, leftover lamb/chuck roast, pulled pork, meatloaf, etc, alongside a similar configuration of eggs from breakfast.  On Friday and Saturday, we’d eat out for dinner, and I was fond of getting an entire rack of pork spare ribs (no sauce) from our favorite local BBQ place along with some beef brisket and hitting up our favorite Hibachi buffet and loaded up a plate with shrimp, some beef and 3 eggs, and then cruising the buffet for more shrimp, octopus, salmon, squid, flounder, and pretty much any other seafood I could get.  I also was found of getting 20 smoked wings from Buffalo Wings and Rings. On Sunday, I’d have a breakfast like the above, and then typically my carb meal, which was a family affair, typically featuring either spaghetti with meat sauce or some sort of pasta casserole dish, some sort of bread with butter, and then dessert featuring some cookies my wife made (all quality ingredients), raw local honey, and a mug of fairlife skim milk.

 

I took photos of almost EVERY meal.  I’ll share some.

A fairly standard breakfast of chuck roast, liver and eggs

Smoked wings

2 grassfed burger patties, sardines and eggs/egg whites/tallow

Pulled pork and eggs

Ribs and brisket

THE RESULTS

 

Certainly feeling this way

As is typical, I’m writing this review before I’m done with the cycle, as it’s what my bandwidth will allow. I just finished day C of week 5, and it’s the first training week where I missed lifts: I didn’t get all 5 reps on 2 of my 3 press sets on Day A, and on Day C I missed the 5th rep on the second set.  I DID manage to get all 5 on day B.  Given my bodyweight is dropping and how hard I’m training, I’m not surprised about this.  I also used a training max based on my log press vs my axle press, which was most likely too aggressive.  But otherwise, I’ve seen progress everywhere else in the program.  I’m squatting better and deeper than ever before, without any knee pain.  My mat pull continues to progress week to week without any hip pain.  I went from 140 dips in my 20 minute EMOM to 190 today, on pace for 200 next week.  I originally got 60 reps of chins in that 20 minutes for a total of slightly over 100 when combined with sets of chins between main work to 145 total chins today, with my between sets number climbing from 4 to 6 and my warm up sets from 5 to 7.  My Cindy workouts have me going up in weight on the vest while maintaining a tight performance on the timeline.  I’m leaner and lighter than when I started and my weight belt fits better, along with the rest of my clothes.  I’m not “stringy” like I was at the end of Phryexian Dreadnaught, having kept muscle while shedding fluff. 

 

In all: this has been a success.  I co-opted Building the Monolith’s assistance and tacked it into Tactical Barbell’s main work, and blended the conditioning requirements of both alongside some strongman requirements, all while following a bodybuilding definition diet: quite the Frankenapproach!  But it also goes to show that the things that “work” work against disciplines. 

 

WHAT’S NEXT

 

Seems inevitable really

I'll finish up week 6 of this cycle before I depart on my 12 day cruise vacation, affording me 2 days beforehand to do something incredibly stupid before I depart.  Once I return from vacation, I enter into a 6 week strongman competition prep phase, which will still be Tactical Barbell Operator, with a possibility of swapping out the Buffalo Bar for a Safety Squat bar.  I’ll keep the axle press and mat pulls, but bump up to 5x5 for Mon and Friday.  I’ll no longer be prioritizing back growth, but I’ll keep the chins between sets.  I’m thinking of brining back my “ultimate shoulder circuit” from the Book of Bad Ideas on Day A, quite possibly keeping Cindy for Day C, and figure out something on Day B.  Beyond that, it’s getting in more event reps and staying lean until the competition, and then rolling into the Mass Protocol.  Stay tuned!

 

And, of course, if you want to see the whole thing in action, here is the youtube playlist

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfcuGAffLlSefwBgSOteDmK0in_ZIjnvf

YOU CAN’T TRAIN HARDER TO LOOK BETTER

Much like the expression “you can’t outrun a fork”, I feel it’s time to address the notion of training to improve physical appearance and how, fundamentally, we, as a society, have it all wrong.  “No pain, no gain” has really done as a disservice, as did a lot of the 1980s, with the notion of jazzercise, aerobics, and all other leg warmer wearing zubaz monstrosities centered around the notion of training our way into a better physique.  Am I refuting the notion that training improves our bodies?  Absolutely not: what I am proposing is a discussion on the importance of DOSAGE as it relates to the matter of improving appearance vs improving performance.  Much like my highly controversial post where I said to stop lifting weights 6x a week if you want to get bigger (controversial, of course, because no one actually read the post before they commented), I am once again saying that, to LOOK better (not perform better), one needs to train LESS.

Oh christ I just realized what I've done here...

 

  Here’s the catalyst for this post: slumming around on Facebook, I found myself, once again, answering a question from someone that has “tried EVERYTHING” yet cannot lose the last bit of fat that is haunting them from achieving their physique goals.  And, predictably, when they say they’ve “tried everything”, what they MEAN is “I’ve tried everything ALL AT ONCE”.  This person is training 6x per week, with a combination of 3 lifting workouts a week and 3 kettbell and bodyweight sessions per week (with a focus on keeping the heart rate high the whole time), in conjunction with a heavy cardio demand, which they’ve stacked with a reduced energy intake to attempt to maximize fat loss.  This dude isn’t burning the candle at both ends: they threw the candle into the fire.  So why do they, ironically enough, resemble a melted candle?  BECAUSE they’re trying too HARD to look better.

 

We didn’t make it to the top of the food chain by having stupid bodies.  They don’t just receive inputs and demands in a vacuum and spit out a response: they get to figuring once they get some inputs.  So when you slam your body with SO much intensity AND you pair that with a starvation diet: it’s going to panic.  Have you ever seen the bodies of people in a panicked state?  They’re no enviable physiques.  Stress is stress: the body can’t distinguish the difference between physical and emotional/mental stress, and when we place stressors on the body physically through training AND through a nutritional deficit, we achieve a STRESSED physique.  Hormones are going to shift in a less than ideal way, cortisol is going to get jacked up, testosterone is going to plumet, metabolism will downregulate (no, shut up with your stupid “starvation mode isn’t real hur dur!” silliness: the rest of the academic world AND those who actually coach physique athletes understand that this is a real phenomenon where the body will adapt to a lower energy intake by naturally reducing NEAT and downregulating metabolic processes), and for all your “hard work”, you’re going to look WORSE than you started. 

People end on on the left when aiming for the right

 

And, of course, with your stupid hamster brain, you’re just going to think the only possible solution is to do it HARDER from here.  Holy cow: 6x a week of training and an hour of cardio a day with a 500 calorie deficit isn’t working?  I better do 2 a days, bump the cardio up to 90 minutes, and go for a 1000 calorie deficit.  No!  Stop!  You keep saying you’ve “tried everything”, but have you tried NOT trying so goddamn hard?  Have you tried actually letting your body have a break?  Have you tried actually RECOVERING from all this goddamn training?  Have you considered the reality that the ANABOLIC process of training is the RECOVERY process?  That the training itself is the CATABOLIC part of the process?  And that, if we just keep hitting the catabolism button and never hit the anabolism button, we’ll never be in a place to actually grow and realize the fruits of our labors?

 

Because if we’re trying to look BETTER, who do we look TO?  The most obvious choice would be bodybuilders and physique athletes: people that compete in the activity of looking better.  And WHEN we look at these folks, what do we see?  Yeah, they train hard, in TRAINING, but then how do they LIVE?  These folks make it a point to LIVE in a very unstressful manner.  Do you remember in Pumping Iron, the party scenes, lying on the beach to get a tan, the naps, etc etc?  The stereotype that most bodybuilders are bums, often leaching off their significant others or trying to find sugar mommas/daddys?  How about the story of the “Muscle House by the Sea”, headed up by Joy Cretaz, who let bodybuilders stay for minimal rent and housed the likes of Steve Reeves, Dave Drapper, Bill “Peanuts” West, etc, who, in turn, took full advantage of the local all-you-can-eat prime rib place down the street despite Joy’s insistence that all the boys eat a vegetarian diet?  To achieve great physiques, these individuals understand that stress itself is a controlled poison that, when applied intelligently, can have a hermetic effect, but when applied too greatly, will kill the organism.  They use just enough through hard training in order to elicit a desired response, and then they introduce enough “stress reduction” through a life of low stress in order to set themselves up in an ideal state to realize physical greatness.  They reveal a body that is NOT in a state of survival, but a state of thriving.  And it shows.

When "feel the burn" refers to how the tanning oil is working...

BUT, I hear you exclaim, I see so MANY great athletes that have enviable physiques that ARE the result of hard training.   Do you though?  I feel one of the greatest cons our brains play on us is making the cause for the effect.  One of my favorite examples is this: we like to believe that running marathons make us thin.  Why?  Because when we see elite marathon runners, we see thin runners.  Ok, but, in turn, are we to believe that playing basketball makes us TALL?  Whenever I see professional basketball players, they are always quite tall.  Shouldn’t it stand to reason?  No?  Why?  Because there is a selection bias for who makes it to the NBA by nature of genetic propensity toward height, and those that lack this propensity are weeded out at the lower levels of the sport (college, high school, middle school, grade school, etc).  …and now we have to start thinking…

 

Could it, instead, be, that those who have a genetic propensity toward physical greatness are, in turn, those who excel at athletics IN GENERAL?  Could it, instead, be the case that these athletes with enviable physiques posses them IN SPITE of their training?  That these individuals are simply so genetically otherworldly that they have bodies that can ENDURE the demands placed upon them and STILL grow, recover, and get stronger?  And that, in turn, if these individuals were to ever actually ease off the throttle, dial in the nutrition, switch drugs (sad but true) and dive fully into the world of bodybuilding, they’d have even crazier physiques?  We saw the physique that Hershel Walker built with just bodyweight exercises, or how Mike Tyson was built like a full grown man at the age of 13, or why they called Alexander Karelin “The Specimen”: are we really going to pretend that we can, in any way, shape or form, actually relate to these individuals as though we are honestly even part of the same species?  These are CLEARLY genetic outliers: to attempt to emulate them in any fashion is setting us up for folly.  Which is not to say we cannot admire them, co-opt them, steal from them, etc, but we will not BE them.

Same planet: different species

 

And am I the biggest hypocrite ever for saying to stop training so hard if you want to look better?  No, because again: you have to read the words I am writing.  This is about LOOKING better, NOT performing better.  Which, yeah, it’s a weird topic for me to address, but I’ve been so far down one rabbit hole that I think I’ve popped out the other side in a Bugs Bunny-esque manner of taking the wrong turn at Albuquerque.  I have ABSOLUTELY pushed myself to my physical limits on many occasions for long and sustained durations and the result was an INCREDIBLE improvement on my performance.  I achieved some absolutely ridiculous feats of physical conditioning when that became my focus, and when maximal strength was my focus, I set standards that I’m still in awe in to this day.  But in both of those instances, I did NOT look my best AND I ate in a manner that supported RECOVERY from the efforts I was enduring.  When I pressed 266lbs over my head with an axle, I had grown my bodyweight up to a sloppy 210lbs, and I was eating so much that I had a pre-pre workout meal of an entire quest frozen pizza, before I ate my peanut butter and honey sandwich on sourdough, leading into my post workout meal that started off as a protein shake and “evolved” into something I ate with a spoon comprised of breakfast cereal, oats (the protein kind of course), heavy whipping cream, fairlife milk, and THEN some protein powder.  I WAS lifting weights twice a day at that point, I WAS training for a strongman competition, my training WAS in high gear, but I WAS also getting fatter as part of the process, and I WAS at peace with that, because my goal was performance: not appearance.  I was placing great stress on my body, and I was attempting to mitigate it with an abundance of food, but I also understood the sacrifices that needed to be made.

 

In the (futile) hope that THIS post will not be misunderstood, allow me to attempt to summarize my point.  It IS possible to see physical improvements with LOTS of hard training.  You CAN lift weights 6x a week and engage in serious hard cardio/conditioning training and still see progress.  You could even do this on an energy deficit diet.  The results you will see, though, are PERFORMANCE results.  You will BECOME better.  But this is NOT the recipe for PHYSIQUE improvements.  If the goal is fat loss and we attempt this approach, we’re just going to tank our hormones, put us in a poor physical state, and look like a stressed out skinny fat version of ourselves.  This is why crash dieting doesn’t work.  If the goal is to put on muscle, we’re simply going to outpace our ability to recover and spin our wheels.  MAYBE, if we REALLY mainline the food, we can put on a little bit of muscle on top of all this training, but it definitely wouldn’t be as effective as a more dialed down training approach paired with a reduced stress lifestyle.  Once again, this boils down to periodization: we cannot have the throttle down ALL the time and, quite frankly, it’s when we ease OFF that we tend to see the MOST growth.  John McCallum called this “softening up”, real athletes call it the “off season”, but however you slice it, taking some time to reduce physical and/or dietary stress in order to get the body into an optimal state to RESPOND to training will lay down the foundation for success.  Dan John refers to this as quadrants: with training and nutrition, you can train easy and diet easy (that’s what most people do, and it’s why they’re broken and fat), you can train hard and diet easy (this is when we’re trying to push for physical performance), you can train easy and diet hard (this is when we’re prioritizing fat loss, cutting the physical stress down because the nutritional stress is up), or you can train hard and diet hard (which, like the first group, tends to end up with us being…broken and fat).  Find your balance. 

 

  

 

I HAD IT EASIER

This is the year that I turn 40, and upon that happening I’ll have been training for 26 years, which is longer than some of my readers have been alive, and also marks 13 years of writing this blog (of which, I’ve had many accomplished trainees tell me they loved reading this back when they were starting in high school, which makes me feel REAL old).  I say all this because I’m going to pull my old-man card for this one, and I felt the need to establish my credentials in that regard.  But, in somewhat predicable fashion, I’m going to flip the script here on this rant, because rather than doing the typical old-man thing of telling you how much harder we all had it back in the day compared to you spoiled youngsters, I’m going to cop to the fact that: I had it easier.  No question about it: I am SO thankful I came up in the era I came up in as far as it relates to physical transformation, because I cannot even imagine trying to navigate the current minefield you “in your prime” trainees are having to endure.  No question about it: between you and me, I had it far easier.

 

Yup, it's gonna be a lot of this

This revelation came about as I was contemplating my early years of training, when I put on the majority of my muscle, as is what is SUPPOSED to be the typical fashion when it comes to training.  Those first few years are SUPPOSED to be the most transformative ones, as we receive the biggest return on investment as far as gains per time spent training, after which time diminishing returns kick in and we fight tooth and nail for every last scrap of muscle.  HOWEVER, in modern times, we observe MANY trainees that are on the Starting Strength wagon for YEARS and still haven’t really scratched the surface of significant gains.  These trainees fear “squandering their noobie gains”, wondering if perhaps they are just genetically inferior and destined to be skinny-fat, having already reached 90% of their max potential because they hit the magical “2 years of training” mark, with everything from here on out being just nickels and dimes.  What is it that was different between us?

Here I am, at age 17, wrestling at a massive 158lbs at 5'9, and clearly already bitten by the iron bug

 

For one, starting out, there was zero expectation of me ever being ripped, diced, cut, sliced, etc etc. Primarily because, there was zero expectation for me to be seen without my shirt on, unless I was at a pool or the beach.  And even though I grew up in San Diego, shirtless opportunities were still not plentiful (the Pacific is frickin’ cold, and we get “June Gloom” in the summer).  There was zero social media, the internet itself was archaic (hello dial-up modems), I didn’t have a digital camera until college, and it used FLOPPY DISKS to store the images, which we would then put into a disk drive on the computer in order to download the files, with nowhere to UPLOAD them: at best we could just e-mail them directly to someone.  Because of all of this, I never worried about how I looked with my shirt OFF: I was concerned with how I looked with my shirt ON.  And THAT meant that I needed to build some goddamn muscle!  I didn’t need to concern myself with if I was getting sloppy, losing my abs (what abs?!), not photoshoot ready: etc.  I was concerned with making sure that my arms filled out my shirtsleeves, my pecs protruded tight against my t-shirts (Cody from Final Fight still holds an ideal physique to me) and that my traps were visible from all angles.  I still remember coming home from my first semester of college, during winter break, when I put on 12lbs having gained access to the college dinning hall AND weight room, and two separate individuals made the comment to me “You got shoulders!”, and how genuinely positive it was to receive that recognition.  No one would have cared if I was rocking an 8-pack under that t-shirt: they were agog at the sheer physicals size I possessed.

It helped that my role models were also just beefy, rather than diced

 

Which meant that training and nutrition sorted themselves out incredibly simply during the beginning.  Having no access to social media and limited internet resources in general (I learned a LOT on the Gamefaqs Martial Arts message board of all places), about the only thing I had to learn from was muscle mags and fellow meatheads in the gym.  I distinctly remember picking up a copy of Muscle and Fitness at the airport flying back to college one year and reading an article about how Phil Baroni trained his arms and deciding to create my own bodybuilding split to run upon landing, which I used to STILL get bigger and stronger, despite how “bad” the program was.  And when it came time to eat, I let my appetite determine how MUCH I ate, while WHAT I ate was guided by a very primitive understanding of nutrition.  It was the early 2000s and Atkins was big, so I KNEW that I needed protein if I wanted to grow, so that’s what I ate.  Cheeseburgers with no buns (but with sugary ketchup), Chicken Strips (I didn’t realize that they were breaded meaning…they had bread on them), delimeats and cheese with no bread on sandwich days, peanut butter by the bowlful (I kept getting told it had “the good fats” and was a good source of protein…), chicken wings, the dinning hall breakfast of “egg loaf” (it’s what happens to powdered eggs) and all the bacon and sausage I could ever want, etc etc.  And yeah, looking back on it now, there are SO many things I would have changed and done differently, but at the same time, looking at how it WORKED…maybe I didn’t need to.

mmmm...eggloaf.  But hey, when you're away form home, you'll let ANYONE do the cooking

 

Because I had it so much easier than you do now.  I had SO little noise to deal with, even IF I had so little signal as well.  All I had to do was train hard, and then eat “protein” until I wasn’t hungry, and somehow I kept getting bigger and stronger. I’d go to different gyms that had different equipment and I’d play with them, and the new stimulus would keep me growing.  I spent time between college and home, which periodized my workout for me, forcing me to pick different goals to train for when I was home because I didn’t have the same equipment as I had in college.  I also had even better food there too!  And there was no pressure on me to look like a model 365 days a year: summers would roll around and I’d lean out as I did more activity, and then I’d get back to school in the fall and gain with the dinning hall, cold weather, and big iron.

 

YOU have it SO much harder these days.  You’re convinced that EVERYONE is walking around at 4% bodyfat year round, because of the bevy of fitness influencers out there that refuse to put on an ounce of bodyfat for fear that they’ll lose the majority of their subscribers.  Hell, these tricks aren’t new: there were bodybuilders in the 70s that would get contest ready and take THOUSANDS of photos and then slowly trickle them out to magazines over the months to create the ILLUSION that they were year-round ripped, and they did this SPECIFICALLY to mindf**k their opponents into staying TOO lean during the off season while they focused on growing and gaining to come in looking even better.  Now the malice behind the sabotage has a different flavor: they’re not sabotaging you to make THEM look better, but to make themselves richer!  But either way, you pay the price with your gains.  If you’d just be comfortable NOT having your shirt off all the time, maybe you could focus on just getting jacked and huge for a bit and THEN spend some time leaning out.  Actually have a slab of marble to chisel away at before you try to build a sculpture.

Like so

 

And how are you going to carve that sculpture anyway?  Oh my goodness, you have SO many training approaches to choose from, and all of them are wrong AND right at the exact same time, and everyone has the best method and every other method is garbage.  One of the biggest issues is the binary and hyperbolic nature of the dialog around training: things are either awesome or they suck.  There’s no acceptable middleground of “this training program will be good enough”, because we don’t like having moderation and civility on the internet.  Everything HAS to be polarized, all decisions HAVE to be crucial and we all must belong to certain camps.  And again, I wasn’t immune to this growing up: we just did this stupid crap over video game systems.  You were either a Nintendo fan or a Sega fan, or you were rich and had both, but OTHERWISE, you had to make sure that YOUR system was the absolute best and the other one was total garbage, because how else could you placate yourself over your purchase decision?  The only way to ward off that buyer’s remorse was to trash the other system, and that’s exactly what we see in the realm of training.  It’s FOMO (fear of missing out) taken to its inevitable extreme of lashing out AGAINST anything that could possibly contradict your own methodology, because we HAD to have selected the absolute best method for physical transformation.  Meanwhile, I was picking up bodybuilding tips from a not-awesome MMA fighter…

 

And oh my goodness, everything I said about training applies doubly to nutrition.  Nutrition is effectively religion: and if you speak out against someone’s faith, you’re going to be in for an earful.  I was ALREADY fringe for “following” Atkin’s in the late 90s/early 2000s, which really just boiled down to not eating bread or sugar (Vinnie Tortorich’s “No Sugar/No Grain” really needed to be bigger then).  Now, I’m of course a lunatic for eating carnivore, but I’m among other fellow lunatics with keto, vegan, Mediterranean, IIFYM, Vertical Diet, Dukan Diet, Zone Diet, pescatarian, gluten free, etc etc.  We just had to deal with the constant fluctuation on if eggs were good for us or bad for us every few months: YOU have “keto bread”, of all things, and “protein donuts” and all sorts of charlatans looking to make a buck off your gullibility.  How do you know what to eat for breakfast?  Do you even eat breakfast?  Aren’t you doing intermittent fasting?  Or are you supposed to eat every 3 hours? 

Honestly, I should have listened to more cartoons growing up...

 

Allow me to even touch on supplements here.  You may THINK you actually have it better, because you have access to a WIDE variety of protein powders that DON’T taste like wallpaper paste (I grew up with 2 flavors: vanilla and chocolate, which meant I grew up with ONE flavor, because NO ONE liked the vanilla flavor), but honestly: this sucks for you.  Because now you have to contend with the TEMPTATION behind all these wonderfully artificially flavored concoctions that are out there.  The temptation to not eat actual real honest to goodness whole food and just drink your yummy fruity pebbles flavored protein powder that is fortified with all sorts of vitamins and minerals (and a graduate thesis worth of other ingredients) has got to be overwhelming and, in turn, prevents you from eating those things that may actually make you grow!  A thick steak, with some animal fat attached to it, is going to have so much more going for it than a few scoops of whey mixed in water when it comes to transforming yourself.  Our protein supplements were so unenjoyable that we ONLY ever considered drinking them after a workout, and that was because we had been hoodwinked since the 60s to believe in the “anabolic window” (which is why I ate sweet tarts with my protein shake: because the dextrose and maltodextrin was going to drive that protein RIGHT into my muscles).  Otherwise, it was unfathomable to miss a meal and just have a shake or a bar (oh my goodness protein bars were horrible back then).  Now?  Now you HAVE to have discipline in order to not live in a Soylent Green universe where all food you consume is just hyperprocessed crap because “it’s got good macros”.

I'm not even going to touch pre-workouts...

 

Young, current trainees, YOU, my friends, have got it rough.  YOU are the ones that get to tell me that you had to walk uphill in the snow both ways in order to get the gains.  You have SO much more to deal with that is taking you off course and sapping your growth.  But perhaps all is not lost!  Perhaps you can take these lessons from the past in order to secure your future!  Much like how Super Squats guided me in my senior year of college to learn how to push hard and drink my gallon of milk a day, perhaps you can shut off the social media, tune out the noise, and rock it 90s, 80s, 70s and 60s style: growing big and strong and eating well.  Perhaps we can just go back to a simpler time and leave all that complexity for those that are pre-occupied with being “optimal” to the point that they’re watching their best training years completely pass them by.  Perhaps YOU can have it easier too!

ADVENTURES IN GETTING TO YES: COOKING IN A HOTEL ROOM

I’ve detailed many of the zany stories of my travels in the past, and this most recent trip of mine was no exception.  Unlike my “Hotel Room Training Insanity” post, this was not about me overcoming terrible hotel fitness center hours, forcing me into inmate like training conditions (it was actually open 24 hours, equipped with a Peleton and a power tower, which allowed me to get in some awesome Tactical Barbell conditioning workouts), but instead a story of me overcoming broken promises and finding a way to “get mine” and, ultimately, “get to yes”.  For you see, dear reader, I THOUGHT I was being proactive by booking a room with a kitchen.  Those that have followed my previous bouts of insanity as it relates to travel have witnessed me trying to make due in austere living conditions by use of microwave egg cookers and canned meats, but as I was fully locked into the Vince Gironda “Maximum Definition Diet” (aka: The "Steak and Eggs" diet), I felt it imperative to have a means to actually cook meat and eggs on the regular.  And I’ve had enough microwaved eggs in my life that I wasn’t about to slum to that level again.  Well, you can imagine my delight when I pulled into the hotel parking lot, got my room assignment, opened the door, and was greeted by my kitchen I painstakingly took time to secure.  Yes, “fully equipped” was this kitchen, with a full sized refrigerator, sink with a garbage disposal, full set of cutlery and dishes, a dishwasher…and a microwave. 

Despite being steak and eggs, let me assure you these are NOT on the diet.

 

Yes, dear reader: a microwave.  THAT was what was deemed a “kitchen” by this hotel.  That is the sad state of cooking in America these days: the microwave.

 

Folks, in the first 8 weeks of my marriage, my wife and I were confined to a hotel room while we awaited the ability to move into our permanent residence.  I lived off Lean Cuisines for dinner during those 8 weeks.  I had traveled on many occasions and used a plastic microwave egg cooker to make breakfasts in the morning.  I’ve paid my dues: I was NOT going to be subjected to the tyranny of microwaved cuisine once more!  NOT when I had been promised “a kitchen”.

 

So I went and got mine. 

 

I got it, in the form of a $20 electric ceramic griddle at Walmart.

 

I'm hoping this is the most meat this hotel bed has ever seen...

 

Alongside 3.5 dozen eggs (most of them pastured), a little over 1.5lbs of grassfed lamb shoulder chops, a little over 3lbs of beef flanken ribs, and a 1.3lb T-bone steak. 

 

I had already packed a jar of beef tallow, because that’s how I roll.

 

And folks, that night for dinner, and for the next 3 days afterwards, I turned that hotel room into a LEGIT kitchen.  It was practically a short order foodtruck/grill.  I made such wonderful meals, to include the first meal breaking that griddle out on it’s maiden voyage: steak and eggs.  Specifically that T-bone I mentioned, which I purchased SPECIFICALLY to celebrate my victory in getting to yes. 

 

Some are rewarded with candy, others with anabolism

My travel was for work, rather than pleasure, which meant I had a tight schedule in the morning and could NOT partake in the free breakfast provided by the hotel, but that was of no consequence now!  I would wake up at 0400, get in my morning conditioning workout, return to my room and make more delicious meals of meat and eggs, cooked in beef tallow, on a $20 electric skilled purchased from Walmart.

 

A breakfast of champions above (lamb shoulder chops) and the dinner below (flanken ribs)

 

And I ended up having to leave my trip slightly early, due to some incoming poor weather, which meant, toward the end, I REALLY got to push the limits on the griddle, transitioning from 6 eggs per meal to 9, as my food plan became altered with the compressed timeline (proving, once again, that chaos IS the plan).

 

Like being back in college and trying to cram 14 people into a Honda Civic

 

Did my hotel room end up smelling like a steakhouse?  Yes, and it was incredible!  Did I set off the smoke alarm in my room?  Only once!  But did the hotel staff ever catch on?  Never once!  As I exercised good college dorm discipline and made sure to put my griddle away when not in use.  I DID walk in on the cleaning staff shampooing my carpet as they wondered why my room has picked up the delicious odor of cooked meat and tallow, but, ultimately, I considered that a fair exchange for their bait and switch kitchen based promises!

 

But I offer this story not just for the sake of entertainment (but, in truth, it was a very entertaining experience for me), but also in the vein of Aesop’s fables: hoping that we can learn some lessons from the experience.

If you get this reference, you're ancient

Because when I walked into that room and saw that microwave, there were a few different ways this situation could have unfolded, and I feel like we’ve all been down these paths.

 

I could have instantly just given up.  Saw that I was without the kitchen I was promised and decided “Guess the diet is over” and just hit up the restaurant in the hotel, gotten some Uber Eats, ordered a pizza, etc.  I’ve absolutely done that before after a long day of travel: just gave up and comforted myself with convenience and garbage food.  Hell, most Americans do this EVERY DAY: they let the day just beat them hell out of them and, by the time they get home, absent a plan, they give up and give in.  And their appearance and health reflects this practice.

When we avoid The Noid, what we DON'T avoid is diabetes

 

I could have given up in a different way: telling myself that I would just make due with the microwave.  I could have cooked eggs in a coffee cup and picked up microwavable meat options, or lived off of canned fish, chicken, beef, etc.  In this way, I would have still met the goal of the diet, but given up on my values.  I told myself I was NOT going to be eating microwaved eggs on this trip, and f**k me if I was going to microwave a steak.

A memorial wall should be built in memory of the terrible act committed here

 

But, instead of giving up, I picked a different attitude: excitement!  Yes, I will confess: when I walked into the hotel, expecting an actual kitchen and being greeted with a microwave, I experienced a feeling of disappointment and anger.  However, I let myself throw my 20 second tantrum over the matter, and then immediately pivoted (quite literally, I threw my luggage down and turned right around to get to my rental car), plugged in “Walmart” into my GPS, and set my mind that I was going to find SOME sort of plug in kitchen gadget to “get mine”.  And that was where the excitement came from: this was the joy of limits!  

I’ve written in the past about how limitations are the catalyst of creativity, and this was no exception.  I wondered what I would be confined to.  Would it be a hot plate?  An air fryer?  Hell, I’d grab an Easy Bake oven if that’s what I had available.  I knew that I wanted to spend as little as I could to resolve this, as I didn’t want my cooking implement to compromise my travel budget, and that just made the game even more fun.  How little could I spend for the biggest impact?  Which, in turn, was what got me to settle on the $20 griddle compared to the $14 Foreman Grill, which WOULD have also been an awesome choice (I’ve used one before to great effect) and it would have been a great way to honor the memory of the recently deceased Mr. Foreman, but in this specific instance, since eggs feature so prominently in the Vince Gironda plan, I needed a grill that did NOT exist in a permanently inclined state, and I also needed enough grill space to be able to get my meals made in an expedient manner. 0400 was already an early enough wake up call: I didn’t need to try to budget in an extra 30 minutes as I attempted to cook 2 eggs a time.

Never would I be so bold as to make this claim

 

It was no different when it came to the food choices themselves: this was my first time eating lamb shoulder chops and flanken ribs, but I picked them both because they were inexpensive options.  Sure: I COULD have just picked up some ground beef, but, once again, with time being a consideration, I preferred a chop/cutlet, since all you REALLY need to do with that stuff is cook the outsides, whereas ground beef technically needs to be thoroughly cooked to kill all bacteria.  Having been violently ill while traveling before, I wanted to limit my potential risk to food poisoning.  What I discovered; holy cow flanken ribs are SO easy to cook and SO delicious.  I’m definitely bringing them into my regular rotation.  And it was no shock to me that lamb was going to be amazing as well.

 

Which, again, is what this was all about: getting to yes, limitations leading to creativity, and taking away lessons learned from whatever experience we have.  Every opportunity is an opportunity to learn and grow, so long as we approach it with the right mentality and perspective to do so.  And when we encounter misfortune, we cannot change the circumstances, but we can absolutely change our mentality, which, in turn, can alter our outcome.