REVIEW OF DAN JOHN’S "MASS MADE SIMPLE"

 **INTRO**

Rather interesting how similar these two are...

* Greetings once again and welcome to another program review.  I endeavor to keep this one a little on the shorter side, as I’ve done a lot of the set-up for it in this post . My intent here is to specifically review Dan John’s “Mass Made Simple” program vs the combination that I’ve been running.

* But, in THAT regard, I must re-disclose that I did NOT run the FULL Mass Made Simple program: only the “important parts”.  That would be the complexes and high rep squats.  For the upper body work, I relied on daily Easy Strength workouts to carry me through, along with a daily prescription of 300 push ups (and 300 bodyweight squats…but that’s not upper body).

* All that said, I’m going to just hit some wavetops here and leave it more open for discussion/Q&A.

**HOW I MADE IT INTERESTING**

You wouldn't try that against Andre the Giant though...

* I did exactly like Dan said and came into this stupidly lean

The before photo was me at the end of Super Squats on 2 Mar, and the after was around 2 Jun, which is actually not quite my starting level for MMS.  

This is a bit closer

taken after my second Mass Made Simple workout, wherein I’m looking pretty damn flat and small.  

Here is workout 1

 so you can see a live action documentation as well.

* I changed my squatting style.  

Here was the 20x405 Super Squats Workout

Contrast that with the Final Mass Made Simple workout

 

This was legitimately the first time in 23 years I tried high bar squatting, and I imagine that being at a lighter bodyweight honestly helped there, as I had less “body” to get in the way of the squat.  I finished Super Squats at 201lbs, and started Mass Made Simple at 166.  I was simply a “new” human, and, in turn, ready to learn new mechanics.  But I ALSO changed up my squat style so that I wouldn’t have any old numbers to compare against and freak out over.  This was going to be totally uncharted territory for me.  Going completely beltless factored into that equation as well.  Plus, in the book, Dan says to go deep.  Roger that Dan!

**WHAT MAKES MASS MADE SIMPLE “DIFFERENT**

Aside from getting to eat like a King!

* HEAVY complexes BEFORE high rep squatting.  When you read the program, it just looks pretty vanilla.  Bench, press overhead, rear delts, abs, complexes and squats.  When you actually DO the program, the sick, brutal logic sinks in.  The complex that Dan prescribes is simple, and it’s BRUTAL when performed at the level he demands.  You rarely go above 5 reps, and, in turn, are often moving very heavy poundages (relatively) on these complexes.  If you keep your rest times honest (I aimed for a minute), you will come into your high rep squats with a significant amount of accumulated fatigue.  Along with that, all the “missing volume” of the program suddenly reveals itself.  On top of your upper body work BEFORE the complexes, you now get in 6-30 quality heavy reps of a wide variety of movements.  It was actually because of this that, the next time I tackle this, I’m going to use a horizontal press (most likely dips) during the Easy Strength portion of lifting: the complexes will get me enough overhead work.

* The reps BEFORE the high rep set.  Again, you don’t notice that they’re there UNTIL you have to do them, and suddenly you realize Dan was a real jerk and has you hit a hard set of 10 before tasking you to take your bodyweight for 50 reps.  This is all part of his master plan to turn you into a squatting machine by the end of the program and it absolutely works.

* Lifting every other OTHER day.  This is 14 workouts in 6 weeks, which means you go Lift-day off-day off-Lift vs the traditional Lift-day off-Lift style that you see with 3x a week programming.  You have some weeks where you lift 3x and some where you lift twice.  It’s absolutely the right prescription of frequency for these workouts.  That said, because I don’t lift on weekends, I had to tweak it a little bit, but I did so by hitting a MMS workout on Fri and Mon, with an occasional one on Wed when my schedule required it.

**MY NUTRITION**

You are what you eat

* I did not abide by Dan John’s prescribed Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches protocol.  I think they would absolutely work and anyone who wants to get after it can go do so.  My nutrition is really pretty nutty these days, and if you want an indepth read on it, go back to this post

* Simplest explanation is Jamie Lewis’ Apex Predator diet.   Whenever I eat food, it’s carnivore.  Otherwise, protein sparring modified fasting using protein shakes.  I would train fasted and drink shakes/eat pure protein until either my midday or evening meal.  Weekends would have 1 pure carnivore day with 4 meals and 1 Rampage day with a carb-up meal.  I also employed Jamie’s “Feast, Famine and Ferocity” protocol, and spent the first 4 weeks of the program in a feast status and finished in a famine.  Ideally, I’d have reverse that, starting with a 2 week famine and ending with the feast, but this was just how my schedule shook out.

**RESULTS**

Certainly felt this way

* I started the program at 166lbs and weighed in on the 5th week at 171.2lbs.  5lbs in 5 weeks: I like it, especially when I was merely eating to satiety vs forcefeeding.  I also stayed lean as hell through it, primarily because those complexes make you WORK!

* I added 8 reps to my 192lb squat, going from 50

to 58

and added 13 reps to my 212lb squat, going from 27

to 40

**WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENT**

Try to have cleans this strong WITHOUT looking like this...

* Either learn how to clean or use a different implement/complex for the complexes.  The clean was the primarily limiter I ran into, followed by the press.  If you watch some of the videos of my complexes, I often can’t get the bar into the rack position to start the front squats.  I MAY have been able to solve this by resting slightly longer and coming in fully refreshed, but the REST of my body was fine: I was just lacking in the ability there.  I DID make a point to try to focus on moving as fast/explosively as possible, but I feel like switching to an axle and continentaling the weight would have been a better call.  Otherwise, I could just do a different but still heavy complex to accomplish the goal.  I give myself permission to do so next time, now that I’ve run the program in full as much as I could.

**SHOULD YOU DO THE PROGRAM?**

"Is this a joke?"

* Oh my goodness yes, AND buy the book that goes with it.  It’s another fantastic “all in one” read for only $10 and contains SO much Dan John goodness in it.  I’m so excited to have finally had a chance to run it and realize Dan John’s genius yet again.

“CHAOS IS THE PLAN”: A 3 SENTENCE TRAINING MANUAL

Any of my regular readers know just how big a fan I am of all-inclusive training books: one stop shopping that covers everything you need in order to get training and eating right.  Paul Kelso’s “Powerlifting Basics Texas Style” does a fantastic job of providing a wide variety of programs AND a fantastic discussion on the 3 main food groups (Tex-Mex, BBQ and Cajun) to get a trainee eating and training right, and even dives into coaching.  5/3/1 Forever quite literally gives you all the tools you need to train, well, Forever.  Marty Gallagher’s “Purposeful Primitive” is an insane value with how it covers lifting, eating, and cardiovascular training, “The Complete Keys to Progress” is exactly that, “Super Squats” and Deep Water, etc etc.  And this love for all-inclusivity also corresponds with a love for all things “high speed/low drag”.  I don’t need fluff or presentation: I want to get to the point and get out.  Heck, people that have observed my bare bones nutrition of meat touched by flame can see it unfold, alongside my strongman equipment cobbled together out of gorilla tape.  It’s also why I’m such a fan of Dan John vs some of our more “science based” authors out there, or why I care more about a good story vs a good study.  And, in a true display of irony, this longwinded bloviation of an intro was put here to introduce the idea I have for a 3 sentence training manual which may, in fact, become my second e-book:

 

“Eat meat and eggs when hungry until no longer hungry.  Spend 180 minutes a week picking something up off the floor and putting it over your head.  Don’t repeat the same meal or workout twice in a row.”

 

Oh my god it was right there in front of us all along

EAT MEAT AND EGGS WHEN HUNGRY UNTIL NO LONGER HUNGRY

We've seen this before...

There’s no perfect diet, sure, but man, if everyone ate JUST meat and eggs when hungry until not, think of all the junk they’re NOT eating, all the damage they’re NOT doing, all the good stuff they’re putting into their body (protein and monounsaturated fats). And this doesn’t require a sliderule and degree from Harvard to figure out (although I AM shocked at how many people don’t seem to know what is an animal vs a plant…)

 

One of the “high speed/low drag” benefits of “eat meat” as a dietary prescription is how it avoids many of the issues trainees tend to have with food allergies and intolerances.  There are SOME meats out there that people can have allergenic reactions to (shellfish is notorious for this, and some folks can have reactions to pork and other animals), but beef, in particular, tends to be one of the least allergenic foods out there.  This is a boon because SO many times a trainee will ask for advice on how to eat and I’ll mention a wide variety of foods only for them to zero in on ONE of them and say “oh, I can’t eat peanuts, so peanut butter is out”. And rather than hold their hand and walk them to the MILLIONS of other choices available I tend to just get frustrated with the experience and wish them luck, as they’ve demonstrated just how much they fixate on the negative and refuse to engage in basic problem solving.  With our choices cut down, we earn MORE freedom, because we’ve eliminated SO many options that might trigger a negative biological response that there are only good choices available.  I say “meat” and you go from there.  There are SO many animals on the Earth that you’re bound to find one you can eat.  Yes: this will preclude vegans and vegetarians from succeeding.  You have the deepest condolences I can offer: you’ll have to walk your own path.

You aren't without your own role models

 

Eggs occupy an interesting space in the allergysphere as well.  Eggs tend to have higher instances of an allergenic response compared to meat, but, often, it’s the egg WHITES that people respond negatively to vs the yolk.  In turn, one can attempt to abide by “meat and eggs” and simply opt for the yolks vs the whites and see how they suits them.  There’s a LOT of good stuff in those egg yolks as it is, so eating them isn’t a bad idea at all.  BUUUUUT, if worse comes to worse and eggs are taken off the table, it just means eating more meat.

 

As a final aside to the aside, Dr. Ken Berry is a big fan of “Beef, Butter, Bacon and Eggs” as the answer to “what to eat”, with the helpful pneumonic of “BBBE”.  There’s methods to the madness too: beef remains one of the least allergenic meats out there, butter is a dairy product that few have a histamine reaction to as a result of the rendering out of proteins/lactose (which, if there is STILL an issue there, ghee can resolve it), bacon is simply magical, and whole eggs/egg yolks contain SO many awesome vitamins and nutrients.  And again, if we wanna talk high speed/low drag, boiling the list down to 4 foods definitely accomplishes that. 

I feel like it's self-explanatory...

 

And then there’s learning about hunger cues: not eating based on a schedule but because we’re hungry, and then eating until we’re not (not until we’re “full”, not until there’s no more food on the plate, just because we’re not hungry). We also get to learn about the difference between “hungry” and “bored”. When ALL we’re eating is meat and eggs, if we’re hungry: we’ll eat it. If we’re not, we won’t. Caveat: there would be no sauces or seasonings, outside of salt. If we have to trick ourselves into eating the food, we aren’t hungry.

 

It's worth observing that in no way am I advocating a means of achieving optimal health here.  That’s between you and your medical provider.  I am simply coming up with A high speed/low drag solution to the question of “what do I eat?”  If you have a BETTER approach: use it…but then, why did you come to me for answers?

 

SPEND 180 MINUTES A WEEK PICKING SOMETHING UP OFF THE FLOOR AND PUTTING IT OVER YOUR HEAD 

Yes; that will do nicely

Man, that just says it all. Much l like how the food is “when hungry, until not”, the pick the thing up and put it over your head can be “Do it until you can’t, wait until you can again, then do it again”. That answers the question about sets and reps. And if people REALLY want an answer, we could prescribe a time limit. And as I wrote that, I thought “how about a “per week” time limit?” That would REALLY streamline things. An hour a day, 3x a week is a very standard amount of “average human” training, so say we do that. 180 minutes. Split it up however you want now. You wanna train 7 days a week? Great: 25 minutes a day. Dan John would be proud. Can only train twice a week? 90 minutes each time. Man: imagine how goddamn strong you would get if, twice a week, you spent 90 minutes putting something over your head? That is a SCARY motherf**ker: especially if, after those 90 minutes, he puts away a dozen eggs and some steaks or ribs.

DON’T REPEAT THE SAME MEAL OR WORKOUT TWICE IN A ROW

Agree to disagree here Tyler

Forced variety/periodization. Don’t eat ONLY ground beef and eggs for every single meal: one meal, yes, the next steak and eggs (and hey, maybe chicken eggs for one meal and duck eggs for another, we can switch that up too), then ribs and eggs, pork chops and eggs, salmon and eggs, etc. For the workout, if ALL we have is a barbell, we’ll change the weights OR the way we got it over our head (snatch vs press), but if we have multiple objects, the world is our oyster. Kegs, stones, logs, sandbags, etc etc.

 

The nutritional variety will cover our nutrient bases. The implement/movement variety will cover our imbalances.  It also dawns on me that, if I wanted to be cute, I could change that sentence to simply “Chaos is the Plan”, so that it reads “Eat and eggs when hungry until no longer hungry.  Spend 180 minutes a week picking something up off the floor and putting it over your head.  Chaos is the plan.”…but you’d have to “know” me to know what the hell that final part means.  But it also DOES communicate more than JUST “don’t repeat the same meal/workout twice in a row.”  Now we can use that third sentence to mean that, not only are we not repeating meals and workouts twice in a row, but perhaps we won’t repeat weeks in a row either.  Think about that: now we just created a training cycle. 

 

When we employ the “Chaos is the plan” corollary to training, it means that some weeks our 180 minutes are divided between 2 workouts, sometimes 4, sometimes 7, etc.  And the change in amount of training days would result in a change in training time, which would naturally cause a waving of training volume by changing the training density or load employed to meet the training time.  Hey, isn’t a weekly change something we saw in 5/3/1, the Juggernaut Method, Dan John’s “1 lift a day”, basic western linear periodization, much of Alex Bromely’s programs, etc etc?  And what if we really DID make chaos the plan and used the roll of a die to determine how many days a week we were going to train THAT week?  Oh my god I’m loving this.

 

And heck, we could even boil this down WITHIN a week.  Just because I’m training 180 minutes over the span of 4 days doesn’t mean they have to be evenly divided workouts.  Rather than 4 45 minute workouts, what if I had one 90 minute workout and 3 30 minute ones?  Or 2 75 minute workouts and 2 15 minute ones?  30-90-15-45?  The possibilities are limitless!

Holy cow: I got 2 memes out of this movie!

 

And Chaos can be the plan with nutrition too.  Eat meat and eggs when hungry until no longer hungry.  Simple enough.  Don’t repeat the same meal twice in a row.  Simple enough.  Chaos being the plan means that some days we may simply just plain not eat.  If we’re not hungry, we’re not eating.  Or maybe we employ a protein sparing modified fast ala the Velocity Diet/Apex Predator Diet, or keep it full carnivore and rely on egg whites, chicken breasts, lean fish, etc and then do a day MUCH heavier on the fats.  I’ve heard some folks employ “fat fasting”: why not give it a go and see what happens?  A surefire way to take in a variety of nutrients is to eat a wide variety and methods of food, and through that we’ll learn just how our body responds to these foods to best maximize performance AND gain a little bit of metabolic flexibility to go along with it.

 

That even lends well to cyclical nutrition, something Jamie Lewis has written about among several other authors.  This could be a golden avenue to employ something ala the ABCDE diet, or take Justin Harris’ carb cycling and put it on its head by doing fat/protein cycling instead.  Therein, just like with training, we observe instances wherein the nutrition can be rotated on a weekly basis or within the week itself.  And this can be done while STILL keeping the nutrition simple: meat and eggs.  There is SO much variety within those two things that we can have limitless possibilities available.  A grassfed sirloin is going to have a much different breakdown compared to a grainfed slab of prime rib, to say nothing of comparing that same grassfed sirloin to some pork ribs, or a pot roast, or chicken thighs/wings.  And wanna compare some quail eggs to an ostrich egg? And while we’re talking about eggs, think about how you can eat the same eggs but PREPARE them differently.  Fried, poached, hard/soft boiled, omelets (steak and egg omelets are the meals of warriors), raw, scrambled, etc.  John Meadows spoke to the idea that we can reduce the instances of egg intolerances by varying the method in which we prepare them on a frequent basis.  Chaos is the plan, and chaotic nutrition can exist in the realm of restriction. 

 

EVERYTHING ELSE

I genuinely can't think of a more fitting image...

I had actually already shopped this idea out and someone pointed out to me the value of an adding a walk to the prescription.  It was the greatest contribution I had seen to any protocol in a long time AND completely overlooked by me because I subscribe to Jamie Lewis’ paradigm that walking isn’t a workout “it’s part of being a human being”.  That said, it wasn’t UNTIL I took on “Feast/Famine/Ferocity” that I started walking daily, so I was living a sub-human lifestyle for quite a while as well.  As far as walking goes, there are several outstanding prescriptions out there to follow.  There’s a lot of great science speaking to the value of a 10 minute walk after meals, and with Chaos being the Plan as far as our eating schedule goes, this allows for a chaotic walking schedule as well…but it also means on those fasting days we won’t walk at all.  But, perhaps, since calories will be on the low side, that’ll be a good thing.  Jamie Lewis prefers a set prescription of “2 miles a day, minimum, outside, rain or shine”, which is also a great way to get in some vitamin D…when it’s sunny.  And Dan John’s Easy Strength for Fat Loss tackles it by having the trainee have a set 60 minutes of training, lift weights at the start, and go for a walk for the remainder of the 60 minutes.  Given it’s an Easy Strength workout, the lifting can last anywhere from 10-25 minutes, so you can get in some decent walks, and Dan wants to trainee to legit put the weight down and head out the door while the heart rate is still up.  All of these are great prescriptions, and all rely on the trainee to do SOME sort of walking, which is the big takeaway.

 

Beyond that, I’d be a cad if I didn’t cop to still making use of nutritional supplements as part of a “safety net” for my carnivore based nutrition.  Everything I’ve read and heard says you can get all the required nutrients you need from animal products, and I find the position believable enough, but I also get my supplements for free from a high quality and high caliber company, so I see no reason to NOT use them.  So if you feel a need to supplement outside of the food to ensure all your bases are covered: go ahead.  The big takeaway with the nutrition prescription was to provide a VERY solid working foundation.

AND it's paleo!

 

For the training, if I HAD to add something to it, it’d be pushing/dragging a sled.  I’ve often written that my “desert island training” protocol would be log vipers and prowler pushes, and that still holds true.  The sled will build up the legs just fine with a concentric only movement that’s easier to recover from to allow for more frequent training, and it provides ANOTHER avenue of conditioning AND a potential for level changes in a workout as well if one goes with low handles/low crawls and drags.  But, I’ll also die on the hill that this is an unnecessary addition.  Is one doing to develop some Tom Platz looking legs from picking something up off the floor and putting it over their head?  No, but I’m sure they could develop some Milo of Croton or Farnese Hercules legs from doing that…and really, do you need more than that?

 

Another consideration I had was to either have a “dealer’s choice day” ala Jamie Lewis OR a caveat to take 10% of your training time each day and use it to train “whatever”.  I feel like this would do a good job of shoring up any issues trainees may have with imbalances, specific lifts that need bringing up, etc.  When we account for the fact that assistance work is responsible for 10% of our growth, it makes sense that we only spend 10% of our time on it.  So if you have a 25 minute training session, spend 2.5 minutes doing some assistance work.  Whether that’s an ADDITONAL 2.5 minutes or 2.5 minutes out of your 25 minute total training session is between you and your god: just get it done.

 

NOT THE END

 

I genuinely want to expand on this.  Look at how much could be done with just 3 sentences.  I can legit open up a book with those 3 sentences and then go on to list a jillion different “meat and egg” recipes in one portion alongside hundreds of “pick up off the floor and put overhead” workouts.  We could train our whole lives off these 3 sentences AND alongside the 3 principles of “Effort, Consistency and Time”.  The Freedom of limitation shines through yet again: give me 3 sentences and I’ll give you a book.

OBSERVATIONS FROM BEING HALFWAY THROUGH EASY STRENGTH/MASS MADE SIMPLE

About a month ago, I had finished up another run of Jamie Lewis’ “Famine” training protocol and found myself in a situation wherein I had a pretty chaotic summer schedule ahead due to travel and family obligations, and could not, realistically, commit to a structured, rigid and involved training program like what “Feast” would entail.  So I needed to take on a new approach.  I had read the “Easy Strength Omnibook” over Christmas (reviewed on this blog. Spoilers: it’s amazing: read it!), and finally found myself in a position wherein I could run it…

Yeah that's pretty much me

…buuuut…I had JUST finished Famine.  I needed to do something that was going to make me GROW!  Easy Strength, in and of itself, was NOT going to accomplish that…which begged the question of what I would do for the “everything else” portion of the program in order to force some growth.  I, of course, instinctively dove toward Super Squats, and considered how it’d answer the “what do you do for squats on Easy Strength” question…but then it got me thinking about ANOTHER hard squatting program I hadn’t run yet…which was ALSO a Dan John program.  

Enter “Mass Made Simple”, a program that had LONG since been on my list of programs to run…but, in truth, I could not wrap my brain around the upper body portion of the program.  Having read through the book a few times, it seemed to violate the “simple” portion of “Mass Made Simple”, because it required a LOT of tracking, planning and tinkering…while “Easy Strength” actually seemed simple…

…LIGHT BULB!  Combine them!  Let Easy Strength take care of the strength and Mass Made Simple take care of the mass.  From reading Dan’s work and listening to his podcasts, the upper body training portion of MMS was really just boilerplate stuff that was thrown in to get in SOME upper body work, whereas the real “magic” of the program was in the complexes and the high rep squats.  That sounds JUST like the “whatever else” of Easy Strength.  Do the Easy Strength workout, and THEN do complexes and high rep squats for “whatever else”…the goal being hypertrophy vs athletic performance (the latter being the more typical goal/”whatever else” of Easy Strength).

With that, I had a way forward, and decided to be cute and call the whole thing “MESS”, standing for “Mass-Easy, Strength-Simple”, and fully capturing just what this adventure is. And after 20 Easy Strength workouts I’m halfway through Easy Strength, and after 9 Mass Made Simple workouts I’m over half-way through MMS, so I felt like laying down some observations NOW before too much time passes and I forget any of this.  And now I’ll have the intro knocked out when it’s time to do a full-up review.

That said, let’s bulletpoint this up and get some observations down.

---

"MESS" IN GENERAL

Props if you get this reference...and it would HAVE to be a PBJ to fit the program

* As far as making the schedule “work”, my situation forced me to get creative.  I don’t lift weights on weekends.  That’s my time with my family.  I will wake up before everyone on the weekdays to get in a lift, but on weekends I sleep in with the Mrs and spend time with the kiddo as much as I can.  This meant all my Easy Strength workouts were Mon-Fri, and I would have to find a way to get in 14 Mass Made Simple workouts in 6 weeks with that approach (Dan DOES permit one to stretch MMS out to 7 weeks, but that wasn’t something I was interested in doing).  In order to make the 14 MMS workouts fit, it required a schedule of effectively 2-3-2-3-2-2 MMS workouts over the corresponding weeks (2 on week 1, 3 on week 2, etc). 

* On the above, my preferred structure was to have MMS workouts be on Mon and Fri, with the 3rd one being Wed if applicable.  The reasoning for this was how my nutrition was structured, which I wrote about recently in my “nutritional alchemy” post, but, ultimately, on weekends I tend to eat more food than on weekdays.  So a Friday MMS workout meant I’d have the entire weekend to eat to recover from the training and force muscle to grow, and then I’d have my Rampage/carb up meal on Sunday and have that to train off of on Monday to really drive hard.  I’d go through my “fasting” meal on Monday, which had enough protein in it to recover and, combined with the HARD MMS workout, did a great job of causing some distress on my body to recover.

Like squatting 25lbs over bodyweight for 50 reps, for example

* The above schedule ALSO helps fit MMS’ intent of following up the hard squatting workouts with a “recharge” workout followed by a “rest” workout.  For me, these would be 20 minute hard conditioning workouts and long walks, while still including Jamie Lewis’ RX of 300 squats and 300 push ups daily.  I’d use the weekends to be generally physically active, but not engage in Easy Strength style workouts or anything that was stressful for long durations.

EASY STRENGTH IN GENERAL

Seriously: buy it.  It's Dan's Best work

* It’s EASY strength: it needs to be treated easy!  I’m a “grinder”, as Derek Poundstone would put it, and super mega slow-twitch, so I move 135 and 405 at the same speed.  But when the weights are easy, they should be moved fast and explosively.  Jim Wendler has spoken about this as well.  We get faster and more explosive by moving that way: grinding light weights just makes us even worse at moving light weights.

* That’s not to way that rep quality should be poor: the opposite.  Reps need to be owned.  This is an opportunity to master these movements, because the weight is light and we have a chance to really nail stuff.  My continental has grown in leaps and bounds because of the frequent practice and mastery.

* The parallels between Easy Strength and 5/3/1 become more and more apparent as I experience the program and review the lessons from Dan and Jim.  The difference is primarily that Jim is more prescriptive than Dan, which is funny because people comment on how Jim doesn’t spell out enough of the program, so they’ll REALLY dislike Easy Strength.  But, ultimately, the main work of 5/3/1 IS Easy Strength, especially when using 5s pro: it’s a small number of reps with light weight performed with the intent of owning the weight and crushing the rep.  From there, Jim lays out the “everything else” that Dan leaves up to the reader via prescribed supplemental, assistance, conditioning, jumps and throws.  Your “everything else” is hypertrophy?  Cool, do BBB or Building the Monolith.  It’s conditioning?  Great: prowler challenge.  Jim also spells out what weights to use, whereas Dan leaves it up to the trainee, and Jim forces you to use light weights whereas Dan tells you to do so.   So perhaps 5/3/1 is Easy Strength training wheels.

* Yes, there is a difference in that 5/3/1 doesn’t have you do the same movements everyday for 40 workouts, and instead tends to focus on 1-2 lifts a day, but that’s getting into nuance and preference.  One of the big takeaways here is how easily one can blend the methods as a result.  If you want to use Easy Strength AND build muscle without using my MESS approach, you could do Easy Strength and chase it with BBB, Monolith or Hardgainer supplemental/assistance/jumps throws and conditioning.  And hey: Easy Strength for Fat Loss is EXACTLY the “light conditioning” days of 5/3/1.

* In that regard, other places to steal for “everything else” would include the 10k swing challenge, Tactical Barbell (especially volume 2), Crossfit (do the Easy Strength program, then the WOD), Neversate/Brian Alsruhe programs (I’d skip Brian’s mainwork and just steal the assistance/conditioning to make this work) and, of course, Mass Made Simple.

Not really the go to for "Easy"

* Meanwhile, for contrasting programs to run AFTER Easy Strength is done, Dan’s 1 lift a day program is pretty much the total opposite of Easy Strength (focus on 1 lift a day, train that lift once a week, do it for a higher volume of total work), Deep Water (some lifts are trained once every 14 days, and you absolutely smash that lift), and possibly DoggCrapp (you’re rotating through so many movements that it’s a long while before you come back to it).  Conjugate would also strike a similar chord in that regard.

* The next time I run Easy Strength (which will most likely be very soon), I plan to use dips or incline bench vs overhead pressing for the press work.  I get in a good amount of overhead work with my conditioning, and with MESS it happens during the complexes as well, whereas my horizontal press these days is primarily the 300 push ups a day I do per Jamie Lewis’ mandate.  

* What I have found the most interesting thing about this is how my physique actually seems to be IMPROVING with Easy Strength, if not at least maintaining.  I felt like I would see a decline from the “lack of work”, but when you lift the same lifts 5 days a week, you DO get in a substantial amount of volume with high quality reps, vs a bunch of garbage sets.  

* Another theory I have about this is that I have “earned” this minimalist approach, as Dan writes about.  I had been going VERY hard and with lots of volume leading up to Easy Strength, and now this minimalist approach has allowed me to realize a lot of the potential I’ve been building up to as the fatigue dissipates and the body rebuilds.  Perhaps this also speaks to the “hormonal cascade” that Dan speaks of occurring once the lifting is done.

* On top of all of that, I can’t ignore how important my shift in nutrition has been as well.  I’m taking in SO much protein and quality fats these days and finally eliminated the ketojunk for good.

Keto...bread.  How was I this stupid?

* Short burstfire thoughts: Easy Strength works: I’m halfway through and already seeing results.  It IS easy, which is a good thing.  I dig these short workouts BECAUSE it allows me time to do other stuff.  In that regard, it’s good to cycle through the “whatever else” portion of Easy Strength and build other qualities.  Periodization, yet again.  Strength isn’t everything, and hypertrophy is a fine goal, so use Easy Strength to build your strength and use your “whatever else” to build your size.  That’s totally fine.

* A good approach to taking on Easy Strength at the start is to pick “new” movements to you so you can reap the benefits that come with improved mastery ALONGSIDE the benefits of Easy Strength as well.  You’ll observe rapid progression.  So go beltless if you’ve been using a belt, use chains or bands, go double overhand on your pulls, or use an axle, or use different foot/bar/hand placement, etc etc.

* Remember that a loaded carry is a LOADED carry.  If you just carry something: that’s a carry.  A loaded carry is a carry UNDER LOAD.  It took me a while to appreciate that.  It’s why I’m wearing weight vests and chains during most of mine.  Other alternatives are to pull a sled while you do it.  If you look at the cover of “Never Let Go”, you’ll see Dan really personifying this by carrying a sandbag while wearing a loaded backpack and pulling a sled.

Also a fantastic read

* For this particular run of Easy Strength, I kept it easy AND simple.  Dan said, if he could do it all over again, he’d just do 3x3, so that’s exactly what I did.  I also am keeping all the lifts the same throughout, minus the carries of course, since Dan said specifically to never repeat that workout.  The next time, though, I plan to play around with reps and sets and the movements as well.  Specifically, if I were to do another run like MESS or something similar with a hard lifting workout thrown in, I’d most likely make that particular Easy Strength day the 1x10 variant OR use the 1x10 variant for the follow-on day as a means to recover from the workout.  The 5-3-2 day would be a good realization day, and then 2x5 would be a good “punch the clock” sort of workout.  So, again, if this was MESS, you could do 5-3-2 on the MSS day, then do 2x5 as your recharge and 1x10 as your rest.

---

With that, there’s my halfway report.  I’m excited to see where this second half leads.

HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER

I miss arcades: they were such a pivotal part of my upbringing as a child of the 90s.  These days, they’re a dying medium, but in the 90s, there was nothing better than a real live arcade cabinet, let alone a whole bank of them all in one concentrated location.  If it was a Round Table Pizza, it was really like having arrived at the land of milk and honey.  And of all the many amazing arcade games out there, “Street Fighter II” will always hold high acclaim among those of us that “were there”.  Even if you owned the home version for the Super Nintendo, the arcade classic just blew it away with its superior graphics and sound.  BUT, what made the game a TRUE classic was that, at the arcade, you could get challenged by random people: not just family and friends.  Yes, these days you can accomplish that by being linked up with the entire world over your internet connection, but back in the day, if you wanted some fresh blood, you waited for some dude to plunk down next to you at the arcade cabinet, throw in their quarters, and be greeted by the phase “Here comes a new challenger!” flashing across the screen.  Suddenly, you knew: it was on.

It's honestly for the best, because this match has been done to death...and Ryu is still better

What if you just wanted to play the game on your own?  What if you just wanted to square off against the woefully inadequate (yet often cheaty) computer AI?  Sorry dude: you showed up to the arcade, you opened yourself up to these random challengers.  Your hard earned quarters just got taken from you as some pro came by and whooped you into oblivion.  Little did you realize just how awful of a choice Dhalsim was compared to Ryu.  Little did you realize WHY, despite looking so awesome, Blanka was a terrible decision.  But from it, you learned, and you grew, and perhaps you even started your very own revenge epic to come back one day and claim what was rightfully yours.

Ok, I’ve bombarded you with my nostalgia long enough, thank you for indulging me.  Why am I talking about this?  Because as you’ve most likely sussed out: this arcade experience is a microcosm for training (and life for that matter). So many of us are content to just play against that familiar computer AI with our absolute favorite character and just keep spamming the same Hadouken over and over again until we win…but do we grow from that?  NO!  What creates growth?  When that new challenger shows up!  Some rando that we’ve never played against before who comes up with combinations couldn’t possibly fathom and just absolutely wipes the floor with us and takes our quarters away.  And if we wanna beat them, we gotta plunk down some more change and get in a few more rounds to learn their strategies and come up with our own to overcome.

At the arcade, this was proverbial, but for Mike...

And much like our time at the arcade, there won’t always be a “new challenger” to force us to grow.  Sometimes, we WILL have to spend a few lonely hours just beating up the CPU.  But when the opportunity finally DOES present itself: we need to be ready FOR our new challenger.  There’s so much in those thoughts already.  We just re-described Dan John’s “Park bench-bus bench” principle, wherein the majority of our training time is going to be “punch the clock” workouts, but occasionally we really dig in and pour ourselves into our training.  Dan’s “Mass Made Simple” program is one that Dan himself says can be run “2x a year, tops”.  It’s only 6 weeks of training, and 14 workouts today.  So that’s 12 weeks and 28 workouts in a year where you’re facing “a new challenger”: the rest of the time playing against a CPU.  But also, let’s talk about “being READY for the new challenger”.  THIS is about taking on these protocols WHEN APPROPRAITE.  If your work schedule is exploding, your wife is in her third trimester, and you’re getting a masters degree, it’s probably NOT a great time to start up “Building the Monolith”.  But you’re a high school kid and it’s summer and mommy and daddy are footing the foodbill, why AREN’T you eating your face off and lifting like an inmate?

And what IS a new challenger in the world of training?  It’s something that FORCES us outside our comfort zone.  It’s something different.  We’ve already memorized the pattern of the CPU: the rando down at the arcade is entirely unpredictable, and we have to learn how to adapt.  In the world of physical transformation, this can be a training program that forces us outside of our comfort zone (hello Super Squats/Building the Monolith/Mass Made Simple/Deep Water), or it could be a nutritional protocol that runs opposite of everything we know (Feast, Famine and Ferocity/Carnivore/ABCDE diet/Velocity Diet).  And these are simply self-imposed “new challengers”.  Think about the obvious: ACTUAL challenges.  Signing up to compete in a powerlifting meet, strongman competition, bodybuilding show, crossfit comp, a marathon, a triathlon, etc etc: SOMETHING outside of your comfort zone that forces you to grow.  

Both men seen here outside their comfort zones

And rest assured: you WILL get your quarters stolen from you the first time you square off against that new challenger.  If it DOESN’T happen: you cherry-picked and didn’t gain ANYTHING from the experience.  You became that predator of the arcade looking to stomp newbs just go bolster your own ego.  We don’t grow from that.  Being king of Chuck E. Cheese is a title that no one wants.  “You are not a warrior: you are a beginner”, “Go home and be a family man”, and all the other fantastic taunts from such a legendary game are all too ready to employ here.  Instead, use these new challenger opportunities to realize your max potential and grow into something TRULY fearsome.  Make it so that when “Here comes a new challenger” flashes across the screen, you’re all too excited for it.  Finally: a challenge!

 

YOU CAN’T OVERCOME A LACK OF EXPERIENCE WITH AN ABUNDANCE OF INFORMATION

I appreciate how the topic I’ve written for this post is just so straightforward, so I’m going to just keep on rolling with it.  This idea struck me this morning as I was finishing up my workout: a combination of Dan John’s Easy Strength AND his Mass Made Simple program (be on the lookout for a future write up there…alongside one called “Here Comes a New Challenger”, because my brain is absolutely schizophrenic along with obsessive and comes up with multiple ideas at once about the same subject all the time).  I had finished up the full workout and had 18 minutes remaining before I needed to get ready for work, so I decided to throw on the weighted vest and get in as far of a walk as I could in that time.  It was only at the end of that time that I remembered that I had intended to do a little bit more “bodybuilding” work after the workout: I was so…conditioned for conditioning (sorry, had to be done) post workout that I forgot my own plan (Chaos, of course).  So, upon my return to the garage, I quickly shucked off the vest and did 1 set of “Conan Curls” (band curls with the band around the wrists instead of held in the hand) and 1 set of full ROM lateral raises with 20lb dumbbells.  And that was “enough”…and in that I realized that I had learned QUITE a bit in 23 years of lifting weights regarding how to get as much as I could out of a single set…and, in turn, realized just how LONG it took me to accomplish that.  Because it doesn’t how much you academically “know” about training: without the necessary experience to actually IMPLEMENT it, it’s all just theory.

No, seriously: what's a widget? 

 

What’s funny is that this is something we know about any other physical activity on earth, but for some reason people treat physical transformation as a separate physical entity.  If I tell you that you can’t READ yourself into playing the piano, or shooting a freethrow, or swimming, you’ll go “duh!”  I suppose combat sports runs into this too, because I’ve known cats that thought they could teach themselves to fight from reading, but, at the same time, martial arts are so mired in mythos (“My Uncle TOTALLY learned from a Shaolin monk a pressure point that will KILL you with just 4lbs of pressure!”), but you get my point.  When it comes to acquisition of physical skills, we understand that they are just that: SKILLs.  NOT knowledge.  Yet the very Role-Play-Game-Playing nerds that can appreciate just that idea (in the “White Wolf” series there is literally a breakdown of “talents, skills and knowledge” for your character sheet!) are the same ones that rally AGAINST it when it comes time to actually put pen to paper…man these puns.  “I already KNOW how to maximize the lateral raise: I gotta keep my chin tight, not shrug my shoulders, control the weight, pinky down, chest high, brace, ground my heels, but I STILL only feel it in my traps”.  Dude: it’s because even though your brain might be smart on all this stuff, your body is stupid.  It needs more education, and that comes PURELY from experience.

 

No matter how much you read ABOUT the lateral raise, until you have a few hundred thousand reps under your belt, you’re going to need to PHYSICALLY learn how to do the movement.  That’s why cues are so popular in the first place: they’re little mental reminders on how to move PHYSICALLY.  BUT, if you haven’t ever “gotten in” when it comes to the movement, the cue is an answer seeking a question.  You don’t even know what “right” feels like to know if you’re GETTING there yet, and it just takes a LOT of practice to get there.  Again: this is obvious with any OTHER physical skill, primarily because we tend to get instant feedback.  Did the ball make it in the hoop?  Congrats: THAT’S how a free throw feels.  Did you NOT drown?  Congrats: you swam!  Knock down all 10 pins?  That’s a strike!  But how do we know when the lateral raise was done right?  When we finally have some goddamn lateral deltoids to show for!  And that takes TIME…BUT, at the same time, an experienced trainee can ALSO “know” when they’ve gotten it “right” because they’ve eventually gotten it right for so long that they “KNOW” the feel that they need to achieve in order to accomplish their goals…which just results in even MORE confusion for the junior trainee observing the experienced.

There is a reason this meme exists

 

How many times have you seen the critique that “so and so can do XYZ BECAUSE they’re a pro!”  Hell there Branch Warren/Johnnie Jackson/Ronnie Coleman/Arnold/etc.  It’s this idea that, somehow, these pros are “training wrong” because how they train doesn’t LOOK like textbook technique.  But winding it back to the combat sports reference: how many times have you seen an accomplished professional boxer with their HANDS DOWN?  Isn’t “hands up” that thing your boxing coach is CONSTANTLY shouting at you?  How come the pros have their hands down?  Don’t they know better?  They most certainly do: they know WHEN to keep their hands up, primarily because, after DECADES of experience, their sense of their opponent’s timing and range is so well tuned that they KNOW when they are actually in danger and NEED to have their hands up to defend and, in turn, they know when they can relax and SAVE their energy, rather than fatiguing their shoulders from constantly being “on guard”.

 

It’s no different from the experienced lifted that is seeking to achieve physical transformation: they don’t NEED to do all that “other stuff” to accomplish their goals: they are beyond the point of cues and can simply replicate the feel that they need to feel in order to achieve the goal they are seeking to achieve.  From there, they tend to develop their own unique style and approach to the situation that best suits them on an individual level, because they have MASTERED their bodies THROUGH experience: NOT through academia.  THIS is the value of physical experience: it can NOT be replicated through speech or text.  And yes, I fully appreciate the irony of me writing about this very subject in order to impart upon you the knowledge that knowledge in and of itself is not enough, but in turn maybe we can appreciate where knowledge IS valuable: in the sharing of ideas, concepts, notions and experiences in order for the reader to TRY IT and GAIN the necessary experience that comes from it.  It’s why I’m such a fan of story-tellers over researchers: SHARE with me a story, tell me a tale, let me learn FROM your experience so I can try to have experiences of my own.  As a parent, THIS is the valuable lesson you impart upon your own children.  They can learn facts from school, or books, or the internet (god forbid), but YOU get to share with them your experiences. 

In fairness, there's a lot of trainees that could stand to learn this lesson

 

And, much like junior trainees: most kids will ignore you because they can only REALL learn from the school of hard knocks…but at least, once they DO learn, they come back and say “oh wow….you were RIGHT!” 

WHO IS ON YOUR MIXTAPE?

Already the topic title is showing my age, and for some of my readers I’m going to need to explain what a “mixtape” actually is, so let me get that out of the way.  Back before everything was streaming, physical media was the only real way to enjoy electronic entertainment, outside of just plain old listening to the radio (which, oh man, doesn’t THAT sound ancient).  In the CD era, it was common for someone to have a large library of music from CDs from various artists and, before engaging on a long road trip, or as a gift to someone with a mutual interest, or simply “just because”, they’d create a “mixtape” (yes, tape would refer to the era of cassettes, but just stick with me here) of various songs from various artists.  Sometimes, these would be themed (a “Valentine’s” mixtape of love songs, or a “Hardcore Metal” mixtape of various hard hitters), and sometimes it would just be absolute madness of stuff mixed up, but the end was the same: different songs from different artists all on one CD.  Heck, you can even buy these NOW, ready made for you at your local Walmart, typically in the form of “Now That’s What I Call Music Volume Infinity”. But what was interesting about these mixtapes was more about what they revealed about the CREATOR of the tape.  Specially, what sort of musical interest they held, what artists they had been exposed to, and, quite simply, what they considered to be “good music”.  So tell me, dear reader: who is on YOUR mixtape?

Like this, but for music...and yes, I DID had this demo disc

 

This whole idea came to me in the shower this morning, as most good thoughts do, as I was recovering from my current workout of Dan John’s “Easy Strength” AND “Mass Made Simple” mashed together (which I intend to flesh out more fully in the future, as it’s just plain awesome).  I started thinking how fortunate it was that I stumbled across Dan John, and it was because I was so fortunate to start reading about training from a martial arts background rather than a meathead/bodybuilding one, which meant I got turned on the Pavel Tsastouline right from the get-go alongside Super Squats (both recommended to me by the same dude, which I owe a LOT for having done so), which got me pointed in the direction of Ironmind, which got me pointed at Paul Kelso and John McCallum while at the same time also got me heading to T-Nation, which got me pointed at Dan John’s book “Never Let Go”, which I DIDN’T let go of from start to finish (reading it on a cruise on an old school kindle when I should have been…enjoying the cruise).  And somewhere along the line I got pointed in the direction of the delightful lunatic of Jamie Lewis, of which I’ve written extensively of his benefit to my overall life, and how interestingly that matched up with Dan John’s high praise of “the Velocity Diet”, and how through T-nation I discovered Date Tate, which got me to Elitefts, which totally colored how I approached training and nutrition in my 20s, which got me pointed to Jim Wendler for 5/3/1 AND Mark Bell for “Power Magazine”, through which I RE-discovered Jon Andersen (“that jacked dude that competed in IFSA?  Hell yeah!), and there’s still SO much more in there I’m missing (Stuart McRobert, we love you!...some of the time!)   Man, what a wild journey: thanks for engaging me there.

 

But check out MY mixtape up there: what an eclectic collection of interesting lunatics.  But that’s also the key point there: almost all of those folks I listed are INTERESTING.  Many were trained WRITERS rather than lifters (Paul Kelso, Dan John, John McCallum and yes, even Jim Wendler’s degree was in English literature and Jamie Lewis’ academic background was on history), and those that weren’t trained authors were, legit, just absolutely insane (Jon Andersen was functionally illiterate and Mark Bell/Dave Tate BOTH overcome learning disabilities).  I was simply never drawn to those authors that were more academic, researched and scientific than they were talented storytellers.  I suppose it boiled down to, if I was going to spend time reading, I wanted to be entertained, since this was my “free time”.  But, as a result: isn’t my OWN training and nutrition pretty entertaining?  This is, of course, self-validating: I’m asking an audience of people that came here to READ me if I’m entertaining…but the sheer fact this blog has ANY sort of following means at least SOMEONE finds me entertaining (and hey, I’m in YOUR mixtape: inception!).

Really going the the early 2000s stuff today it seems

But SOME of you dudes out there are only listening to the top 40s!  Some of you dudes out there are PURE “bubblegum pop”, only listening to what’s popular, mainly because that’s “safe”.  You’re so afraid of having an actual opinion or feeling about the music that you let “the industry” tell you what to like and what not to like.  Alternatively, some of you stopped listening to new music once high school ended, and you’re that dude that just had to keep changing their radio station from “pop” to “modern” to “retro” to “classic” to “oldies”, trying DESPERATELY to hunt down SOMEONE who will play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” over the airwaves for you! (Sirius XM has you covered by the way).  Some of you have a mixed tape of 1-hit wonders: dudes that were right ONE TIME and could never recapture that magic, and you just keep going back to that well to relive that one moment even though their time is GONE. 

 

Flat out: I don’t wanna go on a road trip with some of you dudes, because your mixtape is BORING.  It’s awful.  It’s all stuff I’ve heard before.  Where are the DEEP TRACKS?  Where’s the stuff I haven’t heard before?  Where is the new, undiscovered artist?  Where are those artists who take risks?  Who try something new, different, that hasn’t been heard before?  Play THAT music for me.  Force me out of my comfort zone and let me see if I care for it.  And FORCE me to sit down and REALLY listen.  Did this artist achieve their goal of making ART, or did they achieve their REAL goal of making money?  Hell, I like ACDC, but what I really like about them is that after I bought one of their CDs I effectively owned their whole collection.  Meanwhile, Trent Reznor can release a CD where he sounds like a different artist THROUGH the CD, and for some of you cats he’s too “mainstream”.  And meanwhile, no matter how much I try to like Amon Aramath, since “Viking” and “metal” sound like they’d be great together, I can’t get over how much the lead singer sounds like Cookie Monster….but at least I listened to a LOT of their music before I came to that conclusion.

At least these guys knew they were a parody

A common phrase is “you are an average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”, and there’s a lot of value in that phrase, but it, of course, extends beyond just your friends and co-workers.  Your training and nutrition is going to be an average of the 5 individuals whose media you consume.  I had to re-write that line a few times, because I originally wrote “authors” until I realized that SO many of you dudes AREN’T F**KING READING!  …of course, I’m saying that ON my written blog, so most likely you AREN’T the machine I should be raging against (music pun: hah!) but ya’ll get my point: some folks ONLY consume social media for their information source on how to achieve physical transformation.  Folks: I read entertaining authors, but I was READING AUTHORS: it was 200-300 pages of information.  No matter how entertaining you try to be, over the course of 200-300 pages, you EVENTUALLY say something valuable (although I still think “The Sun Also Rises” was awful…).  But social media stars?  They pride themselves on stretching out how long they can get you to watch their videos and do so by padding the hell out of them with garbage and click bait so you hang out JUST long enough to hit whatever metric they need to hit to cash in.  And it costs them NOTHING to throw up a video, whereas a published author had to go through the rigors of actually having their work reviewed by SOMEONE ELSE that saw fit to publish it (not counting e-book trash directly flooded onto the market…as someone that release a free e-book with no publisher whatsoever).  Yes yes, if you wanna take this music metaphor further you could very well claim these are “undiscovered artists” and that publishers are just “the industry” dictating what is and is not popular: if you’re intelligent enough to be able to figure that out, maybe you can sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to these internet fellows.

 

But either way, take a step back and look at how is on YOUR mixtape.  Is it a mixtape you’d be ok sharing with someone else?  Or is your musical taste…a little embarrassing?  Would you throw your mixtape into the CD player on the roadtrip and let 3 other people jam to it?  If someone wanted a changeup, would you say “give THIS a listen!”?  If not: why not go pick up some new tunes somewhere and see where they take you?  Head down to Sam Goody (points if you know what THAT is), pick up a bunch of CDs from dudes you’ve never heard of before, given them a listen and see what jumps out.  Even if nothing grabs you right away, occasionally, and ear worm works its way in and you eventually think “hey, that was actually pretty good: I wonder what else they released?”