Thursday, April 23, 2020

Beginners: Think Less, Not More

Nobutada: Please forgive, too many mind.
Nathan Algren: Too many mind?
Nobutada: Hai. Mind the sword, mind the people watching, mind the enemy, too many mind... [pause] No mind.

- The Last Samurai
You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. 
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have a theory that I've been ruminating on. I can't tell if - in whole or in part - it is something I found in my brain or my ass. I don't think it applies to everybody. Few things do. Just like with everything, many roads lead to Rome.

This theory branches out from my observation over close to the last decade that the people who think the most about training seem to be the people who are the worst at it. They fuck around the most, they stick with their training the least, they do the least work, they change things too often. It seems to me that the people who are the most successful have a tendency to focus their efforts on really simple shit - eat properly, train hard, train consistently.

The theory is that it is easier for some people to just go do the right things - instead of pursuing the answers to a thousand masturbatory questions - because they were on a sports team as a kid. They didn't get to ask questions. Their coach told them what to do, and they did it, or they were in for it. Through this experience, they learned to just shut up and train.

Let me reiterate - I don't think this applies to everybody. I sure didn't play sports as a kid. But here I am, in Rome.

I'm rambling, but I guess that's what I always do. Rule #1 of doing this blog is that I just write and don't get to go back and edit.

Training is a physical thing. The quality or "efficiency" - excuse me while I spit at that fucking insufferable word - of your plan doesn't matter if you don't go out and do it, over and over, for a long period of time. You can't think or plan or research or optimize super duper hard and then it just naturally follows that you get big and strong. You have to actually train.

Thought and planning are not a substitute for effort and time. I feel like people who think too much somehow cannot grasp this, because they just cannot seem to stop trying to make that sieve hold water.

I sometimes get into arguments about overthinking, over-planning, over-researching. It always seems to be with some bozo who has spent years trying to do it their way and having nothing to show for it. But they still think that they're doing things the right way. And they always ask the same question:

What is the harm in researching and learning more and being more efficient and optimizing?

I have thought about that question more than it deserves to be thought about. I can come up with a lot of ideas. I can argue that it takes time, effort, and energy away from the most important part - the actual training. I can argue that it is often little more than productive procrastination. I could make some analogy about how you don't learn to juggle by throwing 30 balls at yourself on Day 1 that some fucking dildo who has been juggling for a month would WELL AKSHULLY me about. I can drop that quote by Patton about good plans violently executed today. I can say some shit about Hick's Law or how perfect is the enemy of good. I can lob out phrases like "majoring in the minors", "the last 5% that matters", "premature optimization", "analysis paralysis" and "god damnit".

But these people make me tired, and I've decided that I give up. I don't think they even care about the answer - they just want to either do a cost-benefit analysis or prove to themselves that there isn't an answer so they can feel even smarter when they do the thing they were already going to do no matter what you said to them.

I don't know what the harm is. I don't know why it's apparently impossible for so many people to both do a ton of research and learning and actually train hard enough, consistently enough, to get the results that they want. Above all else, I don't know how to explain that a strategy is problematic to someone who can't even get it by looking back at their own history of failure.

I know the harm is there, because I have seen the results of it for years. I know that there are a large number of people who cannot handle both thinking and training. I don't know why, and I've decided that I also don't care, because trying to drag people away from the cliff they're trying desperately to throw themselves off of is exhausting.

You cannot prattle on about efficiency and optimization at the very same time that you are waiting for peak efficiency and maximum optimization to get started. People do this, and it makes me insane.

The act of training is what is the most important. This must be understood. Not the specifics - The act. This is what should receive the most attention and the most time.

If you were to plop a human bread loaf in front of me that would for just once trust that I am not a deep cover Russian agent sent to deliver shitty training advice so Americans will become weak - because I swear to God that is the degree of resistance some people give when asking for training advice - this is what I would tell them:

Find a training program that came from somebody who knows what they are doing. This is not as hard as people make it out to be. Well respected professionals are easy to find and you can pick any of them. Failing that, pick anything in the r/Fitness Wiki. Then do the program. Don't ask questions, don't tweak it unless you absolutely have to because of equipment restrictions, don't think about it at all. Just go and do it. Don't go LARPing that you're an academic researcher, don't go read a bunch of shit about rep ranges and INOLs and MRVs. Don't spend more than a day picking something to do. Don't try to make your own routine.

What you should be learning first is the process of shoving your shrieking brain into a corner with a gag in its mouth, and going out to execute a plan with ferocity and dedication. This is a skill and a tool that every person should have in their toolbox. It is not the right tool for every job. It is the right one for this job.

Get into the habit of training consistently without dwelling on what you're doing, where you might be in six months, what you might be doing wrong, what you could do better - learn how to train based on trust. Your results are measured on a time scale that is long - you have to be able to pick and stick with something for a long time so it has time to bear fruit. Think about refining your approach to training later, when it matters. Because it may never matter.

This is a thing that I believe strongly - Most people can achieve their training goals by doing nothing more glamorous than walking in someone else's footsteps, and it is not until one is at a competitive level that it begins to matter which someone that is or where the footsteps are. There is no shame in painting by numbers, because reinventing the wheel is stupid. Using a wheel someone else already created and refined ahead of you is much smarter than pretending you can replace decades of trial and error and experience with a few days of reading.

You do not get bonus gains points for making up a routine on your own instead of doing an existing one - and I'm here to tell you, after looking over years worth of routine critique posts, none of you are making anything new or interesting anyway. All the hours you are pouring into doing research and carefully crafting optimal volume and exercise selection and timing is for shit, because what you're producing from it is also for shit. There are only two answers to 99% of routine critiques - "It's fucking retarded" and "It looks like one of any of two dozen existing, proven routines except you picked a different kind of curls".

I'm rambling again.

When I was growing up, I was "one of the smart kids", and everybody told me this. Looking back now, I can say with certainty that it did more harm to me than it did good. I understand the shackles of needing to be "smart" in everything by thinking, researching, and planning, and I know that I am more useful as a person having taken them off. These things are just tools and they are not the right tool for every job. "Being smart" is not found in trying to use the same tools to tackle every problem.

If you need to know what the harm in thinking too much is in order to take this advice, I don't have an answer for you. What I have is that I have watched tens of thousands of people spend so much time trying to be smart that they forget to do the most important thing in reaching their goals, and so fail. I have fallen into that trap myself. I do not recommend banking on the idea that you might be the kind of person who can think without sacrificing training.

Think less, act more. Act now, think later. Train constantly, think intermittently.

Monday, April 20, 2020

More Questions Strong People Don't Ask

There is a kind of person who is determined to be mad. They don't seem to care what they're mad about, they just want something to be mad about. It's been my experience that those same people tend to also be dummies who can't think good, and I suspect that is why they spend so much time being mad.

-

A point of clarification: There is a difference between pursuing, having, and challenging others to have strength of will, character, and mind, and literally being Biff Tannen.

There is a model sometimes called the Force Continuum that mostly comes up when discussing uses of force by law enforcement. A self defense coach I used to train with once said that everyone has a maximum level of force they are comfortable with, and most people will consider anyone comfortable with a higher level to be an asshole or abusive, and anyone only comfortable with lower levels to be weak or cowardly. In my own experience I have found that to be pretty spot on.

I feel this is relevant to think about, because one thing I have learned from the internet is that there are people who have lost their ability to tell the difference between the above two types of person. Put another way - a duckling knows no difference between a wolf and my son, the toddler. Both are bigger and stronger, but one wants to eat him and the other just wants to give the quackie some of his Fruit Loops.

Put yet another way - A stack of baby bunnies in a hat and trench coat aping at being a fully formed person knows no difference between someone with strength, grit, and resilience, and the machomasculine bully caricature that mostly exists only in movies written by guys who probably got beat up in high school. I know this because guys who I know to be very good people get consistently called toxic bully gatekeeper macho meathead assholes on the internet the moment something they say reflects that they are not made of glass and don't think anyone else should be trying to be.

So, here is a final word - Preference for strength and disdain for weakness do not make a person a bully. Neither do expressing them, giving advice to others based on them, or writing rants in one's personal blog. Conversely, having disdain for those who are strong is not a virtue - it is simply sour grapes.

***

Another point of clarification: There is a difference between curiosity and wondering about a thing, and then actually asking about it. Every question a person can think of does not need nor even deserve to be discussed, heard by others, or answered. A good life skill to develop is being judicious about which musings that bubble up uncontrollably in your skull are allowed to percolate out of your mouth (or finger-mouths).

Actual thoughts are largely beyond our control. To head off some bozos who are gonna act like I'm pretending to be Emperor Stoicism - no. Incredibly stupid questions come up in my own brain all the time, just as they do for everyone. It is the inability to recognize that a question is stupid or worthless, to let it go and carry on without asking it of others, that separates some people from others. And it is an uncontrolled need to ask some kinds of questions - and to care about the answers - that, in my opinion, is a red flag for potentially being... wimpy? Fragile? Cowardly? An L.7. Weenie? A wet blanket?

Below are some such questions.

***

"Is that person taking steroids?"

If you care about the answer to this question enough to want other people to weigh in on it, there's a good chance you don't have it in you to succeed in training - unless your only training goal is "Don't do nothing", at which point I don't know why you care about anything because nothing you do matters.

There is no point in knowing the answer to this. It doesn't change what you can achieve or what you need to do to achieve it. The only thing you can do with this information is tell yourself "I can't get that because I'm not steroids", which is a statement that has absolutely no value in the pursuit of success - only in the pursuit of being a sad bastard and dragging your ass.

"Should I bulk or cut?"

What you should do is be a god damn adult.

You have eyeballs. You can look in the mirror, decide which kind of shit you look like and make a decision about what to do about it. There is no good reason to outsource this decision to other people. There are no crack experts in bulkorcutology. No experience is necessary to eyeball Play-Doh wearing a person suit and tell it it needs to get leaner. You do not want "the advice of veterans", you want someone else to bear the responsibility of deciding because you are a coward.

If you want to blame something other than yourself if you bulk/cut and don't like how you look at the end, dart boards and dice are very inexpensive.

"Is [thing that is not remotely like strength training at all] an ok substitute for leg day?"

No. Unless it's this:

Hate BOSU Balls? Don't Use Manual Perturbations - Driveline Baseball

Dear everybody: Stop trying to get out of doing strength training in an entire half of your body. It's not that bad, you are just being a baby. If you want to be a baby about training your legs, just be a baby. It's ok. Your all biceps, chest, and abs routine wasn't going to trick Tinders (or Grindrs, I don't judge) into climbing into bed with you despite the gaping holes in your personality anyway.

"What would happen if I did X but didn't do Y?"

You'll explode. Every disc in your spine and the spine of everyone in a 20 foot radius will herniate, your knees will spontaneously reverse themselves, and the Doom Slayer himself will descend into your shoulder and tear your rotator cuffs asunder. You will contract leprosy, and your ass will grow taste buds.

Or nothing. Or, most likely, you'll get worse results than you could otherwise, and you already know that, so why the fuck are you asking?

This is a type of "What can I get away with?" question that's about tackling one factor well and another factor poorly. And if you dig into it with the person, the reason not to do Y is always just "I don't waaaannnnnaaaa". It's never "I can't eat vegetables because I live on a remote island in the Pacific and I have no way to acquire them" - It's always some childish shit like "vegetables are yucky and I forgot salt exists". It's never "I can't change my diet because my best friend framed me for treason and now I'm imprisoned in Chateau d'If", it's "I gave up after a day because cookies are too good to not eat whole boxes of".

"I saw somebody [doing thing], what's that about?"

Only a person doing a thing can tell you why they are doing that thing. If you really have to know - and here's a hint, you don't - ask them directly. But you won't. You will go onto the internet and ask strangers to speculate on a vague description of what you saw instead. You will tell yourself that it's because you didn't want to be rude, and that's not entirely a lie, but it's really just that you are afraid to say words at another person.

This kind of question reminds me of how my son likes to run up to me and say "Daddy whayoudoon" and then run off. It is something that a toddler does out of necessity that an adult should not feel a need to do and should also know better than to be doing - and even then, my toddler asks me directly when he wants to know what I'm doing. Now, granted, he does that because toddlers just don't give a fuck. But as an adult, you should do it because you're not to be afraid of dumb shit like talking to other human beings - or simply recognize it's a question that doesn't deserve to be answered and just move on.

"How do I train to be functional? I don't want to be a fat waddling powerlifter or a gross mass monster bodybuilder."


Chandler Shut Up GIFs | Tenor

You don't. Because that word doesn't fucking mean anything. A function is a specific action. But not to worry - based on my observations, I will answer this question for you with the most common functions that people who ask this want to perform.
  • Be a smug knob on the internet: Do some strength training and some running, but deliberately never reach results above low-intermediate levels. Yoga is optional but recommended - bonus points for hot yoga.
  • Accuse bigger, stronger people of having a disorder: Same as above, except you stop at mid-beginner level and deliberately never gain muscle.
  • Impress unfit people: Learn a couple of basic bodyweight moves that have a skill/practice component. Do lots of unweighted pullups.
  • Fantasize that you could be Batman: Do CrossFit, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and Krav Maga. Train your vertical jump.
  • The mundane functions you actually perform in your everyday life: You don't need to train at all.


"Do you count the weight of the bar when you say how much you lift?"


Head Is Full Of Fuck (@HeadFullOfFcuk) | Twitter

On Starting Strength and StrongLifts

I've had the thought rolling around in my head for a while to do what I'm about to do, which is take this page off the Wiki and put ...