The Obvious Limits

A few weeks ago I told someone what I do for a living and I found myself giving away hundreds of dollars in advice for free again. The young man was tall and very skinny, and told me he “just couldn’t put on muscle.” This was the conversation that ensued: 

“How often do you squat?”

“Well… [looks at ground]”

“How much do you eat?”

“I eat like 4,000-5,000 calories a day!”

“Do you write it down or keep track of it in any way?”

“No.”

“Then you’re lying to me and yourself. You can probably remember 1-2 times when you may have eaten that much in the past few weeks, but I can put dollars to the donuts-you’re-not-eating that you aren’t averaging that much food.”

I know that every scrawny-to-brawny, ectomorph, hard-gainer reading this blog is probably beginning to type the “It’s Not That Simple!” email, tweet, or Facebook comment to me right now, but look past your own struggles and read between the lines of this conversation. I think we can all agree that the two main ingredients to putting on lean mass are:

1. Calories
2. Squats

Everything else is tweaking. As a coach, I know that if you don’t hate squats yet and you don’t hate food yet, then we have no reason to move onto other alternatives like food quality, food timing, and other complex, full body lifts. I’m not saying those alternatives might not be necessary, but until you’ve gotten a handle on the basics of eating and squatting a lot, there’s no need explore them yet. 

The reason I bring this observation up is that it points to something that applies to almost every fitness goal. People come to me because they aren’t making the kind of progress they want towards their goal and want to know what is limiting that progress. The first place I look to find the problem is the most obvious place. In the above case, squats and food. In the case of someone losing fat it would be food and daily movement (not exercise). But there is a common theme that appears with all my clients. No matter what the fitness goal is, the lower limit on progress is usually consistency; the upper limit on progress is usually recovery; and the common answer is always patience.  These obvious limits show up even if we look at someone trying stronger. If an injury-free man tells me that he has been lifting heavy things for 6 years and but cannot deadlift 225lbs, then I suspect his training has been inconsistent. If the same man tells me he’s been stuck at 595lbs for two years, then I suspect he’s training too much. Yes, there are many alternative answers to the problems of these two hypothetical men, but these are the obvious places to start. And no matter what we find the answer to eventually be, there is a common answer that trumps all others. Any tweak to a program is going to require a great deal of patience to see through. 90% of my job is keeping a person motivated long enough to see that change through until we can assess if it worked. Only then will we be able to see if the change worked and then see if we need to tweak something else.

So when you look at your own limits, look in the obvious places first. Are you being consistent? How do you know? Are you giving yourself enough slack? How do you know? Now tweak, relax, and let time take care of your goals.

Pareto Programming

or How I Learned to CTFD, Pick Something, Then Do it Until I'm Done

My clients worry a lot. They worry that they are making the right food choices, performing movements properly, avoiding the bad diet situations, and keeping the company that is going to keep them active. But with all there is to worry about in the world, I feel like most of my job is to help my clients C.T.F.D. and just keep moving forward. And while there’s not a lot from 19th Century Italian micro-economists that can help my client’s sleep at night, the Pareto Principle sure does.

The world of health and fitness is a vast sea of options. Options that all work (until they don’t). When most people are faced with this sea of options, they look to systems, experts, or cults to arbitrarily limit those options so they can get on with the business of training and results. I’m not saying that this is bad; in fact it’s totally necessary. For my clients, I’m the guy who tells them what to do so they can  focus on the business of doing it. It’s pretty good, but totally unsustainable. I want my clients to navigate the sea themselves. Eventually, I want them to even program themselves. That scares a lot of people, but for most fitness goals, programming is the easy part thanks to Dan John and the Pareto Principle. As Dan has pointed out, 80% of your results are going to come from 20% of your efforts. So if you nail that 20%, you’ll have a lot of time to relax and experiment.

Nail the 20

The way I navigate the sea of options is with Dan John’s Five Human Movements (+1). Push, Pull, Hinge, Squat, Loaded Carry, (then “everything else”). If you do those five things in every training session, you’re probably fine. That’s a relief for most people. It narrows the focus to just a handful of movements they need to master. For example, you’ll go pretty far if you just get good at bench press, pull ups, deadlifts, back squats, and farmer carries.  If you combine the movements into complexes, it’s even more focused. The guy who’s dedicated his training to getting really good at the O-Lifts and 400m sprints is probably a beast I don’t want to cross. Nail the basics and you’re 80% there.

Show Up 80

At this point everyone should know my motto is “80% of life is showing up.” The Woody Allen quote is really a funny way of saying that 80% of progress is consistency. If you show up for 80% of your workouts, you’ll make progress. If your concordance rate is less than 80%, then it simply doesn’t matter what you’re doing; you’re not doing it enough to matter. Until you get to 80%, forget everything else in the sea of options and dedicate yourself to showing up and doing the five movements.

Meet Some Standard

As Mike Boyle points out, all great coaches have strength standards. I have a few based on the goals of my clients, but the point is to just have some standard that you meet before you wander off and try the hot new thing. I personally don’t think a man should be doing much else until he can pull twice his bodyweight off the floor a few times or a woman can do a pull up. Is that strong? Kinda. But it also doesn’t matter that much what the standard is. It’s just there to provide focus and be achievable. The best way to insure both of those qualities is to make the standard realistic to your life. I met my strength standards with kettlebells last year when I could do just about every double kettlebell exercise for 10 reps with 2x24kg. Why that standard? I didn’t need to do more reps and I didn’t feel like buying bigger kettlebells. Now my goal is to Clean and Jerk 225lbs. Why? Because that’s how many bumper plates my gym has. The point is just to pick and achieve a standard before you start exploring new exercises. Before you know it, you just might accidentally get strong.

Have Some Fun

So let’s say you’ve picked some exercises. You’ve even shown up and done them 80% of the time. Chances are you’re going to hit your strength standards pretty soon. What next? Play around a little! How little? About 20%. When I go to a fancy strength coaches’ conference and learn about all the fancy new ways to get stronger or better conditioned, I pick one of them and do it a few times a month. I usually train 20 times in a month, so doing a new thing once a week is 20%. Easy math, right? Most things done once a week for a month will show some impact. If I like the impact, I might do it more, but only after I meet the standards I’m working on. I have some great loaded carry variations and functional conditioning I want to integrate on my programming, but until I get that 225lbs over my head, once a week is enough.

Now CTFD

The path is laid out before you; you just have to stay on it. So take a deep breath, punch the clock and get in your reps. You’re moving forward. Worried your conditioning is going to suffer by dropping twice a week sprinting to focus on your Cleans? Yeah, it will. But you’re not strong enough yet for that to matter. Plus, if you get stronger, improving your conditioning will become way easier. Worried you may lose your six pack on a bulking program? Yeah, you will. But you will have learned the skills and habits to get it back even more easily than you achieved it the first time. Calm down. Stay focused. And just keep moving forward.

Confidence: My Key Metric

Before I was in the wonderful world of fitness, I did the internet marketing thing. Specifically I looked at numbers and made recommendations for how to tweak websites to make them sell more stuff. The world of website analytics revolves around “key metrics.” Unique visits, time-on-site, and above all: conversions. Conversions are the number of people you “converted” into customers. Which doesn’t sound creepy at all, right? But creepy or not, when conversions went up, everyone in the room knew something was working. There could be a lot of things contributing to conversions, but conversions up? Good. Conversions down? Bad. That’s a key metric. Now that I’m a coach, there are still numbers that I like to look at. Is the load going up? Is bodyfat going down? But the key metric that I have settled on in my new career has been client confidence. Is confidence going up? Good. Is confidence going down? Bad. 

The major thing to know about key metrics is that you often don’t know why they are moving up or down. They are a snapshot of information that is comprised of so many moving parts that knowing why they are moving the way they are often takes further investigation. But it’s precisely because they take into account so many different things that you know everything is peachy when the key metric is on the rise. Here is why I love confidence as a key metric.

Mobility

KStarr says that mobility is being able to “get into and maintain a position.” I would add, “with confidence.” Someone dropping into an airsquat for the very first time is rarely the picture of confidence. Their whole body is screaming to their brain, “you shouldn’t be here! We’re all gonna die!” But the position is just new to them. Anything you can do to increase their confidence down there will often yield a more stable position. Hand them a bell as a counter balance. Tell them to push their knees out with their elbows. Maybe place your leg behind them and ask them to puff out their chest. None of these queues change the position, they just effect the confidence the person has in that position. And on the flip-side, if I see client confidence going up globally, mobility is usually on the rise as well.

Strength

If mobility is being able to get into and maintain a position, then strength is when your body is confident that it can do it under load. Watch a beginner try to press a 12kg kettlebell. There’s very little I would describe as “confidence” going on there. Now watch a strong person move. The body seems to act as one piece, even under moments of extreme force or resistance. The body is confident that it will survive under load and responds to such loads with grace. As clients get stronger and move greater loads more masterfully, they often respond with greater confidence that they can move even greater loads. This feeds their belief that they can do just about anything well. Watch a middle-aged woman deadlift her bodyweight for reps and crack out a pull up. She’s gonna tell everyone she knows about it. That’s confidence.

Motivation

A year earlier, if I asked that same lady to tell me on a scale between 1-10 how confident she was that she would pull 145lbs off the floor in a year, do you have any idea what she would have told me? Well I did ask her and she told me, “somewhere between 0-2.” At the last Booty Camp of the year though, when I loaded up the plates she told me “9 or 10.” Of course, I didn’t tell her it was 145lbs. I just told her it was more than the last time we had deadlifted and the confidence rose with the weight week by week. But you should know that 80% confidence in attaining a goal does not have a statistically different chance of success than 0% confidence in attaining a goal. Set reasonable short term goals and let the long-term goals take care of themselves. Have the courage to aim low, but often. If I see my clients' confidence in their abilities rise with each short-term goal, I know we are headed in the right direction and at the proper pace.

Willpower

Ego-depletion is a thing. But with great respect to Mr. Ariely's fine summary, it’s a complicated thing. Yes, you have a biochemically limited amount of decisions and resisted temptations in your daily life. Willpower is limited; but it’s also trainable. And according to Job, Dweck, & Walton (2010) a main mitigator of ego-depletion is confidence. In short, if a client is confident that he or she can do something, it’s likely going to get done. Completion of a short-term goal will increase the client’s confidence in their ability to complete the next, slightly harder short-term goal. And guess what? It’ll get done too. Willpower will increase and confidence will increase in kind.

All of these physical and mental qualities that are so important to lifelong fitness and happiness are dynamic. They change a lot. As a coach I’d go nuts trying to track every little piece that went into every one of these metrics every single day. But all these qualities feed into global client confidence. If a client deadlifted 145lb last week but can’t handle 135lb today, I’m not worried if she tells me, “I’m OK. I just don’t have it today. I’ll get it another week.” Because I can hear the confidence in her attitude. The key metric is up. But if she gets 145lbs off the ground and her low back is rounded, I can see that the confidence isn’t there. The metric is down. Time for us to readjust. And as I learned from my old career, the point isn’t knowing every number: it’s knowing the trends on the metrics that matter.

The Stoney Press: An Experiment

In January of 2011, I went to Boston because I wanted to see what Dan John and Mike Boyle, two people who’s training styles could not differ more on paper, had in common enough to present together. I was drowning in all the options available to me as a coach and sick of all the cults that had popped up around those options. It was in Boston that I realized Dan and Mike had well over 80% in common. And it was there that I got to meet Dan John, the man who would become my friend and mentor. In his presentation, Dan dropped a knowledge bomb on me that clarified a lot of the things I’d seen to that point: Everything Works. All the options, all the cults, they all work. Mike nodded his head, but I think this point sailed over most of the other heads in the room. Everything works, people. Until it doesn’t.

Later that month, I went to the taping of Dan’s Intervention DVD. In it, Dan clearly takes the viewer through his process of swimming through the sea of options and determining what is going to be best to get his athlete from Point A to Point B. This is even more impressive because Dan has been accumulating options for 35 years. He’s been around long enough to see every fad twice and even to have flirted with a cult or two. It’d be foolish to recreate that process here, especially since Dan’s upcoming book of the same name is going to do that better than anything. But there is one part of that process that reminds me why I follow Dan around all the damn time: His process of experimentation. Coaches like Dan and Mike don’t have dogma, they have a working model. They are constantly trying things out and seeking better, more direct paths to fitness goals. But in a sea of options that all “work,” Dan has created an elegant system of trying things out and seeing if they will work for him and his clients that is clearly embodied in the Coyote Point (and now Crosspointe) Kettlebell Club.

The CPKC

The Coyote Point Kettlebell Club is a collection of fitness nerds from all kinds of different backgrounds that meet every week to play around with kettlebells in a park, then eat diner food. Dan started it when he moved to San Francisco as a way to ensure he would get outside and train, but also to help his friend Dan Martin do the same. During these workouts, participants try out new stuff Dan is working on and give feedback over lunch. Sometimes we bring stuff to try out. We talk about training, diet, sports, you can even try out a new political argument or two. I am usually the only professional fitness nerd, which means the feedback is even more valuable. When Dan moved back to Utah, he started a new CPKC and invited anyone who wanted to to come train outside in his front yard (just to review: this is a world-class strength coach offering to coach anyone who shows up for free). When I was living with him, one of the young men who showed up was one of Dan’s former students named Stoney. Stoney is about 100lbs overweight but is making serious life changes to take that weight off under Dan’s supervision.

At the moment, Dan is very interested in Stoney’s heart rate. He is using a heart rate monitor to help answer two questions every workout: Is it working? Is it fun? So every training session Dan is trying something new. He’s experimenting. One day we did a standard CPKC workout called "The Hangover." It looks like this (and yes, it's named after me):

• 10 goatbags
• 5 squats
• push up
• PUP twist left
• push up
• PUP twist right
• push up

Rest, Repeat 5x, dropping 1 rep of the squat each round. 

That workout brought Stoney’s heart rate way up. Too up. He was lightheaded and struggling to make it back to his feet between rounds. And if you don’t think that’s a hard workout remember that Stoney is doing all that with an extra 100lbs. A workout that a smaller man could easily do every day and might even find fun was the equivalent of the same fit guy doing an Eagle or a Big 55. So what’d we do the next day? We played catch. Heart rate? 170bpm. More fun? Definitely.

Dan’s model for training is simple: Movement, volume, load. And Stoney still has major movement quality issues because he sits all day for his job. His hip flexors are basically welded shut. So one day we were trying to help Stoney pry them open. We tried all the variations we knew with the ground, a tree, a TRX, kettlebells, and 38 years of combined fitness nerding (granted the experience math is a little weighted in Dan’s direction). Stoney just couldn’t get a handle on the stretch. So Dan had a thought: presses light up the hip flexors. Split stance lights up the hip flexors. So he handed Stoney two little bells and had him do the following movement:

He did 3 presses, going deeper into the split stance each time, switched and repeated on the other leg. We recorded his heart rate and the amount of time it took for his heart rate to come back down. We did this for 8 sets. Stoney felt his hip open up for the first time. The improvement in movement quality from the first set to the 8th was staggering. And Stoney had fun! He was killing two birds with one stone and could see himself improving over the course of a workout. The Stoney Press was born in this cauldron of experimentation at CPKC, and I wanted to take it back to my CPKC to see what else I could learn.

Back in California, I assembled the fitness nerd team. The test? Cross-crawls. Then Stoney Presses of every conceivable variation in load, volume and movement. Then cross-crawls again. Here are some of those tests.

The results were conclusive: the Stoney Press “does something.” Hey, in fitness, that’s all you can hope for people. If anyone tells you more than that he or she is overstating their conclusions based on the available evidence. Stoney Presses made cross-crawling way easier (our legs were jumping off the deck to meet our elbows) and we could feel our hip flexors activating and settling where they were supposed to be. Our belt lines were parallel to the deck after just a few sets. And the results were even better with older, more locked up trainees. I have caught more than one of the members of CPKC banging out a few behind my back in subsequent weeks. One CPKC member, Patrick, called it “Hip Magic.” It also seemed like the best results were triples with light weight, just like Dan had done with Stoney originally. And Heavy Stoney Presses were a recipe for hip disaster.

This process of experimentation may seem haphazard; like a bunch of nerds playing around with heavy things. But look at the progression: There was a specific need, there was a tool, there were questions we were trying to answer, and we tested that tool with lots of other people with slightly different needs. The Stoney Press did not answer all those questions and all those needs (I haven’t done one since these videos were taken), but it was spot on for a few people. The point is, we had a point. We introduced a new tool from the sea of options and used our own model to evaluate it. We didn’t just do burpees for 8 minutes to “see what would happen.” Consistency is king. Add variation when it's necessary, not when it's possible. And have a system in place for finding out if it works.

The Big 21 (Part 2)

The Experience 

For the month of June, I wanted to give the Big 21 an honest shot. So I didn’t care about weight gain or performance in any other area but O lifting. I ate whatever my body told me to eat (this is a fine distinction from eating what ever you want), slept as much as I could, and stopped doing pull ups and handstands when I walked past my pull up bar. I also kept a journal of my time on the Big 21, and as a sport psych guy, I was most interested in what would go through my head during the month of June. We call these “self-talk journals” in the biz. I took a lot of notes, but here are the highlights.

Workouts 1-3:

“This is easy. I should have made my goals higher.”

“I seriously think I should try for 225lb clean after this is over.”

“I’m not even that hungry.”

As you can see, the first week was pretty easy. I mean, I was feeling it, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. Dan had warned me I would think like this. But by the end of the first week, the biological side effects were starting to kick in. I was getting hungrier on my workout days. I was sleeping harder. And most telling for me, I was starting to feel pretty...frisky. I know that seems like a weird thing, but after doing this training thing for a few years, I have determined my biggest indicator that I have my life (training, diet, sleep, work, play) “dialed in” is the strength of my libido. I talked about this with Joe Lightfoot and he agreed with me that libido might be one of the truest indicators of health because it’s the first thing your body dials back when it needs to focus on other health issues. And by the end of workout three, I was very dialed in. 

Workouts 4-6:

“I need to eat more.”

“I’m in PR country.”

“It’s just one.”

By Workout 5, I was starting to hit previously held personal records and the volume was starting to really add up. The place I noticed it most was on the last set of 5 in the clean and jerk. After performing these reps, I would put 5 more pounds on the bar and cheerfully exclaim, “I just have to do one rep!” This became my mantra in Weeks 2-3. It proved to be a powerful thought and it is pretty obvious to me that the workout is designed that way for a reason. After doing 3 sets of 5, doing six singles seems like cake. And even though it’s more weight, those little 2.5lbers are so small as to be adorable. “Of course you’ll make that lift!” The effect of all that volume was also starting to show on my body. I was looking downright beefy. I flew home to see my parents in Week 2 and they were stunned. It wasn’t new muscle yet, it was just “pump” from the increase in volume and load, but I was definitely way beefier. I was also even hungrier and even hornier. Mentally though, the workouts were beginning to fry me. I was listening to heavy music before the workout to get pumped up and focused. I even listened to the same song after every workout to bring me back down into reality. On Workout 6, I set 3 new PRs. All signs were good that I was going to hit my goals, but it took me nearly 6 hours to recover mentally from that workout. My head was in a serious fog and I was unable to do almost anything technical or difficult. I even had trouble driving.

Workouts 7-9:

“Crap. I missed.”

“Crap. I need to get some more recovery in.”

“Crap. I need to eat more than I want to.”

In Workout 7, I started to miss lifts in the snatch and clean and jerk. I didn’t go into a full on panic or anything, but it definitely got into my head. My newfound doubt was even more obvious because my confidence was still really high on the press. So my workouts started to divide into two parts: the presses that I would do without thinking, and the quicklifts that I would start to overanalyze. Thinking too much is the bane of a ballistic movement and by Workout 8, I was starting to think some really dark thoughts. I missed lifts I had made earlier in the program and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the increase in volume combined with the threat of failure was existential for me. I thought some really crazy things when I was resting. Mean things about people in the gym with me. Aggressive, hurtful things. Looking back I know that most of it was displaced fear. Fear of the bar, fear of missing again, fear that I’d wasted these weeks. But I was unable to channel this fear into performance like truly excellent athletes do. After Workout 8, I looked over my logs and decided that I had really neglected my recovery. I was just not eating enough. I was working out slightly dehydrated. I was short on sleep and the travel between Week 2-3 was taking a toll. My appetite was down (a terrible sign on a heavy program) and my libido had leveled off. So before Workout 9, I went into a small panic with a trip to the spa, way too many naps, way too much food and water, and way too much worrying. Obviously, none of it worked. I easily made my goal of a bodyweight press, but I melted down on the quicklifts. I didn’t even make the snatches I had made in Workout 6 and I missed my goal jerk after struggling for two attempts with the goal clean.

What I Learned

Dan John told me that the Big 21 was not a beginner’s program and after a bit less than 64,125lbs I learned that the hard way. My goals in the snatch and clean and jerk were far too ambitious. I was extremely happy making the bodyweight press, but of the three lifts I was performing, that was the simplest and the one with which I have the most experience. With only 3 months of experience in the quicklifts, I still have bar fear. I hoped the Big 21 would cure that, but the only cure for bar fear is more time under the bar, not more load on the bar.

I learned that my body really likes Olympic lifting. I have never felt better, happier, and more fulfilled on a training program that I did in Week 2 on the Big 21. My body likes heavy. My brain likes the focus on mastery. My life fits in well with this type of training.

I learned how much of your life you have to engineer around a heavy training program. And frankly, no one in my life had very much sympathy for my lack of energy after a workout or particularly cared about what I was doing. And why would they? My goals are completely arbitrary to them. I’m not saving babies; I’m picking up heavy things. 

I also learned first-hand the impact of self-talk. My shortfalls on the Big 21 will help me relate to clients and athletes in a way that wasn’t possible before June. In the end, I think that these insights will be the most valuable to me personally. It’s a rare training program that makes you a better coach for others. 

What’s Next

Back to Even Easier Strength. If you are seeing gains on 90 minutes of weekly training why would you stop! After my experience with the Big 21, I have adjusted the timeframe for my strength goals, but that is all. My goal now is to try the Big 21 again in the Fall and simply do it right: never miss a rep. I’ll know more about how to set the right goals in advance and hopefully I’ll have some better self-talk strategies. I’ll know more about diet and recovery and I’ll have another 12 weeks of greasing the groove on the movement patterns.

But If I’m going to take away one lesson from the Big 21, it’s the importance of inevitability. The Big 21 looks inevitable on paper. You just make the lifts, and then you PR. It feels inevitable in the gym because the weight nudges upward and after all, “it’s just one!” This structure is very valuable because it forces confidence amongst the chaos of training options. I’ll be writing a separate article on this concept in the future, but after months of lifting "how I feel," it felt really nice to be told exactly what to do for 9 workouts.