Feigned Retreat

In his 2002 book, How Wars Are Won: The 13 Rules of War from Ancient Greece to the War on Terror, Bevin Alexander makes a big deal of rule #5: feign retreat. It’s a damn good rule. Every great commander since Gilgamesh has followed it and boneheads as recently as Tommy Franks have fallen for it. Whole military cultures are dedicated to this one strategy: attack hard, run away but to better position, attack hard again, run away again, repeat until the enemy goes away. It is such a well deployed strategy in Asia that according to the late, great military strategist Vizzini, the most famous of all the classic blunders is getting involved in a land war in Asia. Eddie Izzard even observed that “Hitler never played ‘Risk’ as a kid.”

But what does this have to do you being fat? Well if as Dan John observes, “Fat loss is an all out war,” then you should be employing the tactics that will win that war. Like Stonewall Jackson, your fallback plan should be an attack plan.

“He was never more to be feared than when he was retreating, and where others thought only of strong defensive positions he looked persistently for the opportunity to attack.”

The Fallback Position

The reason fat loss is a war is because it is simple (eat less; move more) but really damn hard. We are wired to store fat and evolved to conserve energy. The result of a billion years of scarcity is that until prodded by fear, our default is often to just do nothing. So people evolved to have two modes: balls out or stationary. In fitness, the fallback is position is the couch. That’s like hearing the first cannon blast and hightailing it home to Momma: no way to win a war.

Josh Hillis talks about Easy Fat Loss. Dan and Pavel talk about Easy Strength. What these programs are is a fallback position that isn’t the couch. The best fat loss or strength program is the one you do. The easier it is, the more likely you are to do it; the more likely it will become habit. These programs begin with a solid self-assessment of your personal weaknesses, prescribe an intervention based on Pareto’s law, then implement the lowest possible dose of that intervention that will still show results in the long run. Which do you think is more effective: 12 hard workouts or 200 easy ones?

Your Retreat Plan

Stonewall Jackson never told his troops to “run away.” Before he ever went into battle, he picked a spot on the map to retreat to that was also a great attack position. In your fat loss war, you need a retreat plan. But instead of a spot on the map, this plan will be a workout. An easy, 15-20 minute workout that moves you toward your goal but requires as much thought as brushing your teeth. It needs to be simple AND easy, but it has to be bang for your buck. Start by writing down your favorite way to train. Do you like barbell complexes? Swings and goblet squats? O lifts? Jogging? Tae Bo? Anything is fine. Let me repeat that: Any exercise you love is fine. Now write down the bare minimum that you can do of that exercise and still be ready to do it again the next day. For most things this is 15-20 minutes with your heart rate up. For lifting, I suggest Dan’s Rules of 10 for full body movements, 25 for half-body movements, and 70-250 for ballistics. But underestimate here. And I mean really low-ball it. You always wanna leave feeling better than when you started and leave some in the tank for tomorrow. Don’t think, “I’ve done 1200 swings in a workout before” and then think you can do 1000 every day. Ask yourself, “When the sun comes up on Saturday morning and I’ve got a slight hangover from too much red wine the night before, what’s the workout that’s going to make me feel better?” That’s your retreat plan. 

Some examples:

• 100 swings.
• 10 double kettlebells cleans, 10 long presses at 70%-80% of your max
• 10 RDLs, 10 Front Squats, 10 Clean & Jerks at 70%-80% of your max
• A 20 minute jog or bike ride.
• 3-5 light sprints.
• 3 barbell complexes
• 3-5 Turkish Get Ups per side.
• 3-5 Sun Salutations
• Or even just the warm up from your regular workout.

The key to this retreat plan is that you aren’t retreating. You are still in enemy territory, regrouping for your next attack. If you feel like you can do more, do a little more. If you feel like you can do a lot more, do a lot more! But after going hard for a few workouts and don’t feel like you can do anything, do something. Feign your retreat.

The Knob Goes to 11

The vast majority of my clientele are regular folks. They want to feel better, move better, and look better. I have a handful of athletes, but for the most part the people I work with take a casual approach to fitness. I am assuming the same is true about people who read this blog. Which is why I want to ask you, humble reader, the same question I have asked a few of my clients. Why do you think this exists? Why would someone wear a mouthguard to lift heavy things? Because some people get strong enough to break their own teeth. Because their knob goes to 11.

Whatever you want to call it (bar fear, bell fear, etc.), there is a deep desire in our subconscious to not do things that we think might kill us, even when we consciously know it won’t. You have to teach yourself intensity. You have to teach yourself tension. With beginners, it’s more about letting off the brakes than slamming down the throttle. Most people know they need to learn a movement pattern before adding weight or speed. But just how do you learn to turn the dial up to 11?

Deeper and Wider

Fear is the mind killer. When humans are afraid we instinctively breathe into our chest. Doing this makes us look bigger to predators, but does nothing to help us lift heavy things. You have to learn to breath with your diaphragm to activate the deep muscles of your core and protect your spine. Put your a hand on your chest and a hand on your stomach. Take a deep breath in through your nose and by pushing out your tummy for a 4 count. Do not let your hand on your chest move. Hold the breath for a 2 count. Now open your mouth and let the breath out slowly for a 6 count. This is the very foundation of strength. This is the knob itself.

Learn to Plank

When most people get into a plank, they think that the goal is to stay there a long time. That’s certainly true in the very beginning of training because if you can’t hold a plank for two minutes you have little business holding much of anything heavy. But after people are able to plank for 121 seconds, most stop or foolishly try to get the number higher. But if you want to learn full body tension, the very foundation of strength, you should try to get that number lower. The plank is the perfect place to learn how to contract your muscles. So get into a plank, take that deep breath into your tummy, and squeeze every muscle in your body as hard as you can until you can’t. If you see stars and get light headed, you’re on the right track. You’re learning that you have a knob that can be dialed up and down.

Position before Transition

Movements are just two positions that you transition between. The hinge movement is the transition between full hip flexion and minimal knee flexion to neutral (a standing plank). The squat is full hip and knee flexion, then back to neutral. If you want to learn the movement, spend time in each position with weight. Sit in a goblet squat. Hold a Romanian Deadlift. If you are learning the kettlebell snatch, do lots of waiter walks. Worried about your mobility not being up to snuff? Well, mobility is just the ability to get into and hold a position. I can’t think of a better way to get over the subconscious fear of moving into a position than getting into it and staying there with a little weight. Think of it as learning about new hash marks on the knob.

Action before Reaction

A teacher doesn’t teach you a book by reading it to you. He shows you where the library is, how to use the card catalog, assigns you a book, and asks the right questions when you’re finished reading it. Dan John coaches that way. He told me “Heels to China, hinge your hamstrings until they scream, jump, then get the hell under the weight.” That’s the action of the olympic lifts. He taught me that in 3 minutes. If anyone watches me clean they will pick apart my form, but most of the form of an olympic lift is unconscious. As Dan says all the time, "you can't think through a ballistic movement." The form is a reaction to the action of hinging, jumping, and getting the hell under all that weight. I haven't learned the reactions yet because I'm still learning to do the action with the proper intensity. The reactions (like full hip extension) will take care of themselves as my confidence in the movement increases. Your intensity, and therefore the weight will increase as your confidence increases. This is teaching yourself to dial the knob up to new levels. You just ahve to have the courage to push up the volume and the patience to not push it too hard. Eventually when the action is intense enough and the reactions start falling into place, you’ll learn where 11 is.

Driving Success

Do you remember learning to drive? I look back in amazement that I and everyone in the town I grew up in did not die as a result of me having unfettered access to 3,000lbs of steel and gasoline. And like you are probably thinking about yourself,  I wasn’t even the worse driver I knew; I was actually ok at it. Now imagine if, at 16, someone had given you a Formula1 car. Instead of an 1989 Toyota Cressida with an automatic, you have 800 or so horsepower, 1,411 lbs, seven manual-sequential gears, and this staring back at you:

You probably wouldn’t even leave the driveway.

It’s an unusual client that comes to me knowing how to do a push up. It’s a rare client that knows how to squat. And I’ve never had a client who knew how to hinge on the day that I met them. Honestly, I’m still learning how to hinge. So why would I throw this at someone?

The “single-arm swiss-ball chest press with hip raise” is an actual exercise. I stole this picture from Men’s Health. And I am sure that “Michael Mejia, M.S., C.S.C.S., founder of B.A.S.E. Sports Conditioning on Long Island, New York” had the best intentions when he created it and drew the little picture. I’m also positive that "Michael Mejia, M.S., C.S.C.S., founder of B.A.S.E. Sports Conditioning on Long Island, New York” gets great results for his clients and has a lot more clients than me. I’m not picking on “Michael Mejia, M.S., C.S.C.S., founder of B.A.S.E. Sports Conditioning on Long Island, New York.” But when I look at that little picture, I don’t see strength training; I see boredom.

Ayrton Senna, the greatest driver in history, drove go-karts to train for F1 because they were pure driving. No suspension, no transmission, one brake, one horsepower. He mastered the basics and that mastery allowed him to understand all the variations of driving a modern F1 car instinctively and without conscious thought. He recognized there is little difference between complication and distraction, especially complication for it’s own sake.

“I believe in the ability of focusing strongly in something, then you are able to extract even more out of it. It's been like this all my life, and it's been only a question of improving it, and learning more and more and there is almost no end. As you go through you just keep finding more and more. It's very interesting, it's fascinating.” -Senna

You will always get more out of mastering the basics than you will from introducing complications. Push. Pull. Hinge. Squat. Carry. Twist. Variation when it’s necessary, not when it’s possible.

Strength is a Habit

Why can Jon North snatch 166kg and I can’t? Because he’s snatched 165kg. Pavel tells everyone at RKC certs who’s paying attention that “strength is a skill” and he’s absolutely right. But a skill is an outcome. How does one acquire a skill? By doing it a lot. The process of acquiring a skill is habitual practice. So strength is actually a habit.

In the spirit of Dan John’s quadrants, let’s look at what snatching 166kg takes. Power, mobility, technique, and focus are just a few of the qualities required for this feat. But those are only the qualities that are needed at the moment you step on the platform; the skills that are the outcome of practice. Go out another level. What’s it take to snatch 166kg? What’s the habit of John North’s strength? Jon North shows up to California Strength and snatches every day. He squats every day. He spends hours in the positions, every day. He is successfully snatching weight every day. He has consistently and progressively accumulated the qualities necessary to snatch 166kg by successfully snatching weights from 20kg-165kg and allowing his body to recover. He has made success a habit just as he has made snatching a habit. He has not only trained his body to handle the stress of snatching 166kg, he has trained his mind to have the confidence that he can actually do it. The habit has become skill.

“Consistency trumps intensity.” The best programs and the best coaches in the world recognize this process. The best athletes respect this process. Why do Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength, Bill Starr's 5x5, Jim Wendler's 5/3/1, Pavel's Power to the People, Pavel's Enter the Kettlebell and (especially) Pavel's Grease the Groove work so well for beginners and intermediate lifters? They make the patterns and volume habits and adjust the load as skill of strength improves. You just have to show up and do it. Why does the Pavel and Dan John's 40-Day Program and Easy Strength work so well for advanced athletes? They maintain the habits of pattern and volume at a lower load in the face of the longer recovery times necessary for advanced athletes who already have acquired the skill of strength. But you still have to show up and do it.

In the beginning of any journey, it can be frustrating that you aren’t there yet. But when you know that you’re on the right path, you just have to keep moving forward. The destination is no longer a spot on a map, it’s fate. When Jon North steps onto the platform, he’s not surprised to see 166kg staring back at him. He’s been headed there for years. This is just the last step on a journey and being strong is the result. Strength is the habit of showing up.

New Tired

One of the great complisults I’ve gotten as a coach was from a woman in my Booty Camp class. Booty Camp happens to be all extremely dedicated ladies who come to the gym that I teach at every morning at 6am and take what is offered. I designed this class to compliment the other three days a week these women spend with trainers who take them through various metabolic conditioning circuits with bodybuilder splits in the 3 sets of 10 range. To put it simply, I programmed the class based on what they’re not doing. Booty Camp is 2/3 yoga, 1/3 Easy Strength modeled after Coyote Point Kettlebell Club (and minus the sandwiches). One of the women who was new to the class told me “I thought your class was too easy because it was just a lot of getting up and down off the floor, but after the last thing I suddenly realized I was really beat!”

A big problem I see with casual exercisers is that they get used to one kind of “tired.” People think in terms blocks on their Outlook Calendar so that means their workouts are 60 minutes. They also want the most bang for their buck so they tend to either spend as much time on an elliptical as they can (ladies…) or do as many variations of chest and bi exercises as they can in that hour (men….). Trainers and class instructors have only exacerbated this problem by programming to that 60min schedule and feeling like they have to give people bang for their buck so they will come keep coming back. The result is people only ever experience one kind of tired: “as much work as I can cram into an hour” tired.

But does your body know what an hour is?

Different goals require different kinds and amounts of “tired.” Being generally prepared for life means getting some experience with a lot of them. Strength and conditioning is just movements times volume times load divided by time, so here a few variations to try.

Getting stronger: you need to be tired of picking up very heavy things, with one or two reps left in the tank. This usually takes 10 reps per full body movement or 15-25 for half-body movements. I can bang this out in 20 minutes with movements I’m used to, up to 45 minutes with new movements.

Going faster: you need to be tired of accelerating. In sprinting this can take as little as 1200 meters of total volume. 

Going farther: you need to be tired of moving forward. In a 5k you can train this in 20 minutes. In marathon this means training up to long runs of around 22 miles.

Fat loss: you need to be a little tired of always watching what you eat.

Muscle gain: you need to be tired of eating food.