CHECKING IN ON DOGGCRAPP

 

I am currently in my 8th week of DoggCrapp, which matches how long I ran it…13 years ago, before competing in my first powerlifting meet and completely abandoning the program in pursuit of becoming a better powerlifter.  Oddly enough, at that meet I set my best ever bench press in competition (342lbs as a 198 lifter), which was probably a lesson I should have learned but never did.  But, either way, I’ve had 13 years to mature since then, and once again felt the call to take on DoggCrapp again, and after another 8 weeks I saw fit to get some thoughts down on it.  This isn’t a full on program review, as I’m not “done” with DoggCrapp, but a quick check-in to express my thoughts so far: what’s been good, what’s been bad, what’s simply “been”, and, of course, my tweaks and mutations.

 

**BACKGROUND**

In the beginning...

 

Let’s start with “what the hell is DoggCrapp?”  DoggCrapp is the unfortunate name that Dante Trudel gave his training style, which was a joke of a name he came up with on an online forum in the early aughts that regrettably stuck with it for the rest of its life.  Anyone that was online in that era totally understands how these dumb decisions you make in the heat of coming up with a screenname can last with you the rest of your life (self-included), but rest assured that the programming style itself is no joke.  Dante, himself not a bodybuilding trainer at the time but simply an enthusiast, had made several observations on what were the variables in bodybuilding training that seemed to ensure maximal success, and decided to just take all those winning strategies together and make it into its own training style, very similar to the alleged history of Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do: take what is useful and discard what isn’t.  These ideas were circulated through various forum posts and eventually captured and consolidated in a thread known as “Cycles for Pennies”, with Dante eventually creating his own forum known as “intense-muscle”, where he poured our more of his nearly prophetic ideas.

 

For myself, my first exposure to DoggCrapp came via a t-nation article titled “How to Build 50 Pounds of Muscle in 12 Months” by Nate Green, which I’ll link here, because it’s honestly a very solid primer on DoggCrapp and still what I rely on to this day.  

 

https://forums.t-nation.com/t/how-to-build-50-pounds-of-muscle-in-12-months/284515

 

And while we’re talking about background, where was I when I started DoggCrapp again?  I had JUST finished up 5/3/1 Building the Monolith which, in turn, I took on because, prior to that, I was running Jamie Lewis’ “Famine” protocol and was honestly burnt out with lifting 4-6 days a week and wanted to cut it down to 3.  Building the Monolith gave me that opportunity, after which I went on a Disney Cruise, ate my face off, came back home and STILL only wanted to lift 3 days a week, and be able to spend the rest of my days walking or conditioning, which was a great fit for DoggCrapp.

 

**PROGRAM SUMMARY**

Kinda misses the point...

 

You really should just read that primer I linked, but for a quick overview of how DoggCrapp works.

 

* 3 days a week of lifting (yes, there are other splits out there in DC, they are for advanced trainees, which I am not as far as bodybuilding is concerned)

 

* Alternating A/B style workouts.  The A workout is chest-shoulders-triceps-back width-back thickness, the B workout is biceps-forearms-calves-hamstrings-quads.  Yes, it is in THAT order.

 

* 3 workouts PER workout.  What that means is, you have an A1, A2 and A3 day, and a B1, B2 and B3 day.  So it takes a total of 2 weeks to get through all workouts (A1-B1-A2, B2-A3-B3, repeat).

 

* One movement per muscle, one workset per movement (in most cases).  Rest pause for the majority of the worksets.

 

* “Beat the logbook”.  Each workout, you either do more total reps than last time, more weight, both, OR, if you can’t beat the logbook, you change out the movement.

 

* After the workset, engage in a weighted stretch for the muscle (60-90 seconds).

 

* 30 minutes of cardio on the non-lifting days (ideally fasted).

 

* 2g of protein per pound of bodyweight for the diet.

 

**HOW I HAVE CHANGED THINGS**

Perfectly designed! 

 

* I’ve honestly kept things pretty close to original.  The biggest thing is I removed the forearm work and replaced it with a shrug variant.  I genuinely don’t care about my forearm size, and figure I can get it to grow with grip strength work.  Meanwhile, I DO care about the size of my traps, and wanted to use this as a chance to maximize it.  I felt like these were both “small” muscle groups, and fit in well as a swap, and having owned Kelso’s Shrug Book for a decade, I’m at no shortage of shrug variations to employ.

 

* I am also still implementing ROM progression deadlifts, because I have found that, for me, this once a week pulling really gets me strong on the deadlift and doesn’t tax my recovery enough to impact other training.  I’ve even managed to factor it into DoggCrapp: I include it in my A2 workout as my backwidth exercise.  On the week I DON’T do the A2 workout, I do a ROM progression deadlift on Saturday.  It’s one set and 5 minutes of work, and I often count it toward my “sprint workouts” (described below).

 

* I also tend to go above the recommended cardio recommendation.  I still keep it low intensity, because I dig how that’s effective for burning fat, but I tend to go on a weighted vest walk for 40-50 minutes, and will also use this training day to hit some odds and ends (kb swings, reverse hyper, band pull aparts, neck work and some lateral raises tend to be the go to).

 

* I also include 3x10 standing ab wheels on the end of the lifting days.  Direct ab work really serves me well.  Some folks don’t need it, but I do.

 

* I lift M-W-F, I do the walking/odds and ends on Tues/Thurs, and on the weekends I’ll get in non-fasted walking and “sprint” workouts.  These are 3-6 minute high intensity conditioning workouts: things like the Grace/Fran WODs, TABEARTA, 5 minutes of ABCs, etc.  It’s in my best interest to keep those on the short side, as the lifting is intense and I don’t want to dip too far into my recovery.  And, as I wrote above, once every 2 weeks I’ll be including a ROM progression deadlift workout on a Saturday.

 

* With me eating carnivore, I imagine I’m getting those protein recommendations, but I’m not counting or measuring to be able to say for sure.

 

**WHAT I LIKE ABOUT DOGGCRAPP**

Speaking of blasts from the past...

 

* Once again, the big draw was 3 days a week of lifting, giving me more time to walk.  With it being spring leading into summer, I want to get outdoors more often rather than be trapped inside a gym, and this style of training allows me to get in the hard training that I need while affording me the opportunity to enjoy being outside.  That’s also a one/two punch as far as the goals of a bodybuilding program goes, because I find walking to be the best physique improving non-lifting activity to engage in.  Low heartrate level exercise tends to be the exercise that relies on fat as a fuel source rather than carbs, and I find it’s an effective way to either strip fat away from the body OR, at least minimize its accumulation when eating aggressively.  It also allows me to get out in the sun, get a tan, and just be in a great head space. 

 

* This style of progression totally clicks with me.  I hate percentages, and am somehow able to overcome that when it comes to 5/3/1 and Deep Water primarily because they just use them as a starting point, but in my most ideal world I’d never bother with them.  DC is just about doing more than last time until you can’t, and then switching it up again.  That’s what I grew up on with Pavel, and it still clicks to this day.

 

* But along with just not having percentages, I ALSO appreciate how the progression is “slow”.  And I put that in quotes because it’s much like how silly people say 5/3/1’s progression is slow.  What we really mean when we say slow progression is “infrequent opportunities to progress”.  You only play with the TM of 5/3/1 after the cycle is over, but you can still progress as fast as you want.  You only get a chance to beat the logbook once every 2 weeks, but in between those 2 weeks you can make LOTS of progress.

 

* And you really DO make a lot of progress between those attempts because of how intelligently the whole thing is set up.  Forcing you to pick different movements for 3 different workouts is going to force you to work the muscles/movements from different angles, which is going to force you to bring up weakpoints whether you want to or not.  So, for example, Dips for chest on day A1 strengthens the Incline Bench used on day A2 which strengthens the Dumbbell Bench used on day A3, which strengthens the dip.  This, once again, funnily enough harkens back to my days following Pavel’s 3-5 out of his “Beyond Bodybuilding” book, which was supposed to, of course, be BEYOND bodybuilding, yet here we are again.  I’ve also used this approach for Super Squats as well, and it’s really a lesson I just need to learn in general.  Rather than having to keep a movement locked in for 6 weeks at a time and then do a whole new training block, we can vary the movements WITHIN the block to stretch it out longer.

 

* Just to keep speaking to how much I like the set-up: a 2 week break from a movement isn’t enough time to get detrained on it, assuming you come into DoggCrapp with a solid enough base.  This is something I learned first hand with Deep Water, where it was 2 weeks between movements on the actual Deep Water days.  And considering Dante said not to take on the program unless you had 3 years of training and were over 26 years old, there was something in place there to ensure that.  It’s honestly just a great cyclical periodization approach. 

 

* The order of the split/movements makes total sense to me.  I like saving my hardest movement for last in a workout, vs most folks doing it first.  And I most likely picked this up from the first time I ran DoggCrapp.  But saving widowmaker squats for the end of the workout REALLY allows you to put your all into it and not have to worry about the swim back. Additionally, the “back width” exercise at the end of the A days allows you to employ a deadlift variant, which can make DoggCrapp more like a 3x a week full body workout vs a bodybuilding split, and, once again, you can REALLY go all out on the deadlift.

 

* I like how unbodybuilder-esque this bodybuilding training is.  Dante is really big on the whole 80/20 principle, and for movement selection it means picking big movements you can go heavy on.  A big part of that is because you have to “beat the logbook”.  If you’re doing 15lb lateral raises, it’s hard to progress each workout, but if you’re pressing 185lbs overhead, your shoulders have some wiggleroom.  This really gels well with my meathead background.  There isn’t much nuance to execution either.  No tempo counts or rep range trickery.  The calves are the most nuanced bodypart to train in the program, and I can tolerate that.

 

* I dig the inclusion of a heavy set of quad work before hitting the widowmaker.  Once again: very 5/3/1, and I feel like it does a good job of allowing me to stay strong.  And being able to include a deadlift for my back width work allows a similar benefit.

 

* Mandatory cardio.  I’m honestly pretty good about doing that stuff on my own volition these days, but much like how 5/3/1 has conditioning in it, Jamie Lewis includes required walking, and even Deep Water has an active recovery day, I appreciate programs that are PROGRAMS and not just a lifting routine.  Taking the whole picture into account is good.  AND, laying out that the cardio is a 30 minute walk gives a good perspective of how hard to work on those non-lifting days.  Complying with that has been good for my recovery.

 

* I love Dante’s approach to nutrition.  Once again, his 80/20 approach shines through.  He wants dudes to focus on getting BIG while they run DoggCrapp.  Leanness can come AFTER we get big.  And according to Dusty Hanshaw, Dante’s philosophy was “If you’re going to overeat, it may as well be the stuff that muscle is made of”, which is how he settled on 2g of protein per pound of bodyweight, which aligns exactly with the same conclusion of Jamie Lewis in “Issuance of Insanity”, and is very close to the recommendation in “Feast, Famine and Ferocity” during the Feast phase.  Trainees NEED this sort of reinforcement.  Plus, with the thermic effect of food being a thing, there’s a fair chance that overeating this much protein is going to result in the same sort of fat spillover that one would experience with carbs or fats.  And since insulin AND glucagon tend to rise together when protein is consumed, there shouldn’t be as many blood sugar spikes compared to what one experiences when overeating carbs.  I think there’s a lot of method to this madness, and it once again appeals to me as a nutritional alchemist.

 

**WHAT I DON’T LIKE ABOUT DOGGCRAPP**

An easy identifier that you have lame friends

 

* Workouts run longer than I care.  I typically limit my weight training to an hour, and was getting most of my training done in about 45-50 minutes before DoggCrapp, but on DC it’s pretty rare for me to get a workout done in under 65 minutes.  A big contributor to this is the warm-up sets.  Because the dirty secret of High Intensity Training style programs is this: though there is only “one” workset, there is a LOT of volume to be found in the warm-ups.  This style of training uses a ramping up warm-up, where you’re not necessarily burning out in the warm-ups, but you ARE getting a solid pump and putting in some work before you actually get to that work set.  You want to really prime your system for max execution.  Once again, 5/3/1 already trained you on this with the way Jim builds the lifts leading up to the topset of the mainwork, and we saw this also back in The Complete Keys to Progress.  People will LOOK at a DoggCrapp workout and think “I’ll be in and out of the gym in 15 minutes”, which is once again why I say you can’t judge a program until you run it.  When you actually do the workouts, to include the warm-ups in a meaningful way, it’s going to take some time to get it done.

 

* A solution to the above would be to follow a split that has fewer muscle groups per day, but this would require training MORE days per week, which would rob me of the benefit of only lifting 3x per week.  Instead, I just wake up 15 minutes earlier.

 

* And because I’m being a good DoggCrapp citizen, I’m not in there knocking out giant sets or squeezing in a million assistance exercises between sets like I would on other programs.  I AM keeping those warm-up sets very tight and short, but I’m still keeping myself focused on the movement, and will even grant myself a full minute rest before the squat and deadlift workouts.  It’s hard for me to stay disciplined liked this, and I would prefer to get in a LOT of training density, but I also recognize how much I’ve written about periodization to know that I’ve done a LOT of training density work, so now it’s time to go abbreviated.

 

* It’s really hard to care about calves, and they take SUPER long to train on the program, because each rep itself is 20 seconds long at least (5 second eccentric, 15 second hold), followed by a 70-90 stretch once it’s done.  Just another way for the training days to run very long.

 

**WHAT I AM INDIFFERENT ABOUT DOGGCRAPP**

Indifferent dog!  Full props if you get this reference

* The weighted stretching.  It’s just something I do because it’s part of the program, similar to the pullovers in Super Squats.  It does suck because it’s just more time spent in the gym (adding to the long run time), but I don’t feel like it’s the secret weapon of the program NOR do I feel like it’s stupid to the point that I don’t need to do it.  With only one big workset per bodypart, I figure the loaded stretch is just another way to get some more time under tension.

 

**BORROWING IDEAS**

 

* I like to think of DoggCrapp as “conjugate bodybuilding”, and I feel like a lot of its ideas could be lent to other programs.  I have an idea in my head of taking Super Squats and turning it into 3 separate workouts to be run in a week (A1-A2-A-3, repeat).  Still only go up 5-10lbs each time you cycle back.  It would allow the program to be run for longer…which might not be a good thing at all!  But also, dig how you do the pullovers in Super Squats and how that is a “weighted stretch”: it was DoggCrapp before it was cool.  You could also move the squat to the very end like DoggCrapp and have the DC blessing even if it goes against the instructions of Super Squats. 

 

* Meanwhile, if we’re worried that we’re not getting strong enough with DoggCrapp, one could always take Easy Strength and use that to nudge up numbers.  Think about how completely different the programs are: one is about cycling through 3 different workouts, not coming back to a movement for 2 weeks.  Easy Strength has you stick with the same movement 5 days a week for 40 workouts.  And Dan specifically says Easy Strength is there to take care of the strength work so that you can go on to “everything else”, and in a recent podcast specifically stated bodybuilding work as being included in the “everything else” portion of things.  So you could open up with Easy Strength and roll into DoggCrapp if you had that some of training time.  And since Easy Strength can be run as infrequently as 2-3x a week, there’s even an avenue to do it on NON-lifting days of DC.  Especially if you run “Easy Strength for Fat Loss”, which specifically has you go for a fasted walk AFTER the Easy Strength workout.  That may actually be a fantastic idea that I might just have to steal sometime.  If you have any pet lifts that aren’t getting the love they need, this could be the answer.

 

**IN SUMMARY**

 

Holy crap, look at how much I write when it’s NOT a program review.  I haven’t even done a before/after or talked about results, or even my specific set-up this rotation (which is a good overview on how to make the most of a home gym, considering Dante advises strongly against trying that), but needless to say I am progressing well on this and have my first cruise ala “blast and cruise” coming up at the end of May, at which point I’ll have to see what my appetite is for continued crapping. 

 

Thanks for reading!  Always happy to discuss further. 

LEARN FROM BACHELORS: FEAR COMITTMENT

A fun fact my readers MAY not know about me: I got married at age 21.  I was engaged at 20, to a girl that I had been dating for a year, and had been best friends with for a year before that.  We’re still together to this day, and are going stronger than ever.  I say all this to show that I clearly do NOT have a fear of commitment: I knew a good thing when I found it and locked on like a shark.  But from reading how some of you trainees out there operate, ya’ll put me to shame when it comes to not fearing commitment, because some of you dudes are locked in on a program/diet for LIFE.  Or at least, that’s the impression I get, because you guys are trying to make the PERFECT program/diet to run for the rest of your lives.  Ya’ll are ready for the long haul commitment, “till death do we part”, a true “ride or die”…and why?  Why do you owe so much loyalty to a single method?  What do you get from this?  Learn from the lifelong bachelors out there: don’t get hitched to just one wagon, don’t buy the cow when you can get the milk for free (GOMAD anyone?), go sew your wild oats and enjoy all those fish in the sea.  In general: fear commitment.

That sums it up well

 

Here’s what I see: a trainee says “I want a program for hypertrophy”.  Hey, great, go do Super Squats, Mass Made Simple, 5/3/1 Building the Monolith or 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake.  They’ll all get you big.  Within minutes, having not run a single DAY of the program, let alone a week, let alone a training block, the trainee fires back with “It doesn’t have any lateral raises/not enough curls/no calf raises/etc: this program isn’t for me”.  Dude, you wanted a hypertrophy program: these programs will get you big.  That’s what they do.  Are they absent of those movements?  Yeah, sure.  Know how you solve that?  AFTER you run these programs, you go do a program that DOES have these movements built into it.  Not EVERY program you run has to have EVERY movement you want to run.  Sometimes, movements get left out for THIS program so that they can be employed in ANOTHER program.  Because it’s true that there are a LOT of great movements out there to get big and strong and, in turn, EVERY decision we make is a decision with an opportunity cost.  We do barbell bench at the expense of dumbbell bench, we do squats at the expense of front squats, not all things can be done all the time.  But the solution is simple: we’ll just do those other movements LATER.  We’re not going to be married to this one program: we’re going to go out with it, have some fun, and then say “see ya later”.  And we very well MAY see it later, if we really DID have a good time with it.  And if we didn’t, hey: plenty of fish in the sea.  It’s why we date: to see what’s out there.

 

It's no different with diet, and once again, I’ll go to the topic of getting jacked, because that’s more fun to talk about.  “I wanna get big: what should I eat?”  Super Squats says a gallon of milk a day, Jim Wendler had his athletes do 1.5lbs of ground beef and a dozen eggs, Dan John recommends the Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich between meals (as does Paul Carter: very opposite sides of the coin reaching similar conclusions), etc.  What, inevitably follows up?  “Isn’t that unhealthy?”  I mean, maybe, sure.  Let’s say it objectively is: does that matter?  It’s 6 weeks: just how much damage can you do to yourself in 6 weeks?  How long will it take to undo 6 weeks of damage?  Especially if you came into this IN good shape to start with.  This isn’t a “for life” suggestion: this is a SPECIFIC approach for a specific block of training.  We match the nutrition with the training, because otherwise we WASTE the training by not providing our body the fuel it needs to achieve the objectives.  Once again, no one is saying “do this forever”: once you’ve gotten what you need, you get out.  This is the “one night stand”…just for 6 weeks.  Maybe consider it more like a summertime fling. 

Worst beach vacation ever

 

This is why periodization is a thing.  This is why there are “training seasons”.  But there’s an issue with that: one needs to be able to appreciate that there WILL be a future, and this, in turn, means a willingness to engage in some critical thinking and explore the realm of nuance.  People don’t want to do that: they want to make ONE decision ONE time and then just shut off their brains forever.  It’s why you see people run Starting Strength for 4 years, just running into the exact same stall over and over again, backing down the weights, ramping them back up, and stalling again.  They only wanted to take the time to learn ONE program (if that…most folks are just running an app to do all their thinking for them) and just do that forever.  Because learning TWO programs was too much…like, legit, read Super Squats: it gives you TWO programs to run back to back, and if you did just that and nothing else you could DEFINITELY get pretty damn far.  You need to be willing to play the field at least a LITTLE bit.  I can keep up the analogy here and say that you can get married, but you’ll want to have a mistress.  Just SOMETHING to keep the spark alive.  Dan John (who is NOT an advocate of bigamy, just to be clear) has “Bus bench-park bench” which is more than awesome to explain this.  You could easily take Easy Strength and Mass Made Simple and just run them back to back forever and be good.  It honestly doesn’t take much to get these benefits, but it takes SOMETHING.  It takes SOME degree of willingness to change.

 

I get it: change is scary.  This is how people end up in dead end relationships: they love the security of the relationship more than they love the actual person on the other end of that relationship.  But those relationships are so hollow they achieve the opposite of the intended effect: you’re now existing in isolation WHILE cohabitating with someone.  You rob yourself of the potential to actually have a connection with another human because you are TECHNICALLY “taken” and no longer available, yet you’re not getting ANY of the actual benefit of a real relationship.  Getting locked into these “forever” programs and diets do the exact same thing to you.  You will stagnate to the point that the effort you’re putting into the training and nutrition is having a NEGATIVE effect.  Once again: all decisions are an opportunity cost, and that hour you spent on workout 1,948 of Starting Strength where you just hit the same numbers as last time was an hour that could have been spent training ANYTHING else…or even an hour spent DOING anything other than that worthless workout.  Because MAINTAINING muscle doesn’t require that much effort: we could’ve done that in 20 minutes.  And it’s the same if we’re not going to vary our diet in any meaningful way to match our training: why did we just crush ourselves for an hour doing Super Squats if we’re just going to intermittent fast for 16 hours and then eat 1800 calories in our eating window?  Yeah, maybe that “works” day-to-day, but this is a NEW day: it needs a new approach.

Because if we do the same thing all the time it just gets stale

 

Fear commitment.  You’ve got your whole life to settle down: go out and have some fun. 

A RAGELESS BARBARIAN IS JUST A MEDICORE FIGHTER

Once again I am delighted that I get to write about Dungeons and Dragons and, in turn, my favorite class: The Barbarian.  I have written on many occasions about the glory of the Barbarian and why I consider him so much more awesome than the fighter, but it dawned on me this morning that the awesomeness of the Barbarian can only be realized IF we choose to make USE of his awesomeness.  And that statement may SEEM obvious, but I’ve run into enough people that are unable to appreciate this reality that it seems necessary for me to write on this point.  The primary boon of the Barbarian is his ability to enter into a berserker style rage, wherein, upon entering this state, he gains a bonus to strength and constitution (his ability to withstand damage), an extra attack per round, and an immunity to a variety of magical effects aimed at targeting his mind.  He gains extra hit points and can fight BEYOND the point where most folks would be incapacitated: he is simply fueled by pure rage and adrenaline.  But, of course, nothing comes for free: AFTER the rage, the Barbarian enters a state of fatigue: heavily exhausted by the effort of being so enraged, they suffer a PENALTY to their strength and constitution and are, quite simply, knackered.  Knowing this though, the decision to USE the Barbarian’s rage in combat is still an obvious decision, for if one were to NOT do so, they no longer HAVE a Barbarian: they simply have a mediocre fighter.

The world's strongest man acting as the world's okayest fighter

 

Barbarians and fighters both occupy the “warrior” sphere of DnD: guys who are good at swinging swords and taking damage, not so good at casting spells or picking locks.  Where the two differ is that the fighter knows a lot of cool little tricks when it comes to fighting (parrying, kicking sand into an opponent’s eye, hitting 2 enemies with one blow, etc), while the Barbarian is a rage-monster that smashes stuff.  The Barbarian is The Hulk, the Fighter is Black Panther (yeah yeah, he’d be a monk: just stick with me here).  Knowing that, we have to appreciate the specific unique quality the Barbarian brings to the table to justify his existence within the game.  If the Barbarian did NOT rage, he would simply NOT be a Barbarian: he would be merely a fighter with no tricks!  And a fighter with no tricks is not useful at all: they are mediocre at best.  So why would one CHOOSE to be a mediocre fighter?

 

Out of fear of the consequences inherent in using the rage: the exhaustion.  Those players that are too concerned about EVER being in a less than ideal state will refuse to rage for they fear the after-effects of being fatigued and weakened.  They will, under no circumstances, ever allow themselves this opportunity of vulnerability in the game, because it means a moment of weakness…but, in turn, it ALSO means that they will NEVER experience a moment of greatness. They’ll never actually get to experience the fun inherent in PLAYING the barbarian class, because they’re too concerned about negatives to be able to appreciate positives.  Instead, these players resign themselves to a very lukewarm experience: they play a mediocre fighter in the form of a rageless barbarian.

For when bland rice cakes aren't bland enough

 

Where are you, you rageless barbarians?  You are the ones that refuse to engage in a decades, if not CENTURIES long tradition of bulking and cutting.  And yes, I dislike those terms because they tend to suggest that eating dictates training vs the other way around, but it gives us at least a common understanding for dialogue here.  You rageless barbarians REFUSE to put on any fat in the pursuit of gaining muscle, and you refuse to experience any hunger in the pursuit of getting lean, and, in turn, engage in the rageless barbarism of “maingaining”, or “leanbulking”, or “gaintaining”, or “long slow bulks” or whatever buzzphrase is trending on social media these days, because it immediately appeals TO you rageless barbarians that want to believe you have secretly found the way to min/max physical transformation.  Because you REFUSE to experience any negatives in your pursuit of transformation, you will also not experience any POSITIVES.  Think of all of those that have achieved physical greatness before you: they ALL engaged in these rages.  They all had dedicated periods of gaining, of “softening up”, of bulking, of dedicating themselves 100% to the pursuit of gaining mass at the expense of other qualities, AND, when the time came, they went full tilt in the other direction, shedding the fluff and revealing the greatness achieved.  From Bruce Randall to J M Blakely to Ronnie Coleman to Arnold to Dave Drapper to John McCallum: the history and heritage is all there.  What do we call those that spend years eating the same, weighing the same, and looking the same?  They are wheel spinners: they are merely a mediocre fighter, NOT a barbarian.  Reframe it right there: you aren’t bulking and cutting: you’re raging and fatiguing! 

 

We see you rageless barbarians in the training arena!  Those of you that REFUSE to ever see your max numbers take a slight dip in the pursuit of achieving other physical goals.  Those of you that REFUSE to ever engage in a short conditioning/GPP block, where your lifts suffer in the short term but your ability to train harder for longer improves.  Those of you that REFUSE to cycle out your favorite pet lifts to try to bring up weak points.  Those of you that REFUSE to accept that training is phasic: that there is a time for hypertrophy, max strength, and conditioning/GPP.  Those of you that give a program 2 weeks to “work” before jumping back to what wasn’t working in the first place!  You refuse to use your rage ability for fear of the short term consequences, but in doing so you never get to actually achieve the very thing you were designed to do!  You’re the only one at the table NOT having any fun, because you aren’t actually playing your character: you’re playing a weaker version of someone ELSE’s character.

Everyone at the table WISHES you'd just come back and play right

 

Learn the lessons from the Barbarian’s cycle of rage: the fatigue and exhaustion is not a penalty but a NECESSITY.  It’s exhausting for us to be BEYOND our best, and that’s exactly what a barbarian is when he rages.  He taps into that hidden, dark, lurking potential, in the “in case of emergency, break glass” portion of his being and unleashes his full glory upon the battlefield.  And after he’s done with that, he takes a breather and gets himself right before he does it again.  That’s all this is.  When we are gaining, we are training and eating SO hard so that we can grow into something BEYOND ourselves…and that IS exhausting.  So we take a breather, recompose ourselves, and resume.  It’s WHY achieving greatness is a phasic pursuit, rather than a linear one.  It’s why Dan John has “park bench-bus bench”.  It’s not a penalty: its balance!  The gamemasters HAD to come up with some way to make a barbarian “fair” compared to the others, and they did so by giving him a cooldown.  Life has done the same to you: it would be unfair for you to simply achieve awesomeness in a straight line.  Chase after it, cool down a bit, and get after it again.  Because a rageless barbarian is simply a mediocre fighter, but a barbarian that rages is ALWAYS a better choice than the fighter.

 

But, if nothing else, I think we can all agree that wizards are nerds.

   

 

 

INTENTIONAL STUPIDITY

I’m more than certain I’ve written about this already, but that tends to happen when you write once a week for nearly 12 years on the very limited subject of physical transformation.  BUT, the fact I’m wanting to still write about it means it definitely has some staying power.  In fact, I just remembered the post, titled “Dare to Be Stupid”, taken from the Weird Al song of the same name, but allow me to once again sing the praises of stupidity, so long as the stupidity we engage in is INTENTIONAL stupidity.  Yes, stupidity can be a downfall when it happens to us accidentally, but when we CHOOSE stupidity, when we use our powerful monkey brains to analyze a situation, come up with a solution, determine that this solution is incredibly stupid and then WILLINGLY choose to still pursue this path?  THAT, dear reader, is empowerment.  We are no longer a victim of our own stupidity but, instead, a PATRON of it.  We are blessed with the gift of this stupidity. We humans have been granted the capability to determine good and bad decisions AND the free will to intentionally pick the stupid choice among the two.  …so why would we?

If only it was this easy

Allow me to let George Carlin shed some light on the subject of stupidity.  He gifted us many amazing quotes, and it is this one in particular that I find relevant to this discussion.  “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”  George definitely had a talent in illuminating us to new ways to view the world, and as a misanthrope I could not help but cherish this quote.  But aside from the sheer comedic genius of it, let’s consider what this really means to us: “common sense” is of little worth to this seeking UNCOMMON outcomes.  The party-line, the agreed upon consensus, the status quo, the established norms, etc etc: all of these things are irrelevant if one is seeking to be DIFFERENT from average.  And someone seeking a goal of physical transformation absolutely seeks to be different from average.  Ideally, that difference is BETTER than average, putting one at the top of that bell curve of humanity, but if nothing else one is still seeking a break from the norms.  And much like George Carlin talked about regarding stupidity, extend it further: think about how physically unimpressive the average person is, and realize half of them are less impressive than that!”

Which is WHY it should be of no concern to us if we are considered stupid for the actions we take.  So many live in fear of the judgement of others, but are we really to be so concerned of the thoughts and opinions of these average people?  Or of the half of them that are LESS than the already unimpressive average?  Are we to lend any degree of weight to their opinions of us and what we do?  Nietzsche has expressed the idea that, in order for us to be offended or insulted, we must first consider the offender to be our equal, and, in turn, we empower those who insult us.  So, already, we have established the protection from judgement for acting on our stupidity: there is no need to be concerned with the opinions of those that would consider us stupid.  If we abide by what the average person considers to be well thought out and intelligent action, we doom ourselves to their fate.

This is why Skynet kills us

But going beyond that, why would we do something that WE consider stupid?  Because being smart is how we got to where we are…and now we seek to be somewhere else!  I’m willing to entertain the notion that there ARE good ideas out there, that there ARE intelligent individuals out there in the sphere of physical transformation, that there IS an established road and path to success…but we must ALSO appreciate the reality that, often times, we get stuck.  Things work until they don’t.  “Everything works…for 6 weeks”, per Dan John.  When we’ve exhausted our intelligent approaches, what avenue remains?  Stupidity!  Because the smart path has STOPPED working, so now comes time to do something stupid.

And again, the empowerment is in the CHOICE to be stupid.  We are engaging in this stupidity willingly, because we are wanting to explore uncharted avenues that MAY prove to be illuminating because they’ve been hidden under the cloak of stupidity.  We previously wrote off these ideas, saying “I’m not going to do that: that’s stupid”…and now we find ourselves starving, opened up the pantry, and all that remains is stupid.  All of my great breakthroughs have been going off the reservation to do stupid things: drinking a gallon of milk a day while following Super Squats, my initial foray into Deep Water, my first exposure to Pavel in “Beyond Bodybuilding” and abbreviated training with Stuart McRobert, all the stupid things from Westside Barbell, my current indulgence in DoggCrapp training, my attempts at being an athlete on low carb and carnivore eating contrasted with my Dave Tate inspired “Body by Fast Food” living: all of these things were SO stupid compared to the conventional norms and approaches out there, and ALL of them were game changers.  And, of course, in all instances, I initially thought they were stupid ideas…and, in turn, they took hold in my brain.

Once he's in your head, there's no getting him out

We have to understand and appreciate our biases whenever we observe new information.  We always view them through a lens that’s been clouded by our previous experiences and “knowledge” accumulated over time.  In turn, we can become our own echo chamber: we can just keep consuming the things we find agreeable and discarding the things we find disagreeable.  This is fantastic for preventing cognitive dissonance, but it is VERY poor approach for creating the kind of growth that will make us different from average.  Instead, we must employ our cognitive powers to be able to recognize and deduce that something is “stupid” by our own criteria AND be willing to CHOOSE stupidity in the instance where intellect has failed us.  When we hear some influencer out there spout an idea that runs completely counter to everything else we’ve ever experienced, we should absolutely consider it stupid AND absolutely consider it as well.  It should be stored away for the day when being smart is no longer working out for us.  As my Grandfather used to say: “If you’re so dang smart, how come you’re not rich?”  If being smart has only gotten us THIS far, it may be time to employ some intentional stupidity.  

      

STAY TUNED

For my readers out there that aren’t parents, allow me to expose you to a pitfall modern parents will experience that did not exist when I was growing up: you can accidentally let your kid watch 8 hours of television.  Its true!  One minute, it’s Saturday morning and your kid is watching cartoons, and suddenly you turn around and it’s Saturday night and your kid…is STILL watching cartoons.  How?!  Because television is STREAMING these days: it’s on demand!  What does that mean?  It means your kid can pick a show and bingewatch it, just like any degenerate adult can do.  As opposed to?  As opposed to when so many other of us grew up, when there were Saturday MORNING cartoons that ran for about 2 hours (WITH commercial interruptions) and then it transitioned onto terrible infomercials for the Chuck Norris TotalGym and the Flowbee (look that up).  Sure, you COULD sit there for the rest of your Saturday and watch that awful programming…but why would you?  At that point, the cartoons were over and you moved on to something ELSE on Saturday: playing some sports outside, reading comic books, playing video games, arts, crafts, just plain ANYTHING else.  But now?  Now, the cartoons NEVER end, and if you let your attention slip, when your kid asks “can I watch some cartoons” and you say “sure”, you created a Saturday television zombie.  Why do I even bring any of this up?  Well, for one: it’s legit something to watch out for as a parent (don’t be fooled: EVERY parent is just winging it, there is no book, and just like lifting, it’s often good to learn from the bros that have “been there/done that”), but additionally, this streaming on demand access can absolutely negatively impact your training and nutrition.

Granted, THIS particular show definitely helped me find some training intensity (RIP Akira Toriyama)

 

I started this by going back to the past, so allow me to continue that approach in discussing what physical transformation USED to be like: the information was controlled.  And not controlled in the sense that there was some sort of conspiratorial elite mastergroup out there that was hoarding all the knowledge on lifting and nutrition and parsing it how they saw fit: the FLOW of the information was controlled.  Much like old television, information was released episodically, typically in the form of a monthly muscle-magazine (Muscle and Fitness, Flex and Powerlifting USA if you wanna talk the 90s, Hardgainer for the 80s, and Strength and Healthy for the golden era, and I’ll give a shout to Mark Bell’s “Power” magazine, which was pretty awesome when it was out) and a select few books (EVERY lifter owns a copy of Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, and you had Fred Hatfield’s “Power: A Scientific Approach” and Bill Pearl’s “Getting Stronger”, or perhaps something from the HIT crowd).  In both cases, you, the consumer, had to WAIT until the next installment of information was released.  You’d read every article in your magazine, tear out the routines and bring them to the gym, go to the grocery store to buy the food for the diet du jour, and THAT was what you had to work with for that month.  You poured over Arnold or Fred or Art Jones’ book and THAT was all the information you had until the next book got released.  There was a DELAY between chunks of information…which meant you had time to digest it all (whether you chose to use that time or not was entirely up to you).

 

 

Now?  Information is streaming: it’s ON DEMAND.  At any point you can plug in to nearly LIMITLESS information on the realm of physical transformation: irrespective of if any of it is of value.  On that last bit: at least these magazines and books had editors, I say FULLY aware that I’ve written a blog rife with typos and grammatical errors for well over a decade now, because I’m part of the problem (but at least you have to wait a week between my posts!)  And you can absolutely literally bingewatch lifting media if you so choose: you can lose 8 hours on youtube sifting through various channels and talking heads and still not even SCRATCH the surface of all available content.  And that’s just LIFTING: if we wanna discuss nutrition, that world is SO diverse and rife with varying opinions that it’s effectively endless.  No one human will ever consume all of the media that is out there: we simply don’t live that long, and in the process of ATTEMPTING to consume it, MORE will come out.  It’s a truly Sisyphusian task.

 

At least rolling a big rock up a hill will get you pretty jacked...

 

And what’s the consequence of all this?  Aside from the fact that you can lose a whole day to what is effectively brain poison, we’ve once again lost the opportunity to actually think, digest and marinade on the information we’ve received.  Much like economics, when you increase the supply, you decrease the VALUE of the supply.  We’ve created information inflation, and now we the consumers don’t actually take the time to appreciate anything of value: we just immediately move on to the next bit of information.  “Everything contradicts everything else” cries to babe in the woods of physical transformation, who finds themselves swamped with information from a variety of sources, not able to understand or appreciate how the words of a 1000lb squatter turned coach or the words of an elite track athlete that has COACHED elite athletes SHOULD hold more weight than some dude on TikTok with a set of abs.  No different than how you can equally choose to watch “Casino” or “The Human Centipede” on your streaming service: it’s on you, the consumer, to make wise choices.

 

 

But this binge watching also points to another interesting bit of duality: we have an attention span willing to sit down for 8 hours and consume media, yet too short to actually see anything through!  In an era where information and entertainment was released episodically, we HAD to be patient.  “Stay tuned!” we were told, as the commercial breaks interrupted our programming, and “tune in next time!” as the show concluded and we had to wait a whole WEEK before the next episode.  To say nothing of waiting for next month’s muscle mag to come out, or YEARS for the new book to come out.  We waited because we HAD to.  Which is to say, we weren’t necessarily BETTER at waiting, we didn’t necessarily have a longer attention span: we simply had no other choice.  But the IMPACT of not having that choice was profound, as we were forced to engage in de facto periodization: we changed in accordance to the rate that information was received.

 

When demand attempts to meet supply...and yes, this is SUPER old school television

 

You see this play out perfectly in John McCallum’s “The Complete Keys to Progress”.  John was fully aware that his articles were released monthly, in accordance with the rate that “Strength and Health” was published, so he would WRITE programs to be followed for a month, tell the trainee to stick with the program, and in the next month he would release the next phase.  When you read the book, the sections end telling the reader something to the effect of “Focus on this for now, and next month we’ll move on to the next phase”.  And after 3-6 months, an entire training block would be accomplished.  He had a similar approach with nutrition too: slowly adjusting and phasing things over time.  The irony of all this being that my only exposure to John’s work was a book that had compiled all the articles into one spot, which I, in turn, absolutely bingeread, further demonstrating the very problem we have with wanting to consume everything all at once rather than taking the time to digest it and appreciate it. …which is, in fact, where we are today.

 

 

There is a complete absence of patience as it relates to periodization BECAUSE we exist in a state where “the next phase” is already there for us.  Trainees of the heyday understood the value of phasic training and nutritional approaches: there were off seasons and in seasons, various times to emphasize certain qualities depending on the specific demands we had.  Now?  Trainees want to be good at everything all the time, and getting them to stay with one program for a week is already a significant ask, and they’ll be 2 weeks into a half-hearted cut before they decide they got too small and need to add size OR they’ll watch a slight degree of blur happen to their abs on a bulk and decide it’s time to pull all the carbs out and try to get shredded.  And let’s talk about THAT for a second now, shall we?

 

It's not as though you actually get a vote on the matter

 

Another interesting byproduct we see from information being available instantly on demand is that WE are, in turn, available instantly and on demand.  What do I mean?  Once again, in the past era, lifters, even famous ones, like top level bodybuilders, were NOT visible 100% of the time.  Not every single training session was documented, people weren’t taking photos of their meals and sharing them with the world, there was not a daily selfie update: we’d have month long stretches where we would not see or hear from these folks.  During THESE times, these trainees tended to make the MOST growth: it was the off season, where they could focus on bringing up weaknesses and letting their physiques soften up a little while they focused on growing some size.  What does that sound like to a modern trainee?  That sounds like a period of time where you AREN’T setting a PR every time you step in the gym (doing something you’re WEAK at?  Why would you ever do that?!) and it sounds like NOT looking your absolute best for your adoring fanbase.  How horrifying!  If I can’t always be at my most absolute best while everyone is watching me ALL the time, why bother? 

 

 

Because sometimes, in order to make a giant leap forward, we need to take a few steps back for a running start.  If you’re already AT your peak, you can’t “peak more”: really, all you can do is just get slowly and gradually worse.  But if we take a strategic pause to come down from our best, rest, recover, soften up and shore up some weak points, we’ll have recovered and grown enough that we can easily blast forward and surpass our previous best.  We just needed to “stay tuned” for a moment there.  We needed to be patient enough to wait for “the next episode” of our own lives.  If we try to bingewatch our lives, we end up going nowhere, but when we take an episode, pause, wait, reflect, contemplate, and grow, we get SO much more out of the experience. 

 

Because even the greats knew to let their abs go away every once in a while

 

Don’t hit that “next episode” button on your physical transformation: stay tuned and take it one episode at a time.  You’ll enjoy the show more, and being on the couch for so long isn’t good for you.     

 

ON DEADLINES

This is going to be one of those moments where art imitates life, because I’m writing this with the 30 minutes I have available to me on a Friday to finish my self-imposed 1000 words a week rule for this blog, and I intend to discuss the value of deadlines as it relates to physical transformation.  So often I see a young trainee ask the question of “how long should I bulk” or “how long should I cut” or a question of WHEN to do these things, and the answer I see given are reflective of just how inexperienced so many folks out there are, despite having the loudest opinion.  “You want to bulk for as long as you possible can!” “You want a long slow bulk” “Bulk until you hate yourself, cut until you hate everyone else”, and all sorts of other pithy witicissms that offer no assistance whatsoever.  You want some real honest to goodness deadlines?  Bulk for 6 weeks.  Why?  Because that’s how long Super Squats, Building the Monolith, Deep Water Beginner/Intermediate and Mass Made Simple run.  You wanna know how long to cut?  Let’s call it 28 days. Why?  That’s how long the Velocity Diet runs.  Or we can say 2 weeks of cutting and 4 weeks of bulking if you want to run Feast, Famine and Ferocity.  What’s the big takeaway with this?  These protocols HAVE fixed timelines and deadlines.  Why?  Because physical transformation requires a NON-SUSTAINABLE effort! 

Meanwhile, this dude needed super serum 

 

How do we accomplish physical transformation?  We have to create a catalyst for change.  We have to introduce to our bodies some sort of stimulus that is SO shocking that our body decides that adaptation is necessary.  Our bodies LIKE homeostasis: they like NOT changing.  That is their preferred way to exist.  Change is laborious: it requires effort and resources, and our bodies are lazy: they don’t WANT to engage in labor.  So we have to somehow convince our bodies that the cost of homeostasis actually OUTWEIGHS the cost of adaptation.  That it will require MORE labor and effort to remain the same than it will need to expend in the act of changing.  We have to convince our body that, in the long run, it will be FAR less strenuous for it to expend some energy building muscle so that the loads we challenge it with feel lighter vs constantly having to struggle against the loads with the same 98lb weakling body.  And our course: our brain is SUCH a liar to our body.  We KNOW that we’ll never stop challenging it to grow, but we convince the body that, hey, just this one time, if it does us a solid and builds some muscle or sheds some fat or changes in SOME way, we’ll make it worth it’s while.  We have to give the body “an offer it can’t refuse” and try to somehow convince it to appreciate the value of long term investing.  We all know how well THAT goes.

 

But going back to the stimulus: imagine the kind of RIDICULOUS stimulus that would be necessary to convince the body to change.  The body is a master of homeostasis, and you see fit to challenge it.  You better be bringing your A-game.  And anyone who has ever BROUGHT their A-game to anything KNOWS that it’s called A-game for a reason: we can’t ALWAYS perform that way.  We can’t ALWAYS have the best game of our life, the best practice, the best anything: otherwise, it wouldn’t BE the best: it’d be average.  It’s why fighters spend weeks at a fight camp trying to get into top shape before a fight, it’s why any athlete anywhere has an off season and an in-season, it’s why “peaking” is a thing in powerlifting: we simply cannot perform at our best all the time.  That’s not how a human works. 

This is how I feel the majority of the time I read anything online

 

So knowing THAT, the idea that we can spend a PROLONGED period of time in a state of physical transformation becomes positively ludicrous.  The notion of a “long slow bulk” is quickly realized to be understood as the same “long slow bulk” that the majority of humanity has been undergoing: physically spinning one’s wheels while gradually getting fatter.  Telling the body to make muscle requires some HARD, strenuous training, and the idea that you’re going to maintain that uninterrupted for long durations is simply a sign that you’ve never actually undergone any of this hard training.  You’ve been trying to do “just enough” for so long that you’ve missed out on the “enough” part.  Those that talk about how you WANT to stretch out the bulking process for as long as possible sound like absolute lunatics for those that have been in the trenches getting results, for THOSE people know that you want the gaining phase to be OVER as quickly as possible.

 

Which is WHY these periods of physical transformation HAVE definitive deadlines associated with them: we need to know just how long we’re going to put in this skullspltting effort SO that we have an end in sight and a plan to move forward.  If you’re on team permabulk, you’re going to have a LOT of workouts where you just phone it in, knowing that “this is a long gaining phase”, and that, as along as a good amount of effort is applied on some of the workouts, things will probably be ok right?  Whereas when you’re on workout 15 of 18 in Super Squats, you tell yourself “only 60 more reps of squats to go and I’ll be DONE gaining”, and you pour your very SOUL into all 60 squats.  When you’re on day 10 of the 14 day protein sparing modified fast of Jamie Lewis’ famine protocol, you tell yourself that, in 4 days, you can feast again, and it gives you the tenacity to endure.  By having a light at the end from the start, you know that you’re going to have to sprint through this challenge so that you can force the body to change, and that AFTER this sprint can come the cooldown lap, where you allow yourself to get back into some sort of order and reconfigure yourself before your next grand stupid adventure at change.

Been in this situation many times

 

This is basic periodization spelled out for you.  It’s WHY periodization is a thing: we cannot always be forcing the body to undertake the same change over and over again.  Somehow, every lifter KNOWS that the Milo of Croton story is a myth, and then they rapidly forget it when they think they’re going to go on a 3 year bulk.  Carve out a specific chunk of time to transform in a specific direction, pour every fiber of your being into that chunk of time, then pivot the goal and go tilt at that windmill.  And hell: allow yourself some moments where the goal IS to just maintain.  Sometimes, we need to take a few steps back so that we can get a running start at giant leap forward.  But understand and appreciate WHY we employ these deadlines.  When we know we’ve only got 6 weeks, we’re going to make it count, and when we LIMIT ourselves to only 6 weeks, we CAN make it count.