The Dangers of the "Daddy Got It" Mentality, or You Cannot Adapt Without Actually Adapting #2

I had a friend in South Carolina who was forever saying "Daddy got it" in response to virtually anything- be it a request to move a desk across the room or an enticement to try to knock out Mike Tyson, this burly motherfucker would simply clap his hands together, utter his magic phrase, and have the fuck at it.  More often than not, he was able to do whatever it was that he was trying.  It might have been the d-bol he'd eaten for breakfast, the fact that he was ginormous, his positive mindset, or a combination of all three, but he rarely lost a physical battle.  He'd ask me what an article in Flex magazine said though it was sitting right in front of him, but his limited intellect still managed to get him a 450 raw bench at a ridiculously lean 225 because he wouldn't back down from anything.

No amount of positive thinking would unfuck you in the ring with Tyson in his prime.

That mindset's tremendously useful 99 times out of 100.  Every now and again, though, you'll bite off more than you can chew- for Dustin, it meant that he decided to fight 8 guys armed with rebar and knives simultaneously... which proved to be about four too many, but he had some awesome scars to show for his efforts.  In my case, it was dedication to a program of singles that would make a Bulgarian shit himself in astonishment (the Bulgarians, according to Zatsiorsky, only train with weights over 90% of their 1RM 7% of the time- most of their lifting is between 80% and 90% of their 1RM).  No matter how shitty I felt, I'd sidle up to the bar, remind myself that "daddy got it", and have at it.

Injuries?  Go fuck yourself.  Injuries happen to other people.

Shitty lifting days?  Haha.  I heard about that shit on Bodyspace.

More injuries?  Must be a lack of intestinal fortitude.

As such, I got to the point where I'd do near max singles on every single lift I attempted, six days a week.  I even attempted a max single on the Bear one morning, for shits and giggles.  Why?  Because "daddy got it".  Awesome as that was, and as awe-inspiring as it was to other people, who routinely commented that I was the craziest and strongest guy they'd ever seen, it had its drawbacks.

Namely, I ended up fighting my own version of 8 armed guys.  I got four of them, but the other four whooped my fucking ass.  Do I consider this overtraining?  Possibly.  I trained with 90+% of my 1RM on every major lift 6 days a week for more than two months.  Even if it wasn't overtraining, it certainly was fucking stupid, and defied the very name I've given my training style- it wasn't terribly chaotic, although it was definitely extremely fucking painful.  Irrespective of whether or not it was overtraining, it certainly shot a massive hole in the idea that the average person could overtrain on a 4 day a week program.  It took at least 10 weeks of 8-11 free weight workouts a week with ridiculous loading protocols, at least half of which was done while I was on a strict cutting diet, to hit a point where I could be construed as "overtrained".

I accidentally found a pic of a chick with more thigh vascularity than I.  Guess I'm squatting tonight.

I don't mention this to make some case that I'm superman, or as an example of what anyone else should do.  Frankly, I was in enough pain over the weekend that I don't advise following that sort of a loading protocol.  A few things I did notice that I'd like to pass along:

• The One Lift A Day program I outlined recently is a good changeup, but nothing you should do every day with 90%1RM or greater.  Injuries seemed to come fast and frequently with that, but for some reason, I felt compelled to continue with it.  I did see decent gains with it, but it took it's toll over time.
• Tanning seems to reduce a lot of my cramping.  I mentioned here that I used it for warmups, and when I stopped, I seemed to get far more cramping and soreness.  I was forced to stop tanning about three months ago, since my gym owner let a homeless guy move into the room with the tanning bed (I shit you not).
• This is a good recovery drink if used on an empty stomach 2-3 times a day: 1tsp glutamine, 1 tsp leucine, 1 tsp creatine mixed in 20 oz of water with Crystal Light.  I'd take that with 1.5 g of Vitamin C, and it definitely helped cut the soreness down, and totally eliminated joint pain in my fucked elbow.
• Though I don't advocate spending a shitload of time with foam rolling and the like in the gym (it wastes valuable gym time), rolling out knots is definitely something to consider while you're watching Anchorman for the 300th time.  The two tennis balls I've got knotted inside a sock are my best friends right now, having crushed out most of the 11 million knots populating my spinal erectors and lower traps, and my Theracane took care of most of the rest.
• Having shit form on cleans is fine, so long as you do a lot of massage on your upper forearms and brachialis.  If you don't, you're going to regret it.
• If you're going keto (i.e. eating no veggies at all), you better be taking either a super multi like Animal Pak, ISS's Pak, or Beverly's PakGNC's Multi Men is not going to fucking cut it.
• Doing a program that consists of little more than 6-10 hours a week of singles on heavy compound movements is perhaps unwise if done for long periods of time.  Don't fall into the trap on constantly doing the exact same lift for a festival of singles for an hour or more- mix it up.  Festivals are fun, and singles fucking rule, but man cannot subsist on festivals of singles alone- man might die.
• Come to the realization that if you're training balls-out 6 days a week, not every workout is going to be a gem- at least 2 of those workouts will either be throwaways or basically going through the motions.  When you get to the point that an overwhelming majority of your workouts are brutal, unpleasant, and leave you with a sense that you just imitated a monkey fucking a football, it's time to rethink what you're doing.

Life's only a learning process if you actually learn something, so take the time to look critically at what you're doing every now and again, assess your results, and see that you can change.  "Daddy got it" only if daddy can grab the fucking weight and move it without getting lightheaded from the immense amount of pain he's in- as such, you should probably not train to that point.  Much as it's hard to gauge your proximity to extreme drunkenness when you're pounding shots and even harder to stop doing them once you're there, it's pretty fucking hard to pump the breaks after you've gotten to the point of no return with mild injuries.  You figure you can train through them, but they eventually pin you to the ground like you're Ash in Army of Darkness, and then one of the little motherfuckers jumps down your throat and tears you to pieces from the inside out.  A little prevention like the kinds I outlined above can go a long way, so make sure you hop to it when you see the signs...

and as always, Shop Smart.  Shop S-Mart.

:-/

Apologies, people!!
Me tantrum-throwing pampered brat of an internet connection had taken a hike. And now, my lappy's fucked coz hey!! MaywhoevermadeTROJANHORSESdiehorriblyandhaveabadBADBADBADeatyourownshitafterlife.

See y'all. when all that's done.
Have an awesome time...
WITHOUT 'em equuASSES.
love.

You Cannot Adapt Without Actually Adapting

Astute, no?  I titled this entry as such not to be a half-assed Yogi Berra, but as a reminder to myself.  I've come to the realization, once more, that autoregulation only works if you actually pay attention to what your body is telling you and adapt accordingly.  Take this case study, for instance.

1. Lifter doubles workload in preparation for a powerlifting meet.  He simultaneously halves his calories in an effort to shed bodyfat as quickly as possible.  The last day prior to the meet, lifter eats and drinks nothing, then kicks ass at the meet.  Lifter is unsatisfied with his effort, however, and decides to only take three days off after his meet and then re-embark upon the same training routine, but with periodic attempts to drastically increase workload to force physical adaptations while following a less strict diet.  This means up to and including 11 heavy sessions a week, as opposed to 6 heavy and 5 light, as he'd been doing previously.  This is where the fun begins.
2. After a week of 3 hour to hour-and-a-half ultra-heavy and three moderate squat sessions, lifter's legs cramp uncontrollably.  To compensate, lifter switches to deads the following week.
3. More cramping of the back and legs ensures.  Lifter switches to one arm deadlifts every morning, and three weekly nighttime sessions.  In his arrogance, lifter turns to chat with someone while doing a one arm deadlift with 315, causing his right leg from the hip down to become irrevocably fucked.  Pain shoots through his hip girdle, his IT band knots up like some dickhead pirate decided to practice square knots on it for a week, and his lower back feel like it's got a white-hot knife in it all the time.
4. Lifter then switches to clean and jerks, every morning, to work on form and stretch out the forearms and legs.  More cramping in the leg results, followed by tremendous knotting in the brachialis, brachioradialis, and all of the silly little dickbag tendons tying the upper forearm into the elbow joint.
5. Thus, in his last workout, he was reduced to machine bench pressing, which pissed off his right shoulder.
6. He is now a cripple.

I'm the guy with the RPG, but I'd have it pointed at myself.

In case you hadn't guessed it already, the above lifter is me.  I somehow managed to transform my general mindset of "fuck everyone, I rule" into "Fuck you body! Rule more!"  That, my friends, was a mistake.  As I lost use of bodyparts, I increased the workload, massively, on everything else as I kept my total workload constant and dropped lifts from my grab bag.  I was effectively punishing the rest of my body for losing the ability to train the parts that were pissed at me, and ended up spending 6 hours trying to roll out knots (unsuccessfully, for the most part) in my back, shoulder, hips, and legs with a Theracane, tennis balls in a sock, and my knuckles all day yesterday.  I've spent the entire morning today with my left forearm pinned between the arm of my chair and my desk surface, trying to grind out the knots in my forearm.

Considering getting all Evil Dead on it.

Not a good time.  Though I probably should have had a period of reflection as the whole deal started to turn south, I was so convinced that I could force my body to do what I wanted that I ignored every sign to the contrary.  Mike Tuscherer recently commented on this phenomenon, and stated:

"You have to know when enough is enough. This will really be common sense, but we Powerlifters tend to toss that aside sometimes.

If you feel an injury coming on, stop. If you’re not confident in hitting a weight, should you be doing it in training? If you’re too tired to maintain focus, call it a day. The list goes on.

These are really important for everyone, not just solo lifters. But for the solo lifter, the stakes can be higher." (source)

Thus, autoregulation only works if you actually listen to your body and regulate your training accordingly.  I have not been doing that, and failed to recognize every single signal my body sent me.  I started taking being in massive amount of pain and cramping all over,  hurting from the time I got up to the time I went to sleep, having my upper back seize up when I coughed, etc, all for granted.  That's pretty fucking stupid.  Even more stupid, however, is that I didn't recognize that my body was screaming at me to chill the fuck out, rather than suggesting that I increase the workload drastically on anything that wasn't already killing me.

At this point, using my Theracane's kind of like pissing on a housefire.

So, what does this show us?  You might be the master of your domain, and you can employ all of the mind power you want, but at some point, you may be doing more harm than good.  Thus, if you've come to the realization that you've been flogging yourself like a fucking donkey all day long, for weeks, to drag ass into the gym, you might be spinning your wheels at best.  Take a good long look at what you've been doing, and adapt your training to fit your environment.  As such, you should not leave your volume at the same level as it was when you were totally healthy, drop exercises, and continue on- adapt your volume to match your work capacity.  This way, you won't beat your body into a shambles while you recover.

Me, on the way to my last workout.

If you want a bit more scientific method for determining your level of recovery for a given day's workouts, you can try Tuscherer's TRAC system.  It's a comprehensive bit of software (by its appearance) that should help you figure out when you need to dial it back a bit, based in large part on the Bulgarian biometric system.  Unless it's got krieg sirens and lights that go off if your death is imminent, it likely won't be of much use to people like me, but at the very least it will be a fun tool for the tool box, and a nice counterpoint to stories about Stoitsov barely being able to walk and still hitting PRs after forcing himself to hit the gym.

It's all about the journey, not the destination.  Every journey has some detours, switchbacks, blowouts, and sundry other fuckups.  We all make them- the key is to learn from them.  As such, I'm taking this time to reevaluate everything I'm doing, from my lifting routine to my diet, and trying new and old variations to see if I can both spur recovery and improvement simultaneously.  This doesn't mean that I scrap everything- it means I look back on my training and dieting to recall exactly what worked, when, and to revisit something that I used to do or incorporate something new, all while working within the basic framework of what I know to be useful for me.  This is what everyone should do on a free-wheeling regime like Chaos and Pain, but occasionally those of us who are a bit hard-headed might need our bodies to jump up and bitchslap us as a reminder.

Get introspective, then get brutal.