Another post from the road. This one’s a little on the vitriolic side, quite unintentionally.

Part I is about diet.
Part II will be on training.

At some point a couple of weeks ago I found myself standing in my kitchen shouting “YES!” at the top of my lungs at my speakers. Note I used an exclamation mark. I never do that. That illustrates the fervour with which I was annunciating. I was hollering at Greg Everett. Well, I was hollering at his voice, coming out of my speakers. It was episode 81 of the Paleo Solution podcast. The one on Orthorexia Nervosa, at the point where Greg takes exception to some cunt bleating about people who ‘obsess’ about eating a ridiculously healthy diet and don’t deviate from it. Like they somehow have an eating disorder.

That is my eating disorder. Side effects can include, but are not limited to:

• Getting Leaner
• Increased Muscle Mass
• Increased Strength
• Better Athletic Performance
• Improved Immune Response

Poor me. Poor anyone who suffers the same disorder, that’s all I can say. While I watch people my age get fatter and weaker, they say I should chill out with my Paleo ‘obsession’. That and the lifting (like 4.5 hours a week is a lot). I should live a little. Mellow. Eat some pizza every so often. Or bread. Or cake. Smoke some crack (not really).

As Greg said (paraphrasing) this is the sound of the mediocre trying to drag us down to their level. It’s none of their business. Since when has anyone aspired to be middle of the road? Never. It seems, however, a great many people find themselves there. They find themselves there and they don’t like it.

I see this more as I get older. People settling for relationships / jobs / lives that they’d rather not be in, but don’t have the fucking sack to change. This is none of my business. I see it, I say nothing. It is their choice.

So then, why the fuck do I get nothing but questions about why I ‘waste my time’ in the purposeless pursuit of lifting heavy things up? What’s the point of having a strict diet that cuts out so many food options? Why WHY WHY?

Well, let’s see. Some of it’s aspirational. I have no athletic background. No genetic predisposition to greatness. I have the ability to read, learn and use an Internet connection. This has allowed me to observe people bigger, stronger, faster and smarter than me to make a case – a compelling case – for that which I pursue. I wish to get stronger and healthier as I get older. I do not wish to slide into decrepitude like the people I observe, people I love, around me. I wish to ceaselessly learn and attempt to teach anyone who will listen that it is not a fad to be either healthy or strong. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, these are the same thing.

Strengthy? Healthong? Hmmm.

Now. Is my diet restrictive? Yes. It restricts one from eating foods that will hamper performance. Am I constrained only to eat certain things? This depends on your point of view. Here’s my take. THINGS I’M ALLERGIC TO ARE NOT TO BE CONSIDERED FOOD. Nor, for that matter, should be anything that was once something else, especially if it was either previously inedible / indigestible, or pulverised factory farmed animal now featuring in a crusty bite-sized gluten pellet. Aye, that’s right.

So. I can’t consume dairy. I can’t eat gluten. My life is so tough. Waah. Once people start to understand that they walk around feeling like minced bullshit on a daily basis, perhaps they’ll realise that eating shite isn’t a good idea. Sure, it’s fun and normal. The sooner the realisation comes down that they are eating items unfit for human consumption (or digestion) the sooner they may realise that the guy sitting in work with his ‘box of ingredients’, who just happens to be one of the oldest, leanest, certainly the strongest, who has never taken a sick day, seldom gets even a cold might not be in misery with his ‘restricted diet’. It might be that the only misery he faces is why people will incessantly question him, while at the same time bemoaning the fact he is always talking about it.

Now. You can read that previous paragraph in two ways. There’s a right way and a wrong way. The right way is:

“Look! I am strong, lean and healthy. You should try this!”

The wrong way is:

“Look! I am stronger, leaner and healthier than you. This makes me superior to you. In every way. You should feel inferior. Why? Because you are. In every way.”

I think that’s what people get. They’re either on your team or they hate you. It’s unavoidable. This is the problem when a regular person appears irregular. I think that’s what’s hard to get. These trundling Medio-crites see someone who will attempt to change their life for the better and take instant exception to it.

Not so with an athlete. Athletes are expected to strive to perform as well as they possibly can. If an athlete had a performance-based diet, nobody would think twice about it.

For many years I’ve been accused of being hardcore. Compared to what? A fucking cream egg? I could list pretty much every one of the @BAMFathletics or the @craigzielinski followers, and the people I follow with those accounts and tell you exactly how many ways they are hardcorer (that’s right) than I. People like you. YOU. You’re reading this right now and sitting there with a better deadlift, a better Fran time, a quicker marathon, a greater mind for 80′s movies, the ability to play guitar, a better knowledge of fucking UNIX – something. I may be a little jealous of that. Rather than hate you for it, I aspire to be like you. You keep me going. I think you are RAD.

Rubbish people can’t do this. They just can’t. They will hate you for what you are.

Fuck those people.

The ‘everything in moderation’ argument – which I have heard throughout my life – is the sole refrain of the underpowered. Those that lack the drive to change their situation, regardless of how much encouragement, information or horsepower you offer them.

Don’t listen to them. Never let them convince you to go nowhere.

Stay Badassed.

This one’s coming at you from the road.*

I say road. I mean chair. By chair I mean uncomfortable bastard row of seats in Gatwick airport, tapping away on the excellent WordPress App for iPhone. What am I doing here? I’m waiting until tomorrow morning before they let me check in for my flight to Copenhagen for the upcoming CrossFit Football certification at the weekend. I’m honoured to say I’ll be coaching at it, along with John Welbourn. Who’d have thunk it.

So, to the matter in hand – the B.A.M.F 30. Something that started with an impromptu community request from Gary and ended quietly and without much furore. That’s what happens when everyone tools up for something and realises they have jobs and lives and unexpected obligations and duties that keep them from sitting in a forum talking shite with other shite-talkers. This is a Good Thing. Forum dwellers need to be executed. Go and do
Something.

From the looks of it, we embarked on this adventure together and supported eachother as we took fire in the landing craft. Once we hit the beach, we were on our own, and in the hail of caffeine bullets and gluten bombs we survived. Easily. What a bunch of B.A.M.Fs.

Time (and comments and tweets) will tell if we found benefit in the mission itself, but I can certainly tell you how things went for me.

My circumstances are such that my main complaints come from a recurring skin issue that I found impossible to nail down. Skin at the elbows and around the eyes getting inflamed, making one look like a self-conscious (and unusually jacked) junkie. Couple that with a financial situation that makes life shockingly tight. Throw in my paranoia about how weak I am, and the fact I am going to be at a CrossFit Football cert coaching a bunch of power athletes, and you have a fairly heady mix of goals / self-assigned responsibilities.

I was using my Power Athlete Caveat, so I could attempt to add 10kg to my bench press before Saturday. Granted my new tattoo will preclude me from proving my success at the cert. You can’t really do this by skimping on food, so essentially this was a massgain experiment. The Power Athlete Caveat allowed dairy (goat’s milk) – as whole and as raw as possible, a-la Welbourn. My aim was to consume as much food as I could afford, the mainstay of which was ruminants and sweet potato, eggs and salmon, while adhering to the avoidance of B.A.M.F 30 ‘avoids’ like fruit and n-6 heavy shite like bacon and nuts.

Financially, it was difficult. Why? Quantity. Right now, two meals a day is my stretch, but I had to up that to three, which damn near buried me early on. Only luck and guile allowed me to make it to the end of the month. The day before payday I literally had £0.00 in my account. GOOD WORK. Paleo is cheaper than regular eating if you know how to play it. Though workmates may accuse one of eating ingredients rather than food.

Did it the B.A.M.F 30 Power Athlete Caveat work? I’l say. A week ago I managed 5 reps of 95% of my 1RM making my theoretical 1 Rep Max 12kg greater than previous. Epic. I got heavier, a little fatter (to be expected), put 5kg on my squat 1RM and equalled my deadlift 1RM, having not deadlifted SINCE JANUARY.

What did I learn about my skin condition? Well, I am allergic to dairy for sure. Post workout, it doesn’t flare up as badly, but if I have dairy at any time other than directly after a workout I am in trouble. I have henceforth resigned myself to never going back to dairy – unless in the future I can find a source of raw milk and experiment with it. Do I care? Not really. It makes it easier to be a nutritional convention miscreant when you can point at an allergy. Mark you, once you cut something you’re allergic to from your diet, if it creeps back in, may the Paleo Hobo Gods of Lifting Heavy Shit protect you, because your immune system won’t. I have promised I’ll someday book time off work and eat a huge pizza, just once, to document the effects of what it does to a clean eating, strong and healthy individual. It (and I) will not be pretty.

I look forward to hearing from those of you that stayed the course how you feel, what you noticed and what you think. I am pretty sure some have exiled the ridiculous hold caffeine held over them.

So what’s next for you? Reintroduce? Reject? Something else?

After this weekend I have another definite mission. I’m going to try a clean massgain, using a Paleo-ified version of the inimitable Dan John’s Mass Made Simple protocol, followed by a strength overhead / power program. FUN TIMES.

I can’t wait for tomorrow, and all the days after that. I hope you all feel the same way. You’ve proved you can survive. Now prove you can thrive.

Stay Badassed.

*this resulting in a lack of link-love and my usual obsession with unnecessary italics and emboldened text. Also, I am authorising typos. Okay?

Day three of the #BAMF30.

Have run out of things to eat. I can never manage this. It’s impossible.

IS. IT. FUCK.

Man survived on this type of “restricted” diet for thousands of years. Just because peanut butter, Ben & Jerry’s and pizza exists now, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea to eat it.

In my day job, I have to fix computers. People come to me with a problem and I have to solve it. I troubleshoot. If you do a little Googling on ‘troubleshooting theory’, you could come across the following:

Step 1. Identify the problem
Step 2. Establish a theory of probable cause
Step 3. Test the theory to determine the cause
Step 4. Establish a plan of action to resolve the problem and implement the solution
Step 5. Verify full system functionality and, if applicable, implement preventative measures
Step 6. Document findings, actions, and outcomes

After a while, you can pretty much instantly identify whether the issue is software or hardware. This is where the ‘known good’ concept comes in. When we’re troubleshooting an issue, be it hardware or software, we’re likely to attempt to isolate the problem. An example would be someone reporting power issues on battery. Let’s try a known good battery. Is the issue resolved? What about some kind of wacky malarkey going on with user’s operating system. First thing to do? Boot from a known good operating system. Is the machine still acting squirrely? You get the idea. Establish a baseline and work from that.

I was recently drawn into a discussion on Twitter, in which hero of mine Mark Twight of Gym Jones tweeted a link to a recent post from Will Gadd. The inimitable Andy McKenzie drew my attention to it by tweeting “F*ck me at last a decent nutrition post. I can’t agree enough. Food Nazi’s take note..” I obviously had to follow the link to Gadd’s post. My response to Andy and Mark was I thought the post was a bit 80′s. Mark then called me out on recently saying I was going hardcore orthodox [Paleo] for a month and that this “is exactly what WG was talking about. Instead, simply pay attention for the next ten years.” As diplomatically as I could, I explained that for me, Paleo enhanced the quality of my training and how I feel. And left it at that.

I can totally understand it when A-type super-mutants are capable of achieving incredible feats on the shittest diet imaginable and will blow hard about the overemphasis on nutrition. I do, however, take exception to the idea that they wouldn’t perhaps perform even better when their nutrition was tweaked. Ask, oh, I dunno, John Welbourn? I take exception because I am not particularly gifted athletically. I have always been rubbish at pretty much anything I tried. In a lifetime of attempting to carve out some form of athleticism, I have gone through various gels, bars, supplements and training methodologies before landing on CrossFit (follow the link for horrific deadlift form), which eventually led me to, well, whatever this is. Heavy weights, Paleo and punctuated high-intensity training (not so much).

Back to the point. The concept of a known good diet. This is based on the idea that we have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and as such mimicking as closely as possible (and is reasonable) an evolutionary diet, it’s likely to be a fairly good baseline for health and performance. If you are not in agreement with evolution, off you pop.

So. The #BAMF30 – A Known Good Diet.

We’re not doing this to get ripped. We’re not doing this to get massive. The reason we’re doing it, as strictly as possible, for thirty days is to establish a baseline of health. I say that a lot. That’s why I’ve gone further than the original Whole30. Let’s try and strip out all the shite we don’t require. Rather than dosing with vast quantities of N-3, let’s remove as much N-6 as we can. Instead of just jumping from chocolate bars to huge amounts of fruit because it’s “Paleo” let’s try to drive down our blood sugar levels and fuel our efforts realistically. Why not uncouple ourselves from the duplicitous grip of caffeine, but still enjoy our morning cuppa?

At the end of the month, it’s going to be interesting to hear how everyone feels. I wonder how many of you will want to hit the store and pound two tubs of ice cream. I wonder how many of you are going to give less of a fuck about your vices, whatever they may be.

Some of you may even think it was a good idea. Stay the course brothers and sisters. Get troubleshooting.

Credit goes to Gordy for saying “known good diet” first in a conversation about troubleshooting people.

Hey kids,

Welcome to the B.A.M.F Athletics B.A.M.F 30.

What is it? It’s a 30-day strict Paleo intervention to strip out all the nonsense you eat, based on the Whole9 Whole30, which is based on Robb Wolf’s 30 day challenge, which is based on pure common sense.

First off, check out the Whole30 rules.

Here’s an excerpt:

More importantly, here’s what NOT to eat during the duration of your Whole30 program. Omitting all of these foods and beverages will help you regain your healthy metabolism, reduce systemic inflammation, and help you discover how these foods are truly impacting your health, fitness and quality of life.

• Do not consume added sugar of any kind, real or artificial. No maple syrup, honey, agave nectar, Splenda, Equal, Nutrasweet, xylitol, stevia, etc. Read your labels, because companies sneak sugar into products in all kinds of ways.

• Do not eat processed foods. This includes protein shakes, pre-packaged snacks/meals, protein bars, milk substitutes, etc.

• Do not drink alcohol, in any form.

• Do not eat grains. This includes (but is not limited to) wheat, rye, barley, millet, oats, corn, rice, sprouted grains and all of those gluten-free pseudo-grains like quinoa. (Yes, we said corn!) This also includes all the ways we add wheat, corn and rice into our foods in the form of bran, germ, starch and so on. Again, read your labels.

• Do not eat legumes. This includes beans (black, kidney, lima, etc.), peas, lentils, and peanuts or peanut butter. This also includes all forms of soy – soy sauce, miso, tofu, tempeh, edamame, and all the ways we sneak soy into foods (like lecithin).

• Do not eat dairy. This includes all cow, goat or sheep’s milk, cream, butter, cheese, yogurt, whey, ice cream, etc.

• Do not eat white potatoes. It’s arbitrary, but they are carbohydrate-dense and nutrient poor, and also a nightshade.

• Most importantly… do not try to shove your old, unhealthy diet into a shiny new Whole30 mold. This means no “Paleo-fying” less-than-healthy recipes – no “Paleo” pancakes, “Paleo” pizza, “Paleo” fudge or “Paleo” ice cream. Don’t mimic poor food choices during your Whole30 program!

One last and final rule. You are not allowed to step on the scale for the duration of your Whole30 program. This is about so much more than just weight loss, and to focus only on your body composition means you’ll miss out on the most dramatic (and lifelong) benefits this plan has to offer. Give yourself a well-deserved, long overdue break from fixating on that number on the scale! Absolutely NO weighing yourself or taking comparative measurements during your Whole30.

Read the full document and get your head around it. Or, if you’re a pervert, download the PDF.

Next, here’s some little extras for the B.A.M.F 30 (#BAMF30 on Twitter)

The way I feel, the Whole30 doesn’t go quite far enough, so let’s see how hard you can test yourself with the following:

• Completely avoid eating nuts of any kind. Need fat? Enjoy the fat on the meat you eat, the fat you cook in and AVOCADOS. Here’s an awesome breakdown from Diane at Balance Bites (danger it’s a PDF) – Fats & Oils.

• Completely avoid caffeinated drinks. Everything should be decaf. Knock that stupid habit on the head. If you must drink coffee (like me) find some tasty decaf. It exists. Hell, I can’t tell the difference in Starbucks any more. You can get green tea, black tea, white tea and coffee all decaffeinated. It’s awesome.

• Avoid chicken and pork as much as possible. Now, this might sound MENTAL, but there is a very large quantity of N-6 (Omega 6) in chicken (especially chicken skin) and pork (especially pork fat). Grass eating animals are a much better way to go. Now, we’re on a budget, I realise that. When in the supermarket just try to aim for meats that are *more likely* to be eating grass than grain. Lamb is a great one. Beef is next in line. If you must eat chicken, discard that skin. Pork? Trim off all the fat you can see and bolster it with some healthy fats if need be.

• Mix it up. Don’t just fucking buy broccoli. Get adventurous. Oven bake some kale with olive oil and salt. Fry brussels sprouts in coconut oil after part-steaming them so they are crunchy and interesting rather that soggy and sulphuric. Google your ass off when you buy a new cut of meat or some crazy type of veg and create an interesting meal.

• Completely avoid fruit juices of any kind. You may as well drink coke. Check out Dr. Robert Lustig’s 89 minute talk on fructose.

• Avoid fruit. You don’t need to eat fruit. There are all the vitamins you need in meat and vegetables (see below for carbs).

• Stop taking stupid supplements. With the exception of:
  • Vitamin D
  • Fermented Cod Liver Oil
  • Fish Oil
  • Magnesium
  • Iodine
  • BCAA’s

I may have missed some out, but you get the idea. Nobody needs protein shakes.

Questions and caveats:

• Need more carbs? (metconoholics and endurance athletes) – eat more ROOT tubers. Not stem tubers. ROOT TUBERS. Yams. Sweet potatoes. That kind of thing.

• Have a strength meet / competition coming up and need to gain / maintain large mass? Have some post workout (PWO) goat’s milk, raw if possible. Shit’s ANABOLIC. You’re supposed to have no dairy whatsoever. This is the only allowable window and reason to do so – if you are prepping for a comp or on a mass gain cycle ONLY. I call this The Power Athlete Caveat.

• Got kids / family / no time? Oh grow up. So does Sarah Fragoso, and she manages to write a blog, run a podcast and WRITE A BOOK over at Every Day Paleo.

That about wraps it up I think. Any questions, get them asked on the site. Let’s DO THIS.

Craig.

It’s been a while, but B.A.M.F Athletics has been pulled from its slumber by the impetus to assist.

A recent Twitter conversation with Gary resulted in a fairly substantial (albeit quick and easy) change to the website. Gary was thinking about taking part in Whole9‘s Whole30 – a 30 day super strict Paleo experiment. I remember when Melissa ran her blog – Urban Gets Diesel. It changed the game for so many people who were looking for a resource that wasn’t either gym-based, overtly scientific or written by some jacked blow-hard doesn’t-take-his-own-advice asshole. My friend Ceren, who lives in the US, extolled it’s virtues and says she had some really meaningful discussions with Melissa.

Things changed again when Whole9 was launched, it instantly became a valued and respected resource for all things nutrition, health & longevity based – what I associate with Paleo. Melissa and Dallas’ creation of the Whole30 has made a significant difference to countless people in our community. Our community? Aye. Us lot. All us lifters, Paleo eaters, CrossFitters and endurance athletes that interact all over the world in person or electronically.

So Gary posted he was going to give the Whole30 a bash. He wanted to know if anyone else was in. Naturally, I said I’d do it. I am pretty strict anyway, but everyone can do with tightening up their eating game, especially when you have an annoying skin issue that flares up every now and again – like me. I’ve pretty much identified dairy as the cause, but with recent indiscretions like 85% dark chocolate, ice cream, under-sleeping, stress and the introduction of new things eaten at higher frequency like palm oil, brazil nuts and fucking ‘Paleo crisps’ as Gordy calls them (pre-cooked cocktail sausages), otherwise known as gluten bullets, I can’t be 100% certain dairy is the cause.

In comes the Whole30. A total nutritional cleanup operation. Gary being Gary, however, wants to call it the B.A.M.F30 – a hat tip to our little collective. He asked if there was a way we could put together a forum so anyone jumping onto the bandwagon can hang out with us and discuss the finer points of struggling to stop eating cheese or whatever. Bring on the new B.A.M.F Athletics Anti-Social Network. Up for the duration (or longer) of the B.A.M.F30. Next thing on the agenda is putting together a little resource package of the B.A.M.F30 do’s and do nots (there is no try).

Get involved.

And Stay Badassed.

Gra·tis·fac·tion

noun

Something that causes a state of thankfulness though satisfaction.

Last Post

It’s likely this will be the last post of this year, so within it I aim to encapsulate my thoughts for 2010.

It was the Best of Times, It was the Worst of Times

This year has been a series of highs and lows, as with all our lives. My year started in a pretty standard fashion, but on closing it has become the most emotionally draining of all time. Crushing if you will. Significant deaths, huge personal relationship upheaval and the constant foreboding panic of an unknowable future have led me to the highest stress levels I have ever encountered. This is normal. This is what happens to us all. It’s called life and we as humans are ill prepared to deal with the psychology of trauma and yet we survive. This post is dedicated to the thing that I feel is key to that survival.

Two Thousand and N(othing really)ine

2009 ended with a fairly significant stall in training motivation and progress. The reasons behind that have and are becoming clearer with time, but deserve a post unto themselves. Let’s just say that ‘training in all directions’ is fucking stupid. If you do it, you will eventually get to the stage when your lack of progression in anything actually measurable with leave you dispassionate, bored and finding it difficult to sustain a good mood.

Now Then

On the other hand, this year sees me now in the best shape of my life. The standards by which I quantify that are my own. That is the only standard that matters. The classic Robb Wolf “look, feel and perform” measurement has improved in all directions. I now have some lifetime training goals in sight that I would have never thought possible, I am capable of more athletically that I had previously hoped and it’s all down to one key factor.

A Training Partner

Most of the people I admire are strong as fuck and have always trained by themselves. They create programs that dominate, they lift things that would shatter the bone, snap the sinew and tear the muscles of ‘normal people’. Others move with the grace and speed of a wild cat or freight train, depending on the situation. I realise that many of you train by yourself. I did it for years out of necessity. My best friend has always been my teammate from time to time, be that preparing for a marathon, a 42 mile trail running epic, a 100 mile 24hr offroad bike ride or simply strength training in the gym. The problem has always been his work schedule and life versus mine have seldom been compatible. We love to train together, but rarely is it possible. His circumstances are now such that I barely see him. And so, most of my time under – or over – the bar was spent solo. As one does. This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time. Go lift something heavy.

Significant Others

In the summer, Pure Gym opened in Glasgow. This was very convenient for work. I would be able to train there in the morning, have breakfast at work and then begin my day. It was at this point that a couple of colleagues showed an interest in learning to lift, as did someone I would occasionally banter with on Twitter. This is where everything changed. I had a consistent, show up (nearly) on time, same mindset, same goals, same level of commitment partner that would never let me down. Though my life outside of the gym and work was in turmoil, I could always go back to the assurances of confidence in my ability to grab one more rep.

At the same time, Twitter has really taken off. There is a micro-community of Strength & Conditioning and Paleo people, dotted all over the world that help to keep one upbeat and in sight of the big picture when you’re drowning. This is again, significant. I cannot put too much emphasis on the fact that as we strive to improve our health and longevity through thick and thin, the fact that we can now communicate with like-minded individuals all over the globe means that something (like Paleo) which up until recently left you feeling isolated and ‘screaming into the abyss’ or as Robb Wolf puts it, “feeling like the crazy guy in the toolshed with the tinfoil hat”, now you can chat freely about and not meet with the same confusion / hostility / derision (delete as appropriate).

Back to the point

A training partner. The soul reason I have progressed this far is because of their existence. We have seen good days and bad days in the gym, but when elements outside affect us inside, you can be given reassurance enough to make the only thing of any importance be the here and now.

The lift or miss.

The “Do, or do not.” As a little green guy once said.

This has made a massive difference to my approach, zeal and ability. The fact that you owe it to someone else to show up creates a loyalty to your own training that will sometime falter when training solo. It causes you to investigate things more. Working out, through and around sticking points, suggesting and receiving form tweaks, the reduction and removal of bad habits are all benefits many of us never have, because it’s likely we spend out time training solo or coaching others. The beauty of coaching someone well is when they can turn around and point out a fault with your own lifts. Now THAT is what creates gratisfaction. Someone looking at, after and out for you. A comrade. A team mate. A brother. A sister. A loved one.

As I said at the start, this has been the hardest year of my life. It has also been the most rewarding. When you have nothing else, if you have someone that will show up bleary-eyed at 08:00 on a freezing Glasgow Winter morning, ready to chalk up and shift mountains, ready to cause the problems you have outside of the gym to dissolve into insignificance, then you, my friend, have won at life. Although this year has SUCKED. Having a training partner has meant solace, banter, hilarity, extreme aggression, joy and a lot of what we call ‘going into the future‘.

To You

If you are reading this and think there’s a chance you helped me with my training, if you think you listened to me when I gave advice, you gave advice to me, you celebrated in my successes and dismissed my failures, reassured me, congratulated me and bantered with me – you’re right. This is a letter to you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Stay Badassed,

Craig, 00:48, 12/12/2010

“Fuck off.” Respectfully.

People who don’t practice what they preach have absolutely no place telling you what to do when it comes to your health and wellbeing.

Seems this happens all too often though, doesn’t it? I absolutely CANNOT watch television shows that offer any form of physical transformation advice through either nutrition, training or a combination thereof. This has now leaked into real life.

As you’re probably aware, I train in a couple of Globo Gyms here in Glasgow with my BAMF team mates. This means I have to see and hear coaching advice coming from “qualified personal trainers” in these places. It is utterly horrifying. I recently saw a guy built like a preying mantis getting advice from some meathead trainer about performing seated short-repped behind the neck shoulder press ‘for strength’.

Another occasion saw a trainer walking past two gentlemen that were seconds away from destroying their lumbar spine in a hail of vertebrae and jammie dodgers with some of the worst deadlifting form you have ever clapped eyes on.

On both occasions (and more) I intervened. I had to. It wasn’t my place, but it felt like my duty. The preying mantis now knows what to eat and how to train and the deadlift guys will be able to train on their own recognisance without imminent lumbar destruction.

Let’s bring it a little closer to the Home Bone shall we? Let’s talk about CrossFit training. The most potent of doses. There are more affiliates now than I have hairs on my head (don’t laugh at me) and this brings with it a fairly sizeable problem. There seems to be a lot of buy in from those who perceive CrossFit as more of a marketing tool than a training one, and that does for strength and conditioning what that retard Pastor Terry Jones did for international relations.

What I mean by the above is, you’re getting a lot of “fitness professionals” opening CrossFit boxes and hammering their clients with this ‘crazy new functional fitness’ thing they’ve found out about on the internets. Now, these people are likely to have been training people by traditional (80′s to current traditional, not proper traditional) methods. You know. Stretch. Warm up. Re stretch. Re warm up. Sit at your machine of choice. Reps. Move to other machine. Reps. Weight assisted pull-ups. Reps. Good total body workout!  These guys have found CrossFit and have seen the light, affiliated, opened a box and are hammering clients into the ground with ‘challenging workouts’. They are also failing to coach these clients. Just get in, smash yourself and we’ll see you tomorrow for more smashings. Luckily, there is now a test one has to pass to become a CrossFit affiliate. I have not yet seen this test, so can’t comment on the depth it goes into about programming.

Programming. It has been commented on many times, by many people more articulate and seasoned in strength and conditioning than myself. I am a qualified hobbyist, nothing more. BAMF Athletics is not a business, it is a club. The idea is train together, learn together and I lead by example. I attempt to pass on everything I know about movements, why we train as we do and what the hell for. I try to give those I train with an understanding of what correct form is, what incorrect form is and the corrections and cues we can employ to remedy imperfection. It’s my duty. It means when I’m under the bar, someone can fix faults, just like I do when they’re under it. This is the same deal for most of the ‘small box’ gyms we frequent, but not all.

My first experience of CrossFit was a very mixed bag, which I articulated in my last post – The Conundrum. I was embraced by the community and loved every second of it, but the gym owner had gone a bit wrong. He was overweight, would seldom coach and would never take part. All he did was ‘the programming’. His idea of training clients was to construct a workout so heinous that you were smashed by the warmup and the workout itself was a lengthy festival (sometimes a carnival) of pain. Always. Even back then with my elementary understanding of training, I could see little or not variation or focus to the workouts. They were long, nasty, client smashers. This was cool, everyone loved the camaraderie of training themselves to destruction and came back for more. This is not the point. We were stronger. We were fitter. But we had no choice. I didn’t learn a single thing from that guy. I learned a great deal from other coaches on certifications, but the owner of this place taught me nothing. All he did was write stuff on a board, put on some music, watch you workout and film it. That is properly fucking useless. Classic ‘gym owner’. Watch the money roll in and the hamsters on their wheels.

One of my most beautiful, strong and fierce friends was once told by this guy that she was pathetic for taking a day off of training after two weeks. She may be a firebreather, but by that point she was so overtrained and physically destroyed I feel it could have taken her a year to recover. This is not coaching. This is bullying. What do bullies have in common? They are stupid.

This is where the analogy of my title comes in. A fat doctor gives you nutritional advice. There is something very wrong with that scenario. What could possibly drive you to take any recommendations from someone who does not heed their own words? Who should you listen to? What constitutes a good coach? How can you tell if they are worth it? Out of the blue I posed this question to my (then) good lady. She does not do any strength and conditioning. She likes sport climbing and running, much to my chagrin, as she can deadlift and clean and press out the building.

Her response was:

1. Be sincere.
2. Be engaging.
3. Practice what you preach.

I can dig that. I only listen to the advice of those who are serious about advancement, emphatic about what they do and have greater strength, fitness, skill, success, experience, knowledge, or any combination thereof  than my own. You should too.

If your coach is a fat guy, and he tells you what to eat, do not listen to him.

If he cannot articulate succinctly how to perform an exercise and show you how to do it, do not listen to him.

If he cannot outlift, outrun or out manoeuvre you (notwithstanding the monster athletes among us mortals), do not listen to him.

Experience is an interesting one. Mark Rippetoe of Wichita Falls Athletic Club has been in the gym, training himself and others longer than I’ve been alive pretty much. He taught me more about training in two days than I had learned in my whole life up until that point. John Welbourn (@johnwelbourn on Twitter) of CrossFit Football was a professional NFL player for nine years. This is obvious experience.

Not so obvious experience is Dutch Lowy, born in 1982, exceptional coach and CrossFit top performer who wrote the article Have a Fucking Clue, specifically about maximising training effeciveness. I personally received coaching from Jon Gilson of Again Faster, two years my junior, gave me insight into movements, how they work, why they work and how to coach them, shedding light on a history of being in the dark. It’s not about a coach’s age.

While doing a British Weight Lifting Association course, I actually had to stop another coach from performing a movement because it was so unsafe. This man was ten years older than me and had his Level 3 Personal Trainer Certificate as well as the top National Academy of Sports Medicine accreditation. A list of qualifications means nothing.

A good coach loves to coach and loves to train. If your coach does neither of these things he is not a coach. He is your landlord and you’re paying for nothing.

Evaluate what you’re learning next time you’re in the gym. If the answer is zero, you’re in the wrong place.

I have been thinking about this off and on for a fairly long time now.

Physical ability, life and location can really influence a person’s ability to maximise their athletic potential / longevity. This is of great interest to me. A recent setback caused by illness / time off resulted in my returning to the gym and feeling like a novice again. I wanted to fast track my strength & conditioning gains back to that which they were quickly, so delved again into looking at various training regimens to see if I could employ one of them to speed things up a little. There are a number of utterly fantastic coaches out there who are prescribing amazingly effective workouts. These guys have a moderately different focus on what the real key to fitness is, but any one of their programs would be good. Good, but perhaps not right for me. Or a novice. Allow me to elucidate…

The Novice / Returning Athlete

Both of these people have things in common. Usually more than one would admit. I began to look at things from a novice perspective, while adding my own training proclivities / imperfections into the mix

Training Modifiers:

1. Lack of Strength
2. Lack of Technique
3. Lack of Confidence

Additional Sticking Points:

1. Poor Facilities
2. Poorly Defined / Unrealistic Goals
3. No Consistency
4. Can’t Be Arsed

Up until very recently, I suffered from all of these. This puts a massive twist on what type of workout regimen you can select and how you implement it in your box of choice. Let’s cover these in (some) detail:

Lack of Strength

This is something we all suffer from. We are simply not strong enough. It’s all very well to say this generally, but more specifically, we (by we I mean either novices or returning athletes) are therefore unable to perform a great deal of work. This would have a massive effect on any regime you chose that relied on you being able to handle the weight prescribed. If I were to choose to do CrossFit, Coach Rut‘s Max Effort Black Box or John Welbourn‘s CrossFit Football, I would require either a semblance of strength or a knowledge of my 1 Rep Max (1RM herein). I remember having a lengthy discussion with your friend and mine, Mark Rippetoe about 1RM and lifter maturity. It was discussed that a realistic 1RM was only possible after about a year of serious (as in consistent and with good technique) lifting. Less so for returning lifters, but still applicable nonetheless. You need to have been doing this stuff a while before your 1RM is your actual, full-blown 1RM. There is another piece to this puzzle – scaling. If you’re not strong enough and you know it, to handle the prescribed weights in a given program, you scale – simple. Not fucking simple. Not by a long way. Scaling is a tough thing to get right, if you can even be arsed (no. 4 in Additional Sticking Points). I can’t. I don’t like scaling anything. I don’t like having to think about it. I don’t like getting up in the morning, seeing what has been prescribed by someone who doesn’t know me or my abilities and then attempting to scale it on-the-fly. It is an arse-hassle. For novices, even if they could be arsed thinking about it (I could, once) they might get it badly wrong and be left feeling either like they’ve done nothing or that they’ve crashed through an hour-long crucible of pain and don’t recover for a week.

Lack of Technique

So, your regime of choice asks you to perform a whole bunch of snatches or muscle-ups or squat cleans. Have you been practicing these things? No? Do you even know what they are? I do, and I suck at all of them. So then, what do we do with that? We’ve been asked to do some exercises we suck at / can’t do, so we either manage to do the workout with poor technique (thus potentially developing some bad habits) or we chose to do something else, which isn’t really the point of a prescribed training regime is it? If I’m training to get fitter, healthier and stronger, there is little point in wasting a workout trying to teach myself how to do something badly. If I choose to do something I’m good at, perhaps that will result in me having reduced capacity in the next prescribed workout because it hits the same areas I chose to.

Lack of Confidence

A bucket of syrup that carries on from the last two rather neatly. Let’s say I was following CrossFit. The prescribed workout is something I can do, but I’m not sure if I’m doing it quite right, not sure what weight I should prescribe, not sure if I’ll get in trouble from the management, not sure if I’ll be confident enough to run from the bar I have left sitting in the floor to the rower, to the pull-up station in my gym. Get the idea? If you’re not steeped in this stuff, starting out / retuning to it isn’t any kind of fun. Training is meant to be fun. You’re supposed to enjoy thinking about Deadlifting, or having a bar in the rack position or doing Power Cleans. Not having confidence in what you’re doing will have a substantially negative effect on both your strength AND your technique. That is folly.

Poor Facilities

Another can of worms. It can go either way, too. You might only have access to some commercial Globo Gym, or you might be going to a massive CrossFit-esque box. They can both generate problems for you. First, Globo Gym. I train in Fitness FIrst in the South Side of Glasgow. It has two 20kg Olympic bars and 3 other hollow ones that look the part but weigh less. There is a decent squat rack, bench, array of dumbbells and a couple of almost acceptable stations I can do pull-ups from. That’s it. Suppose I’m following CrossFit and today’s WOD is “Helen” – 3 rounds of run 400m, 21 1.5 pood (55lb) kettlebell swings and 12 pull-ups. I’m not strong enough to handle the prescribed weight, so I have to chose a lighter one. I also realise there are no kettlebells, so I have to grab a dumbbell that might do. I have to do my running on a treadmill, because it’s impossible to get outside without totally ruining the flow (and therefore intensity) of the workout and the chin-up station will topple over if I do kipping pull-ups. So. Am I strong enough to handle the prescribed weight? Have I got the technique required to do these exercises? Am I confident enough to look like a retard thrashing about in this gym? Can I be arsed scaling/altering this workout? Makes for an interesting problem doesn’t it? Most of these excellent training systems are designed for a certain kind of place and being performed under the watchful eye of a great coach. Not something we have in abundance here in the UK. Next, what if you are training in a sprawling behemoth of a CrossFit type facility? You can still run into problems. I did.

When I went out to the U.S to learn all about CrossFit and do my certifications, I was in a great facility. It was not without it’s problems. The coach was convinced that everyone should train all the time. Since I was over for a month, he expected to see me in there, doing classes with the rest of them every single day. I signed my disclaimer saying that if I maimed myself, it was my fault and I was set free to train. I was a complete novice at all of the movements. I could kind of run, had a little residual strength for pull-ups etc, but had never Deadlifted, Power Cleaned, swung a kettlebell, or correctly learned to do a kipping pull-up. I was thrashed relentlessly and my performances were always dire. The culmination was doing “Grace” (30 overhead anyhow Clean & Jerks for time with 135lbs). I had no idea whether I should scale the weight or not, so I started with the full value (30lbs less than I weighed) and two reps in my back went. I dropped some plates off and finished the next 28 reps in an abysmal 9 minutes and change. The next day Mark Rippetoe taught us all how to Power Clean at the Barbell certification. If the coach at that facility had interest in my interests rather than just thrashing people, he’d have managed to give me a weight I could handle so that I completed in a decent time, was suitably destroyed and felt like I’d accomplished something. As it was I had injured my back and finished last. Not ideal. If a novice was to visit a CrossFit facility, they could very well suffer the same consequences. It is very hard to know before going in at the deep end whether or not your coach is giving you workouts that are going to be of maximal benefit to you, again limiting your abilities as an athlete and failing to achieve that which is important.

Poorly Defined / Unrealistic Goals

If your goals are a 1’23″ Fran time or a 300kg Deadlift and you’re a 45 year old overweight female, you perhaps need to re-evaluate. For years all I aspired to was getting awesome times for the benchmark CrossFit WODs, but because it is, by design, such a mixed modality system they were never realised. I figured out that perhaps just thrashing myself with metcon wasn’t going to get me closer to my goals, so switched to having equally unrealistic strength goals. I was comparing myself to all of the superstars of the sport of fitness. Big, strong, monsters with an athletic pedigree, years of experience and a facility that had everything they needed. It is the most depressing thing for novices and returning athletes alike to watch as they crawl towards unattainable goals, or move further from them. I’ve seen this with metconaholics, whose only goal is to get ripped. They hammer themselves during metcon workouts, will eat little and perhaps come back for a second workout in the hope that they’ll lose that last 4% of bodyfat. They end up getting fatter due to the amount of stress-hormones in their body. If you haven’t thought out your aims and objectives well, you could just bury yourself in futility and walk away from training for good. Jim Wendler makes a great point in his 5/3/1 manual (buy it) about setting realistic expectations and attainable goals. Progress is most certainly PROGRESS.

No Consistency

Almost all of us have jobs and lives. Training is something that has to fit around that. This might mean getting up at an ungodly hour to train. Theoretically, this isn’t a big deal, but if you attach that to attempting to be sociable in any way, you may find going to bed at 22:00 is useless. Moreover, in a household where others are still up and about, it’s not exactly fair on them either. Let’s take this a little further. You had a day off yesterday and trained in the morning, had an awesome post-workout meal and got a lot of admin done during the day. You’re going to the cinema tonight with your partner. To recover, you need 8 hours of sleep. You’re working tomorrow at 09:00. It takes round 30 minutes to get there. The minimum time you can get up is 07:30. Bed by 23:30? Pretty unlikely. This means you might be a little wiped out at work, but you can make it through. Bummer is, the next day you are working at 09:00 again and are busy at night. This means you’ll have to be in the gym for an hour from 06:30 (when it opens) and be landing back at your place for 07:30 so your day isn’t shot to shit before it begins. A string of confounding days like this can really set you back in terms of recovery and / or actual quality of training. Things get worse if you don’t have a good training partner, don’t get any support for what you’re doing, feel like you’re stagnating or suffer from the last thing in our list:

Can’t Be Arsed

This comes to us all. Some more than others. I think it is equally difficult for those starting out and returning athletes who have suffered from a real confidence knock. It is easier not to train, but at the same time destroys both your mind and body. It’s like those people who know they should lose weight, but find themselves cramming pointless carbs into their face. The opportunity for escape from this problem is slight. You have to muster all the courage, willpower and hate you can. I mean that. You have to hate the situation you are in. You have to think ‘fuck this’ and hit the button. Only you can do this, but it is a tough one to push.

The Solution?

Like I said at the beginning of this meandering rumination, I have been thinking about this off and on for a fairly long time now. I feel I have come to a conclusion. It is my intention to roll out and experiment with a training regime that will address as many of the above pitfalls as is humanly possible. Logically, progressively, simply and effectively. I have had help from a number of my friends, whether they know it or not, and even more help from people who barely know me or maybe never will. These sources I will cite, as they have guided me to this conclusion with their hard work. Hopefully, some of you will try it out and tell me how it works out for you.

Stay Tuned & Stay Badassed™