B.A.M.F Athletics

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?

“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.