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?

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.