Life and Lifting Goals by Dan John

Figuring Out Your Life and Lifting Goals

by Dan John – 7/10/2012

I'm a huge fan of Steve Ilg's book, "Total Body Transformation." In the introduction, he makes a small point that continues to shape my understanding of training, health, and life.

Very simply, he notes that the word "Fit" comes from the Old Norse meaning "to knit." I can't think of a better way to describe, in the most basic terms, the goals of life.

Many of my T Nation articles deal with goal setting. If you're familiar with my work you've probably noticed that my most common response to a question is, "What's your goal?".

For instance, if someone is Olympic lifting and wants to try to increase load without burning out, I often recommend the One Lift a Day program.

Now, a 14 year old boy from Iowa who wants to be Mr. Olympia, play in the NBA, and become a Navy SEAL might not benefit from this program. So, goal setting is a crucial part of any discussion concerning training.

Some ideas simply don't work, even though they're fun to read about or watch your friends do. I see all manner of strange, bizarre, and quirky moves at workshops, conventions, and on blogs. People are using balls, slides, ropes, and stretchy bands to do every imaginable lateral lunge – and I still think a heavy back squat trumps the whole lot of them.

So, if standing on a Bosu ball juggling kettlebells with a stretchy band around your knees is driving you to your particular goal, well, Bless you and carry on.

But most would be better served considering Ilg's insight: Fitness is knitting.

An old friend of mine who died not long ago once told me that "life is a tapestry." These threads from here and there knit together to form you as a person, and Ilg's work is a great example of this. Yoga, strength training, cardio, nutrition, and meditation are his pillars, but you also find in his work insights about life, living, and everything (with apologies to Douglas Adams).

With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a few ideas about seeing your training and fitness goals as part of a larger tapestry of life.

Get on the Success Track

First, there's an old saying that says, "Success leaves tracks." Growing up, I was lucky that Strength and Health magazine came out once a month. I'd read the training of football players and track athletes and realize that I had to get stronger. Gary Ordway, an elite American discus thrower, had these numbers in his pre-season training:

Squats: 505 x 3
Deadlift: 455 x 3
Power Clean: 285 x 2
Incline Press: 325 x 3
Sit ups: 4 sets of 25

When I read this article, I realized that the road from my lifts to his lifts wouldn't be overnight. But at least I knew the path! My 85-pound incline barbell press – and pardon me for bragging but I was doing eight reps with it – was a bit shy of his load.

In my many travels, I enjoy visiting college campuses and researching old articles and materials. Recently, I found an old American Athlete article that discussed how America's best shot put and discus thrower at the time, L. Jay Silvester, had added deadlifts to his training.

The article discussed how a 400-pound deadlift would help him improve his marks "even more." That's a lift routinely done by high school sophomore football players now.

So one of the most fundamental lessons of my career was clear by age 14: lifting weights and getting stronger would support my goals. The lesson I missed was that "enough is enough" when it comes to strength. L. Jay, for example, threw 210 feet with his 400-pound deadlift. At the same time in my career, I threw 190 with a 628-pound deadlift.

The toughest issue for me to wrap my mind around is still that you need to be strong enough. Certainly, I guess you could add flexible enough, mobile enough, and enough of enough is enough, but you need to get to certain standards and then do your best to stay there.

So, how do you find out those standards? Ask those who've been on this road before you.

A certain Austrian boy named Arnold competed in Olympic lifting meets and snatched 242 and clean & jerked 303. Other great bodybuilders, including Sergio Oliva and Franco Columbu, competed on the platform. No, Arnold's numbers aren't earth shattering, but they're pretty good – good enough to support one of the best bodies in history.

How strong should you be? Here are some standards that I've used with success the past few years:

Men

Push
Expected: Body weight bench pressGame Changer: Body weight bench press for 15 reps

Pull
Expected: 8-10 pull-upsGame Changer: 15 pull-ups

Squat
Expected: Body weight squatGame Changer: Body weight squat for 15 reps

Hinge
Expected: Body weight to 150% bodyweight deadliftGame Changer: Double body weight deadlift

Loaded Carry (Farmer Walk)
Expected: Farmer Walk with total body weight (half per hand)Game Changer: Body weight per hand

I used to use different terms than "expected" and "game changer," but no matter. I recommend the basic training templates if you haven't reached the minimum level of simply expected. You honestly don't need much more than linear periodization and perhaps a few minutes or hours on the basics of technique.

If you have game changing numbers across all five movements, well, let's just say the weight room isn't your problem unless you're in a pure strength sport like powerlifting or Olympic lifting or strongman competition. The distance of the Farmer Walk will vary, but let's assume something as short as 40 meters.

For women, any strength training seems to help. Even though I've been chasing standards that are appropriate, the chasm between the drugged ladies and the clean ones has made it hard to find good numbers. Honestly, I used to think that any lifting was a pretty good beginning.

These are the most current numbers I'm using with women:

Women

Push
Game Changer: Bodyweight bench press

Pull
Game Changer: 3 pull-ups

Squat
Game Changer: 135-pound back squat for 5 reps

Hinge
Game Changer: 275-pound deadlift

Loaded Carry (Farmer Walk)
Game Changer: 85 pounds per hand

Again, once a woman reaches all five levels in all five movements, good things tend to happen in the field of play. Now, I know these numbers are low, but it's the balance across the five that seems most important for athletes.

Moreover, achieving all five levels tends to support this notion of knitting. If you have the appropriate levels of strength for your goals, look beyond the weight room for the reasons you're not achieving them. If your goal is fat loss, look at the plates on the table, not the plates in the gym.

A Case for Failure?

Second, failure also leaves tracks. In the past month, I lost my training journal and doubt I'll ever find it again as I lost it in Orlando. I hate losing my journal as this – as I've said before – is, or was, my gold mine. I can trace injuries, illness, and competitive failures back through the days, weeks, and months leading up to the moment things became unglued.

As I look back over a career that takes us back to the Johnson administration, I can pull out failure after failure. Let me suggest something that I put into my book, "From Dad to Grad," that I wrote for my daughter on her graduation from the eighth grade. She recently got married, but the advice is still sound:

"On Successful Failure and Failing Success"

Most people are going to miss the point here, so let me start off by reminding myself that most people miss the point of anything related to success anyway, so I shouldn't worry too much about most people missing the point.

The point? Sometimes, not achieving a goal or a dream spurs people into making a greater impact on the world than fulfilling that goal or dream. And the reverse is true, too: getting that dream can flatten a person out for years to come.

I've known a lot of college English majors who spend four years writing their own work in creative writing and poetry classes and never write another essay as long as they live. They may spend hours red penning in semi-colons and the words "transitive verb" above a student's paper, but never again write a composition. They attained the degree – and stopped writing.

Many athletes sweat and fight for four years of high school to get a scholarship to college, then quit after the first weeks of college practice because "it doesn't mean anything" to them.

Mark Twight, the author of "Kiss or Kill" and one of the world's foremost mountain climbers, noted the same thing at our dinner table not long ago. Faced with a decision to keep climbing and probably die on Mount Everest or to come back to base camp, he came back down. But, he noted, he learned far more from this failure than he would have from succeeding.

In a sense, success can dilute the lessons of life. No, I'm not telling you to fail; it's just that failure seems to prod most people into rethinking their attempts, their journey, and their path.

Joseph Campbell commented on this several times regarding the fact that the most renowned person in Comparative Religion never got his doctorate. Campbell chose not to do it and often encouraged his students to not go on either.

He also warned them of getting buttonholed in a job that stopped them from exploring all the directions that life presented them. He noted that people who earned their terminal degree and were appointed to their dream job often "flattened" out.

Much like Earl Nightingale warned us, "A rut is a grave with the ends kicked out."

Every four years, the world turns it attention for a few weeks to the Olympic sports. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that one of the worst kept secrets of Olympic sports is how many of the athletes quit their sport after the Olympics.

Even gold medalists abandon the pool,  track, field, and court. After all the sacrifice and pain, "Here's your medal, thank you very much, next!" just doesn't seem to fulfill the athlete as much as the dreams of victory while training.

Those who fail to make their goals turn to coaching, writing, or other forms to continue expressing their goals in other mediums. Or, they take those lessons learned and parlay them into a successful life, but they don't just drop them and walk away.

Now, I'm not encouraging failure or the initiating of a "culture of failure." But I coached football at Judge Memorial Catholic High School for a long time and I realized a very unsettling thing: when we began losing games, my athletes were getting more out of losing than winners did from winning.

When you win a game, as I had the good fortune to do when playing for South San Francisco High School, the team goes into the locker room and before you untie your shoes, the coach is talking about next week. The total amount of celebration in a winning locker room – for true winners – is often not very much.

As for the losers? The losers have hugs, tears, long heart tugging speeches, and kisses from the prettiest girls. While the victors are thinking of yet another week on the grindstone, the losers are being cuddled and caressed back to a smile.

Don't let success flatten you nor let failure let you join the "Loser's Club." Learn from failure, enjoy it (if you can), but plug along into another expedition to the top.

When you win, be gracious. When you get your goals, dream of other goals.

Kelly went on to become Prom Queen and All-State in the discus in the same week, graduate from college in three years while also volunteering full-time at an impoverished school, and is now a first grade teacher. Her life, so far, is "knitted."

Find A Worthy Mentor

Is there an easier way to learn how to achieve your goals and learn from failure? Actually there is, and it's my third insight: Pick good lifelong mentors.

This is not what most people think. I'm not necessarily talking about those who guide, coach, or teach you here. What I'm saying is that you should watch carefully someone who is ten, twenty, or thirty years older than you that you admire and salute their success in life, learning, and lifting.

In my case, my positive role model has always been Dick Notmeyer. When my family first met him he was 47 and looked to be in his early thirties. He trained with very basic movements, took his supplements, and drank protein drinks every day. He looked and moved great.

When the great jogging boom hit, Dick got swept up in it with his friends and lost some of his shoulder mass and looked older. When Dick moved to Arizona, he dropped the jogging and began simply cycling and lifting – and he looked younger!

Dick not only taught me how to Olympic lift, he also taught me the value of combining lifting and cardio throughout a lifetime. The key, it seems, is not to let the cardio side destroy the muscle mass.

As I've since noted in every talk and work shop, after age 28, the body seems to conspire to lose lean body mass and stiffen up. Jogging, while certainly better than nothing, tends to waste some muscle mass and lock up the joints. Runners turn to everything to deal with injuries from arch support, weird shoes, yoga, and herbal concoctions. The alternative, as I learned from watching Dick, is to just lift and get some crashless cardio in.

Of course there were others I learned from. One thing that's clear to me is that alpha males tend to hang around the sports I compete in. The day of the competition is the day to shine.

Alas, that's not what most guys in the throws and lifting sports seem to understand. If a stupid challenge somehow presents itself, it becomes:

"Watch this!"
"Hold my beer!"
"Get your video camera ready!"

As anyone with an internet connection can see, this is where things tend to go badly. Among us who came up as throwers in the 1970s, the bulk of the injuries are from doing something extremely stupid.

Blown biceps from challenges, hamstrings torn off the bone from doing something the human body wasn't designed to do, and dislocated shoulders from trying to prove that the shoulder joint can really do much more than God thought it should do.

When I also think about the number of friends I've lost to heart attacks and bad choices, I'm also happy that I avoided those life-altering bad choices, like drugs.

When I think of the dozen or so old friends who are dead or crippled from bad choices, I'm happy that I was lucky enough to have "chosen wisely," as the knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade tells us.

Think about the life you want to live ten, twenty, or thirty years from now and observe someone who is living this way now. I wanted to be "healthy, wealthy and wise" and I observed, followed, and studied those who had this, and simply did what they did.

Your goals and your dreams should be intertwined with threads of career, family, and community, as well as fitness, health, and body composition. Certainly, that 17-inch arm is a noteworthy goal, but be sure to knit it with a lifetime vision of health and success.

Study those who have achieved your goals and follow their tracks. Learn from failures along the way and even embrace them as the price of failure is so high.

Finally, take some time to "Go back to the Future" by looking at those people who are a few decades older than you and reflect the lifestyle you want to eventually have.

Knit all of this together for a fit life.

The Frog, Elephant and Alpo Diet

Personal training this summer has definitely reinforced this lesson to me: 

 "I would love to use pain as the crowbar to engage my people to stick to their goals. I wish. There rarely seems enough pleasure out there to overcome the magic of cookies and creamy ice cream. The problem with goals and goal setting is that it is hard to get someone to buy in to the promise of future pleasure to overcome momentary pain."

http://danjohn.net/2012/07/i-never-read-my-own-work-but/

I Never(!!!) Read My Own Work, but…

July 3, 2012 in BLOG

So, my former student, Doc Brunetti and I bump into each other just after my blood test. Next Wednesday, I get my physical and he had a few minutes. Well, he is proud of his “old coach” and asked for copies of all my books. I figure to myself: “Well, he is going to putting digits in places no digits belong, so let’s follow up on this!”

Tiff had a copy of “Mass Made Simple” at work and I stole it from her. I stole it in a kind and loving way, of course, but, honestly, few people should steal from an office of the federal government. When I got home, I read it…for the first time.

Few people know this: I HATE pictures of me or reading my own work. Hell, for me, is watching videos (well, Blue Ray in Hell) of me teaching. I can’t read my own work. As I read MMS, I came away amazed…and a touch proud…of the work. It might be some of my best writing, my best work. So, I decided to cut and paste a small taste of my favorite part.

Originally, this was going to be a blog post about people who hate my faith and ended up needing favors from me, a sexist guy who had to take a golf cart ride from my daughter (folks, mess with me. I will only rip your arms off…my girls (Kelly, Lindsay and Tiffini) will do much, much worse) and how wonderful the community of training actually is in this world. That might be my next blog, but, for now, enjoy this free sample of what I liked in the book:

The Principles Behind Bulking

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” Emerson

If you want Methods for Bulking, the fitness world is brimming with them! The conversation on forums usually goes like this (for ease of reading, I will actually capitalize words and attempt to spell them right, unlike the internets):

Q: Hey, my good lads, I need a superior Bulking Program that will put lots of weight on me quickly.

Answer Number One from “lovetobulkupandcruise2”:
Try this:
Work your legs on Monday, Arms on Tuesday, Chest and Back on Wednesday, Arms on Thursday, Friday just rest, Arms on Saturday. Rest on Sunday, my Brother in Iron, as you will need it.

Answer Number Two from “biggestgunzinthelargermetropolitanareaofrawlinswyoming:
Wow, that looks good, but I would switch Tuesday and Thursday.

Alas, it is only a slight exaggeration.

Breaking up the body in to smaller parts (call “splitting”) is a method. Oh, it works and it can work very well. But that is just a “thing.” Principle Based Bulking is designed around four simple insights:

1. Everybody is the same, but just enough different to warrant some exploration.
2. Doing everything at once makes it difficult to discern what is working.
3. There is a need to spend time under a load.
4. There are some nutritional tweaks that work.
Everybody is the same, but just enough different to warrant some exploration.

In full candor, I believe in absolute dignity of every human person. Having said that, I have also coached and played in sport over four decades. Certainly, human size fits into a certain bell curve. As Nassim Taleb summed this point (which I will paraphrase), if I told you that two people walking down the street had a sum of their heights at 12 feet, most people would get the idea that each of them was probably around six feet, give or take. It would be rare person who would guess a ten footer and a two footer were strolling together.

So, yes, we are all God’s creatures endowed with certain inalienable rights and our Mothers love us. Now, let’s be honest: there are some people who are going to simply be stronger, faster, and prettier than you and me and that is just the way it is. So, in discussing a Bulking program, we have to accept some variations.

That’s the problem with most methods of bulking. It is a template that we simply step into and on Day One I do this and that and this. By the way, this method works! Except for some, so let’s get back to the principle.

Stu McGill, the great Canadian back specialist, spent some quality time with me recently and noted that I had a “Scottish Hip.” Instantly, certain things made sense. Years ago, I was tested with a little machine that measured maximal poundage in certain lifting positions. At the Quarter Squat position, I maxed out the machine at 1400 (I’m not sure I could support it, but the system said I was pushing that amount). In the Half Squat, I was at 255. The next guy was literally 405 in both positions.

I noted this story to Stu and he said: “Of course. That is why you do the Caber Toss and throw things. You are built for it.” Now, McGill is the expert here, but he told me to look at the popular sports of a region and how they tend to reflect the basic small, but crucial, difference in body structure.

To sum up: you have this structure. It’s not going to change, but it is going to impact your Bulking program. Long limbed guys with narrow shoulders probably will struggle with double bodyweight squats for max reps.

But, there is more. I know guys who can treadmill for long periods of time. I get bored after I touch all the buttons. I’m not going to be doing a lot of boring, repetitive stuff in my career because it is literally not in my nature. I work with athletes who can groove in on one thing and just keep doing it over and over.

Well, what about you? Can you sit at terminal and work on the Williewank Proposal or whatever for ten hours. Or, do you have to be stimulated? The way you are wired to work has a huge impact on your training. With luck, a “One Size Fits All Program” might be perfect for you, but most people seem to have little luck beyond a few weeks with any program.
There is no question that the axiom, “Success leaves tracks,” is true. Part of the issue with bulking is making sure those tracks take you on the right path.

Doing everything at once makes it difficult to discern what is working.

If there is one bit of clarity from my coaching career, it is simply this: Keep It Simple, Stupid. The KISS method is certainly just a cliché to many, but, time and again, it is the secret to success for most people.

Recently, I AGAIN had this conversation with an elite athlete who was injured. “How did you get hurt?” “Oh, well, we had this idea to do…” The athletic careers of so many amazing athletes have been brought to a halt by simply adding one new great idea, that looked so promising on paper or on the net, and then trashing a bodypart in the process.

Here is a hint: stick with what was working and be very mindful of adding anything new.

In Bulking programs, very often the person is given a long list of things do including food programs, supplements, secret voodoo stuff and lots of little other things. Well, which one works? Which one is counterproductive? I have tried many very expensive programs in the past, including one that set me back hundreds in supplements to train on an empty stomach then work to excess, and when one is mixing five or six or ten items, which one works?

Certain things make some people sick to their stomachs. Mix that with high rep squats and you have the perfect recipe for a mess on the floor. You must take some time adding ingredients to the bulking recipe.

There is a need to spend time under a load.

To be honest, I think this is the most complex principle. Notice what I didn’t say: you must do this exercise for this many reps and this many sets. Well, I will, but honestly the load can be any tool you want:

Barbells
Machines
Kettlebells
Sandbags
Rocks
Sleds

They all work. Now, some are obviously better for some things than the others, but the loading is the key. I made my biggest gains in bodyweight with weights that were not very heavy in hindsight, but they were killing me at the time. Why? Well, I had never done, for example, a Front Squat. The wrist flexibility issue alone was making my nights long. Add in all the other joints, the upright posture and the fact I had never done real squatting before added up to a lot of dead legs and tired arms and back for a long time. My body responded, even to these relatively light loads, by exploding in growth.

Time is also a bit hazy, too. You can get freakishly big, if that’s the way you are made, by doing just singles. I have never seen a waifish 800 pound deadlifter. The time it takes to deadlift a max attempt is far shorter than running a marathon, although you might feel the same after either finish. It does seem, by the eyeball test, that most guys who are longer limbed and a little taller need more reps and more time with the load in hand to gain size. If you are one of those 5’ 2” fireplug shaped guys, added width might be pretty easy by simply moving singles. If you are 7’ 2” NBA center, we need to spend some time with more reps.

I think that there are great, simple ways of extending time under a load. Sadly, the two best are complexes and high rep squats. Why “sadly?” They both make you feel awful! Now, if it is true that stomach upset is a sign of Growth Hormone release, at least you can feel happy that you are releasing GH for free.

There are some nutritional tweaks that work.

I feel bad for a lot of guys on bulking programs. In fact, in hindsight, I feel bad for me. I was on a gallon of milk a day to bulk up in the late 1970’s. I found out later that I was Lactose Intolerant. That might have explained the “explosiveness” of my day (let’s just say “I was gassy” and move on) and the huge acne cysts on my face. I was literally drinking a kind of poison (for me) every day. Modern protein powders are miles ahead of what we had “back in the day,” so this is much easier to deal with today.

I give this advice, over and over, for most people’s goals:
Eat More Protein.
Eat More Fiber.
Take more Fish Oil.

And, that is exactly the advice I will give you for each and every program I ever design for any sport or goal. But, we will go a bit farther. Instead of choking down as much as you can every day, we will build up to several very inventive and exciting techniques where we use the clock as much as we use our mouth to utilize our protein intake.

Creatine, for example, works wonders for some people and provides misery for others. In the traditional “Shot Gun” approach to Bulking, we would add it from Day One. We will do things different. I would rather give you a few days to test your personal response to Creatine. Should you have no issues, stay the course. If cramping or distress appears, we know the culprit.

Let’s get started: The Mental Side of Bulking.
The Toolkit for Goal Setting: The Key to Bulking
Eat your way to SUCCESS!!!

I think I could make a fortune with a book entitled “Eat your way to success.” I love to browse bookstores through the diet, fitness and cooking sections and just feast on all the delicious options for food and not eating food. Everything makes you fat, if you look through enough diet books. That same “thing” is also the cure for your fatness in a book one shelf away. Walk over to the Personal Success isle and you can learn to talk to yourself until you have a million dollars. Rather than talk to yourself like the nice lady on the midnight bus from downtown, I suggest eating your way to success.

Honestly, the three best mental images I have for success involve eating. From what I have seen across the vast landscape of America, I think that eating is not a rarity for many here in these United States. I have been elbowed by many a moo mooed woman in a buffet line in Las Vegas and I have the war wounds to prove it. Sadly, my “Frog, Elephant and Alpo Dog Food Diet” might lose customers simply by the title. Every time I fly, I see an advertisement for something called the “Cookie Diet.” That can sell. Somehow, even if it was “The All You Can Eat Frog, Elephant and Alpo Dog Food Diet” still might not break the top ten bestseller list.

If there is an axiom for a successful life and having any chance at achieving any goals, it would be the following:

“You can’t do everything, but you can do something.”

Let that sit before you for a moment. If I could do anything for my legacy to this fine planet earth, I would hope and pray it would be “Do something.” For years, at workshops I have been preaching my “secret” two words to success: show up. I need to add “Do something,” too.

In this approach to bulking, we are NOT going to do everything. We are going to add some basic things and see how the journey is taking you. But, you MUST do something: Show UP!

My favorite story about the magic of simply showing up happened in 1984. I was standing in line, after a long train ride to get to there and probably no real sleep in two days, to register for my intensive Turkish language class. Quick, imagine me standing in line because that is all I was doing. If you have ever stood in line, use that imagine if that is easier for you.

A guy behind the registration desk slammed a phone down, looked up at me and said;” Do you want $1500.” My answer was “uh, yes.” It turns out that another student just decided to quit and had been given a nice stipend just to show up. I was given a check in the next three minutes for $1500 for simply standing in line.

If you want to be a national champion, you really need to get to the stadium on time. If you decide to get married, the ceremony starts at 11. Be there. Showing up is underrated as a life skills success clue.
Of course, showing up is only step one. Step two is to do something. When I counsel/mentor/coach/teach/help others in goal setting it often only takes a few minutes to outline a list of goals in every single area of life. Warning: be careful about setting goals, because you may attain them. Almost every time I have had one of these goal setting experiences, the person looks up and smiles from this sheet of paper, then their eyes go wide and they ask: “Well, uh, what do I do?”

Do something.

Easy to type. Easy to read. And, actually, easy to do. The problem for most people is that the enormity of a goal seems to explode like the Big Bang before them. You want to get your college degree? Well, you have to register, get a parking pass, find the cafeteria, buy a school sweatshirt, find a lifetime friend to have several funny experiences, go on a roadtrip, write and lose the Great American Novel, read a book simply from Cliff Notes…hey, you have a lot to do! For me, when someone says to college, I have a refreshing mental image of fun, study and free time. Why the disconnect? Well, I’ve done it! Talk to people have had done the goal you are interested in achieving, and, well, do what they say!

By following the path of generations of successful “bulkers” of the past, you are well on your way to success!

That is why I go to experts when I have a question. Years ago, as I often joke, I “woke up” fat. For many of us, you may understand that completely. Working two jobs, raising kids, mowing lawns, struggling with life, and all the rest might just keep you from making excellent food and exercise decisions each and every day. And, one day, you wake up fat. So, I consulted a group of women called the “100 pound club.” Each of the women had lost one hundred pounds through a variety of diets, exercise choices and attempts, and discussed their findings freely. You see, they had been there. My friend, Dave, dropped one hundred pounds by simply making a new habit each month, from something as simple as drinking more water each day to walking each day. When it came time for serious goals, like running a Half Marathon, his background of successfully nailing progressively harder goals led him across the finish line. If you want to learn about fat loss, ask a competitive bodybuilder. If you want to learn about persuasive speaking, ask or read Lincoln or Churchill. If you want to learn the next step after “showing up,” listen to me. Let’s do something! To help you “do something,” let’s discuss my “Frog, Elephant and Alpo Dog Food Diet.”

The First Thing is To Do SOMETHING!

The first thing about getting things done is that there is always something, something big, sitting there that you don’t want to do. Years ago, my wife, Tiffini, clued me in on how to deal with this:

“If you have to eat a plate of frogs, eat the biggest one first.” Hmmm? Listen, this “system” works. If you have to do something today involving a crappy phone call, an awful meeting or a visit to the IRS, schedule it first. I made a career as a strength coach simply by teaching people to do FIRST the stuff they don’t want to do in the weight room or in the field of play. Eat the BIGGEST frog first.

Imagine a plate of frogs sitting before you. Now, imagine that you will get a billion dollars for eating the whole plate. Would you do it? Or, is your revulsion from eating our little frog friends so great you will pass on the billion? For most of us, including me, I am going to shove those guys down my throat as fast as I can for a billion bucks. Yep, I have standards about food and drink, but I will take the billion, thank you very much.

Which one should you start with? Tiff tells us to reach in and grab the biggest one and swallow it down and, from there, none of the little ones will wiggle down as much.

So, Rule One of “Do something” is to pick the worst thing you perceive of the new direction or decision and get rid of it. Surprisingly, it is usually not bad. Moreover, the RELIEF (breath out, wipe your brow, relax your shoulders, smile again) of dealing with this first big frog makes the rest of the goal pretty easy. I have been there many times in my life. As a teacher, it is dealing with the crazy helicopter parent (the parent whirling constantly around their child), as a professional, it might be that task that just feels like labor pains and you can fill in the blanks for yourself here. Find the big frog. Eat it.

So, 
1. Show Up
2. Do Something (Eat the Biggest Frog/Issue first)

That is why we are going to emphasize the High Rep Back Squat in our bulking program from the first day to the last day. You are free to hate them, loathe them and perhaps never do them again the rest of your life, but, folks, the High Rep Back Squat is the biggest frog I can find.

Wipe your palate clean from the frog juice, try a refreshing gelato, and let’s get ready for the next meal: Elephant.

One of the oldest motivational clichés I know is this: if you have to eat an elephant, start with one mouthful at a time. In goal setting success, you need to take small bites, but keep on biting! I can remember fondly when my daughter Kelly first began to learn to speak. I was overwhelmed, to be honest. Think about it: the days of the week, the names of the months, holidays, clocks, street signs, the presidents, the political system…there was so much to teach her!

She did fine. We didn’t have one day to do it all. From preschool elementary to high school to college, we ate a bit of the elephant every day. Trust me, if you can learn the days and the months, you can achieve your easier goals like adding some Lean Body Mass.

So, Do Something comes in two flavors: Frog (take on the ugliest task first) and elephant (attack a bit of the task every time you can). If your goal is to bulk up, have a few photos taken of you in your swimsuit. You will hate it. Learn to squat, if you don’t already know how. A quality bulking program is going to be rough. But, what’s your motivation? Now, let’s talk about dog food. Successful people will almost always mention that it was a series of small goals, small changes that lead to success.

The single best piece of diet advice I ever heard came from peak performance consultant Anthony Robbins. Robbins got his advice from one of his clients. It’s called the “Alpo Diet.” Invite a dozen friends over to your house. Tell them that by the end of the month you’re going to lose ten pounds. Tell them that if you don’t, you’ll eat the can of Alpo in front of them.

For the next week, every time you feel the urge to take a piece of chocolate from the cubicle next to you, reread the contents of the Alpo can. If someone offers you something smothered in goo, open the Alpo can and take a good deep sniff.

Robbins approach is based simply on the principle that most people would rather avoid pain than embrace joy or pleasure. I can sit you down and give you line after line, reason after reason, about why making a life change or choice is going to really help you. I can show you movies of the new joy you will find once you succeed your own goals. And, most people will ignore them. If you need some encouragement, crack open the can and sniff some Alpo and, for whatever reason, we tend to stick to the plan!

And, before you can say it, why don’t people meet their goals? Honestly, I have spent many hours at cafes, bars, bistros, cafeterias, libraries and corners of gyms walking people through pyramids, charts and schemes to achieve all manners of goals and, more often than not, they fail. Perhaps the simple answer is this: it’s me. I seem to be the common denominator here. And, I’m sure many people will take that option: Let’s just blame Dan. I have broad shoulders, feel free to stand on them!

You see, motivation is a strange thing. Every person reading is familiar with some aspect of the Frog, Elephant and Alpo Dog Food Diet. None of this is news. Oh, this is going to be the cornerstone of your goal achieving as this Diet, simple as it may seem, is the foundation for every single goal ever achieved. Two parts then of our success program then are this:

1. Show up.
2. The Frog, Elephant, and Alpo Dog Food Diet (Start with a tough task, keep chewing away and have something awful in mind if you fail)

I don’t want to walk away from the Alpo Diet too quickly. For years, I have argued that the best client a personal trainer can have would be someone like this:

• Recently divorced woman whose husband ran away with ex-best friend, who is chubby.
• High School Reunion coming up where woman, ex-husband and ex-best-friend will all attend.
• Old high school friend, who is also a Billionaire now, really wants to “see her” as he had a crush on her all four years of school. His private jet will drop him off to his private helicopter at the reunion.
•Now, with this woman, I can make demands. “Twenty eggs a day.” Fine. “Two workouts a day.” I will do another on my own. “A pound of salmon for breakfast.” Raw?
You see, pain brings clarity towards a goal. I would love to use pain as the crowbar to engage my people to stick to their goals. I wish. There rarely seems enough pleasure out there to overcome the magic of cookies and creamy ice cream. The problem with goals and goal setting is that it is hard to get someone to buy in to the promise of future pleasure to overcome momentary pain.

All right, let’s look at the Mental Toolkit and how it relates to this Bulking Plan.

You are already ahead of most of the guys who want to simply wave a magic wand and get twenty pounds of lean body mass added on to their body.

Now, your task is simple. I ‘m going to ask that you show up to the weightroom a couple of times a week and train hard. I also want to add a few, small additions to your diet. Some aspects will be hard and others will just be humoring me (even though the suggestions work!).

The Frog? Well, that’s going to be the Back Squat program. Sorry.

The Elephant? Well, simply, you need to follow the advice, do the workouts, ease up your other activities and move ahead one day at a time.

The Dog Food? That’s up to you, my friend. When I decided to do the Velocity Diet, I started an extremely popular forum topic at t-nation.com and literally answered dozens of posts some days. I “put it out there.” If I failed that diet, it would have been a big deal and a real hit to my integrity. I know that part of the reason I was so successful with Dick Notmeyer’s advice is that I was running quickly out of time to compete as a college athlete. I had to get bigger as fast as I could and I poured all my energy into it. My dog food would have been the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” that so many former high school athletes bore their friends and family with the rest of their lives (please shuffle to “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen).

Pour your energy into these next few weeks and months of work. This is a familiar path; many have walked this before with great success. Now, it’s your turn. Eat up!

"Busyness is the Devil"...

Summers off is one of the great things about being a teacher.  What good is it to acquire possessions and strive for long life, if you neither care for the Good Life and the time to enjoy it.

http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/07/02/the_busy_trap_and_having_it_all_is_busyness_ruining_us_all_.html

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The Busy Trap: Is It Ruining Us All?   

By Hanna Rosin

Updated Monday, July 2, 2012, at 1:00 PM ET

My initial response upon reading “The Busy Trap” in this weekend’s New York Times was a feeling of sweet revenge. After two weeks of working-mother angst prompted by the Atlantic’s “Women Still Can’t Have it All,” I was delighted to have the tables turned. Obviously it’s not just women who can’t have it all. None of us can have it all. In fact the wanting it all is a disease not specific to women or loaded on us by feminism but a generalized global pandemic that’s destroying us all.

The “Busy Trap,” after all, is written by a man and one who does not mention having children. And in his view a 23-year-old single man has a daily reality not all that different than a 40-year-old mother of three. “Almost everyone I know is busy,” writes Tim Kreider, “They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications.”

But after that brief moment of revenge/relief I began to feel pretty uneasy, because what good does it do me that men live this way too? So many lines in that story made me cringe in self recognition: “Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with classes and extracurricular activities.” And then this part, which really hit home: “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life can not possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy.” My one quibble with Kreider is his insistence that this kind of busyness is a form of bragging, a one-upsmanship over who worked more hours, familiar from how my investment-banker friends from the '90s used to act.

He’s right that busyness is a choice, but it’s not a choice choice; it’s more like a condition we are passively not resisting, a trap we can’t see our way out of. This revelation came to me the other day when I talked to an acquaintance who is a book binder. I had visited him expecting a respite from my harried screen-centric existence, an afternoon full of unusual smells and textures. But his life was just as insane seeming as mine. He had clients hassling him on email to get projects done faster, lost packages he needed to track and an inbox that was equally oppressive. Everything is sped up; stay at home moms are just as manic as I am about getting through their day.    

In my better moments I aim to live the way Katie Roiphe suggested in her Financial Times response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece: We should embrace the chaos, screw the balance, revel in those days when we get home too late and wake up groggy to a toddler sticking Band-Aids on our half open eyes, and then steal some more sleep by handing over a box of cookies. But the same thought keeps coming back to me: I don’t want to be busy. I don’t want all my friends to start their messages to me with the sentence “I know you’re really busy but …” Anyone have any advice?

"Or you may have noticed that on a day you had to make a lot of tough decisions at work, you found yourself short-tempered with your wife and kids when you got home. Because you had used up your willpower earlier in the day, it was harder to control your impulses later on."... also known as football season.

http://artofmanliness.com/2012/01/08/willpower-part-ii/

Willpower Part II: How Your Willpower Is Depleted

by BRETT & KATE MCKAY on JANUARY 8, 2012 · 80 COMMENTS

in A MAN'S LIFE, PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

In the first post of this three-part series, we offered a general outline of the nature of willpower, noting that it is a real mental energy which regulates your thoughts, emotions, impulses, and performance control by keeping in check desires and behaviors at odds with your values and long-term goals.

We then compared the battle between your willpower and those unwanted desires to Al Bundy and Theodore Roosevelt sitting on your shoulders in the roles of the classic angel and devil.

We ended by saying that the winner of that battle depended on the strength of TR relative to Al at a given moment. And today we will explore what affects that balance and just how your willpower is weakened, a fascinating subject in and of itself, and one that is a necessary precursor for understanding how to then conserve, strengthen, and harness this vital force.

Willpower: A Finite Resource

In addition to the TR/Bundy image, it is also helpful to think of your willpower like a muscle. All of these qualities of your muscles also apply to your willpower:

• Your muscles become weak and flabby through disuse and a lack of exercise.
• In order to build the strength of your muscles in the long-term, you must exhaust them in the short-term.
• While you can build the strength of your muscles over time, on any given day when you walk into the gym, your muscles have a finite amount of strength–there’s an absolute max weight you can lift before your muscles reach failure.
• If you exhaust your muscles with one exercise, you’ll have less strength and endurance on the next exercise because your muscles will be fatigued. Your muscles need time to recover before they can be fresh again for your next workout.

We’ll come back to the first two points in our final post. Today we’re going to concentrate on those last two, exploring the fact that on any given day you have a finite supply of willpower, and that when you use part of that supply for one thing, you have less of it for others.

How Is Willpower Depleted?

Your supply of willpower is depleted in two ways.

First, by exercising self-control.

Every time you have a desire to do something that conflicts with accepted social norms or with your values and goals, and your willpower overrides that desire and keeps you on track, part of your willpower supply gets depleted. The stronger the desire and the harder it is to resist, the more of your willpower fuel is burned up in the struggle.

The need for self-control kicks in more times a day than you probably realize. In one study, participants were given beepers that randomly went off seven times a day and asked to record what they were experiencing when they heard the beep. Researchers found that at any given moment, 50% of the participants were feeling a desire right when the beeper went off–whether to eat, sleep, have sex, or surf the web–and another quarter of them had experienced a desire in the few minutes preceding the beep. All in all, the researchers found that on average people spend four hours a day resisting desires.

If that number seems high, think of all the desires you may have had in the last five minutes:

I want to eat that leftover pizza. But I’m not really hungry, I’m just bored. Bob just posted a ridiculous and false partisan article on Facebook. I really want to leave a comment telling him about all the errors in the piece, but that will just stir things up for no reason. I shouldn’t be on Facebook anyway, I need to get back to work. I really want to put my head down on the desk and take a nap….

The four hours you spend resisting desires each day doesn’t even include the second thing that saps your willpower: making decisions.

As with exercising your self-control, the harder the decision, the more your willpower supply gets drained. But even a back-to-back series of small and enjoyable decisions will eat up some of your willpower.

While simply shopping around and weighing different choices diminishes your willpower, it’s the moment when you lock in that choice and cast the die that gobbles it up the most. When you lock in one choice, you must reject other possibilities, and humans hate narrowing their options.

The diminishment of your willpower supply through the making of decisions and the exercise of self-control has been named “ego depletion” (for Freud’s term for the self) by foremost willpower expert, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister.

Your Brain on Ego Depletion

So what’s going on in your brain when your willpower energy gets depleted?

When you’re suffering from ego depletion, your brain’s anterior cingulate cortex—the part of your brain that detects a mismatch between what you intended to do and what you’re actually doing—slows down. When your willpower tank is full, and you start getting off track, the ACC is quick to jump in with a, “Hey, hey, hey, what do you think you’re doing? Get your hand off that mouse and put your eyes back on the textbook. We have a final in 2 hours!” But when your willpower muscle is fatigued, your anterior cingulate cortex reacts with a delayed and muted alarm.  The more of your willpower that’s been depleted, the slower the ACC responds, and the more likely you are to give into whatever the next temptation is you’re hit with, especially if the temptations come back-to-back. Then you might get no alarm at all, no voice that says, “You really don’t want to do that.”

It’s as if when your willpower gets low, TR falls asleep on watch, and Al has the run of the place. You can also imagine it like those video games where your health meter declines as you get injured—but if you can run around for awhile without being hit again, the health meter starts to climb back up and replenish itself. Crouch behind something and recover and you’re gold, but get hit again before that breather and you’re a dead man.

The Effects and High Cost of Ego Depletion

What happens to you when TR falls asleep and Al takes the wheel? Two things. Both of them bad.

Not Enough Slices of the Pie to Go Around

The biggest effect of ego depletion is what we mentioned in the beginning when we compared willpower to a muscle–when your willpower gets used up on one task, decision, or goal, you have less it for working on other tasks, decisions, and goals. Basically, the more ego depletion you experience, the less willpower you have to control your thoughts, emotions, and actions. There’s only so much willpower pie to go around.

This can be seen in a study that was conducted with two groups of college students. Both groups fasted before being brought into the laboratory. At the lab, the students were taken into a room and sat at a table on top of which two platters of food had been placed—one filled with warm, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and the other with raw radishes.

One group was told they could eat all the cookies they wanted–the other that they could only nosh on the radishes. The researchers left the students alone in the room, but watched them secretly through a window. The cookie eaters happily enjoyed their repast. The radish-eaters, on the other hand, were seen valiantly trying to resist eating a cookie while glumly biting into the raw roots.

After their snack, both groups were given puzzles to work on that were actually impossible to solve (they were not told this). The students who had eaten the cookies worked on the puzzles for an average of 20 minutes before giving up. But the radish-eaters threw in the towel after an average of only 8 minutes.

Why did the radish-eaters give up so quickly? They had already used up some of their willpower supply on resisting the cookies, and thus had less of it available for working on the puzzles.

Similar studies confirmed this result; once people use up their willpower on one self-control-requiring task, they struggle and do more poorly on the subsequent one.

This phenomenon is something you probably already intuitively understand and have experienced in your own life.

Take your college finals for example. As you focused your willpower energy on studying, you had less of it for other things, and your hygiene and diet went in the crapper. Wearing jeans and eating chicken breasts was replaced by donning pajama pants, scarfing pizza, and guzzling beer (researchers have found that as counterintuitive as it may sound—at least to those who haven’t been in college for awhile—drinking goes up during finals not down, because of ego depletion). You probably chalked those changes up to stress, but ego depletion is also playing a role—you simply don’t have enough willpower to keep all your impulses in check.

Or you may have noticed that on a day you had to make a lot of tough decisions at work, you found yourself short-tempered with your wife and kids when you got home. Because you had used up your willpower earlier in the day, it was harder to control your impulses later on.

In my own life I can track my state of ego depletion on whether or not I respond to negative feedback on the blog. Being a blogger is of course an awesome job, but one of its drawbacks is that you are constantly barraged with baseless criticism, petty complaints, and inane comments from people who miss the point of an article by such a wide margin, it makes you worried about the future of mankind. In the real world, it would be like having a constant stream of people march by your desk saying, “You’re doing that wrong.” “You misspelled that.” “You’re a idiot.” You’ll invariably feel a very strong urge to confront these critics on why they’re wrong or how they really, seriously need to get a life. But I’ve found that responding is a huge waste of time–the naysayer never changes his mind, which only raises your blood pressure further. So I’ve tried to make it a policy to never respond to pointless criticism, and am generally successful…except when I’m suffering ego depletion. A couple of months ago the launch of our new book fell on the same date we were moving into our first house, and since I was putting my willpower towards those and other important things, I found myself lashing out to any unfavorable comment. I just didn’t have enough willpower left to control that angry urge.

This is why you start smoking again when you get stressed. And why they put the candy by the checkout line in grocery stores; after making all those choices on what to buy, your willpower guard is down. This is why it makes sense that ascetic monks stay single and celibate as well; children are specially-patented willpower-sucking machines (“Do not throw crying baby out window, do not throw crying baby out window”) who would consume the willpower needed to wholly focus on one’s spirituality.

This is also one of the elements that makes rising out of poverty so difficult; the downtrodden have a ton of tough decisions to make every day, leaving them more prone to giving into short-term impulses, even if those choices conflict with their long-term goals.

Risk Aversion

In addition to making it more difficult for you to control your emotions, impulses, and behavior, ego depletion also makes you risk-averse in your decision-making. When your willpower starts running dry, you begin to default to the easiest, safest, status quo option, the one that least locks you into a set path, in order to avoid expending any more mental energy. Your brain gets tired and starts to seek the path of least resistance. You become what author John Tierney calls a “cognitive miser” and will focus on just one factor of a decision instead of looking at the whole picture…”Give me whatever one is cheapest.” “Whatever you think is best.” But these “whatever” decisions may not be in your best interest or in line with your long-term goals. It’s like being tired after a day of shopping for a big ticket item, and when the salesman presents you with the store’s suggested package, you sign off on it, even though it’s more expensive and includes features you don’t actually need.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: Your willpower is a finite resource and when the tank runs dry, you become much more prone to making decisions that distance you from your goals, torpedo your progress as a man, and hurt other people in your life. But as with any force in the world, once you understand how it works, you can become the master of it and learn how to minimize its destructive potential and then strengthen, conserve, and harness the energy for your own purposes. And that is where we will turn next time.

Source:

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney

 Illustrations by Ted Slampyak