Squat Every Day, page 13
We need to learn the opposite: how to leave that psychic energy in reserve when we aren’t using it, an elusive condition otherwise known as relaxation.
We’re grading our mental efforts, using our mental energy appropriately and in the right circumstances. We grow larger reserves of willpower, become more resistant to fatigue, and better at switching on and releasing that energy exactly when we need it and nowhere else.
Not Less. Appropriate. Knowing when to go all-in, when to be easy, and teaching ourselves how to do this with the right programming.
Ivan Abadjiev, recognizing this, says to go for it. Don’t worry about the emotional wind-up or feelings of exhaustion. By his thinking, lifters will eventually adapt to routine max attempts, and the neuro-endocrine systems fortify themselves. With repeated exposure to the stresses of heavy weights, lifters become better able to handle those stresses.
Abadjiev suggests that these lifters aren’t simply boosting their arousal levels, but are actually becoming better at throttling back down to normal. It’s the calming and soothing response of the parasympathetic nerves that they develop and learn to control.
Lifters with better autonomic control are only putting their mental energy into the actual working sets, switching it on exactly when they need it and no longer. Like Sapolsky’s zebra fleeing the lion, the stress-response acts as intended. Face the threat, then relax.
That’s what we want. We want to conserve nerve force, as Boeckmann wrote, to keep our cool in training and learn how to mete out our energy only when it’s most needed.
What happens after you spend a few weeks squatting every day? The stress-response kicks in when you’re actually lifting the weight but, crucially, you aren’t spending hours jittery and nervous before it happens ― and when the lifting’s done, everything winds down back to normal.
The stress is intense but brief, just how it’s supposed to be.
Feelings of control and predictability make the difficult ― like jumping out of an airplane ― into the normal. You spend a few weeks riding the adrenaline and on the edge of collapse, and then it becomes normal.
No big deal.
V.S. Ramachandran speaks of the “James Bond reflex”, in which the emotions are inhibited but the actions are not.53 This is what we call a dissociative state, in which you lose yourself in the moment and your emotions separate from the experience. This is the kind of thing that soldiers, police, and martini-sipping secret agents receive training for. Diminishing the automatic emotional response is, in effect, improving your recovery powers (I’ll say more on this in Chapter 10).
I can’t overstate how huge this is. You can train as often as you want as long as the motivated workouts are managed. Here, motivated workout covers any artificially-inflated performance. Using pre-workout stimulants. Psyching up to hit a training max. Entering a competition. Anything you do that elevates your performance above your normal calm baseline.
Managed can mean that your psyched-up workouts and maximal attempts are infrequent. Maybe you take one or two workouts each week ― or each month ― and use them for PR attempts. Let a little adrenaline go, rest a little longer than usual, and see if you can’t add 5 or 10kg to your best poundage, or squeeze out an extra rep or three on your best set at 85%.
Managed could mean that you don’t have any plan, but you take legit PR attempts any time you feel up to it. And in exchange for a few weeks of hard efforts, you leave every third or fourth week for psychological recovery ― you still train, but without any emotional wind-up.
Managed could mean powering your way through and forcing your body to adapt to regular max attempts.
Whatever you do, the important part is that you have a strategy acknowledging your mental preparation.
Whether Abadjiev’s explanation meets the strictest standards of scientific correctness, I can’t say for sure. I’m not particularly concerned with those technicalities, as I think he’s on to something in principle irrespective of the precise science. Abadjiev points out an often-neglected aspect of adaptation, illustrating that our bodies are far more robust than we give them credit for, and that our training can benefit from that resilience.
This opens an exciting possibility. We can make lifting a maximum weight a normal event in our daily routine, as uneventful as reading the paper with your morning coffee. Make it normal and the stress-response can be trained just like any muscle.
Why not? After all, we’ve seen that feeling bad is only weakly coupled to performing badly. How you feel really is a lie.
There are limits, of course there are. Following this line of thinking will not be easy and is not for everyone.
You suffer. But you adapt.
❧
In as much as we can identify “a thing” responsible for overtraining at all, the brain is it. CNS fatigue, that modern-day bogeyman waiting to destroy anyone who works hard, is a function of altered brain activity. Your brain-state changes in order to cope with a perceived stress, and that creates a cascade of physical symptoms that include feelings of fatigue and reduced motivation, altered hormone profile, and, when taken to extremes, decreased performance. Whether caused by accumulated tissue trauma or lots of excessive emotional arousal, there’s not too much difference in the outcome.
Muscle recovery, hormones and immune signals, even CNS output, that’s all beside the point. Those processes are all aspects of an incredibly complex system trying to keep itself (that is, you) alive.
In the last few chapters, we’ve seen how intricate, interrelated, and almost miraculous that relationship between mind and body truly is, not to mention how poorly we understand the threads connecting squishy flesh to the not-physical world behind our eyes.
Psychology matters. Where you sit relative to the avoidant introvert or sensation-seeking extrovert, or between the neurotic high-reactor or sedate normal-reactor, impacts your life. Your intuitions, your gut feelings, your instinctive reactions, that all influences your physical state. Your mind lays the foundation for subsequent physical responses.
The link between mental well-being and physical health is becoming clearer by the year. While there’s as yet little to no research into the effects on exercise and physical training, we’re talking about many of the same biological systems and behaviors. The same “stuff” that keeps you healthy and vital also happens to be the same “stuff” responsive to and cultivated by exercise.
It’s obvious that some people are “just like that” when it comes to temperament and personality (although whether that’s truly inherited or a product of environment is up for debate).
What isn’t so clear is which ― or how much ― of those tendencies are fixed, and what can be cultivated with effort. Plasticity means that nothing need be set in stone and many traits we’ve taken for granted as fixed actually can be changed with the right set of circumstances. If you train hard and often, will your mind and body trend towards a more stress-tolerant, fatigue-resistant mode?
I think so.
Training often conditions you to train often. We can train our whole psycho-biological system to handle brief, intense, and frequent stress events, to take the edge off and remove their destructive power.
We just have to make the effort to do it.
There’s something to be said for treating physical training as mental exercise. Training has a belief-dependent quality which matters perhaps more than any of the physical explanations. If you don’t believe that your goal is achievable or your program is going to get you there, then your entire condition ― psychological and physiological ― will respond as if that were true. That goes for medical interventions and I’d be highly surprised to find it has no impact on athletic performance.
Part of making daily training, any training, work is the belief. Your mind follows your thoughts. If you don’t believe that you can toughen up, push through dark days of sore muscles, and come out the other side as a more robust and fatigue-hardened lifter, then it won’t happen. You’ll give up and go complain about how overtrained your CNS got. You’ve got to practice the mental along with the physical.
What you do is what you become. If you don’t practice it, you’ll never get good at it.
PART THREE
How to Squat Every Day
6
Practice, Not Pain
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
–Aristotle
No Pain, No Gain?
I’m not exactly sure when the fascination with The Pump began, but it can’t be too far removed from Pumping Iron, the iconic 1977 documentary following the now-legendary trio of Arnold Swarzenegger, Franco Columbu, and Lou Ferrigno as they prepared for the 1975 Mr. Olympia. It’s Arnold who so eloquently sums it up:
It is the greatest feeling that I get. I search for this pump because it means that that my muscles will grow when I get it. I get a pump when the blood is running into my muscles. They become really tight with blood. Like the skin is going to explode any minute. It’s like someone putting air in my muscles. It blows up. It feels fantastic.
You don’t have to stray far from any kind of mainstream exercise to find pain-chasing. Step class attendees and circuit cross-trainers and long-distance runners can all tell you stories of the euphoric high, the hit of dopamine and opioids that come along with the discomfort and exhaustion of exercising. Pain is practically a religion. Pain means “you’re doing this right”, whether that means a pumped muscle or sucking wind after a timed circuit.
No pain, no gain.
We naturally equate discomfort and effort with productivity. We seek out painful, physically- and mentally-exhausting exercise because fatigue brings us warm, euphoric fuzzies. Even the sore, stiff muscles that accompany the day after a hard workout leave us feeling satisfied. It just feels right.
Among the weight-training population, capillary-bursting effort otherwise known as “intensity” has taken a place alongside The Pump. Taking each set to excruciating failure makes it feel like you’ve done something.
Bodybuilding has always been about smashing and exhausting. Whether blasting and bombing our muscles with high volume, or going the HIT route of effort and intensity over quantity, it’s understood that obliteration, exhaustion, and leaving the muscle a pumped-up mess are the goals. The only real point of argument is how best to make this happen.
In the culture of pain that is mainstream fitness, it hardly ever occurs to us that weight training can be about something else. That bodybuilding is only one possible goal in strength training. That you can improve without reducing yourself to a nauseous mess.
It’s always about “surviving” the training. You can squat every day if you survive it.
We’re back to the same arguments: More will break you down. More will take, not give. So they say.
Nature and Nurture in 60 Seconds
“He’d be at the top regardless of his training, with his genetics.”
It’s nearly impossible to watch a world-class performance without hearing those words. Whether we’re talking bodybuilders, cyclists, powerlifters, sprinters, or weightlifters, from the annual taker of the IFBB’s Sandow trophy, Usain Bolt’s record-shattering sprints in the 2008 Olympics, or Benedikt Magnusson’s effortless demolition of a 1000 pound deadlift in early 2011.
There’s an inevitability built into our genetic makeup. Our athletic destinies are governed by inheritance with little room for your input. Genes dictate everything: your build, the amount of muscle tissue you can hold, the efficiency of your nervous system and cardiovascular tissues and endurance capacity. Everything unfolds from the genes, with the rigor and precision of a foreman directing his crew from a set of blueprints.
Strict genetic determinism ― the belief an organism’s future is determined by the content of its genes ― has an obvious appeal. And how else do you explain the differences between the reigning Mr. Olympia and the underweight string-bean who’ll be lucky to gain 20 pounds in his entire career?
Genes carry all the information used to build us into functioning organisms. With the understanding that DNA molecules encode the information of life and transmit it between generations, the case seems closed. Your genome determines who you are. Don’t like it? Too bad.
Genetic determinists were forced to rethink their position, however, when it was discovered that DNA could be chemically altered by certain regulatory proteins. In response to signals from the environment, the genes you’re born with can be switched on or off as casually as we’d flip a light switch.
Biologists now suspect that genes aren’t simple data-storing devices, like the biological equivalent of your computer’s hard drive, but are actually participants in biological processes. The way your genes switch on or off determines how you develop and behave as much as the genes themselves.
The study of epigenetics, the influence of environment on gene expression, has added a new dimension to the nature versus nurture argument, and it turns out that nurture has a far greater role than “it’s genes” would suggest. What kind of signals do genes respond to? Name it. How much you’ve eaten (or haven’t eaten). How much fat you hold (or don’t hold). How often you exercise, and what kind of exercise you do. Stressful day at work? That alters the way your genes work. Taking a challenging test or learning a new language? Ditto. Supportive parents and a stress-free home? You bet.
Every single thing you do, everything you encounter, every event or activity that elicits a response from you can influence the way your genes express themselves. Your phenotype, the final realized product that is “you”, emerges from the effects of your environment on your active genome. This includes your frame, your musculature, and all the neuro-psychological issues covered in previous chapters.
Nurture acts through nature to create the final product. Genes set the stage, providing a background of tendencies and probabilities so that we aren’t a tabula rasa, but everything about your little part of the universe ― feast and famine, friends and foes, joy and sadness ― dictates how those traits express themselves and how you develop into a realized human being.
Practice, Deliberately
We’re gradually coming to understand that, while genes aren’t irrelevant, we’re not entirely slaves to them. Epigenetics, like neural plasticity, gives us considerable breathing room.
What we are is flexible.
Suddenly work ethic, family life, and even cultural background are relevant to the discussion of natural talent. Might it be that, with the right encouragement and supportive surroundings, we could all be champions?
A whole range of books have attempted to answer this question, notable among these being Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, and Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated. All three authors examine talent development in light of these findings, suggesting that the common variable between mastery in any field, be it music, math, or athletics, is not genetics but practice.
Practice, however, is not just a matter of logging hundreds of uninspired hours. According to “expert on experts” K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, what defines the high performers is how they practice. Ericsson, the source of the current buzz around talent development, says that achievers go through an intense, directed effort which he calls deliberate practice: “considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well ― or even at all.”54
You become an expert by pushing outside your comfort zone and working on those things just outside your grasp. Deliberate practice skirts the edge of your current skill set while not making for an unrealistic challenge.
It’s through years of deliberate practice, gradually chipping away and refining their skill-set, says Ericsson, that experts are made. And time is certainly the defining factor. The magic 10,000 hour number, cited by Gladwell and everyone else, originates in Ericsson’s research.
A little math puts that in perspective. Any non-leap year contains a little more than 8700 hours. Practicing two hours a day, seven days a week, would take you almost 14 years to reach the mark. An average of 2.7 hours a day, every day, for a decade, is what it takes to become an expert in most any task.
Ericsson believes that this dedication shapes expertise, arguing that the difference in the expert and the average is not so much the genes, but the way the environment brings them out.
Is success in sport then just a matter of a 10-year commitment to deliberate practice?
This question has an obvious answer. You can walk down any street, most anywhere in the world, and see a tremendous range of body sizes and types. You see textbook examples of ectomorphs with a lighter structure and heavier-set endomorphs, with most everyone falling into a mediocre of average.
Indeed body size is mostly genetic, as shown by twin studies. Since you can expect the lives of adoptive families to be different, while adopted twin siblings share their genes, you can get a better idea of which traits result from genes and which result from upbringing. Twin studies routinely show that physical characteristics, like height and bone structure, are almost 100% genetic.
Upbringing has nothing to do with it, which is unfortunate news for those convinced that hard training and strict dieting can make substantial changes in a body.
There’s less information on genetic contribution to traits like the tendency to store body fat or to build and hold large amounts of muscle, so it’s not currently possible to speculate on hard numbers. But, much in the way we see different body types walking down the street, it’s clear that bodybuilder- and powerlifter-friendly traits are largely genetic. Some people are just naturally inclined to hold more muscle, keep lower body-fat, or have more strength-friendly body structures, and the majority of that difference is inherited.
