Squat Every Day, page 22
As we’ve seen, there’s likely to be a strong connection between your possession of these traits and the biological machinery inside your skull. But if you aren’t automatically a cool immersive personality, there’s no reason to think you can’t practice that, too.
These are exactly the things we want to happen with quality training. You want to move the weight aggressively, with snap, and you get instant feedback through the RPE score. You want to make your sets challenging enough to test you but not so overwhelming ― emotionally or physically ― that you feel out of control or don’t have fun with it.
Japanese martial artists are said to enter a mental state called mushin no shin during combat, which loosely translates to “mind without mind”. A mind free of ego or fear or judgment. No attachments. Just being.
You relax, go into the state of total concentration and immersion, and just do. You move with intention, but automatic, intuitive. Effortless effort.
The weights you use from day to day are not important. Relax and let strength happen. Let it come to you. Progress takes care of itself when you allow gains to happen. Lots of little changes add up to big numbers.
Forget all the Musts and Shoulds.
Some workouts will suck. Some workouts will be amazing, leaving you feeling like Superman. Most will be mediocre ― and that’s okay. Lots of mediocre workouts mean progress over time. Strength happens as a consequence of patience and gradual, consistent improvements.
Don’t force gains out. Allow them to happen.
Bad day? So what? Good day? So what?
Relax and let it happen.
Quality training is about an optimal experience.
It’s easy to get emotional about your training, but we can forget that staying cool means learning to relax outside of training too. I can’t emphasize this enough. It does no good to nail down your focus in training, to learn how to switch on and then wind back down, to fine-tune your daily intensity and volume, only to spend the rest of your day as a neurotic mess.
Recoveredness has as much to do with your overall state of being as it does with your time in the gym, and as I hope you see by now, your mental attitude is an extraordinary influence on that state of being.
Being cynical, depressed, and generally grim about the world may be all the rage these days, but the price is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your thoughts follow your thoughts, and giving in to the dark cloud only guarantees that you’ll face a dark cloud.
Wrap yourself up in a goal and you become it’s slave. If the goal is modest and achievable, this is fine. Often it isn’t. You overestimate your chances of getting there. You take it personally when you don’t make it, and even if you can gut it out, you’re living under constant pressure. You want to have achieved, rather than doing the things that leave to achievement.
Setting an unlikely goal and then hedging all your bets on it will lead to disappointment. When optimism crosses the line into blatant self-delusion and your ego rides on the outcome, you’ve already failed.
Optimism has to be balanced with rationality and cold pragmatism. Otherwise you wind up like the fixed-mindset children: you want to serve the ego, hit those big numbers, and you forget all about the enjoyment of doing.
Forget the goal, take your self out of the equation, and just train. Immerse yourself. Center your workouts on effortless effort. Seek optimal experience. Be mindful. Do what happens and nothing more.
You just go train, and forget the rest.
❧
It’s possible to construct a story about how these methods ― meditation, mindfulness training, the flow experience ― work in scientific terms. It all connects back to the biology touched on in earlier chapters. Allostasis. Central fatigue. Ego depletion. The interconnection between mental state and physical state. The placebo effect.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that mind is nothing. Mind is no-thing. Mind is, instead, a process of looking outward. It becomes what you put in it, it goes where you send it.
Where the mind goes, the body can follow. No magic, no voodoo, no supernatural forces: just the conjunction of Self and Body.
When you switch off and “just be”, you’re taking your cognitive self-regulation out of the process. You’re not getting emotional and setting off (or aggravating) the stress-response. You aren’t fighting against your body, introducing an artificial distance between Mind and Body. You aren’t thinking about the thing, forcing yourself to do it, or stressing out over minor details. You just go do it, and enjoy the act of doing.
Everything else flows from that.
External cues and structure, in the form of programs and training cycles and team mates, keep us on task, off-loading our decision-making needs and freeing up our self-control reserves. That’s important. The structure keeps you motivated and effortlessly focused. It’s why the Russians can train on systematic, methodical programs. It’s why others can thrive on autoregulated programs. It’s why still others need the comfort of exercise lists and spreadsheet-planned percentages.
None of these are right or wrong. All that matters is effectiveness.
These workouts aren’t just meaningless rituals or superstitions. They serve a purpose: they focus you and discipline you. Pre-workout rituals, training partners, teams, and coaches, even the habit of going to train all creates a structure that you operate within. Meditation, mindfulness, the flow-state, these all indicate that head-space where quality work is being done. These strategies are all about imposing a sense of order on your self.
It’s easy to forget this. Year after year, new fads spring up. Trends come and go. It’s easy to forget what a program or method is really about.
When you train, train. Don’t go through motions. Don’t train on feelings. Go in with intent. Whatever you do, make it work.
What you believe about your training matters. What you believe about your recovery abilities ― or the non-existence of recovery as a concept ― matters.
Train your body and train your mind, together, and you can surprise yourself.
❧
GO SQUAT.
Notes
From Iron Man Magazine, April/May 1952.
Ditillo wrote two books, The Development of Muscular Bulk & Power (1971) and The Development of Physical Strength (1982) , which are sadly hard to come by now. More accessible writings can be found in his MILO articles and through online collections.
From “Adaptability” by Anthony Ditillo. Available at: http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2008/04/adaptability-anthony-ditillo.html
From Bud Charniga’s 1989 interview with Taranenko, available at: http://www.dynamic-eleiko.com/sportivny/library/news/nv005.html
From Siff (2000).
See Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran (2000). They describe the “body image”, how the activity of the brain’s sensory maps creates our conscious perceptions of bodily experience.
From Hebb (1949). Hebb would go on to be proven right by modern neuroscience, which demonstrates that the human nervous system, including the brain, has a higher degree of plasticity than earlier findings had presumed.
From Tsatsouline (2000). Pavel’s “neural” style of training heavy and often, while staying away from fatigue, has been a major influence on my thinking.
From Siff (2000).
A surprising amount of research shows that skill isn’t just about the gross movement through space, but that you have to “learn” the speed and resistance as well. See Carroll et al. (2006), Griffin and Cafarelli (2005), Jensen et al (2005), Adkins et al. (2006), and Flanagan et al. (2012) for examples.
You have to wonder what good it does to “work on form” by squatting with 70% weights when your goal is to lift as much as you can. You might as well go bench press or run a marathon for all that translate to strength with the heaviest weights.
See Ostrey et al. (2010). Feedback between the sensory and motor systems “wires in” changes to the brain as we learn.
From Yessis (1987).
From “Elevating the Peak of the Pyramid” by Bill Starr, in Iron Man Magazine. Available at: http://www.ironmanmagazine.com/only-the-strong-shall-survivebr-elevating-the-peak-of-the-pyramid/
See the slew of Sheiko spreadsheets on the internet, as well as the (bad) translation of his book. A little time spent working through the translations makes this more productive than muddling through Google’s ugly job.
See Jamie’s blog at http://chaosandpain.blogspot.com Not always safe for work, but always entertaining.
See the project website at http://www.styrkeloft.no/nyheter/frekvensprosjektet/1437-resultater-fra-frekvensprosjektet Bring Google translate if you don’t speak Norwegian.
From Feynman’s lectures, collected in The Character of Physical Law (1967).
I declined to elaborate on the details of this in the text because that discussion would quickly get out of hand. For any interested readers, there is a staggering range of scientific and philosophical literature on both chaos and complexity. Recommended starting points are Chaos by James Gleick (1987) and Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop (1992) .
See everything with Bruce McEwen’s name on it.
I am also indebted to Sapolsky, particularly his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, for perspective on these matters.
See Calvert and Banister (1976), Banister and Calvert (1980), and Banister et al. (1992). The notion of fatigue as being just one part of a complex series of biological processes has been central to modern ideas on program design.
See Busso, Candau, and Lacour (1994).
See Rhea (2003) and (2004), Peterson (2004), and Wernbom (2007).
From Siff (2000).
For a quick look, see Pendlay and Kilgore (2001). A more technical treatment is in Hartman, Pendlay, and Kilgore (2004).
Personal correspondence.
When trained to an unholy excess, a muscle’s fibers can actually be killed off in a process called cellular necrosis. When a living cell dies, it deflates like a balloon and dumps its contents into your blood. In small amounts this is a normal part of your daily life-processes. When it happens to a lot of cells at once, those cellular by-products flood your system and become life-threateningly toxic.
From Zatsiorsky (1995).
From Moravec (1988).
See Kahneman’s excellent book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) for a detailed account of how your mind works (and deceives you).
Damasio wrote a couple of books about the connection between emotion and decision-making. See his papers with Antoine Bechara for more technical accounts.
See Gibson et al. (2004), Lambert et al. (2005) as well as all of Noakes’s citations for an introduction to the central governor. For a counter-point, see Weir et al. (2006) and Marcora (2008).
See Marcora et al. (2008), Marcora, Staiano, and Manning (2009), and Marcora and Staiano (2010). Marcora (2008) is also a strong criticism of Noakes’s central governor hypothesis.
Also see Mehta and Agnew (2007) for more on the way cognitive effort and physical effort seem to run on the same equipment.
And again see Williamson, Fadel, and Mitchell (2006) for another perspective on the interplay between cognitive and motor fatigue.
The literature on loss of motor output thanks to central fatigue processes is literally too large to cite it all. I’d suggest starting with Enoka (1995) and Gandevia et al. (1995) for an overview, and then reading the work on supraspinal fatigue and intracortical inhibition done by Simon Gandevia and Janet Taylor, starting with Taylor and Gandevia (2008).
Meeusen et al. (2006)
Meeusen et al. (2007)
See everything with Baumeister’s name on it, or Hagger et al. (2010) for a meta-analysis. A good lay-intro can be found in Baumeister and Tierney (2011).
See Martin-Ginis and Bray (2010).
See Segerstrom and Nes (2007) and Reynard et al. (2011) for a look at HRV and self-regulation.
Kagan’s work on neurological reactivity is extensive. For further reading, I’d suggest beginning Kagan, Snidman, and Arcus (1998).
See Knab and Lightfoot (2010). This is the only work I was able to find connecting the reward-seeking pathways to voluntary movement, but the relationship makes sense based on everything else we know about these regions.
The amount of dopamine we produce, the type of receptors we have, and how long it hangs around all seem connected to our degree of wanting and liking ― for drugs, food, sex, gambling, and many other things. Dopamine activity is considered a major driver of activity in mammals thanks to its role in these behaviors.
See Marshall, McEwen, and Robbins (2011).
Boeckmann’s books are hard to come by, and I get the strong impression he was something of a carnival salesman as far as the huckster-ish vibes given off by some of the old advertisements, but there is no doubt he was on to something about keeping “nerves” under control.
See Reynard et al. (2011) and Segerstrom and Nes (2007)
See Dantzer (2001) and (2006) for reviews of the connection between the innate immune-system response, sickness behavior, and depressive symptoms.
See Armstrong and VanHeest (2002) for the similarities between overtraining syndrome and major depression.
See Smith (2001), who originated the cytokine hypothesis of overtraining. Smith (2004) also proposes a connection between tissue trauma and overtraining symptoms, through this same mechanism.
See Braun et al. (2011). The brain is the master controller, and the various chemical signals do its bidding.
Borrowed from Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain (2011).
Ericsson’s writings on the topic are extensive. See references for more.
See Morsella (2005) and Bargh and Morsella (2008).
Borg’s original 1962 paper on the subject was his doctoral thesis. He has since written more about RPE in conjunction with his daughter Elisabet.
See Kristen Lagally’s work, as well as Day et al. (2004) and Gearhart et al. (2001) and (2002).
From Poletayev (2005), available at Sportivny Press: http://sportivnypress.com/documents/75.html
From Ditillo’s article “The Single-Rep Principle”, available at: http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2008/02/single-repetition-principle-ditillo.html
An analogy I’ve borrowed from Eric Liu’s and Nick Hanauer’s wonderful book The Gardens of Democracy.
If you haven’t read Taleb, please do so as soon as possible. So much of the thought processes in this book will click together in a deep way after reading Black Swan and his newest work, Antifragile.
I’m only partly kidding here. I leave it to your judgment as to which part.
Spassov’s articles on the Bulgarian system were posted in the NSCA’s Strength & Conditioning Journal back in 1988.
I wanted to say more about both of these routines as they are quite intelligent, but I decided to leave that discussion for another time just for the sake of brevity. I do think that there is something to at least the regular inclusion of unusually high frequency for the purposes of physique-buildling, although it would look different from the daily-squatting setup. Both HST and Hernon’s workout methods can be found online, and they’re worth a look to get the gist of it.
Borge has done a lot of writing on Myo-Reps, and I think it’s a solid system. Have a look for yourself: http://borgefagerli.com/myo-reps-in-english/
See Broz’s post at http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=121212081&p=433631911&viewfull=1#post433631911
See Kjaer (2004) and Kjaer et al. (2006) for lots of goodness about how tendon health seems to depend on activity.
See Job, Dweck and Walton (2010). Although Baumeister’s work seems to suggest a purely physical cause, findings such as this call into question the actual cause. It isn’t clear whether glucose depletion (or neurotransmitter activity, for that matter) is actually causing us to become ego-depleted, or whether those physiological changes just convince us that we are.
In Supertraining, Yuri Verkhoshansky levels this very criticism at Westerners who latched on to periodization theory in the 80s and 90s, oblivious to the fact that the orderly, intricate plans were directly inspired by the Communist ideology of central planning.
Sheiko’s book is freely available online but the popular translations have been (very) bad, as Google Translate doesn’t handle idiomatic Russian so well. Crawling through it with a good dictionary for a better translation takes time, but can be worth it.
I’d suggest starting with Kabat-Zinn’s book (1995) Wherever you go, there you are. For a more technical start with the literature on mindfulness, see Kabat-Zinn (2003).
Original quote cited from from Wired Magazine: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.09/czik_pr.html For a more thorough look, see Czikszentmihalyi’s 2008 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
