Ground Up Strength

The entire introduction of this book was centered on failure. Out of all the countless aspects of training you may wonder why I would place such primary importance on failure. And although I combined many facets of failure into one concept there are different ways we fail.

We fail to make a lift. We fail to progress. We fail to have a “good” workout. We fail to stick to our plan. We even fail to get our reps or sets.

All so different so why would I combine them? I combine them because together they inform our “experience” of training.

Our experience of training is just as important as what actually happens in training. In fact I could argue that it is more important. Because our experience of training often has nothing to do with what actually happens! We can’t really rely on what we perceive as “how our training went” because our memories and our experience often don’t match.

Stay Tuned for the Book!

Considering that we can have a very good workout and still feel bad about it perhaps you can see why I would react so strongly against training systems that have failure built into them.

Have you ever heard that progress is 80 percent nutrition and 20 percent training? Such hare-brained quantitative notions are the height of nonsense as training is a multi-faceted interrelated process that can’t be sliced up like a pizza. But that is not the real problem with such statements. The real problem is that progress is mostly mental.

The good strength trainer works out the technical parts pretty quickly. The psychological parts are where the real work begins. A great part of the psychological aspect of our training and everything that goes into it is our experience of it.

Let’s say I assign seven near maximal singles to a trainee. The trainee goes into the workout thinking he can hit 350 for his max that day which would be a personal record. He fails at 350 but re-groups and manages to hit 345 which is also a personal record.

The fact is that going for a personal record and failing then coming back and achieving a lower personal record is a great achievement. It’s still a record. And if the required number of singles were performed at percentages of greater than 90% of that then we would have a great day in the gym.

But the typical trainee would call this a bad day. The personal record of 345 and the seven successful singles and such high percentages, all after a fail that can take so much out of you should be a great experience. But it is “ruined” by the trainees memory of failing at 350.

You see the memory and the experience do not match. More than just memory was the problem of the trainees judging his workout based on expectation rather than really experiencing it. Even when we have a great personalized plan for progress which is built on successive success we have trouble being positive if we base our training on expectations rather than experience and results.

How can we hope then to progress when our entire routine is just “getting it done” until we run up against a wall? This kind of program causes a trainee to simply passively go through the motions rather than experiencing the training and learning from it.

Many people tell you that the more programs you do the more you learn. You learn what “works” for you and what doesn’t. This is not always the case because in order to learn we have to set up an environment that makes us psychologically receptive to learning. Mundane and repetitive training dulls our perceptions and reactions and as a result we do not actually “learn” anything that informs our future training. Instead we memorize tasks and then move on to the next task.

Think of an assembly line where each worker is responsible for assembling a separate part of a machine. The worker does not know how to build the machine or how it works. Nor does he need to. In fact he doesn’t even have to know what the end product is supposed to be. He only needs to know how to perform rote tasks related to assembling his part.

Such factory work makes for very unhappy and unproductive workers! So much so that now most factory workers are trained in all aspects of the production process from beginning to end and are cycled through each station routinely so that they are a part of the entire process and feel invested in the end product. The end result is that production and quality goes up and so do the profits.

You have to become invested in your training. Not just go through the motions.

You may have noticed that Yoga is many times more popular than strength training. Although it has been watered down and commercialized there is a central factor in its popularity that has little to do with the results of the actual practice of Yoga. That is Yoga is an “experiential” practice. You cannot practice Yoga and feel disassociated from it. The very idea of it is that it is a centering and meditative process. This experience itself is a large part of what attracts people to it. It may not be what sparked their interest but it is what keeps them interested.

Most strength trainees, on the other hand, are entirely disassociated from their training. Sure we see trainees paying lip service to the “almighty Iron” but if you pay attention you see that they have very little understanding of why they do what they do in their training.

Like the factory worker assembling one part so are the blind men and the elephant. Each person has a different idea based on his or her experience of one tiny part.

To avoid this learn to always start with the general before proceeding to the specific. If you focus in on the details you cannot experience the whole. And you MUST learn to experience the whole before you can benefit from minute focus.

Too many trainees say things like “I’ve figured out what supplement to take and how much protein to eat. Now I just need a training routine.”

They haven’t “figured out” anything! You don’t figure out your training any more than you figure out your life. It is an integrative process. You are not a sky-diver until you jump out of a plane.

A problem I frequently see with trainees, however, is the tendency to "palm" the bar. They keep their hands in close enough. No problem there. But they push against the bar with the heel of their palms rather than grip it with the fingers. This forces the chest forward and hyper-extends the shoulders. It also causes the trainee to compensate by posturing and tensioning the neck. So the next time you back squat check yourself for this habit. You only need to loosely grip the bar with the fingers. The wrists can bend to facilitate the elbows coming forward. This will allow you to keep the chest "up and proud" which will help keep you from going into flexion at the bottom and getting stuck coming out of the hole.

While I'm not the subject let's talk about the "hole". This is something I will be writing about in the Ebook in-depth as related to the squat in general. The overhead squat will be my example in the book but it applies to all squatting.

The squat can be thought of in different ways. For instance, to a Yoga teacher the squat is a "grounding position". This works great for the purposes of the related Yoga practices. However when we add a heavy barbell to the equation what is good for Yoga becomes a big problem.

I'll save the details for the Ebook but for now I'll settle for dispensing some practical advice:

1. You should not think of the squat as going up and down. Yes, think of the squat as the position you are going into at the bottom. Based on this viewpoint setting up the lift becomes the 'starting position', squatting down becomes the 'squat', and what we usually think of as the squat, standing up again, is returning to the standing position. This helps us learn that the squat IS a position and not a movement per se.

2. But don't think about "the ground"! You need to learn to maintain extension. This is almost a "stretching" of the spine and should feel as if you are trying to push your shoulders (or hands in the OH squat) up into the bar.

3. The problem is that most people teach to do this only at the initiation of the concentric. Wrong!

4. You have to try to push up toward the bar the whole time including during the eccentric…while you are going down. On the way down you should be actively trying to extend the upper body up into the bar.

5. While you are at it do not think in terms of "going down toward the floor". You are simply moving down into the squat position and that is something you "let happen" under control. If you think about "going down" and what's more, start looking down, you're body will start moving into flexion mode almost immediately and you will be fighting the bar, especially at the bottom where the bar will want to push you further into extension, causing you to have to first reposition the body to maintain center of mass and typically, to get stuck or turn the squat into a good-morning with the lumbar doing the work after the knees extend.*

6. You will find this VERY difficult, strange, and uncomfortable at first. Be diligent. It will pay off.

*It's not always a compensation! You see here that it's a perceptual problem. You may also have developed compensations as owed to the perceptual problem but this can help you solve those as well.

I didn't go into this so much in the article because I like to save things for you, my correspondents. One of the most important parts of the acclimation you need to dial in is just how close you get to your projected working weight. All too often we see trainees jumping 40 to even 60 pounds between their last "warm up" set and their working weight! That is a huge jump.

Intuitively it may seem like extra increments in between will just make you more tired. Well, how tired you get is more a function of how many reps and how much rest you take. Sure it's "extra work" but it's extra work with a purpose. "Acclimation" is a process of adapting to changing demands from the environment. In this case the "environment" is the force of a big heavy barbell pushing or pulling on your body. Let's say you jump that 40, 50, or 60 pounds from your last warm up set to your working weight. The body has not had as much of a chance to 'get ready' and the working weight can actually be somewhat of a shock. This is easier to note with squats because the working weight, especially with near maximum loads will "feel" extra heavy and make you feel that something is wrong because "it shouldn't feel so darned heavy". This is lack of acclimation.

The "shock" of the heavy load can cause the brain to kick in it's protective mechanisms making you fail at a lift you should otherwise have no problem with. Hey, these mechanisms aren't perfect. They weren't developed with the aim of you having a 350 pound barbell on your back. That's why they invented spotters. That's the funny thing about your body putting on the breaks isn't it? It would be safer to get the job done than to get stuck at the bottom of a squat or pinned to a bench! So acclimate properly! And use spotters of course. If you work out at home you DO need a rack with safety spotter pins!

Read the article.