People have workout ADD.

They can’t stick to one god damn thing for more than 2 workouts in a row without getting “bored”.

Every-workout is different, every month, a new goal.

That, my friends, is why:

YOU SUCK.

Here’s the thing, maybe if you actually took the time to learn some lifts, what it feels like to be under some strain and perfected some technique you wouldn’t suck.

But that Would be Boring.

It would take practice and the realization that next week, on Tuesday, you’ll be doing basically, the same damn thing.

Confused Muscles and the WOD Mentality:

X-Fit and P90X both are all about doing different stuff everyday.

That’s one of the big reasons why people keep coming back.

Everyday is a new, novel, challenge and people like new.

Here’s the thing….

It’s why you still suck.

Yes, you will and probably did get better……..At first.

Cause, at first, you’re worse than suck and anything will work.

photo is from the most excellent t-nation.com, go read that site everyday.  And that’s Dave, you should buy stuff from him @elitefts.com

Usually this lasts for a year or two. Then, you’re all like….

WTF Happened? Why haven’t I progressed in 6 months.

It’s cause the “programs” aren’t programs at all. You’re doing too many things to stress any one thing hard enough, long enough for the body to see the need to allocate “Adaptive Resources” to the stressor.

“All components must be raised constantly throughout the year. The problem is everybody just wants to keep the same volumes for all the components, but you can’t because they all compete for the same central nervous system resources. So you have to be intelligent with your programming and training.”-Buddy Morris

Fundamentally,you’ve been doing random workouts, strung together.

That’s exercise (and it’s still good for your health), but it’s not TRAINING (and it wont make you actually good at anything).

If you really don’t give 2 damns, just want to workout everyday, and get yo’ sweat on…….

Stop Reading NOW,

the rest of this is a waste of your time and It’s cool, I get it, and you’re not alone.

P90X is the greatest selling infomercial product EVER and CrossFit is a 4 BILLION dollar bizznezz.

And, truth be told, many people have gotten is really awesome “shape” with these products.

Hell, most people never make it past Sh@t, so getting to Suck is a small achievement.

But what happens when you decide being in a state of Suck isn’t good enough and you would actually like to make some progress again?

Time to take some Exercise Ritalin. <—sorry, no street value here.

You Need to Start a Training Program.

It has to be more than random exercises thrown together each day based on what you feel like doing or someone put on a whiteboard, with the sole purpose of making you tired.

The exercises and weeks, yes, weeks, hell, months or years (wholly crapola Batman, years?) of training need to be put together with at least some thought towards the end goal.

Training is not as simple as doing 5 sets of 5 reps or 5 sets of 10 reps or any combination of sets and reps. You must plan to obtain certain objectives.- Louie Simmons

Want to squat a lot of weight?

Squat heavy once a week for a decade, you’ll be strong? -Matt Vincent

He’s right….

You probably don’t need an advanced Block Periodization program, you’re not that good.

You’d probably be just as well to try to add 5lbs to the bar every week for as long as you can.

Nope, you shouldn’t be varying the type of squat, rep ranges and the loading wildly from week to week.

Pretty much add 1-2 reps or 5lbs every week for a couple of years <—–it wont actually work this way, but try.

And once that does stop working, you’ll have an idea about what the hell is going on and you wont need to worry too much about what to do next cause you’ll know.

Keep grinding….

But What About: Confusion, Variation and Randomness? 

The only thing that matters is the effect an exercise has on the biological level, all the other voodoo is BS.

Muscles Don’t get Confused

they only know length and tension.

They don’t forget, they can’t reason, they don’t have brains.

And guess what?

Brains control the muscles…

This is why lifting, getting stronger, is as much a skill as anything else.

As you practice the lift, week after week, rep after rep you build and ingrain the pattern.<—-muscle memory? still in the brains…

Eventually, after months or years of practice,  you can change the movement slightly without completely restarting the learning process.

But that can take YEARS. It depends on the frequency with which you practice the movement and your neural plasticity (genetics).

For many folks, every time you change an exercise (movement pattern) you’re changing the neurological feedback and literally relearning the pattern.

Every time you change the rep ranges you’re changing the biological outcome.

If you’re constantly changing exercises and rep ranges, and you’re not a beginner:

You’re Basically Starting from Zero Every Time.

Quick Lesson:

It takes about 6-8 weeks, for the average person, to make the neurological adaptations to a new exercise.

AFTER that, you’re able start making primarily muscular/ biological (energy systems) changes.

That’s why beginners get so strong so fast.

Their brain is learning the movement, how to synchronize the muscles, how to generate force and use the muscle cells they already have.

That’s why you want to stick with things for a while, especially if you’re trying to actually add some muscle, you’re going to have to get past the point of neurological adaptation and to the point where you can really stress the muscles under fatigue. 3 Mechanisms of Muscle Hypertrophy 

Variation vs Randomness: How CrossFit Fudged this Concept and Confused People

*this isn’t to bust on CrossFit, but it is to clear up something that they got really wrong and unfortunately perpetuated. This has confused the hell out of a lot of my distance training clients who happen to be reformed addicts CrossFitties. In short, what “Conjugate Periodization” is, variation of a training stimulus vs. randomness of training stimuli, they sh@t the bed on that one.

The CrossFit definition of Variation:

One of the main characteristics of constant variation is the use of very different loads, time domains and movements.- CrossFit

Here’s the issue….

Variation is about making the slightest change in how an exercise is performed.

NOT the biological/ neurological stress it creates as a whole on a gross level. The end goal/ physiological adaptation of the movement MUST remain the same.

Changing the loads, time under tension and movements is changing too many nervous and biological system stimuli to create a “Training Effect”.

These exercise variations don’t need to be drastic; rather they should be subtle enough to resemble the classical lifts and maintain proper form and technique, but provide enough of a change to impose new demands.- Jordan Syatt

Case in Point:

Lets say you’re trying to increase your bench press and you currently bench 315.

That’s a better than average number, you’re pretty strong and have probably lifted for a while.

Programming body weight pushups or dumbell bench pressess @ 70lbs to failure probably wouldn’t do a damn thing to increase your bench. <—-they might for you, everyone is different, but I’m playing the averages here. 

The biological/ neurological demand is completely different even thought the general motor pattern is the same.  You would be stressing the body to create the wrong adaptation (for your goal), IF, your sole purpose of that exercise was to increase your bench press.

If you directly substituted these exercises for your bench with the intent or expectation of increasing your bench, that’s random (actually it’s “low correspondence”) exercise selection, and will have no or possibly a negative, training effect on your bench press maximum…

Varied:

The purpose of varying the exercise is to stress the neurology/ biology in the same fashion but in a slightly different way to stave off “hardening” or adaptation of the neurological system.

Over time, continually doing the same thing will lead to lesser and lesser results.

The law of Accommodation:

“In the broad sense it means the adjustment of an organism to its environment.  If the environment chances, the organism changes to better survive the new conditions.”- Zatisiorsky

You’re body WILL accommodate to the stresses placed upon it.

So, at some point, things must change, the input must be different enough for the body to react and force a change (adaptation) to the new stimulus.

This is why variation, eventually, is necessary for adaptation to occur.

“If you only squat, you will get only so strong because no new stimulus is introduced. This may not happen in the early stages of training, but as you become more advanced, you will need a more strenuous method of training. This training will indeed help your motor potential and help you to perfect your technical skill.”- Louie Simmons

But variation, doesn’t mean do whatever the hell you want as long as it looks similar. You must continue to stress the same neurological and biological pathways for a specific adaptation to occur.

For example: Lets take the same person who is trying to increase their bench from 315lbs.

They’ve been benching using one heavy day a week typically getting 3-5 lifts of 90%+ in.

Varying the exercise would be things like:

• Switching the bar: Straight bar to Swiss bar, Fat Bar etc
• Adding bands for tension
• Using reverse bands and a supramaximal weight.
• Adding chains
• Changing grips
• Increasing the pause on the chest
• Incorporating boards and using a higher relative percentage weight…ie 320lbs to a one board.
• Changing from sets of one to two at a slightly lesser percentage.

Varying the exercise would NOT be changing the rep range from 1-3RR or 90%+ to 8-10RM and 75%.

Doing so would completely change the biological outcome of the exercise from one that is primarily stressing the neurological system (heavier weight) to one that is stressing the muscular system more (longer duration, higher rep sets).

“On max effort day the entire volume consists of unidirectional loading. One training workout con-tributes to the next. The sequence of exercises you use does not matter, as long as the load is maximal. The time it takes to do a maximal effort, for example in a low box squat with a Manta Ray, takes at least as long as max deadlift or squat.”- Louie Simmons

We’re varying the exercise by slightly changing how the base movement pattern is performed.

“The good morning is very similar in motion to deadlifting. A conventional deadlifter will, no doubt, bend over. Therefore, bent over good mornings will increase the deadlift. But remember, when doing the good morning, in your brain, you must duplicate the action of your deadlift precisely. It is not so important to raise your good morning as to raise your deadlift by performing the good morning.”- Louie Simmons

The stress placed on the body is fundamentally the same despite the variation in the exercise.

It’s a Long Game, Commit to It.

“I just want to run 1-2 cycles of 5/3/1 and see what happens?”

So, you’re going to see what happens in 8 weeks?

If you’re any good….not a whole hell of a lot probably.

Maybe you gain 5-10lbs on your lifts (which, in 2 months for someone with experience, is excellent btw).

But if you’ve only been squatting (squatting means with a bar, on your back, I refuse to call it a “back squat”, that’s the default position the variations of it need to be named) once every 3 weeks for the last 3 years maybe you’re just not a very good squatter yet and doing it every week for the last 8 allowed you to learn the movement better and figure some of the nuance out.

What if you did 5/3/1, where you’re squatting every week, for 6 months?

Or a year?

Maybe actually committing to putting the bar on your back everyweek for the next 6 months would, for the first time, allow you to grind and train and adapt and progress and learn.

Yeah, it wouldn’t be something new and exciting everyweek, but it would be progress…

Something you probably haven’t had in a while.

And Progress, is Fun as All Hell

If you just want to be sweatty and lay in a pool of your own sweat, piss and vomit at the end of the workout tired?

Stick with the WOD mentality.

Do different workouts everyday, make it up as you go along.

If you want to get better,

find a program, get a plan and stick it out until the end. 

*Final Note, before I get some hate mail. When I refer to CrossFit, I’m referring to what they post on the main site, not what goes on in your gym. I don’t have any f-ing idea what goes on in your gym. I’ve never been to your gym.

See, it’s kinda like Nabisco. You go to the website and they say, “We sell Birthday Cake flavored Oreos and Target carries our product”. <—-Yes, I do understand the irony in that link

So you go to Target looking for Birthday Cake flavored Oreos’s and dammit they don’t have any. So you ask someone who works there, “where are the Birthday Cake flavored Oreo’s?” and they say, “We don’t sell the Birthday Cake flavored Oreo’s. But another Target might”. 

See, no two Targets are exactly alike, some suck, some are great. Some sell many flavors of Oreos, some….not so many. 

So while Nabisco says, “Target sells these Oreo’s”. They don’t mean “All Targets sell ALL flavors of Oreo’s”.

Reality is; only one, little, lonely, Target in Helena, Montana might be selling Birthday Cake flavored Oreo’s right now. But when researching what flavor of Oreos they sell at Target, I gotta go with what the mainsite, CrossFit.com posts as being an example of CrossFit because  they are the voice and public face of the brand, CrossFit, itself  Nabisco WEBSITE says. 

And, just a FYI, I did find them at Weis and they are amazing….