The System

Here’s a little story. Jean Claude Van Damme walks into a bar. His loose fitting tank top sits on top his oiled, shorn body, glistening under the dim lights. His pants are baggy, always baggy. His $3,000 loafers side step a spilled drink on the floor and he surveys the bar.

This bar is like most bars: a mash up of disgusting human behavior and a few shiny gems strewn about. One gem catches Jean’s eye, a beautiful creature sitting at the bar. With hair like a fresh brewed espresso and fingers as crafty as a bonobo, this beauty lazily reclines on a barstool. One arm dangles over the back of the stool, the other consumes a juicy, fleshy treat.

“You know…I could eat a peach for hours…” says Nic Cage, the beautiful creature. A powerful feelings sweeps over Jean’s loins as he knows his night — Nay! His life! — cannot be complete without speaking to, without learning the secrets of Nic Cage’s heart.

Jean saunters up, thumbs hooked in his waist band, squeezing a few beads of sweat out onto his shoulders. He catches Cage’s attention and slowly rumbles, “Hello my sweet, may I buy you a dreenk?”

Cage, is startled, “Sorry boss, but there’s only two men I trust. One of them’s me. The other’s not you.”

Jean’s face slips into desperation. He can no longer hold onto his beaded sweat and it begins to embarrassingly soak through his tank top. Suddenly, a paw thuds on Jean’s shoulder. Despite the grease and sweat, the paw remains motionless after the sound of the clap echoes through the bar. All music and conversation has stopped. All eyes are on the man with the paw.

It’s literally a paw. There’s a guy holding a bear paw, and he slapped it onto Jean’s shoulder. It’s the creepy “Get off my train,” guy from the movie Ghost. He stares into Jean’s eyes and then asks, “Who do you think yer talkin’ to?” his words spilling out like gravel.

Jean’s biceps flex hard and he performs a flurry of unnecessary splits and the guy from Ghost falls through a wooden table, pieces of wood exploding throughout the room. A swarm of bar patrons rush to engage Jean, who somehow has already removed his shirt and is adamantly flexing, increasing his systolic blood pressure well over 170. Johnny Cage steps from behind a row of trees and Steven Segal somersaults into the room. Boba Fett crashes through the roof while Danny DeVito in his Penguin attire from Batman Returns stumbles in, opening and closing his umbrella menacingly. All of these villains begin beating Jean to the ground. As they pummel him, Jean looks through the mass of punches and kicks to see Nic Cage sitting on his bar stool laughing…laughing.

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Allow me to explain.

You are Jean Claude Van Damme. Your attraction to Nic Cage is your “bright idea”. Everything that happens after is a reflection of your bad decisions. Think of the bar in the story as your “system”.

I use the term “system” to summarize all of the crap going in the human body. In physiology, we teach all the systems separately to understand the whole. Systems of the body include the integumentary (skin), skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, circulatory, lymphatic and immune, respiratory, urinary, digestive, and reproductive. It’s easy to forget how these are interrelated, whether from a training perspective or in modern medicine.

In our case, it’s important to pay attention to all the stuff that effects our system. This awareness can help make programmatic adjustments to prevent illness, injury, or poor performance because the state of the system is an indicator of recovery capability. If the system is “depressed”, or something causes a debilitating effect on it, then all functions of the system are hampered.

Let’s go through two case studies.

The first is a person with a lot of emotional stress due to relationship issues for a month. Significant emotional stress itself can lowers the can lower the capability of the system, but it’s often associated with altered dietary and sleep habits. The person is tired, not getting enough calories, full of inflammatory stress hormones, and then on top of all of that, they are trying to maintain their normal training load.

The person in this example now has a depressed system and their physiology is not functioning at a normal level. Now imagine that they go out for a night of drinking and stay up late — events that depress the system. Their metabolism is working to oxidize the alcohol and they are dehydrated, further harming the system. A day or so later, they get sick.

It’s not that they were hit with a super bug infection that knocks them on their ass. It’s that their system had the shit kicked out of them by several different things and a minor bacteria or virus took advantage of the immune system being compromised. A good training program is a stress on the system. But so is emotional stress, a lack of sleep, binge drinking, and a lack of calories. All of the factors together create a storm that the body can’t recover from. Eventually there will be a fail point.

For the second case study, we’ll travel to  this Reddit post in /weightroom. The TL;DR is that a young fella’s deadlift strength has significantly decreased. He made a list of potential contributing factors he thought may be contributing. My answer is in the comments (/u/70sbig), but I wasn’t surprised to hear that he took a few weeks off, started a manual labor job, was training 7x/wk, decreased his deadlift frequency, and had a decrease in caloric intake.

Any one of those things would provide a change on his system that would likely have a debilitating effect. Seeing them all sitting before you in succession makes it very obvious to see why his strength suffers. But if you’re living your life and not looking at all of the variables that can influence training, it’s easy to miss them until the fail point occurs. The fail point is when you get injured, miss a lift, or finally realize you’re sick.

You easily can find yourself in a situation. You’re in a metaphorical bar (a depressed system) attracted to a beautiful creature (training). You won’t see the danger you’re in until you’re getting a solid beat down from Segal, Boba, and bad guys that know Whoopi Goldberg (the things walloping your system). Look, this metaphor is wildly out of control. The lesson is this: you may not be able to avoid problematic circumstances, but you can at least identify them and make better decisions to accommodate them. The last thing you want is to helplessly see the face of Nic Cage laughing at you uncontrollably.

PHXVQfe

 

Halloween Costume Contest

In the past we actually set up a premeditated costume contest. This year, I posted the idea on the day of Halloween, and there was still an amusing response. Here are the contestants with the winner at the very bottom.

Andrew as Slash

Andrew as Slash

Chet as Kissing Booth

Chet as a Kissing Booth

Chris and Family as Ninja Turtles

Chris and Family as Ninja Turtles

Chris as Pumpkin Pie

Chris as Pumpkin Pie

Clay as Duff McKagan

Clay as Duff McKagan

Graham as Jon Snow

Graham as Jon Snow

Iain as Teen Wolf

Iain as Teen Wolf

JT as Walter

JT as Walter

Julian as Bane

Julian as Bane

Liam as the Driver

Liam as the Driver

Matt as Macho Man

Matt as Macho Man

Mike's pup as a unicorn

Mike’s pup as a Unicorn

Paul as a Georgia State Bicycle Cop

Paul as a Georgia State Bicycle Cop

Peter as Pikachu

Peter as Pikachu

Rosco as a Bomber Pilot

Rosco as a Bomber Pilot

Tim as Simon from Adventure Time

Tim as Simon from Adventure Time

William as Hanz or Franz

William as Hanz…or Franz

Mike as Monroe

Mike as Monroe

Kyle as Strong Man

Kyle as an Old Time Strong Man

We couldn’t decide who should win, so these last two guys (Mike and Kyle) will both get a shirt. Guys, send me an email with your address, shirt choice, and size. Well done on respectively disturbing and awesome costumes.

PR Friday – 31 OCT 2014

PR Friday — Post your training updates, PR’s, and questions to the comments for the 70′s Big crew

Weekly Q&A gives you a chance to ask anyone from the 70′s Big Crew a question in the comments below, on Facebook, or Twitter. Follow 70’s Big on Instagram

Today I also posted Chalk Talk #10 – Clean Your Press; if you want to spice up or fix your press training, check that article out.

My friends, today is Halloween. We’re gonna have an impromptu picture contest, so post your costume pictures to the Facebook, TwitterInstagram, or the comments here. If the costume is 70’s Big-ish, it’ll help. The winner will get a 70’s Big t-shirt of their choice. If you’re not dressing up, then at the very least you can slap together something like Chris did a few years ago:

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The Feast

The premise of my nutrition philosophy is quality, non-inflammatory foods in appropriate macros to fuel performance. Improved body composition is a resultant or secondary goal. I use the Paleo Diet as a foundation; it is predicated on eliminating harmful foods from the diet as well as putting an emphasis on real food instead of edible processed items. Improving food quality will drop body fat off of people, but the uber Paleo approach is low on carbs.

The obvious solution — and I am baffled as to why people don’t intuitively do this — is to eat more carbs. In Paleo for Lifters I use potatoes as a primary source of carbohydrates as they are not a gut irritant and few things sound more manly than “meat and potatoes”.

It’s pretty simple: meat and potatoes, vegetables, fruit, and lots of quality fat. You can lift and train hard on this eating method. You can improve your health metrics like blood lipid profiles and blood pressure on this diet. Sometimes, you can even feast on this diet.

What is a feast? 

A feast is an event in a man’s life when he consumes a significant amount of food. Feasts are inherently at least 1.5 pounds of food; anything less is merely a meal. Feasts are memorable because of their sheer quantity, taste, or complexity. A feast should be so special, you can look back at it and say, “Remember that feast?” Everyone around you will stare with an unfocused gaze and nod their heads, “Yeah, I remember…”
Below is a modest feast.

Is food quality a concern? 

It depends. In Paleo for Lifters I give specific instructions to different population types. Are you fat and need to lose it? Are you skinny and need to gain muscle? Are you low body fat but could gain some weight? These scenarios will dictate the feast.

It’s entirely possible to have a Paleo for Lifters feast. Grill a few pounds of steak, a few rack of ribs, or a pork loin (or all three), throw in some taters with butter and go to town. But usually those feasts aren’t as fun.

If you’re concerned with health or body fat, then tighten your feast’s shot group. If you just want to have a sit down with the boys and feast your god damn eyes out, then make it official: have a feast.

How to feast? 

Feasts can be impromptu or planned, yet they need to be at least 1.5 pounds of food, preferably more. The only necessary ingredient for a feast is meat; a feast without meat is no different than your front lawn. You wouldn’t eat your lawn for half an hour, would you?

Make conditions as perfect as possible. Cook or grill it your favorite way. Get your favorite sauces, spices, or beverage. Ideally you should make it a group event. Men who feast in groups are happier, have higher T levels, and have bigger biceps.

You have two approaches to the feast: The Crush Method or The Marathon Method.

SSlam1988WarriorThe Crush Method – This is when you sit down, stare at your food for a fleeting, poetic moment, and then feast in the same manner that the Ultimate Warrior shakes the ropes. If you’re going for pure volume or you’re really hungry, this method is ideal.

My friend Jeremy (owner of CrossFit Annandale) has a Brazilian Mastiff who weighs at least 165 pounds. His name is Cane, and he “crushes” on a regular basis. Cane knows no other method. Jeremy gives him three or four chicken thighs, and Cane crushes. He snaps the bones and nearly swallows the chicken hole. We can all learn from Cane’s crushing ability.

The Marathon Method – Choose this method when in a large gathering. Barbecues, weddings, or reunions aren’t necessarily the time and place for The Crush Method. Instead, stay uncomfortably full throughout a day. Sample everything. Eat as many animals as possible (preferably already dead and cooked). Be merry. And if someone looks at you questionably, look at the women around you and shout, “OUR DIET STARTS TOMORROW! AM I RIGHT, GIRLS?”

The Meat Sweats

At some point in your feasting, you may notice a phenomenon known as “the meat sweats”. In the absence of dysfunctional kidneys, don’t let this deter you. It’s merely your body’s excited way of saying, “Yes! You’re doing it! Keep going!”

One of the guy’s I’ve trained returned home from a special operations selection. After several weeks of limited food intake, he had a hankering for a feast. He went to Krystal’s and ordered — and feasted upon — 24 Krystal burgers. He reported meat sweats so significant, it was dripping off his nose during the feast.

24 Krystal burgers may sound disgusting — because it is — but it’s an impressive feast.

And that, my friends, is what this is all about. Do something impressive. Do something memorable. Have a feast.