George cools it down and feeds a spoonful to his unsuspecting grandmother. She inflates like a balloon and grows as tall as the house. Bemused by this development, George feeds a tiny amount to a nearby chicken who grows to ten times normal size. At this point George’s family come home and George’s enterprising father sees the possibility of an entire farm of giant animals. They feed some of the potion to all of the livestock until there is a farm full of freakishly huge fauna, but nothing left in the pot.
The next day George’s dad insists he make more, and the recipe will be written down and sold around the world. There is a problem (and a point beyond a self-indulgent summary of a great book, I promise). George isn’t quite sure what went into the potion. He makes three more batches, but the results aren’t good when they are tested on some more chickens. The first grows long, stringy legs. The second grows a huge neck. The third shrinks to a tiny size.None of these developments are particularly great news for George’s dad’s ambitious plans. The grandmother sees the last potion’s effect, siezes her chance to return to her old size, and glugs down the rest of it- only to shrink down past her normal size, and beyond until she disappears altogether.
At times, I have been like young George making his medicine. When deciding how to train and eat, I’ve thrown a lot of concepts into the mix at the same time and hoped something would work. I’ve also fed my grandmother anti freeze, but that’s another story.
Websites, books, industry experts, friends, and trainers are the sources we go to when looking for the ingredients to create a program and diet plan. It’s easy to cherry pick this from Ben Coomber, that from a lean guy you know at the gym, this from Dan John and that from Jim Wendler. 6 weeks later you may be bigger, you may be stronger, you may be better conditioned with lower body fat. You may be some combination of these things. Smaller but better conditioned. Higher body fat percentage but stronger and more flexible. You may have regressed completely. And you don’t have a clue why. You don’t know what parts of your potion of ideas worked, or what didn’t. Understanding how diet templates and training plans fit together will create a result that is greater than the sum of its parts. But without knowing what does what, you’re just throwing ideas in the pot, leaving it to simmer and hoping for the best.
knowing is better than wishing
This isn’t efficient, and as people who want to maximise what we get out of our time, this is a problem.. We want to continue programs and diet templates that work for us, and drop those that don’t; but if everything you do is a weird hybrid of conflicting ideas, it’s almost impossible to know what works for you and what doesn’t.
By understanding everything that is going into the pot, you can understand what comes out. Pair complementary diet and training. Intermittent fasting while following Wender’s 5-3-1 program on the Big But Boring template (after the max reps stuff it was 5x 10 on the lift of the day @50% of max supersetted with an assistance lift for the day) was a truly stupid thing to do. High intensity followed with high volume left my body depleted. The accumulative stress coupled with inadequate recovery through diet left me exhausted. My lifts stalled or even regressed. I could have achieved far more on the program if, upon leaving the gym, I’d taped a spoon to one hand, a bucket of buttery sweet potato mash to the other, and eaten myself into a carb induced coma. After four months of 5-3-1 I stopped, thinking it wasn’t suitable for natural lifters. But the fact is that I’d tried mixing two ideas which work can work well when supported by complementary ideas. Intermittent fasting may work well for you when you’re trying to lose bodyfat, but you probably aren’t going to hit a 10kg lifetime PB on your deadlift while only eating in a four hour window for an extended period of time. It was easier to blame the program than admit that I’d wasted four months of my life because I’d stupidly just thrown some stuff I’d read on T-Nation together and hoped for the best.
Some combinations just don’t work
If you are pursuing a goal and find an idea you think will help achieve that, understand how that fits into the broader framework. Pair it with complementary training or diet. Follow it for at least three months. Evaluate your progress, or lack thereof. Try and understand which bits worked, and which bits didn’t. Decide why certain bits didn’t work. Could your sleep have been better? What about your recovery? Was every set completed in a way that was specific to your goal? Be critical, deliberate and analytical and you will progress. Be intelligent, discerning and honest when thinking about training and diet rather than slapping it all in the pot and hoping you end up with a giant chicken.
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