Do As I Say, Not As I Do

The past 72 hours have been some of the most stressful and intense of my entire life. In fact, things got really bad starting on Monday morning but things have been spiraling slightly out of control for the past several weeks.

This Monday morning around 11am was when I got the semifinal sales page from our web designers for Lift Weights Faster, the amazing workout library my wife, Jen, is launching. We were supposed to go live the next morning at 10am. Things looked dire.

I spent the next 23 hours working to put together all of the tech pieces that were still outstanding. At some point around 4am I realized that I wasn’t shivering because I was cold — the space heater was dutifully keeping the room toasty warm — but because I was running on pure adrenaline. I finished around 9:15, just in time for the 10am launch time.

By 1pm when it seemed like things were relatively stable (I would eventually be proven wrong) I was facedown on the hardwood floor passed out. I wasn’t just tired, I felt like I had been through an ordeal. My stomach hurt, my head hurt, and I felt stupid.

Beyond dealing with the unexpected and simply having to finish things at the last minute that various parties hadn’t delivered earlier, this launch was so nerve-wracking because it represents perhaps the biggest moment in Jen’s career, and certainly the biggest step forward. Putting something you created out there and saying “I made this” is an enormous risk. I had to make sure everything worked, and besides the fact that we had more work to do than there were hours in the days for the past two weeks it was terrifying and nerve racking to be in that position.

Listen, I realize this is a pretty soft situation in the grand scheme of things. I have friends who are special operations forces who would get a good laugh out of this. There are probably single moms for whom this would be a welcome respite. Nonetheless, the demand placed upon me was far outsidemy limits and what I’m accustomed to.

The point of telling you how awful I felt after staying up for 30 hours straight, believe it or not, applies directly to training.

Put in the terms I use to discuss training, this event was fully distressful for me. I was operating way outside my limits (I make no apologies that I’m a 9-10 hours of sleep per night guy) and I had to pay a high cost for it. This is not stress my body easily resolves, and I pushed fully into distress.

It was the training equivalent of choosing a weight I can’t truly handle and doing it for more reps than I should with no rest. And then doing some more.

It all came to a head when, on Monday afternoon, I took a break from putting together the sales page to shoot a video to tell you about the strength training component I wrote as a companion piece to Lift Weights Faster. About six months ago, Jen asked me to create a program that people could use in conjunction with her conditioning library, which of course I was very excited to do.

I had a complete and total meltdown during filming.

I couldn’t think of words, and the more takes we did the more stressed I got. Even with sticking cue cards on the wall behind the camera, I was having a complete breakdown. After every bad take I contemplated saying, “I can’t do this” and throwing up my hands.

But I didn’t have much of a choice. Emails had been scheduled, promises had been made, and there was no turning back. The ball was rolling.

So when you see that video, you now know the inside scoop. I apologize in advance for it. The state I put myself in with the lack of sleep and pushing harder and harder meant that when I was called on to perform the result was miserable. I was beholden to external control, rather than doing what was even remotely best for me and my body.

Which is an anecdotal way to say that distress is not a good place to be. The cost is high and the result is often terrible.

Yet, the distress model of operating represents exactly how most people train. An arbitrary set of exercises with no regard for how they interact with their body. Reps and rest and other parameters based on a math formula, not modulated by the response of their own biological systems. Frankly, it’s a recipe for disaster so it’s no surprise that a lot of people haven’t set a personal record since back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark.

I got into the fitness industry in the first place because I want to change exactly that.

When I learned the method of training that I employ and teach, called Gym Movement, I truly felt an obligation to teach other people. I want people to know that it can be easy to make incredible progress in the gym. Not only can it be easy, but by making it easy you do exactly what enables you to make the most progress possible. And believe me, it’s incredibly satisfying to hit PRs every single time you train. How much better would you be a year from now if you set multiple PRs every day?

The strength companion program I wrote for Lift Weights Faster is, appropriately, called Get Stronger Faster. For foreseeable future, it is available exclusively as an add-on to Lift Weights Faster, which is fortunate because Jen has put together an absolutely astonishing resource in Lift Weights Faster. She can tell you more about it on the site, but suffice to say that if someone who hates conditioning work as much as I do can enjoy the workouts Jen designed, anyone can. It’s a massive resource: The manual includes 130 workouts, with 225 written exercise descriptions and photographic demonstrations, and nearly 20 how-to videos.

Get Stronger Faster is an application of the Gym Movement protocol that you could say is a distillation of a lot of what we’ve learned over the years of training clients at The Movement Minneapolis. I looked at what worked, what didn’t, what people enjoyed, and what people disliked and formulated a template that fully integrates your biofeedback into the plan. Your next 3 months of training might look similar to someone else’s on Get Stronger Faster, but it would also be incredibly different.

The goal of the program is to make you stronger, faster, of course. To do so, I have you do exactly what is best for your body based on your biofeedback and work just within your limits by avoiding excessive effort. Skeptical? So was a new client I just started working with a couple weeks ago. He emailed me before our session the other day saying:

“I have to admit that I was skeptical of your ‘stop a few reps short’ mentality but I’m finding that I’m actually firing better in the appropriate muscle groups and having better lifts.”

It’s a common thing I heard from people who are shifting their mentality from what they used to do, which didn’t work very well or they wouldn’t have sought me out, to a better way of training.

Big surprise though – when you work within your limits you do better than when you push through and work for 30 hours with no sleep.

So, do as I say, not as I do. As I type the final words in this post it’s 3:14am, and in all likelihood I’ll be up another hour or so making tweaks to the various parts of our campaign. In my view, this is a necessary distress that I have to do, regardless of the toll it takes. When the launch is over I’ll pay the cost and rest and recover.

The gym is always optional, always flexible, and never a necessary distress. Treat it like the opportunity that it is to get better in exactly the way that is best for YOU.