TRAIN AND EAT LIKE A WARRIOR

 

My son Garrett Sloan trains, eats, and looks like a warrior.

     One of the problems I often see in strength-training/muscle-building circles is an emphasis on aesthetics over performance.  Aesthetics can be “tricky” and even misleading if you only go by the “mirror” instead of what you are actually doing in your workouts.  So—you might now be asking—how should you approach your training, not to mention your diet, if the emphasis is on performance instead of mere aesthetics?  What follows are a few thoughts on exactly that.

Train the Movement or Train the Muscle? Go By the Mirror or Go By the Weight on the Bar?

     This is one of the “arguments” that you will often hear/read about, and one that can sometimes become heatedly debated.  Some bodybuilders, for instance, will argue that you should train the muscle, and not so much the movement.  They will talk about feeling the muscle, and about how you should leave your “ego at the door,” and the like.  They’re definitely not wrong when they say this.  There are far too many bodybuilders or average lifters who go to the gym to “show off” or to just see how much weight they can lift—not to mention demonstrate to others!  It’s certainly true that these lifters need to leave their egos at the door, but there is also the other side of the argument where too many lifters who train the muscle and not the movement need to be honest about the fact that they’re not gaining as well as they should because they’re not striving enough for performance.

     I can personally see the validity, at least to some extent, to both arguments.  For instance, when it comes to “ageless bodybuilding,” I’m often more in the train the muscle and not the movement camp because I believe, once you reach a certain age, you need to be more concerned with longevity and “health span,” so it’s better to NOT be focused so much on simply getting stronger (or, conversely, bigger).  But for the vast majority of lifters, I believe that it’s wholeheartedly better to focus on training the movement over the muscle.  Even the older lifter—and I most unreservedly place myself in this boat—who doesn’t need to place so much emphasis on simply getting stronger and/or bigger would do well to focus on other performance markers as indicators of growth and improvement in his or her fitness/physique goals.  It’s just that the emphasis for improvement needs to shift from a pure strength/mass-gaining focus to an endurance/time/length-of-workout focus.

     This is where I think you would do well—no matter what stage you’re at in your training; whether you are young and solely focused on strength, or whether you are well-past middle-age and focused on improving your cardiovascular strength—to think of your fitness/physique goals as would a warrior.  The warrior, the soldier, the combatant, etc. is not worried about what he looks like.  He is worried about how he performs.  His training and his nutrition is geared towards achieving performance goals, not whether or not he has a “great physique” when he takes off his clothes and looks in the mirror.  Now, before we go any further, let me be clear: you should use the mirror as an honest indicator of where you are at, especially when it comes to body fat percentage.  But use it more as a gauge or a tool in your arsenal, not as the last harbinger of whether or not you are succeeding.  Because the thing is this: if you train and eat with performance in mind, the aesthetics will follow.

Train Like a Warrior

     Let’s talk about training first.  Nutrition next.

     If this isn’t your first time to read my work, then you probably know that—in order to optimize results—I believe every lifter must be doing the following thing each and every week in her training.  These things are:

• Squat heavy things

• Pick heavy things off the ground

• Press heavy things overhead

• Drag or carry heavy stuff for time or distance

     One of the easiest ways to do this is to focus on improving your strength and performance in specific exercises.  Instead of having a leg day, you have a squat day.  Instead of having an upper body “push” day, you have a bench press and barbell overhead press day.  Instead of having a “pull” day, you have a day of training heavy deadlifts and power cleans.  And instead of having a “drag” or “carry” day, you have a day of farmer’s walks.  This ensures the emphasis is on increasing the performance on very specific lifts, whether that performance is for repetitions or for raw, single-max strength doesn’t matter so much, so long as the performance goal itself is specific.  Here is a training split that would work well using this methodology:

• Day One: Squats and Farmer’s walks

• Day Two: Flat Barbell Bench Press and One-Arm Overhead Dumbbell Presses

• Day Three: Off

• Day Four: Deadlifts and Power Cleans

• Day Five: Off

• Day Six: Repeat

     As far as sets and reps go, pick a scheme that is conducive to results.  Because here’s another thing, and one that too many lifters don’t understand: the most common set/rep schemes—such as the oft-used 3 sets of 10 reps—are not very conducive to results, at least very specific results that you can monitor at each workout.  The lower the sets, and the higher the repetitions (this does change when you are doing ultra-high repetition sets, but this isn’t the time to go into such an in-depth discussion; I’ll save it for later) means that your performance will “wave” quite a bit on a regular basis.  If you are aiming for, say, 3 sets of 10 reps with a weight, and you get 2 sets of 10, and 1 set of 8 reps at your first workout, you may be quite surprised when, at the next workout, you manage to only get 1 set of 10 and 2 sets of 8 reps.  Of course, at the next workout after that one, you may find that you easily get 3 sets of 10 reps, only to follow it up with a workout where you don’t get 10 reps on any of the 3 sets.  This is one of the reasons why lifters find their numbers oscillating so much from session to session.  Instead, flip the typical way of performing sets and reps on their heads—utilize more sets than reps.  This is the key to having a more, and much better, performance-based, results-oriented program.

     If you’re after strength, then for the next 4 to 8 weeks, try the following set/rep protocol using the above split: perform 5 to 8 doubles on each exercise.  Select a weight where you know you can get 5 doubles, but you’re unsure if you can get any more.  See how many doubles you can get with that particular weight.  Once you can get 8 doubles, increase weight at the next session and repeat the process.  Make sure that your rest between sets stays consistent at each session.  This ensures that you’re not making “progress” simply by increasing the rest time between sets at each ensuing session.

     If you’re after more muscle mass, then train with 8 to 10 sets of 5 reps.  For this method, however, keep the sets the same at each session.  If you decide to do 10 sets of 5 reps, then select a weight where you would probably reach failure around the 10th repetition.  Do 10 sets with this weight, and keep track of the amount of reps you do on each set.  After you have performed between 7 and 8 sets, you may struggle to get all 5 reps.  Once you can do 5 reps on all 10 sets, increase weight at the next session.

     There are, quite obviously, a myriad of other ways to train for performance-based results, and the above is just one suggestion, albeit a highly effective one, which is the reason that it’s the program(s) I chose.  Whatever kind of program you choose, just make sure that it includes the following elements:

• Make sure you incorporate the “Big 4” each and every week, so you must squat heavy weights, press heavy weights overhead, pick heavy weights off the ground, and carry or drag heavy implements for either time or distance.

• Make sure that your sets are always higher than your repetitions.  In other words, 10 sets of 3 reps is almost always a better choice than 3 sets of 10 reps.  So whether it’s 10 sets of 2, 8 sets of 5, 15 sets of singles, or even just 6 sets of 4 reps, just remember that these are (for the most part) better than their inverse.

• Make sure that you include enough variety to keep from going stale, but not so much variety that you aren’t able to monitor your results closely.  This is why I want you to stick with the same exercises, and the same set/rep combos for at least 4 weeks before you decide to make a change.

Eat Like a Warrior

     Most people understand that training has to be, at least to some extent, performance-based.  However, I don’t think most people apply that same understanding to diet and nutrition.  In fact, I doubt very few people do so.  When most think about nutrition, they often think of “losing weight” or “gaining muscle,” decidedly aesthetic-based ideas, and most decidedly NOT performance-based understandings.  This is, of course, a mistake, but I also think it’s one that can be fairly easily corrected.

     I would prefer if lifters thought about nutrition in this manner:  First, you approach training with the goal of increasing your performance.  Second, you devise a training program to increase a very specific performance.  Third, based on these first two, you devise a nutritional program with the specific intent of increasing that performance.  It’s the third part that most dedicated lifters, and even dedicated performance athletes, get wrong.  Even powerlifters will too often approach nutrition—if they even approach it at all—as something that will allow them to “stay lean” or to “get bigger” instead of devising a nutritional regimen that is a direct answer to the training they are imposing on their bodies.

     The next, and most obvious question, you may have is how do you actually go about doing this?  What does this approach look like in practice?

     If you’re a low-rep strength athlete, for instance, then you need to eat a very high-protein diet, but one that limits carbohydrates.  You aren’t doing as much aerobic training—if you’re even doing any—so you don’t need a lot of carbohydrates, however, you need to base total caloric intake each day on how much training you’re doing during the week.  The more that you train, the more that you need to eat.

     If you’re trying to gain muscle, this is where the old-fashioned, “traditional” advice works best:  You need plenty of protein, fat, and carbohydrates.  But not just to “gain muscle,” rather, those are the foods that fuel the kind of workouts you better be doing if you’re after serious hypertrophy.

     Conversely, if you’re an older athlete, such as myself, then you need to be doing plenty of cardiovascular activity, and just general movement, during the week.  This means that as an older athlete, you need to make sure that you’re eating enough “good” carbohydrates to fuel your activity, along with staying well-hydrated.

     The bottom line is to make sure that your diet reflects your training choices and your training goals, not just what you want to look like from an aesthetic perspective.

     There is enough to write about “training and eating like a warrior” to probably fill an entire book, much less this one small blog post.  In the future, I may do some more posts on the subject, especially if I get many questions based on this essay.  And if you have any comments or questions, leave them in the “comments” section below or, even better, send me an email.