Tough and Easy

Some Thoughts on Attaining Your Training Goals

     It won’t be long—about a month and a half—and the gyms will be filled with new members, intent to get in shape or lose weight as part of their New Year’s resolutions.  They’ll probably quit sometime in February.

     I have long believed that the reason for this—well, outside of the fact that it’s not something they really want to do in the first place—is because the approach they take, at least here in America, is wrong.  We live in a culture—at least, a gym culture; I suppose this applies to other areas, too—that is all or nothing.  You either train all-out, balls-to-the-wall, foot-to-the-floor (use whatever pithy little slogans you can think of) or you don’t train at all.  And to get in shape, it’s not just weights, either.  Nope, you gotta start running 5 miles a day, and throwing a medicine ball against a wall hundreds of times in a session, then battling ropes until your arms are fatigued noodles.  (Let it be known that I’ve never used battle ropes, or whatever-the-hell they’re called, a single day in my life.)  But we don’t just assume that’s the best way to train.  We make the assumption that if you do that in training, you also have to do that with your diet.  We starve ourselves on kale, carrots, chicken breasts, some plain rice if we’re lucky, and then top it off with only water to drink.  Folks give up because the training is tough, the eating is tough, and the mentality is tough—actually, crazy might be the better word.

     You want to know the secret to sticking with your resolutions?  Not just that, but the secret that actually produces results at any time of the year?  Something you can start applying right now.  Believe it or not, the all-or-nothing mentality doesn’t just cause gym-goers to quit, it doesn’t work.  The secret is to combine tough with easy.  Now, before we get much further, and just so there’s no misunderstanding, please pay attention—you wouldn’t believe some of the emails I get about some of my articles; they may have read the article, I guess, but they sure didn’t understand it—when I write “easy” I don’t mean “lazy” or “not to do any-damn-thing.”  I just mean that in all likelihood—I guess you could be David Goggins, so there’s a possibility I could be wrong—you won’t reach your goals if you attack everything “tough.”  If the training program you get on is hard, then your approach to diet should at least be reasonable.  Or vice-versa.  Same goes with applying different training methods.  Despite the absolute plethora of material online telling you otherwise, plenty of folks apparently think they can train for the world powerlifting championships while they also train for the Boston Marathon.  So, another way to put this is you shouldn’t attempt everything at the same time.

     I write about a lot of different training programs.  I even write about different diets.  Perhaps I’d have more readers if I stuck to primarily one thing.  I’m just not built that way.  Wherever my training and workout muse takes me, I go with it.  Now, most of my stuff is about serious strength training or that combined with mass-building.  But I write powerlifting programs, bodybuilding workouts, martial arts training, fat-loss regimens; you name it.  Despite the title of a recent Academy Award winner, you can’t do everything everywhere all at once.  You can try.  But you will fail.

     There’s a simple way to look at this.  (There’s another word you should be using more when it comes to reaching your goals: simple.)  Tough workouts go best with easy (and simple) diets.  Tough diets go best with easy (and simple) training programs.  A lot of the time, to be honest, you ought to stick with simple + simple.  Rarely should you utilize tough + tough.  By the way, even the tough stuff should be simple.  Simple doesn’t have to be easy.  It can be damn hard, in fact.

     Do you need to lose some body fat?  Cut out of all of your carbohydrates and start doing hill sprints.  For your weight workouts, do something like an easy strength program or a “standard” bodybuilding workout of a moderate amount of sets with a moderate amount of reps.  Don’t go to the gym and “kill it” with maximum effort singles or bodybuilding sessions with all sorts of “intensity” techniques—drop sets, forced reps, giant sets, stuff like that.  Do workouts that you enjoy doing.  You need all of your mental effort to stick with your diet and not think about twinkies, ding dongs, or ring dings.  So, give your mind something in the gym that you love doing.  It’ll make all that effort with your diet at least tolerable.

     Same thing goes if you’re trying to get as big as a house.  Most small guys don’t have a problem with the training they need to be doing.  It’s the diet.  I used to be that way when I was young.  If I was going to eat 5 to 6 meals a day and follow the GOMAD strategy—that’s gallon-of-milk-a-day if you don’t know—then I needed a training plan that I enjoyed and would stick with.  Luckily, I enjoyed heavy squats and heavy, high-rep back training.  That definitely helped.  In the gym, do the “big” lifts.  You got to squat, do some heavy pulls, and some heavy overhead work.  But also do all of the bench pressing and barbell curls your little Arnold-heart desires.  (Most guys like chest and biceps training, let’s admit.)  And for your squats and heavy pulls, if those aren’t your favorite things, at least do them in a manner that you enjoy.  If you like 5x5 training, do that.  If you like the good ol’ “standard” 3 sets of 10 reps, do that.  Hell, if you like to rest 5 minutes between sets—which is actually a good idea when trying to get big, anyway—while also talking to the pretty girl on the adductor machine, do that.  Once again, the point is if you know you’re going to have to put all of your effort into the diet, make your training enjoyable, at least reasonably so.

     What about tough workouts and easy diets?  Is that really possible?  After all, as the saying goes, and it’s not wrong, you can’t out-train a bad diet.  If you’ve been around this training thing for at least a moderate amount of time, you’ve probably seen trainees (or at least heard about them) who workout like crazy but still have donuts for breakfast and get their lunches from one of those places run by an old, grizzled white-haired man that claims to be a Colonel, and then can’t figure out for the life of them why they’re not losing weight.  So, no, I don’t mean a bad, lazy diet.  I just mean one that you can stick with.  You know, one that’s—here’s that word again—reasonable.

     If you’re training for strength, the training is what’s important.  The diet, not so much.  If you’re following a strength program—whether it’s a Hepburn-style program of multiple sets of low reps or a Westside template or a heavy-light-medium program; the kind of ones I regularly write about—you do need fuel, but you don’t need to starve yourself, nor do you need to eat like you’re trying to become Big Jim Williams.  Just make sure you’re getting enough calories to fuel your sessions and enough protein to help you recover from your sessions.  Outside of that, you don’t need to weigh your food or make sure that your macronutrient ratio is “perfect.”

     I like intermittent fasting.  I can spend my time training, or writing about training, and not thinking about food all day.  But I’m not everyone.  As with the “easy” training above, find a diet you find tolerable and one that you’ll stick with.  I know I can stick with intermittent fasting, so I often do it.

     Maybe it’s not strength you’re after.  Maybe you want to get in shape.  If you want to follow some tough-as-heck workouts to do so, I like the strategy of fast-lift-run-eat.  Fast until you train.  If you train in the morning, then have your last meal in the early evening and go to bed reasonably hungry.  If you like to train in the afternoon or evening, just fast from the time you get up until then.  Then train.  This is when you can use the “ball-busting” stuff, by the way.  When you’re finished lifting, do your cardio.  Even though I wrote “run,” it doesn’t have to be running.  It just has to be something for your cardiovascular system.  It can be an easy walk.  Do it for 30 minutes to an hour.  When you’re finished with your cardio, then it’s time to eat.

     Okay, I admit, there may be some times when you can do tough workouts along with tough diets.  In fact, there are a few times when that might be essential.  If you’re getting ready for a bodybuilding competition for instance.  Or maybe the last month before you head to the beach.  Or, heck, if you want to go that route for one month starting in January.  But if you think the only way to get in great shape is to do that all the time, then, not only will you find it hard to stick with, but your results will eventually grind to a screeching halt.

     For a few months a year, you want to do everything easy.  Play around with some new workouts or a new diet.  That’s another word we need in our lifting repertoire: play.  But I’ll save that for another essay.  Until then, decide what’s going to be tough and what’s going to be easy in your training life.  Select the right combination and stick with it.  In fact, sticking with it won’t be tough at all.  It’ll be easy.  And by the end of February, you’ll still be training.