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Take Action and Train: Time & Strength Wait for No One - Beast Over Burden - #575 Aug 06, 2024

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Take action and train because time & strength wait for no one. Get the most out of your training, & don't spend any more time without barbell training.

Take Action and Train: Time & Strength Waits for No One

Time is our most valuable asset because we can never earn more of it. We can make changes to make more money. We cannot make changes to earn more time (though we can make changes to spend our time in more valuable ways).

You do not want to spend another year, month, week, or even day without moving toward your health and fitness goals. You do not want to be ten years older having not trained. Not only will you be no closer to your goals, you may be further away. Furthermore, you will have lost ten years' time to train and reap those benefits.

But there is no better time to begin training than now. Make the change now. If you're short on time, that is no problem: spend time with simple, hard, effective training that delivers the minimum effective dose for maximum return on investment.

Take Action and Train: MED Strength Training for Maximum Value

You get no better return on your investment of time and effort than using compound barbell movements, such as the squat, press, deadlift, and bench press.

Too many people - especially template peddlers - know because all they are selling is a program, they need to show off by including complexity and many exercise. Because of this, these programs often take 2-3 hours and have needless complexity, as it looks like you received more value with the longer, more complex workouts.

Simple, hard, effective is the way. If you're extremely limited on time, you may even simply perform one exercise a day.

You don't know how much benefit you can get from how little time. It is not easy, but it is simple. It is brutally simple and brutally effective.

Take action and train today.

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Tackling Tweaks - Beast Over Burden - #573 Jul 30, 2024

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Tackling tweaks can be terrifying. You're lifting and suddenly - OUCH - pain. We discuss how to handle these tweaks. Tackling Tweaks: Don't Catastrophize

You're lifting, all is going well, then suddenly you feel pain.

What do you do? How do you handle this? Why me, why now!?

It can be easy to catastrophize, to immediately assume the worst.

The reality is, your workout may be over, it may not be, you may be able to do something. You want to do what you can do, and most tweaks may affect one or two workouts but will have a quick return to normal.

Tackling Tweaks: Step-by-Step

Andrew & Niki break down how Niki dealt with a recent adductor tweak and how this can apply to similar situations for you.

Evaluate for red flags
Calm down
Check for range of motion
Incrementally start loading it

The first two steps may be interchangeable, but first check in with your body. Do you feel tingling? Is there bruising or swelling? Is it unilateral or bilateral? If you feel tingling or see bruising or swelling, it is more than a tweak.

Depending on how you are feeling, you may need to calm down. This may involve sitting or walking around.

Check for range of motion. Move into a position of discomfort and see if it gets better or worse. Stop if it gets worse.

Then, assuming you encounter no red flags, begin to load incrementally. It is probably a good idea to do the movement slow and controlled - maybe a tempo variation with a pause. You may adjust the movement to limit the involvement of the muscle that hurts.

Winning may look like getting some movement done - it will likely not look like getting the programmed workout done.

Tackling tweaks does not have to be terrifying. Learn how.

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Consistency: Compliance & Technique - Beast Over Burden - #571 Jul 23, 2024

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How does consistency help us reach our goals? We explore the fundamental but undervalued lynchpin to success that is consistency. Consistency: Lynchpin for Success

Repeated action brings you toward your goal. Obviously, if you want to learn Latin, you need to study Latin regularly - studying Mandarin Chinese will not help.

That being said, a mediocre plan that you consistently follow is better than the "perfect" plan followed sporadically.

Fitness influencers like to argue about the perfect program, the best exercises, the proper technique, and many other things. None of these things matter if you do not train regularly.

The difficult part of this is that you have to put in the effort for a long time before seeing the results you want.

Consistency: Compliance & Technique

This is about actions, not outcome, though the actions bring you to your desired outcome.

Compliance - following the actions that bring you toward your goal - does not mean following a rigid plan perfectly without any possibility or flexibility for deviation.

Rather, it means regularly performing actions that bring you toward your goal no matter what. You train whether you are motivated or not. That may mean bodyweight exercises, shorter workouts, fewer workouts, but it means you do not "go dark" for periods of time.

Consistency of technique, as it relates to strength pursuits, is also undervalued. Having a repeatable way to perform an exercise helps provide a clear measuring stick, let's you know if you completed a repetition or not, helps prevent injury, and targets the muscle groups as desired.

Pursue consistency, because nothing matters as much as this.

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Minimum Effective Action - Beast Over Burden - #569 Jul 16, 2024

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Learn how to get beyond the sticking points, where failure and quitting too often arise but opportunity and long-term success await those who intelligently persevere. Minimum Effective Action: Where is the Progress?

PRs have stopped, you're not feeling as good as you had been, you'll not looking forward to your time in the gym like you had been.

Sometimes it takes longer to realize than you would think, but suddenly you realize things are not going as you would like them to go (and as they had been before). What do you do?

Because recovery is the limiting factor, it is helpful to think through different areas of your life that contribute to recovery and where you might be falling short or missing the mark:

sleep (quality & quantity)
eating (quality, quantity, consistency)
alcohol
protein
routine (do you have one right now?)
stress

You will likely identify an area or multiple where you are not doing as well as you can. For example, maybe you've fallen out of your normal routine during the summer, partly by drinking more. The drinking has reduced your sleep quality and quantity and also your protein and fiber.

Tightening things up, reducing alcohol, and reestablishing your routine can help.

Minimum Effective Action: Consistency & Path of Least Resistance

Identifying the path forward when you want to make changes can be hard. Really, the simple, hard, effective way is the way forward. Focus on one or two things, and do them consistently.

The change needs to be something you can see yourself doing indefinitely. IT needs to become a habit, so that when you do not have discipline OR motivation, it is the easy thing to do.

For example, for Andrew and Niki they feel bad when they do not work or they eat bad food. It has become easy for them to eat healthier and train because otherwise they very quickly identify they feel bad and see the negative consequences.

Take the minimum effective action to reach your goals.

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Get Beyond the Sticking Points - Beast Over Burden - #567 Jul 09, 2024

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Learn how to get beyond the sticking points, where failure and quitting too often arise but opportunity and long-term success await those who intelligently persevere. Get Beyond the Sticking Points: Frustration, Failure, & Quitting

There is a time around 6 weeks into an attempted habit implementation, new diet, or workout routine, where people tend to quit.

The early, easy gains end; the long-term changes the person wants have not really been seen; and the path forward remains unclear.

This is when most people quit. They build a habit of quitting, not knowing how to get beyond this common sticking points.

If approached with wisdom and perseverance, these times are actually doors to long-term success.

Get Beyond the Sticking Points: Perseverance & Long-Term Success

These times are great times to ask for help or dig deeper. For lifting, signing up for online coaching can be great (real online coaching where you get technique feedback and personalized programming) or go in for an in-person technique check up with a professional coach.

If you cannot afford this or, for some reason, do not want to seek a coach, you have to educate yourself and become a coach.

Piling more stress on in and of itself typically does not work. Pulling the stress back often does not work. The stress-recovery-adaptation period must be elongated, no longer one stress event with time afterword, but rather a period of time where you stress yourself, build up fatigue where fitness decreases, and then allow for recovery to allow fatigue to go down, fitness to come up, and ultimately cause more performance (hopefully a PR).

Getting through these sticking points, however, is really the key to long-term success. You have to be able to handle unexpected bad times, keep going, but keep going intelligently so you do not burn out.

Get beyond the sticking points. Learn how to build life-long health and fitness habits. Strength is for everyone. Strength is for life.

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Uncomfortable Truths - Beast Over Burden - #565 Jul 02, 2024

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How do we confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves, not get bogged down in negativity, and move toward our goals. Uncomfortable Truths: Coming to Terms with Your Shortcomings

You set a goal. Inherent is this is that you do not like what you are doing now. Something must change.

You have probably intertwined your identity with the actions that you need to change.

The potential pitfall is wallowing in negativity and neuroticism. You may adopt a victim mentality. Clear this hurdle.

Uncomfortable Truths: Move Toward Your Goals

Niki and Andrew share common and personal examples.

One that happens that is less obvious is coming to terms with the slowing improvement toward the end of LP or early intermediate training.

You may have not reached the goals you expected or desired. You may have wrapped up your identity in the daily and weekly PRs, and now are trying to accept you have to do more work to get fewer PRs in less time.

Niki struggled with the process of gaining weight. She found having structure and guidelines around the process and metrics helped her have confidence in the process and her coach.

Andrew has confronted that he has accomplished much reacting to his emotions. Now, to reach further levels of professional development, he has to overcome this inclination.

Learn how to confront uncomfortable truths.

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Accessory Lifts: What's the Point? - Beast Over Burden - #563 Jun 25, 2024

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We investigate accessory lifts: what's the point? Why do auxiliary lifts and how should you think about incorporating them into your training? Accessory Lifts: What's the Point?

It's that time of year, where people begin to go on vacation and either take breaks from lifting or ask to do hotel workouts (which they often do not do).

What may cause, in part, the low compliance with hotel training is not understanding the point of the accessory lifts that, because of the limited equipment and weight, have to be used for these workouts.

So, what purpose do these lifts serve?

The provide additional volume for muscle groups that cannot be adequately stressed by solely using the main lifts.

We love the main lifts, they are fantastic tools and over time they should go up.

As you advance, though, you will almost certainly need to incorporate more of these auxiliary lifts that train muscle groups like the deltoids, triceps, biceps, hamstrings, calves, and more.

Adding Accessory Lifts to Your Training

As always, you first need to know the why? We explained the general why, but the personal why - why do you as a lifter need them now?

You have to consider your time, equipment, preference, goals, and desired muscle groups to target.

The benefits of home gyms are huge, but this is one area where home gyms tend to be more limited. You may have to get creative or invest in things such as adjustable dumbbells or pulley attachments.

These need to be performed strictly and for difficult sets. In fact, these can be more productively trained at higher RPEs than deadlifts and squats because they provide less systemic fatigue to the body.

You want to bar speed to slow down for the last rep or two and for them to be challenging. Program them for reps below 20, typically, because you do not want to stop because "you're tired."

Consider adding accessory lifts to your program if you want more training stress and hypertrophy.

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Questions for Niki - Beast Over Burden - #561 Jun 18, 2024

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We have questions for Niki Sims (and she has answers)! Learn more about Niki, her thoughts on training and life, and her goals. Questions for Niki Sims: Training, Success, & Motivation

Andrew asks Niki an assortment of questions.

What is a particularly memorable success story from one of your clients?

A story that stands out (and there are more, but this one jump into her head) is a daughter of a client who started to lift. Her family lifts, and so she started to lift.

Niki could tell something was off, but her client was not talkative. Finally, the client told Niki her back was hurting.

Niki change the training and let her know training should not hurt or be something you don't look forward to.

Now, she loves training, she is into it, and you can see the different in her videos.

How do you stay motivated to train consistently and what advice do you give to those struggling with motivation to train?

For Niki, this has become the favorite part of her day. She has tailored the time and space to what she wants. She has removed things she does not want.

If a lift is painful, she takes it out. She has her own home gym she loves. This time is a time without work (except work against gravity).

You should make this as fun and enjoyable and comfortable as you can - this includes the exercises you are doing but also the space, music, and more.

Questions for Niki Sims: Goals, Mentors, & the Future

Niki and Andrew continue.

What are your personal fitness goals and how are you working toward them?

Niki is working on her chin-ups, both 1RM and AMRAP.

Besides this, she wants to consistently train four days a week with fun training sessions to get more meat on her body. Additionally, she learning how to eat to support this.

Who are some of your mentors in the fitness industry?

Matt Reynolds has helped, but especially when it comes to learning about the business side of the industry.

Niki las learned much from Andrew Jackson on how to organize work to be more effective and efficient.

Gillian Ward, Niki's coach, has been a huge mentor, from whom Niki has learned a ton.

Lastly, Niki loved to see how Dan Campbell of the Detroit Lions infused passion into the everyday work of the team.

Where do you see the industry heading in the next 5-10 years?

Gyms will get better and better, especially in terms of equipment.

AI programming will mean less manual input but more data. You will be able to go into a gym with your program and not have to enter anything manually. You will know exactly what is available in the gym in your App.

These are questions for Niki Sims.

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Gauging Nutrition Progress - Beast Over Burden - #559 Jun 11, 2024

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Gauging nutrition progress can be hard, as weight & waist may fluctuate or not change quickly (or as quickly as we'd like). Learn how to better gauge progress on nutrition.

Niki and Andrew discuss how you can better gauge nutrition progress and advance in the realm of nutrition.

Gauging Nutrition Progress: Subjective Feelings

Tracking nutrition progress can be frustrating. The amount of work that goes into changing behaviors, even in a relatively short few day period, with no or little measurable change to metrics such as weight or waist, can cause people to quit.

What can become important, not just in these first few days but in general to become someone who builds some mastery in the realm of self-control and nutrition, is observing the feelings associated with feeling bad and feeling good.

How do you feel during training? Do you feel depleted, bloated, or energetic? Are you full, satisfied, or hungry? What do these actually feel like (e.g. how do you feel after eating an appropriately portioned healthy meal versus overeating versus undereating).

Observing these sensations and associating them with behaviors that connect to certain outcomes can help you see that you are on the right track or need to make adjustments.

Some of these feelings are longer-term feelings (e.g. tight pants, the seat belt test) others you can experience soon after a meal or after a day or a couple days of behavior changes.

Really, what you are learning to do is trust in the process by knowing the sensations that come from behaviors that will lead you toward your goals.

Gauging Nutrition Progress: Objective, Quantifiable Behaviors

Beyond this growing self-awareness, tracking behaviors that will lead you to your goals can be helpful. For example, tracking glasses of water, servings or grams of protein, servings or grams of fiber can help you track habits that will lead you toward your goal and, importantly, that you can control.

This helps provide a quantifiable metric that comes before the weight, waist, and appearance progress and is much easier to observe than the subjective feelings.

Gauging nutrition progress can be hard. Learn how to observe your subjective feelings associated with moving toward or away from your goals and create quantifiable metrics with healthy behaviors so you can better track your progress.

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Conquer Your Limiting Beliefs - Beast Over Burden - #557 Jun 04, 2024

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It's time to conquer your limiting beliefs to finally achieve that goal you've had for years or decades. Conquer Your Limiting Beliefs: What is Possible

One of the biggest limiting beliefs is failing to understand what is possible, especially over a longer period of time.

People tend to overestimate how much change they can make in a short period of time but underestimate how much they can change over months and years.

The short change bias is why so many diets fail and why many media outlets develop the "8 weeks to abs" and similar things.

Seeing "normal" people perform things you think is impossible, though, is powerful. Watching people who don't look like Ronnie Coleman or Ed Coan deadlift 500 or bench press 315 makes a big impact.

How did they achieve these goals? Through consistent training over years.

Conquer Your Limiting Beliefs: Feeling Stuck

We love what Barbell Logic offers because Barbell Logic coaches help clients get unstuck. Barbell Logic clients tend to fall into this general boat: ready to change, ready to work to change, ready to pay some money to change, but unsure of what to do.

Getting unstuck is possible. Achieving a physique or strength level you thought impossible is likely possible. It won't happen in eight weeks. It might happen in eight years. See what happens with consistent training over months and years. Experience strength with Barbell Logic.

Conquer your limiting beliefs and crush your goals.

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