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Are You Working Hard Enough? - The Voluntary Hardship Series S15E6 Jun 11, 2021

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If you're failing early in LP, you have to ask yourself: are you working hard enough? Some symptoms of not working hard enough might be not uploading your failed sets to your coach & failing reps early in LP (like the first 6 weeks). This often occurs with people who think a lot in their work. No thought will help you move from the bottom of a squat to the top of a squat besides a simple cue.

As an example, consider the Bulgarian Method, a program of lifting where lifters train 6 days a week with heavy weights. We don't recommend this, but the point is that you're not working that hard in the weight room and though there are people out there who coaches will need to rein in, but you're likely not one of those people.

LP, especially, is simply not enough stress to overtrain you and the risk of injury is incredibly low. Not only does strength training have low risk, but you're in the steep part of the adaptivity curve and you're not moving heavy weights compared to your biological limit.

Many of these people have done hard things in other areas of their lives. They might be professionals like lawyers, doctors, or engineers who solve complicated problems as part of their job, but in the case of heavy weights you need to turn your brain off a bit.

If you're a coach, you might see that they failed a rep and then didn't send you the video. Or they failed the rep and then backed off. They often might have an idea or solution about what happened too.

When it comes to shutting off your brain and just thinking about the cue, the lifts have different flavors. Bench press & squat are similar in that they start in the top and a failed rep can be awkward. Press starts from the bottom, but people often use something to get the bar going on heavy reps. The deadlift, though, is just going to take some time to get off the floor on a heavy rep.

So, are you working hard enough?

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Motivation over Discipline - The Voluntary Hardship Series S15E4 Jun 10, 2021

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It is popular these days to laud discipline and the ability to endure suffering. The problem with this is that it ignores people's values and preferences. Some people can bear more hardships, but others are drawn to certain types of hardships. Some people--gasp--like running, and many lifters do not.

Matt, for example, enjoys waking up early and getting things done. He's done this since he was young. It's not a challenge for him. Staying up late, however, to complete tasks is difficult. The path to productivity for Matt is to acknowledge this and exploit it and continue to wake up and get after it.

This doesn't mean that discipline doesn't matter or won't be necessary, but we need to examine our feelings for habits we've failed to create or end. If we begin to pursue a hobby and can't seem to make time for it, despite having the time, maybe this doesn't align with our values or preferences. We either need to find the good, the enjoyment, the creativity--that thing that draws us in--or we need to potentially look for alternatives.

Similarly, external motivation is a poor way to change behavior. While incentives matter, think about trying to change someone's opinion or getting someone else to lift or eat healthy or join you in something you enjoy. The other person has to come to the activity on their own terms, or they won't do it or will have resentment toward you.

So, know your values & preferences. Look for the good in the things that take up your time. If you can't seem to find it, it might be time to try to change your activities.

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Confidence Matters: Strength Training's Greatest Benefit - The Voluntary Hardship Series S15E3 Jun 09, 2021

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One of strength training's biggest benefits is CONFIDENCE. As people grow stronger, overcome difficult things, and build a more capable body, they tend to carry themselves differently and bring confidence to other areas of their lives.

Increased capability lends itself to more confidence. You know your body and do more and meet physical challenges better than it did before. You know that you can do difficult things, repeatedly, and gain confidence from that. Finally, as you train you begin to build a capable, muscular body. All these contribute to confidence.

Some may criticize this idea, as ultimately squatting and deadlifting aren't THAT hard compared to the myriad challenges humans can face. Maybe this is true--modern lives come with comforts and conveniences--but we can add difficulty with strength training, better ourselves, and prepare ourselves for unexpected, involuntary hardship.

Gyms are notorious for tearing down confidence, not building it up, so as a lifter look for supportive gyms and coaches. If you're a coach, you have to know not only that you're not a drill sergeant but also that technique cues & programming aren't enough. To have to support your client.

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Voluntary Hardship - The Voluntary Hardship Series S15E2 Jun 09, 2021

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This is a throwback to the early days of the podcast. Matt and Scott discuss the concept of voluntary hardship: what is it and how does it refine us?

Life will undoubtedly present difficulties. This is involuntary hardship. Choosing to go through something difficult, however, seems to provide benefits.

Essentially, this is delayed gratification: do something hard now to delay the benefit to a future you. Working, working out, saving & investing money, growing food: these all require work now for future benefits.

Think about what provides you value and what does not? If you're doing things that deprive you of value, reduce or eliminate these activities.

One useful framework is using the concepts of urgent & important to create 4 categories of activities. Important activities provide value. Urgent things need to be completed soon.

Not urgent, not important: provide no value-->reduce or eliminate
Urgent, not important: these tend to take up lots of our time-->reduce the time these take up
Not urgent, important: the hardest category to protect; find ways to spend more time doing these
Urgent & important: worthy of your time, but don't ignore the important things that are not urgent

As you can see, the important things that are not urgent are the hardest to get done. There is little to no pressure.

Work seems to be something people have to do. It provides a creative outlet and helps prevent us from spending too much time with unimportant, nonurgent tasks (vices).

You can also appreciate the beauty and good of human work. A well-cooked steak, good cheese, a beautiful painting or building. These required the dedication of the craftsman in pursuit of excellent, the everyday work on these skills. The fruits are sweet, though they require much work to come to fruition.

Much modern work can be unsatisfactory. Some time spent on simple, hard things can be refining. Squatting, splitting wood, growing food: simple, hard, effective.

Voluntary hardship goes against the grain. You have to pursue the important, nonurgent things because you value them and have the discipline to continue this work.

Finally, this isn't simply work for work's sake or white knuckling discipline, though a bit of that may be necessary. It's about looking toward the future and cultivating a life spent doing more things that provide value, not pleasure in the here and now.

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Mindset Matters: Voluntary Hardship Reexamined - The Voluntary Hardship Series S15E1 Jun 07, 2021

Show notes

Life comes with difficulties, no matter what we do. Hardship comes voluntarily or involuntarily, but for any hardship our mindset before, during, and after matters: how we approach and process challenging events matter.

Hardship--voluntary or involuntary--can refine us and improve our relationships, or it can beat us down and weaken social ties. Our relationship with the event--which we define with our mindset--helps determine the benefit to us.

Why are you taking on the hardship? What are your thoughts about the hardship? If it's involuntary, what's your story about the difficulty?

Think of military units or families who are subjected to hardships: deaths, challenging missions, divorce, tragedy. We know that not all military units or families come out better on the other end. Our stories about these events matter.

If we consider the event a challenge, it should be a self-challenge about seeing how we can push ourselves, not about being better than others or being perceived as good.

In line with this, Matt even argues that past hardships can benefit more today if you reprocess them and develop healthier stories about them.

This ultimately comes down to your values and priorities. Having awkward conversations can prevent huge amounts of mental bandwidth going towards resentments and anger toward others, so it's probably better to have the awkward conversations.

Niki shares her experience with cleaning out her house and ridding herself of unnecessary items. Ultimately, this came down to not holding onto things she doesn't value and don't improve her life. She added that if you don't see the objects in your desired life that you're pursuing, you probably should get rid of them.

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The Art of Coaching with Brett Bartholomew #368 May 31, 2021

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Brett Bartholomew joins Matt & Niki to discuss the art of coaching: what is coaching and how to do it more effectively. Brett is the author of Conscious Coaching, and you can find out more about Brett & his work here. Consider experience versus exposure. Experience requires skin in the game. You might have exposure to lifting and ideas around coaching or business, but do you have experience doing it. An example might be the difference between criticizing podcasts versus doing a podcast yourself or coaching versus criticizing a coaching methodology. Brett works with professional athletes and has developed a knack & reputation for working with "difficult" athletes. He enjoyed the challenge and honing his communication and connection skills with these athletes. An important note, that applies to all coaches and really all professionals, showing your client how smart you are doesn't mean you're coaching them well: this doesn't lead to effectiveness or connection. You need to build buy-in and trust. While technique coaching and intelligent, personalized programming are great, they aren't enough. A point of discussion here is public versus private sector. Consider D1 athletes or military service members as opposed to people paying you to receive coaching. The former have to show up and work as part of their job. The latter can quit at any time, and only continue if they want to. This leads to Brett's ideas of commitment, compliance, or resistance. To create these categories, you need to consider the task and relationship in the situation. Is the relationship good or bad? Does the client appreciate or like the task or not? If both are bad, you get resistance. If both are good, you get commitment. If you relationship is good but they don't buy in with the task, you get compliance. Another factor as a coach is that one-size-fits-all doesn't work. There are different types of clients and athletes (and, again, there's variation within, but categorization aids understanding). There are also coaching types, so you have to know your preferences and tendencies. Most people learn how to coach through a combination of how they were coached and their perception of what is successful (what they observe). When coaching the world-class or professional, you have to consider the difference between behaviors and traits and how they apply to their domain of excellence. Behaviors can be situational (potentially in the case of a world class athlete). Traits stay consistent. If you are truly world class at something, you will be narcissistic in that domain, whereas if you have a narcissistic trait that remains consistent throughout your domains of life. Brett also discusses some struggles he went through when he was younger with overexercising & also finding a way to connect through Dr. Katie. He both wanted to avoid his home life and his friends who began doing hard drugs. He came to compulsively exercise, and was sent to an institution oriented toward people with eating disorders. The treatment was similar to prison, where he had no privacy and no choice. During this time, he felt no connection with the supposed experts and professionals who were supposed to help him. He was even told, as his parting, "You'll be back." Dr. Katie finally connected with him, showing him a way to help others and actually be effective in changing others' behaviors. They end by discussing marketing: how do you ethically self-promote? Well, first, differentiation is critical. What is your brand? How do you communicate your value? If you haven't thought about this, or think this is below you, you still have a brand and are still communicating your value, though not doing so consciously. This episode touches business and health, coaching and personal growth, and the personal and professional. Check it out.

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BJJ & Strength with Chewjitsu #367 May 24, 2021

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Niki talks to Chewjitsu (aka Nick Albin), a competitive black belt Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practictioner to discuss BJJ, strength, sports-specific training, & balancing various physical attributes & life pursuits. You can find him here: https://www.youtube.com/user/chewybjj https://www.chewjitsu.net/ Chewie is a strength advocate within the BJJ community, a community that sometimes dismisses strength as sloppy or cheating or preventing good technique. While proper technique is important, these same people would likely not dismiss conditioning or flexibility or dedication as things that stand in the way of good jiu jitsu. Strength is important for life, and important for BJJ. Strength is really about building your machine. Add muscle, improve strength, build your injury resilience. Then apply this strength in your pursuit of BJJ. One error many BJJ novices make is they get hooked and then want to improve everything at once, which can cause burn out. Just like with strength, consistency is key, and understanding that we're in this for the long haul can help. If you lift and decide to pursue BJJ, you'll need to set priorities. Likely one will need to be prioritized over the other (though this can change). You may almost assign seasons throughout the year where you put one above the other. For BJJ, you may focus on it for months leading up to a competition. For strength, you may decide you want to hit some new PRs, so BJJ may need to become less important. When it comes to strength training for BJJ, it's really like training for anything else. Strength training gets you stronger, and you apply your strength in BJJ. Many will try to load a BJJ movement with the idea of "sports-specific training." This is really misguided for a couple reasons. First, if you find yourself moving through a particular movement repeatedly in your sport, it probably makes sense to emphasize a different or opposite movement in your training. Second, training is meant to get your body stronger. Apply this strength on the mat, but do the same movements anyone would who is building their strength. BJJ can be a fun, meaningful pursuit that definitely falls within the voluntary hardship realm. Coming to BJJ with your strength will help. This episode will help you consider how best to do that.

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Q&A 56 #366 May 17, 2021

Show notes

Matt & Niki and your lifting and life questions.

Topics include coaching certifications oriented to coaching females, shoulder pain from presses & squats, adductor tears during squats, office strength groups, and power clean rack position.

0:00 Introduction & BLOC Party Overview

8:16 Programming During Weight Cuts

Gained a bunch of weight during LP, having a USSF meet coming up: still want to hit big numbers, but want to lean down
Performance doesn't have to suffer very much with small weight cut if done intelligently
Top set with volumes can really be a nice combination of hitting enough volume and still hitting the intensity
Lots of volume can help maintain muscle mass
Drive up that top set as much as possible

15:21 Certification to Coach Females?

Do you need to get a certification for coaching females? No
Need to improve your coaching, in general
Need to relate to your clients
Permission to coach mindset: more variation within group than between
5x3 works well for lots of people with a deficiency of upper body muscle mass

23:32 Shoulder Pain

play with squat grip: probably bring it in
guess at what it is: proximal bicep tendinopathy
if it persists, put squat at the end of the workout (as squat tends to make rest of workout worse)
be very specific in where things hurt
do more sets of lower reps with slower, perfect form
lower the weight, slow down the lift
keep pain below a 3 and look for it to reduce over time
incline dumbbell press?
work to get the intensity back up
can also play around with frequency

30:14 Adductor Pain during Squats

Where is the pain presenting itself? (middle or end of muscle)
Is it at the tendon or in the muscle belly
Did you bruise?
Play with stance angle and ensure form is on point

35:25 Strength Office Activities

Start a strength training for running & cycling groups, but it's really just strength
Help coach 1/3 sessions they lift
Cycling Power Development

38:27 Power Clean Rack Position

wrist mobility or strength?
have to think about strength & mobility and what they really are, first

43:00 Most Impactful Non-Strength Books

Matt: Lonesome Dove, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Measure What Matters, The Bible
Andrew: Endurance, Man's Search For Meaning
Niki: Deep Work, Sparking Joy, Into Thin Air, Bone Clocks

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The Ways & Wherefores of Weight Cuts #365 May 10, 2021

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Gillian Ward joins Niki Sims to talk weight cuts and Niki's recent experience cutting weight, which Gillian helped her with. Why cut weight, and how do you cut weight if you decide to cut weight? Weight cuts aren't for beginners, and people need to really think about why they want to cut weight. This isn't about sustainable weight loss like we've discussed with Take Charge 10 and the Nutrition Series. It's probably better--especially around weight cuts for weight class events--to compete in a heavier weight class. Cutting weight adds a large amount of stress and can limit performance. Others may want to cut weight for their job (e.g. the military) or improve their appearance for specific event (wedding, reunion, beach). Finally, some people compete in physique competitions. This is the most advanced type of weight cut, as not only do you want to look better but looking better in a specific way at a designated time is the whole point of the competition. This requires more precise work and dedication, both long term leading up to the competition and in the days and hours before the competition. The amount of weight matters. Other factors to think about here, beyond the reason the weight cut, include: salt, carbohydrates, sweeteners--sugar & artificial, alcohol, fluid intake, and, for females, which part of the cycle the weigh in will occur during. Niki cut weight for a BJJ event and had planned to cut months in advance, so performance mattered. She has also worked with Gillian before, so Gillian had lots of information about Niki with how she and her body react to certain interventions. Niki also has high compliance, so not following Gillian's prescriptions wasn't a worry. Niki was able to be transparent with Gillian of all the relevant details leading up to the event. They knew the amount of time between the weight cut and the event, and Niki knew exactly why she wanted to cut weight. Niki manipulated carbs and liquids, and the suffering window was relatively short. She upped her liquid intake leading up to the event, then cut it immediately before the weigh-in. She also reduced carbohydrates immediately before the weigh-in. Niki & Gillian also had contingencies prepared if, on the morning of the weigh Niki's weight was not where it needed to be. Contingencies can include sauna time or other ways to induce sweating and fluid loss. Because these contingencies were not ideal, it's really important to follow the plan. The contingencies are contingencies for a reason. One hand trick Niki plans to keep is cucumber and lemon in water. Cutting weight is ultimately about manipulating fluid. Outside of manipulating fluids, manipulating salt, processed food, alcohol, sugar, artificial sweeteners, and carbohydrates can all be factors. Gillian's #1 rule is to keep the weight cut healthy: there is no reason to risk ending up in a hospital. Finally, Niki & Gillian discuss what many people can relate to: wanting to improve appearance for a specific event or period of time. Ultimately, this is NOT about scale weight but rather appearance, so fluid can be manipulated to prevent belly bloat. If the event is far off, sustainable weight loss approaches should be planned, and then the icing on the cake can be some fluid manipulation. A final note. Weight cuts can be exhausting, so, again, really think about why you want to do this. You're adding stress to the event, and it might not be worth the effort.

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Strong Mom Myths Busted: The Strong Mom Series S14E5 May 07, 2021

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Rachel Reynolds joins Bekah & Anna Marie to bust some strong moms myths, including toning & tightening, burning belly fat, giving you energy, and confidence.

0:00 Introduction

2:57 Energy to Keep Up with Your Kids

doesn't give you energy, but gives you strength & confidence & calmness
it's a give and take because it also takes energy

6:31 Tightening & Toning Your Body

nope
lifting does probably does what you want "toning" to be & do
visible muscles but not too many muscles
can't promise what you're going to look like
your body will change
finding clothes can be more difficult, but more options exist these days

20:15 Burning Belly Fat

lifting does use some energy and also helps skews calories toward building muscle
you want to be a gas-guzzling body and eat all the calories, not a prius
it does take hard work to look a certain way
lift+nutrition=superpower & real body transformations
just dropping body weight really won't do what you think it will do (you probably won't be happy with the result)
you can eat more food

35:33 Body Transformation & Not Feeling Like Yourself

can cut and get stronger if you start off bigger
some people have a number they're unwilling to get heavier than, regardless of how they look
important to have people in your corner (spouse, friends, family)

43:33 Strength Training Builds Confidence

Yep
choosing to struggle builds confidence
sense of control as well

52:27 Why Train as a Busy Mom?

try it
how important is your long term health for you and your quality of life?
find a coach you connect with
you can do it!
most people have this "I'm so glad I did that" feeling about training, getting stronger, and the overall process & change
you won't regret trying it

#strongmoms

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