Old habits and ways of thinking die hard, usually because they served us well at some point — though with varying degrees of consequence. I came across an Instagram / Substack post with strength and conditioning standards reminiscent of what I had previously written.

The post was similar both in categories of movement and tiers of performance. Initially, I “liked” it. Then I hated it.

I don’t know anything about the trainers or organization that published it, so that’s not the point of this article. The point is that I realized the more we’re beholden to any idea or ideal, the more imprisoned by it we become.

Subscribe now

The two major complaints I have here are regarding (1) content and (2) process. The first, smaller, problem is the content.

If one were to describe an “elite” standard as:

• Bench Press: 1.5x BW

• Back Squat: 2x BW

• Deadlift: 2.5x BW

• Pull Up: 15

• 5 Mile Run: 35:00

• 6 Mile Ruck (45 lbs.): 1:15:00

Then we should first note that the time frame of achievement matters greatly. If this is a career resume, it’s not bad, but certainly doesn’t knock my socks off. If we’re talking about a rotating seasonal cycle (e.g. winter strength, summer endurance, and fall capacity) then this is much more impressive, but still doable.

If the “standard that keeps us accountable” — which the post in question asserted — is that one should be able to perform any of those 6 tasks on-demand at any time throughout any given year, then I’m extremely skeptical.

Benchmarks with multiple tiers often come with the implication that scaled (down) tiers are of lower standing (i.e. for novices to aim for) and that the highest tier (RX?) is the “real standard.” What happened to being “cross-fit” enough that physical fitness was not a limiting factor in my skill / sport / or operational tasks?

In a more practical sense, Dan John uses similar “expected” and “game-changer” verbiage for lower tiers 1 and 2, but most importantly denotes the third, highest, tier as “specialized.”

This is much more honest in my opinion, as it implies that exceptional performance in one area will always come at the expense and exclusion of other areas.

The second, much larger, problem is in the process of how we (as an industry and collection of practitioners) define these “standards” and “benchmarks.” In the case above we have what appears to be intended as tests of:

• Strength,

• Aerobic Capacity, and

• Endurance.

First, we have three classic power lifts. Note the important distinction in nomenclature. Strength may be a pre-requisite for expressing power, but it is not tested here — save for the vertical pull (pull ups). Further, all of the “big lifts” involve an axial (balanced) load executed through a bilateral (even plane) movement.

This is where we start to see a breakdown in “functional” and “preparedness” language as well. Synthetic benchmarks and testing are fine, but they are a poor representation of real-world or sporting demands. We all know the difference between “farmer strength” and “gym strength.”

Next, we have the run. The problem here is that running is a skill. In fact it’s not just one Olympic sport, but several of them. This means that if my skill in that sport doesn’t match the capability of my engine (heart and lungs), this is a very poor test of aerobic capacity. On that note, there are far better ways to assess mobility (the structural chassis) than by running.

Speaking of structural chassis, lastly, we have the ruck. If I weigh 180 lbs, and want to be “elite” then I’m expected to keep about a 12:00 / mile pace while carrying 25% of my bodyweight. Perhaps I’m just an idiot, and under-whelmingly not-elite, but that sounds like acute orthopedic trauma to me.

I suspect that the ruck is intended to test endurance, but here’s the catch:

Endurance isn’t just about suffering. It is about learning to love, which is required to “endure” said suffering.

We should also ask what standards are trying to prove, confirm, or question. Otherwise, we succumb to appeals to authority. Is X benchmark “the standard” because Austin said so? Because an Olympian from a bygone era said so? Because someone on a magazine cover or badass on YouTube said so?

Recall the immortal words of Mel Siff:

“Any fool can create a program that is so demanding it would kill an elite athlete, but not any fool can create a tough program that produces progress without unnecessary pain.”

So, what do tests prove? At a minimum it proves that one of two outcomes are true — you either pass or fail. What we learn from those outcomes can be a vastly different story.

If we give a little and pass easily, we likely learn nothing. If you’ve checked all the boxes and got all green lights, you aren’t trying hard enough. When a test (or it’s incumbent measures) become a goal and training in and of themselves, they cease to be a good test (Goodhart’s Law).

On the other hand, to give everything and still fail can be an elucidating experience like no other. Two experiences like this that stand out to me are:

• April 2023: 158 assault bike calories in 10:00 (~180 lbs bodyweight).

• July 2023: 6-hour AMRAP, 40 bike calories + run 400m (35 rounds total).

The former was an agony I have no desire to replicate, but the lessons have stuck with me ever since. The goal was to hit your bodyweight in calories in 10:00. I failed. Similarly, the latter shattered and redefined the limit of what I thought was possible to “endure”; of no small note, that particular day peaked at 105’F.

Subscribe now

Similar to this discussion about benchmarks and standards is the question of “quit or don’t quit.” Immediately, a lot of fitness bros are going to jump on an obvious choice, one that surely reveals their limitations and deficits.

Sure, a lot of people quit early. Those folks are far more concerned with surviving than performing. If you’re struggling to show up, that’s a completely different battle than chasing a standard, let alone setting it.

On the other hand, quite a lot of “high performers” (SOF, CrossFit, combat sports, etc.) have the exact opposite problem. They bury themselves by their own hand thinking it more noble.

The picture where I found the above benchmarks also contained the disclaimer “not intended to be tested on the same day.” Yet, the publisher’s profile prominently displayed the quote “no one cares what you can do fresh.”

That is the take-home irony.

If you’re always half-beat-up you’re always going to get half-ass results, even if they look pretty good relatively compared to the rest of the field. But who and what are we measuring ourselves against? What I believe I am capable of should not change based on what someone else does, but we see this all the time (the 4:00 mile being a prime example).

Meanwhile, you don’t get extra credit for putting an asterisk next to your sliver medal. The pity party of “yeah, but I did it the hard / right way” will never feel as good as gold. Anyone who has been there or even seriously in the hunt knows this in their bones.

“To know your limit is to set one.”
~ Michael Blevins

What’s more is that “functional” fitness and once counter-culture movements have become “the establishment”; not in rhetoric or policy, but by the principles demonstrated by their actions.

I want to start with a story, but first, a little context. For the last several months, for my own efficacy and honesty, in addition to maintaining my BJJ practice and half-marathon training most mornings, I’ve been traveling around to different CrossFit gyms on Fridays.

This is part of the marketing campaign I use for somatic fitness and experiential stress management seminars. I use a 9-point evaluation tool to assess categories of coaching, business, and training.

In complete transparency, having done dozens of theses assessments now, I’ve had to be more critical of, honest about, and adjust how I teach and train others myself.

Story Time:

A thunderstorm knocked out most of the traffic lights in a major metro suburb as I was already running behind to the 4:00 drop-in class I had scheduled and paid for.

I kept checking the light, the clock, my watch, and wondering if it would be faster to park on the street and run the last few miles to they gym. About 15 minutes after the hour I arrived at one of the most expansive CrossFit boxes I’d ever seen. The facility was fantastic, and also without electricity at the moment.

A 23 year old coach leaves the class on the floor and meets me at the front desk. She curtly informs me that there’s a policy that if someone misses more than 5 minutes of the warm up, they cannot attend class “for safety reasons.”

“However,” she continues, “you can get ready quickly and still do the WOD if you want to.” I replied, “yes.” She looks at me like I have a third eye.

As I’m getting settled, the coach starts to make small talk and states the obvious, that the gym is without electricity at the moment, but is fortunately well lit naturally. I jest that “Aren’t we supposed to be training to be ready for anything?” She looks confused. I continue, “That’s what CrossFit is supposed to be right, unknown and unknowable?”

Based on her facial expression, my forehead must have sprouted yet another, fourth, eye.

As the main WOD — 500m row + 100 wall balls — heated up, I turned to the patron next to me and asked what number (of wall balls) he was on. He took his ear buds out and I repeated the question. “95” he said. I chuckled and kept plugging away, counting out loud “67, 68, 69.”

He knocked out the last 5, turned to me and said, “Try to do it in small sets.” Without looking back I replied, “I did BJJ last night and ran 4 miles this morning, tonight is just marketing for me.”

The advice from the coach, “let’s go guys!”

As we continued to the second segment — work up to back squat 1RM in 15 min — I notice that myself and others have to keep asking the coach how much time is left. Instead of watching the stopwatch on her phone and calling out intervals, she’s busy curating a playlist of dentist office pop music.

Intentionally, I finished my sixth and final single rep seconds before the clock ran out. I was the last to finish. I’m perplexed that I was almost banned from a class I had paid for “for safety”, yet, not single rep of mine (either in the warm up, nor WOD, nor 1RM attempts) was form-checked or even supervised by the coach.

There was no cool down. The only clean up chatter was about obsessive smart watch metrics — sleep score, recovery score, body battery, etc. I had to speak up, “Your watch will lie to you, your CNS never will.” Everyone looked bewildered.

Before leaving, I made sure to do my job and market myself to the coach, at least handing out a business card. If not for that, I would have received no further commentary, let alone an apology for the abrupt “welcome.”

Pay your money and get out.

Subscribe now

The Paper Moat:

Unfortunately, the transaction at this facility isn’t anomaly. It is the logical conclusion of an industry that prioritizes credentials without scars. Weekend certifications serve the optics of corporate authority and satisfy the insurance actuaries.

Many of these certifications are designed to protect businesses from athlete litigation, not actually develop an athlete through coaching; despite innumerably similar sales pitches and rhetoric.

Corporate gyms have made their choice clear — $1,000 and a long weekend seminar means you get the job. Decades of experience and a myriad of accolades means you’re overqualified and are going to ask too many questions — hard pass.

The collective internet made it’s choice too. It’s a well trodden trope that an attractive female in revealing attire has “15% off codes” on every Instagram post, and is titled “coach” in her bio, right above the Only Fans link. In addition, there are droves of “doctors” that sold out to Patreon and talk show television (or podcasts) under the guise that “they could reach more people” — and conveniently dodge professional licensing board ethics in the meantime.

It should be noted that this isn’t necessarily an individual coach’s problem. Just like athletes, we all have to start somewhere, exactly where we’re at. However, that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for our mistakes (see below).

Credentials are a license to begin learning, nothing more. The attitude and perspective you carry forward are exactly what will dictate your outcomes.

A good place to start is often a terrible place to stop.

Subscribe now

Thermodynamics of Service:

Across virtually all helping / service professions, the idea of a “wounded healer” is grossly misunderstood. In pop-culture, even in clinical settings, this seems to mean something like Red Skull’s musing in Infinity War; that he “leads others to treasure (he) cannot possess.”

This is backwards. It’s the same inverted bastardization as assuming that because a particular intervention has produced a powerful change for yourself, that you must shoehorn it into everyone else’s life and every conversation ad nauseam.

The reality is that getting good at producing change for other people, helping them from one place to another — the literal definition and etiology of the word “coach” — is a costly process.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything costs, and everyone pays.

In physics, not only are energy and matter not created “out of nothing”, they are also not transitioned freely. Such is the microcosm we see here on Earth in our precious meaning-making activities like sport and fitness.

I’ve taken a lot heat in the “functional” health / fitness space for clapping back that “food is fuel, not medicine.” I’d say the same for locomotion. More and more evidence is emerging to show that it is not so much the case that exercise is an anti-depressant, but that being sedentary is an active depressant.

In short, motion is a human’s natural state. However, these terms — movement, exercise, training — often get used interchangeably when in reality they have distinct functions and implications as to who we are while practicing them.

Subscribe now

First, I want to be clear, that in a lot of recent posts it may seem like I’m ragging on CrossFit, but that’s not the case. A lot of these ideas, like the hierarchy of development, are quite good. They’re just 20 years old and need some context added — lest we’ve spent those 20 years learning nothing.

Conceptually, the move from:

• Sickness » Wellness » Fitness

Is really to say we’re moving from:

• Deficiency » Sufficiency » Proficiency

Virtually anyone who has taken any interest in their health or fitness will tell you that modern (American) medicine has quite the disparity between what kind of “recommended daily allowance” will keep you non-deficient versus what is actually sufficient for the goal or end you are seeking.

I’m inclined to point out that the above arc does not account for the quite broad term of “performance.” Why stop at proficiency (fitness) when you can achieve excellence (performance)?

Certainly, fitness, or the lack thereof, can be a limiting factor in our ability to express “performance” — however that may be defined. Excessive emphasis on always performing leads us paradoxically struggling to maintain wellness and even non-sickness (i.e. injury).

All the “optimal-bros” online would do well to recall that such events are, by definition, not sustainable. An indefinite “peak” is called a “plateau.”

We can actually do much worse than sickness by becoming decrepit — defined more by our dysfunction than capability. Many are preening online about removing anything we “don’t need” for biological survival; under the premise that those things then carry unworthy risk.

Therein lies the problem with this conservative thinking. Your biological survival is, in fact, not necessary at all — let alone cell phones, air conditioning, automobiles, or sports. So, my paramount question is, what are we doing in the meantime?

Would you like to wear out or rust out before you inevitably expire? What is the point of living forever if you have no stories worth telling? Meanwhile, let’s also make sure we persist long enough to laugh about how stupid and lucky we were to have survived!

Subscribe now

Movement:

As mentioned above, and many times before, avoidance is a terrible plague. You will never win by trying to not lose. Ultimately, “risk aversion” (i.e. litigation aversion) has largely prompted medical and “sport science” advice in this direction.

It hurts to squat, stop it.

You sprained your ankle playing basketball, stop it.

God forbid your hips, ankles, and knees need to bend more than 90’ to pick something up off the floor; and if you press the “longevity experts” you better give up all hope of a PR after 40. Maybe just sign up for the nursing home now.

Paradoxically, the same types of locomotion we must all learn as infants, toddlers, and children are exactly the same patterns that keep the elderly lively.

• Crawl

• Walk

• Carry

• Jump

• Climb

• Tumble

You might not need to “balance what you eat, drink, and do” nearly as much as you need to “play like a 5-year old”, but eat like an adult and drink more water (instead of other stuff).

Exercise:

Whereas “movement” is simply about different planes of locomotion, exercise requires exertion… effort. I used to look pejoratively on this as directionless exhaustion. Certainly that is often the case in many “boot/y camp” types of group fitness classes.

However, I’ve changed my mind to view this as an important part of the process. The goal is to move something within us, out of us.

EX-ercise (in multiple contexts).

EX-ert.

EX-pell.

These words all share the same root.

In a technical sense, we might refer to this as “active recovery” — the active and intentional engagement in activity that helps remove waste, repair tissue, and does not further incur more CNS stress and fatigue.

Our tolerance for adaptation is limited, no matter how much we train or grow it. Thus, we must inevitably take out the trash. We have to clear space psychically, neurologically, and muscularly in order to be able to budget for further stimulus — which is the pre-requisite for adaptation (i.e. progress).

Training:

When it comes to training, our exertion now requires intention and direction (among other things). Laws of specificity and adaptation abound, as well as concepts of (progressive) overload.

While effort (and its rate of perception, e.g. RPE) is applicable for the above “exercise” domain, it is not relevant for training.

Effort does not equal outcomes. Though, the outcomes we’re training for will require effort.

You can dig yourself into all kinds of holes, to various depths, and still miss the target. It feels hard. You moved. You exerted yourself. You achieved little else.

Our ability to train in a developmentally productive way will vary greatly depending on our “training age.” That refers to the amount of our genetic potential that has been actualized. This takes chronological time, intention, novel stimulation, and adequate recovery to produce desirable adaptations.

Inevitably, this follows a j-shape curve wherein initially we see quick gains seemingly just by showing up. However, there is a growing disproportionate return on investment where more time, effort, and specificity (and sometimes remedial generality and “fitness” to maintain our “wellness”) are required to provide smaller and smaller increments of improvement.

Subscribe now

Practice:

This is another one that I used to dismiss as “re-training” on the surface, but it’s quite important for athletic development. Again, language matters. Virtually all team / ball sports call their daily activities “practice”; which is to say they are re-training and re-enforcing previously learned skills.

Ironically, this is a far cry from what we often see in many other sports:

• Just run more (running).

• Just spar more (combat sports).

• Just add weight (lifting).

• Just do the WOD.

As if to say that progress and success in those fields are just random occurrences you need to hit the right slot machine on. Most of those things I just mentioned are Olympic sports.

Running is a skill.

Weightlifting is a skill.

Every combat sport is built on skills.

CrossFit requires specific skills training to build general physical attributes.

Thus, we do need to practice those skills.

Adaptation does not wait for your intention or activity. Skills are depreciable assets. If you’re not using them, you’re losing them.

Conclusion:

Coming full circle then, our state of wellness, fitness, or performance is not passively sustained. We are either growing or atrophying. As discussed earlier, perpetual excellence is a mistaken impossibility.

The nature of the universe is towards entropy in the sense that it simply costs less energy.

Thus, if we wish to not go quietly, we have to fight to maintain our fitness. Do not accept mediocrity, wellness, or non-sickness. You must choose where and when you’d like to perform, what it will cost you, and what is “well-enough” left alone.

For example, let’s consider how pervasive modern technology — specifically wearable technology — has become in our lives, and particularly in the fitness industry.

I have a fancy Garmin watch. All of the “smart features” are turned off. I’ve never made one phone call, sent one text message, or issued a single voice command from it. The “face” has the time, date, and a seconds counter. The most used “app” is the countdown timer.

It logs biometric and workout data in the background. The numbers are not the objective. I care not for someone else’s synthetic and proprietary benchmarks — “fitness age”, “step count streak”, “badges”, etc.

Those little dopamine and accountability hits have a purpose. They may keep you engaged and moving, and for that they are fine. They may even help you exert yourself a little further, a little more often, or more intentionally.

They will never teach you the intuition needed to expel what’s cluttering your life or impeding your training and making your skill retention lag. What they do offer in terms of qualitative “practice” evaluation is limited to activities easily monitored by a GPS radio and proprietary algorithm.

You are the system and the signal. Learn to listen.

Share

Almost as predictable as it is inevitable, this is first interpreted (falsely) as an error. What am I doing wrong all of a sudden? Why isn’t what I’ve always been doing working anymore?

First, this friction is expected and often a symptom of progress. Novices improve with just about anything that keeps them consistent, engaged, and recovered. The novelty and noob gains wear off sooner or later and we’re offered an opportunity to actually improve — which is to say, change ourselves.

Second, what’s worse may be the folks that convince themselves to keep doing things “the way they’ve always done them” despite overwhelming evidence that their “training” and “fitness” protocols are leaving them broken and less capable.

The natural impulse here seems to be to look for a quick fix, low hanging fruit that’s easy to grab — a new exercise variation, a different rep-set scheme, maybe a diet hack, or miracle peptide.

If any of those things make a significant change in training outcomes — that actually matter — you’re still a novice. That doesn’t mean they’re not effective, useful, or relevant to your circumstances. It just means that your system hasn’t accumulated enough novel experience and confidence to differentiate robust causes and effect size (signal) from distracting correlations (noise).

Periodization Pitfalls:

From a logical perspective, traditional or linear periodization sounds excellent. However, very few of us operate in completely socially isolated containers (like military boot camps). Even professional athletes have to contend with the fact that human systems are messy and complicated, particularly when compounded with other imperfect and complicated systems (like other people).

Block periodization works a little better and offers more congruence, particularly when you think of most sports having a pre- , in- , and post- “season” interval.

Though eventually we will still run into same problems. How much more “general” preparedness does an Olympic or World-level competitor really need? Should we not be exploring whether or not their “specific” training is producing the “specific” results they’re seeking?

Undulating periodization, again conceptually, sounds intuitive, but that’s just the problem. Outsourcing our intuition to a spreadsheet leads to feeling like we are more clever planners than we are competent coaches and athletes. Changing your focus every other week effectively means you’re focusing on nothing.

Again, if that’s working for you, you’re still a novice. That’s a good thing. Keep showing up and trying hard until that stops working. Then, be honest. Evaluate. Adapt.

Other micro-cycle management strategies have come along to explain things differently and do have valid appeal that gets us out of the 7-day cycle:

• Build > Output > Armor (ref.)

• Stimulation > Development > Rebound (ref.)

The latter is superior in my opinion, because of exactly what we’re going to need to get at — and that is the ability to think for myself. If the spreadsheet says today is “supposed” to be an “armor day”, what if I still feel really good? Or, perhaps this is a week where I have few obligations and can get more training volume / focus in.

When I talk about “development” sessions, we’re talking about training and driving specific adaptations (like physiological systems or tactical / sport skills). This is not the same as exercising, which is far from “useless” — despite my own derogatory references to “just exercising” in the past.

When we get closer to the “truth”, we usually start to find more questions, and the one that’s creeping in now is:

“How many days per week can you train?”

I used to answer this with:

“As many as you can recover from.”

Perhaps a better question is:

“How many days per week should I train?”

To that, I have to give a different answer, perhaps:

“As many as you see positive results develop from.”

If we’re being honest, about results rather than desire, that probably means 2-3 sessions per week. A lot of people, including myself, “exercise” a lot more than 2-3x per week. At that point, what we’re really talking about largely “re-training”, not “training training” or the development of “new” abilities provoked by a “novel” stimulus we must form “new” adaptations to.

The paradox here is that, as a novice, you can increase this number as your “training age” dictates you still have a lot of room to grow, you’re probably just not resilient enough yet to recover from that volume.

By contrast, the more experienced you become and the more your training age grows (i.e. performative ability actualized), you can recover from large amounts of moderate volume, but rarely get a stimulus great enough to push you to new levels.

More Management?

Often we miss the point, and pundits online capitalize on leveraging these extremes for engagement. How many of the sprinting evangelists, in recent years, doting on “jogging”, have spent serious time — say 100 hours or more — steadily between 60% and 70% MHR?

Similarly, walking / rucking is poor preparation for the same “Zone 2” range. Yes, the cardio-respiratory stimulus may be the same, but orthopedically it is dramatically different. You learn to move heavy and slow, which is not good for running. As a result, your gait, cadence, and posture all change significantly.

That certainly isn’t to say any of those practices — sprinting, walking, rucking — are bad. It’s to say they have functions as well as corresponding limitations. Shocking, almost as if specific stimuli invoke specific adaptations!

The folly here is that what you’re avoiding is probably exactly where you need to work — and suffer the consequences of — or ideally learn to adequately regulate and integrate said stimuli.

It is much more comfortable to slog along under VT1 (ventilatory threshold, fuel substrate level) as well as sprint past VT2 (wast buffering threshold) and boast about “hard” training — all while avoiding the quite unpleasant work that actually needs to happen in between.

First Principles and Fundamentals:

Have you ever met an over-recovered athlete?

I haven’t either.

So, I usually start there. Most of the people I work with, and virtually all of the climbers and fighters I’ve ever met, don’t have a problem showing up. They have precisely the opposite problem.

I stress the importance of a long warm up, not just for the physiological components, but as an opportunity for self-inquiry, assessment, and calibration.

It doesn’t help us to push more horsepower through flat tires or test the steering agility with imbalanced suspension. Likewise, if we’re not breathing (well) we either need to call 911 or revise the day’s “intended stimulus” and our means of achieving it.

In truth, this is a microcosm of my “adjusted hierarchy of development” contrasted with CrossFit’s 2002 model. That model asserts that nutrition and metabolic conditioning should compose more than 40% of training, and adding gymnastics should take us past 60%.

It’s easy to show up to a gym and ask:

What are we going to / supposed to do today?

With a little prompting, it’s not too hard to include:

How do I feel today?

It takes a lot of practice to go a step further and decide:

How do I want to feel today?

How will I get there?

This isn’t as revolutionary as it may look, you’ve likely been copy/pasting this sort of information on daily whiteboards and spreadsheets every session. It’s hiding in plain sight under obtuse rhetoric like:

• (Training) Goal

• (Cycle) Phase

• (Weekly) Objective

• (Daily) Task

To actually be useful, this might look like:

• Goal: Improve Metabolic Conditioning

• Phase: Anaerobic Endurance

• Objective: Avoid re-injuring right shoulder.

• Task: Double mobility segment, focus on confidence and control of movement.

We are sold a reductionist line of logic; that neurons in our brain procure thoughts, those thoughts precipitate perceptions called feelings, and actions are conducted based on those feelings.

We’re told that the key to happiness is eliminating, even avoiding, all possible stress; as if a life without stimulation would be worth living (?). Then you hear chants of “hustle and grind” as if the system will reward you before you break yourself against the shore.

If the “key to enlightenment” is to “chop wood, carry water”; then equally, that process — which you might call meditation — does not hold the objective of forcing thoughtlessness or anhedonia, but the effortlessness of movement (thought, body, and soul).

What if this type of “movement” was the entire point of training?

To exercise we must exert, which literally means to push out. What is it that we’re clearing space for? Similarly, adjacent words like “coach” and “training” all refer to drawing out or moving an organism from one place to another.

My proposal here is that we are not victims or subjects to whims of the cosmos, we are active participants in creating it. Thus, perhaps, we can think intentionally, to create an actionable stimulation, that provokes a feeling (experience) that moves us to become greater.

In that sense, the core of The Integrated Fitness Problem is this:

Capacity is not what you can tolerate, it’s what you can regulate and integrate.

Why This Program Exists:

Everywhere you look someone is pushing a sales funnel, a PDF reset guide, a cheatsheet for this or that, and selling the promise that their “challenge” protocol is the panacea you’ve been missing. Magazine covers have been effectively using this tactic for over half a century. Social media has caused it to grow like an infection.

• The problem with static programs is that life isn’t static. A 30-day challenge can be revitalizing, however, the paramount question is: “what happens on on day 31?” A lot of otherwise “healthy” people live their lives compulsively purging on 30-day sprints and crashing for days or weeks on follow-up binges.

• The flaw in “lifestyle” rhetoric is that it dismissively chants “just do X” or "don’t do Y”; none of which addresses — let alone teaches you to address for yourself — how to navigate emotional ups and downs, psychological fatigue, and varying states of stress and adaptation. No program can accurately predict what your recovery needs will be in six weeks.

• The discipline cult pours gasoline on an already corrosive fire. “More is better” and “grind harder” are what we’re told. In fact, more is not better; better is better. Further, the cognitive overhead and allostatic stress variables are entirely absent from this kind of calculus. Training through exhaustion and chronic under-recovery doesn’t build resilience — it teaches you how to get beat up and build resentment.

The missing element, as far as I can tell, is the ability to truly develop sensitivity to and awareness of ourselves — in short, the ability to pay attention (mindfulness).

• There are some great programs that will teach you how to control your state or how to train yourself. This program goes a layer deeper to utilize physical movement as an opportunity for exploring emotional states and navigating, rather than compulsively challenging or avoiding, psychological heuristics.

• Following a program is one thing. Creating it is another. Learning what makes a good program, and how to adapt and address your needs amid a matrix of life factors on the fly, is a lifelong endeavor.

While growth and change will always be painful, this isn’t monastic amelioration, it’s alignment. Effort needs multiplied by time, and their factor needs reconciled (divided) by the truth.

Most programs tell you what to do.

A few get you to think differently.

Rare ones ask how you feel.

I’m asking you to invest 12-months to begin to know.

12-Month Curriculum: Program Overview

Phase 1 is about self assessment, building a theoretical training foundation, and understanding the core IP of mapping somatic states on top of physical energy systems (Module 1, 1 month).

• Goal: Understand training programming, systems, and methodology.

• Key Outcome: Acquire foundational somatic language while continuing your existing training and collecting data for self-assessment.

Phase 2 is about using a unique readiness scaling system for each of 6 energy systems, training those systems, and soliciting their somatic experiences (Modules 2 - 7, 6 months).

• Goal: Implement training principles of mobility, endurance, hypertrophy, power, anaerobic capacity, and aerobic capacity.

• Key Outcome: Identify energy system deficits, reliably identify emotional and psychological states accompanying varying degrees of effort and movement expression.

Phase 3 is a critical bridge, an opportunity to re-assess yourself and test your understanding (Module 8, 1-2 months).

• Goal: A mandatory self-assessment to diagnose and prioritize a specific element of training.

• Key Outcome: After 7-months of practice, you’re left to your own devices, with minimal guidance, to create and seek an experience and outcome based on your adaptive needs.

• Bonus: This phase also includes essays and training sessions for team / group fitness which offers uniquely exponential opportunities.

Phase 4 focuses on applying the general fitness principles to sport-specific conditioning needs (Modules 9a-9d, 4 months). Submission grappling is used as the proxy, but the concepts can be applied to any sport.

• Goal: Refine and translate general physical fitness assets to functional conditioning (congruent with sport-specific demands).

• Key Outcome: Training becomes sport-specific with fitness becoming a supportive measure that does not compete with sport skill development.

Phase 5 is a collection of resources to support the training program (Module 10).

• Including: Links to assessments and meal planner webtools, books / products / podcasts, “broken beta” sessions that were not included in the official curriculum, and even other training programs to continue your own autonomous journey.

How to Use This Program: The Compass, Not the Map

Technically, you do not have to complete the training modules in order, but that is how the program is designed. If you already have a strong fitness base, you could jump straight to Module 8 or 9. However, I would discourage that since you’re missing the point of the program which is to cultivate a thorough understanding of the somatic sensations evoked by a broad range of physical expressions.

What’s more is that the purpose of the program extends far beyond purely physical development or grappling-specific conditioning. AI can easily write you a good enough evidence-based program of any duration, intensity, or skill level.

It is your responsibility to maintain, cultivate, and develop the human element of your training.

• Weekly Articles (free) will continue to be published to discuss high-level training philosophy and theory. Knowledge should be free for everyone, but practice and application will cost.

• Substack Notes (free) will contain “micro-blogs” and distilled content from the weekly articles.

• Savage Zen Athletics Podcast (free) contains audio broadcasts of the weekly articles, starting with some of the “greatest hits” from the archives. [Also available on YouTube and Spotify]

• Training Modules (paid) consist of 26 articles in total (not including appendices). Each module includes at least one:

  • Physical Technical Essay: Discussing physiological mechanisms.

  • Somatic Experience Essay: Interpreting and navigating psychological friction between stimulus and adaptation.

  • ~30-Day Training Program: Pre-written sessions coupled with progressive prompts designed for you to test your understanding and write your own sessions.

• Quarterly Field Notes (paid) will be published as an ongoing part of Module 10 (APPX) to feature data and reflections on my current training.

• Substack Chat (paid) will contain the official changelogs and updates for the IFP program.

You are, of course, encouraged to FAFO “what is wrong with” or how these sessions stack up to your expectations and what you’ve learned in the rest of the program.

They also serve as an example that even good coaches get things wrong sometimes and that sport and exercise “science” are anything but “settled” — they are very much a living art and craft.

Read more

Last week I wrote an article (Part 1) challenging whether or not CrossFit, by its own definitions, tests fitness in its competitive “Games.” This was done by comparing Open Workouts from the past 5 years against CF’s 10 domains of fitness.

Spoiler: CrossFit doesn’t test fitness.

What’s more is that there have been recent rumors (source) that deaffiliated gyms who continue to use CF’s “proprietary methodology” will be litigated against by HQ. That’s quite peculiar since US copyright law explicitly excludes “methodologies” (17 U.S. Code § 102(b)) and CF’s Level 1 Trainer Agreement also explicitly states that “the CrossFit methodology is free.”

This paradox is a proxy for a larger cultural critique where authoritative figures posture much to the chagrin of their originally espoused anti-establishment, open source, and grassroots culture.

Hence, we have arrived at a professional wrestling level of kayfabe — a roleplayed narrative that we all seemingly know is fake and play along with anyway. Except, some people seem to have drunk a “go down with the ship rather than adapt” level of Kool-Aid.

None of which exudes confidence from an organization that’s currently up for sale, but I digress. This is not a business blog, it is a fitness and philosophical one.

So, speaking of methodology lets look at three major potholes I’ve noticed while floating around to different CF gyms over the past few months.

Note (again) that this critique isn’t directed at any particular gym, athlete, or coach; it’s a general observation that I think warrants fair critique and call to action.

The Scaling Kayfabe:

We often hear the tagline “forging elite fitness” as well as the adage “program for the best, scale for the rest.” However, one problem, right off the rip, is that this is the very definition of special pleading.

RX is the “real” workout. The ecosystem at large (HQ) has spent two decades seemingly gaslighting people into believing that if they got injured it’s the athlete’s fault because they didn’t scale correctly.

However, the palpable ethos has always been dopamine-driven high-intensity.

Further, there is a peculiar discrimination in who is allowed to scale, and to what degree — which is directly reflected in how leaderboards are presented (this was also discussed in Part 1 regarding increases in athlete size).

Right from the get-go the term “functional fitness” is weaponized. We scale for everyone — except lightweights — to keep the leaderboard prestigious. If the logic is that “grandma needs to carry her groceries”, why is she using a balanced barbell instead of shifting sandbags or water-filled-tubes? If the logical excuse is that “a real world incident” doesn’t care if you weigh 150 or 250 lbs, why would it care about your biological sex or age either?

So, we scale for age and sex, but not weight, and call that “elite” and “functional?” We have already seen that the outputs on erg machines instead of bodyweight movements is dramatically affected by athletes’ size and limb distribution (source).

Additionally, I searched through several old CrossFit Journal articles (here, here, and here) which only muddied the waters. While the authors seem well intentioned, they also reinforce the hypocrisy we’ve been discussing so far. They also set up the next point on a T.

The Practice Kayfabe:

One of the most perplexing things to me, that has still yet to be explained — and it shouldn’t have to be asked for directly — is when / how do people actually learn the skills and movements that will be tested?

If every session is a test of capacity or throughput, when are mechanics built? Real sports aren’t trying to “get better” by testing themselves with game-speed scrimmages every practice. They’re building skills.

What’s more is that many CF gyms only offer CF classes, which means there are very few that offer “open gym” times. You know, like when you can go to the place you’re paying a membership at and actually work on the things you want to improve instead of doing what you’re told or what HQ publishes for the day(!).

In the above linked CF Journal articles there’s still no mention of “practice”, just a rhetorical distinction between “adapting” and “scaling” that doesn’t actually describe how athletes adapt and progress.

What’s more is that the original methodology publication came out in 2003, long before the term “hybrid athlete” was a thing. Yet, it hits all the high notes and still has the same glaring omissions 23 years later.

Focusing on 3 modalities — gymnastics (mobility), weightlifting (power), and mono-structural conditioning (endurance) — is actually pretty good on the surface.

In the outlined 3-week sample, there are 6 single-modality sessions. The problem here is that that means across 3 weeks of training, and 15 training sessions, you will only have worked on the “skill” or “element priority” of each modality twice.

This begs some very important programming questions:

• Exactly what are your expectations when you’re only practicing something twice every three weeks?

• The even distribution of all elements assumes that I’m equally proficient / deficient in all of them, an assumption that belies infinite hubris.

• In the same 3-week span we’re training “2 element days” where “work/rest interval management is critical” 6 times. That means we’re spending almost 3 times as many sessions practicing getting tired as we are getting better.

On top of, and within, each of those problems is the fact that entire “modalities” are conglomerates of dozens of movement patterns (exercises). What if my rope climbs are fine, but my handstands are struggling? How long do I have to wait for a single modality skill session to be dealt from HQ to work on the things I actually need?

The Warm Up Kayfabe:

I’ve written a lot before about active recovery and “the lost art of long warm ups”, and both are relevant here. What I’ve notice about CrossFit warm ups is that usually they’re technically sound — that is, the warm up movements are relevant to the working movements.

However, my experience has been that there is a marginal aerobic component to the warm up, and overall volume is largely inadequate. The shorter, more intense, and more specific a “work” interval is, the longer and more specific the warm up needs to be.

In a 2-hour endurance block, you’ve got time to spare and can get away with a bit of a whimsical warm up (though you ought to be intentional about it) because the first 15 minutes are only 12% of the whole session.

By contrast, if you’re going to haul ass for a 15 minute AMRAP, and you haven’t even broken a sweat before starting “the work”, you’re going to waste at least the first 5 minutes calibrating your CNS — if not be on the fast track to injury.

To warm up for that, if I were writing the session, there would probably be 15 minutes of easy aerobic work and another 15 minutes of specific mobility or a “not for time” series to find your working load / pace for the day.

I will say again, that some gyms / coaches do a much better job of managing this than others; though it’s a ubiquitous trend I’ve notice, albeit to varying degrees.

On the other side of this equation, cooldowns or auxiliary work — often noted as “support” segments in my programming — is even less strictly enforced. Sometimes it’s actively avoided. This is unfortunate, because recovery is where you get stronger. Adaptation starts after the stimulus stops.

This means that you don’t have to wait until you eat or sleep to start recovering (e.g. getting stronger / faster / etc.). Learning to down regulate your CNS — especially after a hard capacity interval — is a literal cheat code that’s getting left on the table.

Full Circle:

As Dan John says, “chase two rabbits, go home hungry.” Or, more directly, you can’t ride two horses with one ass. Unless you’re a complete novice, trying to get better at everything all at once is a surefire way to make sure you, in fact, do NOT improve, and in all likelihood regress.

It’s a fair counterpoint that “varied” stimuli doesn’t necessarily mean “random”; though that’s a highly discretionary programming difference — one that is overlooked by many coaches and highlights the main takeaway:

“You cannot dramatically improve a weakness with accidental exposure (source).”

Many people have suggested that the “best way to improve for Hyrox is to join a CrossFit gym.” However accurate this may be, it is another foot-in-mouth moment.

That assertion implies that you do not get better at Hyrox just by doing more Hyrox races. Why, then, would we assume that you get better at WODs just by doing more WODs?

To further this point, consider the (necessary) neuroticism around movement standards. Obviously quality matters. Equally, it’s an athlete’s responsibility (in any sport) to manipulate the rules of engagement to their advantage — and win.

Therein lies the faultline. Always trying to “win” inevitably means that corners get cut, quality drifts, and athletes get sharp, but brittle — combat sports athletes inevitably learn this lesson the hard way. How “elite” is our fitness if we’re just teaching people how to get beat up and broken?

Have we not, then, regressed back on the “Sickness → Wellness → Fitness” spectrum (CrossFit, 2002)? I thought we were supposed to knuckle up and “Fuck the quick fix?”

The meta-to-the-meta here is that I’m not judging an organization based on 20+ year old publications. There’s plenty I’ve misstated or change my mind about buried in the archives of this site — but you’ll also find plenty of articles detailing the progressions I’ve made along the way.

What I want to be clearly critical of is:

1. Public stances that contradict reality. CrossFit still wants to wear the “elite” brand and claim the pinnacle of fitness. But, the organization has been for sale since 2020 and in that same time has lost more than 30% of its affiliates.

2. Stagnation and refusal to adapt. If you’re still using the same training protocols from a decade ago and haven’t changed anything, you’re missing quite a bit. If you stretch that to more than two decades, you’re willfully ignorant.

You reap what you sow. Weeds will be there no matter what, so you better water the fucking flowers you want to grow.

Environment, culture, and standards all matter. The people we surround ourselves with and spend significant amounts of time with — whether we like them or not — eventually rub off on us. Humans literally adopt each other’s idiosyncrasies and mannerisms if they spend enough time together.

This is called social learning.

On one hand, there are always opportunities to remain “a big fish in a small pond.” On the other hand people who constantly surround themselves with others who are more fit or more successful or better at something they want to get good at, tend to cumulatively be successful.

What do group or community based programs like CrossFit, Hyrox, F45, Orange Theory, etc. all have in common? They capitalize on the convergence of fitness and community. While the culture of those communities varies greatly, the point is that they have all recognized the power of coming together.

Previously, when we’ve discussed strength, we’ve identified that “sometimes you need to push against something until you can push yourself.” This is where good coaches and good training partners come in.

We need equal parts competition and comradery, judgement and support. Recently, I wrote an article on “The Case for Braves Spaces, Not Safe Ones” that is quite relevant here. Rest assured, that this is not to be confused with either fake-commando “man-camps” or “we don’t stop until someone pukes” types of “training.”

One of the major benefits of team-based (fitness) training is that most of us push a little harder when someone is nipping at our heels. Sometimes, even the most ardent and disciplined athletes let themselves off the hook slightly, subtly, psychologically, when they spend too much time alone in a dungeon.

However, this social milieu effect is so strong that we don’t even need direct contact for it to make a difference. The 4-minute-mile (long thought to be impossible) was first accomplished in 1954 by Roger Bannister. In the 70 years since then, over 2,000 people have accomplished the same feat.

Additionally, shared struggle is one of the most powerful ways to bring people together. In a pathological sense this is colloquially referred to as “trauma bonding” — though that usually implies said struggle was not overcome. However, when the struggles is overcome, we see the same mechanisms played out in military selection and deployment, generational adversity (Pearl Harbor, 911, etc.), and group therapy.

Bonds get built, stories worth telling are created, new heights often achieved, and you probably make a few friends along the way too. One of the greatest assets to humanity’s survival and proliferation across the globe has been our ability to collaborate.

Nobody really gets anywhere worth talking about alone. Someone else had to be involved along the way even if it was to get stepped on or to snap the picture.

Candice Burt’s consecutive utlra-marathon record stands at 200 days. What if we turned that into a relay of 3 people alternating “shifts?” My guess is that we’d see well over 500 days. For reference, that’s over 15,000 miles. The Earth has a circumference of about 25,000 miles. Who is going to be the first “team” to “run the circumference of the globe in less under 2 years?”

Lastly, and to come full circle, chemistry and compatibility matter in all partnerships. Musical “super groups” are almost always a flash in the pan despite star studded lineups. Likewise, NFL Pro Bowls (and similar) are beyond cringe-worthy as they never eclipse the halo of individual teams and “dynasty” runs.

Another great example of this is the Dawn Wall ascent of El Capitan. The first free ascent of this route was completed in 2015 by Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson. The project took 7 years of trial and error. At the time, Tommy was already a Mt. Rushmore figure in climbing. Several other climbing superstars chimed in on the Dawn Wall project, but none of them stuck. It was the much lesser known Jorgeson that provided the right synergy of ingredients to complete the project.

Our own training rooms are full of people who are both “training room heroes” — that for one reason or another, maybe don’t choke, but can’t ever seem to hit on all cylinders in the arena — as well as “x-factors” — that somehow always “punch above their weight” and rise to the occasion.

I don’t think either of these are coincidences. I think they’re cultivated and reinforced developments. The real question is, how do we, as coaches and / or autonomous athletes build awareness of these things and train an adaptive response to them?

Read more

What I’d like to challenge here are published protocols and accepted practices among many CrossFit athletes and, explicitly, headquarters (HQ).

I’d like to present a call to accountability for the ardent worshipers who either cannot, or will not, think for themselves. What I’m going to be very critical of in this article is the theology that promised physical sovereignty and delivered a centralized corporate leaderboard.

While my formal exposure to CrossFit has been limited to the past few months, that does not change the truthfulness or accuracy of my points below. I don’t require an appeal to authority to be correct, though you’re welcome to review this site’s archives for receipts.

I’m not just punching up at the biggest target I can find — while it’s tempting and easy to do. I can’t help but be lured into a much needed somatic and academic autopsy of methodology.

Many others, who have decades of exposure, have made similar criticism. I’ve met great athletes, great coaches, and trained at great gyms — and many “not great” ones as well. To say “CrossFit is bad” seems quite unfair, there really is no debate that any movement or brand has been more influential in the fitness world over the past 20 years.

Nevertheless, if you’ve persisted for 20 years and refuse to change, your stubbornness belies your ignorance.

First, I want to set the stage for my perspective so that readers will fully understand where I’m coming from and know that this isn’t another nauseatingly pedantic "I tried X for 30 Days” clickbait article or video.

Around 2022 I was introduced to Brian Mackenzie’s work through his company Shift Adapt and have been a fan ever since. Around 2015 Brian published a seminar (PDF) applying cross-training and interval protocols to a methodology that would challenge endurance and running orthodoxy.

This became known as CrossFit Endurance (CFE) and is also explained much more deeply in Brian’s book “Unbreakable Runner (2014).”

In the book Brian challenges the religiously held belief that the answer to better endurance is always “more” — more miles, more running, more injuries. The core hypothesis isn’t necessarily that intensity can make up for volume (it surely cannot, no matter how many peer reviewed journals try to convince us otherwise).

The idea is that:

1. Running is a skill, that needs developed separate from metabolic throughput.

2. “Conditioning” can, and should, be trained and cultivated via varied cardio-respiratory (ventilatory) thresholds.

3. If you want to be “fast”, regardless of the duration or distance, you cannot (only) train to be slow.

Fast forward another decade or so (2026) and we see many of the exact same criticisms of orthodoxy plaguing the proprietary whiteboard model:

• “Program for the best…”,

• just do more,

• just go harder,

• just go / do the work faster,

• just keep coming,

• just scale down (but Rx is the real workout)…

Bollocks.

One gym I went to had a nice list of “commandments” that included “CrossFit won’t injure you, your ego will.” While that’s a good individual reminder, I would contend that that sentiment ought to be extended to coaches, gyms, and their respective programming allegiances as well.

Node (ref.):

1. a pathological swelling or enlargement.

2. a discrete mass of one kind of tissue enclosed in tissue of a different kind.

3. an entangling complication.

Node 1: The Performance Kayfabe

The centralized blueprint has established a definitive tagline of “forging elite fitness.” However, if one is more cynically oriented, you might reframe that as “curating leaderboards.” Therein, the corporate definition of fitness is “work capacity across broad time and modal domains (CF Journal, 2021).”

To accomplish this, there are 10 neatly defined “physical skills (CF Journal, 2021)” which comprise those time and modal domains:

• Endurance

• Stamina

• Strength

• Flexibility

• Power

• Speed

• Coordination

• Agility

• Balance

• Accuracy

Looking at the aggregate of open workouts from the past 5 years, we see quite an imbalanced distribution of these skills. As mentioned in the introduction, I’m not the first person to point this out. WOD_SCIENCE has published data critiquing both the limited time domains (here) and strength / power bias (here).

Other sources (Beers, 2021) have taken note that the average CF women’s weight went from 137 (2009) to 143 (2016) and for men it increased from 184 to 194 in the same time span. More recent research (2023, here) suggests that “optimal” performers may tend even higher towards 155F/200M. Obviously this is a trend that follows programming bias, not the other way around.

So, what we see is quite the deviation from the foundational philosophy that:

“The goal is to get as good at as many physical endeavors as possible, over as many time durations as possible, throughout our entire lives. He or she who is best at the most skills and drills pulled from an infinite list of sports, workouts, and activities is most fit. (Widman, 2009)”

My concern here isn’t necessarily that any of the definitions offered are inaccurate, or that those 10 skills aren’t important. My concern is that, by CF’s own definition, it does not test fitness. It curates optics.

Continued from Widman’s 2009 CF Journal article:

“We say that CrossFit is the most effective fitness program in the history of the industry, and we have the numbers to back that up. No other program is producing athletes capable of greater work capacity in more domains at all age groups. Our prescription is constantly varied, high-intensity, functional movements.”

… except that that “prescription” is not the actual competition as indicated by “open” workouts that are intended to preview the actual “games.”

Not only do elite athletes in other sports not do random WODs (workout of the day), CF’s own elite pantheon (Froning, Fraser, Hopper) aren’t doing random workouts either. They’re tactically improving skills — something we’ll dissect in Part 2.

What’s more is that difficulty (which is often narrowly assumed as “intensity”) is not a universal variable.

The mechanism of what makes a particular training session “harder” — i.e. the targeted adaptation — isn’t just a matter of lag metrics like “faster, heavier, or more reps.” It is a completely different metabolic and somatic experience.

It would not be the worst idea in the world to say:

• Here are the attributes that define “elite fitness.”

• We have competitive “games” to test each of those attributes.

• Therefore, for 10 traits, we have a decathalon over several days.

I don’t buy the line that specialized events, particularly endurance, would not make for “good television.” The Tour de France is one of the most watched events in the world every year — 33M views in 2025 (Lead Out, 2025).

Astonishingly, the World’s Strongest Man is more watched than golf or the NFL at > 200M views per year (Sims, 2023). CF Games viewership peaked in 2020 with 17.7M views and has crashed to 5.5M views in 2024 (Davies, 2024).

I also don’t buy the line that gyms need to be beholden to the 1-hour class schedule. Says who?

My BJJ classes are regularly 90 minutes. Open Mats are 2 hours. How long is your average high school football practice or rec league adult softball game?

If you want to be treated like a legitimate “sport”, start acting like it. That means training with an intentional rather than ideological structure. What is stopping you from saying, “classes are blocked in 2-hour increments so that we can adequately address varied domains and modalities of fitness?”

What if you don’t need a whole 2 hours for a capacity or “metabolic conditioning” sessions?

Well, I don’t know maybe actually work on the skills of movements(!) — covered in Part 2 — or find a way to make that blasted word “community” actually mean something.

Editor’s Note: The Open Workout graphic was updated 5/25/26 after my human review of Google Gemini’s qualitative assumption. Read more about the analysis and conclusions in this Substack Note.

As I alluded to in previous essays, it’s incredibly important to understand the specific physiological demands of your sport, or whatever skill / hobby / thing it is you want to be good at.

It’s a very different end goal, and thereby training picture, if I want to be generally fit and well rounded (the literal definition of cross-fit) versus competitive at a specific prescribed physical task (running, swimming, Hyrox, etc.).

The picture is even small and more detailed when our competitive endeavor (“sport”) becomes more mentally or technically dominated versus physically dominated. This is a third dimension to the graph below depicting a sport-spectrum of expressions of “maximum strength and power” (weightlifting, track sports) to “maximum endurance” (marathons, triathlons).

While Joel Jamieson puts “combat sports” closer to the endurance side, this is because of the overall oxygen consumption (e.g. a 10 minute round versus a 20 second sprint or 10 second deadlift pull). We did see, in the previous discussion on combat sport “fuel”, that striking sports typically have more aerobic demand, which is not a surprise.

What this tells us is that we often see a more direct carryover to grappling — a sport literally based on gripping and controlling — from strength training. However, top-end power expressions in a single-rep format start to lose relevance the same way long runs do.

Since we covered “grabbing and holding” in the last module, let’s move on to that “conditioning” element. This is where a lot people really go sideways. Two great errors are:

1. Assuming no nuance and that "improving your gas tank” means endless miles of low-intensity-steady-state (LISS) exercise.

2. Training conditioning at the exact same intervals and intensities you practice and compete at.

These are the same error in different directions.

In the endurance module we thoroughly debunked that “endurance myth” that associates LISS exclusively with monostructural activities (running, cycling, swimming, etc.) and more accurately maps them onto a somatic expression or at least a ventilatory / heart rate zone regardless of movement or implement.

However, there’s a long, LONG, road to transition “running endurance” to the aerobic (threshold) and anaerobic (intervals) of grappling. So, while this foundation is important, we need to recall the 3:1 rule. If I typically compete in 5 minute rounds, then training intervals longer than 15 minutes start to lose relevance (that is, adaptation specificity).

Inverted, we have a decent strength / power heuristic as well. If I compete at 5 minute rounds (300 seconds), then my (applicable) strength / power intervals shouldn’t be shorter than ~90 seconds.

To come full circle, we also have to recognize that only training in 5-minute intervals makes us stale. We will need to push those tertiles a bit to see the benefits of each. By always training in the middle, we derive neither specific power or aerobic adaptations and actually become de-conditioned.

Read more

Let’s talk about engine fuel. Yes, that means food. I would love to tell you that that makes huge difference in performance, but I can’t. I spent a almost a decade obsessing over food. “We all have to eat, so I might as well learn to do it well” is what I told myself.

The truth is that humans are capable of performing at extraordinary high levels on a variety of dietary practices. Any discussion about longevity or career-long output is a separate discussion. I’ve written about this many times, so I won’t hash it all out again here.

I also don’t want to do what every other zealot seeking confirmation bias does and use the dietary practices of single outliers to justify my own decisions. What I will do is present data collected by myself on my training and diet and compare that to the professional level.

This program (The Integrated Fitness Problem) isn’t diet-centric — much to the point of the opening paragraph here. However, obviously our physical bodies require fuel to do work. In my opinion, the clearer carryover is between ventilatory gas exchange — as imposed by exercise and sport demands — as an informant and precursor to dietary substrate.

In other words, metabolic substrate signals a demand and we need to provide it with the appropriate fuel. Often times this is misconstrued as:

• I eat X, therefore

• I can train Y, and justify that decision by

• Research showing Z.

Perhaps those first two bullet are swapped, but either way that top down approach isn’t sufficient for serious competitors (of any sport).

Above is a fascinating graph I made showing the different fuel substrate contributions to various Olympic combat sports and BJJ. For the record, we have to take these things with a grain of salt because they are particularly difficult to use ventilatory and other apparatuses during grappling sports.

Nevertheless, we can see that there’s a significant contribution to grappling output from the glycolytic (CHO / carbohydrate) pathway. While that’s not an excuse to “carb load”, it certainly means that you may run into problems if you’re training BJJ 3-5 times per week on a low-carb diet and doing supplemental strength and conditioning work.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. I did it for years. I also had to face the music that 750 calories / hour or 1,300 calories / session (metabolic) wasn’t easy to recover from on steak alone (as I wrote about here).

Similar in build, but a whole lot better at BJJ than me, Dante Leon is churning through a whopping 23 calories / lb of bodyweight every day (ref.). He’s also eating almost 60% carbs. This is yet another example of the metabolic conservation theory we discussed in Module 1.

This is where most diet / health / fitness “influencer” logic falls off. Language of “elite” and “optimal” and “un/necessary” abounds. Yet, where are the optimal and elite performances produced by those ardent evangelists?

When confronted about this, these people tend to fall back on “marketing to average / everyday people” or saying that those training numbers are “unreasonable for most people.” But wait, I thought we were talking about elites, like Dante?

I’m just a “recreational” athlete and still churn about 18 calories / lb of bodyweight on average day and upwards of that 20 cal / lb mark on hard days. Nevertheless, excellence ought to be the standard we measure ourselves by.

That was a long way around to finally getting at the take home points. There are several training and body composition related variables that effects which fuel substrate our bodies will prefer.

• Body fat (more means the body prefers that as fuel).

• Dietary fat / adaptation (more means the body will prefer that as fuel).

• Exercise intensity (typically around 60% VO2max is where the body burns even amounts of fat and carbs, hence it’s called the “crossover point”).

• Movement in/efficiency has a direct effect on observed and experienced intensity (e.g. HR and O2 update / CO2 clearance are more effective measures than reps / minute or miles / hour).

  

Additionally, there is a need for tissue repair (protein), though more modern research has shown that total daily intake is more important than timing. Essentially, as long as you have enough circulating amino acids, they’ll find their way to where they need to be.

We should also mention here that the idea of “more than 30g of protein per serving is a waste because that’s where muscle-protein-synthesis is maximized” is a myth that has also been debunked in recent years. It’s sort of like saying, just because we cannot accelerate the car faster (e.g. 0-60 mph), we do not have any further to go (on a 100 mile road trip). Usually 1g / lb of lean or goal body weight is a good general reference point.

Lastly, it’s important to note that animal sources of fat and protein are far superior to plants in terms of bio-availability of nutrients — which means how well those nutrients get absorbed by your stomach / intestines before being excreted as waste. Similar to protein, around 1g / lb of lean body mass is a good starting point that you can and should adjust as you need.

I know that was a lot of talk about food, but recall that training anaerobic capacity is directly inferred by “engine fuel.” That is why the moniker of a “metabolic dumpster fire” is such a relevant description!

Read more

I’ve talked a lot about “normalization” and “general populations” lowering the accepted standard of (lacking) fitness. You may have also heard this referred to as a “comfort crisis.”

While there is a lot of merit to this idea, there’s also a lot of absurd pretentiousness in the sport / fitness world exhibited by people who have done just enough to step outside that “normal.”

Subscribe now

Unfortunately, the relative perspective and / or limited experience of those people often leads to a quite skewed belief. I’m sick of rhetoric about elite / optimal / maximal / peak athletes; so I’ll defer back to Tim Grover’s definitions of: posers (I added this one), players, closers, and cleaners.

Suffice to say for now that “cleaners” don’t need reassurance because they’re already asking the right questions. Effort and sacrifice are implied by their very existence. Their life and the (usually intentional) disproportionate return on investment is absurd to the average player and role-played by the poser.

For a lot of people I train and work with, excellence is the standard. That’s not to say I’m in a room full of world champions every day, it’s to say that we don’t allow excuses, encourage honesty, and pursue training that exhibits that integrity.

However, the flip side — that’s quite prolific in CrossFit and combat sports alike — is that the “everyday porrada” mentality bites us in the ass. By trying to “win” the warm up and every practice round or WOD we (1) never develop the skills that will actually help us win, (2) eventually get very sharp, but very brittle, and (3) thereby only end up learning how to get beat up.

Obviously, there are endorphins associated with exerting ourselves that feel good. However, social media, magazine covers, and commercial big-box gyms have made this all much worse with tropes like:

• “grindset” / 5 am / “humble brag”

• It’s not a practice until someone pukes.

• If you’re sore, you did it right.

• Make practice suck so competition feels easy.

• Progressive overload means persistent and perpetual progress.

• Don’t forget to “do more” and include “active recovery” (more stress) like cold plunges, saunas, fasting, etc.

At any rate, your training is only as good as your ability to recover from it. That remains true from a stimulation perspective. In order to develop “novel adaptations” (i.e. progress) we need novel stimulation. What got you here won’t be enough to get you to the next level.

By contrast, in order to get the most out out of a given training sessions I need to have appropriate intention, attention, effort, and physicality. RPE (rate of perceived exertion) is a greatly misleading metric. Just because something “feels hard” doesn’t mean I’m actually producing a good output.

So, yes, I cannot buy performance on credit and perpetually accumulate recovery debt. Does that mean that recovery is the ultimate goal? Well, no.

If you really want to be 100% recovered all of the time, the best way to do that is to never train, never get tired, never exert yourself, and avoid any and all risk. Now, obviously that would make it quite difficult to develop the skills (movements and implements) needed to express competitive attributes (strength, endurance, athleticism, etc.).

As mentioned above, there are people profiting greatly on both sides of this equation. There’s a lot to be sold:

• Gym memberships / subscriptions.

• Supplements for “performance.”

• Supplements for “recovery.”

• New functional / movement / diet trends and machines just like flavors of Doritos and Mountain Dew.

• Recovery gadgets, portable sauna, and refrigerated tubs.

What I’m trying to highlight here is the difference between feeling tired / exhausted and the reality of being capable. The latter, capability, requires one to capitalize on what they’re able to develop.

For instance, I am probably able to achieve a 500 lb. deadlift with months of dedicated practice. However, I’m certainly not capable of a 500 lb. deadlift at this exact moment. Further, I certainly would not try to capitalize on that ability by testing my 1RM every training session (the entire point of this article).

“The suck” may be a necessary by-product, but it usually isn’t the objective. There are a lot of ways to make a workout suck, but how many of them move you closer to your goal? Yet, many people spend decades exerting / exercising / exhausting themselves and call it “working out” while they remain un-fit, in-capable, or otherwise unchanged by either their cumulative effort or any single experience.

Subscribe now

Soreness is your body telling you the credit card bill is due. It only gives a vague indicator of your spending habits and has virtually no predictive value regarding future ROI.

The paramount question for any training (career / program / session) is “did I get better?” The results do not lie. Sometimes what I need to get better is trying hard. Sometimes it’s paying attention. Sometimes it’s resting so I can be capable of expressing my abilities better tomorrow.

For what it’s worth, you should know that the game is rigged. If you actually got better on your own, the magazines and globo-gyms couldn’t sell you any more magic pills or miracle 6-week programs.

Does your coach / trainer want you to get better, or are they just plugging your credit card every week?

We owe it to ourselves to do better than asking “how fast can I burn out or break myself?” Choose to play and win the long (infinite) game of “how can I get better?” The answer isn’t fatigue, or recovery, it’s adaptation.

“Your greatest sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” ~ Dostoevsky

Share

In this module, we’ll be looking at the sport-specific application of strength, power, and hypertrophy. As described in the previous module (white tissue), what constitutes “sport specific” isn’t a matter of “weaponized specificity”, but range of application and effect size of direct implementation.

In a grappling context that, obviously, we need to endure (e.g. multiple matches in a tournament bracket) and we also need to be explosive (none of that matters if you don’t make it out of the first round). However, the top end expressions of both power and endurance have limited returns on investment in BJJ.

That’s certainly not to say that they’re useless, it just means there’s a long road of transitions to see direct carry over in a match. A 2-hour run and a 5-minute round are not very similar; likewise a 10-minute round and 2-minute round have very different “pacing”. We’ll talk more about these “fuel and air” components in the next two “engine” modules.

What we really see in grappling is a dominant expression of anaerobic capacity, which is supported by aerobic capacity (which is build on an endurance foundation). Similarly, one rep maxes aren’t particularly relevant due to their bilateral, balanced, and often single-plane expression. In grappling we need to be strong in “weird” or compromised positions.

However, we do see the most direct carryover from strength / power training in grappling because our sport is fundamentally about control -- literally grabbing and holding.

If I had to pick strength priorities for grapplers, off the cuff I’d look at:

• Grips

• Hips

• Spine

• Isometric / End-Range Strength

Just like we looked at joint and connective tissue integrity in the last module, here we want to start building resilience (hypertrophy / strength endurance) specific to constricting and holding movement patterns.

We can also use this “resilience building” to support antagonist muscle groups (pressing and squatting) that often get ignored in grappling and as a result often lead to over use injuries of the primary muscle and movements groups (hinging and pulling).

As far as implements, sandbags and kettlebells are our friends here. We will get some barbell work, but we’ll also look at creative uses of bands because of the variety of angles they allow us to address and also give a mild grip stimulus -- particularly if you grab both strands like “pistol grip” rather than looping your thumb through the inside.

For myself and others, this often looks like minimalist or maintenance “active recovery” training; but with a little focus and a little creativity, we can go a long way without breaking ourselves. Injuries are really bad for progress, so, we want to make sure we’re building resilience rather than just getting beat up (reread the hypertrophy essays).

Structurally we want to pay close attention to time limits and recover-ability, making sure that our supportive (off-the-mat) training is indeed supporting rather than competing with our primary (on-the-mat) training.

For example (recalling the wisdom / re-assessment module):

• Aerobic Warm Up / Readiness Assessment: 10-20 minutes (always)

• Dynamic Warm Up / Calisthenics: 10-15 minutes (always)

• Specific Warm Up / Mobility: 10-15 minutes (always)

If we’re “not feeling it” we can stop there and it’s been a good day where we still trained something -- even if it was our intuition -- and moved around a little to promote blood flow and be better prepared to train tomorrow.

If we are feeling good, and not beholden to an arbitrary weekly schedule, then we can add a brief ‘work’ segment which will also require a ‘support’ or ‘cooldown’ following.

45 minutes has been a sweet spot for me, so if my warm up process (above) takes 30 minutes, then I have to be very intentional and diligent with how I spend the remaining 15 minutes of the session. There is only so much damage I can do in that time frame without intentionally going overboard.

If it’s a power session, that might only be three good sets. If it’s a hypertrophy session, that might be 1 rep OTM (on-the-minute) for 10 minutes. If it’s a capacity session, I want to ‘feel’ like I hit a high output, but not necessarily that I crashed into a brick wall.

Common movements we’ll see will include:

• EQIs (eccentric quais isometrics)

• ENGs (eccentric neural grooving)

• PAILs / RAILs (progressive / regressive angular isometric loading)

• Isometric holds

• Loaded carries

Read more

As many of you know, I’ve spent the last 4 months and counting creating The Integrated Fitness Problem training program. Unlike any other training program I’ve seen to date, this isn’t a monthly challenge, but a request that you commit 12-months to changing yourself. It is a program that utilizes physical fitness as a proxy to explore somatic and emotional states.

The last part that needs completed is the module pertaining to Teams and Trust. That’s where I need help.

In the true spirit of being a grassroots, bottom-up, open-sourced and experience driven project; I want to invite groups of people to contribute to the IFP program.

The ask is is pretty simple:

• Send me a DM on Substack or Instagram.

• Receive a sample team workout.

• Complete the workout.

• Return a few video clips and feedback from the session.

The reward:

• 1-Month FREE access to the IFP once v1.0 is released (ETA June 2026); assigned via email voucher per participant in the bounty program.

• Peace of mind knowing you’ve contributed to a fitness program that means something and changes more than just people’s bodies.

Here’s a little more context and a preview of what you’ll be getting into…

Module 8 of the IFP is about autonomy. The first sub-module focuses on self-directed training and cultivating wisdom — which is the self-design application of the first 7 general physical preparedness modules.

The second sub-module takes that one step further to capitalize on the social capital that humans uniquely thrive on — exploring teams and trust. The stakes get raised and with that the potential ROI expands as well.

Tentatively, I’ve separated the TEAM sessions into three distinct categories, each with different intentions and rules of engagement:

• Category 1: Competition Consequences

  • These sessions represent the “sport of fitness” which I often criticize. However, it can be a valuable motivator to know that a hungry rival (or teammate) is always on your heels; and together you drive each other forward, further, faster. The additional imposition of consequences will reveal who accepts their fate as well as who cannot regulate their state.

• Category 2: Shared Workload

  • In these sessions there is a general prescription that either each player, or a team collectively, must complete. Often, this is where individual deficiencies get revealed as “bottlenecks” in the workflow. Such “clogs” also reveal the character of the milieu (e.g. who’s getting frustrated with their team, who rises as a leader, who checks out, etc.).

• Category 3: Divided Tactics

  • This is where we get a chance to remedy and resolve problems that may have been revealed in previous sessions. Communication and strategy are paramount here. Explicitly plan for people to do what they’re good at so that the team collectively can succeed (e.g. score higher).

If you have a team, partner, or group of people that like to get after it or are tired of the same regurgitated workouts and charlatan playbooks (i.e. weaponized specificity) and want to build something that transcends all of that; leave a comment or DM.

Integration:

In the wisdom / trust (self / team) module we explored some heuristics for developing a self guided training program. These next four modules will go into more detail regarding that process, using submission grappling (BJJ) as an example proxy.

Even if wrestling or jiu jitsu aren’t your thing, I would still highly recommend continuing to read and follow along through these next four modules and adapt them to your specific sport of interest.

This would also be a good time to mention that the process we’re describing here is a transition from fitness-first training to sport or skill-first training. That is, which will demand the most of our attention, effort, recovery, and adaptation?

Certainly, it has become the case where “competitive fitness” is its own sport (i.e. CrossFit, Hyrox, etc.). However, what we see is that even in those cases, top competitors at “the game” aren’t doing completely randomized workouts or generalized training, there are specific and historical precedents (CrossFit) and even explicitly predictable prescriptions (Hyrox).

What this means is there are skills or movement patterns that must become our primary training focus, energy systems that support the expression of those skills are secondary, and general conditioning / GPP becomes tertiary. All of those are also underpinned by our ability to recover and sufficient restorative / damage control / injury prevention practices.

We can adapt the 2x2 decision matrix we previously used (i.e. “like vs. need” or “like vs. skilled at”) for sport-specific purposes; asking ourselves “am I good at it” and “is it relevant to my sport.”

• Good at and Relevant: These are the foundational staples of our style. they promote engagement and enthusiasm (~3 / 10 sessions).

• Good at and Irrelevant: This is good content for support training that helps build interest with variety and keep us curious (~1 / 10 sessions).

• Not Good at and Relevant: These are our growth edges, where we should spend most of our training time (~6 / 10 sessions). What we can’t see in the 2 dimensional graphic (below) is that there can be a lot of overlap on the gradient spectrum of “how good” or “how relevant” a given practice may be (we’ll dive much deeper into this throughout these last modules).

• Not Good at and Irrelevant: These are time, energy, and recovery sinks that should be avoided.

Years ago I wrote a series of articles titled “Barbells and Bell Curves” that explained, generally, that for the median (as many above as below) 70% of athletes, spending 70% of their time on skill development is a good idea. In other words, the priorities are reversed from the pyramid structure we discussed in earlier modules. These athletes already have a GPP foundation, performance and fitness need maintained, but skill development will have the highest return on investment.

By contrast, the 15% least fit will benefit from the pyramid structure as previously explained. On the flip side, the 15% most fit will like benefit from the same structure though for different reasons -- generally suffering from overuse imbalances or injuries and depleted / decrepit / ignored systems and movement patterns.

The takeaway here is that “sport” or “skill” become our seventh energy system. This means that training our other systems must not impair our ability to train, recover from, and adapt to the primary stimulus or system in-focus.

Read more

Aesthetics sell. That isn’t the problem. In fact, looking good naked is a huge (beneficial) side effect of being a fit and capable human. While photo-shopped magazine covers have long since capitalized on people’s insecurity by curating “unrealistic body standards” — heck even Frankensteined body parts from different models — we see the same categorical errors exploding across social media.

To be clear, when I say “photo-shopped” I’m not talking about color grading, lighting, and saturation filters; I’m talking about changing the morphology of your body structure. Nowadays, you don’t even even have to edit photos and videos manually, AI can do it for you.

If you’re really desperate, there’s always cosmetic surgery — ab and calf implants for example — and the obvious option of PEDs has always been on the table. The latter however, would require you to still do some work in order to reap the benefits of, but I digress.

There is an obnoxious trend going around to role-play vanity by idolizing golden era (1970s) bodybuilding; as if to say that the only thing that defines one’s “fit”-ness is the amount of (hyperphysiological) muscle mass they can procure.

What’s more is that this will be exaggerated into categorical errors (logical fallacy) in two major way:

1. Assuming that the dietary practices of drug-enhanced persons are metabolized and partitioned in the same ways as non-enhanced persons also seeking to build muscle mass.

2. That excessive amounts of body mass are the only, and or primary, feature that define “elite and optimal” athletes; thereby contributing to the “peak” performances of those athletes.

Firstly, as I’ve noted before, the people complaining about an athlete or bodybuilder’s drug use probably lacks the willpower and genetic potential to achieve such results (with or without PEDs).

Second, many bodybuilders and powerlifters are notoriously un-athletic because they’ve trained their physiology (namely the spine) to be excessively rigid. If you can’t wipe your own backside and get out of breath tying your shoes, you’re not an athlete, and certainly aren’t “fit.”

The bar of capability has sunk so low. We’ve descended from aspirations of world and Olympic championships (athletics) to fitness (attributes desirable for survival), even further to exercise (simply exerting yourself being too much to ask), on down to movement (5K steps / day to not couch-rot), and finally hit bottom by calling anything above that and / or achieving a certain aesthetic is considered “peak.”

What’s really important here isn’t that anyone should feel ashamed by or discouraged from wanting to look better or improve their life. What’s important is that you should have the integrity and intelligence to know the difference between seeing and being, knowing and believing.

Talk has always been cheap and actions have always been loud.

A lot of people are eager to shout from the rooftops what you “need” — repent, vote, eat-this-not-that, do this-or-that, buy-sell… on and on. The reality is that what one “needs” is entirely based on what they want to achieve.

From the most bleakly existential sense, none of us “needs” to exist at all. If we simply want to remain alive, we can be pumped full of Soylent and prescription drugs. So, beyond that, what’s next, is a very pertinent question.

Where you are is likely not where you want to stay, but it is where you have to start. Likewise, the first big step or hurdle you encounter may be necessary, and it may be a good place to start as well. However, it’s likely a terrible — or at least underwhelming — place to finish. Base hits aren’t the same as home runs.

Perhaps, what is most important about developing one’s physical capability is that the process of doing difficult things changes more than just our bodies. By actually plumbing the depths we emerge from the other side forever altered. We can never return from whence we came. We will never see the world the same.

This experience cannot be manufactured by a surgeon any more than “some yolked guy on YouTube.”

When you truly achieve things worth talking about, you don’t need to lie or embellish. The stories stand on their own because it was never about the things (feats) in the first place; it was about who you became by doing it.

It’s for these reasons that I don’t think you can truly test yourself more than once per year. There may be other benchmarks like quarterly trial-runs, but to really savor and sit with an experience that fundamentally alters your perspective of your Earth-time takes… time.

Time to work. Time to plan. Time to think. Time to train. Time to recover. Time to fail. Time to analyze. Time to do the thing. Time to wonder if it was enough. Time to be scared. Time to be strong. Time to realize you know what others do not.

If everything is a test, you never get a chance to practice and develop the skills that will actually matter. Being tougher and grittier isn’t nearly as hard as paying attention and changing yourself.

If you’re getting “1% better every day” you’re still a novice. That’s okay. Will you still have the same vigor in 10 years when you’re fighting months for 0.01% gains?

You can keep your 8-12 second reels, complete with the perfect 3-second hook, inquiry promise, suspension build, and closing call-to-action. If that’s what keeps your identity intact, so be it.

I’ll keep climbing mountains.

Learning to do something for yourself is a huge step. Learning to think for yourself and resist the urge to mimic or copy, even more or less “correct” ideas and patterns, is a victory on another level.

It has been the explicit intent of this program to avoid “expert creep.” No module is intended to make you “elite” or “optimal” at any given energy system expression. The modules are intended to give you a sampling so that your palette can become acquainted with the experiences each movement exposes you to.

The more well rounded an athlete is, the more they can get away with minimalist implementations or “greasing the groove” as Pavel called it. On the other hand, the more glaring our deficits (mobility or endurance for example) the more you’re going to need to explicitly dedicate entire training sessions to developing those attributes.

That leads us to a good discussion about training, programming, and investing. If you prepare 12-weeks for an endurance or strength event (for example), it is not “just another training session” regardless of what many internet sport psychologists will tell you.

The atmosphere is often entirely different — stages, judges, spectators, weather, expectations, consequences, etc. You don’t get to come back on Monday and try again. You have 12 weeks of exclusion from your family and dedication to your craft riding on this event.

In this module we have a chance to further explore curiosities and / or face challenges.

All of the modules we’ve covered so far deserve far more attention than the minimal 4-week buy-in we’ve given them. In truth, 12-weeks for each wouldn’t be a stretch. Tissue remodeling and ventilatory threshold adaptations take place over months, not single sessions.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make “progress” in a shorter time, but it does mean that adaptations that come on easy also leave just as easily. Typically, it takes 5-10 years of “regular, focused, and dedicated” training to reach your maximum adaptation potential.

That’s a fancy way of saying, “If, after 5 years, someone who would know, hasn’t told you (honestly) that you’re world caliber, you probably don’t have it in you.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t still improve. It doesn’t mean you can’t still get a lifetime of enjoyment out of an activity.

It means that if your training focus flip-flops every month it’s going to be hard to gain traction in any one direction; and rather than a lifetime of accumulation, you have a collection of random events.

It means that if you look back on your training from 3 or 5 years ago and nothing has changed, you’re either stuck or still just skimming the surface.

The above template is relevant for a well rounded athlete on a 10-day training cycle — 10 days “on, 2 days “off”. We can similarly scale this to 6 days on, 1 day off though the distribution gets a little contrived and there’s no inherent benefit to being obliged to a 7-day calendar week. Overall though, we’re looking for ~80% dosage of training frequency.

What’s important to note for the general athlete is that they’re still abiding by general principles and a hierarchy of energy systems. Conveniently, these also tend to mirror common prescriptions for heart rate “zones.”

At the lowest, most foundational tier, is our ability to move well. Recall that mobility isn’t a whimsical, passive session. It’s an active engagement in range of strength, and an exercise in hope.

Technically, while we need to breathe to move, mobility limitations often impose further limitations on “engine” expression — various implementations that might be used to develop endurance.

Our ability to breath and move thus gives us the tools to build resilience, tissue mass, and strength endurance — hypertrophy. Then, because of it’s potent signaling, capacity and power work have limited frequency.

Note as well that “desire” is not to be undervalued. Ultimately our Earth-time is short. If we’re not enjoying our training at least half the time, why are we doing it? Essentially we’re all just playing a game anyway.

However, your individual training should reflect your individual needs. A simple 2x2 matrix can help us decide which attributes or energy systems need the most work or what we should focus on for our current training block (4-12 weeks).

Movements that we are good at and we enjoy (motivation builders) are good choices for active recovery days, or “shakeouts” when we’re “not feeling it.”

By contrast, areas that we do not enjoy and are not good at are where we need to spent most of our adaptation energy (growth edges). This isn’t necessarily dictated by number of training sessions, but the effort required to engage at a level that will develop meaningful adaptation.

To balance out this intense effort, cultivation and curiosity (medium intensity, confidence builders) days can be used as confidence builders by using movements and systems we’re not particularly good at, but generally enjoy engaging in.

Lastly, there may be a few movements and systems that we’re good at, but don’t particularly like or feel like drudgery. These “support skills” are good fillers for pre-fatigue and cool-downs.

Linear periodization looks great on a calendar and in textbooks. However, it’s a largely outdated modality because for most people, even competitive amateurs and professionals, the reality of our lives and complexities of stressors that affect adaptation contain inherent randomization.

The doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan or focus. It means that “general physical preparedness” means that I am generally and equally capable in a broad range of physical domains. The natural outgrowth from there is to be “cross trained” in these sense that I am capable and prepared for randomization and mixed-modal training.

As that progression continues, well programmed training, even if randomized in disciplines, should expose different “general deficits.” As we become better conditioned to varied stressors and stimulus, we likely find that our anatomy, psychology, training, temperament, and culture lends us towards certain areas of specialization where we can continue training.

Read more

Wisdom has to be experienced. It cannot be bought, collected, or given. By contrast, the only reason to not trust one’s intuition is when they lack the experience for it to have been developed.

In Module 1 we intentionally stayed away from wearable tech and noisy data. However, there is a place for these tools. Just like any tool, tests and benchmarks have their utility an limitations. For example, once a test becomes the thing which we are training for, it ceases to be a good measure of what we’re testing.

Also in Module 1, we criticized 30-day challenges by asking, what happens on day 31? This program isn’t above those same critiques. If there are 6 primary energy systems, each with about one month of programmed training, what happens on the first day of the 7th month?

This module is specifically designed to help you start thinking about programming your training for yourself. Of course, you’ve had opportunities to do that throughout each module, but it’s a different story when you’re left completely to your own devices for the month rather than a single session here and there.

There’s a fine line between resting and rusting out.

This module is not intended to be a “deload” month, but a “check your understanding” at scale. Perhaps you do need to “learn to rest” or to moderate intensity and pacing. Perhaps the opposite is true, you need to “bite the bullet” or “step up to the plate” a little more often.

Moreover, the point here isn’t to back off or be lazy. The point is to take inventory and reflect on the past 6 months. What has been difficult? What have you accomplished? Where do you still have left to grow?

Tech and Tools:

The self-assessment and inventory tools from Module 1 are simple, effective, and never go out of style. Nevertheless, I think it’s somewhat foolish to not use all of the tools one has access to — just as it is foolish to stifle one’s own intuition with noisy data.

There certainly is a profound neurosis that can develop in many ways in today’s world, and the “bio-hacking” incentives of a quantified self are a leading example. The irony is that our lives are dynamic. Usually, about the time we really get into a routine, life throws us a curve ball and we have to re-calibrate yet again.

Weighing and measuring your food, tracking your steps and sleep habits, writing down your gym results and body composition changes, all help “calibrate” our internal barometer, intuition, and sense of direction.

The goal isn’t necessarily to treat yourself like a lab rat forever, but to gather about 30 days of data to get a snapshot of your life once or twice per year.

For example:

(A+B+C+D) = (X+Y+Z)

• A = daily movement / output

• B = training routine / output

• C = nutritional habits / recovery input

• D = sleep habits / recovery input

Combine to yield:

• X = body composition (weight / body fat)

• Y = biometrics and blood markers

• Z = mood, stress, libido, etc.

Similar to going to the dentist twice per year or getting your blood work done with an annual checkup, these things aren’t cumbersome, they’re preventative.

Doing them everyday would be a toil. Being able to extrapolate trends and principles to create behaviors and habits that will ensure you continue NOT having to do them everyday is a worthwhile investment.

Module 10 will contain bonus resources including apps, gear, books, supplements, and other resources I use (or have used) and recommend. Suffice to say for now that $200 in gear can get you a lifetime of data — that's far less than most people’s monthly health insurance premium.

Tests and Benchmarks:

I had written the following essay a couple weeks before the video below came out, but as per usual, Michael does an excellent job sorting out the details of fitness culture’s perception and the difference between developing attributes versus capability.

Read more

I’m not going to write a sob story or ask for sympathy. I want to illustrate an important point that we owe it to ourselves to never forget the struggles we’ve overcome.

Recently, it seems people have taken a liking to my critical commentary on modern fitness culture. However, I want to, as evidence that people can and do change, offer something more optimistic.

Two of the most powerful emotions humans experience are nostalgia and regret. Both are seemingly without a direct, reducible, behavioral function (e.g. the erroneous reduction of love to reproduction for example).

From my perspective, it seems that these experiences offer great spiritual insight into what we actively value, desire, and pursue. Of course, we don’t have time machines to “go back” and either fix the bad days or relive the glory days.

What we are left with are choices and opportunities.

We are currently living through a period of information and content industrial complexes. Our every thought, millisecond of attention, dopamine spurred fear and impulse, has been commoditized by the tech overlords.

Further, information and “intelligence” are increasingly artificial. We don’t need cheap AI slop training templates or “experts” selling generic lifestyle plans as paths to “elite and optimal” any more than we need cheap TVs and plastic junk from the department store.

What’s more is that the bar for fitness has been set so low, that people now clamor for attention by feigning poverty and simulating grit. Your cold plunge in a $10,000 tub is a privilege. Getting some dirt on your bare toes is cool, but I don’t want to see it in the grocery story.

Any number of peptides, PEDs, or dietary practices can have a significant impact on your physique, so you’ll need to do a lot better than a 6-pack and a tan to impress me. As I’ve said before, proof of work is the only consensus mechanism that matters — it’s just not the one that sells.

On the other hand there is a forged sincerity that can never be falsified. You want to know where a wo/man has been? Tune out their words. Count the wrinkles on their face and the scars on their knuckles. Watch the weight and the tears in the corners of their eyes. Watch how they treat the janitor, the wait staff, and people they disagree with.

These days I’m blessed with comfort — relatively speaking. When I bought my house a few years ago I had the idea that running water was such an indulgent blessing, I never wanted to cut weight again.

The real definition of “privilege” is “believing that because something is not a problem for you, it isn’t or shouldn’t be a problem for anyone else.” How naive. How foolish. How short your memory has become.

The antidote, as far as I can tell, however, isn’t the “liberal shame” most pundits insist on — arguing over who has / had it worse and is most aggrieved and deserving of compensation. The answer is to wash your privilege down with gratitude.

Don’t turn away from the things “you’d rather not remember.” Greet them with a smile, soft eyes, and maybe even a hug. The more you have to scream to be heard, the more you belie your own insecurity and woundedness.

Many fit-fluencers love to use the expression “no one is coming to save you.” However, they seem to forget that includes “from yourself” and all the things you’re overcompensating for with pretentious bravado, sponsorships, and role playing certainty.

You better start caring for yourself, because it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility.

“No shot of sobriety will bury your demons

that demand obedience in pure self destruction…

Yeah, I’ve flown on wings of madness,

Sure, I’ve had a fall from grace,

Yeah, it’s all part of the process…

No spiritual group think, or slacker dejection

or 12-step Jesus, or career opportunities, or natural medicine…

There ain’t no simple solution.

There ain’t no miracle cure.

There ain’t no easy way out of this.”

~ Wayne Kramer, No Easy Way Out

General Program Instructions:

Each training module is 4-weeks long. Each of the first three weeks will feature:

• A consistent warm up (that is the same for all sessions that week).

• Three training sessions (that vary in difficulty).

Your first objective is to complete the warm up, then assess which training session is appropriate for you on that day.

This process helps manage realistic scheduling logistics rather than shoehorning a specific split (e.g. Monday, Wednesday, Friday). It also encourages you to actively assess your recovery state and loot at your training more broadly. If you have a hard sports practice scheduled for Saturday, you probably want Friday to be an easier gym session.

You are required to complete all of the sessions on the menu, but it is up to you to decide when the best, or least bad, times to complete them throughout the week will be.

Assessing our readiness for training isn’t as simple as an arbitrary biometric like resting heart rate (RHR) or heart rate variability (HRV). These are valid measures and can be used to calibrate or confirm our subjective sense, but ultimately they undermine our intuition if we become reliant on them. The only reason to not trust your intuition is when it hasn’t been developed through (enough) experience yet.

Throughout each module we will be using the terminology of the particular emotional and somatic experiences I outlined for each energy system in Module 1d.

The 4th week of each module is intended to be a “de-load week.” The menu for this week will simply include prompts and guidelines for you to test your understanding and write your own training sessions. You are limited to two sessions in the final week. You’re welcome to aim for any desired difficulty, but the 2-session-limit allows some latitude to make mistakes either in perception of recovery or session difficulty.

The standard rule here is that “once it is written, it must be done.” Assess and re-evaluate based on what went well, what worked, and what didn’t.

Disclaimer:

By starting this program or any of the modules herein, you agree that you’ve consulted a licensed and credentialed medical provider before starting any fitness or dietary program. You also agree that the elements and modules herein are not a substitute for medical or mental health advice and direct care by respectively credentialed providers of those services.

Objectives: Aerobic Capacity

• Understand the fundamental value each Heart Rate “Zone.”

• Cultivate a somatic and intuitive awareness of your experience in each zone.

• Express cardio-respiratory threshold work that challenges ventilatory waste clearance.

Key Concepts: Aerobic Capacity

• No amount of dieting or breathwork alone will make you more aerobically fit.

• Eventually all intensity ends. Find the edge. The only way out is through.

• Internal dialogue is noise. Intuition is wisdom.

Read more