Further, these types of discussions often fall into either confirmation bias, post hoc arguments, categorical errors, or misattribution of symptoms and experience.

That’s a lot to tackle in a single article, but here we go!

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The Low Friction Foundation

Earlier this year I wrote an article about re-envisioning CrossFit’s Theoretical Hierarchy of Development. I proposed that there are several misleading elements to this model, which proposes an ordinal demand — that’s what that word “hierarchy” means:

1. Nutrition

2. Metabolic Conditioning

3. Gymnastics

4. Weightlifting and Throwing

5. Sport

The previous article discussed revisions on the movement side, so here I want to emphasize that:

Fuel is not the foundation. It is a consequential demand.

CrossFit’s own operational practice belies this reality. How much class time is spent talking about nutrition versus a dusty poster in the bathroom? Of course, I’m not saying that fuel doesn’t matter — we’ll get to that later.

I’m saying that the ordinal demand is flawed. Logically, by the proposed hierarchy, I could accommodate lacking metabolic conditioning by improving my nutrition.

To the degree that that may be true, I’m willing to bet your training age is pretty low. You can’t out work a bad diet any more than you can out diet bad training.

The other problem here is that the internet is full of, and encourages, pedantic arguments over minutia. It’s way easier to “do your research” via YouTube benders and AI-assisted literature reviews than it is to spend the equivalent time sweating and straining enough to actually learn something about yourself.

In case you haven’t noticed, the world is not short on information or access to it. Therefore, the presiding problem isn’t accumulation of facts and curated truths. It’s wisdom and actual knowing.

How much can you know if you haven’t done? Haven’t failed? Haven’t bled, sweat, and cried wondering why you’re doing any of this? That requires experience.

Categorical Errors

Next, we have a mismatch of terminology and a misattribution of “root cause.” Many people point to Chris Palmer’s book “Brain Energy" (which is great) as evidence of food as psychiatric “medicine.”

But, what’s the title of the book? It isn’t “brain medicine.”

This is partially a terminology error, where (psychiatric) “disorders” are classified based on symptom checklists (DSM/ICD). What we get then is a lot of confusion about organic (biological / neurological) problems manifesting what appear to be a psychological symptoms (e.g. depression or anxiety).

That’s not exactly how it works. An ER doctor administering saline to resolve hyponatremia induced delusions doesn’t claim that sodium “cures” psychosis.

Humans don’t exist in test-tube vacuums. There are vast social, relational, emotional, cognitive, and existential factors that also contribute to various malfunctions and dysfunctions within those areas.

As above, it’s way easier to futz and fiddle with endless combinations of supplements, vitamins, minerals, “hacks”, and “the optimal morning routine” than it is to pull back the curtain on the things you’d rather not look at or remember about yourself.

Furthermore, we see endless idol worship among actual performance outliers and often attribute their unique idiosyncrasies and habits to universal best practices.

The line goes something like:

So-and-so that won this-and-that did blah-blah or ate yada-yada, therefore everyone should do blah-blah and eat yada-yada because it’s “optimal” and makes you “elite.”

The accuracy of a dietary intervention’s effects on performance may suffer from placebo effects (which are still valid interventions as they do produce measurable results), but validity cannot be as easily dismissed.

If a dietary intervention is solely responsible for an outlier’s exceptional status or performance, then why isn’t everyone who practices the same dietary intervention (hack, supplement, or morning routine) also performing at the same level as the outlier?

If we were to further test this hypothesis in an actual social science / statistical model, it would be far more useful to:

• Pick an athletic field to study…

• Look at the top 10 athletes in that field…

• Over each of the past 10 years…

• And ask “what are the most common, top-tertile (upper 33%) factors?”

Then, here’s the really hard part, you’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to make concessions and accommodations to those “scientific” and “evidence based” optimizations in order to produce real results in your real life.

That is, if you want to play the infinite game.

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Fueling Elite Engines

While we’re talking about games, let’s also talk about winning. Specifically, in contrast to finishing.

Finishing or surviving is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, akin to discussions of “endurance.” What I have no tolerance for is the entitlement of assuming that because you rose above average, you now preen insufferably about how “elite” you are.

This is another categorical error that exposes how a sinking floor (average) lowers the collective standing and warps the perception of achievement.

It would be fantastic if we “normalized” making changes in your health and fitness (and other areas) because you knew they’d make you a better person; instead of doing so in order to blab about “lifemaxxing” or some other rhetorical nonsense.

Borrowing language from Tim Grover, we can separate “players” into four categories:

• Contenders (I added this one),

• Coolers,

• Closers, and

• Cleaners

Contenders are big on thinking, purport to “know”, and are short on doing. Because of that, they’re also short on feeling. Because they cannot feel, they will never actually know — and only chose what to believe.

The line of thinking goes:

• Start with an ideology (e.g. a dietary constraint).

• Imply the ideology as the ground zero non-negotiable (appeal to reason / emotion / nature fallacy).

• Search for post hoc confirmation to reinforce your belief.

Coolers, despite their best effort, and even good intentions, tend to be the peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

People are amazingly resilient. We have done all kinds of extraordinary things under unimaginable circumstances. You can build muscle on a meatless diet. You can train HIIT intervals without carbs. You can run a marathon with a cigarette hanging out of your mouth.

I already know I can do a lot of dumb things for the sake of suffering.

So, the question I come back to here is, “are those folks winning?”

Closers might be the folks we’d consider outliers above. They are great performers who thrive under pressure. But sometimes they fall apart when unexpected variables are introduced.

If you’ve been alive for more than 30 years, professional athlete or not, you know that “shit happens” … sometimes bad shit, sometimes really bad shit, and occasionally really great shit.

Cleaners, not by coincidence, take the word “shit” in all of those instances, and replace it with “opportunity.” Then, they take action.

Diet zealots clutch their pearls when they see CrossFit champions noshing Snickers bars and Coors Light, or Michael Phelps drinking milkshakes, or Usain Bolt eating 100 chicken nuggets from McD’s.

Like it or not, those are the elite of the elite. To avoid the biases I mentioned above, we could easily accumulate a list of 100 examples. History is full of them.

Winners find a way to win.

Practical Application

I’m working on a project. It isn’t “longevity” in the pop-culture sense. If a health “expert” is currently 60 years old, we still have to wait another 40 years to find out if they were selling snake oil or not. In the meantime, I’ve work to do.

My current endeavor is finding a sustainable way to train twice per day (or about 10 sessions / week) over an extended timeline. At the time of writing, I’ve logged about 6 weeks. But, 6 weeks is just a training camp; it isn’t a long term model. That might look something like 12+ weeks.

To do that, I have to adjust the inputs. I’m 38 years old, 5’8”, 180 lbs, and around 10% body fat. My daily calorie intake is around 3,500 and I’m bumping that up to 4,000 and ~50% carbohydrates. That’s roughly 20-22 calories per pound of bodyweight, every single day.

For reference, high level athletes like Dante Leon and Alexander Volkanovski run similar proportionate intakes. Anyone who has browsed the nutrition archives of this site knows that I spent years in the low-carb and carnivore camps, trying vehemently to “make it work” under what I thought were high training volumes at the time.

My point in sharing all of this is to remind myself — as much as anyone else — that the “math of hard work” looks fundamentally different in the real world than it does in a RCT.

Herman Pontzer’s work on Constrained Total Energy Expenditure (CTEE) demonstrates that human metabolism isn’t simply additive — you can’t pour more fuel into a human, like gasoline into a car, and expect a linear increase in output. Pontzer’s model suggests a systemic ceiling around 2.5 x BMR before behavioral compensation occurs.

Conceptually, there are two ways to navigate this ceiling:

1. Build a bigger engine. Adding functional muscle mass increases your baseline metabolic rate (BMR), thereby lifting the total calorie output ceiling.

2. Train system throughput. Work capacity (e.g. metabolic conditioning) is a trainable and adaptable asset.

This brings us back to our starting point. I could accept someone else’s proposed limit (Pontzer) or rigid hierarchy (Glassman) and concede my desired achievements. But, that’s not what cleaners do.

Much preferred, I want to:

1. Train how I deem necessary to achieve the goals I wish to pursue.

2. Make the necessary accommodations of fuel and recovery to sustain that output (and subsequent adaptation).

In other words, stop making excuses. Do the work first, and fuel accordingly. Adjust as necessary to continue pursuing the goal.

Once you’re churning more than 2x BMR calories every day and still need more fuel for your required demands; Gatorade, orange juice, or even White Claws hit like a wave of euphoria.

This isn’t because you’re “carb addicted”, it’s because:

Excess protein is just expensive glucose.

At any rate, I reserve the right to be wrong, so stay tuned!

We all know, traditional “conditioning” methods — which for most people is a default to low intensity steady state (LISS) training — offers very marginal direct returns inside a grappling context (of varied energy systems and “repeat sprints”).

Further, we’ve also heard the outright lie that “technique conquers all” endlessly espoused. That’s a lovely sales pitch, but sooner or later we all find out that physicality is a weapon, a tool, and one that we should train and leverage to our advantage.

First, we need to establish some operational terms.

Strength is the ability to generate and hold tension.

For this reason, I usually don’t differentiate between strength and mobility in most of my training programs.

Conditioning, then, isn’t as simple as “endurance”, unless your sport is specific to that experience of persisting. What we’re mostly talking about, then, is capacity — loads and duration relevant to our sport.

Conditioning is the ability to produce work (load and duration) relevant to our field of play.

At the highest level work capacity is simply defined by work divided by time. Operationally, this may look like:

1. How fast can I complete a static workload? (e.g. Run 5 Km or do 300 burpees “for time.”)

2. Do more work in a static time frame (e.g. AMRAP, as many reps / rounds as possible in 10, 20, 30, 60 min, etc.).

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Power, which requires letting go, and hypertrophy (the ability to change ourselves) are inherent bridges between how “strength” and “conditioning” are expressed.

I should also note that I’m a strong critic of “weaponized specificity” and other types of proprietary nonsense — shrimping sled pulls come to mind. This creates a situation that looks like a duck, maybe quacks like a duck, but offers virtually no return on our ability to do duck things.

In other words, it’s an ineffective middle ground where neuro-muscular movement patterns (technique) actually lose their specificity and energy system efficiency (conditioning) is obfuscated.

Strength: Easy Gaps to Fill

I am a huge proponent of strength training for all athletes. As mentioned above, I don’t differentiate between strength and mobility training. The idea is that I want, particularly combat sports athletes, to consider “how strong are you if you cannot move yourself?”

If my sport was strongman and I need to be able to pick up a Honda Civic, then it would be helpful to be roughly the size of a Honda Civic. The same is true in combat sports where, go figure, moving something roughly the same size as our body is extremely helpful.

Further, it is not so much the case that mobility training — as I define it — will magically make you immune to joint locks. It is that the less capable I am of moving myself, the easier it is for someone else to break me. Therefore, I must be “strong” in “weird” positions.

It should go without saying as well that, despite common stereotypes, strong does not imply dumb. Strong folks can learn the same techniques with the same proficiency as the not-strong folks. This leaves the not-strong folks in quite a dilemma should they find themselves in an open division competition — or even a regular training day.

The trouble here is that because grappling sports are literally based on grabbing, holding, and controlling an opponent, there is a very quick carryover from one’s ability to hold (strength) and their ability to grapple.

This seems to be particularly true for under / un-physically developed body types. For example, consider the massive array of different body types and maturation you find on a high school wrestling team; now extend that down to the youth division of your club and all the way up to the oldest person in your gym.

Can you really tell me with a straight face that being a little stronger, more mobile, and more capable of change isn’t going to be helpful to just about everyone?

Conditioning: The Real Bottleneck

Now we get to the sticky part.

My training logs show that I crossed the 2,500 hour mat time milestone in September. Never once, after any training round or competition, has anyone ever told me;

“You know what Austin, you’re feeling kind of scrawny. I think you need to hit the weights more.”

Yet, somehow, I’m sucking wind every single Wednesday and Saturday. It’s almost like hard rounds are, well, hard; and putting the pedal down is always exhausting regardless of how fast you’re going. To top it off, you’ve probably never lost a match because you couldn’t squeeze tighter.

There are countless examples (in fact many top competitors make this their entire strategy to exploit) where exhaustion causes people to make poor technical and tactical choices that cost them the match.

While strength may give us the quickest return on investment, it has the lowest ceiling. You don’t have to take my word for it though. Let’s do an experiment:

1. Pull up YouTube and search any match. Literally any match, any style, any weight class, any skill level.

2. Get a piece of paper. I want you to guess what the bench, deadlift, and squat totals are for each athlete.

3. Then, I want you to simply observe who gets tired faster.

Even for an educated eye, guessing the powerlifting totals would be pretty difficult. Yet even an untrained person can see who’s generally fatiguing faster. For the record, the stronger person could also be the better conditioned person (which is the point of this article), and there are myriads of reasons to win or lose a match (which is beyond the scope of this article).

If we polled 1,000 black belt matches and made the same guesses, do you think the hypothetically stronger athlete won more often than the one who got less tired (when they were different)?

How / do you think the results would be different if we watched 1,000 white belt matches instead?

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What to do about it?

1. Improving our sport is primary.

I would strongly discourage lung-ripping aerobic capacity sessions every day. We must remember that improving at our sport is primary. Anything that is taking away resources that could be spent on the mat with real coaches and real training partners is a concession.

2. Build general capability first.

LISS is not useless. Humans are fundamentally aerobic creatures. Without oxygen you’re dead within minutes. So, our ability to exchange gas (i.e. respiration) is pretty important. The aerobic system is always running. A better aerobic base will help build more efficient recovery between sessions, rounds, and scrambles.

Metaphorically, if you’re going to romp on the throttle, you probably want a gas tank big enough to last the whole race, right? You also want to make sure you don’t end up stranded and walking (or limping) to the fuel station on your rest days.

3. Acquire relevant attributes.

Those general adaptations need to be converted to specific ones. Remember that strength-mobility overlap? If you wouldn’t drive a car with square tires, you shouldn’t try to “build a bigger engine” before the one you’ve got is moving well.

4. Cultivate throughput.

Once our machinery is moving smoothly we can start adding horsepower. With internal combustion engines, the limiting factor is never getting more fuel in, it’s getting more air. Our bodies aren’t that different.

In fact, you will probably find that the limiting factor is actually your in/ability to exhale (off-gas CO2) fast enough.

5. Create adaptive demands.

Lastly, we’re ready to move from the drag strip to the obstacle course where we’ll need to shift gears, both up and down, during a given encounter. This is where we’ve got a great game to play.

There are endless combinations of sprint-hold-grind cycles we experience on the mat / in the ring. What’s more is that, with a little creativity (and no need for obscure band and fascia fixations) we can produce almost exactly the same physiological experience in the gym.

That is the point of “strength and conditioning training.” It is not to replicate our sport in the weight room or track. It is to leverage an intentionally synthetic environment to isolate and cultivate specific physiological variables.

Sample Session:

EMOM / 4 min (every minute on the minute):

• Bike x 10 calories

• Power Clean x 2 (bodyweight)

• Front Rack Hold x remainder of minute

Rest 4 minutes.

Repeat.

Rest 4 minutes.

Repeat.

Rest 4 minutes.

Repeat.

*If you’re feeling frisky, you can add a couple calories to the bike each round..

Here, in Part 2, I want to talk about the narrative, the standouts, and the future.

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Standout Performances:

Key Upset: Josh Saunders over Felipe Pena

Every year there are always upsets, though the lack of “star power” in this event made many of them feel less astonishing in my opinion. However, Josh over Felipe absolutely brought back vibes of 2019’s Nicky Rod over Cyborg.

I think it was the right call. I tell my students all the time that you can’t win by trying not to lose. If you pull to an open guard, you’ve already conceded an inferior position and the “burden of proof” is on you.

Further, in overtime (alone) Felipe had two deep takedown attempts while Josh had one. However, as we saw with PJ Barch v. Mica Galvao in 2024, recency bias matters. PJ got robbed, but Mica’s late activity was enough to skew the judges’ perspective.

Even if Felipe “won” the overtime portion, he had virtually no offense even attempted during the regulation period.

Underdog: Victor Hugo

I can’t believe I put those three words together in a sentence… calling Victor Hugo an underdog. However, he was seeded 7th in the +99Kg division. He submitted his way to gold and didn’t have a single point scored against him.

MVP: Helena Crevar / Luke Griffith

In recent years, notably the WNO win over Victor Hugo, Luke has made it clear that if he builds confidence and momentum he will absolutely, irreverently, steal submission win off a legend. That’s exactly what happened versus Kaynan Duarte (the defending division and absolute champion) — who’s 2024 run looked as good as any Gordon Ryan has put up. Notably, no points were scored against Luke either.

Helena, at 19, ties Kade Rutolo for the youngest ADCC gold medalist. She is the youngest female ADCC gold medalist, and the first to do so by all submission wins. She did not have any points scored against her either. Imagine having two ADCC World Championship medals on your shelf before you can legally drink a beer to celebrate!

Honorable Mentions: Jasmine Rocha / Joslyn Molina

Both of these ladies were outstanding. Jasmine (like Hugo and Crevar) submitted her way to gold without having a single point scored against her. She’s also only the second female to do so, Crevar being a little younger and literally running a bracket just a few minutes earlier to claim the achievement. It was good to see Jasmine step up and hunt wins when she’s had a history of “being tough and good at getting beat up” but not quite good enough to win.

Joslyn became the youngest medalist (male or female) in ADCC history at just 14 years old, taking bronze at -65Kg. An achievement previously held by Crevar (17 in 2024). What’s even more crazy is that she has plenty of time, 2028 and 2030 worlds to break Crevar and Kade Ruotolo’s records of ADCC gold at 19 years old.

Best Matches Overall:

I can’t pick a single “performance of the night”, but here are some bangers you don’t want to miss!

Declan Moody v. Achilles Rocha

Right out of the gate, first round, two big guys pushing the pace and getting after it. Achilles runs away with it towards the end, but it’s well worth watching.

Owen Jones v. Dominic Mejia

As expected, small, scrappy guys get after it. The final scramble is a series of nail-biting submission escapes.

Jozef Chen v. Marlon Tajik

This match probably had the best wrestling scrimmages of the tournament. If you want to see more technical guard work versus wrestling, Ryoma Anraku v. Gavin Corbe (honorable mention) is your match.

Jozef Chen v. Gabriel Brod

This match starts slow, but halfway through there’s a solid 90 second wrestle-jitsu scramble that leads to a methodical guard pass / back take dilemma by Jozef.

Ana Mayordomo v. Mayssa Bastos

Here we have a refreshing reminder that “pushing the pace” doesn’t necessarily mean chaotic scrambles. Literally, someone is always moving in this match and it ends with a sick mounted guillotine.

Luke Griffith v. Kaynan Duarte

If you called this the biggest upset of the tournament, I wouldn’t disagree — I just think Saunders was the bigger underdog versus Pena. At any rate, Kaynan absolutely broke, hit a wall, gave up? Luke stayed focused and seized the opportunity.

Best Submissions:

This is an even tougher call, because there are always so many to choose from. On top of that, a highlight match (above) doesn’t always have a highlight finish, and sometimes a highlight finish comes out of nowhere.

Daniel Schuardt over Achilles Rocha: Heelhook

This was, by far, my favorite. The announcers called it a lateral kneebar, but it’s actually a rotating (heelhook) lock. You just grip and rip the big-toe-side blade of the foot as a lever instead of “digging” a wrist-heel grip.

Similarly, Victor Hugo over Heikki Jussila by what modernists call a “Mikey-lock” is just using a different grip (seen more in kneebars) to apply rotational pressure — making it a heelhook.

Luke Griffith over Kaynan Duarte: RNC

This is a great example of what I call “irreverent jiu jitsu.” Your job is to win. Period. That means that when you see an opportunity, you take no prisoners and offer no quarter.

Victor Hugo over Ruslan Abdulaev: Shoulderlock

The Flo highlight called this a “thunderlock” which I hadn’t heard before, but essentially we’re talking about an extending shoulder break, from back mount. You don’t see this often, but Victor actually did it twice (the second time against Josh Saunders).

Ana Mayordomo over Mayssa Bastos: Guillotine

This was a close match with a fast, savage, mounted guillotine finish in overtime!

Felipe Costa over Mateusz Mazur: Triangle

Recent rule changes now treat missed “flying submissions” the same as guard pulls. So, you better make them count, like this one.

Daniel Schuardt over Eoghan O’Flanaghan: Anklelock

We saw several anklelock finishes with “double under” grips. This one happened to come with a shootout and upset win.

Honorable Mentions:

• Jasmine Rocha over Kanae Ikeda: RNC

• Nick Hartman over Haisam Rida: Guillotine

• Kennedy Maciel over Gavin Corbe: Americana (from rear triangle)

• Sarah Galvao over Livia Barasine: Armbar (from mounted triangle)

• Pawel Jaworski over Gabriel Brod: Heelhook (all of Jaworski’s leglocks were absolutely surgical!)

Other Commentary:

The Gordon Ryan / Greg Souders beef is completely artificial and fueled by both egos.

Greg supporters will point to Corbe’s win over Mejia, though Gavin himself has publicly commented for folks to “chill, Dominic and I are friends.” Gordon points to Crevar and Griffith’s gold medals and claim that Greg “stole” the “constraints lead” approach from Danaher.

All we really get out of this is confirmation of what competitors already know and behavioral scientists figured out long ago:

• Structured / Block-Based (drilling) learning is better for skill acquisition.

• Randomized (games) learning is better for skill retention and application.

• At a high level any given athlete can win on any given day.

40 minutes is too long for a single match.

I saw this come up on Instagram and agree. The match in question was the 77Kg finals between Magomed Dzharbaev and PJ Barch. Make no mistake, this was an absolute grueling war of attrition.

However, as we all know having rounds be half-sub-only and half-points has shifted from an “exciting new format” to a very tactical decision. It’s not quite to the extent of EBI (yet) but certainly many athletes try to conserve energy in regulation and squeeze out an overtime win.

My suggestion here would be for championship matches to be the same length as regular matches (10 minutes), not double. Keep the guard-pull-anytime penalty. Even if we keep the double overtime (at 5 minutes each), that’s still cuts the maximum match time to 20 minutes.

Women’s absolute division?

This also came up online and I don’t quite agree (yet). The ladies did get an absolute division back in 2024 after being absent since 2007. However, I’d first like to see the existing three female divisions get expanded to a full 16 person bracket (each).

More international representation.

I certainly don’t think this is a bad thing. I’ve said for a long time that I’d love to see more wrestlers, judokas, sambo fighters, and catch-wrestling in ADCC — it’s literally what the competition was designed for.

I’d just also note that the absence of so many dominant American and Brazilian star athletes from this event is what created the space for more diverse nationalities.

Predictions for the Future:

Playing dice is always risky business, but I have a decent track record. In 2022 I said we would start to see specific scrambles and transitions be trained as independent positions. In 2024 I agreed with the widespread observation that low-risk takedowns and aggressive anti-wrestling would surge in importance.

Further, the obvious “meta” really hasn’t changed:

• Score first.

• Don’t get scored on.

• Hunt submissions.

For what it’s worth, Chris Haueter’s rules remains unimpeachable:

• Get on top.

• Stay on top.

• Have a guard that “they shall not pass.”

• Don’t be seduced by the addictive comfort of playing guard.

So, what’s new for 2026-onward then? Well, I don’t see any of the above changing any time soon. In fact, all of those concepts have been heavily reinforced.

• Specialize.

  • The age of the generalist is long gone. Everyone is good, almost, everywhere. You’re going to have to pick a position to be better than everyone else and put them there. This is precisely what legends like Marcelo and Roger did.

• Simplify.

  • Speaking of Roger Gracie, in a recent interview he commented that most people make jiu jitsu too complicated. Others have echoed this, that we’re enamored with social media highlight reels. The reality is that we don’t need “more” moves, we need to do a few things better. RNCs and heelhooks combined for over 50% of all submissions this year. Add anklelocks and armbars and you’re at almost 75%.

• Pinning.

  • I saw someone online say that their major takeaway was that “you better have a guard because literal Olympic wrestlers are coming to ADCC, so you won’t even sniff a takedown.” Rubbish. That’s the completely wrong approach. Yes, you should have a guard (see Haueter above), but how did this strategy work for Pena against Saunders? Getting someone down isn’t nearly as hard as keeping them down, provided they refuse to concede bottom position — something ground fighters often take for granted, and something MMA exposed long ago. Jiu jitsu folks often describe wrestling and takedowns synonymously, but they’re forgetting the whole other half of that sport — pinning.

Part of the excitement of an “Olympic” event like this is that you can’t keep up with all of the action all at once. Thankfully, one of the things Flograppling has gotten right is the “Flo Zone” which lets you watch three matches at the same time.

Naturally, like most folks I usually watch the whole event all the way through for entertainment first, then go back and replay / study individual matches as needed. However, I did have the foresight to keep a spreadsheet of win methods, submissions, and point spreads so that I could push some quick data to Notes as soon as the event was over.

Here, I want to dig a little deeper into those numbers as well as take a high level perspective of what I observed from the event, and maybe make a few predictions.

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By the Numbers:

First, for the nerds, which are most of us, let’s look at some high level data.

Off the cuff I thought there were a lot more submissions than usual. I’m not sure how this compares to previous years, but almost half (47%) of all matches across all divisions in this event ended by submission.

As you’d expect, for matches that ended by submission, 36% of those submissions were rear naked chokes, followed by heelhooks at 16%. While the RNC is always the clear favorite, typically we see heelhooks and armbars flip flopping for the second and third spot, with some combination of armbars, triangles (including rear triangles), and anklelocks rounding out the top five.

This year, anklelocks pushed to a solid third place (something I’ll talk more about below) and surprisingly there were enough smother “chokes” to contend with armbars and place that submission in the top five as well.

As far as division-specific data goes, it was a lot harder to submit smaller men (66, 77, and 88 Kg divisions). If we only include the male divisions, the data isn’t clear on matches won by decision. But, including data from female divisions, we clearly see that there are more matches won by decision in lighter divisions (-77, -66, +65, -65, -55) compared to heavier divisions (-88, -99, +99, absolute).

Note as well that there are only half as many female competitors in each division and only three female divisions overall (compared to 6 male divisions), so a couple outcomes one way or the other have a larger impact on the overall data.

Now, the really fun part, which submissions were most frequent in each division? Here again, recall that not all divisions had the same number of submission finishes, so the data can be a little skewed.

At any rate, we already know that RNCs are the favorite across the board. Further, we didn’t need a fancy graph to know — though it’s still fun to see — that heavyweights like to smother (and head-arm triangle) while smaller guys attack the legs and chicks dig armbars.

Something else I was interested in was point spread. It’s been well established many times that the first person to score has a significant statistical advantage for winning the match.

I did not look this deep, yet, but the effect is so strong, that if you achieve a scoring position before the points period (the first half of the match), you may actually hurt your (statistical) chances of winning. Though, setting an early pace while building momentum and confidence are considerable factors as well.

The average number of points scored by any player in all matches was 1.1 (including penalties since they’re a “true negative”). There were only three matches where the loser scored positive points. About 2/3 of matches won by points had a 1-3 point spread.

All of that confirms what most of us already know, that it’s hard to score under ADCC rules. Further, if you score 1 point, you had an 87% chance of winning. If you scored 4 or more points, that went to 100%. However, note that per ADCC rules you’re only able to score points in the second half of the match, so the time required to score more than 4 points is a significant limiting factor.

Now that we know ~1 point is a notable margin, and 4 points is huge, let’s recall that 21% of matches in the -99, +99, and Absolute divisions (average) were won by points. The average scored by the winner? 2.83.

When you compare that to all other divisions (average), 35% of matches were won by points and the winner scored an average of 4.25. Again, this isn’t really new information, but for the big guys, scoring first (or at all) has more significant consequences.

For medium and small guys, and all women, this means that you need to score more points in order to achieve the same margin for victory.

The Big Picture:

Now, let’s zoom out and take a look at some high level observations.

Ankle Locks:

As mentioned, anklelocks have made a triumphant return. Actually, they never left, people just got better at defending heelhooks, which have actually risen back to a solid second place as well.

Hungry Newcomers:

I was skeptical of this event at first as only a few reigning champions were returning and there were many notable omissions and invitations declined from premiere competitors — no Ryans, Rodriguezs, Ruotolos, or Tacketts, etc.

However, I was quickly reminded that winning or placing at trials is no small task. People showed up either with momentum or a chip on their shoulder, and that made for good matches!

In a lot of ways this did feel like a turning of the tide with so many omissions on top of OGs either retiring, not making it to the second day, or getting upset.

No Redemption:

With a single, technical, exception (Hugo v. Saunders) nobody that got down on points (including penalties) came back to win by submission. In fact, they didn’t come back to win period.

Drama as a Feature:

Jiu Jitsu started with family. Where there is family, there will always be drama. Some folks are (still) entitle divas. Some have a reputation for starting shit off the mat. Some have dance-offs with each other after the match. That’s just how it goes sometimes.

Stay Tuned for Part 2!

In Part 2 I’ll look at some of the standout athletes and matches as well as high-level perspectives for the sport / event in general. This will also include some wishful thinking and predictions for future events!

This week I pulled the plug. I quit. Gave up. Surrendered… not because it was hard, not because of external acute circumstances, and certainly not because I was lazy or unfocused.

To preface this conversation, let’s note that nothing is new and almost everything has been said before. So, let’s set the stage with some folks who have said (and done) it better than myself:

Excerpts from “Quitting vs. Failing” in the “Capacity Manual” by Non-Prophet Publishing (2023):

… A truly self-aware individual might admit, “I failed”, and assume responsibility for this outcome of overwhelming external conditions. On the other hand, “I quit” reserves no ambiguity about who did what and who is responsible for that choice and action.

Declaring that, “I failed after trying as hard as I possibly could and then some,” is not the same as saying, “I quit because it was too daunting to continue,” or “I quit because the outcome wasn’t going to be consistent with my self-image.”…

Egoic self-delusion prevents growth so if I am trying to change aspects of my own human condition I must undertake a ruthless self-assessment and accept my behavior and the beliefs that allow it. In this, honesty is paramount…

Of course, as part of the negotiation I must learn to differentiate the signals warning me of genuine impending harm and those I merely dislike. So I ask myself whether, apart from the acute instances of a poorly executed lift, have I ever damaged myself irreparably in the gym — especially in the context of confronting an Oxygen Limitation, which is when the “Quit/Don’t Quit” negotiation most commonly occurs…

I know there will be many days when my desire to quit will be strong and only I can pay enough attention to persevere. This is trainable and sustainable, but also — when left unattended — prone to decay. Attention must be practiced and Capacity training is the ideal means of developing and maintaining it… as long as I don’t quit.

Parenthetic to the above, and any exclamation of “Quit/Don’t Quit” should also be “don’t be an idiot.” Or, perhaps, we should consider that “until death, all defeat is psychological.”

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To be sure, a lot of people give up early, and often. What’s worse is that many more don’t even try. Under the guise of “living a little” they’re not living at all — elbow deep in a bucket of fried chicken and a 2-liter of Coke on the side, washed down with a “couple” drinks.

Just as surely, as I’ve written many times but it’s come to the fore again, many people mire themselves in obsessive minutia — and also cease “living” for the sake of “longevity.” What’s more is that the fear and outrage based neurotic machine known as “media” fuels this. Dully note that the producers of such “content” are beholden to your “engagement”, not your outcomes.

As far as I can recall, though you’re welcome to fact-check my archives, I’ve never referred to myself as an “elite athlete.” I’ve tried my best to only document what I’ve observed, what I’ve done, and what the outcomes were.

I’ve done my fair share of hard things; from black belts and cage fights to climbing mountains and academic / professional awards. Yet recently, the fitness equivalent of “Sunday Scaries” hit me like an existential crisis I hadn’t experienced in quite a while.

What’s particularly troubling about this phenomenon is that we’re not talking about acute stressors — like struggling to get going on a Monday morning. We’re talking about the difference between “I don’t want to go to work today” and “I don’t want to go back to work ever again.” In the case of the latter, a couple sick days, or even a week’s vacation, won’t save you.

What brought this on wasn’t acute injury, though external parameters played a role. It was the culmination of curiosity around “what if I just went back to training / playing my actual sport (jiu jitsu) most of the time?” What if I did that (training) every day and supplemental exercise was just the filler or support?

Pardon the suspense, but it’s necessary framing before we get into the particulars. This isn’t as simple as “I changed my workout plan.” It’s a reminder that our Earth-time is limited and our most valuable resources (time, attention, and effort) grow increasingly scarce.

So, what exactly happened?

I hate running, though less so nowadays. However, I hadn’t really dialed into endurance training in a few years, so it was time. We should also note that the experience of endurance is distinct from the skill / sport of running.

Yes, there was a good bit of running in that prior program, but this time around I specifically wanted to challenge myself to do something I’m not good at and that I don’t particularly enjoy… for posterity you could say.

Sometime early this year (2026) I started every workout with a 1-mile trot on a treadmill and slowly added volume to that. I’m known for insisting on long warm ups, and typically that includes an aerobic component anyway — so 10-20 minutes was suitable.

Then I recalled that there’s a local half-marathon in late September in my area. At that time, 13.1 miles seemed unfathomable, but I had time to work.

I wrote a program for myself that was broken down into 3 x 8-week phases.

• Phase 1 - Structural hardening: 45-minute walk daily, plus mobility.

• Phase 2 - Volume Accumulation: The goal here was to increase weekly running volume (miles), broken up however was needed throughout the week.

• Phase 3 - Consecutive Consolidation: This block focused on continuing skill development days (running better, not faster or further) and included one “long” day per week which focused on stretching the limit (miles per session).

These were morning “exercise” routines on top of BJJ “training” 3 times per week. Much of the program contents were taken from CrossFit Endurance (seminar) and Unbreakable Runner (book).

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Knowledge is great for building plans, but until we execute (accumulate experience) and adapt, we are none the wiser. That’s a clever way of saying “shit happens.”

About 10 weeks out from race day I got a call out of the blue from a colleague; a potential career trajectory changing opportunity had just fallen on my lap. In short, instead of running a half-marathon in September, I’d be spending a week in Hawaii.

Business plans change just like training plans. So, budget constraints shifted the above engagement and I’d be working remote, though I was determined to get my beach vacation. My pivot was to still train for the half-marathon, skip the race, and work remotely from coastal Georgia.

Ultimately, administrative bottlenecks caused fundraising to get cancelled and the entire project was killed. A few days before I got that news, I pushed my longest consecutive run to date — 8.14 miles in 81 minutes, the relative humidity was over 90%. I looked at my limping 10 year old malinois and knew it was his last long run.

All of that was an emotional roller coaster that left me wondering, as I often do, “what is the point of any of this?”

What constitutes failure depends on what we’re measuring success by and ourselves against; what we’re trying to achieve. If the goal was to finish middle-of-the-pack on an arbitrary race day, then yes, I failed. Not only did I not finish (DNF), I didn’t even start.

However, if the goal was to improve my aerobic base, re-define what it means to endure, and improve my running skill, the data doesn’t lie.

I’m not going to tell you 8 miles in a swamp was fun. I will tell you it changes the perspective of what “hard” feels like. A few weeks prior, in similar conditions, I notched a 10K in 58:00. Neither are particularly “fast”, but they’re a different experience than a “casual 5K” in favorable conditions.

If you asked me in January, 3.1 miles (5K) would have seemed like a haul, not “just another Monday.” 6.25 miles (10K) would have been a noteworthy achievement, not “the start of when I have to dig deep.”

Some 20 years ago Gregg Glassman, controversially for the time, described a 5K as “capacity, not endurance.” Certainly, I can “endure” a lot of punishment in a 20-30 minute window. That story changes radically (regardless of the implement, skill, or sport) if the query becomes “go until you can’t.”

That brings us back to the fundamental question, “why are we doing any of this?”

• Do I want to run / roll / surf today?

• Do I want to run / roll / surf as many days as I can until I die?

One grappler, who I was working with on their conditioning, I intentionally threw into the deep end. We warmed up light aerobics and mobility, lifted a little to pre-fatigue the musculature, then I smoked his lungs — he puked three times. Then I made him roll (jiu jitsu) until I decided we were ready to stop.

In the whiteboard briefing before the session I warned him:

We have to remember why we’re here. We have to end with something we love, because it’s too fucking hard to do it for any other reason.

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Where does that leave me now, or at least for the rest of the year? Well, I won’t be in Hawaii in September and I won’t be running a half-marathon either.

Maybe you’ll catch me wrestling my two malinois on a beach somewhere else. There will probably be more jiu jitsu than anything else — ADCC World Championships are a couple weeks away so the stoke will be high among training partners.

CrossFit style gymnastics — double unders, muscle ups, handstand / walks, etc. — are fun, help grappling, and don’t leave me wrecked because I’m not good enough at them to accumulate meaningful volume.

Heavy lifts still look and feel cool — I always liked Olympic weightlifting even if I wasn’t particularly good at it either. Once / week or a couple times per month goes a long way once the foundation is built.

Coming full circle, it would be a shame to waste the aerobic capacity I’ve recently renewed, so I’ll likely still do a couple “shorter” runs each week.

The moral of the story, then, seems to be not to seek failure and never quit, but whatever you chose to do (ref.):

• Show Up.

• Pay Attention.

• Tell the Truth.

• Don’t be Attached to Outcomes.

The other is the whimsical, purple and pink, yellow-eyed Cheshire Cat saying: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

The working dog is a symbol of profound loyalty and relentless effort. Then there’s the stupid cat with its stupid smile; reminding us that most of our rituals are either to keep us from going insane or to pass the time until we expire.

“Discipline equals freedom.” You’ve heard the line before, often attributed to Jocko Willink (who needs no introduction). The idea is that when we establish habits, structure, and routine, the things that are important take care of themselves.

This commitment to consistency is framed as liberation from distractions and the waning incentive of motivation. At its heart this is a powerful and accurate concept.

If the first thing I do every morning when my feet hit the floor is:

1. Push shoes on.

2. Run with the dogs.

3. Throw kettlebells around.

4. Eat breakfast.

5. Clean up before work.

I’m much less worried about “days off” when I “just don’t feel like it” because exceptions only occur maybe 5 / 100 days.

The folks claiming that the above is obsessive, or “too much work” usually aren’t the ones standing on podiums — so take that for what you will. However, just as avoidance leads us astray in one direction, blind obsession is the other side of the same coin.

Ironically, our beloved discipline can become a cudgel that paradoxically builds a prison. In either case (avoidance or obsession) we become the limiting factor in our own story.

This isn’t the first time these simplistic narratives have drown out the truth:

• “Everyone has the same 24-hours in the day.”

• “You get what you work for.”

• “Eat less and move more.”

• “Everything in moderation.”

The issue here is that many of these models assume that people are too dumb to think for themselves. Mainstream medical / nutritional advice is notorious for this. Unfortunately, as a result, people actually do stop thinking for themselves.

For what it’s worth, the counter-argument about “discipline smut” being a “pipeline to toxic masculinity” is a valid criticism. But, it’s not as simple as conceding defeat and assimilating to modernity — becoming undisciplined.

Needs never arise out of coincidence, and this is no different.

Regarding the permeation of “toxicity” here, Richard Reeves does a much better job explaining this specifically for men, but the idea is that super-sterile environments have the counter-intuitive effect of promoting even more aggressive and invasive pathogens.

In biological terms this looks like benign hand washing on the surface, but abuse and overuse of antibiotic drugs leading to the evolution of MRSA. Culturally, in health and fitness, you get Andrew Tate and Brian Johnson.

Of note, this isn’t just a “men’s issue” either. Candi Frazier (with 1M Instagram followers) has a notorious Grinch-like “go fuck yourself” attitude and all the nuance of a drinking straw.

Speaking for myself, that’s not very appealing.

Note: Normally I don’t name names and prefer to criticize ideas rather than a specific person. But, when you intentionally draw attention to yourself like the folks above, you deserve all the strays you catch.

These folks display classic traits of narcissism; not just in a pop-psychology sense, but clinically. As I said above, needs don’t arise out of coincidence, and neither does psychopathology.

But this article isn’t about vicarious diagnosing of celebrities. It’s about misleading reductionist tropes. All of which brings us to that age-old concept that “ego is the enemy.” Admittedly, I have not read Holiday’s book, but we all know how this gets re-spun in headlines and conversation alike.

I’d agree that self-aggrandizing at the pain and expense of others is not a good thing. But that’s not the verbiage that gets used. We’re told, by all kinds of pop-psychology and pop-spirituality sources, to dampen our expectations of and belief in ourselves (“be humble”, “don’t have an ego”) as well as other nauseating fluff (that equally misses the point) about “vision boards” and “affirmations.”

In a literal psychoanalytic context, nothing could be further from the truth. “Ego” is literally our concept of self. Frankly, without it, we’re driven only by pain/pleasure (Id) and internalized praise/persecution (Superego). A true “absence or death of self” leaves us psychotic — tragically ungrounded.

This is worth mentioning because (1) clearly if we’re distracted by every fleeting pleasure or unpleasant prickle we won’t get very far, and (2) even with the purest guide post, if we don’t have a vessel to bring us there, we’re lost all the same.

Now, back to discipline.

You could shave your head, grit your teeth, degrade yourself in the mirror and ask, “who’s going to carry the boats.” You could do that every day for the rest of your life.

I’d hope that, sooner, rather than later, you’re reminded that:

“When a soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune”

~ Albert Camus, The First Man

As I’ve written elsewhere, resilience is not about how much suffering we can absorb. There’s nothing inherently more noble about getting good at getting beat up whether it’s by yourself or someone else. You certainly don’t get extra credit for doing things “the hard way.”

Resilience is about how much we are willing to change ourselves; which implies that we have a self (Ego) that’s worth nourishing in the first place.

So, why discipline?

Why is it that you chose a particular direction or method to get there?

Is it because you heard it on a podcast or magazine?

Is it because you love the burn in your legs and your lungs?

Is it because you actually do want compliments and recognition, but you’re afraid so you chose to suffer in silence instead?

There is no such thing as stagnation in life. A choice to not act is a choice to be left behind. Skills and traits that are not trained degrade. Everything, including character, is perishable.

So, at some point you will have to choose. That’s non-negotiable. What you deliver and where you end up is a different story.

You won’t get another go around in this lifetime.

I was going to write this article about the well trodden paradox in modern sports, particularly the UFC, that we’ve never seen more impressive physical athletes per capita and yet the talent pool seems to have dropped off a cliff.

Then, the broader fitness-culture concept hit me. It’s not just a regression toward the mean, presumably to then raise it. It’s that that entire process inherently forces a pruning and purging of outliers. It shrinks the height we might otherwise aspire towards.

This forces a twofold disconnect. On one hand, there’s a pervasive expert creep in internet-land (i.e. social media). Once well meaning specialists fall into the trap of a content mill which inevitably dilutes their productions to rage bait and weekend benders on PubMed. Yet, the buzzwords of “elite and optimal” abound.

On the other hand the 20th anniversary CrossFit games just wrapped up and there are already posts flying around reminding people to lower their standards and “not train like professional athletes.” Likewise, this is well intentioned and not unfounded, but stifling none the less.

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Single Serving Amateurs: The PubMed Aesthetic

I don’t have to name names. We all know who they are in the “health and fitness space”… the folks that started out with noble intentions and are now beholden to produce an endless conveyor belt of 3-hour podcasts; or worse, 8-second TikTok clips.

Inevitably, and obviously, they get stretched thin and well out over their skis. The result is a flimsy posture, something that’s blatantly apparent to anyone who’s still working on the ground floor.

It’s not that any particular person isn’t “allowed” to have an opinion on any particular topic. It’s that appeal to authority in one area of expertise is used as a cudgel for any other topic that will garner “likes” and “shares.”

It’s really easy to tell who has never cultivated change in anyone besides themselves. These people are incapable of nuance and insist on ramrodding their excitement for what is currently working for them onto everyone else’s every problem — plus or minus some evangelist arrogance and narcissism.

In case you haven’t noticed, a lack of information isn’t the problem — for most things in the world, but specifically health and fitness. It’s way easier to scour PubMed (or Reddit) to bolster your confirmation bias than it is to bleed and sweat for 100 days in a row to try to begin to understand something.

So long as these folks are beholden more to sponsorship revenue and their egos, they’ll only ever be keyboard warriors with citations. A lengthy bibliography doesn't make someone an expert, let alone an effective coach.

The Specialized Generalist: The CrossFit Effect

In 20 years of CrossFit Games, 13 of the individual men’s titles have gone to just 4 people (9 of them to 2 people). In the women’s individual category a single person has claimed 8 titles.

Those are beyond astonishingly impressive feats for the individuals referenced. However, it points out the obvious fact that such an event is anything but “unknown and unknowable.” It is, in fact, predictable and trainable as seen by winners who are not drawn out of the ether like a random hopper pool (*cough*).

If you’re going to call it a sport, then it is, by definition, requisite of specialized skills and is not general physical preparation.

With that said, I’m a little tired of the apologists floating around telling people to (essentially) dampen their expectations and stop trying to train like professional athletes.

I suspect that this generally comes from the perspective of injury prevention and longevity. Certainly, I saw (and succumbed to myself) this play out often in the climbing world. A magazine interviews a world-class athlete, distilled workout or training routine gets published, recreational normies adopt the routine, injuries ensue in less than 6 weeks.

Conversely, nobody watches the NFL/NBA/MLB on Sunday and then says, “Yeah, I’m gonna start training like those guys on Monday!” At the same time, this usually doesn’t stop the folks, who were inclined to anyway, from their regularly scheduled backyard pickup game next Friday.

So, why do coaches (or athletes) make this assumption with fitness? Because the message is “this is GPP”, it’s general so it’s not specialized. But, if it’s not specialized it can’t be a sport. If it’s not a sport, a false assumption grows that ease of accessibility is mistaken for availability of success.

What’s more, who are you to “rain on my parade” or tell me what to believe about myself, or that I must lower my expectations and aspirations because of your beliefs and limitations?

“The only reason for someone to tell you to stay in your lane is so they can get (or stay) ahead of you.”

~ Tim Grover

Is the entire purpose of a coach not to help me achieve those, or at minimum create a an attainable route to an endpoint that still adequately satiates the original desire?

The mixed message fails this objective. We cannot simultaneously tell people “grind and get after it” because we’re “forging elite fitness” while also anchoring anyone who doesn’t make the leader board with “just stop trying so you don’t hurt yourself.”

That creates a very caustic environment where obviously toxic personalities metastasize.

Excellence Requires Radical Exclusion: Real Recognizes Real

The power-lifter, international violinist, and chess grandmaster don’t shit on each other’s craft. In fact, their profound respect for each other is likely proportionate to their level of success in their respective field of play.

Anybody who has “been there” almost instantly notices the way someone else walks, talks, treats others, and approaches their work when they have also “been there.”

I used to say that “excellence is the standard.” But that’s not the way it works. You can raise the standard, but excellence will always imply exclusion. If you think this isn’t the case, consider every truly once-in-a-generation athlete you can think of. Then, count their championship rings/belts/etc. against their divorce decrees. It’s not unanimous, but you get the idea.

My point here is that elitism doesn’t need defending, but apparently our dreams do.

I’m not saying your next “win” has to cost you your marriage or that you should bet the house on your next training camp. I’m saying you will have to choose what you want to win at, because there is no such thing as not-choosing — even if that choice is in-action, which is the most costly of all.

You will also have to pay for your wins somehow, and the debt always comes due — usually with an unaffordable interest rate. So, pay with cash. Decide ahead of time “what is worth it” and what is not.

Do not negotiate your dreams. Do not compromise your integrity. Make choices. Make things happen. Accept the consequences. Savor the rewards.

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The Collaborative Solution: From Surgery to Sports Ball

Podiatrists don’t try to tell you about your eyes. They refer out to an optometrist. The “internet guru” behaves in a way that’s exactly the opposite of real “elite” competitors — the aforementioned chess, weightlifting, and violin performers.

We don’t need more generalists shouting noise at each other about who’s marginally, rhetorically, or abstractly more correct. We need specialists and real experts who work together and celebrate each other.

Social media and podcasts have devolved into echo chambers seasoned with outrage and performative depth. In many ways, Substack isn’t an exception to this either. This fuels the scarcity mindset of the attention economy.

That has not been my experience in the past 15 years of healthcare and combat sports. There is no shortage of people who want to get more fit, stronger, healthier, and live more capable lives or perform better at their sports. Many people are willing to go to great lengths to do so, but are distracted by vast amounts of noise created by “experts” bickering.

Acknowledging the limits of your experience and expertise (as a coach or athlete) isn’t just professionally ethical, it reinforces your personal integrity and fulfillment by avoiding time and energy siphons with marginal returns.

If I’m a runner who wants to improve my deadlift because I think it’s lacking (a GPP perspective) then that’s great. So long as my identity is “a runner”, then I should not compare my deadlift to people who identify as deadlifters (the specificity of training and adaptation). If I want to change my identity from runner to deadlifter (or vice versa) that’s also cool.

The point, and the problem, is choice.

What a privilege it is to be exhausted by an ambition of your choosing.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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!

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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.”

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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.

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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

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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

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