• The gym is now 7 years old; we have 2 employees who are a really great fit and are continuing to steadily grow. Time-efficient strength training seems to have a market niche that would be worthy of your attention if you’re looking to start a business.
• I still weigh 175lbs +- 3lbs. Years of continued interest and effort in moving the needle without getting fat have not changed that. In some ways, having the same body at 40 as I had at 30 is an achievement. Also: Al Kavadlo filmed something similar recently.
  • An observation I once made to James Steele II: if there wasn’t a hard limit on muscle gains and it was just a function of hard work x time, the all of the super heavyweight competitors in a bodybuilding show or powerlifting meet would just be the oldest competitors by training age.
    • These are weight class sports, regardless of one’s age.
  • This not to say that I’m not continually scheming and trying to overcome this limit, become fitter, look better. This is why I’ve also done trail racing on low volume, and currently use the Carol bike as a high effort cardio outlet for competition and seeing something improve. Challenge yourself, as Clarence Bass said.
• As per the above: I get to come to work and be the expert of people who want to see me and interact with me. I save for retirement, pay my bills, send my kids to camp etc. with this one gym working < 40 hours a week (now, not at the beginning). We’re slowly moving the business and systems toward growth and further backgrounding me so that the service and the business is the asset, not my 25 years experience, graduate degree, and perception of self-importance and value. There are worst jobs I could have bought.
  • This is a value judgement: I have colleagues who sincerely believe that their business is the only “good” HIT business and everyone else is an idiot because they haven’t grown into a multi-territory monster or franchised or licensed their IP. These are all marks of a (typically) well-run business, but it may not support what that person values in their life.
    • If businesses are immortality projects, they’re not great. My children don’t know who the fuck Steve Jobs is and I submit that unless their parents are frothing-at-the-mouth fanboys, most children won’t know either. So much for denting the universe.
• I’ve been enjoying the longevity videos of Brad Stanfield and have wondered if something for exercise + strength training (with an eye toward longevity) would be an enjoyable endeavor for me to embark on.

Since you’ll ask, here’s my current training & diet:

• I use an upper/lower split on an A/B/A, B/A/B schedule, meaning each muscle gets hit about every 5th day. Total volume hovers around 4 sets per muscle per week split between nearly as many exercises. Sometimes I do drop sets or rest-pause sets, but am not convinced of their value above and beyond concentric failure. I do them because of the the pump they provide.

• On my lower body days I do Carol bike sprints at the end of my workout. This has not affected progress to any substantial degree I can detect (to be sure: it’s only an extra 40-60 seconds of HIGH EFFORT pedaling. It’s practically a high rep finisher for the quads.) This is done for another market of progress in *something*.
  • There’s also data that suggests Resisted Sprint Intervals do not change strength or hypertrophy response when performed in close proximity to a resistance training session.
  • There’s enough data that such HIIT work does improve central cardiovascular adaptations, contrary to what was previously thought. I tell clients that Strength/Muscle and VO2 are the most predictive aspects of fitness insofar as all-cause mortality/relative risk, which is true. Since central adaptations are part of the VO2 equation, it’s a very small (<8 minutes) investment every 5th day to nudge that stat in my direction AND it sets me up for embarking on longer specific conditioning for trail races etc.
    • I *could* do my workouts in a “Project Total Conditioning” fashion and get nearly the same effect but I wouldn’t like it as much. It would be a fun short term challenge and I’ve even fashioned a bodyweight version for my garage if I wanted to do an 8 week challenge but it is just that, not a long-term sustainable routine.
• If pressed for time or feeling tired (4 kids) I’ll revert 1x/1x for a week or two before increasing the frequency.
• Diet is largely “If it fits your macros” with a lower carb bend. This year is the first year in probably a decade (my oldest is turning 10, so that tracks) where I’ve started tracking with specific phases. When I’m cutting (think beach trip on Memorial Day weekend) the carbs come down to < 150/day and calories come down too. The rest of the year I’ve set my calories to try to gain at a rate of 2lbs/month in line with the current natty gain rate limit suggestion. I’ll do a “mini cut” as needed, before doing a longer cut leading up to the beach every year.
• Supplements? Creatine, TMG, Fish Oil, D3/K2, Boron are mainstays.

Final point: if you’re going to be in this for the long game (til’ you die) then the training needed to be the most intolerance you can tolerate. This is going to be seasonal with your life; I’ve spent the better part of 10 years training mostly 1 day per week strength and “Cardio” (supporting the trail races I did) but now middle age has me staring down the back half of my life, which includes things like colonoscopies (2 down, no cancer), the aging and death of loved ones, therapy to see around the corners of our worst tendencies, children growing older and into themselves, sibling changes, and the inevitability of decline. I’ve set a goal of getting as jacked as possible by 42, 2 years from now, which may result in nothing but is a nice anchor to focus on progression as possible, keeping the daily farming of diet and health guiding toward a future harvest.

Which is to say: how can you structure your training so that you actually ENJOY the hard work you’re embarking on? I can do well on 1x/1x training as above, but I do enjoy the concentrated effort of a split.

If you need permission to experiment, you have it from me. Just don’t hurt yourself!

I hope you find it as usual as I have! Enter Art:

I was once a philosophy major, but I got bored with it. Only a few philosophers seem to know or care a lot about science and many love paradoxes and infinite set problems that are mostly just a confusion. I do admire the work of Dennet, the Churchlands, Popper and my friend and former colleaque Bryan Skyrms who uses game theory to study the dynamics of deliberation I did read a fair amount about Zen and the Tao. Wonderful imagery and poetry, but the core of the knowledge is easily put in terms of complex systems theory and Bayesian inference.

Here is all you need to know about Zen and the Tao.

The Tao is algorithmically incompressible. To reproduce the information contained in a life sequence requires no less information than is contained in the sequence itself. There is no algorithm that is capable of reducing the information in a life sequence to a shorter statement. Each sequence is unique unto itself.

This means you cannot predict which among many possible stochastic paths originating from this point in time and space your life will move onto. You can know something of the ensemble of paths and how your actions may condition the likelihoods of these paths.

Your only moment of power is NOW, the moment when you can take actions that influence the distribution of future outcomes. You learn of the possibilities from your experience with no regrets and you make your choices in the Now with the knowledge that they do not determine the outcomes only the possible paths on which your life may evolve.

Thus you do not fear the outcomes or attempt to control things you cannot. Nor can you rationally have regret.

Adopt a rational Bayesian decision framework and use evidence from your past to form expectations of the possibilities of the future and make choices that influence the distribution of possible outcomes in your favor. Never expect a distinct outcome to result from your actions. Your genes already do this (see Dr. Sejnowski’s talk just a few posts ago) and your fast decision brain modules are better at decisions than all the calculations you can ever do.
Don’t look for causes. Complex systems don’t have causes. There are just patterns and at any point one’s state of health can move randomly onto a new path. It is not the particular path that one should think about. You move over an ensemble of possible paths, conditional on how you live and the choices you make. All you can do is to try to influence the distribution of possibilities. You can never set the particular path or outcome that will be yours from this time forward. If you think you can look back and see some cause of events, you are probably suffering hindsight bias or what I call complexity blindness.

Think of the freedom this view gives you. There is no possibility of failure because you only control your actions and they only influence the probable evolution of your life over stochastic future paths. There is no failure, only feed back.

Finished 3rd in my age group, 8th overall for the men and 10th overall for the field. This means top third and quarter, respectively, on less than an hour a week of running on average. How did I do it?

Going Ultramental

I’ve had on again off again talks with Andrew Magness about this stuff for a while now and after a disappointing Turkey Trot last November, decided I needed a goal to weaponize my endurance efforts. I eventually settled on the J & J Trail Running Reunion, which offered an incredibly supported event in a supremely rugged setting. It was also the USATF 100k National Championship so I’d get to see some really fast individuals. 

Having read Andrew’s book numerous times and combed over his guides, I settled on the following schedule:

• Monday: Strength Training
• Wednesday/Thursday: HIIT (no more than 15 minutes)
• Saturday: Long intervals/Time Trials/”Long” Runs

This was made in February before the birth of my 3rd son so I was flexible to changing the structure. Total time invested would average less than an hour every 4 weeks, though some weeks would be longer overall. This is in line with what Eric Orton suggested for 2 runs a week:

And then a follow on comment:

Understand this is not Eric *endorsing* what I was doing, not that I needed his permission, but rather than when you have a limited amount of time the most powerful use of your time is going to be Threshold work and interval/”VO2″ work. 

Leading up to this effort, my running had largely been a 6 mile loop in my greater neighborhood once per week, with the occasional interval session. It was all done by feel and was focused on just running “easy.” There was no objective pacing, it was all RPE. As a result, my early fitness assessment as per VDOT was 40. This is not absolutely correct as my VO2max has been measured higher on numerous occasions but for the sake of progression I decided to use VDOT as a means of measuring performance improvement using a test I would not be practicing: the 2 mile time trial. 

Why 2 miles? Well according to a podcast I had listened to from Rogue Running, the coaches like using the 2 mile because that’s about where the “inflection point” occurs  and lactate really ramps up. Basically a good glimpse into aerobic function.

Objective Data & Progress

There is a YMCA right around the corner from my house, so I established a 2 mile time trial an extracted base paces from the VDOT calculator for my Baseline workouts. In addition to these workouts (which would repeat approximately every 4th week), I had time trial efforts that were outside and subject to environmental factors. I was attempting to run them as fast as comfortable, looking to get some of the skill training for the rugged race while also doing longer efforts. The challenge quickly became the environment as my time trials were flat owing to the increasing Texas heat. Going out at 6:30am for a 7 mile run around Town Lake Trail with the temperature already at 80*F is not a recipe for a PR. That said seeing my paces matching as fast as I’d remembered going around the trail in spite the increasing temperatures was promising. Plus I chalked up the experience as “heat acclimation training” and carried on.

The workouts at the YMCA were followed by time in a dry sauna to further the heat acclimation. I could not spend the sheer volume of time in the sauna as research suggests would help but I could spend time in there after every workout, thus accumulating adaptation over time. As I did not seem to suffer in the heat beyond lots of sweating, it seems to have worked.

About a third of the way through my extremely long training block, I retested my 2 mile time trial and now had a VDOT of 44. Progress!

Incremental Gains & Mental Fatigue

Of course the easier gains were over but they still came none the less. The challenge became actually getting my workouts in due to my better half going back to work and having to manage the schedules of my children. Some weeks my mid-week HIIT workouts was skipped and my weekend workouts had to shift from time trial toward more structured work i.e. 45 minutes at X pace. These workouts are actually a little harder to wrap my head around: shorter workouts at HARD but brief; the longer time trials allow you to settle into a fast pace which offers a lagging indicator of fitness improvements over time. The middle pace workouts are just chugging at threshold with no break or ability to undulate pace. 

At this point I did my only really “long run”: a 10 mile trail run on super technical terrain the Barton Creek greenbelt here in Austin. I felt fit and fast; trails play to my natural fast twitch springiness where I’m always dancing along the terrain. I finished faster than my running partner by 5+ minutes. He’s finished 10k’s faster than I have, so that was super confidence boosting.

By the end of the training block I was just kind of hanging on to fitness. One particularly down day I jumped on the treadmill and rifled off a 5:36 mile which going by this sweat science article  means that going that fast outside would have been easier. I followed that up with a 2 mile time trial a week later that had me scoring a 48+ on the VDOT scale. I was fitter and faster than I had been in my entire life but would it be enough to do well at this race?

Trail Race Weekend

The weekend of the race was HOT. It was over 80*F near the start of the race and just got hotter. Here are some random notes:

• The trails make you slow: Andrew Magness is right that the longer the race, the slower the pace. Add to that the trail itself and the nature of the terrain and I was not at any point near my lactate threshold pace. 
• Trail runners are tons of fun: super chatty individuals who want to talk as they run to help pass the time but also because of the above. You’re moving fast for the terrain but you can still communicate.
• Get ready for isolation: once you’re in the middle of the race, you’re likely alone. I was running with folks the first 4.5 miles and then ran the next 11 without any human, save for those I passed who were running the 50 mile or 100k. I found myself singing John Mayer’s “Gravity” as I ran downhill, let our random primal screams, and had conversations with the idea of the ghost of my mother in my head while also disavowing the idea that I was talking to anyone other than myself.
• Meet the Central Governor: about 11 miles into the race, I found the strange sensation of fatigue in my legs outstripping my heart rate. Compound that with the fact that I had NO IDEA how much longer I had to go and you get the desire to slow down. The 50-something year old who finished ahead of me had run the race before, so he knew where he could push and where to back off. I was running blind and that lack of awareness demonstrated an intense desire to take it easy. At this point I was having to negotiate on the uphill portions, using tactics like “Run 2 markers, walk 1” and the like to move forward and then…
• The Mile 12 Hill: Fuck this guy; I could only laugh and remind myself that no one was going to deliver me but me:

• The example for your children: As I was coming into the home stretch, I picked up the pace as my 4 year old started running beside me to the finish. He had given me 1 piece of advice before the race: “Daddy, just run as fast as I do.” So of course he asked as I ran down the chute toward the finish: “Did you run as fast as I did?” I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do that, but I sure tried.
• The Letdown: I sat there holding my youngest son after the race and became quite emotional. I thanked my wife for generally dealing with me shortly before reality set in: the baby was upset, Sarah went *somewhere* and my two older boys were wearing helmets and throwing balls at their heads. My feet were bruised from hitting rocks and my legs wiped out from running for as long as I had ever run but in that moment, the is-ness washed over me in an awesome wave.

So what now?

Am I a trail runner who goes out every weekend now? Nope. Do I have confidence in knowing that I can tackle goal and perform reasonably well given my time investment? Yes. Do I have confidence that I could run even further? Absolutely. That was earned and cannot be taken.

Aside: I now understand why lots of addicts are runners. Never mind the actual physical endocannabinoid addiction mitigation function of running. The psychological value of running away  from something is very real. This was something I could control in a sea of so many things in my life that I only have loose control of or zero control of but are a part of.

The past 4 years of my life saw much joy and hardship: a business partnership fell to pieces, more children means less control, we started a business my taking on 100,000+ dollars of debt on top of all of the debt from school and my attempt to switch careers…in short I felt tossed about in a storm on a daily basis. Anxiety all the way down.

This race came right at the end of the repayment of the business load, my children are a bit older and more predictable, my thought processes around parenting are better, I spend more energy working on my marriage and my relationship with my wife, it turns out I’m a very good trainer and a decent (to improving) business owner, to name a few. This race represented a controlled version of life: you’re undertrained to believe you can do the task well and yet somehow in the throws you deliver yourself through it all any way.

1. There’s less of a tendency to think about actions in the context of how I’ll talk about them on social media. For example, if I was doing a water fast and I didn’t achieve my intended duration goal, I would have been been thinking about how I would explain this to people on the internet. This still happens, but I’m aware of the dialogue and can correct it.
2. The value of surrogation. By stepping away from social media and then coming back, I’ve come to appreciate how little the people doing things have in common with my life circumstances. For example, it’s usually single white dudes in their 20s doing biohacking things that “aren’t hard.” I remember that much free time and lack of interest outside of myself! I find myself asking more questions about how people with circumstances similar to my own achieved a specific outcome, rather than what is the “best” or “optimal” way to achieve the outcome.

As it turns out, you don’t need to be on the internet in order to have a successful business. We’ve hiring our first employee and look forward to sustained growth. What do I attribute this to? Two things:

1. Treating a business like a business, where we implement repeatable systems and strategies to deliver a consistent experience for every client.
2. Not being on social media.

When I first watched Cal Newport’s video on why nobody needs social media, I certainly agreed with everything he said, but did not bring myself to full strip away the social media utilization. There was substantial time on twitter, Instagram, and Facebook that, while it didn’t take away from my work (because no client is going to stand here while I check my feed), it did occupy precious mental energy that could be allocated to churning business ideas into action.

As such, after my wildly successful year without chocolate, I needed a new challenge utilizing the same nuclear option: a year without Facebook. I started January 1st 2018. Quickly I realized that the thing I missed the most was the messenger feature as that’s how I communicated with my colleagues all over the world. Turns out you can just use messenger.com and that solved that.

From then on it was quiet. When you don’t have every voice on the internet sharing their opinion about all sorts of things (yourself included), life scales down. Here were some observations:

1. After some period of time away from Facebook, all of my social media usage went to zero.
2. The pace of life slowed considerably. All of a sudden life was like a damn blue bell advertisement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMCfaJDQ6j8
3. Internet usage in general went way down. I used it for very specific reasons: directions, restaurants, how-to guides, reviewing research, etc. Screwing around on youtube went way way down.
4. People whose businesses rely on the internet often decry the internet. It’s effectively an occupational hazard, as so many friends with internet presence that earns them income have to deal with all the shit that rolls downhill. I don’t have to worry about this, thankfully.
5. Once I was away from Facebook for long enough, the utility of twitter increased. I could use it to quickly get clarification from a researcher as to their methods or ask a question of an author about something they wrote. There is no FOMO.

The only thing I haven’t solved is the event feature of Facebook. Fortunately my wife just tells me when things are or pins it to our shared calendar.

Quitting Facebook has been the most productive thing for my business and my well being. By not wasting my time on social media I’ve been able to focus better on the things I value, to learn new languages, and to actually disconnect every day when I leave work. It’s been a joy to behold and I highly recommend anyone who reads this do the same.

To put it another way: are you measuring improvement by external factors (performance), or by internal factors (control, focus, concentration)?

To be sure, there are performance improvements to be had especially in the beginning of your training career. And if you want to take on a new challenge with that base fitness, you’ll gain task-specific improvements (fit-ness, you see) that are built on your foundation with a very small impact on your actual foundation. Motor learning calls this “indifferent transfer” and most of the sports or activities we participate in will at best result in this outcome given the time we can invest in them.

One of the gifts of having the internet and the internet archive is that you can watch the progression of fitness gurus over weeks, months, and years. By and large, unless they’ve lost a ton of fat, most haven’t changed aggressively. That “hypertrophy expert” doing 10 times the volume you are? Are they 10x bigger? Have they had 10x the result? How is that measured?

Of course we run up against biological limits, but for some reason something like hypertrophy that has a degree of plasticity (but a hard upper limit based on skeletal size) is seen as a limit of choice. As long as you “choose” to keep gettin’ gainz, you keep getting bigger. It’s a matter of choice. This is of course false. Just like I didn’t choose to be nearly 6’3″, you can’t choose your sensitivity or absolute limit to this stuff.

Just like you shouldn’t wait until you have X dollars in the bank or have achieved Y to be happy, don’t wait until you’re in Z shape to start enjoying what your body is capable of. “Oh I can’t enjoy that tough mudder/5k/giant camping trip because I’m not in good enough shape yet.” There’s always someone faster/stronger/better than you, and you’ll eventually decline no matter how diligent or lucky you are. Enjoy the fitness you’ve built doing things with said fitness… that was the whole point in the first place, remember?

HIT and Running: An in-depth conversation with Skyler Tanner about Resistance Training and Cardio

Why should you care? Well if you’re like me you intentionally cultivate a net around your online activity to filter out noise so that you can focus on information that’s actionable and proven to help improve your workout or your training business.

It would be a whole lot easier if you could find the highest quality information in one place. This is what the Corporate Warrior Membership delivers.

In exercise, you might assume that trainers follow best practices, informed by what the peer-reviewed research confirms is safe and effective for trainees over a wide age range.

You’d be wrong.

Evidence-Based Resistance Training, Explained

Most of what passes for exercise in commercial gyms is ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. At Smart Strength we practice “Evidence-Based Resistance Training,” but what does that mean?

Let me explain with the help of this handy diagram:

Let’s break this down shall we?

1. What the research says works

When it comes to resistance training, most things don’t work very well, are dangerous, and have limited ecological validity. So we look for what the literature says works for most people, safely, across their training career. In other words, X works under Y conditions given Z constraints.

This however is merely a menu, not a map. If the literature was extremely precise, you wouldn’t need an experienced, educated trainer to help make sense of the variables; you’d only need a flowchart.

Which leads us to…

2. Trainer Experience

When it comes to applying training principles that have been proven to work, there’s no one better than an experienced, educated trainer to help you. At Smart Strength, we marry university education with a robust continuing education and certification process. This means that our trainers are actual professionals, ready to help clients marry what the research says works for their goals with their affect and circumstances.

3. Client Preference 

We’re the experts, but in order to do our job to the best of our ability, client preference is taken into account. If a client does not like the A+, most-effective exercise or method for whatever reason, then a B+ solution is great because long-term adherence is required to make and maintain all of the look great, feel great, perform great benefits of resistance training.

Putting it all together

At Smart Strength, our expert trainers use their experience to prescribe the safest, most effective exercises and methods to where the client is at to help them look better, feel better, and become the strongest version of themselves. This sets us apart in the crowded fitness landscape!

Thanks for the question!

To be clear, I rarely PSMF; the last time I did was ~10 years ago before this past January. I’ll likely do one again with blood testing later this year to confirm or deny the hunch I have.

To Aureus’ question: how do I eat the rest of the year?

1. Long Term Attention

First, I love food. La comida es hobby (y el gringo habla un poco español). So the workaround has been doing time-restricted feeding for the past 10 years. For the longest time I’ve done 16/8, getting all of my calories between 12pm and 8pm. However with the start of Smart Strength and being busier than I’ve ever been (think growing almost 300% in 18 months), my eating window is now typically between 4pm and 9pm during the week, and moves out to 11am to 7pm on the weekend unless Sarah and I have a date.

This is one of those “strong beliefs held loosely” tools. As long as I’m eating my calories in a window that is smaller than I’m fasting, it’s cool. I don’t agonize about if my fasting window was 3 minutes shorter today, as if the human body does arithmetic in that fashion. It doesn’t, which is my beef with “biohacking” in general.

My leanness, therefore, is a long term habit married with gentle changes as my circumstances have evolved. You have to do this stuff until you die.

2. Real Food

I know, I know. It’s so not vogue to say you eat paleo anymore because it’s a term void of meaning and co-opted for selling things. I get it.

That said: I eat mostly paleo, most of the time. Real food as close to its natural packaging as possible. Lots of nuts, tubers, and meat, with fruits and veggies for variety and flavor. Still high fat, but “moderate” carb. I don’t go over bodyweight in carbs on most days, just because if you’re eating real food in the narrow feeding window, it’s really hard to do.

3. Relaxed Saturdays

I don’t “schedule” a cheat day, but on Saturday we tend to have friend visits so I loosen up my eating and include things that don’t fit with my normal intake like homemade bread. Bread + butter is awesome, especially homemade bread.

I don’t try to eat ALL of the garbage food and the eating doesn’t start at midnight just to see how much junk I can stuff. If there is a craving or a get together, I enjoy.

4. Celebration food for celebrations

I try to be the model for my children: cakes, ice creams, and the like are celebration foods and should be enjoyed predominantly for such events. So my birthday fell on a Wednesday, so I had cupcakes and ice cream because it was a celebration. I went back to my normal habits at the next meal.

That’s the long and short of how I eat to stay lean year around, in this case around 11%, give or take 2%.