A N T H O N Y M Y C H A L

Outside of a raw dawg beginner, you will never be as strong and as fast as possible simultaneously. This is one of those myths perpetrated by people that obsess over strength

I won’t deny strength being an important part of speed. (Although, it may be if you’re a genetic freakazoid as some people are just fast. And, in fact, some believe that speed is a ticket to strength, not the other way around.) 

But if you’re chasing (or exceeding) a 2xBW squat and looking to maximize your vertical jump, you’re going to have to prioritize. Back off of your strength work when you’re looking to peak. The slow grinding strength adaptations interfere with the relaxation and recoil adaptations needed for explosive movements.

When I say “back off,” I don’t mean stop. Something as simple as cutting the volume in half will do the trick. So if you’ve been squatting for 4x6, ramping up your strength, drop it back to 4x3. You don’t have to necessairly lower the weight either, since the volume reduction tends to be “enough.”

You can’t hear a whisper unless you’re actively listening. Your body whispers to you all the time, mostly on the pain front. 

ersonally, I have five places that like to whisper to me. My formerly broken foot, my left knee, my left hip, my right elbow, and my right shoulder. 

If I hear these whispers, things aren’t going well. A severe injury is likely around the corner. Or, at the least, that I’m going down a hole that will be hard to climb out from. 

So this past Sunday, I was doing body weight squats to warm up. My knee felt foggy and my left hip popped. When I moved to pull-ups (again, during the warm-up), my elbow didn’t quite feel right. The nerve pain in my foot has also increased. 

All things considered, I’m not in a boatload of pain. Nothing hurts to the point of grandpa movement. But I would be an idiot not to listen.

Sadly, most people don’t listen. Whispers are easy to ignore, after all. It’s not a slap in the face. Not a shout. Just a murmur of a warning. The faintest, “psst.” 

Find out the spots that like to whisper to you. And when you hear them, don’t ignore them. Your body is smarter than your mind sometimes. Listen to it.

The easiest way to keep tabs on the overall stress you impose on yourself is to choose self limiting exercises. 

For a light pulling day, do power cleans with no jump or feet movement. 

For a light squatting day, only front squat what you can power clean. 

For a light running day, only run to the point where you can maintain breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. 

All around try avoiding the smaller plates.

Doing shit like this means you aren’t going to lie to yourself. If you feel crappy, you aren’t going to slap fifty extra pounds on the bar. 

Find these “self limiting” things. Plan your training around them. Most autoregulation techniques don’t pan out well because it’s hard to determine “feel” on a fine level.  

A lot of people dive into unilateral work when they have knee pain because they think strengthening the external and internal rotators of the hip will fix their issues. 

But even if a lack of strength in the upper hip is the problem, you have to consider how the problem manifests. It’s not so much that the hip rotators are weak, it’s that that weak hip rotators lead to faulty movement. (IE: not being able to keep the knee and foot aligned.)

Working on strength in a non-specific movement pattern doesn’t guarantee it will be used in the specific one. For example, just because you can squat fine doesn’t mean you know how to land safely from a vertical jump. The body position is different, let alone the velocity and type of muscle contraction.

More often than not, you have to reeducate the pattern from the beginning. Build up the activation patterns correctly, then learn how to incorporate it all into the movements causing the most dysfunction. 

There’s little mention of unilateral work in An Athlete’s Guide to Chronic Knee Pain because focusing stress into one leg doesn’t make sense to me. If the knee is in pain when the stress is widespread, what’s going to happen when it’s concentrated?

And then there’s the issue of most unilateral lunging work exposing the rear leg’s patellar tendon. It’s just not worth the hassle. Learn how to operate pain free bilaterally first. 

I hate this for two reasons. First, because I hate it. Second, because I don’t know how to solve it. 

And it’s this:

The dichotomy between “training” and “not training.” 

For some reason, I absolutely hate the mindset of optimizing your life around a workout. I’m not necessarily talking about taking time out of your day to workout either. Just the concept of:

Oh, it’s 6PM, time to workout. 

Oh, I’m going to fast until I workout.

Oh, I can’t do “x” I haven’t worked out yet. 

Oh, that’s my post workout meal.

Oh, I can’t do that today because I’m not training. 

Oh, I trained legs, better cancel any and all activities for the next week because I’ll barely be able to walk up the steps let alone have a semblance of an active life.

And other similar shenanigans. 

Part of me thinks the answer to this is to train daily, take off days when life demands it, and have a minimal exercise selection. Intensity and volume to fluctuate as needed. In and out in under an hour.

Five years ago, you drank a sugary shake before right before you lifted and immediately after you lifted. Today, a lot of people will tell you that this plummets growth hormone levels and kill your gains. 

Yet people made progress five years ago. And when looking at an empirical body of evidence, the amount of people that made progress using “old” methods is greater than the that of people using “new” methods. 

I’m not quite sure what this means as a whole. But I do know that it means the most important part is actually giving a conscientious effort to train. 

Even if you hate baseball, you know that ever hitter has a different stance. That’s because the stance is merely the means to the end. What matters is how the body is positioned at the finish of the swing.

So the stance is the means. The finished position is the end.

When it comes to athletes, squatting is nothing more than a means. It doesn’t matter how you do it, really. So the goal isn’t to squat a lot of weight. It’s to make the legs stronger.

Powerlifters, however, squat as an end. Not a means. So the goal isn’t to make the legs strong. It’s to squat a lot of weight.

Start mixing means and ends and you wind up in a bad place. You end up worrying about things that don’t really matter. And you end up undervaluing what does matter.

The type of squat is kind of like the batting stance. It doesn’t matter. It’s largely individual. As long as it accomplishes the goal, which, for most athletes, is to get the legs stronger, it is serving its purpose.

This was originally posted in an article on my blog, 21 Fantastically Awesome Random Things ,but I liked it so much, I had to re-post it.

Reward yourself for small wins. You probably never do. Neither do I. But we should. It seems that every time we make progress, we’re unsatisfied. We just set the bar higher and keep climbing, forgetting to relax and enjoy the moment where we step from peg to peg. But this pushing and pulling between wanting more and enjoying the moment can kill us. The happier you are on the journey, the more successful you will be. End of story. So even if it’s the tiniest step in the right direction, at least recognize that it’s not in the wrong direction. And that’s something to smile about. (This is a scientific fact.)

And a quote from a good friend of mine, Jon Call:

“Eat for what you do. Don’t do for what you eat.”

Can it really be that simple?

Probably.

A few posts back, I mentioned compression and expansion with the lesson being what we compress, expands. 

I talk about simplifying a lot. Reducing exercise selection, getting more meaningful work in, etc. But after thinking about this, it’s compressing. And most times, it chokes people. The end result is that the problem expands and people are more apt to add movements and do the opposite of the intended goal.

So instead of minimizing everything, think about maximizing it. Say you had hours upon hours to train. What would you do? What exercises would keep your attention? What would you have fun with?

Try finding your answers in there. They may be closer to your heart.