This weekend I started getting emails back from the first group of individuals that bought my most recent kettlebell program, the Dellanavich Kettlebell Regime when I first released it.

Incidentally, email feedback from people who go through my programs are one my truly favorite things to receive and they really make all the hard work to put these things together worthwhile.

Anyway this one guy emailed me the journal entries from all of his workouts for the program and he literally doubled the number of reps he was able to do. Truly staggering progress.

So then his question was, how do I move forward? Do I move up to a bigger bell, and then after that move down to a smaller bell and go longer?

YES, EXACTLY YES!

This one question about one particular program so perfectly encompasses the entire training paradigm.

When it’s too easy, make one part harder.

When that part gets easy, change a different part and make that harder.

And on and on.

This constant dance if two steps forward one step backward is almost the extent of what you need to know about how to train effectively for long term progress. Sure, programs can be great because an expert can lean on their experience to know exactly what kind of overreach is possible and how much to step backwards, but the general principle is exactly this. What you see as a pattern in the micro of one program or training cycle can be applied to the macro of training in general. Or of course you can apply it to other movements.

Don’t make things too complicated.

Simplify, and execute.

I’ve been talking a lot about exploration, play, and eschewing rigid objectives this week so I thought it would be a good time for another weekend workout challenge.

A few weeks ago I had a deadlift challenge that a lot of people had fun with, so I figured we could do the same with squats.

My buddy and fellow gym owner Marshall Roy had the same idea about a week ago and filmed a great video of 38(!) squat variations that might give you some ideas, click over to the video here:

The idea is to figure out how many different ways and implements you can find to squat with. Marshall came up with a stunning 38 variations and he honestly didn’t even scratch the surface.

One of my favorite “weird” squat variations is squatting with a rotated upper body. Imagine trying to squat down and put your chest onto just one of your quads. It feels fantastic, usually especially in one direction more than the other.

Like I said last time if you came up with 20 variations and you did 5 reps of each you’d have done a hundred squats in all different forms and I’d wager you’d get a pretty good, and fun, workout.

Let me know how many you come up with and what you experience.

Last year Jen and I went to Australia and New Zealand for a few weeks, spending most of that time in New Zealand driving around and exploring the north island. Some of the days we had a bit more rigid of a timeline than I would have planned for with more experience, but other days we were able to take a leisurely pace. It was on one of these days (after we spent hours scouring the coast for oysters to break off the rocks and eat just like that) that I turned off the Google Maps and just followed signs for the next town we were headed to. I probably didn’t take the most direct route and as a result I passed by a small sign that said “knife maker.” It was late though and I knew there wasn’t much chance it would be open so I made a mental note to look it up later.

Sure enough, I had passed right by the workshop of a well known Kiwi artisan knife maker who makes handmade knives from recycled car coil springs. Suffice to say they are beautiful pieces of artisan handiwork. Now it’s a goal of mine to go back and buy one of his knives.

The story of finding something you weren’t looking for is as old as time, right, so what does this have to do with Monday’s email?

Most often when you have clear objectives the only things you can see are the objectives. You can only find exactly what you were looking for. Sometimes your tools and perspectives are so limited and myopic that there is no hope of true discovery.

This week has been particularly heavy with smug self-righteous articles dismissing one thing or another because science hasn’t been able to accurately assess their worth with the available metrics.

Let me just stop you there before you think I’m anti-science. I love science. I was winning science fairs before science was cool. But I also recognize the stunning limitations of the scientific method.

A recent review of clinical evidence of the efficacy of turmeric (hypothesized active ingredient: curcumin) to improve various maladies such as sore throats, etc. And they looked at all this evidence and all these attempts to isolate the use of turmeric or to extract a drug from it and on the face of it there is no evidence to suggest that it’s “effective.”

Yet, you have countless cultures that have used turmeric as a key ingredient in their cooking for something like 4000 years. Could there perhaps be some wisdom trapped in something that been done for so long?

There is a particularly good episode of Krista Tippett’s On Being with chef Dan Barber that has stuck with me since I first heard it many, many years ago. Chef Barber essentially set his objective at “tastes good” and it led him down this road of discovery where he realized the best way to make his food taste good was to follow the most ecological process to grow it. No metrics needed. But there’s one particular passage I loved. Sorry it’s a little long:

“And he’s strict I think it’s glatt kosher — it’s kosher, anyway. So he needs a rabbi at the farm when he’s harvesting. The rabbi grabs hold of the combine and walks with him on the field. These grain farms are enormous, even in upstate New York. It’s a lot like what you have here, thousands of acres. And a combine with a rabbi walking next to it has to go a lot slower than it would without, which generally makes kosher food, by the way, more expensive. That’s one of the issues related to kosher food.

But what he realized, when the rabbi would stop the combine, he would stop it because there was wild garlic in the field. Wild garlic in the field would make the matzo treyf for Passover. You have to go and pick out the wild garlic. So he started researching both kosher law — what was it? Why is wild garlic in the field, it’s natural? Why is that considered treyf ? What he discovered was that, from a biological point of view, wild garlic was an example of low sulfur content in his soil. He had an imbalance in his soil and, when he corrected the balance — by the way, by manure, by taking extra runs of his cattle through the spelt field — he corrected the imbalance and got rid of the wild garlic. And he made more money because he could go faster on the combine with the rabbi, and the quality of his grain was improved dramatically. Now he’s given me many examples — I think that’s a really good one — of kosher laws that seemingly have no reason to them. But, of course, if you research them and think about it, they have to be grounded in agriculture, in the proper agriculture that produces the best food and the best nutrition.”

So you have this seemingly ridiculous rule canonized in religious law, that you can’t have wild garlic in the field. Yet when you dig deeper you realize that without having any idea how to measure sulphur content then was a particular wisdom embedded in this ancient tradition that had lived on for so many centuries.

The big picture in all of this is that you don’t always know what to measure, you don’t always know where you’re going, and sometimes (often?!) that is exactly when the best things happen.