Helping Jen, Martin, and her crew prepare for their launch of The Bigness Project, got me thinking about the importance of clearly defining what it is you’re training for. Maybe that sounds obvious but I can’t tell you the number of times I see someone whose training is out of alignment with what they really want. Sometimes it’s because they started out wrong, but other times your wants, desires, or needs change without your actions keeping up with them.

If you want to put on 40 pounds of muscle and look like a bodybuilder come summer time then chasing a 600 pound deadlift probably isn’t the quickest, safest, smartest route to your goal. Could getting a triple bodyweight deadlift make you jacked? Possibly? But you’re not going to end up looking like a bodybuilder unless you also get lucky and have amazing genetics. Training like a bodybuilder will make you look like a bodybuilder though.

On the flip side, if you’re training like a bodybuilder and thinking that it’s going to get you to a 600 pound deadlift you’re going to be really jacked and woefully disappointed that you haven’t hit your deadlift goal.

Bringing it down to Earth, if you’re training for general health, resilience, and capability then chasing any one particular lift or going deep into a particular training style may not be all that effective. Training for general physical preparedness is no less a goal, and your actions should reflect it.

In the case of The Bigness Project, Jen had this realization that when the pendulum swung towards training with a focus towards capability it almost became verboten to even talk about training for aesthetics. But you know what? Physical training as a healthy way to modify and accessorize your body is no less a noble goal than training to be able to do a pull-up. Neither one is strictly necessary in every day life, but damned if life isn’t better with it.

Taking a moment to reflect every so often and see if your actions are lined up with what you’re actually after can be super valuable. Try it – you might be surprised.

Here’s a funny thing about fitness:

We don’t know how muscle grows.

Sure, we have some good ideas as to what conditions create muscle growth, or hypertrophy, and bodybuilders have been using these method for centuries at a minimum to build bigger muscles.

But no one actually understands the full depth and breadth of the interactions on a cellular level to the point where they can say definitively: this is how muscle growth occurs.

The closest thing that we really have to a map of the territory is Brad Schoenfeld’s seminal paper, “The Mechanisms of Muscle Hypertrophy.” Read the paper if you like, but the conditions can be summarized and memorized very easily:

1. Mechanical Tension: The muscles lengthened under load.
2. Muscle Damage: Micro-traumas to the muscle tissue.
3. Metabolic Stress: Byproducts of muscle energy utilization build up in the muscle.

When you have one or more of these conditions the result is that the muscle grows. Really, it’s as simple as that.

Therefore, it stands to reason that if you can increase one of those factors, you might get more hypertrophy. Might.

In the 1970s a young Japanese man started experimenting with restricting blood flow return in the hopes of increasing the build-up of metabolites and stimulating greater muscle growth. As the story goes he applied his techniques very successfully when he underwent knee surgery for torn ligaments and after six months in a plaster cast his muscles hadn’t atrophied at all thanks to his protocol. He later went on to study the method at the University of Tokyo where it was dubbed “Kaatsu training.”

The broad strokes are simple: Restrict return blood flow around the muscle group, and then perform a lot of relatively light reps to build up metabolites.

For reasons that should be fairly obvious this works best on discrete muscle groups that are easy to occlude, like the arms or legs. It would be hard to do on your lats.

Now this is where I have to tell you I have always been extremely hesitant and critical of BFR training. The weight of evidence is clear that it is effective. In short, it works. But the reality of occluding blood flow is always going to increase risk, and the limited nature of the body of research may not fully amortize the risks in a wider population. I would suggest you pursue this method with extreme care. I would argue that it’s abnormal to occlude blood flow beyond what is caused by the swelling of muscle under normal training circumstances, and there may be second-order effects that haven’t been picked up. Personally, I would never use this with clients. Additionally the risk of injury or damage under improper execution is extreme, and as with any complex procedure there is always risk that someone will screw it up.

Now that you know where I stand on it, and you are taking your own personal responsibility and making an informed decision, here’s how to do it:

The Method

You’ll need a way to occlude blood flow. What prompted this little experiment was a Dutch company launching a Kickstarter for inexpensive and very functional BFR straps sending me a pair to try out. I have no financial ties or incentive with the company, but I can tell you they work and the price is fair for a tool that makes it easier. You could use any old gym band, but it can be extremely uncomfortable to get the tension right.

Speaking of tension, the goal is a 7 out of 10, where 10 would be extremely painful and completely constricting bloodflow. If your limbs get tingly or numb it is too tight.

One way to approach it is to superset opposing muscle groups and then do three sets of 30-15-15 reps. So like in the video you might start with curls, do tricep extensions, and then go back to curls.

You do this in one continuous set, paying attention to keeping a slow-ish methodical tempo throughout. Obviously if you’re starting with a set of 30 you’re going to want to go pretty light. The goal here is not to create a ton of mechanical tension, it’s simply to build up those metabolic byproducts.

When you’ve completed all 60 reps, release the cuff. Don’t release it in between.

Here’s a short video of an arm session with the Marshall Roy the other day:

Recently I was talking with my wife, Jen, and I had mentioned that my friend Robb Wolf was sending over an early copy of his next book about food and the brain, and Jen asked “Is Robb still pretty big on low carb/ketogenic diet?”For those of you who may not be familiar the basic idea between very low carb and/or ketogenic diets is that the body absolutely needs fats and protein to sustain function, but can actually function quite well without really any carbohydrates. In the literature low carb diet can mean an amount that is actually relatively high, so when we talk about low carb in this context we’re talking under 50 grams per day. Going under that floor will put the body in a state called ketosis where the body will generate fuel for the brain from fat. Suffice to say you also eat a ton of fat to make up for the calories you’re not getting from carbs.

I’m not going to get into all the pros and cons of ketogenic diets because that’s not the point at all. Suffice to say low carb made a big splash a few years ago and has since faded in popularity, as diets often do.

The rub is this: The preponderance of scientific evidence that we currently have says that ketogenic diets may be interesting for some very specific indications (such as epilepsy) but that it is absolutely crap for high performance athletics or sport.

This is important to understand. As of what we know right now there isn’t a credible sports physiologist or nutritionist in the world who would recommend that any athlete who wants to be able to perform at the highest possible output go on a low carb diet.

However. And this is the big BUT. It seems like there might be some people out there who actually CAN perform extremely well on low carb diet. Even at high demands and intensities of exercise where normally carbs are essential to generating and maintaining output.

But the data hasn’t caught this, and what I think is most important for you to understand is that it may never.

The scientific approach is not intended to and can not give us “answers” or end points. It doesn’t work that way. Science works in averages, probabilities, and standard deviations. In fact, in a sense it doesn’t even tell us anything about YOU. It tells you about what was or wasn’t true about some other group of people, and the likelyhood that it applies to you.

What is supported by the bulk of current evidence should be thought of as a best practice or a starting point.

So if you’re going to figure out how to eat to win at your athletics, you’d be best served by starting with a moderate to high carbohydrate diet.

However, if in doing your own n=1 (the number of participants in the study equals one, you) experiments you do an experiment to try a low carb diet and you find that you are able to maintain or even improve performance then you would be an absolute fool to go back to your high carb diet because “science says this is correct.”

The ultimate science experiment is that one you run on yourself to get your own ever-changing answers.

Which brings us back to my friend Robb. Yeah, he’s a pretty big advocate of Paleo and low carb diets, but he recognizes that individuality and context is king and acknowledges that it might not be ideal for everyone. He knows he actually performs better on low carb diets, and that some people will perform poorly on low carb diets so they shouldn’t use them.

Bottom line is this: Use the scientific literature to figure out where to start when you don’t otherwise know, but don’t get hung up on it, because you may be the outlier they tossed out of the data.