I love analogies. I think they’re super useful in helping us understand the world. Jen sometimes makes fun of me because I’ll try to build an analogy and it will fall flat, but in general I think I’m pretty good at creating analogies to explain concepts.

For example, a car’s check engine light is a pretty good analogy for pain in the body. Depending on how much you know about cars you know that the check engine light can mean anything from low oil pressure which means impending doom and your engine could literally grind itself into metal shavings in the next few minutes, or it could mean your gas cap is loose and needs to be tightened. The only way to know for sure is to take it in (or get a reader) and read the codes to see what is going on. Pain is similar. Sometimes it just means you need to change your positioning a little bit, and sometimes it means you have cancer.

The problem with analogies is that they fall apart when you try to explain complex non-linear systems with them.

So let’s take the old “bucket” analogy for stress.

You have a bucket and in goes all of your stress and the bucket can fill up but it can only take so much and then when it overflows ostensibly you’re fucked.

The problem with this is that it’s totally linear and totally negates the complexity of stress.

I call it the version 1.0 understanding of stress. Basically stress is bad and when you get too much of it then it’s really bad.

So you try to extend the analogy a little bit and you poke some holes in the bucket, and you add a tap that is constantly trickling into the bucket and you say “OK now you have all of this stress coming into the bucket, some of it is good and some of it is bad. Stress is constantly leaving the bucket through the holes in the side but if you overflow the bucket you’re still fucked.”

This is better. You’re starting to move into the version 2.0 understanding of stress in that everything is a form of stress and there is good stress and bad stress (eustress and distress.)

But what if I told you that some of the water coming into the bucket could mix with elements in the bucket causing some of the holes in the bucket to either shrink or enlarge changing the rate of outflow, and then that one stream into the bucket isn’t sufficient to explain it so you’d have multiple streams, and then that the actual shape and size of the bucket could change based on the streams in and out and…

You can see where this is going. The analogy falls apart because you can’t explain a complex system using a simple one.

But it’s been useful to understand the progression in understanding stress. Now let’s ditch the metaphor.

Think of stress as nothing more than a signal or input to the body. When you do a bicep curl there is a cascade of signals, but the main message is “this area of the body is going to be stressed” and the healthy body says “ok, let me lay down some more tissue there to make it more resilient to stress in the future.”

When you eat food you’re providing building blocks but you’re also signaling that building and restorative processes can commence – protein specifically kicks off muscle protein synthesis. When you sleep it’s a signal that a whole host of restorative, autophagy, and cleanup processes can begin. When you are scared or in fear it’s a signal for the body’s defensive processes to kick in – the pulse quickens, hormones are released, the eyes dilate to take on whatever caused the stress.

One of the keys to really, truly understanding stress is knowing that the effects are associated to the stress signal, not caused by it.

As an example, the first time you jump out of a plane you are going to experience the fear response I referred to above: your pulse quickens, adrenaline is released, your focus narrows, you may experience time dilation in which everything seems to happen slowly. Most skydivers can’t tell you anything about the first skydive other than that they successfully pulled their parachute and landed.

On your 500^th skydive you can tell each of your five partners what they specifically could have done better with their body position, ask them if they noticed the other plane pass pretty close by, and remember that you had to reach down to pull your shoe back on when it came loose. If your heart rate and hormones had been monitored there would have been no change.

Same stress, same person, completely different effect. So what’s different? The context.

Stress + Context = Response

This is why what is distressful for one person, say running 3 miles, is totally eustressful and restorative for another person. Or for the same person at different times in their life!

Understanding this you can begin to comprehend why the prescription for a restorative or eustressful intervention may not be the same for two different people under intense “life” distress. Again, an example is helpful:

Two middle-aged men who are otherwise identical are having an exceptionally stressful week at work and at home. The only difference between the two is that one has lifted heavy his whole life and the other hasn’t lifted much at all and has only recently started strength training. Psychologically our middle-aged-meathead loves training and finds it a release and escape from his worldly concerns, while our new trainee is enjoying his new routine but finds it somewhat exhausting.

How do you plan their training sessions?

If you’re an average coach or trainer you will back off their session to make it easier because you understand that an overload of stressors can turn almost anything into distress and you’ll send them off with an admonishment to get more sleep.

But the great coach will go further. They’d back off the training intensity for the new trainee because they understand that in context the mere act of doing any strength training at all is stressful enough for this guy and it doesn’t need to be a hard week on top of what he’s already got going. But our meathead thrives on training and the stress response he gets from hard training is more like what you’d see from something that actually promotes recovery rather than something that is destructive or distressful.

The great coach will take advantage of knowing this, they’ll also know that volume more than intensity tends to wear down the experienced lifter, and they’ll take advantage of the high sympathetic nervous system tone during this stressful week to have the lifter set some new maxes – doing essentially the opposite of what might sound intuitively best. But in context it’s actually better, because our meathead friend’s body is physiologically primed to respond best to exactly that.

Only in knowing, or predicting, what the response is can you judge the stressor. This is version 3.0 understanding of stress.

One reason biofeedback through ROM or HRV can be useful is that you can use the past to inform your predictions about the future. I know several folks who use their HRV religiously and they know what types of training stimuli will push their HRV up or down based on where they are at the moment. I’ve seen ROM biofeedback used successfully for years to predict what stimuli are going to be responded to positively or negatively. You can of course only know – via measurement – after the fact of the stimulus, but you can make pretty good predictions if you look at the patterns of history.

If you take one thing away from this article it should be that stressors aren’t defined by physical therapists, marketers, doctors, meditation teachers, strength coaches, or anyone else. The only thing that qualitatively defines a stressor is the response.

Once you understand that you can stop jamming round pegs in square holes and start making better decisions for yourself and those you coach.

 

Maybe that sounds like a bit of a malapropism, but really it’s true. Mondays always hold that special power of feeling like a fresh start and when Monday happens to fall on the second day of the year, or the first day you aren’t nursing a hangover (truth is I wasn’t, I had a wonderful New Years Eve watching lathe, vertical mill, and other machining tutorials on youtube) is a special fresh start indeed.

Last year was very much a transition year for me, which is a way of saying that I feel like I have a good excuse (selling our house and moving half way across the country) to not have accomplished as much as I would have liked to.

This year I have big goals to make up for lost time. One of the main ones is to talk to you all more often, about more topics that I think are important. Fitness is of course going to be a key topic, but it won’t be all fitness all the time. If you’re not interested in anything other than fitness, so long! I’ll miss you. But if you’re looking at the big picture and you want to talk about the stuff that matters stay tuned.

Here’s the first thing that really matters that I want you to be thinking about this year: Standing up for what you know is right and what you believe in.

The past few weeks have brought about a couple social protests that have been interesting enough to really get me thinking about this topic. A couple weeks ago I got involved in a little social satire that accidentally blew up into national news. Then yesterday some NoDAPL protesters scaled a beam in Minneapolis’ U.S. Bank Stadium and dropped themselves and a huge banner from the ceiling – calling for U.S. Bank to divest from Dakota Access.

Now, I don’t really care what you believe about the DAPL, because it doesn’t matter to my point. My point is that if you call yourself a freedom-loving American then you have to have tremendous respect for these non-violent social gadflies who risked their own butts to create social tension.

Just like the other social protest people flocked to social media to wring their hands over what could have happened if “something went wrong” or “someone got hurt.” Folks, the world is a dangerous and scary place. Very often the harm that is happening by maintaining the status quo is far greater than whatever freak situation might get someone hurt in a non-violent protest. It’s a cost of doing business. And if you call yourself an American who wraps themselves in the warmth of the constitution you should be damn thankful that there are people willing to take on those risks.

“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”

Martin Luther King, everyone’s favorite rubber-stamped methods-condened social revolutionary wrote those words from JAIL.

Again, let me reiterate: It doesn’t matter if you think they should plow that pipeline right through the middle of a river. If you love freedom, you have to love someone who is willing to stand up for their beliefs especially when they’re going to pay consequences for it. Otherwise I’m told North Korea is lovely this time of year and you will surely be pleased that there are no dissenters amongst your midst.

Which brings me to you. I want you to have the guts to stand up for what you believe in more often – even if it’s unpopular. Maybe it means telling someone on the street to pick up their dog’s shit. Maybe it means standing up for someone you don’t know who is being harassed on the street. It’s not always going to be safe. It’s not risk free. Take some risks. Strengthen your spine with deadlifts and declarations.

If you’ve been looking for a hero I have good news and bad news: you’re the hero.

I hope you have an amazing year and we’re going to be talking a lot more often.

 

Guru in the fitness world has become synonymous with snake oil salesman. My buddy the glute guy, Bret Contreras, has a regular series of “Grill the Guru” posts and videos where he takes down pseudo-science and questionable justifications by well known fitness personalities. Being called a guru, to most people, would be taken as an insult.

But as so often happens guru has been appropriated and misused. It’s a Sanskrit term which has important meaning in Indian culture and tradition, and is used in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other religions and cultural traditions. The connotation in these traditions is a teacher – but much more than just a teacher. A guru is someone who has deep and expansive knowledge, as well as the varied abilities as mentor, counselor, guide, and journeyman with the ability to impart knowledge and wisdom.

Guru is far from a pejorative – it’s a revered position.

So we took this term of honor and ruined it as we often seem to do, because we apparently can’t have nice things.

But I think it’s a mistake to think of the word guru in this way, and I think more people would do well to have a guru.

If you were to exclusively follow my buddy Bret Contreras your training would be fairly strength-focused consist of large compound movements done for relatively low reps (1-5 in general) along with some higher rep accessory movements and a lot of glute and booty exercises for both low and high reps. You wouldn’t stress over nutrition too much, focusing on eating real food with lots of protein and not getting into a lot of supplements.

What if you only followed my wife, Jen Sinkler, for your fitness information? Well your training would be biased a bit more towards strength or sport and involve a lot of large compound movements with a lot of movement variation and rep ranges from low to high. You’d probably throw in some circuit workouts which are well-known to improve general fitness and work capacity and are usually fun. Nutritionally you’d follow sort of a Paleo-plus-cupcakes strategy of eating a lot of whole foods, keeping protein high, and not worrying about the occasional dessert or junk food. Your workout fashion would be on point.

If you followed my friend Mike Vacanti you’d pay a little more attention to your nutrition I’d wager – at least for a while  – by diligently tracking your macros and making sure you hit the targeted proteins, fats, and carbs every day. You wouldn’t worry too much about how you got there as long as it was mostly real food sources, and you’d eat a fair amount of ice cream. Your training would look a lot like a recurring theme with a bit more focus on bodybuilding instead of maximal strength, lots of large compound movements combined with higher rep accessory work for the aesthetics.

Or, if you followed my pal Pat Flynn your training would be spartan but effective – using only a minimal complement of barbells and kettelbells to create workouts that are primarily strength based but short, difficult, and effective. There’s a good chance your journey would have started with a fairly-challenging fat loss program that would have you limiting what you eat to only the bare essentials, but after that you’d relax the reins a bit and focus on moving the big rocks and keeping your diet high in protein, good fats, and relatively low in added carbs or sugar.

What about someone who leans a little further towards a more extreme philosophy? If you were sold on the Paleo principals and you followed my friend Robb Wolf you would train primarily with large compound movements along with some hiking, carrying, or low intensity cardio. You might even be convinced to try out Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Following the Paleo principals would have you eating a lot of protein, a fairly high amount of good fat, and you’d keep your carbs really low. For most people this would work exceptionally well, but a few would notice the low carbs affecting their performance and ability to train – those folks would adjust upwards according to their tolerance until they find the sweet spot. You might care a bit more about where your food come from and you might pay more attention to things like circadian rhythms and how much natural light you get.

My point – if you haven’t been able to discern it yet – is that the broad strokes are all pretty much the same no matter who you listen to. As a result, when you take everything that one person says as gospel, and then take everything that someone else says as gospel and try to reconcile them you’ll get hung up on minor details that conflict but don’t matter.

This is the danger of not having a guru, or having more than one guru.

I’d argue that you’re better off trusting one source to be your mentor or “guru” until which time they either prove they’re not trustworthy or you determine that their approach and philosophy just doesn’t jive with your constitution – no matter how deep or correct their wisdom is.

I wouldn’t be ashamed to say I have a guru. What about you?