ddn

David Dellanave

by Leave a Comment

This Is a Weird Bank Account

This Is a Weird Bank Account

Imagine a bank account whose balance grows every day. The amount varies based on various factors like your balance and some of your financial decisions, but no matter what it always gets money deposited into it every day.bank-accounts

This bank account has a couple more interesting features. You can spend as much as you want out of it, and it will still be continuously replenished. There is only one “catch” so to speak. If you spend into the negative, your balance will still grow but you will be required to pay 50% interest on what you spend past your available balance. What’s more you won’t know when the bank is going to ask for the repayment.

Would you sign up for this new type of account the financial wizards of Wall St. have come up with?

Believe it or not, this is a fitting analogy for the body and how it handles stress. Your body is very much like a bank account that is constantly being replenished. Provided you go to sleep at night, you wake each morning restored, renewed, and on some level better than before depending on what you “spent” on stresses the day before.

Here’s the other important similarity. Your body, like your bank account, doesn’t differentiate what you spend money, or stress, on. Necessary expenses diminish your bank account just as frivolities do, and your body doesn’t distinguish stress either. Your boss yelling at you carries roughly the same amount of cost as a workout. It’s all stress.

It’s not good, or bad, it’s just stress.

But not when you go into a negative balance – whether it be by necessity or carelessness – you will pay for it.

Undesirable body composition, unexplained illnesses, lethargy, poor output or performance are the costs, the high interest repayments that you must make for spending past your limit.

On the other hand, if you take your available balance into account and only spend (apply stress) within your limits your balance grows and grows. You get better and better all the time without paying the high cost for overdoing it.

The better you account for the myriad stressors in your life and training the better your training progress will be. This is not one of those “try this, it might work for you” statements. This is an absolute fact. How exactly you do that is up to you, and there are various solutions.

You’ve already got the bank account that replenishes itself every day. All you have to do is be careful with your spending.

P.S. I created a companion product to Lift Weights Faster called Lift Weights Faster and Smarter to address this exact idea because I see too many people spending willy-nilly with their conditioning workouts. Well-designed workouts can only take you so far when they are not programmed specifically for YOU and what is going on with YOU at this very moment.

by Leave a Comment

How to Lift Weights Faster and Smarter

The weeks since the Lift Weights Faster launch have been a blast with all the tweets, Facebooks, and emails about people doing the workouts. Twitter especially is full of the #liftweightsfaster hashtag.lwf_3d_cover_250

Ever since the book launched I have had an idea in the back of my mind, and I started working on it soon after all of the hard work of the launch died down. Today I sent this out as a gift to anyone who already bought Lift Weights Faster through me and I want to offer it to you today as well.

See, I have a bit of a dark secret when it comes to conditioning work. And it’s not just that I hate doing it.

My problem with it stems from how it’s applied. In short it’s prescriptive – not adaptive. In teaching strength training I always teach people to move towards making things easy and doing just the right amount to be a stimulus for change. But in conditioning work the rigid formats and the intention to do it in the least amount of time possible often conflicts with the minimal effective amount ideal.

With strength training the application of this seems to more intuitive. We choose our movements, and make modifications to them, by testing them with biofeedback. We stop sets before it gets hard and use biofeedback to determine when we reach the minimal effective amount. It’s all very simple, intuitive, and straightforward.

But for whatever reason, it all goes off the rails when it comes to conditioning. There is a better way.

So I sat down to create a structure that reconciled these ideas and allowed you to customize your conditioning work just as much as you do your strength training. This became Lift Weights Faster and Smarter.

The protocol allows you to tweak and personalize your conditioning work just as much as you would your strength work. What’s more, it provides a model for taking into account many of the other stressors in your life that will affect your capacity to recover from difficult conditioning workouts and making adjuments accordingly.

Of course, you wouldn’t need to do this if you don’t have outside life stressors, never feel tired or get poor sleep, and are always fully recovered for every training session. In that case, you’re probably just fine to hammer away with conditioning workouts as prescribed.

But if not, my experience tells me that this will get you better results, faster.

I created Lift Weights Faster and Smarter as a guide that accompanies Lift Weights Faster itself. It builds upon several of the Lift Weights Faster workouts to create an additional 48 distinct workouts. You could certainly use it alone, but combining the Smarter protocol with Lift Weights Faster would give you 1040 discrete workouts. No, I’m not kidding. One thousand and forty workouts, all across the spectrum of stress.

Let me say that again so I’m clear. Combining this protocol with Lift Weights Faster gives you 1,040 conditioning workouts.

Pretty sweet.

Even without the Lift Weights Faster package, you’ve got 48 workouts and a protocol that allows you to instantly customize any workout you might find online, in a magazine, or from a peer. It’s kind of like having a trainer on call to ask how to maximize the benefit you get from a workout that wasn’t designed specifically with you in mind from the ground up.