It’s very likely that some of my clients think I’m a real pain in the ass to work with. I have to be, at least from their initial perspective, for it’s exactly what makes me seem like I’m being evasive is exactly what gets them the unprecedented results they’ve been looking for.

Here’s a typical conversation: “Hey David, I have a question for you.” To which I respond, “OK, I have questions for you.”

I don’t have (many) answers, but I have a lot of questions. To understand what that means, we have to take a trip back to middle school science.

The Scientific Method

If you’re not familiar with the scientific method, you’re about to get a crash course. The scientific method is currently the best algorithm we as monkeys who stood up have to begin to understand the world around us. It’s far from perfect, but it’s what we’ve got.

The scientific method begins with asking a question.

“If the sun is so powerful but the power is very widely distributed, what could I do to harness the power of the sun?”

or:

“How do I make muscles bigger?”

The next step, perhaps preceded by some amount of research, is to construct a specific hypothesis that can be tested. The hypothesis is an educated guess as to what happens or how it happens. The key to a good hypothesis is that you have some idea in mind, and that it can be tested specifically.

“If I were to use a magnifying glass to focus the power of the sun on one spot it might be powerful enough to create fire.”

Or:

“If I were to do bicep curls often, my bicep muscles would get bigger.”

Notice that the scientific method begins with a question, but a hypothesis is more like a statement of belief.

Next, you would design an experiment to test the hypothesis. Experimental design is important because the results are only as good as the experimental design. You can be perfectly correct in your hypothesis, but not prove it out correctly because your experimental design was flawed.

“I will take a magnifying glass that combines a 6 inch diameter area of sunlight into a spot one sixteenth of an inch in diameter and determine how much heat is generated by measuring the temperature rise on the bulb of a thermometer. Or just burn some ants.”

Or:

“I will do one set of bicep curls to failure every other day for the next 4 weeks.”

Keep in mind the limitations of experiment design. For example, I rarely if ever train to failure, but if I were designing an experiment for multiple people I would want to control the variables, so I might use failure as a common stopping point for everyone.

Once you’ve come up with your experiment that you’re going to use to test, you’ll perform the experiment and collect data.

Collecting data on your experiment is vital. I am one of the biggest proponents of keeping a training journal or log. This is your experiment data.  You are hopelessly lost without it. If your training results suck I would bet my stack that you don’t keep a training journal.

Second to last you analyze your data. In short, did it work?

“Through a highly accurate analysis of the smoke coming up from the melting ants, I was able to determine that a magnifying glass does in fact enable you to concentrate the power of the sun.”

Or:

“My biceps have grown a half-inch in circumference since 4 weeks ago, proving that 4 weeks of 1 set of bicep curls to failure appears to be associated to muscle growth in my biceps.”

Finally, and this is perhaps the most important step of all: construct a new hypothesis or ask a new question. The fundamental limitation of the scientific method is that when you’re done with an experiment you have an answer that is very limited in scope, most especially temporally or in terms of time. In other words, you only know that what happened, happened right now – you don’t know that it will always happen and you don’t know that it will happen to everyone unless you test everyone. One set to failure of bicep curls might make your muscles grow now, but unless it always makes (your) muscles grow then it’s not really the answer, it’s an answer.

The question you ask could be bigger, such as could the same principle apply to other muscle groups? Or it could be smaller, such as what would happen if you were to change the movement variation slightly.

In any case, the process never ends.

The Experimental Mindset

This questioning or experimental mindset is one of the most fundamental ideas I hope to instill in people I interact with. No one else has the answers, but they’re inside of you if you are willing to ask the questions to find them.

Asking better questions, like nearly everything worth doing, is a skill that you will develop over time. As a coach I consider asking questions to be my most valuable skill. When I ask a client if turning their foot out slightly makes their movement feel better or test better I am asking a better question of their body. Sometimes the questions are the more traditional kind such as “how much protein are you eating” but often the questions are for the body, such as “what happens if you eat more protein?”

One of the unexpected benefits of approaching training (and life) with this experimental mindset is the understanding that experiments often don’t yield the results you predict or expect, and that’s an acceptable natural part of the process. Too many people are wrapped up in guilt with what they can and can’t do or change especially when it comes to exercise and health. If you decide that you’re going to start eating better across the board it’s easy to feel guilty and frustrated when you predictably fail a few days in. On the other hand, if you acknowledge that it’s an experiment to see what you’re capable of doing then it’s simply a data point when you realize that you aren’t capable of doing what you had in mind – yet.

Ah, cardio! In other words, anything over five reps. My favorite forms of cardio include deadlifting for between 20 and 50 reps per set, one-arm rowing heavy dumbbells for 20+ reps, and loading atlas stones to a platform or my shoulder for as many reps as possible.

If that doesn’t sound like anything remotely resembling something you’ve considered cardio before allow me to explain. In short, we’ve learned that the commonly held belief that there is a dichotomy between resistance training and cardio is completely false. In reality, these systems overlap and in the gaps between intense exertion you have, essentially, “cardio.” Or what my wife, Jen Sinkler, has been credited has having coined “Lifting weights faster.”

After my email yesterday about the amount of distress I was under during the Lift Weights Fasterlaunch a few people emailed me and asked how I can reconcile the idea of doing circuit workouts with set time or rep frames and the idea that you should be doing exactly what is best for your body. It’s a great question and I’m glad that some people reached out so that I can expand on it for everyone.

The type of strength training I advocate is primarily eustressful. If you’re not familiar with the term it is colloquially considered “good stress” but we use a more useful definition: stress that is easily resolvable. On the other hand, distress is stress that is not easily resolved. Another way to say that is that distress has a high cost, whereas eustress has a low cost.

While I absolutely hold that you should be optimizing for the maximal effective amount of eustress training, a minimal effective amount of distress training is also important.

The reason why is a matter of adaptability and specificity. Specifically, if you never ever train in distress you will not be able to handle any amount of distress. However, if you train a minimal amount relative to your needs, you’ll be better equipped to handle a distressful situation. The more distress you are likely to encounter in sport or life, the higher your minimal effective amount is.

Throwing in an untested, potentially distressful circuit at the end of a workout on occasion provides you an opportunity to train for the position you might find yourself in. Sometimes you just don’t have a choice and you need to gut it out, whatever it is. Training that ability is exactly what you’re doing when you grit your teeth and keep going in a tough conditioning workout.

I don’t usually particularly enjoy conditioning workouts, but I recognize the necessary role they fill.

A primarily eustressful training model combined with a minimal effective amount of distress training is a recipe for unparalleled success.

Which is why it’s the exact model we use at my gym, The Movement Minneapolis. In fact, for the past 6 months my members have unwittingly been the guinea pigs for over a hundred of Jen’s Lift Weights Faster workouts. Doing so gave us an unparalleled sample size to tweak and tune the workouts so that they’re just right.

I can’t say enough good things about the library Jen has put together. It’s absolutely massive, and comprehensive:

Whether you love that a quick circuit workout can provide a great stand-in for a more traditional strength workout, don’t have the facilities or equipment for more involved workouts, or like me, simply recognize the necessity for a little heart-pumping lung-burning action you will love Lift Weights Faster.

And if you’re stuck, frustrated with a lack of progress and need a complete overhaul of your training you might want to pick up Get Stronger Faster while the opportunity lasts. During the launch special it is being offered as a $29 add-on to Lift Weights Faster which is something I only did as a favor to my lovely wife! Afterwards, I will be offering it alone at a higher price.

Today is the last day of the 50% off launch sale, so grab it while it’s on sale.

Taken together, these two programs are as close as you could get to training at my gym without setting foot on Minnesota’s frozen soil. Call me biased, but the results I get for my clients who range from people lifting their first dumbbell to athletes at the highest levels of their sport speak volumes about the efficacy of what we’re doing. It’s certainly unconventional, but perhaps that’s exactly why it works.

The past 72 hours have been some of the most stressful and intense of my entire life. In fact, things got really bad starting on Monday morning but things have been spiraling slightly out of control for the past several weeks.

This Monday morning around 11am was when I got the semifinal sales page from our web designers for Lift Weights Faster, the amazing workout library my wife, Jen, is launching. We were supposed to go live the next morning at 10am. Things looked dire.

I spent the next 23 hours working to put together all of the tech pieces that were still outstanding. At some point around 4am I realized that I wasn’t shivering because I was cold — the space heater was dutifully keeping the room toasty warm — but because I was running on pure adrenaline. I finished around 9:15, just in time for the 10am launch time.

By 1pm when it seemed like things were relatively stable (I would eventually be proven wrong) I was facedown on the hardwood floor passed out. I wasn’t just tired, I felt like I had been through an ordeal. My stomach hurt, my head hurt, and I felt stupid.

Beyond dealing with the unexpected and simply having to finish things at the last minute that various parties hadn’t delivered earlier, this launch was so nerve-wracking because it represents perhaps the biggest moment in Jen’s career, and certainly the biggest step forward. Putting something you created out there and saying “I made this” is an enormous risk. I had to make sure everything worked, and besides the fact that we had more work to do than there were hours in the days for the past two weeks it was terrifying and nerve racking to be in that position.

Listen, I realize this is a pretty soft situation in the grand scheme of things. I have friends who are special operations forces who would get a good laugh out of this. There are probably single moms for whom this would be a welcome respite. Nonetheless, the demand placed upon me was far outsidemy limits and what I’m accustomed to.

The point of telling you how awful I felt after staying up for 30 hours straight, believe it or not, applies directly to training.

Put in the terms I use to discuss training, this event was fully distressful for me. I was operating way outside my limits (I make no apologies that I’m a 9-10 hours of sleep per night guy) and I had to pay a high cost for it. This is not stress my body easily resolves, and I pushed fully into distress.

It was the training equivalent of choosing a weight I can’t truly handle and doing it for more reps than I should with no rest. And then doing some more.

It all came to a head when, on Monday afternoon, I took a break from putting together the sales page to shoot a video to tell you about the strength training component I wrote as a companion piece to Lift Weights Faster. About six months ago, Jen asked me to create a program that people could use in conjunction with her conditioning library, which of course I was very excited to do.

I had a complete and total meltdown during filming.

I couldn’t think of words, and the more takes we did the more stressed I got. Even with sticking cue cards on the wall behind the camera, I was having a complete breakdown. After every bad take I contemplated saying, “I can’t do this” and throwing up my hands.

But I didn’t have much of a choice. Emails had been scheduled, promises had been made, and there was no turning back. The ball was rolling.

So when you see that video, you now know the inside scoop. I apologize in advance for it. The state I put myself in with the lack of sleep and pushing harder and harder meant that when I was called on to perform the result was miserable. I was beholden to external control, rather than doing what was even remotely best for me and my body.

Which is an anecdotal way to say that distress is not a good place to be. The cost is high and the result is often terrible.

Yet, the distress model of operating represents exactly how most people train. An arbitrary set of exercises with no regard for how they interact with their body. Reps and rest and other parameters based on a math formula, not modulated by the response of their own biological systems. Frankly, it’s a recipe for disaster so it’s no surprise that a lot of people haven’t set a personal record since back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark.

I got into the fitness industry in the first place because I want to change exactly that.

When I learned the method of training that I employ and teach, called Gym Movement, I truly felt an obligation to teach other people. I want people to know that it can be easy to make incredible progress in the gym. Not only can it be easy, but by making it easy you do exactly what enables you to make the most progress possible. And believe me, it’s incredibly satisfying to hit PRs every single time you train. How much better would you be a year from now if you set multiple PRs every day?

The strength companion program I wrote for Lift Weights Faster is, appropriately, called Get Stronger Faster. For foreseeable future, it is available exclusively as an add-on to Lift Weights Faster, which is fortunate because Jen has put together an absolutely astonishing resource in Lift Weights Faster. She can tell you more about it on the site, but suffice to say that if someone who hates conditioning work as much as I do can enjoy the workouts Jen designed, anyone can. It’s a massive resource: The manual includes 130 workouts, with 225 written exercise descriptions and photographic demonstrations, and nearly 20 how-to videos.

Get Stronger Faster is an application of the Gym Movement protocol that you could say is a distillation of a lot of what we’ve learned over the years of training clients at The Movement Minneapolis. I looked at what worked, what didn’t, what people enjoyed, and what people disliked and formulated a template that fully integrates your biofeedback into the plan. Your next 3 months of training might look similar to someone else’s on Get Stronger Faster, but it would also be incredibly different.

The goal of the program is to make you stronger, faster, of course. To do so, I have you do exactly what is best for your body based on your biofeedback and work just within your limits by avoiding excessive effort. Skeptical? So was a new client I just started working with a couple weeks ago. He emailed me before our session the other day saying:

“I have to admit that I was skeptical of your ‘stop a few reps short’ mentality but I’m finding that I’m actually firing better in the appropriate muscle groups and having better lifts.”

It’s a common thing I heard from people who are shifting their mentality from what they used to do, which didn’t work very well or they wouldn’t have sought me out, to a better way of training.

Big surprise though – when you work within your limits you do better than when you push through and work for 30 hours with no sleep.

So, do as I say, not as I do. As I type the final words in this post it’s 3:14am, and in all likelihood I’ll be up another hour or so making tweaks to the various parts of our campaign. In my view, this is a necessary distress that I have to do, regardless of the toll it takes. When the launch is over I’ll pay the cost and rest and recover.

The gym is always optional, always flexible, and never a necessary distress. Treat it like the opportunity that it is to get better in exactly the way that is best for YOU.