"CHAOS IS THE PLAN: THE PLAN"-A 3 Sentence Training Manual

Training
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Dude, I’ll no joke buy you a kindle copy. You don’t even have to follow it: just to have it. Just as a thanks.

You mentioning short arms lights up even more theory for me, as I have the opposite issue, with stupidly long arms and a short torso. Gotta wonder what role that was having with outcomes as well.

Good shout with the Jamie Lewis’ bit there too. Absolutely spot on: get lean and build up the shoulders and people will notice.

I’d love to see how your nutritional experiment unfolds. It’s so cool watching the individual variations.

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Great write up and some obvious results. I wonder if you could put a spin on this and use a different movement but under the same type of chaos scheme. Pick something up and squat it, or pick something up and carry it. Then use the 10% for specific overhead work.

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Wow, that’s incredibly generous. Thank you for that and everything else you’ve given me on this journey. I would certainly give it a read if you wanted to do that. It seems that the goal of the program is to squat your BW for 50 reps? That’s always been in the back of my mind as a benchmark, and would go well with my idea of total mastery of any weight I aim to press. Also, someone on Amazon said “these workouts are not recoverable” which is hilarious and all the more reason to try it. I don’t think private messages are a thing here, I could post my email address that my kindle account is under and then delete it after you’ve seen it?

I think that’s the beauty of this program; taking things off the floor and putting them overhead is the great equalizer. You might make the clean part look easier and I might have the shorter press ROM, but it all averages out. No using body type as an excuse like if we were doing only squats or only deads.

The other variable I am considering tinkering with is meal partitioning; that is, eating the same amount of food, but dividing up my meals differently. I actually feel better having 2 huge meals day compared to 3 or more; I start to really get hunger signals then instead of feeling like “time to eat? But I just ate…”. However, I still feel like this stuff is the 10%, and making sure you’re eating enough of the right stuff is the 90%, if that makes sense.

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I mean, depending on how loosely you want to apply the rules, tons and tons of people have done “squat every day”. That stuff definitely works, but what about the show muscles? Brian Alsruhe has a program called “Every Day Carry”, but I think there’s a lot more to it than just carries (and at that point you might as well just be a farmer/laborer). And then Wendler has the “WALRUS” which is basically “pullups/pushups/squats” every day (with room for variations). The moral of the story is high frequency/grease the groove training works. I still think Pwn was onto something by theorizing that floor-to-overhead was the ultimate builder and display of strength, as seen over centuries, but of course I’m obviously biased, as well.

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Exactly this. Yeah, you can definitely take any movement and train it daily and become “that which does” with it, it’s just “that which does squat” and “that which does carry stuff” doesn’t inspire me as much as “that which does take things from the floor and put them overhead”. Milo of Croton would be the notable exception of “that which does” and daily carries, but his would be a unique case with the bull. And, of course: it’s a myth.

Very much the same. I used to eat ALL the time, thinking “I like to eat”, but because I was eating so frequently I never really got to eat: I was just grazing. I so much prefer to just sit down and feast, and then wait until I can feast again. And again, taking “that which does”, we see what grazing animals become vs feasting animals.

I’m excited to see the direction you go with MMS! The program is awesomely laid out, but Dan’s insights through the book are incredible.

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Discovered this thread a few days ago. Really good stuff and ideas here. Made me think a lot. I had came up with a similar concept years ago. I was only thinking about training and not about eating for that concept however at the time.

For context, I am an engineer and specialize in continuous improvement/process improvement. Monitoring progress comes down to metrics. Simplicity of processes is also a must to improve.

At that time, I was monitoring my training with a bunch of metrics like max bench, squat, deadlift, press and power clean; max reps of push ups, dips and pull ups; best 400m, mile and 5K time on running. Etc.

It was a bunch of metrics and as we know, testing it takes a lot of energy that could be spent on training. It was not simple. I came to the conclusion that by monitoring only my strength from ground to overhead and my 5K time, I would have everything I needed to know if I am heading in the right directions. By monitoring max strength on something that covers so much muscle and monitoring conditioning with a simple metric, I knew that if I was going in the right direction on both, I would be more muscular and leaner. For a few years then, I would always ask myself if what I did (in the gym, while running or in the kitchen) was going to improve my strength from ground to overhead and/or if it was going to help my 5K running time.

I could expand on it big time. To be strong on ground to overhead movement, it helps to have muscle, strength and power but also some kind of basic mobility. I really like the choice on Chaos Is The Plan to focus on ground to overhead for many reasons. For running, the 5K was the right metric according to me because you need to work on running technique, speed, anaerobic conditioning, aerobic conditioning, you can’t be to heavy so it gives some balance to the other metric that is max strength. Running is also a basic human movement. Just being strong on ground to overhead allow you to be fat but if you have to be fast on a 5K you can’t. You adress this on your plan with diet. By the way, I like the way you adressed diet and it looks appealing but living in Canada, I really don’t know how I could afford to eat like that. Prices of groceries here are insane especially for meat!

To honor this thread, I trained mostly ground to overhead yesterday for fun which I had neglect in recent past (swings, power snatch, snatch grip high pull, overhead squat and press). I rediscoverd muscles in the back of my body and all around the soulders. I feel awesome today and feels that by working on this again would allow me to reclaim my humanity!

So, to finish, it got me thinking big time, I had tought about something similar in the past and feels like this thread has reignited something in me. Thanks and keep up with your awesome writings!

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Brandon's Backyard Buffoonery
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Dude, thanks SO much for what you wrote here! It’s awesome to see great minds think alike and collaborate. I really dig what you came up with on the 5k there: I think that absolutely has wings, and could be supplemental to the idea as well. There’s some limiters there for folks that are limited on running, but I feel like the general premise is sound: don’t get so fat you can’t do a very basic bit of conditioning. The 5k is a great distance metric as well: you’re not going to need to spend hours on cardio to hit a solid time on that distance.

I feel like the chin up is another great measuring stick in that regard. I think I picked that idea up from Joe DeFranco or possibly Thibs, but it’s predicated around the idea that, if you’re gaining weight but your chins aren’t suffering, you’re gaining a favorable distribution of muscle and fat. If the chins start to suffer, you’re getting over fat.

Well here’s the bit about that: because the rule is “eat when hungry, stop when not”, you may find you end up spending quite a bit less on groceries than you think. Carbs tend to trigger something of a hunger response, because of the blood sugar elevation and crash “roller coaster” effect. You get hungry, you eat carbs, it elevates your blood sugar and you feel satiated, blood sugar falls and you’re hungry again. Because meat and eggs don’t cause this same response, they tend to result in longer satiety, especially once an athlete becomes “fat adapted”. In my own log I document how I eat just one meal a day, and that’s all I’m hungry for. I DO employ a protein sparing modified fast ala the Velocity Diet using Metabolic Drive, but that’s not out of hunger: it’s out of a desire to spare muscle mass. I’m not hungry when I consume Metabolic Drive: I’m just covering my bases to make sure I get in enough protein.

With the money you’re not spending on other groceries, and with eating being limited to only when hungry and stopping when you’re not, you might actually end up ahead, especially if you can find some thrifty purchases.

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No problem! Thanks for brining the discussion. It is really interesting.

I understand your point but the same could be said about lifting weights overhead or any other movement. At some point you have to fix the issue. However, I also feel like running issues are more complex to fix and a lot more people have trouble with it than overhead movement. Anyway, like you said, great add on for folks that feels like it. I am almost equally interested in strength and conditioning so it make sense for me but if the plan is for someone focusing on strength, ground to overhead + meat and egg diet will take care of strength, muscle mass and leanness.

Wow! It was the third metric at first and I kept it for a while. I had also read the same thing from Joe DeFranco. However, I discover after a while that I could do no chins for a while and if I was strong on ground to overhead (espacially from ground to shoulder) and wasn’t fat thanks to running (and eating responsibly), I was able to do a lot of chin ups anyway. I suspected the ground to shoulder movements I was performing were keeping my back and arms really strong and as a result, pulling my bodyweight was not difficult. What I like about having pull ups as a metric is it adds a strength-endurance metric. (I was measuring number of bodyweight pull ups not max weighted pull up)

I would have to look deeper into it but if I estimate, with the amount of calories I need right now and use really cheap meat, it comes about 30-50% pricier. Maybe less calories are needed I don’t know. You know more than I do about this.

Like I said, it looks appealing to me but I am not ready to make the jump. I feel like I have great balance right now nutrition wise. We buy better meat (not highest quality but not lowest either) and complement mainly with fruits/vegetables and rice/potatoes/oatmeal/sweet potatoes. Could do better but it is not my main focus at the moment. If I want to lean out in the future and want to experiment the benefits, I could totally try it for a few weeks/months and assess were I am budget wise. I understand why people do it and it makes sense for your plan! I just don’t see myself doing it right now.

Our child is also eating with us now since a few months and not only relying on milk anymore. I think it is important to teach him what is a varied diet and lead by example.

By the way, I saw you also mentionned walking somewhere in previous posts and since this is also a basic human movement, I have also observed lots of positive benefits of walking outside everyday (or almost everyday). I did a lot of walking outside almost everyday no matter the weather while preparing to summit Kilimandjaro and felt so good doing it. I was not running a lot at that time but just by walking, my running performance stayed good!

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I definitely started eating less total food when I switched this way. You’re looking at “calories I need” based off your current body composition, but something @BrandonCrawford and I discussed is how this becomes a “body optimization” plan. Your body will decide where it wants to be. For me, I ended up dropping 35lbs, and then regaining 20 of them, and the food intake changed along the way. Rather than “eat meat and eggs to hit XYZ cals/macros”, it’s just “Eat them when you’re hungry, stop when you’re not”.

Walking outside is magic! I try to do that as much as possible, and get as much sun exposure as I can. The Mrs has come to peace with me always being shirtless when we’re out walking, haha.

And yeah, no rush to employ the diet, and I totally get nutritional modeling for the little one. It’s more just how paradigm breaking the whole experience is that I find fascinating.

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This principle is also probably easier to apply while only eating meat and eggs.

It made me think about what I eat right now. I would like to 100% apply “Eat when hungry, stop when you’re not” but the problem with a varied diet comes to “Eat what?”. You eat meat or fruits or vegetables? You just eat what you feel? If you just eat what you feel, how do you make sure you have what you need? Of course for body optimization, you don’t eat junk. In that case, if you only eat natural foods similar to the paleo diet or what the human body have known or had access to for tens of thousands of years, does your body know what it needs?

I have observed that when I really am hungry, I indeed crave meat, eggs and nuts but at some point while eating it, I will start to crave fruits. I rarely crave vegetables but I crave them hard when I am sick or when it is really hot. Craving carbs like plain rice or plain potatoes (no spices, sauce or butter) only happen when I am deep in an endurance event. Junk food craving will happen and it is always a sign of electrolyte deficiency. Since I am mixing electrolytes in water during the morning, I rarely crave junk anymore.

I am sorry if I am going wild here. This is just because I am not really familiar with carnivore diet or similar, I am curious and it got me thinking.

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Don’t apologize at all dude: I love this dialog. It’s a great bit of self-discovery.

You’re absolutely right about the eating according to hunger specifically applying to meat and eggs. Once we try to apply it outside of that, it falters pretty quickly, primarily because most stuff outside of that tends to have elements to it that elevate it’s palatability. Meat and eggs have something of a natural limiter. My favorite place to go out to eat is Texas de Brazil: a Brazilian steakhouse. I have had the pitbosses sent on me there a few times: had the manager ask me what it was I wanted so that I would leave my spot. I can sit down for 90 minutes and eat meat…but EVENTUALLY, it gets to the point that I’ve had enough, and the literal thought of eating any more of it makes me ill. And after that meal is done, I don’t want to eat for a LONG time. I’ve never had that feeling with pizza, cheesecake, ice cream, pastries, etc. For those things, the only reason I stop eating is because I run out of food.

Some foods may include some natural limiters to them like fiber, which is why it’s harder to overeat fruit vs overconsume fruit juices, or why you won’t get fat on an all broccoli diet, but even still fruit, dairy and nuts are easier to overconsume compared to meat and eggs. And nuts occupy an interesting space as well in the “paleosphere” of eating, as there’s something to be said about “paleo portions”. You’d NEVER come across a handful of nuts in a natural environment. Not unless you harvested EVERY nut in your geographic area, in which case you’d have exhausted yourself from the labor (in the gathering and the opening of the nut), and EARNED all that energy that nuts provide. And then that’d be all the nuts you’d eat that season. But now we can eat them by the handfuls if we so desire, and really do ourselves some damage. Same concept with fruit consumed out of season, or honey.

With a diet restricted to meat and eggs, it’s much easier to rely on those hunger signals. Once we go outside of that, we’ll need other mechanisms.

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Great observation here on portions available in paleo times. I had not think about that. The same could be said about cooking technique. They probably chew a lot of tough meat compared to what we can have now. It is easy to eat a lot of meat when it is grounded or braised but cook a large chunk over open fire and a lot of the processing will be done by your teeth and jaw. Also, seasonality like you said would dictate what they would eat and bodyweight must have varied according to season and not what the ideal physique is. If you have plenty of fruits, veggies and nuts that are ready around you and winter is coming, you would probably eat more than you need at that moment to make some reserve.

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There are a lot of folks out there that propose this very idea. When we eat fruits and nuts, we signal to our body “winter is coming: start putting on the fat!” and it obliges. Also a fair point regarding the act of chewing, ripping and tearing the meat. I love meat on the bone for that very reason, and it is a natural way to slow down the pace of the meal, which can also help with satiety. Along with that, the bones have a lot of great stuff in them as well. I chew off the ends, getting that connective tissue and calcium.

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@Hugo_Fillion Try flat out sprint over 40-60m and standing jumps. Good predictors of 100m - 400m athletic events. And explosiveness in various ball/field/team sports. Bit of a contra indicator to 5k endurance, if you can do both reasonably probably a good sign of overall physical condition combined with your lifting protocol. Need to be more orientated in one direction for sporting success in a particular field.

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@T3hPwnisher Good call for meat on the bone. It is so easy to eat braised beef with a shovel. Are you eating some organ meat too?

@doddfrank I like the idea of incorporating the sprint since it is a great measure of athletism! I remember while training that way (lots of clean and snatch variations, push jerks and push press, some squats), my standing long jumps and vertical jumps were good even if I was not training them often. However, for the sprints, direct sprint training would probably be needed because it is a lot more technical than jumping.

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Beef liver. When I have the time to run it through the smoker, it’s magical, but otherwise I’ll just air fry it. I treat it like a vitamin and eat a quarter sized piece a day. I actually enjoy it, but I worry about Vitamin A toxicity.

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Beef liver is a solid choice and I understand you going easy because of vitamin A.

Are you adding spices or do you marinate some of your meat? I ask because there is peruvian dish consisting of grilled marinated beef heart on a skewer, anticucho. The taste and texture are insane and could bring some variety without the vitamin A. I guess it would be good without the marinade. You really feel like a warrior eating that!

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No, not at all. I actually addressed this a bit in one of the posts on this topic

Since this is about returning to a natural way of eating and re-learning hunger/satiety signals, I intentionally avoid seasonings, spices, marinades, etc. I want to eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m not. Spices and marinades artificially enhance the palatability of a food: they make it even tastier than it really is, even IF you are using natural ingredients to do so.

Like, if I am really, truly hungry, a plain chicken breast will be delicious. Egg whites will be delicious. If I’m hungry but “not for that”: I’m not hungry. And, in turn, once I stop being hungry for whatever it is I’m eating, that’s the sign that my body has had enough food.

Salt is an exception, as it’s a mineral, rather than a plant, and a necessary one for our survival. But that said, I don’t salt food to make it taste better: I salt it to get salt.

I’ve heard good things about beef heart. It straddles the line between muscle and organ. I’m definitely not opposed to eating it: just haven’t gone out of my way to get it.

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Sorry, I shoud have made a short research. I already had my doubts.

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Oh don’t sweat it dude: I’m enjoying the opportunity to discuss more.

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