Good to read abc’s sneaking back in occasionally still here matey. Simple but brutal emom work - I concur it’s something to love/loathe.
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@raven78 Much appreciated dude. In full disclosure, I had to hang up ABCs for quite a while because they were causing me a LOT of anxiety. I’m finally in a healthy enough state to bring them back in on occasion.
Got in a 5 mile run with the Mrs in the evening.
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AM WORKOUT (0405 wake up via alarm)
MESS (Mass-Easy/Strength-Simple) Workout 25: Easy Strength for Fat Loss
Axle continental and press away/weighted chins
3x3x166
3x3x50
(3) Axle double overhand deficit deadlift
3x3x246+chains
Standing ab wheel
1x10
100lb shouldered keg carry w/60lb weighted vest
3 trips per side
1+ mile walk w/weighted vest w/5 burpees every 3 minutes
4 minutes of burpee chins (34 total)
Notes:
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After so much training yesterday, today seemed like a good day for ES4FL vs something harder. I’m also taking tomorrow off from work, so most likely won’t be lifting in the AM, so it all kind of fit.
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Was feeling an odd combination of strong and fatigued, so I kept the weight on the lighter side on the press and focused on just making it move as fast as possible and having short transitions. The chins were too heavy: gotta knock that off. Deads moved very solid.
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Huge fan of the keg shoulder carries. I think that’s one of the most valuable things I’ve picked up so far.
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Took a page from Tactical Barbell and turned the weighted vest walk into a “fun run”. 60lb weighted vest burpees definitely keep the heart rate up. And then got back in the garage and knocked out the burpee chins for a solid finisher.
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Care to elaborate on this? They were certainly a cornerstone of your conditioning for a while there. I did notice they fell to the wayside for a while. It’s such a ‘simple’ but brutally humbling movement once the reps start stacking up. Your amrap in 5mins on them produced some INSANE numbers iirc. Keep at it here, chaos personified.
I won’t presume to speak on Pwn’s behalf, he’s more than capable as we all know.
But as a fellow workout anxiety haver, particularly around conditioning, it’s fairly simple. You start off sucking at something, so they only way to go is up, and you do. But, the only way to go up is to dig deeper into the suck well. You find more reserves to get more reps, move more weight, or do it faster, but each workout comes at a cost, you now need to dig deeper to find more oil. Eventually you reach a point where the hole starts to cave in, and no matter how hard you dig you aren’t getting anywhere, because the mind simply isn’t in it any more.
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@raven78 Happy to discuss. As I’ve been noting, my healing has included a lot of changes in mentality, as getting my biology right has been big on getting my psychology right. I was legit trapped by my training for quite a while: I didn’t WANT to do it, but felt like I HAD to do it, and the 5 minutes of ABCs were a big driver of that (alongside TABEARTA). It was an albatross around my neck to get those workouts in, and I legit dreaded them. They were 4-5 of the most painful minutes I’d experience in a single day, and I was obligated to do them. The day I finally realized I had trained “enough” for the day and didn’t need to do that stupid workout was SO liberating, and those two workouts are an easy trigger toward these feelings again. I’m walking that balancing act these days, and doing what I can to avoid old habits. My attempt to get in 15k swings in 25 days was falling into that trap: stopping that was HUGE.
Got in a 3.4 mile walk with the wife and kiddo after a fantastic dinner of a 10oz grainfed flanksteak and 6oz grassfed sirloin steak cooked on the smoker alongside some egg whites. First time using the smoker on steaks.
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They look good!
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Thanks! Cooked fantastically. If I had a little more time I’d have tossed them on the grill to put some marks on them, but I’m just tickled any chance I get to use my smoker.
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Reverse searing using the smoker and then a pan to put a crust on them is something truly amazing!
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Crazy day, training happened, got Easy Strength done in 10 minutes with a 3 mile walk and all my push ups and sit ups
2 meals today, fasted the rest, going to keep that going. Just relying on hunger signals.
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AM WORKOUT (0600 wake up via alarm) FASTED
MESS Workout 26
Axle continental and press away
3x3x161
3x3x40
(3) Axle deficit double overhand deadlift
3x3x236+chains
Standing ab wheel
1x10
75 “American-ish” KB swings w/24kg bell in under 5 minutes
Notes:
- Schedule is still pretty nutty, so I’m making things quick and getting it in where I can. May be a bit before I can post more indepth. All good things: my off-line life is so full of love and joy that my online life needs to be on the backburner. That’s a good thing for sure.
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Absolutely beautiful!
Go enjoy - we’ll still be here when you’re back!
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Dude that’s excellent, enjoy!
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I like my most recent soon to be released blog post so much I’m going to post it here and later to the site proper. Big thanks to @cyclonengineer for helping me flesh it out.
“CHAOS IS THE PLAN”: A 3 SENTENCE TRAINING MANUAL
Any of my regular readers know just how big a fan I am of all-inclusive training books: one stop shopping that covers everything you need in order to get training and eating right. Paul Kelso’s “Powerlifting Basics Texas Style” does a fantastic job of providing a wide variety of programs AND a fantastic discussion on the 3 main food groups (Tex-Mex, BBQ and Cajun) to get a trainee eating and training right, and even dives into coaching. 5/3/1 Forever quite literally gives you all the tools you need to train, well, Forever. Marty Gallagher’s “Purposeful Primitive” is an insane value with how it covers lifting, eating, and cardiovascular training, “The Complete Keys to Progress” is exactly that, “Super Squats” and Deep Water, etc etc. And this love for all-inclusivity also corresponds with a love for all things “high speed/low drag”. I don’t need fluff or presentation: I want to get to the point and get out. Heck, people that have observed my bare bones nutrition of meat touched by flame can see it unfold, alongside my strongman equipment cobbled together out of gorilla tape. It’s also why I’m such a fan of Dan John vs some of our more “science based” authors out there, or why I care more about a good story vs a good study. And, in a true display of irony, this longwinded bloviation of an intro was put here to introduce the idea I have for a 3 sentence training manual which may, in fact, become my second e-book:
“Eat meat and eggs when hungry until no longer hungry. Spend 180 minutes a week picking something up off the floor and putting it over your head. Don’t repeat the same meal or workout twice in a row.”
EAT MEAT AND EGGS WHEN HUNGRY UNTIL NO LONGER HUNGRY
There’s no perfect diet, sure, but man, if everyone ate JUST meat and eggs when hungry until not, think of all the junk they’re NOT eating, all the damage they’re NOT doing, all the good stuff they’re putting into their body (protein and monounsaturated fats). And this doesn’t require a sliderule and degree from Harvard to figure out (although I AM shocked at how many people don’t seem to know what is an animal vs a plant…)
One of the “high speed/low drag” benefits of “eat meat” as a dietary prescription is how it avoids many of the issues trainees tend to have with food allergies and intolerances. There are SOME meats out there that people can have allergenic reactions to (shellfish is notorious for this, and some folks can have reactions to pork and other animals), but beef, in particular, tends to be one of the least allergenic foods out there. This is a boon because SO many times a trainee will ask for advice on how to eat and I’ll mention a wide variety of foods only for them to zero in on ONE of them and say “oh, I can’t eat peanuts, so peanut butter is out”. And rather than hold their hand and walk them to the MILLIONS of other choices available I tend to just get frustrated with the experience and wish them luck, as they’ve demonstrated just how much they fixate on the negative and refuse to engage in basic problem solving. With our choices cut down, we earn MORE freedom, because we’ve eliminated SO many options that might trigger a negative biological response that there are only good choices available. I say “meat” and you go from there. There are SO many animals on the Earth that you’re bound to find one you can eat. Yes: this will preclude vegans and vegetarians from succeeding. You have the deepest condolences I can offer: you’ll have to walk your own path.
Eggs occupy an interesting space in the allergysphere as well. Eggs tend to have higher instances of an allergenic response compared to meat, but, often, it’s the egg WHITES that people respond negatively to vs the yolk. In turn, one can attempt to abide by “meat and eggs” and simply opt for the yolks vs the whites and see how they suits them. There’s a LOT of good stuff in those egg yolks as it is, so eating them isn’t a bad idea at all. BUUUUUT, if worse comes to worse and eggs are taken off the table, it just means eating more meat.
As a final aside to the aside, Dr. Ken Berry is a big fan of “Beef, Butter, Bacon and Eggs” as the answer to “what to eat”, with the helpful pneumonic of “BBBE”. There’s methods to the madness too: beef remains one of the least allergenic meats out there, butter is a dairy product that few have a histamine reaction to as a result of the rendering out of proteins/lactose (which, if there is STILL an issue there, ghee can resolve it), bacon is simply magical, and whole eggs/egg yolks contain SO many awesome vitamins and nutrients. And again, if we wanna talk high speed/low drag, boiling the list down to 4 foods definitely accomplishes that.
And then there’s learning about hunger cues: not eating based on a schedule but because we’re hungry, and then eating until we’re not (not until we’re “full”, not until there’s no more food on the plate, just because we’re not hungry). We also get to learn about the difference between “hungry” and “bored”. When ALL we’re eating is meat and eggs, if we’re hungry: we’ll eat it. If we’re not, we won’t. Caveat: there would be no sauces or seasonings, outside of salt. If we have to trick ourselves into eating the food, we aren’t hungry.
It’s worth observing that in no way am I advocating a means of achieving optimal health here. That’s between you and your medical provider. I am simply coming up with A high speed/low drag solution to the question of “what do I eat?” If you have a BETTER approach: use it…but then, why did you come to me for answers?
SPEND 180 MINUTES A WEEK PICKING SOMETHING UP OFF THE FLOOR AND PUTTING IT OVER YOUR HEAD
Man, that just says it all. Much l like how the food is “when hungry, until not”, the pick the thing up and put it over your head can be “Do it until you can’t, wait until you can again, then do it again”. That answers the question about sets and reps. And if people REALLY want an answer, we could prescribe a time limit. And as I wrote that, I thought “how about a “per week” time limit?” That would REALLY streamline things. An hour a day, 3x a week is a very standard amount of “average human” training, so say we do that. 180 minutes. Split it up however you want now. You wanna train 7 days a week? Great: 25 minutes a day. Dan John would be proud. Can only train twice a week? 90 minutes each time. Man: imagine how goddamn strong you would get if, twice a week, you spent 90 minutes putting something over your head? That is a SCARY motherf**ker: especially if, after those 90 minutes, he puts away a dozen eggs and some steaks or ribs.
DON’T REPEAT THE SAME MEAL OR WORKOUT TWICE IN A ROW
Forced variety/periodization. Don’t eat ONLY ground beef and eggs for every single meal: one meal, yes, the next steak and eggs (and hey, maybe chicken eggs for one meal and duck eggs for another, we can switch that up too), then ribs and eggs, pork chops and eggs, salmon and eggs, etc. For the workout, if ALL we have is a barbell, we’ll change the weights OR the way we got it over our head (snatch vs press), but if we have multiple objects, the world is our oyster. Kegs, stones, logs, sandbags, etc etc.
The nutritional variety will cover our nutrient bases. The implement/movement variety will cover our imbalances. It also dawns on me that, if I wanted to be cute, I could change that sentence to simply “Chaos is the Plan”, so that it reads “Eat and eggs when hungry until no longer hungry. Spend 180 minutes a week picking something up off the floor and putting it over your head. Chaos is the plan.”…but you’d have to “know” me to know what the hell that final part means. But it also DOES communicate more than JUST “don’t repeat the same meal/workout twice in a row.” Now we can use that third sentence to mean that, not only are we not repeating meals and workouts twice in a row, but perhaps we won’t repeat weeks in a row either. Think about that: now we just created a training cycle.
When we employ the “Chaos is the plan” corollary to training, it means that some weeks our 180 minutes are divided between 2 workouts, sometimes 4, sometimes 7, etc. And the change in amount of training days would result in a change in training time, which would naturally cause a waving of training volume by changing the training density or load employed to meet the training time. Hey, isn’t a weekly change something we saw in 5/3/1, the Juggernaut Method, Dan John’s “1 lift a day”, basic western linear periodization, much of Alex Bromely’s programs, etc etc? And what if we really DID make chaos the plan and used the roll of a die to determine how many days a week we were going to train THAT week? Oh my god I’m loving this.
And heck, we could even boil this down WITHIN a week. Just because I’m training 180 minutes over the span of 4 days doesn’t mean they have to be evenly divided workouts. Rather than 4 45 minute workouts, what if I had one 90 minute workout and 3 30 minute ones? Or 2 75 minute workouts and 2 15 minute ones? 30-90-30-60? The possibilities are limitless!
And Chaos can be the plan with nutrition too. Eat meat and eggs when hungry until no longer hungry. Simple enough. Don’t repeat the same meal twice in a row. Simple enough. Chaos being the plan means that some days we may simply just plain not eat. If we’re not hungry, we’re not eating. Or maybe we employ a protein sparing modified fast ala the Velocity Diet/Apex Predator Diet, or keep it full carnivore and rely on egg whites, chicken breasts, lean fish, etc and then do a day MUCH heavier on the fats. I’ve heard some folks employ “fat fasting”: why not give it a go and see what happens? A surefire way to take in a variety of nutrients is to eat a wide variety and methods of food, and through that we’ll learn just how our body responds to these foods to best maximize performance AND gain a little bit of metabolic flexibility to go along with it.
That even lends well to cyclical nutrition, something Jamie Lewis has written about among several other authors. This could be a golden avenue to employ something ala the ABCDE diet, or take Justin Harris’ carb cycling and put it on its head by doing fat/protein cycling instead. Therein, just like with training, we observe instances wherein the nutrition can be rotated on a weekly basis or within the week itself. And this can be done while STILL keeping the nutrition simple: meat and eggs. There is SO much variety within those two things that we can have limitless possibilities available. A grassfed sirloin is going to have a much different breakdown compared to a grainfed slab of prime rib, to say nothing of comparing that same grassfed sirloin to some pork ribs, or a pot roast, or chicken thighs/wings. And wanna compare some quail eggs to an ostrich egg? And while we’re talking about eggs, think about how you can eat the same eggs but PREPARE them differently. Fried, poached, hard/soft boiled, omelets (steak and egg omelets are the meals of warriors), raw, scrambled, etc. John Meadows spoke to the idea that we can reduce the instances of egg intolerances by varying the method in which we prepare them on a frequent basis. Chaos is the plan, and chaotic nutrition can exist in the realm of restriction.
EVERYTHING ELSE
I had actually already shopped this idea out and someone pointed out to me the value of an adding a walk to the prescription. It was the greatest contribution I had seen to any protocol in a long time AND completely overlooked by me because I subscribe to Jamie Lewis’ paradigm that walking isn’t a workout “it’s part of being a human being”. That said, it wasn’t UNTIL I took on “Feast/Famine/Ferocity” that I started walking daily, so I was living a sub-human lifestyle for quite a while as well. As far as walking goes, there are several outstanding prescriptions out there to follow. There’s a lot of great science speaking to the value of a 10 minute walk after meals, and with Chaos being the Plan as far as our eating schedule goes, this allows for a chaotic walking schedule as well…but it also means on those fasting days we won’t walk at all. But, perhaps, since calories will be on the low side, that’ll be a good thing. Jamie Lewis prefers a set prescription of “2 miles a day, minimum, outside, rain or shine”, which is also a great way to get in some vitamin D…when it’s sunny. And Dan John’s Easy Strength for Fat Loss tackles it by having the trainee have a set 60 minutes of training, lift weights at the start, and go for a walk for the remainder of the 60 minutes. Given it’s an Easy Strength workout, the lifting can last anywhere from 10-25 minutes, so you can get in some decent walks, and Dan wants to trainee to legit put the weight down and head out the door while the heart rate is still up. All of these are great prescriptions, and all rely on the trainee to do SOME sort of walking, which is the big takeaway.
Beyond that, I’d be a cad if I didn’t cop to still making use of nutritional supplements as part of a “safety net” for my carnivore based nutrition. Everything I’ve read and heard says you can get all the required nutrients you need from animal products, and I find the position believable enough, but Biotest is an amazing company and I trust their products. They have also taken fantastic care of me through so much of my journey. The big takeaway with the nutrition prescription was to provide a VERY solid working foundation.
For the training, if I HAD to add something to it, it’d be pushing/dragging a sled. I’ve often written that my “desert island training” protocol would be log vipers and prowler pushes, and that still holds true. The sled will build up the legs just fine with a concentric only movement that’s easier to recover from to allow for more frequent training, and it provides ANOTHER avenue of conditioning AND a potential for level changes in a workout as well if one goes with low handles/low crawls and drags. But, I’ll also die on the hill that this is an unnecessary addition. Is one doing to develop some Tom Platz looking legs from picking something up off the floor and putting it over their head? No, but I’m sure they could develop some Milo of Croton or Farnese Hercules legs from doing that…and really, do you need more than that?
Another consideration I had was to either have a “dealer’s choice day” ala Jamie Lewis OR a caveat to take 10% of your training time each day and use it to train “whatever”. I feel like this would do a good job of shoring up any issues trainees may have with imbalances, specific lifts that need bringing up, etc. When we account for the fact that assistance work is responsible for 10% of our growth, it makes sense that we only spend 10% of our time on it. So if you have a 25 minute training session, spend 2.5 minutes doing some assistance work. Whether that’s an ADDITONAL 2.5 minutes or 2.5 minutes out of your 25 minute total training session is between you and your god: just get it done.
NOT THE END
I genuinely want to expand on this. Look at how much could be done with just 3 sentences. I can legit open up a book with those 3 sentences and then go on to list a jillion different “meat and egg” recipes in one portion alongside hundreds of “pick up off the floor and put overhead” workouts. We could train our whole lives off these 3 sentences AND alongside the 3 principles of “Effort, Consistency and Time”. The Freedom of limitation shines through yet again: give me 3 sentences and I’ll give you a book.
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Great writing as always Pwn, I do really like the way you tell a story.
Not being a dck but
But that’s more than 180, maybe a little edit before it goes in the blog and some ar$e like me wants to highlight that instead of all the crazy good information.
I, a jackass at heart, immediately thought of ways in which doing this wouldn’t be productive. My first thought was jumping jacks where your hands went overhead and touched the ground for each rep. Much to my trolling nature’s chagrin, I realized that doing that, at speed, 180 minutes a week would be a fantastic way to get more conditioned while probably also providing auxiliary mobility benefits.
On the walking note, I can’t remember where I read Dan John say something about the a 30 (maybe 45) minute walk being something of a panacea but I’m a believer these days.
Anyway, I enjoyed the post. Using good, simple principles as a backdrop really can keep you on course when life gets complicated.
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Appreciate the shout out here.
You have put way more thought into this whole idea than I have but definitely similar thought patterns emerging.
Great write up and good caveat about supplementation (for all those out there that will insist we need veggies).
Post my Alaskan Cruise (where copious amounts of many animals will be consumed) at the end of the month I want to further pare down my daily food type intake too. Maybe not as austere as BBBE, but I have hit on a dozen or so foods that my messed up diabetic pancreas can handle without trouble.
Question: do fish eggs (like salmon roe sushi) fall under eggs or meat? 
The whole idea outlined above is a nice way of breaking out of the social media influencer mentality of pushing everyone to the extremes of the fitness populace distribution.
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Awesome post, and would make for a killer series/ebook.
Let’s not forget the untapped market of lizard/snake eggs. Idk who’s eating those, but I would not want to cross paths with them in the proverbial dark alley.
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@simo74 Appreciate the kind words man. Glad you could dig the story.
@Heretolog I’m actually curious what you’re picking up off the floor when you do jumping jacks. Do you do them with hand weights? That’s pretty intense! Kinda like “heavy hands”. Glad you dug the post, and concur on the walks. One of the most positive things I’ve ever done for myself.
@cyclonengineer Really appreciate what you’ve done to help me flesh it out. And man, an Alaskan Cruise is the PERFECT place to put down some animals. I wanna get more fish eggs into my diet for sure.
@mr.v3lv3t Hey thanks for that man! And dude: I REALLY wanna take on a platypus omelet one day. As an egg laying mammal, they can make their own eggs AND cheese, and then you can grill them up for the meat on the inside. My kid says I’m not allowed to eat a platypus…but I can just wait until they go off to college, haha.
AM WORKOUT (0405 wake up via alarm) FASTED
MESS (Mass-Easy, Strength Simple Workout 28: Mass Made Simple Workout 13
EASY STRENGTH WORK
(3) Axle double overhand deficit deadlift/weighted chin superset
3x3x236+chains
3x3x40
Standing ab wheel
1x10
Axle continental and press away
3x3x166
Reverse hyper
75x250
MASS MADE SIMPLE WORK
Complex A (row-clean-front squat-press-squat-good morning)
5x2x145 (1 min rest)
Buffalo Bar Squat
10x102
5x142
3x192
10x212
58+2x192 (3 rep PR in single set)
9 minutes of assistance work (Conan curls, pull aparts, kelso shrugs, shrugs, pushdowns, dips, lateral raises)
BREAKFAST
Walk w/dog
Notes:
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Fatigue is still hitting hard. My nutrition has trended toward lean proteins vs fats as I’m making this a semi-famine. I figured I could ride that into the home stretch of MMS, and I’m still seeing growth, which is awesome, but it’s definitely hard work. I DID eat well yesterday, which helped.
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Playing around with exercise order on the Easy Strength, basically running things backwards. It’s mostly out of laziness: the bars are loaded from the previous workout, so I run it in the previous order. But I also remember an idea Pavel wrote about in “Beyond Bodybuilding” wherein you specifically take the same workout but change the order of the exercises as a means of progression. NOT pressing first thing is pretty nice, because I don’t run as much of a risk of blacking out.
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That squat was absolutely bonkers. It’s wild when getting to 50 is when the work STARTS. And I weighed in at 171.2 this morning, so I’m hitting 20lbs over bodyweight for 8 reps beyond the goal of finishing the program: that’s pretty goddamn outstanding. And that also shows about a 5lb bodyweight growth, so that’s cool.
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Getting all the complexes was a win. I do feel like I’m leaving some weight on the platform just because my technique is so poor. I foresee MMS being a go-to supplemental protocol, and when I run it again I may try different implements to make it work.
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Got Tang Soo Do tonight, wherein I should be granted my new belt, so that’s cool.
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I had to read this three times to make sure I read it correctly…
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