At the urging of a new friend who started reading my book “The Paleo Dieter’s Missing Link” a few days ago, I’ve decided to post the preface of the book here on my blog. My journey from where I was to where I am was long and difficult and full of setback, disappointments, shady characters and people who were all to willing to push me into accepting less for myself, my life and my health. Here’s how I got from where I was to where I am…

My book, “The Paleo Dieter’s Missing Link“  is a book I knew I was going to write for a long time.

In the fall of 2004 I owned a big house with a big mortgage, worked a high-stress corporate biotech job, slept fewer than 5-6 hours a night and had just started an evening MBA program. I drank tons of coffee. Everything about my life was rushed and stressed. Of course, everyone would have expected me to remain healthy despite the schedule and the stress – after all, I was working out all the time, jogging almost daily and eating a “very healthy” diet of chicken breasts, protein shakes, whole grains, protein bars, granola bars, name brand yogurt and taking plenty of vitamins and supplements.

I soon found out I was far from healthy.

After nearly dying from Ulcerative Colitis, I began a long battle with digestive illness, chronic fatigue, depression and a lot of other health issues. Of course, I (at the time) and anyone in the mainstream establishment I knew, attributed my problems to “bad luck.” All the conventional doctors I saw (save for one) couldn’t – and wouldn’t – do anything but medicate symptoms with drugs that usually made things worse or caused other problems. I was told over and over again: “There’s no known cause for your illness and no known cure. All we can do is ‘manage your disease’ with drugs. Diet has nothing to do with it.” I even had the head of Gastroenterology at a major university hospital recommend I eat “bread” because my diet of only raw fruit smoothies and steamed vegetables – which seemed to be making me feel better and reduce the pain of digestion – wasn’t of adequate nutrition and nutrient “deficiencies” might result without bread. Bread…

I also made the rounds to various alternative medical people. All of them proved useless as well and were only interested in selling high-priced supplements or advancing their own dogmatic ideas. None had any answers, but all were more than happy to accept money in exchange for a useless opinion, some tests and some useless bottles of crap that didn’t help or made me feel worse.

I spent years sick and exhausted. My usually boundless creativity and energy were gone. I had all I could do to drag myself in to a job that I hated so I could sit at a desk and collect a paycheck. I still worked out and did Karate, but my training was lackluster and always interrupted for various time periods by digestive problems from moderate to severe. I made more than one trip to an emergency room due to dehydration, anemia and sever inflammation of my intestinal tract. Each time it was the same story: “Diet has nothing to do with it. You’ll need to be on medication for the rest of your life to ‘manage your disease’.”

That’s me, sick and miserable sitting at a desk doing a job I hated. The company I worked for was failing and I was surrounded by difficult and negative people…

My grandfather once said about me: ”Adam is over-confident and over-optimistic, but he usually turns out to be right.” Looking back it was pretty crazy – I stopped taking the prednisone and other crap they were loading me up with, stopped going to anyone for help and began reading everything I could get my hands on and experimenting. I experimented with all sorts of diets, fasting, positive thinking, meditation and everything else that had even a remote chance of helping me. Every so often, I’d show up in an emergency room because things got out of hand. I’d do just enough conventional treatment to get back on my feet and get back to my still-stressful job and resume my dietary research and trial and error.

This was all nearly 7 years ago. It’s relatively easy to talk about, but the day to day process I went through was excruciating. Over that 7 years I examined every aspect of my diet, my past, my goals, my thinking, my friends, my relationships, my work and my life. It was a battle and I was literally fighting for my life. And not just my “life” as in not dying, my life as in having a good one that I enjoyed and actually wanted to live. I have no doubt that the doctors could have kept me alive – but I’m certain the life I would have had under their care would have been a living hell.

I reached the point where I was determined to regain my health and live the life I wanted or die trying. There would be no lifetime of drugs and surgeries and emergency rooms and gastroenterologists who could barely speak English. They all told me I would die if I didn’t take their medications and do what they told me. They told me that nothing I did with my diet or lifestyle would help.  It was a risk I was willing to take. Life on my terms or death, those were my options. At times, I really didn’t care which one it was.

Things began to really turn around in 2008, even though I was working yet another stressful and miserable corporate job and still had plenty of negative people and situations in my life. I was doing relatively well on a diet of meats, fruit, vegetables and goat yogurt and had been eating that diet for years. I was still far from healthy, though. At this time, I still thought my training days were over. I was too tired and too out of shape to want to do much of anything. I used to be big and strong and fit and live in the gym. College, then corporate life and then illness changed all that. I had lost all of the muscle and strength I built from a lifetime of weights and training. And now, the diet I needed to be on to stay healthy wasn’t anything like the one I “needed” to be on to get strong and train again. Or so I thought.

Like most, I was deluded by marketing and mainstream nonsense. I thought there was a specific diet you ate for each health problem, a diet you ate to build muscle, a diet you ate to burn fat, a diet you ate for psychological health, a diet you ate to run marathons and on and on. Special diets and special supplements. Like everything else in our modern world, everything was specialized and fractionated as far as I could tell. Something Paul Chek’s work helped me realize is that there’s a basic, foundational way to eat for health – and that health is a foundation you build on for specific needs. Eating to heal a digestive illness may have been my priority at one time, but it was entirely ignorant of me – and of our culture in general – to think that the diet that healed my digestive system wouldn’t be the diet that would help me achieve strength and performance or psychological health or any other goal I had. Certainly the application of certain principles or foods might change, but a healthy diet is a healthy diet regardless of goals or specific circumstances.

A healthy diet is a healthy diet and is universal.

Let me say that again in a different way:

There are solid, unchanging principles that make up a diet that is healthy for humans. This is a fact. There is a right and a wrong way to eat.

Yes, there is latitude within the context of “what is a healthy diet to eat” and there will be differences and variations depending on goals, individual health, tolerance for certain foods, genetics and a million other details, but the question of what to eat is not as complex as many would like us to believe. In fact, science tells us – with absolute certainty – what is healthy for us to eat and what is not healthy for us to eat. It’s just that the science that tells us this isn’t medical science. The science that gives us the answers to the questions we ask about what to eat is anthropology and the related disciplines. To see our way to a healthy future we need to use science to look at the past.

The idea of this diet vs. that diet, the 1000’s of diet books, the experts and doctors and pundits and arguments and conflicts on The Dr. Oz show and most everything else within the commercial diet landscape are nothing but distracting nonsense, bullshit, hype and manipulative marketing efforts.

Evolution tells us how to eat and how to live. History shows us what we were designed to eat and how we were designed to live and history shows us how we’ve declined as a species the further we’ve drifted from what is natural to us. The future of health and of medicine is in this evolutionary concept and it will someday be the commonly accepted way to understand and treat health and disease.

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“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer

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Everything changed for me in 2009 when I read Randy Roach’s book “Muscle, Smoke and Mirrors. Volume I.” In this outstanding history of bodybuilding and Physical Culture, Randy showed the diets and nutritional philosophies of the strongest and healthiest from the 1800’s and early to mid 1900’s. This is before modern medicine was what it is now, before marketing and medicating symptoms were what they are now. The early strongmen ate the things we eat now and consider “Paleo” in many instances.

For the first time, I was aware of athletes who were capable of moving weights I couldn’t have dreamed of in my best training days – and they were doing it long before anabolic steroids, “advanced” protein shakes and bars, pre-workout drinks and stimulants and all the equipment “advances” we’re told we need to be strong and be healthy. Many of these men drank raw cow or goat milk, ate foods straight from the farms they were grown or raised on and practiced a lot of the “strange” things I read about in many of the very fringe books I was reading about health and healing. Many of them fasted, they obsessed about food quality. Many avoided grains. Most avoided alcohol. This is the first time I really saw the connection between eating for health and eating for strength and performance.

I also saw the connection between lifestyle and health or the lack of it. Once I started making these connections, things started to really pick up momentum and change in my life. I quit jobs and ended relationships. My friend Chris Wright-Martell let me start training clients as a strength coach out of his school, Modern Self-Defense Center in Middletown, CT. He had a few kettlebells at the school and I started using them. I got hooked. A few months later I got certified as Kettlebell Teacher by Steve Cotter and Ken Blackburn from the IKFF. I started training harder and feeling better.

It wasn’t too long after this that I found my way to the CrossFit community when I taught a kettlebell seminar at CrossFit Relentless. I became good friends with the owner, Merle Mckenzie, and he encouraged me to get into CrossFit. I did. And that’s when I came full circle. CrossFitters were eating Paleo and doing it for performance. I started following Robb Wolf’s work.

In 2005 all my friends and coworkers wanted to know when I would be able to eat “normally” again. Girlfriends were annoyed and frustrated because there was “something wrong with me” that kept us from taking day trips to Sturbridge Village to eat fried seafood and ice cream. They wanted to stay out all night and drink in loud clubs and I wanted to be home sleeping at 10pm – because there was “something wrong with me.”

Today, I’m healthy. I’m happy. I live in the tiny beach cottage in Old Saybrook, CT that my great grandfather bought for the family as a summer home. I run at the beach. I feel good. I eat good local foods. I do yoga in the yard in the sun with humming birds flitting here and there. I go to bed early, I get up early and I lift heavy things in a little barn behind the house. I write constantly. I have a wonderful, spiritual woman in my life. I actively avoid negative people and places and practices. There’s nothing “wrong with me” anymore…

And this is me NOW (Summer of 2011) – Strong, happy, healthy and doing what I LOVE…

Me and my great friend Carrie.

That’s my AWESOME girlfriend Michelle in the beach pic above. She has a great new blog called “Chalk and Chi!”

In truth, there never was anything “wrong with me.” There was – and still is – something wrong with a culture where health isn’t a priority, foods we’re told are healthy by “experts” aren’t, disease is rampant, lifestyles are out of control with stress and strife and no one will look at the facts, tell the truth, drop the politics and create change. Misinformation in the diet and health fields is ubiquitous. Almost no one tells the truth. Almost. Change is coming and there will be many established power structures that suffer and disappear when it does.

The “Paleo Dieter’s Missing Link” is my contribution to creating change in the way we think about health and diet and the way we eat and live. Some of the things I say in the book are risky and unpopular. It’s a Paleo diet book but, as I’ll show you, Paleo is a diverse diet genre. It’s not a single diet made up of black and white principles to follow without question or individualization. I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to help you understand Paleo and related approaches in a way that they’re not typically presented or explained. I want to empower you to make your own decisions, ask your own questions and find your own answers. I want to make connections and integrate knowledge from different places and different historical periods. I want to help you understand health and diet on a much deeper level than it’s currently presented.

I had to understand diet, health and lifestyle to heal and live again. I understand it on a very deep level because of the stakes I was playing at. I had to because I couldn’t have turned that mess of a life I was living around any other way. Many people still don’t get me or my lifestyle or my diet, but that’s really OK. I don’t care. I’m living my life the way I want to live it and that’s what’s important. I’m living life on my terms…

ttys

Adam

Today’s question came from Joe in a private message he sent me on the CrossFit discussion board. Joe’s question was basically related to problems he’s having with lack of appetite and weight loss on a Paleo Diet. Joe is also dealing with Adrenal Fatigue.

Thanks a lot for the question, Joe and please be sure to post some follow up questions if you need to!

ttys

Adam

IMPORTANT! Adam Farrah is not a doctor or medical professional. This information is based on my own opinion and is not meant to be medical advice or to treat, diagnose, cure or prescribe in any way.

This blog post is sort of a follow up to the discussion I had about yoga in this post: http://practicalpaleolithic.com/paleolithic-diet-blog/adding-yoga-to-a-strength-program

Yoga and meditation can have a central role in treating Adrenal Fatigue, depression, anxiety and a number of other disorders. The video above discusses some of these and points out a number of resources for further exploration.

ttys

Adam

IMPORTANT! Adam Farrah is not a doctor or medical professional. This information is based on my own opinion and is not meant to be medical advice or to treat, diagnose, cure or prescribe in any way.

A BIG thanks to Sonya Conrad for this pic – Sporting a SINS shirt on Mt Kosciuszko, the highest point in Australia! Thanks Sonya!

This answer is in response to Jennifer’s question below:

“Hi Adam,

I have been hearing a lot lately about over training, even my own trainer has insinuated that I am no longer changing my body because I am not allowing it to recover. I go to the gym 6x a week for an hour. I do the classes as I find motivation with others. I also see my personal trainer twice a week for a half hour. In the past, I noticed my body was changing but now I feel like I have hit a wall. Yes, I have other things to consider such as diet. I don’t think I eat enough actually do a hectic night job (I’m 5’5 122lbs). I’m thinking of chaning my routine and starting crossfit but working out less.
Anyhow, my question is how do you find the right balance over working out and recovery?

Thank you,

Jennifer”

Thanks again for the question, Jennifer!

Here are the two blog posts of mine I mention in the video:

Overtraining and Adrenal Fatigue

CrossFit Workouts and Becoming More Efficient

ttys

Adam

IMPORTANT! Adam Farrah is not a doctor or medical professional. This information is based on my own opinion and is not meant to be medical advice or to treat, diagnose, cure or prescribe in any way.

On the plus side, Sara is WICKED HOT so it might be worth watching just for that reason

What does all this have to do with Adrenal Fatigue and Lifestyle?

So, a point that came up during Sara’s interview is how many of us are making so much effort in our lives that we finally become so exhausted that we have to stop. We essentially realize we have to find another way. (This gets discussed starting around 41:00min.) We are so exhausted from all the struggling and all the ego, we actually “give up” and it’s from this point we can begin to truly live.

Here’s why I think this is important and how it relates to Adrenal Fatigue:

If your lifestyle is unsustainable you will be in constant stress. If your training is unsustainable (meaning, not periodized and well programmed with varied intensity) you WILL eventually become exhausted because your physical resources have been spent. This is overtraining.

But while we think it’s working we keep doing whatever stupid behavior we’re doing. It isn’t until we completely crash and burn that we (hopefully) realize we were going down the wrong path, reevaluate and get back on track. I’ve been doing this in every area of my life – intensely – for a while now…

Pema Chodron talks about this in her book “When Things Fall Apart – Heart Advice for Difficult Times.” In Buddhist terms, she basically says we get so tired we can’t make any more problems for ourselves… The training interpretation of this is that we get so overtrained we have to take a week or two off from training to recover.

So, in terms of practical training and lifestyle stuff, take a good hard look at what’s going on with you and decide if it’s actually sustainable and moving you TOWARD what you want and toward better health, performance and happiness. And, by moving toward I mean you’re already there on some level. How’s that for a contradiction? What I mean is, if you’re beating the crap out of yourself now so you can have something you want LATER, you better be seeing some indication that the work you’re putting in is working. If you’re working on health or happiness or performance NOW and aren’t at least seeing SOME positive movement TOWARD what you want, you better stop and reevaluate.

Are you consistently moving toward your goals?

Think about this one for a minute or two. Are you truly, TRULY moving toward your goals? Are you stronger and healthier today than you were last month? Last year? Are your relationships better? Does your life have less stress and more fulfillment? If these are goals for you – but you can’t answer “yes” to that question – you’re trying to live in the future and that won’t work. You need to create these things NOW so you know you’re going in the right direction.

Here’s a concrete example: Say your goal is to improve your health overall and take your deadlift from 365 to 405. Good, attainable goals, right? As long as you have measurable health goals like: improved sleep, better digestion, better mood, etc., you’ll be able to objectively tell if you’re moving toward your ultimate health goals. Add to that a good training journal with your poundage progression and you can tell pretty easily if you’re moving toward your goals or not.

If you’re NOT ON TRACK and consistently moving toward your goals in small increments you need to STOP and reevaluate your lifestyle and your goals and your methods. Don’t think you can keep doing what you’re doing and get different results than you’re getting now. There are no quantum leaps in health and training. Little improvements add up to create BIG improvements – and if you’re not seeing the little improvements you’re NOT going to see the big ones. Time to reevaluate…

I hope that makes sense – assuming I didn’t lose you a minute into the video

ttys

Adam

I figured I’d keep going on those topics and see if I can say what I meant a little more clearly and with less piss and vinegar. Or, at least less vinegar…

Darren’s first article – Fitness Today: How You Measure Up – is essentially a comment on the fitness standards we see all around us and how some of us can have a bit of an inferiority complex depending which side of the spectrum we look toward. If you assume MOST of us sit in the main part of the bell curve we can feel great or awful about ourselves depending which direction we look toward. I’ll argue that those reading this blog and Darren’s stuff will sit a bit further to the right than most, but the vast majority of us will be in that main distribution. If I recall my stats class stuff at all, the hot computer guy and Arnold are going to represent 0.1% of the population EACH and everyone else will be between them with about 70% in the thickest part of the curve – 35% to the right of the line and 35% to the left.

Thanks to JC for the Fat Guy pic!

I won’t go as far as Stuart McRobert and claim that anyone with a bench press of more than 135lbs is a genetic superman who’s also using steroids, but I absolutely will not downplay the genetics thing for a minute.

Regardless of genetics, however, I believe that LIFESTYLE is the single most important – and most overlooked and downplayed – factor in health, fitness, strength and performance. I think a great disservice that occurs in the fitness mainstream – and the media in general – is the downplaying of the importance of lifestyle in building an outstanding, “0.1%” body.

I can vividly recall Flex magazine running pics of Ronnie Coleman in his police uniform – working a claimed 80 hours a week of SHIFT work in the patrol car – while preparing for the Mr. Olympia. Bullshit. Or the old Muscle Media 2000 running pictures of “Dan Gwartny, MD” who supposedly did 100+ hours a week in the ER – while maintaining 4% bodyfat and working out 6 days a week “to relieve stress and stay energized.” Bullshit. Both of those scenarios are obviously impossible – unfortunately, at the time I was reading that stuff I didn’t know better. Some NEVER know better.

While I’m on this topic, I also recall the urban legend that circulated through the science and engineering circles I hung out in during college. Supposedly, there was some guy who worked a full-time job, had a family AND was going to engineering school full time. Of course, he was also pulling straight A’s. Now, no one ever actually SAW this guy. And no one actually KNEW him. They only knew someone who knew him or knew someone who knew someone who knew him… The fact is that MY senior chemistry classes ran pretty much 9-5 Monday through Friday (OK, Wednesday was a light day) and many nights I NEVER SLEPT because I had so much studying to do. Of course, some part of me felt like a loser because I should have also had a full time job and been 250lbs at 3% bodyfat while pulling straight A’s. “All” I managed was a 3.5 GPA with no job, living at home and little weight training and no sleep. What a loser…

I think the frustration of “the guy in the street” is that he thinks he should be able to have that 0.1% body AND do everything else in his life with no problem. This is the image we’re sold in the media. So many people feel inadequate because they think they’re falling short or not working hard enough. Then, they WORK HARDER at EVERYTHING and get even worse results because they get even more fatigued, more scattered, more cortisol, less clear thinking and on and on. I LIVED THIS FOR MORE THAN 10 YEARS.

Seth Godin – who runs THE NUMBER ONE MARKETING BLOG IN THE WORLD – has said over and over again to pick one thing and become the best at it. Here he is saying it in an interview on Technorati.

If you truly are passionate about something, GO DO IT! Don’t believe for a minute that you’re going to be able to do everything all at once. Even Arnold couldn’t do it. He focused on being the best bodybuilder in the world – and succeeded – then he blew up the box office, then he went into politics. He never could have done all 3 at the same time. It would have been impossible. Many have probably tried but we’ll never know, because they never made it…

I think the media likes to promote the “you can have it all” idea for two reasons:

1. No one likes to think they might have to give up something to get something else
2. Many, many industries thrive on people being frustrated, misinformed and ready for a quick fix or magic pill

If I wanted to be generous, I might even say that many of the hardworking people who make up the mainstream media actually believe that they CAN have it all. They’re functioning under the same delusion. So the delusion just keeps spreading.

Darren’s other article asks the important question: Fitness vs. Money: What’s More Important?

I think this article and some of Darren’s points follow right along with my point on media conditioning. My current view is that you can – and should – have both health and fitness AND money. I think our current society takes an attitude that you can be healthy OR rich. And if you want to be rich you have to work yourself to death in hopes that “someday” you’ll have enough money to do what you REALLY want to do. If you think this way, read “The Four-Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferriss and see why the thinking is flawed. I bought into this flawed thinking for a long time and I’ve already ranted about it a lot

And, yes, some people are born into money and are able to follow their passion with no worries about paying the bills. But I think that they are few and far between (go back to the Bell Curve above) and that situation comes with it’s own problems.

I’ve read somewhere around 80 self-help/success books to this point and the general consensus is:

• Clearly define your values
• Live by them
• Find what you LOVE to do and figure out how to make money doing it

Tim Ferriss will add to that: Figure out how to make what you LOVE run on autopilot to the greatest extent possible while it’s making you money

ttys

Adam

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My "Home Gym"

There’s no shortage of writing on overtraining as it relates to weight training, bodybuilding and even newer pursuits like CrossFit and kettlebells. Anyone who has spent time training hard in any form of athletics is going to be aware of overtraining and likely the symptoms of overtraining.

Currently, there’s a lot of talk about “Adrenal Fatigue” as well. A lot of the adrenal fatigue information is outside of the training world and it’s a pretty big deal in the “Alternative Health” industry. In fact, sometimes I think it’s just a catch-all diagnosis a lot of Naturopaths give when the don’t know what else to say.  But, there is also starting to be some good and real information and awareness of Adrenal Fatigue in the CrossFit community. This is mainly due to guys like Robb Wolf and OPT.

I’ve been thinking more and more about Adrenal Fatigue and find it interesting that 10 years ago no one had ever heard of it. At least I hadn’t and certainly the bodybuilding training community wasn’t talking about it. What’s interesting is I certainly HAD adrenal fatigue at a few other times in my life and guys like Stuart McRobert WERE talking about it. They just weren’t calling it Adrenal Fatigue – they were calling it overtraining. Once you change the term and understand the symptoms, you’ll find stuff about Adrenal Fatigue everywhere in good, complete and responsible training related writing.

Is Adrenal Fatigue really just another name for Overtraining?

I originally approached Robb Wolf about nutrition coaching. We’ve done a bunch of phone sessions at this point and the results have been great. What I didn’t expect is all the training advice he gave me. The basic deal is, I’m supposed to be doing powerlifter and strongman stuff at a relatively low intensity and my CrossFit Met Cons are no more than 1-2 a week and always less than 75% perceived effort. Somewhat of a difficult prescription to take, but definitely needed. In fact, when I do over do it with the training I can really feel the fatigue the day after. The point, according to Robb, is to train and stimulate the body – and have fun – without dipping too deeply into my reserves. No “seeing the White Buffalo in the sky” after a Met Con as Robb would say.

Intuitively, this makes a lot of sense. If you constantly crush yourself in your training you won’t really be able to progress. This brings in the concept of Periodization as it relates to training as well. Periodization of training and effort is a whole other topic – and an art and science – in and of itself…

Finding some classic and definitive work on Overtraining

I’ve recently been reading some of Stuart McRobert’s outstanding older stuff. Notably Beyond Brawn and Further Brawn. There is so much great stuff in there! Stuart is huge on avoiding overtraining. Rightly so. If you are overtrained you simply WILL NOT progress in your chosen endeavor – whether that’s powerlifting or weight training where the goal is more weight or reps or CrossFit where the goal is (usually) a faster time with the weight held constant. Overtraining will pretty much kill your progress in whatever you’re trying to excel in.

Here’s Stuart’s take on the relationship between training, gaining and resting from Beyond Brawn:

“As long as you’re truly training hard and seriously, and really are eating, resting and sleeping well, if you’re not gaining well, then you’re almost certainly overtraining. You need to find the amount and frequency of training that does the job of stimulating increases in strength and muscular size, but without exceeding your ability to recuperate. Some people need to abbreviate their training more than do others.”

Stuart makes a great point that is profound on a number of levels:

1.    His statement really makes you look at your program. If you actually ARE eating and resting as you should and training hard, then not gaining means only one thing – you’re overtraining. Could it be any simpler?
2.    Since most CrossFit types are probably training “hard and seriously,” Stuart’s statement pretty much leaves you with eating, resting and sleeping as the places where you’re messing up.
3.    There is some implied “individuality” in here when he says “Some people need to abbreviate their training more than do others.” As a side note, guys like Robb Wolf and James “OPT” Fitzgerald have elevated individualizing program and diet to an art form. This kind of stuff is what’s been missing from athletic training since day one.

For Stuart and in the “bodybuilding world” in general, the most common variable to work with is training frequency. I can remember in my peak bodybuilding days (Is bodybuilding even relevant anymore?) that taking an extra day off from training was enough to ensure a great workout when I went to the gym next. In fact, when I got into the Dorian Yates and Mike Mentzer “Heavy Duty” style training I made my best progress ever. And that was with a MANDATORY 1 day off completely between workouts and sometimes 2 days.

But bodybuilding doesn’t live here anymore

What I want to add to all of this is that there’s more to adjusting your training than just frequency – particularly within the context of CrossFit style training and training in multiple disciplines (CrossFit, Mixed Martial Arts, Kettlebells and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in my case). When all you do is “weights and cardio” 3-4 times a week, regulating frequency makes sense and can be pretty easy to do. But what happens when you train more days than not. What about multiple sessions per day? I’m not talking about typical gym obsession or that weird reverse anorexia some would-be bodybuilders get. I’m talking about when you have several disciplines you’re training in, multiple training goals and need to keep regularity and consistency in your training schedule.

Today was a scheduled training day but I was very overtrained from the previous week. Rather than skipping training today (regulating frequency) I opted to leave frequency constant and train lighter and easier instead (regulating intensity). At first this might seem to be antithetical to most training doctrines. Power and weightlifters will tell me I’m wasting recovery on sub-maximal poundages when I could wait a day or two and hit a more intense workout. CrossFitters would say similar because, well, every second counts and why come in and train with the intention of taking it “easy?”

I think this method – regulating training load rather than frequency – has some distinct advantages:

• It keeps you in the groove. Particularly in martial arts, kettlebells and CrossFit, there is A LOT of stuff to learn and perfect. Too much time off can really get you out of your groove and feeling like you’re rusty and clunky on everything that requires any technique. Pavel calls lower intensity practice-style training “greasing the groove.” There’s so much technique to learn and perfect, these lower intensity “practice” sessions can keep technique progressing while your body gets a rest from higher intensity training. Robb Wolf talked about this very same concept in his Paleolithic Solution Episode #33 podcast and I’ve blogged about the topic of becoming more efficient in response.

• For me there is also a big mental and adrenal health component to all of this. Mentally I feel better if I train every day or close to it. I also feel energetically better throughout the day on training days. And therein lies the problem. You can’t train intensely every day and, if you tried to, any mood or energy benefits would quickly evaporate as you fatigued and fell into overtraining and adrenal fatigue. So, very often, the “technique” or efficiency work can have a place in getting the body some work without digging into reserves.

A non-weightlifting version of the “hard all the time” mistake would be something dumb I did last year. I love to run. I’m not particularly good at it, but I really enjoy running outside when the weather is nice. I don’t run more than a few miles at a time and I like to do hills and somewhat challenging routes. It’s a “brief and intense” version of running as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, last spring I was running about 4-5 times a week and was progressively going further and doing more difficult runs. I did one great run of about 40min with a bunch of hills – probably the hardest one I’ve done in a long time. The mistake I made what that I tried to make my new personal best my regular route. DUMB, DUMB, DUMB! I should have taken a day or two off from running and then done SHORTER and LESS CHALLENGING runs while I recovered and consolidated those gains.

Stuart McRobert also talks a lot about cycling of training intensity and a “gaining momentum” within weightlifting. I reread that chapter in BRAWN and had the realization that the “gaining momentum” period he’s talking about is very likely brought about by a period adrenal rest and recuperation from the lower training intensity as well as the adrenal stimulation from the lower intensity exercise. Most of the Adrenal Fatigue books I’ve read recommend “light to moderate” exercise to stimulate and heal the adrenals. If you look at the lower intensity “gaining momentum” part of a workout cycle you can pretty easily correlate that with a high degree of adrenal recovery and gentle, healthy stimulation from exercise. This sets up a healthy hormonal environment that supports the very hard work to come in the later stages of the cycle.

So now what?

I’m still working with this concept a lot and I’m not sure I can give any really firm recommendations. What I will say is to start looking at how you have your training intensity cycled – no matter what type of training you do – and begin thinking about how you can cycle your intensity, periodize your training and get some lighter skill-based work into your training.

It’s a hard thing – to back your training off – when you want to progress. But in many cases, the way foreward is a few steps back.

ttys

Adam