Episode 9 - Stop wasting your most important commodity

Most people spend way too much time in contest prep where time could be better spent elsewhere. What is the right balance for you, listen and learn. 

Transcript

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Time is the most important commodity in life. And the most critical decision that you make each day is how you decide to spend the time that you have. There are no do-overs, there's no resets in life. You get one shot to spend each day wisely. Yet each and every year I go to shows and I speak to competitors over and over again who tell me the worst aspect of their prep was all the time it took away from their family, work, friends, and the outside environment. When digging deeper, some people have told me that they spend on average two to three additional hours per day in their in bodybuilding preparation. But is it necessary? Well, let's take some time to discuss it. Welcome to the OCB Natural Edge Podcast, the official voice of the world's largest drug-free bodybuilding federation. From the science of the shred to the grid of the stage, no secrets, no substances, just the edge. I've been obsessed with the thought of time and how much time it takes to achieve a championship physique since almost my first days in bodybuilding. I remember back when it really solidified in my head was a day back in May of 1982. But before we get there, a little story on how I got to that point. I was living in Cape Cod, Massachusetts in the 80s, and there were really no gyms in the area. As a matter of fact, the only gym was about 45 or 50 minutes away from my house and couldn't get there very frequently. So at 15, I started buying angle iron and I found a local welder who started putting equipment together. I'd start making up some plans and we'd work it out until we had something that worked. And before you knew it, I had a flat, an incline and a decline bench, a squat rack, a vertical leg press, a wig extension, leg curl, a lap machine, seated cable row, and a cable crossover machine. Truly state of the art for its time. Also, my friends and I went to every yard sale we could find within a hundred mile radius and bought every 10, 5, and 2.5 pound plate we could find. I then went to the same welder and he welded me up a rack of dumbbells. So when you think back at that time, the only thing available for equipment outside a commercial gym was the old plaster weeder sets and a hollow angle iron bench press that you'd get at Sears and Roba. For those of you who are fairly young, you're gonna have to look and Google that stuff up, but it was nowhere near state of the art. So once I had this gym, word got out. And before you knew it, not just kids from my high school, but from the adjoining high schools were ending up at my house to work out. Me being the ever entrepreneur that I was, I put a little coffee can down, cut a hole in the top, and people would occasionally drop a five or a buck or two in there, and that became my occupation during my high school years. It was great. But we had a fellowship down there, and we were all into training. And at that time, the only real training source that you could find was Arnold's education of a bodybuilder. That and whatever article appeared in the latest issue of Muscle Builder and Power. So we all started working out. And we put a little contest together that in that May of 1983, a lot of us were going off into doing different pursuits. I was on my way to Marine Corps boot camp, other people were going to college, people were graduating, everybody was moving on. So we put together a great fitness competition. And it was going to be based on your bench press, your squats, your deadlift, the size of your biceps, chest, waist, and legs, and a lot of other different things that we were doing in the gym that we were going to use to gauge who the winner of this competition was. So obviously, we all put in hard training. Now, I was obsessed with training logs also from a young age, so I started writing everything down. And I had gone from doing a four-day-a-week workout routine, which took about 40 minutes a day, to at the peak of the preparation for this four-month transformation competition phase that we did, I started not only working out on Arnold's education of a bodybuilder, two-hour massive programs, but also because our gym was in my basement, I'd sneak down for extra workouts all the time. I was forever down there banging weights and lifting and cranking stuff out and doing more reps and really feeling like dog. Some things I'd suffered, my relationship. My girlfriend basically broke up with me because I never saw her. My grades began to suffer. My mom was pissed off that there was always rock music going on downstairs as I was banging out and slamming weights. And it just seemed like it was a huge time investment. But I knew for a fact I was going to win this because I had the edge. I had the time to invest in this, and I put all my time in it. At the end, some surprising results. I had some friends that we would consider slackers. They were only coming three or four days a week for about 25 or 30 minutes at a time. I had other people that were on the Arnold blueprint of a bodybuilder six days per week, two-hour routines, and then me with my mega marathon workouts. The people who made the best, most consistent progress were those that trained the least. The best among us was my friend's father, who was 55 years old and went back to his old training workout that he had gotten from Reg Park, which was three days a week, full-body workout trainings for 45 minutes. And it started to ponder in my head, was it really necessary to do that much? Now he fast forward, and I go get stationed at Camp Pendleton out in California, and I'm running around Gold's Gym and World's Gym. And I also had found a coach, a mentor coach. And back in those days, you didn't hire a coach. What you did is you answered one of the many advertisements that were on the back of a muscle magazine, and you reached out and you find a found a coach. And I picked Vince, Vince Geronde from Vince's gym, and I started working with him online. I bought his courses and I'd get an hour phone consultation once a month. He'd send him a check, snail mail. When he got the check, he'd send you back a letter that would tell. Anyway, the process took a long time. So once I got stationed out in California, I started going to Vince's gym. And the first thing that was explained to me from Vince is that bodybuilders chronically over-trained. They spend all of their time in the gym on the pursuit of this one thing where, if they use their time wisely, they could accomplish the same goal with spending far less time in the gym and spending more time pursuing other things that were more worthwhile. Now, this was the iron guru. This was Vince's gym, the guy who trained Larry Scott to a Mr. Olympia, Mahab Makoui, who was a big star at the time. This is a guy who really seemed to be in the know, and he was contradicting most of what you'd hear. Now, at the time, there was also a bodybuilder by the name of Mike Metzer who was talking about his heavy-duty, high-intensity system, and he didn't need to train as long. But here's where the difference is. With Vince, he was absolutely into training to threshold, but not doing all that crazy beyond stuff and finding the right sweet spot. So I started working at Vince's gym back on a three and a four-day per week program. I decided I was going to ramp up and go for a competition. And so I quit going into Vince's and started popping into Gold's Gym and World's Gym and seeing what those guys were doing and getting ready for competitions. And I ramped up to a crazy level of volume. And the same thing happened. My physique started to cease improving dramatically and quickly. My gains slowed down, my fat loss slowed down. The time that I was spending in the gym increased. I was trying to do my Marine Corps duties, being in the infantry. It consisted of a lot of ruck marching and living in the field and trying to do the best she could there and then training on top of it. And again, I ended up in an overtraining state where I was investing all of my time and effort and energy into this pursuit. Needless to say, the show didn't go well. So I popped back into Vince's gym a few months after the show, and we were talking about it. And the thing that he had said to me that resonated the most was why did you increase everything when you were decreasing your nutrition? It makes no common sense. So that was caveat number two. So I started struggling with this and starting to do some like really in-depth research, like how much is enough? Now, normally in these videos, I give you all kinds of scientific links and the backups and whatever. And this episode, I want to focus on what was real for me and what I learned along the journey. All those links are out there for you to look at. All these things are out there for you to find out what is overtraining and what's the proper volume. What I'm going to tell you is it's different for everybody. So this is why I want to talk to you from my perspective and to give you an instinctive blueprint of what worked for me and maybe it could work for you. Find the lowest amount of training you possibly need to do to achieve the results you're looking for and no more. That became my quest. How little do I need to do to get to where I need to be so I can take all that other time and invest it into things like relationships, education, employment, and all the other things I wanted to do with my life so that I could get some stuff back. Now, in my case, what I found is that the closer I got to a show and the more everything ramped up and the lower that my calories went, I actually would decrease my training volume. I would decrease the number of days and number of hours I spent in the gym. Because I started thinking about what Vince said. When your nutrition is going down and your calories are going down, why are you ramping everything up? It makes no sense. You will overtrain your nervous system. You will overtrain your endocrine system. You probably won't overtrain your muscle system. And so that's something I started to think about as well. And I realized he was absolutely right. At one point, I had the opportunity to go to a very high-level military school. It was when I was in the infantry in the Marine Corps. And in this particular course, it was a kick-ass, no sleep, ruck marching, limited food, a lot of physical activity course. At the end of that course, I noticed that my muscle soreness, my back, my bice, my tries, the actual muscles themselves seemed to recover relatively quickly. Within a few days, I felt like I was back to normal. What seemed to take forever was how my overall body felt, my nervous system in particular. I know my endocrine system was low. I had a hard time getting my temperature back up with my thyroid, my heart rate stayed high for a long period of time, all indicators of overtraining. And so what that taught me was that if you do too much with too little nutrition, your muscles may recover from the stimulus, but the rest of your body will not. And I started putting that into the demographic of bodybuilding, competition, preparation. More, more, more for training, activity, cardio, less, less, less for food and nutrition, and why the two spirals went like an inverted X as opposed to paralleling each other. And so I started thinking about what Vince had said, and it just made total sense to me. So the next time I went out for another competition, I did the exact opposite. The more my caloric intake went down, the more I adjusted my training intensity and a little bit with the volume. I still had to keep my cardio where it was being in the military. I had to run so many days per week, but I didn't do any additional cardio. I tried to let the diet and the recovery handle all that. In the end, I had a far better prep. I looked way better, and I had invested far less time in the training program. So this led me to that individual, let's find the blueprint for me of what I needed. Now I'm only going to give you my stats. You can turn around and you can Google recovery, you can IG all this stuff, you can use Gemini, you can use whatever platform that you want to. It's all going to lead you to the same type of information that natural, non-enhanced athletes, as we all are, have a finite amount of recovery and do not need or cannot handle the same volume and intensity that our PED using counterparts do. With that being said, it is so tailored individual. Going back to what I was talking about with my high school friends, the ones who trained the least did the best. But some of those that trained the least were still training six days a week. It worked for them. Some were training three, some were training four. All the crazy ones that did way, way, way more volume, way more time invested, like myself, did the worst. So now let's fast forward it. I continuously cycled down every time I had an off-season or every time I had a training prep over the next few years to find my personal sweet spot. I invested the time in finding out how little time I needed to invest instead of spending all the time in the gym and taking away from everything and having hindered progress. Once I found that sweet spot, it seemed to work throughout most of my competitive life with only a few tweaks as I got into my mid-40s. And now at 61, there's even more tweaks because I'm still in training, although I'll never compete again. So what is my point? What is the valuable lesson here? The valuable lesson is that when we blindly follow somebody else's training advice or we blindly think that more is better, particularly in the pursuit of physical improvement, we're missing the boat on our own individual recovery. We're also missing the boat on the three aspects of recovery, not just recovering the muscles, because they recover relatively quickly, but also the impact you're making on your nervous system and your endocrine system. They take far longer to impact. And also to start thinking about as you do your contest prep, if you're going from training four days a week intensely for an hour and you're suddenly on six days a week for an hour and a half, is it really beneficial given your reduction in nutrition? How much are you really losing? Are you impacting your metabolism in a favorable way or an unfavorable way? I always recommend finding the bare minimum you need to crack that egg. There was an old adage that went around back in the day about overtraining, usually from the Mike Metzer camp with the high intensity of you only have to hit an egg on the side of a bowl lightly to crack it open. If you use a hammer, you're going to get nothing out of it but destruction. And so that's kind of my same philosophy when it comes to this. Take the time, find your blueprint, and take the time that you would have spent in the gym doing more and more and more and getting very little in return and invest that back into more important pursuits, things outside of the gym and things that give you a better body balance. I guarantee you, you will be a better and happier competitor, as well as a competitor that goes into the stage, having spent less time away from all those other things that are important in life, so you don't feel like you neglected anything. Now, along with time, there's time in context, which is in the moment. As athletes, our entire identity is often built on the next, the next workout, the next pound on the scale, the next competition, the next thing we do. In life, it's always the next job, the next promotion, the next girlfriend. We treat today as a mere transaction for a future, a future physique, a future job, a future you. And we live for what will come and not as what is now. One opportunity I had over my long military career was the ability to travel and experience a lot of different cultures. And one thing that was taught to me when we started experiencing these cultures was the difference between high context and low context cultures. So let me outline the difference. The Western society or Western culture is considered low context. This is a next step culture. It's always about the next. It's always about how many short-term things you've got going on, how many short-term connections that you have, how many people that you have as Instagram friends as opposed to a real circle of friends, always based on moving forward fast, fast, fast. We always look at life as a sequence of data points and deadlines, and we're so busy explaining and planning for future events, we fail to capitalize on what's happening in the current and in the present. Now, Eastern cultures are high context, and that's a big contrast. A high context culture emphasizes the atmosphere and the relationship of the current environment. They find meaning in the being rather than the doing, in only a few close connections, as opposed to millions of transient connections. And one thing I found is the difference in perceived happiness between the two cultures. Most of my Western culture friends were not very happy. They were stressed out, they were depressed, they suffered a multitude of issues in life. Where those high context cultures that were living in the moment cherished the little things and they observed every detail of what was happening around them and they appreciated every moment. Even in the worst of circumstances, even just outside battle zones, they seem more happy with their connections than we did with all of our multitude of connections. And there is a health cost of this forward leaning. There is a health cost of always living in the future. When your mind is always 12 weeks out, or your focus is the next promotion or the next relationship, your body stays in a state of chronic sympathetic tension. Your cortisol levels go up, and that's not just bad for your gains, it's bad for your heart, and it's bad for your head. Just take some time to look up how much cortisol can damage the human. Being in the present lowers that systematic stress. It allows the nervous system to shift into a rest and digest state, which is ironically where most physical and mental growth actually happens. So when you try to live in the moment, you miss less of what's happening around you, and you can see things that you would have ordinarily missed. Now, I try to practice this daily now, and one way I do so is by taking my dog for a walk and a play session out in a field. This is where I can focus on the now and just the moment of being in nature and with my furry little friends. The other day I was at the furball PlayStation and I noticed all the beauty around me. And I looked down and I saw a five-leaf clover. Now, this five-leaf clover was right there. And if I was distracted on some future event or some future deadline, I would have trampled right past it and missed seeing something that is so rare. I have yet to talk to somebody else who has actually found one in nature. And I wasn't even looking, I was living in the moment and I saw something unique. Now start looking for that unspoken in your day. Instead of just focusing on the literal tasks where you need to go and where you need to be and all the energy being sucked out of the room, take a moment to actually detach and breathe. The breath is the only thing that happens in the present. You can't breathe for yesterday or tomorrow. And one deep, conscientious breath is a reset button. It helps remove the next obsession from your head. We spend decades building a body and a life for the future only to realize we've become strangers to the present. Happiness in life isn't about how much you can lift or how much you earn, it's about discipline to stay right here. And that's a hard thing for us to learn in this culture. It was hard for me, and it's hard for you. Because if you aren't present for the journey, you're not going to see the five-leaf clothes. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. And please comment, subscribe, join us on our Natural Edge at Tri Set's Instagram page. And until next time, stay hungry, stay humble, and stay natural. Sell yeah.