It’s inevitable. Things seem perfect. You’re making huge progress. You’re getting stronger, building muscle, losing fat, or doing whatever it is you want to do…like a champion. “I can just do this forever!” But then “it” hits. And when “it” hits, “it” hits hard. You blink a few times, just to make sure the world [...]
It’s inevitable. Things seem perfect. You’re making huge progress. You’re getting stronger, building muscle, losing fat, or doing whatever it is you want to do…like a champion.
“I can just do this forever!”
But then “it” hits.
And when “it” hits, “it” hits hard. You blink a few times, just to make sure the world isn’t ending.
You stalled. You hit the dreaded plateau. All of that progress…all of that “forever” talk…gone…all gone.
The truth?
Things will never be the same. What worked so well in the past will never work quite so well again in the future.
Here’s what you need to know so you don’t repeatedly bash your head against the wall trying to relive your glory days.
Two facts about chaos you need to know
First fact: when you first start, just about anything works.
Second fact: when “just about anything” stops working, “just about anything” will never work as good as it did when “just about anything” worked, and if you try to make “just about anything” rework, you’re ignoring biology. Thank chaos.
Chaos—a certain level of unpredictability—has recently captivated my heart. I’m so in love with chaos that I named my nutrition resources—The Chaos Bulk and Fractal Fat Loss—after chaotic concepts when I realized that, realistically, I was doing nothing more than purposely making nutrition unpredictable. (Something which has led to amazing results.)
Sadly, chaos (or any other advanced biological concept, for that matter) isn’t something most “trainers” know about. I went to school for “fitness” for a total of 5.5 years, coming out with a Masters degree, and we never touched chaos. But, given the chance, chaos could single handedly explain 99% of the “problems” people have in the world of physical transformation and performance.
Let’s give it that chance.
Why your science is wrong
The science you know best lives under a linear umbrella. For brevity’s sake, let’s just say linear means predictable. Think back to algebra class and plotting things on graphs. The equation ( y = mx + b ) allows you to predict where you’ll end up on a graph given any one set of values.
This is all fine and dandy for simple systems. Scientists have long been using these linear methods to study, analyze, and predict performance, behavior, psychology, physiology, and every other element of the human condition.
Too bad humans aren’t simple systems. We don’t follow linear rules. (This puts an asterisk on most “fitness” research, but I’ll save that tangent for another day.) We’re a complex system. And the more complex a system gets, the less linear (predictable) it becomes.
Less predictable doesn’t jive well in the “fitness” world. I touched on this in my post on antifragility, but we use a lot of linear-esque ideas to predict what we need.
We use calorie calculators. Plug in your height, weight, and (perhaps, but not likely) body fat percentage (an estimation that is most certainly wrong), and out pops the magical number of calories needed to sustain your body weight. This is essentially saying that two people of the same height, weight, and body fat will have identical metabolic rates, regardless of job, race, socioeconomic status, means, etc.
But we can reroute to the antifragile post again here, and how Dr. Sapolsky mentioned grand master chess players churning through an absurd amount of calories doing nothing more than sitting in a chair and thinking about whether or not to move a pawn two inches forward.
Examples of using linear logic to understand complex human behavior are aplenty. Just about everything we do is based on the simple idea that our body is going to function identical on a daily basis.
This is a problem.
Why you'll never be the same again
Beginners often see linear gains, be it losing a certain amount of weight regularly, or gaining a certain amount of strength regularly. Starting Strength, one of the most popular basic barbell programs, is all about adding a predictable amount of weight to the bar every session.
This works very well.
Until it doesn’t.
At some point, predictable linear increases stop. Most would call this a stall.
This happens with fat loss too. Things seem perfect, and then you just stop progressing. Nothing changed on the exterior. You’re still doing what brought you success in the past. But you have nothing to show for it.
The answer as to why this happens is, of course, a function of chaos. We’re linear…to a point. Once you cross the linear barrier, things will never be the same.
You need to understand this analogy
We’re going into analogy mode, so hold your pants up. The classic analogy for understanding a chaotic system appears in James Gleick’s book, Chaos: Making a New Science. (This book is about the birth of chaos. It’s worth the read, even though I admittedly couldn’t comprehend 94.6% of the book. But the comprehended 5.4% changed my life.)
Think of a water wheel (pictured above). It’s fully possible to have a predictable water wheel by closely controlling the amount and rate of water dripped into the buckets. But as the flow increases, the system becomes increasingly less linear. The speed of rotation:
- Depends on the amount of water in the bucket.
- Determines how much water fills each bucket.
When the wheel is rotating slowly, more water fills the buckets. More water in the buckets creates a faster rotation.
When the flow increases, the wheel rotates faster. The buckets exposed to the fast flow first fill more (because they were exposed when the rotation was slow) than the buckets at the end, as the buckets at the end are exposed to the flow at a much higher rotational speed (it increased because of how full the preceding buckets now are).
We’re left with some buckets filled more than others, and an all around systematic debacle. Make sure you reread this section until you understand it, as it’s critical to your future.
The important pieces of chaos
Beginners are “drippers.” They can’t create a heavy flow of water, so the system behaves rather linearly.
Let’s make a few more analogies to flesh this out a bit more:
- Water flow = training stressor. Naturally, the stronger you get, the more stress you impose upon yourself.
- Bucket capacity = your ability to recover. Bucket capacity is important because the smaller your water capacity, the faster the system has a potential to get out of control.
Bucket capacity is determined by genetics and environment. Some people naturally have bigger buckets for the adaptations they’re looking to improve. Someone with thick wrists will have greater potential for upper body strength than someone with thin wrists. (Bones are an important part of strength training, and are often neglected. Perhaps I should write about this soon. What say you?)
But genetics aren’t everything. If I wanted to make this more chaotic, I’d say that after genetics, bucket size depends on butterfly effects. Butterfly effects are minuscule happenings with potential catastrophic effects.
Are butterfly effects ruining your progress?
We usually ignore butterfly effects. For instance, the common prescription for prolonging strength gains is to eat everything in the house to ensure nutrition isn’t a limiting factor in recovery. But nutrition is only one butterfly effect. There’s stress, sleep, extra activity, natural personality inclination (someone more laid back will recover better than someone high strung), etc.
There are a lot of small things—things we often neglect—that go into sustaining drip-like progress. This is why some people do well on linear strength progressions, and why others don’t do quite-so-well. Some people linearly work up to 300+ pound squats. Others stall before hitting 200 pounds. It has nothing to do with the program, and everything to do with genetics and butterfly effects.
Every seemingly small event in your life factors into how well you recover, and then how well you can progress. Most of them are so subtle that they go unnoticed. Nutrition gets pegged because it's an easily controllable target.
Drip progress doesn’t last forever. With every increase in ability, the flow becomes heavier. At some point, dripping becomes a splash. Splashes become streams.
Once the flow becomes large enough, you enter a world of chaos. As mentioned earlier:
When the flow increases, the wheel rotates faster. The buckets exposed to the fast flow first fill more (because they were exposed when the rotation was slow) than the buckets at the end, as the buckets at the end were exposed to the flow at a much higher rotational speed (from how full the preceding buckets are).
The wheel doesn’t spin at a steady speed. Buckets end up with varying levels of water.
You are no longer linear. Say hello to the dreaded stall.
Some like to “reset” (deload) when this happens. They empty the buckets, trying to get back to drip-like progress. Wiping the slate clean like this might help for a little bit, but you’ll always return to a state where the flow creates a chaotic system. That is, at least, provided you’re actually improving.
Must take-home lessons from chaos
So what do we do? Given that chaos ruins steady and predictable progress, do we just give up hope?
Quite the contrary. Understanding chaos sets us up for the best progress possible, and also uncovers realistic expectations.
1. Reap linear progress while you can, ideally with a method best suited to your bucket size. I love Starting Strength for those looking for general (and more powerliftingcentric) strength, but I don’t put my skinny-fat clients on Starting Strength. They still use linear progression. But not the linear progression within Starting Strength (and the lifts are different too). Why? They need something better suited to their genetically inherent bucket size.
2. Don’t forego predictable progress after linear progress. Linear progression (the way the word is used in the strength world), usually means making progress every training day. We all hit a point where this becomes impossible. But more often than not, we can still have predictable progress. Maybe progress once per week? Every other week?
In other words, now that your water flow is faster and stronger, you can adjust how frequently you “turn it on,” which can then better regulate the flow. (And thus, making it a bit more predictable.) This is the basis of the progression within the athletic-aesthetic resource I’m working on, which is basically the next step of progression up from The Skinny-Fat Solution.
3. Absolve expectations. This is going to totally dishearten you, but you need to hear it. I often recommend that most people past their linear prime (and not using performance enhancing drugs) should expect to gain around one pound of muscle per month.
Brad Pilon, who I respect a bunch, (and who recently wrote a blog post that is essentially Chaos Nutrition Ethos 101) put out a Facebook update not long ago, dismantling my recommended one pound gain per month.
Think about it. If you trained for 10 years, and gained a solid pound of muscle per month, you’d likely be a 250-300 pound brick house. At those initial numbers, that’s basically gaining 112 pounds of solid muscle. Alas, this just doesn’t happen…forever.
4. Embrace chaos. When your progress is more linear, your gains are more linear. That means, yes, probably can gain one pound of muscle per month (probably more, actually) when you’re a beginner. But over time, the gains become increasingly chaotic. Same with strength, fat loss, or anything else for that matter.
There comes a point when things aren’t going to be nice and easy. This is something you have to accept. Don’t bash your head into a wall and force linear behavior. Be proud that you aren’t behaving linearly anymore—it’s a sign that you’ve improved. The answer here is to play to the hands of chaos, not go against it.
5. Learn from the linear days. Counting calories is stupid. Gaining a predictable amount of weight in a certain time frame is stupid. Making your body behave linearly is stupid.
And yet these are all things that you’ll likely benefit from in the early linear days. This is a time when making things a bit more controlled and predictable works. It’s almost as if this more calculated time is a rite of passage for more laxity in the ever-increasing chaotic future.
6. Understand the genetic component to chaos and progress. I have a saying about nutrition: the worse your genetics are, the more chaotic your nutrition should be. This applies to training too. The worse your genetics are, the more chaos you’ll encounter in your training. Someone with a naturally big water bucket will be able to go a longer ways before things go haywire. And even then, they’ll be able to better control the flow.
This is why so many superstars get away with terrible programs. And it’s also why you probably won’t find the same fate.
7. Keep an eye on butterfly effects. The thing about butterfly effects is that they aren’t really noticeable, yet they can produce profound results. Are you an sympathetic nervous system idler? Won’t help you. This article I wrote for T-Nation, 12 Tips to Tune the Nervous System, may help in the butterfly effect realm.
The chaos conclusion
The chaotic days may seem dark and dreary, but floating in them myself, I can fully say that they are rather reinvigorating. Things become less immediate and less high stakes. You get to fully appreciate your body for the marvel that it is.
If you're not quite at the chaos cliff, embrace your linear progress. There's no reason not to. It's the fastest way from A to B. But don't freak out when things don't come as easily. It means you're getting better, and getting better is always a good thing.