“FRA-GEE-LAY. It must be Italian!” “Oh, I think that says ‘fragile,’ honey.” And not long after, we learn that the beloved leg lamp is indeed very fragile. Broken to bits after falling from a coffee table. Lucky for us, the human body isn’t so fragile. We not only handle a bit of disorder, but also [...]
“FRA-GEE-LAY. It must be Italian!”
“Oh, I think that says ‘fragile,’ honey.”
And not long after, we learn that the beloved leg lamp is indeed very fragile. Broken to bits after falling from a coffee table.
Lucky for us, the human body isn’t so fragile. We not only handle a bit of disorder, but also thrive through a bit of disorder. Training itself is “disorder.” If we were leg lamps, squats would smash us to pieces. Glue us back together, perhaps, but we’d never quite be the same.
We have this unique ability to rebound after disorder—something more known and applicable in the toxicology world by its “official” name: hormesis.
Hormesis is defined by the dose-response relationship. Something at a high dose or concentration may be dangerous, but at a lower dose that same “something” can be beneficial. The prime example of hormesis: vaccinations. Inject a handle-able dose of a disease into the body in order to develop a long term immunity. That same disease in a larger dose would likely kill us.
If we were fragile, no amount of disease would be good. Fragile likes order. Fragile likes predictable. Likes nice. Neat. Color in the lines control.
I dare say we’re built for disorder. Putting on my imaginary paleo goggles, I see primitive folk waking up to an ever changing environment. Overly predicting seems to be an industrial age gig—weather, traffic, sales, etc…
Our body is like silly putty. We’re more fun with disorder, provided we don’t overstep our boundaries. We even enjoy disorder. That’s why nature is beautiful. Nature is anything but orderly in the traditional mathematical sense. There are no straight lines or perfect circles in nature. We often forget that randomness and disorder are normal in nature, let alone “real life.”
A bit of clarification
The idea and inspiration for this article comes from Nassim Taleb’s book, Antifragile. I’ve ranted about fragility enough, so I won’t really talk about the book itself here. (It is a good read though.)
Taleb creates three categories:
- Fragile: things that don’t like disorder. Think of glass. Easy to break, no repair.
- Robust: things that “break even” through disorder. They don’t gain or lose anything, just stay the same.
- Antifragile: things that benefit from disorder. Think of the body getting stronger from lifting weights, or developing immunity to a disease.
After reading Antifragile, I couldn’t help but think that I’ve naturally made my training habits more robust-to-antifragile over time. But we live in a glass world. Making things truly antifragile is tough. Most of our “fixes” will be more on the robust side of things—finding a way to survive and “break even” even in the face of mayhem.
Respecting inherent antifragility
Your body has inherent antifragility. What you can’t do is eliminate this natural antifragility by making yourself fragile. And I don’t mean “breakable,” but rather less receptive to disorder. Remember hormesis. Something bad might be good provided it’s not in excess. We don’t like to think this way. We don’t want to know that the hinges allow the door to swing both ways. We want to know that “x” is good for us, no matter what. Not that “x” might be bad if overdone, yet good if underdone.
Alas, such is the nature of biology. The era of over calculating and over predicting is over. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Embrace the fact that we aren’t machines with twistable knobs. You wouldn’t be reading this is we were. The worst thing you can do is transform yourself into an overly predictable — overly fragile — creature. Here’s the start of making sure this doesn’t happen:
1. Introduce gradually
“Hey, I just signed up for a marathon. It’s three weeks away, and I haven’t trained in one year. Can you help me?”
“GTFO.”
That’s basically how the email conversation goes.
When introducing anything new, introduce gradually. Just like I mentioned in When to Add Weight to Bodyweight Exercises, too much too soon is a recipe for injury. Injuries are often caused by not respecting this hormetic dose-response relationship. (As opposed to muscular imbalances.) Tissues, muscles get strong over time.
One does not simply walk into Mordor and train like a professional Olympic weightlifter. Even Goku had to gradually increase his supragravitational limit. You’re only antifragile up to a point. You can’t exceed that point, else you’re gonna break.
2. Don’t disrespect physiological chaos.
This means a few things.
First-
Don’t overly predict your nutrition needs. I get a lot of emails about this — people can’t seem to find an accurate “calculator” online that predicts their metabolic rate. But nothing online will accurately predict how many calories you need.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky says grand master chess players churn through 6,000 – 7,000 calories on match days. If this is true, I won’t fathom what any metabolic calculator would spat out for their needs, considering they’d be categorized as a sedentary “out of shape” people.
There are a million minuscule things that effect your nutrient needs from not only a calorie standpoint, but also from a “how each calorie is used” standpoint — what determines the delegation of each calorie to muscle, fat, or use in other bodily processes. In The Chaos Bulk, I recommend eating a round about level of food every day for a little while to make it easier to gauge your needs. But even then, it’s an understood estimate because the tenant of chaos is being receptive to eating more (most times way more) or less (sometimes way less — to the point of nothing) depending on how any one day (and it’s randomness) shakes out.
Second-
Allow wiggle room in your training. I should say, “don’t use percentages,” but I fear my head would be on a stake by days end.
I think most of us can make tangible and predictable progress for a long time. (This will make sense soon. The Skinny-Fat Solution is soon to launch, as is a separate (and free) program: The Great Eight Exercises for the X Physique.) But this process doesn’t make use of percents. It’s gradually built into over time (hormesis, anyone?) rather linearly. Do a little. Rest. Adapt. Do a little more. Rest. Adapt. Repeat.
Through this, we have “maximum” in mind. And then it’s matter of trying to either break the maximum, or training “lighter.” You can use percentages for this “lighter” training, but percents form a conception in our mind before any work gets done. We know 75% is going to be around “this” heavy. 90% “that” heavy. We’d probably lift 75% just as well as 70% if we thought the 75% was indeed 70%. But the % artificially creates a certain level of difficulty in our mind.
Percents also don’t allow for wiggle room. 75% won’t always be 75% because your absolute maximum isn’t necessarily representative daily maximum. Sure, you can deadlift 500 pounds after drinking six cups of coffee and sniffing ammonia, but that doesn’t say what your calm, cool, and collected everyday self is capable of.
That’s why I like light days that only make use of the 10’s, 25’s, and 45’s. It’s a cruder gauge. You either have the ability (and desire) to lift 20, 50, or 90 pounds more or you don’t.
Third-
Deprive and indulge.
To finish up the thought from last section, I’ll throw out a concept popularized by Charlie Francis: make your highs higher, and your lows lower. I think most of us are best served either trying to beat our previous maximum, or training light enough so that we’re fresh enough to beat our previous maximum when the time is right. My light deadlifting day consists of snatch grip deadlifts: 5×135, 5×155, 5×185, 5×205, 5×225. That’s all. Never more. It’s easy, yes. But that just means I can go higher on my heavy days.
Deprivation and indulgence is even more relevant in the nutrition world. Nothing is more predictable than eating the same thing in the same quantity and the same time day in and day out. Give yourself some variance. Don’t let the body take nutrients for granted. Let it know that, at times, certain nutrients (food in general too, via fasting) won’t be around. Something tells me this is good in the long run, and does indeed make your body better at making use of whatever it was deprived of — precisely the foundation of The Chaos Bulk.
Yes, this also means your multivitamins are junk. I mean, realistically, how prone were we (this is the imaginary paleo goggles talking) to get an abundance of every single vitamin and mineral on a daily basis? Now, I’m not all that paleo (I eat white rice, which means I’m more Goku than paleo) but I think some ancient ancestral habits still hold worth — deprivation and indulgence being a topic in that conversation.
Factors of fragility
Now that you aren’t making your inherent antifragility fragile, we enter the realm of true fragility. Fragility is caused by anything random that gets in the way of that which seems “perfect” on paper. There can be many reasons why these events occur, all of which are largely unpredictable. Worrying about their origins is a waste of nervous energy. It’s much better to set your sights on how to thrive despite the randomness.
- Oops, I just read 23546 pages of A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s now 3AM and I have to wake up at 5AM. Lulz. The heavens!
- My friend just called me and told me he needed picked up from the car dealership. But I was supposed to train in five minutes. The heavens! (Thanks Phil.)
- I’m scheduled to max on deadlifts today, but my neck is in shambles from the way I slept. The heavens!
- Just got done training in supragravity. Time to eat a dinner Goku would be proud of, in true Chaos Bulk style. What’s this? The girlfriend just told me we will be going to a bar to meet a friend. Starchy carbs and alcohol don’t mix too well. Do I still eat? Do I forego drinking and look like a social outcast? The heavens!
- Was planning on eating a Goku sized rice feast for dinner, in true Chaos Bulk style, but I got to the gym and pooped out. I didn’t have it. Didn’t get any meaningful work done. What’s the fate of the feast? The heavens!
- An unexpected rain shower spoiled my tricking intentions. The heavens!
You can spend your days cursing to the heavens that life doesn’t conform to your perfect-on-paper training and nutrition plan. Randomness is around us. And I’m starting to think that those that “make it” are those that know how to handle the randomness — how to make things either robust or antifragile.
The thing about randomness: there aren’t any rules (hence randomness). But if you take a look at what prevents you from working your magic on a regular basis, you’ll probably find commonalities. Someone with a wild social life will face different sorts of randomness than someone with three kids.
So here’s what we’re going to do. Since each stumbling block is a case-by-case thing, either a) drop a comment, a b) drop an email about random events that get in the way of your progress — things that you’ve been unable to make robust or antifragile. If the demand is high, perhaps it can be the start of a new antifragile post “series.”