Say you wanted to be a good artist, but you have no experience. You go buy one of those how-to-draw books. Everything you need to know is in the book: proportions, shape, sequence, shading, you name it. On your first go, does your final drawing look like the final drawing in the book? Do you [...]
Say you wanted to be a good artist, but you have no experience. You go buy one of those how-to-draw books. Everything you need to know is in the book: proportions, shape, sequence, shading, you name it. On your first go, does your final drawing look like the final drawing in the book? Do you immediately turn into Leonardo da Vinci?
You have to learn how to draw. This is an easy enough connection when it comes to drawing. Yet when it comes to “creating” our body, we expect our first run through the how-to book to deliver greatness. We want da Vinci in one day.
It won’t happen, of course.
There’s nothing wrong with the how-to book. You just have to learn. There probably isn’t a better solution or a better how-to book. Respect the sequential reality of art. Some paintings are completely drab until the third, fifth, twentieth, whatever coat of paint. It’s easy to look back and say, “Wow, that thirtieth coat really did the trick.” But the thirtieth coat only “did the trick” because of what came before it.
We’re very much artists. The sequence of creation—when to be detailed, when to be vague, when to add, when to subtract, when to include, when to avoid—is key to creation. This means that you can follow the same exact how-to book—do the same exact thing—at a different point in your training life and get vastly different results.
There are so many subtleties that go into “learning” how to coordinate everything together that extend beyond how-to rules. When I was first learning how to squat, my mentor told me: everything looks good, but you look afraid. You have to attack the repetitions. Be controlled, be confident. That’s something you only learn after going through the how-to book time after time. Nothing changes with the rules, but everything changes with your execution, perception, and understanding of them.
I go over a lot of things in my Free Athletic X Physique Blueprint Course. I give you my Eight Essential Exercises for the X Physique. I give you the two step process to supercharging nutrient uptake (and gaining muscle without fat). I teach you how to start an acrobatic-athletic conquest. But those are the “how-to” things.
The real secret isn’t in the how-to. As I mentioned, you can be following the same how-to directions in different parts of your training life and see different results.
On Day Five of the Course, I talk about how this is possible. If you remember back to my post on antifragility and hormesis, Dr. Sapolsky mentioned grand master chess players using 7,000 calories on match days.
You and I can play chess. We can follow the same “how-to chess rules.” We can move the pieces in the same places as the pros. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to go through 7,000 calories. And understanding why is perhaps the most important training concept that no one talks about.