In Over Your Head

My wife flies around a lot. She’s all important and what-not, so she gets to travel to big cities helping people with her elite lawyering skills. Since these are usually quick trips, she travels with a roller bag, a really big purse, and not me. When it comes time to board the plane, a funny thing happens to her every time she needs to put the roller bag into the overhead bin: a man offers to help her. This probably doesn’t surprise anyone (especially when I mention that my wife is also smoking hot). And I’m certainly not saying it’s rude (I help people put their bags in the overhead bin every time I fly). The reason I think it is funny is because my wife is probably stronger than the majority of the men asking if she needs help with her little 30lb bag. She one arm presses bells way bigger than that. And after all the chivalry, most of the men struggle to get the bag up there.

Maybe it was all the time I spent backpacking in High School instead of dating, but I consider traveling a great test of fitness. There are few times in modern urban living when we have to rely upon our bodies, plans, and wits in order to accomplish a task. And fitness is just the ability to complete a task.

The Task

You’re going someplace. You are leaving your home for a number of days so you put everything you need into a bag. You have to carry that bag, picking it up and putting it down. Pulling it and pushing it this way and that. Twisting with it and squatting down to get things out of it. Pressing it over your head and never letting it leave your sight. You need a certain amount of stuff. Stuff weighs a fixed amount. The weight of the bag should be determined by your needs, not by your physical ability to maneuver that bag. The task has been determined; you must be fit enough to complete it. So when the time comes to put the bag into the overhead bin and you cannot hoist it, the bag is not too heavy; you are too weak.

Overhead

A decently strong man can deadlift 2x his bodyweight; clean, jerk, front squat, and bench press 1.5x his bodyweight; and military press 1x his bodyweight. Clearly, pressing weight overhead is the hardest of static human movements. It requires stability, tension, coordination, breathing, focus, and intensity of the highest order. And the ability to turn that level of strength on is a learned skill. Quite frankly, a person who can press a lot is a person who can do a lot. And getting weight overhead may only be second to carrying it for distance when it comes to life-specific training. Still have doubts? Then why do you think the expression “in over your head” is so evocative?

Pressing Prep

When I meet most of my clients, they are way too jacked up to put weight overhead. It seems to be the first skill we lose to mobility and stability issues. Wall slides, pec stretching, massage, lacrosse balls, and scapular stabilization training are all usually required. But what’s the best bang-for-your buck? Waiter walks. Put the heaviest weight you can cheat up with one hand over your head, and start walking. Keep your elbow locked and your shoulder packed. Keep breathing, but keep your ribcage down for as long as you can. When any of these fail (the abs go, the shoulder shrugs, or the elbow bends), stop! Rest. Cheat the weight up with the other arm and walk back. If you can put a 24kg bell overhead and walk “pretty far” with it in either hand, it’s probably cool to start pressing.

Press a Lot

There is an old Russian joke: “To press a lot, you must press… a lot.” Of all the human movements, pressing seems to respond the best to daily practice. Every gain I have made after my initial newbie bump has been the result of pressing less than I could for as many sets as I could throughout the week. This was either a Grease the Groove program, Even Easier Strength, Easy Strength, or Pavel’s truly excellent Enter the Kettlebell. The principles of all these programs is the same though: press less for more. Pressing is incredibly fatiguing precisely because it is so hard. You have to generate a hell of a lot of tension to get weight overhead. Coincidentally, this also makes it a very handy fat-loss tool. But you have to be careful not to overdo it on reps. Stick to the “Rule of 10” reps and just up the sets. After 2-3 weeks of patient practice, the weight will probably feel light. So move up! That overhead bin just got a whole lot easier to fill.

Traveling is hard. It’s hard on our bodies and fraught with frustration and compromise. Why not begin the journey in the best shape possible for completing it? Pick up heavy things. Carry them. Put them overhead.

Why Kettlebells?

I’ve been “Russian Kettlebell Certified” for a little over 2 years. My logo is a kettlebell. I have kettlebells on my shirts, pants, hoodies; I have kettlebells in my living room, bedroom, and 600lbs of them in my truck. So it’s not surprising when people ask me, “Why kettlebells?” I’m obviously a fan. There are many reasons for this but none of are probably what you think and none of them are dogmatic.

First of all, kettlebells are simple. They are canonballs with a handle. No one is worried about breaking them and they come in a relatively small array of sizes so there’s less wrangling of equipment and accessories. A group can grab a dozen or so in one trip and pile them all up outside in short order. Clean up is quick and no one asks, “how does this thing work.” It’s heavy; you pick it up; sometimes you carry it around. Done.

Secondly, kettlebells are weird. The sizes are weird so it’s less likely someone’s ego is wrapped up in showing off with a 24kg bell instead of a 20kg bell. You just grab one that looks right and monkey around with it. There’s nothing intimidating about them, but they are heavy enough to inspire a sense of conscientious safety. They are also just weird enough that even experienced people keep an open mind about experimenting with them. Do you have 60 incoming college freshmen who’s 300+lb “squat” will probably result in the death and injury of 40% of them by the end of the season? Hand them one 24kg bell, tell them to go all the way down, step back and watch the learning that happens when you take ego out of the equation.

They are convenient. You can buy them anywhere, they require no maintenance and will last two dozen lifetimes. If I want to go to the park or a beach, I can just grab a bell from my trunk. If they get sand or goose poop on them, I just hose them off. You can scatter them around your life to insure that you are never far away from the ability to train (hence my own scattered collection). I’ve been known to bang out an easy strength workout in my school parking lot. I once carried 40kg in each hand for distance in a McDonalds parking lot. You can’t beat that kind of convenience.

They are social. Something as convenient as a kettlebell can be used in contexts far more conducive to fun than a gym. Most of my friends have a bell or two of their own that they can throw in their trunk and join me on the beach. We can each have our own or share. No one gets territorial about a hunk of iron that is impossible to break. We can train in a circle; we can form conga lines of different-sized bells. We can even leave them in a pile and run sprints because no one is going to mess with them. And frankly, anyone who manages to steal a 24kg kettlebell earned it.

They are just better for some kinds of exercises. You can’t really swing a dumbbell. The asymmetry makes pressing, get ups, and jerks more intuitive. The unstable load makes bottoms-up pressing, get ups, squats, and carries a lot more informative. The handle helps you learn to use your grip to generate tension in goblet squats, pressing, and goat bags. And the handle just screams, “pick me up and carry me!” 

They are relatively inexpensive. My entire collection averages around $1.25/lb. None of the bells will expire, rot, or become obsolete. I can do every human movement with them, store them all in milk crates, and loan them out to needy exercisers without much worry. Plus, I have trained four people with a single 16kg bell. That’s value.

Finally, they are attached to pretty excellent system of strength training: the RKC. I could go on and on about the RKC system, but it’s hard to do without sounding like I’m in a cult. So I’ll just say that Mark Reifkind and Brett Jones are Master RKCs. Also some guy in Utah.

Beware of Medium

General James T. Mattis is an interesting guy. When I was playing Marine*, he was the person I most idolized in uniform. General Mattis (Call sign “Chaos” How cool is that?) has been in the Marine Corps since January 1, 1972. He has commanded Marines in every situation from rifle platoon commander; to the commander of the 1st Marine Division’s 17 day, 500 mile sustained march into Baghdad (the longest march in Corps history); to the head of USCENTCOM and one of the key authors of the Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual. In all the diverse billets that General Mattis has held, he has stuck to diligent study of previous wars for guiding wisdom (he assigns hundreds pages of reading to his junior officers), and been an evangelist for the key principle that he has found to be the defining characteristic of success in war: Risk. 

The risks we take in our daily lives—a diving tackle, asking someone out, karaoke— are quaint and petty compared to the risks of combat. But Mattis is not an evangelist for managing risk. He’s also not an evangelist for acting brashly or even boldly. He’s an evangelist for the paradoxes of risk:

• Sometimes the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.
• Sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is.
• The more successful the counterinsurgency is, the less force can be used and the more risk must be accepted.
• Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction.

The lesson that General Mattis has learned is that the delivery of force (i.e. blowing things up and killing bad guys) needs to be simultaneously slow and fast. Marines need the courage to show great restraint, even when being fired upon. But when the opportunity arises to eliminate enemies (and only enemies) Marines need the courage to act with the upmost ferocity. And knowing they can act with more ferocity allows Marines to show more restraint. The two qualities feed each other and drive progress. By sacrificing either of these qualities in the name of “safety,” you create an environment of compromise. You slide to the middle and progress stalls.

"Every Attempt To Make War Easy and Safe Will Result in Humiliation and Disaster" 

If you don’t know why I’m talking about all this war stuff, then I suspect you have been cruising on medium for a long time. Medium is the same. The status quo. Medium is when you run 5 miles every day; do chest every Monday; or can’t remember the last time you improved a lift or dropped a pound of fat. Medium is a rut of risk averse behavior that sacrifices improvement for fear of doing too much or too little. Ever do a recovery run that turned into a tempo run? Ever go in for a light workout that kicked your butt? Ever read US Weekly while on the elliptical or between sets of curls? You’re on medium.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, everything in nature has a wave pattern to it. Intensity followed by recovery done consistently leads to progress... eventually. If you look at the park bench workouts (Easy Strength, the 40 Day Program, Grease the Groove), there is no medium. There’s “pretty easy” peppered with “pretty tough” for about a month, then you move up in weight. Twice a year, you throw in a month of bus bench workouts (Big 21, ETK, RTK, Kettlebell Muscle, Afternburn, 5/3/1, etc., whatever) and you have a lot of intensity (read: hard). Then you go back to the park bench stuff and you have the recovery (read: easy). The result is the weight keeps going up. If it doesn’t, you try a different wave of intensity followed by more recovery. But you have to have the courage to go hard enough then the courage to go easy enough for months at a time. And after years and years of slowly nudging up the progress, sometimes you even have to have the courage to stop altogether and reassess your path. And by “stop” I mean “STOP.” And by “altogether” I mean for a few months. After all those years of “up” you might need a bit of “down.”

So if you know you’re at medium, what do you need to do? You need to go harder or go easier. And if one of those sounds more appealing than the other, then you probably need to do the opposite one. Have the courage to embrace the paradox and beware of medium.

*So we're clear, I was never a Marine. I was not selected for, did not attend, nor complete OCS. I was an officer candidate from November of 2008 to February of 2010 and that alone was enough to be a formative experience in my life. The picture is actually Gunnery Sergeant Mata yelling and my friend Gram. I'm 3rd in line to get fucked with.

Just Show Up

When I was a teenager, my family went on a trip to Great Britain. We drove from London to Edinburgh and made one very special stop at a castle along the way. Now castles are cool and all (especially the ones with dungeons), but this particular castle in the North East of England was extra rad because it was the castle where my family’s name first appeared on record. We asked the tour guide when that was exactly and it turns out “Leadbeaters” have been around since before the battle of Hastings, but Durham was the first place we held a family seat. The tour guide said the date was hard to place because my family has a habit of just “always being there.” To my Mom, Dad, brother and I, this was a compliment. We’ve always joked our family crest should be the Woody Allen quote:

80% of life is showing up.

For my family, this quality has been steeped into our stories. My Mom's favorite is about my Dad. The summer before they met, he was getting a Master's Degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management at Cornell and landed an internship in Las Vegas. The Casino owner put him to work washing dishes from the buffet. It was a 6 week internship and my dad washed dishes, for free, all day for 5 of those weeks. On the first day of the 6th week, the Casino owner came down and said "What the hell?! You're still here?! After the first week, no one ever shows up for the second!" The last week of that internship, the owner didn't let my Dad leave his side.

On Valentine’s Day of 2008, I remembered that story and all the others like it. I was 60lbs overweight. I was depressed, angry, and just not the person I once was. I woke up that day with an overwhelming sense that my wife deserved better than me. I wasn’t physically attractive or capable. I was too unhappy to be sexy and too lazy to be ambitious. I needed to change, but I wasn’t disciplined. So that day I decided to do the only thing I knew I was good at: I decided to just show up. I told myself I was just going to go outside. Once I was there, I told myself I was going to run. Once I was running, I told myself I was going to run a mile. I nearly vomited before the end of the first block, but I had shown up. The next day, I showed up again and made it to the end of the block.

After a few weeks of running a little further each day, I knew I needed help. A coworker put me in touch with Steve Grubbs, a personal trainer who had been out of shape a few years prior as well. When I met him, I asked him what he wanted me to do. “For now,” he said, “just show up.”

In training, working, life, and love, never underestimate the power of just showing up. Even on days when you don’t want to do anything, just showing up and do the bare minimum is always better than doing nothing at all. 100 swings. 20 Pull ups. A paragraph. One quick drink. A made bed. “I love you.” In a world where everyone over-promises, everyone flakes, everyone says "sure" but no one commits to a time and place, just showing up is dangerously close to demonstrating integrity.

When I met Dan John and he asked me to come to the Coyote Point Kettlebell Club, I did. And I kept coming back. After a few weeks Dan said, “I knew we’d get along when you did the only thing no one else manages to do.” “What’s that? I asked. “You showed up twice.“

The Water or the Wave

My favorite book is The Magus by John Fowles. It was given to me by my first mentor, the late Dr. John Miller. The book is so good and I love it so much that I have never finished it. Every time I pick it up, I come across a sentence so breathtakingly perfect that I have to close the book and leave it for a while. The prose is just too much for me. I have been absorbing it in small doses for over 12 years and I never want to be not reading it for the first time. But this odd problem I have with the book is the very problem that the mentor character points out to his pupil when he discusses his problem with modernism sacrificing ethics for aesthetics: Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? "Which do you drink? The water or the wave?"

Nothing in nature is linear except time. Everything moves from one side of the middle to the other. When this is mapped over time, you’ll see that everything has a wave pattern to it. Summer and winter. We sleep and we wake. We work and we rest. We hunger and we feed. Action-reaction. Train-recover. In season-off season. These are the waves that we live in. And fighting it can be fatal.

Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? The water will quench your thirst, but the wave will drag you under. The mentor is ostensibly talking about art. But he isn’t. He is talking about the dangers of contrivance in the the face of reality. For him it’s aesthetics over ethics. For us it’s schedules, programs, diets, and routines. We look at these linear progressions and think that if we follow them we will make our goals. But we ignore the wave: progress-plateau. Most training programs and diets are six weeks long because any structured plan will work for six weeks and no structured plan will work longer than that. But plateaus are not failure. Progress is building the muscle, cutting the fat, getting more done, lifting heavier weights, throwing further, running faster and going harder. Progress is that rush when we think we are quenching our thirst. Plateaus are what keep us from getting dragged under.

According to George Leonard, mastery is about embracing the plateau. To continue practicing and training for the love of it and because it’s part of who we are. The plateau is when we are truly learning. Learning to integrate the technique with the strength. The tension with the relaxation. The new skills with the old. Because the plateau is when we are learning patience. The patience to let our unconscious catch up to our conscious. And the patience to continue on while we wait for the next wave of progress. 

So how do we do it? How do we get to our goals when there is no plan that will take us there? How can we learn to embrace the plateau? How do we drink without drowning?

“Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

Plans may contrivances, but principles are reality. And doing something according to a plan will teach you a lot about the principles that underpin that plan. Look at every strength training program ever written and what do they all have in common? Pick up heavy things consistently but not too frequently. Every diet program? Eat less calories than you use, but don’t starve yourself to death. These are the principles that work and upon which every plan is based. These are the ways to keep moving forward toward your goals while you figure out what your next wave is going to look like. Master the habit of picking up heavy things. Master the habit of eating enough food. Drink slowly and embrace the plateau. The wave will come; and if you can recognize it for what it is, you might not drown.