Train Hard, Fight Easy
Putting in the work ahead of time
Reflecting
Just relax, Chris. Breath. Flow.
I get that from my jiu jitsu teachers… a lot. One tried to add “like dancing” before taking a second look at me and realizing that I don’t dance. I’m not a natural, but the closest approximation I can get to relaxing in a fight is to arrive prepared. That involves training hard, but also reading enough to make sure I’m aligned with the best practices from the people who have already succeeded in my current endeavors. Before you compete, before you even train, here are some ideas for what you might want to know – for mountaineering, lifting, fighting, fueling, running, and recovering.
Training
This morning’s whiteboard:
2:30 rest 1:30 x 7 rounds
15 dips
50 double unders
Row in the remaining time
Mountaineering
Lifting
Strong Enough? Thoughts from Thirty Years of Barbell Training
The Squat Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering the Squat and Finding Your True Strength
Fighting
Fueling
Running
Sky Runner: Finding Strength, Happiness, And Balance In Your Running
Grand Trail: A Magnificent Journey to the Heart of Ultrarunning and Racing
My next run:
The running guide most relevant to my training is Training for the Uphill Athlete: A Manual for Mountain Runners and Ski Mountaineers by the great (at least lower body) Kilian Jornet (who could do with a few push-ups).
Living
Recovering
Closing
I learned something from each of the books above. Two you can skip:
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. The recording takes 13 hours and 52 minutes to listen to. I can save you 13 hours, 51 minutes and 50 seconds with this summary: sleep eight hours.
Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. The author essentially eviscerates every recovery fad over 312 pages. I can save you the time and distill it down to six words: nothing works; just get some rest.
What did I miss? Please comment below about the books that have most impacted how you live, especially how you train, fuel, and recover.
There’s a lot of good sense here. By far the most important steps are the simplest: thinking about what you eat, and thinking about how you use your body (as opposed to specialized exercises that target muscles instead of chains and set you up for injury). I would also add that one of the greatest benefits is to avoid getting pulled in to the fictitious world of the “fitness” industry.
As with anything where there’s a buck to be made, there’s a lot of bad information and philosophy out there. A great example is the word “primal” which is appealing in theory but all too often no more meaningful than “it’s got electrolytes.” The candidates for most disgraceful primal huckster are many, but none can match SARM and GH model and would-be cave man that is Liver King. And people buy his act! (and his products). But he’s just one of many riffing on an old formula and building a world that has never been real life. Look at a Spartan helmet in a museum, those guys weren’t Jeff Cavaliere big, they weren’t even modern fit guy big. Today’s fitness stars are selling a world that was never real.
There’s no one right answer, and I don’t fault people who choose to supplement, juice, whatever. But these are modern choices being sold as ancient secrets. Come to think of it, Gwyneth Paltrow’s in the same business.
Personally I am a fan of working hard at whatever functional regimen makes you happy. Th only ice bath I get is being launched into whitewater in the winter, but I don’t doubt the mental and physical benefits as you get out. I’m not a runner but I’m all for the folks who find joy in endurance trail running, even if it drives the body to be light. Our bodies have evolved over millennia to adapt and reshape to meet the demands of whatever use and hardship they face. The only thing we are not evolved to adapt to is the couch.
Thanks for the great recommendations. Just 1-clicked 'Mastery of Hand Strength' as just the other day I was noticing my hands starting to become the weak point in some of my lifts. Slowly realizing how they are the constant in nearly every upper body exercise I do.
Thanks again for keeping your blog going. I really gain a good bit of knowledge and a lot of inspiration. At 37 I just did my first pull-up this morning and it's exciting to see real measurable progress.