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Friday Thoughts 71
Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Thoughts, where I share small, random ideas that haven’t turned into blog posts yet, or some of my favorite things I saw on the internet throughout the week. Enjoy!
Ergathon Training
Here are some of the workouts I’ve been doing in preparation of the Ergathon.
Bike
12 minute warm up
8 sets
2 min @ hard, hard, hard pace
2 min @ rest
Intent: spend some time going really hard with a 1:1 recovery ratio and see what I can hold for two minutes.
Splits: 1:43/1000m average
Rower
warm up: 5 min bike, 5 min row
5 sets
1000m row @ hard pace (target time 3:45)
-rest 3 minutes-
*must pedal easy on bike for at least 2 minutes of the rest period.
Intent: Medium-length intervals rowing in the 1:50s/500m with an active recovery of easy pedaling on the bike.
Splits: 1:54, 1:52, 1:53, 1:54, 1:52/500m
GAIN Triathalon
Warm up: 15 minuets of moving around, walking, jogging.
For Time: 5k run, 5k row, 5k ski
Intent: Come out hot and hang on for dear life.
Splits: run: 26:29, row: 19:59, Ski 20:55 = total elapsed: 1:08:28
Old School:
I was looking for a file the other day and stumbled upon this; Hannah’s workout program from 12 years ago. Some of you will remember those sheets fondly, personally, I couldn’t be more happy to be freed from trying to fit everything on one printed sheet.
Hard Doesn’t Equal Good or Effective
I believe that doing choreographed spin class curls with a 2-pound dumbbell for 90 minutes in an intentionally heated room is hard. I also believe that just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean it’s effective training.
Gell-Mann
I haven’t been spending as much time on Instagram, mostly because it makes me feel like screaming. And a big part of that is learning about the idea of Gell-Mann amnesia - and how we can critically look at things from our own field, but don’t give other information the same amount of scrutiny - depsite knowing that the information from our own expert field is often flawed.
In other words, if I don’t trust the fitness information I can get on there, why should I trust any information I can get on there. And that’s the problem - Instagram is supposed to be about being connected and sharing things, not a source of information and education. However, in the Influencer Era, so much content is being pumped in, we’re starting to thing that this is a reliable place to learn.
Thanks for reading, see you next time!
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Sets vs. Rounds, What’s The Difference?
The terms sets and rounds are often used interchangeably, but I like to differentiate between them when writing a workout program. Both refer to how many cycles you complete of an exercise (or series of exercises), but the distinction I make is based on rest periods.
What is a Set?
I use "set" when describing exercises with a prescribed rest period. Whether it's heavy squats or 400m running intervals, if there’s a designated rest time, it's a set.
Why does this matter? Because rest is critical—especially for new and intermediate lifters who often overlook it. Taking the right amount of rest can be the difference between successfully hitting a big lift or failing it. If you want to get stronger or faster, you need to allow your body time to recover between sets.
Example of Sets:
Back Squat – 5 sets of 5 reps @ 70% of max
Rest: 2 minutes between sets
Running Intervals – 8 sets of 400m at a hard pace
Rest: 3 minutes between sets
What is a Round?
Rounds are more fluid and don’t have a built-in rest period like sets do. You might complete rounds at a steady pace, or you might push yourself to finish as fast as possible. While there’s no prescribed rest, you can—and probably should—take breaks when needed to maintain movement quality and avoid burnout.
Example of Rounds:
Complete 3 rounds at a steady pace:
8 push-ups
10 ring rows
12 med ball slams
Complete 3 rounds for time (as fast as possible):
50 ft sled march
10 bodyweight squats
Final Thoughts
Understanding the difference between sets and rounds helps structure workouts more effectively. If you're training for strength or speed, rest between sets is key. If you're focusing on endurance or conditioning, rounds keep the intensity up while allowing for self-paced breaks.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Make it Easy
I’ve been doing pull ups at least once a week for the past 6 months. The results are surprising, although they shouldn’t be. In truth, they’re just confirming the simplicity of training at its very best - the SAID Principle - Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands.
My goal was simple, make doing sets of 1 pull up so easy, that doing 2 becomes no big deal, and so on.
This system works perfectly, if you can stick with the habit. I had to let the small wins add up, even though for most of the time, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything productive.
Then recently, doing my typical EMOM 20 minutes, 1 thing + 1 pull up (usually a power clean, kb swings or a bench press), I couldn’t help but realize my pull ups felt easier than they ever had. I felt faster, snappier, like I was getting higher, and all the usual elbow crankiness I’ve experienced over the years just wasn’t there. I haven’t tested my max reps in a while, but they’re improving.
I’m eager to test my max reps but, I’m going to stay on the bus - let the training continue to run its course.
It’s simple not easy.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
February By The Numbers
Welcome to this month’s edition of By The Numbers, where I lay it all out and look back at the data my watch collects from the month. I breakdown things like average sleep duration, steps and total workouts. Ive been doing this monthly reflection for 18-months now, and it’s proven to be a valuable tool for understanding my habits and routines and finding areas that I can focus on. I highly recommend everyone has a practice like this.
Steps: 257,918 total for a daily average of 9211.
Yesterday I coached 5 classes. I saw close to 50-people and felt like I didn’t stop moving all day. I ended the day with 8000 steps. It made me realize the importance of talking a walk! If I can be on my feet in the gym for 7 hours, and only get 8000 steps, I can’t imagine what it’s like for the person who sits at a desk for 9 or 10 hours. As for the number, this is the same average from last month, and the month before, and where I expected it to be.
Sleep: 7 hours 2 minutes average duration, sleep score average 78.
I love the idea of yearly cycles when thinking about my training. I run a lot in the summer, not a lot in the winter, I lift in the fall and try to get strong, things like that. I always thought that I should get more sleep during the winter than the summer. Dark, cold, no early sunrises to miss. Looking back, however, I realize I tend to get more sleep in the summer than the colder months. Is it do to increased training volume, or increased steps or what? I’m not exactly sure, but that’s my hypothesis so far, and I’m eager to see what happens in the summer.
As for the current sleeping routine, it’s actually been pretty good. I’m always striving for more sleep, and I think that’s a good place to be. I once heard a coach, when asked what his super powers would be, say to get an extra bonus hour of sleep every single night, and I think I would like that too, just for the gains.
Workouts: 26 total, 9 runs, 7 machine conditioning workouts, 10 lifts, 1 metcon
It was a good month of training. My primary focus had been what we renamed Miner’s Triangle. It’s a tough workout on the air bike, rower and SkiErg, trying to accumulate as many calories in a minute on each machine before taking a rest. Obviously, this was a nice lead in to the Ergathon coming up. That being said, I also have been looking back to my training from 2018-2021, and I was logging a lot of time of machines, cross-training, if you will. Lately, that piece has been missing from my training, and it’s been fun (and painful) to push the paces hard on the machines and work my capacity in a different kind of way.
I was consistent with bench pressing, at least once a week, and had a couple of short and easy workouts like this one
EMOM 12: 3 kb swings + 2 chin ups + 1 wall walk
And more brutal ones like this one:
GAIN Triathalon: for time - 5k run, 5k row, 5k ski.
As always I hope this inspires you to take a minute and reflect today. Look back at the past month and see where you can make improvements.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Reasons to go to a strength & Conditioning Gym
Someone makes you do the stuff you don’t want to, but should.
Make the boring wok more palatable. See above.
Accountability builds consistency.
Perspective adjustments - seeing goals and challenges differently and increasing confidence.
Belong to a community with a shared goal of improving yourself.
Sometimes an easy workout is appropriate, and it helps when a coach tells you that.
Warming up.
Long term development - a strength and conditioning program constantly readjusts and builds upon it set to maximize physical capacity.
Learn new skills - squatting, olympic lifting, push ups, pull ups and swings are all movement skills. Learning new skills is good for your brain.
Because no one wants to do intervals by themselves.
Foam rolling just feels better at the gym than at home, right?
Modifications. If things aren't going as planned, an experienced coach can make adjustments on the fly to elicit the desired outcome.
Shared suffering - there's something rewarding about doing hard stuff with other people.
Stay in the game. Strength training is about the long game. Belonging to a gym and having a coach in your corner is imperative to keep playing.
Postive regard. Getting a “nice rep”, fist bump or high five doesn’t seem like a big deal, but grown ups in the real world don’t often get positive reinforcement, unless they have a coach.
Get strong. Build muscles and bones and do good things for your brain.
Do something for yourself.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Friday Thoughts 70
Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Thoughts, enjoy!
Protein Shakes
People often ask me what protein I like, and the truth is I don’t really drink protein shakes, at least not in the traditional sense of water plus scoop, shake and chug. I put a scoop in my oatmeal. To me, protein shakes are a need to grab when your daily protein is running low, you don’t have time for a meal, or all of your other options aren’t great. Usually when I grab a protein shake it’s from a gas station right after a workout. I love the Fairlife protein shakes, they have 26 grams of protein, no or few carbs, no fat and are 140 calories. They’re expensive. I usually pair it with a bagel for a fast, on the go, post workout recovery meal. The other day however, I was struck by the nutrition label on the Fairlife chocolate milk; 23 grams of protein, 22 grams of carbs, 4.5 grams of fat and 240 calories. It costs less than half of the protein drink, has carbohydrates, which I need, and is more dense with calories. It’s funny, chocolate milk was always championed as a great post workout shake when I was in college, and I’ve finally come back around to it.
Dialed In
I mentioned I was dialed in with my nutrition to someone and they asked what that means, here’s specifically what I mean.
Black coffee - I know a little milk in my coffee isn’t going to make or break me, but I love milk in my coffee and I tend to think I can go over the top with it, so for 8 weeks, I had no milk in my coffee at home. To give me a little bit of hope, I would put some milk in my espressos at the gym.
Delayed first meal - I haven’t been exercising early in the morning lately and I’ve been having this problem of eating my breakfast, and then being really hungry a couple hours later. No big deal, I would have a snack. I wanted to stick to 3-4 meals, not because that’s some secret meal formula, but because it’s easier and the goal here was to be in a calorie deficit. So, by delaying my first meal for a couple hours, which isn’t always the best option for some, I had my first meal when I was had been having my first snack. I found it to be helpful.
No snacking off kid’s plates - this one is huge and it definitely adds up.
No Bars - In part of my 3 solid meals, I eliminated bars to avoid snacking temptation. If I did have a situation when I needed a snack, I ate fruit instead, and have really come around to bananas.
Training takes a backseat - since I was in a caloric deficit, I would sometimes alter my training or skip it all together. It was a nice reminder about how important it is to properly fuel workouts.
Not Typical
Our oldest member, Coach Taylor’s personal training client, Gerry saw me do Coach Alex’s February challenge the other day. It was a bunch of dumbbell snatches at heavier and heavier weights. After seeing my huffing and puffing and laying on the floor, she said, Justin, you have kids, and a business to run, it can’t be healthy to workout that hard! I laughed and explained don’t worry, this is an occasional trip to the pain cave, most of my workouts are very easy, and now and then I tap into the reserves and do something really hard. I looked back at February and I did what I would consider 3 hard workouts. The purpose of bringing this up is to remind you, staying strong and fit is easy - you just have to keep doing the boring, repetitive work. Remember the training poem from Steve Magness:
Mostly easy
Some moderate
Occasionally hard and out of breath
A bit of fast and smooth
Vary it up
and very rarely… Go see God.
GAIN Triathalon
In 2018 shortly after we got the Air Runner treadmill I created what I dubbed the GAIN Triathlon. I’ve done it only twice, as it’s a daunting task, and no one else has even tried. The allure about it is the possibility to go under 60 minutes.
For time:
5000m air runner
5000m row
5000m ski
I first did it 2018 with a time of 1:23 ish minutes.
The following year, January 2019 I completed it again in 1:14:30.
I’ve been thinking about those numbers since the end of December, and I was finally motivated to give it a go again yesterday and am pleased to report that older, heavier Justin beat his previous best time with a total time of 1:08:29.
Training Schedule
I got into the Mount Washington Road Race! I have about 15 weeks to get ready, and I’m planning on at least one other race on the calendar before Mount Washington.
That’s it for this week, see you next time!
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Winter Run Chat 4
I haven’t done one of these in a couple weeks because, well, I haven’t run much.
Last week I hit the snow covered trails for the first time in years. It wasn’t the best conditions, it rarely is when it comes to running on snow. But it was a lot of fun nonetheless. It was a really cold day and it felt good to defy the elements and willing get out into them.
The week before I got one running treadmill workout in.
It isn’t that I haven’t been training at all, but rather, just a couple weeks of a busy schedule and I haven’t prioritized running.
Like I’ve been doing all winter, I’m reminding myself that nothing is urgent right now. It’s okay to focus more on in gym time vs running time, I have plenty to time to get dialed in. Training for the Ergathon that I wrote about yesterday will provide a nice cross-training stimulus, something that I have been working on recently/had been missing from my training for a couple years.
As for what’s coming up this summer, the Mount Washing Road Race lottery is being held today, and I couldn’t resit throwing my name in the hat again. I had fun with it last year and only had 7 weeks to train because of the weightlifting meet. I’d like to find out what I could do with 15 weeks.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Seacoast Ergathon
Seacoast Athletics in North Hampton is holding the Seacoast Ergathon on March 22. It’s a 60-minute race, 6 people on a team accumulate meters on the Concept 2 machines; the Rower, SkiErg, and BikeErg.
We put together an excited team and are looking forward to the challenge. The work to rest ratio, combined with endless ways to strategize for the most meters, has me really looking forward to the event. Plus it’s a nice way to use up some fitness.
Mark your calendar to come cheer on Team GAIN, or better yet, gather 5 gym friends and put another team GAIN into the ring, which I would happily sponsor.
All the details are below.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Deliberate Practice
We've all heard the saying practice makes perfect. Have you ever thought about how to practice though?
You’ve likely heard of the 10 thousand hour rule; It states that it accumulating that many hours your craft'/skill will make you a true master. The type of practice that you accumulate matters though, you can’t just go through the motions. Deliberate practice is the most effective way to carve and hone your skills and abilities.
Deliberate practice requires three criteria:
A clearly defined stretch goal. The task must be clear and challenging to achieve.
Immediate informative feedback. Success or failure in the task must be clear and provide new information.
Repetition. The task must provide an opportunity to alter our effort for a better result.
Deliberate practice methods are found in all of the worlds top performers routines. It requires focus, intensity, and commitment over time. If you want to improve at something, build some deliberate practice into your routine to fast track your progress.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Does This Get EAsier Or What?
It happened again, someone asked if push ups would ever become easy.
I had to break the news. Push ups are always hard. That is, if you have a good training program.
Good training puts you right on the edge. When 3 push ups become easy, we slow the tempo and add a pause, we then start doing 5 and they’re hard again. When you can do 10, we’re on to the rings, then band resisted, plate loaded and increased range of motion.
Progress like that it can make you feel stuck, like you’re doing the same thing over and over again. The level of difficulty is increasing but the end is no where in sight. The endlessness of the gym is scary when you’re new, but once you’ve been training for a while, you realize it’s crucial to keep you going.
It’s helpful to think of the process, that each rep you do is contributing to your improvement. Training will get easier,but it’ll never feel easy, it’s going to continually be hard, even as you improve. Good training puts you right at the edge of your limits. Keep going!
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Friday THoughts 69
Greetings! Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Thoughts, enjoy!
Hard Doesn’t Equal Good
Just because something is hard, it doesn’t make it an effective training method. This video reminded me of the famous Mike Boyle quote, if your athletes want to be sore from a workout, just thwack them in the legs with a baseball bat.
Reverse Plank
This looks incredibly hard. I believe the Chinese weightlifting team is known for doing some crazy core accessory work, and this very heavy, each one of those plates weights 55 pounds.
Truth.
World Record?
Doesn’t seem that heavy.
This was by far and away the post I sent to the most people and read the most. It’s a great decoding of all the fitness information coming at you, and on the last slide there is a great training poem.
That’s all for this week, see you next time!
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Basic Squat Checklist
There’s a quote that goes something like, once you’ve mastered the basics, start over and pay closer attention this time. Review this list of basic squat cues and hopefully you’ll pick up a new perspective or two on an important but tricky movement to master.
Get Organized!
Screw your feet “into” the ground by turning you heels towards one another. You can also imagine spinning your knee caps away from each other. When you do this, we’re trying to rotate the hips into the best position for range of motion and for force production.
Foot Pressure
After you get your hips organized, you might feel the weight on the outside of your feet. That means you’ve gone too far. Try to maintain a balanced foot - weight right in the middle of your heel and ball of your foot. At the gym, we say find your “mid foot.” This is initially difficult to do, but after a few reps it usually evens out.
Back THEN down
When learning to squat, it’s helpful to imagine the lowering portion as two pieces. Start by pushing your butt to a wall behind you. Once you start moving, let your sternum fall towards the floor. Once that happens, start bending your knees. This way, you’ve got the right trajectory to squat using your hips and putting less pressure on your lower back and knees. It’ll feel clunky at first, but as you learn the pattern, the two step movement will become fluid, and happen simultaneously.
On the Bottom
Maintain that foot pressure! No knees caving in, instead push them away from each other, like they’re magnets. To get up, start pushing that middle of the foot into the floor like you’re trying to break through it. Careful not to let your heels lift from the floor, if they do, lean forward more. If the opposite thing happens and all your weight is in your heels, you may feel like you’re going to fall over backwards. Keep your toes on the ground too.
Back on the Top
Once you get to the top, stand up tall and be sure you squeeze your butt to finish the movement to set the next rep up for success.
Breathing
For squats we want to breath in going down, exhale as we’re coming up. We’ve talked before about a slight breath hold for added pressure and stability, but this is a basics primer. For the purpose of bodyweight squats, we want to inhale down, sharp exhale coming up. That’ll keep you in a good, smooth rhythm.
I hope one out of the many cues I just gave makes something click for you.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Trying Viral Recipes Part 2
Last week’s Instagram recipe was a flop.
It was cheeseburger mac and cheese, and it was just trying too hard. I gave it a 5/10, which was probably generous from my wife’s perspective.
This week’s recipe comes from the same account and was much more of a hit in our house, something more along the lines of a normal meal we would make, but the sauce on the recipe was excellent.
Honey Teriyaki Chicken and Rice
Overall Grade: 8/10
Simple recipe, we didn’t have cornstarch, but otherwise made it work. Personally, you can’t go wrong with boneless skinless chicken thighs in the crock pot, it shreds apart easily and is delicious. The sauce, 10/10, took some playing around to get the right amount of kick, but simple and easy to make.
We kept the rice separate, made using a rice cooker, the MVP of the kitchen, and added some peppers and onions and leafy greens to the meal as well.
Give this one a shot!
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Gym Lingo: EMOM
EMOM stands for Every Minute On the Minute.
This style of workout requires focus on the clock. When doing an EMOM, you start your exercises on the top of the minute, and after completing the prescribed work, rest all the remaining time in the minute before starting the process over.
EMOM 10: 5 push ups
This means you’ll complete 5 push ups at the top of each minute, rest all the remaining time and start again at the top of the next minute. The way this is written, you would do this for 10 rounds, or 10 minutes. This is a nice way to practice, challenge technique, build volume and sprinkle in some conditioning while lifting.
Another variation of and EMOM can be with multiple exercises, with each movement getting their own minute.
EMOM 21:
Minute 1: 5 pull ups
Minute 2: 10 kb swings
Minute 3: 50ft sled march
In this scenario, you would complete 7 rounds of the 3 movements equalling 21 minutes total. This style of workout builds work capacity and gets more difficult as minutes on the clock tick by.
EMOMs are great way to be time efficient and cram a lot of work in while keeping yourself on a strict pace. They’re one of my personal favorite workouts (lately) because it forces me to get to work, and I can get a lot done in a short period of time.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Skiers Rejoice
I know your pass is blacked out today, but it isn’t at GAIN, come on in for your regular Monday workout and get the week started right!
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Friday Thoughts 68
Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Thoughts! Let’s get into it.
Plate Flip Gate:
I was wildly impressed when I saw Nate from Oak Performance flipping this 45-pound plate. However, if you look closely, Nate’s 45-pound bumper plates look a little small. Nate is a strong man, but that plate flip challenge is wildly difficult. His effort seemed too easy so I did some digging.
Let’s take a look at Nate’s Rep Fitness bumper plate dimensions. His 45-pounder is 2.8 inches thick.
Contrast that with the Rogue bumper plate, 3.25 inches for nearly a half inch difference. Sorry Nate, I’m going to have to disqualify you from the plate flip challenge for breaking the rules and using a smaller sized plate.
I love this video, I’ve shared it before but was talking about this arm position with someone recently, and figured it was a good refresher for us all.
Goals. I’m a disaster when I cook, I always have been. Lately I’ve been trying to clean as I cook, and while it isn’t the perfect system yet I’m getting better.
Lance has nothing on a sled dog.
Thanks for reading, see you next time!
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
ICe Cubes and Progress
The following analogy is from Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Imagine an ice cube sitting out on a table. This room where the ice cube is located is temperature controlled. Starting at 20 degrees, we’re going to raise the temperature of the room 1 degree at a time.
After a while, we’re up to 25 degrees. No change on the ice cube, it’s still just sitting there, frozen. Fast forward a little longer, we’re at 29 degrees. Still no change to the ice cube. Once we hit 31 degrees, our ice cube is there, still unchanged and apparently unfazed by the increasing temperature.
Finally, we hit 32 degrees. The ice cube starts to change, it’s melting.
What made the ice cube melt? The 1 degree change from 31 degrees to 32 degrees? Or was the compounding of the temperature change to get there? We saw no progress from 20 degrees all the way to 31 degrees. Just because we couldn’t see the progress, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
You might be going through something similar now. It feels like you’re turning your wheels, not getting any traction. You could be making progress and adapting, it just isn’t visible yet. Remember the ice cube, you could be making change without even noticing it, small actions add up to big changes.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Trying Viral RECIPES So You Don’t Have to
I saw this recipe on Instagram and was intrigued. It’s bacon cheeseburger mac and cheese that’s high in protein, with an easy Crock Pot recipe and tons of leftovers. What’s not to like?
You start with the beef into the pot, with some crushed tomatoes, garlic, and a few spices, and salt and pepper. I used two pounds of beef, although I noticed today the recipe says 3 pounds.
To make the cheese, you blend up cottage cheese, shredded cheddar cheese and American cheese. This recipe calls for 150g of each type of cheese, but we only had shredded, so I used 300g of that. That didn’t look like nearly enough cheese for the tub of cottage cheese, so I added another handful. I used a stick blender and am wondering if the blender or food processor would have had more fire power for better consistency.
After the beef cooks, you add the pasta, caramelized onions, and the cheese sauce. We added two diced red peppers too to up the veggie content.
We’ll be eating this stuff for days to come, but it didn’t come out very good. Hannah said it was trying to be too many things, the bacon was unnecessary, everything barely made it into the Crock Pot, thankfully I didn’t add that third pound of beef. The texture was off, more soup like that mac and cheese like. It has potential, but trying to wing it with the cheese mixture was probably not the best idea. Also, the amounts of the ingredients were annoying. For example, my full tub of cottage cheese has 680g in it, the recipe calls for 900g, which I can’t fathom fitting into the pot with a whole extra pound of ground beef too. Also, with 300g of cheese and 8 slices of bacon, I’m just a touch skeptical on the macros listed in the video.
Not the easiest Crock Pot recipe, either, because the beef cooks first, before adding the half-cooked pasta, you have to have two separate sessions of cooking to get this all ready, no set it and forget it.
Grade: 5/10
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
THat One Thing
I recently listened to author Steve Magness on a podcast and he said something that really stuck with me.
Along with being a writer, he’s a high-level running coach, an exercise physiologist and no slouch of a runner himself.
He mentioned that elite athletes will consult with him. These are the highest level, access to all the best coaches and information, been training years and years, dedicated athletes.
He said that all he often does is find the outlier - the one thing that got overlooked.
Maybe the athlete is only sleeping for 6 hours a night and trying to train at a really high level, or they’re undereating and not taking in enough calories to perform. Sometimes they’re just stressed out and need a better way to manage the stress or get their life organized.
It got me thinking, if I had an high level performance coach drop in a follow me for a day, what would they say I’m missing, or need more of? Of course I’m not preparing for the next world championship or Olympics, and I think there’s a little more nuance to it, but it’s a fun thought experiment nonetheless.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain
Reasonable vs. Tough Matrix
I was recently reminded of Dan John’s Reasonable vs. Tough Matrix. It’s a simple idea taken from one of my favorite strength coaches. You can use it to audit your own efforts to make sure they’r appropriate. Specifically, we’re going to use this to look through the lens of diet and exercise.
Dan John’s point is that a tough diet paired with a tough program is a lot of stress on the body, and if you are going to do it, you shouldn’t be stuck in a permanent cycle of starving and trying to exercise a lot, but rather, locking down for a few weeks out of the year, because tough+tough = unsustainable and maybe even unreasonable or unrealistic.
You can use the matrix to come up with the 4 options below, each of which could make up a portion of the year. For example, Dan John says most athletes live in the tough training + reasonable nutrition category. They’re working hard trying to improve, and that means properly fueling for these efforts, which means they can’t be on too strict of a diet.
Reasonable Training + Reasonable Nutrition
Reasonable Training + Tough Nutrition
Tough Training + Reasonable Nutrition
Tough Training + Tough Nutrition
Right now, as I typically do in February and March, I’m locking in my own nutrition. I’m eating in a bit of a caloric deficit, and because of that, the intensity of my workouts has changed. Most of them are “check the box,” workouts where I get in and get finished what I’m doing. It was unsustainable to keep going with hard workouts with the limited fuel. I’m on a tough nutrition + reasonable workouts. Sometime in the Spring that will change.
Sometimes your goals compete with each other, i.e., working out hard and dieting hard. There’s a time and place for both, but it shouldn’t be your baseline or norm. Perhaps you’re trying to put too many eggs in too many baskets rather than doing it right with one thing.
Justin Miner
@justinminergain