Fundamentals.

In order to reach the top of the mountain you must start at the bottom.

In order to run you must first learn to walk.

In order to make a grilled cheese, you must first butter the bread (I made this one up).

What wisdom are these aphorisms alluding too? The necessity of understanding the most basal element(s) of a domain before you attempt to progress your understanding. In coaching, you often hear aphorisms like these thrown around because they are more digestible, and more discernable, than the wisdom they contain when it is fully fleshed out. In fact, coaches have boiled these aphorisms down even further, down into just one word. Fundamentals.

Pillars holding up some sort of grandiose structure, that is an analogy I think of in relation to the word, fundamental. Of course, the eyes are drawn too and see the impressive beauty of the structure. The elegance of it reaming outwardly, filling us with awe. What we do not see are those aforementioned pillars. Perhaps the project was designed so that the pillars are clandestinely located. Or maybe they are in plain sight, but how artistic can an architect make bulky beams? What the architect does understand however, is without these pillars, the entire structure would collapse on itself. They are of central importance to the entire operation.

As my training and coaching gains a deeper and wider breadth of experience, I hope that my understanding of it all is doing the same. To facilitate this, I will often ask myself, “Well, what do you think about this?”, as if I were interviewing another person. Recently, I’ve been asking myself what I believe to be a fundamental part of the training process. I think that this is a critical question to ask yourself about anything you aspire to become more knowledgeable of. I’ve quoted C.S Lewis before when he wrote, “The god dies or becomes the devil”. The essence of this quote is that anything you intend to use as a foundation for further creation must possess the internal integrity to be able to stand on its own.

I am going to present one fundamental that I believe should be at the bedrock of the training process. I’m not explicitly stating this is the only one. But what I will say, is that if you understand this fundamental, you will not go looking for answers in the wrong places.

Father Time

I remember when I first got into training there were many fallacies that we all seemed to accept as axioms. One of them was the idea of a “strength plateau”. It was all anyone talked about. “Man, I just can’t seem to get over this plateau”, was the impetus for almost every conversation in the gym. I can remember it existing in advertising even, with supplement headlines reading something like “Burst through your training plateau with…”, then fill in the blank with any corny supplement name you can think of.

This paradigm of strength plateaus is an example of a poor choice of fundamentals. The idea that you’re eventually going to run into a strength plateau is like hiring a disoriented person to be your wilderness guide; you are going to get lost. It’s not a guiding principle for multiple reasons. It encourages testing far too often to see if you have surpassed the plateau, and constantly testing your strength instead of building it is a good way not to build your strength. It also encourages this corollary idea of “shocking the system”. That, in order to surpass your plateau, you must do something that is completely foreign to your body. This often manifests itself in absurd amounts of volume, hilarious looking exercises, or completely unspecific training.

Instead, we should be thinking about the process our bodies go through in response to training stress. From there, it is easier to see the real fundamental principle is a respect for time itself.

Let’s take a quick dive into training-stress-response theory to elucidate this. There are multiple theories that attempt to explain, or at least give a working model for how our bodies respond to training stress. The purpose here is not to analyze, compare, and contrast these theories, rather we need only a glance at one to get to the bottom of this.

The Fitness-Fatigue Paradigm is one of these training-stress-response theories (1). It suggests there are two after-effects of training: fitness and fatigue. These two after-effects are purported to have an inverse relationship relative to performance. This means that a session that manifests more fitness will also manifest more fatigue, fatigue being a negative influence on performance and fitness being a positive one. As a visual model, it would look something like this:

*Yes, I did draw this. Dope, I know.

Fitness is more tenacious than fatigue, meaning it has longer staying power. Although fatigue will initially decrease performance, once it begins to dissipate, the remaining fitness can reveal itself through increased performance. We can see this through the elevation of the performance line above baseline (the straight line also resembling time). This logically makes sense. If fitness was more transient than fatigue, well then, humans would have a hard time getting better at anything. This is just a representation of one training session, however, so here is another example:

Now we are looking at the effects of three training sessions. These figures are not perfect, but it would be impossible to draw a perfect working model for this theory. What these figures do for us, however, is assist in the understanding of the acute effects of training. For example, through this it is easy to see how a taper works. Build up a ton of fitness, decrease some aspect of the training stimulus, rapidly reduce fatigue, couple that with the staying power of fitness, and you will have an elevated performance.

But, for this discussion, I do not care about this!

These figures represent an inconsequential amount of time. The first figure represents one day, and the second a week at best. For a trained athlete or lifter, one week of training is not enough time to create any chronic adaptation. If the goal is to create adaptation that brings you closer to your potential, and encroach upon the borders of the elite, then it takes years of training.

Here is another example:

This figure is about a month of training. This is most likely enough time for someone who is relatively untrained to create some sort of meaningful adaptation in performance. This idea is of central importance. We want to raise the baseline. Let’s look at one more:

This is more like a year of training. Unless you are Usain Bolt, or Ashton Rouska, or Lasha Talakhadze then a year of dedicated training is enough time to manifest lasting changes in performance and raise the baseline. I mention these specific people because they are the best of the best. They are so good at what they do that it may take multiple years of training to increase their performance by just a few percent. However, over the course of their careers, they continue to get better. They haven’t abandoned ship because of a “plateau”. No, they are dedicated and wise enough to understand that getting better is a process hinging on time.

One session is not a strong enough stimulus to achieve lofty heights, but the synergistic effect of hundreds and thousands might be.

What are your expectations? Do you really see yourself getting that much better in a couple of months, a month, a week, or a day? Perhaps you need to spend some time alone if you do. You need to ask yourself, what do I fundamentally believe in? If you are not willing to answer with the dedication of years of training, then you aren’t ready for what it takes to chase your potential.

Turtles All the Way Down

Stephen Hawking has told a story that goes like this. A famous scientist giving a public lecture on cosmology was interrupted by an old lady towards the end of the room. She told him what he was saying was nonsense, because the universe is a flat disc resting on the back of a turtle. The scientist, wanting to quiet the old lady, cleverly asked what the turtle was standing on. And with more guile, the old lady replied, “You’re very clever, young man, but it’s turtles al the way down” (2).

Circling back to the beginning of our discussion, what turtle do you choose to rest your universe on? Of course, it does not have to be so cut and dry. It doesn’t have to be just one turtle, or fundamental principle, it could be a sort of eclectic host of them. You could say, one is not necessarily more important than the other, and give a “it depends” answer. We live in a dynamic world and humans are dynamic beings, so it depends, is often a safe answer to give for a question like this.

But for rhetorical purposes, and more importantly, for figuring out what you fundamentally believe in, shouldn’t you put your foot down somewhere? Declaring what you believe to be a fundamental principle isn’t pretentious, and certainly doesn’t lead to dogma. In fact, you must do so in order to test your fundamentals. If the story is unraveling in a positive way, perhaps you are on to something. If the story begins to be hard to follow, the message unclear, and dissolves into chaos…well maybe you should rearrange what you believe in.

In this case, if you want to be stronger or better, you must first accept the onerous amount of time it will take to get there. I don’t care about your program, your periodization scheme, or phase potentiation. To Hell with tempo training and technique. And damn your strength plateaus.

No advanced principle will get you there without fundamentals. None if this matters if you are unwilling to put in the time.

References

1. Comfort, Paul. Advanced Strength and Conditioning an Evidence-Based Approach. Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2017. Pg. 122.

2. Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order. Profile Books, 2012.