Recipe for Success: Stick to the Plan

Let’s say you were interested in baking a cake for your special someone in order to woo them with your culinary prowess. You go through a website of one of the world’s top pastry chefs, view their cook book, and find a recipe that looks amazing. You then proceed to buy the ingredients, switching one or two out that you feel will make a better recipe or one in favour of what kinds of ingredients you want to use, and get set to rock out your kitchen.

What results is less than appealing and more often than not will leave a look on your special someone’s face sort of like this:

This leads to an early “I have a headache” and quick departure of that special someone, leaving you all alone (probably for ever) to contemplate what went wrong. Inevitably, you turn to the recipe and say to yourself “this recipe sucks!!!” Never mind the fact that you decided to switch out the wheat flour for some kind of concoction like rice flour or hemp flour, which doesn’t have the gluten you want to avoid, even though the gluten is what gives most baking its’ consistency and ability to form a structure that doesn’t resemble something used to fill potholes. Gluten bad? Yes. Cooking bad? Even worse.

Note to guys: Learn how to cook. Real food. Not that mixture of fried meats and veggies in some sort of bottled sauce. Actual cooking that involves ingredients and recipes and a bit of preparation. Chicks tend to like that sort of thing. Learn how to make at least one appetizer, main course, and dessert item. Trust me, it makes a difference.

This is pretty much the same as someone getting a program from a reputable strength coach who has gone through the nuts and bolts of why each exercise is in there, why they’re in there in that specific order, why there’s X number of reps for Y number of sets, and has a specific goal outcome in mind for the program, and the recipient starts making illegal substitutions left right and centre. Major foul on that one.

I’ll just take out the six mobility exercises and make that into two cuz I don’t wanna spend all day at the gym, and I’ll double the number of sets of deadlifts, then I’ll add in an extra day of conditioning cuz I wants ta get lean for da ladiez.

Hey, what happened?? Only one week in and I can’t move my arms and I’m getting numbness down my legs and I feel like I got run over by a flock of Kardashians, all whiny and shoulder-padded?? This program sucks.

 

Most programs made by highly reputable strength coaches who actually train real live human beings tend to have a lot of forethought and use variables from training programs that they’ve found to be highly effective with their own clientele or athletes in producing a specific result. Extending rest periods, dropping key exercises, or subbing in your own thing that you’ve done for the past decade will either do nothing good for you, or potentially injure you.

Take for example a program like Eric Cressey’s Show and Go Training. I’ve talked about this program before, and with good reason. See, Eric’s had the opportunity to train literally thousands of people, both in person and through distance coaching, which has led him to understand some of the fundamentals that cause people to move, perform, and look a whole lot better than they do now, and in a way that doesn’t make you feel like you just got hit by a Mack truck and can’t function when said lady-friend returns to let you make it up to her for ruining her dessert soufflé.

He’s even made some substitutions based on equipment availability and the number of days an individual can work out each week, but that means they had to be the right substitutions and for the right reasons, not simply haphazardly throwing around exercises like darts at a dart board between some drunken frat boys night out.

Another product I like is The SuperHero Workout, by John Romaniello. Roman’s also trained lots of people, mainly models, athletes, and celebrities, which means he has a very image-concious style of training, which many people are primarily interested in when they work out.

Aside from being all about comic books and superheros (hence the title), this workout program focuses on making you look extremely good naked, which means it’s right up the alley of a lot of individuals who go to the gym or who want to go to the gym. The workouts are intense, involve a lot of creativity, and will produce the desired result of packing on some muscle in key areas while trimming down others. The included nutrition plan and supplementation recommendations are both sound and include logical explanations as to why they’re included and why they work.

These are just two such examples of a lot of quality information products available on the market today, but there are also a lot of questionable products out there as well. Just the other day I had someone send me an email asking me to promote his latest fat loss program. First, I could totally tell he bulk-emailed me with a bunch of other people because he didn’t use my name or site name anywhere in his email. Second, when I looked through the program, it sounded eerily similar to page 269 in Mike Boyle’s Advances in Functional Training, to which I brought to his attention and haven’t received any response to.

If I can’t talk with the creator of the program and get answers to questions about the programming, I’m not going to say a word about it anywhere.

Now these programs are all well and good because they have a specific goal in mind and develop a specific plan of action for how to get there. Just like in baking they provide a recipe to follow. You can make the odd substitution if it’s absolutely necessary and doesn’t affect the core reason as to why that exercise or variable is there in the first place, but meddling too much can cause disaster.

This is no different from the client who was an habitual overhead presser and wanted me to help her with her shoulder problems following being rear-ended and developing some neck and shoulder irritation. I gave her a specific program that I wanted her to follow for the next month to make sure she had the scapular stability to not have any more flare-ups, to which she decided wasn’t sufficient to her goal of having smoking hot shoulders, and started overhead pressing again in addition to what I had her doing, even though I specifically said absolutely NO overhead pressing for the time being. Amazingly, she started to complain about headaches, losing neck range of motion, radiating pain down both arms, and had to go to the emergency room one fun and enjoyable evening.

She decided to bake the wrong cake here.