From Assessment to Application: The Five Tools from Dan John
....and something about being an adult or something
From the archive of gold that the legendary Dan John sent to me to share with you…
Remember, this is written for coaches but if you are the DIY type, you are your own coach so swap out “your client” for “yourself”
From Assessment to Application: The Five Tools[LS1]
The five focuses outlined above form the basis of training programs for all seven QIII E2 subgroups and are what I call the Five Tools—
Nutrition and caloric restriction
Inefficient exercise
Strength training
Basic bodybuilding and mobility training (the “Fountain of Youth”)
Mental set
After the 1-2-3-4 Assessment, you will know if any client is a One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six or Seven. Remember, if the person is an active athlete, your job is to support the technical work with a reasonable program focused on the fundamental human movements. In addition, if someone doesn’t fit one of the seven categories (waistline in check, successful plank test and sleeps with just one pillow) but is not an active athlete, train her as a Six.
We are going to now focus on the Five Tools as ways to help your clients feel better, move better and, ideally, live better. Each of the Five Tools is interconnected, and each can be confusing and frustrating for everyone from the researcher to the mom choosing dinner with hungry kids in a shopping cart. With each, forget about perfection and begin the process of moving forward to a generally “good place.”
The first tool, nutrition, tends to be a touchy subject. No matter what I discuss concerning nutrition, I usually upset someone. Still, our approach, honed by daily discussions with nutritionists, is solid advice that I believe will stand the test of time. The middle three tools involve movement of all kinds.
Try to get a handle on the idea that equipment is simply a tool; it is how you use the tool that matters. One person’s inefficient exercise might be another’s mobility movement. And that is fine. The final tool is the mind, and I believe that we tend to work best in extremes here. Either option offered in this section may work for your clients.
The First Tool: Nutrition and Caloric Restriction
Caloric restriction is going to involve talking about nutrition, and nutrition is going to lead to discussing food. I don’t know if there is anything as confusing as something as simple as what to shove in your mouth a few times a day.
Whether or not a food is good for you is enough to cause fistfights. Recently, all the following have been outed as being bad for you—
· Coffee (Hearing this made me spit out my coffee!)
· Wine (What else does one serve with veggies?)
· Veggies (Too many pesticides! Wine and coffee don’t have those…I think.)
· Tap Water (Poisons and heavy metals!)
· Meat (For a while in the 1960s, eating meat was on par with launching nuclear weapons.)
· Milk (From “producing mucus” to “lactose intolerant”)
· Grains (I heard one speaker call this “public enemy number one.”)
It seems that few of us know what to eat. Yet we all bravely carry on eating. I can’t keep up with all the conflicting information, and most other people seem to struggle with it too.
At our gym, we attempt to tell the story of reasonable eating and reasonable fitness. We strive to keep a moderate and balanced approach to all goals. The problem is this: Most people don’t hear us.
Bill Koch, an American world champion in cross-country skiing, did a workshop years ago in Salt Lake City. For ten dollars, I figured that eight hours with a world champ and Olympic medalist was well worth my time.
There was a problem with the workshop: I still feel like I was the only participant who could hear him. It seemed the audience wanted elaborate programming, fancy training equipment and expensive gear. His answers were always simple and clear.
“Intervals are the biggest bang for your buck.”
“My daughters take the lift up the hill; I ski up it and race them down.”
But the workshop still ended up being a series of intricate questions about the smallest details of training, and Koch’s response was always, “No, I don’t do that.”
The audience couldn’t hear what he was saying. It is a problem that we all see in every field: Most people want to be reaffirmed about their current methods of doing things.
When someone asks “What is the best diet?,” what do they want to hear? I think it’s “The one you are on.” As we joke around our gym, the best diet most people will ever do is the next one.
So, what’s best? Atkins? Zone? Vegan? Paleo? I’m not sure which one is best, but I know that the adherents of some diets will physically attack you for eating the wrong kind of item.
“Don’t you know that X is poison, and your children will suffer tragically if they come near it?”
That’s hyperbole, but closer to reality than most people will admit. So, which is the best diet? My standpoint shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point, but I believe they are all right. There is a joke about Jesus and the miracle of the loaves and fish. As his disciples are handing out the free food, the audience starts yelling back.
“Is the fish mercury tested?”
“Is the bread gluten free?”
“I’m a vegan!”
If you want to have a fun plane ride, sit between a vegan and a Paleodieter.
There are some people who follow strict diets with the religious fervor of a convert, the discipline of a monk and the know-it-allness of a teenager.
Let’s be big kids with food. Yes, fast food is bad and made from asphalt, toxic sewage and roadkill. Or whatever. But beyond that, what I look for are the consistent truths. What do all the ways of eating agree upon for daily consumption and daily avoidance?
I have found five truths that practically every way of eating agrees upon—
1. Cut back on sugar.
2. Cut out cardboard carbs.
3. Get rid of Frankenstein fats.
4. Eat colorful vegetables.
5. Let’s all find what to agree on before we seek perfection.
Although some argue sugar consumption hasn’t increased as much as we thought, we still consume too much. Overall, your kids eat too much sugar—make them stop that. I’ve looked, and I can’t find one good argument for eating more sugar or maintaining the amount of sugar you are currently eating. Cut out sugar[LS2] .
Cardboard carbs are any carbohydrate found in a bag or box. If it can last on your shelf for ten years, it will remain on your butt that long, too. Cut them out.
Given a cow and a video on how to make butter, I can make butter. But give me corn, and I can’t squeeze margarine out of it. It takes a lab. It takes equipment. It takes a scientist. Mother Nature doesn’t seem to be able to figure out how to deal with these Frankenstein fats, and neither can the human body. Get rid of them.
Every diet agrees on the value of colorful vegetables. Those green, yellow, orange and red veggies will do wonders for you. Eat them.
The point is this: Let’s get to where all of the various ways of eating agree. I am not sure the perfect diet exists and, if it did, the body would figure out a way around it too. Let’s instead keep focused on eating pretty good and forget perfect. I’ve said it before, in my book, Mass Made Simple—
Eat like an adult. Stop eating fast food, stop eating kid’s cereal, knock it off with all the sweets and comfort foods whenever your favorite show is not on when you want it on, ease up on the snacking and—don’t act like you don’t know this—eat vegetables and fruits more.
And in my workshops, I often add this little list for simple nutritional advice—
• Eat like an adult!
• Eat veggies.
• Eat lean protein.
• Drink water.
• Train in a fasted state—sometimes.
• Stay hungry after training—sometimes.
Recently, a hand came up about training in a fasted state. The person wanted to know if I followed this “modern” intermittent fasting idea. Fortunately, I had a slide prepared—
“Obese people and those desiring to lose weight should perform hard work before food. Meals should be taken after exertion while still panting from fatigue. They should, moreover, only eat once per day and take no baths and walk naked as long as possible.” ~ Hippocrates, circa 471 BC
Hippocrates was recommending intermittent fasting long before the internet and even bound books. I’m not as sure about the bathing and nudity points, but I can defend the first sentence without much issue.
Over a century ago, Doctor Shelton in The Hygienic System noted, “The ancient Greeks—the finest of people, physically and mentally, that ever lived—ate but two meals a day.”
By the way, not eating is a common way to approach caloric restriction. In the religious traditions, it is called fasting, and there are a lot of degrees here, from simple hunger to dangerous starvation.
Pavel Tsatsouline summed up the whole diet question for athletes like this: “Meat for strength. Veggies for health.” Marc Halpern, my resident nutritionist, sums it up for us with a simple arrow.
Move to the right as far as you need.
Your perfect place is a blend of health, lifestyle and values.
Out there on the far right, at the arrow, is diet perfection. Forget it. Choose more salads and veggies, but don’t try to be faultless. When it comes to diet and nutrition, especially in terms of caloric restriction, doing more, better, is going to be where things work best.
Less candy. More veggies.
The Second Tool: Inefficient Exercise
On the other side of the fat-loss coin is the concept that everything works and it always has. Whatever you choose to do or have your clients do—whether it is African disco dance or step-marching Spandex or kettlebell swings—it will work. The problem is a little odd: As you become more and more efficient, you get less and less benefit. A modern dance class will just about kill me, because every time the class does “step-ball-change,” I will have done twenty extra moves. Oh, it will be fat loss for me—but the “twinkle toes” to my right had better have a perfect diet, because she is just going through the paces.
Fat-loss exercise needs to be as inefficient as possible. That is why I like the kettlebell swing: You expend tons of energy with absolutely no movement! But and many disagree with me here, as you get better and better at swings, these too can become too efficient. Now, we have tips and tools to get around this, but it is wise to remember that Tim Ferris found seventy-five swings three days a week to be enough to start peeling the fat off one woman. If your client goes from seventy-five to two thousand swings a workout and stops losing fat, you may need to look for alternatives, additions, or another bell.
Inefficient exercise is going to look different for everyone—if your client is a horrible dancer, encourage him to dance; if your client is a lousy swimmer, encourage her to swim; if your client never bikes, encourage him to bike.
People must seek ways to waste lots of energy. Leonard Schwartz had it right with his HeavyHands training. Tossing hand weights up and down while walking is a very poor way to walk—but it roasts the fat off!
And, I know, you can’t hear me. A reasonable approach to diet and nutrition, something your grandmother would applaud, just isn’t sexy enough for the postmodern reader.
The Third Tool: Strength Training
Assessment allows us to see that our clients are on the path to their goals. It’s time to talk about the path. There are hundreds of options in training, but I think what is more important than the daily workout or yearly plan is the philosophy of training. It takes a while to come to clarity on your philosophy of training. My approach continues to evolve in clarity, although the principles have been around for a long time. My greatest insight came from a long-distance phone call with a friend, Mike Rosenberg.
I edited a fun little online newsletter called “Get Up!” for about a decade. In hindsight, its little run was amazing as we had reports from Olympic gold medalists who wanted to share their training ideas, programs of world-record holders, perhaps the first eyewitness report of how the Chinese were training the Olympic lifts and countless firsthand stories of “how I did it.”
It was wonderful stuff, but the editing and writing was taking up a lot of my time. It died a quiet death, and the archives are still available on my site, danjohn.net. The price, as we always said, is going to double next month. (The joke: All the editions are free. Contain your laughter.)
In the second edition, Rosenberg told me to include my philosophy of training. Mike and I discussed what this was, and it slowly fleshed out into these three points—
1. The body is one piece.
2. There are three kinds of strength training: putting weight overhead, picking it up off the ground and carrying it for time or distance.
3. All training is complementary.
Let’s look at all of these in detail.
“The body is one piece” is from John Jerome’s remarkable book, Suppleness. I often say you could add any superlative in front of “piece” to make the point better: The body is one amazing piece. The body is one astonishing piece. The body is one stupendous piece. I think you get the point. If you have diarrhea, today is not a good day to squat heavy. If you are doing a chest exercise like the bench press and I stick your calf with a fork, you are going to be in trouble with the bar across your neck.
Sadly, most of us train like we are building Frankenstein’s monster. Arm day. Leg day. Chest day. The body is one piece, with one digestive tract, one cardiovascular system and one magnificent nervous system. If a client has trouble “here,” she is going to have trouble “there.” If the supply of blood to a client’s brain is shut off, his training would be impaired. That is not medical advice, by the way.
This first principle separates the good coaching from the less-than-stellar coaching. A college athlete walking into a workout after breaking up with her beloved is going to have a different workout. Sure, it is just a mild case of a broken heart, but with a proper dynamic mobility warm-up, I am sure we can cure this! In my youth, I was told it took eight days to recover from an NFL game, but, sadly, they play every seven. To my knowledge, Bill Walsh was the first NFL coach to come to the idea that practice is, well, practice.
Your clients’ days, weeks, kids, bosses and just about everything else will impact, for bad or good, their training. Disease or illnesses will burden their systems. And let me offer you this: Idiotic training and programming will be as toxic to the system as many diseases. I have had my share of parasites in my life (sadly, true) and a good case or two of pleurisy, and these are easily overcome and fixable compared to idiocy and tomfoolery in the gym. One moment of too much load, poor technique or just bad timing can hold one back for months, years or decades. I have friends who strive to recover from muscles ripped off the bone, spinal injuries and a variety of broken, twisted and ripped joints and bones.
Understanding that the body is one piece begins the process of seeing the life of the athlete, a training year and a workout from a more distant vantage point. It is a global view, a paradigm shift, from seeing everything as bits and pieces like Frankenstein’s monster to seeing everything as miraculously interconnected.
The second point is that there are three kinds of strength training. It’s taken me twelve years to come up with a better way to explain this to people. Obviously, I still stand by it, but some good questions have come up. The best is when the fitness industry fell back in love with movement. The industry falls in love with everything new, exciting and shiny and, frankly, I fall on the opposite end of new, exciting and shiny. I like things to be basic and simple.
My gym is basic and simple. (It’s also my garage.) It’s heavy with kettlebells, barbells, TRXs, and a mishmash of stuff that allows us to handle up to two-dozen people and get some great training in a short period of time.
For recovery, I have a hot tub, sauna and a very interesting electronic massage bed that does all the work for you. I also have plenty of food and emergency supplies from beer to bandages, depending on your injury.
It attracts a great range of people. I train with nutritionist and the elderly, high school coaches and people with life-altering diseases. Everyone is welcome—and by everyone, I include elite Special Forces personnel and NFL and MLB players. The upside of all of this is the great conversations. You get a glimpse into the wide world of elite performance, and you hear some funny things.
One of our regulars is a Major League Baseball player. One of the things he likes about training at our gym is that we don’t have “eyewash.” What is eyewash? It is all that pomp and circumstance and grandstanding and “look at me, look at me” that dominates the fitness industry. Listen, it’s a burpee; you don’t need to film it for the historical record. That’s eyewash.
Eyewash abounds in our industry. We need to get back to the basics of getting people to move more and move better so they can move more and move better.
Jim Gaffigan, one of my favorite comedians, has this great insight into Mexican food—
Mexican food’s great, but it’s essentially all the same ingredients, so there’s a way you’d have to deal with all these stupid questions.
“What is nachos?”
“Nachos? It’s tortilla with cheese, meat and vegetables.”
“Oh, well then what is a burrito?”
“Tortilla with cheese, meat and vegetables.”
“Well then what is a tostada?”
“Tortilla with cheese, meat and vegetables.”
“Well then what i—”
“Look, it’s all the same s—t! Why don’t you say a Spanish word and I’ll bring you something.”
I see training people the same way. You want to play in the NFL? Good, then we have to do pushes, pulls, hinges, squats and loaded carries, plus that everything else that’s mostly groundwork.
And you? MLB? Ah, yes, that would be pushes, pulls, hinges, squats and loaded carries.
Do you see that nice fat-loss client over there? She seems to need, I don’t know, let’s say, pushes, pulls, hinges, squats and loaded carries, plus that everything else that’s mostly groundwork
Programming is that simple. Everybody has the same basic body and needs, and we must have the courage to train the fundamentals, the basics, at least 80 percent of the time. Sure, add some spice in there now and again, but focus on the basics.
As I was told by a truly great coach, Rick Bojak: “You need to have the courage not to get bored watching the basics.” That’s the key. Yes, I know our clients and athletes come in with all these new and great ideas about how to train after watching twenty seconds on the internet or a TV commercial, but it’s our responsibility to steer them back to the basics.
Let’s practice.
Client: “I saw blah blah blah on the internet, and I really want to give it a try.”
Inside your brain: “Eyewash. Eyewash.”
Program like this: Tortilla with cheese, meat, and vegetables. Stick with the basics for everybody—
Pushes
Pulls
Hinges
Squats
Loaded Carries
Everything else, but mostly groundwork
Honestly, if your clients do the fundamental human movements with appropriate repetitions and load, they will be well on their way to almost any goal.
The third pillar in my philosophy is that all training is complementary. As I have noted to many trainers, there is an “e” in there, not an “i.” So, it isn’t complimentary like: “Well, you look very good today, my young trainee! Excellent to see, and I love what you are wearing.
Complementary is a bit different. We need to be able to tell the client: “Well, the soccer game you just played worked perfectly on honing your sprinting skills” or “You know, yoga would be a great place to practice that joint mobility work you want for increasing your sprinting speed.”
Understanding the concept that all training is complementary frees up a lot of time as you begin to realize the key to success in training and life: More is usually just more. One of my favorite stories comes to mind here. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are sitting around one day, talking about life, when Thoreau pauses.
“Yes?” asks Emerson, expectantly.
“Simplify, simplify,” says Thoreau.
“You didn’t need the second ‘simplify,’” replies Emerson.
It is hard to remember this basic point sometimes. Training programs and exercise selection and nutritional tweaks bombard us nearly every time we get on the internet or open a new fitness magazine. We get deluged with “try this” and “do that.” How do we filter what works for us or for our clients? How do we discern what will or won’t work? Start by discovering your philosophy for training. What are the basic suppositions that drive your vision of training, health, and fitness?
Once you know this, it’s time to design a multiyear, yearly, seasonal, or daily program (training session) by focusing on these three simple things—
1. Focus on movements, not muscles. Ignore biceps, quads, or arm day. Stop thinking your clients are a Frankenstein’s monster. Training the movements will build muscles, stretch the client back into alignment and bring back joint mobility.
2. Do what’s important every day. Once we know the moves, how often should they be done? My suggestion: every day. With most athletes, the movement needs repeating far more than most people think. At the elite levels of track and field and Olympic lifting, the total number of full movements is simply staggering.
3. Repetitions…lots of repetitions. I can’t say it any better than what I learned from a hearing-impaired discus thrower I worked with a few years ago. He had become very good, and I asked him his secret. He took his right middle finger and twisted it over his right index finger and then slapped it into his left palm. In sign language, it means “repetition.”
The Fourth Tool: Basic bodybuilding and Mobility Training (the Fountain of Youth)
Let’s just say you are a well-meaning trainer, and you decide to take ninety-three-year-old Grandpa on the journey back to teen muscle.
So, we pick up Grandpa and take him over to one of these new “back to the jungle” training programs. Gramps has been in a wheelchair for seven years after falling in church. Sign him up for tree climbing and leaping off boulders and all the rest, which I respect, but then press “refresh” on your brain. How do we get Gramps from the wheelchair to the wilderness?
That’s the value of machines. For post-youth basic bodybuilding, it’s hard to argue with how well machines work. For the record, I am not talking about machines as the answer to all questions after a six-week study that proves that Nautilus or whatever makes a difference. One of my readers sent me this study about how stretching alone improves strength in untrained people. Frankly, everything works for six weeks!
So, I see some hands raised.
“Yes? “
“Um, Danny, don’t you hate machine training?”
Alas. Before you ask, “Aren’t you the O-lifting/Highland Games/football guy?” Well, yes, I am, but there is also great value in just about every training system.
Moreover, the longer you stay in the game, the more astute the following point, attributed to Aristotle, becomes: “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” I had this same point explained to me as a circle. Inside the circle is everything you know. The circle line is where you touch all the things you don’t know. So, as you study something more and more, the more you realize that you have so much more to learn.
The more I learn and study, the less sure I am about anything. The same idea is true when someone takes a weekend certification program and suddenly knows how to fix everything from cancer to MS, and knows everything there is to know about sports. In case you are wondering: I do not think a weekend is long enough to achieve mastery in anything.
So let me say this: When it comes to aging well, I pull out my collection of Clarence Bass’s books and online materials, where I had my first contact with the Tabata protocol all the way back to 1998. In Bass’s work we discover how you train an older person safely, intelligently, and progressively. Yes, I love O lifts and kettlebells, but we need to keep in mind that every tool works, every method works, and every principle works at the right time.
A few sets of eight to ten reps with a few strength moves—and a touch of stretching to top things off—may be life changing for the elderly. A few movements will make a huge difference.
It can be that simple: a few lifts and a few stretches. Mastering the movements, however, is going to be a journey. On this journey, there will be some obstacles. We need a system for dealing with these issues, and at the heart of it is this: Strength training for lean body mass and joint mobility work outruns everything else.
How much time should you spend on basic bodybuilding and joint mobility? The answer is simple: all the time you can spare. If the goal is to live well enough as long as you can, don’t overlook either one.
Years ago, Doctor Vladimir Janda began discussing the muscles necessary for posture. To simplify, and that’s always a slippery slope, he separated muscles into two groups: tonic, which tend to shorten when tired (or old!); and phasic, which tend to weaken under stress (or age, I dare say).
Tonic Muscles (Shorten) Phasic Muscles (Weaken)
Upper Trapezius Rhomboids
Pectoralis Major Mid-back
Biceps Triceps
Pectoralis Minor Gluteus Maximus
Psoas Deep Abs
Piriformis External Obliques
Hamstrings Deltoids
Calf Muscles
I usually explain it this way: If a tiger chased you up a tree, the muscles you use to hang onto the branch for a long time are tonic muscles. If you decided to chase a deer, you’d use your phasic muscles.
Sadly, most trainers work this backward. They tend to emphasize the mirror muscles like the pecs and biceps—with, say, bench presses and curls—and ignore the muscles that are really the muscles of youth. Simply training with the fundamental human movements will do more for basic bodybuilding, mobility and function than a million isolation moves. Janda taught us this, and we can see how the chart above and the FHM are interrelated—
· Push: Deltoids and triceps
· Pull: Rhomboids
· Hinge: Butt
· Squat: Butt
· Loaded Carries: Butt
The movements you are ignoring are the things your clients need the most! As you look at this list, you should be impressed by the number of times “butt” appears. Training the glutes intelligently may be the fountain of youth!
So, movements first. Then, load. Let’s talk about reps, sets and load.
More coming soon…
live to learn give to earn.
Commandment One
More From Dan John:
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Dan’s favorite Guardian Academy principles are Raising The Floor and What Is Enough? Both are also discussed in Bumpers.