athletic training

Folding Inner Space, Part II – Cessation of Thought and Super-Human Effort

October 15, 2015 By Marty Gallagher 2 Comments

Folding Inner Space Part II Lead Photo

Hormonal Nitrous Oxide

Body-shocking physical effort, maximum effort of a very specific type and kind births an exercised-induced altered state of pure awareness that elite athletes routinely experience, yet fail to identify. Access to this exercise-induced zone of pure awareness can only be attained when the degree of difficulty is sufficient to cross a hormonal threshold.

How difficult is difficult? In progressive resistance training difficult means exerting to a degree equal to or surpassing whatever you are currently capable of. To enter exercise-induced Nirvana, you must equal or exceed your current physical limit in some way, shape or form, in some manner or fashion.

I have been self-inducing this physiological phenomena for fifty years and can say with the certainty that comes with half a century of concentrated practice that 100% maximal physical effort, and preferably 102% or 105% effort, is necessary to gain entry into the post-workout bliss-zone.

I am an athlete in a sport of complete mathematical certainty: I have been a national champion in both Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting. My sports are all about pounds lifted. It is a universe of numbers: sets, reps, frequency, duration, time under tension–everything in the elite strength world can and is assigned a numerical value. The iron elite create complex training matrices using cold logic and empirical data; this approach is the apogee of sophisticated rational thought applied to progressive resistance training.

How metaphysically ironic that we utilize the Yang rational left-brain, with its Spock-like coldness, its numerical and mathematical certainties, its science and logic to create the savage training regimens that unlocks the ethereal, intuitive artistic consciousness that lies dormant in the Yin right brain.

The rational goal of powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting is to increase the sheer amount of poundage lifted in the three powerlifts or two Olympic lifts. This can be accomplished by honing technique and/or by becoming stronger. The way in which we become stronger is to stress the body to such a degree that we invoke an adaptive response. We traumatize the body in a deliberate and systematic fashion in order to elicit a specific and desired physiological reaction.

When the body is purposefully stressed–and stressed to a dramatic degree, new muscle tissue is constructed: cells split and divide and strength increases; all as protective response to the self-inflicted trauma of an expertly applied progressive resistance training session. If the degree of difficulty is sufficiently intense, a hormonal threshold is crossed and a tsunami of hormones are released into the bloodstream: endorphins, adrenaline, cortisol, growth hormone are shot into the bloodstream like hormonal nitrous oxide.

A productive training session is a body-shocking event. The sheer physicality of the effort is so muscularly exhaustive that it completely depletes and drains the human body. There is a concurrent hormonal floodtide. Somewhere in the immediate aftermath, the mind grows silent and the shattered body becomes enveloped in a relaxed and blissful state of pure awareness and contentment.

In this post-workout state, clarity, vividness and cognition are amplified. Effortlessly, without suppression, the conscious observer ceases its endless babbling inside the athlete’s skull. As my mental mentor, Krishnamurti noted, “The cessation of thought is the awakening of intelligence.” When the never-ending unceasing internal dialogue ceases, the athlete is able to experience the electric crackle that imbues the very atmosphere of the instantaneous present.

As the exhausted yet elated athlete basks in his endorphin afterglow, he looks out at the gym from inside his head without the inky film of thought blurring his vision; every thing, every object, every person, every object and color is vibrant and enhanced, visually amplified. The athlete glows and basks in his centered, peaceful post-workout state of intense quietude: he is content, he is exhausted, he is at peace and centered. This post-workout glow, the beatific state-of-being bears many overt and subtle similarities to the amplified states of consciousness achieved in sitting meditation.

Like base jumping, big wave surfing, skydiving or cliff jumping, big poundage teaches with a big stick. Any man that attempts more than he is capable of, via psych and preparation and sheer effort, must learn how to create a totality of effort–nothing less will accomplish a muscular task that exceeds current capabilities and capacities.

On the other hand, dare to struggle, dare to win. No one ever improved by doing the same thing, over and over in the same way. To approach, equal or (optimally) exceed current physical capacity, the athlete must successfully achieve a synergistic melding of mind and body. We seek something profound: we seek to perform past all rational and realistic expectations. To do so will require more than human effort, it will require superhuman effort. Superhuman effort can only occur if a mind/body melding has already occurred.

Psych and Artificially-Inducing “Fight-or-Flight”

Elite athletes access modified consciousness by self-inflicting a cataclysmic event in the form of a body-shocking training session. They train so hard, so intensely and so fiercely that the body is “tricked” into invoking the primal “fight-or-flight” syndrome. We force a mind/body synergistic melding by subjecting our own body to a task that is so physically demanding, so difficult, so outrageous, that it can only be accomplished by exerting a 100% effort.

Any physical effort at or above 100% of realistic capacity demands that mind and body enter into a unified partnership in order to successfully cope. Only through a successful mind-body melding can we make the body do that which it is currently incapable of. If successful, we set a new performance benchmark and simultaneously acquire all the physiological benefits associated with progressive resistance training.

Humans are no longer chased by bears, attacked by invaders, forced to hunt and kill to eat. Only on rare occasions does modern man invoke the fight-or-flight response. Athletes rekindle and reawaken the dormant fight-or-flight impulse, they hotwire it, like stealing a car. Any athlete performs better, light-years better, when aroused, centered, focused, fierce, alert, highly combative and possessing an overall heightened sense of awareness.

The athlete convinces the mind that it is fighting for its life. How? By subjecting the body to a 100% all-out physical effort. The degree of struggle and effort are the tripwire mechanism. The body realizes it is about to be pulverized and the fight-or-flight response awakens in order to cope.

*The nervous system’s response should be the same…*

So instead of having a saber tooth tiger leap out of the woods, the athlete voluntarily attempts to exceed a previous best in an exercise, set and rep benchmark. Once the brain becomes convinced that, yes, we have a genuine fight-or-flight situation, the brain declares Defcon 5 and triggers an adrenaline dump–which is felt immediately. When the adrenaline begins coursing through the bloodstream, we throw hormonal gasoline on the mental fire.

Excitation combines with emotion and if channeled properly enables the lifter to lift 5% to 10% more than if they performed the identical lift without a proper psych. The best athletic psychers are getting a full 10% over their non-psyched self. Think of elite athlete “super psych” as the bottled, formalized, artificial version of the 140-pound lady who lifts the back end of the car off her child that is pinned underneath the vehicle. The elite strength athlete is a psych master. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t be elite.

Normal fitness trainees are oblivious to the degree of effort needed to forcibly morph the human body: only in response to self-inflicted trauma does the adaptive response trigger; only in response to superhuman effort does the body build new muscle. Elite athletes have performance benchmarks that they continually seek to improve upon. By continually expanding our limits, the body is forced to transform. The human body will not and does not grow new muscle (hypertrophy) or acquire more strength by exerting sub-maximally.

Sub-maximal exertion, can, at best, serve to retain the physical status quo. The body will not radically transform in response to sub-maximal exertion.
Exceeding capacity requires the mind and body unify and assist one another–otherwise the total effort is insufficient to accomplish the task.

Please be aware that you are not expected to perform one-rep maximum single reps in all your progressive resistance sessions. The man with the 400×1 back squat will have a 5-rep personal best of say, 350-pounds, a triple max of 370, a 10-rep PR of 315-pounds, and so on. In any session the trainee can select from an infinite variety of capacity benchmarks. Capacity can have a myriad of expressions.

A trainee that seeks extraordinary results must exert extraordinary effort, superhuman effort; mere human effort can only maintain what has been achieved already. Continually assault the limits. This implies that you have limits to assault. Establish benchmarks; embrace struggle and embrace difficulty. Do so and reap the optimal physiological and psychological benefit: a transformed body and a transformed mind.

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Marty Gallagher is the author of Strong Medicine, The Purposeful Primitive and Coan: The Man, The Myth, The Method. Gallagher coached the United States team that won the IPF powerlifting world team title in 1991. He is a 6-time national masters champion and national record holder. He was the IFF world master powerlifting champion in 1992. He currently works with elite athletes, spec ops military and governmental agencies.

Folding Inner Space: Part I – Iron Zen: Exercise-Induced Altered States

October 1, 2015 By Marty Gallagher 12 Comments

Iron Zen

Tibetan Lama Dungse Jampol is the son of a Tibetan meditation master. At a young age he asked his father to explain to him, “What is the nature of the mind?” and “What is ‘pure existence” and what is the meaning of “enlightenment?” His father sat down and said to the boy, “Come closer.” The boy came within arms length of the father who gestured him even closer by wagging his finger. When the boy’s forehead was within six inches of the father, the elder lama unleashed a blood-curdling scream that literally sent the youngster reeling. Dungse recalled, “That scream was so loud and so intense and so unexpected that I was paralyzed; shocked, my mind was completely cleared of everything – instantly. My father excitedly said, “See! There it is! There it is!”

It is my contention that intense physical effort, the kind of effort generated during limit-exceeding weight training sessions, offers an entranceway into higher realms of consciousness. My Zen master friend, Ken O’Neil, and I have talked frequently about this phenomenon at length and in depth. I have long sought out others that have experienced this Iron Satori in my ongoing effort to bring attention to this rarified and refined quality of consciousness attained during “Iron Zazen.”

Exercise-induced altered consciousness, or, alternatively and more poetically, The Zen of Pure Physical Effort, is a higher awareness induced by intense physical exercise. Superhuman effort opens the “heavy door with rusted hinges.”

I have been a hardcore weight trainer for 54 years and a meditator for 43 years. Nietzsche once noted “true greatness requires long obedience in the same direction.” To which I would add, over time and with continual repetition the ability to enter into exercise-induced altered states of consciousness becomes easier. The longer and more often the athlete enters these zones of heightened sensory awareness, the deeper the experience becomes and the easier it is accessed: vividness and clarity magnify with repeated visitations.

The exercise-induced altered mindset offers a “shortcut” method, a meditational way in which to fold inner space.

We can jump the beginning meditator ahead; throw them into the deep end of the pool, metaphorically speaking, through the precise application of Iron Zen. Intense physical effort shortens the meditation learning curve, depositing the Iron Zen adherent into an advanced state-of-being. Entry is dependent on the quality of the individual workout: if the effort is deep enough, sincere enough, intense enough, Huxley’s Doors of Perception swing open and the exerciser is predictably enveloped in blissful state of exercise-induced nirvana.

Conscious thought is the enemy, the destroyer of optimal human performance. The elite athlete understands this fact: they embrace and inhabit a wordless state that characterizes optimal human performance. Intense physical effort attacks the human body on a variety of fronts in a variety of ways: we self-inflict body trauma in order to induce beneficial stresses. The optimal workout creates stress. The poison is in the dose.

Our subtle task is to create sufficient stress to invoke the adaptive response–this in order to reap all the considerable benefit associated with expertly applied progressive resistance training. Too little self-induced stress and nothing of any physical or psychological consequence occur. What are the stress categories?

Mental stress
Hormonal stress
Central nervous system stress
Muscular stress
Internal organ stress

How do we create beneficial stresses and not overdo or under-do the dose?

The requisite stress dose appears when we approach, equal or exceed some measure, some current performance benchmark. Hypertrophy, strength, power and exercise-induced satori do not and cannot appear or occur in response to sub-maximal effort. Pushing up to or past capacity–in some way, shape or form–is what triggers all the good stuff.

The elite athlete is able to will his body to perform past its realistic capacity. This ability is one of the contributing factors to why the elite are the elite. At the highest levels of athletics, regardless the sport, everyone has the genetics and everyone has the work ethic, everyone is fast, everyone is strong and agile–so what separates 1^st form 5^th place?

In most cases superior or inferior placing correlates to the mental attributes (or lack there of) of the athlete. Some athletes are natural competitors and rise to the competitive occasion while others shrink and fall apart at the actual competition.

Human Nervous System

The elite athlete is willfully able to invoke the primordial fight-or-flight response, the necessary precursor to extraordinary effort. Successfully triggering the flight-or-flight response sets in motion everything of benefit that follows. How does one “artificially” invoke fight-or-flight? They create a system of psych.

Successful superhuman effort requires a singularity of mind. A person does not casually exert superhuman effort.

Elite athletes develop individualized mental methods by which they psych themselves up in order to achieve superhuman levels of performance. Athletes do not care one wit about attaining higher levels of consciousness; elite athletes only care about improved performance. An experienced, mature, seasoned athlete uses a highly developed psych designed to elevate the quality of the individual workout and elevate performance in actual competitions.

Recalibrating the mind is the necessary precursor to elevating performance. The “Psych” is a conscious, willful act. The athlete executes a mental checklist that they have developed over time. They recalibrate their mindset to prepare for the training session. Once the actual training session is underway, a highly individualized psych-up routine is used repeatedly in each exercise, drill or protocol.

By consciously focusing, concentrating and using tunnel-vision focus, the seasoned athlete optimizes their capacities and abilities. This singularity of purpose improves the quality of, and results derived from, the workout. The key to continual improvement is being able to string together long series of quality workouts, like pearls strung together on a necklace strand.

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Back in the Coaching Saddle… After a Twenty Year Hiatus

July 23, 2015 By Marty Gallagher 6 Comments

Marty Gallagher and Cristi Bartlett

I stopped coaching at the national and international level when my superstar powerlifter, Kirk Karwoski, retired in 1996. After a ten-year rocket ride with the Kirk, the undisputed King of powerlifting, anything subsequent would have been anticlimactic. Kirk crushed the best with yawning nonchalance: he won seven straight national titles in three different weight divisions. He steamrolled to six straight world titles and set 20 + world records, including an all-time squat record of 1,003 pounds that remains unsurpassed to this day, 18 years after being set. He was widely considered to have had the strongest legs in the history of powerlifting and he built his unprecedented leg power using a strength system I introduced him to. He and I, coach and athlete, refined and fine-tuned this simplistic approach over the next decade. With each succeeding year he got substantially better.

We called our power approach “The Modified Cassidy” because this unique strength strategy was based on an approach first devised by world champion Hugh Cassidy. Hugh’s template was brutal yet effective, a minimalistic approach towards strength training (and eating) that we customized for Kirk. We were heavily influenced by innovative modifications made to the same system we used by power immortals Ed Coan and Doug Furnas. I talked to Coan weekly for years; we were like two lab scientists discussing a mutual science project—which happened to be Kirk. He was the baby gorilla we were raising in captivity: each week I would tell Coan what Karwoski had done in training and listen to Ed’s feedback. We had this ongoing three-way conversation and eventually settled on a system that caused Kirk to skyrocket. It took five years of dues paying before Kirk won his first national title. That same year he took second place at the world championships when Kristo Vilmi of Finland, edged him by 5-pounds. After that, Karwoski went on a rampage: Vilmi was the last man to beat Kirk, ever.

Kirk and I were a coach/athlete partnership: we thought long and hard each successive competitive year about what new wrinkles we would add, what modifications we would apply, how would we hone and refine our core strength system to make it better. We had a viewpoint, a philosophic strength strategy and our report card was how we did at the national and world championships. For seven years he was the best in the world—by a country mile. He didn’t defeat the competition; he annihilated the competition. He was our champion and we campaigned a specific method, a defined strength philosophy. Kirk was the best in the world for a long, long time and he could have won five more world titles had he not become bored with it all.

I did a lot of coaching at nosebleed levels, including coaching the United States to the IPF world team title at the 1991 world championships in Orebro, Sweden. Like Kirk, I too got burnt out. Truth be known, I didn’t miss coaching. I did so much of it for so long and with such a high caliber of athlete that the idea of coaching again held zero appeal. That all changed when I got a load of Cristi Bartlett. Naturally I heard about her before I met her. She was a protégé of Jim Steel, the no-nonsense, Old School, hardcore strength coach at University of Pennsylvania. Jimmy has been at Penn going on 15 years and oversees a 20-million dollar facility with responsibilities for twenty + collegiate sport teams. He needs help and Cristi worked for Jim as an assistant coach. He began telling me about her years ago and a few years back I met her.

I was really impressed with how she looked and how she moved. She was a muscled-up 190-pounds, which sounds huge, but on her it looked quite normal. She moved like a panther and had “elite athlete” stamped all over her. I was hardly surprised when told she’d been a collegiate basketball player and held a Masters degree in exercise science. Cream rises to the top and genetics, brains and youth are always a good combination in an athlete. While I was not surprised at her athletic pedigree or academic degree, I was quite surprised (shocked, actually) at how “spot-on” her deadlift technique was: she deadlifted as if she’d come straight out of the same Hugh Cassidy technical deadlift boot camp that world champions Mark Dimiduk, Mark Chaillet, Marty Gallagher, Kirk Karwoski and Don Mills were schooled in.

She had intuitively taught herself how to pull using the same technique we were taught: narrow stance, upright torso, bust it from the floor using leg power, finish off the pull with a steel-coil hip hinge held in reserve until that special instant. “Where’d you learn to pull like that?” It was the first question I ever asked her. “Oh, I sort of figured it out on my own. It seemed logical.” Now that was the right answer. She had excellent body proportions; a positive indicator for future balanced lifting. Most good female powerlifters are short and squat; they usually have good squats and good bench presses and are piss-poor deadlifters. Cristi is the rare breed: world level bench presser and deadlifter. She is also a 100% lifetime drug-free athlete.

I asked around a bit about the national and world records in the newly minted USAPL and IPF “raw” divisions. Raw powerlifting is done without any supportive gear, other than a weightlifting belt. The explosion of CrossFit has been a shot in the arm for raw powerlifting competitions. Nowadays the raw national championships might attract 400 + lifters. The USAPL and IPF are strictly judged; squats have to be below parallel; and they practice out-of-competition drug testing. Strict judging and strict drug testing work in Ms. Bartlett’s favor. Her training lifts were at or above world record level. For the first time in decades I sensed that here was an athlete capable of going all the way: become the best in the world. Few knew those “all the way” ropes better than me.

She was receptive to the idea of going to the USAPL national powerlifting championships. That competition would be held close by, in Scranton, and would occur in October, a long time off. We agreed in principle to “go for it.” She needed to compete in a qualifying meet in order to be eligible to compete at the nationals. We found a USAPL competition in suburban Baltimore on July 12^th and worked together for eight weeks leading up to the Baltimore competition. The web is a wonderful training tool: each week she would video tape her “top set” in the squat or deadlift and e-mail it to me. I would review it, critique it and then, based on all the combined factors, we would make the poundage/rep call for the subsequent workout. It was agreed that the key to her ultimate powerlifting success would be lie in increasing her leg strength.

She was already world level in both bench pressing and deadlifting but she was 100 pounds off the pace in the squat. Champions don’t continually play to their strengths; instead they attack their weakness. That is where the dramatic improvement lies. Ergo, it only stood to reason that she would concentrate on bringing up her squat: to do so would make her invincible. Rome would not be built in a day and we would treat the Baltimore meet as a mere workout, she would lift conservatively: no close misses.

Cristi Bartlett Deadlift

The actual competition turned out to be a madhouse as 100 lifters were lifting. The 28-year old exhibited coolness in her competitive demeanor; she was aggressive yet upbeat, engaged but unfazed, she was alternately in one of two states: totally relaxed sitting in the audience with her dad and Tracey, her training partner, or prior to a lift, concentrated and focused. In her squats, her first attempt was with 295-pounds and she buried the lift a full three inches below parallel. It was a “three-white-light” success. Her 315-pound second attempt squat was easier than the first. She roared out and methodically dispatched a perfect 3^rd attempt with 330. Each squat was a cookie-cutter replication of the previous perfect squat.

In the bench press she was nursing a shoulder injury, a serious injury that caused her to train light. She was not at her benching best. The competitive bench press has to be paused on the chest and then pressed evenly and perfectly: she perfectly pressed 205, 231 and finally a very easy 248. We were unaware that the national record was 252-pounds, or we would have taken 256 on her 3^rd attempt. Six lifts, three squats, three bench presses, eighteen white lights; she was perfection in motion.

In the deadlift, she hit her first (and only) snag of the day when on her 1^st attempt deadlift with 440-pounds she drew a lone red light; the side judge said she did not have her shoulders all the way back at lockout. Two judges passed the lift. She asked for 485 pounds on her second attempt deadlift. The current national record was 473 pounds. After seeing the slump-shouldered 440 opening deadlift, I secretly thought 45 pounds might be a bridge to far. Plus the competition was dragging on and on and cumulative fatigue was a real factor; Cristi had taken her first squat warm-up at 9:30 am and now it was 2:30 pm. That is a long time to maintain an edge.

To my surprise and delight, she strode out and after a long, hard pull locked out 485 pounds to set the new national record. What a GRIP! Mark Chaillet had the strongest set of hands I’ve ever seen and he could just tug and tug and tug on an 850 + pound deadlift all day long—Cristi has that same powerhouse type of “kung fu grip.”

After she locked the weight out and accepted the thunderous applause, she came off stage and I congratulated her. “That’s it—right? You don’t want a 3^rd do you?” After seeing how tough the 485 was, after seeing the adrenaline dump and the excitation of that national record, I was convinced she was done. “Whoa!” she said, “How about a 3^rd attempt?” I was puzzled, “Really?” I looked deep in her eyes; she was smiling but serious. I didn’t say it but thought; if you worked that hard with 485, what are we going for on the 3^rd, 486??? “Sure!” I said, “What’s the number?” She didn’t hesitate. “500!”

She would need to find a deeper well somewhere. To make a long story short, it was as if everything in the competition leading up to this point was the preliminary stuff. By now it was apparent to everyone in the oversized, stuffed to capacity gym, that this woman, pound for pound, was the best lifter in the entire competition, female or male. This deadlift would be more than the male class winner in the 184-pound class and it would exceed her just-set national record. It would also exceed the current 496-pound IPF world record in the deadlift.

https://youtu.be/V3eGtpDQaW4

She crushed 500. 485 was light years better than 440 and 500 was light years easier than 485. She had racked up nine perfect lifts and made 26 out of a possible 27 white lights. She ended with a world record-exceeding lift in her second-ever powerlifting competition. It was exciting as hell. It triggered a feeling in me I hadn’t felt since Kirk hung it up. As my old boss at the Washington Post, Vic Sussman used to say, “Let the facts speak for themselves.” Here is a fact: Cristi Bartlett got me back into coaching…and I am excited to see how far she can go. If she caught fire she could become the female Ed Coan, she’s that talented.

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