Lou Schuler's Blog

When my friend Ellington Darden released his new book, The Body Fat Breakthrough, it immediately rose to the top in Amazon’s Weight Training category. It’s still there as I write this.

Ellington noticed that a handful of books perennially rank in the top 10: Strength Training Anatomy, Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength, and one that doesn’t seem to fit in that group: The New Rules of Lifting for Women.

He pointed out that all fitness pros know the same basic facts about human physiology. Alwyn Cosgrove’s training programs are both unique and effective, but they aren’t the only way to achieve the results our readers want. So he asked me a simple question: What’s different about NROL for Women? What separates it from so many other workout books written before and since?

I gave him my honest response: I don’t know. I’m as surprised as anyone. It’s the second in a five-book series, but in a typical week it doubles the combined sales of the other four. More than that, it’s a book for women written by a bald-headed, middle-aged journalist whose best work appears in Men’s Health magazine.

Ellington said some flattering things about my writing style, which I appreciate. But if you look through the one-star reviews on Amazon you’ll see the limits of my literary appeal.

So what is it?

I found one answer on a lively Facebook page dedicated to the NROL books. In a post titled “The New Rules of Lifting for Women Alumni Club,” Dana Smith wrote this:

For a lot of us, this was our first experience with compound, heavy-duty lifts. We went into the gym a little intimidated, clutching our book, and just praying we didn’t make complete fools out of ourselves in our very first workout. We leave the gym 7 stages later with a lot of swag and a sense of confidence that can’t be bought anywhere else.

That’s it, I thought. It’s the sense of adventure, of possibility. You never thought of lifting heavy weights as something you can do. But what if it is? What if you actually enjoy it? Thrive on it? How does that change the way you see yourself?

When I wrote to Dana to ask permission to quote her post, she added this:

Anyone who actually finishes the book as written comes out a changed person. It really is amazing how the transformation is just as much mental and, dare I say, spiritual, as it is physical. Most of us never knew just how awesome we could be! Finishing that book opens doors we never knew even existed. It really is a life changer.

It’s also interesting to me to see the women who don’t finish it. ‘It’s too hard.’ ‘It’s too confusing.’ ‘It’s too long.’ They are the same ones who never finish any program, and nothing ever changes. The ones who stick with it are never the same.

[The book] makes us feel like we have a right to be in the gym and actually have everything we need to be successful. That right there is mind blowing to a lot of us. Who knew?

Lots of people knew then. Lots more people know now. But back in 2006, when I first proposed the book to my editor, Megan Newman, what the experts and enthusiasts knew wasn’t reaching the average woman working out in the average health club. That woman was typically doing machine circuits, or using Barbie weights (a term I didn’t coin but did my best to popularize), or staying out of the weight room altogether.

NROL for Women made the counterintuitive case for doing the opposite, for training like men instead of fragile ornaments who’ll break if they lift a weight heavier than their purse. (The original title was Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess, which we kept as a subtitle.) If we were wrong, the book would’ve died a quick and much-deserved death. But we weren’t. Almost every day I see readers’ testimonials in emails, on Facebook, on blogs, in Tweets and Pins. And of course I see it in sales, which is the ultimate validation for a writer.

Which brings me back to Ellington’s question: What is it about a six-year-old book that continues to resonate with readers? After all, the basic information in the book can be found in countless places these days. Female strength is celebrated in groups like Girls Gone Strong. My friend Jen Sinkler, a terrific writer and athlete, has become a hero to gym rats of both genders with her admonition to “lift weights faster.”

And no matter how good the message is, there’s still the unlikely-messenger problem.

I wonder if the key to the whole thing can be found in these lines from the Introduction:

What I can’t bring myself to do is find a hundred ways to say ‘you can do it!’ You can do it if you want to do it. I know it. You know it. Do I really need to say it over and over?

They’re echoed in the book’s final sentences:

Nobody can choose to be perfect, but all of us can choose to be better. So what’s your choice?

Thoughts?

Recently I made a huge decision: I self-published my novel, Saints Alive.

Huge for me, anyway. To the rest of the world, my fiction debut is somewhat less epic. But that’s okay. You have to start somewhere, and for most of us that’s the bottom.

As it happens, the bottom of self-publishing is almost immeasurably big, and it gets bigger every day.

Consider: As recently as 1998, there were about 900,000 titles listed in Books in Print. By 2012 there were 32 million. Those are just the ones that can be tracked by ISBN number. Digital-publishing specialist Thad McIlroy estimates that a million Kindle ebooks are published a year through Amazon.

If he’s correct, and if those Kindle uploads are evenly distributed throughout the year, that means Saints Alive was one of 2,740 books published on March 3, 2014, and it’s now competing for readers with the 2,740 that were published on every day since then.

So why would I throw my first novel into that gaping void – the literary equivalent of emptying my bladder into one of the Great Lakes – when I already have a decent career in publishing?

Let’s discuss.

What I do for a living

I started writing my first book, Testosterone Advantage Plan, in 2000. Since then I’ve rarely gone a year without working on at least one. This year alone I’ll publish two: Wolfgang Puck Makes It Healthy (a project I launched with Wolfgang and Chad Waterbury back in 2010) and The Lean Muscle Diet, with Alan Aragon, which comes out December 23.

I’m deeply invested in the idea that an author is only as good as his last book, and my last book is never good enough to lift the low-grade pressure I feel almost every day. I still panic over every deadline, as my coauthors will attest. Before every release I worry that I’ve slipped past my sell-by date and I’m the last to know.

More often than not, things turn out okay. Most of my books have spent at least an hour or two in Amazon’s top 100, and rank as the number-one book in a key category, if only for that same 60-minute window. They all remain in print. Three are “in the black,” meaning my coauthors and I collect royalty checks twice a year. (My first two were work-for-hire, so there was no “black” to get into. If I’d had royalties, I’d be sitting in a much nicer chair as I write this.)

I tell you these things with a mix of gratitude, pride, and wonder. I’m grateful for every single reader, even the ones whose reviews are the equivalent of a punch to the trachea. At least they gave my work a chance. Pride comes from enjoying some success when there’s never been more competition for readers.

As for wonder, I feel it when I read sentences like this one, from Thad McIlroy: “The average author doesn’t have a hope in hell of making more than a pittance.”

That would be really scary, if not for the fact I am an average author, and I do make more than a pittance. At least when it comes to nonfiction.

I’m what the industry calls midlist, which means my books are profitable but not bestsellers. I’m not rich (although I’m very much in favor of the idea), but I’ve been able to pay the bills and keep my family in the middle class.

So far, anyway.

But that still leaves open the question I’ve asked myself over and over the past few years: Do I really want to jump into a completely different branch of publishing, one where I have no record of success and exponentially more competition?

I have some perspective on that.

The news is always bad

For as long as I’ve been in the media, going back to journalism school in the late ’70s, the forecast has been some variation on “cloudy, with an 80 percent chance of Oh my God we’re all going to die!”

There are always too many writers vying for too few jobs. There’s never enough opportunity, or money, or bandwidth.

The difference between then and now is that, until recently, you couldn’t choose to publish yourself. There were barriers to entry, guarded by agents, editors, and even the writers who were successful enough to act as gatekeepers. Collectively, we rejected anyone who tried to create his or her own reality by self-publishing. We wouldn’t even glance at their books. We only let outsiders in when they looked, spoke, and wrote like insiders, and self-publishing was the last thing an insider would do.

Of course those gatekeepers still exist. They’re my friends and allies when I write diet and workout books. Together we make the cost of entry prohibitive to outsiders. I bring subject expertise and editorial skill. They bring enough money to allow me to do this for a living, along with design, production, and distribution. With a quick glance most readers can see the difference between traditional and self-published books in my niche.

But fiction is different. Production costs are negligible. Editorial skill can be purchased by the hour. Subject expertise is unnecessary. You either write well, or you don’t. Your story captivates readers, or it doesn’t. The only advantages traditional publishers have are in distribution and prestige. And when so many self-published novelists build large, loyal audiences and make a decent living, neither of those matters.

The bottom line: Why not?

Now, it’s one thing to note that lots of writers have beaten the gatekeepers at what used to be their game. It’s another to contemplate my own odds, especially when I stare into an abyss with thousands of new competitors each week.

It really comes down to this: I feel like I’ve already beaten the odds. Early in my career I got work in newspapers and magazines despite the market being saturated with journalism-school grads. In mid-career I found a perfect niche for my interests and skills. My nonfiction books have generally sold well, starting with my very first. And I’m still challenged by the work I do for Men’s Health.

But that’s not the only writing I do.

I’ve been making up stories since childhood. I started writing short fiction in college, screenplays in the mid-1980s, and novels soon after. Some of that work objectively wasn’t bad.

I typically got through the first gatekeeper, in that I worked with an agent. I sometimes got past the second gatekeeper, the lowest-rung editor at a publishing house. But that was it, and that was only a couple of times.

The worst part was the illusion that I’d come close. The editor would have suggestions on how to make the novel salable to his or her bosses. The agent would throw in some ideas as well. And that’s where my hopes died. In effect, what the gatekeepers said was, “Your project might work with a different story, different characters, and different words. While you’re at it, try being a different writer too. What do you think?”

One thing I learned about wholesale revisions: they never work. Not for me, anyway. The farther I got from the nugget of an idea that pulled me to the keyboard in the first place, the worse the project got.

Something similar happened with Saints Alive. I worked with an agent who gave me some good ideas and some that I didn’t think would work. I decided to stay with the nugget of my idea, and she stopped returning my emails.

As a publishing lifer, I know exactly what it means when a gatekeeper doesn’t just shut the gate, she moves it in the middle of the night. An agent’s job is to sell a book to an editor, whose job is to sell it to his or her bosses, whose job is to sell truckloads of books to retailers and distributors. The agent looked at Saints Alive and saw a book that might sell armloads, and even that would depend on my family and friends coming out in force.

I’m totally fine with the family-and-friends distribution plan. If the book sits on my hard drive gathering giga-dust, I have zero readers. If it’s out there on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, I have zero + something.

Zero + thousands would be great. But for now I’ll settle for zero + you and your parole officer. If each of you like it, and tell two more people, and each of them tell two … I’m not good at math, but over time it should add up to a couple of armloads.

And if it does, you know what that means: I’ve beaten the odds again.

A guest post by John Williams, Ph.D.

A couple of weeks ago a study came out claiming that Neanderthals ate chyme – the partially fermented stomach contents of reindeer. My first thought: “Lou Schuler will love this.”

Not because he enjoys obscure and occasionally revolting facts, although he probably does. I thought of him because we’ve had an ongoing discussion about the Paleo diet. We agree that it’s very effective and based on sound nutritional premises. But it can be a little thin when it tries to retrofit history and archaeology onto its preferred menu.

Since I’m an archaeologist and we’re both history buffs, we sometimes take issue with that retrofitting.

So I messaged Lou the chyme link, to which he replied, “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Chyme.” We went back and forth like this for a while. I would mention another factoid about hunter-gatherer delicacies, and Lou would come back with a punchline.

Me: “Comanches enjoyed squirting salty gall bladder bile on a bison’s liver and eating it raw.”

Lou: “So the Paleo diet wasn’t an endless smorgasbord of fatback ribs and fresh berries?”

Me: “And the Tonkawas liked to eat … roasted Comanche warrior.”

Lou: “Obviously for the sodium content!”

In a matter of minutes we turned our conversation into a pitch for menshealth.com. When we got the green light, we both started writing. Lou produced a concise 2,300-word article that got straight to the point, with some humor thrown in. I produced a long-winded, 4,700-word essay more suited for Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences than Men’s Health.

Lou was able to incorporate some of the more poignant parts of my writing into the mh.com article, and gently informed me that the remainder of my thesis would be better suited for a blog post on his website, where readers of the original article could go for more information.

So here you go, all 12 of you who actually want more details about lesser-known Paleo foods such as bile, blood, brains, and guts. You’re welcome.

The Noble Savage

When archaeologists read about the Paleo diet, they often cringe at the tendency to romanticize the past. Those tall, robust cavemen had it made, roasting the best cuts of meat over an open fire on a starry night. The perfect life, right? We have a name for this: the “noble savage” myth.

But know, that I alone am king of me.

I am as free as nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

-John Dryden, “The Conquest of Granada,” 1672

The concept was popularized in 18th-century western Europe to describe a general feeling that mankind had become corrupted in industrialized society, straying from a hypothetically harmonious natural state that all primitive societies enjoyed.

But archaeologists know better. The amount of unadulterated violence and suffering doled out and endured by our prehistoric ancestors and pre-modern societies would make Caligula blush. Prehistoric people mostly lived short, dirty lives and died young, usually at the hands of another person. According to Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, in a tribal society, a man was nine times more likely to be murdered than someone who lived through all of the wars, genocide, and crime in the 20th century (1).

This is not to diminish the fascinating story of the human endeavor. At times, life during the Paleolithic was undoubtedly glorious and even poetic. But the tendency has been to gloss over, or ignore altogether, some of the aspects of our past that don’t fit neatly within the noble savage stereotype.

I don’t share these details to have fun at the expense of other peoples or cultures here. All of us come from hunter-gatherer stock, and at one time or another, our ancestors delighted in eating foods that you won’t see in Bon Appétit.

More than Skin Deep

Today we look at a cow and see sirloin, T-bone, brisket, and ribs. Hunter-gatherers had a much more holistic perception of the animal, looking not only at steaks and kabobs, but also deep into its organs and vital bodily fluids, and even into the bones, all of which were dietary staples.

The following is a list of standard fare on the Paleolithic menu that you won’t hear touted very often by paleo diet advocates.

1. Chyme

In an age before dentists and fluoride, Neanderthals can be forgiven for not having a perfect Hollywood smile. Yet even by prehistoric standards, Neanderthals had really bad teeth that were densely coated in plaque. Archaeologists have studied this plaque buildup under a microscope and found traces of plant food.

This is surprising on several levels. We know that Neanderthals were big meat eaters based on chemical signatures left in their bones. Moreover, they lived in Ice Age Europe, when plants were sparse much of the year. The presence of medicinal herbs such as chamomile and yarrow on their teeth led some researchers to suggest they were self-medicating.

Recently, however, anthropologists Laura Buck and Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum have come to a different conclusion: the plant residue that turned their teeth yellow probably came from eating the warm, gooey chyme of freshly killed animals. Why spend the time and energy foraging for vegetables when they’re sitting right in the stomach of a freshly downed reindeer, who had spent the previous day finding and eating the most tender bunches of lichen? It was the Paleo equivalent of picking up a bag of mixed veggies in a grocery aisle, with active live cultures included for easy digestion. Even the bag was a chewy treat of tripe.

Eating chyme is not uncommon; it’s been observed in many near-modern pre-agriculturalist societies. In East Africa, the Kuria people use the gastric fluids of cattle, sheep, and goats for ritualistic purposes, slathering it over their bodies like a magical perfume that protects the wearer from harm (2).

In the Arctic, where plant food is almost nonexistent, the Inuit and related tribes got most or all of their vegetable food by sipping on the partly fermented and pre-digested content of caribou and muskoxen rumen. Thidwick wasn’t the only ruminant who munched on moose moss.

2. Milk and Blood

Prehistoric folks didn’t discriminate against bodily fluids. If it yielded any nutritional value at all, they used it. Humans were perpetual vampires, frequently gorging themselves on blood straight from the veins of downed animals, or even ones that were kept alive.

Is drinking blood, which is almost entirely protein, really all that different from drinking milk? In fact, milk and blood were commonly mixed into a warm, syrupy protein shake. This was done by several hunter-gatherer groups, in particular the pastoral Maasai of East Africa, whose diet consists almost entirely of milk, meat, and blood from their cattle (3). The milk and blood are primarily taken from live animals, who serve as walking vending machines. Their pastoral lifestyle has persisted for roughly 10,000 years, since cattle were domesticated in that region.

In the Llano Estacado of the Great Plains, which covers parts of present-day New Mexico and Texas, Comanche were able to survive the harsh, dry conditions by drinking warm buffalo blood straight from its veins (4). All fluids were appreciated. A real delicacy was the yogurt produced in the stomach of a suckling calf from the fermented remains of its mother’s milk. And mind you, the Comanche were hunting wild buffalo, not herding dairy cows.

The next time someone tells you that milk was only introduced in the human diet after the domestication of cattle, remember that hunter-gatherers, since time immemorial, have exploited the milk in the udders and stomachs of downed animals.

3. Man Flesh

The earliest unambiguous evidence for cannibalism dates back 800,000 years, to a cave known as Gran Dolina in Spain. Bones from at least 11 humans of species that preceded even the Neanderthals were found butchered and mixed up with the remains of other food sources, including bison, deer, and wild sheep.

Every human species since (and probably before) has engaged in man-eats-man. Why? Fair question.

It’s nearly impossible to look at any archaeological evidence and project intention. But our best guess is that the bones at Gran Dolina suggest those early humans didn’t think there was anything special about eating other people. The defleshing marks on the human bones at the cave were no different from the others. Nor was there any difference in the way the bodies were disposed of after they were butchered. Pragmatists to the end.

In contrast, cannibalism in modern and near-modern times, when not out of desperation, seems to have been more ritualistic. An interesting example is the ceremonial consumption of fallen warriors. The idea was that their power could be transferred to whomever got a taste.

For example, Captain James Cook, the famed explorer, was probably eaten by the Hawaiians who killed him in 1779 because he was considered a supernatural being (5). For all the good it did him.

The mh.com article mentions that the Tonkawa would cook and eat any Comanche warrior they could take. It includes part of an eyewitness description by Noah Smithwick, a pioneer Texan who was able to spend a lot of time with Native American tribes in Texas before they were confined to reservations. Here’s a longer version of Smithwick’s story:

“The only one (instance of cannibalism) I ever witnessed was … of a Comanche, one of a party that had been on a horse stealing trip down into Bastrop. They were hotly pursued, and, reasoning … that the biggest must naturally be the best … the most expert Tonks were mounted on the three fleetest horses and sent to dispatch him. This they soon accomplished, his steed being a slow one. After killing and scalping him they refused to continue the chase, saying they must return home to celebrate the event, which they accordingly did by a feast and scalp dance. Having fleeced off the flesh of the dead Comanche, they borrowed a big wash kettle … into which they put the Comanche meat, together with a lot of corn and potatoes – the most revolting mess my eyes ever rested on.” (6)

In the Tonkawa world, that pot of dude stew was a way to absorb the mojo of the fearsome Comanche, their traditional enemies who had reigned supreme on the Great Plains, and had handed out plenty of ruthless tribal justice for as long as they could remember.

Whether it was a form of everyday food, or a ritualistic means of achieving greater power, cannibalism was a part of many pre-modern societies across the world for hundreds of thousands of years.

4. Bone and Organ Grease

Dietary fat wasn’t easy to come by in the Paleolithic. Vegetable oil wasn’t even a thing, and wild animals were extremely lean. Domesticated animals, like domesticated humans, are much fatter than their wild counterparts. Not only do they carry more subcutaneous fat (the white strip you see surrounding a steak), but they also carry more fat within their muscles, creating the marbled cuts of meat that are most prized. The same cut of meat from a modern cow has many times more fat than from an elk.

Take tenderloin, for example. Even though it’s one of the leanest cuts of beef, you could trim off all the visible fat and it would still have more than twice as much as elk, by virtue of carrying more in the muscle.

To get enough fat to survive, they had to go a lot deeper – all the way down to the organs and bones.

Marrow is a particularly rich source. The marrow from a single tibia of a caribou provides on average over 100 grams of fat. It seems that hominids began exploiting bone marrow around 2.5 million years ago (7).

Our earliest human ancestors, the Australopithecines, were all of four feet tall and usually weighed in at less than 100 pounds soaking wet. They were far from the top of the food chain in their East African neighborhood. The physical strength, technology, and brainpower needed to hunt and take down big game came much later in human evolution. So they got their bones by scavenging.

We think it went like this:

A lion takes down an antelope. Our diminutive ancestors would hide in the bushes until the lion ate its fill. Then they’d scurry out, grab some bones, and run like hell to get away from the other scavengers looking for sloppy seconds. (Hyenas, then as now, weren’t exactly lap puppies.) Once they were safely sheltered, they’d crack into the bones with a rock to extract the marrow.

Wild animals also store fat in their organs, and their fat deposits fluctuate seasonally. Hunter-gatherers targeted animals during their “fat” stage. They also learned how to exploit the fat, which in wild animals is primarily stored around the gonads, kidneys, and intestines. They could either eat it directly, or cook the animals in a way that released the lipids.

For example, kangaroos were slow-cooked by Australian aborigines, who placed the whole kangaroo over coals in a pit, covering the carcass with hot ashes and sand. The abdomen was then opened and people dined on the ‘soup’ gathered in the carcass, comprised of blood and the fat-rich juices from and internal organs (8).

Another common method to extract hidden fat was to crush the long bones of butchered animals, bring them to a boil, and scoop off the bone grease that rises to the top. This method was used by ancient and modern Native Americans to make pemmican – a mixture of bone grease, berries, and dried meat that served as the equivalent of modern protein bars (9).

5. Alcohol and the “Drunken Monkey” Hypothesis

Grain alcohol is a relatively recent invention. It happened less than 10,000 years ago. But that doesn’t mean Paleolithic man couldn’t booze it up. There have been several sightings of drunken primates in rain forests across the world. This wasn’t an issue of apes hijacking beer trucks. Instead, some primates have developed a strategy of eating overripe fruit, which has undergone a natural fermentation process in warm, humid environments.

Experiments on overripe palm fruit have produced alcohol content typically in the range of beer, and as high as 8.1%. (That’s more than a Guinness.) It didn’t take long for researchers to make the connection from apes to ancient humans, particularly since fruit consumption remained an important part of the human diet up to the advent of agriculture.

It’s likely that, over millions of years of evolution, humans living in humid and warm forested areas have regularly consumed rotting fruit with levels of alcohol equivalent to your average beer (10).

Scientists have also noticed that, within the fascinating realm of human biodiversity, there is considerable variation in human physical and behavioral responses to alcohol. From an evolutionary perspective, this variation makes a lot of sense if exposure to low-concentration ethanol occurred in some human groups over the course of thousands and even millions of years, favoring the evolution of metabolic adaptations that maximize the benefits of alcohol consumption while minimizing the related costs.

Indeed, studies have shown health benefits with moderate alcohol consumption in both fruit flies and humans, relative to abstinence or getting cross-eyed drunk (11). It’s perhaps no coincidence that both fruit flies and humans have evolved for millions of years as frugivorous species.

Humans diverged from chimpanzees about 5 million years ago, and researchers at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida, recently discovered that a common ancestor of chimps, apes, and modern humans developed the ability to metabolize alcohol some 10 million years ago (12). Since then, human groups have apparently evolved distinctive responses to alcohol that at least partially explain the likelihood of alcoholism.

For example, alcoholism rates are much lower among East Asians than in Western Europeans and Native Americans (13). It has to do with our biological responses to alcohol. Alcohol is metabolized in a two-stage process by different enzymes (ADH and ALDH), and alcohol preference and tolerance is determined by which of these enzymes is more dominant. Essentially, non-alcoholics have more severe hangovers than alcoholics, and this is a result of which enzymes they inherited.

In contrast to the belief by many Paleo dieters that alcohol played no role in the evolution of pre-agricultural diets, it seems that low- and moderate-level alcohol consumption started millions of years before we began eating meat.

It’s also clear that after the domestication of grains, they were immediately used for beer and related beverages, along with bread and porridge. In Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages), archaeologist Patrick McGovern traces the development of beer from prehistory to present and reveals that alcoholic drinks were nearly ubiquitous in prehistory. They used whatever they could get their hands on to make it – dates in Mesopotamia, mare’s milk in Central Asia, corn and cacao in the Americas, cherries and berries in northern Europe. And it was made nearly everywhere they could find or grow plants with high sugar content.

The evidence of widespread alcohol production during the early Neolithic is so compelling that McGovern proposes a radical idea: The first cereals weren’t grown to make bread or gruel, but to brew alcoholic grog. Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that humans have been swimming in alcohol for thousands of years.

If Not Noble Savages, then Drunken Cannibals?

We don’t mean to take lightly the dangers of alcoholism. For most of human history it wasn’t possible for the average person to drink enough to get addicted. Alcohol became a problem soon after Hellenistic alchemists figured out how to distill drinks with more than 10% alcohol. That was fewer than 2,000 years ago (14). Like obesity, alcoholism can be viewed as a disease of nutritional excess.

And where did we learn to eat to excess? Ironically, from the very cavemen we now say we should emulate. To them, gluttony was a rare gift. It ensured survival by storing a bit of body fat they could burn when food was scarce. It’s precisely because we act like Stone Age hunter-gatherers that we’re in trouble today. The Stone Age motto was to eat as much as possible with as little effort as possible. Old habits die hard.

Our much-maligned sweet tooth comes from the same ancient instincts. For example, a well-studied hunter-gatherer group known as the Ache regularly got more than 40% of their daily calories from wild honey in the rain forests of Paraguay (15). When they could get their hands on sweets, they eagerly did so.

And while we’re grinding axes, we must also debunk the common contention that humans have not evolved since we became Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, or even since the Neolithic Revolution 10,000 years ago. Therefore, the argument goes, we shouldn’t eat things we didn’t eat throughout our evolutionary history.

First of all, wild grains were commonly eaten well before the Neolithic, such as at the 23,000 year old site of Ohalo on the Sea of Galilee (16).

But there’s a bigger point: Evolution is an ongoing process. It didn’t stop when we became a species 200,000 years ago. Otherwise, how would you explain the predominance of lactose tolerance in western European populations, who began regularly drinking cow’s milk well within the past 10,000 years? In fact, genetic anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue that human evolution has actually accelerated since the Neolithic in their book The 10,000 Year Explosion (17).

So don’t get too worried about eating that bowl of lentil soup because someone told you that legumes are a Neolithic food. Lentils were domesticated in the Middle East some 9,000 years ago. Most human groups have had plenty of time to adapt.

Those points aside, a 21st-century human can’t really go wrong following the basic Paleo premise: Eat a well-balanced diet with lots of lean protein and healthy fats, and a mix of plant foods including vegetables, fruit, nuts, and seeds.

Just don’t go down the path of obsessively trying to keep it real, Paleolithic-style. Eating like a caveman is a ticket to an early grave.

John Williams, Ph.D., is an archaeologist based in Denver. In addition to co-writing “The REAL Paleo Diet” with me for menshealth.com, he was a valuable resource for “Should You Go Paleo?“, a feature I wrote for Men’s Health that was nominated for a a James Beard Foundation journalism award. 

Works Cited

1. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. New York : Penguin Books, 2011.

2. Religion and Society among the Kuria of East Africa. Ruel, M. J. 1965, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, pp. 295-306.

3. Maasai Food Symbolism: The Cultural Connotations of Milk, Meat, and Blood in the Pastoral Maasi Diet. Arhem, Kaj. H. 1./3., s.l. : Anthropos, 1989, Vol. Bd. 84.

4. Gwynne, S. C. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. New York : Scribner, 2010.

5. Captain Cook at Hawaii. Sahlins, Marshall. 4, s.l. : The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 1989, Vol. 98.

6. Smithwick, Noah. Evolution of a State: Recollections of Old Texas Days. Austin : Gammel, 1900.

7. Variability in Long Bone Marrow Yields of East African Ungulates and its Zooarchaeological Implications. Blumenschine, Robert J. and Madrigal, T. Cregg. s.l. : Journal of Archaeological Science, 1993, Vol. 20. 555-587.

8. Traditional Diet and Food Preferences of Australian Aboriginal Hunter-Gatherers. O’Dea, Kerin, et al. 1270, s.l. : Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 1991, Vol. 334.

9. Bison Processing at the Rush Site, 41TG346, and Evidence for Pemmican Production in the Southern Plains. Quigg, J. Michael. 159, s.l. : Plains Anthropologist, 1997, Vol. 42.

10. Ethanol, Fruit Ripening, and the Historical Origins of Human Alcoholism in Primate Frugivory. Dudley, Robert. 4, s.l. : Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2004, Vol. 44.

11. Conditioning to ethanol in the fruit fly – a study using an inhibitor of ADH. Cadieu, N., et al., s.l. : Journal of Insect Physiology, 1999, Vol. 45.

12. The Natural History of Class I Primate Alcohol Dehydrogenases Includes Gene Duplication, Gene Loss, and Gene Conversion. Carrigan, M. A., et al., 7, s.l. : PLoS ONE, 2012, Vol. 7.

13. Agarwal, D. P. and Goedde, H. W. Ethanol Oxidation: Ethnic Variations in Metabolism and Response. [book auth.] W. Kalow, H. W. Goedde and D. P. Agarwal. Ethnic Differences in Reactions to Drugs and Xenobiotics. New York : Alan R. Liss, 1986.

14. Evolutionary Origins of Human Alcoholism in Primate Frugivory. Dudley, Robert. 1, s.l. : The Quarterly Review of Biology, 2000, Vol. 75.

15. Seasonal Variance in the Diet of Ache Hunter-Gatherers in Eastern Paraguay. Hill, K., et al., 2, s.l. : Human Ecology, 1984, Vol. 12.

16. Small-Grained Wild Grasses as Staple Food at the 23 000-Year-Old Site of Ohalo II, Israel. Weiss, E., et al., s.l. : Economic Botany, 2004, Vol. 58.

17. Cochran, G. and Harpending, H. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. New York : Basic Books, 2009.

There’s this young guy in my gym who bugs the living shit out of me. It started with an incident I wrote about for menshealth.com:

My gym has one dual-cable machine, with high-low settings on each pulley. And one young guy tied up both sides of the cable for the entire time I was in the gym. He did one exercise, cable crossovers, for at least a half-hour.

At one point he walked off, and I went over to the machine to set up one side of it for my exercise. A trainer, working with a client, went to the other side. The kid ran back across the gym to tell us that he was still using the machine. “I have two more sets,” he said.

So I watched. At the end of his second set I went over and asked if I could use the machine now. “No,” he said. “I still have more sets.”

“You said you were going to do two more sets. I counted your sets. One, followed by two. So you understand my confusion. I thought ‘two sets’ meant two sets.”

He insisted he was still using the machine. Both sides.

There’s a bit more to the story, but that’s the part that set me off. Since then, I’ve seen him in the gym almost every time I train. He’s the fitness equivalent of Tolstoy’s opening line in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Every good training program is based on bedrock principles like progressive overload. You give your body a stimulus. You repeat the stimulus an optimal number of times. And then you give your body the opportunity to recover from it. Every good lifter eventually learns how to apply the principles in a way that works for him or her, but it always starts with the basics: learn the movements, apply the movements, build on the movements.

Every bad training program ignores these fundamentals, but it ignores them in a unique way. Too much stimulus with too little recovery. Too little stimulus with too much recovery. Poor exercise selection for the individual’s abilities and goals.

There are only a few ways to get it right, especially for someone new to training. But there are thousands of ways to get it wrong. Maybe millions.

Back to the kid: From the minute he walks into the gym, every single thing he does is absurd. It’s the opposite of what any knowledgeable person would advise him to do. It’s like he looked at all the YouTube videos that people make fun of and didn’t realize that’s not the way you’re supposed to lift.

We’ve all heard you can’t fix stupid, but I’m going to try anyway. Here’s what I would say to the kid — let’s call him Zeke — if I gave unsolicited advice, and if I thought there was any chance he’d listen.

1. Get rid of your goddam iPod

This applies to almost everyone under 30, but it’s especially problematic for people who have no idea what they’re doing. Zeke spends three-fourths of his time in the gym adjusting his iPod.

This boils my blood if I’m waiting to use a piece of equipment and the person monopolizing it is focused on his music instead of his workout. But the fact I’m inconvenienced is only part of it. The real problem: If you’re thinking about your music, you aren’t thinking about your training. Which is the only reason you’re in the gym. No focus, no results.

Music is, at best, a tool to help you apply more effort to the task. If it keeps you from applying effort, it’s not a tool. It’s an impediment, and it makes you a tool.

2. Understand the difference between primary and accessory exercises

A primary exercise is based on a fundamental human movement. Our bodies are meant to run, jump, push, pull, climb, throw. You can work almost all the muscles involved in those movements with just four exercises: squat, deadlift, pushup, row. There are countless variations on those exercises, and any number of ways to use them in programs to achieve a range of goals. But any good training program will be built around those basic movement patterns.

Everything else is an accessory exercise.

Not an hour in the gym goes by without somebody — usually a guy in his teens or 20s — walking into the weight room and starting his workout with an accessory exercise. Zeke takes this to an extreme; I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him do anything else. His heavy lifts are curls and chest flies for low reps. He follows those with more curls and flies. Sometimes the other lifters move on to basic strength exercises (bench presses, typically), but Zeke doesn’t, at least not when I’m in the gym.

Building a workout program around exercises that should be an afterthought is like beginning a diet by deciding which supplements you’ll use.

3. Learn what makes muscles grow

I don’t know Zeke. But I’m reasonably sure I understand his goal: bigger muscles. I’m absolutely sure he has no idea how to do it.

This T-nation article by my friend Bret Contreras sums it up:

There are two primary mechanisms to gaining muscle:

1. Mechanical tension

2. Metabolic stress

To get all the advantages of both, Bret says, you have to get stronger in a variety of exercises in all rep ranges — low, medium, high. If you’re only using heavy weights for low reps, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re only using light weights for high reps, you’re doing it wrong.

Here’s how Zeke started two recent workouts:

Workout 1: Heavy dumbbell front raises for low reps

Workout 2: Heavy dumbbell hammer curls for low reps

Both exercises were done with terrible form, bouncing on his toes to fling the weights up on the curls and generating momentum with his lower body on the raises.

As I watched, I found myself having this imaginary conversation with him:

“Zeke, do you have any idea how mechanical tension works? No? Okay, let’s suppose that you wanted to break a branch on a tree. Would you pull on it really hard, and then immediately let it go? Or would you grab the branch, hold it, and apply increasing pressure until it finally snapped?

“So imagine the branch is your torso. You obviously don’t want to break it. You want to do the opposite: make it thicker and stronger and harder to break. So we know two things you don’t want to do: You don’t want to tug on it and let it go. That just makes you tired and sore. And you don’t want to hold it in an increasingly stressful position for a long time. That will cripple you.

“What does that leave? That’s right: You pull hard and then let it go, but you do it in a repetitive, systematic, controlled way. That way you give it a stimulus, a reason to get stronger, but you stop short of breaking or permanently deforming it.

“I’ll be honest, Zeke: I don’t know if my arboreal metaphor makes any sense. I’ve never tried to make tree branches stronger. But I’ve broken hundreds of them. And I know that human tissues need a certain threshold level of stress — one that stops short of inflicting injury — to trigger a growth response.

“There’s a finite amount of time you can devote to the imposition of this stimulus without it backfiring. Your body needs the rest of your time to recover from and adapt to the stress. That’s why every successful lifter eventually learns to devote the majority of his time in the weight room to basic exercises with relatively heavy weights. The next priority is variations on those basic movements with lighter weights for higher reps. If there’s any time left, sure, throw in some accessory exercises.

“But when you do, slow the fuck down! Use lighter weights and a full range of motion. Feel each repetition right in the belly of the muscles you’re trying to build. Once you start a set, don’t finish until the muscles are completely exhausted. Now you’ve added some metabolic stress to the mechanical tension you imposed on your muscles in the primary exercises.

“Let’s end this on a helpful note. You’re willing to work hard. That’s admirable. Now stop wasting your time and inconveniencing everyone else in the gym.”

Would he listen? We’ll never know, because I’d never actually say this to a complete stranger who didn’t ask. I guess I’ll just have to write another book, and hope he reads it.

I first heard about Josh Hanagarne through Megan Newman, the editor we share at Penguin. Megan told me I’d like Josh because we’re annoyed by the same things. I’m sure she’s right (editors are paid to be right, and Megan is a great editor), but it’s hard to focus on that when you look at the many ways we’re different.

Josh is a librarian in Salt Lake City who was raised in a deeply religious LDS family. He’s 6 feet, 7 inches tall. And he has Tourette’s, but not the funny kind, like Bart Simpson pretended to have that one time.

Josh’s Tourette’s was so debilitating, with tics so violent and unpredictable, that it compromised every part of his life. Imagine trying to focus in school when your body could disrupt the classroom at any moment. Imagine going on a Mormon mission and trying to talk someone into giving your religion a shot when any noise might come out of your mouth. Imagine asking a girl out on a date.

Eventually, as Josh writes in his memoir, The World’s Strongest Librarian, he came to see the disability as “a separate being; a parasite that I was in a relationship with. I named her Misty, short for ‘Miss T.’ ”

His path toward a normal life began with strength training. He lifted hard and often. Along the way he met strength icons like Dan John, Pavel Tsatsouline, and, most important, Adam T. Glass. The chapters with Glass, in the final part of the book, are some of the most interesting and insightful you’ll ever read about not just fitness, but self-discovery.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that, because I want everyone reading this to read Josh’s book, which comes out May 2. You’ll be happy you did. Until then, I hope you enjoy this quick interview.

First things first: You say that the Salt Lake City public library has more than a million items. How many of them are books written by me?

Currently you’ve got the author credit on six books at this library. However, I know you were the inspiration for Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, so let’s include that in your oeuvre as well.

Fair enough.  So how strong is the world’s strongest librarian?

Well, you’re in no danger of seeing me on World’s Strongest Man any time soon, but I’m strong for a librarian.

My best lifts are a 590-pound deadlift, 400 squat, and 350 bench. These were all done at a height of 6’7” and a body weight of 255-260. As my condition has worsened, I’ve had to let some things go, so I’m not anywhere near those numbers right now.

Wait. Your tics have gotten worse? Wasn’t the book about how you learned to control them?

It was! I actually thought I had cured myself, and I told people that. And then, during the writing of the book, it went bad again. This was probably a more satisfying end, editorially, but personally, it was maddening.

Now it’s worse than ever, but because of some of the things I’ve learned, my life is better than ever.

How many years did you train before you realized that you’re stronger than the average human? Was there a moment when you realized the training had an effect beyond controlling your tics?

It didn’t take long. Maybe a year of consistent, enthusiastic training. I was making a lot more progress than most of the other gym regulars I saw. Once I realized I was stronger than most of the people who were there as much as I was, it was obvious that I’d be stronger than most people who didn’t train.

In WSL you write this: “I didn’t work out. I trained. I wasn’t a bodybuilder. I was building an obelisk that would commemorate the end of Misty’s dominion. I didn’t want muscles – at least, that wasn’t the priority. I wanted exertion.” But it’s still cool to have muscles, isn’t it?  

Of course! But that period described in the book was desperate. I was just trying to stay alive, so muscles were the last thing on my mind.

That said, I’m still at least half Dude-bro. I want to look good, and so far, simply by trying to get stronger, I’ve been happy with how I look.

What’s your training philosophy these days? What are your goals, how many days a week do you train, and how do you assess your results?

My training philosophy is pretty simple:

Chasing that kind of fatigue is counterproductive for me these days. At the time, I was proud of how brutal I could make a workout. But I did it so that I could voluntarily choose a pain that made the pain of my symptoms pale in comparison. Kind of dumb, but it worked and I got stronger.

At this point I’ve been experimenting long enough to know that if I even get out of breath, my tics get worse immediately. If I really grind through a set, the rest of my day might be a disaster as far as the symptoms. It’s not worth it to me, but I’m not doing any competitions that require that kind of effort, so it doesn’t really matter.

Short term, I’m currently focusing on the Highland Games, which has been a great way to mix things up. I’m concentrating on the lifts that seem to have the most carryover to my throws, and I throw a lot as well. I want to throw farther every competition, that’s the goal. I’ve been working with Dan John on this, which has been great fun.

I have two long term projects. I have a 290-pound stone that I can shoulder easily now, but I want to be able to press it overhead. Also, I want to age well, which is a huge part of why I lift. Because of some of the odd things my body has been going through for 35 years, I’ve got a lot of mileage. I’m not sure how the disorder will be treating me when I’m 50, but I want to stay ahead of it and make sure I’m as healthy as possible so I can deal with it.

I measure my overall progress by how livable my life outside the gym is. If my lifting is going well, I tend to be happy and productive. If another area of my life is suffering, I can usually tweak it by changing what I’m doing in my training. I think most people who are lifetime lifters will be able to identify with that statement.

Of all the fitness pros you’ve met or corresponded with, which one do you think would make the best movie character?

Adam T. Glass. No question. Adam is like a mix of Temple Grandin, Jack Bauer, and a running chainsaw. Go spend a couple of days with him and tell me I’m wrong.

Unlike me, you actually have a full-time job. So how do you balance work, family, training, reading, and writing?

Family comes first. When I go home, I play with my son for a couple of hours. Happily, he likes to exercise, although he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing. I spend the rest of the night with my wife. Then she goes to sleep, and that’s when I read. Because of the tics, I rarely get more than 3-4 hours a night.

I write on my breaks at work. I rarely need more than 15 minutes in a day to keep moving. For all you aspiring writers who think that you have to have hours of uninterrupted free time to write … sorry. If you even write a paragraph a day, if enough days go by, you have at least a book-length mess to work with.

I never thought about it that way! But you bring up the most important aspect of writing: No matter when or how long or how often you write, that first draft will be a mess. Any advice on how to turn that amorphous opus into a diamond-cut narrative?

The most useful advice for came via Stephen King’s book, On Writing. He said during the first draft tell yourself the story. In other words, learn what the story is. During the second draft, take out everything that isn’t the story.

That worked for me, as well as having a brilliant editor.

Amen to that!

Josh’s book, The World’s Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette’s, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family , is currently available for pre-order. The publication date is May 2. It’s entertaining, horrific, and uplifting, sometimes all on the same page. I give it my highest recommendation, and hope you’ll pick up a copy.

I spoke at the NSCA Personal Trainers conference last weekend in Las Vegas. (It still kind of blows my mind that I can write a sentence like that in a nonfiction format.) For two days, I not only got to talk with and learn from people who know far more than I do about strength and conditioning, I also got to share almost every meal with one or more of them.

You’d think that brand-name fitness and nutrition experts would be the pickiest eaters in the world, or at least the most discriminating.

And you’d be wrong.

Taken as a group, they order the biggest steaks on the menu, rarely stop at a single beer, eat chips and fries if they happen to appear on the table, and every now and then throw a dessert into the mix.

So why do people who regularly and authoritatively advise the general public on how to eat tend to break all their own rules when they’re out with their peers?

It’s simple, and yet it’s complicated. But before I get into that, I’ll start with some disclaimers.

When the rule-makers follow the rules 

In my experience, if someone says he’s following a particular plan, he actually follows it. For example, I attended a conference last October with a fitness pro who said he was experimenting with a multiday fast. I never saw him eat a bite of food the entire time, even at group meals when everyone else was eating.

Last weekend, at the NSCA conference, I had lunch with Alwyn and Rachel Cosgrove. Alwyn was taking the paleo diet out for a 30-day test drive. He wasn’t sure what to think of it, but figured he couldn’t offer a reasoned opinion unless he followed the rules to the letter. That included ordering a bowl of chili with no beans, because, for reasons that continue to mystify me, the paleo diet proscribes legumes along with grains and dairy.

Alwyn, like me, “doesn’t really buy into the no-rice, no-beans thing.” Yes, that’s a real quote from an email exchange, as is this: “But I’m also open-minded enough to follow the plan exactly as written and make my own judgments.” He added that a month without beer — another paleo no-no — should be a net plus.

My own diet is probably 75% paleo-approved these days. A year ago, when I was writing this article for Men’s Health, it was more like 80-90%. I even went without beer for a couple of months, and followed most of the rules for every meal following breakfast.

I lost an estimated 10 pounds in about 5 months. I didn’t eat my first sandwich or slice of pizza of 2012 until mid-May. Even now, I rarely eat any bread, which is the part of the paleo diet that I think accounts for the biggest calorie reduction.

It’s also the part of the diet that I suspect most fitness and nutrition pros follow, no matter what they think of it in general. Which leads me to kind of a funny story: One of the highlights of the conference was Alan Aragon’s entertainingly skeptical presentation on the paleo diet, pointing out many of the same issues I noted in my Men’s Health article. But when a group of us hit the hotel’s buffet for lunch on Saturday, someone in our group observed that Alan was eating a 100% paleo meal. No grains, no dairy, no legumes.

As a group, in my experience, nutritionists seem to eat more cautiously (in public, at least) than trainers and strength coaches, who seem more likely to cut loose and eat whatever looks good.

That brings us back to the original question: Why do they do that, and how do they get away with it?

Rules? In a food fight? No rules!

I could tell lots of stories about selectively uninhibited eating. Just last fall, I went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant with some well-known strength coaches. The bowls of tortilla chips were emptied as fast as they appeared on the table. I would run out of fingers counting the times I’ve been out with people who ordered desserts, or devoured oversized burgers and fries.

And yet, none of the people who ordered them are fat. Most of them maintain consistently impressive physiques. They could eat you under the table on Friday night and crush you in the gym on Saturday morning.

How are both things possible?

The simple answer: They eat so much because they can. Most are big guys who burn shit-tons of calories in their own workouts and need to eat a lot just to keep from losing lean tissue. Conferences throw all of us off our normal feeding routines, so by the time dinner comes around, they may be eating the equivalent of two meals at once.

But here’s the more complicated answer:

1. They get away with uninhibited eating every now and then because the rest of the time, I expect, their diets are relatively clean and strict.

2. I doubt if anyone in this group is a calorie counter. Most, I would guess, are pretty good at self-regulating their diets. Muscles looking flat? Train harder and eat more. Stomach looking round? Train harder and eat less.

3. The “train harder” part seems to have a cumulative effect. In the past fitness writers like me have oversold the metabolic boost you get from strength training. It takes a long time to develop the strength, size, and skill to train hard enough to get a substantial post-workout boost. I suspect it takes years of steady, intense workouts for the boost to become more or less constant. But once you’re there, the effect is real, and it allows you to a eat a lot more food than a person your size who doesn’t train.

4. Weight is much easier to control if you never get fat in the first place. Hard-training guys who’ve never had to lose more than a few pounds here or there are going to have faster metabolic rates than those who lose a substantial amount and then work to maintain the lower weight. If you’re in the latter group, your metabolism will probably be slower, thanks to adaptive thermogenesis.

5. Age matters. The average guy in the picture at the top of this post is probably 35. Twenty years ago, I could (sometimes) eat like that and get away with it.

6. Larger-framed guys have more margin for error than those of us who’re naturally smaller. At one point the two biggest guys at the table — Chad Waterbury and Bret Contreras — challenged each other to a Krispy Kreme doughnut-eating contest. (I didn’t stick around, so I can’t tell you if they went through with it, or who won if they did.)

I mentioned to Brad Schoenfeld that I was pretty sure I hadn’t eaten a doughnut in 5 years. Brad said it had been at least 10 years for him. It’s probably closer to 20 for both of us.

Why? Some indulgences are worth it, some aren’t. If I eat a really, really good steak (which I did on Saturday night, thanks to Chad and a guy he trains who happens to own a steakhouse in Las Vegas), I might not be hungry again for 12 hours (which I wasn’t; I timed it). Doughnuts, as I recall, don’t have that effect.

A diet that works for you will always come down to choices. Make 10 good ones for every indulgence, and you’ll probably be very happy with the results.

For those endowed with a Y chromosome, the maturation process never really ends. Life remains unpredictable, sometimes disappointing, occasionally embarrassing. The best and worst parts typically catch you by surprise.

Age 2: The complexities of life are starting to weigh heavily on your developing mind. First it was your parents insisting that you sleep through the night. Until that moment, all you had to do was open your mouth, exercise your lungs, and, for good measure, roll a few tears down your adorably chubby cheeks. That got you out of the baby jail and into the best spot in the house, right between the two coolest people in your world.

Sleeping in your own bed — you could deal with it, as long as Mom let you have a double shot of breast milk in the morning. But then she got stingy with that. “Weaning,” she called it. You had a better name for it: a waste of the two most perfect food supplies you’ve ever known.

Now comes the worst insult of all: Your parents have let you know that you can’t just shit in a diaper for the rest of your life. You wonder where all this is heading.

Age 5: You get to kindergarten and learn you’re too old to suck your thumb. Why didn’t anyone at home tell you? You begin to think that maybe your parents don’t always act in your best interests.

Age 7: In your first exposure to competitive soccer, you learn a harsh lesson: Bigger kids are better at sports than smaller kids. The desire to be bigger will dominate your private thoughts for the next … well, pretty much forever.

Age 9: Your dad stops letting you beat him in checkers. Before now, you actually thought you were better than the old bastard. What else are they not telling you? Maybe Santa Claus will put some kind of decoder ring in your stocking this year.

Ages 12-17: Every girl you’re attracted to, starting in sixth grade, is either dating an older guy, or trying to. You spend every waking moment wishing you were older than your current age.

Age 18: Now that you’re officially one of those older guys, you finally admit to yourself that age wasn’t the issue after all. Girls not being attracted to you — that’s the problem. So you make an important life choice: Since alcohol makes girls more attractive to you, you decide that alcohol must also make you more attractive to them. You resolve to get as drunk as possible as often as possible.

Age 18 1/2: You resolve to not make any more resolutions that are likely to result in vomiting, loss of brain cells, traffic accidents, arrests, or vomiting. Especially vomiting.

Age 23: Three players on your favorite baseball team are younger than you. It’s the first of many times that you will feel your youth slipping away.

Age 29: Not only are all the models in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue younger than you, their boyfriends are richer than you. You find this extremely depressing.

Age 31: Giving up all hope that you’ll ever be rich enough to date a supermodel, you get married.

Age 33: Your first child arrives. It’s a boy. Although you haven’t prayed in many years, you say a prayer now, with one simple request for the Almighty: “Please, God, don’t let him suck in sports the way I did.”

Age 35: Your new boss is younger than you. There’s a whiff of failure in the air, and it’s starting to piss you off.

Age 39: After five straight years of outstanding performance reviews, you finally get promoted to management. Your first move: hiring someone older than you to fill your old job.

Age 40: Watching your son’s first competitive soccer game, you realize you should’ve been more specific in your prayers. He doesn’t suck in sports the way you did. He’s worse.

Age 41: You and your wife decide you deserve something special after so many years of hard, often thankless work. So you take that dream vacation to an exotic island, staying in a luxury resort, sparing no expense. Sure, it eats up most of your savings, but you’re heading into your peak earning years. You’ll soon make it back.

Age 41 (cont’d): With your island tan just beginning to fade, your boss calls you into his office for a surprise meeting. Even though the company’s still doing well, the path ahead looks rocky, and he’s been ordered to cut back wherever he can. Your first thought: “Oh, shit, there goes my expense account.” Your second thought: “Wait, did he say severance?”

Age 43: You tell your friends your new job as a “consultant” is going great, and you’re as busy as you can possibly be. But somehow you always have time to drive the kids to their doctor’s appointments and music lessons, and you’re happy for the opportunity to get out of the house. Some days it’s the only reason you can think of to brush your teeth.

Age 45: A random stranger calls you a pervert. You struggle to think of what you did to deserve that. That’s when it hits you: The girls she caught you staring at aren’t much older than your daughter. You go home and burn the last of your porn stash.

Age 48: You almost get into a fistfight when you catch a random stranger staring at your daughter. Two things hold you back: 1) The  stranger is a woman. 2) Your daughter gives the woman her phone number.

Age 52: When you hit 30 and realized you’re now older than the average athlete in almost every professional sport, you got over it. You’re not an athlete, so who cares? When you were 35 and reported to a boss who was younger than you, it just made you more determined to work your way into management, which was fun while it lasted. But now, for the first time in your life, the president of the United States is younger than you.

Even though you aren’t a politician, and never wanted to be one, this hits you harder than you expected. It seems like anyone in charge of anything interesting and important is now younger than you. Baseball managers, music moguls, CEOs. Come to think of it, the only guy you admire who’s older than you is your own dad. And he’s … oh, is that the phone? Be right back.

Age 52 (cont’d): Your dad’s funeral is a revelation. A whole roomful of guys at least 20 years older than you, and not one of them seems unhappy. Sure, they talk about weird shit like their latest operations, but they also tell you about things you never thought guys their age would be into. They work out, play music, travel, cook, paint, write. Nobody seems to have any regrets. Nobody talks about what might’ve been, or what they could’ve done. Most important, nobody compares himself to anybody else.

Age 53: Work is okay. You and your wife make enough to pay the bills and help the kids with their college tuition. But what you live for is your new hobby. You can’t wait to quit work at 5 p.m. so you can get back to your latest project.

Age 55: You decide to blow off work on a Friday to go to a regional convention of people who share your hobby. Not long after you get there, you see your former boss, the one who’s younger than you. Turns out, he had his midlife crisis before you did. At first you resent the overachieving bastard — if you had a heart attack, he’d find some way to have a bigger one — until you learn that he’s started a new business based on your shared pastime. It’s growing fast, and he needs a partner. Someone who can do pretty much exactly what you do.

Age 58: Employee turnover is the most frustrating part of running a new and growing company. It seems like you spend half your time interviewing, hiring, and training new employees, only to see them move on just when they’re starting to contribute. What is it about these kids today?

At the same time, it’s frustrating to watch your son floundering as he tries to start his career. He was a mediocre college student who lived at home for nine months after graduating before landing his first job. And then he was back home when he got fired a few months later.

One day you’re interviewing a 25-year-old whose face goes momentarily blank when you ask him a straightforward question about his work ethic. For that split second, he reminds you of your son, and you have a sobering revelation: You would never hire your own son, or anyone who reminds you of him. That’s followed, a day later, by a more disturbing thought: If your 25-year-old self walked in for an interview, you wouldn’t hire that guy either.

Is your son just a chip off the old block, proof that genetics is destiny? Not really. If anything, he’s even more screwed up than you were. But if you’d had the Internet and Team Fortress II when you were his age, it might be a draw.

Meanwhile, you find yourself spending more time with your 23-year-old daughter, and enjoying the time you spend with her more than ever. The two of you have nothing in common, unless you look in the mirror and see a lesbian who dropped out of college to work at a vegan raw-food restaurant. But she and her wife are happy — much happier than you were at her age. Or, really, any age.

You’d like to call your mom and discuss all this, but her dementia has advanced to the point that she doesn’t remember you.

Your dad’s dead, your mom’s lost, you don’t understand the child you get along with, and you understand too well the child you find so frustrating. You make a mental note to talk this over in great detail with your wife, as soon as she gets back from her appointment with the oncologist.

Age 61: Your wife hung in there. You’ll always give her credit for that. She fought that cancer to the very end.

You always thought the worst part of being a widower was coming home to an empty house. But the business is growing so fast that you’re hardly ever home, and when you’re home you’re never alone. Your son lives there again, following his second divorce and third job loss, and your daughter comes by every weekend with your beautiful grandchildren.

Although you’d never tell her this, you’re happy she and her wife chose to adopt. You couldn’t deal with the stress of knowing your genes had been inflicted on yet another generation.

Age 70: Nobody calls it a “retirement.” In your mind, that’s something the world forces on a guy, whether he’s ready for it or not. This seems … natural. The company is in good hands with the people you hired, trained, and mentored. It’s time to let them run the show.

Besides, you have other interests. You exercise more than you ever have before. You’re helping your daughter at the new restaurant she just opened. You have things you want to do, places you want to see. And those grandkids — why didn’t you enjoy your own children as much as you enjoy your kid’s kids? What in the world were you thinking?

You don’t know how much time you have left to take all of it in. You just know you’ve wasted enough of your life already. All that drinking, all those foolish decisions, all that time you spent thrashing around doing nothing meaningful while waiting for your real life to begin. This is your real life, and you’re finally ready to embrace it, no matter how it goes from here.

My favorite book in adolescence was Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. I loved the stories about gods and mortals interacting and creating utter chaos — wars, harrowing (if often pointless) quests, demigod offspring who didn’t really belong in either realm.

Mostly, I was fascinated by the idea that immortal and supremely powerful deities were bored silly unless they were stirring shit up. They never seemed to care about the consequences, only the momentary pleasure they got from tweaking a rival god.

This troublemaking pantheon gave the Greeks some great stories, the best of which told of heroes who rose to fame on the strength of their superhuman abilities, but inevitably fell because of a tragic flaw.

We no longer believe in flesh-and-blood deities and demigods, which makes sense. At a time when we can map every inch of the planet, from the peak of Mt. Everest to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, there’s no place for gods to hang out, free of human scrutiny. Our notion of the divine is now ethereal, both all-knowing and mostly unknowable — everywhere, always, forever. No beginning, no end. Whatever unattractive human qualities we once ascribed to this being — like the rage, jealousy, and occasional cruelty of the Old Testament — have been replaced by compassion, love, and help for our favorite sports teams in their hour of need.

Which brings me to the real point of this post.

When the hero takes a fall

Once we gave up on the idea that gods walk among us and meddle in our affairs, we likewise had to give up on the notion that gods bump private parts with mortals, thus creating semi-divine heroes with semi-super powers. Sure, kings continued to claim divine ancestry for a while, and segued from that magical notion to the slightly less magical but equally absurd claim of divine rights. Today most of us reject the idea that gods exist to provide us with either leaders or entertainment.

So we look elsewhere. We seek out exceptional individuals and elevate them to the role of stars, or at least celebrities. The biggest stars ascend to the status of heroes, at which point we don’t just celebrate their achievements, we hold these men and women up as role models. We aspire to be more like them.

Problem is, these stars and heroes are still human, subject to all the qualities we hate — the greed, lust, jealousy, and selfishness that we try to hide from the outside world (and sometimes from ourselves). The better the story we can tell about a hero, the more willing we are to suspend disbelief about that person’s true character.

Lance Armstrong is only the most recent example. Each time an eyewitness report confirmed what was increasingly obvious — that he must have used every performance-enhancing drug in the universe to keep up with all the competitors who admitted they were doing the exact same thing — his fans chose to believe his denials. He was the hero, after all, and a hero’s word must be better than a non-hero’s.

The Greeks could’ve told you how this would end: with a strange kind of infamy in which we have to weigh what he accomplished (started a charity; made Americans pretend to care about cycling when all we really care about is winning). As I write this, in early 2013, the public has mostly moved on. There was that crazy thing with the football player and his imaginary girlfriend, followed by that other thing with the “anti-aging” clinic in Miami providing steroids to ballplayers. By the time you read this, who knows what will momentarily capture our attention?

Whatever it is, it will almost certainly involve the basic narrative structure of every scandal: we elevate someone to the role of hero, and then we reach for the popcorn as our 24-hour media details his or her subsequent fall.

Too many channels, not enough heroes

The other problem we have is an acute celebrity shortage. I grew up with five channels on our black-and-white TV: ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and the independent channel that showed Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet reruns. FM radio didn’t yet exist, and the AM stations mostly played music. We had daily and evening newspapers to tell us what happened while we were working or sleeping.

My mom used to make cracks about how she “just sits around all day, eating bon-bons and reading movie magazines.” We knew what bon-bons were, but none of us had seen a movie magazine. We just thought it was another of her anachronisms, like when she said “criminetlies!” in the same way we would scream “son of a f***ing bitch!” today.

Eventually, though, we got our movie magazines. We also got fluffy TV shows about entertainment, and eventually the Internet made it possible for us to read about entertainers 24 hours a day. Same with the political media, same with the sports media, same with whatever you call the media that gives us fresh video of kittens and puppies.

Meanwhile, the actual amount of news didn’t really increase. The really important stuff could still be covered by daily and evening newspapers, the original broadcast networks, and a handful of AM radio stations.

The real newsmakers — the people who make important decisions that affect our lives — are no more abundant than they were a generation ago. So the political media is forced to pick apart everything they say, how they say it, where they say it. They take what are sometimes clear statements and work them over until they’re so far out of context that even the speaker wouldn’t recognize his own words.

The no-news dilemma is especially acute in sports and entertainment. Athletes play games, we all see what happens in the games, and then they live their private lives until the next game. Entertainers make movies, record music, write books. They promote the hell out of those things when they’re ready for public consumption, and then they go back to their private lives so they can create some more.

But you can’t fill 24 hours’ worth of media space with accounts of what happened in games, or reviews of movies and music, or even with the bland comments athletes and entertainers say in carefully controlled press conferences and media events.

So what do we do? We manufacture celebrities, and we depend on them to manufacture news. That’s the only reason reality TV exists.

Real stars, like Johnny Depp or Bruce Springsteen (just to pick two that come immediately to my middle-aged mind), are only available to the media when it suits them — that is, when they have a new product to promote.

But fake stars are always there. That’s the implicit compact they agree to when they descend into Kardashian Canyon and present themselves for public scrutiny. They’re like self-selected lottery winners. They want to be rich and famous without actually doing any of the things that traditionally lead to wealth and fame.

Which means they also pay the price of wealth of fame. What gets celebrated must also be defamed and ridiculed. Narrative story structure demands it. The ancient Greeks perfected it.

The difference is that their stories were about imaginary gods and heroes. Their myths and fables were often cautionary tales: fly too close to the sun, and the sun will burn you.

Our stories are about real people. Some, like Armstrong, probably deserve whatever happens to them, because if there’s anything we hate more than a cheater, it’s a cheater who fools us into believing he’s a genuine hero.

The rest?

Personally, I think our lives would be better if we ignored all but the handful whose work deserves our attention. And even then, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to think they’re anything more or less than us, just because they can do something we can’t.

Appreciate the work, in other words, but leave the worker alone.

A question that often comes up when Alwyn Cosgrove and I release a new book in the New Rules of Lifting series: “Will it work for advanced lifters?”

I have short answers and long answers, but I don’t always have persuasive answers. So I asked my friend Bryan Krahn, an editor at T-nation, to ask me some tough questions about Supercharged. You tell me if I close the deal.

Who’s this book for? What problem does it solve?

I think it’s for any lifter — any age, either gender, any stage of development — who either doesn’t have a program at all, or understands that his current program has stopped working, knows he needs to do something different, but doesn’t know what.

My philosophy is, if you’re putting in the time and effort, you probably deserve better results than what you’re getting.

That’s the problem Alwyn solves. His business depends on providing programs that give people better results than they can get from his competition.

How does an advanced lifter benefit from this book?

What is advanced? Is it years of training? Is it hours per week in the gym? Is it a level of achievement?

Speaking as someone who’s worked out in gyms almost continuously since 1980, I’d say that a lot of people are doing advanced workouts. But I rarely see advanced lifters.

To me, an advanced lifter is a guy or a woman with advanced form, advanced strength, and an advanced approach to training.

Those three things are going to look different from one lifter to the next.

Explain.

We all know some basics. If you can’t squat without your heels coming off the floor, or your form breaks down on the second rep of a set of five, you aren’t even an intermediate, much less advanced. Adding more weight to the bar before you fix your form is just going to mess you up, and probably sooner than later.

Advanced strength, to me, means you’re close to maxed out on both form and load. If you bench press on the Smith machine with your feet up on the bench, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing My big point is, what looks simple on paper becomes as complex and sophisticated as you want to make it. I use different exercise-selection strategies for each movement pattern. I also vary the exercises I use in core and metabolic training based on what I’m doing in the rest of the workout.

That’s why Alwyn can use this same basic workout template for complete novices at Results Fitness, or with some of the world’s most famous and best-paid athletes at the Nike complex in Oregon. One template, infinite applications!

I just finished my first post-Christmas workout. I felt a little shaky going in; it’s been a while since I asked my body to process so much alcohol and refined flour. Once I got warmed up, though, I felt like my old self. (I’d much rather feel like my young self, but that’s not an option.)

My workout is derived from The New Rules of Lifting Supercharged, my new book with Alwyn Cosgrove. Of course it’s only new to you; I’ve been using the book’s workouts for much of the past year.

I typically jump around more, experimenting with new and different ways to get just a little more out of my aging, genetically mediocre body. But this was an unusual year, in that my body changed more than my program.

What happened:

About a year ago I got an assignment from Men’s Health to write a feature about the paleo diet. I decided to try the diet, starting just after New Year’s Day. It was almost an afterthought. To my surprise, I lost weight steadily for the first few months of the year. I’m pretty sure I started at 185 pounds; by late spring I was down to 175. As my body changed, the same training program produced different effects. Training for pure strength didn’t do much for me, but Alwyn’s Supercharged workouts, with their emphasis on body composition, helped me achieve the leanest physique I’ve had in probably 10 years.

Just when I was getting the hang of training with this new, streamlined body, Superstorm Sandy hit. It knocked out our power for a week, which was bad enough. But right in the middle of that clusterf**k — and I’m still not sure how it happened — I hurt my knee and came down with the worst illness in recent memory.

The illness cost me another five pounds; I’d guess that most of it was lean tissue.

Now I not only had to train around an injury that prevented me from doing anything in the squat category, I had to do it with a smaller, weaker body.

Yet again, Alwyn’s Supercharged workouts gave me the mechanism to rebuild my strength and restore some of that lean tissue. I’ve since regained the five pounds (I wish it was all muscle, but my diet wasn’t strict enough for that), and each workout I feel stronger than I did the last time.

So, to sum up, in 12 months I’ve worked with what seems like three different bodies. There was regular me, there was lean me, and there was recovering me. Each time, the Supercharged workouts gave me what I needed.

Now you get to try what’s worked so well for me. The New Rules of Lifting Supercharged should be available everywhere books are sold by the time you read this. Maybe a year from now you’ll have your own tale of personal transformation, although I sincerely hope it doesn’t include a superstorm, illness, or injury!