SQUAT EVERY DAY by Matt Perryman

• Any practitioner, whether we’re talking the line technician who keeps the phone lines working or the MD who keeps you healthy, has more knowledge than is immediately evident from their educational background and formal training. There is an unspoken ― and unspeakable ― element in the Doing. The term for this is tacit knowledge.
• Some things are going to remain fuzzy, and you’ll have to make judgment calls based on necessarily incomplete information.
• If doing everything wrong works better than doing it by the book, is it really wrong?
• Take the lifts you want to improve and, perhaps, a bare minimum of assistance work, and hammer it as often as you can.
• This is a trend among top weightlifters ― lots of pulling and squatting, then more pulling and squatting, leads to a strong squat.
• Strength sports aren’t bodybuilding. Strength means lifting things.
• A central theme of this book is that there’s more than one way to get strong.
• The “bulk and power” method, effective as it can be, is not for everyone, and probably has little place outside brief and occasional growth spurts.
• Paraphrasing Vladimir Zatsiorsky, the idea is to train as heavy as possible and as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible.
• Whatever you want to call it, the idea is to get as much exposure to heavy weights as you can stand.
• If you want more than modest results ― if doing it all “right” hasn’t worked out for you ― then you should be open to new kinds of training instead of resigning yourself to being a genetic reject.
• Circumstances matter. The people around you, the people in your gym, the atmosphere of your gym, what you read about training, who you talk to about training, what you believe about training ― this all matters, and I believe it is key to making any type of training effective.
• What you’re going to find in this book is affirmation of the basics: squatting, picking up, and pressing heavy weights on the regular.
• Strength training is Not That Complicated. The hardest part is showing up and putting in the effort. If you can do that, just about anything will work.
• Seek to lift gradually heavier weights and over weeks and months and years those tiny increments eventually add up to a respectable number. This is the fundamental principle of exercise: to stimulate physical fitness, we must present our bodies with ever-increasing challenges.
• For most of us, progress doesn’t happen in a straight line.
• Progress fluctuates. Progress is nonlinear.
• Muscle mass will always determine the upper limits of strength, but only in terms of potential strength. The more muscle available to contract, the more potential for generating force and torque around joints.
• You become what you do.
• Hebb’s rule, as this came to be, says that “cells which fire together wire together”. Nerves learn through repetition.
• The more you practice a skill, the better you become at that skill. Practice enough and the skill hardwires itself into your brain.
• A skill is just a movement. Once you learn it, you’ve learned it.
• In principle, the more practice you get with an exercise ― not just the gross movement, but the weight and technical conditions of that weight ― the better you get at it.
• To get good at lifting heavy things, you must practice lifting heavy things.
• It’s hard to draw a line between too much training and just being out of shape for what you’re doing.
• A high work capacity allows you to handle the volume you need to improve.
• The more quality work you do in training, the more your whole body ― muscles, nerves, organs, everything ― experiences a demand to adapt.
• More workouts mean more opportunities to practice under weights without the boredom and exhaustion of three-hour workouts. You get in shape through sheer repetition and consistency.
• Strength is about skill, teaching your brain how to handle both a movement and a maximum weight, but it’s also about building your body’s capacities.
• Progressive overload and neurological adaptation tell us that, at least in principle, the more you do, the stronger you can become.
• In principle, more frequent training should add up to more progress.
• Getting strong is not what the cliques would have you think, but neither is it complicated.
• If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
• Exercise science defines intensity as a physical measure: your output relative to your maximum capability. In strength training, intensity is given as a percentage of your one-rep maximum (1RM).
• Stress has a specific meaning: the biological response to a threat encountered by a living being. Stress is your body’s reaction to a threat.
• Train hard, then rest and recover.
• Supercompensation is all about timing.
• The supercompensation model dominates the way we think about exercise. Train hard, then take time off to recuperate. You grow outside the gym, not in it.
• Think patterns, not pieces.
• Muscles heal, and they heal fast ― especially if you’ve got a background of training.
• No single measurement can describe you as “recovered” or “not-recovered”.
• “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” ―Marcus Aurelius
• Fatigue is just a fancy way of saying that you’re tired and not operating at peak capacity.
• We’re often physically capable of doing much more work, at a higher effort, than we typically do, but from a survival standpoint, voluntarily working to a point of catastrophic failure isn’t the best idea.
• the brain is receptive to physical signs of fatigue as well as being the site of mental fatigue.
• CNS fatigue is nothing more ― or less ― than “getting tired” during training.
• The more you exert your will and train your attentional focus, the better you get at staying focused and in control.
• The survival systems in your body are dumb. They can’t distinguish between a deliberate exercise program and physical labor that might kill you. Your body treats conditions as they come without concern for the intent behind them.
• Reactivity can be thought of as how sensitive or numb you are to this environmental noise.
• Top lifters are natural intensity responders.
• Practice builds proficiency with lots of repetition at the edge of our limits.
• The lesson is that if you don’t find that “less” works for you, then you might be better served by upping the amount of work you do.
• High volumes of tissue-damaging exercise can, like infections and trauma, trigger a feeling almost like a mild form of depression.
• A prepared body can handle more than an unprepared body, differences in reactivity and constitution aside.
• Scaling back the stress of heavy lifts by way of periodization is certainly one way to address recovery.
• Exercise is supposed to be uncomfortable.
• Nothing says you have to train to deliberately maximize the discomfort.
• With repeated exposure to the stresses of heavy weights, lifters become better able to handle those stresses.
• The link between mental well-being and physical health is becoming clearer by the year.
• Your mind follows your thoughts.
• Every single thing you do, everything you encounter, every event or activity that elicits a response from you can influence the way your genes express themselves.
• Practice, however, is not just a matter of logging hundreds of uninspired hours. According to “expert on experts” K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, what defines the high performers is how they practice.
• You become an expert by pushing outside your comfort zone and working on those things just outside your grasp.
• Consistent practice working through not-so-great genes yields athletes who are still well above average.
• So that’s our target: to think of training as deliberate practice instead of another round of beating ourselves to paste.
• The brain, as we know, is particularly sensitive to the intensity of physical sensations, and when you exercise, fatigue in heart and lungs and muscles begins competing for our attention.
• Forcing yourself to pay attention, to reflect on and honestly evaluate each set, adds information that percentages and sets can’t quite capture, and this helps you keep your work sets dialed in to that zone of quality.
• To get good at lifting a really heavy weight one time, you need to practice lifting really heavy weights one time. Singles let you do that.
• Fatigue, not weight, causes injuries.
• That’s all autoregulation is: adjusting the next set based on the set you just did. You plan on the day, not in advance.
• A black swan is an event that appears unlikely in the extreme, at least according to our forecasting methods, but actually has a substantial probability of occurrence.
• Your body is the outcome of a few million years (at least) of mammalian musculo-skeletal evolution.
• Your training (and eating) gains no benefit from over-analysis and detail-fixation. Good enough isn’t just good enough – it’s all there is.
• Your body needs the kick provided by environmental stresses; it just needs them at the right levels.
• Lots of small doses and occasional extremes can create better long-term results than a gradual, incremental process.
• As we know by now, your mental and emotional condition is a crucial part of stress, and it’s also key to workout performance.
• Learning to relax in the rest of your life is as critical to this process as what you do during training.
• When you go hard, go hard. Push your weights, add more volume, and lift all the time. When you rest, don’t half-ass it by saying you’re “deloading” while hitting the gym for a couple of PR attempts. Rest. Stay away from the gym. In fact, donft think about the gym. Eat bad foods and drink beer.
• “If it’s worth doing, do it every day.” ―Dan John
• Experimenting costs you very little, but it has a potential for large payoffs.
• Don’t be afraid to tinker around and see what suits you – and if you feel like hitting a different lift, hit that lift. Be volatile.
• The “dead” in deadlift refers to the starting position: the bar sits on the floor, and you have to lift the weight from a dead stop.
• To summarize the two approaches: Squat a lot and limit deadlifts to fast pulls or one hard deadlift day. Or pull a lot, limit squatting, and cycle the daily training intensity and the range of motion (by pulling out of the rack or off blocks).
• When you squat every day, it will hurt no matter what weights you lift. Frequency has it’s own break-in curve.
• In my experience, losing your motivation for training and falling out of the habit is the hardest thing to recover from, and preventing that is always better than trying to fix it later.
• The people who focus on the doing, rather than the achieving, tend to get better results.
• Success happens when you do for the sake of doing. Success happens when you see outcomes as a result of effort, practice, and consistency, rather than the exclusive province of natural talent.
• Going through life as an unfocused zombie with an unsharpened mind. That’s dangerous.
• Act with intent. Focus your attention on the task at hand and cultivate self-discipline. Make the effort without making it effortful.