I’ll be honest. I don’t know much about Dave Portnoy.
But here’s what I do know.
He’s a polarizing character because he comes across as an asshole from Boston. Which is a particular brand of asshole that some people love and some people despise.
He started something called Barstool Sports which I believe makes entertaining sports-based content on the internet.
In an effort to support, or at the very least highlight, small businesses, he goes around to pizza places, buys a pie and goes out in front of the shop and does a review.
Two mandates regarding the reviews.
The first is that they must take place immediately. No taking the pizza to a picnic table three miles away with great scenery. Nope. The review starts the minute he walks out the door and places a scalding hot slice into his mouth.
The second is the review is to take place after only one bite. In fact, the catch phrase of the entire series (he’s done hundreds of such reviews) is “one bite, everyone knows the rules” which basically never actually happens. Because his one bite turns into about seven bites.
Which is a bit of unintentional comedy that never grows old on me because I’m mostly a simpleton.
But I’m not really here to tell you about these pizza reviews and I’m struggling to remember why I brought it up.
Oh, yes, Barstool Sports. Which, once again, I believe makes entertaining sports content in print or podcast or social media form. But the reason I am not sure is that I don’t really consume any sports content.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy sports, I do. But I watch them rarely. And don’t get involved beyond the games themselves.
I also think sports analogies are a flimsy and cheap way to get a point across so I apologize in advance because I am about to make a very on-the-nose sports analogy to express a training concept.
Believe me, I wracked my brain for the usual, on brand-type stuff. Can I link this idea to a Kelly Clarkson performance? Or the latest season of “Love Is Blind” (side note: what’s with all the Madison hate, people?!?!)? Or some childhood memory about how I didn’t get hot fudge on my ice cream or whatever?
But, unfortunately, I landed on football. So I guess this one is for all the sports fans out there.
If you had to produce the best football player, which one of these would you have them do?
Play in games? Scrimmage? Perform drills? Lift weights? Watch game tape? Spend time on recovery methods?
Spoiler alert, the answer is all of the above.
A great football player does all of these because they maximize his capabilities.
It would be silly to have him only play in games (just as it would be silly to have him only sit in a sauna).
In fact, a professional football player only plays in games 17 to 21 times per year. And this is if they are good enough to play in all the games and not get hurt in the process.
Which means, best case scenario, they are playing in games roughly 5% of the year.
Now, no one would argue that a great athlete should only spend 5% of their time being a great athlete. No. You would say they should do the other things listed above in order to help them become better players.
Yet, for some reason that escapes me, people can not come around on this concept when it comes to their own training.
They think if they are runners they should only run. Or if they want to get stronger they should only do heavy singles. Or if they want to do Hyrox they should only do burpee broad jumps.
Training isn’t reggaeton where you can literally have one beat at the same tempo, repeat it endlessly and call it a genre (zing!).
Different training stimuli not only moves everything forward, it helps prevent overuse injuries and makes training a lot less monotonous and boring.
And, to round out the football analogy, the NFL alone generates around $20 billion in revenue. If those teams believed that only having their players do game simulations would make their teams more successful, I promise you that is exactly what they would do.
Now, the flip side is also true. It’s very hard to be a great runner or football player or pianist or whatever if you don’t spend your time doing the actual thing. An important concept known as specificity.
And there are times in your training block to get more specific (usually closer to competition or competitive seasons) and times to be more general.
A good way to figure out how all this works is either to study the principles or exercise science and programming or hire someone who already has and will lay out the plan for you.
But those are just mandatory disclaimers. The point I am trying to get across here, that many people struggle with, is that general training is required to drive specific training outcomes.
I would even argue that most people should focus more on general capabilities than they should on specific outcomes. And we have some proof of this. More professional athletes grow up playing multiple sports than single sports even though they grow up to excel in one.
Ilya Ilyin, perhaps the greatest competitive weightlifter of all time, would spend the first two years of every four-year Olympic training cycle, swimming and jumping and barely touching the barbell.
To put this as simply as possible, if you want to get as strong as possible, you shouldn’t max out every week. If you want to be a great marathon runner, you shouldn’t only run marathon distances.
Sounds silly. Until you program a set of fives or one mile repeats and people freak out.
I promise you will benefit from the variety.
Everyone knows the rules.