The World’s Fittest Humans
Chapter 13: Lake Jacoby (United States of America)
I found a way to stay true to the Truth. I imagine I have only 6 months to live and not just by conceptualizing that as a token, wooden idea but by internalizing a vibrant life designed around it, cultivating it until it embodies my ground zero to the extreme that everything in my life radiates like spokes from that hub from the inside-out. It keeps me alive and on the razor’s edge of life like that moment of Truth you drop down the face of a giant wave and some mysterious force deep within takes command of the timing and the energy of when to spring to your feet and you are forced to trust the Beyond on how to carve out the unknown path of the wave. Each of our lives is like riding a wave and each wave, like snowflakes, is unique. My life is about taking on the biggest wave I can ride all the way to that final beach someday without falling. Phenomic Games presents a challenge identical to that unique giant wave, that signature wave with my name on it. You have to train your body and mind pushing the limit everyday to be able to ride that final wave, that wave you have never seen but felt and dreamed about a million times, the one you instinctively know will show up at precisely the right point in time and space and write your final verse.
— Lake Jacoby
7.5 billion humans… what is it like to be the Fittest 1?
It is Tuesday and a monster training day is on the docket. Lake gets up about 6:00 AM and the moment he gets on his feet he does an inventory of what is sore and what just doesn’t feel right. Glutes and lower back are little tight but not bad…right shoulder is sore…neck is tight. Overall, no problem. Par for a very perplexing course. He will have a 2-hour neuromuscular therapy session tomorrow afternoon that will right some irksome wrongs. But for now, all will feel better after a long stretch in a few minutes. The room is kept pretty cold and is pitch black except for a little green light leaking from the LED on his pulsed electro-magnetic sleep system. He turns it off. The sun is up and he will be going on a 68.6km (42.6 miles) mountain bike climb from Hilo at sea level on the east side of Hawaii’s Big Island up to about 4192m (13,753 feet) on Mauna Kea with a steady vertical climb of 4191m at an average grade of 6.1% but there are a lot of sections at 18%, even 20%, where even in the most absurd granny gear it is nearly impossible to avoid pitching the bike like an America’s Cup catamaran tacking through a 20 knot headwind. If you ever do this ride — even one time — in a single pull, from seashore to snowfall, you will never need to show your courage in any other way. It is The Climb on steroids — this is considered the hardest mountain bike climb in the world and this is penciled into Lake’s training calendar as: “Long MTB Climb”, a ride he does once every 10 to 14 days when his mind is the matador in backend mode while mind-gaming his bull of a body. But would you expect anything less challenging — less fitting — if you were the fittest human in the world?
If the weather conditions pan out it will take 5 hours and 50 minutes to finish the ride not including a couple of short breaks to chow down some food. Because of the altitude it could be freezing with snow or sleet at the summit. Sam Olsen will be riding point in a 4-wheel drive truck with additional water and some energy bars. Sam is Lake’s full-time sports videographer; he is commissioned to keep Lake’s Instagram feed in a log jam for his 23 million global fans. Sam is world-class at what he does and what he does is digitally document in almost realtime what’s its like for the world’s fittest human to prepare for Phenomic Games World Championships coming up in August at Whistler, Canada. Lake has developed his own training philosophy and training method called Way of the Jaguar. A male jaguar is around 185 pounds soaking wet and Lake is 178 and looks like a jaguar with the fur pulled off. In a stare down a jaguar would still out last him before the first blink but he is now legit game. They both are apex predators that relish the hunt as much as the spoils. Guys like to see him train and girls just like to see him whether he is training (or not) as long as the pictures show a lot of furless jaguar surface area performing jacked action.
Lake’s main training facility is on the west side of the island in Kailua-Kona at Kealakekua Bay. The US government provided funding for a raducool gym and apartment right near the beach and an entourage of specialists to support the training process. On the east side in Hilo he has a small apartment for access to hikes and mountain bike rides up Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, the two highest volcanos in the Hawaiian Islands. Mauna Kea is a little taller whereas Mauna Loa is the largest active volcano on earth. From the surface of the earth to sea level and then to the summits, Mauna Kea is the world’s tallest mountain (10,210m or 33,500 ft.) if you drained the Pacific ocean and Mauna Loa is the largest in terms of volume. Both serve as colossal training tools for The Climb and Nemesis, challenges for backend fitness of volcanic caliber.
Lake takes a very hot shower and mentally tunes into a stretching flow zone just like all big cats dream about every waking moment. His stretching routine lasts about 2 hours and overflows from a pool of primeval functional movement patterns, a palette of yoga asana, and gymnastic warmup routines; this event is equally reliable and timely as the sun rising. He is a coffee connoisseur with his favorite being 100% Kona coffee from nearby Kainaliu. Grown from some of the deepest, mineral-enriched, black volcanic soils in the Kona Coffee Belt on the Big Island at around 2000 feet of altitude with lovely sun-kissed mornings and cloudy or rainy afternoons, these superlative environmental conditions push the envelope of the Coffea arabica phenome to the level of the fittest coffee plants in the world. The aroma is powerful and the caffeine kick is enduring — even his coffee is long and strong. Lake doesn’t settle for second best in anything that matters to his mission of being repeat Phenomic champion. Sam is like a fly on the wall capturing that precious coffee moment followed by the stretching ritual. Lake’s fans know the routine by now, it has a hypnotic, frenetic vibe that gets people motivated to get off their hindquarters and explore their boundaries. Today Lake is not on island time; this is a big ass training day. Lake’s bike mechanic has his machine ready to roll and Lake starts the ride while Sam captures some video footage and posts it from his iPhone before Lake starts the real climb. Sam will be leading him up all the way. In the meantime, Lake’s personal chef gets his meals prepped for later in the day and gives a yummy bag lunch to Sam that takes two hands to carry.
It is a particularly hot and humid morning and Lake’s jersey is dripping with sweat. But he will be freezing his ass off in a few hours as the air gets thin and the wind starts swirling. That is what makes the Mauna Koa ride such an epic, one-day odyssey. Thank the lord he will have the opportunity to refill his Camelbak on demand. Breathing gets a little more intense as he gets above 5000 feet but he is reasonably well acclimatized to 13,000 feet given the time he has spent above the clouds with both hiking and biking over the last several months including Pikes Peak in Colorado and Mount Rainier in Washington, both 14,000 footers. Lake, being from Seattle and an alumnus of University of Washington, heads back about twice monthly to Seattle for Mount Rainier speed hikes and meeting with his UW Husky rowing coach Roy McKenzie at the Lake Union Boathouse. Lake is not far off the record time for running from Paradise up the Muir Snowfield to the summit of Mount Rainier, an effort he logged about 3 weeks ago.
But today his mind is dialed into Mauna Koa. He is going to do 3 x 30 minute intervals with 10-minute rest intervals with a low cadence of 50 to 55 rpm in-the-saddle at a torque of 4.0 to 4.2 kilogram-meters (kg-m) with one 15 minute interval out-of-saddle rocking the bike at 35 rpm at 5.0 kg-m. This destroyed him 3 months ago. The extended, high-torque work sets are killer work capacity training for The Burn as well, especially out-of-saddle. The Burn to the uninitiated is a really short bike ride uphill but to the seasoned competitors it is high-intensity step-ups to the puke threshold; the bike is almost ornamental. But today his legs are feeling good for the first time after the 3-hour mark. His conditioning is finally falling into place. The one thing Lake wants to beef up this year is his backend, both The Climb and Nemesis — that and along with his ability to get on top of the gear on his BMX bike in The Burn: torque! He wants to send a message to his wannabe rivals. He is counting on competition this year being deeper and more balanced across the board. All the familiar faces will be leaner and meaner and longer and stronger but it is the new faces that fuel the deepest motivations; there is just some mysterious, weird power that possess known unknowns. But out of all the uncertainties one thing is for certain, there will be no one-trick ponies in the men’s Phenomic Top 25. There will be no ultra-marathon runners or Olympic lifters fit enough to qualify — there is going to be a pack of carnivorous animals that will pass as Lake clones at Phenomic Worlds. And you can bet they will all look like jaguars with the fur pulled off. Ditto, the Phenomic Top 25 chicks, deer in stilettos armed with vendettas.
You are forced to face your weaknesses head-on when training phenomically because there is no place to hide; other sports are far more one-dimensional compared to Phenomic Games and this breeds a tragic hubris, a vein of thought where lesser mortals believe they are badass because they have been dominant in one of the many small ponds elsewhere. Rudely — abruptly — they realize they have a long uphill climb to realize their ultimate potential given the lowly performance cul–de–sac they dwell in. It is the mind — after dealing with the cruel blindside of staggering weaknesses of the body or mental-training shortcomings you have never seriously encountered — that is first to fold like a cheap tent. Phenomic Games is only something for the truly serious to take on at the pro level.
Lake discovered last year that training is a lot like advertising, 10% of what you do accounts for 90% of the results but you don’t know which 10%. The game is to decipher the 10% and then don’t do the 90%, this is tantamount to flipping overtraining on its ear and discovering the hidden treasure of under-training spearheaded by tapping the potential of the mind to pull the cork out of the bottle unleashing the body’s genie. After watching jaguars in action and seeing how they lived and what they could do and how they accessed their genie on command, he started putting it together. They are on the prowl a lot with a game face that projects stealth and vigilance and when they aren’t prowling they are sleeping, stretching, sexing and chilling — they mostly rest and digest and when they train they kill it. Jaguars don’t know how to worry and they are always on point, they never allow distractions to dilute their focus when it is game time: kill now, sex later. Lake started to piece together his own training philosophy inspired by his observations of real jaguars. He called it Way of the Jaguar. On his Instagram intermingled with his training videos he posted little jewels of jaguar philosophy translated into a human tongue for those talented enough to absorb the vision quest for Phenomic Games gold.
Way of the Jaguar started when Lake had the epiphany that priorities are what you do; your values are not what you think or say but what you do. He feverishly wrote down everything he did in 15 minute increments for a week and then condensed it into behavioral categories…that represented what he was and also what he stood for — those were his values-in-action, the only values that matter.
Priorities = what you do = values-in-action, not what you think, say, or believe they are. This changes everything, you included.
The idea: what you value is simply what you do so prioritize your actions and marginalize or shit-can the rest. Duh. Otherwise[!]: what you do is not what you value or what you do has no relationship to what you value? Unfortunately, for typical humans, ass backwards is the rage, not just the tip of the spear but the shaft as well. Again, in a typical week, write down everything that you do in 15 minute intervals — this is much more difficult than it sounds, but it is a royal imperative. Think of it as an “Action Audit”. List them out, consolidate, and then re-list in descending order by time spent per activity. The top 15 things on that list are what you really value, who you are, and point to what you will become and also, by omission, what you won’t become. Make sure you actually do this exercise because otherwise there is no way to know who you are or where your compass points; you only think, speculate or believe you know who you are — this process Lake called collecting “Life-Value data”. If you are an advocate of the Quantified Self this exercise sums you up with dominance and seizes the lion’s share of what makes you tick and dwarfs the weighting of all the other numbers — Life-Value data is what is central, all the other data is periphery. Make sure you are cruelly honest with yourself or else you are fooling yourself. What Lake discovered is that a big chunk of his life was of marginal or zero value — in other words, he was wasting his life on a grand scale. Collecting big (“obese”) data in the cloud and grabbing precious attention on your phone app to the point of banal minutia on fat slices of life with value less than zero is a fool’s errand, certainly not an enviable trait of the Fittest 1. Life-Value data sweeps the deck of life’s detritus with a single seismic revelation — know thy self, not speculate that you know thy self. Laziness or waywardness are hazardous to your potential. So he took on the task of remedying the problem with a re-structuring but first he sketched out his philosophy and theory of goal achievement: to know your optimal actions is to know your priorities but to know your priorities you need to know your goals first. So Lake addressed his means of ascertaining goals and then prioritized them followed by scheduling them in loose blocks that mapped into his master, periodized-training schedule.
Lake’s life was about training to be the world’s fittest human. Only one person can be the world’s fittest human, the Fittest 1. The purpose of training is to improve your performance akin to the Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius”, which is Latin for “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. The adjacent possible is a theory created by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. He proposes that biological systems, whether single organisms or ecosystems, evolve to increase their access and control of energy by increasing structures that constrain greater amounts of energy and their ability to manage that energy. For example, a mouse houses more energy than a grasshopper; has a much more complex nervous system to manage that energy; and — at the integrated, organism level — can more efficiently harvest opportunities that are embedded in its immediate environment (i.e. the mental faculties of attention, awareness, and the proto-self). Now, say you are an Olympic gold medalist in the 400 meter freestyle in swimming. You have greater energy capacity and “management” than when you competed as an 11-year old. It is a creative process that can only expand its present boundaries one tiny step at a time. But Lake reflected on what a difference it creates over time!
In Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, the brain is viewed as an organ of adaptation to the unknown: your mind is trained to become aware of adjacent possibilities, constantly anticipating what’s around the next corner in your personal growth and development, and excited to explore what you cannot do and do not know — yet. Kind of like an intrepid mouse that sprung for the upgraded CPU and OS. Emily Dickinson gave sage advice in this regard: “I dwell in possibilities.” Mentally it is the process of expanding your comfort zone one little step into the unknown — your adjacent uncomfort zone — but not beyond that. Learning is exactly this process too. You learn about numbers, then addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division, then algebra, geometry, and it goes on and on. As you open these next physical and mental doors, a whole new set of adjacent possibilities emerge as fractal patterns emanating from your new stance. The view from the next mountain top is not visible until you do the work, one step at a time, to climb there. And the journey is not free; you must expend scarce time and energy to get there — don’t squander your precious resources doing stupid shit! The reason you prioritize is to constrain your energy, attention, and resources so that they are laser-focused toward achieving your goals instead of pissing them away.
Lake thought of a room with an air conditioner blazing full-blast on a hot summer day with a goal of having a cold room given the air conditioner as a resource. Before, his action to have a cold room was to turn on the air conditioner full-blast and open the door and windows. After doing an inventory of his values-in-action and comparing that inventory to his goal he was shocked to see that the room won’t get that cold doing what he was doing! He changed his priorities (e.g. one of his previous priorities included opening the door…) and scheduled new values-in-action to include closing the door and windows. Lake found that deep truth out repeatedly in his college days of Olympic lifting and rowing and then later in long mountain bike rides, surfing and trekking. Behaviors need to be organized to work as a system to produce specific results and this is best achieved by focusing energy and resources on the goal while eliminating waste or counterproductive actions. You can’t do this until you make an inventory of what you are doing now first. You will be astonished by the all stupid shit you do without an action audit!
Evolving synchronously both physically and mentally through this framework allows you to see by connecting the dots how you transformed from a single cell to: exploring your crib; learning to crawl and then walk so you can play with something out of reach; graduating from high school; lifting a heavy dumb bell overhead; becoming a Phenomic athlete; and becoming a parent, professor, mentor, coach, author of your memoirs, and, finally, getting your Last Will & Testament flawlessly dialed in. If you had the ability to see all your possible phenotypes as a function of time from the time of conception to death, what you would see is a single chain of selected phenotypes that compose your life. Of course, the actual phenotypes you manifested in the trajectory of your life also means a much larger number of contingent but unselected phenotypes never happened. All the phenotypes that can happen in your future constitute what is known as “potential”; you will realize a continuous stream of potential phenotypes no matter what but what will be their value? Well, that connects back to your values-in-action. Not all your trajectories of potential are of equal value; Way of the Jaguar is about doing something really intelligent about it (hint: the Quantified Self idea ain’t it as it is). Smarter: closing the door and windows and getting a bigger, more reliable, air conditioner.
It is all about the relentless pursuit of the expansion of your limitations; present limitations and boundaries today will become unconscious stepping stones to completely new, even unimaginable adjacent possibles tomorrow. Layers will be built in a process called consolidation, a biological process of integrating motor and control systems (i.e. muscles, nerves, senses and their inter-relationships). But this will only happen if you make the transition from what you can do to what you just might be able to do and perform it iteratively (i.e. highly intentioned, repetitive practice). Lake believes that you must accept and learn from small failures and setbacks just like a toddler stumbling in the process to walk — this process of stumbling never stops, you will never outgrow or out fox the most efficient means to experience your potential — stumbling is the key to learning throughout the lifespan, whether mouse or man.
Your mind and body need to be coordinated to execute the continuous building of a new you. You will be a different person tomorrow in many small but imperceptible ways depending on your choice of values-in-action. Lake spends a lot of attentional resources in the present moment of training and also on mental rehearsal of tomorrow’s training. You don’t know what you can’t do unless you try and actually experience failure; otherwise you only believe you can’t do it. Don’t let your mind stop you because it is the only thing that can stop you. Instead, train your mind to motivate you to experience your potential like a baby does, to do little things you have never done but are within your grasp — those are the things that precisely define your sphere of adjacent possibles. Your mind is a tool and it is your choice how you use and develop it. If you just get out of your own way and merely allow yourself access to an adjacent possibility you will either succeed or fail but — in the process of failure — learn how to succeed on the next attempt. Lake interpreted this to mean that success or allowance of failure both lead to the same thing: success, there is just a difference in the time to get there. No stumbling, no learning; no learning, no success. Thus, embrace and cherish little stumbles as part of the learning process of conquering the adjacent possible.
Jaguars screw up a lot before they make their first solo kill. Usain Bolt had to stumble a lot on his journey becoming the world’s fastest human. Lake stumbled a lot on his journey becoming the world’s fittest human. Visualize how the ocean erodes massive boulders on the shore, one grain of sand at a time over the millennia. Train yourself to continuously test your perceived limits: why not believe you can instead of you can’t? You don’t need to tackle the vastness of the unknown; you only need to focus on the tiny layer just out of reach but touching your finger tips just like the ocean doesn’t believe it is going to eat a boulder in a day or a decade or a century, it just eats a few grains of sand continuously — no-big-deal X 10-years = big-deal. Gradatim ferociter, Latin for “Step-by-Step, Ferociously”. That’s it, Lake thought. But not original. Jaguars thought of it and put it into values-in-action first. And jaguars never leave the windows open.
The philosophy and theory of training locks down vital constraints on the third element of your life strategy: your practice of training — that is, what you actually do. The philosophy and theory provide the intractable and unassailable rules for engaging life but without loss of the critical freedom to explore the adjacent possible. In other words, it prohibits behaviors the equivalent of using a grenade to a kill a cockroach in your kitchen. Yes, the grenade accomplishes its aim but takes you with it. When these three layers — philosophy, theory, and practice — are not only in alignment but are synergistic, then you are fully alive as a force of nature which is precisely what you are when unbridled and free of physical, mental, and social toxins: it is also called experiencing your potential. Yes, you are in flow but this is much beyond mere flow experience and should not confused as such. Way of the Jaguar is light-years beyond the best that sports psychology has to offer — it is tethered to the much more vast power of deep biology, the essence of biological evolutionary process, the source of the origins of life-energy itself.
For Lake this is what makes life worth living — the quest to be the world’s fittest human equates to being attached at the hip to feeling maximally alive — he is going for it!
Way of the Jaguar provides the cognitive tools to experience your potential, a trajectory of selected phenotypes in a continuous stream of adjacent possible phenotypes in your phenome over your lifespan that leads to realizing goals based on your execution of finely-tuned values-in-action. Lake lifted the hood a little more on the adjacent possible…
Mechanics of the Adjacent Possible, the Process of A → B
Traversing the chasm between your present phenotype (what you are NOW) and the next one (what you want to become NEXT) is about making the tiniest change in your structure that you are aware of, can notice, or measure. It is not the tiniest possible change (millions occurred while reading this WORD and changes are fractal all the way down the rabbit hole), it is A → B where that means NOW → NEXT with NEXT being the smallest perceptible, meaningful change that you task your mind to make, either a change in physical or mental performance (in reality, these are very hard to pry apart, actually impossible).
- First, accept that the desired change is possible (you are not asking for the moon or a moonshot, only to flick off a few grains of sand from a huge boulder).
- Second, and this may seem really strange as in “abusive overkill”, but use your mind to make a distinction between NOW and NEXT by creating a vision of what this change means to you and embody the visionary change: what this achieves is that your mind draws first blood: NOW → NEXT is consummated in the mind before the body. If life were chess, in your mind you move a lowly pawn a single square forward into a specific adjacent possible before you physically commit energy to its actual movement.
Zander and Zander in The Art of Possibility outline a practice of framing possibility. Lake takes that one step further and (soon) one step deeper. Normally the use of the term “vision” is reserved for heroic acts like leaping tall buildings with a single bound or proverbial moonshot lore or grandiose rhetorical flourishes. But not Lake. He doesn’t bother with comic Superman stuff like that; instead he uses vision in the context of making tiny but positive moves toward strategic objectives. Sir Winston Churchill said, “It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.” By the subtle mental technique of making NOW → NEXT you are over halfway to realizing NEXT and are over the hump because mental processes that reside in your nonconscious that regulate body function will unlock the door that currently stops your body from performing at NEXT-level versus NOW-level — get out of the way and let the special forces of the nonconscious mind work on your behalf in the background as your intangible tip-of-the-spear. This door is the transition between two immediately adjacent states in the context of the adjacent possible and understand that the mind can move through a keyhole and then unlock the door from the other side for the body to gain free passage. This mental process is precisely what pulls the cork out of the bottle letting your genie out. Lake is taking the theory of the adjacent possible and bringing it down to earth as a practice, in fact, beyond a rudimentary practice to an engineering discipline with not only full accountability structures in-place but also reliability metrics that connect feedback (i.e. performance: “How did I do, coach?”) to inputs that then improve the practice’s efficiency and stability via tweaks-on-the-fly. How did Lake do it? By going one step deeper by tapping into principles of theoretical biology and neuroscience and then converting those theories into practical practices! (Lake is smarter than he looks, gürls.)
Theoretical biology and developing scaffolds
Barbara Wimsatt in Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition from The Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology discusses biological adaptive processes in terms of scaffolds, entrenchment, footholds, and handholds. Although on some level this is theoretical (and metaphorical!) on other levels it meets sufficiently concrete criteria to construct a surprisingly cogent working model for developing practices and is very idea-rich for mental visualization practices. Lake discovered pay dirt here for sure!
Like on the book cover, constructing a tall building uses temporary structures to aid the process of a trajectory or growth sequence: A → B → C → D. In a biological setting, Wimsatt defines a foothold as a stable position to venture into new growth (a “launchpad”) whereas a handhold is part of the temporary scaffolding structure that aids nascent, fragile growth (a “beachhead”). So Lake applied this to his context of the adjacent possible in terms of NOW and NEXT. NOW is stable and entrenched; its structure and function is resilient to shocks. Understand: if NOW is not solid, then NEXT is out of reach. NEXT is dependent on temporary structures (think metaphors: a rope bridge or ladder) that span and support the transition across the adjacent possible chasm. Lake: (1) accepts that this change is possible; and (2) creates a vision (a visualization) of what it would feel like to embody this change, the NEXT-level. He establishes a mental beachhead (moves the pawn in his head which triggers the behind-the-curtain genie-like magic of the nonconscious…) and then stabilizes the change via visualization and further training until NEXT is sufficiently reinforced on the physical level that it now is promoted from a handhold to a foothold and so forth (NOW-A → NEXT-B (traversal) … NEXT-B → NOW-B (consolidation) … NOW-B → NEXT-C (traversal)…).
The philosophy, theory and practice that Lake developed was sound and was working well for many years early on but then it started to not work in a predictable, causal fashion, particularly as he became very advanced and especially after shifting to phenomic training methods that could even make the mighty Achilles doubt his manhood. The default, linear causality of A → B → C → D shows a temporal progression from left to right but doesn’t include time frames, only time directionality. For example, A → B and B → C may have taken 30 days each but C → D took 90 days. He discovered that transitions between adjacent possibles occur with nonlinear behavior in bursts. A burst is when a system is stressed and say it is linearly and periodically stressed but nothing happens... so you keep doing it and think nothing is happening (you naturally doubt everything!) and then, suddenly, BAM!, C → D! Well, Lake figured that stuff was happening nonconsciously, he just wasn’t aware of it. In Albert-László Barabási’s book Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-Mail to Bloody Crusades, he describes the missing dimension of networks: there not only is network structure and changes to that structure (spacial structure) but there is also the temporal aspect (networks function in space and time). The temporal aspect examines flow of information through the network structure with respect to time and this flow can all of a sudden ramp up and create a burst of activity that can take you unaware. An avalanche is like this, the term “tipping point” applies, network effects, as well as simple linear cascades like dominos (avalanche effects are linear cascades on nonlinear steroids).
Lake came to the realization that this spurty, bursty, unpredictable, nonlinear behavior is under the spell of heterochrony, the fact that adaptive response (technically called phenotypic or developmental plasticity) occurs in layers of change that have varying time scales (and seem glacially slooow!). Some of these changes are synchronous others are asynchronous; some are periodic, others are aperiodic or chaotic. Changes in metabolic networks, muscle structure, gene-interaction networks, neural plasticity (e.g. neural circuit adaptations and synaptic plasticity), connective tissue growth (e.g. bone modeling, facia, tendons, ligaments, etc.), hormonal regulation, etc. occur on their own sweet time and not on your best-laid-plans-of-mice-and-men schedule especially for those bold enough to step up to the highest level of training challenge in history and train phenomically. Heterochrony ties directly into theoretical biology’s model of attractor basins, biological states that manifest as being resilient to shocks due to cobbled-together, loose confederations of many seemingly unrelated structures and functions. The idea of “set points” (like your body weight or body fat levels and most regulatory functions that oscillate between high and low thresholds in tightly-coupled, feedback loops and are range-bound: low limit ⇌ high limit) are attractor basin ideas or can be modeled as such with high success.
The take home message that Lake learned is to be aware of the many layers of deep change that occur structurally and temporally do not linearly and logically correlate to demonstrable performance in terms of endurance or strength or anything in-between as the Phenomic 5 present. In Phenomic Games, all changes in performance are expressed as ΔP (“delta P”, a change in performance) where ΔP can be expressed on any scale: small or large, weekly or seasonally, tactically or strategically. ΔP = B-A is the difference of the change of state between B and A which can be small or large changes. ΔP when expressed in terms of the adjacent possible means the smallest perceptible, meaningful change: ΔP = NEXT-NOW.
Physical Examples
It could be deadlifting 100kg x 5 → 102.5kg x 5. (ΔP= +2.5 kg)
It could be doing your routine 8-mile hike averaging a heart rate of 137 instead of 140 bpm. (ΔP= -3 bpm)
Mental Examples
When performing a weight training set (not a complete training session but just a set) you were able — as a mental drill — to keep your attention on one precise element of the execution (say how your left (not your right or both) hamstring feels throughout the entire set) without interruption.
When performing the concentric phase of a standing one-arm dumbbell press your mind is 100% actively focused to produce maximal motor drive (i.e. compensatory acceleration) through the complete range of motion instead of the default mental laxity of just “lifting the weight” with passive engagement of mind.
Lake was pleased with his discovery and integration of these deeper mechanics of adjacent possible theory. But Way of the Jaguar is a lot more than a really good working theory in pursuit of ΔP.
So how do you determine what you want in life? Seems like a silly or stupid question but actually it is as deep a question as a human can ask Lake found out. The key to knowing thyself is knowing as much about your total self — your presently known self plus your currently unknown self — as possible. This means an indefatigable exploration of your uncomfort zone until there are no more dragons to slay, no more shadows virgin to light — only then do you finally know your complete, possible self, which, at the end of the day, is only the beginning. But all of this originates by having a personal philosophy because your theory of how life works (everyone has a theory of how life works even if you can’t articulate it) depends on that philosophy and what you do — that is, your values-in-action — depend on your theory.
philosophy (beliefs: purpose of life & guiding principles) → theory (approach: how life works) → practice (mechanics & organization: what & how to do) → values-in-action (performance in time & space: doing it)
But in any case, everyone — by default — has a philosophy, theory, and practice whether they know it or not. It is just that most people have really shitty or counterproductive (bad diet, don’t read, waste time, hangout with people with negative energy, leave the windows open, etc.) practices. The run of people conduct their life in a fashion that imperils their potential — if life were a garden, then weeds are running rampant sucking up all the metaphorical nutrients. So Lake was really clear at the beginning of this process of creating who and what he wanted to become by articulating his personal life philosophy, pulling weeds and discarding noisy behaviors even if superficially sexy, seductive or popular. The herd is, by definition, atoms that in aggregate form the popular, the average, the mediocre majority; conversely, the world’s fittest human is, by definition, infinitely lonely but carried by the invisible wings of unified natural forces like the power of the nonconscious mind eating adjacent possibilities.
Lake’s philosophy of life is built on three principles:
- Be vulnerable. Vulnerability is the intersection of the courage to do something unknown with the fear of failure — you have skin in the game and it is at risk but the upside has deep meaning to you. There is an obstacle — either a paper tiger or a real one — that is saying to you: “If you want this then you have to get by me.” This means keep attempting what you have not done and ignore failure — stumble! Little failures are the process of learning and lead to success. Continuously attack your uncomfort zone, explore the unknown — campout on your perimeter and be as persistent as the tide’s erosion of the seashore. Invent, tinker, create. The crucible for creativity is made out of pure vulnerability. A subset of this is well known: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” When you are in dire straits, when survival is in the balance, when you are most vulnerable, you spontaneously create by moving a pawn boldly forward into the breech — or cowardly perish. Under these conditions fear of failure is noise compared to staring down death but why can’t you create all the time? Because two other qualities are absent…
- Be passionate. This means mentally and physically flip the switch that commits you to being all-in — take no prisoners style. Think eye of the tiger in beast mode. Get in the face of the unknown. When vulnerable be counterintuitive: instead of moving gingerly, push the needle into the red zone without hesitation or calculation. Awareness and untapped energy will come from your unknown depths and slay fear and vanquish obstacles, you have the power to crush your inner demons like an Abrams tank rolling over Chihuahua shit. Your inner unknown is stronger than the perceived outer unknown but will only emerge if you are passionate, intense, abandoned — in other words, you overclock. In the words of 6-time Ironman World champion Mark Allen, “Use pressure to focus energy.” If you are not all-in you cannot access your potential because your potential lives in your unknown depths and you can only experience it if you internalize and practice these three principles. Otherwise, you are like a big ship tied to the dock collecting barnacles. Yes, the ship is safe but that is not what ships are for and neither are we.
- Be disciplined. This means you do the unsexy grunt work like wax-on wax-off when you don’t like to do it. Suck it up because that is what it takes. No exceptions, no excuses. Doing this type of work is not to be confused with being a robotic drone. A drone’s life leads nowhere like becoming just another empty suit with robber baron ethics.
So Lake wrote down his philosophy, check. Now he put Way of the Jaguar together:
- Collect Life-Value data (What the hell are you really doing now?)
- Determine goals (What do you want in your life? Are you sure? Why?)
- Prioritize values-in-action (What is the real relationship between your daily actions and your longterm goals? Do the dots connect? Are you squandering energy leaving the windows open? → Focus on signal, abandon noise, make sure A → B → C → D clearly and directly connect.)
- Execute values-in-action in a disciplined manner: NOW-A → NEXT-B (Shut up and be the ocean eating a monster-sized boulder a moment at a time! You did the work to free your genie from the bottle, now get out of her way and let the genie kick ass while you take credit!)
- Tweak values-in-action to maintain progression of adjacent possibles A → B → C → D (Priority of values require the flexibility and awareness to keep the compass setting on course when you deviate)
- Experience your potential (Sowing what you reap → enjoy the spoils! You are performing at the level you want because you slowly built a phenotype from your phenome library that can do what you desire. See step #1 & repeat...)
Understand: In normal evolution an organism transitions from phenotype to phenotype within its phenome as a function of a changing environment; with training you also go from phenotype to phenotype but it follows a trajectory due to intension, you make it happen — not by happenstance. Training is about being your life’s matador and directing the trajectory of phenotypes (the bull) that are possible within your phenome over your lifespan by mentally controlling the aspects of your environment that influence how your mind and body adapt to stress. Properly designed stresses (i.e. “training and recovery”) in the form of values-in-action steer the optimal progression of adjacent possibles of A → B → C → D. The more you experience and know the better you get at making things happen swiftly and without mishap.
Way of the Jaguar is a training blueprint that Lake created to navigate his improvements of ΔP at the most granular, measurable level of change like the tide hewing out a single grain of sand out of a boulder: he always knows what his limiting training factor is and what his weakest event in the Phenomics Games is and plans a tactical angle-of-attack accordingly. He religiously uses the Adjunctive Tool Pool in concert with his values-in-action list to remedy his flaws. He strives to improve ΔP with the most efficiency in terms of managing his energy, time, risk exposure and resources.
Lake’s training method Way of the Jaguar uses Stuart Kauffman’s theory of the adjacent possible as part of his approach but that isn’t all of it. Also in a theoretical capacity, Lake created an approach to physical training called Constructing the Physical Layers for Mastery of the Motors and an approach to mental training called Constructing the Mental Layers for Mastery of Motor Control.
Both of these approaches are about sequencing layers that build on top of each other like building a house:
foundation → infrastructure → superstructure → ornamentation
iceberg → tip of iceberg
planning and work effort to be world’s fittest human → Phenomic Rank of 1st (“Fittest 1”)
Constructing the Physical Layers for Mastery of the Motors
First, biomechanics. Second, flexibility and mobility. Third, biomechanics at a deeper level. Fourth, an aerobic base of endurance capacity. Fifth, building strength from Zero. Sixth, real endurance capacity. Seventh, real strength. Eighth, maximal aerobic power. Ninth, feeling and knowing each muscle move through all movement patterns super slowly. Tenth, biomechanics at an even deeper level…repeat with beginner’s mind as the guiding principle. Set crosshairs on your flaws and get “into” them.
Constructing the Mental Layers for Mastery of Motor Control
First, basic performance visualization. Second, mental exploration of the desired adjacent possible by embodying the change, going through the keyhole mentally to unlock the door from the outside to let the genie out, moving the pawn forward one space in your mind. Third, mimicry with intense sensitivity to feeling of body movement (what happens is several layers of sensitivity to feeling details emerge and improve that you didn’t know existed prior). Fourth, healing and recovery visualization (requires a lot of book knowledge first to fruitfully execute this).
Lake especially used his mind in the second step, exploration of the desired adjacent possible. He used to force creativity which is a nonstarter he soon discovered — creativity is not something you reductively plan, it is something you open up to and embrace by falling in love with vulnerability, the key to strength beyond science’s ATP energy paradigm. What he learned was that instead of futilely trying to force creativity into his training or life, he shifted his frame of reference from one of creativity to one of just exploring (taking action and looking for awesome opportunities to stumble and appear foolish!) the adjacent possible in all aspects of his life and simulated in his mind how that would improve his performance. Then tune into a reality check for some concrete feedback: did it (the genie…) do what I tasked her to do? He would go do it and find out…
Learn!
Tinker!
Break-and-fix-it.
Make your inner demons fear your relentless and ruthless presence.
Relax and go with it…
He mused: why not find out something that could surprise his prediction? He made a game of being a heat-seeking missile to blow away his assumptions. This became a productive process and meshed beautifully with his approach to building out the physical layers. His mental approach targeted the nervous system — motor control — a vehicle to master movement. Lake’s physical approach targeted the muscles — the motors. The two approaches united with the form and quality of movement: biomechanics. This was a great work in progress, something he will indefatigably perfect during his pro Phenomics career and beyond into coaching. His fans give him their love and support — being the Fittest 1 is a lonely perch in limbo somewhere in the thin air between heaven and earth — and a precarious one for mere mortals to take-in all at once.
The ride went very well resulting in a PR of 5 hours 48 minutes, a full two minutes faster than the previous PR three weeks ago. A long day!
Probably one more big Mauna Kea climb before going back to Colorado Springs and tuning up his frontend at the U.S. Olympic Training Center for the clean and jerk and the U.S. Olympic Training Velodrome and out in the hills on his new tricked-out BMX bike for The Burn.
Gretel Antonelli, Lake’s girlfriend, arrived around 7:30 PM for dinner back at home base in Kailua-Kona. She brought a special dessert that Lake’s personal chef wouldn’t even dream of. The sun was still struggling to set given the fierce resistance of some really dense, gray clouds. In Hilo, Lake had lunch at 4:20 before the long drive back to the west side of the island. Dinner came together at 8:20. Gretel, the Italian national-champion, cross-country mountain-bike racer in 2013, met Lake in Oslo, Norway in 2014. She had some really surprising upper body pulling and pushing strength that was an under-utilized asset as a cross-country mountain biker: Phenomic Games will put that to use in spades. She was thinking about Olympic gold in Rio in 2016 but after meeting Lake her compass changed to Continentals and Whistler in 2015. They had a magnetic attraction that easily trumped Gretel’s so-so English and Lake’s less than so-so Italian: they had a common tongue that spoke fluent body language. Gretel’s long limbs and back became more muscular as she shifted into a higher Phenomic gear under Lake’s tutelage. Vitals: 5–8, 133, 25, hard, blond, hazel, long, strong, tactile, focused, hungry, excuseless, skilled (highly skilled). And don’t forget aggressive: she knows what she wants and gives no quarter or mind to the fear of failure that separates wanting and getting. She is Lake’s Way of the Jaguaress apprentice by day and he is her delighted captive demigod by night. No, Gretel is not officially Lake’s queen but she is his princess and he has no handmaidens.
The wind was blowing pretty hard. A storm is coming. Glad he got that mammoth ride out of the way. Just strength training coming up day after tomorrow after a nice day off.
Tomorrow after his 2-hour stretch he has a 2-hour neuromuscular therapy massage — which is kind of painful in a Rolfing sort way. But just like he has a mountain bike mechanic keeping both his BMX and mountain climbing bike purring he has a body mechanic to keep his body machine purring as well. The lifestyle of a professional Phenomic Games competitor extracts a pound of flesh that must be paid for as you go, not on credit. Lake checks his email and he got one from Dr. John Beasley. Lake has been following John’s world tour and Lake, being the defending champion world’s fittest human, is his last port-of-call. Next Wednesday at 3 PM it is. Lake knew that John would want to do some exploratory surgery on Way of the Jaguar.
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July 18, 2015
Emailed transcript to the LONDON HERALD for the weekly column:
Portraits of The World’s Fittest Humans: Preparing for The Phenomic Games
Lake Jacoby, reigning Phenomics World Champion
Dispatch from Lake’s Kealakekua Bay Gym on the Beach, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, USA
— — — — — — — —
by Dr. John Beasley, PhD
Scientific Journalist
My mission is to track down the leading contenders for next season’s Phenomic Games World Championship in Whistler, Canada and bring their dreams, beliefs, and training approaches directly to you every Saturday.
Who are the world’s fittest humans?
What do they do to prepare?
Why do they do it?
_________________________________________________________
Lake Jacoby
Phenomic Human Ranking: 1, 1 (male)
Age: 28
Height: 5–10 (1.78m)
Weight: 178 lbs. (80.7kg)
Birthplace: Puyallup, Washington, USA
Education: University of Washington, B.S., Computer Science
Occupation: professional Phenomic Games athlete, (previously at Microsoft Research Lab — Seattle, Washington (algorithm design for virtual reality))
Background: functional weight training, Olympic weightlifting, rowing, surfing, mountain biking and hiking long distances at altitude
Started training for Phenomic Games in 2013
Favorite event: The Erg
Most challenging event: Nemesis
Favorite exercise: rowing intervals in a single scull
Coaches: head coach Elijah Wright, rowing coach Roy McKenzie
Diet: omnivore
Favorite food: Alaskan King crab legs
Status: single
Children: none
Current residence: Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, USA
Nickname: none
Interview
Dr. John Beasley: Hello, greetings from Lake’s Kealakekua Bay Gym on the Beach on the west coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. My world tour ends with a chat with the world’s fittest human, Lake Jacoby. With him today is Lake’s head coach Elijah Wright and girlfriend and fellow Phenomic Games’ competitor from Italy, Gretel Antonelli. Through the window behind me you can see the crowd of Lake fans that come to watch Lake do his strength training when he is in town. Lake, most of the serious competitors for this year’s World Championships in Whistler have been training in remote locations while you have been in the public eye the whole way. Has that been a disadvantage or advantage?
Lake Jacoby: I feed off the energy. When I need to get away and have alone time I have done it. But for the most part I tune into the energy. Look at these people behind us, how can you not love it!
[with noses flattened against the glass, the crowd roars]
Dr. John Beasley: In a sense, you are the principal Phenomic Games ambassador, have you assumed that role?
Lake Jacoby: I think so. I can’t globe hop like you have this year but I have provided tremendous access with Sam Olsen doing a great job via Instagram with the pictures and then we do a daily live video show using Snapchat and Instagram.
Dr. John Beasley: Something like 23 million followers on Instagram and must be similar on Snapchat. Ji has really built a huge following on Weibo in China and, of course, there is Gabriela…
Lake Jacoby: Hey, it is tough to compete against those two, I just might have to focus all my competitive energies on the Phenomic 5. Gretel may give Gabriela a run for her money this year.
Dr. John Beasley: You mean at Whistler or on social media?
Lake Jacoby: Whistler first, social media second. Gretel has got serious game. She has kicked my ass on some of the long mountain bike climbs in Colorado Springs and is breathing down my neck here on Mauna Loa. She is right there with me on speed hikes on Mount Rainier and I am within 10 minutes of the record.
Gretel Antonelli: Lake convinced me to switch from Olympic cross-country mountain biking to Phenomic Games. I love the challenge of the Olympic lifting and BMX, and rowing is something I always wanted to try and I am good at it.
Lake Jacoby: She is way better than good at it. Airi and company are in for some re-calibration. She has animal pulling power.
Dr. John Beasley: You two are the second Phenomic power couple I have bumped into. Ellie Murray from the UK and Loris Ferraris of Germany are the other pair. Should there be an award for best couple this year?
Lake Jacoby: It would be a great idea. The best women are amazing specimens. I wouldn’t bet against Gretel.
Elijah Wright: I wouldn’t either. Pound for pound she is a lethal weapon. The top women will surprise you this year on how they stack up against the men. Nobody knows the limits of these gals.
Dr. John Beasley: Lake, I take it Gretel is a guinea pig for your training strategy Way of the Jaguar?
Lake Jacoby: She is putting it through its paces, certainly killing all the bugs. She is a world-class athlete but I am still treating her as a beginner in many ways to create new habit structures. I believe that habits are the bricks and mortar of elite performance.
Elijah Wright: Lake and I are on the same page in our training philosophy. Creating the right mindset to cultivate habits is the cornerstone of a great career in anything. Watching Lake over the last two years and Gretel this season has provided ample evidence of the importance of habits, structure, and routine.
Dr. John Beasley: What really stuck out at last season’s Worlds in Turin was your balance across the Phenomic 5. Is that something you set out to do or is that your genome talking through your phenome, so to speak?
Lake Jacoby: The one advantage I had was background in the events, everything except BMX. Sure, I have genetics that lend well to having both strength and endurance but I believe there is a layered approach to building your performance that has philosophical similarity to building any complex structure.
As in any fully-comprehensive approach to building a life, Way of the Jaguar has the three primary layers that are structurally aligned: philosophy, theory, and practice. The practice component has two elements: physical and mental. The physical is about achieving mastery of the motors, where the motors are your muscles. Mastery of the motors needs to be implemented in layers with respect to time over your lifespan, there is a logical sequence to building out the physical dimension. You can’t put the cart before the horse. But what I have found is that people, by default, even athletes with great natural gifts, have a natural tendency to deep dive into what they enjoy or what they have natural talent for but in the process set themselves up for failure because they don’t get their ducks in order first.
Dr. John Beasley: So they fail to build a foundation first and just go for the low-hanging fruit?
Lake Jacoby: John, that’s right. There is a lot of wisdom in the story of the three little pigs. You can get away from building a strong foundation and infrastructure for a long time and gain a false sense of security, an undeserved reward for cutting corners and only chasing after the low-hanging fruit. But laziness and ignorance catches up to you eventually when going after something absurdly difficult like Phenomic Games at the pro level. The Phenomic 5 exposes all your weaknesses not just in performance but also in terms of indefinite parking on plateaus and exposure to chronic injuries that cripple your aspirations.
Dr. John Beasley: One criticism I have heard of Phenomic Games is its lack of events that measure flexibility or particular classes of motor skill. Lake, are you saying they get addressed in a comprehensive assault on the Phenomic 5?
Lake Jacoby: Definitely. Their criticism holds true at the neophyte level of competition but as you move up the performance echelons toward world-class it falls apart. It is naïve to think you can skirt flexibility, mobility, and basic gymnastics skills on your way to being the world’s fittest human. You may need to spend months at a time to move up one notch in ΔP for The Burn or The Erg in gymnastics fundamentals. There are so many motor abilities you will need to master or at least seriously face on your way up Mount Olympus. There is no cookie-cutter easy path to the summit. Judging Phenomic Games by the five events is like judging a book by its cover or sizing up an iceberg by what you see from a boat.
Elijah Wright: I cut my teeth working with middle-distance runners in my early coaching days at the University of Oregon, a hotbed of world-class runners over the last 30 years. No one became even top national caliber without paying homage to extensive flexibility and mobility training or working on weak links in core strength. Getting to the top of any internationally-recognized sport will require dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s before having the gold medal hanging from your neck.
It would have been a travesty and blow to the integrity of Phenomic Games if the Phenomic Secretariat cowed to having even one of the five events being a particular skill-driven event even if really important. The structure of having skill sets be adjunctive tools to ΔP construction of the Phenomic 5 was truly visionary, absolutely the right strategy, and a wise approach. There are no short cuts to winning Phenomic Games. All the top places will be athletes that are complete packages and the performance would be diluted by attaching weight to any skill-driven event. Each of the Phenomic 5 events is an essential tent pole aligned with biological anthropology that — in aggregate — constructs the most resilient tent subject to the widest range of potential shocks that put at risk your survival prospects. The Phenomic 5 parallels the dictates of survival requirements in indigenous environments given what Homo sapiens are and where we came from. We cannot allow the timid physical requirements of modern times to skew the breadth of essential requirements.
Gretel Antonelli: I can tell you how much of a mistake it would be to just start doing the Phenomic 5 and not concern yourself with flexibility and strength in seemingly unrelated movement patterns. You end up with chronic injuries and plateaus.
Lake Jacoby: That is exactly it, you are stopped by injuries and plateaus long before you reach your performance ceiling. Way of the Jaguar is all about climbing the performance mountain in the most efficient sequence, one step at a time. I want to make my logic clear. Fans are always asking questions about why I do training in specific sequences with respect to time.
I begin a rote beginner or an advanced practitioner such as myself that has completed a full physical cycle from A thru Z with step A: biomechanics. Biomechanics is about positions of the skeleton with respect to time, it creates animated sequences of stick figures. Over a career you are going to perform the same movement patterns for hundreds of thousands or millions of repetitions. Imagine a machine that is slightly out of tolerance or performs movements that create high stress points somewhere in the movement path. The machine will breakdown at its weakest links just like you. By learning, understanding, and programming ideal biomechanics you reduce your exposure to injury and increase the usual lifespan of the machine, your body. You focus on this first so that these movements become consolidated and happen involuntarily, automatically, by default under pressure. Also, by learning biomechanics first you come into contact face-to-face with your particular high-risk, limited ranges of motion from the get-go which are remedied by the second layer — flexibility and mobility.
Dr. John Beasley: Your approach makes a lot of sense. I have seen approaches that begin with flexibility but it makes even more sense to begin with what defines proper movement patterns first before deconstructing ranges of motion. Range of motion is about quantities whereas biomechanics and motor control are about the qualities of the complete, underlying movement execution and its function.
Elijah Wright: Mobility problems are the bane of the some of history’s greatest athletes. It shows up as injuries that become chronic and cancerous to career performance but the cause is limited range of motion or poor movement patterns. They are related in more than the obvious way — poor range of motion forces the body to compensate using secondary levers and secondary motors that are unfit to do the heavy lifting of repetitive motions thus causing a chain reaction of potential injuries or decreased potential due to their inadequacies. In survival circumstances displacement from primary to secondary movement patterns is necessary due to injury but cannot be allowed to manifest simply due to a lack of flexibility in primary movement patterns when there is no injury. That is a pure structural defect that needs correction. Way of the Jaguar identifies these flaws immediately before they become entrenched and fly under the radar because of becoming second nature and then “feeling right” while being dead wrong. I think I discovered a new law of coaching: learn wrong, feel right. That is hard to fix unless someone points it out.
Lake Jacoby: These are the kinds of problems that can take you out by death by a thousand cuts. I spend two hours every day with my flexibility routine. It also gets me in tune with how I am feeling on a deeper level. Next in my sequence is another layer of biomechanics but on a deeper level. The first round is exploratory and definitional and this next round is going deeper. Start looking at video of yourself in action. What you discover is that what you feel you are doing you aren’t doing. There is a tendency to believe that the video is wrong and what you think you are doing is right. You need to get past that delusion right away.
Gretel Antonelli: It is so true! I thought I was doing some new functional training exercises correctly because they felt right but I was way off.
Lake Jacoby: Ok, now that you know how to move and what to move and have a clue what you can and cannot move correctly due to limited ranges of motion, now you begin to move repetitively. You begin with low tension on the motors which means endurance first. You learn about endurance capacity and why and how to built it. Most of your training time is going to be spent doing low heart rate endurance capacity training unless you are a pure strength athlete training for a strength-only sport.
Dr. John Beasley: I have heard that sermon a lot on my global tour. You have to build the backend starting early. It is a huge time sink and you need to acquire great habits.
Lake Jacoby: That’s right, this is all about cultivating great habits. Next is learning about strength training assuming you know nothing at all. Mentally clear the deck of everything in your head. Get the biomechanics of strength training dialed in. Know what good form is and isn’t and also what good form feels like and doesn’t. Watch others so you can know the most common errors because that will be you too.
Gretel Antonelli: This is the layer that caught me. It took months to iron out the bugs in my form.
Lake Jacoby: Better you catch all those bugs in the bud than let them grow into injuries and permanent limitations later. “A stitch in time saves nine” is prudent wisdom and is tattooed in Way of the Jaguar.
Elijah Wright: This is so true. There is no hurry in that first 6 months. In fact the first year should be all about the ABC’s of fundamentals and not about breaking records. Develop your potential slowly over 10 years or more. You build it, one brick, one habit, at a time.
Dr. John Beasley: This just might be a reason why so few child prodigies ever have long-term, sustainable, high-performance late in their careers. If they are in cognitive disciplines they burnout and in physical ones they burnout or get ensnared in a permanent injury vicious cycle. If you have obvious talent early there is a natural tendency to go wide-open throttle with a focus on breaking the records of previous prodigies or your own records with ego egregiously and recklessly going full alpha while cutting corners. Big mistake, yes?
Lake Jacoby: My thought, John, with a child prodigy would be to build an awesome foundation then slowly build out performance objectives. With the right foundation, as you hit 30 — not 15! — you are just hitting your stride. You have to ignore the data on performance metrics in the 30s or beyond because the data is founded on people with shoddy foundations that blew up! Few people in history, particularly athletes, built a strong foundation first. Rewind the 3 little pigs narrative again. Or the Greek mythology of Icarus.
Dr. John Beasley: I bet your theory on prodigies’ crash-and-burn is spot-on. Seeking high performance too early is a dead end, literally.
Lake Jacoby: But nobody listens. Well, except Gretel!
Gretel Antonelli: Yeah, you got that right, buster. Lake built a governor into my Icarian wings! They don’t open up all the way!
Lake Jacoby: Ok, so you start to build strength starting from zero. The next layer is back to endurance capacity but on a deeper level. You start to immerse in it. Then, after that iteration it is another layer of strength training and you immerse in that now.
Dr. John Beasley: What do you mean by immersion?
Lake Jacoby: You eat, live, sleep and dream about endurance. Then you eat, live, sleep and dream about strength training.
Dr. John Beasley: Ok, so now you have a solid foundation in movement, ranges of motion, endurance capacity, and strength. So your approach tunes into the adjunctive dimension of flexibility and mobility and exploits biomechanical properties first and then you build the metabolic poles: strength and endurance.
Lake Jacoby: Precisely. Once you get biomechanics and the metabolic poles dialed-in you have laid a really solid foundation for addressing aerobic power. Aerobic power is where strength and low heart rate endurance capacity meet in the middle. The Erg defines that middle ground. The next layer is moving in a qualitative direction with the development of a mind-body connection with individual motors in any given kinetic chain of movement pattern. So there is an elementary layering of the three principal, fundamental physical capacities first [Ed. endurance capacity, aerobic power, and strength development] and then a mental connection to all the constituent motors as they perform in these three primary capacities. After that, you go back to basics with biomechanics and dig deeper. You then repeat the sequence. At some point as you begin to enter the competitive arena, emphasis will shift toward identification of your intrinsic weaknesses and tuning into those as they emerge and hinder your pursuit of ΔP. After awhile you have an inventory of weaknesses that you pick off one at a time with immersive intensity. You always know your weakest link and that will command a lot of mindshare once you are at the level of a pro Phenomic Games competitor. Now you understand what the Adjunctive Tool Pool is all about, it provides the means to overcome obstacles in your path to your potential.
Dr. John Beasley: All of that makes great sense on all levels. It is easy to see the pitfalls that plague mortals on their climb up the performance mountain. There are so many temptations fueled by ego and ignorance to go off the prudent path.
Lake Jacoby: The higher you climb on that mountain without the proper safeguards and preparation, the more damage that happens when you go splat. Once again, beware any Icarian temptations to soar without proper preparation. I have had many setbacks in my career. I didn’t waltz to the title of Fittest 1. I reflected on the deeper causes of my obstacles along the way and that was the crucible of Way of the Jaguar. Real jaguars do not make these mistakes, ever. They do not overreach.
The other half of the practice layer is the mastery of the nervous system and motor control. The physical half I described is about the motors. The mental half is about the mind’s influence on the nervous system which has one foot in the cognitive and one foot in the physical as nerves and their direct influence on the muscles. Other people create parallel universes as in dualities of mind and body whereas I do not: I have the mind defined in a Western sense with the conduit to the physical being the nerves. The nervous system is wired for controlling the muscles which is the efferent signaling and is also wired for sensory feedback from the muscles in the form of afferent signaling. So my 9th physical layer, the one about feeling each motor in action is a bridge in my system between the physical and mental dimensions.
Dr. John Beasley: So you are not a Descartes fan.
Lake Jacoby: Not at all. To me, having parallel universes of mind and body cuts you in two and that leads to failure by divide and conquer. To perform at the pro Phenomic level you need for your mind and body to always be on the same page, not different pages in two books that do not recognize the existence of the other!
John, I am a bodybuilder. No, not that kind of bodybuilder. I build nerves, I build metabolic pathways. I use my mind to build all the structures you cannot see. Bodybuilders build what you can see, the muscles. Muscles, unfortunately, are only the showy plumage. That is a very limited existence, a superficial way of being. What you cannot see is what truly defines high performance and if you want to be the world’s fittest human the focal point is not muscles, they are only a piece of what true bodybuilding entails and not the foundation of world-class, full-spectrum function. If you care about world-class function you want to keep muscle mass to a minimum. In other words, zero mass, not muscle mass, is closer to the mark.
The answer is to be a mindbuilder first. If you learn how to build the mind, the body — the complete body — gets built and it gets built to last. And your muscles will look precisely how they should look. The visual art form is minimalism of body fat and muscle mass.
Dr. John Beasley: Well said!
Gretel Antonelli: It helps a lot to directly connect mind and body and not toggle between the two. I always had that connection through visualization.
Lake Jacoby: And visualization is the first layer in my mental approach; you learn visualization of your body’s performance on a cursory level to setup development of a feel for skill development, what I call “feelization.” There is no end to the depth of this mental approach and no end to its contribution to any ΔP objective, large or small, short-term or long-term. In fact, as you become more advanced and start hitting plateaus, visualization and feelization are my go-to tools to break me out.
My next mental layer is the key to overcoming the most formidable obstacle to phenomic training: the conflict of simultaneous pursuit of endurance and strength performance. John, you have to realize that our nonconscious mind has the power to change the structure and function of our bodies even though we don’t believe it is possible or understand how it does it, it just does. And because it can do it we need to get out of its way and let it do it even though we don’t understand it. Way of the Jaguar recognizes this truth and makes an engineering discipline of it. Exploitation of utility does not require understanding it. Doing without knowing is how evolution works!
Dr. John Beasley: Ok, you need to really flesh that out.
Lake Jacoby: And I will! To experience your potential you must explore your possibilities, no? A limitation is only a limitation if when you push something pushes back. So what is it that pushes back? The boundaries of your limitations is your performance envelope, the grey zone where there is push-back and then eventual failure. My second mental layer addresses the nature of the resistance of that push-back. In the transition between what you can do now and that immediate next step into the adjacent possible, there is a door and that door is the source of the push-back that is slammed shut in your face. That door is a barrier that can be easy to break through or seem insurmountable.
Plateaus are thick, heavy doors with big, rusty, gnarly locks. Your body cannot get through the door but your mind can. By using your mind, you embody the capabilities of what it would be like physically and mentally to experience performance as if you already inhabit those feelings and capabilities on the other side of that door. Just like in chess when you mentally simulate moving that lowly pawn forward one increment forward you do the same thing with your mind moving one space into the adjacent possible. That seemingly tiny move forward is the engine-of-change towards your long-term strategic goal — all progress, whether small or large changes in ΔP, stems from that tiny mental vision of embodying the adjacent possible. Big jumps in ΔP appear to be the result of mighty Herculean mental and physical effort but actually they are the outcome of patient, steady increments of wax-on, wax-off, disciplined effort that shows no immediate payoff. Then, in a burst — out-of-the-blue — there is a quantum leap of performance that from the outside looking-in is inexplicable. But, from the inside-out, an inner bridge was being built all along. This bridge cannot be seen, cannot be felt, but it can be doubted. If you adhere to the canons, tenets, and principles of Way of the Jaguar you need not worry, change is under construction and will be revealed on a time schedule determined by the wisdom of our ancient biology, not by the algorithm in your phone app. Our rational minds are linear whereas biological process is nonlinear — it happens in unpredictable spurts.
What you are doing is tapping into the power of the nonconscious mind. This process pulls the cork out of the bottle that imprisons your genie in the bottle, that mysterious agent that always shows up in the nick of time to the save the day. If you cannot get the genie out, you will never reach your potential. It is that simple, folks. So by letting your mind slip through the keyhole in the door it gains access to the other side of the door and opens it from the other side. This is what pulls the cork out of the bottle and the genie does the rest — you can now pass through the open door and assume the powers and capabilities of the adjacent possible. Just be patient, train with diligence, and show respect for sacred process beyond our current understanding.
Dr. John Beasley: Lake, that is probably a little tricky to explain in terms of cognitive science, psychology and physiology!
Lake Jacoby: True, but so what? While scientists are fumbling around explaining why it isn’t true I am showing that it is. And so is Gretel.
Elijah Wright: John, it works. How the mind works its magic is unexplained. As George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Scientists don’t have a model that incorporates many unrecognized principles including these very strange ones. The process of evolution is about adapting to change. The environment changes and we either change with it or die. What Lake is describing is a means to facilitate change proactively along a desired trajectory of sequential changes through a chain of adjacent possible steps in order to achieve a big ΔP that is acquired one little tiny ΔP at a time.
Dr. John Beasley: Yes, I can see how this approach strings together phenotypes in your phenome one little step at a time. I am well aware that our current understanding of the power of the mind in terms of cognitive science is very rudimentary, barely at the baby step where we are still working out the alphabet or simple words but what you are doing is reciting verses of a Shakespearean sonnet.
Lake Jacoby: It is sort of like that but I do not claim to know the complete works of Shakespeare, just juicy passages that have awesome utility. Way of the Jaguar is like that. A working model that is a work in progress but just happens to be very useful like George Box intimates in his maxim.
The third mental layer in my mastery of motor control is about the development of the ability to know your body from the inside out independent of the influence of any form of measured data. Not that a quantified approach is bad, because it isn’t. Instead, learn how powerful a tool it is to feel what is going on at a super deep level. This takes years of discipline and focus. What happens is that you discover layers and layers of ability to connect to the inner workings of your body as your inner onion skin is peeled off. Once you get this discovery process underway then bring the data into play. At an advanced level in a challenging environment like preparing for Phenomic Games, what you want to have are three independent streams of feedback on making tactical training decisions: a deep connection to what is going on in your mind and body, feedback from your coaches, and the objectivity of the numbers. With these inputs you can make better informed decisions than operating in the relative blindness of one or even zero sources.
Elijah Wright: An athlete needs to seriously address what Lake is talking about. As you begin to face the unforgiving realities of the Phenomic Games’ metabolic wall created by the convergence of the contradictory signaling of the anabolic and catabolic pathways triggered by strength and endurance training, you are going to need all the help you can get to navigate through the opaque obstacle course.
Gretel Antonelli: Making decisions gets increasing perplexing: should I spend the next month focused on The Climb or improve my Romanian deadlift? Should I take a few days off entirely or shift from the backend to the frontend? These decisions become tricky. Lake’s third mental layer of being able to listen to your body on a deeper level has helped me make these choices. But you have to mentally roll up your sleeves and do the work every day for a long time to get results. Mental work is just as hard as physical work.
Elijah Wright: Excellent point. Athletes don’t comprehend the difficulty of executing highly disciplined mental training. It is not a passive process at all. Training and amplifying attention and directing it on specific tasks is daunting.
Lake Jacoby: The more advanced you become the more you realize that the mental dimension is not just more difficult to execute but becomes the essence of the physical dimension as well. What I mean is that training the body or the mind becomes dominantly a mental task. The body morphs into a tool of the mind, you mold it to your will if you develop a more powerful will.
Elijah Wright: And that is the way it should be.
Dr. John Beasley: Yes, that reminds of the interviews I had with the three competitors with Eastern-based approaches: Janu, Ji, and Jōtara. What draws the line between mind and body is the thought of drawing the line itself — the process of drawing the line directly births causality, objectivity and the Western belief system’s scientism. The East’s subjectivity is indivisible while the West’s objectivity is divisible to infinity. There is either one or it is innumerable. There is either causality or there isn’t. They are irreconcilable by definition. So what you are really saying is that as you reach very high performance levels using a Western approach that the line you drew in the sand to allow science and objectivity to exist vanishes leaving only the single, original mind remaining. Yes?
Lake Jacoby: It seems to converge on something like that but I still depend on scientific principles. To me, it is more like the textbook models of science are working great for a long time when you are a beginner to intermediate and then get rough along the edges as you push the model’s boundaries and then, finally, you find out that once you cross that final adjacent possible that separates the known world from the unknown world the shit hits the fan and you find yourself lost because the model fails. You run out of map and, therefore, find yourself in uncharted territory. Then what?
Dr. John Beasley: So that is when the real training begins?
Lake Jacoby: That is precisely right, that is when the real training begins. All the years of training up until that juncture are guided by the training wheels of cookie-cutter, connect-the-dots approaches that you find in all the exercise physiology textbooks and all the published books by the experts, the map makers. But there are no books that provide navigable maps from this point onward. You are on your own. But Way of the Jaguar is not like other books, approaches, or models; it is the first guide that is designed from the ground up and top down to prepare you for the journey that starts here, not back there. Most of your preparation in the early years needs to lay the groundwork for this point because otherwise you are going to shipwreck on the shoals and you will limp into this point — in other words, not be ready to use this position as a launchpad. No, instead, your body is long-in-the-tooth and you are in the twilight of your career just when you should be shifting gears to access greatness by taking flight and soaring.
Gretel Antonelli: I can attest to that. I received excellent training and coaching while growing up in Italy. We, after all, invented modern heart rate training for athletic performance. But I felt lost once I got to the world-class level. I wasn’t prepared. It feels scary when you are confronted with an obstacle you have recognized before and handled with regularity with tools you are accustomed to… but now that don’t work!
Elijah Wright: The Adjunctive Tool Pool comes in handy here but only if you can connect the problem you have with the tool you need. As I said earlier, the Phenomic Secretariat got the Phenomic 5 right by not putting in some skill-based event because you are going to need mastery of all mission-critical skills at some point because of the very different obstacle course at the advanced level will demand all those skills to progress to your next ΔP milestone. If not, that is the end of the road for you. You will be plateaued spinning your wheels.
Lake Jacoby: As the Buddha said, “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” The road to truth will stop here because the road you have been traveling and know so well will forsake you. To go all the way will require great mental skill and mastery of cognitive tools that you needed to hone since day one. So what you see is a lot of naturally talented people kick ass for awhile and then, suddenly, like flies hitting the windshield, the ugly reality that lives past the edge of their performance envelope conspires and stops them cold in their tracks and you hear of them no more.
Dr. John Beasley: I see what you are saying and I get it. Western scientific models of building athletic performance are well documented to a point and that point is dependent on the constitution of your individual phenome. As your phenotype nears the edge the marginal rate of adaptive yield plummets and then goes negative. That event then begs the question: “Help, coach, what now?” The correct answer was — not is — learn the Way of the Jaguar starting on day one.
Lake Jacoby: You got it. Dig your well before you get thirsty. Such is the downfall of many wannabe action heroes. My mental approach has a fourth and final layer: develop visualization for healing and recovery. This requires extensive book knowledge of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and cell biology. But without it you will stall out at some point. Due to the conflict of concurrent anabolic and catabolic signaling there is an artificially low threshold of marginal returns stalling out and then going negative. That means you cannot make a positive adaptation to training stress. You have to use your mind to accelerate recovery or else you will go into an unrecoverable flat spin, so to speak.
Dr. John Beasley: Would you call yourself a competitive person?
Lake Jacoby: Only with myself. “If you continuously compete with others, you become bitter, but if you continuously compete with yourself, you become better.” I don’t know who said that but those are words I live by.
Dr. John Beasley: What attracted you to Phenomic Games. Did you have any idea you would become the world’s fittest human?
Lake Jacoby: What lured me in was the extreme diversity and insane challenge of each event. Any one of the Phenomic 5 you could spend an entire career specializing on and still not master it. They all require such vastly different mental and physical tools to get a handle on. The events demand different facets of mental discipline, you must be able to switch gears between events. If you are great at Nemesis it doesn’t mean you will dominate The Climb. If you super strong in Olympic lifting it doesn’t mean you will automatically excel in The Burn. Yes, metabolically they are close but mentally they aren’t. There is always something you have never encountered that blocks the straight and narrow path to high performance. You may have to spend six months doing gymnastics or yoga to navigate an impasse. So you not only have to recognize the nature of the obstacle but also know the mechanics and tools of the remedy and have the discipline and fortitude to see it through to the other side.
Phenomic Games has an aesthetic, artistic, even poetic quality to it, where the feel of the Olympic bar’s knurling makes you feel something both powerful and linked to the feel of the steel. The feel of the BMX bike chassis flexing under your own power makes you feel powerful because you are powerful. On Nemesis it is just your mind, body, gravity and the mountain. No place to hide with that! Nemesis keeps us grounded to the roots of our origins and you feel that in your bones.
Dr. John Beasley: Do you have a personal approach to life you can share with your fans, all 23 million of them? Plus I have gained a few followers globally interviewing the world’s fittest humans the last 12 Saturdays. How does the world’s fittest human take on life’s challenges, do you take the bull by the horns or go with the flow? Those are the two extremes unless you see it differently.
Lake Jacoby: We pretend to be athletes and not animals, but if we just drop the “athlete” mask and be the underlying animal, performance would be at a much higher level. To achieve mastery you must do exactly that. That is why my approach to training is called Way of the Jaguar. It is a constant reminder to replace thinking with instinct. As humans we are told that we lack instincts but make up for it with guile and intellect. For me, I find that the more I go deeper into being instead of thought I am able to connect to instincts and then, when those deep instincts are allowed free reign of my behavior, turn out, in hindsight, to illuminate remarkable intelligence, in fact — more often than not — they display prescient problem-solving prowess.
Dr. John Beasley: I believe all great athletes find their way to that great Truth. Performances that take our breath away are fueled by the depths of instincts from our distant past; bottled-up wild spirits that predate our measurement of time and measurement itself. But getting out of our way by getting out of our head is such a scary act of courage!
Lake Jacoby: I found a way to stay true to the Truth. I imagine I have only 6 months to live and not just by conceptualizing that as a token, wooden idea but by internalizing a vibrant life designed around it, cultivating it until it embodies my ground zero to the extreme that everything in my life radiates like spokes from that hub from the inside-out. It keeps me alive and on the razor’s edge of life like that moment of Truth you drop down the face of a giant wave and some mysterious force deep within takes command of the timing and the energy of when to spring to your feet and you are forced to trust the Beyond on how to carve out the unknown path of the wave. Each of our lives is like riding a wave and each wave, like snowflakes, is unique. My life is about taking on the biggest wave I can ride all the way to that final beach someday without falling. Phenomic Games presents a challenge identical to that unique giant wave, that signature wave with my name on it. You have to train your body and mind pushing the limit everyday to be able to ride that final wave, that wave you have never seen but felt and dreamed about a million times, the one you instinctively know will show up at precisely the right point in time and space and write your final verse.
In the beginning all you can handle is a ripple. But over time, as your skill and fitness grow, you seek bigger waves but for me I only seek a wave that is incrementally more challenging than what I handled yesterday. Now I am at a point where the ferocity of each next wave is really scary but my tolerance and preparedness to such extreme scariness I have solidly built within — one wave at a time over the years — is equal to the task and I can and I will have the courage to ride that wave — my wave — when the universe calls my number. I will keep riding the next wave until I fall; it is my destiny. If I ride that wave all the way in come Whistler I will repeat as the world’s fittest human. If not, someone more deserving will win. And I can accept that with appreciation, grace and gratitude. Because in the end it is not about that final wave because all true champions will fail to ride some next, last wave someday, but is about matching your ability to just the right wave every day of your life so that you are just barely able to ride it and learn something joyfully surprising from the experience. That final wave — in all of its grandeur and magnificence, whether you stumble for the last time or triumph once again — will force you to apply in some subtle way everything you ever learned from every wave you have ever ridden. This is the story of my life and Way of the Jaguar. Someday, I will be gone but my story and Way of the Jaguar will remain forever.
Dr. John Beasley: Lake, I feel you. Your way is the only way to approach Phenomic Games. It is bigger than any one man or woman, even the fittest one. Elijah, I must say you have done a great job with Lake. It has been quite a ride and may not be over yet. Gretel, I bet living on the North Shore with Lake as your North star has made you a formidable “surfer of life” for life! See you all in Whistler!
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The World’s Fittest Humans ©2015 James Autio. All rights reserved.
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The Continental Championships are next…
There are a lot of new faces that will vie for the title of world’s fittest human at the World Championships in Whistler. But first they have to qualify at Continentals…who will emerge as the badasses to challenge the medalists from Turin? What you need to realize is John only interviewed 5 of the 50 competitors that will be on the roster for Worlds for sure — everyone else must qualify. The Phenomic Top 25 Men and Top 25 Women will be there. Most are former Olympic medalists, world champions, or top-ranked athletes from over 25 different sports. No one has a clue how it will turn out by the time Nemesis is over.
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PHENOMIC GAMES and PHENOMIC 5 are trademarks of James Autio.
James Autio | doctorgo@gmail.com
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