We'll open with a paraphrase from the premier modern philosopher of randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Nature is not smooth." Taleb applies this axiom across all domains and uses this observation to deconstruct assumptions regarding financial markets, top-down policy "solutions", and computer models, among many other endeavors of spurious human prediction. He has briefly digressed on nature's "roughness" vs. the "smoothness" of gyms and it is this observation that I want to expand upon as I see it holding huge implications for how we approach both our conditioning training and our fight training.
In a nutshell, Taleb's axiom is an evolutionary perspective on how the human body and mind developed. If we take this long-view we must allow that man evolved and adapted to a world far more random, far more dangerous, and far more variable than the one most of us inhabit today. A world where food must be pursued with actual cunning and physical work and run down in terrain and conditions that never exactly duplicated previous hunts. A world where the "knowable" was a bit less certain (the path home may always lead to home but the potential for diversion/interruption may be more dire than a spot of traffic). A world where the sprints may not be of "regulation" distance, the loads not necessarily equally distributed or easily grasped, the work-to-rest intervals not precisely measured, the thermostat not adjusted just so before effort is exerted, the tasty protein bar not consumed before the task that "requires" it and so on and so on.
These observations should be of no real surprise to anyone steeped in evolutionary history. There have been moves made towards moving the dial from the smoothness of gyms towards the "roughness" of nature with any of the somewhat randomized conditioning regimens that alter tasks on a daily basis such as the CrossFit model. These efforts are a significant move in the right direction but, if we embody the full spirit of the axiom we must recognize that further moves in the direction of "roughing up our training" can be made.
The current efforts at randomization, excellent as they are, still lean heavily on predictability/smoothness. The runs/sprints are measured distances culled from smooth sports, the lifts (for the most part) are two handfuls of smooth lifts, the calisthenics are dictated by smooth sport standards and performed on (or with) industry-standard equipment (similar circumference pull-up bars, et cetera). By all means, do not see this as an indictment of this approach, far from it. In the current environment the randomized smooth sports being mixed and matched are head-and-shoulders above most dictated approaches. But the logic of the axiom seems to dictate an even further push to roughing up the game.
Assuming we are on board for an evolutionary/paleo perspective and the view that adapting training and diet closer to the circumstances under which this species evolved then it's not much of a stretch to see that the move towards roughing may have some merit to it. Just as we see gains made by randomizing exercise circuits and mixing running/sprint intensity with lifting intensity it is surmised that we may see even greater gains if we occasionally rough or randomize within the standard routines. We can do this by making all or the majority of our runs/sprints not on tracks, paths, or treadmills but off-trails, up and down hills, over, under, and through a variety of urban environments. We can lift unwieldy objects or we can rough our gear by increasing bar circumference occasionally, experimenting with uneven grip positioning, or uneven-loading the bar (Note: It doesn't take much to throw your lifting form off so approach in increments). We can decide to exercise outdoors more often than not, we can experiment with conditioning at different times of the day, with eating before the workout, 3 hours before, or not at all that day. We can wear thick winter gloves when performing pull-ups, we can narrow our stance on squats to decrease balance, we can strive to alter terrain (simply jumping rope on gravel alters that task, for example). If you workout to music try the occasional switch to music completely outside your taste to see how or if something as simple as that affects your performance. The potentials for variability seem limitless.
It is with this eye on constant variability that we use to inform our own conditioning with our inTENS program and our fight training with our Outer Limits Drills (you can find samples of these at our site). By roughing the gear, roughing the routines, roughing the sparring you will find a tendency to focus less on questions such as "What do you bench?" or, "How fast is your mile?" How do you answer these when your last bench was 240 pounds, 15 pounds of that loaded asymmetrically and the time before that your bench was only your bodyweight but one foot was allowed on the floor and the other was held awkwardly in the air? Or, your last mile was run holding a 45 pound plate alternately in the right and left hand but never both hands at once or, the mile before that was ran in dress shoes, and the one before that was ran in waist-deep water?
When we rough the gear, rough the routine, the game becomes less about how well your times or lifts match or beat previous smooth iterations but along the lines of how much intensity can you bring to the roughed task at hand. If "roughing" the diet by moving towards paleo works for those who experiment with it (and quality research seems to support this assertion) and randomized conditioning seems to deliver greater results than adherence to smooth dogma, then it seems reasonable that the occasional introduction of roughness to smooth approaches, at least a few times per week, may potentially elicit similar gains.
