What I Learned from the 2014 Crossfit Champions

So here are a few takeaways from the Crossfit Games winners two weeks ago that are applicable to anyone competing in strongman. Coaching, diet, strength, and weak point training are the basics here. I'm sure if you hooked these four horses up to a carriage it wouldn't move because they are all dead but perhaps you are missing part of the picture. For me, this confirmed what I already knew and reassured me I'm on the right track.

1. Coaching

While Froning appears to be the roguish cowboy who follows no set plan and basically trains as he wants, Leblanc-Bazinet's coaches program for her. I think this is an important tool that we can easily forget to use. If you pay attention you will also see that many pros and high level amateurs in strongman either have a coach who assists with or designs their program. Plus, there are many more that train with a group that pushes them past their capabilities should they train or plan their training alone. That extra watchful eye and authority you must be accountable to beyond yourself can push you to new heights and expand your own wealth of training knowledge.

2. Diet 

Fucking eat already.  Leblanc-Bazinet eats like a bodybuilder! She claims to consume 200 grams of protein a day in about six meals! Ok, two of those meals are shakes, but this girl is putting away some calories. She also said in interviews that her main carb source is the sweet potato. High protein, sweet potatoes... Sounds familiar? 

You've seen this.  After the chicken and the vegetables come the sweet potatoes.

As for Froning, he does whatever he wants. Again. Like Leblanc-Bazinet, he relies on lots of protein shakes to get through the day, but at night eats whatever he wants. This doesn't include bread or pasta, which he doesn't like (wtf?). But he does like lots of peanut butter which he washes down with whole milk.

Another huge front squat for Leblanc-Bazinet

3. Strength base. 

Did you know Leblanc-Bazinet did a double bodyweight front squat! 265 at 130! That is fucking strong. The bulk of her training is also barbell training, either building strength with squats and deadlifts or working on her weightlifting technique, as she reports in a recent interview: "I don’t even do a lot of wod … it is a lot of strength training and skill work… some aerobic too... I might do typical sod [skills] 4 times a week but mostly strength work…"

Froning is also strong, showing us what he is capable of with that 377 overhead squat in the games. But he doesn't have a plan for getting there so we'll just not talk about him anymore...

"I just do what I want, dude."

4. Weak point training.
The whole idea of this sport of fitness is to be well-rounded. At least that's the definition of fitness according to some of the the commercials aired during the games. For Leblanc-Bazinet, as a smaller athlete, she needs to be efficient and strong. She has repeated in interviews that weak points are the focus of her training and thus you can see how, being smaller, strength is key. Her coach had this to say about the matter:

"I wouldn’t say that Camille had any major weaknesses. She’s a smaller athlete, so she needed to get stronger to handle the heavier loads we expected [and saw] at Regionals. She had already started to focus on Olympic lifting and was making great progress. We kept that focus and added in supplemental strength and skill progressions. We worked a lot on cycling moderate to heavy loads for multiple reps, and we carved out time for her to continue to develop her gymnastics skills outside of the pressure of the clock. We structured her energy-systems training so as not to impact her strength development and then moved into building her aerobic base later in the season.”(1)

There you have it. After the Games, I looked into the winners and I wasn't surprised to find out what I did. In strongman or any other sport, you must train, eat, and problem solve to reach the highest levels and do so consistently.

Using Time to Your Training Advantage

Time.

We always seem to have so little of it and yet are so bad at managing it. How many workouts were cut short on time? How often does our workout seem to take longer than we anticipated? How often have we stressed about being on the clock in a contest?

One instant remedy is to make the clock your friend and incorporate it more frequently into your training. Below are some easy suggestions for you to use the clock and increase your training intensity:

1. Time rest periods

Every time I begin taking short rest periods in training I realize that my conditioning was not as good as I thought it was. I am informed of this because I end up on the floor gasping for air. 

Try keeping rest between heavier sets to a minimum of three minutes and cut it to 60 seconds for most everything else and note how your strength and conditioning both improve.

2. Time events

In strongman, you generally have a minute to do as much as possible or you must complete a task faster than your competitors. Therefore, timing events in training is critical to your progress and should be mandatory for every event you do from yoke and farmers to tire flips and stones. 

3. Time your entire session

I followed a Franco Columbo bodybuilding routine years ago and he said it had to be performed in one hour and fifteen minutes. This was a lot of work and the guys at school would ask me why I was lifting such light weights. Well, there were so many exercises I couldn't finish it all any other way but to reduce the weights and cut rest periods short. This was effective for getting lean, but the point is if you cut yourself off you will work harder to get everything done that you need to.

4. Perform X amount of work with a time goal.

I used to love this for dips and chin-ups. I would set a timer for 10 minutes and try to do as many of one or both as I could. Each week I would try to get more reps in during that time and when I failed to do so I would change the time determination, either going up as high as 15 minutes or as low as 5 minutes.

There you go. Grab a stopwatch next time you're training and note your progress with every passing second.

Lessons in Grip Training, Part 1

Beginning to Accomplish Feats of Strength

After dropping the farmers handles before the finish line for the second time in a  strongman competition I started looking for ways to improve my grip and for some reason that meant doing more than heavy farmers. I knew nothing about grip training except what people had told me and that was limited to wrist rollers and grippers. So I started looking around online to see what the best of the best did for grip and I found a whole world of training that I still, two years later, have just begun to scratch the surface of. 

Like any ignorant beginner, I watched some videos and read some blogs and quickly looked around to see what I could emulate. We had an Ironmind Rolling Thunder at the gym as well as axle bars. We had some grippers too. But I wanted to do something a little extra so I went to Duane Reade and bought some playing cards. This was to be my first "feat of strength." 

Over and over I watched Adam Glass tear mini decks in seconds. I saw another vid of lightweight pro strongman Zack McCarley tear two decks. I gleaned what I could from these and humbly started with a suit and continued to add 4-5 cards a day until I reached a full deck. It took me about 4 weeks to get through a whole deck but it was braced, meaning the deck was against my body. Then I started tearing away from my body and it was about two months until I could tear a deck in that fashion. 

I learned that all decks are not created equal. Duane Reade's Play Right brand was like tissue paper compared to Bicycle; and Bee, found in all the bodegas of NYC, was a total bitch. Even stranger still was the variances between decks of the same brand so every now and then my decks from Duane Reade would put up greater resistance.

I also learned that frequency was everything. If I tore every day or every other day I could eventually get through decks in about 30 seconds even with Bicycles. The video below was taken about five months after I started tearing and my frequency was not as high as it was a couple months before. It took me about a minute which among grip specialists is analogous to a year.

I will be much stronger in my next grip video. And bearded.

I wasn't limiting my adventure to cards. I pursued a second "feat of strength": nail bending. Shortly after I bought my first deck of cards I ordered my first bag of nails. When it arrived I watched some more YouTube videos and went to work. At first I wanted to bend with the reverse grip method since it was the hardest, requiring tremendous hand and wrist strength. This involves stabilizing the nail with one hand while the other hand takes an opposing grip and pulls it back over the top of your stabilizing thumb. It took a minute of straining to go back to a double overhand grip because I wanted to bend the heavier nails in my lifetime. 

Pat Povilitis can twist your head off.

Starting with the color coded Ironmind nails I found the White and
Green too easy and the Yellow really damn hard. It took me a couple of weeks to bend a Yellow and a few more weeks after that to bend the Blue. 

That left the imposing Red nail and that wasn't going anywhere. 

I soon ordered more nails and some bolts from Fat Bastard Barbell Co. to fill in the gap between the Blue and Red nails.  I organized and labeled them all from easiest to hardest and went to work again. This time, I managed to get to a grade 5 bolt and then to a grade 8 bolt.

Blue and Yellow nails among the lesser grades, some cards, and IronMind wraps.

Frequency was everything, but now it was hindering progress. After all this tearing and bending, spanning a solid six months, I started to accumulate lots of pain by overtraining.  

My method of bending, double overhand, put a tremendous stress on the tendons and joints of my upper body.  A lot of the action was isometric because a lot of the time I failed to bend the next hardest nail or bolt. My elbows and shoulders began to hurt at the joints. 

I tore my cards by stabilizing, or choking, the deck with my left hand and peeling the top off with my right hand. This looks like a heavy, tense cross body concentration curl. My right brachioradialis was killing me. My weight training was beginning to suffer. Picking up stones hurt. Pressing hurt. I had to lay off my destructive ways.

Now, I should reiterate that I did all of this to help me become a better strongman athlete. Instead I became an achy strongman athlete with some average "feats of strength" to impress the family at Christmas. And none of the things I bent and tore helped me with farmers...

This all leads me to my point and the subject of the next part of this article, which I will post soon:

1. Prepare your body for grip training before you delve into it. Adjust your training volume and intensity to handle the stress of grip work. I must add that bending and tearing was not a waste of time and didn't make me weaker, but overtraining did. The point: prepare yourself for added stressors and don't overtrain!

2. Understand that there are different types of grip strength and being good at one modality doesn't ensure success with another.

3. Success in grip sports like any endeavor takes a long time and a lot of hard work. This point, however obvious, always seems to get lost on us.

Lots of hard work and then two hours with Chris "Wonder" Schoeck and I destroyed more steel and cards than I thought possible. RSVP now for Chris' seminar at Global Strongman Gym on August 17.

If you want to accomplish some "feats of strength"of your own or get into grip training, check out these sites first:

Diesel Crew (Jedd Johnson)

Adam Glass

Chris "Wonder" Schoeck (Chris is the subject of the documentary Bending Steel and is featured in the NY Times and NY Post. Also, contact us at Global Strongman Gym to RSVP for his first seminar.)

Ironmind

The Gripboard (forums with tons of links and info)

Strongman and squats

When I got into strongman I loved squatting. I had done some powerlifting competitions and it was my best lift. It was always my best lift as long as I could remember. When I first started training at the age of 14 I always put more into that lift and took pride in the fact that most guys were not willing to match my efforts there.

Fast forward about 20 years to my first strongman contest and three months of event days and I had developed a deep anxiety for my old friend. My back hurt all the time. I was deadlifting, squatting, cleaning, pressing, loading stones, carrying kegs and sandbags, moving yokes and farmers and lifting whatever else I could. Obviously, I was overtraining. But this led me to really delve into programming for a sport that requires strength across multiple movements.

Besides planning my event training more efficiently, I had to plan my squat training more efficiently. As a low bar, wide stance, squatter that used a lot of back strength to move the weight, I needed to change my pattern and squat variations. Here are the changes I made.

1. Front squats

Front squats became my primary focus. I didn't do them at first because I hated the. I hated them because I wasn't good at them. I couldn't hold the bar with an Olympic grip and the bodybuilder's cross arm style usually ended up with me dumping the bar. I learned a good trick from some fellow trainers (Kyle Hunt and Jonathan Lespinas) to solve my problem: load up a bar or a yoke, assume the Olympic grip and have a buddy pull your elbows up into a good rack position. You will have to do this more than once.

The benefit to doing front squats is obviously you will be using more leg power (quads) and not as much back (so you can get more from deads and events). Therefore you can expect better recovery following your squat sessions. Furthermore, most of our events are front loaded so they have a more direct carryover to your event training. Front squats will build your upper back by forcing you to maintain thoracic extension throughout the lift. This will carryover directly to front loaded events such as sandbag and husafel carries or keg and stone loading.

2. Back squats: from low to high

Again, this will save your back and open up those hips. If you are like me then you will need oly shoes or a board underneath your heels to perform these. 

Instead of pushing your butt back and descending slowly, you let the knees translate forward a bit and drop a bit more quickly. You will end up with a greater range of motion and better quad development.

3. Hack squats

I swear these are awesome for strongman. I like to do these with both heavy weights and high reps. All the grind is in my quads and the unbearable pain is similar to the kind I feel in a car deadlift.

4. The bodybuilder: high reps and pumps

Since we are now using squats to help us improve our sport training we need to think about the how we organize our sets and reps. 

When a contest is near I like higher reps. 8 will be the lowest I go and I love sets of 20. At a certain point, it's all heart and conditioning and that will help big time on competition day.

5. Programming squats with all those events 

You can be creative here, but these plans have helped me in the past:

A. Squat and deadlift on the same day. I prefer to deadlift heavy first then squat for reps.

B.  Train legs early in the week and then deadlift with events later in the week.  When the leg strength needs to come up, you must prioritize.

C. Squat before events. You can never be sure how fatigued you will be when you do farmers, yoke, Conan's wheel, or medleys in a competition. By leading your event day with squats you will acclimate yourself to the severity (hopefully) of competition day.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to respond. Thanks.

10 Tips for New Strongmen and Strongwomen

Strongman is rapidly growing and whether or not you plan to compete or plan to spice up your current training program, every beginner seems to make the same mistakes.  Though there are more than what I have listed below, I think these 10 are good to start with.

1. Curling the stones. 

After you lap an atlas stone and prepare to load it, it is imperative that you adjust your hand position. You need to put them over the stone with your elbows pointing out and slightly upward. If they are pointing down, you are going to use too much biceps power and put yourself at high risk for a tear. Don't curl the stones!

For more info on stone training, check out this old post: 

http://powernyc.blogspot.com/2014/03/atlas-stone-training.html

2. Curling the log

This is similar to the above in that you don't want to put undue stress on your biceps. When the log is lapped, the handles are facing upward and are slightly turned out. Sit back so the top of your abdominals touches the log. Pull the log in while pushing your stomach out. Now extend your hips violently maintaining that upper body tightness and the log should roll right up onto the top of your chest. 

When you mess this up, you don't pull the log in with your lats and it separates from your core on the clean. This forces your biceps to make up the slack. This will hurt when done over and over again.

3. Yoke height

If you set the pin too high you will be risking dragging and dropping it. If you set it too low, you now have to do too much of a squat to pick it up. That can be taxing and it takes more time to get moving.

While there are many kinds of yokes you will use, I suggest you write down your heights on the Bigg Dogg and Rogue yokes since you will likely see these at some point during the contest year.

4. Learn to continental clean

Lots of guys and gals can Olympic clean and can do so very well. They can rip an axle up to their shoulders without issue and push press or jerk the weight with little effort. The catch is that this is not always possible. In a medley or a press for reps, the weight is often light enough to get away with this. I assume the weights for reps and medleys are supposed to be about 70-80% of most of your maxes. When the weight is above that range, the Olympic clean will only serve very few when using the axle.

My advice is to practice continental cleans from the get go. This is related to a later point: don't just train what you are good at. It takes time to improve on new movements and this clean will be a challenge. But if you're going to be the last man or woman left standing at the end of a max axle press, you're going to need the proper technique. Continental!

5. Squats

I know we all love to back squat but there is a new boss: front squats. As most of your events are front loaded and forcing you to use about a shoulder width stance, the front squat will serve you best in preparation. It will also put more stress on your quads and give your back a break since deadlifts, yoke, farmers, stones, Continental cleans, etc will already put a tremendous amount of stress on your back during the training week.

6. Paleo, intermittent fasting, carb back loading, etc

I will not rip each of these but let's think about their purpose: aesthetics. You should eat with purpose and mine is to be as strong as possible. I don't eat like shit but these are my staples: chicken, beef, turkey, eggs, rice, potatoes, yams, oatmeal, kale, spinach. Eat well, eat balanced, don't skip meals, don't pretend you live in an era of comestible paucity, and you will be better off for it.

Here is a brief write up on my nutrition: http://powernyc.blogspot.com/2014/04/cheap-meal-preparation-for-lifters.html

7. Cardio

I know the lighter guys and gals don't have as many problems as the bigger competitors do, but nobody should ignore this. I posted on how to get started with cardio for strongman before:   http://powernyc.blogspot.com/2014/05/cardio-for-strongman.html 

The basic idea is that we need to have all 3 energy systems working efficiently to ensure optimal performance. Don't skip it especially if you are gaining weight.

8. Not adjusting your overall training volume

When I started strongman I lifted six days a week. I love training. Naturally I just revised my program and did strongman on one day and kept training six days a week. That didn't feel good. That really did a lot for giving me chronic overuse injuries that have never seemed to go away.  Modulate your volume to ensure recovery now that your loads are heavier and that you are spending more time under tension.

9. Not prioritizing your weaknesses

Too many people dally about with the same exercises and same rep ranges and never think critically about what is keeping them from making to the next level. We all have weaknesses and those are a good start to build your training plan from. Press sucks? Try doing it first in the week with lighter weights to improve technique and higher reps to build more muscle. Deadlift sucks? Try different angles like block and deficit pulls. Do lots of rows to beef up your upper back and stiff leg deads for your shitty hamstrings. Slow? Try agility drills in your warmups and do light events for speed. Increase the weight while maintaining speed. And on and on.

10. Bodyweight

Last I checked there are no wilks scores for strongman. Worry about getting stronger, adding more muscle, getting faster, and let the weight take care of itself.

If You're Not Going to Reno...

Buzz about the 2014 Amateur Strongman Nationals in Reno has spread across the Internet and thus the country now that we know the events and weights for October 4. Many will qualify and attend this year, likely breaking whatever the previous attendance record has been in recent years.  Many qualified athletes, however, will not attend, unable to afford the trip. Many more will not qualify at all.

If you are not going, I think the best thing to do is to continue competing. And I don't mean hide out in the novice division. Do contests that challenge you, and that, even better, have your worst events.  When you cherry pick your contests based on your strengths you are just postponing the inevitable ass whipping that is coming your way.

By continuing to compete and perform your worst events, what you accomplish is twofold. Obviously, you will focus on the events that are your worst. Perhaps not so obvious, but more importantly, you will gain the extra contest experience that likely separates you from the top or even middle of your weight class. 

It takes many competitions for some to gain the maturity to deal with contest pressure, with the yelling, with being on the clock, with competing for points, with crowds, with adrenaline and anxiety. The goal is to come in composed and to treat the competition like any other day. Eat the same breakfast, wear the same gear, do the same thing you did in the gym to prepare.

After you compete at least one or two more times and hopefully a minimum of 4 times that year you can begin your offseason with the goal of qualifying. You should have a handful of contests under your belt, you should know your strengths and weaknesses, and you should take a moment to be honest with yourself about how you will get better. 

The scorecards don't lie when there are a number of them to read. You know the formula and you know where your points are coming from: pressing, deadlifting, moving speed, moving endurance, and loading.

It is possible to not be terrible at any of them but evenly mediocre across all five categories. In this case, your offseason plan can simply focus on rotating through events to get more practice while making sure to hit gym lifts hard and bring up overall strength. 

If you one of those categories is well behind the others, then you need to prioritize that in your training. For example, if pressing is a weak point you can move it to first in your training week when you're most fresh. You can add an extra day or extra volume to your one day. You might discover some mobility or core issues are keeping your shoulders from obtaining the optimum position and then you will attack those. There are of course myriad ways to go about it.

If you want to know how I know all this, it's because I have gone through it. After my first year of competing, I felt I was sufficiently mediocre across the board. I rotated all my events, got bigger and stronger, and even went up a weight class. My placings went down but my strength was up. I was performing better with heavier weights. However, new weaknesses that I didn't know I had couldn't be masked by the lighter weights I was moving in the lighter division. 

I spent the first half of that year focusing on one weakness, pressing, before turning to another, deadlifting. This competition season my placings have improved and I qualified for Nationals. But there is now another more glaring weakness that is coming to the forefront and is now the focus of my training...

After nationals, I, like everyone else, will sit down and look at the scores and look at the videos and be brutally honest with myself. I will probably confer with a few trusted others to verify my conclusion. Then I will start the process all over again.

Improving Deadlifts: More of These, Lots of Those, Bigger You

Whether you're a strongman, powerlifter, crossfitter, or gym bro, you probably want a bigger deadlift. If you're willing to put in the time and work, here are some things that I learned over the course of my training.

More volume. 

Programs such as Cube Boss, Coan-Phillipi, Ort-Mag are not magic formulas. They simply prescribe more volume than you are used to. Cube Boss uses a variety of deadlifts and multiple sets giving you the bulk of your volume by actually deadlifting. Coan-Phillipi really just makes you do explosive sub max work and a variety of assistance work. Ort-Mag pushes you to do more reps. Think about why these programs work and what you need before you try them.

More reps. 

I pulled heavy singles for a while and noticed I always used the same weight. That's because heavy singles didn't help. I started doing reps but they were touch and go and my max still stayed the same. So that didn't help either. Dead stop reps from the floor finally got my numbers moving again. I tend to work in the 3-6 range. This will do a lot for your starting strength than singles or touch and go reps.

More rows. 

Your back just isn't big enough. Pull-ups are great but you need rows. Barbell rows and dumbbell rows are best. Use heavy weights here and do lots of reps. 

Leg press. 

Don't be afraid to use this machine to put size and strength on your legs.

Grip. 

Farmers carries are best because they train support grip. This is the kind of grip you need for deadlifting. Crushing grip and pinch grip don't really help so much here so put the grippers and shit away unless you want to be good at grippers.

Hamstrings. 

Put some more meat on your backside and use straight leg deadlifts, leg curls, and GHRs. Like the rows, train these heavy. 

Angles. 

This is related to deficits but experiment with different heights and variations. I found 4" block pulls helped me in the past. Unfortunately 18"/rack pulls only made me better at 18"/rack pulls, which is great for strongman when the event shows up. Sumo deadlifts can help too.

My favorite, however, is deficit deadlifts. The longer range of motion means more power off the floor and those extra 2" make the top end a real treat to lockout too. I find that being more powerful at the initiation of the lift does more for my lockout than any hip thrust does.

Strongman effect. 

Strongman training can make your back big and strong in new ways. Lifts such as stones, farmers, and yoke tax the musculature in new ways, particularly because of the increased time under tension of these lifts. It's not uncommon for a new strongman trainee to see a huge improvement in their deadlift by virtue of training events hard.

That's the bulk of my general thoughts on improving your deadlift. If you read some of my other training articles you will see the same theme: more reps and more volume and building more muscle pays off. Good luck.

Cheap Meal Preparation for Lifters

Eating for the serious lifter doesn't have to be overly expensive or consume all your free time. I see far too many people fuck up their meals by eating out too much (low quality food for the most part) or just not eating enough. Even if you are on a budget and don't have a lot of time, you should look for solutions instead of excuses.

I am not a nutritionist but I have followed near every damn diet under the sun. Yet I keep coming back to a basic bodybuilder type diet high in carbs and protein with only the essential fats. I can prepare all my meals for the week on Sunday and I can do it rather cheaply which is important since I live in Manhattan and my wife and I have a baby.  I don't shop at Whole Foods but I do well at the Spanish grocery store on my block.

Here is what I purchased at the store (for me) and it cost $80.

2 packs chicken breast. Each pack had 4 breasts. I had to split them myself and I peeled the skin off before I cooked them. This will be the protein base for 8 meals.

3 packs lean ground turkey. These will be the base for about 6 meals.

1 grass fed steak. Good for about 2 meals.

1 bag jasmine rice.

5 sweet potatoes.

1 jar natural peanut butter.

1 large container of oats.

6 cans tuna.

1 loaf pumpernickel. 

3 dozen cage free eggs.

1 bunch fresh kale 

1 container spinach leaves 

2 packs frozen broccoli crowns

That's right. That's not that expensive if you break it down to a six day work week and see that I spend less than $15 a day. 

I cook everything on Sunday and fill up about 15 containers for the week. I hardboil the eggs and put them back in their cartons. When I leave in the morning I scoop my oats into another Tupperware, sprinkle some stevia and cinnamon inside and hit the road. So, Monday might look like this:

wake up: 1 liter water, 2 scoops protein, fiber, greens

Breakfast: 3 egg whites, 2 whole eggs, 1 cup oats

Meal 3: 1 chicken breast, rice with kale

Meal 4 and 5: same

Meal 6: protein, peanut butter

This diet has been my base in helping me go from 210 to 240. I bust my ass in the gym and do cardio 2-4 times a week depending on how close I am to a strongman competition and what my big lifts look like for the week. I bring a gallon of water to work with me and drink it before I go home.

I will have the beef meals after my workouts on Wednesday and Friday. I will eat the tuna sandwiches on Tuesday and Thursday when I come home early. I drink fish oil from the bottle when I wake up and when I get home. There are lot of other little things I can mention but those are minutiae and can be expounded on later. The big picture point is that someone with a busy schedule and a child can manage their food expenses, whether bulking or cutting, and prepare all their meals in a relatively short amount of time and for relatively little money.

Since I brought up the bulk/cut dichotomy, this same diet can be applied for losing weight. I would just cut carbs in half for meal 4 and drop them from meal 5 and make sure I eat an extra serving of broccoli or spinach. After my weight loss plateaus I would cut back my protein portions a bit and ditch the peanut butter at night. 

Let me reiterate my main point, it's all very simple and doesn't need to be a pricey or extremely time consuming endeavor. If you want to get big, eat a lot. Eat a lot of protein, carbs and fat. If you tend to get fatter like me, limit yourself to carbs or fat. When you want to trim, start cutting the energy sources slightly or just decrease all of your portions proportionately. The bottom line is to just make it work.